← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
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C
We lose 200,000 tons of soil every hour.
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D
Every hour.
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Every hour we lose. We lose a country the size of Nicaragua or North Korea of soil every year. We have 60 harvests left according to the UN before we run out of soil and can't grow food. No soil, no food, no humans.
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D
Hey everybody. Welcome to health theory. Today's guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, a giant in the health and wellness space. He's not only written 11 number one New York Times best selling books on a wide range of health related topics, but he's also the Director of Functional Medicine at the world renowned Cleveland Clinic. Additionally, he's consulted for the Surgeon General and testified before Congress on the issues of healthcare reform and functional medicine and further proving that healthy living apparently makes you essentially superhuman. He also founded and serves as the medical Director of the Ultra Wellness center, acts as the chairman of the board for the Institute for Functional Medicine, and somehow has time to be the medical editor of the Huffington Post. And quite honestly, all of that is just the tip of a very large iceberg of incredible accomplishments. It really is crazy, dude. Doing the research on you, like seeing how many things you're involved in. And it all seems to revolve around a couple of core things, one of them being shocking. We'll get to that one in a minute. Around Buddhism and connection and love and all that, which I was really blown away by, but the core notion of the body as ecosystem. Yeah, talk to me about that. What does that mean?
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C
Well, you know, I went to medical school and we learned about the body as a bunch of separate parts. There was your heart and your cardiovascular system, your GI system, your nervous system, and on and on, and there's all these specialties that are all siloed.
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D
And.
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C
And you go to the doctor and you have a whole bunch of different symptoms. And when you basically ask about, well, you go to the cardiologist, well, I got this rash. Oh, don't talk to me about that. I want. Go to the dermatologist, or you feel like a little depressed. Oh, go to the psychiatrist. You've got a doctor for every inch of you. And the truth is, the body is one ecosystem. And I discovered this by myself, becoming really, really sick and having to reverse engineer my way to health. And I discovered this model of thinking that was basically a systems model. And it helped me to understand the root cause of disease and how the body works together. And everything is connected like a web. So when you pull on the right strings, you don't have to treat everything separately. With multiple medications, you can get to the root cause and everything goes away.
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D
Now, one thing. So having lived through this myself with my wife, and seeing how complicated it becomes when you start thinking of the body as an ecosystem because she's had massive microbiome issues, digestive trouble, this is where it all starts, right? So we started trying to use traditional western medicine. So it was like, okay, what is this? How do you. And maybe you walking us through what you did in your own life, because I know that you ran into a very catastrophic health problem. How do you begin to figure out what is the root cause and then actually take steps to repair?
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C
So functional medicine is basically a methodology. It's an operating system. It's a way of thinking differently about disease. And it's becoming a medical detective to connect the dots between all these disparate things. And so I basically look at a person's story and try to get a sense of how they got to where they are. So for your wife, I'd want to know, well, was she born by C section or vaginal birth? Was she.
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D
Dude, you go all the way back
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C
to that bottle fed or breastfed? Did she take early antibiotics? Did she have gastroenteritis? Or was she traveling to a foreign country? Or something happened where her gut didn't develop properly. And then I want to know what other exposures she's had and whether she's exposed to toxins, heavy metals. So ask a lot of questions. I want to know everything she eats, exactly her lifestyle, what she does, how she sleeps, exercise. So I'm looking at whether the body's imbalance in these systems. So functional medicine has a map. We call it the Matrix.
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D
Okay.
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C
And essentially, as we look at, you know, you know, your genetics and triggering factors, we look at your lifestyle.
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D
You know, give me an example of triggering factors.
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C
Were you exposed to a moldy house? Like, I got really sick living in a moldy house. I lived in China, got exp to mercury. That's a triggering factor. Right? You could have got Lyme disease. You could have eaten bad sushi and got something. So all that is relevant as a triggering factor. But then there might be predisposing factors, like, she had a gut that wasn't so great in the first place. She might have had, again, more my C section, bottle fed, not taking antibiotics. And then we see where are things are in or out of balance. When you have too much of the bad stuff and none of the good stuff that your body needs, sleep, exercise, nutrition, relationships, connection, love, meaning all that stuff. When you have too much of the bad stuff, not enough the good stuff, your body breaks down. So we look at these seven systems and how they're in balance or out of balance, and that relates to all disease. So there's your gut, and they're all connected. They're not really separate, they're like a web, but we just break them out for the purposes of thinking about them. So there's the gut and digestion, the microbiome. There's your immune system, we call it defense and repair, your energy system, how you make energy from oxygen and food, your detoxification system, how you process your metabolic toxins, environmental toxins, your transport system, which is circulation, lymphatic circulation, your communication system, which is hormones, neurotransmitters, messenger molecules that communicate, and then your structural system, which is everything from your biomechanical skill structure down to the structure of your cell membranes. And all those are influencing how you feel at any moment, influencing whether you're getting more disease or less disease. So when your gut breaks down, and the gut is really the central thing, because when your gut breaks down, everything breaks down, because the microbiome is this extraordinary ecosystem of bugs within you that control a lot of what happens in your body. And when they're out of balance, you not only have digestive symptoms, but you can have everything from dementia to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to autoimmune diseases and lots more.
