What the Heck Should I Cook, Dr. Hyman? : 637

So I think a lot of it has to do with our whole food system and our food policies that drive an agriculture system and a food production system that produces really bad food that has multiple downstream consequences, mostly unintended, but real and serious, and they need to be dealt with. Our food system creates chronic disease and kills 11 million people a year from bad food. It bankrupts our nations. $95 trillion is what it's going to cost our nation just in America over the next 35 years to deal with. Chronic disease causes social injustice because the kids who eat this food can't learn in school and are cognitively impaired. It causes mental illness. It causes violence and divisiveness. We know that people who eat these foods are more likely to have homicide, suicide, and violence.

Bulletproof radio. A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day uncovers why people with celiac disease get nauseous within hours of eating gluten. And it turns out we now understand that some immune cells dump immune chemicals that churn your stomach. These are called cytokines into the blood soon after your cells encounter gluten, which triggers those symptoms, at least according to a new study. And scientists already knew that. Some of those immune cells called CD4T cells in people with celiac disease react to glute in wheat, barley, rye, and they get a little bit of damage to the small intestine. And it's interesting because normally T cells don't rev up until a day or two after you're exposed to a protein that triggers your inflammation. But if you have an autoimmune disorder like celiac, in this case, it affects 1% of people. But many, many more are sensitive to gluten. But those people have that nausea, pain, and vomiting within an hour or two of eating gluten. So they're the extreme responders. And there are many people who aren't quite as extreme responders who get chronic inflammation. And now we understand so much. We know that cytokines called interleukin 2 or IL2, and other things released by T cells climb, and they climb and they climb. These are compounds of inflammation and thus compounds of aging. And that's kind of cool, because if you understand which T cells do what and which cytokines are released, there are herbal compounds and pharmaceuticals that can block specific inflammatory molecules. I'm very interested in this because as an anti aging guy and a biohacker, if you know which inflammatory cytokines are plaguing you maybe you can just turn them off. It's not permission to eat gluten, but wouldn't it be nice if you accidentally got exposed to gluten, that it didn't knock you on your ass? Now, and just full disclosure, if you want to perform really well, gluten, it doesn't belong in your diet. I don't really care if you say, but I don't feel anything when I eat it. It is still not making you live longer and perform better. And the fact you like croissants, I don't care. You might like heroin too. That's okay. It doesn't mean it's good for you. Although actually in Superhuman, my new book, I do have a chapter about heroin as an anti aging substance. Liar. Actually, it's about heroin analog, low dose naltrexone opiate receptors. And it turns out people who use pharmaceutical grade heroin at low to normal doses, not as addicts, not living under bridges, not cut with God knows what, actually age much less quickly than the rest of us. So there you go. In my book I talk about nicotine as an anti aging compound and heroin. And I'm telling you, don't smoke and don't use heroin. But these pathways are so cool.

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Today's guest on the show, he's a little bit intimidating because he only has like 14 million New York Times bestsellers. Maybe more than that. He's almost as tall as me. Fantastic.

I'm taller now.

You got the old age stooping, my friend. He thinks he's better looking than me.

That's my opinion.

Maybe true. And a guy if you don't recognize his voice, who's been on the show a couple times. A dear friend and a world changing superhuman in his own right. Dr. Mark Hyman. Marc, welcome back on the show.

Oh Dave, thank you. Love being on your show.

Now, Mark, a lot of people know your name. You're director of functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. You've written extensively about the dangers of gluten. And I want to talk with you today about some of the other toxins that you've dealt with with the thousands of patients in your ultra wellness centers. And I want to talk also about food policy because I set out to disrupt big food with bulletproof. I'm like, guys, here's what you feel like when you eat food that's done right. Eat this protein bar versus a sugar bomb candy bar and see what happens to your life. Things like that. And you're looking at how do we fix policy. So this is going to be a fun interview because we're going to talk about all kinds of cool stuff. And I'm trying to figure out where to point people for your work. You've done the Broken Brain documentary that I was in. That was really good.

Doctor's Pharmacy, my podcast.

There you go, Doctor's Pharmacy. In fact, I was just a guest on Doctor's Pharmacy. That's with an F, which is doing really, really well. And I'm just counting the number of times you've been on Bulletproof. You've been on three times. So this is your fourth time. You're tying the record for the most times on the show because people don't even understand who you are. Last episode you talked a little bit more about why you do what you do. But knowing you really well, you have story after story of, oh, yeah, I wasn't the first airplane to Haiti. Bad things happened. And you help people in such a profound way. So I just love getting interview you. And every time we get feedback from people who look at the show, they're like, I love that episode. So you've got good energy, man. So I'm always pleased to do this. And we're actually doing this interview live at your headquarters in Santa Monica.

That's true.

Which is super cool. And you wrote a recent book called what the Heck Should I Cook?

Yes, I did.

I love the title. And let's start there because it leads to this thing about how do we fix our food system. So you talk about cooking being a revolutionary act. And why is cooking revolutionary? And why did you write a cookbook?

Well, first of all, if all of America started cooking whole food from real ingredients, like whole grains, like any frickin whole food. I mean, I don't care actually at this point.

You're right.

I mean, like, if they just got off the crap and started eating real food and literally unplugged from the industrial food system, their health would dramatically improve. We would reverse climate change, we would end social injustice, poverty. We'd have money enough for free education and free health care for everybody and can support the neediest among us with no effort and have lots of money left over to do cool stuff and create new science and solve all the world's problems just by cooking at home. Why? Because if we eat real whole food that's made from real ingredients, it changes what food is grown, what food is produced, what food is distributed. It changes our own biology and resurrects us from the path to death that we're all on in a rapid way. And it. And it is fun and delicious and it actually is what is Needed as the antidote to the food system, which has deliberately disenfranchised us from our kitchens and from our ability to cook. Our ability, literally. The food industry during the 50s, when there was a woman named Betty who was a home EC teacher trying to get America to learn how to cook and take care of themselves. And she was going around teaching young families how to grow a garden and how to cook meals and how to take care of things. They were terrified because they were producing all this processed food and they didn't want that to happen.

