Transcript of Dr. Mark Hyman: How To Reclaim Your Health In A Food System Designed To KILL You

Six out of 10 Americans will have a chronic disease in their lifetime. Is that correct?

No. Six out of 10 Americans today have a chronic illness.

Six out of 10 have it now.

We went from relatively healthy nation to one of the sickest nations in the world.

Do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us?

Oh, that's easy. It's designed to kill us. Physician and wellness expert Dr. Marc Hyman. 14 New York Times bestsellers, none other than Dr..

Marc Hyman.

We're spending more and more money. It's one of five dollars in our economy. We're throwing more and more drugs on everybody, getting sicker and sicker. Nobody's asking why. I'm sorry. If another country was doing to our kids what we're doing, we'd go to war to protect them.

What would you say are three to five things that could help someone reclaim their health and end chronic illness forever in their family?

That's a beautiful question. We got a lot about.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guests. We have the inspiring Dr. Marc Hyman in the house. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you, buddy. Welcome back to the show. We've got a crazy stat here. You've got 15 New York Times bestselling books. You've got amazing businesses, podcasts that are helping millions of lives around the world understand their health and understand what's causing them to get sick and unhealthy. That's right. There's a stat that I saw online that said, Nearly 90% of the $4.1 trillion spent on health care in America each year is attributed to chronic disease. My first question to you is, do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us?

Oh, that's easy. It's designed to kill us. Really? A hundred %. It wasn't starting out that way, Lewis. I mean, we had, after World War II, a need to feed a hungry, growing population around the world. So there was a huge push to industrialize agriculture, to produce more calories, more starchy carbohydrate calories. That could feed a growing hungry world. And the unintended consequence of that was two things. One, producing massive amounts of sugar and starch. We actually have about 500 calories more per person in America than we did in 1970. Two, we also increased the amount of starch and sugar. Three, we industrialize agriculture in a way that has destroyed the environment because of the tillage that's destroyed the soil. The soil, yeah. That is now one-third of all the The carbon in the atmosphere comes from loss of soil carbon, which is the life in the soil. We destroyed our rivers and waterways because of the runoff from nitrogen that caused euthrification and has dead zones the size of New Jersey. In the Gulf of Mexico, there's 400 around the world of those that feed a half a billion people. What's a dead zone?

Dead zone means when you have too much fertilizer in the water, it makes the algae grow, sucks all the oxygen out of the water, and all the fish die. That's a dead zone.

Dead fish. There's no fish.

Dead fish. People are They're bending on that fish to live. And then we have the pesticides and the glyphosate, which is drawing this whole microbiome, our microbiome that causes cancer. And so we have all these downstream consequences, not to mention how horrific factory farming is. So the whole industrial food system, for field to fork is completely effed. And I've actually had a nonprofit called Food Fix campaign that's based on my book, Food Fix, that was entitled How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, and Our Planet, and Our Communities, One By The Time. It was really laying out from peel to fork, what's wrong with our food system, with our food policies. We really have to address this because it's why we're gone from a relatively healthy nation. If you look even back in the '70s, you can't Pretty fit. Yeah, you can't see that many overweight people. Now, you can't find a skinny person. If you look at the data, we've gone from about 5% to 10% obesity when I was born to now 42%.

It's so interesting you say that because I was in City with Martha, my fiancée, the other week, and then we flew into St. Louis. As we landed in St. Louis, which I lived in for about eight years, I grew up in Ohio, lived in St. Louis for a while in high school, college. As we landed, I said, Notice what you see when we get off the plane. And if we're walking through the terminal, I said, What do you see? She goes, People are a little bit bigger here. It's hard to find. The majority was a bigger set of individuals walking through the airport. I go, Unfortunately, as much as I love the Midwest, the people in the Midwest are the best, the kindest, the best values. Yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Let me open the door. How's your day? Like, beautiful people. But it just seems like a majority are leaning into chronic disease, prediabetic diabetes. Everywhere. I don't know if this is your stat or if this is somewhere else online, but I saw that 6 out of 10 Americans will have a chronic disease in their lifetime.Is.

That correct?No. 6 out of 10 Americans today have a chronic illness.

6 out of 10 have it now.

4 out of 10 have more than one. If you're over 65, it's 83%.We.

Have a chronic illness.It.

Has a chronic disease. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, autoimmune disease, you name it.

What is a chronic disease? What is the root of all chronic illness?

Well, we're going to unpack that, but it's primarily our food and our lifestyle and our environmental toxins. I would say those are the big three things that are driving it, and we're going to unpack that. But I would love to just help people understand the problem we're in. It's the frog in the boiling water. When you turn the heat up slowly, you don't notice it. It's where we are. We went from relatively healthy nation to one of the sickest nations in the world. We've seen not just this rise in obesity and diabetes. We've had a huge rise, for example, in heart disease. We think we're improving heart disease treatments. We're getting better and better health care. We went from spending $1.3 trillion in 2000 to spending almost $4.9 trillion in 2023 on health care. Most of that's for chronic disease. Most of it's preventable. Most of it's caused by dying lifestyle. We've seen heart disease go up by 50% in the last 50 years. Cancer go up by 30%. It's gone up by 50% in those under 50. It's like colon cancer. We're seeing young kids getting cancer now. Not the typical kid cancer, like leukemia, but like adult grown up cancers.

What's the root cause of that? Our food?

100%, type 2 diabetes. When I went to medical school, Louis, which I'm ancient, but not that old, right? I'm going to be 65 next month. There was nothing that was called type 2 diabetes. It was called adult onset and juvenile onset. Juvenile onset is basically an autoimmune disease requiring insulin. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease because of too much sugar. Now, they threw out those terms because kids as young as 2 or 3 years old are getting type 2 diabetes. Kids as young as 15 are needing liver transplants from drinking soda. Wow. Yeah, this is a big problem. We're seeing autoimmune diseases, 100% increase in autoimmune diseases. We're seeing 100% increases in mental illness. What illness? Mental illness, depression, anxiety, especially in kids. 20% of kids have some type of mental illness, autism, ADD, depression, anxiety. We've seen the rates of autism go up a thousand %. We've seen digestive issues go up doubling to 100% increase. We've seen dementia go up 150%, and we're spending more and more money, and we're getting worse and worse and worse, and we're spending more and more on drugs. That's even the other thing that's shocking to me.

How much are we spending on drugs a year?

Collectively, I haven't done the math, but just for example, statins alone is almost a $40 billion a year industry. That's the number one selling class of drugs. But if you look at the drugs that are sold, it's the lifestyle drugs we're selling. Heart disease prevention like statins, asset-blocking drugs, mental health drugs, which are often lifestyle-related. Now we understand there's a whole role of nutritional psychiatry, metabolic psychiatry. You had Casey Mees on the show, but she talks about brain energy. But Christopher Palmer, who's a psychiatrist, talks about brain energy, how the loss of metabolic health in the brain causes psychiatric illnesses. Everything from depression to bipolar disease to schizophrenia to autism. These are things that areAnd brain health is affected by what we eat also, right? A hundred %. The brain is, this is a famous saying in medicine, psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain, and neurologists pay no attention to the mind. They're connected. Often the mind doesn't work because the brain's not working. The brain's not working because unless In large part, we're eating a diet that's full of sugar and starch that causes insulin resistance in the brain. It creates a metabolic crisis in the brain.

It creates inflammation in the brain. All these diseases are inflammatory diseases, even things that aren't like allergies and autoimmune disease. We've seen allergy rates go dramatically in kids. We've seen all these problems, and we're spending more and more on all these drugs. We're spending more and more. We've seen a 400% increase in these diabetes drugs, a 300% increase in the use of cardiovascular drugs. We've seen a 400% use of psychiatric drugs increase. We've seen increasing cancer therapies, and 500% increase in the use of autoimmune drugs, and respiratory drugs, 200%, pain drugs, 400%, GI drugs, 300% increase. We're pouring more and more drugs on everybody. We're getting sicker and sicker. We're spending more and more money. It's $1.5 in our economy. Nobody's asking why. It's like we're just trying to plug the holes. If you 100 holes in the boat or we're trying to bail the boat while the boat's sinking instead of going, Why are the holes in the boat?

