Ask Mark Q&A #3: Regenerative Agriculture, Getting Adequate Calcium, Cholesterol, Saturated Fat, And More

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

It's starch and sugar that are driving the bad cholesterol profile we call the atherogenic profile. That means you get small dense LDL particles, you get a lot of them, you get high triglycerides, you get low HDL, you get lots of inflammation, your blood sugar is a little too high, your insulin is a little too high.

That all drives high blood pressure, high.

Cholesterol, high blood sugar.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman.

Supplements are one of those things that I'm always being asked about.

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Do we need them if we really eat well? And can your body even absorb them?

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Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. How y'all doing today? So I'm really excited to be here with you all today. We're doing a live Q&A show that I'm doing for my community. It's called Ask Mark. That's me. And it's where I take questions from my text community and I invite those folks to join me live and ask their questions directly to me, which is super fun because I get to talk to people. Now, if you want to ask a question to me in the future, I just want you to text me. Text me at 413 225-8995 and use the hashtag AskMark, right? AskMark, you can remember that. And my team is going to pick your question maybe for the next time in the future. So I really hope I can talk to you soon. So text me your questions and let's get going. Now, I just want to make a disclaimer. I can't give medical advice because I would lose my license and that would be bad for me, it would be bad for you, it would just be bad. But I can give you big picture advice about how I would think about various issues and various health conditions and any other questions you have. So Let's jump in with our first guest, which is, I think, Vivian.

Hi.

Do you see me?

Hi, Vivian. How are you? I do see you.

Great to see you live.

Great to see you, too.

So I have been doing a little bit of research. I was reading your book, Food Fix. and loving it. And at the same time, I was also reading Joel Salatin's book, which is Folks, normal, right? And I'm reading them at the same time, and I hear you talking about food policy and how we should look into taxing certain foods like high fructose corn syrup and meat and soy, everything that's kind of subsidized. right now. And then I heard Joel Salatin talking about it at the same time and he suggested just removing the subsidies from those foods so that the healthier stuff automatically starts to level out price-wise. And I just wanted to know what you thought about that and if you think it's realistic or not.

