Use These NUTRITION SECRETS To Heal Your Body TODAY! | Mark Hyman x Dave Asprey

I'm willing to use whatever it takes to help my patients. I don't care if it's exercise or exorcism, I'll use it. I'm not opposed to medication or drugs. And I use them in the right way for the right person at the right time, the right dose for the right indication. But most of the time I don't need them because food is way more powerful a drug than most pharmaceuticals.

What inspired enough to write a book?

Well, I don't know. If you were there, you might have been there. Was it revitalized about eight or nine years ago, and I was sitting on a panel with two friends. One was a militant vegan cardiologist and the other was a paleo doc, Frank Lippman and Joel Kahn. And they were just fighting like cats and dogs. And I was in the middle, like ping ponging back and forth and the tension was getting really high. And I'm like, hey, if you're paleo and you're vegan, I must be piganistic. And everybody cracked up. I thought, oh, that was a good joke. And then I just kind of thought about it on the way home on the plane and I was like, wait a minute. They have way more in common with each other than with the traditional American diet. In fact, they're identical except for one thing, which is where you get your protein, animals or grains and beans, that's it. They both don't want to have dairy. They both encourage whole foods, good fats. They both encourage lots of fruits and vegetables. That's insane.

Like industrial animal raising, even, like most of that world is about grass fed beef. And it's like, yeah, we agree on almost everything.

It's right. And so I was like, wait a minute. And so they started writing down the basic commonalities and principles I've just refined over the years. And then all of a sudden, you know, the articles picked up in the USA Today and the Daily Telegraph in London that there were people starting to make pegan bars, Pegan shakes, pegan cookbooks. I'm like, what's going on here? I go, wait a minute. I better just sort of step back and sort of create the big tent view of what I really meant by this, which is that, you know, there are so many diet wars and people are so confused about what to eat. It's keto, it's low fat, it's low carb, it's vegan, it's paleo, it's raw food, it's carnivore. I mean, it's like every week there's a fat. And everybody's kind of fighting with each other and we're fighting the wrong person. We should be fighting with the traditional American diet, or we call it standard American diet or the SAD diet. That's really what's driving the chronic disease epidemic. And then, you know, I began to sort of look at how do we begin to sort of be inclusive, to create a framework for really understanding how we actually support a set of principles that can break through the nutritional confusion, that can take down the science to digestible bits, that can include a lot of the things that people are interested in, like discussions around keto and longevity and hormone balancing and detoxification and, and regenerative agriculture and how to actually save the planet and save yourself and regenerate your health and health planet and talk about, you know, what do we know about meat or what do we know about all these different foods that we're eating. And it's a very, it's a very overarching framework that focuses on really two main principles. One is food is medicine. So everything you eat you need to think of as instructions or code that can upgrade or downgrade your biological software that literally programs your genes, your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome with every single bite. And are you putting in good information or bad information? Are you putting in crap code or good code if you're a programmer? And so that's really important. And I can drill down into understanding what is the quality in each area of our diet. In vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, grains, whole meat, dairy. What are the nuances of what you should be eating in each category if you're going to eat those foods, if you're going to eat dairy, well, damn, you shouldn't eat a one, Casey. You shouldn't eat industrial cows. You should be eating sheep or goat, or you should be eating a two casein cows, for example.

Yep.

And then, and then, and then I, and then the second principle is personalized nutrition or precision nutrition. Because listen, I'm a, I'm a doctor. I don't just play one on tv.

I play one on the. I don't even do that.

You, you kind of, you kind of are a doctor imposter. You're like an amd, almost a doctor. And I've been humbled. And all the dogma has left my thinking. Because you can identify what your metabolic type is, what your nutritional levels are, whether your food sensitivities, what your microbiome is, and how to optimize your diet for you, because you can believe all the things you want, but ideology should not trump biology. You listen to your biology, your body is the smartest doctor in the room. And I think it's a really, really important framework.

Telling yourself over and over that something is going to work when it's clearly not working is one of the biggest risks of any diet. I did it when I was a raw vegan, like, oh, I must not be raw enough. I'll double down when it stopped working because it did work for a while. And then when you do the hardcore keto thing and it works great for six weeks and then your sleep goes away and you start losing hair, you're like, it's cause I'm not keto enough. I'm going to go down from 15 grams of carbs to 12. And then it' going to work. And so we have this idea that if something worked a little bit more and more and more is going to be better. And what you're saying there is maybe it worked for a little while, maybe it never worked. You just thought it was going to work. And so that's freeing for people.

