Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: My Go-To Breakfast, Alcohol Consumption, And More

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Okay, here we go.

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Ask Mark Anything.

My name is Hershel Perth. I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager and I'm joined by Darcy Gross. Hi Darcy.

Hi.

And Darcy is one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries and of course we're here with Dr. Hyman.

Hi Dr. Hyman. hi, everybody.

Well, thanks for being here with us today. And we're ready to ask Mark anything. So we're going to start off with a fun question today. Dr. Hyman, what'd you eat for breakfast this morning?

Well, I did my workout, my little TV12 workout before the podcast, and I made my shake, which basically I use regeneratively raised goat whey. I I have some Pegan powder left. Sorry, for those of you who like it and no more available. I have some left. I use that. I throw in some creatine for muscle building. I use an adaptogenic tartome blend, stamina seven. I've put in MitoPure, which is urolithin A to help my mitochondria rejuvenate. And then what else did I put in there? Blueberries, banana, a little bit of banana, and some academia milk. Oh, yeah.

And gut food.

I put in a scoop of gut food for my tummy. So that's my basic shake. And I had that, and I'm. That keeps me, like, even my mood, my energy, even throughout most of the day. I mean, I literally can have that. you could shake like that for breakfast and probably 40 grams of protein in it, and it asked me well into the afternoon. So I'm, I'm, I'm really happy I had my shake this morning. Yeah. So are we?

Seems like you're all ready to go for our question. So we'll go ahead and get started. I know I was, I was about.

To do this, and then I was like, oh, geez, I better, I, because I was up and I didn't want to eat early. I want to have a little time restricted eating. So I, I kind of worked out and I just, Got a little crunch for time, so I basically kind of have my shake and then I'm good now.

Okay. So excited that you're all ready to go and pumped up and had your protein. And so you're ready to pull out all the information and answer all these questions. So, Darcy, I'll go to you for the first actual question.

Yeah, for sure. All right, jumping right in. What is the purpose of betaine hydrochloric acid, HCL, as a supplement?

Yeah.

So this is, I mean, something that has many benefits. So, I'm betting is some methyl donor and the hydrochloric acid part really helps to improve digestion. So a lot of people have achlorhydria, which is a, or some version of it. And then it's common as we get older, we lose stomach acid and we have trouble with digesting our food. We may see undigested food in our stool. We might see, we might have like heartburn, even those paradox where you think, oh, I'm having heartburn. Actually, you may need more digestive support. You might feel bloated or distended. You might have maybe overgrowth of yeast and other things that can as a result of not having enough stomach acid. And so there's a lot of reasons for it, but often people who have really, really struggle with digestion and can actually take this before they eat and can help improve their overall digestion. We, we often do a challenge or loading test, which essentially you take an increasing amount before every meal until you start feel a little burning in your stomach, and then you reduce the dose. And over time you'll need less and less. And once you heal your gut, you probably won't need it at all, but it is a very Very helpful therapeutic strategy for people with various kinds of gut issues.

Is that something that can be achieved by taking other types of acids like apple cider vinegar?

Yeah, I was gonna say that. So people use other remedies, whether it's bitters, which are something that have been used for centuries as an herbal remedy for digestion, which help, or using apple cider vinegar can help too. So there's a lot of ways to do this, but I think I found I don't use it a lot, but I do find it for certain select patients can be extremely helpful.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you. And over to you, Herschel.

So we've talked a lot about pancreatic health in previous episodes, but this question is about supplements. So are there any supplements or medications that a person should or should not be taking in order to protect their pancreas if they have a history of pancreatic cancer?