Well, that's a great question. First of all, I'm not an agricultural policy guy, although I try to pretend I'm one by writing a book about agricultural policy. I'm a doctor. With that disclaimer, I have studied a lot and I do know for a bit about it. I think, you know, the myth is that there are actual subsidies. What actually is going on now mostly is crop insurance. And that means that farmers get paid if their crops fail and they get paid, you know, depending on what, what they plan. If it doesn't do well, they'll get sort of a floor so they don't lose money. But it's a kind of a vicious system that only is for certain crops. So for example, if you're a soy farmer or a wheat farmer or corn farmer and you decide you want to plant a giant five acre plot of vegetables on your 5000 acre soybean farm, you can't do it because you lose your crop insurance. It also forces farmers to plant certain crops because they need the money from the bank to plant crops and to buy the agricultural chemicals and to buy the seeds. But they can't get the money from the bank unless they get the crop insurance from the government to guarantee to the bank that the bank won't lose money. So it's kind of a rigged system where the farmer is in the middle, they're being squeezed. And the average farmer makes minus $1600 a year. Which is pretty bad, right? So the farmer loses money. The banks make money on the loans. the seed companies make money, the chemical companies make money, they're pesticide, fertilizer and herbicide companies, and the farmer loses out. So I think the solutions are to the food system are really complex. We need to look at the food system as a whole. And there's not any one solution like just pulling out all crop supports or crop insurance that's going to fix the problem. I think I do agree it needs to be changed. But for example, we need to support regenerative agriculture, which is a way of growing food that regenerates the soil and regenerates human health by creating food that's far more nutrient dense and healthy. And it has also incredible side benefits of sequestering carbon, conserving water resources by storing water in the soil, increasing biodiversity of bees and pollinators and birds and animals. So you're really creating way more life by doing farming this way. But right now, farmers can't really do it because they're stuck between the banks and the chemical seed and ag companies and these crop insurance loans and these crop insurance payments. So they're kind of stuck. So what has to happen is incentives for farmers to convert to regenerative agriculture. And there was a bill introduced recently that was a bipartisan bill to pay farmers for carbon offsets. In other words, if they store carbon in the soil, they will get money for storing the soil carbon. And that's a good thing. So for example, the airlines have to become carbon neutral. The only thing to do that is by buying carbon offsets. So they have to buy carbon offsets from farmers. And so the farmers can be part of an economic system that actually makes money. The good thing about regenerative agriculture is it actually makes farmers money. And even in the first year they can make money. So right now there's an enormous movement of regenerative agriculture. I was just at a conference where there are like, there's a fund, a 250 million dollar fund to support regenerative agriculture initiatives. There's all kinds of training programs for farmers. And you get them over that bridge to break out of that trap that they're in between the banks, the government, and the agricultural big ag companies. Then they can be free to actually grow food that is good for humans, that's good for the environment, that reverses climate change, and that actually makes them way more money. I mean, Gabe Brown, who's a regenerative farmer from North Dakota. He has been on my podcast. I'm not sure we aired it yet, but he'll be on the podcast. And he was a traditional North Dakota farmer with 5,000 acres of land and he was doing the big corn and soy and big ag chemical stuff. And his farm got decimated by the hail storms and by droughts. And after a number of years, he's gonna have to close. And he began reading Thomas Jefferson's journals. And in Thomas Jefferson's journals, he learned about methods of agriculture that actually built and restored soil, like no-till agriculture, crop rotations, you know, and cover crops and integrating animals into the agricultural cycle. So you use the poop and the pee and the grazing to actually stimulate soil building. And you do all these things in a way that are actually learning how to work with ecosystems. and so he started trying this and he started actually being very successful. And now he tells me he doesn't use any agricultural inputs, no seeds, no chemicals, nothing, fertilizer, pesticides, barely use any irrigation because this water, soil holds so much water. Every 1% organic matter, you can hold 27,000 gallons of water per acre. He built 29 inches of soil and for every 1% organic matter, you can hold tremendous amounts of carbon. It's actually how the cycle works. Some people aren't listening. What is he talking about? Well, where does the word carbohydrate come from? It comes from the word carbon, right? Carbon is what the plants suck out of the air. So they breathe carbon dioxide and they put that carbon down into their plants, which makes the all like broccoli is a carbohydrate. It's made of carbon. And then they put more of that into the soil and that carbon becomes food for the microbiology of the soil. So you literally have, you know, in a thimble full of soil, you have more organisms than exist in the entire rest of the planet or stars in the entire solar universe or something like that. I forget the exact. It's like a crazy amount. And so the amount of soil building that happens with the the carbon going into the plants actually creates a whole microbiology in there that actually helps the plants extract the nutrients. Because now, even if you're growing like organic food and you're not doing in soil that's really regenerative, you're not necessarily getting the same level of nutrient density. And for sure, for sure, the traditional agriculture, we've lost 50% of our nutrient levels in many plants. Even if you're eating your broccoli or your beans or whatever you're eating, you're eating the healthiest food, you're getting 50% less of the nutrients than you did 50 years ago. So, the way the plants get nutrients is by these regenerative processes. So, it's so important. And even animal products, you know, I think people all have this false dichotomy in their mind. Sorry, I'm just going on a little rant here, but it's okay. People have this false dichotomy in their mind of plant-based or, you know, you have to just, you know, do conventional agriculture or plant-based. And it's just a false dichotomy because, yes, if we continue to do CAFOs and factory farming of animals, we 100% all should be vegan. But there's a third option, which is regenerative agriculture that includes all these methods that I'm talking about. There are six principles and you can Google regenerative organic agriculture and read about these principles developed by the Rodale Institute and by the Soil Health Academy, which is a bunch of farmers including Gabe Brown. And what they found is that if you include animals in the cycle, you actually can build huge amounts of soil very quickly. So Gabe Brown built 29 inches in a few decades compared to nature, which takes a thousand years to build three centimeters of soil. So we can accelerate the natural process by using animals. And actually the animals will have better lives. It's more humane. You don't have to eat them if you don't want to, but they have to poop and pee and graze and they're alive and all that creates enormous capacity built soil. It has to be done in the right way. And it doesn't use any water because soil, you need, you know, tons and tons of gallons. I don't know what the number is, but to, to, for every pound of beef, you need so much water. Well, that's only if you're doing Factory Farm animals, which require irrigation and require watering, whereas, whereas regeneratively raised beef actually have the rainwater that they use. The rainwater supplies the water for the grass that they eat. And so they're getting their, their liquids through that and they're getting over the streams and so forth. It's rain water. It's not, it's not actually irrigation water, which is depleting our aquifers. And then what they, these animals do, which is fascinating, is if you let them to their own devices, they, they move in, like, in herds traditionally, like bison. So they would bite a little bit of grass, and then they chew it and they move on, they peep and they pee and they poo. Well, what actually happens is when you look at animals, they naturally seek out plants that have way more nutrients and phytonutrients, which are plant compounds that are medicinal. So they're literally, I want this plant has a little selenium. This plant has a little this plant chemical that's good for me. And so they're literally eating their medicine and they'll eat up to a hundred different species of plants. Now, a cow is eating corn. or a little bit of soy cakes or whatever the heck they're eating, ground up candy or animal parts, there's not that much in there. What they found is in these real regenerative farms, not if you're just having grass fed and it's eating just grass and the same kind of grass, they're literally eating hundreds of different species. They're actually putting these phytochemicals into their meat and you're getting sometimes as much of these phytochemicals in the meat as you would or in the milk as you would from eating the plant. For example, goats grazing on certain shrubs can have as much of the powerful anti-cancer detoxifying anti-inflammatory compounds from green tea called catechins as green tea. So, so I think, you know, we're just sort of at the beginning of discovering all this, but there's enormous amounts of investment. And I think, I think the whole idea of, you know, these simple remove all subsidies or just tax, I mean, it's, it's way more complicated, but all these things are needed, and I think The goal is really to push the system economically to do the right thing. And that's what the beauty of regenerative agriculture is because it actually is better for everything. It's better for humans, it's better for the animals, better for the farmers, better for the economy. I mean, it's just, it's a win-win. There will be losers, right? Big ag will lose. People like Bayer, Monsanto, the Chem, CDAG companies, they're not going to be happy. The banks might not be happy. But I think it's a win-win at such a scale that I think it's.

