The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 115. Dr. Mark Hyman: The Truth About Why Americans Are Getting Sicker

Starting point is 00:00:00 The number one killer today is not smoking, it's not war, not infections, it's food. When you look at the Global Burden of Disease Study, which looked at 195 countries, they said that 11 million people die from ultra-processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods. And I think a lot of people don't even realize it. We make GLP-1 in our bodies and it responds to satiation. And if you eat nutrient-dense foods, you actually release the GLP-1 that stops you from overeating. Ultra-processed food is what makes people hungry. Our gut is the gateway to optimal health.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Now people get it. And when I started on this, people thought I was crazy. You were early on talking about the importance of gut health and its myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis. Basically, our intestines, the size of a tennis court, laid out flat, but it's only one cell thick is the lining. So it's one cell between you and a sewer. That's a very important dynamic.

Starting point is 00:00:50 And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick. And when you get to the root, you don't have to treat each thing separately. You know, it's somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do realize the importance of my gut health. Where do I start? Functional medicine is where we start. We start with nutrition and gut repair. And if you do that... Today on The Ultimate Human, we have a true pioneer, a personal mentor of mine,

Starting point is 00:01:24 and an absolute icon in the wellness and functional medicine space. With decades of experience, Dr. Hyman has really redefined how everyone approaches health. He's shown millions of people that food can be your medicine. He's a 15-time New York Times bestselling author and a champion for health as preventative practice. We'll dive into his groundbreaking work on reversing biological age, the true impact of our dietary choices, and practical steps that you can take to live a longer, healthier, happier life. Let's welcome Dr. Hyman to the podcast. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm

Starting point is 00:01:59 your host, human biologist, Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And as you just heard, today's guest is an extraordinarily special guest because he's very special to me. He doesn't know this, but he doesn't know this, but he is actually a mentor of mine, 15-time New York Times bestselling author. I think he's just an icon in the functional medicine space. And when I was looking for people early in my career, which is only 10 years ago, that agreed philosophically with what I was preaching so I could latch my wagon to somebody that was saying the same thing I was that had some credentials, it was definitely Dr. Mark Hyman. So I'm very, very excited to have you on the podcast because you have liberated me

Starting point is 00:02:46 from a lot of the chicanery and charlatan tree that people accuse me of. Is that a word or did I just make it up? I think it's a word. Charlatan tree. Okay. Yeah. Let's put that in there. Google it. Because, you know, I just believe so much in foundationally what you preach, which is, you know, essentially that, you know, we can take charge of our cellular biology and we can cure reverse chronic disease and we can even extend our life. And that is a very exciting concept to me. And we just did a podcast where we talked about a lot of the simplicity and the complexity and, you know, about getting, getting back to the basics. So I'm really, really excited for today's podcast. I want to actually start with something, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:36 out there a little bit, because I just did this gut reset challenge. And every, every month I, on The Ultimate Human, I run these free free challenges like three-day water fast uh cold plunge challenge 10 000 step challenge we've done lots of these sleep challenges and the idea is to just introduce some of these concepts to people where they can use fasting or sunlight or grounding or breath work or um cleaning up their food their water to really you know heal heal their bodies. And we just did a gut challenge. And when I was doing some research for the podcast, I stumbled on a podcast you did with Andrew Huberman.

Starting point is 00:04:12 I think it was Huberman. And you were talking about a gut bacteria that was present in high volumes in patients that were really responsive to immunotherapy. And its absence reduced the responsiveness of immunotherapy. And since I just- Yeah, acclimatea. That's it, I couldn't think of it. Acclimatea muciniphilia.

Starting point is 00:04:37 It's one of those keystone bacteria, like the keystone species, like the wolves in Yellowstone. It's like one of those important species of bacteria. If you don't have it, the cascading effects are quite significant. You increase leaky gut, you increase inflammation of the body, autoimmunity, metabolic diseases, diabetes. It's critical for gut health and maintenance. And we basically killed it off with all the antibiotics we've taken. Yeah. So, you know, I think that people generally accept the notion that, you know, our gut is the gateway to optimal health. You know,

Starting point is 00:05:10 our immune system sits right outside of our gut. You know, it's high. Now people get it. And when I started this, people thought I was crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about gut and leaky gut. You and Dr. Perlman were the only ones talking about this story. I read his gut brain connection and grain brain and some of these other books that he wrote. And in fact, that's what led me to you. And you were early on talking about the importance of gut health and gut function and its myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis. And that's what I really want to touch on. I mean, we only have have what, a single cell layer separating us from our inside world.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Basically, our intestines the size of a tennis court laid out flat in terms of surface area, but it's only one cell thick, it's the lining. It's one cell between you and a sewer. You know, you got poop and you got food. And it's like, that's a very important dynamic because essentially your gastrointestinal system is outside your body. It's a tube that goes from your mouth to your butt.

Starting point is 00:06:10 But it's sort of got all this foreign stuff in it. No one in your body is all this foreign stuff. And your body has to sort through, like, what's friend or foe? What can I let in? What do I have to keep out? Right. And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick. When the whole ecosystem of bugs, of which there's, you know, at least as many as our

Starting point is 00:06:29 body's own cells, probably more, 40, 50 trillion. Trillions. You know, there's a hundred times the DNA in the bacterial DNA in our bodies as our own DNA. We're outnumbered 101. Wow. And they're producing all these metabolites. Half, probably a third to half of our blood metabolites

Starting point is 00:06:45 are from the microbiome. They all affect all of our body functions. And if you have good bacteria, you're creating healthy metabolites. And if you're creating bad bacteria, you're getting bad metabolites. And that's what's leading to this cascade of disease. In fact, in terms of longevity,

Starting point is 00:06:58 it's now understood as one of the hallmarks of aging, a dysfunctional microbiome. Wow. And so if they're new to this subject somebody's new to this subject i mean where where do they start i know that you know at functional health you guys do a whole myriad of testing i'm actually very impressed with function health yeah our function health um of the caliber and the breadth of testing that you do, quite honestly, for the price. And, you know, $15,000 worth of testing for $499. It almost sounds too good to be true, but it's not.

Starting point is 00:07:32 We talked about it on a previous podcast. But so, you know, it's somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do, I realize the importance of my gut health. Where do I start? Well, first is to understand what is going on there. Why is it important? Let's just sort of do a little primer on the gut, right? So you've got this whole ecosystem in you.

Starting point is 00:07:54 You're basically just a host for the bacteria and they outnumber you in terms of what they do. And there's probably a thousand species of bacteria in there, so maybe more, we're just figuring it out. They have all kinds of jobs from helping you digest your food to helping produce vitamins to preventing leaky gut to modulating inflammation to affecting your brain chemistry and mood to regulating your appetite, to regulating your weight, to regulating your risk of autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer,

Starting point is 00:08:22 dementia, diabetes, Parkinson's. I mean, you name it, it's connected to everything. Autism, ADD, depression. So you name a disease or a condition in our modern society, at some level it's connected to the gut. Even our mitochondrial health is connected to our gut. And so what's happened is that we've gone from an era where we're all hunter-gatherers,

Starting point is 00:08:43 we're all eating wild food, we're all eating, I mean, I visited the Hazza tribe in Africa last year and they're the one of the few hunter gatherer tribes. Yeah, we lived with them for a few days and we went hunting with them. Did you really? Yeah, it was super fun. When you say we, who went on those trips?

Starting point is 00:08:54 It was a whole crew of sort of friends and entrepreneurs and creative people who were just a part of this trip called Wow It's Now, which is pretty fun. But the idea is that we camp with them and they have huge amounts of fiber so they eat about 150 grams of fiber a day they were you know went under this tree and they knew this yam was there this wild yam that's and they dug it out and it's like you know you think it would like very tough to eat but they cook it they mash it down and and they eat

Starting point is 00:09:22 all these foods that are extremely high in fiber. They don't eat processed sugar. They don't have artificial foods. They don't have emulsifiers and additives. Food dyes. They don't have antibiotics. So we've kind of changed our diet so radically in the last 100 years. Even 100 years ago, it wasn't so bad.

Starting point is 00:09:39 We were eating a lot more foods just close to the earth. And so what's happened is we've taken, you know, our diet and turned it into an ultra-processed diet, which contains compounds that cause a leaky gut, that feed the bad bacteria, that cause inflammatory bacteria to grow. Two, we've, you know, C-section rates have gone through the roof,

Starting point is 00:09:56 probably third of all births were C-sections. The baby doesn't get inoculated with bacteria as it's going through the birth canal. The mother's probably taking antibiotics, so she's knocked out a lot of her healthy bacteria, which then the baby doesn't get it, even if it's going through the birth canal. The mother's probably taking antibiotics, so she's knocked out a lot of her healthy bacteria, which then the baby doesn't get it, even if it's vaginally born. Then we bottle feed, and what's really fascinating

Starting point is 00:10:12 is when you look at, and look, some women need to formula feed their babies, so the formula needs to be improved, or somebody's gotta figure that out. Because it's, you know, it's- They require seed oils. Yeah, it's seed oil, it's sugar, it's, you know, and what's really important is that 25% of breast milk,

Starting point is 00:10:28 the calories in breast milk, are not digestible by humans. It's oligosaccharides that are complex sugars that can't be broken down that are the fuel for bacteria. Formula doesn't have any of that. And so when you look at the bacterial strains and the short-chain fatty acids, which are the fuel that the bacteria produce that are keeping your gut healthy, that are using to run everything in your gut, there's higher levels of propionic acid, which has been linked to autism,

Starting point is 00:10:56 and there's lower levels of butyrate, which is the really critical fuel for your gut lining and also for regulating so many biological processes that's absorbed in the body. It's used as an anti-cancer compound in the body. So you, you form a feed, you don't get these good bacteria. You get all these bad bacteria producing all these bad short chain fatty

Starting point is 00:11:15 acids. So then by the time, then, you know, you, then you add in all the processed food and these kids are having these guts that are causing high levels of food allergy. We never had the food allergy rates.