Just say, look, it is. Find what works for you. Yeah. And it's important to understand that eating well for health, for longevity, for disease reversal is not that hard when you stick to few simple principles. And that's really why that subtitle of the book is 21 Practical Principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world. Because we're all so freaking confused. Even I get confused from time to time. Like, wait a minute, what does the data say? And it sort of goes into nuances. And some of the things I've learned as I was sort of just researching this book and I've been doing this for a long time, were really striking to me. And if I can maybe. Can I give a few examples of the ways in which food regulates your biology, but in a granular level? And why. Can I do that, please? Yeah. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is the microbiome. Now this is just a little snippet and this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we know about the microbiome. But turns out that there's a particular bug that should be in your gut that's critical for your health. To regulate immune function, to prevent leaky gut, to regulate cancer risk, heart disease and metabolic health, and protect the lining of the gut from intrusion of bacteria and toxins and basically food particles from getting into your bloodstream through your leaky gut. And this bug is called Akkermansia mucinophilia. Mucinophilia is called the mucin layer or the mucus layer, essentially, that covers the lining of the gut. Now, this particular bug you can't take as a probiotic. And if it's low, you're susceptible to all these problems. And if it's low, what's really striking is, based on the research, these new cancer drugs, they're called checkpoint inhibitors, or immunotherapy drugs. They literally help your immune system fight the cancer. And if you have stage four cancer, that's a death sentence for most people. With these new drugs, you literally can completely reverse. Like, Jimmy Carter had stage four melanoma, I think, and he completely reversed it. And he's still alive at whatever 90 million years old he is now. And so it's really striking to see that when you have low levels of this bacteria, these immunotherapy drugs don't work. So the difference between life and death is feeding these right bugs, right? And guess what? They love to eat. They eat. Then that's not prebiotics or probiotics. They love something called polyphenols, which are these phytochemical. There's 25,000 of these in plant compounds. And the Rockefeller foundation is funded, $200 million, I think, to create a periodic table to assess and investigate all these incredible phytochemicals and what they do. So the particular ones that Akkermansia likes are cranberries, pomegranate, and green tea. So our friend William Lee, mother, had stage four uterine cancer. She was not responding to any treatment. She was not responding to the checkpoint inhibitors. And he figured this out with her because he really loves this stuff. And he gave her, for her low Mac, Akkermansi. He gave her pomegranate, green tea, and cranberry. And lo and behold, boom. Cancer cured in a month. 100% gone. So that's the power of food is medicine. The second story I want to tell is one you're going to love and is kind of a new story on the horizon, which is of an incredible new, powerful superfood called Himalayan tartery Buckwheat.

Oh, yeah. We just had Jeff Bland on the show.

Yeah. Okay, great. So you got it. I'll just share a snippet of it. So, I mean, Jeff is wonderful, but I feel like my job in life is the Jeff Bland translator. That's my job. And so, long story short, there's a part of your immune system that you write about in your book around aging that gets senescent. We call it immunosenescence. And this aging, the immune system creates these things called zombie cells, which are the result of mutated stem cells in your bone marrow that usually produce about a million white blood cells every single minute. And if these cells are damaged, these white blood cells get in your bloodstream, and they become zombie cells, and they cause cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease. They're really bad for you, and they accelerate aging, or immunosenescence. Well, what's really fascinating is that this Himalayan tartery, buckwheat, which is this forgotten plant that was grown in the most rigorous conditions in Tibet and the Himalayas with poor soil and lack of water and high altitude and cold weather. I mean, it's just. I mean, this plant shouldn't grow anywhere, right? But it's. As a result of living in such a stressed environment, the plant has created robust defenses to protect itself, called phytochemicals. And it has more phytochemicals than almost any other food on the planet. Like 137 different phytochemicals. Some are found nowhere else. And these phytochemicals just happen to be the perfect antidote for the zombie cells. So they literally nuke your zombie cells. And so you go from immunosenescence to immunorejuvenation, which now, with COVID is ever more important. So this is the power of food is medicine. So one regulates your microbiome, one regulates your immune system, one can regulate your detoxification system, and so on and so forth, your hormones. So the book is really designed to understand how food is medicine and works on these seven key systems in functional medicine that drive all disease, and then how to use food to actually help optimize the function and performance of these systems. And when you do, that, disease goes away as a side effect. I never treat disease. I'm a doctor. I was trained to diagnose disease and treat it with medication, more surgery or radiation. I almost never use medication now, because I'm not against it. I'll use it. I'm agnostic. I don't care if it's exercise or exorcism, I'll use it. But food works so much better most of the time. And so I feel like the book is the first attempt to really create a food is medicine framework for people to think about specifically what they're eating.

What's new about this, too, Mark, is we didn't realize that most drugs, when we take them orally, it's what the gut bacteria do to the drug that turns on the drug. And when you eat a food, it's what does the gut bacteria do to the food? In pomegranate, for example, I did a recent episode about a compound called urolithin A where.

Yes. Oh, yes, I love that stuff.

Well, like 60% of people don't have gut bacteria that turn pomegranate stuff into urolithin A. So if you don't have those, you need a pomegranate. You got a bunch of sugar. But if you have those and you can turn into urolithin A, it's useful. Or now we can actually figure out the metabolite and you can take urolithinate directly. So I do that now where I actually don't have the gut bacteria that can metabolize pomegranate into the magic stuff that makes it do good things for you.

Well, that's another interesting example, right, because it's another system. So we talked about your microbiome, your immune system. Another key system that you talk about a lot is mitochondria. And a lot of your work is around how do you optimize mitochondria by getting rid of light pollution, by different kinds of exercise, by various supplements. Because it's the key to healthy aging. Well, it turns out one of the key things that has to occur in the body is mitophagy, which is the cleaning up and getting rid of old mitochondria so you can have renewed vigor and energy and youth. Well, this particular plant compound from pomegranate that is converted to urolethan A with the right microbiome actually causes mitophagy. So it literally helps to build muscle and clean up your mitochondria and promote healthy aging simply by eating the right polyphenol with the right microbiome to produce this molecule that then works on your mitochondria. So this is an example of how food is medicine and, and the purpose of this pegan diet is to let's get rid of all these dogmas and ideologies. Let's look at what does the science say about how do we optimize our health and how do we customize our diet for ourselves and not have some kind of overarching ideology other than the simple principle that food is medicine and that we should personalize our approach and then we should eat in a way that regenerates our health and regenerates planetary health and improves our actual social fabric as well. So there's a lot of wonderful ways that we can eat in a new way. It does all those things. And there's a whole chapter in there on becoming a regeneratarian, which probably people don't know about, but essentially it's talk about that.