Right.

So they got together in Minnesota General Mills headquarters, and they had a big convening and they decided they were going to make convenience king. They were going to create it as a value. So you deserve a break today. Right. That's that messaging. And they literally invented somebody called Betty Crocker. Now, I thought Betty Crocker was a real person. Your mom might have had the Betty Crocker cookbook like my mom did.

It was a red and white checked cover. I remember that there was a little.

Picture of Betty on the front. Yeah, Betty was an invention. It wasn't a real person. And. And they put in all this processed food into the recipes, like Campbell's Cream of Chicken Soup garbage. Add it to your casserole, or take a strip of Ritz crackers and crumble them and put them on your cass. I mean, and then they went further, the TV dinners and then processed food and then all the fast food restaurants. So they literally disenfranchised from our kitchens. We've made generations of Americans who don't know how to cook. Americans spend more time watching cooking on television than actually cooking at home.

Now, Mark, do you know my friend Betty Rocker?

Betty Rocker? No.

No, She's a real person. Her name is Brie. She's a fantastic person, and she's teaching people how to cook. So the antidote to Betty Crocker is beautiful. Bettyrocker. Her Instagram's awesome.

Okay. Bettyrocker.

But we do need an antidote to that because, I mean, if you look even further back in big food history, you know where Graham crackers came from?

Mr. Graham.

Oh, Mr. Graham. But do you know why he did what he did? And Corn Flakes were from the same cult?

Oh, yeah. Because of Mr. Kellogg.

They decided that male sexual desire was the root of all evil. And if they could just make a food that would lower libido, that it would solve the world's ills. So they created graham crackers and corn flakes. Low fat, high carb. Because those do lower testosterone. If you eat that for breakfast, you're probably not going to want to go out and have male libido or do anything else.

Well, you got to watch that movie, the Road to Wellsville. Have you seen that?

No.

It's about Kellogg and about this place called Battle Creek, which is where they used to have this spa and they'd bring people in and all eat corn flakes. It was like. It was pretty bad. It was kind of scary. It was all about poop. It was a very funny movie. But the point is, you're right. We, we, we decided to create all these industrial foods, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so great reasons. But at the end of the day, these processed industrial foods are killing us, killing the planet. And by learning how to cook. And that's really why I wrote the cookbook, because it, you know, I wanted to show people you can make real food that's delicious, that's easy to make, it's cost effective, and it's not that hard. I mean, I, I actually, you know, often don't even use recipes. I just learned the basic cooking skills, the building blocks. It's like you've learned the Alphabet. You can write, you know, the Great Gatsby or, you know, the War and Peace, it doesn't matter. But you went through the Alphabet of the skills of knife skills and cutting and chopping and actually how to combine ingredients in the right way and what to put in first, second, third, and the timing of meals, it's not that hard. You can make amazing meals. I mean, I cook three meals a day. I can do it in less than 30 minutes total.

Yeah.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, super easy. And have delicious, amazing food. And I have all kinds of shortcuts I've learned because I'm busy. But, you know, sometimes I make meals that take longer. You can throw stuff in a hot pot or like a crock pot or a Dutch oven and stick in the oven for three hours and you end up with a delicious meal. So I want people to learn how to cook. I want people to take back their kitchens. I want people to actually start to enjoy it as a community event with their families and friends. And it's just the best thing ever.

It is. It's funny. My second book was the Bulletproof Cookbook for the same reason that, look, when you cook your own food and you use the right ingredients, you will naturally learn to select the foods that are good, that are fresh, that are going to make you feel good. All animals do this. Cows will walk around and Eat that tuft of grass, not the other one, because that one had the right nutrients. We actually have that. But when you're done, you should have a food high. Not the sugary MSG high. But I mean, man, I feel so good after I ate that I'm recharged. And I don't get that at restaurants very often at all. And when I do, I go back. The value from the big food industry that we are both disrupting, it was all about convenience. But there's a good side to convenience. Because if you look at the amount of time that women spent just letting bread rise, waking up at 5am to knead the bread to make the morning bread, it has been between laundry and cooking. These have been the things that kept women from doing things that they wanted to do. Not even counting about child rearing, things like that. So there was a war over baking powder. Not an actual war, but a marketing aggressive war with attorneys and things like this. Because baking powder set women free. It saved them two hours a day. And it's okay to use baking powder to make something rise versus natural yeasts, right? And yes, you might lose something in the soaking of the grain or whatever else, but it wasn't that good for you to eat bread anyway. So I want to just say you said something really important there in that you can do it in less than a half hour. It takes you 15 minutes to drive to a restaurant, sit down, wait, order. You're actually not saving time when you go to restaurant. You're saving dishes though.

No in the morning. For now, make two poached eggs, a slice of tomato and avocado, pour some olive oil. Quick breakfast, right? Lots of protein, fat, vegetables. Or I'll make a quick protein smoothie with like nuts and seeds and frozen berries and some, you know, coconut oil or some avocado. Just super easy, delicious. And for lunch I'll just throw together a quick salad.

I'll.