So important to do.

So thank you Vivian for the question.

I'm so grateful and it felt like such a great one-on-one session with you and I always admired your work. So thank you so much for all that. I learned a lot.

Sure, thanks Vivian. So I think we have our next question will be from, no, I don't know who it's from, who's the next question? Michael, can you hear me, Michael?

I can hear you.

Great, what's your question?

Well, first just want to say big fan of the show, big fan of your books. Read the 10-day detox diet, read what the heck should I eat, and my wife and I enjoy cooking from what the heck should I cook. So thanks for all that.

Of course, welcome. Well, my question is about the free advertising. Thanks for the free advertising.

Your podcast. But yeah, all good stuff. And I think it was a recent episode that you had on supplements. And I confess I didn't listen to the whole thing. So hopefully the question wasn't already answered in there. But afterwards, I was thinking about supplements and I started just looking through the National Institutes of Health to see what foods were supplement dense. Could I get my supplements, everything nutrients I need from food? And I got onto calcium and was looking at how to get calcium. And it just seems like there's no good way to get calcium without eating a lot of dairy. So my question is, can you get calcium without eating a lot of dairy? and looking at that list, it seems like you'd have to eat just tons of kale and turnips.

And it doesn't make a lot of sense. Okay, well, there's two parts of that question. Can you get your vitamins and nutrients from food? And two, where do you get your calcium? So I'm gonna. I'm gonna dive into both of those. Okay. Okay. First of all, I had a patient once who said, Dr. Hyman, I don't want to take any vitamins. I want to get everything from food, and I'm gonna learn how to do that. And she was so diligent. She's like, okay, I need. 200 micrograms of selenium. So I need four Brazil nuts a day. I need 30 milligrams of zinc. So I need like 17 pumpkin seeds a day. And I need two grams of omega-3 fats. So I'm gonna eat 14 sardines a week. And I think it was great. I just love the idea of her doing that. And I think if you can get good food grown a good way and you wanna do that, all the power to you. But I would encourage you to test because I have been for 30 years testing people for nutritional levels. and every day I see deficiency. I mean, I just had a patient that she had iron deficiency. It was really common in menstruating woman. You know, it's gonna be hard unless she's eating a lot of meat to get that. And she might need a supplement. Vitamin D is another tricky one. You can eat a lot of herring, a lot of porcini mushrooms. You might be able to get your vitamin D up, but if you don't do that on a regular basis, you're either gonna need to go take vitamin D or be in the sun somewhere south of Atlanta, 20 minutes from 10 2:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., mostly naked, maybe a bathing suit, every day. So if you're not doing that, probably need vitamin D. Okay, so let's talk about calcium. Well, calcium is one of the biggest propaganda myths that's been ever perpetrated on the American public. Here's why. It's not about the calcium you eat. It's about the calcium you lose. It's about calcium balance. so there are countries where their intake of calcium is 300 milligrams a day, which is very little in Africa. They have no osteoporosis. If you look at the studies of people who drink a lot of milk, and this, this is an, I encourage you to Google milk and health New England Journal of Medicine.