It's so important, Mark. Like, I wish I had coined that word. I'm glad you did, because it's probably the most important thing that we'll talk about. So define what that is.

So the way we actually grow food, and the food we eat that's grown in the way it's grown degenerates our health, which is why we have six out of 10Americans with a chronic disease and 88% metabolically unhealthy. And it degenerates ecological systems, environmental health, and accelerates climate change. So we should not be eating in a way that kills us and kills the planet. Right. Everybody can agree theoretically with that idea. I mean, nobody's gonna be, yeah, I want more climate change, I want more ecological collapse, I want more chronic disease. Like, nobody's gonna be for that. Right. So I'm figuring like, well, no one's against becoming a regentarian. It's like apple pie and ice cream and motherhood. Right. Nobody can be against those guys who.

Are into rolling coal might not be on your diet, Mark. You know, the guys who, like, modify.

Their trucks to pollute more, but they in principle understand that there's a good thing to be had here by doing good things for humanity and the planet. So, yeah, so the idea is that how do we eat and do it in a way that does that? And what I learned about through my last book, Food Fix, was the power of regenerative agriculture, starting with the seed and the farm and the soil to produce more nutrient dense food. It's better for you, that is actually more profitable for the farmers. That conserves water, that eliminates the need for agrochemicals, that helps to mitigate climate change and drought and floods, and makes the farmer 20 times as much money and at the same time draws carbon out of the atmosphere, puts it in the soil where it belongs. I mean, one third of all the carbon today in the atmosphere from climate change, one third comes from soil erosion, from the loss of organic matter in the soil as a result of over tillage and the use of antibiotics on the soil. What I mean by antibiotics, like glyphosate, is a microbiome destroying compound that's used on the soil. It's on 70% of all crops. It's the most abundant agrochemical use around the world. Like hundreds of Millions of pounds of this stuff. Every billions of pounds. I think it's ridiculous the amount they use.

You know, Mark, if I wasn't already taken, I think I would want to marry you.

I know, I know we have a bromance going on here, but like what.

You'Re saying, yeah, it's why I live on a small farm, it's why I'm building soil, it's why I eat what I grow. And it makes such a difference. And you can see where the animals poop, the plants are twice as tall. And I put it on my Instagram, like, look, do you see this line right here? That's where the fence was. This is where the sheep poop. This is where there is no sheep poop. And we want to fix the planet. Elon Musk is saying, I'm going to spend $100 million on carbon capture. I'm like, it's called farming done right. That is the biggest carbon capture we can have. And it makes you live longer and healthier and you eat the stuff that comes off that land. There's no loser in the system except Big Ag in Monsanto, right?

It's true, there are some losers. And what's really fascinating is looking even this is not some left wing opinion thing. The UN has come out and said if we take 2 million of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world that has been degraded through modern agriculture and we convert it to regenerative agriculture, incorporating animals in the ecosystem to build soil, it would cost $300 billion, which is basically less than we spend for Medicare and diabetes every year. And also, I mean, we spent $3.7 trillion in America, direct indirect costs for obesity and diabetes. 3.7 trillion, we're talking about 300 million. Could convert 2 of those million hectares of land into regenerative agriculture would stop climate change for 20 years, giving us more time to figure things out. And it would produce better food, More food. And the thing is, people understand is like, well, we could be all vegans to save the planet. And then climate change, in fact, factory farming is an abomination. It's bad for the animals, it's bad for humans who eat them. It's bad for the planet. 100%. We should ban them. They should be no longer on the planet. We should get rid of every single one. I mean, I was just talking to my friend Kelly Brownell. He said there's like 69 million chickens and 30 million hogs in like, North Carolina is one county. And it's, it's just so Toxic and polluted.

It's horrifying.

But that does not mean that in done in the right way, according to ecological principles. Incorporating animals into an overall ecosystem on a farm is a bad thing. In fact, it's a necessary thing. And then you could literally stop climate change for 20 years, giving us Runway to figure things out. So we really need to move in that direction. And under the Biden administration, they're now talking about creating an initiative around regenerative agriculture. I've been working with the administration and trying to get farmers and others involved in communicating these ideas. And I think there's a real openness to it. And what's interesting is when you do that, when you eat in a way that that is choosing. And by the way, there's very few regenerative farms out there, so you really need to hunting seriously gather for these places. But they're out there and they're resourced in the book. But the more people ask for it, demand it, encourage it, more people shop at farmers markets, go to their community, support agriculture, buy online from regenerative farmers like Bel Campo or Mariposa Ranch and others. And I think Gabe Brown, I think I forget the name of his regenerative product company, but he's got a great regenerative meat service as well. If you do that, you start to move the market, right? You start to move the market. You see what's happening with all these health brands. It's really driving the marketplace. That's why General Mills and Danone have literally funding millions of acres of regenerative farming in America, which is really exciting to me. And maybe it's greenwashing, but I don't think so. I think they're recognized that their supply chain is threatened by the way we grow food, and so they want to keep having the raw materials.

Walmart did the same thing a while ago. They said we want more organic stuff and like, oh wait, if we bought as much organic cotton as we want, we would buy more than is made in the world. Therefore, we have to change the world to make the stuff we want to buy. That's right. So the power of big business to realize we won't buy industrial animals that deplete the soil and we won't buy plants grown on depleted soil. They will have to to stay in business, do what's right for the planet and what's right for us. We just make food that's worth eating.