I'll get the pre washed arugula, I'll get the cherry tomatoes. I have to cut them. I'm like lazy. I'll get pumpkin seeds on there. I'll put some sliced avocado, I'll throw a can of wild salmon or maybe some sardines on there and I get this delicious salad. It's high in fat, it's full of vegetables and nutrients. Super easy and quick dinner. Maybe quickly stir fry some greens. Maybe I'll throw a sweet potato in the oven sometimes, just add that in there and leave it for an hour and then it's ready for dinner. I'll set a piece of fish or chicken or meat quickly on the stove or on the grill. It's really simple and easy and it doesn't take a lot of time and it's super delicious.

Mark, have you ever thought about doing an intermittent fasting cookbook where just a third of the pages are blank?

That's a great idea. Actually. The recipes are amazing. It takes zero time to make. They're ready in an instant.

If you didn't have time in the morning and you're worried about that, you could skip breakfast and have one third less cooking and save some money. And that stuff happens as well. So I find it kind of confusing that people saying cooking's too hard because if you have the tools and there's an investment in good quality knives and good quality pots, but it's just not that hard. But other question for you is grocery shopping. So what's your take on having your groceries delivered or using one of the services that just picks things up? Is that a good move? Is that a bad move?

I mean, listen, sure, if that helps, no problem. I use Thrive Market where I can order all the non perishable stuff and regeneratively raised meat, which is almost impossible to get, and fish and get it delivered to my door. I have to recycle all the packaging, which is annoying, but basically it's super easy and I get it at a half to a quarter off their retail price. And then, you know, I get no other things like Butcherbox where I basically get the organic grass fed meat delivered to my house. I don't have to worry. So I do have things for convenience. But actually I love going to the grocery store. I love like hunting and gathering in the pharmacy there. You know, it's like, I call it my pharmacy F A R M A C Y where I go and find all my medicines. And you know, I, I learned a lot about what food is medicine and which foods to use and which combinations. And so I literally am looking for all my drugs and I bring them home and I make delicious meals that heal.

I feel like there's something really valuable to go to either farmer's market or grocery store and look at the broccoli and I want that broccoli because that one looks better than the others for whatever the reason is. And I find when I order fresh produce from a delivery, I'm like, oh, you got me moldy blueberries. Like I wouldn't have bought those.

Yeah, yeah, I actually don't. I usually get enough produce fresh.

Yeah, I think that all of the produce things. Sorry, Amazon, you're not going to win on delivering produce because when we see produce, our cells know what to eat and what not to eat. And I've never been happy when I.

Have produce, although sometimes community support agriculture is great because it's fresh picked on the farm, delivered that day, you pick it up.

It's just literally there's a 90% hit rate because the food was grown right when you're going to a small farm. And for me, I live on a small farm, we grow almost all the food we eat, including our pork and our lamb and most of our veggies.

I know you had a run in with a pig recently.

Yeah, I sprained my making sure I didn't end up in the mud after I pushed on a pig. But he did move into the new pig pasture, so it was all good. So I just, it's like there's something about selecting the food and then interacting with it. And the Dalai Lama, he's very precise about who he allows to prepare his food. And in some of the Buddhist teachings, the number of.

Because the Chinese want to kill him.

Okay, there's that. There's also though, like the, the notion of teaching in Buddhism that you want fewer people to touch your food and that that's somehow better. And I teach my kids, look, it tastes better because you put love in it and that's one of the ingredients. And when you cook with just with intent, you don't have to sing a song over your food, but you just, you think about how's this going to taste? What's it going to do to the people who eat it, including yourself? And you're creating, it's an act of creation for that. And so having a, a cookbook, that's sort of like, look, here's the ideas, here's the palette. You don't have to do an exact paint by number, but do it like this. It seems like it's a skill that's devolving. What are the things that people can do other than, well, just start cooking, damn it. It seems like it's almost like a lifestyle surgery to become.

Yeah, I mean, you have to start slow and just sort of take a few steps. But in the cookbook, food, what heck should I cook? I give you a list of what are the tools you need. You know, what are the ways to cook without recipes? What are the basic strategies for how you make animal protein or vegetables or, or how you just prepare things? And I think it just gives people a framework for how to do it. And then, you know, just pick recipes. I, you know, the way I think about recipes is sort of like paint by numbers.

Yeah.

Like once you kind of figure it out, then you kind of can do it on your own. And I almost never use recipes, although I've been making a lot of recipes from the cookbook and they are unbelievable.

Well, you did something cool. You reached out to a bunch of friends like you. Yeah, I contributed recipes for it.

Dave's got a recipe in the cookbook. Yeah.

And it's one of the things where I'm happy to contribute. I want people to just go out and buy the good stuff. Because one of the concerns that you and I both share is habitat destruction. And if you're on one of these corn and soy based diets, which includes eating industrial animal meat or just eating corn and soy themselves because you wanted to cut out the middleman of the apocalypse.

We can get to that.

Well, what you end up doing is you end up supporting monoculture. And when you do that, all of the bunnies, mice, ladybugs, turtles, birds. I'm only picking the cute ones.

Slugs, insects.

Insects. We end up killing.

The microbiology of the soil.

Oh, the soil destruction is. I'm actually more worried about soil destruction than ocean destruction because we're going to run out in 60 years at current rates. And it's hard to build soil because it takes decades to build good soil.

Doing it the right way, it turns out it doesn't.

What makes the best soil poop. I knew you were going to say that.

Yay.

There's a reason I have sheep. They walk around, they shit everywhere, Mark. They're indiscriminate. They're looking at scratching their ears and they're pooping because their job is to regenerate soil.

The kind of prevailing view is that cows are the cause of all of our problems in terms of climate change, or at least a big contributor. And that is true. Absolutely, if you're talking about factory farmed animals. But the best way to build soil is to integrate animals into a regenerative farm.

