How Our Food System Harms Humans And The Planet

So the very way we are growing food is destroying our ability to grow food in the future. Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation really matters to all of us and it matters to me a lot. And our special guest today, you're going to love, it's me. This is my most vulnerable podcast, yes, talking about some of the most important issues that I care about today that I think matter to all of us. So in order to actually interview me, I'm asking my CEO and partner, Drew Perrotta, who's an amazing man, has his own broken brain podcast, which is super popular to interview me about me and my new book.

Mark, welcome to your podcast.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

It's an honor to be here. And like Mark said, we're turning the tables. We're putting Mark in the interview seat so we can talk about how he lives, what he eats, what supplements he takes. We'll also get the inside scoop on his new book, Food Fix, and cover some of your most pressing questions for everybody listening. This podcast is going to be in two parts. This is part one. We're going to break it up into two because it's so long. Stay tuned for part two and make sure you listen to that. Now, a little bit about our guest, the man, the myth, the legend, Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician and internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator and advocate.

Okay, do this short one.

In the field of functional medicine, he's written a bunch of books, 12 New York Best Sellers.

Host of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Host of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Work on policy? At the Cleveland Clinic Center of Functional Medicine. And most importantly, when people ask me, Drew, you're close with Mark, he's your business partner, he's your friend, who is he really? I said, well, first of all, I know the question that they're asking, which.

Is, does he practice what he preaches?

And he does. Yeah, we're going to yoga after this, right? We're going to yoga after this. He eats the way that he describes.

And most importantly, I tell them that-- With an occasional tequila. With an occasional tequila, because, hey, life is about balance. Less occasional now, meaning less, 'cause I just don't want it as much. Yes.

But most importantly, he is grateful. That's how I always think about you, Mark. You always have a lot of gratitude to share with not only me, but the team, the people that are in your lives, your family, the partners that you are working with to change the food system and change the world. And I wanna acknowledge you for that, because it's your show. And I wanna say that we see you, we see how you show up in the world. And if I can speak on behalf of the listeners of this podcast, Thank you for everything you've done over the last 60 years.

Oh, yeah. Geez.

And helping us with our health. And thank you for putting out so much content for free. We really appreciate it.

Well, you know, the truth is that when I got very sick almost 30 years ago and discovered this new way of thinking about healing and the body functional medicine and use it to heal myself and my patients, it just I just became on a mission to share this because there's so much needless suffering in the world. And I realize my mission is to help end that needless suffering. And there's some things we can't do anything about, you know, natural disasters, war, bad stuff happens. But there's stuff we can do something about. And I don't think people need to suffer the way they do from chronic illness and from so many things that are caused by the food we eat and the food system, which is why I'm excited to talk about it today.

It's so true. And, you know, natural disasters, terrorism, these things that get so much attention and they're horrific and bad. They are a small factor of what really ails us and actually contributes to death on a daily basis. The number one thing that's killing us is actually our food.

Yeah, not smoking, not guns, not accidents, not war. It's food. It's the number one killer. 11 million people, I think that's a conservative number, based on a study called the Global Burden of Disease Study of 195 countries, found that 11 million people die every year from eating too much ultra processed food, and I'll define that in a minute, and not enough good food. Whole foods, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, real food. And that's striking to me because if there was a virus like Ebola or Zika or something was killing 11 million people or AIDS, which affected a fraction of that, we would be all over it as a global community. Scientists, politicians, business innovators, pharmacy companies, everybody would be working on solving the problem. And yet, this is an invisible problem. 95% of the world's global resources for disease are spent on infectious disease in terms of NGOs, governments and so forth. The Gates Foundation, for example, malaria, TB, AIDS, important issues to solve. But they're only a fraction of the deaths now on the planet. They're maybe a third of the deaths compared to two-thirds that come from chronic disease caused by food. And yet we don't really have a global effort to solve this.

Yeah, in fact you say that we used to be dying primarily because we didn't have enough.

Yes, that's right.

And there are still people in the world that are dying or in a really bad state of health because they don't have access.

Access.

And that's a very sad situation. But the vast majority now, in fact, more people are dying from something else. And that something else is obesity, chronic disease. Yes.

Yeah, there's 2.1, 2.3 million, depending how you slice it, people who are overweight on the planet and 800 million or so who are hungry. And there's far more than enough calories to feed everybody. It's just a distribution problem. And obesity is actually a climate problem because we're having to grow so much food to feed so many calories to people that it actually is contributing to climate change.

So I want to take a pause because I shared in the podcast earlier, many listeners of your podcast don't know that you recently turned 60.

Oh yeah.

And 60 is a milestone year. You have plenty of life left. You look great for 60. Anybody who follows your Instagram, you're out there working out, doing your thing.

Do my robes.

Doing your robes at the gym. And 60 is definitely a year where people reflect back and they really ask themselves, what am I really standing for? What's the legacy that I wanna live in the next part of my life and what I wanna do? And I've seen an incredible shift and I saw this happen about end of two years ago as you're starting to prepare for this and where you are in your career, that the topic was shifting. It wasn't just about how to get the individual healthy. It was about how to get the society healthy. When did that shift for you?

Well, I've been thinking about this for a long time. Yeah, I was thinking back, you know, I wrote Blood Sugar Solution and I talked about the, you know, the toxic triad of big food, big pharma, and big ag, right? So I was always thinking about these issues, but it was sort of a sideline. And then I began to really think about, look, I'm sitting in my office every day seeing patients who are sick from the food they eat. Not everybody, but most of the time, sometimes it's environmental toxins and viruses and Lyme disease and other things. But most of the time, It's food. And then I begin to think about as a functional medicine doctor, what's the cause? I always ask why, why, why, why. So why are they sick? It's the food. Why do we have the food? It's the food system. Why do we have the food system? It's our food policies. Why do we have our food policies? Because we have a $15 trillion food industry and ag industry that is influencing the political process and driving the policies that are counterproductive to public health, to the economy, to the climate, to the environment, to social justice, to national security, to academic achievement. All these things are undermined by our policies, which is crazy because the government's supposed to create policies that help support citizens instead of corporations. Unfortunately, that's not the way it is today. And the reason I decided to focus on this so much is because I realized in order to solve my patients' problems, I couldn't do it in the doctor's office. I couldn't do it in the hospital or the clinic. I had to do it at the root cause, which is in the kitchen, in the grocery store, on the farm.

At the seed level, all the way through the food chain. I had to think about that. So take this more personal. you spend part of your time at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine.

Yes.

And the local population around that area is much more diverse than your home state of Massachusetts, where you live.

Which is all white.

It's much more diverse and you have a lot of people that are coming from all sorts of different economic backgrounds. Give us a personal anecdote or story about trying to work with people's health over there and doing your best and how you sort of made that connection that we need to go even bigger than just working with the individuals on the ground as you were?