Yeah, I mean, I think I understand the question. I think, you know, I want to sort of reframe it a little bit. You know, pancreatic cancer, we've talked about, but it's a really serious problem and often hard to diagnose and diagnose late. And it's generally caused by insulin resistance, which seems paradoxical, but it actually, the pancreas makes insulin, among other things, digestive enzymes. And the high levels of sugar and starch in a diet are driving an increase in insulin resistance, which increases your risk of pancreatic cancer. So from a dietary point of view, it's really important to eat a low glycemic, higher fat, healthy diet with full of phytochemicals, basically the Pegan diet. You also need to take supplements that could help with regulating blood sugar in some of those fiber, extra fiber, things like magnesium, fish oil, vitamin D, all these help improve insulin sensitivity. And I think there are other herbs that I often will use as well. So it's like berberine we talked about in a previous AMA. So I think there's a lot of things we can do supplement wise, but it really is more of a lifestyle disease and I think it's more concerning. Also, there's actually a new diagnostic test that's worth considering if you have a family history. you know, pancreatic cancer usually doesn't present till very late as symptoms, so you can have it and be fine. And then, boom, you're at stage four pancreatic cancer, and you're done in a year. So it's not, it's not great. And there's no good screening test for it. There's no good ways to look for it. Until recently, there's a new test called the gallery test, and that gallery test measures a liquid biopsy. Now it measures DNA fragments from cancers, and it can be very specific to the cancer and where it's from. So I recently had a patient who was seen by their doctor. who had had breast cancer, had a clean bill of health, everything was normal. He said, you,'re fine, don't worry, it's five years out. And we did a Grail test, this Gallery test by Grail, and she had breast cancer that lit up. So we did a PET scan, we found she had nodes in her hilum, which is in the chest, so she had lymph nodes that were affected and it spread. So it wasn't great news, but we were able to get it a lot earlier and deal with it, which I will, I think, hopefully save her life. same thing with pancreatic cancer. You go, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. But if you know, then you can actually do something about it. So I think knowledge is power. And the more knowledge we have, the more ability you have to actually take control of your life and to be proactive among, among that and other cancers. 50 cancers, it actually screens for 60 of the most common cancers. So it's, it's a, it's a, it's not a perfect test, but it does actually help. and making decisions about what to do, particularly if you have a family history and you're worried.

Oh, that's super helpful. Is that something that you feel is available around the country or do you have to go to specific locations to get?

Yeah, so I offer it in my practice. You can kind of Google it and learn about it. It's part of Function Health, which is a company I co-founded. We offer it so people can go to Quest and they'll draw the lab. along with their membership. It's a $500 year membership for $15,000 for the test that helps empower you to take control of your own health. And one of the things that we offer is a Grail test. So you can actually just get that even without a doctor's order and find out what's going on. And then of course, you know, if you find a result, you've got to learn how to deal with it. And we, you know, there's a whole team that can help guide you on.

What to do and where to go and how to manage it. Okay, super helpful.

Darcy, over to you for the next one. All right, so kind of switching gears, do you believe that alcohol impacts women and men differently if let's just say for example, all the other factors are the same, age, diet, activity level, et cetera?

Yeah, for sure. It 100% does because what alcohol is is a poison and it poisons the liver and it causes particularly for women higher levels of estrogen. high levels of estrogen over time increase the risk of breast cancer and ovarian cancer and uterine cancer. And so we know that, for example, if a woman has one glass of wine a night, one glass, the risk of breast cancer goes up by 40% and many people have more than that. So alcohol is really much more concerning and they can also cause what we call the estrogen toxicity independent of cancer, it increases the estrogen levels and then the relative ratio of estrogen progesterone is higher, so you have higher estrogen to progesterone. And that can lead to uterine fibroids, to uterine cancer, to heavy menstrual periods, to worsening PMS, to perimenopausal symptoms that are worse, to menopausal symptoms that are worse. So it absolutely is worse for you as a woman than it is for a man. not good for a man either. Obviously has all the downside effects of increased cancer risk, brain deterioration, impaired sleep, you know, other issues. So I, I don't really think there's a safe level of alcohol as a recreational substance. Fine. Once in a while, it's not gonna hurt you. Um, what about the blue zones? They all drink wine and everything. I'm like they did, but they literally had everything else right. Like they literally had everything else right. Their diet was rich in phytochemicals and medicines. They didn't have any of the processed food we eat. They exercise every day of their life just as an old part of how their life was they had meaning and purpose and sense of belonging and community and love. They had these deep social connections that are so important at determining your longevity and your health. So I think, you know, we can't just kind of go by that. I think we have to look at, really look at the data. And I think depending on your genetics too, you might be more or less susceptible to issues. So I think for women, it is, is it a bigger risk?

Yeah, for sure. Well, that's helpful. Thank you, Dr. Hyman. And crucial.

So the next question is about peptides. What are peptides and who can benefit from their use?

