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Are You Nutrient Deficient? The Hidden Factors Accelerated Aging | Rhonda Patrick
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the.
- [00:02]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Dr. Hyman show, what the study found. These are randomized controlled trials. Placebo controlled. Right. It the multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they, they were less. People taking the multivitamin mineral supplement were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction, memory loss, and in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.
- [00:29]
Ron
Wow. Okay. Yeah.
- [00:31]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Randomized controlled trial. Here we are ten years later.
- [00:33]
Ron
Yeah.
- [00:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I'd.
- [00:38]
Ron
Like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal.
- [00:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Practice, there is simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several.
- [00:46]
Ron
Passion projects to help you.
- [00:47]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you're looking for data about your.
- [00:48]
Ron
Biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights.
- [00:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And if you are in need of.
- [00:52]
Ron
Deepening your knowledge around your health journey.
- [00:54]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Check out my membership community, the Hymenhive. And if you're looking for curated and.
- [00:58]
Ron
Trusted supplements and health products for your.
- [01:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Health journey, visit my website@doctor.com for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.
- [01:07]
Ron
So, Ron, it's so great to have you on the Dr. Hyman Show. Welcome. And I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I think, you know, you're one of the few scientists out there in the public sphere who's actually communicating science and data in ways that have a lot of integrity and that adhere to kind of some common sense principles that, you know, a lot of things out in the blogosphere or the podcast world are often, you know, a little bit, you know, extreme. And you kind of really take a very science based approach. So I'm really thrilled to have you on the podcast. And, and the topic I want to really dive into is micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, maybe some phytochemicals. But, you know, there's so much confusion and controversy and, and you know, the medical profession has historically said, you know, you don't really need multivitamin if you're eating a healthy diet. Well, first of all, most of us don't eat a healthy diet. And second of all, you know, the idea that vitamins and minerals just cause expensive urine doesn't quite make sense. I always say, if, you know, you say, why should you drink water? You're just going to pee it out. It's like your body uses what it needs. And I think there's a lack of understanding of the widespread insufficiency and often deficiencies of nutrients in America. You know, we're overfed and undernourished. And so there's a. A problem that I think we're facing, which is people don't understand the need to actually obtain the right nutrients and the right amounts for not just preventing a deficiency disease, but for optimizing health, preventing the diseases of aging. And I want to sort of dive into that with you, where I want to go through sort of the overall framework of like, you know, where we're at in terms of the nutritional status of American population, what things we should be worried about, and, and, you know, that kind of like dive into the science of each of the key nutrients and what they do and how they affect us. And, you know, one of the things that kind of really got me excited when I was sort of, you know, when I have you on, was that you studied with a scientist named Bruce Ames, who is someone I've, you know, really admired, has been someone who inspired me. And a lot of my work and thinking has come out of a lot of his work, which was really looking at how do we really understand the nature of aging and micronutrients and. And how do we get a metabolic tune up. You know, he wrote these incredible papers that were, I think, landmark papers. And, you know, you had the privilege of actually working with him, studying with him. So maybe kind of you can share with us how you sort of got into this with Bruce and what, you know, what you learned from him and what the sort of whole idea of the role of micronutrients is in health and wellness.
- [03:42]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Well, first of all, Mark, I want to thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate what you do as well, and I also appreciate the kind words. So sorry, did I make you cry? Bruce Ames passed away a couple months ago, and he was my mentor and a very good friend of mine. Unbelievable guy. And kind of a funny story about how I ended up in his lab. You know, I was, when I was wrapping up my graduate research, my PhD at St. George Children's Research Hospital. While I was there, I really got into health and for just wanting to be healthy. And also I had done some previous research before graduate school in an aging lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. And so I was already very interested in aging. You know, even though I was in my 20s when I was working in that lab, you know, there was always.
- [04:38]
Ron
The best thing people think about when they're 20s is living to 100.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
But yeah, I was definitely thinking about it. And specifically I was thinking about, like, things that I can do in my diet and lifestyle, as I had done some research on how insulin affects aging and, you know, glucose metabolism. And so it was very real to me that there's a very strong connection between our diet and lifestyle and the way we age. And so that led me to reading a lot of Bruce's studies on mitochondrial health on micronutrients. And I continued reading him throughout grad school. And I started a blog at that time. I was, you know, blogging about vitamin D and Omega 3. And I kind of decided I didn't want to be a professor necessarily. I didn't necessarily want to go and write grants and do the sort of classical pathway that a lot of scientists do when they're doing their training. And I had told that to my mentor and my mentors at the time, and they were very distraught about that because they were saying that I was a very good scientist and I was completely destroy my scientific career. They begged me to please, at least go interview for some postdoctoral, you know, positions. And so I, I did. I said, okay, well, I'll go ahead and interview. And I. I went on a few interviews and some very prominent labs. I interviewed for very even aging labs. In fact, one of the guys that I interviewed with at Stanford looked me up and saw that I was blogging and said to me, you can't do this if you're going to come to my lab. You need to work for me. So then I go to Bruce and I meet Bruce, and he is absolutely just. He blew me away with not only his excitement for science, but his excitement for science communication and what I was doing. And he was so enthusiastic about it. And he was basically like, oh, you need to continue doing this is a very important thing you do. Now, remember Bruce, you know, he kind of switches fields every few years or so. He started out looking at enzymes, and then he developed this test known as the Ames test, that is a very, very simple test for testing for mutagens, things that can damage your DNA, which is the precursor for cancer. Yeah, it's still widely used today. And he had done a lot of, you know, research back in the. The late 70s and early 80s, and he found that chemicals that were in things like women's hair dye, children's pajamas were mutagens and carcinogens.
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Ron
Yeah.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And he published this paper on it, and nobody was doing anything about it. And so he was on the phone calling up these companies. Have you seen my paper? And he was responsible for getting these chemicals out of women's hair dye, out of children's pajamas. I mean, he has had an amazing impact on public health. Continues to have an impact on public health.
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Ron
Isn't he one of the most cited scientists of all time?
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
He is. He is. And then, you know, he got into, you wonder, okay, he's doing this cancer research, and then he gets into micronutrients. So, you know, These are about 30 or 40 essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids that we need to get from our diet. We need them to survive, but as Bruce would argue, we also need them to age optimally. And he got into this field quite. I would say it was an accident. He had a guy in his lab doing a sabbatical, Dr. McGregor. And this guy was a cytobiologist. He was. He was looking at red blood cells and doing a lot of experiments with red blood cells. And it turns out he used a media that didn't have folate. And all of a sudden, he started noticing all these double stranded breaks in DNA.
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Ron
So the DNA was like, being damaged, being damaged.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And so he was like, oh, what's going on? And he finally traced it down to, oh, we have this media that we've used that doesn't have folate. So then he decided to do some animal work. Well, let's see what happens if we don't. If we deprive rodents of folate. And sure enough, widespread DNA damage just completely. You know, double stranded breaks in DNA are the precursor to basically oncogenic mutations.
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Ron
Cancer.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Cancer. So Bruce, of course, was like, wow, this is amazing. Not having a important micronutrient can potentially cause cancer. And that's kind of what it was doing in the rodent studies. And then he'd done some human. He had found some humans that were low in folate and did some experiments as well, found a similar thing, gave them back the folate. DNA, double stranded breaks went away. He worked out the mechanism, which was folate is a precursor for making DNA. And so if you don't have that there, your body will put something there from rna, a uracil instead of a thymine.
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Ron
And those are like nucleotides of DNA that build DNA.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And so it basically causes these double stranded breaks. So, long story short, that's how Bruce got into micronutrients. And he started to really dive into understanding how these vitamins and minerals are affecting the way we age. Because cancer, you know, is a disease of age for the most part. There are some childhood leukemias and childhood cancers, but those are mostly linked to genetics. Aging in general is a major driver of cancer. Bruce Came up with this theory called the triage theory. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah, this is a theory that he came up with that posits that vitamins and minerals that we get from our diet, they get triaged to essential functions in our body that are important for preventing basically acute death. Right. So if you think about blood coagulation, vitamin K1, very important, like you need to have your blood clot, otherwise you could have, you know, a pretty severe injury and you could have a hemorrhage and that would be detrimental. Right. So vitamin K is one example, and there's some other examples, like selenium that Bruce has published and showed. There are proteins that have a stronger binding to vitamin K1 that are important for coagulation. So these are proteins in the liver versus, for example, other proteins that stay in circulation and are activating proteins that are important for calcium signaling and trafficking, moving calcium out of the bloodstream, moving it to muscle, moving it to bones. Right. So. So he's published a couple of papers showing that. So the idea is that your body will triage them to essential functions to prevent short term death at the expense of these long term sort of health functions. Right.
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Ron
So your body hijacks whatever nutrients we have to deal with the immediate needs we have, but then it kind of misses the boat on what they're doing to protect us long term from the ravages of aging.
- [11:36]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. And so magnesium would be another one. Magnesium is an essential mineral. It's involved in over 300 different enzymatic, you know, processes. And ATP production and utilization is one of those. And ATP is the energetic currency of our cells. We need to make energy to survive. Right.
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Ron
So runs our cells is energy everything.