Okay.

Milk and health New England Journal of Medicine. And if you're a nerdy guy like me, read the article. If not, you can go on medium and you can find an article by Dr. David Ludwig, which is the Consumer version. But essentially he, he and his colleague from Harvard, these are top Harvard researchers, had broken down all the myths about dairy and say that in fact, those people who are drinking more milk have more fractures, have more risk of various diseases, have more issues, especially if you drink low fat milk, you have more risk of weight gain because you're hungry because there's no fat. So, I mean, there's a whole bunch of issues around cancer and other things. So I think the myth that we have to have dairy is just a myth. In fact, the The Dairy Council was supported by the government. Well, there's something called the Checkoff Program, which is essentially a government program that ties basically money from the food industry from these councils like the Dairy Council, the Egg Council, the Beef Councils. And they're supposed to help do research and advance the research and understanding about these products. What they do is actually market for them. So they'll take this money and then the government pays for the Got Milk ads. Remember those Got Milk ads? Well, they were all false. And in fact, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, said, wait a minute, there isn't proof for the claims you're making. So stop running those ads. So you might have noticed those ads don't exist anymore. That wasn't an accident. They were working. They were working very well. But the other part of the government said, hey, you guys have no proof that what you're saying is true. The science doesn't support it. we are told to drink three glasses of milk a day by the government has nothing to do with science and has everything to do with lobbying. So, I think that that said, the things that cause you to lose your calcium are alcohol, caffeine, phosphoric acid, which is in soda, particularly Cokes, right? Colas, salt, sugar, stress, smoking, lack of exercise, obviously, lack of vitamin D. So I think vitamin D is far more important in maintaining your bone health than calcium. And, and I think that making sure your vitamin D levels between 50 and 75 is really key. So you can't just say, I'm gonna take this much vitamin D and be fine. You have to actually measure. Some people need 10, 000, some people need 1, 000 to get that.

I don't care about vitamin D and. bone health.

Oh, well, it is, it is critical. I mean, it's why they fortify milk with vitamin D. It's not naturally found in milk, right? It's not, it's not naturally milk.

Would it be fair to conclude that on that same National Institutes of Health where I was trying to get smart on calcium, the daily value of calcium.

I guess I should disregard that as well. Yeah, no, because it's like, it's like, well, if you're, if you're, if you're taking in like 300 and you're putting out 200, you're plus 100. you're taking in 1500 and you're putting out 1600 because of your lifestyle, you're losing 100. So it doesn't matter. I think with that said, the best source of calcium are tahini, tahini, which is sesame seeds, incredibly high in calcium, chia seeds, more calcium per serving than milk, and also sardines and salmon with the bones in them. You can eat the bones. That's how a lot of people got calcium. and of course all the dark green leafy vegetables. So, as long as you're balancing out your calcium by not doing all the things that aren't good for you anyway, right? Drinking soda and tons of salt and alcohol and too much stress and all the things I mentioned, then you should be fine.

Very helpful, thanks.

No problem. Okay, we have another question. Hi.

Hi there. Thanks for having me on. I love your podcast, the Doctor's Pharmacy. And I also love your cookbook, Food, what the Heck Should I Cook? And that is one of the reasons I have this question is, Because I am always looking for creative and delicious ways to eat my medicine. And I've been on a strict anti-inflammatory diet now for about almost six months.