Great question. You know, peptides are sort of emerging in the medical field as a powerful therapy for many different problems. And people are becoming more aware of them. They're trying to, their doctors are prescribing them mostly sort of alternative-ish doctors. But, but people don't understand what is a peptide. Peptide is a small protein, like a mini protein made up of 20 or less amino acids. Proteins actually have more than 20. And so it's kind of a mini protein. Now, what do proteins do in the body? Think of them as like the communication superhighway, the information superhighway. And they are, there are thousands and thousands of peptides that your body uses regulators of every function in your body, your immune system, repairing tissues, hormones, brain function, mitochondrial function, metabolism. now you're familiar with a couple of peptides. Insulin is a peptide, okay? Ozempic, which you might have heard about in the news or on TV or somewhere from your doctor, I hope not, but Ozempic is a peptide called semaglutide, which is important in regulating something called GLP-1, which is a glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist. Essentially, it helps with blood sugar control. It's good for diabetics. It also has central effects in regulating appetite. It makes you feel full, it can sometimes cause digestive issues. And so it's being now touted as a solution for obesity, which is kind of ridiculous because the solution for obesity is changing our toxic food environment and our lifestyle and our diet, and it works better than the medication without any side effects. So when these, these, there are over, you know, I think 70 peptides that have been approved by the FDA for various kinds of medical interventions, and, and they definitely have a huge role in medicine. I personally use them. for various conditions. I've had, for example, injury or I'd work out a lot. So I basically, you know, pull this or pull that and, and, and they use this peptide called BP 157. That's powerful for repair and regeneration. It's quite amazing. I was just like injected by bicep 10 has been irritating me. I injected it and it's like almost gone within a day. So I think there's a lot of powerful benefits of peptides. They can have side effects. like thymus and glutathione, and then you have to be conscious of what they are. But many, many people who have chronic conditions can benefit from it. For example, the immune peptides like thymus and alpha-1 and others can actually be helpful in regulating immunity. So, for example, if I'm exposed to somebody who's sick or if I'm going to a concert and I don't want to get COVID, I'll shoot up with a bunch of thymus and alpha-1. And I actually was with someone who had COVID in a car for an hour and a half. before they knew they had COVID, I never got it because I use these peptides and it's impressive. So they have many, many uses and there are many, many different peptides. I do write about them in Young Forever and some of the most common peptides, what they're used for, how they're used, and I think we're going to see more and more of this over time.

Yeah, super helpful. Thanks for that information, Darcy, over to you.

All right. So what is the best way to assess your circulatory or and/or like blood vessel health? and how about we'll tack on and also how to support that as well. Great.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, in your blood pressure cuff is a good way. You could see are you have high or low blood pressure. That's a great way to look indirectly at your blood vessel Health. There are also ways to look at your health through Imaging. If you're looking at your coronary circulation, you can use something called the clearly test, which is an AI test basically that uses a CT scan, but uses an AI software to look at soft plaque and inflammation within that plaque and is a much better predictor, for example, of cardiac events and heart attacks than a typical coronary calcium score or, you know, an EKG or a cardiac stress test. So you can get a really good idea of what your vessels look like, how much plaque is there, what kind of plaque is there, the soft plaque, is it inflamed, is it not inflamed? And it's a really great advance in medical diagnostics. Also, crowded ultrasound is a great way to look at your blood vessels. You can look at your carotids, which are the main arteries that feed your brain. if they have thickening or plaque, you can see and you can actually intervene to do things about that. Also, you can look at your, your heart rate variability, that's sort of an indirect measure of your parasympathetic sympathetic tone that can measure the, the sort of health of your blood vessels. There's also something called an endo pat machine, which looks at the kind of elasticity of your blood vessels. And the more elastic, the more flexible they are, the healthier. If you have stiff, you know, pipes, you know, it's like thinking about like a brand new hose, you know, it's flexible, it's soft, it can work, but if you lead out the sun, it gets cracked and dried out, you know, it'll break and be brittle. It's the same thing with your blood vessels. You want to have these soft pliable blood vessels. And so you can look at the kind of vascular elasticity through some of these tests that measure blood vessel function. So there's a lot of diagnostics you can use. and I think, you know, we, we, we can, we can, I mean, there's many, many tests. I don't know how deep we want to get into it, but, like, looking for vascular disease in your legs and, you know, lower, like, kind of blood pressure, impedance tests, vascular impedance test looks at blood flow in your lower circulation. So there's a lot of Diagnostics we do in medicine to look at your blood vessel and circulatory Health. Also, you can just look at your, your blood numbers. You know, CRP is a measure of inflammation, oxidative stress. These, you can right away see that your blood vessel is going to problematically harmed. In terms of things to do about it, I think, you know, obviously the same usual diet and lifestyle things that I recommend. There's a few supplements that can be helpful. Arterosil, which is a really new product, relatively new product that helps with the inflammatory responses, bioflavonoids we talked about, which are important, which you can get from, from all kinds of plants and take them as well. And, and there's, there's just, you things that increase nitric oxide, very helpful for your circulation, like breathing through your nose and certain foods that contain arginine like almonds and even sort of supplements that can boost nitric oxide like arginine. So I think there's a lot of things you can do to improve your circulatory and vascular health.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, Plus, Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus monthly functional deep dive episodes. I guess that's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Then head on over to the Doctor's Pharmacy on Apple Podcast and sign up for your seven day free trial.

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