- [11:57]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. But it's also essential for DNA repair enzymes. They use it to repair damage to our DNA. Every time we make a new cell, whether that's a skin cell or a liver cell or a blood cell, there's, there's damage that occurs even with just the process of cell division. Right. Let alone the external processes that we're exposed to, UV radiation, unhealthy diet, things like that. So we need to repair that damage. But magnesium is essential for those DNA repair enzymes. And so if you don't get enough magnesium, it's only going to those essential roles of ATP production and not the DNA repair enzymes. And this is important because about 50% of the U.S. population does not have adequate levels of magnesium.
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Ron
50%?
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Close to 50%, yeah. And you know, magnesium, as Bruce would say, is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule, chlorophyll give plants their green color. So magnesium is very high in dark leafy greens. You're supposed to eat your greens, you get your magnesium. And so people aren't eating enough of their greens and they're not getting enough magnesium.
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Ron
Greens and beans.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Greens and beans and oats, nuts, almonds. Exactly.
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Ron
Things that aren't typically staples of American diet, which is 60% ultra processed food.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, right, exactly. So, you know, the magnesium RDA is about 350 to 400 milligrams a day, depending on if you're male or female. Males require a little bit more. And so you're really supposed to be getting the majority of that from your diet. People aren't getting that from their diet. And you know, just in terms of. We talked about triage theory in cancer. There are a variety of studies that have looked at. These are observational studies. So it's always difficult to establish causation, of course, from observational data, but nonetheless, there are studies that have found a dose dependent effect of low magnesium. So for every 100 milligram dose, 100 milligrams less intake per day was associated with a 24% increase in pancreatic cancer incidence. Well, so instead magnesium of, of magnesium. So eventually. And that's dose dependent. Right.
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Ron
So let's back up a little bit because Years ago, at 20, God, more than 20 years ago, I wrote an article called Paradigm Shift, really about the sort of end of normal science, which is this sort of our current view of how things are in medicine and how the body works and shifting more toward a systems view and understanding the body as a network, as a sort of an integrated organism that requires basic raw materials to function optimally. And what I wrote about in that, in that article was that, you know, micronutrients are really kind of miraculous because back in the turn of the century, we didn't really know about them of the 1900s, not 2000s, but we still. I kind of don't know that much about them from the consumer and medical point of view for sure. The amount of serious deficiency diseases like pellagra and beriberi and rickets and, you know, xerophthalma, which is like a vitamin A deficiency and causes blindness, just widespread, you know, zinc deficiencies. And these cause really significant serious diseases. They could literally be cured almost in minutes with infinitesimally small amounts, you know, milligram amounts of nutrients. There's no drug that can do that. And you were talking about magnesium having 300 different enzymatic reactions. When you take a drug, it usually has one target like one receptor and one action. But nutrients have, are pleomorphic, which means they can do many, many, many things. And they do many things. And each nutrient literally can have hundreds of different reactions in different systems of the body that regulate almost everything we can think of. And what's really frightening to me as a physician and we do testing of this, I co founded a company called Function Health and we do a lot of micronutrient testing as part of that, which is not typically done, whether it's, you know, methylation testing for homocysteine methylic acid, you know, with the B vitamins, we're talking about like folic acid or the, you know, vitamin D or omega 3s and you know, zinc and the selenium, the list goes on. And we see iodine, the tremendous amount of deficiencies that exist in red blood cell magnesium, you know, that exist within the population that are being undiagnosed. I mean, and what we're seeing, I don't. We have 110,000 people in our cohort, 67%. Last time we looked at the data of the cohort, which is I think a more health forward cohort who would be like proactive about their health, going to function, health, getting rid of diets, done. 67% have a nutrient deficiency. Iron, omega 3s, vitamin D, homocysteine, whatever. At the level that the lab reference range says, not at what you or I would think would be optimal. Right. So like if, you know, we probably would think vitamin D should be over 45 or 50, but their level's 30 or ferritin. I think they're level 16, which is your iron stores probably. I think it should be a 45 or more for optimal health. So we're talking about 67% being deficient at a level that I think is already pretty low. So what about the general population? And maybe you could talk about the degree of nutrient deficiencies and then talk about how these things actually do their magic and why they're not just causing expensive urine. And then I want to sort of get into what should people be taking because that's. I think we're going to get into at the end because I think it's important to know what are the foundational things that are going to protect you long term, you know, for pennies a day that can actually save your life.
- [17:30]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Well, I want to start out with the multivitamins and vitamins don't do anything. And they're expensive urine, which you also mentioned earlier, because this is a pet peeve of mine, I guess.
- [17:43]
Ron
Me too.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And I'll tell you, I'll tell you.
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Ron
It was funny that I just. Introverted. Sorry. I go to these medical conferences and I'm like, I ask, okay, doctors, you know, how many of you recommend supplements to your patients? And like a few hands will go up, you know, how many of you personally take supplements? I'm like, almost everybody's hand goes up.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Oh, really?
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Ron
Yeah, it's very funny.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It's a great question.
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Ron
Yeah. So there's no evidence, but I take.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
But I take. Here's a big flaw with a lot of those studies that are cited by journals, great journals, like jama, for example.
- [18:20]
Ron
They're poorly designed.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
They're poorly designed.
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Ron
So, you know, they're designed like drugs, I guess.
- [18:25]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly.
- [18:26]
Ron
Exactly.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, exactly. So the problem is when you have a drug trial, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard, right? You have a drug and then you have a placebo. But the thing is, is that with a drug, everybody has zero levels of that drug in the start of the trial. That's right. So you don't have to measure anything. Right. Because there's nothing to measure until you take the drug.
- [18:46]
Ron
There's no like pre ozempic level. Although actually the way ozempic is true. You have a GLP one.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, Bad, bad example. But like statins. So you know, but when you, when you're doing a.
- [18:55]
Ron
You don't have a normal blood level of Lipitor.
- [18:57]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, right. Exactly. When you're doing a study on vitamin D or omega 3 or fill in the blank, vitamin mineral. Everybody has varying levels of these micronutrients in their body. And so you have to measure things. You have to measure things. At the start of the trial, you might have someone that's already got sufficient levels of vitamin D. They may have 50 nanograms per milliliter level vitamin D. And so you give them a vitamin D supplement and it's not going to do anything because they're already sufficient. Right. Or the converse is they're so deficient and you give them a supplement that's 400 IUs or 800 IUs, which doesn't raise their blood levels hardly at all, that it doesn't really do anything. And so you won't.
- [19:38]
Ron
The dose is wrong. You don't measure who's sufficient. Like, yeah, I mean, like if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything. Right. So it's like if you, if your levels are great of omega 3s and you add omega 3s, you won't see a change in your health.
- [19:50]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, exactly. So that's the fundamental flaw of clinical trials in nutrition. That right there is that the MDs that are running these trials are running them like they're drug trials and they're not. You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well done trials and in fact, I.
- [20:09]
Ron
Remember just interrupting the other thing, the other flaw is that they will use a single dose of a nutrient that usually works as a team, like, and that can actually make things worse. Like the beta carotene trials and smokers show that it can cause cancer, but oxidative stress is managed by a whole team of nutrients. So like I would say you could be, you know, you know, Michael Jordan, but if you're playing one against five on a basketball team, you're going to lose every time. Right. Even if he's the best player in the world. So you need a team of, of these nutrients, particularly in terms of the oxidative stress cascade, to actually modulate free radicals. And if you give a high dose of one nutrient, you're going to kind of screw up the whole chain.
- [20:52]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, that is possible. Not to mention the fact that smokers, I mean, if you give beta carotene to non smokers, it doesn't cause cancer. But smokers are doing so much oxidative damage and they're getting DNA damage that a high dose of something like beta carotene, which can be an antioxidant, may then allow, you know, some of that, it's basically, it's allowing some of the cells that would otherwise die from the oxidative stress, you know, not to die. Right. And so it's, yeah, it's a very complicated thing when you're doing things like that. But it, you know, I think like it was about 10 years ago, there was a huge study in the annals of internal medicine and it was called Enough is enough. Vitamins and mineral supplements not only don't do anything, they may be harmful. Yeah, I think that was, do you remember that study? Yeah, it was about 10 years ago.
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Ron
Yeah.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And you know, I was, I just dug in and it was a meta analysis and I went and looked at all those studies and I found that all these flaws again coming from, you.
- [21:44]
Ron
Looked at the actual studies that they made their conclusions from. So they do a review and they go, we're going to look at all these studies and we're going to make a summary and that's called a meta analysis. And then from that, you didn't just take their conclusions. You actually went and looked at the data itself from the original studies.
- [21:58]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly, yeah. And I put out a video about it, like years and years ago, and all these flaws that we just talked about were there. And here we are ten years later, and the Cosmos trials was just published. Right. So this is another meta analysis of a couple randomized controlled trials where older adults were given a multivitamin. They had about 20 or so essential vitamins, essential minerals, omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D. Right. Magnesium. This was all present in this multivitamin. And they were given it for two years.
- [22:28]
Ron
Yeah.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
What the study found. These are randomized controlled trials. Placebo. Controlled. Right. It. The, the, the multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they ha. They were less. People taking the multivitamin mineral supplement were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction, memory loss, and in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.
- [22:55]
Ron
Wow.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Brand mice, controlled trial. Here we are ten years later.
- [22:59]
Ron
Yeah. And there's many, many other studies that show the value of nutrients in many, many different conditions.