Oh, how's it going?

It's going really well. Yeah, I am attempting to nip a diagnosis in the bud before it gets bad. And so I'm really excited about all the things that I've learned from you. And I love the cookbook. Mommy, all the recipes in your cookbook are delicious. and in particular, I was really surprised at how delicious the sardine cakes were.

Oh, yeah.

And because I've always kind of been like, sardines, I know they're good for me. I'm not sure why exactly, but. And I know they're also, like, a responsible thing for us to be buying and eating compared to other types of fish. But I. So my question is, what makes them so healthy and. what besides sardine cakes can I make with them? What are your favorite things to make with sardines?

Okay, great. So, you know, first of all, we just talked about milk, and milk is often called nature's perfect food, which it is, but only if you're a calf. Sardines, on the other hand, are nature's perfect food, and here's why. One, they're an incredibly rich source of protein. They're really low on the food chain, so they're really low in toxins. They are rich in omega-3 fats, one of the richest source of omega-3 fats. If you eat the bones, you get a lot of calcium. They're also a resource of selenium. And also they have iodine, which is really healthy for you. And, they have something called choline. They're one of the richest source of choline, which is one of the most important things for your brain health and for liver detoxification. So, they really are a superfood. Of course, my wife won't eat them. And no matter how great I make them, she won't eat them. But it's okay. She doesn't like fish. She doesn't like shellfish. She doesn't like anything. So she likes a lot of food, but just not seafood. And the way I like them, I mean, I'm sort of hardcore. So I just open up a can and just eat them on a cracker. Like, I'm just, I go for it because it's like, you know, but sometimes you can.

It's great for a picnic. It's really easy to pack on a picnic.

Yeah. So easy for picnic, you know, you can spray pickle lemon on them. Sometimes I'll mash them up and make like a sardine mash. You can put on crackers, you can put lemon, parsley, little garlic, salt, pepper, so you can kind of mush them up. Of course, there's the recipes in my cookbook, the smoked fish spreads. You can make like a fresh fish spread. You can put in olive oil and carrots, onions, celery, parsley, Little onion garlic powder, a little avocado mayo, a little vinegar. It's really, really yummy. The sardine cakes I love, which basically you just chop up the onions and basil and cilantro and green onions and little ginger, mustard, apple cider vinegar, paprika, salt, pepper, little eggs, and you sort of mush them all together and you make these little yummy sardine cakes. So I really love sardines. I love mackerel. You can get canned mackerel. You can get canned herring. I get it from. Yeah. My little choice. Seafood is a great resource. They really are very conscious about where they used to get their stuff. My wife, you know, really must love me because, you know, she went to Portugal for a trip, and her present to me was a big, giant box of Portuguese sardines. Wow. So, yeah. So she wouldn't eat him, but she, she lets me eat him. I just, but I just have to.

Brush my teeth before I kiss her. Yeah, but, yeah, it is kind of a smelly thing to bring. to, you know, into a room if people don't like them.

It's true, it's true. Awesome.

Well, thanks for answering the question. I'm going to have some sardines sometime soon.

Great. All right, we have our next guest. Thank you, Meg. Hi, how are you? Hi, Dr. Hyman.

Good, I'm doing well. How are you?

Good. You have a question?

Yes, so I've been listening to your podcast. I enjoyed that and got your recent cookbook.

And.

So my question is, I've started eating healthier and doing things that you recommend, reducing stress and exercising, trying to do it more regularly. and I'm looking at my cholesterol numbers, which are on the borderline. And what I get confused about is the role that saturated fat plays in my diet, because some doctors I hear talk about lowering your fat and trying to reduce saturated fat. But then I hear you talk about eating coconuts and... Yeah, it's confusing.