Absolutely. And Walmart is the biggest organic grocer in America. People don't know that. So. So one it regenerates the, the health of the planet and the soil and the animal. It's all good on that one. But what's even more interesting is the, is the role of this type of farming in generating much more nutrient dense food for us humans that has these phytochemicals that literally can reverse disease and produce food, real food that's good for us and good for the planet. So this is the win, win, win, win, win across the game. It's good for the farmers who are squeezed between the banks and the agrochemical companies and the crop insurance and the government. It's good for the ecosystems that regenerate and bring back pollinator species. It brings back, conserves water resources that are depleted around the world. It builds soil, which we're losing at an incredibly accelerated rate. So it's got a win, win. And it generates products and food products that are more nutrient dense and more healthy. So Gabe Brown and his farm, they've been testing their carrots and their vegetables and they have far more phytochemicals than the traditional farms. And what's even more amazing, I literally just got an article in my inbox this week about how, and I have a chapter in here about is meat medicine, basically. And as I know, it's a controversial one off. That's the title that's going to be a little provocative, I think. And what's so fun about it is that I've been learning from guys like Fred Provenza, who's a rangeland scientist, who's working with scientists at Duke University, analyzing the differences in phytonutrient content. And I said this right, Phytonutrient content in meat that's grown regeneratively. And what that means is that if animals are foraging on wild plants or on lots of different varieties, like 100 different varieties of various plants, each of which has its own phytonutrient content and composition, each of which has very unique vitamins or minerals or other compounds. The animals seek this out. So the animals are smart. They know how to eat for nourishment, they know how to eat for health. So they are literally eating their medicine and finding it and eating the drugs that they need on the farm so they can stay healthy. And as a consequence, these compounds get incorporated into their meat. And when you eat them, you're getting the same thing. And some of these animals have as high phytochemical contents as the plants that they're eating. If you were just to eat the plants, it's really different.

On my farm, our sheep walk around and we have forest here. They eat whatever they want. So they'll eat a little bit of rosemary, I call it inner basting, but they'll eat a couple bites of pine, which is anti parasitic, but they'll go and they'll muzzle it. And if instead you take animals in a compressed area and you pour a bunch of mixed up food into a trough, they don't get to do that. And the difference is that when we put the meat in a local market, someone will come and they'll buy some of it and they'll come in the next day and they'll buy all of it. Because that is the best meat I've ever had. I felt so good when I ate it. So I'm actually opening a restaurant in the middle of the pandemic in Victoria, downstairs from my office in a little while. And we're actually going to take the animals that we raise ourselves and use them in the restaurant because you get a food high when you eat. An animal that ate what it was supposed to eat was treated kindly throughout its entire life. It's not even in the same universe as an industrial steak from the store. But most people never felt the difference.

No. And in one of the studies I quote in the book, in Australia they did a study with kangaroo meat, which they have abundance of there, and compared it to feedlot meat. Same, you know, ounce rounds of protein, profoundly different effects on the body. The feedlot meat causes inflammation, the kangaroo meat reduced inflammation. And so wait a minute, how is that possible? Why? It's the information in food, it's the instructions that are programming your biology. So quality is really important. And in the book I go through every bit of food we eat. You know, what, what protein and fats and carbohydrates, you know, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, chicken, fish, meat, what you should be eating in each of these categories. Because a feedlot beef is very different than wild elk. Right. A wild blueberry is different than a, you know, I don't know, some, some horrible, like starchy tomato that's grown in a hot house that has no nutrients in it, it tastes like carbon. Right.

You just said blueberries. Even those. If you're not comparing it to some random tomatoes. If you get the normal industrial blueberries from factory farms that grow blueberries and there are such things versus I live in the Pacific Northwest, I buy a couple hundred pounds of blueberries at the height of the season from a local regenerative grower and they taste like blueberries and we freeze Them and we hoard them because they're so good. And if you go to the store and buy a little shrunken baggie of whatever, they don't taste like blueberries, they taste like something else. And what we have here is it's legal and considered normal to say, well if it looks like a tomato, it's a tomato. But just because the outer layer looks like a tomato, the inside is completely different based on how it was treated. But we don't have standards or way to tell. How would you suggest that listeners know whether they're eating the good stuff versus stuff that looks like the good stuff?

Well, you know, there are ways to sort of ensure a little higher quality nutrient density. One is source your food from the right vendors, right? Yes, farmers markets, community supportive agriculture. Online resources for for example, regenerative food like Tribe market has incredible sources of regenerative meat and sustainably harvested or you know, low toxin fish, for example. So there, there's vital choice seafood that again sources their fish from really great Alaskan waters that are small fish. And so there, there are ways to get these things. It's a little bit more work and a little bit more detective work. Also eat weird food. And I go to the farmers farm, like what is that? I never seen that before. I gonna eat some of that bitter melon or what is that fruit or. And I, and I'm sort of always trying to eat weird strange food because the more wild, the less commercially raised it is, the more weird it is, the better it is for you. And so I've got on the behind me a whole like tray of fruit from Hawaii and stuff there. I've never eaten eaten before. I'm like, what is that?

I'll warn you, jackfruit is gross. No matter how much you torture it, it still is not meat when you eat it. The information signal from jackfruit will never be meat.

Yeah, yeah, jackfruit. And there's breadfruit and there's. I don't even know. There's all kinds of breadfruit's awesome.

And that's a feature gut.