- [23:04]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, Exactly. Yeah. I think that it comes down to, yes, you should try to get your micronutrients from diet, however, taking, you know, a multivitamin supplement, taking vitamin D, taking omega 3s. Like these are insurance, Right? This is insurance to make sure you're getting your optimum levels. So you asked about deficiencies and what are some of the common ones? Well, omega 3. Okay. So about 80% of the world's population and 90% of the US population does not meet the requirements for omega 3 fatty acids. Yeah, that's a lot.
- [23:36]
Ron
Which is basically what your body's made of. You know, the cell membranes, your brain, you know, nervous tissue runs, regulatory inflammation. I mean, it's critical to everything.
- [23:46]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. And there's been a lot of work by Dr. Bill Harris. So I'm, I'm an associate professor at the Fatty Acid Research Institute with Bill Harris. And so I'm involved in a lot of research on Omega 3 and he's published just an array of studies that are quite convincing. So looking at the omega 3 index. So this is the omega 3 levels in red blood cells, which is sort of like a long term marker for Omega 3 because they take about whatever.
- [24:23]
Ron
What does the index actually measure?
- [24:25]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It measures the EPA and DHA levels along with a bunch of other fatty acids, if, if you're interested in that. But it's really the EPA and DHA level in the red blood cell membrane.
- [24:36]
Ron
Which gives you the index. And you want a certain number.
- [24:38]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So he's published studies using like the Framingham cohort. So these are large cohort studies with a lot of people. And he's looked at the omega 3 index and correlated with all cause mortality, so dying from a variety of different causes. And what he's found is that people that have what is defined as a high omega 3 index, so this would be 8% or more, have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people that have a 4% omega 3 index, which is low. And actually the average omega 3 index of the US population is about 5%. Pretty close to that 4%.
- [25:15]
Ron
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we actually measure that in the function health labs.
- [25:18]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah.
- [25:18]
Ron
So it's great to see when we.
- [25:20]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
See that five year increased life expectancy. If you think about Japan. Japan, who. They eat a lot of seafood in Japan. Their omega 3 index on average is like 10%. So they're above the high, the 8%.
- [25:31]
Ron
Yeah, yeah. Their mercury levels are probably also very high.
- [25:34]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
What's funny, it's funny that you say that, Mark. There's been studies like in pregnant women.
- [25:39]
Ron
Yeah.
- [25:39]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
You probably remember this, that decades ago women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury. And that actually had a detrimental sort of effect because omega 3 fatty acids, as you mentioned, they're so important for the brain, very important for neurodevelopment. And there have now been a whole host of studies that have come out showing that omega 3 fatty acids actually protect from any potential mercury toxicity in the developing fetus. And in fact, there's been studies looking at children that were born to mothers that had a high level of omega 3 and high mercury. Those children scored higher on intelligence tests. So IQ scores, even, like, even if so. So high mercury was actually biomarker intelligence. It wasn't actually the mercury, it was high omega 3.
- [26:23]
Ron
That's crazy.
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick
But yes, you get, you get the point.
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Ron
Although in Japan they eat a lot of seaweed, which. And seaweed is a chelator for heavy metals.
- [26:30]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Oh, is it?
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Ron
So is green tea, by the way.
- [26:32]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I think garlic. Garlic. The beta mercato mercaptans and garlic as well. But back to the Omega 3. And this study I was talking about from Bill Harris is so interesting because he also. This is a huge cohort of people, the Framingham. There's people that have all sorts of lifestyles including smoking. And so he did a sub analysis looking at smokers and non smokers and their omega 3 index. And what Bill and his Associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega 3. So they had a high omega 3 index of 8%. They had the same mortality as non smokers with a low omega 3 index.
- [27:10]
Ron
Okay, everybody, this does not mean you can smoke and take your own fish oil pills. I don't get any ideas.
- [27:15]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Or if you're not getting enough Omega 3, it's like smoking. Right. I mean, if you learn.
- [27:21]
Ron
That's another way to look at.
- [27:22]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right. If you look at the graph of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect. Yeah, perfect.
- [27:28]
Ron
Fascinating.
- [27:28]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
So having a low omega 3 index had the same mortality risk as smoking.
- [27:33]
Ron
Okay, so we're talking about 90% of the American population is in that category.
- [27:38]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yes, yes. And, you know, there's also been a whole host of randomized controlled trials looking at omega 3s being protect cardio protective. Right. So they're. They're very important for cardiovascular health. Triglycerides.
- [27:51]
Ron
Yeah. There's actually prescription omega 3s which you can pay much, much more than you would if you go get a basic omega 3 for lowering triglycerides as a therapy.
- [28:00]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, yeah. And you mentioned inflammation. You know, so this is another thing they do. They play a major role in lowering inflammation. And so that's a driver of aging in many ways. Brain aging, you know, Cardiovascular Aging. So Omega 3s are, I would say, one of the most profound lifestyle factors that can play a role in. In negating inflammation, aside from exercise.
- [28:23]
Ron
Yeah, and they're just. They're so like. Like the word I use is pleomorphic, but it's a big medical word. But essentially it means. It does a million things. Right. It's not just one thing. It's great for your skin, for your hair, for your nails, for your brain health, for preventing dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer. I mean, it regulates inflammation. So these are nutrients that do so many things in the body, then they work differently than drugs. And they're essential. They're called essential because they are essential. And one of the challenges is that we're looking for that in, you know, quick fix. And we're trying to diagnose a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure you're familiar with Robert Heaney, who was a vitamin D researcher, and he wrote this beautiful paper years ago called Long latency Deficiency Diseases. And the basic thesis was that in the short term, if you're a nutrient deficient at a severe level, like we used to see, you know, in the 1900s, if your vitamin D is super low. You'll get rickets. Or if you don't have enough vitamin C and you're a sailor, you get scurvy, right? Or if you don't have enough, too much white rice and white flour, which they started doing at the turn of the century, you get beriberi and pellagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies. The thesis he had essentially is that you can correct those vitamin deficiencies in the short term to fix those deficiency diseases. Like if you're low in folate in the short term, it'll cause anemia, a form of anemia, which is big cells called megaloblastic anemia. But in the long run, it can cause cancer and heart disease and dementia. The same thing with vitamin D. You know, in the short run you'll get rickets. In the long run, you'll get osteoporosis and cancer and die sooner. And so medicine hasn't really gotten that concept. It's like, yeah, if you're deficient, take a vitamin, but otherwise you don't need them, Right?
- [30:15]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
That's also very much in line with Bruce's triage theory, right? Is these micronutrients are running our metabolism, which runs everything from our heart pumping blood to neurotransmitter function, to repairing DNA. So there's a lot of, you can look in the mirror and if you're vitamin C deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, oh, I've got scurvy, I got scurvy, right? But when you're magnesium deficient, you're not going to see DNA damage happening, but.
- [30:41]
Ron
You might feel muscle cramps and you might have anxiety, you might have constipation, you might have muscle twitching or headaches or a million other things that are symptoms of magnesium deficiencies, sensitivity to loud noises. And so, like, as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at micronutrient deficiency symptoms that are not necessarily pure true deficiency, but more like insufficiency. And I think people don't make that distinction. And I think when you treat people, it's often a miracle when you, when you get them a plate and the nutrients they're deficient in, so many things get better.
- [31:15]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I, I like it, it is insufficiency because most, most people are not deficient. We do have a lot of fortification even in our ultra processed foods because of, you know, preventing neural tube defects, preventing pellagra, like all these diseases that were sort of cropping up like you.
- [31:30]
Ron
Mentioned in the early Fortified. But it's like junk fortified.
- [31:34]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It is, it is, but it seems to stop some of those deficiencies. Right. But it's the insufficiency. And with vitamin D, it's a really big one because it is converted into a steroid hormone. So this is something that is going into the nucleus of our cell and binding and interacting with DNA. It has a little sequence of DNA called a vitamin D response element. It's so important, it's encoded in our DNA. Right. So to not have enough vitamin D. So 70% of the US population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is about 30 nanograms per mil. 70%. 30, which would be.
- [32:12]
Ron
And if you add it up to 45 or 50, it's probably like 80 plus 90%.
- [32:18]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, right, yeah. So, and, and so that would be. There have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin D levels. Of course, this is again observational. Lots of meta analyses out there even dating back for like 30 years. And it seems as though having at least 40 nanograms per mil seems to be a sweet spot. You know, 40 to 60 is a really good place to be where you're having a good level of vitamin D. But again, it's a steroid hormone. It's not, it's, it's regulating over 5% of the protein encoding human genome. That's like thousands of genes.
- [32:50]
Ron
Yeah.
- [32:51]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
You know, everything from immune function. It plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity brain function. It regulates genes that are important for converting tryptophan into serotonin. Yeah, serotonin is an important neurotransmitter that regulates mood, cognitive function, impulse control, you know, so vitamin D, maybe I need.
- [33:09]
Ron
More of that then.
- [33:10]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Well, and the problem is, is that, you know, vitamin D, typically you make it from uvb, radiation exposure from the.
- [33:16]
Ron
Sun, but we're all told to shield ourselves from the sun and sunblock. And so we live indoors, work indoors. And yeah, it's a problem. I mean, you're all running or half naked, hunting and gathering. We got a lot of vitamin D and we ate and we're coastal areas and we ate, you know, fish, small fish like herring. And so they're higher in vitamin D. Or if you're forging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin D. So there's ways in which our historical population got it, Paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that.