I want to ask you, why is this happening? And also, what needs to happen in order for America or the world to have a radical shift shift in their approach to health? Because it seems like there's more and more doctors like yourself who've been speaking up and educating the world and more books teaching us how to do these things, more documentaries showing the strategies and all these things. What needs to happen to America or the world in order for us to get healthy? Great question. Do we need to go through extreme pain and suffering and horrific death in order for us to wake up?

Because I feel like that's...We're there, Lois.We're.

Boiling, right?

We're in the boiling water right now. We are. Right now, probably, we're talking about the economy and inflation. Probably there's $2 trillion added to our federal deficit every year because of unnecessary health care costs because of what we're eating and because of environmental toxins and because of our lifestyle that are totally fixable. What's happened is companies develop, they create products, they make money, and then they keep wanting to do that. If you're If you're making cigarettes, you want to sell more cigarettes. If you're making sugar, you want to sell more sugar. If you're selling Kallax Fruit Loops, you want to sell more fruit loops. There's only so much that you can do. You have to get people to be more and more of the same stuff. There's only so many people on the planet. In the food industry is the number one industry on the planet. If you look at the full industry, from farming to food processing to fast food to process food to the restaurant industry, and in grocery, it's the number one industry on the planet. It employs more workers than anybody else. It's a huge economic driver. There's an incredible set of insights that have now come out of the World Health Organization that I wrote about in my book, I didn't call it this, but essentially it's what they were talking about, called the Commercial Determinants of Health.

We've all It's hard about the social determinants of health, which is if you're poor, you have access to food, if you're stressed, if you have trauma, if you live in tough neighborhoods, understand all that plays a huge role in our risk of illness. But the Commercial Determinants of Health is the role that multinational corporations play in subverting public health and privatizing profits. They will do it at any cost. They're immoral. They're not immoral, they're immoral. So Coca-Cola just wants to sell more Coca-Cola. Of course, they don't feed it to their kids. If you go into this Coca-Cola building in Atlanta, they don't really drink a lot of Coke. They drink all the other products like water, Tarzani. Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use an iPhone or an iPad. I think there's something we know about that. We now have a whole industry that profits off of doing the wrong thing. Governments are now paying the price. We socialize the costs and we privatize the profits. We, taxpayers, are paying the price. One, we It's government money. We pay for farming crop insurance to subsidize commodity crops like corn, soy, and wheat that are turned into ultra-processed food that are deconstructed science projects.

They're not actually food by definition. Food by definition is something that supports the growth in development of an organism. This doesn't do that. It makes you sick, right? Yes. So that's actually food. It's then turned into all sizes and shapes and colors of chemically extruded food-like substances that we are consuming. It's 60% of our diet. It's 67% of kids' diet. It's dysregulating our biology. It's screwing up our microbiome. It hijacks our brain chemistry. It hijacks our metabolism. It creates inflammation in the body, and it leads to all these chronic illnesses. There was a major published paper in The Lancet that recently showed there were 32 or 37 different illnesses that were caused by or made worse by ultra-processed food, and yet this is what we're eating. So we pay for the growing of this food. Then with our largest government program Snap or Food Stamps, we pay for $125 billion of food for the poor, which is important. Over 46 million people depend on this. But 75% of that is junk food. It's ultra-positive. And 10% is soda. Our government is paying for over 10 billion servings of soda a year for the poor. It's making us sicker.

The government Food Stent program is 20% of Coco Call's American profits.No way.Yes.Wow.Yes. Then we pay on the back end for Medicare and Medicaid to take care of the illnesses that are caused by these foods. Then there's all these other collateral damage that we don't pay for directly, but we pay for indirectly. We talked about the loss of all the fish, the damage to the environment, the damage to our soil, the increases in climate change, and the consequences of that. How much What are these hurricanes costing? That's not even factored in. When you calculate all that, this comes from climate destabilization because of how we're growing our food. By the way, the food system is the number one source of changes in our climate. It's not fossil fuels. It's just people I didn't realize that. Partly, it's because a lot of fossil fuels are used in the production of our food. 2% of global energy use is used to make fertilizer because it's a very energy-intensive process. We're in this vicious cycle where we We have to actually have some serious policy changes. The WHO report is coming out next year on the Commercial Determinants of Health.

The goal, and I talked to one of the scientists there, is to help educate governments on how they're being manipulated by these companies in ways that are driving policies that are helping them, meaning them, the food industry, and two, hurting the populations. We're left holding the bag. We should be doing things that other countries doing that were not. For example, in Chile, they decided they were going to do some radical things a number of years ago. This was because they had a doctor, Michelle Bachelet, who was a pediatrician who was the President of Chile. They had a doctor who was the vice chair of the Senate. They got together and they said, This is our moment. Let's do this. Then, of course, we're going to kick that off us, but let's do it anyway. They put in an 18% soda tax, which wasn't actually even the biggest thing they did. What they did was they ended marketing of junk They do this house.

No marketing of junk food.

6:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night. They took off all the cartoon characters. No more Tony the Tiger, no more on the Frosted Flakes, no more Fruit Loops with the Toucan character. Because they're not No, they're not. They're not great. No, they're not great. They got rid of all the cartoon characters. They got all the junk out of schools. Really? They got rid of all the formula advertising. They put on front of package labeling, meaning they put... If you go to South America, you've been, but I think your fiancé is fromMexico. Yeah. They have these now stop signs on the front of package.

It says excessive calories.

Too much calories, too much sugar, too much whatever. Every different countries have done different things, but it's a stop sign in black.

It's a reminder, yeah. When I'm in Mexico, I see these, I think it says excessive calorias or something. It's like excessive or something like that. It's excessive calories, and it's right in the front. It might be multiple of them. Listen, as a human being, my only vice is really sugar. It's like, I don't do drugs. You? Yeah, I don't do drugs. I don't smoke. I don't do alcohol. I don't do any of these things. I don't know if anything external is meant for us unless it's organic food. For me personally, I believe we have the most powerful pharmacy within us that can heal us and take us to astronomical universes within our own mind. But that's for a whole another conversation.

That's right. The greatest pharmacy is between your ears. A hundred %.

I don't think we need an outside drug unless you're in extreme cases or you've hurt yourself so badly that you need that for that moment. But I think that's another story. But being in Mexico, it reminds me to pause. Do I really want that? Being here, I don't see it unless I turn it around and they see, Oh, this has got 50 grams of sugar in this many calories. It's less of a pause.

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

I saw Vonnehari. Were you working with Vonnehari on this whole petition thing? The Kellogg's thing?

Yeah, we were helping out. We were supporting out.

Yeah, for sure. But even with It's funny. She had, I think it was 400,000 signatures that she took to Signatures that she took to the headquarters of Kellogg's. Was she able to make any changes with this process? I know she's done it with some other companies.

I think it's going to… Think about change. It takes a grassroots movement. It takes years and years when you think of the end of slavery, took a civil war. Hopefully, you don't need that. Look at women's suffrage, look at the right to vote, look at civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. I mean, these are just things that slowly happen over a long period of time with a lot of people working for a long time to push Congress to make the change they need to make. And so that's how we are. I was talking to Cory Booker, who's a friend, a senator from New He's like, Mark, this feels like 1959 in the food movement. For example, he put a bill together. We were supporting it as part of our nonprofit, which is called the Safe School Meals Act. Essentially, they found that 94% of school lunches in California are contaminated with pesticides and heavy metals. Things that should not be in the food that we're giving to our kids. Two, there's all these ingredients that are in the food that are added and dyes in colors that are banned in other countries. You've literally go to jail in Singapore if you put that in the food.

If you're a food manufacturer, you go to jail for 12 years. They're a little extreme. You spit a gum on the floor, they cane you, whatever. That's extreme. But the reality is that we allow things in this country that are banned in other countries. Like food marketing, many other countries have shut down. Pharmaceutical marketing, us in New Zealand are the only countries that allow that. It wasn't around when I was in graduate. No, when I graduated medical school, there was no pharmaceutical marketing.

When I go on and watch SportsCenter at night and the commercials happen, I have to turn them off.It's all the drugs.My dad never allowed us to watch commercials growing up because he didn't want drug commercials telling us that you're going to get sick and you're going to need this. So he didn't want the subliminal or conscious marketing. I have to mute them and turn them off because the commercials are fast food and drugs.