So I think, I think we are really, you know, able to sort of be a little more diligent when you go to the grocery store, buy, you know, buy stuff that is sort of a little more funky. Like you know, get mustard greens, you know, get dandelion greens, get things you don't normally would eat. Eat seaweed. These are just ways of picking out things when you go to the grocery store that aren't these big commercial products. So there are ways to do it. It's a little trickier, but you want color, you want variety, you want organic, when possible, regenerative. You can get it. There's a new regenerative organic certification that Rodale and Patagonia are putting together. So it's coming, it's coming, this is coming. And there are more and more farms that are converting to regenerative agriculture. So it's going to take time, but you literally can transform your diet by starting to sort of widen out your palate by exploring different foods. I mean, I got these, I got these bitter melon greens which are really wild. And I got the bitter, you know, from, from the farmer's market. You just don't see that stuff, right? Or I'll get, you know, these weird different mushrooms and things that are just kind of funny. And I tend to try to include as many of those things as possible. Variety is key because like those, those cows that are foraging on 100 different plants, we need to forage on a wide variety of foods. I mean, the carnivore diet can help a lot of people with chronic disease because it eliminates stuff. It's not so much about the meat, it's about what else they're not eating. Right? They're not eating.

Thank you for saying that.

Right. They're not eating dairy, they're not eating gluten, they're not eating grains, they're not eating beans, they're not eating sugar, they're not having lectins, they're not having all these inflammatory foods in their diet. And they're taking out all the hormones, the antibiotics and the pesticides and all the weird crap. I mean, hopefully they're eating grass fed meat, but you know, it's like, yes, but it may not be the meat. And then long term it's going to be a problem. Long term it's going to be a problem.

I've said the same thing. And what all foods have in them is they have energy. And in the traditional American farm, you know, agricultural lobby industry, energy is the only thing that matters. It's calories, as if that's somehow the most important thing. But we do have to have some energy from our food. Then it has the good stuff, the nutrients, the signaling phytochemicals, the polyphenols, the, the vitamins, minerals. And then it has stuff that's not good for you in it. And depending on how you prepare the food and how you grow the food and all that, it can have more of the bad stuff or less of the bad stuff. And yeah, when you go carnivore, you remove all the bad stuff plants are doing to people, whether they're bad plants or good plants, whatever else. But then you eventually find, you know, I tolerate some plants really well but that plant's not compatible with me. And that's been kind of the core of what I've been doing. On the bulletproof side, it's like, look, find the foods that work for you. It's not the same for everyone. And I think in the vegan diet you've become really programmatic about it. Like it's fine. You might do so well on red bell peppers because they're full of parenthocyanins. Me, they give me rheumatoid arthritis. I'm never going. It doesn't mean they're good or bad, it means they're compatible or not compatible.

Yeah, I love raw onions and I love raw garlic, but if I eat it, I feel like crap. I get a brain fog headache. I don't know what to add.

I don't touch this stuff.

Some people have reactions. Cooked onions and garlic are fine. So. And sometimes I'll go on the garlic because I just love raw garlic and I'll put in something but you know, I have a little bit. It's okay. But I think, I think everybody needs to understand what is their particular biology. And so the ideology and dogma that we have has really kind of usurped common sense and science. And so the take home should be let your biology rule over your ideology. See what works for you. If you, if you go vegan and you lose your period and you have no sex drive and your muscle mass goes down you and you're tired all the time and you're kind of, you know, want to stay in all the time and hide. That's not good. But if you're a rich roll and you're like running tribe, you know, Ironman triathlons, and you figured out how to do it, go for it, it might not work for everybody.

And it's okay. And people get really angry like, ah, you have to eat the way I eat. And like I would recommend people do eat the way I eat, which is don't eat the stuff that makes you weak and then eat the stuff that makes you strong and eat enough calories at the right time there, eat the way I eat. That's it. Right.

And within.

That's very different.

It is. And there's a little bit of homework that has to be done. I go through. How do you personalize your diet in the book. But within that, within that, like there are foundational principles of how do you choose quality and the best information in every bit of food you eat and then how do you personalize it and how do you optimize all your functional systems? Because, you know, as a functional medicine doctor, I don't treat disease. You know, the body is structured in a way that has nothing to do with the way medicine is organized right now. Medicine is organized in specialties. You've got your cardiologist, gastroenterologist, rheumatologist, your neurologist, your dermatologist. You got an ologist for every part of your body and nobody talks to each other. And people often have multiple things. They call them comorbidities, which means you have multiple diseases, which is absolute nonsense because they're all connected. If you have migraines and rheumatoid arthritis and irritable bowel and reflux and you have rashes and you have headaches, it's not just a random bunch of bad luck that you got all these things. They're connected underneath by common mechanisms of inflammation and dysbiosis and other other factors. And so functional medicine is about how do you optimize these systems? So I never treat disease, I optimize these functional systems. And it turns out the biggest influence on these seven dynamic functional systems that are your biological network, your ecosystem, the most important influence on these is food for bad or good, Right?

Yep.

Right.

So for example, what percentage is it? 80, 90%?

I mean, I think it's probably like, yeah, about upwards of 80%. I mean, if you look at, you know, there's a class of things that are not food related. So I've had those. I'm good with diet, but I've had stuff that's taken me down.

If you're living in toxic mold in automobile exhaust, it doesn't matter what you eat, you're probably not going to like it.

Yeah. So Dave, you know, you helped me when I almost died a few four years ago from mold toxicity in my house and I, this is after I, you know, been your movie about mold. After, like I knew and I just collapsed and, and so, you know, I could eat all the great food I want. It wasn't helping or yeah, you know, I had mercury poisoning. You know, that's not going to get sorted out by, you know, eating better. I mean, yes, you have to cut out the swordfish and all that and eat vegetables that up regulate your detox, but it's really about, you know, Finding those things that are real triggers, but absent that, you know, like Lyme disease, tick infections, mold, mercury, environmental toxins, all that. Yes, parasites, gut stuff. Yes, you have to need a little extra help. But for most of the problem that's facing America today. And by the way, Dave, we are, we are in a real pickle. Why is Covid so prevalent in America? It's not just because we eat a.