Well, I mean, there's a lot of components to that question. I think that what's really true is that the people who are most affected by our food system are the poor and minorities. African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans are disproportionately affected by chronic disease caused by food. They call these health disparities or health inequities. And even people who are white and are not thriving economically also struggle because they live in areas where there's not access to healthy food or they don't have the education and knowledge about this. And I think, you know, I was sort of shocked, you know, about my own prejudice when I went to South Carolina. to work on the movie Fed Up, which came out in 2014 about the way in which the food industry causes obesity through the promotion of sugar and processed foods. And one family was a white family in Easley, South Carolina that lived in one of the worst food deserts in America and they were severely overweight. The father was diabetic on dialysis already at 42. The mother was massively overweight. The son was 15, 16. almost diabetic, very, very overweight. And they were all desperate to get healthy, but they did not know what to do. And I think I had a prejudice that all people kind of know they shouldn't drink soda and they know they should, you know, not eat too much sugar and starch. And, you know, I think I just sort of living in a bubble. And I was, like, shocked that they were desperate to get healthy because the father had to lose 45 pounds to get a kidney, which he couldn't get if he didn't lose the weight. And they didn't know what to do. And they were crying about it. And I'm like, look, here's how you cook a simple meal. Here's some real ingredients.

Everything in their kitchen was processed, packaged, frozen.

Deep fried. I mean, they didn't know what to do and they were trying to do the right thing.

They had a low-fat salad dressing.

In fact, you say they thought they were being healthy. They thought they were being healthy. I'm cool with it. It said zero trans fats. It's a healthy dessert topping. It's not. It's all trans fat and sugar and high fructose corn syrup. So it was really shocking to me. And I gave him a simple guide from the Environmental Working Group, How to Good Food on a Tight Budget. I gave him my cookbook. I said, you can do this. I sent him a cutting board and knives because they didn't even have knives. I had to cut onions and sweet potatoes with a butter knife. It was like terrible. And I taught them some simple skills of chopping, cutting, dicing, sauteing, baking, roasting, just simple, simple things. And one, basically one meal, they did it. And the mother, they lost 200 pounds in a year. The mother lost 100 pounds. His father lost 45 and got a new kidney. The son lost 50, but he gained it back because he went to work at Bojangles, which he said was like putting a alcoholic to work in a bar. And then eventually he got his act together. He lost 138 pounds. and applied to medical school. He asked me for a letter of recommendation and I wrote him a letter and I said, you know, you can do this and we're still in touch and he's doing amazing. So I realized that in Cleveland, where you've got really underserved populations, there's just a lack of education, there's a lack of access and support. And I went to this place called, I think it's Cuyahoga County Community College and they had a whole education program for cooking, and chefs and they were trying to help people rise up out of poverty and most of the students were African-American. And I sat in a group with them and sort of asked them about their families and their lives. You know, one was almost homeless with their family, another one had multiple relatives with amputations because of diabetes. One of the mothers wanted to give her kids better food and wanted to give them vegetables, but she had to take two buses Round trip, like four buses basically, round trip two hours just to buy some vegetables for her family. And in the town there's little Debbie's, which is like a kind of crappy cake, like Hostess cupcake things and processed food. I mean, in some of the dollar store. Dollar store. I mean, it's terrible. And some of these neighborhoods, it's rough. I mean, they don't even have McDonald's. That's like an upscale restaurant in some of these neighborhoods. Like they have rallies, which I'd never heard of. and it's so cheap and so disgusting. Who knows what's in there? We went up to a rallies and you're not allowed to go in because it's so dangerous. In order to buy your burger, you have to go to this window with bulletproof glass and they slip it under like, you know, like a bank with the teller and that's how you get your burger. I'm like, it's pretty frightening. And, you know, Delmar Coates, who's a pastor of an incredible church in Baltimore, said, you know, we're losing more people to suites in the streets that it's really devastating these communities. And we're working with incredible programs there in Cleveland Clinic. We worked in the community center near Cleveland, which is right around Cleveland Clinic is a really rough, underserved neighborhood. We had all these people coming who were, you know, we sold out. We had a like we're going to do a group, a community group, and we're going to teach them about nutrition and provide some education about food and support. And they all were overweight, had high blood pressure, chronic diseases. and this woman even had a stroke and she was struggling. And after the 10-week program, she was talking, was able to move her hands, do all kinds of stuff that she wasn't able to do. And they were so grateful. Their blood pressure got better, their weight dropped, their blood sugars improved. They were so into it. I mean, they were the best group we ever had. So people are not trying not to be well. It's just the way our whole system.

Is set up to undermine everybody's health. So for the skeptical person who's listening, who's saying, like, look, that's great. and that's, I want people to be healthy, but that's their problem. So for the skeptical person that's listening and saying, okay, look, it's tragedy. There's a lot of tragedy in the world, right? But also, too, how does that affect me? So how does the health of others in our society also have impact on us all?

Two good questions. One is, is it just their fault? And I think it's easy to say that, and that people should just have personal responsibility. But when you are living in a toxic nutritional landscape and you have no access to food and you have no education about what's healthy to eat and the schools serve kids that are making food that are making kids sick and fat, when you have barely any money to buy food because you're on SNAP or food assistance and you're in a really struggle environment, it's more than about personal responsibility. Yes, we all have to have some level of personal responsibility, but unless you know what to do and have the access to do it and the resource to do it, it's not so easy. And it is affecting all of us, Drew. I mean, when you look at the amount of economic burden of chronic disease, we talked a little earlier, but six out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Four have two or more. And by 2030, which is 10 years, 83 million Americans are going to have three or more chronic diseases. And it's bankrupting our country. You know, in six years, by 2026, there will be no money in the Medicare Trust Fund. And what that means is we're screwed. It means we have to, we don't have any backup money to pay for the overhead on Medicare. We have to pay for it out of our current revenue. And it's a trillion dollar a year budget for Medicare. Crazy. That's one-third of our total tax revenue. And it's, and it's growing and growing. And by 2048, it's going to be 100% of government mandatory spending. By 2048.

Just for those who listen, can you.

Say that one more time?

Okay.

I was like, it's hard to understand. It's hard to understand the magnitude. Okay, so just get this. By 2048, according to current trends and estimates by the government, there will be no money left for anything except chronic disease. It will only be money for that. No money for roads, education, transportation, defense, nothing.

That's how expensive it's gonna become if we don't wake up as a society and do something. And for those that are listening that are saying, well, that's because the US doesn't have universal healthcare and other things, Countries like England are also dealing with this. Countries like Canada are also projecting out that even though they have universal health care, because the chronic disease burden is so intense, they are not gonna have enough money to fund it.

Yeah, it makes me nuts when I hear the political debate. Medicare for all, restrict entitlements, repeal Obamacare or Medicare for all. That's the wrong set of questions. It should be, is there a third path that solves the reason why it's so expensive in the first place, which is making people healthy and fixing the food system.

And really just because you mentioned politics, whether you're independent, Republican, Democrat, this is something that you can get behind. I know you're doing a lot of work in that. We'll talk about that later on.

Some of my best friends are on both sides of the aisle.