Starting point is 00:11:24 We have true food allergy, not just food sensitivities. We're seeing rates of, you know, allergy and asthma and eczema and then all these behavioral issues and ADD and autism rates have gone up a thousand percent. You know, the use of ADD drugs has gone up like 400%. I mean, it's just, it's insane what's happening. And then we see kids with depression. Why is that happening? Because their microbiome is messed up and, and the microbiome needs to be taken care of. Just like if you had a garden, you have to take care of your garden. You have to take care of the soil. Yeah. And if you don't take care of your microbiome, you're going to end up with so many different chronic illnesses. And we see this story, you know, as functional medicine

Starting point is 00:11:58 practitioners, we see this all the time. We just, when you take a history and you watch the timeline, okay, you have an autoimmune disease when you're 40. well what was your story well i was you know my mother uh you know i had a c-section i was bottle fed i took lots of antibiotics because i had colic when i was a kid you know and then i started getting this and that allergies and asthma and irritable bowel and eventually it all ends up in something bad you know right and so tending on your garden is a huge is a huge factor and in functional medicine is where we start start with nutrition and gut repair and if you do that like 80 of things will get better yeah it's quite remarkable yeah what's amazing is um i think unbeknownst to you we've actually shared some clients who have you know

Starting point is 00:12:42 since disclosed to me that that they were also working with you. And some of them had serious gut dysbiosis. And when I was working with them and my clinical team was working with them, we had real difficulty with absorption of nutrients, getting levels corrected in the blood. And then they did a stint with you. And once the gut microbiome was corrected,

Starting point is 00:13:04 you see these dramatic shifts in how they respond to the more, let's call it traditional therapies that we were applying. Still not traditional therapies in terms of allopathic medicine. We don't use chemicals, synthetics, pharmaceuticals. But even the basics approach that we were taking that a lot of people respond to, these clients were having real difficulty. And it just sort of further heightened my awareness to the work that you're doing. Yeah. It's so important. So important. So when you, when you're starting with the gut, I mean, you say, um, test treat. Um, and so how, how, how, how does somebody walk, walk through this process? Because if you've got trillions of bacteria in the gut, Hey guys, Gary Brekka here. And I want to talk to you about something I consider a true

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Starting point is 00:14:22 get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Well, there's some simple things. You know, if you have real issues, you probably need to get some testing, right? Yeah. But empirically, you can actually get a lot of done without actually a lot of testing. So they used to call me Dr. See Every Poop because I used to get everybody. It's floating too much fat. It's sinking. It looks good.

Starting point is 00:14:40 Right. Yeah. And I know, but I would literally do stool tests on everybody. You came to see me. It was like getting your blood pressure right give me your poop yeah let me know what's going on in there and then in that you know we looked at um your pancreatic enzyme function we looked at absorption of fats we looked at inflammatory markers things like calprotectin eosinophil protein x which are markers of inflammation we We look at your antibody levels, because your gut is the line with antibodies that are your first line of defense.

Starting point is 00:15:09 Call IGA. Yeah, you got 60% of your immune system right under the gut. And that's because it's where you're getting the most foreign material. We also look at short chain fatty acids to get a sense. We look at the bacteria, including acromantia, which we can see based on PCR testing.

Starting point is 00:15:23 We look at stool cultures, look at levels of healthy bacteria, yeast overgrowth pcr testing we look at stool cultures look at levels of healthy bacteria yeast overgrowth parasites we look at zion levels we look at a whole series of things not just looking at the bacteria itself but like what is the ecosystem like because you can check the bacteria and you can kind of kind of sort of guess but you want to look at not just the bacteria you want to look at all the functions that the bacteria are doing and see if they're working right right and and so we do that we also if people have uh bloating uh it's it's really common to have what we call bacterial overgrowth where because of motility issues because of our crappy diet because of various drugs we take like acid blockers we get overgrowth of bad

Starting point is 00:16:00 bugs in our small intestine basically your most of the bacteria in your large intestine or the bottom of your small intestine they're not in the upper part right so when you when your food goes to your stomach and down your small intestine it just gets digested but if there's bacteria that have sort of migrated up there they ferment the foods and you get what we call a food baby yeah people know that is when you're just like bloating distension and sure feel full after a meal that's because you have bacteria or yeast we call it SI SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIFO, small intestinal fungal overgrowth. Which they usually hit with high amounts of antibiotics.

Starting point is 00:16:30 Yeah, so you can use antibiotics, you can use herbs, you can do any fungals, depending on the person. But you can test for that with breath testing. You can look at also not just breath testing, but you can look at urine, actually, to see metabolites of yeast and other things, for example, in the urine or bacteria in the urine, because your body's absorbing it,

Starting point is 00:16:50 and then you're trying to get rid of these metabolites. And you can see non-human metabolites in the blood, and you can also see them in the urine. So we use a whole variety of tests to see what's going on in that ecosystem. And looking at things like low acromantia, which is really important. And we then create a regimen

Starting point is 00:17:07 to help people rebuild their gut. And in functional medicine, we call it the 5R program, and it's a methodology for helping reset the gut. It's remove the bad stuff. Like what is the bad stuff? Well, obviously all the crappy food we're eating, over-processed food. It could be removing the bad bugs that are in there,

Starting point is 00:17:24 like bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. How do you just remove those bugs? Well, you can use herbs. So there's a lot of herbal formulas that do it. Sometimes you need medication like rifaximin or fluconazole, which are antifungals, antibiotics that are used to actually treat SIBO. There may be cocktails for certain SIBO. For example, if you have methane SIBO, we can measure the gases. We can see which gases are being produced. You have methane or hydrogen or sulfide, and they all require different treatments. So you can have bloating,

Starting point is 00:17:52 but you don't know what's causing it. Sometimes there's diarrhea that's more prominent with irritable bowel that may be more hydrogen-related SIBO where you can have constipation-related irritable bowel where you're mostly constipated like that, you know, then you, you need maybe a treatment for methane producing bacteria that you can find that are causing constipation or fungus, which can cause constipation. So it's really looking at all the different kind of biology down there and using whatever

Starting point is 00:18:20 tools needed to kind of reset the gut. So you kind of have to reset it kind of like, almost like wipe the slate clean. So you get a profile of everything that's in there. These guys are bad. We need to get rid of them. These guys are non-existent. We need to populate them. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:18:34 And then these guys' levels are low. We need to enhance those. So that's kind of remove, is removing the bad foods, emulsifiers, food additives. Emulsifiers are really common. The things that make food creamy. All processed food has them in them. They're highly damaging to the gut lining.

Starting point is 00:18:47 They cause a leaky gut. And leaky gut basically is the idea that you have these cells, this one cell lining, and it's stuck together like Legos. And it's an energy-dependent process. It requires energy from the mitochondria. And what happens is when you have various insults, whether it's a change in the bacteria, whether it's gluten, which is the biggest cause of leaky gut, whether it's emulsifiers, you get these cells separating, and the food leaks between them,

Starting point is 00:19:12 and also bacterial toxins and products leak between the cells, instead of going through the cells, like a filter, right? Think about a coffee filter, you put the coffee in, you don't get any grounds in your coffee because you have the filter, but the same thing, when the food goes through our cells, you don't get into trouble. And the immune system has nothing to react to because everything's broken down into its fundamental amino acids, fatty acids, sugars. And then you're just de-identified.

Starting point is 00:19:38 So when you eat a piece of chicken, you don't become a chicken. Your body breaks it down, right? Yeah. a chicken yeah your body breaks it down right yeah and so the the the um then you have this incredible um damage to your your gut from all these various insults and even toxins heavy metals also can cause leaky gut that's what happened to me and then then your immune system starts reacting and this creates inflammation and you get this chronic sterile inflammation where your body's reacting to the toxins and antigens and bacteria there, and you're creating the systemic immune response.

Starting point is 00:20:11 And that's how it's linked to all these diseases. Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is. Diabetes is. Obesity is. Dementia is. Autism is. ADD is.

Starting point is 00:20:21 Depression is. Autoimmune diseases are. Allergies are. These are all- Yeah, cognitive decline. are, allergies are. These are all- Yeah, cognitive decline. Cognitive decline, they're all inflammatory diseases and the source of most of the inflammation in our bodies is coming from, aside from our diet,

Starting point is 00:20:33 is coming from dysfunction in our gut. And so healing your gut, taking care of your gut, tending your inner garden is so important. That's the first step is remove. And then if we find a parasite, we might have to give you any parasite drug, right? And then I had a kid with Giardia, for example, and he had bad autism.

Starting point is 00:20:51 And we treated Giardia, his autism dramatically improved. That's not to say every kid with autism has Giardia because there's no such thing as autism. They're autisms. Like we put these people in buckets of labels, which have nothing to do with the cause. It just has to do with the amount of neural inflammation, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:21:07 And so it misses the problem of medicine. We have a label like depression or autism or breast cancer or whatever it is. And it's the same pathology, but the causes are different. Right. In functional medicine, you say, you know, one disease can have many causes and one cause can create many diseases. Like gluten can create a whole hundreds of diseases, right? right right so first you kind of got to do the remove step and uh and then you got to do the replace step which is replacing digestive enzymes prebiotics

Starting point is 00:21:35 and i'd also probably say polyphenols which are important and i think this is a fairly new discovery of how important the the colors are mainly plant poly yeah the colorful- These are mainly plant polyphenols, right? Yeah, the colorful compounds in plants fertilize the bugs. They're also kind of a prebiotic. So for example, acromantia, if you feed people green tea and pomegranate and cranberry, it loves that stuff and it grows the acromantia. Wow.