- [33:41]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right. Exactly, we don't. And so I do think so people, the simple solution is a vitamin D supplement. Right. And so about 4000ius a day will generally get someone from a deficient range, which is 20 nanograms per mil, up to a sufficient range.
- [33:56]
Ron
Okay, but you're just talking about 10 times what's normally in a multivitamin or what doctors will recommend.
- [34:02]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I am. Because you. Yeah, you really do. It's about a thousand I. It's a 1000ius of vitamin D will raise blood levels between 5 to 10 nanograms per mil. But it all. We have genes, we have different variations of our genes that are able to do this. And this again comes down to these clinical studies showing that, you know, nothing happens.
- [34:21]
Ron
We're all different.
- [34:22]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
We're all different. And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose. Right. Because they have genes that aren't doing. Converting vitamin D3 into 25 hydroxy vitamin D, which is the circulating form of vitamin D or the steroid hormone, 125 hydroxy vitamin D. You know, so let's.
- [34:38]
Ron
Go down this rabbit hole because I think, you know, there's a paper you just reminded me of that Bruce Ames wrote, it was published in, I think, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition years ago, about how one third of all of our DNA codes for enzymes. And an enzyme is a catalyst that converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts, or the coenzymes or the helpers are micronutrients. And so what he said in that paper was that there's a huge variation in the population's need for different nutrients. So some people might need 400 micrograms of folate, some people might need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so it's really about personalized nutrition. It's about testing, not guessing. It's about figuring out what your body needs, what your genetics are. And it gets really fascinating that you can actually start to customize your own diet and your own supplement based on what your own particular genetics and your levels are. And so I think there's this. It was sort of a wake up call for me. Like, holy cow. When you think of our DNA and everything it does, if one third of it is coding for enzymes and all those enzymes require vitamins and minerals. If we don't have enough of those nutrients, it's like, it's like a, like an assembly line in a factory. If you don't have one station, the thing can't get made right. So you gum up the whole works of your metabolic machinery. If you don't have the right levels of nutrients to optimize the function of your body and that's why we call it functional medicine, because it's about how do we optimize function. Right.
- [36:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It's true, you know, these minerals and vitamins. So you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins, like these are, these are co factors for these enzymes to make these enzymes run properly. And if you have, if you don't have sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally. Right. So in the case that we talked about, DNA repair enzymes, they're not going to be repairing damage as well. Zinc is also involved in DNA repair as well. So B vitamins are involved in serotonin production, Magnesium's involved in vitamin D production. Right. You were talking about, you know, nutrients working together. And it's, it's very true. So I think a really great way to think about eating diet is what do I need to run my metabolism. Yeah, right.
- [36:58]
Ron
And when you say metabolism, like, what do you mean by that? Because like, it's not like my weight. You're talking about metabolism as sort of a bigger concept in medicine.
- [37:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, yeah. I guess when people hear the word metabolism, they think about weight loss.
- [37:11]
Ron
I got a slow metabolism.
- [37:13]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, right. What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes you're talking about, you know, one third of the protein encoding genome that are doing enzymatic reactions that have, that are making proteins function. So they are producing energy, they are, you know, running neurotransmitter synthesis. They are causing, you know, your, your liver to function properly, your heart to function, the lungs, everything.
- [37:43]
Ron
So every chemical reaction all the time.
- [37:45]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly.
- [37:45]
Ron
I don't know if I heard, I read this somewhere and I can't find the original citation, but that there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body every second. It's just like an insane amount of activity is going on chemically and biochemically and converting one molecule to another. And if you, if you don't have enough of these nutrients, that whole 37 billion trillion chemical react functions may not work optimally.
- [38:05]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So getting the micronutrients you need from food and nature sort of color coded them in a way. Right. I mentioned chlorophyll, that's magnesium, you have vitamin K. Also the salts.
- [38:23]
Ron
What color is vitamin K?
- [38:24]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I guess it's green too. I would say green. Vitamin K1 and then the orange ones. The orange, right. And then you've got like the phytochemicals. Right. So that would be the purples, but you know, you really do need to get a lot of vegetables and fruits and then you need your protein, right. And fiber. When you're getting your micronutrients, you're also getting the fiber because a lot of the micronutrients are coming from plants which are a great source of both fermentable and non fermentable fiber. Right. So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there, right? Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, Paleo. And although I do think Paleo is the closest thing to what I'm talking about. But what I'm talking about is even simpler because what it really means is that you understand why you need food. What's the purpose of food? Right. The purpose of food is to provide you with these essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids like omega 3 and protein and fiber to improve gut health. That's the purpose of eating and feel. Right? And so that means you don't need ultra processed foods. That means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet, you're going to be missing out on a lot of micronutrients. It's going to be very hard.
- [39:39]
Ron
I have a theory which is like, I have many theories. One theory I have is that, you know, we're so depleted in these nutrients and it dysregulates our appetite. And so when you're eating ultra processed food, there's no nutrients in there. And so when a kid is iron deficient, it'll eat dirt, it's called pica, and try to get some iron from the dirt. And I think so many people in this country are so nutrient deficient that they're just eating more and more of the ultra processed food. It's like they're looking for love in all the wrong places.
- [40:13]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis?
- [40:16]
Ron
Yes.
- [40:16]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. So it's kind of the same thing where, you know, your, your body needs a certain amount of protein to, to run optimally. And if you're eating, there's been a couple of randomized controlled trials on this. I think it's like Stephen Simpson is one of the proponents of it. It was like 2000s or something. And that essentially if you're eating ultra processed foods, which are high in, you know, a lot of refined carbohydrates, low in protein, that you overeat to sort of try to get enough protein. So it does make sense if your body's looking for more of micronutrients, more vitamins, more Minerals, more protein that you start to overeat. And are you familiar with Kevin Hall's study that he published a couple of years ago?
- [40:56]
Ron
You mean the ultra processed food where they ate 500 calories more?
- [40:59]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
They ate 500, yeah. So for people listening, ultra processed food. Exactly. They had two diets. They had a whole foods diet, which was essentially mostly. They were getting salads and they were getting poultry and lean meats and some fish, oatmeal. And then there was the ultra processed foods diet.
- [41:15]
Ron
And they were trying to match them for macronutrients.
- [41:17]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. So they were matched for calories. They were matched for total sugar, although the added sugar and the ultra processed foods group was. It was like a huge difference. I mean, it was like something like 70 or 80% versus 1%. So the sugars in the whole foods diet were coming from fruit, which has a fiber matrix. Right. So they were matched for that. Exactly. So the added sugar was not matched, although total sugar was. Right. And then protein was somewhat matched. The whole foods had a little bit more protein. It was like something like 15.6% in whole foods diet versus 14% in the ultra processed foods diet. And they were given. So a lot of things were matched. And they were given these foods in a sort of metabolic ward where they came in and eat and they had 60 minutes to eat the meal ad libitum. Right. So they could eat as much or as little as they want.
- [42:09]
Ron
Yeah. So you got a big. As much like giant buffet. Eat as much as you want. Like you got 60 Minutes.
- [42:15]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right.
- [42:15]
Ron
And then they did it. And then the group that eat the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day. And then just to do the math on that, 500 calories times 7 is 3500 calories. That's 1 pound of weight gain. So you add that up as 52 pounds of weight gain in a year. Now order America's overweight.
- [42:32]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, I didn't do that math. I know that. I just read the results. Which was two pounds. They gained two pounds in two weeks, whereas the Whole Foods diet lost two pounds.
- [42:39]
Ron
Well, let's say two pounds. Right. Two weeks, 20. Yeah, it's like you do the math. It's like. But you add that up over a year, and then you add up year over year. It's like that's why we're seeing this sort of just incredible level of severe obesity and diabetes. And I mean, it's just, you know, the latest data I saw was sort of shocking, was that 38% of teenagers have pre Diabetes.
- [43:00]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Wow.
- [43:00]
Ron
It's like what I mean, it didn't even exist when I graduated. I'm old, but it didn't exist when I graduated from medical school. Like we didn't have it. We never saw a kid.
- [43:08]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
There's been studies that have looked at like healthy individuals and they've given them, they're actually young men. They give, they gave them a 20 ounce sugar sweetened beverage, sort of akin to like a soda, coke or something. And they did this for three weeks. And after that three week mark, their C reactive protein biomarker for inflammation went up 100%. Their small dense LDL. So this is, these are lipoproteins that are transporting.
- [43:36]
Ron
Yeah, the ones that are causing more heart disease.
- [43:38]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Causing more atherosclerosis. They went up as well. This was just after three weeks, you know, and of a sugar sweetened beverage, which is the ultimate. Right? That's the ultimate, yeah.
- [43:49]
Ron
Ultra processed food.
- [43:50]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
But the reality is that it's gluten free. It's gluten free, yes. But it's definitely, it's causing inflammation, massive inflammation at the level of the gut. And so you, you can take healthy people and dramatically change their profile within a matter of weeks of having, you know, this ultra processed foods, these sugar sweetened beverages, you know, which again, like.
- [44:12]
Ron
And they deplete nutrients because I think people don't realize that one, you're not getting them, but two, you actually need nutrients to actually run your biochemistry. And so you're trying to burn these calories and burn the food, but you're actually depleted in the very nutrients required to run the metabolic pathways to actually metabolize the food. So you're kind of, you know, getting it from both sides.