So you can get behind it because it's actually getting to the root cause because you're going upstream. Now you mentioned something important. You said it's not just a personal responsibility conversation, we have to actually set up the right system. And part of the way the system is designed right now is to actually encourage some of these unhealthy behaviors. Let's talk about, for instance, the SNAP program commonly referred to as food stamps. How is it designed to encourage people to eat unhealthy?

Okay. Well, first of all, most government food programs which are administered under the US Department of Agriculture have some semblance of nutrition guidelines. The Women's Infant and Children Program are WIC, school lunches, although recently Trump rolled back some of the changes under the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act that Obama put in to improve school lunch quality. But there's guidelines about you can't just serve people candy all day, right? In SNAP or food stamp program, there are no guidelines. Now, it was designed to help relieve hunger. and it was very effective at that. And it's 46 million Americans, and by the way, one in four kids is on food stamps. That should wake us up. If one of our four kids in America is food insecure, pretty frightening. I mean, there are 100 million Americans who were either below the poverty line or barely scratching the surface above the poverty line. 100 million Americans. I mean, I was walking down the street today in Los Angeles, and it just broke my heart. I was walking down in Venice, California, which is sort of a hipster town and very wealthy, and there's just like tent row of homeless people along the sidewalk. And I'm just like, why in America? We're the richest country in the world and we just don't care for each other. It's kind of crazy. So we have enormous issues with the ways in which we distribute money. But the Food Stamp Program has no nutrition guidelines. It's the biggest food program It's one of the biggest programs in the government. So it's of the $1 trillion, almost $1 trillion USDA Farm Bill, which should be called the Food Bill because it's mostly about food. Three quarters of that is for food stamps. $75 billion a year, three quarters of that is junk food. 10% of it, or $7 billion a year, is soda. That's 31 billion, eight ounce servings of soda to the poor every year that the government pays for. And we're paying it four times. How are we paying it four times? One, we pay for subsidies and supports for corn, which damages the environment, the climate, you know, uses up our water resources, destroys the soil. And pesticides and soda. Yeah, why fructose, corn syrup, right? It causes damage to biodiversity, loss of pollinator species, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, destroys our waterways. I mean, all those costs. And who's paying for that? Second, we pay for not only the subsidies and the damage, we pay for the food to be purchased through the SNAP program. I mean, the number one source of US revenue for Coca-Cola is food stamps. 20% of their bill of Walmart's budget of the $730, whatever, $80 billion of changes depending on the farm bill of food stamps, about 130 something billion goes to Walmart alone. And so we're seeing these massive challenges. So we're paying for all that. And then we're paying for the chronic disease on the back end, the diabetes and heart disease. So we pay for the subsidies for the corn, we pay for the damage environment, we pay for the food stamps, we pay for the Medicare Medicaid. So who's paying for this? We all are paying for it because of our are misguided food policies.

We as taxpayers are taking on the burden because the food system, which is often encouraged by the government, lobbyists, not all obviously bad, there's some lobbyists that are good out there.

I want to be one. I'm going to be a lobbyist for the good guys.

Yes. Because the system was designed that way, it was almost like a de facto plan because nobody really thought about designing it intentionally for health. It was designed for disease.

Yeah, and listen, the truth is that the food companies, the government policies, a lot of these were put in place decades and decades ago when there was a massive hunger, when there was a shortage of calories. And so the policies were really good after the Depression and the war of having an agricultural system that produced an abundance of starchy calories, but not a lot of nutrients. with devastating harm to the environment that we didn't really even understand. You know, Rachel Carson called out in the early 60s with her book Silent Spring, the Dangers of DDT and Pesticides. And now we're waking up to the fact that the way we grow food, our agricultural system, is the number one and the rest of the food system is the number one cause of climate change. So let's shift to that topic, climate.

Change, because I want to start off with this. You have people across the political spectrum-.

Wait, wait, before we do that, because I'm going to go back to the snap- you-'re interrupting me, interrupting me- yeah, yeah, because- yeah, because I want to talk talk about the SNAP thing. Okay, let's talk about that. So the book Food Fix is really about how do we solve these problems? And there's a lot of great ideas about how to do this and people are supportive of it. And all we need to do is put the N back in SNAP. Nutrition. We need to have nutrition guidelines. Why should the government feel like it has to support the use of soda? Well, we don't want to stigmatize the poor. We don't want to be regressive. We actually need to give them choice. All that is fair, but not to.

The detriment of them. They're going to be the ones most helped by this. Incredible. And we're gonna talk back on solutions.

Sorry, I get excited about this.

I can tell you're passionate about it. And being close to you, being your business partner, being your friend, I can see when you get worked up and I love it and the audience loves it. Okay, I want to shift for a second, okay? Besides how food is wreaking havoc on our health, it's also wreaking havoc on the environment.

Yeah.

But I want to address something head on. You have people across all the political spectrum, even people who don't necessarily care about politics, who listen to you. This year, meaning the last 12 months, as I've seen you speak more about climate change and food, which is a very nuanced topic, and we're gonna go through all those nuances, I've never seen you get more hateful messages from people who feel like, you know, either climate change isn't real. Stay in my lane.

Stay in my lane. Right?

It's everything from like, climate change isn't real, but they trust you on a lot of other topics, but they don't believe in climate change. Then there's other people who are vegan who are like, Yay, Dr. Hyman, wait. He's saying that meat and going plant being plant based and being vegan isn't always the right solution for climate change.

So I've never seen you get more.

Hate messages across the board. You're making a lot of friends out there.

That's good.

So let's start off with the first one. It sounds pretty basic, but I know your audience and I see that audience interact with you all the time. Let's start off with the basics of climate change. This sounds funny to ask you. But some people genuinely feel that climate change is not real. And I think that they need to hear from you that if they trust you...

It's just bad weather.

Yeah, that it's just bad weather. We're just going through a cycle. The cycle changes. There's a lot of things that are out there. Our own president currently right now has his skepticism around climate change.

What do you want to say about that? Well, there's two issues. A lot of people believe that there's changes in our climate, but that it probably isn't man-made, that it's a natural part of a cycle. so I don't think there's too many people out there that can ignore the fact that we're seeing, I think this year, 2019, was the second hottest year on record in human history and the last was 2016. The last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere, which is a scientific fact, 415 billion parts per billion, it was 800,000 years ago. There were no humans. There were hippos swimming in the Thames River. The oceans were much higher.

And.

There were palm trees growing in the South Pole. So we are facing undeniable consequences. All the fires, for example, we're seeing around the world. Australia was the most recent. California has been devastated by fires, worse than they've had in recorded history. The floods in the Midwest last year destroyed a million acres of cropland. so the very way we are growing food is destroying our ability to grow food in the future. Think about it for a minute. So the ways in which we're destroying the soil, the way in which that contributes to climate change, actually leads to our inability to grow food in the future. According to the UN, we have 60 harvests left. Meaning in 60 harvests, there'll be no soil, No food, no humans. This is an existential threat to humanity. I don't care if you believe in climate change or not, there's no deniability that we are destroying our soil.