Starting point is 00:22:00 So you can see even, you know, this is my friend William Lee. His mother had stage four uterine cancer, was failing immunotherapy, and maybe other kind of treatment. And he knew about this literature about acromancy, and he tested her, and she was very low. He gave her all these foods that had high polyphenol content to increase the acromancy levels, and then she responded and was cured of cancer. Wow. So that's how powerful it is. I've heard you talk about that and and this was and what is it about the acromantia that is is it is it's calming the immune system

Starting point is 00:22:30 well it's it's called acromantia mucinophilia mucin loving ah mucus loving what is on the lining of your intestine is this thick mucus layer it's kind of like a filter like a mucoid yeah that protects your lining from getting damaged when you have low levels of mucous layer, it's kind of like a filter, like a buffer. Yeah, that protects your lining from getting damaged. When you have low levels of mucin, then your gut is more susceptible to be leaky. So then we do the second stage. And the third step is to reinoculate, that's probiotics. And there's a million of them.

Starting point is 00:22:58 They all have different properties, they all have different effects on the body, they're used in different ways for different things. So there's a whole science of nuts. It's not just that there's a probiotic. There's many species and they all have different impacts. You can take acromantia now. You can take bifidobacter, you can take lactobacillus, but there's different strains like plantarum

Starting point is 00:23:16 or rhamnosus or other ones that have different modulating effects. So you kind of have to understand how to use them very specifically. So you have a whole universe of probiotics that you can select from based on the deficiency. Yeah. So someone has, for example, fungal overgrowth, I'll give them something called Saccharomyces, which is actually a yeast that fights other yeast. And so there's, for example, Bifidobacterium infantis, which is used for babies to help inoculate the gut and colonize the gut, which prevents all these autoimmune analogy diseases,

Starting point is 00:23:44 which I think every woman who's having a baby should use this product. inoculate the gut and colonize the gut, which prevents all these autoimmune analogy diseases, which I think every woman who's having a baby should use this product. I have no association with or affiliation with it. And what is it, an infant probiotic? It's basically bifidobacterium infantis, the company that makes this called the Vivo, E-V-I-V-O. I have seen them. And they spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research.

Starting point is 00:24:00 It's very impressive data. And I think, you know, I recommend that every woman, if she's breastfeeding, she puts on her breast. If they're obviously bottle feeding, you can put in the formula, but really important. And so you've got to kind of re-inoculate with the right bacteria. And then you've got to repair the lining of the gut. You know, the gut requires glutamine and zinc and vitamin A and omega-3 fatty acids and phytochemicals and things to help repair the gut. And lastly, restore, which is to kind of reset the kind of gut-brain connection because a lot of stress will affect the gut, right?

Starting point is 00:24:33 You can literally create a leak. The veil nerve is just enveloping that. Yeah, your whole nervous, yeah, your gut brain has more neurotransmitters than your brain brain. Yeah. And so. Yeah, the majority of them your brain brain. Yeah. And so- Yeah, the majority of them are in here. Yeah, serotonin.

Starting point is 00:24:47 So if you really don't have them here, it's hard to have them upstairs. Like when people take psilocybin, which increases serotonin, they often get gut symptoms, right? Because it's often related to the serotonin in the gut. And the beautiful thing is by using, whether it's breath work or meditation

Starting point is 00:25:03 or any kind of practice that resets the nervous system will reset the gut. So it's a very systematic process. It's got to be personalized, though. It's not like one size fits all. Although there is a way to just sort of do a basic gut reset, like I'm sure what you did. Yes. It works for most people.

Starting point is 00:25:16 Yeah. But if it doesn't work, then you got to go back. Oh, maybe I have SIBO. And the results are amazing. I'll just tell you a quick story of a patient I had. She was a 50-year-old business coach. She was depressed. She was overweight.

Starting point is 00:25:28 She was pre-diabetic. She had severe psoriatic arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease. She had severe reflux. She had severe irritable bowel syndrome, bloating. She was seeing the gastroenterologist, the rheumatologist, the psychiatrist, the endocrinologist. She was on metformin. She was on drugs for $50,000 a year for autoimmune disease. she was on acid blockers for reflux hero valid drugs i mean she was on antidepressants she was on the pile of meds right and i said gee what are all these

Starting point is 00:25:54 things having in common you know what is her depression and psoriasis and her overweight issue or insulin resistance and gut issues have in common well they're all inflammatory diseases right so where is it likely coming from well she had all these gut issues i said let's start there yeah put her on elimination diets we get rid of the most common foods that cause a problem and what is an elimination diet so elimination diet is basically eliminating foods that are more likely to cause problem it can be based on testing or just empirically and then you add foods back slowly to see what's happening. And the most common foods that are a problem for people

Starting point is 00:26:29 are gluten and dairy. Gluten and dairy. And then there's a whole sort of cascade after that, whether it's grains or beans, or sometimes people react to eggs. And there's extreme versions, for example, autoimmune paleo would be like an extreme elimination diet where you get rid of grains, beans, dairy, obviously sugar processed food obviously right but you also get rid of nuts

Starting point is 00:26:50 and seeds also get rid of nightshades um i i my 10-day detox side is essentially an elimination diet you know you add in nuts and seeds there's there's also um um you know eggs you can have and so forth the nightshades it's a little more liberal. But you know, the results are pretty profound. People are really, really sick. I might put them on an autoimmune paleo diet. But for most people, a 10-day detox, which is a reset, it's where you get, like we see 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases.

Starting point is 00:27:16 And we actually have an online program called the 10-day detox where people are seeing a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days and i've done this program with thousands of people that is incredible in retreats around the world it's quite amazing whether you have a food-based it's just almost entirely just get rid of the shit and add in the good stuff it's not that hard yeah you know you and i get to pay a lot of money for just telling people to do simple stuff that's so obvious but it's basically just you know uh eating whole real food,

Starting point is 00:27:45 nutrient-dense food, a lot of phytochemicals, a lot of fiber, low glycemic, lots of good fats. So they're not starving on this day. No, you're eating a ton of food. You're eating a ton of food. Raw food, vegan overnight. No, no, no, no. Protein, vegetables, nuts, seeds. We get rid of them. And you can add things back to see, maybe dairy doesn't so i know i know that dairy bothers me but if i have goat or sheep i'm fine oh right so i can tell uh and when you reintroduce it you have to get a worse reaction than you had when you were eating it all the time because your body actually has these stored antibodies that it just goes out

Starting point is 00:28:18 and attacks it right so basically we do an elimination diet and on her we we basically treated her SIBO and SIFO. So she'd taken lots of steroids, lots of antibiotics in the past. So I knew she had bacterial overgrowth. So I gave her a drug called rifaximin, which is a non-absorbed antibiotic. I gave her diflucan or fluconazole, which basically kills all the fungus. And then I re-inoculated her again with healthy bacteria.

Starting point is 00:28:40 I gave her some prebiotics, just gave her vitamin D, some fish oil, very simple, some probiotics. Comes back six weeks later and I'm like, I never tell people to stop their medication. I said, let's just try this and see how you do. Came back six weeks later, I stopped everything. I have no more psoriatic arthritis, skin's clear. I have no more heartburn, no more reflux, no more irritable bowel, no more depression.

Starting point is 00:29:02 I lost 20 pounds. I don't have prediabetes. Wow. And I got off all my medication. Yeah all we did was reset her gut. My joke is I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a holistic problems. And when you get to the root, you don't have to treat each thing separately. Right. And I think unfortunately, modern medicine has so many silos. I forget how many specialties and subspecialties are now, but it's mind numbing.

Starting point is 00:29:30 They're basically a doctor for every interview these days. Yeah. And we used to see this in the mortality science space. Patients go into the primary care doctor and they get referred to cardiology or refers them to psychology or refers them to gastroenterology, you know, refers them to autoimmune.