Yeah, they're like, Oh, the drug company. Oh, we have to charge all these high prices for these drugs. We put so much into R&D. Bs. They spend twice as much on marketing than they do on research and development. Twice as much.

Wow.

I mean, yes, they spend money in R&D, but I'm telling you, and those commercials are not for the patients. They're for the really to get to prescribe by the doctor. But they know from the data that 40% of the time when a patient is, Hey, Doc, I saw this drug on TV. It says blah, blah, blah. Can you prescribe it? They go, Yeah.

So they know. Is there any drug in the world that has zero side effects?

No, you could die from drinking water. I mean, you can die from drinking water. The dose makes it poison. If you know people who are marathon runners and they overhydrate and they get seizures and they dilute their blood, they get low sodium in their blood, and they get seizure and they die. So water can kill you. There are no, even anything, like a vitamin, if you take the wrong dose. I think drugs used in the right way, prescribed by educated doctors, delivered by trained nurses that are not medical errors, are between the third and fourth leading cause of death in hospitals.

Wait, drugs that are used the right way? The right way, right.Not the wrong way. Not the wrong way.

Not like a mistake. I go, I gave you too much of this drug and it killed you.

It was like... This is not like, Oh, you were allergic to this thing and it killed. I say this One more time. Drugs used the right way.

This is not my opinion. This is the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was published quite a while ago, and there's more data recently. But basically, drugs prescribed by doctors in hospitals for the right patient, for the right indication, at the right dose. The right symptoms. The right symptoms, delivered the right way, is between the third and fourth leading cause of death. Holy cow.

The third and fourth leading cause of death in hospitals or just in total?

In Really? Yeah. I have to double check that. I have to check that fact. But I think it's Sure, sure, sure. But I think either way, it's a lot. Wow. I think that peopleHow many people die in hospitals based on something just not working out, prescribing the wrong thing or a surgery that goes wrong. How many people-There are medical errors, and it's significant. The Institute of Medicine did a report on it. It's not trivial. The good news is there's better systems than processes now to help reduce those medical errors and better tracking of things and better systems. I think they're getting less, but it's not insignificant. Wow.

Now, going back to chronic illness. Did you say how many people are chronically ill now or will be chronically ill?

Look, it's 6 in 10 Americans. 6 in 10 Americans. It's 51% of children, Louis. Wow. Have obesity, asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes.

Does it matter? And does it matter if we can any certain politician, president, government save us from being less chronically ill, or what will save Americans from being healthy?

What will help us get healthy, you mean? Yes.

Can someone save us? I'm not trying. Is there a government that could save us? Is there one politician that could save us? Is there a company that could save to us? What will save us from being sick?

I think we need a systematic understanding of the problem first. I think whatever political party you adhere to, whatever you believe or not, the fact that there's a conversation now about health in America in a presidential campaign is important. And calling out the corruption in our systems, how the FDA is captured and the NIH is captured and the HHS and USDA. The The USDA had checkoff programs, which are supposed to be research programs and also promoting healthy products. They're the ones who came out with the Got Milk ads. So the US taxpayers paid for those ads with the Derry Council. Those ads had to be stopped. If you notice, they don't have them anymore. Why? Because they were very effective. Because the Federal Trade Commission said they needed to be stopped because they were unscientific, and they were making claims in there that were not based on science. Like, it's good for your bones. It's not. This is not my opinion. There's a major published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Ludwig and Dr. Willet, two of those esteemed researchers in the world, showing that milk and health, it was called milk and health, and all the fallacies in our belief of we should be drinking three glasses of milk a day.

The US government says today in the Dietary Guidelines that Americans need to drink three glasses of milk a day and kids need to drink two. There's no scientific data to support that. Why? Do we have it? Well, guess what? The Dairy Council is a huge influence on our policies In fact, guess who was, after his last run as Secretary of Agriculture, between his current run as Secretary of Agriculture, was on the Dairy Council Board. Thomas Vilsack, who's our current Secretary of Agriculture. The Dairy Board. The Dairy Council, which is basically this trade group that represents the dairy industry. It's just so corrupt. Someone needs to come in and go, Okay, we've got to address this problem. It's bankrupting our country. The US government collectively spends 40% of the money on health care. In other words, a $4.9 trillion, 40% of that is footed by the taxpayer. When you're not just Medicare, but Medicare, Medicaid, Health Service, Department of Defense, federal employees, the VA, you add up all the programs end-to-end. It's one in three dollars of our entire federal budget, which is over $6 trillion. One in three dollars that we spend on our taxes is going to health care, and about 80% to I'm up to 90% of that is lifestyle-preventable diseases that we can do something about.

It's going to take some sweeping changes, and I think some really committed politicians in Washington, hopefully the next president will take this on. There's a lot of pushback from the industry. Like I said, it's the biggest industry, it's the biggest lobby group. I mean, just one bill to label GMOs. And by the way, I think us and Syria are the only countries that don't label GMOs. China does, Russia does, not known for transparency. Those But they label GMOs. The GMO labeling bill in this country, the Food and Issue spent $192 million lobbying for one bill. You know what I'm saying? To pass it. To not pass it.

To not pass that.

To go against. Yes. You cannot label foods with GMO because that's going to make people not want to buy it. Oh my gosh.Right. Then they did the same thing. They put in a... A bunch of them colluded, which they got actually sued for by the attorney general of State of Washington, and they had to pay the biggest fine ever assessed because they colluded to actually put a ballot initiative in that was anti-GMO labeling. To get people to vote against the labeling of GMOs in State of Washington. This is what's going on, and it's very dark. It's not like, oh, gee, we don't know. There's a lot of actually malicious intent. There's also people who are just trying to do their job and make better products and do the right thing. But look at Mark who was the CEO of Nestlé, the biggest health company, I mean, the biggest food company in the world, got fired because he was pushing things too much in the health direction. I was working with him. Really? Yeah. There was the head of Pepsi, Andrew Nuis. She got a lot of flack and We're not can for trying to push Pepsi to be a healthier company.

Wow. Yeah. It's very complicated. I think we do need a strong leadership in Washington. We need an educated consumer base. We need grassroots movement. We need clear research to actually show what works and what doesn't work. 46 billion dollars are spent on the NIH budget. The amount of spend on nutrition is 121 million. It's 0.02% or 002%. I'm not good at math, but anyway, that's not my target, but it's very little. Most of that is not actually for the nutrition research for chronic disease. It's other stuff. It's almost nothing. Yet it's the number one cause of death and illness, and we're not even studying it.

It's It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that this is not something that's going to happen overnight. That's going to take time. It's going to take time to make changes.

It takes time until it doesn't. The Berlin Wall came down in one night. Sure. It takes time, it takes decades, and then it happens. I'm hopefully I'm going to try to… I wrote a book called Young Forever on how to Stay Healthy, and I've reversed my biological age four years in the last two years. I'm counting on staying alive long enough till I can see this.

It sounds like it's not going to happen anytime in the next 4-8 years.

It might. It does. It might, Louis. I see consumers are carrying more about their health. But people are sicker than ever. People are sicker than ever. I co-founded a company called Function Health, which allows people to access their own lab data, disrupts the healthcare system. So you have to go through a doctor insurance company. People are flocking to that. We've had over 80,000 members, 300,000 people on the waitlist. We have over 110 million biomarkers we've now tracked. We test five times what you get in a normal doctor's visit and look at everything for your metabolic health, and your nutrient levels, toxin levels, things that you should be looking at. People are wanting this because they get that the health care system is broken. They're not getting the answer from their doctor. They want to get healthy. They want to be empowered. I think there's a grassroots movement. We saw the 400,000 people on Bonihari's petition. That's significant.

Yeah, there's movement, but it's still, most people have chronic illness.

Yeah. They don't know. They don't know they don't have to. That's the thing. They don't know this is optional. Even if you have it, you can reverse it with with food. Food can heal and food can harm, and if you know how to use it.

Then what are the most dangerous foods that cause chronic disease that we should be avoiding?