Yeah, that's there and everybody sees it. We're gonna come back to the soil because that's, I don't know if everybody understands that. I think we gotta break that down. I think we gotta break that down. It's dirt, right? But even if you don't believe in climate change, and it's better to have an honest conversation with people directly, and for those of you that are like, oh my gosh, who could not believe in climate change? All the data's out there. Listen, we know the polls, we know the stats, there are people listening to this podcast who don't believe in it, you can see that we're polluting our Earth. So even if all the same things that go to fix climate change, clean up our Earth. So if you want to maintain your belief that climate change isn't happening, the same solutions that go to fix it are going to clean up our lands, our waters, our ocean are going to prevent coral bleaching and are going to make us healthier.

Well, that's true. So true, Drew. You know, the truth is that the beauty of this book, Food Fix, is that if you fix the food system, it fixes everything. Yes. It gets people healthy. It increases biodiversity of animal, plant, insect species. It increases soil. It protects our fresh water resources. It helps improve kids' academic performance and the way the food affects their brain. It improves national security because we are actually able to have kids who can get in the military. Right now, 70% are rejected. It protects us from Political instability, I mean there is estimated going to be 200 million to a billion refugees from weather or climate or whatever you talk about it within the next 30 to 40 years. I mean we had a million from Syria, that was devastating and created global consequences, but I can't even imagine what a billion refugees looks like and how.

That- That's a threat if we don't change it.

And how that threatens our political stability and safety as a nation. Forget about if you care about other people in other part of the world. Forget about if you care about climate change. You should care about the safety and political stability of our nation because that is something we all depend on. So, the beautiful thing about the food fix is that the solutions are there to fix everything along the way. And it's not that hard if we collectively join to do that.

Yeah, and it's first getting educated on the magnitude of the problem. I compare it to an inconvenient truth when people saw Al Gore talk about it, even though the data was out there. Even though the science was out there and it had been out there for years, nobody had wrapped it up into a story that people could understand. And I see you doing that in your new book, Food Fix. So one of the ones that I feel like it's hard for people to understand, I'd love you to unpack it, is when you say we only have 60 harvests left, what does that mean and why?

Okay, before I get to that, just to finish up on the what is the climate? People don't understand what is 415 parts per billion? It doesn't make sense.

You're talking about carbon in the atmosphere.

Yeah, the amount of carbon and heat, greenhouse gases emitted, all of it, every day, is equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima bombs going off every day. That's about four to five every second. Imagine that going on day after day, year after year, and what that's doing to our climate. And you can talk about you know, whether you believe it or not, but there's scientific facts that are hard to deny. And all you have to do is look at the news, look at the weather, look at what's happening with storms. I mean, there was a hurricane in Scotland. The hurricane tracking software didn't go up that high. So they couldn't track it because it was like it never happened before. You know, we've lost 3 trillion tons, 3 trillion tons of ice from Antarctica. I mean, that's staggering. The oceans are going up. I mean, there's octopus in parking lots in Miami.

It's hard to deny that. It's hard to deny that, and it sometimes feels like the solutions are so the problems are so big that the average person that's listening is like, okay, if you wanted me to feel depressed, I feel depressed. Yes.

I'm going to buy your book, but I'm still depressed. And like, what do we do? Here's the good news. The UN recently came out with a report, and we're talking about soil now, so you asked about soil. So said that if we restore degraded soils, There's five million hectares, which is far more than an acre, of degraded soil around the world. If we restore just 200, 2 million of those 5 million degraded acres, I mean hectares, we would be able to stall climate change by 20 years. In other words, decrease the amount of carbon in the environment enough so that would give us 20 more years to come up with solutions, technologies, advances to fix the problem. And it would cost only $300 billion, which sounds a lot for the average guy. It's more than Jeff Bezos has, but only three times as much. And that money is the amount of money that the global economy spends on military spending in three months.

And it's a proven methodology. It's in the book Drawdown. It's like in the top 11.

That was one of the items that.

Can help us reverse climate change.

It was a shock to me. I'm like, I had no freaking idea that food played a role in climate change? None. I was like, I know factory farming of animals, okay, that's greenhouse gas emissions, but the rest of it, I had no clue. And it's the, if you took end to end the food system, how we grow food, deforestation, soil erosion, the processing of food, transportation, refrigeration, food waste, all of it, end to end, it's half of all climate change, more than fossil fuels, which is about a third. And, and in, in the you know, the science of why that's happening is that we have lost a third of all of our soils since the Industrial Revolution, which is staggering. And it contributes, it's contributed about 30 to 40% of all the carbon and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere right now. So the cause of much of the heating up of the atmosphere and climate change is the loss of soil, 30 to 40%, which is staggering, which is great news because it means we can fix it. I mean, we can use the most advanced carbon capture technology ever discovered, which has been around for billions of years that is free, available everywhere on the planet that is called photosynthesis. which is basically the process by which plants make energy. They breathe carbon dioxide, we breathe oxygen. They basically get sunlight and the energy from the sun, and they combine that to make the carbohydrates in plants. Carbo-carbon. That's why they call it carbohydrates, because it's carbon and all plant matter is made of carbohydrates. of carbon. And so we have this unutilized technology which is available everywhere to actually draw down carbon out of the atmosphere into the plants. It basically breathes it in, it goes into the roots, it gets fed to microbes, it gets fed to micro-rhizal fungi, and it creates this incredibly rich soil which is full of life that basically holds huge amounts of carbon. It's estimated that the soil can hold three times the amount of carbon, which is about a trillion tons of carbon that's in the atmosphere right now, can hold three times that amount of carbon in the soil. So we're not using it and we're degrading it and we're turning basically an area the size of North Korea or Nicaragua into desert every year by the way we farm. And the soils we do have, we're screwing them up so they don't work. They turn to dirt, which you can't really grow stuff in dirt. unless you use tons of fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides which further destroy the soil. And the fertilizer is another story I want to get into a minute. But the soil has this amazing capacity to suck out carbon from the atmosphere. It's like the rainforest of the prairies. It's phenomenal what it can do. And that's why the UN, it's not my opinion, I'm not the expert in this, I'm just talking to farmers, I'm talking to UN scientists, I'm reading the literature I'm like, wait a minute, you know, this is an incredible solution. And if the UN is saying, this is a solution that's right available right now, we don't need any more technology, we don't need any more innovation, it's like it's free and we can do it everywhere.

And so connect the dots because the people who are listening are like, I'm not a farmer, how can I participate in that? What behaviors can I do that encourage that and can encourage the regrowth of that topsoil that's out there to start pulling this carbon in?

Well, you know, in the last year, I mean, I've been doing this for a while and have heard of regenerative ag, but in the last year, it's like the buzzword. And I think there are now places where you can buy regeneratively grown food. And a lot of times it's maybe not called that. For example, if you go to your local farmers market, a lot of local farmers are growing in sustainable ways that restore soil, that use ecosystem service practices to help actually preserve and make new soil, to help restore water, to not use chemicals, So, there's different grades. Organic is one certification, but we're talking about now regenerative organic certification, which goes one step further, which means that the farming uses practices that help to restore soil. We'll go through this in a minute. And, people can buy them, for example, on Thrive Market, they can get regeneratively raised beef, they can go to Mariposa Ranch online, there's a lot of online.