Starting point is 00:29:46 Then got a hematologist and then nephrologist. And the next thing you know, it's so, and everything's so segmented. And even in this, in this client that we talked about earlier that had this, this stage four colon cancer that, that, that was, you know, cured in five months on the immunotherapy. She had, I think she was seeing 13 different specialists at any given time. And, you know, for most people, they didn't really realize there were 13 subspecialties in medicine. And interestingly, you know, the cardiologist would have her on a non-potassium sparing diuretic. And then the kidney, the nephrologist also had her on a diuretic that was potassium sparing diuretic. They didn't know that they both had her onaring diuretic and then the kidney the nephrologist also had her on a diuretic that

Starting point is 00:30:25 was potassium sparing diuretic they didn't know that they both had her on the diuretic and there was all this duplicity and and compounding effect because there wasn't this systemically holistic approach like i i i liken it to the hub of the wheel yeah right i mean you got all these spokes and if you start chasing the spokes yeah you'll just spend the rest of your life just, you know, running around that wheel. But if you find the hub, which very often is the God, then, you know, you found the panacea. One of my favorite things about these bars is that I formulated it in conjunction with Body Health because they formulated the perfect blend of amino acids. That's why they're called perfect aminos. So to get 30 grams of protein, if you look at one of these bars and it says 30 grams of protein on the back, the chances of you

Starting point is 00:31:09 getting even 10 grams of protein are very, very slim. About two thirds of the caloric intake that you're putting in as protein is actually turning to sugar or turning to fat. With these bars, 99% of it is absorbable. It has a blend of the exact necessary essential amino acids that you need to fuel your body. Yes, we use amino acids to build muscle, but we also use them to build collagen, elastin, fibrin in the skin. We use it to make cellular structures in the body, things like natural killer cells. So we want to be eating whole food ingredients that taste great, that actually fuel our body at a cellular level. There is no other protein bar like this on the planet. This was years in the making. Just trying to find a manufacturer that

Starting point is 00:31:48 would take whole real foods and press them, put a little CO2 into the container so it doesn't spoil, and then seal it and package them for the shelves was a difficult task. You know, most of the manufacturers we talked to wanted to add seed oils. They wanted to add preservatives. They wanted to add food dyes. All the cheap ingredients that make these salable and palpable, but don't feed our cellular biology. I can't wait for you guys to try these. You're going to love them as much as I do. So click the link below and be one of the first ones to get this delicious new way to fuel your body. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. And the key to this is what we're doing is restoring a healthy gut ecosystem, right? And you and I both do this.

Starting point is 00:32:25 The work we do is basically helping people create health. We don't treat disease directly. When you remove the conditions that cause disease, add in the things that help prevent or reverse disease, the body is very smart. It knows what to do. So true. You don't need to, like, even though we may not understand everything that's happening when we do these things, because it's impossible to know there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second of the body. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:50 You and I, no matter how much we studied, could never learn. The reality is that just doing some simple practices can make profound impact. And so really functional medicine, I think is one of its greatest contributions to humanity is the understanding of the microbiome, is understanding how to reset it and, and treat many chronic illnesses through, uh, improving the health of the microbiome. Yeah. And, you know, we've been doing this for decades and we, before it was even called the microbiome, you know, and it, and I think it's, it's, it's really the center of the practice we do. You know, and I think what's really interesting is interesting is that you know if you look at the blue zone research um there's really not continuity in any of the

Starting point is 00:33:28 diets right the centenarians you know there's high carbohydrate consumption in sardinia for example there's high meat consumption in in singapore there's there's high uh you know there's fatty fish and oils in the mediterranean diet yeah but the commonality is that they are all whole foods yeah no none of them were eating a process high highly processed diet i mean maybe they were making bread but they're eating bread or pasta but they were eating bread and pasta yeah but i went to korea they made bread but it was from zeo wheat which is ancient wheat that alexander the great used to consume and is to fuel his you know campaign yeah the world yeah but but it But it was very long gluten, super nutrient dense,

Starting point is 00:34:07 lots of phytochemicals, lots of fiber, and maybe wasn't a problem for them. Yeah. You know what's funny? Well, maybe it's not so funny, but I was actually watching one of those history channels the other night, and it talked about in the 1800s how they did

Starting point is 00:34:25 they had this thing called fencing and um it was they would feed prisoners that they were transporting certain diets and like you ever heard that you know when you go to uh jail it doesn't happen anymore but they just feed you bread and water um as a bread and water diet um there's actually some history to that and that they because they would transport these convicts on horseback over long distances um what they didn't want them to do was on foot was to to run and get away from them so they fed them bread and water to weaken them and it weakened them it actually just gummed up there they they didn't know why i mean they didn't know the bifidobacteria cycle you know the single cell layer of the gut but they but but these mounties knew enough to know yeah that if i only

Starting point is 00:35:10 fed them bread and water they wouldn't die but they couldn't go more than a couple hundred yards yeah and and that was it so they didn't ever have to hunt them down um and so i i just it just struck me when i was watching this thing that they would, you know, they put them on horseback. And now those guys are eating beef jerky and, you know, shooting animals and cooking them on a fire and things like that. But then the prisoners, they just gave bread and water too. And after a few days of just on a bread and water diet, they were just so sick. They weren't dead, but they certainly were not in any kind of condition. And you think about what we're doing in modern societies, we're essentially fencing ourselves.

Starting point is 00:35:46 Yeah, it's most of our diet. We're taking away all these nutrients. And it's even worse because the foods we're eating are so, one, depleted of nutrients, and two, they're full of compounds that actually actively damage the gut, right? And I think this is sort of the, you know, we're switching topics here.

Starting point is 00:36:04 I mean, you and I are both big believers that if we're going to fix chronic disease in this country, that we have to fix the food supply. And, you know, our soil has become so nutrient deficient. People say, no, you can get all everything that you need from foods. And I go, well, theoretically, I guess that's true. Right. But the truth is in modern society today, it's really, really hard. I mean, if you had a farm and you're growing your own, you know, chickens and your own eggs and you had your own hydroponic facility and you had grass-fed cows, you probably could get there. But I think the chances, even of people that are as conscious as you and I are with our travel schedules and everything else, you know, there has to be certain supplementation.

Starting point is 00:36:41 And, you know, I was actually looking at a research article on soil depletion, you know, the difference between the soil and the forest and the soil. And, and this was 2016. I haven't seen another one in the last, you know, eight or so years, but I'm sure it's gotten worse. But to talk a little bit about the food supply and depletion in the food supply. And, you know, it's linked to this pandemic of chronic disease because we are the sickest, fattest, most diseased nation in the world. And we spend the highest amount on healthcare, which is the ultimate dichotomy because we know that spending doesn't equate to outcomes or else the four and a half trillion we spend, we would be the leanest, healthiest, know it's highly functioning humans on the planet for

Starting point is 00:37:25 four and a half trillion dollars we should be yeah and we're spending more and more and getting less and less absolutely true we're like uh i think more than twice per capita in the other nation and we're 48th in life expectancy we're 30th drop to 60th now 20 yeah who knows it's like it's going up and down yeah we're we're i'm a mortality scientist we're like i think south of angola or something in terms of life expectancy. And I think, you know, we also are 30th among all developed nations, last among all developed nations in all the major health care metrics, like infant mortality.

Starting point is 00:37:55 So we're doing something wrong. And in terms of, you know, the food supply, yes, it's depleted of nutrients. The soil has been damaged by our industrial farming practices. And my joke is nobody really needs to take any vitamins, but only under certain conditions. You have to hunt and gather your own wild food. You have to be exposed to no environmental toxins. You have to drink only pure, clean water, breathe pure, clean air, sleep nine hours a day,

Starting point is 00:38:17 wake with the sun, go to bed with the sun. And have your own garden. Have no chronic stress. No, then you probably don't need vitamins. Because it's true we effort you know hundreds of thousands of years maybe if you're amish right yeah hundreds of thousand years humans never took vitamins never needed vitamins but if you look at um um cordain's work uh around paleolithic diets you know the nutrient density was so much higher they had 150

Starting point is 00:38:40 grams of fiber we have maybe 8 to 15 and per day. You know, their vitamin levels and mineral levels and consumption, the omega-3 fatty acid levels, so much higher than all the foods they're eating. And the ratios were different too. It's omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios. Yeah, and the salt and the potassium. We have like 12 times as much or 10 times as much salt as potassium. So salt is good, but it's not, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:01 it's like you need the potassium, which comes from plants and foods. So I think we're in this really crisis moment. And, you know, we're six out of 10 Americans have a chronic illness. Four out of 10 have two. When you define chronic illness a little more broadly, you know, not just one out of two have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, but 93% of us probably have some form of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Because that's based on these. Genesis of metabolic dysfunction. Right. I mean, we talked about the form of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Because that's based on-

Starting point is 00:39:25 So genesis and metabolic dysfunction. Right. I mean, we talked about the criteria of prediabetes. It's like if your triglycerides over 150, if your HGL is under 40, if your waist is over 40 if you're a man or whatever if you're a woman, your blood pressure is 140 per 90. So the numbers that are used to define prediabetes I think are a low bar. Yeah. Right? Your blood sugar is over 100 these are low bars by the time you get there you're already anyone sees like 5.7 yeah you're already in trouble so when you look at metabolic dysfunction

Starting point is 00:39:56 through to a broader definition only 6.8 percent of americans are. That means 90%. Metabolically healthy. Yeah. And that means they don't have some degree of prediabetes or insulin resistance. And now with function health, we're seeing just extraordinary dysfunction. That's what we call function health. It's hard to be more functional. And we have, you know, it's basically a lab, a platform, a health platform where we allow people access their own data through lab testing.

Starting point is 00:40:25 And we're testing over 110 biomarkers on first flush. And we see all the metabolic things, insulin, which never gets measured. The first thing you go up, your blood sugar is the last thing you go up. Your A1C, we can see, that's going your blood sugar. Plus- So you can see the insulin resistance,

Starting point is 00:40:39 but for the heme 1C, it starts to react. And we can see also look at cholesterol differently. We look at the particle number, particle size, things that are not looked at. Less than 1% of all cholesterol tests actually measure what should be the gold standard of cholesterol testing, which is looking at particle number and particle size

Starting point is 00:40:53 and quality, not just the weight of the cholesterol. Right. Because you can have a cholesterol 150 and it can be terrible. You could have 2,000 particles and small particles or you could have cholesterol 300 and it'd be completely fine because you're all large, fluffy particles

Starting point is 00:41:06 and your triglycerides and HDL are fine, there's no heart disease. So we're doing diagnostic tests that are so antiquated at your regular checkup where you get maybe 19 biomarkers. Yeah, even the lipid panel now is just, that I see on the majority of all testing is very basic. It's triglyceride, HDL, LDL, VLDL. Yeah, no, it's not, yeah, it's not what we should be doing. And, and we're, we're, we're also not

Starting point is 00:41:29 looking at the, the, the other biomarkers that are important for metabolic health, like uric acid and, and inflammation, CRP, ApoB, which is super important. The most predictive biomarker for, yeah, like the most predictive marker for RDC is doctors don't check it. So we measure all that. And we're seeing like 96% of the people who we test, and this is a health-forward population, have some degree of metabolic dysfunction based on these biomarkers. Holy cow.