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D
So I know you've talked a lot about the need for coaches and getting a health and wellness coach involved in your life. If somebody right now is at home listening, so now they understand the seven systems that are working together, how can they begin to diagnose what's going on? Are there, like, simple questions that they can ask themselves? So, like, in Lisa's case, we sort of backed into. There are probably several problems, including bordering on an eating disorder when she was younger.
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C
Yeah.
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D
And then that'll mess up your system. Yeah, for sure. And then a lot of antibiotics, and the threshold event ended up being she just got some sort of bug of some kind, but it was because she had taken antibiotics. I mean, a lot. She was taking antibiotics probably four or five times a year for years because she had chronic chest infections. And so then she hits this bug, whatever here in intestinal bug. Yeah, yeah.
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C
That was a tipping point. That's a triggering factor.
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D
Yeah.
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C
So the whole point of functional medicine is about creating health. You know, regular medicine is about diagnosing and treating disease. I don't really care what disease you have. I want to know, how do we create health? How do you get the best microbiome on the planet? How do you create a healthy inner garden? What do you have to do to do that? How do you diagnose what's out of balance there and get rid of the bad bugs and then put in the good bugs? But it's not just as simple as taking probiotics. You know, I actually had a.
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D
Do you think probiotics work?
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C
They. They're like tourists. You know, they come through the economy, they affect things a little bit, but they're not. They don't stick around that. So you have to keep taking them, which is not bad, necessarily. But what's really extraordinary is that I recently developed ulcerative colitis as a result of taking an antibiotic for a bad tooth. I had a tooth infection that led to C. Diff, which is a deathly intestinal infection that then spiraled into colitis. And doing what I do, I was like, okay, well, this is kind of messed up. I got to rebuild my gut, and I took all the things I knew, and I put together this cocktail of stuff. And there was one particular bug called akkermansia, which is really important in regulating immune function and cardiovascular health and lots of things. And it protects the biofilm, it re stabilizes your gut. And this is all really relatively new research. If you have low levels of this, for example, if you get those new checkpoint inhibitors that are anti cancer drugs that are immunotherapy, they don't work.
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D
That's a checkpoint inhibitor.
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C
It's an immunotherapy drug which activates your immune system to kill the cancer. And this is like 100%, like if it works, you're cured. You have melanoma, like Jimmy Carter. It's stage four melanoma. You're going to be dead in a few months. You take this drug, you're cured. And he's still building houses at 99 years old or something. So these are amazing drugs, but they don't work on everybody. And it turns out if you don't have a healthy microbiome, they don't work. So all this research is going on. I started looking at it, I realized, you know what, taking prebiotics is good, which is fiber feed. The good bugs. Taking probiotics is good, but they also like polyphenols, which are these extraordinary compounds in colorful fruits and vegetables that the microbiome needs to grow. And so thinking about creating healthy soil, you can put all kinds of chemicals on, right, Fertilizers and this, and you have a damaged soil. It doesn't really grow good food. But if you have a healthy, you know, rich soil, you can. You can create health. And so we put in all these things like cranberry, pomegranate, green tea. And they are really great for Akkermansia.
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D
Okay.
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C
And then I use prebiotics, fiber, like acacia fiber, to help feed the good bugs. And I also used a form of colostrum, which is immunoglobulin. So it's like passive immunity, helps regulate the immune system. And I use a little collagen peptides. I took some. Something called probutyrate, which is a product that helps with the fats in the gut. And this is a general cocktail that I take. It's a shake. Take it every morning. And within three weeks, my ulcer class was gone. Like, gone. And now I'm like, best poops of my life.
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D
So that's. That's very interesting. So first we had to kill the C. Diff. Then we have our magical cocktail. What if somebody has sibo? Would you recommend doing a round of antibiotics to kill the sibo first?
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C
Yeah. Sibo for everybody listening, doesn't know what that is. It's basically where the bugs migrate up into your small intestine and from your large intestine. So you normally should have a sterile upper gut and your lower gut, your colon is where your poop is and your bad bugs are or good bugs. When they migrate up, that's when you get bloating, distension. I call it food, baby. You feel, you know, like every time you eat, you just feel bloated and full after. That's often a sign of bacterial overgrowth really common. So you can. You have to figure out why it's happening. Because if you just treat it without knowing that it can come back.
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D
That's interesting. Why would it happen?
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C
Can happen because you have motility issues, you have low magnesium, you have a parasite. There may be some reasons why you could have babesia, which is a tick infection, so you have to figure all that out. But then you can take herbs or you can take special antibiotics that are only in the gut. And I also use antifungals that clear out the bad bugs. I call it the weeding, seeding, and feeding program. You weed out the bad bugs and you seed it with good bugs and you feed it with all this good stuff.
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D
Okay, so if we're doing weeding, seeding, and feeding, what do you use to identify what the current state of your microbiome is? Is there a particular test that you recommend?
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C
Yes, there's so many tests out there, but clinically, I think the most useful one. I've been doing this for 30 years, and it's. It's called GIFX from a lab called Genova. And it looks at not just the microbiome from the measuring the bacteria, because you can do that. You can measure with new, you know, DNA testing, which is actually RNA testing for bugs. You can actually measure all the bugs in there. But then what does it mean? How clinically relevant is it? So I look at the function of the gut. Are there the products, for example, in there that are made by healthy bugs called short chain fats? If they're low, you know that there's no good fats, and that's the fuel for the colon. I want to look at you. Are your digestive enzymes working? Are you absorbing food properly? Is there inflammation in your gut? What's your immune system doing in your gut? What is growing in your gut? You have a parasite or bad bugs. So I look at all that, and then I can come up with a sense of what's going on. And often people have leaky gut and food sensitivities and this vicious cycle of these bad bugs and food sensitivities, and it's what makes so many people sick.