Lot of omega 6 plant based fats and a lot of sugar and a lot of crap. That's my assumption. Do you agree or is there something else going on?

Yeah, yes, I agree. I think what's happened is people don't understand is that America is one of the unhealthiest nations in the world. And Covid kills you by inflammation. And we are all pre inflamed. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. That means they have some form of pre diabetes, insulin resistance, poor health from their metabolism. When you have that, that's an inflammatory state. That's nine out of ten Americans. Even people who are just a little overweight, a little bit of belly fat seem to have higher risk of severe illness and death from COVID So it's not like you have to be £300. You could be just a little, or even not even overweight, but just more belly fat. And I think we're in a situation where we haven't even talked about that in America. We're talking about vaccines and masking and social distancing. And I'm like, wait a minute. There's a lot we can do aside from nutraceutical interventions which like vitamin D and zinc and vitamin C and quercetin and green tea and NAC and a lot of things can really help. But the food is such a big, big, big, big thing. And I think that we just kind of are missing the boat here. And if I were president, I would say, I would say, listen America, get off your crappy diet. You're all getting the quarantine 15 or the COVID 19 pounds. Freshman 15. This is not the time to comfort, eat, to drink, to not take care of your health because you're just a sitting duck. When Covid lands on a pre inflamed person, it actually causes a super fire called the cytokine storm, which is what kills us.

Are you saying that throughout all of human history, diseases take out the weak first?

Yes, it's such a radical thought.

I mean, no one's ever thought of that before, but yeah, like we've done things to ourselves to make Ourselves weak. And our ideology says that we haven't, but our biology says that we have. You know, to, to use some of the words you've been using. And so let's say that someone reads the vegan diet tomorrow and they start adding pomegranates and the Himalayan buckwheat and all the other good stuff in. How long does it take to turn the inflammation dial back down?

Oh, my God, Dave. This is what's shocking. Like, it's shocking to me. I mean, it takes. It takes like decades often to get sick. It can take days to get better. Yes, exactly. Like, I'm like, you wake up the.

Next morning, your joints don't hurt. Like, what did I just do? Well, you didn't eat the popcorn.

One guy came in after doing, you know, the program. It's very similar to the pig and diet. He's like, Dr. Hyman, I've been 10 years and 10 days and I feel like all my joint pains on. Is that possible? I have rheumatoid arthritis. You know. Another woman, after being in and out of psychiatric hospitals for depression and multiple medications or marriage and job are falling apart. She's like, every three days of changing my diet, my depression is lifted for the first time in my life. This is a woman who spent a lot of her life in psychiatric hospitals and on piles of pills. Another woman came to one of our shared medical appointments at Cleveland Clinic who had type 2 diabetes, heart failure and hypertension, and she had multiple stents and she had this. And she had kidney failure and liver failure. I mean, it was like a mess. She was on her way to a heart transplant and kidney transplant. Three days. Three days she was off her insulin. Three days, three months, she was off everything. Kidneys reversed, liver reversed, heart failure reversed, which never happens. Okay, this doesn't happen in traditional medicine. You manage this as a chronic disease. You don't cure or reverse. I have multiple patients with heart failure, but we reversed using food as medicine and a few extra nutraceuticals. But she swimming very tough. Three days shows off everything. She lost, I think 43 pounds in three months by a year. She lost 116 pounds from going. She was a body mass index of 43 and she was 66 on her way out. And she's back in the game. And I think we don't understand the power. When I have people do the 10 days of just really clean eating, like a reboot or reset. 10 day reset. 62% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. Migraines, irritable, bowel, insomnia, depression, joint pain, reflux, whatever it is you got it fixes. And it's like if it was a pill that could do that, it would be a trillion dollar blockbuster, right? Be a trillion dollar blockbuster. So I don't, I, I'm, I'm willing to use whatever it takes to help my patients. I don't care if it's exercise or exorcism, I'll use it. I'm not opposed to medication or drugs. And I use them in the right way for the right person at the right time, the right dose for the right indication. But most of the time I don't need them. Because food is way more powerful a drug than most pharmaceuticals because they work with the body rather than against it. They actually activate the body's own healing mechanisms like we talked about. Like the Akkermansia for your microbiome gets activated by certain foods. Or the Himalayan tartary buckwheat helps your zombie cells, or the, or the urolithin A in pomegranate that causes your mitochondria to rebuild and to build muscle. So, so we have the intelligence to do this. So it's not just about treating disease. It's not just about not having symptoms. It's the opposite. The way you get to health is not by treating disease. The way you get to health is by creating health. That is the science of functional medicine. It's otherwise known as biohacking, which you are the grandfather of. But essentially functional medicine is biohacking. And it's what, they're very closely related. Yeah, completely.

There has to be a name for there's a medical side and then there's a lifestyle side as well. You know, are you sleeping well? And that hasn't been the traditional purvey of anyone but a sleep doctor. But a good functional medicine doctor is going to say, how do you sleep? Because it's the food affecting the sleep, it's the other conditions like that. And so I've seen just a flourishing of functional medicine in the last 10 years, Mark. And I know you're director of functional medicine at Cleveland Clinic. You spent a lot of time working with big, well trusted institutions bringing this out. Are you hopeful that functional medicine is actually taking off, that it has staying power, or is this is going to be a long, hard march?