Thank you.

And the truth is that we had 60 million bison and probably 10 million elk and many other ruminants roaming around America, which is, by the way, far more than the cows we have in America, creating tens of feet of topsoil and not contributing in any way to climate change. And they were belching and pooping and doing all that stuff back then, but they were roaming around in the grass in a way that they mowed the grass, not all the Way down. So overgrazing is bad. They dug it up with their hoofs just by walking on it. And they peed and pooped everywhere, which is like natural fertilizer. Nitrogen. And P has nitrogen in it works and it works. And it literally built tens of feet of topsoil. So when farmers like Gabe Brown from North Dakota used to be a conventional farmer, his farm was destroyed by hail and drought and he had to convert to regenerative farm. And he researched about it, he learned about it and he started doing it. And now he makes more food, better food, makes more money and has complete drought and flood resistance. Where his farmers fields are flooded, his aren't. Because the soil that's built, he's built 29 inches of topsoil in just a few years by integrating animals in a very strategic way. Not just overgrazing and letting them roam around, but you move them in this thing called adaptive multi paddock grazing. So we do or managed grazing and that actually helps to create new so soil in a very rapid way. And turns out, soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. It can hold three times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And it's really the solution to climate change. There's very few technologies that can allow us to draw out carbon. There's carbon catcher technologies which are going to cost billions of dollars, factories all over, like, it just like seems like a nutty thing. I mean, maybe it'll help, but we have the most powerful technology ever invented to draw down carbon out of the environment. It's called photosynthesis. It's this ancient technology that plants actually suck carbon out of the environment. They breathe carbon dioxide, they put it into their roots, it goes into the soil, there's organic matter that develops and that becomes this massive carbon sink. So people think the rainforest. The rainforest, yeah, they're important. But the grasslands are the rainforest of the prairies.

It's funny, I also, I talked with my kids about this. One of the things that animals do is they eat stuff that we can't eat and they transform it into delicious, amazing food and they fertilize the soil. And if you're doing it the way I do on my small farm, you know, you treat the animals really well and they're well cared for.

Did you kick that pig in the butt?

I didn't kick him, I pushed on him, but he got even with me.

You're pushing the pigs, but I can.

Tell you that's gonna be the best thing.

That seems like pretty animal cruelty to me there.

That's funny.

You got your due, you got injured.

I did. But it's funny, you actually get to know your animals and things like that. And people are saying, oh, it's so mean. How can you die? It's like, look man, go to a therapist already. Look at mother Nature. There's a wasp that lays its eggs inside a spider. It paralyzes it and eggs eat the spider from the inside out. Like mother Nature hates you and wants you to die. That is actually how nature works.

Well, it could be. It also provides a lot of abundance.

Oh, of course it does. But here's the deal. You have to be comfortable with both sides of that stuff. So I've learned Simba. Yeah, I was a vegan. I was a raw vegan and I don't like animal cruelty. But I'll tell you, just like you talk about in sort of the pegan diet, Paleo plus vegan. I will eat the vegan food, not the gluten, crappy, soy, whatever. But I'll eat vegetables if there is no grass fed meat to be had. And all of my recommendations in Superhuman are eat less meat. Industrial meat is bad for you, bad for the soil, bad for the planet. It's not food. Just like random junk food isn't food. So once you take those out, what's left? You eat less. And guess what happens if you eat more than 20% of your calories from protein turns into sugar. 400% increase in all cause mortality. It doesn't just turn into sugar, it creates inflammatory things throughout the body because your amino acids get screwed up. You get too much cysteine and methionine. That's one of the anti aging things.

Which is sort of why I came up with the whole concept of pegan, which is kind of a joke making fun at the extremes of paleo and vegan.

Yes.

And the cookbook is sort of a pegan cookbook. And there's vegan recipes, there's, you know.

And you and I have more in alignment with vegans than anyone in paleo, keto or any standard diets. And here's the thing, you should be eating mostly vegetables and you and I would say not mostly grains. And a lot of vegans are all about the grains and canola oil because those are vegan. So it's not about whether it came from animals or didn't. That's an artificial distinction because every plant came from animal poop which came from an animal. And if you get rid of the animals and you only have plants, you just deplete the Topsoil. And we are going in a very bad direction if we think that's going to work. And if we allow the continued destruction of the soil from just raising huge amounts of corn and soy to feed to cows, like that also is bad. But the idea that we have to be an extremist, like eat crappy meat or eat no meat at all, it doesn't work in the system of life. And you recognize that in your work and in your cookbook. So I fully endorse the approach you took in this. What are the other mistakes that people make either when they're choosing their foods or when they're cooking their foods?

Well, I mean, is grabbing for that thing that's so easy. That's all pre processed and prepared and made in a factory. I think, you know, one of the saddest things is that we've lost the family dinner. That if we do eat family dinner, it's usually less than 20 minutes. Each person eating a different factory made science project, made in the microwave from a different factory, all while watching TV or on their phones.

Yeah.

And I think that's really, you know, what I want us to share with people is that, you know, if you create cooking as a, not a chore, but as a community event. Right. I invite my friends for dinner over. I don't prepare everything before they get there. They come in the kitchen, we talk, I chop, I give them a knife, I give them a cutting board. We all work together, we have fun, we laugh, we talk. That's what life is. And I did that with my kids. I got them in the kitchen early making stuff, you know, making food. They loved it and they got to eat it. And then I taught them how to grow food in the garden. I and my daughter thought, an eggplant, there's an egg. So she picked it.

But I was like, where's the chicken?

I think it's really about bringing those values into your family and your home.

My kids are 10 and 12 now, and we just told them two weeks ago, guys, you're going to be cooking one meal, one dinner every week each and.