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D
How long would you expect when done? Well, how long would you expect this repair protocol to take if you combine it with diet?
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C
Because you also have to eliminate the things that are in your diet that are driving gut problems, right? Because think about it. You're eating pounds of food every day, and that is what's landing in your gut and feeding your bugs. And if you're eating processed food, sugar, starch, bad fats, it's going to be a problem. You're not going to get better. So you need a whole foods diet. I call it the pegan diet, which is kind of a joke, but it's like, you know, less extreme, more inclusive, but whole foods focusing on quality, not so much worrying about quantity and sometimes eliminating things like gluten and dairy and, and other things that can be trigger food sensitivities. And combined with the diet and this protocol, within a few weeks, people start to feel significantly better. And then it takes about three months to really kind of reset the whole thing.
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D
When somebody has a stubborn problem, like, Lisa is insanely disciplined. If you tell her to do something, she's going to do it for sure. Her diet is clean. In fact, I would probably consider that one of the things that became her problem was it's too restrictive. Too restrictive. So, and then once the SIBO kicked in, once she encountered the parasite and had the threshold event, it's like the weed seed and feed thing. I don't know that we've ever gotten perfect. Like, is there, is there any particular thing that creates a stubborn problem when the person is being disciplined, but it continues to not go away?
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C
Almost 30 years ago, I had another problem, which was mercury poisoning. And that messed up my gut big time. And I got a triggering event, which was some bug I picked up somewhere in a lake in Maine. And then my entire gut broke down and I literally had diarrhea, bloating, pain for years.
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D
Whoa.
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And a whole. And I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. My whole system broke down. And it wasn't until I got rid of the mercury that my gut sorted out. So if she has mercury poisoning, if she's mold toxic, if she has a tick infection, some underlying thing, it can impede people getting fully better.
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D
Yeah.
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D
So now let's say that we've identified the problem, we've done the weeding. What should somebody be eating? So obviously in your new book, what the Heck, you go into, it's all whole food based, but there's obviously a lot of whole foods in the world. So what should people be aiming at?
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C
Well, here's the thing, you know, there's so many diet wars. You know, nutrition is often based on ideology, not on good science. And there's so much conflicting information and people are buffeted about by the media. One day the meat's bad, then it's good. One day eggs are bad, then they're good, then they're bad. I mean, it's just. It kind of makes people crazy and give up and what a scientist doing. And it's just a mess. But I've been studying nutrition for 40 years and I've been not only studying it in a book, I've been using food as medicine for 30 years as a doctor. And I'm humbled by it because I realize everybody is different. Everybody needs different approaches based on their genetics, their preferences and so forth. But there are some common principles, I call them the pegan principles, that are universal, that no one will argue with. And I was sort of joking because I was on a panel with a friend of mine who was vegan. He was a cardiologist, another guy was a paleo doc. And they were fighting and I was in the middle and I'm like, well, if you're paleo and you're vegan, then I must be pegan. And it was like just kind of a goofy joke. And I realized, wait a minute, they agree on about everything except where you get your protein from. So they all agree that we should be eating whole foods. They all agree we shouldn't be eating any industrial processed foods. They all agree we should be eating a ton of vegetables, lots of good fruit, lots of nuts and seeds, lots of good fats. Everybody agrees that the things that are different are should we have our protein from animals or from beans and grains. That's the only difference. And I thought, you know, well, not everybody has a problem with beans and grains, and not everybody has a problem with animal protein. In fact, it can be a very important source of food for most people. The question is what? Right? What grains, what beans, what meat, what fish? And so that's really what those principles are about. It's focusing on quality. So, for example, do you want to eat a feedlot Burger? Heck no.
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D
Because they're raised on grain for many reasons.