Yeah, no, I think this is the future. Look, there's five trends that are transforming everything about healthcare which are emerging and I think this is going to be a huge disruption. One is this framework of systems biology. Systems biology is understanding the body as a network, as a biological system, as an ecosystem. It's often called network medicine, systems medicine, systems biology. It's functional medicine. It's what functional medicine is. Functional medicine is the clinical application of systems biology. It's understanding how to work with your biological networks to create health. And it disrupts all of our notions of disease, all of our notions of treatment. And that's coming and it's here. We're at Cleveland Clinic. We're not going away. We're publishing data very often in our center showing that we actually get better results than traditional medicine. The second trend is the omics revolution, which has allowed us to understand so much about our biology, including genome, the microbiome, the transcription kryptone pron and so forth metabolome. The next trend is the quantified self trend, which is all the devices like the oura ring and other things that people are wearing to track their biology. And now we're getting continuous glucose monitors and this is getting more and more sophisticated about like a, wearing a contact lens with, you know, measuring your blood sugar continuously. So that's going to be putting huge amounts of data about our biometrics into a database. And then the 2 sec. The last two advances that are going to transform it is taking all this information from network biology, from the omics revolution. I mean, you're talking about millions, if not billions of data points which any one doctor will never be able to understand or figure out. And I've seen more data points and I've seen more information on more patients than anybody I think on the planet. Because of the nature of my practice. I've literally done $10,000 worth of testing on thousands of thousands of patients over decades and decades. So I have this really rare kind of understanding of the network connections between everything. So when you take all that information and you put it up in the big data and then you analyze it with artificial intelligence, all of a sudden you're beginning to see patterns that no one else has seen. For example, like this pattern of akkermansia and the microbiome and cancer and polyphenols. So these are the kinds of things that are the URL of thna. These are all things that are going to be fed into this database. And when that happens, there's no going back. And there will be, you know, doctors will be important, but they will be, you know, given support through decision making for what they do and how they diagnose by actually getting the help of these powerful transformational, you know, transformational things. That are all coming down the pike. So all the stuff that you're on. All the stuff that you're. You're sort of on the leading edge of that. You're talking about Dave all the time. This is on the periphery now. It's coming to the center, right? I mean, Listen, it took 50 years from the time this guy named Semmelweis said, hey, you know what? All these women are dying of childbirth fever. And I noticed that the midwives washed their hands between patients and deliveries. The doctors don't. I just sort of observed this phenomenon. And for some reason, all the midwives. Patients are living and all the doctors. Patients are dying of childbirth fever. And he said, maybe doctors should wash your hands. And they thought, oh, my God, how could you even imply that we as physicians would ever cause any harm to our patients by what we're doing? That's ridiculous. And they banished him, and he died in disgrace. It was 50 years before doctors started saying, hey, maybe we should wash our hands before surgery.

It's so frustrating. There's so much of that. It's the logic that says, that can't be, therefore it isn't. It's like curiosity was removed in med school, and it's that curiosity that has led to every major great breakthrough.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think we are just so behind in our thinking in medicine, and it's unfortunate because, you know, like, the paradigm shifts are hard, right? I mean, the Earth is not flat. The. A lot of people still think it is, which is amazing. You know, evolution. You know, this is still controversial, right? I think there was the monkey trial, the Scopes trial, back in the 20s, but people are still, you know, disbelieving the evolutionary theory of Darwin. The fact that the.

It looks like Darwin probably was wrong because epigenetics kicked genetics ass. It seems like we change a lot more quickly than Darwin thought we did. But we do change rapidly based on our environment.

Yes, but it. But it's the same idea that our environment is.

The same idea is that we change in response to our environment that we know.

And, you know, the fact that, you know, the Earth doesn't. Is not the center of the universe, and the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. I mean, you know, people are put in jail for thinking that right back then. And it just takes so long for these paradigm shifts to happen. And we're in that in medicine today. I have no doubt we'll get there. I do think that we are coming across a threshold of a crisis around chronic disease, the agricultural system and the food system that are coming to this perfect storm where we can't ignore it anymore. I think my job has been to try to draw those connections, to talk about this publicly, to interact with lawmakers and policymakers, to just bring this into academic centers, try to move the needle forward. And I'm just one guy, you know.

Yeah, you're a guy who's, who's pushing harder than anyone else I know on this and having a bigger impact. And I'm really, truly grateful for doing on that.

For real.

That's a genuine.

I have no illusion, I have no illusions about my. What I'm doing. But, you know, I just. Whatever. It's like.

Well, I think that it's time for a new business model to emerge and maybe you and I should talk about this offline for years. When I retire, I'm going to retire on the golf course. And the golf course is covered in glyphosate and all this other crap. What people actually want in the future, I truly believe, is a regenerative farm surrounded by houses. And if you own a house, you make your homeowners association payment to the farm, but you get the profits and the food back from the farm. So the real luxury going forward is to live right next door to a farm thing that builds amazing food that makes you live longer. And this is what, not just retirement. This is going to be the most sought after place to live that there can be. So there will be many of these around the world coming up and those will be the places where the people of the longest are the healthiest live. It's going to happen.