Starting point is 00:41:55 So we're in deep doo-doo, and it's why we have this crisis of chronic disease caused primarily by insulin resistance, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all on the rise. Diabetes got up 400%. Heart disease, 50%. Cancer, 30%, but over 60%, those under 50, primarily caused by our diet and this mess in our microbiome and colon cancer. We're seeing 150% increase in Alzheimer's. We're seeing increases in cancer. Yeah. Increase in cancer rates. We're seeing over a hundred percent increase in, in, uh, depression and mental illness, a thousand

Starting point is 00:42:29 percent increase in autism, a hundred percent increase in autoimmune disease. And at the same time, we're seeing two to three to 400% increases in all the drugs that treat all those diseases. Yeah. So we're spending more and more, we're doing more and more, we're getting sicker and sicker. What's wrong with this picture? Yeah. It's like, it's really, the root cause is our food system. So as a doctor treating people for decades, I'm sitting in my office going, geez, I just have all these patients with chronic disease. And as a functional medicine doctor, I'm trained to ask why. Functional medicine is the medicine of why.

Starting point is 00:42:58 Not what disease you have and what drug do I give, but why is it? How'd you get here? And I started thinking, okay, why is my patient have diabetes? Why do they have heart disease? Why do they have autoimmuneunity? I'm like, it's the food, stupid. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, okay, well, if it's the food, well, why do we have the food we have? Well, it's our food system. It's our industrial food system. Well, why do we have that food system? It's our food policies. Well, why do we have those food policies? It's the food industry that's driving most of those policies globally. And most of the research.

Starting point is 00:43:25 Most of the research. And I'll unpack that for you in a minute. Leading to nutritional outcomes. Yeah, I really want to unpack that. It's really stunning. And I wrote a book in 2000. It came out in March 2020, which is a terrible time to publish a book right at the end of COVID. Right when nobody could go to the shelf and get it.

Starting point is 00:43:42 People were occupied with other things than the fate of our food system. But I started a nonprofit, a food fix campaign where we were working on policy change in Washington. But in that book, I answered the question for myself is why are my patients sick? And how is the food system responsible for all this? And why is this happening? And what are the policies? And it was really clear to me that it was the food industry driving a lot of this and and obfuscating the truth corrupting the science corrupting public health agencies uh confusing lawmakers with you know nonsense data and and uh and i'll tell you anything in a minute but the the uh there's a new report that's coming out next year and i recently talked to one of the scientists from the World Health Organization who's leading this.

Starting point is 00:44:28 Wow. Of 20 scientists, leading researchers in science around the world who've come together to write a report on the commercial determinants of health. We've heard of the social determinants, which is poverty. Wow. Lack of access to food and so forth. But the commercial determinants of health

Starting point is 00:44:43 are the ways in which multinational corporations, food, you know, ag, tobacco, alcohol, corporations, privatize profits and subvert public health deliberately. Yeah. And as I began to unpack the story in my book, I began to see, you know, when I did the research, I was like, I knew there was this shit going on, but I didn't know how bad it was. You know, like, like I, as part of my work in Washington, we got the government accountability office, which is the government watchdog to do a report through friends who are congressmen that can ask for these things. Nobody looked at this. What is the impact of our food policies on disease in America and the costs and our healthcare costs? No one looked at it. Right. So they looked at it. They did a couple of years study. They analyzed it and they found

Starting point is 00:45:29 that there were 200 policies plus in 21 different departments and agencies in our government, all working in cross purposes, telling people to do different things. So on one hand, we say in dietary guidelines, eat healthier whole foods. And on the other hand, with SNAP, our biggest food program, we spent $125 billion. 75% of that is for junk food, culture processed food, 10% for soda. So we're spending $12 billion for soda for the poor, which is probably 15 billion servings of soda that the government's paying for. 20% of Coke's profits in the US come from food stamps. No. Yes. From food stamps. Yes. And this is the population that's the most underserved that has the least awareness of what's going on and they are the most susceptible

Starting point is 00:46:11 to you know government and regulatory bodies dictating what they're going to that's what they're going to eat and what's exciting to me gary is the first time in a presidential campaign and probably when this podcast airs we're going to figure out who's president i don't know who's going to be president right now well we're we're 24 hours away, right? But yeah, the first time any candidate talking about chronic disease. Yeah. You know, President Trump in 2023, even before Bobby Kennedy kind of joined him with this Make America Healthy Again movement,

Starting point is 00:46:38 was put out a five minute video about the chronic disease epidemic, particularly in children, that we have to do something about. And I was like, whoa whoa this is amazing yeah and and i think there's so many forces that are pushing against doing it right and what the food industry has done and i include the ag industry the pharma industry uh and the processed food industry the fast food industry it's it's basically probably 20 ceos around the world that control the biggest industry on the planet which is the food industry it serves its food which is we all eat on on the planet so right it's it's i think last time i looked it was 16 17 trillion dollar a year industry wow okay and and so what they've

Starting point is 00:47:17 done is is both uh i think deliberately and just through historical you know kind of um you know the the kind of uh kind of practice that they had that weren't necessarily malicious. They deliberately create a food system that makes us sick and they profit from it and we get sick and the government pays for it. So number one, they fund 12 times the number of studies on nutrition as independent scientists. Even though they're directly conflicted. Right. So like the American Beverage Association funds a study on dietary sweeteners and artificial sweeteners, they're finding they're fine.

Starting point is 00:47:49 Well, should we believe that study? Probably not. Yeah. They fund academic institutions to do research. And so a lot of the medical school curriculums are pretty much pharmaceutical school curriculums. Yeah. You know, my daughter's in medical school. I see that really clearly.

Starting point is 00:48:05 We see also how they fund the professional associations. So for example, the American Heart Association receives $192 million in funding from food and pharma. You're kidding. A year. 192 million a year. Yeah, the Diabetes Association, American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics,

Starting point is 00:48:24 American Academy of Pediatrics. I mean, there are a whole bunch of family doctors that quit when the American Academy of Family Practice took $3 million from Coca-Cola. Wow. So they're funding all these groups. They're also funding fake front groups like the American Council on Science and Health, which did a hit piece on Callie and Casey Means. Oh, they did?

Starting point is 00:48:43 They've done many hit pieces on me. And it sounds great, American Council on Science and Health, which did a hit piece on Callie and Casey Means. Oh, they did? They've done many hit pieces on me. And it sounds great, American Council on Science and Health, but who funds them? It's pharma. It's the pesticide makers. It's Monsanto, or now it's Bayer. Did they do a hit piece on Callie and Casey?

Starting point is 00:48:53 I knew it was coming. I mean, I take it as a badge of honor to get these pieces written about me because it means I'm touching a nerve. They don't want. And they're the organization that says that pesticides are safe, that trans fats are good, smoking tobacco doesn't cause cancer i mean i'm not joking here

Starting point is 00:49:09 yeah the guys who are the doctors and people affiliated with it's all funded by these big corporations and many of these guys are corrupt some of these guys have been in jail and they came out after dr oz and once in the new york times and said they wrote a letter to columbia saying he should be taken off uh the col the Columbia faculty because of his crazy views. And it was all this group. And there's many, many of these front groups, like Crop Life, which sounds great, but it's basically an industrial agriculture front group. And so they fund research.

Starting point is 00:49:37 They fund our academic institutions. They fund our professional associations. They fund front groups that are confusing people with misinformation and propaganda. And then they also fund social groups like the NAACP and the, the Hispanic Federation. Wow. Uh, and for example, they, there was a, I was in a movie called fed up, which was about childhood obesity with Katie Couric and Laurie David. We did about 10 years ago. And I met Bernice King,

Starting point is 00:50:03 who's Marla King's daughter. And I said, why don't we show this film at the King Center? And she's like, great idea, let's do it. Because you know, violence, nonviolence also means nonviolence to the self. I'm like, great. And so a few days later she called me and said, Mark, we can't show the film. I'm like, why?

Starting point is 00:50:16 Because Coca-Cola funds the King Center in Atlanta. I walk onto the campus of Spelman College, which is a black woman's college in Atlanta. And there's more houses such as the men's of Spelman College, which is a black woman's college in Atlanta. And there's more houses, which is the men's and Spelman. Dean of the university said to me, Mark, 50% of the entering class of 18-year-old African-American women have a chronic disease. Hypertension, diabetes, obesity. 50%. 50% of 18-year-olds.

Starting point is 00:50:44 And I look at the campus, it's just blanketed with Coca-Cola. I'm like, what's going on here? Yeah. She's like, well, Coca-Cola is our biggest donor. You know, you look at the board of directors of Spelman college on the trustees, it's someone's a vice chair of some big position at Coca-Cola. It's just so corrupt. And, and, uh, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was involved with the recent dietary guidelines that you might have heard about were mandated to look at ultra-processed foods. I heard about this. Lucky Charms came out more nutritious than grass-fed steak. That was different.