Resources where you can buy regeneratively grown food. And, non-profits like Kiss the Ground, the people that kind of direct individuals.

Yeah, so we need a huge- resources that are out there. Yes, we need a huge movement to fund it and develop it, and that's what we're trying to do. We need the government to fund the transition for farmers to get into regenerative ag. And I'll just tell you a quick story about a farmer. People say, oh, it's elitist, oh, it's only for rich people. But it turns out that's not true. And people say, oh, we can't be scaling this, it's too difficult, we don't have enough land. Gabe Brown was a North Dakota farmer, who had his farm destroyed by hail and bad weather and was 5,000 acre farm in North Dakota, family farm for decades. And he was about to close shop. He was about to go bankrupt. And he started reading about this regenerative ag, started practicing it. And it turned out he built 29 inches of soil in his land. He grows more food, a better quality food with no inputs, no pesticides, fertilizer. He makes his own fertilizer from his nitrogen fixing plants and from the poop and pee of the animals running around his farm. It's a complex farm which is highly resilient to drought, to bad weather. The worst and most unstable ecosystem is lack of diversity, right? A monocrop corn or soy field. But he has a diverse ecosystem. Rainforest is very stable. If one plant dies, who cares, right? Same thing with the regenerative farm. And he makes more food, better food, uses less inputs, Built 29 inches of soil, is resistant to droughts and floods, and he said he makes 20 times the profit that his neighbors do next door in North Dakota. Incredible. So it's good for him, it's good for the land, it's good for the animals, it's good for the climate, and it's good for his pocketbook. That's a win-win-win because most farmers in this country make minus $1600 a year.

In fact, this year, because of the tariffs and a few other things, we've seen one of the highest rates of.

Bankruptcies of especially small farmers that are- Bankruptcies, suicides. I mean, it's terrible. One of the worst things that's happening in this country, you know, I was talking about is farmer suicides.

They just can't manage anymore. They're going bankrupt, they can't keep up. A lot of rural areas have guns.

Where suicides are more common. You know, when it comes to like gun deaths or suicides. And we have like these subsidies, oh, the farmers are getting all these subsidies and blah, blah, blah. Guess what those subsidies are used for? Buying GMO seeds. buying pesticides, buying fertilizers, buying glyphosate herbicides. They're buying inputs that are sold to them by the agribusiness companies that are making off of the profits.

But they're just middlemen that are squeezed. And for all the GMO advocates and the people that are out there, this is really the only true way to like feed people. They're ignoring the topsoil conversation completely. Just assuming that like, you know, for anybody that is an advocate for GMOs and is saying, look, this is the way that we feed the world. they're not really factoring in that if we run out of soil, you don't even have anything to plant those in.

You have to hijack the narrative. I mean, that's the message. We got to feel the world. How are we going to do without all this stuff? Well, you know, in Europe, there's no GMO. And research has shown very clearly that they use less pesticides and less fertilizer and less herbicides than using GMO crops. And their yields are no better, if not worse. Right? Fertilizer is a great example. You know, when you use fertilizer, which shocked me actually when I learned this, you know, we use 400 billion pounds of fertilizer. It is one of the most energy intensive processes to make nitrogen fertilizer, which uses fracking natural gas. In fact, the fertilizer companies are the biggest utilizers of natural gas, far more than the energy companies. Can you believe that? And when you frack, you add to climate change also because there's about 34% contribution of methane to the environment. Because when you frack, you might have seen that New York Times article where in Ohio there was this leaking methane being released from these fracking wells that you could see from space.

Yeah, people were getting sick from that.

Right, so that's just one problem. Then on top of that, you put on the soil and it releases nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And if that wasn't bad enough, then the fertilizer runs off because it goes into the rivers, lakes and oceans and creates dead zones. For example, in Gulf of Mexico, the size of New Jersey, and kills 212,000 metric tons of fish. Now, it also creates those dead zones around the world. There's 400 similar dead zones the size of Europe that are feeding 500 billion people and are threatened. I mean, this is the kind of stuff people just don't think about and that's because of how we grow our food. I'm sorry, don't get too depressed because there is solutions.

There is solutions and I'm going to pivot to that besides just voting with your dollar, right? And people who have the ability and the privilege of being able to make better choices with their food and the education, if you're listening to podcasts chances are that's you that's listening here, we're definitely of that. Even people who don't have the means to sometimes support solutions that sometimes are a little bit more expensive in the beginning, but then the cost as more people adopt them can come there have access to another way to support this process, which is compost.

Yes, yes. I just want to touch on the money thing, Bill, before I get to compost. And we'll get to food waste because it's the way to get to compost. Let's do it. So, there's a ranch called Mariposa Ranch where you can buy online, direct to consumer, regeneratively raised beef for $8 a pound on average, which is when you think about it, for a four-ounce serving, less than a McDonald's Big Mac. Okay?

Which goes back to really, if you really want to save money with food, cooking is the solution.

Cooking is so powerful. Yes, and you can make good food at home for less money than you can go out with a family of four. and eat much better and be healthier and do good for you and good for the planet. And it takes a little bit of work, a little bit of help, but people can do it. And I think the beautiful thing about Regenerative Ag is that it's something we all can call for, it's something we can demand, it's something we can ask for, it's something we can search for. We can go to our community farmers markets, join our community supported agriculture, and advocate for our congressmen and senators to change policy to support this. In fact, there's a group called the Food Policy Action Group that's online, foodpolicyaction.org, that literally scores every senator and congressman for their vote on food and ag policy. And some of them are terrible, some of them are awesome. And in fact, they use that platform to unseat two congressmen who were in the pocket of the food and ag industry using a massive social media campaign. So we think our vote doesn't matter. It does matter. These issues do matter. what your senators and congressmen are thinking about, what your state representatives, your mayor, you know, it's people care about these issues. I'm actually inspired. I got an email yesterday from somebody asking me to find a new executive director for the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. That's huge. Which is a new food policy council. You know, San Francisco has made composting mandatory. So why do we care about composting?

Who cares?

Well, the biggest problem you know, with our food almost is food waste. We waste 30 to 40% of all the food we produce.

That's imagine. Imagine you go to the grocery store, buying your weekly groceries, immediately coming home, taking 40% of it, 30% of it, and throwing the garbage. That's exactly what's happening.

Exactly right.

But on a national.

And the average family throws out about 1800 worth of food a year. That's a lot of money for people. And if, if that food were grown on a piece of land, it would take the entire landmass of China to grow that much food. It's a waste of over $2 trillion a year of food. And it is not only bad because of that, because so many people are starving and need to eat and don't get to eat the food, it's because when you throw the food in landfills, it decomposes and actually creates methane, which again is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And if if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and China. Wow. It's crazy. And yet it's a solvable problem. In France, they made it illegal to throw out trash. And it has to go to a food bank, it has to go to a composting facility, it has to go to feed animals, something, right? And if you don't, you get a fine and you can go to jail. In San Francisco, I don't think they throw you in jail, but I probably get a fine. and it's mandatory composting. You go to the airport in San Francisco, there's a compost bucket.