Well, as a class, I think what's come to light in the last decade or so is this concept of ultra-processed food. Now, what is ultra-processed food? Well, everybody understands whole food. That's an apple or an egg or a piece of chicken. Then there's minimally processed food. If you make sauerkraut, while you're taking cabbage, you're chopping it, you're fermenting it. It's still pretty It's pretty much whole food, but it's got some processing. Then there's maybe some little more extra processing that can happen. It's not so bad, like canning or something like that. Those are all real foods. If you buy a can of tomatoes, it says tomatoes, water, and salt. You know what it is. Then there's ultra-processed food, which is not actually food. This is based on the NoVA classification, which they developed out of Brazil. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good barometer for what to eat and not to eat. Ultra-processed food essentially is industrial foods like They're commodity crops, corn, meat, and soy. They get chemically broken down. The molecules are just completely disassembled. They're reassembled, but not in ways that our body recognizes or probably can process. They're incredibly inflammatory.

They destroy microbiome. They dysregulate our appetite. Kevin Hall at the NIH did a study where he took a group of people and he gave him Whole Foods Diet for a few weeks and then gave him a washout period, then a few weeks of an ultra-process diet. They were pretty much for calories in what they were available. They were matched for fat, protein, carbs, fiber. What they found was that when these people were eating ultra-processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day. Now, if you do the math, in a week, that's 3,500 calories. That's a pound. That's right. 3,500 calories is a pound of weight gain. In a year, that's 52 pounds. Holy cow. This is what America is eating.

If you're not burning It's not those calories in some other way, you have to work out more.

By the way, here's what happens. It's a fuel partitioning issue. This might be a little too technical for you, but I'll try to break it down. Part of the problem is that these foods are extremely starchy and sugary for the most part. They have bad fats, and they have Other additives, ingredients, and weird things that make you addictive. But when you eat sugar and starch, it causes your blood sugar to spike. Then your insulin goes up, and then the fuel goes into your fat cells. It basically drives all the available fuel. You store the fat in your belly. But then in your blood, it feels like you're starving.So you need more.You want to eat more because you're actually not regulating your fuel properly. It's a fuel partitioning issue. You're basically starving in the midst of plenty. It's really crazy. You want to eat more and more. That's how people can get to be 200, 300, 400, 500 pounds because they're so dysregulated by these foods. I I had a patient who was eating these foods for most of her life. By the time she got to be 66, she was educated but didn't know anything about food.

She was from the Midwest. She had heart failure, she had type 2 diabetes, she had multiple stents, she had high blood pressure, she had fatty liver, her kidneys were going, she was on a pile of pills, her copay was $20,000 a year. Who knows what we were paying for Medicare. She was on her way to her kidney and a heart transplant. Terrible. We put on a program. It was a group support lifestyle change program. We put her on a very cold-foods, anti-inflammatory diet. That's actually what I wrote in my book, the 10-day detox diet, which is really great for just resetting the body. In three days, she was off insulin, which sounds crazy. In three months, she went her A1c, which is a measure of blood sugar went from 11:00 to five and a half. Five and a half is normal. Eleven is like, you should be in the hospital. Her heart failure, which was significant, for those doctors listening, it was 35% ejection fraction, went back up to 50%, which is normal. Basically, that doesn't happen in medicine. You don't see that. These are one-way diseases. Once you have high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure, you can manage them.

You can't reverse them, but you can. She reversed her diabetes. She reversed. Three months, she was off all her medications. I'd lost 43 pounds. Everything was normal. Then in a year, she lost 116 pounds and got her life back. She was on her way to the grave, and she was able to resurrect herself just by using food as medicine. So food can heal or can harm. If you understand how to use food in the right way, it has incredibly curative powers. So yes, food got us into this, but it can also get us out of this.

So ultra-processed foods sounds like the worst things.

The worst, yeah.

But that's where the food industry makes the most money.

I think 73% of what's on the grocery store shelves, It's stuff that looks like food that isn't like fruit loops is not for food. And top tarts and lunchables. How did the USDA allow lunchables to be in school lunches? I mean, this is just criminal. And these The foods are driving most of the problem. A lot of these foods have also starch and sugar, which is the other big driver. So you mentioned sugar is your Achilles heel. It's not an accident, though. It's nothing wrong with you. It's how we were designed. Think about bears. They starve all winter, and they eat a lot of salmon at the beginning of the season when the salmon are running, a lot of protein and fat. They don't gain that much weight a little bit. Then it's bear season, and they go to town, and they gain 500 pounds, literally 500 pounds of fat because they're eating sugar. Right. They're eating fructose, which increases fat a lot. Then they go to sleep, and they sleep all winter, and they burn off. We just keep eating all winter. Our bodies are programmed when we find something starchy or sugary to eat it and to eat as much as we can because we don't know where we're going to find our next root or barrier.

We don't want to find our next animal to hunt and kill. We didn't have grocery stores and Uber Eats, you know what I'm saying? Hundred gatherers, right? Yeah. We're programmed to eat sugar because it's stored quickly, and that's good in a situation where there's scarcity, but not in America.

I mean, it just seems like there's going to be more and more conveniences in life with the ability to push a button and have ice cream in your door in five minutes or go to the grocery store and see all the... Even if they stop all the marketing, even if they put the labels on there, there's still going to be foods available that are not good for us. I was talking to Casey means about this this morning, about how she was saying that society, humanity, is spiritually broken also. We need to find spiritual healing so that we can just have awareness and make better choices. I don't know if that's a different mindset and being disciplined to just not take the action to have the easy fix or the thing that's going to make us feel good because we're in a fight or flight state or we're going through a breakup or we're going through stress at work or whatever it might be, and this is going to make us feel comfortable, comfort foods. Or if it's a spiritual brokenness. And because we're spiritually broken or emotionally broken, we don't feel whole. Therefore, we need to refuel things to try to make us feel better.

That's right. But those things aren't healthy for us. No. If we could start to heal ourselves spiritually, it's huge. Could we start to see and notice things and say, I don't need this right now, or I'm going to have this once in a while, and that's okay. But it's not going to be every day constantly to fuel something inside of me where I feel wounded, broken, less than, unworthy, guilty, shameful, needing this to feel quick fix and then take me to my grave.

That's right. Obviously, it's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you. That's the problem. If you understand what's eating you, and it's the stress of our modern life, it's the political division, it's the conflict around the world, it's the threat of nuclear war, the threat of climate change, the economic instability, the pressures to work hard. There's so much going on. The social media is created as such a bunch of chaos in our life. Technology which should have fed up-time seems to suck all our time. We're in a state where we're disconnected from nature, we're disconnected from each other, we're isolated. What do we do? We have to feed the emptyness. We to fill that hole. I get it. When I feel like a crapper, I've had a stressful day, I want a pint of Chunky Monkey Ben and Churries. Tell me about it. It tastes amazing. It tastes great. I just try not to have it in the kitchen. Sometimes my wife's having a bad night, and she's like, Or is it a pint of ice cream. Then she orders me another pint of Sicilian Van Luyn pistache, which is my favorite. But I'm like, I don't want that.

And they're like, Oh, I just got it for you. I'm like, No, you got it. So you didn't feel bad that you're eating.

I'm eating alone. Exactly. But I really feel like It is something to what you were saying about the spiritual brokenness of our society, of feeling empty and needing to fill something up because we feel broken or empty or less than.

Trauma is a real thing, Louis. Of course, we've talked about this before. When you look at the Ace questionnaire, which is, I think everybody should go and check this out. It's available online. It's adverse.

It's like 15 or 16 different things.

It's adverse childhood events. It's essentially a set of a few questions. You fill out, you get a score. Like, did my parents get divorced? Was any of my family an alcoholic? Did anybody go to Was it a deal? Did I get hit? Was I neglected? No, it's not.Sexual.

Abuse, all these things.Sexual abuse. I think I hit every one of these things.It's.

Real.yeah, it's real. When you have that, and the more you have, it's almost more correlated with chronic illness than anything else, smoking or diet. If you look at the risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, suicide, you name it, mental health issues, all of it, it's related to these traumas we have. We don't really have a great way of thinking or dealing with it. I look at my parents' generation, they just didn't have a language for it. Now we do. We're talking about psilocybin therapy and MDMA therapy and trauma. There's a lot of people like Evermatti out there talking. There's a really interesting conversation happening around that. I think for me, we're a traumatized society. All of us, to some degree or a little degree, he talks about big T traumas, little T traumas. Big T would be sexual abuse. Little T would be your parents just didn't understand you and neglected you. We're just too busy and self-absorbed. It doesn't matter. They all have an impact for us, and they drive our behaviors. The healing, spiritually, is a key part of this.