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C
One, they're raised in a way that is inhumane for them. They're raised on foods that create bad metabolic profiles in the animal. So you're eating a lot of inflammatory stuff. They feed them chicken shit, they feed them candy, they feed them corn. And then there's how they grow the food for the animals, which creates massive environmental destruction. You know, loss of biodiversity in the soils and animals, loss of water resources because of all the irrigation, the growth of crops for the animals, the deforestation that results, the destruction of our soil, the use of fertilizers, pesticides. The fertilizers run off and destroy all their rivers and lakes and oceans and create dead zones the size of New Journey in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 212,000 metric tons of fish a year. And there's 400 dead zones like that the size of Europe, around the world, that are in coastal areas that are killing the food supply for half a billion people. You know, that's because of the consequences of how we're growing our food. And not only that, it's a giant source of climate change for all those reasons. So nobody should be eating factory farmed animals. On the other hand, you look at regenerative animals, which means, regenerative means you farm or grow animals in a way that is bringing the ecosystem back to health, which is restoring soils, reducing water use, reducing, eliminating fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides. And there was an interesting analysis. Everybody's into these plant based burgers now. And you know, I think, yeah, it's better that we eat plants, and that's great, but what plants should it be? A highly industrial product like Impossible Burger, for example, is GMO soy. So it's grown in a way that you're getting lots of glyphosate, which is not good for you. It destroys your gut. The food is grown in big monocrops, intensively with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, destroying the soil, using up water and so forth. It's way better than a feedlot beef. But when you compare it, this was done by an independent life cycle analysis company, Qantas, that looked at both Impossible Burger and a regeneratively raised beef burger from White Oaks Farms in, I think, Missouri. And they found that you literally had to eat one regeneratively raised burger to offset the carbon emissions of a plant based impossible burger to offset it. In other words, the soy burger added three and a half kilos of carbon in the environment. The grass fed burger Took out three and a half kilos of carbon from the environment. Because soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. It can hold three times the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere. If we took care of it and built organic matter in the soil, which only happens through the use of animals, right, that dig and pee and poo and move around and chew down the grass and that builds soil. And that doesn't use fertilizer, it doesn't use pesticides, doesn't use herbicides, uses rainwater. So you're not using 1800 gallons for every pound. It's called green water. And producing higher quality meat with high levels of antioxidants, high levels of omega 3 fats, better for the animals. And you're not destroying ecosystems when you grow soy. You, you're destroying ecosystems. You know, you're destroying the habitat of animals and rabbits and mice and birds when you're making these giant mega farms. So I mean, probably eating a regenerative grass fed burger is probably the most vegan thing you can do. So you know, it's like, and I think it's just you get this false dichotomy like all meat is bad or only vegan or oh, you should only eat me pale. It just doesn't make sense. Right.
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D
That's really interesting. The green argument is, is fascinating seeing sort of the balancing out that's going to happen between whether there is some amount of farm raise that's actually necessary. I've heard you talk about the topsoil before and that that's actually something that without animals you're going to erode the soil. And that in and of itself causes some dramatic issues.
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C
We lose 200,000 tons of soil every hour.
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D
Every hour.
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C
Every hour. We lose, we lose a country the size of Nicaragua or North Korea of soil every year. We have 60 harvests left according to the UN before we run out of soil and can't grow food. No soil, no food, no humans. Forget climate change.
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D
That sounds relatively problematic.
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C
And by actually using the strategy of regenerative agriculture, we can draw down carbon, not add to the carbon in the environment. Even if we stopped all fossil fuels tomorrow, we still would be screwed. We need strategies that draw down carbon out of the environment. And the food system is the number one set of solutions.
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D
Let me ask you, so even just forgetting anything ecological, why plants? So when you were saying everybody agrees we should eat more vegetables, obviously I would say Stephen Gundry probably doesn't agree that we should eat more vegetables. Maybe if there's certain, yeah, the right vegetables do you have a take on that? Like, what's your vibe about Lectin?
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C
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I think it's really personalized. And so for some people who have serious illnesses, getting off of inflammatory foods, including lectins, can be helpful. But you know, look, 60% of our diet is ultra processed food. That's the first priority to have is get people off that stuff. Don't restrict vegetables, you know, because like, unless you're really sick and you want to try it as a therapy, fine. But I'm really not, you know, a big fan of telling people to not eat vegetables because I think there's so much value in them. And I think if we actually have the problem of restricting unnecessarily for people, it's not great.
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D
Well, let's talk about. So what do you think about the carnivore diet? Is there any logic there?
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C
Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, like Jordan Peterson's doing that and his daughter did it to cure autoimmune disease. And yes, if you are really sick, sometimes it can be profoundly helpful. I mean, if you have autoimmune disease, if you have severe obesity, I mean, there can be real benefits. But again, we used to eat 800 species of plants as hunter gatherers. We ate animal products when we could find them or hunt them. And it was a part of our diet. It wasn't a staple. Some cultures, like the Plains Indians, like the Lakota, they lived mostly on buffalo. And they were the longest lived people in history. They had more centenarians per capita than any other population at the turn of the century.
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D
Yeah, so you've talked about, you know, one thing that medicine really has got to start doing is looking at the laws of biology. So, yeah, you know, physicists are looking at the laws of the universe. What are the laws of biology? I'd love to hear what are some of the laws of biology. How does that play out in terms of plants? Because I can walk you through. It's admittedly like a layperson's understanding, but when I walk through the notion of the plant paradox and you start thinking of a plant as having a, basically a chemical evolutionary advantage, or the way that they stop predators is by creating these chemicals that either upset their stomach or they're bad for them, or they're bitter tasting or whatever, it's like, oh, that makes sense. When you have something, it has to have a mechanism against predation. And humans are one of the predators. And so, okay, it didn't develop claws or whatever. It developed like These chemical signals. And you've talked about food being signals more than just calories. So it's like, okay, well, there's actually some logic. Whether it's true or not is a totally different question. But there's a followable chain of logic to why plants potentially have issues. And so it's like, is there anything that they all share that for somebody with the sensitivity they're, you know, they're an issue, or no, no, no. Like there's so many other nutrients in vegetables. If you're not eating them, you're committing a cardinal sin of the laws of biology.
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C
Well, if you're eating nose to tail, like you're eating the liver, which has more vitamin C, more vitamin A than any vegetable on the planet. Right. You know, you can get by, but
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D
you can get by or it's ideal?
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C
I don't think it's ideal. I mean, I think your gut microbiome feeds on carbohydrates, feeds on phytochemicals. So it feeds on fiber. Right. Which is.