Every city in America can do this. And a lot of Whole Foods. Most people don't know this, but if you live close to a Whole Foods, Whole Foods, you say, in Santa Monica, Los Angeles here, we're really lucky. They have these green bins everywhere, and you can toss your compost inside of these green bins. Most houses have that. Some of my friends say, In my local city, we don't have those. Okay, if you live nearby a Whole Foods, you can actually go and drop your compost.

Yes, you can.

Most of them will accept it. In Massachusetts, I sent you an NPR article about how they're leading the way in composting. It's amazing. And that the state is working with Whole Foods to really triple, quadruple the amount of total amount of compost that's.

There and create a program that they hopefully can inspire other states to. Yeah, this is a great thing about this whole space. There's so much food and ag tech business innovations that can happen. So you're talking about this thing in Massachusetts, the state of Massachusetts made it illegal if you make a ton of garbage and food waste a week, you can't throw it out. You have to figure out what to do with it. It's not throwing in the landfill. And so this dairy farmers are making no money anymore and they work with this other venture company called Vanguard and they figured out how to create these anaerobic incinerators on their farm. They truck in three tractor trailer loads full every day of food waste, 100 tons a day. They throw it in this anaerobic incinerator, throw some dairy poop on it. It kind of creates all this energy, creates energy that's then turned into electricity that actually gives electricity for 1,500 homes.

It was amazing when I heard it. It's like a triple threat. They're getting electricity for those homes for free, basically.

Yeah, done with the manure and done with the food waste. And the farmer makes 100 grand a year because they're losing money already.

And when people hear about the environment and doing these solutions in composting. It's like, this is not a mom and pop, you know, thing where it's just like people who are shopping at like health food stores who are freaking out about the environment and we're all going to hell. These are not like little tiny solutions. States, big companies, Microsoft in a different way, just committed to go carbon negative.

Yeah.

That they're gonna pull out more carbon from the environment. They're not doing it through composting. From what I've heard, it's more through advanced technologies that are pulling carbon out of the environment, putting it into the ground, back into the soil. This is happening at a much bigger level, and we can be a part of it and accelerate it because if we don't-- we're screwed. That's the message of the book.

We're screwed. I mean, Europe has 17,000 of these anaerobic incinerators. This should be a federal law, should be mandatory. We shouldn't be allowed through any food waste in the incinerators. And there should be programs in every state and city and county. I mean, in New York City, I can literally walk a block from my apartment and throw it in the in the compost bin in the Union Square Farmers Market. I mean, not everybody has access to that, but you can have it in your apartment. You can go on Amazon or go online and find a small in-apartment composter where you can throw your food scraps and it turns it into compost. And then you can give it to your community garden. You can get your local farmers to get it, whatever. There's a ways to do it. And I've had a compost pile for 40 years, and it's so easy. Just throw it in a bucket in your kitchen, toss some things if you live in, if you have a backyard and, and there's, there's all sorts of ways to do this. I think it's really important. And it's a huge solution if we did this at scale.

It's incredible. You know, I think that's the message of the book is first, we need to understand the problem, but we also understand that we're part of the problem, all of us. But that also means that we're part.

Of the solution for sure. And to be fairly straight, we all need to do our part. We can vote with our fork, vote with our wallet, vote with our vote. But at the end of the day, we do need massive shifts in global food policy, and especially starting the United States. And if we do that, we will see significant changes because we all need to be active politically. I know people feel discouraged. I know they feel disheartened. But, you know, think about the changes that happen in this country. People feel, you know, apathetic. How did abolition happen? You know, it was a couple of people who said, listen, slavery is not cool.

Small minority.

Yes. slavery is not cool. And then they started the Underground Railroad. I mean, Harriet Tubman was worried that we wouldn't have a black president for like 100 years while she was doing that. There'd be an end of slavery, it would take 50 years to end slavery. No, they just did it. What about women's rights? Suffrage. Women stood up and said, Hey, we need to make change and we want the vote. And it was finally they got the vote after 150 years of our country. and again, still that wasn't enough and it took another 50, 60 years to get the Equal Rights Amendment and we're still not quite there yet. So same thing with civil rights or gay rights, gay marriage. I mean, these things started on the margins. They started with people who were in their communities, in their homes becoming active and caring enough to do something. You know, Margaret Mead said, Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.

You know, there's a small group of committed individuals. I mean, your podcast's pretty well known now, so maybe that group has got a little bit bigger that are listening to this podcast. And a lot of those individuals invest in their mental health, invest in their energy, or trying to be better citizens or trying to be productive members of society. They care about it. And they vote sometimes, especially the ones that are in the wellness community or in spiritual communities, there's a little bit of concern about getting caught up in politics because politics can seem so negative sometimes. So what's your encouragement and your advice for people of how to be part of this political system but not let it eat you alive?

You know, you do debates and the.

Family debates against the president for the president. How can we use politics to lead as part of this shift but still maintain our integrity and peace of mind as human beings?

Well, the truth is, and I pretty tied into a lot of people in Washington and politics. The truth is that your representatives depend on you for their vote and they care about what you say and what you think. And if you work as a collective group, if you bring your community to Washington to meet with your representatives, if you meet with them in your local constituencies, if you build a coalition, for example, and do petitions and write letters. It matters. They listen. I mean, you know, think about everybody listens. We got 150,000 downloads this podcast every week. Imagine if everybody wrote a letter, you know, to their senators and congressmen to say, we want X or Y. We want you to support regenerative agriculture. We want to put nutrition back in food stamps. We want a better school lunch policy. We want the FDA to limit all the toxins in our food. Guess what? They're going to listen.

So true.

I mean, we abdicate. I mean, I do too. I would say, you know, it's like we abdicate our authority to the corporations. I mean, there's 187 lobbyists for every member of Congress. They spent in one year, in one year to fight GMO labeling, they spent $192 million for the farm bill, which is every 10 years or every five years, it kind of gets reviewed. They spend half a billion dollars a year.

So let's make this super.

I mean, $500 million for the whole farm.

It's 2020. It's an election year. Yeah. Right. You've been close with some of the people that have been running for president on the Democratic side. Some of those people are, some of those people are still in the race, some of those people are not in the race. But again, like you said, you work with people across the aisle because this is a national issue, whether you're Republican, independent, libertarian, Democrat, whatever it is. So it's 2020 for the listeners podcast. when we're in the midst of an impeachment trial with the president and there's a lot of polarizing topics that are there, how can we make climate change and food part of that? Besides writing to your representative and telling them what are practical things that people can do in an election year to get people to start talking about these matters?