The challenge is, if we're raised as a child, there's so many things to go in here. It's like, were you born through a vaginal birth or through a cesarean birth? Did you have multiple shots as a kid? Did you not have shots as a kid? Were you given sugar right away? Were you breastfed? It's like all the decisions from birth It could compound and impact you over time, till in your 20s and you could be chronically ill not knowing how you got there. That's right. Because your parents influenced what you ate and the environment and everything. It's like you have to unlearnt it all and learn how to get healthy in your 20s or 30s when you finally start waking up to it.

That's right.

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

Yeah, that's right. It's quite astounding how many people are unwell. And as I mentioned, this company Function Health. We've done tests now on 80,000 people, and this is a health in the population. Over 95% have some metabolic dysfunction, which means they have normal cholesterol, too small particles, 46% have high inflammation, 33% have an autoimmunity problem.

These are people that are actively focused on being healthy.

67% have a nutritional deficiency. This is at the level the lab says is deficient, not what I would think is a good level of vitamin D or iron or whatever. It's like vitamin D level should be over 50. Well, there's under 30. Over 30 is okay. Well, I'm like, 30 is not good. It should be 50. There's such a prevalence of people having all these low-grade things that they don't know about. Illness doesn't just happen, Lewis. It's not like one day you get dementia, heart disease or cancer. I mean, these are slow, progressive things that happen over decades. There's a slow transition from wellness to Illness. We have not paid attention to that medicine at all. We're like, Come back to me when you're sick, I'll give you a drug. Like, literally, I had a patient, I saw him and his lab test showed him how to high blood sugar. It was like 113, which was prediabetes. I said, Did your doctor talk to you about this. Oh, yeah. I said, what did the doctor say? He said, oh, well, he says, When it gets higher and I get over 126, I have diabetes. Then he can give me a medication.

Oh my gosh.

This is straight up.

This is not talking about how to prevent it or reverse it or prove it.

Right. Oh, your autoimmune disease isn't so bad, but when you get worse, come back and I'll give you a drug. It's like, that's nuts, Louis.

The doctors also aren't incentivized to help prevent people from being sick. It's true. They're not because they don't make a living. So that industry is a little bit off.

Oh, for sure. I mean, that's one of the things we're working on in medicine now is, in Washington, with a food fix campaign, is how do we reimburse for nutrition services in health care? How do we get doctors paid to do the right thing instead of the thing that's paid for? You can get paid for doing an angioplasty, but you can't get paid for a lifestyle change program that will prevent them from eating the angioplasty. My daughter's in medical school. No nutrition education. 40 years later, I had none. She's got none. Very few medical schools provide any nutrition education, and we're working on that. For example, we spend $17 billion a year. It's a federal government, paying to support graduate medical education programs. There's no strings attached. We're like, Hey, maybe you should have some minimum composite requirements for nutrition. Hey, maybe on licensing exams for medical school, you should have nutrition questions because that's what's killing all your patients. We're trying to change reimbursement. We're trying to change education. These are the kinds of things we're working on. Changing Snap policies, changing food packaging, labeling, changing diet trade guidelines, paying for medically tailored meals, basically getting the NIH to have a National Institute of Nutrition.

We don't have that.Sure. Other countries have it. There's many levers to pull front of package labeling, FDA regulation, getting junk out of... There's so much to be done. It's not going to be one thing, ending food marketing to kids. Why should we... If we were doing to our kids, I'm sorry, if another country was doing to our kids what we're doing, we'd go to war to protect them. Think about it. It seems like there's a lot of leverage to pull a lot of different industries, policies, companies that need to make changes.

But say never happens. Each individual on this planet has to make their own decisions and own changes and take full responsibility of their health, no matter what these companies or governments do for them. What would be the three to five things that an individual listening or watching right now can say, I want to take back responsibility and control of my health and my family's health? We'll start with myself and my family. We're going to start implementing only three to five things because anything more than that is overwhelming. I don't have the time, but it's already a struggle. We're already chronically ill or on the way there. It's tough. Life is tough. Responsibilities are hard. Managing it all, making money.

Totally.

Relationships are challenging. Marriage is tough. Kids are not easy. There's ups and downs. Parents are dying. All these different things. I don't have much more energy. Although I know when I do this, I'll have a lot more energy because I'm healthier. That's right. So I need to get through a three-a-month window to take on three to five things to help me reverse chronic illness and be the difference maker in my family to say, I'm the one who stood up to this suffering. I'm the one who took responsibility and took ownership back in my life, and therefore, I'm going to change my family's generational history because of decisions I make today. That's right. Based on what you say here, what would you say are three to five things that could help someone reclaim their health and end chronic illness?

Forever in their family? That's a beautiful question. I mean, I thought a lot about. I think it's not as complicated as people think. Yes, it would be easy to do if we didn't live in a toxic food environment. Yes, it would be easy to do if the systems around us support us to do the right thing.

But even against all those odds.

We have the easy choice being the bad choice for us, the unhealthy choice. We have the hard choice being the healthy choice. We don't want that. I'll just tell story that illustrates how this could be done. I think I had a belief, and I'm just going to be upfront about it. I believe that people knew what to do. They just didn't do it. They were lazy. They just liked to eat the junk food. They didn't really care. I was a little bit arrogant, honestly. About 10 years ago, or more actually, I went down to a place called easily South Carolina as part of this film called Fed Up that we did with Katie Curek and Laurie David, who did Inconvenient Truth. I got introduced to this family of five that lived in a trailer. They were on disability and food stamps. The father was 42, already had kidney failure on dialysis from type 2 diabetes, which is usually you get later in life, but he's already so bad. The mother was easy, 100 pounds plus of her weight. The oldest kid was about 16, and he was 50% body fat. Now, a guy should be 10 to 20%.

He was practically diabetic, almost diabetic. I rather than give him a lecture, I said, Why don't we cook a meal together? Here's the truth, Lois. The food industry has hijacked and disintermediated us from our kitchens. They basically like, You deserve a break today. Convenience is king. Don't bother cooking. We'll do it for you. Most people, families, don't have meals together. They don't cook together. They eat from a different package, made a different factory, cooked in a microwave all while they're on their phones or watching TV. Not exactly conducive to help. I went down to this family and I said, Let's cook a meal together. Let's get some simple ingredients. I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group, and there's a guide called Good Food on a tight Budget, which is how to eat well for you, well for your wallet, and well for your planet. They had some turkey chili recipe in there, a nice salad recipe, some roast of sweet potatoes, simple stuff. And cheap ingredients, roast ingredients. They lived in one of the worst food deserts in America. When you look at something called the retail food environment index, how many fast food and convenience stores are there to a grocery store, healthy food?

It was like 10 to 1. It was like really bad. I said, let's look at what's in your cupboards first. We took out all the packages and stuff in the freezer and the cans and the packaging. They were like, you couldn't tell if it was a pop tart or a corn dog by looking at the label and the ingredient list. I mean, it's just the same processed ingredients. We were talking about all the ultra the 2,500 things you see on a label. Then you don't even know what they are, how to pronounce them or where they came from. See, maltodextrin or butylihydroxy toluine, you don't know what that is. That's not something you sprinkle on your salad. I started showing them, this is not good for you. They had, Oh, a cool whip. It's good because it's a low fat dressing. It says zero trans fat. But yes, it's all trans fat because the FDA was under the thumb of the food industry. When they basically made them label trans fat, they said, If it has less than a half a gram per serving, you don't have to label it. It says zero trans fat, but it's almost all trans fat because it's mostly air.

It does all this crap. I showed them it through and they were like, Oh, my God, this is terrible. We didn't know. We cooked and didn't have cutting board, didn't have knives. We were cutting garlic and sweet potatoes with a butter knife. We did dinner. It was fine. It was delicious. We all ate together. The son was like, Dr. Hyman, do you eat with your family like this every night? I'm like, Yeah, I cook and eat every night like this with my family. He's like, This is amazing. They loved the food. I said, Listen, I don't know if you can do this, but Here's the guide on Heed It Well For Less. Here's a cookbook that I wrote. You just follow it, on how to Balance your blood Sugar. On my way home on the plane, I ordered them cutting boards and knives because they didn't even have them. The first week, the mother texted me. She's like, We lost 18 pounds this week together. In a year, they lost over 200 pounds. The mother lost 100. The father lost 45. Was able to get a new kidney, which was their motivation. The son lost 50.