Really? Yep.

And if you want some help, we'll help you out. But you decide what it is. We're not going to.

You'll be your sous chefs.

You already know how to do it. And so my daughter Anna said, I'm going to make a stir fry. I really like those. So she picked the vegetables from the garden, she sliced them up, she asked me to help slice some of it, and then she cooked everything. And you Know what? It was really good because the kids have seen it. They've helped before. So her first one was a success. And, man, the sense of accomplishment there. She was really happy, and she took some to lunch the next day. It's really empowering for kids. And it's a social time. And what kids want most, they don't spend time doing stuff with their parents. And so you can do that. And when they're in charge, I find that it's good. Father children time.

Totally.

Now, okay, so what about people who say, look, I live in New York. I just don't have a big kitchen. Some people don't have any kitchen, but let's say my kitchen isn't big enough or things like that?

Well, I mean, there's. I remember going and lived in China for a year, and I remember going to this restaurant. It was just when it was starting to sort of have private restaurants. And it was in this guy's house, and he cleared out a room in his house, and he didn't have a kitchen. He had a Coleman stove with two burners in the back and two woks, and he was in an alleyway in the side. That was his kitchen. And he made the most unbelievable gourmet food I've ever had in my entire life. So I think, you know the myth that, oh, you can't cook even in a small space. You can. In my apartment in New York. You know, we do what we call an Alka Gezer. So essentially, we get a ton of veggies, and we make it in our Vitamix every morning, and we drink two or three glasses of veggies every morning, and it's awesome, and you feel full, and it's delicious.

Now he needs a blender.

Yeah, he needs a blender. And you don't have to cook, but I think there's lots of ways to sort of make simple food. I make salads. You know, you can do it.

When I was first getting going with Bulletproof Steven Jenkins from Third Eye Blind, I met him at this dinner somewhere, and he said, dave, let's film a cooking thing. I'm like, really? This is super cool. He said, let's do it before my concert in Portland. So I go there, and I'm like, how do you bring everything to cook something? So before they open the doors for the concert, we're at the base of the stage there, and I've got an inductive cooker thing for 80 bucks, like a single burner and a pan and a cutting board and a card table. And we made this delicious salmon dish with a coffee rub and all this. And this pops out because it wasn't very much gear and I could carry it all. And it was delicious and it was amazing. But it took a little bit longer to cook than I expected. And I said, stephen, Your concert started 20 minutes ago and the doors aren't open yet. Do you want me to cook this backstage or something? I don't know what to do here. And he just looks at me and goes, I'm the rock star.

They'll wait.

And I'm like, all right, Stephen, you are the rock star, man. It was one of the most memorable things. But we made fantastic wild caught sockeye salmon that was delicious and it took 25 minutes. And all the stuff you needed to cook it was with me. So it's just not that hard if you're determined to do it.

Yeah, exactly.

And bonus points if you get to do anything with Third Eye Blind. They're cool. Now I'm also thinking about people who say, look, I just didn't have time to pick up the ingredients. And you've talked about how you would go to Thrive markets. There's butcherbox, there's grass fed co op, and now you can get it. And it's actually very affordable. If you order grass fed meat, if you buy it at your local butcher, you're supporting a local business, which is great, but it can be more expensive.

Yeah, I mean, there's places you can get it for eight bucks a pound, which basically makes a serving of grass finished beef cheaper than a McDonald's hamburger.

And we're talking you should be eating a quarter pound, not a half a pound or a pound of this stuff. And if you're worried about animals or something like that, you got to do the math. A butchered cow, if you eat a pound of meat a day, you kill 0.7 cows per year eating a pound a day. So if you were to eat a quarter pound a day, that's a quarter of 0.7. So basically 0.2 animals every five years. It takes one cow for you to eat a quarter pound of meat every day. And that cow doesn't kill anything. If it doesn't eat corn and soy, if it walks around on grass, it built soil, it built a healthy ecosystem. And so we have to do that.

I mean, people say, well, it can be done at scale. Is it hard? I think I wrote my book, Food Fix, which is out in February 2020, about the science of regenerative agriculture and the estimates of if we took all the land that was available, the grasslands that are not suitable for growing crops, Bureau of Land Management, land that's not managed well, if we take some of the soy and corn fields that are used to grow food for animals and turn them into regenerative farm just to.

Grow ethanol for gas.

Stupid, right? We stopped all that. And if you look at all the land, we actually could raise almost twice as many cows as we do now with factory farming. If we use all those lands in.

America and those cows would be healthy and they would build soil that would suck carbon out of the air.

Absolutely.

So how's it going to happen? We've got to fix this. I'm going to live to 180. I don't want to be breathing oxygen bottles while I'm 140.