Well, I think they can read my book, Food Fix and get educated and then start talking about it in your local communities. because people care and teacher friends, teacher work co-workers in your schools, this is a conversation that needs to start happening. And that's the hope of my book is it starts a conversation. And I'm launching something called the Food Fix Campaign, which is a nonprofit with a 501c4 advocacy group as well to help change policy in Washington because I care about this and I'm not getting paid for it. I'm volunteering my time. In fact, I've donated money. I'm donating all the profits from the book to the foundation to actually start to make real change. And anybody can be part of that. And we need a whole grassroots coalition to start to make the movement. So I think, you know, if we're apathetic, you know, I understand. It's easy to say, heck with it, I'm just going to watch Netflix and hang out with my friends and drink beer. I'm like, whatever, I get it. But if you care about your kids, if you care about your health, if you care about the environment you live in, if you care about your country, I mean, this is the most patriotic thing you you could do is to stand up and say, Hey guys, you better listen about this and you better deal with this because this is the most pressing issue of our time.

So I want to take a pause real quick and I want to take us back to the early life of Dr. Mark Hyman.

Okay.

Before he was a doctor, where does this advocacy energy come from? Just give us some insights into your life growing up and where you were and how you sort of found your place in the world.

I grew up in the 60s and got a little bit infected with the ideas of environmentalism, with the ideas about social change. And I remember when I was very young, I read a lot of books about this. I read biographies of Martin Luther King. I read about slavery and I read about this book called Walden on Walden Pond by Henry Thoreau who wrote an essay called On Civil Disobedience. which was about standing up for our rights. And his civil disobedience idea was the beginning of the movement that influenced Gandhi and got India free. He was a huge influence for Martin Luther King. And so I always had this idea that we should stand up for what matters to us and we should do something about it and then we can be actors in our own life and not have to just be passive recipients of what's happening in the world.

What was one of the first sort of campaigns or movements that you can remember? actively getting involved with and participating with into some degree, not just reading about, but you're like, you know what? I want to do something.

Well, there were two things. There were two big things in college. One was no nukes, because we were, people don't remember now, but under the Russia, Soviet Union, US conflict, there was missiles pointed at each other. They could go off any second. And so, I was very concerned about that and became very involved in in college and going to nuclear sites and protesting. I remember going to Rocky Flats plutonium plant where they make plutonium, which is the most deadly chemical toxin known to humankind. And I remember protesting and sitting on the railroad tracks with Alan Ginsberg and a bunch of crazy guys. And I was 20 years old and I was like, yeah, we need to do something. We need to be active. We go to protest in Washington in March. also very involved in the anti-apartheid movement in Africa. I was in college forcing our university to divest from South African businesses that were supporting apartheid. So I always really was focused on these issues all the way through.

And it comes full circle because your own daughter has been a part of it. Yeah. And actually got arrested.

Yeah, I was like, Rachel, my daughter, why didn't you call me on Father's Day? She goes, well, Dad, I was in jail. I said, why were you in jail? She says, well, I was on the Tabernacle Plateau in Utah where they're doing tar sands mining, this big company from Canada that's threatening the headwaters of the Colorado River and the livelihood and the water supply for Native American communities all the way down in the whole Colorado River itself. So I was like, all right, that's okay. You know, she's a very much socially minded girl. She, for Thanksgiving, she doesn't go eat a bunch of turkey. Tennessee and get food comas like the rest of us. She goes to the Navajo reservation where most of them live far below the poverty line, live in basically wood huts, have no heat and no running water. And she brings a truck down. They have no trucks and actually creates firewood for the winter. They have a whole team come down and they chop firewood, they cut it, they bring it to people. You know, this old guy was there that she met, his old Native American guy, he's like, I didn't know it was making through the winter because I think I was going to freeze to death because I don't have any way to heat my home. She's amazing. She went to Standing Rock and I bought all the food for the cooking implements for the kitchen and I gave her money to go down and help the Native Americans. I'm going to buy them a truck so they actually have a truck so they can get heat in the winter and get firewood. I mean, things that most of us don't even think about. I mean, I'm thinking about, oh, how are we going to stay warm this winter?

Winter.

I mean, how many of you listening think about that? Oh, you just turn the dial up on your thermostat, you know, like, but that's not how it is for everybody. So she's very focused on that. I'm very proud of her. And she's going to medical school. Not under my advice. I encourage her not to go, but she seems to want to go. So.

So in addition to the political genes, which have definitely been passed on and this advocacy, there was also this sort of through line of interest. in spirituality. Where did that come from in your life, in your early life, growing up? Spirituality, Buddhism, Eastern philosophies. Where did that come from?

I think I was born with ODD, which means I'm odd. And I remember, like, being two or three years old and, like, seeing grown-ups and wondering why they weren't all full of love and connection. And that's all I felt was just love for everybody and didn't understand what was going on. And. And it was a very rough go for me. growing up in that space, in that headspace, and I began to sort of read different books and explore different philosophies, ended up reading again on Walden Pond, which was heavily influenced, like when I was 14, by Eastern philosophies and all the transcendentalists like Emerson and so forth, and became very interested in that. The Upanishads, the Vedas, and then I went to a lecture, and then my sister brought me to it, Amherst College, where she went, by Robert Thurman, who's a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, and I was like, holy crap, what is this? So I all came together, started reading Alan Watts, and so, and I became fascinated with this even before I went to college and ended up going to Cornell and majored in Asian Studies and Buddhism and like, you know, it was like, it was an accident. I just keep taking the courses and like, you have to have a major. And I'm like, what major? Like, well, you have a lot of Asian Studies credits. I'm like, okay. And then you, you have to have the language. I'm like, oh, Jeez, I don't know. So I'm like, I better speak Chinese because a lot of people speak Chinese. That could be a good bet.

So I study Chinese. How do you think your studies in Asian philosophy and your work in spirituality, your connection to Source, the universe, God, however you see it, your upbringing in the Jewish tradition, right? Like your background, your family background, how do you think that that shapes your.

View on these global problems that we're faced with today? Yeah. I mean, you know, there's two things. This sound may sound kind of corny, but one is a central Jewish philosophy which is Tikkun Olam, which I talk about in the book, which means to repair the world. So, you know, when you look at, you know, civil rights and, you know, social justice movements, there's a lot of Jews involved in that. Why? Because it's part of the culture. It is to make the world a better place, to heal the world. So that always was in me. And then, you know, I studied Buddhism and the fundamental concept in there is compassion, you know, and separating your ego from, like, your life's purpose, right? Healing, healing that sense of separateness. So I always felt connected to everything, and it really drove who I am. And I. I think the idea of a bodhisattva, which is, you know, this ideal of this being who reaches the edge of Enlightenment, the doors of Enlightenment, and then turns back to help. take care of the world, to heal the world, to compassionately serve those who are suffering. And that's sort of the embedded software I think that I have in my DNA that drives my every behavior.

And part of the work that I see you doing is reminding people that if you are born into privilege or have attained some sort of privilege in your life where you actually can pay attention to these things, rise up against Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, then you have the power, the will, the right, the duty to also give back into this world. I mean, and I wasn't like that. I mean, I grew up in Queens.