- [44:34]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, it comes down to, I think, you know, thinking about why you need to eat is so important because then it's like, I need to get micronutrients, I need to get my fiber, I need to get protein. When I say fiber. Carbohydrates. Right, but it needs to be carbohydrates in the form of fruits and vegetables which have the micronutrients and the fiber.
- [44:54]
Ron
Right.
- [44:54]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Nuts and seeds. And nuts and seeds, yeah. And oats. And then avoiding ultra processed foods. I think if people were to do that and think about eating that way and then you have to move, Right. You have to be physically active. Being sedentary is a disease. Yeah, like that's like there's data out there that show people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. So this is a marker of, you know, I mean, it's a, it's a marker of how physically active you are. Essentially. That's an oversimplification. But people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness have the same disease risk as people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, smokers.
- [45:29]
Ron
So how do you measure your cardiovascular fitness?
- [45:32]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Well, cardio respiratory fitness is something typically you can measure. If you go into like a lab that measures them and they put that like, it's a VO2 Max. So it's measuring your maximal oxygen uptake under maximal exercise. They put a mask on you and that's, that's really how you empirically quantify it. However, if you, you know, if you have like a smart watch, Apple watches, do sort of measure it, it's not really entirely accurate.
- [45:55]
Ron
I like mine Garmin because it says I'm 45, but I don't believe it.
- [45:59]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Well, you can actually do it. You can do what's called the Cooper test. And so that's basically you do a 12 minute run on a flat surface like a track. If you have hills, it's harder to run hills. And so you can't, you're trying to run as fast as you can maintain for that 12 minutes. So it's like a, it's a maintainable 12 minute pace. Right. And that is, and there's a calculation. You can look it up, the Cooper test, and you can sort of get a good estimate of your VO2 max.
- [46:25]
Ron
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:25]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
But essentially, you know, having.
- [46:27]
Ron
That's assuming you could run for 12 minutes, which most Americans can't.
- [46:31]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
You know, there is, there's an argument to be made for exercise snacks. You know, so these are short bursts of, you know, physical activity where you're getting your heart rate above, you know, 70% max heart rate. So you're getting to more into the vigorous exercise, you know, range. And there have been some studies. They're called the vilpa studies. Are you familiar with these? These are vigorous intermittent lifestyle activity studies. And Martin Gabala, who, he's a, you know, expert on high intensity interval training, I've had him on my podcast. He's involved in a lot of this.
- [47:03]
Ron
Jump down and then 10 burpees and then go back to work, sort of.
- [47:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. People are wearing these, you know, wearable devices that they can measure their heart rate. And so scientists can see when they're getting these bursts of high intensity exercise. So, so this type of exercise is actually not structured. What you're talking about would be structured right where you like and get up and do burpees or air squats or high knees or jumping jacks. This is where people sort of take advantage of everyday situation. So they sprint up the stairs, right, and run, you know, they're running to some, some place rather than walking. So they're really using their everyday lifestyle to kind of get their heart rate up. Yeah, well, people that do that do anywhere between three to nine minutes a day have a 40% reduction in cancer mortality, a 50% reduction in cardiovascular related mortality, all cause mortality. So this is beneficial for people and this is even in people that identify as non exercisers. So just getting some sort of exercise does have benefits for people in general?
- [48:00]
Ron
Yeah, I mean you look at the data on mortality and longevity, one of the biomarkers that's the most correlated with longevity is VO2 max is your level of cardiovascular and respiratory fitness, which is basically how fast your metabolism can run because it's basically an indirect measure of how much calories you can burn per minute and how much oxygen you can burn per minute because they're very correlated. And your metabolism being having a slower, fast metabolism is really about your VO2 max. Because if you have a high VO2 max, you can burn a lot of oxygen and then you can burn a lot of calories because you need both to actually combust in your mitochondria, the energy factories to actually produce ATP, which is the source of energy for the runs everything in your body. So it's like you actually have this incredible system, but we don't really take advantage of it and we don't maximize our fitness, which is so correlated. And I think the other number that's sort of a little easier to get is your waist to hip ratio, which you need a tape measure. And that again is the, the bigger your waist, the shorter your life basically.
- [49:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Is that also for visceral fat? Measuring visceral fat?
- [49:09]
Ron
Yeah, I mean it's, it's a, I mean your waist to hip ratio is a crude measure of visceral fat. I mean, but yeah, if you did a DEXA scan or an mri, you could look at body composition for sure. It's like it's that belly fat. But again, that's all relates to insulin resistance and prediabetes and inflammation, which again I want to getting back to the micronutrients, all those things actually accelerate your risk of many of these. Like magnesium is very involved in blood sugar regulation. Right. So if you're talking about 45% Americans being deficient in our 50% being deficient in magnesium, that affects blood Sugar. We have a epidemic of diabetes and prediabetes in this country.
- [49:43]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Are you familiar with some of the. There's some gene variations in the transporter that transports magnesium into cells and people with a gene variation that obscures the transport, so basically they're not getting as much magnesium into their cells, are much more likely to have type 2 diabetes. So there's really some, I would say, more causal evidence there. Right, because one would argue, well, people that are low in magnesium are also eating refined sugar, diet and they're not exercising and all these other potential unhealthy lifestyle factors that could be contributing. But when you look at the genetics, right, I mean, it doesn't lie. So you're, you're looking at someone that's not getting enough magnesium. They are, you know, insufficient and deficient in some cases and their risk for type 2 diabetes just skyrockets.
- [50:28]
Ron
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think this is so important that, you know, we are walking around with a population that is, got such treatable, cheap solutions for so many issues and that we're looking for sort of drugs to treat this and drugs to try. I'm not against drugs at all, but it's like we're missing the boat because, yeah, somebody doesn't have scurvy or rickets, but they're still insufficient and they're going to need these nutrients and actually to optimize their health. And you kind of started to unpack the degrees of different nutrient deficiencies. And as you're going through the list, you're going through the things that are the most common, common deficient in, in our, in our country, right? Omega 3s, vitamin D, magnesium, and there's others, right? So there's other. There. You need every essential vitamin and mineral, right? You need all those for sure. But, but the ones that are really causing havoc are, you know, deficiencies in, you know, the methylation, nutrients like the B vitamins, folate, B6, B12, deficiencies in iron, deficiencies in zinc, potassium. These are like, yeah, because we, we, we didn't die this very plant poor. And that's where you get your potassium, which is from plants. And you need to actually not get as much sodium, which is what we're eating on lots of processed foods. So not like salt is bad. We need salt. It's just, it's all the salt added by corporations to your food to make you palatable because otherwise it tastes like cardboard. They sugar and salt and fat and it makes you addicted to it. So we leave out all the key nutrients that are needed to regulate everything in our body. And so, so maybe you can kind of take us down that, that list a little deeper. So we've got, we've got to get omega 3s, we've got to get vitamin D, we've got to get magnesium and, and literally we could spend a podcast on each nutrient and probably 10 podcasts on each nutrient. But, but we're just going to go through so people understand like these are the things that are non negotiables that you've got to have and that you got to test, you got to measure and figure out whether your levels are okay because the average physician or a practitioner isn't going to do it and they don't know how to do it and they don't get taught this in medical school. And I'm working on trying to change that in Washington. But it's kind of a travesty because it's like staring us in the face that we have this epidemic of micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies and they're not being addressed and often worst, we're being told not to fix them.
- [52:46]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. So the vitamin D, magnesium, omega 3 we talked about. Right. Believe it or not, a lot of people, I don't remember the exact percentage, but quite a bit of people are not getting enough vitamin c. Something like 30 or 40. 40%. 40% or something like that are not getting enough vitamin C. Yeah.
- [53:04]
Ron
I heard that 10% are deficient at the level that would cause scurvy in America.
- [53:08]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
That's unbelievable. Just not eating any vegetable, any vegetables or fruits. Because vitamin C is also in vegetables, not just in fruits. Calcium is another one. So I mean these are things that can be tested for and measured. Another one is vitamin E. People are not getting enough vitamin E. Again, that's also found in things like avocados, nuts, whole grains. And then potassium is a big one because it's so important for the sodium potassium pump, which plays a role in blood pressure. And so when you're talking about too much sodium and not enough potassium, it's really exacerbating that not getting enough potassium aspect. Right. Because that ratio is so important. And so not only are, I think it's something like 96% of the US population doesn't meet the adequate intake for potassium.
- [53:54]
Ron
Yeah.
- [53:54]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It's essentially everyone.
- [53:56]
Ron
Yeah. And our potassium indeg is hunter gatherers. Should be 10 to 1 potassium to sodium. Now it's the other way around.
- [54:02]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It's the other way around. Exactly. And so there's, you know, all Sorts of problems with blood pressure. And, you know, gosh, it's like even, like 30% of, like, individuals age 20 to 39 have hypertension.
- [54:14]
Ron
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:15]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
These are young adults with hypertension. And we now know that hypertension isn't just a risk for cardiovascular disease, it's a risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, particularly if you start earlier. Right. If you're, like a younger person. So, like, it's cumulative exposure to hypertension. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's important because you have to get blood flow to your, your brain. And, you know, you've got all these tiny, like 90% of the, of the brain vascular vasculature surrounding the brain is made of these tiny, tiny blood vessels that are like the. Smaller than the size of a hair in terms of diameter, and they have to get blood flow to them. So exercise helps that, but hypertension exacerbates the lack of blood flow going to those blood vessels. And what happens is they're so tiny they start to sort of constrict and sort of fall off.