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D
Does happen to your microbiome. If you're only eating carnivore diet, nose
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C
to tail, it changes, but in a bad way. Potentially, potentially. I think, you know, there's some interesting experiments. I think we're still in the exploration of like what happens when you eat different diets, but I have a little different view about vegetables and I call it symbiotic phyto adaptation, which is a fascinating concept, but essentially, yes, there are defense mechanisms in plants that help the plants, but also can help us. Right. So for example, we don't make vitamin C, we get it from plants. We need things to help us detoxify. So when you eat broccoli, you upregulate the glutathione, the pathways of detox in your liver through phytochemicals called glucosinolates. Your microbiome loves the polyphenols in pomegranate and cranberry. Right. So I think we have evolved, co. Evolved with plants. So we use these compounds, these phytochemicals to regulate all sorts of biological functions, from inflammation to our microbiome to detoxification, to brain function neurotransmitters and so on. So I think there are plants you wouldn't want to eat. You don't want to eat poison mushrooms, you don't want to eat foxglove, which will kill you. But there are a lot of plants that we've evolved with that we use in our bodies to regulate our biological functions. And I think they're really necessary.
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D
Talk to me about soy. I heard you say something, which I'd heard before, but I don't know, there's something about the way you said it that really hit me, that you see women drinking or young girls drinking like soy milk, like going out of style, and then it, it will put them into premature.
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C
Happened to my stepdaughter. You know, soy milk was the big rage and she liked to drink. I mean, she was allergic to dairy, so she was, like, drank, you know, quart of soy milk a day and she ended up like at 9 years old, getting little boobs. Whoa.
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D
And we're like, oh, because it's upping her estrogen.
- [28:44]
C
Yeah. So. So soy. Soy is a very controversial topic for many reasons. There's all the environmental issues, obviously of big monocrop fields, of tearing down rainforests in Brazil, of all the consequences of climate change and all that. But from a dietary perspective, it's been a staple in diets for millennia in Asia. And it's always been processed in a way that makes it more digestible. Tofu, tempeh, right, miso, soy sauce, those are traditional foods. When you start making soy hot dogs and soy burgers and eating all these processed things, even soy milk is not something we used to consume. You get one, trouble with digestion, two, increased risk of allergy, and three, you get extra hormonal effects when you have these massive quantities of these things.
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D
Yeah. Thinking of food as a signaling molecule, and then all the talk around soy, what is the mechanism that's happening that makes soy trigger an estrogen response? I've never understood that.
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C
Well, you know, all food is information. Not just calories, it's all information. It's instructions. It's literally like code that programs your biology with every bite at like an
- [30:00]
D
epigenetic level, at every level.
- [30:02]
C
So every bite of food you take can change your gene expression across a whole range of genes. So you eat green, you drink green tea or eat broccoli, you upregulate the gene called glutathione transferase that helps you detoxify heavy metals, environmental chemicals, metabolic toxins. So it regulates your genes, it regulates your hormones. So if you lost starch and sugar, it increases insulin, lowers testosterone, increases estrogen, for example, it affects your brain chemistry, what your hunger hormones are, your craving levels are, and what foods you're attracted to. It affects your immune system, it regulates inflammation or it's anti inflammatory, it regulates your microbiome with every bite. So every single system of your body is regulated by the quality of the food. You eat. And when you realize you shouldn't just focus on calories, you should focus on quality. And the information you're eating changes everything. So that's really what I have people focus on. And I think when people do that, then you have a different relationship to your food. You go, well, I'm eating. Am I going to eat toxic information or am I going to eat healing information?
- [31:06]
D
So if you were to put together a few groups of the sort of healing signals, what would they be like? What would be if you were so in investing, there's this thing called the all weather strategy. And they say, okay, look, I'm sort of blindly talking to my grandchildren, I'm going to pass away and all I can leave behind is a strategy that will work in any environment. But if you had to just put together an all weather eating strategy, what would the ideal. In air quotes I wrote about it,
- [31:40]
C
I wrote a whole book about it. It's called Food what the Heck Should I Eat? And it's about these principles, like homeopegan principles. And it's really focused on quality first. Right. Nobody thinks we should be adding additives and hormones and antibiotics and pesticides and glyphosate to our food like it's in it. But nobody's like, yeah, how do we
- [32:00]
D
avoid it at the grocery store?
- [32:02]
C
You know, if you look at the label of something, if it has something you can't recognize, pronounce, then you shouldn't have it. Or if you don't have it in your cupboard at home, like butylated hydroxytoluene, which is in almost every processed food is bht. It's illegal in Europe. You wouldn't sprinkle that on your salad, would you? No, no. So that's a good rule. The second principle is, you know, we should be eating a plant rich diet and across the spectrum from fruits and
- [32:31]
D
vegetables to do you treat fruits and vegetables as sort of one in the same or.
- [32:35]
C
No, it should be vegetables and fruit. Right? So it's like we should. You don't want to be consuming only fruit because that's full of sugar. And, and if you're diabetic or you're overweight or have issues, you might want to cut back on the sugary fruits or eat berries which are less glycemic. Lots of nuts and seeds, Everybody agrees we should be in lots of nuts and seeds. You want to soak them, reduce selectins, that's fine. If you're going to eat beans and grains, pick low starch ones. Right. And, and also give us a few examples. So, like black rice, which is like the blueberries of rice, quinoa.