Went to work at Bojango's after that. That's a fast food store in the south. He's putting an alcoholic to work in a bar, and he gained back the weight, and then some. Then he reached out to me, he says, Dr. Hyman, will you help him? I'm like, Sure. I coached him, and he lost 132 pounds. He then, a few years later, he was the first kid in his family to go to college. A few years later, he wrote me, he said, Dr. Hyman, would you be willing to write me a letter of recommendation for medical school? Now he's a doctor.No.

Way.yeah..

That taught me something, which is that...

You thought they knew the information.

I thought they knew. They didn't know. It's not that hard. What I would say to people is a few things. One is make your home a safe zone. If you want to eat crap, do it. Make it the hard choice. You have to go to McDonald's, drive there. But in the home, only have stuff that's going to support your health and well-being. No ultra-processed food in the house. That's really straightforward, simple. Honestly, that doesn't even look like food to me anymore. If I see M&Ms, like I'm at an airport and I'm craving sugar, I see a package of M&Ms or a hersy chocolate bar, I'm like, it doesn't look like food is like a rock. I'm like, why would I eat the rock or why would I eat that camera? Sure. But I might eat like real good chocolate I might do that.

Some dark chocolate.

Yeah. Ultra-processed food has got to go. If you really want to be healthy, you just got to cut that out of your diet. The third thing is, don't drink your liquid sugar calories. Sodas, sweetened coffees, sweetened teas, energy drinks, sports drinks, gatorade. That's just got to go. Artificial sweeteners aren't a whole lot better, really.

Even if it says zero sugar, it's got an artificial sweetener.

They're problematic. The sugar alcohol can mess up your microbiome. There's some real research that's concerning that they might be increasing the risk of diabetes, obesity, affecting your microbiome. Some of them may be okay, like Stevie or Munch Fruit a little bit here and there. I'm not If you want... Look, what about this whole-If you get a 20 on soda, you're having like 15 teaspoons of sugar. That's a lot. You're not going to put 15 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee. So put a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee. That's fine. Don't put 15.

What about this Allulose sugar?

That can be a little bit better. That can be a little bit better. There's a little hacks, but I think that's the addict in you talking, Louis. Yeah, how can I get around it? Negotiating. Exactly. Don't do it. That's okay. I'm not a yes or no extreme person, but it's just like, understand that liquid sugar, calories, ultra-processed food, about giving your home a safe zone. Then I think the other thing that people don't realize is, getting healthy is a team sport. Find a buddy. Rick Warren, who I did this program with his church called this Daniel Plan, where we got 15,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year. Did it together in small groups. He says, Everybody needs a buddy.

He wrote Purpose Driven Life, right?

Purpose Driven Life. More books than any non-fiction other than the Bible.

It was like 30 million books or something crazy, right? That was huge back then.

Huge, yeah. He's great. We did this whole program, and it was the same thing. We used the community. Community is medicine. Love is medicine. Just as food is medicine. If you understand that part of the drivers of chronic illness is loneliness, is disconnection, is isolation, is focus on cultivating your friendships, cultivating your relationships. Invest in those. Yes. Those are the most important things. Even if you have two or three, it doesn't have to be a million people. But how many people in America don't have somebody to pick up the phone and call when shit goes down and they're struggling? A lot of people. A lot. And men, even Of course, most men don't have real friends. It's like, Hey, bro, let's go have a beer, watch some football. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But can you talk about your marriage, or can you talk about this stress you're having with your kids, or you can talk about your worries about money, or you can talk about your struggle with, I'm sick and tired of this job, and I want to figure out what to do in my life. There are things that we need to be in community to thrive.

In terms of health, loneliness is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Getting healthy is a team sport. What would you say is the the fifth thing, if you could add one more thing.

You let me roll. I think we have to live in our bodies. So many people are disconnected from our bodies. You're an athlete. Yeah, of course. I'm not an athlete, but I definitely love to exercise. I think it doesn't have to be a lot. Going from zero to something, you see most of the benefit. Going from zero to a half an hour walk a day, you get enormous benefit, especially if you walk after dinner because it helps to regulate your blood sugar and insulin because you basically control your blood sugar through your muscles and even without insulin. So even if you're insulin resistant, you can dispose of the sugar and fuel. I think exercise is is, again, such an incredible medicine. If you look at all the benefits of it, across every aspect of health, it's as good as Prozac for depression. It helps him prevent reverse diabetes, heart disease, cancer just walking prevents dementia. Dementia, cancer, arthritis. I mean, this is the list goes on and on. In every metabolic biochemical level, and I can give you all the sciency parts of it, but the bottom line is exercise is medicine. If it was a drug, it would be a multi-trillion dollar drug.

It would be like, you would buy stock in that and you'd be a billionaire overnight. Because of all the things that it does for the body.

What about the business of supplements is a massive business. I don't know how many supplement companies there are in the world. What is the science of supplements in terms of helping us prevent chronic illness? Is there any research on it helping us? Or is it all just…

No, there's a lot. There's a lot. There's a guy named Robert Heaney, who was one of the pioneer researchers on vitamin D, and he wrote a beautiful paper. It was a thought piece, really, but with a lot of scientific evidence behind it. That was called long latency Deficiency Diseases. What did he mean by that? Well, if you don't have enough vitamin D acutely, you get rickets, and your bones bend, and what the kids used to get from being out of the sun and not having a vitamin D. You get vitamin D from the sun or from wild fish and certain things like wild mushrooms. You don't need very much, like 30 units. But if you don't have optimal levels of vitamin D, let's say 50, the endo-gratial deciliter of your blood, and that would maybe require 1,000 to 5,000 units. So anywhere from 20 to 100 times more than we typically think you need to prevent the infusion disease. If you don't have that, you're going to get osteoporosis, you're going to be more prone to infections, you're going to die from COVID. Big meta-analysis just came out about COVID and vitamin D that prevents hospitalizations and death.

We need to have optimal levels of nutrients. Now, why don't we? Why do we need vitamins? Why should we? It wasn't a design flaw that all of a sudden God or whoever of nature, whatever you believe in, made us, and we're screwed up, and we have all these problems. No. If you look at the nutritional density of the Hunter-Gatherer diet, it was humongously more nutritious, really, in terms of vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, all the things that we are deficient in now. When you look at, I was actually talking to Bill Gates, not too long ago, and he was telling us about this bullion that he created for this bullion cube with extra vitamins in it for the developing world because there were so many vitamin deficiencies. I said, no, Bill, there's a lot of nutrition deficiencies. He's like, oh, there's no deficiencies here. He's got plenty of food and protein. I'm like, no, Bill.

Just because he has it doesn't mean everyone else does.

Well, he just didn't know because he's focused on the developing world and that's great and whatever you think of it. But he just didn't quite get that in America we're also nutrition deficient. When you look at the N Haynes data, it's the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It's a government research project. It's ongoing, which tracks bloodwork and tests and diet and everything. They found that over 90% of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrient at the minimum level to prevent a deficience disease like scurvy or rickets. We've got probably 90% deficient in omega-3s, 80% insufficient, deficient vitamin D, 45% deficient or insufficient in magnesium, probably 30% in Zinc, up to 40% iron, folate.

Because there's no vitamins in ultra-processed food.

No, there's not. That's what our diet is.

Unless you're outside in the sun getting vitamin D. You're not getting it from your food.

No. I had a patient once. She was like, I don't want to take vitamins, but I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get my nutrients. I'm like, great. Okay, well, I want to get 200 micrograms of selenium. Okay, you need to eat four Brazil nuts. Okay, I want to get 30 milligrams of Zinc. Okay, you need to eat 45 pumpkin seeds. Like, She was like, she had a whole spreadsheet of everything. I'm great. Good for her. I need to do this many cans of sardines a week to get my omega-3s. It's fine. But most of you aren't going to do that. Those are whole foods.

They're whole foods. Those are whole healthy foods.

That's right. Also, we have more toxins in our environment. We have more stress. We have more dysregulation of our circadian rhythm. We have foods, even if they're eating whole food. If you're eating a broccoli today, the soil has gotten so destroyed that it's got 50% less nutrients than it did 50 years ago. Even the broccoli. Really?

50% less nutrients.