It's true. So I think a lot of it has to do with our whole food system and our food policies that drive an agriculture system and a food production system that produces really bad food that has multiple downstream consequences, mostly unintended, but real and serious, and they need to be dealt with. Number one, our food system creates chronic disease and kills 11 million people a year from bad food. That's a lot of people. More than any other thing in the world, including smoking. It bankrupts our nations. $95 trillion is what it's going to cost our nation just in America over the next 35 years to deal with chronic disease. Which money could be spent on education, free health care, social service, or whatever the heck, you know, invention, science, whatever. More bombs, you know, and that is about 3.1 trillion a year. And our total tax revenue is 3.8, meaning it's almost our entire federal budget. We're wasting on this. It causes social injustice because the kids who eat this food can't learn in school and are cognitively impaired. It causes mental illness. It causes violence and divisiveness. We know that people who eat these foods are more likely to have homicide, suicide and violence. It leads to threats to national security because we can't even mount an army, because 70% of military applicants are rejected because they're too fat or sick to fight. It leads to tremendous environmental degradation. We are depleting our soil, as we've mentioned, we 70% of our fresh water, human use of fresh water is used to grow food for animals for human consumption, which is the factory farm animals. We're depleting our aquifers and our water resources. We are also causing loss of biodiversity. We now have 90% less species on the planet. We have 90% less plant varieties. We eat about 12 varieties of food and plants and half of all livestock species are gone. And we also are contributing to climate change through the massive amounts of, of commercial agriculture that we're doing end to end. The food system is the number one cause of climate change. So when you count in deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming of animals, the food waste, which is the third largest emitter greenhouse gases after us and China, if it were a country, and when you count in the refrigeration, processing, transport of food, all that end to end is the biggest source of climate change. And then you've got all the policies that we have that are driving this food system, the way we subsidize agriculture, that grows commodity crops that make people sick and fat. 60% of our diet is processed food, essentially that's made from these crops supported by our government. When you basically are, are giving that to the pe people who can't afford to eat enough. So people who get SNAP or food stamps are 46 million people, including 1 in 4 kids, and they are sicker and fatter than the rest of Americans. And it's mostly junk food. 75% of it's junk food, $7 billion of it's soda. And you've got food marketing, unregulated food marketing to kids and adults, which drives consumption. You've got food labeling, which is super confusing. You've got all this stuff going on because of the policies that are, are being manipulated by the lobbyists that are spending half a billion dollars just on the farm bill. So this is all bad news. But the good news is we can change it by changing what we eat, by changing how we deal with our food waste, by actually being active politically, voting with our votes, being advocates, working with grassroots organizations. These are things that actually can shift and change.

You talked about unregulated food marketing. Yeah, I mean, as a food manufacturer, I want to do it right. I want to show the big food companies, hey, people will pay for food that makes them feel good instead of food that's just convenient. And I am not allowed to say.

What, you can't make health claims.

But they're actually borne out by masses of science, of course. And so the regulatory environment makes it very hard to be truthful, to do.

The right thing about food. It's easy to do the wrong thing right. These big food companies are advertising to kids through all these cartoon characters and heavy duty marketing. There's no regulation on that, no advert games which suck people in.

But if you want to say, for instance, this has These benefits that are borne out by studies I did not pay for that are well established. Yeah. It is exceptionally hard. In fact, there's a rule right now, now, if a food contains saturated fat, it is not allowed to say healthy on it. Any saturated fat. Even though 45% of your cell membranes in your body are saturated fat. And we know that the stuff that clogs your arteries is 100% made by bacteria in your gut, it is not from the food you eat. So even if you have all sorts of good stuff, that one ingredient doesn't work. So we have just bad science because of lobbying that gets built into regulations.

Let me the dietary guidelines, the new administration. Thirteen of the 20 people on the new guidelines committee are in bed with the food industry. The woman who's actually overseeing our dietary guidelines process in the Trump administration, her former job was a lobbyist for the Corn Refiners association of America and the Snack Food Association. So the people make high fructose corn syrup and junk food. That was her job. And now she. I mean, now she's helping design our dietary guidelines.

That is crappy on so many different levels, because corn farming is one of the things that is causing the most harm to the environment. We've taken millions of acres of grassland and turned them into corn land. We spray glyphosate on them.

Corn and soy.

Yep. Which destroys the soil and it kills the bacteria that live in the soil, so.

And it kills us, too. Oh, yeah. I mean, I read the most frightening study about glyphosate, which is basically Roundup. I mean, they're now multi billion dollar settlements against Monsanto.

I think Bear's going down.

Yeah. I mean, their stock price went down $35 billion. But. But this study was frightening because it showed that when they fed. This is, of course, an animal study, but when they showed they gave the grandmother rat glyphosate and then they measured her health effects and then the mother and then the grandkid, basically the grand rat baby. And what was striking was that the epigenetic effects, the harm, was passed down two generations, even if that baby rat wasn't ever exposed to glyphosate. So it turned on disease and caused heart disease, kidney disease, all kinds of chronic issues that were pretty frightening to me when you think of the amount of glyphosate. I mean, if it was an ingredient on a Cheerios box, it would be higher in terms of its quantity than all the vitamins in there.

Really? I did not know that.

Yeah. And General Mills got taken out for this. And they committed, whether it's just a PR stunt or not, they committed to putting a million acres into regenerative agriculture.

That is profound. In fact, very recently, in the last couple days before we're recording this, one of the very large food companies, in fact, 19 of them, got together and decided that they were going to do some really large regenerative farming things. So I'm hopeful that the work that you're spreading, the things that we talk about, just as influencers of health, based on reality, is that the food companies did see, like Campbell saw, a 20% drop in sales. People realized, I don't want to eat that stuff. So now they have this decision, which is, well, do we spend money convincing people that our crap isn't crap? And you can do that. Unfortunately, it's easier for us to learn these days. So social media does that and just people are more able to access information. Or you could spend the same amount of money or maybe even a little bit more making food that people want to buy. You've probably met some of the people who run the big food companies. I have as well. What I find is that, by and large, they look at me and they say, we want to make better food for people. People won't buy it if it costs $0.01 more. They'll buy the corn syrup stuff from our competitors. How do we deal with this? We want to improve, but it's a race to the bottom. What do you say to them?