- [33:06]
D
What does that mean?
- [33:07]
C
Well, the black rice is called the emperor's rice or forbidden rice. And it's full of these dark. It's black. So anytime you see color in nature, there are polyphenols and phytochemicals in there. So it's got more antioxidants per serving than blueberries. And then you want to make sure if you're eating grains, the gluten. Grains are interesting. So most of the gluten we eat is wheat. It's 133 pounds per person per year. That's a pharmacologic dose. It is worse for your blood sugar than table sugar.
- [33:39]
D
Really?
- [33:40]
C
Yes.
- [33:40]
D
What?
- [33:41]
C
Yes. When you look at the glycemic index, which is how much the fixed amount of the food will raise your blood sugar. Table sugar is 80. Bread is a hundred.
- [33:52]
D
Whoa. I had no idea. Why?
- [33:53]
C
Because it's so processed and so quickly absorbed. And if you want to eat, like, if you're not gluten sensitive, you want to have farro or einkorn wheat or, you know, spell, you might tolerate those because those aren't highly altered genetically. But the new. The wheat we eat is super starchy, has a lot more gliadin proteins, create more gluten sensitivity, is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest to defoliate the plants. And it also has preservative called calcium propionate, which causes autism in animal models and is shown to cause behavioral problems in kids. So add all that stuff. Could be all of flour. So I'm not a big flour person. Plus, it's just like sugar. So if you want to have other grains, if you're not going to say like rye or barley, that's fine. And then beans again, you know, lime beans, kidney beans. If you're if. Look, 75% of Americans overweight, so most people should be eating a lot of starch. And you have to eat 3 cups of beans to get the equivalent of 4, 6 ounces of protein. So I have this. Lentils and things like that, which are lower starch, beans, adzuki beans, other kinds of beans I talk about in my book. And then if you're eating animal products, you want animal products that are not going to hurt the animals, not going to hurt you, and not going to hurt the environment. Right. So for beef, it should be regeneratively raised ideally, which is hard to find, but you can actually get more and more of that around and there's ways to do it by by looking online to get it looking. Thrive market is a great resource for regeneratively raised beef. And again chicken should be pasture raised. Pork and all that should be raised in ways that are are more organic or sustainable fish. You want to eat fish that's sustainably harvested or you know, sustainably organically aquacultured because we over harvest the fish and then we don't eat big fish. It's like full of mercury and tuna
- [35:37]
D
just because they've lived longer.
- [35:38]
C
Well what happens is the coal and all the fossil fuels go in, the ocean go in, the algae gets stored in the algae, the little fish eat the algae, then the little bigger fish eat the little fish and it goes on up the food chain. And when you got a swordfish or a tuna, these are monster fish and they bioaccumulated all this. And so you want to eat the right animal products, you want to eat the right grains, the right beans, the right vegetables, the right fruits, the right nuts.
- [36:02]
D
Give me the right vegetables. Are we just looking for color?
- [36:05]
C
So non starchy vegetables. If you want to cut out nightshades and get it lectins, that's fine. You know, I don't care but I love tomatoes. I'm not going to do that and they don't make me feel bad. So there's no point in restricting your diet necessarily if you're not sick. Right.
- [36:17]
D
Talk really fast. Just because you mentioned that you eat nightshades which are problematic for a lot of people. I've heard you say that your body is the best doctor. What do you mean?
- [36:24]
C
Yeah, exactly. So man, you listen and watch my stuff. I'm impressed. So the whole idea is that you can listen to all the nutritional advice you want but pay attention to how you feel. Your body's going to tell you if you go vegan and you stop having your period, you lose muscle, you feel tired, you're B12 deficient, you feel like crap, you develop autoimmune diseases, you gain weight, whatever. Maybe it's not for you, right? I mean I literally just did a whole analysis on a very well known celebrity and he's a vegan and he's massively nutritional efficient. No omega 3s, extremely low vitamin D, extremely low B vitamins, extremely low zinc, selenium. I mean it was frightening to see in a young guy how depleted he was. But other people, it works really well for him. And then see how you feel. If you get rid of gluten and dairy, do you feel better? Right. So I have people do A detox, essentially a dietary cleanse, which is get off all the junk, get off all the sugar, get off all the processed food, eat whole foods, get rid of gluten and dairy, even get rid of grains and beans for a while and see how you feel. And if you don't feel good, try to add things back. If you feel amazing and your autoimmune disease goes away, your digestion problems clear up, your brain fogs clear, your migraines are gone, well, then that's probably a sign that your body likes that way of eating.
- [37:45]
D
Walk people through really fast. Your 10 day detox, what does that entail? How do they take advantage?
- [37:51]
C
So one of the essential therapeutic approaches of functional medicine is food is medicine.
- [37:55]
E
Medicine.
- [37:56]
C
And in that thinking, one of the ways we treat people is taking away the most inflammatory foods. So gluten and dairy are number one and two for most people, for a lot of reasons. But then there's a whole host of other ones like eggs and soy and some nuts for people. So the 10 day detox essentially is whole foods based. It's high quality animal protein, lots of veggies, but non starchy veggies. So it's extremely low glycemic. So there's not starch and sugar and flour. It cuts out grains, cuts out beans, cuts out fruit, except for berries, and it's got a lot of good fats.
- [38:40]
D
Fruit, except for berries, just you're trying to get.