In a very poor neighborhood. My mom slept on the couch. My sister and I shared the bedroom. We ate chicken livers and onions and rice. I thought that was like a gourmet meal. I didn't realize that chicken livers were the cheapest cheapest thing you could buy. And my mom was a school teacher and made, like, seven grand a year, and we were struggling, and, and it was hard. And, and yet I felt, you know, like, I didn't know any different. You know, I just is what, you know. But, but I, i think, you know, I really strongly feel that, you know, we are a human community and that, you know, people say, how can you, how can you meet with this one or that one or, you know, how, I mean, they're republican. They get mad at me. for meeting with the Democrat. If they're Democrat, it's like, I'm like, how can you treat this person? I'm like, I take care of everybody. Like, I don't care if you're Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Democrat, Republican, you know, whoever you are, you're human being first. That's always what I believe. And everybody deserves love and care and compassion. And, you know, I might not agree with everything they think or feel. And people, I mean, like I did this thing in the church with Rick Warren. I mean, he's an evangelical Christian guy who we have very similar values at the core, but also we have very big differences on certain issues, right? Like for example, you know, being gay is one. And I, you know, I don't have a problem with it, but I think certain evangelical Christians do. He's more moderate, but I just think people get really upset and people got upset with him for dealing with me because I did yoga and it's sacrilegious to do yoga. So I'm like, you know, and he doesn't care. Like, so I think we just had to find the common ground where we all can work together. And, you know, I think of it like the Game of Thrones. You know, I I I didn't really watch it, and my wife's like, you got to watch it because i'm gonna watch season eight, and, and if you want to watch with me, you got to get up to speed. I'm like, all right, all right. So, so I watched Game of Thrones, and i'm like, you know, it's a metaphor. The dead are coming. Like, we're all gone. We're all going to be gone unless we work together. I don't care which family you're from or who you hate. Like, forget about it all. Like, we're you know, like we're an existential moment in human history. And if you want to read about it, read an Uninhabitable Earth, read Fault by Bill McKibben. I mean, you know, it's really undeniable at this point. And I think we have to come together and say, look, you know, we're killing ourselves. I mean, the economy of the world is threatened by chronic disease. According to the World Economic Forum, it's the biggest threat to global economic development. You know, we're killing ourselves with the food we're eating. We're killing the planet. We're destroying biodiversity. We're creating a generation of kids that's not going to live well. I mean, for the last three years in a row, life expectancy has gone.

Down in America, which is nuts to think about it because you think about the world progressing and especially in America, we should be living longer with all the advancements that are there, but it's actually going backwards.

Going backwards, yeah.

And there's a whole bunch of factors including opioid crisis, a lot of other things, increased rates of suicides, but in general that all goes towards our overall well-being and how well-being even though technology is advancing, it's also a thing that's.

Getting us into trouble and well-being is regressing. Well, it's true, you know, maybe I'll jump to this in the book, because I talk about the effect of food, not just on the economy, not just on climate, not just on health, but on mental health, on behavior, on violence. Why is there so much divisiveness? Why is there so much disconnection in the world? Why is there so much hatred? You know, I recently had David Promoter on my podcast and his son talking about his book, Brainwash. And I learned something there that was so striking. He said, Because of our inflammatory lifestyle, namely caused by our inflammatory diet, all the processed foods, lack of exercise, stress, lack of sleep, all that, It disconnects the adult in the room, our frontal brain, our prefrontal cortex, with our lizard brain, the fight or flight part of our brain, the amygdala. And when that disconnection happens, the adult in the room doesn't work. And so that's why people are so reactive and impulsive and aggressive and it's like, oh my God, you know, like come on people. Like, you know, I think we're so divided and maybe some of it has to do with the food. we see that depression is connected to food. We see that using randomized trials, feeding people healthy diets, depression gets better. We see that using healthy diets in violent criminals or in juvenile delinquents in places where they have really ability to control what they're eating, dramatically reduces violence, oppositional behavior, aggression, self-harm, even suicide. I mean just giving prisoners a healthy diet in prison reduces violent crime by 56%. I mean, think about it.

And I think zooming out and taking the 40, 000 foot view on the new book, on what you're talking about, the new message that's out there, it's not just about saving our planet. It's not just about reversing climate change. It's not just about making our political system better and Injustice and reversing Injustice and food Injustice. That's out there. It's also about improving our own health. We do this, we win too.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, the beautiful thing about it and what was so beautiful thinking about this from my book and it really is functional medicine. It's honestly functional medicine for the food system and for the planet. Because when you go upstream to the cause, all the problems go away. I was thinking about this girl I treated. who had so many different issues. This woman, she had psoriatic arthritis, which required a very expensive drug, which is 50 grand a year. So that means they have arthritis with bad psoriasis. She had reflux, she had irritable bowel, she had pre-diabetes, she was depressed, I mean just one thing after the other. So she didn't need a skin doctor and a joint doctor and a psychiatrist and a stomach doctor, etc. Etc. We fixed her gut. We just got rid of gluten and dairy, processed food and sugar. We got her gut bacteria healthy and everything went away. It was like one-stop shopping. It was so easy, it was so cheap. And the same thing is really with the food system. As I wrote food fix, I began to see that if we start at the seed level, you know, we create the seeds of change, right? We start with, with nutrient dense plants. We start with regenerative agriculture. It produces better quality food in ways that are better for us and the animals, and even if you don't eat animals, you need animals as part of the cycle. We can get in that if you want. And then it creates better quality food that humans eat that makes them healthier and creates a win-win domino effect across all these crises we're facing, right? The economic crises, the global health crises, the crises of children education, the crisis of depression and mental health and violence and behavior issues, the crisis of poverty, all these things get solved if we just fix the food system.

So Mark, the book is out there. It's available for pre-order. There's a bunch of really cool bonuses. Share with your audience where they can find it and what you have available for them.

I encourage you to go to foodfixbook.com, that's foodfixbook.com because On that site, now look in your pre-order of the book, but I've got an amazing free bonus video, which is five steps to heal the planet and your health. And the book is full of action steps for citizens, for policymakers, for businesses and so forth. So there's a very detailed action guide so you don't feel hopeless. It's on the website. So check that out. Foodfixbook.com and one of the coolest bonuses.

That I would throw in there for anybody that's interested in what you do talking about in part two. There is a longevity masterclass that's included. Tell the audience a little bit about that and you get that only if you pre-order the book. What is the class?

The truth is I become way more interested in longevity the older I get. Now that I turn 60, I'm super interested in it. So I've been studying like crazy about how to keep my health strong and healthy so I can do all this work because I got a whole thing to do here. This is not going to take a couple of years. It's going to take a couple of decades. to fix the food system, so I got to get strong and healthy. So I put all my secrets and all the things I've learned and all the foundations of functional medicine into this longevity masterclass. It's available free when you preorder the book.

FoodFixBook.com, you can find it, get the preorder over there and get all the bonuses. Yep. One thing leads to them all. I think that's a great place to pause for part one of this conversation, Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time. Dr. Mark Hyman, you broke it down in part two of the podcast, which is coming up. We're going to talk about should you go vegetarian to save the planet, even vegan, and other top questions that the audience had. Mark, this was an incredible part one of the conversation.

Thanks, Drew. You've been listening to Doctor's Pharmacy. And if you like this conversation, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy with a very special guest, yours truly.