Well, it's interesting. I met with the guy who was the vice chairman of Pepsi, and, you know, we have very fun banter back and forth. Oh, yeah. But I respect him. He's a good. He's a good human being. And he said, you know, Mark, we want to do the right thing. We went. In fact, he was invited to the United States Department of Agriculture to give a talk. I'm like, why is the vice chairman of Pepsi going to the USDA to give a talk? And it was about regenerative agriculture. It was about what we need to do to transform agricultural systems. But he said, you know, any one of us can't do it alone because of this competitive marketplace, and we can't convene actually all of us together, but the government can, and we can collectively come up with solutions. I literally just got a text this morning because I gave a podcast on the Carbon Underground about how to bring soil back to life using regenerative agriculture. And someone who's a friend of mine who works for Nestle says I can arrange a meeting with the CEO I want you to talk to them about. So I think there's an interest in this.

It's funny because I've insisted on grass fed collagen in all of the bulletproof products. And the reason collagen's a thing is because of that early work, just popularizing it. And why grass fed collagen? Because of poop? Because you have to have this out here. So it is cheaper to go buy non grass fed collagen. Unquestionably. Of course, you're probably getting glyphosate, which is the glycine molecule in that bad collagen. I wouldn't want to eat that stuff myself. But you can save money. If people don't know and you're a big company and it's the race to the bottom, you're going to go with that. The person doing the formulation of the big company probably doesn't know either, but they're starting to wake up to that. Because you're talking about it. Because I'm talking about it. If the CEO of Nestle is talking about it, all of a sudden it's like, actually we're doing this to make the world a better place and because we want to feed it to our consumers.

Yeah, I'm hopeful. I just talked to someone who said there are many governments in Europe up that are getting together, I think with the WHO and the UN to create a food, a food summit in 2021 to address these. All these issues that I talked about that are seen as separate things. So, you know, my passion has always been about creating, healing and finding the root cause. And as I began as a doctor to see that most of my patients were sick because of food, I began to ask, why do we have the food system? We do. Well, it's because of the policies we do and the food is producing all that, all those problems and we can fix it.

So tell me the five worst foods, the five things that people should never buy or cook again.

Well, I mean high fructose corn syrup, trans fat, anything with additives in it that you don't recognize or can't pronounce, which is 3,000 additives. We eat about 3, 5 pounds of those a day. If you just start there, you're like 90% of the way there.

Okay.

And then I think there's clearly things that, that are things we should be avoiding, like factory farmed animals, like factory farm chickens and beef and so forth. And what's the fifth thing I would say? You know, I think gluten and dairy are problematic. Because of how they're raised and grown. I mean it's it like we're not eating the grains that our ancestors ate, we're not eating the dairy our ancestors ate. It's very inflammatory, creates a lot of gut issues and helps health and disease problems. So as a doctor, my superpowers come from knowing that and often getting rid of gluten and dairy in people's diet and seeing like magic happen.

And when you talk about dairy specifically, there's dairy sugar, there's dairy protein, and there's dairy fat. Are all three equally bad?

No. Good point, Dr. Dave. Okay, so what is problematic is that we've created these hybridized cows, Holsteins, that are basically all the same kind of cow. They're probably fertilized by like three bulls in the country. And those are really tired bull. And then they're pretty homogenous. Not homogenized, but homogenous. And they've been bred to have a certain kind of casein which is called a one casein, super inflammatory, creates a lot of gut issues. Autoimmune diseases may be called cancer and it shouldn't be something we're eating the heirloom cows, all these, I mean, I've traveled all over the world. You see these really weird, funny looking cows. I'm like, I've never seen a cow look like that. But these are funny looking cows and they have more like a 2 casing, just like sheep and goat. I think many people don't tolerate lactose because lactose is a problem. It's a milk sugar that it's 75% of the world's population can't tolerate. Then there's butter and ghee, which are different. So dairy fat, if it's from grass fed animals, has a lot of beneficial properties. It has cla, which is basically anti cancer, supports your metabolism, it contains a lot of vitamins, like vitamin A nutrients and it has a good source of saturated fat which I think can be a part of a healthy diet. I don't think it should be the staple. You don't want to be in sticks of butter every day. But I do think it's, it's something and I, and I think, you know, I think different people vary in their ability to tolerate it like everything. So I think it's just something we, we should be really aware of and I think we don't want to eat these modern cows. And also, you know, even if you eat a grass fed cow that's organic, you still might be getting when they do the milking of the cow, it still might be milked when it's pregnant because they just keep milking them all the time and you're getting all these extra hormones. So I'm not a big fan of milk. I think butter and ghee are on my list.

Milk raises IGF1, which can increase cancer risk. And also, as the author of a, a very detailed book on fertility, a lot of people don't know this, but if you take human mother's milk from the morning and you give it to a baby at night, it'll keep the baby up at night. And if you give them night pumped milk and give them to them in the morning, they'll go to sleep because you're secreting circadian hormones in your breast milk to help the baby.

Right. Melatonin.

So God knows what kind of hormone homogenized stuff is coming from that cow, but that's how biology works. All right, I have a couple more questions for you. I know we're running short on time. One of the questions for you though, okay. We talked about five things you just should not do. Give me three or four foods that people probably aren't eating that they should be eating.

Great question. I mean, I always say eat weird food. Ugly cows. Got it. Eat weird food. Because when we eat these modern industrial fruits and vegetables, we're not necessarily getting very nutrient dense foods. So if it's like a watermelon radish or some funky green or dandelion greens or some weird fruit or some funky thing, I think those are great things to include in your diet because they're far more nutrient dense, have more phytochemicals. I think fermented foods are awesome for the microbiome. Things like sauerkraut, miso, things like that. That I think there are also really important phytochemicals in food that we're not getting enough of. And one of the sort of big discoveries in the last years has been that the microbiome depends not just on fiber like you were talking about, but also depend on polyphenols.

Absolutely.