- [38:42]
C
Well, the diet is designed to be like, it's not one size fits all, but it's close because it's low glycemic, so it helps you lose. Wait. It's anti inflammatory, it fixes your gut, and it's highly nutrient dense and has lots of fiber, lots of phytochemicals, lots of good fats. So it's high fat, low starch and sugar. So it works for autoimmune diseases, for gut issues, for weight issues, for diabetes. I mean, I should show you this picture. This woman who literally had type 2 diabetes for 10 years on insulin, heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, high blood pressure, tons of medications. 65 years old. On her way out, she came into one of our group programs at Cleveland Clinic, went on the 10 day detox, took basic supplements like a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, not a lot of stuff. And within three days, she was off her insulin.
- [39:34]
D
Whoa.
- [39:35]
C
In three months, she reversed her heart failure, her kidney failure, her liver failure, her high blood pressure, got off all her medications, lost 43 pounds, and in a year, she lost 116 pounds. And is off everything. And she saved $20,000 a year in CO pays for her medications because insulin's so expensive. And that was food. I mean, it was, you know, she was seeing so many doctors, she was seeing the best in the field and they were managing her disease. And I don't really want to manage people's disease. I want to get to the root of it. And for so many people, food is really the root.
- [40:06]
D
What I like about that approach is that it's a detox. Right. So it's more about what you're removing even than what you're adding. And I find a lot of times that's interesting. I want to hear more about that because what I find a lot of times is that people want to just add like, oh, if I add broccoli to my Twinkie diet, that I'll be fine. So where do you think that balance is? Like, how much of this is a removal? How much of this is an addition?
- [40:33]
C
I think we have the most inflammatory diet in the world right now. And all the diseases that people suffer from, whether it's gut issues, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, these are all inflammatory diseases. So the foods that we're eating, 60% of our diet is considered ultra processed food made from corn, wheat and soy, mostly in the form of white flour, high fructose corn syrup, and trans fats or soybean oil. Now, and the people who eat the most of it are the sickest. And the people who eat it, for every 10% of your diet that's ultra processed foods, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So we eat 60%. And, and so we have to get rid of that stuff that's destroying our biology because it's like literally putting poison in our body. And, and our bodies don't die immediately. It's a slow, long, prolonged, painful death, right?
- [41:29]
D
Yeah.
- [41:29]
C
So it's taking out all that stuff, it's taking out things that are often inflammatory. Like the wheat we eat isn't the wheat that our ancestors ate. Right. The dairy we eat is not the dairy that our ancestors eat. It's been highly altered through genetic breeding. The changes of quality, the fats, the proteins, the allergens in there. So like we used to have heirloom cows which were, you know, if you travel around the world and you see these cows, you're like, wow, that's a weird looking cow. You know, like, I never saw a cow like that because they're all like these same cows in America. They're like white and black holocene cows, they're all bred by like three bulls and they're pretty much genetically the same and they have high levels of a 1 casein, which is super inflammatory, whereas heirloom cows don't. Or sheep and goat also have a two casein, which is less problematic. Wheat, same thing. The way they've created the dwarf wheat, they breed the wheat for all these properties that are drought resistant, more starchy and so forth. And the guy won the Nobel Prize for this. But the unintended consequences is when you breed plants, it's not like humans. You get your 23 pairs of chromosomes. Every, every human has 46. If you were a wheat plant and you have 46 chromosomes and you breed with another wheat pants of 46, you had 90, you get 92 chromosomes, right? And then what that means is you're making extra proteins because chromosomes, genes make proteins and you're making way more gluten proteins that are much more likely to cause celiac, which is why we've seen such an increase in celiac disease and gluten sensitivity.
- [42:57]
D
That's really interesting. Okay, one thing I want to go back to is where you started and like your whole thing around love and community and how if you really want to make change, it's about connection and getting other people that are around you to change their lifestyle as well. And then it self reinforces one. Walk us through. Like how did you end up going so deep on Buddhist studies? What did you draw from that? And then as you were having really a near death experience, but I mean you were in a risky place there the first time you had that medical emergency, like the peace that you had during that whole process, which I found very interesting.
- [43:33]
C
Yeah, well, you know, I was always a weird kid. I always like, didn't really have any friends, just read a lot of books, couldn't really relate to anybody except grown ups. And then I got to college and it was like, wow. And I read Walden when I was like 14, 15 and I just like studied it like a Bible. And I.
- [43:53]
D
What specifically is hitting you like at 15 to encounter those ideas which would be very, run very contrary to a standard American upbringing. Yeah, but what specifically were you like, whoa, that, that.
- [44:06]
C
Well, it just, you know, I, I remember being like three and you know, just feeling so much love for everybody and just feeling in a state of love all the time. And I remember noticing how all the grownups were just so weird and why were they so disconnected and. And I always felt that sense of love. And I think when I began to Understand what Buddhism was about. It was about understanding compassion and kindness and service and also like wisdom, you know, how do we see the world? So Buddhism isn't a religion. It's basically a phenomenology of the mind. It's a description of how our perception works, why we suffer, and how we can break down that in slow motion like the matrix, break down the ways in which we get into this suffering pattern of getting attached to our meanings. We put on things and it creates all this misery and suffering. It's all created in our head. And I really was looking for a way out of my own suffering as a kid, and it just really spoke to me.