Yeah. If you go to Europe, like I was in, when I did my research for my book, Young Forever, I was in Icaria and in Sardinia, and the old food waste that they haven't changed in thousands of years. You eat a vegetable there or you eat something there, it tastes totally different. Really?

Yeah. What's it taste like?

It's like when you go to the garden and you pick a tomato at the end of August and it's this cherry tomato explodes in your mouthful flavor. It's like that. Or you got a wild strawberry. It's like, it's just... And flavor always follows the nutritional density and the phytochemical richness of the food, naturally. So if you have to put a lot of stuff on It's not the same food to make it taste good, which is what ultra-processed food is, you won't taste. It just tastes like garbage. But natural whole food tastes amazing if it's grown in the right way. And so it has to do with the soil health. It has to do with the soil microbiome. It has to do with the ability to extract nutrients. It was amazing. It was a guy who served me this pig meal, this nose to tail meal. I even hit the lung, which was weird, but I never done that before. He's like, his name was Olinto. He says, Mark, we flavor the meat before we kill the animal. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, We know if we give it acorns and we give it this caribbe thing and we give it this plant and this thing, then it tastes better.

Wow. They're not doing it because it's good for you. They're doing it because it tastes better. They go, Oh, we have all these goat sheep. They're sheep herders. They know if they feed the sheep and the goat these certain wild plants at certain times of the year, like myrto and other plants, that the cheese and the milk taste better. But they're full of phytochemicals. Now we know, for example, you can get catechins or in green tea, or they're a great compound for longevity, for health, or antioxidants, detoxifying. That's why green tea is so great for you. You can get as high levels in the milk and the meat, in the animals as you do from the green tea if the animals are eating That's what that food. It's not only what you're eating, it's what you're eating ate.

The food's eating. This is fascinating. This is fascinating. Supplements you feel like are-I think we need them.

I think minimum, a multivitamin, vitamin D, fish oil, magnesium for most people, and probably a probiotic because of all of the... I gave a talk the other day to a thousand people, and I was like, Who's never taken an antibiotic in this room? One person raised their hand. Right.

Antibiotic, you said. Yeah. So prebiotic or probiotic?

No, an antibiotic. In other words, people's guts are messed up. One dose of antibiotics, you're changing your microbiome.

So prebiotic or a probiotic?

Probiotic.probiotic.probiotic. Yeah, probiotics. I think those are multivitam official vitamin D for sure. Magnesium probiotic would be rounding it out. But that's a penny a day. I mean, a dollar a day or less. Sure. It's a fair bit of money, but it's doable. It's doable.

There's one other thing I wanted to ask you about, and I don't want to scare people necessarily, but the belly fat that, I have belly fat, but the belly fat that a lot of people have, how dangerous is that for them, for their health long term? Terrible. As a doctor, you've been in this field for how long? 30, 40, 40 something years.

I've been a doctor for 41 years. How? In medicine, 41 years.

41 years. You've seen people extremely obese. You've seen people with just some belly fat and everywhere in between, right? What is the link to belly fat and I guess overall just long term health? Or how much is belly fat linked to chronic illness and disease.

It's the main thing. If you look at it-I don't want to scare people, but I want to wake people up. No, please. People need to know. That fat around your middle is not just holding up your pants. It's a metabolically active organ that's spewing out harmful chemicals all the time. That's dysregulating your appetite, making you hungry. It's slowing your metabolism. It's causing inflammation. It's screwing up your hormones. It's bad. What drives it is this pharmacologic doses of sugar. As a hunter-gatherer, we would maybe get 22 T-scoons of sugar a year if we got lucky to find some honey or something, right? We eat that every day in America. We eat 152 pounds sugar on 133 pounds of flour per person per year. Wow.

That's 152 pounds of sugar?

Per person per year. That's almost a half a pound, sorry, three quarters of a pound of sugar and flour. By the way, flour is no different than sugar in your body. Below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cornflakes and a bowl of sugar. That's almost three quarters of a pound a day per person. Now, I'm not having that much, so some people are eating a lot more. Maybe you are. But the bottom line with this belly fat is that it was a good thing when we were hunter-gatherers, if we could eat lots of sugar, berries, whatever, honey, we could store it. Now we just keep it on. What happens is that fat is causing something called insulin resistance, which we talked about on the show, I think. That's like a form of prediabetes, or I call it diabesity, which is this continuum from optimal metabolic health to poor metabolic health. Now, this stat is terrifying to me. When you look at this recent data that came out, 93.2% of Americans have this. 6.8% of Americans don't have it. That's frightening to me. That means they have high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or overweight, or have had a heart attack or stroke.

93.2% of Americans. What that means is that they're all somewhere in that continuum of prediabetes to type 2 diabetes. Why is that connected to everything? It's the biggest driver of cancers, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, many cancers, prostate cancer, heart attacks, probably two-thirds of all heart attacks caused by this, dementia, they're calling type 3 diabetes now, and of course, type 2 diabetes. These are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, as you get older. All of them, every single one of them, is driven primarily by insulin resistance and this metabolic dysfunction, which is caused by belly fat, which is caused by starch and sugar and ultra-processed food. It's not that complicated.That's.

The root cause. The challenge is, in the last year, I've lost close to 25 pounds of fat, and I've been putting on muscle, too, so I've lost 25 pounds. I remember, I still have belly fat, a little bit of belly fat. It's like, I'm not where I want to be, necessarily. I can speak for myself, but I feel like others might have a similar feeling. If they look in the mirror and they see belly fat, they might feel a little shame. They might feel a little guilt, a little shame. It's what I felt.

It's not your fault, though. That's the problem.

It's not your fault, but it can feel so hard for people to make that change and see results because it doesn't happen in a week or a month or a few months to lose all the belly fat. It takes time. It took time to build it on, and it takes time to get it off and then keep it off. It is a complete lifestyle shift. It's a complete identity shift of saying, I'm going to kill off the person I once was for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, and I'm going to become a new identity. That is a big change.

It is. The question I always ask people is why? Like, Simon Sinek, who's our friend, goes, Why? What's your why? Why do you care? I want to feel better. I want to be able to show up and do the work I want to do and not feel like crap and watch TV all night. I had a patient recently. It was like she was working really hard. She was a med student. She was eating crap to get through coffee, sugar, gained all this weight. She said, look, I would come home and all I wanted to do was lay in bed and watch TV. I would want to exercise. I want to do anything. I just want to eat more sugar and crap. She was in this vicious cycle. Within two or three days of changing her diet, she was like, my move is better. I have energy. I just run my bike 30 miles. I'm like, wow. I always say we're only a few days away from feeling better. Most people don't know how bad they feel until they start feeling good.

If you can start to feel good, you can stay more consistent.

That's right. Then How do you know, Oh, if I'm doing this, I'm going to feel like crap. Most people don't connect that to what they eat and how they feel. It's just astounding to me. I have very smart, educated patients in my patient cohort. I'm like, God, really don't know that this is making you feel like this. People don't know. They just don't know. That's part of why I created this program, which is basically an elimination diet, where you put in wholefood, you take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff in 10 days. I'm not going to do anything for 10 days. When you see a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. Wow, that's amazing. Migraines, irritable bowel, depression, joint pain, congestion, sinus issues, whatever.

Just biting the whole food for 10 days.

But it's a more extreme version. It gets rid of sugar, alcohol, all grains, all beans, all starchy foods.

All grains, all beans.

All beans, yeah. For a short period of time, just see, because a lot of people have gut issues and just can have inflammation from gluten and people don't know. What do you eat? Dairy. Get rid of dairy. Lots of veggies, protein, nuts and seeds, berries. That's it. Some sweet potatoes.Ten days.Yeah, 10 days. It's the most unbelievable thing. I read these spreadsheets around the world, and people just have the most unbelievable transformation. I would say to people listening, if you want to do something, just see doing something like that for 10 days, what you'll do. I'm going to be running, starting in January, we're going to be launching an online 10-day detox course. You can find it on drheimen. Com. But essentially, it's a way for you to just hit the reset button. The way I explain it is like, imagine if you could put your body back to its original factory settings when your computer is not working, you got to reboot it or you got to reinstall the software. It's like that. You can upgrade your biological software so fast. Like I said, this woman had type 2 diabetes on insulin. In three days, she was off the insulin.