So you can feed the good bugs by giving them all these colorful compounds in fruits and vegetables.

And coffee and tea and chocolate are huge sources of polyphenols.

Yes. I mean, unfortunately, coffee is the number one source of, of antioxidants in the American diet. Not because it's such a great source, but because we don't eat any other antioxidants.

And it's full of those dark colored compounds. And you also get, in fact, inner fuel, the new prebiotic that I made has probiotic polyphenols in it that are shown in studies to change your gut bacteria. But like you said, watermelon radish with those colors. I had those for lunch because we used those at the bulletproof coffee shop. Because if you're eating cooked cruciferous vegetables and you have one bite of watermelon radish, it has an enzyme that releases the good compounds in cruciferous vegetables. So you can use things like dim and it's such a complex, amazing thing, but it comes down to you eat a bunch of unusual foods, unless they're ones that cause inflammation for you. What do you think about the whole nightshade thing?

I think, you know, nightshades, lectin, tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, eggplant, they. You're never gonna eat Italian food or Greek.

I mean, it sucks, but I'm sensitive to many of those.

I think it's a very small. My experience of 30 years of practicing. It's a very small subset of the population that has trouble with these.

With all of them or with some of them?

Well, with any of them. I think they're mostly tolerated by people. But I think for some people, they are big triggers of inflammation. So if you're that person. So what I tell people is, if you have inflammation, stop them. See how you do.

It's so easy to try that.

Then eat them and see how you feel.

And eat none of them for a couple weeks and then eat all of them for a day. And if the next day you feel like a train hit you, you're sensitive.

Exactly. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. We'll tell you every time what works and what doesn't work.

There you go. So I'd be the first person to say, you know, I wouldn't say those are bad or good. I would just say they're suspect. And until you've eliminated them, you don't know. But when you add a lot of variety, you say, man, I added those weird golden nugget things I got from South America and I felt like garbage the next day. You should probably listen, right? And otherwise eat them.

I mean, we used to eat 800 species of plants. Now we eat about 12. Wow. Well, and actually 60% of our calories.

Comes from three corn, soy, and rice. And rice globally.

I mean, wheezy is right up there.

What about fish, Mark? I mean, we've got all this mercury poisoning, plastic in the ocean.

Fish. Yeah, Fish is probably one of the healthiest foods on the planet, except in 2019, probably one of the worst foods on the planet.

Even wild caught fish, one of the worst foods.

I can tell you my experience as a doctor seeing people who eat fish and even people who try to eat healthy fish like wild salmon, it still has mercury in it. So it's not because the food deliberately has mercury, because I mean naturally has mercury. It comes from the pollution in the cold brain. We've done that. And now in addition to the heavy metals, we put in all sorts of plastics in the ocean. So microplastics are these tiny little plastic balls to they, they make up up to a third of the way to some fish eating birds because of all the merc of all the plastics in the fish. So I do worry about that. I think there are sustainably, organically raised, farm raised fish which I think are probably going to be the best option in aquaculture. I think small wild caught fish probably are still okay. You know, anchovies, sardines, herring, mackerel, those are my favorites. But if you don't like those, well, there's other options. But I think you have to be careful.

What about sockeye?

I think sockeye. Wild salmon's okay. Small is good, bigger is worse. Like you said 100 pound halibut, you don't eat that, but a little one.

Okay. I tend to recommend sockeye because it only lives for two years and because it spends half its time in fresh water and it can't bioaccumulate and it eats very low on the food chain.

Well, fresh water, it can bioaccumulate in.

A single river and absolutely polluted, but it only lives for two years versus a king salmon which lives much longer and eats other fish, versus the sockeye. So I just look at eating lower in the food chain in terms of big fish. It's the safest of the big fish, but it's certainly 100 pound tuna or something. And that's it. I'll still eat some good sushi, but when I do it, I take my chelators. Yeah, I take my chelators at the same time you bind it and microplastics, this is something we probably won't have time to talk about today. But that's a big issue for soil and for the oceans and for us. And it's probably going to require lots of fire, as in burn the plastic so it doesn't bioaccumulate. And I'd rather deal with those chemicals.

Or turn it into something good. There are people who are turning all the plastics into fuels.

Yeah, yeah, just good stuff. There's technology coming for that. Well, Mark, your new cookbook, which includes a lot of this thinking. Just as you tell the story of the food, where do people pick it up?

Amazon.com, they can go to foodthecookbook.com thecookbook. Or foodthecookbook.com I think foodthecookbook.com and there's amazing recipe videos where I'm actually cooking the videos. You can get them for free.

Are you wearing an apron and stuff?

Actually, no, I didn't wear an apron. I did not. No. I just wore my nice shirt. I mean, all these recipes, they're just so fun. They're so delicious and there's great content there. So foodthebook.com and just check it out.

All right, Mark, it's always fun to pick your mind and I know behind the scenes how much work you do to create positive change in the world that is outside just the field of medicine. So thank you for just continuing to push. I see it and I appreciate it.

Thanks, Dave, as always. I love talking to you. This is such a great podcast and keep up the work you do.

Will do. If you liked today's episode, you know what to do. Head on over to your favorite place to buy books and pick up a copy of Mark Hyman's new book. Or go to Food the Cookbook and look at the videos and all that sort of stuff and actually cook dinner for someone you care about, even if it's just yourself. And you might find that it tastes better and makes you feel better and it's fun. And if you have kids, do it with them. And after you do all that, leave a review for Mark or for me. Because as authors, we like to know that we made a difference. So if you can help us by leaving reviews, we listen.

Yeah, go to Amazon, leave a review. We'd love to hear it.

All right.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey, and the producers disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owed Owned by Bulletproof Media.