Starting point is 00:51:16 That was a different thing. That's my favorite. But this is a dietary guidelines committee, which is supposed to be an independent group of scientists that have to review the literature that the USDA then can kind of authorizes them to look at. And you've got a bunch of people in the USDA, you know, may or may not be paid off if something's going on, but they're basically, the way they designed it, the whole process was so set up to fail because they was like, you know, they didn't define processing properly. Like a can of tomatoes is processed food, a can of sardines is processed food, right? So it's like, when you kind of look at the data on it, it's very clear. And this is the British Medical Journal came out with a paper a few years ago, showed that 32 different diseases were

Starting point is 00:51:52 caused by or worsened by ultra processed food, all the major illnesses we have from autoimmunity to cancer to heart disease, diabetes, I mean, the list goes on depression, clearly depressions and mental health is caused by ultra processed food um and he said he was one of the reviewers on this sort of guidelines and he pointed out all the flaws and they just completely ignored it wow they completely ignored it and they came out with a ruling and said there's no data to support the fact that ultra processed food and i've seen is causing obesity and so we're not going to make a determination with the dietary guidelines. This is the guidelines that set the standards

Starting point is 00:52:27 for all nutrition programs in the country. And when you look at the global burden of disease study, which looked at 195 countries, the number one killer today is not smoking. It's not war, not infections. It's food. It's 11 million people. And I think that's conservative

Starting point is 00:52:44 because about 75 million people die a year in the world. And I would say probably 60% of those are from chronic lifestyle preventable illnesses. Globally, not even in the developed world, but even in the developing world, there's twice as many deaths from chronic lifestyle preventable diseases like diabetes and heart disease than there is from infectious disease or malnutrition. Wow. They call this a double disease burden in the developing world. And so they said that 11 million people die from ultra-processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods. And I think it's probably more,

Starting point is 00:53:15 it's like two holocausts a year. And this is 100% preventable. So we have a system that's set up for everybody to fail. So for people to do what you want to ask them to do, to eat better, to live a healthier life, it's very tough because there's so many forces pushing against them. I totally see that. And when you look at television, what are the ads? When you look at the media, it's junk food ads and it's pharma ads. So it's like eat this and then take this.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Yeah. I actually, on my gut challenge, I actually played one of the pharma the farmer's ads farm ads and and just listen to the the side effects and um well they say really fast at the end they say really fast and it's always like you know it's like grandpa's like pushing his daughter on the you know granddaughter on the swing and it's like liver failure blindness right you know um mental mental decline and occasionally death. Contact your physician immediately if you experience a sudden loss of consciousness. I'm like, what?

Starting point is 00:54:08 Yeah, but they say they show this beautiful, you know, life, you know, giving thing. And then they show like the end is like super fast. Like I just read through it. You know, and I've even heard that the reason why they spend so much money advertising direct to the consumer, that it's actually the worst ROI.

Starting point is 00:54:26 There was a worst return on investment marketing expense like in marketing history. It's like they actually lose money advertising directly to the consumer. So then it begs the question, well, why do they spend so much money advertising the consumer? And then, you know, I've heard people talk about it and it's to control the media. Just like you were saying, like you can show your movie at, what was it, the college. Not because they actually wouldn't have benefited from the movie, but because the purse strings were controlled by. I was sitting with one of the top journalists at CBS who kind of agrees with us. And I said, you know, why can't we get more content around these issues on the media?

Starting point is 00:55:04 And he says, well, Mark, you know, we are pretty tightly controlled by our advertisers. Yeah. I'm like, at least you're freaking honest about it. Yeah, at least you're honest about it. And they're stuck, too, because, I mean, if 75% of my budget to pay for my family's well-being came from one source, it would be hard for me to bite that hand. Yeah, and we pay so much for drugs in this country and they always because r&d is so expensive and takes so much money to develop a drug and do this

Starting point is 00:55:30 they spend twice as much money on marketing as they do on r&d wow yeah and and while they may may may not see the return investment i think they probably do 40 of the time this is based on published research 40 of the time that people see an ad on television and go to the doctor and say i want that drug they get that drug really yeah that's why they do it wow hey i only control the media with the amount of ad spend i mean if you're 75 of anybody's budget you go listen that's not so so we we've got to address the food system you know from feel the fork and you know if i were king which i'm not going to be, or a dictator- You want to run for president?

Starting point is 00:56:08 No, do not. I'm not old enough. I'm not old enough. I'm only 65. I have to wait a little bit. So if I were king, there would be a whole set of sweeping things that could transform the food system in America. One, develop a national institute of nutrition and fund it adequately to really deeply research the root cause of our chronic disease epidemic, which is primarily food. And make it independent. Make it independent. Truly independent. If it has any effect on public policy, it has to be independent in nature.

Starting point is 00:56:33 Because I think the challenges that our public policy makers are not. Remove conflicts of interest across a whole segment of government that's dealing with these issues. Because right now there's so much conflict of interest. So the NIH has a big role the nih also could say and this i think this would make a big difference say to all um academic institutions you're getting zero money from nih grants unless you change your medical school curriculum to incorporate nutrition and we're not also at the federal level because we fund graduate medical education, $17 billion. We're not giving that $17 billion

Starting point is 00:57:06 unless you have a nutrition lifestyle curriculum in your graduate medical education programs. So that's a big thing. Second, I would reform our HHS policies and Medicare policies to reimburse for lifestyle change programs and for nutrition and medically-healed meals and nutrition services.

Starting point is 00:57:24 Really important. Change what's paid for. Because doctors do what they get paid to do, not what the science says they're supposed to do. We know, for example, there's not a doctor on the planet that's going to say to you that lifestyle isn't a better treatment for diabetes. Right.

Starting point is 00:57:36 Right? Everybody knows that. We know that food causes it. It's not a secret. And we know that food can fix it. And we know that food can fix it. Although there's still some controversy because people haven't seen it that much but i mean verda has shown this very clearly you can reverse 60 of diabetes with a ketogenic diet we've seen it

Starting point is 00:57:52 we've seen it i've seen it in my practice every day but you know one of my favorite biohacks outside of breath work by far is mineral salts baja gold sea salt it's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass-fed steak with grass-fed butter and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary and I sprinkled Baja Gold Sea Salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking

Starting point is 00:58:29 too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a $15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. And it's literally the world's best biohacking secret. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Doctors do what they get paid to do, not what works. Right. And so they get paid to give all these diabetes drugs. So we can give Ozempic for $1,600 a month, but we can't put people in a nutrition lifestyle change program, which is pennies, you know, in a group model program that works effectively. Which will actually take the pressure off of the healthcare system. Because, you know, I heard Casey Means talking about it. And she was saying, you know, the,

Starting point is 00:59:02 we're, we're about to approve uh ozempic as a frontline defense for um uh not just diabetes but yeah diabetes um which is like when you start to become um you know it's not morbid obesity it's just obesity so you know you get a little little fat and we don't hey don't stop bathing your cellular biology in the toxic soup um we're just going to press down on on with a GLP-1. And I think a lot of people don't even realize that GLP-1, we make GLP-1 in our bodies. It's a hormone we make in our gut, and it responds to satiation,

Starting point is 00:59:36 amongst other things. But what makes you satiated? Nutrients. And if you eat nutrient-dense foods, you actually release the GLP-1 that stops you from overeating. Yeah, ultra-processed food is what makes people hungry. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 00:59:51 And it's like, you know, no one's going to eat 12 avocados or, you know, four 10-ounce steaks. You just can't. You can't overeat a rib eye. You can't. But you can easily eat a bag of cookies. Right? And a sheet cake. Right?

Starting point is 01:00:06 And a sheet cake. And drink a, a you know a liter bottle of soda and what's interesting is you know when you look at the dichotomy about how people present it they're like no it's just calories in calories out it's calories a calorie is a calorie well that's maybe true from you know it's true in a lab when you burn the calories they release the same amount of energy. When you eat them, they're different. Yes, exactly. A calorie burn is a calorie burn. A calorie eaten is not a calorie eaten. Yeah, it's whatever the kilojoules is that raises a cubic centimeter of water, one degree centigrade. So you compare an ultra-processed food to another calorie source. But I totally agree with you. That's not where the example can stop.

Starting point is 01:00:43 Because if I get hungry from the other calories, if I have an insulin spike and an insulin crash, and if I actually overeat, so now I'm on two identical 1500 calorie a day diets, one's ultra processed, one's nutrient dense, the nutrient dense diet is going to release more GLP-1, it's gonna actually cause a greater sensation of satiation, it's gonna reduce cravings.

Starting point is 01:01:05 The other one is gonna actually trigger the cravings. So this person wants to eat 3,000 calories. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of validated in the NIH study by Kevin Hall, where he basically gave people whole food or ultra-processed food, the same group, and two weeks they had ultra-processed food, two weeks they had whole foods. The ultra-processed group ate 500 calories more a day.

Starting point is 01:01:23 Because they said, eat whatever you want till you're full. And so they ate 500 calories more a day. Because they said eat whatever you want until you're full. And so they ate 500 calories more a day, that's in a week that's 3,500 calories, in a year that's 52 pounds of weight gain. Wow. Just from that one little defect of ultra-process. That's why America's so obese, it's like insane. I mean, it wasn't like that.

