How Eating An Anti-Inflammatory Diet Is Key To Regaining Your Health

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

Go look in your kitchen. Get rid of all the corn, soy, canola, cottonseed oil. They just do not belong in your diet because every time you go out to eat, there's a likelihood that you're eating one of those oils and that's, you know, very much contributing to the demise of our health in this world.

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Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kasia Perowietz, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. Just about every chronic health problem is driven by inflammation or has an inflammatory component. This comes as no surprise when we consider the inflammatory nature of our modern day diets. Simply put, the food we eat is making us sick and inflamed. Food activist Vani Hari recently shared her.

Personal realization about this in her conversation with Dr. Hyman. as a child, I was severely sick. I mean, on several medications, eczema all over my body, asthma, always just, you know, having a very allergic reaction to every season, just always feeling under the weather or having a stomach ache. And I felt like a zombie for most of my life. And it wasn't until my early 20s where I hit rock bottom, where I was overweight, I was working this corporate job, in the rat race lifestyle, trying to keep up with my co-workers and just work through breakfast, lunch and dinner and eat whatever's being catered in or sent into the office that I finally made a choice and it took, you know, being hospitalized, getting my appendix out and taking a long time to recover from that surgery to finally say, okay, enough's enough. And so what I did back then, which, you know, We didn't have Google when I was going through high school, so I learned how to research the hard way. You go to the library, you check out periodicals, you look through law journals, you look through the microfiche, all that kind of stuff. And so I went to the library to learn about health and how to improve my health and lose weight and feel better. And one of the first books that I came across was actually by Gabriel Cousens. Yeah. And it's unconscious eating. And he had this concept in there that just hit my head so hard that I was just like, what have I been doing? And what he says in this book is that the majority of foods on a grocery store shelf are dead. It's dead food. And that's exactly how I felt for most of my life was dead. I felt like a zombie. And so I was like, oh, okay, I got it. I gotta eat alive food. I gotta eat real food that comes from nature. And so I slowly started to make these changes and then finding alternative societies that didn't eat kind of the garbage out there, didn't eat the processed food, weren't going to the fast foods and trying to find these different role models and books and other things. of course, one of your first books, Ultra Metabolism back then, you know, I came across and I was like, yes, this is it, right?

And.

So I started to make these changes and everyone around me was like, Bonnie, what's going on? You look like a completely different person. And I look back at those pictures of when I was so inflamed. I mean, 'cause really that's what it was. It was just inflammation of my entire body. And when I look back at those pictures, I feel the pain that I used to feel. And you ask me, what drives your passion for quality ingredients and doing this work? It's that feeling of, I don't want anyone to feel that way. And I know there are so many people out there that feel that way right now, and they have no idea how easy it is to stop feeling that way and make a change for the better, and their whole life can improve. I think there's so many people in this world right now are on these endless cycles of trying to lose weight every few months, and then they gain it back, and then they get another health ailment, and then they gain more weight, and then they lose it, and then they gain it back, and they're just on this constant yo-yo cycle. But when you move to real food, whole food that hasn't been adulterated by the food industry, your body regulates And I mean, I have so many stories of people in my family and people you've helped, like when I called you when my dad was really sick and I explained everything about what was happening with my dad and you told me, you said, Bonnie, it sounds like inflammation of the brain, diabetes of the brain. You need to get his food under control and that those episodes will go away. He will get better. And that's exactly what's happening.

Inflammation is part of the body's natural defense system. However, when your immune system shifts out of balance, inflammation can run rampant, causing a chronic smoldering fire inside of your body that contributes to illness and disease. Dr. Hyman discussed how our diet drives.

Inflammatory diseases in his conversation with Dr. David Perlmutter. You talked about inflammation being a huge issue in Alzheimer's, but it's also an issue in depression. in ADHD, in autism, in Parkinson's disease.

In cancer, in diabetes, in coronary artery disease.

It's pretty much every chronic illness.

Exactly.

Particularly the brain and I don't think people realize that. So the question is, what is driving all this inflammation?

In a word, our diets. And we can start there and then work through the whole mechanistic pathway that ultimately leads to people losing their cognitive function. So our diets being higher in simple carbohydrates with reduction in healthy fat, reduction in dietary fiber, paves the way through multiple mechanisms for our blood sugars to rise, our insulin activity to reduce, and ultimately that leads to inflammation.