In three months, she reversed everything. She lost 43 pounds. It's possible if you know what to do. You have the right information. For you, the question around shame and how you feel, I'm going to tell people something. This is a message that's been put out there by our culture, by the food industry, by doctors, by nutritionists, by our professional associations, whether it's the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition Dietetics. It's the prevailing message out there that it's your fault, your weight. You're a lazy glutton, is the subtext. Just eat less and exercise more. Subtext, you're a lazy glutton who doesn't want to do anything. It's not about eating less and exercising more. It's about understanding what you're eating is more important than how much you're eating. The quality matters more than the quantity because the quantity will take care of itself. Could you eat 10 rib eye steaks? Well, maybe you could, but you could eat 10 giant chocolate chip cookies in a minute.Easily.You could eat a quart of ice cream, no problem. But you could eat 10 avocados? No. You feel full. Your body will self-regulate. It's not your fault. It's number one.

It's not about blaming yourself. It's about understanding that you're in a toxic food system that's set up for you to fail. Then the food industry has these talking points. There's no good and bad foods. It's all about moderation. Just eat less and exercise more. It's okay, you're getting Coca-Cola as long as it's part of your calorie for the day. Nonsense. It's basically the food industry talking points, and they're wrong. They're just wrong. Because when you start to accumulate this belly fat, it's hungry fat. It's literally hungry fat. That fat is going to make you crave and want more food. This is a startling statistic. When I learned about this, there's something called the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a validated scientific scale of questions that you can You can find it online, you'll link to him in the show. I'm sure you have a show notes that tells you whether you're a food addict. You have biological addiction based on the definition of substance abuse, whether it's heroin or cocaine or nicotine. 14% of the population are food addicts. 14% of the adult population are alcoholics. What's even worse is 12% of kids are food addicts.

I was at an obesity conference, a childhood obesity conference not too long ago, and there was a hepatic surgeon there. I'm like, What are you doing here? He said, Oh, yeah. Well, we're seeing the need for liver transplants in kids now because their liver have serosis from drinking so much soda. That's what's going on. This is not their fault. A three-year-old with type 2 diabetes, it's not their fault. This is just ridiculous. The fact that 40% of kids are now overweight. I mean, it was that one kid in my class when I was growing up, Erica, and she wasn't, by today's standards, wasn't even that overweight. She was a little chubby. Now, you see kids who can barely walk.

We're all skinny growing up. There's a couple of things I want to leave people with. One, what you said is getting healthy as a team sport. I think it's probably the hardest thing to try to do it on your own. A hundred %. Maybe if you're watching and listening, you may not have the support you want, or people may not want to get on board with you, but it's whatever you can, enroll a friend, hire a coach, find a nutritionist, someone to support you. If you can't afford a coach, find a friend and beg someone, whatever it might be, find the healthiest person you know and say, Hey, can I just keep you accountable and you keep me accountable? We go to the gym a few days a week and we just try to help each other. Getting healthy is a team sport.

It doesn't even have to be your healthiest friend. It could be anybody. You both feel overweight or struggling.

Getting healthy as a team sport, that's something I think that everyone here should be thinking about. Do not do it alone. The second thing is a new company that you're a part of called functionhealth. Com. It gives people data. I think when you get tested, everyone's talking about glucose monitors or rings or just something to get data. If you can get data about what's off inside of your bloodwork, and you can say, Oh, I have the information. How can I just improve it a little bit here over time to improve the data inside of me? That's right. And functionhealth. Com offers a process where people can get blood work and have the information. Is that right?

Super easy. It's like five minutes, sign up online. You get to skip the waitlist of 300,000 people. Greatness 100 is the skip the waitlist code.

Greatness 100 if you want to use it.

It's five minutes to sign up. You will tell you a lab near your house. It's all on the top of Quest Labs. It's thousands of draw centers. You go in, it's 15 minutes in and out. You go in, it's You get your labs in a beautiful dashboard that not only tells you your lab results, but you're not a doctor. How do you know what they mean? But the results are interpreted based on knowledge input from the world's leading physicians and from all the scientific literature about what it means and what to do about it. Well, okay, my blood sugar is high. Now what? Or my thyroid is not right. Now what? Well, it gives you a very clear idea of insights and education about what you can do and how to be an empowered consumer. Our rings are great. I have one. It's fine. But it's only skin deep. The blood work is what you do. It's only skin deep. You can pick stuff up. It's causing you to feel like crap, and you don't even know it. Like a patient today, she had low iron, her hair was falling out, she was tired, her thyroid was off.

She had all these different things going on that she didn't know about. They were easy fixes. They're easy fixes. Sometimes it's more serious. You have diabetes or you have high blood sugar, whatever. We've had people actually just come up to us in a restaurant. We were having dinner, the team from the company, and this guy walked out, Dr. Hyman, I use I found out I had all this metabolic issues, and I changed my diabetes on what you guys said, and I did all these other things, and now I lost 20 pounds, and I feel great. All my numbers are great. We don't have to wait for the healthcare system to catch up. We don't have to go through insurance and your doctor's visits. It's a dollar 37 a day for twice a year testing. You can add another stuff if you want. In fact, we're doing cancer screening now because as I mentioned earlier in the show, we're seeing a 50% increase to 60% increase in cancers, so colon cancer in people under 50, even in the in 30s. There's now screening test called Gallery, which is a blood test for cancer. It's like a liquid biopsy.

Rather than having to do us colonoscopy or scan, it's pretty good at picking stuff up early. Out of the people we've tested, it's one in 188 had a positive cancer signal, which means then they can go get checked out. Early stage cancer is pretty much curable. But if you wait too late, it's not. We're thinking these early stage cancers that people can get cured of. It's really empowering. I feel like for me, it's a way for getting people to be the CEO of their own health, to understand what's going on in their bodies, and to be empowered with the data.

That's what I think is going to be the future, is having accountability and having your own data accessible and affordable. It's something that functionhealth. Com offers. Again, if you guys use greatness100 as a code, the first 100 people that use that will get early access to it. You'll skip the line, 300,000 people on the waitlist. So functionhealth. Com for that. Then I think having that accountability, it's like, okay, twice a year, I'm getting bloodwork or quarterly or something where you can at least know the decisions I'm making are either helping me or hurting me. That's right. And you take back responsibility. You don't need government to change policy. You don't need a politician to make some changes. You don't need the food industry to change. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But at the end of the day, you got to take back the power. I think having data is extremely helpful. And you being aware of like, okay, my decisions now are hurting me moving Going forward. And I'm going to get the bloodwork again. And, oh, well, I did continue to eat processed foods. My sugar is going up. So it's on me at the end of the day to take responsibility with the actions I'm taking once I'm informed.

That's right. And at your website, drhyman. Com, you've got a ton of free resources to continue to educate people. That's right. Your Instagram is amazing with just quick free resources as well and content. Did you say you have a program in January?

Yeah, a 10-day detox.

10-day detox. Great. People can sign up for that.

Yeah, sign up. It's a co-coach program. It basically goes for a month of support, and it gives people really a transformation.

Starting in January. So drhymen. Com@drmarkhymen. Com. On social media. Functionhealth. Com, and use code greatness100.

If you're not sick of listening to me, you can check on my podcast, Dr. Hyman, Doctors Pharmacy.

Doctors Pharmacy. You got another one, HealthHealth Hacks. Health Hacks, right? Health Hacks, yeah. Health Hacks. So you got a couple of great podcasts. How else can we support you or get involved?

You're doing it. I think for people, actually taking ownership of their health is so important because once people start knowing what's going on with themselves, they start to change. When you create that change, it starts to create change in the system. One of the best stories I ever heard recently was that one of the CEOs of this big food company called up the CEO of Novo Nordisk and saying, We're in trouble because with Ozempic, People are not eating as much as they can.

Right. Wow.

Their sales are going down.

Now they're going to start fighting the drug companies. Yeah. Wow. It's a whole other conversation. Dr. Marc Hymer, make sure you guys check him out, follow his work, get one of his 15 New York time best selling books, all the things. We appreciate you, Mark. Thanks for all your support and your service in helping us continue to heal from all this sickness that we have. We appreciate it.

Thanks, buddy. Well, it's great to be here and love you, man. You've been doing this together for years now. Of course, man. Let me tell you.

I appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple podcast. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcast as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you, and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.