Starting point is 01:01:41 We want to treat obesity as a disease, as if it happened to us, not happened within within us and then we want to bring in more pharmaceutical intervention on the back of the taxpayer paid by pay for by medicaid and medicare it is the bill is i think 48 18 that's really dangerous one the end all obesity act uh yeah which they all sound so altruistic you know it's like it's a pay for ozempic yeah it's not the best solution i mean listen if we covered these drugs for everybody who's overweight or obese in america it would be 5.1 trillion dollars which is more than we spend on health care it would be like literally more than double our health care which is already twice as everybody else in the world yeah so if i were king back to where i was king

Starting point is 01:02:17 yeah yeah i like this with nih the hhs then then we we attack the uh dietary guidelines usda those have to be updated to include all the relevant science, which means we have to fund the process. And I'm working with people in the agencies saying, we don't have any money to do this. We're mandated by Congress to develop this. We don't have the money to review the data, to put science panels together. There's no money for the National Academy of Sciences.

Starting point is 01:02:39 I said, why are you publishing the evidence around the effect of high carbohydrate diets and the adverse effects on our health? He says, well, the National Academy of high carbohydrate diets and the adverse effects on our health? He says, well, the National Academy of Sciences hasn't reviewed the literature yet. It costs a million dollars and they don't have a million dollars and there's no funding for that process. So we can't actually review and revise our dietary guidelines. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like we're talking, I mean, a rounding error, which has a huge impact on how we understand nutrition and health. So reformed dietary guidelines to match the science. We need to change our school lunch programs to only allow whole foods in schools. We need to upgrade the quality of the food and put more

Starting point is 01:03:15 money in that. We need to change our SNAP program. It's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. It is not nutrition. It's food. Not really. If you actually look at the definition of food in the Webster's Dictionary, it's not even food because that's something that supports the growth and health of an organism. Ultra processed food by definition does not do that. It was actually not food.

Starting point is 01:03:34 And it's food security. It's calorie security, but it's not nutrition security, which is getting enough nutrients. It keeps you from dying. Well, it keeps you from dying from starvation, but you die from diabetes. And it's interesting,

Starting point is 01:03:47 the people who are most obese are the most nutrient deficient. If you have the most food insecure, you're more likely to be diabetic. So we need to provide real nutrition security and get rid of all the junk in SNAP and make it like WIC, which is Women's Infants and Children Program. You can buy fruits and vegetables. You can buy meat. You can buy whole grains. You can buy beans. You can buy a lot of good stuff. We already have those restrictions for women, infants, and children programs.

Starting point is 01:04:09 Just apply that to SNAP. Yeah. Okay. Listen, if you're going to have that stuff, it's just not going to be on the back of the tax payer. So much resistance from both sides, even Democrats and Republicans, because of the food industry. Then we need to also change the marketing. So we need to end marketing of junk food to kids, at least. We can say First Amendment, whatever.

Starting point is 01:04:34 In Chile, they don't allow any marketing from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. UK just banned junk food marketing. You shouldn't be able to see ads if you're a kid for this crap that's going to cause you to be addicted. It's just like advertising cigarettes like Joe Camel. It should just be banned. It kills more people than cigarettes every year. It should just be banned.

Starting point is 01:04:50 So that's a huge one, marketing. And then we need to look at the FDA around what they're doing in terms of food additives. Let's just meet what other countries have come to the conclusion, based on the science, are not safe additives. BHT and all these. Red dye 40. They just have no

Starting point is 01:05:05 place in our food supply and then we need to actually have clear labeling of food the fda these are not hard policies they're hard to implement because of resistance but they're simple ideas yeah put front of package labeling on so you know stuff is good for you put the amount of servings of fruits vegetables beans whole grains on the label and put warning labels like they have in other countries if it's bad for you it's like red light is bad green good yellow eat with caution or they're stopping giant stop signs or like cigarette labels they have the ability to do this and they've done this in other countries and it works right so you don't interrupt free choice right you don't come in just regularly educate people educate them don't take people want to eat crap that's fine but like tell them

Starting point is 01:05:42 what they're doing like in you go to europe the, that's fine. But like, tell them what they're doing. Like, you go to Europe, the cigarette package, the entire cigarette package is basically a warning label. It's so funny. And then we have a few other things I think would make a big difference. So we have the FDA, we have the NIH, we have the HHS, USDA. Then we need to reform agriculture. Yeah. So that's USDA.

Starting point is 01:06:00 But mostly, USDA should be, is mostly food programs. You know, there's 20 billion spent on supporting agriculture. There's 125 billion spent on food stamps alone. Really? Yeah. 125 billion on food stamps. It's the biggest food program in the country. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:16 And so the regenerative agriculture movement is gaining steam, and that's going to create more money for farmers, more productive farms, restore ecosystems, restore biodiversity, restore the soil, restore water tables, produce more nutritious food. The farmers make more money. We eat healthier food. It's a win-win-win. The people that lose are the fertilizer and the seed and chem companies. Right.

Starting point is 01:06:37 So nobody's going to like that. So what I'm saying is very heretical. Right. It's not going to happen likely unless, you know, maybe President Trump or Bobby Kennedy could do it. I don't know. But, you know, we need to put in these policies that have been studied, that are validated, that work, that will actually change the health of America from the ground up. Yeah. And I, first of all, could not agree with you more. You know, in medicine,

Starting point is 01:07:02 there's something called informed consent, you know, which isn't like a physician doesn't have to educate a patient to the point where they thoroughly understand the procedure, certainly not how to conduct the procedure, but they understand the risks and the benefits. Like what's the upside? What's the downside? What, you know, if I do this surgical procedure or I take this medication, what is the potential downside? I mean, I like what you're saying in the food labeling because it's their choice about whether or not they proceed. I mean, you can still go to the store and buy cigarettes. But if you buy cigarettes, you know what you're getting yourself into.

Starting point is 01:07:35 But if you're an adult and you're aware of the risk, you're aware of the risk. But I think the truth is that the majority of us have been so conditioned to believe that these are foods. And, you know, what we've seen in our practice is that people's palates actually change. They actually really don't like whole foods. No. They don't actually.

Starting point is 01:07:54 Like, you know, you make like a bone stock grass fed chili, which is what we're going to have after the podcast. And they taste it and it doesn't taste good to them because, you know, it doesn't taste good to them because they're used to highly processed ingredients and that palate changes. And then when I started- We just hijacked our taste buds for sure. Not only hijacked our taste buds, but actually designed a lot. And Casey Means talks about this a lot. But Callie Means talks about this a lot. Designed to create an addictive response you know

Starting point is 01:08:25 ding the dopamine receptor the r1a2 receptor in the back of the tongue to really hammer that and give you a dopamine reward so now you're not just liking the food you're addicted to 100 14 of adults and 12 of kids are biologically addicted to processed food ultra processed food according to the yale food addiction scale this scale. This is a global study. Wow. And 14% of adults are alcoholic. So it's like the same. It's frightening.

Starting point is 01:08:51 And Michael Moss wrote a book called Salt. When you say biologically addicted, they don't like the food. They're addicted to the food. They're addicted to it. Literally, by definition, all the behaviors that they have around food, they have cravings, they have withdrawal you know they can't control themselves it's all the same behaviors as addiction i've seen kid go kids go dafcon nine yeah i mean yale has done a lot of the work on this kelly brunel is very compelling research and i mean there's whole textbooks on this is not just

Starting point is 01:09:19 sort of like oh they're making food addictive this is like a deep science. And my book, 10 Day Detox, was basically about that. And what they found was like the Michael Moss and his investigation, he's a journalist from New York Times, investigated the food industry. And we talked to 300 industry scientists, experts, executives, whistleblowers, and found that this is deliberate, that they have taste institutes where they hire craving experts. You create them. Craving experts. This is their own internal language. Taste institutes craving experts

Starting point is 01:09:52 to create the bliss point of food, meaning the maximum dopamine response and the most mouth-filled taste response to create heavy users, which is their own terminology, heavy users like an addict. Right, of course. So it's easier to get someone who's drinking a 12 ounce soda or 10 ounce soda to drink a two liter soda than it

Starting point is 01:10:11 is to get you or i gary to start drinking a 10 ounce coca-cola right right and so they focus their marketing on these communities of mostly of color underserved communities who are are targeted far more with ads black kids drink twice as much soda as white kids and it's because there's so much targeting of these communities by these these um food industry and also when they get their ebts or bennett their food stamp you know snap benefit cards and they they kind of up at the beginning of the month they go they know they they go to all the uh convenience stores, the little bodegas, and they have all these giant ads, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:47 use your EBT, two-liter bottle of soda, soda, 99 cents. It's like it's really bad. Wow. It's really bad. It's very deliberate. You know, and what's interesting is the taxpayer is funding that. Oh, yeah. And then the taxpayer is also funding the Medicaid-Medicare bill

Starting point is 01:11:02 to actually treat the disease that's caused by that. So it's like no wonder it's called the food and drug administration because the food leads to the drugs and, and, and now we're funding the foods and the drugs. So it's really bad. You're right. A hundred percent. I mean, the, the Rockefeller foundation put out a report that for every dollar we spent on food, we spent $3 in collateral damage of costs and they didn't even include all of the things that are happening. So yeah, think about how much the tax pays are covering. We privatize the profits and socialize the costs. The soil gets destroyed.