It is confusing. It's confusing for you. It's confusing for most doctors. It's confusing for nutritionists. It's confusing for pretty much everybody. And here's the reason. There is no one simple answer. We are complex human beings that are all genetically different and all respond differently to different diets. so I've had patients, for example, who had super high cholesterol and very high triglycerides, very low HDL, or overweight and struggled like crazy to lose weight and fix their cholesterol. And I put them on basically coconut oil and saturated fat butter diet. And their numbers dropped like, boom, just like cholesterol dropped 150 points, triglycerides dropped 300 points. HDL went up. 30 points. I mean, stuff you just never see. And she lost 20 pounds. I had another patient who was, who was a avid cyclist, and he wanted to try a more kind of ketogenic like diet. And, and he was, like, cycling 40, 50 miles a day, and, and his numbers went through the roof. And so there is a phenomena called lean mass hyperresponder, which I'm one of those, which is if you eat a lot of saturated fat, you actually can increase your lipids in a way that's probably not good. so we're all genetically very different. And one day there will be a test which you just prick your finger or take a cheek swab and you get a sample sent off to the lab and they'll say, gee, you should eat these fats and you shouldn't eat those fats. And we have some of that already. We do some of these testing at the Ultra Wellness Center, but, but I think we're gonna become much more sophisticated about it. So really, it's not also just about the LDL cholesterol, which most doctors focus on, which is really because we have drugs that are designed to focus on LDL cholesterol, right? I mean, it's really, right, it's not just the, the, the, the, the right thing to treat. I mean, it's sort of like the, the thing is if everything, if, if, if all you have to hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if all you have is drugs, the lower LDL, then that's the problem. Right. But it turns out it's really not the problem. The problem is metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes or insulin resistance, which affects probably 70, probably to 88 of the population to some degree. And that is what drives most of the problem. That's driven by carbohydrates, not by fat. So I've written a book called Eat Fat, Get Thin, which I went into all this in great detail. And the science has certainly Advanced since then, but it's pretty much the principles are the same. That. That it's starch and sugar that are driving the bad cholesterol profile. We call the atherogenic profile. That means you get small, dense LDL particles. You get a lot of them. You get high triglycerides, you get low HDL, you get lots of inflammation. Your blood sugar is a little too high, your insulin is a little too high. that all drives high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar. That is not fixed by eating less fat. That's fixed by eating more fat and by eating less starch and sugar or no starch and sugar, depending how severe you are if you're diabetic, you might need to do that. So you have to also look at the whole profile. And there's a test that most doctors don't do. It's called NMR or it's called Cardio IQ. NMR is from LabCorp, which is something you can just get your doctor to order. from Quest, which also you can get your doctor order. And that looks at the particle number, the particle size of both HDL, LDL, triglycerides. So, it's a much more sophisticated test. What we're doing now is basically like looking at a, you know, like looking at an X-ray instead of an MRI. In fact, the test that's used to actually or scale, 'cause the LDL particles we measure, the LDL cholesterol and cholesterol we're measuring by weight. So, it's milligrams per deciliter. So, how much is your cholesterol weigh? That's how we figured out. the NMR test is actually looking at it through a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. So NMR stands for an MRI of your cholesterol, literally. And that is way more effective in determining your risk and what you should do about it. For example, if your LDL was 140, but your, which should be, let's say under 70 doctors are talking or under 100, but your HDL was 80 and your triglycerides were 50, I'm not worried and your insulin was three and your blood sugar was 75. I'm not worried at all. On the other hand, if your LDL is high and you have a lot of small particles and you have a lot of particle number, then I'm more worried. So it's a really personalized, individualized approach and your traditional doctor won't really think about it that way. So you kind of have to read around and look what you're doing. So I think the biggest thing I would say to most people is if you think saturated fat is an issue, you can still eat fat. just eat avocados and nuts and seeds and things like that. Coconut oil is saturated fat, so some people are saturated fat sensitive, but most of us are not. Did that answer your question, Roger?

Yeah, it did. I also noticed that my triglycerides in my HDL are great, but my sugar isn't where it should be either. There might be something to what you're saying about the whole metabolic syndrome.

Yeah, well you can do the mirror test. It's a very effective test. What you do is you take off your shirt and you look in the mirror and you jump up and down. If your stomach jiggles, it's probably an issue.

All right, thank you.

That's helpful. Sure. It's all about the belly fat. So yeah, the belly fat is going to drive a lot of the issues. So that's it for our show today. If you want to ask me a question in the future, you can text me. Yes, you can text me 413-225-5555. 855-8995. Use the AskMark and my team might pick your question for one of our future calls and I'll get to chat with you myself, which I'd love to do. Thanks for joining us today on this special episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy called AskMark and that's me. hi, everyone.

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