I agree. I agree. I'm here in Maui and friends of mine, there's a whole crew that have all this land on the other side of the island or they have regenerative farms. And you know, my, my friend I've had for years there, she's growing like 25 different kinds of bananas. We walk around our property, it's like you're eating this, you're eating that. They're like these Suriname cherries and all these varieties of different plants that I've never eaten before and all these different greens and all these different fruits and all these different. It's just like the most wild scene of abundance and deliciousness. And they eat 80% of the food from their land and I just never eat anything like it when I'm there. And it's not for everybody. I mean, they're living off the grid. They get their own water, they have their own solar. It's A lot of hard work, but it's just so beautiful to see such abundance and regeneration. And I think, you know, in America, we've sort of, you know, it's like we have food scarcity, food ins. I mean, listen, 40. 40 plus million Americans are food insecure, including one in four kids. And, you know, we are. We're the richest nation in the world, and yet we can't even feed our. And we have so much food. It's not like a lack of food. We throw 40% of our food away. We grow more food than we need for 10 billion people on the planet. But somehow, you know, we don't have equity and access, and we have, you know, food swamps and food deserts. And imagine, you know, like, if we started to do what we did in World War II, where the government said, hey, everybody, like, y' all gotta pitch in and have your victory gardens. And 40% of food in World War II was produced by the average person in victory gardens in their backyard. And it was an incredible thing to see. And then, of course, in the 50s, that all ended and there was. There was a deliberate effort to usurp the home farm and garden model and home cooking. And it was. It was a deliberate attempt by the food industry. There was a woman named Betty who was a HomeX teacher, and she was part of the incredible movement to. Of extension workers to go around to all the new families and teach them how to grow gardens, how to cook food, how to. How to take care of their families. And it was part of the. It was a government program. And this woman was named Betty. And the food industry invented Betty Crocker as a way. A way of usurping that and creating convenience as a value in food. Right. You deserve a break. Today, convenience is king. And so they started inserting in the. If you look at the Betty Crocker recipe book, my mother had one. We had this all the time. You know, put one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in your casserole, sprinkle one package of Ritz crackers on the top of your broccoli cheese, Velveeta cheese, whatever. And so that's really what happened. And I think we really have this tremendous ignorance of how we got to where we are, where we've then had the TV dinners and the astronaut food, and it just accelerated. Now we've usurped the American home and. And people don't know how to cook. They don't know how to choose real food. And the kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry. And the idea of home gardens just not even a thing. I mean, my mother, when I was growing up in Toronto, because she lived in Europe for 11 years after the war in Europe, she missed the whole fast food and the convenience and industrial food revolution in America. And so she was buying from all the cheesemaker and the butcher and the, the farmer and the fruit guy and this guy and the dairy guy, all like they do in Europe, and they're all artisanal, local. And so she got home and she had a garden. We live in suburban Toronto. And we would go in the backyard, we had fruit trees. We had pear and apple and plum trees and. And then we had gardens with zucchini and tomatoes and basil. I just go out there and eat from the garden. And this was in a suburban backyard in Toronto, so we had a little homestead there. Yeah, totally.

There's also. For people listening, if you want to start a business that's. That's useful. There's a lot of people who don't have knowledge or time on how to have a garden that makes food in their backyard. And it's one thing to say, yeah, I have a lawn service. Screw that noise. You have a regenerative backyard agriculture service, and you go out and you actually tend other people's gardens because now you're part of their grocery budget, not their lawn clipping budget. And it's that big of a deal. There will be a hundred thousand people doing this over the next 10 years because it's actually better to have food in your backyard. It tastes better, it works better, and it's more sustainable.

We had a garden, but I had a big problem this summer. I planted all these fruit trees. I spent a lot of money playing the whole orchard in my backyard. And I. I let all the, all the, all the grass grow to wildflowers and, you know, to go back to field. And all the bees came. It was so fun. And then, you know, the food started having these trees, these incredible peaches, had like hundreds of peaches on these trees. I was so excited to get my peaches. And this freaking bear came and ate all the freaking peaches. Italy would sit at the bottom of the. In the middle of the day, coming out, sit there like a king and just eat all the peaches. There were like hundreds of peach pits everywhere. And finally he took the whole tree down. So now I'm like, so depressing.

It's one of those things where learning how to do it at scale is hard. We've spent the last seven years building our farm to the point, we can feed our community, but it doesn't have to be that hard in your backyard. It can be a couple rows of stuff, and it actually feels good, and it doesn't take much time. So I love it that you're bringing that out. And it's part of the wisdom that's built into the Pegan diet in your book. And, guys, if you want to understand what Mark's talking about, this isn't just a diet book. This is a book that includes that regenerative thing. It's like, look, if you want a signal that's compatible with your biology, if it comes from your backyard or your neighborhood or at least your state, it's probably more compatible with you than something that came from Chile. And that's just how it works. So it's a system, and I found that there was wisdom in here. Mark, all your books have new stuff. I don't know how you keep the pace up with your 13 New York Times bestsellers and counting, but all of the books have new stuff in them. So the amount of curiosity and innovation there is quite impressive.

Yeah, I have a rare disease. It's called logaria.

You can't stop writing.

That's right. I just. Abundance of words. And it's a trouble because I wrote this book and it's supposed to be short, and I literally had to cut half of it out and throw in the garbage. And I was so upset, my publisher was like, oh, there's too many words. I once wrote a book that was supposed to be, like, 80,000 words, and it was 160,000 words. And at the time, my partner said, oh, that's great. You had two books. And I'm like, no, it doesn't work like that. I got 80,000. I negotiated. I got 110.

Yeah, that does mean, though, that every word counts. And as a fellow authority. Yeah, you write it big, and you go, oh, is this one really that important? So you know that what's left is the good stuff. And I think you hit the bar like you always do in your books. Mark, thank you for the work you're doing in the world. Thank you for the pegan diet. Bringing a little bit of peace and sanity to these discussions where truly vegans and carnivores and paleo and all that, we have a 90% overlap in what we believe. And there's militant people on both sides who are never gonna get along. That's okay. There's militant people in all sorts of things, but the vast majority of us are like, eat more good plants and eat stuff that's good for the world, and I think you nailed it.

Yeah. Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

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