And they call Alzheimer's now type 3 diabetes. That's right.

Diabetes of the brain. Exactly right. So It puts the ball back in the court of you, the consumer, not you, Mark Hyman, the doctor, but you, the consumer, to do something and do it right now. And that is simply change your diet. Other things are really important, restorative sleep, aerobic exercise, meditation. We could talk about a lot of things.

Yeah, it's anti-inflammatory to meditate.

You bet. But if we can simply focus on the fact that the global diet is becoming westernized. That is increasing inflammation globally. And we're seeing incredible increased rates of things like Alzheimer's globally. Those are important dots to connect and important dots to leverage because we can turn this thing around.

Yeah.

It's both the diet and how the diet affects our microbiome.

Exactly right.

Which is influencing our brain all the time through creating inflammatory molecules that get to the brain. And how does your poop get to your brain? That doesn't even make sense. Could you break that down for us?

Sure, break down the poop. And as you've written about, and you coined the term diobesity, the relationship between diabetes, higher blood sugar, obesity, creation of inflammatory chemicals, damaging the brain, heart, et cetera, we now know that What sets the, what we call the set point of inflammation in the body is a one cell layer thick that, as you've said in the past, separates the garbage dump. Those are your words.

Yeah.

From, right?

Sewer. I think I call it a sewer.

From the rest of the body. Chemicals in the gut remain, by and large, dangerous, damaging chemicals. We call them antigens. Need to stay there. When they transgress the gut lining, get through the gut lining, they stimulate immune cells to create the very mediators of inflammation, chemicals, that we call cytokines that then initiate these damaging activities for cells throughout the body. The downstream effect of inflammation is a turning on of the production of chemicals called free radicals, damaging chemicals that damage our protein, our fat, and even our DNA, and even our energy producers called mitochondria. So it all starts with diet. Diet nurtures our 100 trillion microbial friends that live in the gut and want me to be healthy. They want you to be healthy, but we have to feed them right. The ball is very much on your side of the net. It's not up to me on the other side of the net, the doctor to fix this. It's up to you to hit that ball appropriately with some topspin so that I can return it. Give it a good shot. And here's how to do it.

How?

The broad strokes are more dietary fiber, less simple carbohydrates, and changing the quality of the fat that we eat. I think nothing's indelible, but I think those are important bullet points that if we could just get that message across, that's really very, very fundamental. The type of fat that is eaten in Western cultures is awful. It's highly processed Omega-6 oils.

Soybean oil, canola oil.

Soybean oil, sunflower that dramatically increase the production of inflammatory chemicals in the body and get back to where you and I started our conversation today.

These are new. I mean, we didn't have these oils a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago. You're right. We, we've increased our intake of soybean oil, which is now 10% of our.

Calories, 1000 fold since 1900. And canola oil that, health advocates still talk about, which was developed at the turn of the century as an industrial oil to lubricate machinery.

Whereas the wrong foods will make you sick, the right foods will transform your body in even just a few days. Dr. Hyman and Vani Hari also discuss how we can start to turn our health around by making more informed decisions about what we eat.

We're in a situation right now where we need to take our health very seriously. If anything about the world's events today show you is that government is not going to save us. We need to save ourselves. And we're going to have to save our kids and we're going to have to save our families. And so we have the responsibility to learn about these chemicals in food. and make a choice not to obviously buy these products and support these companies and vote with our dollars.

I'm a little more hardcore than you. I'm like, don't buy anything with a label. I love it. I love it. If it ain't made by God, don't eat it. If it's made by man, don't eat it. Make sure you don't eat it, right? So you wanna make sure if you look at a food, you recognize what it is. An avocado is made by God, but a Twinkie isn't and Lucky Charms are certainly not made by God.

So that's an easy thing.

It's hard to do because people want convenience, I understand. But we really have a crisis in this country. But one of the things you help us understand is how to read labels and how to be a smart consumer. Because unless we're paying attention, and I even get duped sometimes, sometimes I'll pick up something that looks healthy and I'll forget to turn the ingredient list over and I'm like, I get home, I'm like, oh God, this is terrible. Why would I even want to eat this?