- [45:14]
D
And how does that become so important as you look at wellness and think of that as. As sort of a critical pillar of actual wellness? Do you talk in functional medicine? When somebody comes to see you, do you talk at all about the need to meditate?
- [45:29]
C
Of course, yeah, 100%.
- [45:31]
D
So what is that? What's the connection there? What's the mind gut connection? Like, how does this all.
- [45:36]
C
Well, like I said before, we're one system. So your brain is connected to everything else. And when you're stressed, you're dysregulating all the functions in your body, right? It's fine if you're running for a tiger, but if you're stressed all the time, your gut shuts down, your immune system doesn't work. You're constantly in a state of vigilance and stress, which just degrades every system in your body. So it's a huge component. It's both dealing with your mindset and your way of thinking to sort of be able to unhook from all the meanings we attach to things, all the perceptions we have that aren't really true, and the suffering we self generate. And then I also teach people tools and techniques to help them reset, right? So we're all stressed. Like, I'm running around in LA today, you know, doing my TV shows and this and that, you know, for my new book. But like, I make sure I meditate. Like I meditate this morning, you know, sometimes I'll be able to squeeze in a yoga class.
- [46:30]
D
Like I'll, you know, used to be a yoga instructor.
- [46:33]
C
I did. I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. Yeah, I was kind of weird. I told you I was weird.
- [46:38]
D
It's. It's so interesting, man. Here's the problem with where you're at today. Functional medicine is no longer like this alien notion, but the fact that you've had your finger on this for as long as you have is really interesting. The fact that it was born into the mind of somebody that was so into Eastern philosophy does not surprise me.
- [46:56]
C
Well, it's a systems view, right? And, you know, what is, you know, Buddhism is sort of a description of the laws of the mind, right? And so functional medicine is an ascription of the laws of biology. For we have no theory. We have theories of physics, right? We have the laws of physics. We can build a bridge or a spaceship based on the laws of physics, right? And it works because there are natural laws. What are the natural laws of biology? There are natural laws in medicine. We've not thought about that. We were like, well, this hurts, so fix this. You know, it's like a knee problem. The knee problem might be related to your gut, right? And how do we think about that? So. So functional medicine attempts to describe what are those natural laws, what are those essential elements. So when I look at traditional medicine, there's now 155,000 diseases. If you look at your code book, it's ridiculous. And it used to be 12,000. They subcategorize them to say you have depression. It's just the name of the disease. It doesn't tell you the cause of the disease. So functional medicine, what are those natural causes? And you can have a few natural laws that describe an immense number of phenomena that you see, right? So that's like the laws of physics, immense number of phenomena. So the same thing is true in biology. And functional medicine, I think, is an attempt to codify what those natural laws are, how the body actually works, how it's connected as a web. What are the root causes of diseases? And there's not many, right? It's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, microbes. And what are the things we need to create a healthy human? It's a short list. The right food, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, love, meaning, connection, purpose. Those are the things that we need to thrive. And you just take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, and, you know, miracles happen.
- [48:38]
D
Dude, that is such a powerful way to explain all this. Yeah, that was fucking amazing.
- [48:43]
C
Thank you for that.
- [48:44]
D
Where can people connect with you?
- [48:45]
C
Oh, they can go to drhyman.com I've got a podcast, the Doctor's Pharmacy, which is killing it. I don't know why, but people love it. And, you know.
- [48:55]
D
Yeah, very easy to answer why people love it. It's absolutely amazing. High quality, as is everything that you put out there. Dude, it's amazing what you're Doing is really, really extraordinary. I can think of few voices that would be able to match yours in this space. And so the fact that you've stepped out front and are doing all this is really incredible. And just the knock on effect with you getting involved in regulation and everything,
- [49:19]
C
I think is, yeah, we all got to save ourselves here because nobody's coming to save us. And I think we have to understand that, that our food system is generating most of the problems we see in the world. The chronic disease, the burden on our economy, our $22 trillion debt. A lot of that has to do with the food we're eating and how it's causing chronic disease. It's burdening our government, climate change as it results from it, the environmental degradation, violence, poverty, injustice, malnutrition. I mean, it's all. It just goes on and on.
- [49:48]
D
It's all a web.
- [49:49]
C
It's all connected. That's the beautiful thing. It's like functional medicine. When you see how it's all connected and not in silos. You can actually fix one thing and everything gets better, right? Yep.
- [50:00]
D
All right, if you could have people make one change that would have the biggest impact on their health, what change would you have them make?
- [50:08]
C
It's pretty simple. I mean, eat whole real food. I mean, follow the Pegan diet, get my cookbook. I mean, it's pretty simple. I mean, I kind of laugh because I got paid a lot of money to tell people to eat real food. And I'm like, you know, it's sort of obvious, right?
- [50:27]
D
I think it is a very effective answer. Mark, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you, guys. Go check out everything that he does, the books. He has so many. They're so good, you can literally pick them almost at random. But starting with the one that he just released, I think is a very good start. And then be sure to check out his podcast, the Doctor's Pharmacy with an F. It is really fantastic. Everything that he does, I think, is incredible and is leading everything in the right direction. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Nine out of the 10 largest banks get it. They get that. VantageScore, the modern credit score, is the leader in predictive power, improving mortgage default predictions and saving lenders billions. Better predictions, better for your business with VantageScore.