- [55:04]
Ron
And you can get mini strokes.
- [55:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Mini strokes. But also neurons don't get the nutrients and the oxygen they need. And so then you start to lose neurons. Right. And you get brain atrophy. And so there's this connection between hypertension and dementia. And, you know, I'm talking about potassium here, because potassium does play an important.
- [55:22]
Ron
Role in blood pressure.
- [55:24]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, Right.
- [55:24]
Ron
So does magnesium, though.
- [55:25]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
So does magnesium. So does magnesium.
- [55:27]
Ron
It's the relaxation mineral.
- [55:28]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And then exercise, of course, is one of the best things that you can do.
- [55:32]
Ron
I mean, and I mean, as a doctor, when a patient comes in with preeclampsia, which is a problem of high blood pressure in pregnancy, whereas preeclamptic seizures, where they can get seizures, the treatment is intravenous magnesium.
- [55:46]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right, right.
- [55:48]
Ron
Think about it. And so, like, this is someone with, like, with uncontrollable high blood pressure. What do we do? We give them intravenous magnesium because all the drugs don't work.
- [55:55]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I think there's some evidence also, I've seen that vitamin D plays a role in preventing that as well. And it's funny, like, when I was pregnant, I asked my OBGYN for a vitamin D test. Do you want to know what his answer was?
- [56:09]
Ron
You don't need it.
- [56:10]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Why? It's going to be low.
- [56:13]
Ron
Why is it going to be low?
- [56:14]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Why it's going to be. You're gonna. It's gonna be low anyway. Like, just.
- [56:16]
Ron
I was like, vitamins and Just take it anyway.
- [56:18]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Are you kidding me? Right? Like, you're. You're telling me, why do I need to test? It's just going to be low. And, you know, and I'm like, well, I want to test. And I, yes, I'm going to be supplementing, but I want to know with how much I'm going to be, you know, should be supplementing with. But it was just really astonishing to me, that mentality, you know. And actually, just recently I went in for. I didn't go to my normal doc. I went into. It was like a, you know, sort of, er, kind of urgent care doc. And I wanted to get my vitamin D levels measured. And he goes, you know, that's falling out of vogue now. And I just. I just gave him this long lecture. I mean, I was like, I went in deep. I looked at. When he goes, is this your area to. Area of expertise? And I was like, yes, it is. I've done research on it. I've published studies on it. And he kind of was like, okay, all right.
- [57:02]
Ron
I mean, it's not their fault. I mean, I'm a physician and, you know, I don't fault them. And my daughter's graduating from medical school this year and like, zero nutrition.
- [57:12]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It is.
- [57:12]
Ron
It is like, even micronutrients, like, I don't even think they covered any of that. And it. To me, it's like, this is the center of our biology. And if we don't understand how our bodies work and how to work with them and how to facilitate normal function. And it's not like the micronutrients are the only thing, but they're a very key foundational part of being healthy. And when you go through the litany of things that we're deficient in, it's a lot of things or insufficient. And it's different degrees of insufficiency in the population for different nutrients, but widespread deficient iron, zinc, selenium, a lot of things that iodine. I mean, I see this all the time in our testing at Function Health. And I'm, like, kind of shocked. And I've done testing for, you know, a lot of patients who've come to see me over the decades, but this is like 110,000 people. It's not like I can see 10,000 people or 20,000 in my lifetime, but, like, this is a huge amount of people, and it's sort of shocking to me, and yet it's not really being talked about as a. As a sort of critical step in helping address our chronic disease epidemic. And what you're saying is that yes, you can get deficiency diseases like scurvy, but what's really the issue is how these contribute to our long latency deficiency diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and diabetes and osteoporosis and all muscle aging and all the things that we don't want, right?
- [58:33]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. I mean, so, you know, one of the last papers that Bruce published, his second to last paper, was called longevity vitamins. And it was about these vitamins like vitamin D and magnesium and omega 3, taurine or some other like essential amino acids. Amino acids that play a role in the way we age and slowing age related decline. And you know, there was just a recent study that came out on vitamin D. Sufficient levels of vitamin D. People that supplemented with vitamin D were 40% less likely to have dementia. You know, so the reality is, is.
- [59:08]
Ron
That, I mean, vitamins don't just create expensive urine.
- [59:11]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
They don't. They don't. You know, these micronutrients are running everything in our body and when you have insufficient levels of them, you're not going to necessarily see it, although you probably.
- [59:24]
Ron
Feel it, you know, like you might have symptoms. But you don't attach it to that.
- [59:28]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right? You don't attach it to that. But it's causing this insidious damage, right? This insidious DNA damage. A little bit of oxidative stress, a little bit of inflammation, or just I.
- [59:36]
Ron
Get sick all the time because my vitamin D is low.
- [59:37]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right.
- [59:38]
Ron
Or you're getting sick, or my muscles ache, you know, because vitamin D is low. Or you know, I have muscle cramps because my magnesium's low. Right? So. Or I have depression because my methylation vitamins are low. People have symptoms, they just don't correlate it with the nutrient deficiencies.
- [59:53]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Depression is interesting. There's a pretty classic study that no one ever talks about where healthy individuals were injected with lipopolysaccharide. So for those listening, this is a component of your bacterial outer cell membranes. It's present in our, in our colon because we have about, I don't know how many trillions of bacteria, like so many bacteria in there, right?
- [60:20]
Ron
A lot. 40 or 50 trillion.
- [60:21]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Okay, 40 or 50 trillion. There's about a gram of lipopolysaccharide in our gut because those bacteria do die off.
- [60:27]
Ron
And these are bacterial toxins. This is what pisses off your immune system to. No way.
- [60:30]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It does. And when we have gut permeability, lots of things that cause that, it releases it. Right. Also known as leaky gut, it leaches the LPS into our bloodstream. Well, this study took healthy individuals and injected them with an amount of LPS that would be equivalent to something that you could get from intestinal permeability.
- [60:49]
Ron
Yeah.
- [60:49]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And it caused depressive symptoms in these individuals. Okay. One that links inflammation to depression. 100%. Two, if those individuals were given EPA. So this is one of the omega 3 fatty acids. It does play a major role in dampening inflammation through a variety of mechanisms, like resolvins and marisons and the SPMs. These are all malformations, molecules that are resolving inflammation very quickly. They did not experience those depressive symptoms.
- [61:17]
Ron
Yeah.
- [61:17]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
If they were injected with the LPS.
- [61:19]
Ron
If they got Omega 3s.
- [61:20]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
If they have the Omega 3s.
- [61:21]
Ron
Yeah.
- [61:22]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
So it comes down to, like, again.
- [61:25]
Ron
You know, and Omega 3s have been shown to actually help with depression.
- [61:28]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
They have.
- [61:29]
Ron
And add. They have.
- [61:30]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. With depression, specifically, EPA seems to be very important for depression. And I think that's because there's a really big inflammatory component to. To depression where, you know, there's. There's now studies showing that people that don't respond to classical SSRI. SSRIs. So serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac. Exactly. People that don't respond to that, they typically have very, very high levels of C reactive protein. Inflammation. So there's like a subset of people, some people respond and they. It helps them. But there's a subset, a quite large subset of people that have very high inflammatory biomarkers and do not respond to SSRIs. And so logically, the next question would be, should we lower their inflammation? How can we lower their inflammation?
- [62:19]
Ron
I read some paper that was like, hypothesizing that we should use TNF alpha blockers, the biologics for depression. In other words, these are drugs that massively suppress inflammation in the body, used for serious autoimmune diseases, and they're talking about using it for depression. I'm like, wait a minute. How about we find out why there's inflammation in the first place and get to the root cause of it and which is really what we do in functional medicine. I think what you're kind of hitting on just sort of peripherally, and I want to sort of tie the dots together, is that when you don't have enough of the right nutrients and you don't have a proper functioning metabolism, there's a lot of downstream consequences. You get inflammation, you get oxidative stress, and you get damaged mitochondria, and you get DNA damage. And when you look at these processes, these are the fundamental things that have to be working for you to be healthy across every organ, across every disease state. And it's what we're now calling hallmarks of aging or including many of these things. And what you're talking about is, and Bruce Ames figured this out even before there was a word hallmarks of aging. He figured out that these nutrients are critical in these pathways that degrade and become problematic as we age, but that we can offset that and actually take longevity nutrients and get a quote metabolic tune up. And he's even talking about things that I think are, we don't think of typically as essential nutrients that are we call conditionally essential nutrients. And whether it's carnitine or taurus chlorine or things that may not be kind of a typical deficiency disease, vitamin or mineral, but that are still really important for our biological function and we're still low in them. So I have this theory I want to come back to in a minute about that I, that I kind of made up called symbiotic phyto adaptation, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means that we've co evolved with plants to borrow their phytochemicals to regulate key pathways in our body so we can stay healthy and that without them we don't get a deficiency disease like you don't get like, you know, like broccoli deficiency. But, but actually we kind of do because the phytochemicals like sulforaphane or the glucosinolates or isothionates, these are, these are molecules that regulate key pathways in our body. For example, liver detoxification or removing heavy metals or whatever, controlling oxidative stress. They work to actually facilitate these pathways. And so I kind of this theory that it's more than just like the central vitamins in the minerals. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's essential if you want to be really healthy.