Starting point is 01:11:27 The pesticides go on. The waterways get eutrophication, which kills all the wildlife and the seafood in the water. We drain our aquifers. We damage the soil. We lose carbon to the atmosphere. And then we produce food from that that's commodity crops that goes into ultra processed food that we pay for

Starting point is 01:11:42 with SNAP benefits that go to the poor. that we pay for with snap benefits that go to the poor then we pay for that with medicare medicaid so we're literally paying so many times either directly or indirectly for the harms from our food system and the government is holding that bill wow i love how you said we privatize the profits and we socialize the cost the cost wow when you say socialize the cost i mean mean, that's, that's taxpayers. Yeah. I mean, like who's paying for the fact that our aquifers are draining dry? Who's paying for the fact that our soils are damaged and there's, there's no carbon in the soil anymore. And we don't have organic matter to grow nutrient tensors. Who's paying for all the dead fish in 400 dead zones around the world, the size of New Jersey that are killing, that are feeding half a

Starting point is 01:12:21 billion people. Who's paying for the loss of biodiversity and the killing of 75% of our pollinators and half of all the birds? Who's paying for all that? Well, nobody. It's all our collective commons. We call it the commons, which is, oh, you know. And for the people that are so interested in green energy and global warming and the Green New Deal,

Starting point is 01:12:43 I mean, this is at the episode 100 that is regenerative farming and and in less expensive food you know it's interesting and it works for the farmers too everybody should see common ground and kiss the ground two films i was in that are talking about common ground and kiss the ground i'm gonna put links to those they're great films or they're they're gonna be i think i'm on amazon coming up soon but they're they're they're really telling a story of how we can move to a more regenerative system. Yeah. You know, I, I have a friend of mine, his name is Alfie Oaks.

Starting point is 01:13:09 He owns a huge grocery store in Naples called Seed to Table. And we actually got on a helicopter one day with my film crew and we, we parachuted into to some of his organic fields and he was showing me how, um, he's going organic produce. Um, you literally parachuted or you just landed? landed in a helicopter you're hardcore Gary that's really good I'm doing it like deep investigative background mark you know I'm committed you know like wow night with my ar-15 you got your your night vision glasses paragl paragliding in. There's a tomato. Dropping in from 30,000 feet with oxygen. Mission impossible. So we took a hillock out there and we dropped it on a bunch of his fields.

Starting point is 01:13:53 And he was showing me how he's actually growing organic produce at less than the cost that it would be to spray it with herbicides and pesticides, insecticides and all this. And some of it was really ingenious. Like they ran these reflective foils. So they have, you know, imagine just these long rows and they would wrap the roots in these reflective foils because they realized that these white flies were photosensitive. They don't have real eyesight. They're photodynamic.

Starting point is 01:14:22 And what would happen is this reflective foil would just bend and scatter the light, and it would confuse the insect, and they all went into the woods. I mean, and the fields looked so pristine. They were beautiful. And that's the irony. Farmers will make more money, produce better food, restore the ecosystem. It's a win-win-win. It's like a triple bottom line.

Starting point is 01:14:43 Yeah, and I watched the produce get picked at 9 o'clock in the morning. I watched it myself. Picked, washed, processed, and it was on the shelf by 2 o'clock that afternoon. So there's a strawberry that was in a field at 9 o'clock in the morning that's on the grocery store shelf at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And it's a profitable grocery store. So, I mean, this can be done in a way that creates jobs creates profit creates nutrition that actually fixes the dynamic in the food supply and he was saying that some of these fields are so they have been sprayed for so many years with these herbicides and pesticides yeah

Starting point is 01:15:14 that there aren't pesticides for three states away yeah like you know there's true we're not even we're not even protecting them against the pesticides that exist the pests that exist anymore because the overspring has just... We're all poisoned. One of the things I love about Function Health, this company I co-founded, which is lab testing, we're including testing for pesticides, PFAS chemicals, BPA, and we're finding... Glyphosate. Glyphosate. We're seeing incredible toxic load in the population.

Starting point is 01:15:44 What do you do? What do they do for, because I've read that there's now testing for microplastics. Yeah. And the only thing that I'm aware of that gets those out is this new serif filter, this Xterra filter by Lumati that actually filters the blood in a dialysis type format,

Starting point is 01:16:02 which I'm a big fan of. They use these heparin binding sites and they pull the toxins out of the blood. But what do you do for people that have heavy toxic loads? I mean, first you got to remove the toxic load, right? But what do you do for all these things that are embedded in the body, the heavy metals, the mycotoxins?

Starting point is 01:16:16 Yeah, it's tough. I mean, detoxification is another core modality that functional medicine uses to treat patients. So metal detox, cellular detox uh and there's many methods to do it but one is you know reducing the exposures right filter water filter air eating organic comments and stuff changing your household care products your skin care products and environmental working group has a whole set of guides on how to do that so i would go to ewg.org and that's great just for free information too by the way yeah second thing is

Starting point is 01:16:45 you've got to operate a lot of your detox systems so pee poop sweat you know like saunas lots of fiber you know lots of water just flushing stuff out and then there's a lot of molecules that help to increase your body's own endogenous or built-in detox systems glutathione boosting compounds whether it's the broccoli family of foods whether it's taking N-acetylcysteine or lipoic acid. Or even glutathione. Glutathione, you can take glutathione, selenium, all the nutrients that help boost glutathione. And then, you know, there's other cofactors like zinc for metal binding proteins that mine metals. So there's a lot of things you can do nutritionally to upgrade your biology. And then sometimes you need chelation and then saunas are another big thing. And then there's another protocol,

Starting point is 01:17:26 which I've been using with my patients, it's a little harder to access, called the PK protocol. It essentially uses phosphorylcholine to flush out cellular toxins and rebuild mitochondria. And how are you taking that, orally? It's an IV treatment. You also can take oral phosphorylcholine, but it's the structure of your cell membranes.

Starting point is 01:17:40 And all these toxins are embedded in our fat tissue, and their cells are all made up of fat. So that's where the cell membrane, yeah. So that's where it is. So basically, there's this incredible protocol, I can show you after, it's like really quite profound. It helps with mold, toxins, pesticides. Yeah, and we live in the mold capital of the world here

Starting point is 01:18:00 in Miami. Physicians just told me that. So I'm excited about this company that I co-founded because it really gives people agency over their health. It helps them undatify what's out of balance. We talked about nutritional health and metabolic health and a lot of things that people are just not catching and they wait until they get really sick and then they find out. And so our goal at Function Health is to help people live a hundred healthy years. And we provide a really deep analysis of what's going on with your biology. And we're going to be able to track more and more data from your wearables, from your medical

Starting point is 01:18:27 records, from imaging, from your omics, from stool testing, toxin testing, and use that information to create a personalized set of recommendations that tells you where you are, where you're headed and what to do about it. And so it's very empowering. And I think, you know, we just started and we had like a hundred thousand people sign up hundred thousand we had three hundred thousand people on the wait list although your podcast listeners can jump the wait list and use ultimate health 100 as the code ultimate health 100 i'm ultimate health 100 yes i'm gonna be the first one you're gonna see 100 for the first 100 listeners just set sign and you can jump the wait list yeah and uh and use that code as the early access code and it just you get incredible data on your biology and you know jump the wait list yeah and uh and use that code as the early access code and it just

Starting point is 01:19:05 you get incredible data on your biology and you know people are using wearables and glucose monitors and all it's great but this is like this is next level this is amazing and i'm going to put links to um uh function health and everything that you're doing in in in the uh show notes on the podcast i'm also going to put links to your um. I'm really excited to be also, you know, part of trying to make America healthy again. Yeah. This movement to really be apolitical about how we try to influence public policy in the country. Disease doesn't know if you're red, blue, or purple. It doesn't.

Starting point is 01:19:37 You know, I mean, I don't know how people could be on the other side of, you know, making our children more sick. So, you know, I wind down every podcast by asking all my guests uh the same question i definitely have to have you back because literally my this happened last time you know and i was like god i got so many more questions i have for you um but we'll definitely we'll definitely do a follow-up podcast but i ask all my guests um yeah come to austin we'll do a double back-to-back again. Let's do it. No, for sure. I want to go back for Rogan. So we'll do another double back-to-back.

Starting point is 01:20:13 I ask my guests, you know, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? To me? What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? You know, I think it's being able to show up fully in your life, feeling good and able to do what matters to you. To love the people you want to love, to do the work you want to do in the world, have the energy to show up for your friends and family and your kids, to be able to actually be fully here. Because if you feel like crap, you want to just sit and scroll Instagram or watch Netflix and not be engaged in life. And the end of the day, it's about the quality of our life

Starting point is 01:20:45 and the quality of our experience. And I don't care what age I am. I want to be able to do what I want to do. I want to go play tennis. I want to ride a bike. I want to make love. I want to go for a hike. I want to jump in a lake.

Starting point is 01:20:55 I want to do all those things, you know? And I count on doing those until my last day, you know? And you're crazy. You're 65. Why are you riding horses across Mongolia without a helmet? I'm like, you know, because I can. Because I can. You know, it was crazy.

Starting point is 01:21:08 We went on this Mongolian horse trip. And that's like, for me, you know, like a dream to be able to go into the tundra in Mongolia and be in the middle of nowhere and ride these little Mongolian horses, you know, at full gallop across crazy terrain. I've been riding since I was a little kid, so I'm experienced. But, you know, it was just like, I don't want to not be able to do that because I'm 65 years old. I mean, you're 65 years old. And you're so much pain and you can't get out of bed and you don't like the long flights. That's right.

Starting point is 01:21:35 Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this podcast. I mean, this is going to be probably one of my most popular episodes. And, you know, my audience is going to absolutely love this. And I really just can't thank you enough for coming on. Thanks, Gary. Huge fan and a big follower of your work. And I wish you all the success. And I hope that I can be a small porter giving you a bigger voice.

Starting point is 01:21:57 Thanks, Gary. Appreciate that. You got it. And as always, guys, that's just science.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 115. Dr. Mark Hyman: The Truth About Why Americans Are Getting Sicker

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