You know, I think what's really important about reading labels is that that there's this kind of three question detox that I talk about at the end of Feeding youg Lies. And this is kind of how you start the process of really training your mind to eat real food. You start with the question, the first question, what are the ingredients? So you have to know kind of everything that you're eating. And so if you sit down for a meal and you don't know the ingredients, stop eating that meal and find out. Once you read the ingredients and look at them, do you understand them all? Are they real food? Is it an apple, cinnamon, and sea salt, or is it TBHQ and blue number one? TBHQ, by the way, is a very popular synthetic preservative that they use in very popular products and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups comes to mind.

Oh, no, I used to love those.

Oh, yeah. And this is actually an ingredient that negatively affects your T-cells in your bodies and promotes allergies. So, if you have an allergy to anything, it can just increase your immune response to that allergy, and you can have a very adverse reaction. And if you eat a lot of foods with this, It's been linked to vision disturbances, stomach cancer, behavioral problems in children, all sorts of things. This is a preservative that's in a lot of things. But when you read that on a label, TBHQ, you have to ask yourself, what is that? That leads you to the second question, which is, are these ingredients nutritious? Is TBHQ nutritious?

Hell no.

Hell no, right? Then you start to realize, why am I eating these non-foods? nutritious ingredients and maybe I need to choose something different. And then the third question you ask yourself is, where do these ingredients come from? Are they made in a laboratory, in a chemical factory? And in the case of natural flavors that you mentioned, yes, they are. And so removing natural flavors from your diet is like the number one thing, I think. And it's so, you know, even though there's many more chemicals that are many more, much more harmful to you, almost 99% of the products on product shelves at the grocery store have natural flavor. So if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. So one of the things that I want you to do when you go look in your kitchen, if you're watching this, and I just want to make sure you just get rid of all the corn, soy, canola, cottonseed oil, any of those just throw them away, get rid of them, don't even donate them. They just do not belong in your diet because every time you go out to eat, there's a likelihood that you're eating one of those oils and that's very much contributing to the demise of our health in this world. Not only are those oils high in omega-6, which again affect our omega-3 balance, but also are somewhat rancid of the way that they're produced. They are produced with hexane, a carcinogen a xenogenic substance that is a chemical that allows the solvent to allow them to extract the oils from corn and soy, et cetera. And this is a very popular way to extract the oils. And it's something that the FDA doesn't even regulate, doesn't even test for the hexane residue that's left in a lot of these oils. So when you're cooking with an oil, I want you to start with something that is as close to nature as possible. An extra virgin olive oil, unrefined coconut oil. I found that actually refined coconut oil is a great substitute for frying things in. The reason is because it doesn't have the flavor of coconut oil but has some health benefit versus frying in a corn or canola oil or soybean oil. And grass-fed butter and ghee. those four the most in my kitchen.

What about avocado oil?

I do use some avocado oil in some of the products from Primal Kitchen and others that have popularized avocado oil.

Okay, last question because this is really important. You are guiding us on how to reclaim our health and reclaim our kitchens and our bodies through making different choices about what we eat personally and what we feed our families. But you're also driving huge change in the food system. And my question to you, Bonnie, is people listening might go, well, she's very special, she's an activist, what can I do? I can't make a difference. But that's not really true.

So what can people do?

What action things can people do to be our own food activists and advocates and change the system? Because we all need to change the system together.

So the best thing that people can do is to share what they learn about food with the people they love, their friends, their family, do whatever they can to teach them, educate them. If you learn about an ingredient, tell someone about it. Try not to be the food police or go into people's pantries and throw stuff out like I do. But you can do it in a very respectful way and an educational way. And that's how you bring about changes through education of what's in our food, and how to make the changes. When you go to a party and you know there's going to be a lot of bad food, always bring something that's amazing and healthy, that's delicious so that people can see what it tastes like and try a new food and really become the change, right? Be the change in your environment and to those around you.

Taking back our kitchens and embracing the act of cooking real food is one of the single most important things we can do to reclaim our health. While food is the primary driver of our chronic disease epidemic, the good news is it is also the solution. Not just for prevention, but for reversal or even long-standing and difficult to treat chronic diseases. And it works fast. Not in years, but in weeks or months, sometimes even days. If you'd like to learn more about the topics you heard today, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Bonnie Hays and Dr. David Perlmutter. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. this podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

Healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.