- [64:34]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I completely 1000% agree they just made this up. But so I think that humans, we evolved to eat plants and meat and things, but plants because of the phytochemicals, you know, there are. So you mentioned sulforaphane, right? So sulforaphane is present in a variety of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. It's much more, it's not present, I'm sorry, the precursor to it, glucoraphanin is present in it and it gets converted into sulforaphane when the plant matter is broken and chewed because it activates an enzyme called Myrosinase, which converts glucoraphenate into sulforaphane.
- [65:12]
Ron
Big mouthful of words.
- [65:13]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But essentially when you chew your broccoli.
- [65:14]
Ron
You get cool chemicals that help your body.
- [65:16]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. And if you go even further and chew the young plant, the broccoli sprouts, there's about 100 times more glucoraphanin in it.
- [65:25]
Ron
Damn. I'm trying to grow broccoli sprouts and I keep trying to forget and then I think, I gotta get back on that.
- [65:31]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yes, broccoli sprouts are really, really high. And in glucoraphanin, I also take a supplement that's been used in a lot of clinical studies called Avmacal. I don't have any affiliation with them, but they're, they've got a really great method of, of stabilizing that myrosinase enzyme, which is very unstable. It's also very heat sensitive. But before I get, before I get sidetracked, sulforaphane is the most potent dietary activator of a, what's called transcription factor in our body. It's NRF2. Yeah. And this is NRF2. Yeah. It's a master regulator of, as you mentioned, detoxification enzymes. So they're called phase two detoxification enzymes, also phase one biotransformation enzymes. So those are enzymes that will convert pro carcinogens into carcinogens. So NRF2 activation will blunt that, it'll stop that from happening. So think things like nitrites being converted into nitrosamines. Nitrites are present in a lot of processed meats. And so NRF2 activation, typically it's like it gets activated every 80 minutes or so inside of our cells. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets, sorry, it gets activated every 130 minutes. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets activated like every 80 minutes. Something like that, where it's like you're getting like a 60% increase in the activation of this important transcription factor which is regulating just hundreds of different genes that are antioxidant, involved in antioxidant function, anti inflammation. Clinical studies showing that if you give someone broccoli sprout extract or sulforaphane or glucoraphanin, plus the enzyme myrosinase, it increases glutathione in plasma and in the brain by fmri. I mean, this is unbelievable. Glutathione, as you know, it's one of the major, major antioxidants that our body has. And it's very Important for the brain. Other studies in China, where there's a lot of air pollution, show that people that take about 40 micromoles of sulforaphane, they start to excrete some of the chemicals that are in air pollution, like benzene, which is a carcinogen. They excrete it by 60% after 24 hours. Again, because the activation of the phase two detoxification.
- [67:38]
Ron
I'm thinking of all the people in LA right now.
- [67:40]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. It's very. So I've been telling all my friends.
- [67:42]
Ron
In LA to hear toxins get released into the air. Dioxin and all organic compounds and heavy metals and.
- [67:50]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right.
- [67:51]
Ron
You know, plastics. I mean, it's just, it's pretty frightening. So I think people can protect themselves to some degree by upregulating these pathways and, and taking the right foods and the right supplements.
- [68:02]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I, I think the, the phytochemicals, again, I, I'm 100% with you. I think we were, we were supposed, we're supposed to eat these. These are, these are pathways in our body that are activated by a little bit of stress. They're stress response pathways. And the phytochemicals provide that tiny bit of stress that activates them in a way that's powerful enough to not only deal with a little bit of stress, but to, like, deal with the stress of aging.
- [68:24]
Ron
Yeah.
- [68:24]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And anthocyanins from blueberries. I mean, this is another one. We've got so many randomized controlled trials now on giving people blueberry extract powder with actual anthocyanins versus, like the, you know, just taste of it. So it's placebo. It improves cognitive function across the lifespan. Kids, adolescents, older adults. It lowers damage to DNA, it improves blood flow to the brain. You know, this is equivalent to like a cup of blueberries a day. So it's so important to get these phytochemicals. It's not only important to eat the fruits and the vegetables because of the micronutrients, but the phytochemicals as well. And Bruce would argue that, like, these, some of these phytochemicals, they're longevity vitamins. We need them.
- [69:06]
Ron
Yeah.
- [69:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
And he argues that.
- [69:07]
Ron
I mean, that's sort of striking to me as I sort of dug into this, you know, 25, 30 years ago, is like, wait a minute, like, how. How did these molecules know what to do and how do they know to bind to this receptor? It's just from a plant. Like, so why is it working in my body and how's it regulating all these different enzymes? Or pathways that regulate, you know, immune function and your microbiome, I mean just it's, the list goes on and on and I, and I. And so it occurred to me that, you know, we, we grew through evolution, consuming over 800 different plant species. And now I think we have three are the main staples, you know, corn, wheat and soy and rice, depending where you live, and then another 12 make up the total amount of vegetables and plants. We typically like onions and cabbage and whatever, carrots and tomatoes. But like when you look at the full array of plants out there, we ate all these plants and those molecules are not there for us. Like those plants didn't say, oh gee, I'm going to, I'm going to make this like sulforaphane so I can help my little human friend over there. They're the plant's defense mechanisms. So they're actually there to help the plants protect themselves against damage, predators, UV radiation from the sun, like pretty much they're their immune system. And so they are a little, kind of can be a little toxic. Right, but that's what you're saying. It's a little, kind of tiny stress. The xenohormesis kind of concept where you're taking some foreign thing and stressing your body with like a sauna or a cold plunge or being up at altitude or being under the sea level. Hyperbaric. These are all stresses on the body that activate our body's own innate healing response. And so that's kind of how I see these phytochemicals.
- [70:49]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly, exactly. The antioxidant response element you were talking about DNA having. There's a sequence in our DNA, in genes, in our DNA called antioxidant response elements that respond to this NRF2 activation. Right. So it is, it's evolved into our DNA and there's ways to do it. Xenohormesis, you're talking about plants and phytochemicals, exercise all these different like, you know, ways that we're meant to, to basically stress ourselves a little bit. Right. And not just sit and be sedentary and have all the calories we want and you know, consume all the ultra processed foods. I mean, it's Instacart.
- [71:24]
Ron
Holy cow. Terrible. I mean, I mean it's crazy. You don't actually have to leave your house with Amazon Instacart, you know, like Uber Eats or whatever. Like you don't need to go anywhere.
- [71:39]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, and we really do need to move. I mean it's not an add on. It has to be something that's part of your hygiene that you do every day, like brushing your teeth, you have to do it. It's not like even if it's just 10 minutes of exercise, you have to do it. It makes a difference and our bodies need it. Like you're depriving your body of it if you don't.
- [71:58]
Ron
Okay, so let's kind of back up a little bit. We were talking about all these incredible things and yes, exercise 100%. But that's another podcast. This one is about micronutrients. This widespread deficiency we have in the population that's undiagnosed, that's not tested for, that people walk around with, that's fixable for pennies a day at levels that are relatively influential. Small, like when you, for example, eat a piece of chicken breasts, it's 4 ounces, that's 30 grams. We're talking about milligrams or sometimes microgram doses, like tiny little bits of stuff in micronutrients can have profound effects on our well being and our health, on our mental health, our risk for chronic diseases. And yet most of us are walking around in this invisible cloud of insufficiency or deficiency and have no clue. I know you're not a doctor and a practitioner, but you're like a PhD doctor, not like an MD doctor. What do you recommend? And does it have to be difficult and onerous and expensive or how do you sort of stack the deck so you're like getting the basic things you need and not running into this trouble?
- [73:14]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, I do have some of the basic things that I think, well, that I take, but also that I think that would help a majority of people that are insufficient in a lot of these micronutrients. And first and foremost, vitamin D supplement. And again, I think generally speaking, vitamin D, 4,000 IUs a day, pretty, pretty for the most part, gets people to a sufficient ish level. You have to do a blood test to really know for certain. You may have to take a little more, you know, but starting at 4,000 IUs a day, which is the upper tolerable, is safe.
- [73:50]
Ron
And this is actually by the National Academy of Sciences saying this is a safe level.
- [73:54]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Number two, omega 3 fatty acids. And you know, this is something where Bill Harris has published studies, published studies looking at how do you get someone who is low omega 3 index. So 4% omega 3 index up to an 8% takes. Turns out it takes close to about 2 grams a day. So 2 grams of EPA.
- [74:15]
Ron
So when you get, just for clarification purposes, if you get A pill, and it says a gram of fish oil. It might not have a gram of EPA and DHA. It might be like 300 or 200 milligrams. So you have to look at the concentration of EPA and DHA in the milligram amounts on the label. Otherwise, you know, it might take one pill or it could take five pills.
- [74:37]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So that, I think, is a pretty simple solution. So 1 to 2 grams, 1.5 to 2 grams. You get. Get most people that are in a 4% low range to an 8% low range.
- [74:47]
Ron
And the balance of EPA and DHA, does it matter?
- [74:50]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Not really.
- [74:50]
Ron
Is it 50, 50?
- [74:51]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Usually. Usually it's like a 2 to 1 ratio. EPA to DHA? Yeah, for the most part, something close to that.
- [74:57]
Ron
Okay.
- [74:58]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
But I wouldn't sweat the small stuff, like number three and number four kind of tie. But I think. I think a multivitamin is a really good insurance because, you know, there's so. Selenium, boron, you know. Boron. Yeah. There's, you know, the B vitamins, you know, you're getting. There's vitamin A. There's so many different micronutrients, and it really covers a lot of the bases. So I think a pretty high quality multivitamin is good, along with magnesium. So magnesium, because such a large percentage of people are not getting enough magnesium, it is so important for a variety of processes. DNA damage, brain function, muscle function. People that are physically active, they sweat out magnesium. So you might need anywhere between 10 to 20% more than the RDA.
- [75:46]
Ron
And stress. In coffee also comes stress depletion.
- [75:49]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Exactly.
- [75:50]
Ron
So you're like, what is the American life? Stress, coffee and alcohol. That's why we're all deficient. We're literally. Pee it out.
- [75:56]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yes. And so you want to make sure you're getting an organic salt. So that would be something like magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate, and citrate if you're constipated. Right. So. So those. So those are the organic salts which are more bioavailable.
- [76:11]
Ron
Tell a funny story. I just aside. I was in the hospital recently for a back surgery and I wanted to get magnesium. And I talked to the hospitalist and he gave me magnesium oxide. And I'm like, that's not bioavailable. And I sort of went through this with him and like. You did? Yeah, it wasn't as confrontational as that, but. But, you know, he's like, oh, you're right. I look it up and actually. No, true. I'm like, yep. So but that's the main nutrient form of magnesium that you get in in a lot of the supplements that you buy over the counter because it's the cheapest form. So magnesium oxide, if you see that on the label, just skip over.
- [76:48]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Right. So that would be another one. And then I add to my essentials the sulforaphane I used to sprout and I no longer do that because life is busy. My excuses. Yeah, I'm. I'm who now.
- [77:03]
Ron
So you're busy telling the world how to eat better and be healthy.
- [77:06]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It's like the worst thing you can do for your health. But I trust the science that I've read. Looking at the supplement that I take, which again is. It's a really good supplement, avmacol and they have about the advanced formulas, what I take, I take about two to four a day depending on.
- [77:22]
Ron
And we'll put the link in the show notes for that.
- [77:23]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
They're great. And they publish studies on them improving autism. So it's affecting the brain. So it's approved autism spectrum disorder in kids with autism, adolescents with autism. But it's a very strong activator of glutathione.
- [77:37]
Ron
Right.
- [77:37]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
So NRF2 pathway. So that's my phytochemical.
- [77:40]
Ron
I actually wrote a blog about glutathione years ago. If anybody wants to sort of find out more about glutathione, go to hymen and glutathione and you'll find it. And it's kind of the master detoxifier, the master antioxidant, the master immune regulator. It's like it's so critical. And you get it through some of these plant foods. You get it by sulfur containing amino acids which are found often in animal foods or in whey protein. It's a great source.
- [78:03]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It is, yeah. It's a major, major antioxidant in the body. So I think those are really some.
- [78:10]
Ron
Of the their vitamin D fish oil, vitamin D 4,000 fish oil, one or two grams of the actual EPDHA, a multivitamin and high quality, high quality, meaning it shouldn't be blue or purple or green or yellow and titanium and dyes and should be just, you know, the right. And the bioavailability, the formula, nutrient matters. I mean, I think you and I both done a lot of work on this and people can dig around, but it's not just like go to get your, you know, Walgreens or CVS multivitamins a little more judicious. And then magnesium and how much magnesium.
- [78:45]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
You know it depends. So some people get a laxative effect and they want that.
- [78:49]
Ron
That's what's citrate.
- [78:51]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Even with higher doses of other forms they can. But yeah. So I mean, I think it depends on your diet. Like if you're not eating a lot of plants, shame on you. You need to increase that. But you know, about 250, 300 milligrams, you know, is a good range. Now if you're trying to treat like migraines and stuff, you might have to go higher. Like some studies show like 600 milligrams. And then there's the form of magnesium, magnesium threonate. That's thought to cross the blood brain barrier more effectively for brain health because magnesium doesn't cross the blood brain barrier very well. But magnesium threonate isn't essentially, it's not necessarily going to do the DNA damage repair aspect of magnesium. So make sure you're getting both if you're doing, doing that. Yeah. So like for me I take like about 250 milligrams, maybe 300 milligrams. Yeah.
- [79:42]
Ron
And it depends on you. I mean, I remember I had a big magnesium aha when I had a patient, you know, decades ago who was a radiology resident, so a radiation oncology resident at a Mayo Clinic and she had debilitating migraines. Like, I mean she saw the best doctors at Mayo Clinic. She says everybody, she tried every drug, she'd done everything. And she came to see me and we took a history. Amazing thing to do in medicine these days is to take an in depth medical history. But it's like critical. I'm being facetious, but like they don't. Doctors only.
- [80:15]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
That's the root cause.
- [80:16]
Ron
Yeah, I mean I have a 32 page questionnaire. So I was like, oh, you're constipated. Oh, you have muscle twitches and muscle cramps and you have, have headaches and you have anxiety and you have insomnia and you have palpitations. This sounds like pretty severe magnesium deficiency. So why don't we load you up? And so we gave her like 1200 milligrams of magnesium. Like migraines just went away and she was fine and everything else kind of corrected. And so she had all these, quote, different problems, Right. Everything constipation to insomnia to palpitations, which you don't think are related, but they're all connected as the body's one system. And that's what I'm talking about. These nutrients have so many different functions and they're so critical. So anybody listening to you, you know, you can't really get away from the fact that we live in a nutritionally depleted world. No matter how hard you try. Even the foods, if you're eating organic, may not have the nutrients that they did 50 years ago. And, you know, most of us, you know, should test. And that's why I created Functional Health with my co founders, to allow people access to this data because they weren't getting it. Like you said, doctors like, oh, you don't need vitamin D. You know, why bother testing? No, that's what people are facing. And then, you know, just take a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, and then, you know, maybe a broccoli pill.
- [81:26]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. Then there's a bunch of other things you could add to that list as.
- [81:30]
Ron
You'Re going through this. That's a $2 a day, you know, and that's not an insignificant amount of money. But, you know, given the benefits, you know, the risk benefit, cost benefit ratio is pretty good on this.
- [81:43]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It is. It's amazing. I mean, I think. I think it's a. As Bruce would say, you know, it's a really. It's affordable, it's easily correctable for pretty cheap, and it will have a huge difference in the way you age.
- [81:58]
Ron
Yeah, this is amazing. So we're gonna link to a lot of these studies from Bruce Ames, from your work. I want people to follow you, to learn about what you're doing, to listen to your great podcast, Found My Fitness. You've got a great website. Tell us all the places that we can find you and learn more about your work and keep up with your science.
- [82:14]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Okay, great. Thank you. So I have a podcast. It's called Found My Fitness. I'm on, you know, YouTube, which I.
- [82:20]
Ron
Hope to be on someday.
- [82:21]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah.
- [82:22]
Ron
One of my aspirations.
- [82:24]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Let me know when you're in San Diego.
- [82:26]
Ron
Okay. All right.
- [82:27]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
So Found My Fitness. It's on YouTube. It's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. I have a website, foundmyfitness.com and I also. I'm on, you know, social media, Instagram X as Found My Fitness. Or you can look up Rhonda Patrick. I have some free guys out there. I have one on Omega 3. We talked a lot about it. So how to choose a good Omega 3 supplement. So I kind of have a guide on that in terms of, like. And I talked about some of the science of omega 3. So you can find that@ Omega3guide.com and.
- [82:55]
Ron
Then I have free guides on how to do this and go into more detail and have the scientific papers and.
- [82:59]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Yeah, and then I have another free guide on improving brain health through brain derived neurotrophic factor and a variety of exercise protocols and polyphenol protocols that have been published to improve brain health. And that's bdnfprotocols.com you can find that there. I have a new guide out how to train from all the exports that I've had on the podcast.
- [83:20]
Ron
Oh, I want to see that one.
- [83:21]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
It's a good one. It's how to train. So it's like to improve VO2 max. We talked about that. How to train to improve muscle mass, strength, function and it's according to all the incredible experts that I've had on my podcast and that is the howtotrain guide.com so those are all just free information that people can get by going and downloading the guide. So thank you so much Mark for having me on the podcast. Very interesting discussion. We share a lot of common passions with nutrition and micronutrients.
- [83:48]
Ron
Totally, totally. And you know, we didn't cover a thousand topics from protein to exercise to hermesis. So I think I can see three or four more podcasts. I'd love to have you back to talk about these things because there's so many people out there who are quote health influencers who don't have a degree, who you know may be educated, some better than others. I'm not saying you need a degree to be smart or to have an opinion, but there's a lot of noise out there and if people want signal and they want the kind of juicy truth, go to Rhonda.
- [84:19]
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Appreciate it. Thank you Mark.
- [84:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach, reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening. What if I told you that you could change your Life in just 10 days? That you could reset your metabolism, break free from food addiction, and feel better than you have in years? You'd probably be skeptical. Most people are, including doctors. They don't think radical health transformation can happen in such a short time. But I do. Why? Because I've seen it happen over and over the last 20 years with more than 10,000 patients. I call it the 10 day detox and it's my fast track plan to help you relieve your most frustrating chronic health symptoms. Heartburn, bloating, joint pain, brain fog and headaches. Sinus issues, even acne, eczema and psoriasis may get better or disappear completely. Plus, you can lose weight without calorie counting or starving yourself. That's the power of the 10 day detox. To learn more, go to Dr. Hyman.com detox to get all the details. That's drhyman.com detox.