How To Eat Smarter with Shawn Stevenson

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

Nobody's talking about that in these cookie cutter diets that you need to address the inflammation in your brain in order for you to lose weight.

Right?

So these are all-- and the beautiful part is it's possible. It's not just possible, it's probable when you have the right information and we avoid the things that create the inflammation.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. It's pretty obvious that I love to cook. and I especially love using real whole foods to bring people together. And there are a few ingredients that I just can't live without. And one of the most important ingredients in my kitchen cabinet, hands down, is sea salt. Now, I've tried lots of different brands, but Redmond's Ancient Sea Salt has become a favorite. It's packed with more than 60 beneficial minerals, and that natural light pink color is actually a sign of all the trace minerals it contains. I also love that it's mined right here in the US, in Utah. Now, some of you might be thinking, isn't salt bad for us? And the answer is yes, when it comes to the highly refined salt with additives and anti-caking agents that's completely overused to enhance flavor and highly processed food just to make it edible. But when it comes to your own kitchen, using high quality, 100% real salt like Redmond's can be part of a healthy, balanced diet. Now Thrive Market is my go-to place to buy Redmond salt and all my other must-have kitchen staples, and they offer 25 to 50% off all their items compared to other retailers so I save a ton of money. Their different membership options make it easy to find the right fit for you and your family. You can choose from a one month or a 12 month plan and each one will save you lots of money on your groceries and get you all your favorite healthy ingredients delivered right to your door. Thrive has a huge selection of natural and organic foods and you can shop by diet type, you can get entire meals shipped to you, you can even get sustainably made low sugar wines for those special occasions. Thrive offers 25 to 50% off all their items compared to other retailers and they have a huge selection of natural and organic foods. They even have skin care products, cleaning products and meal delivery kits all at a huge discount. Right now Thrive is offering all Doctor's Pharmacy listeners an amazing deal. Select a free gift from Thrive Market when you sign up for a one year membership and at any time you spend more than $49 you'll get free carbon neutral shipping. Just head over to thrivemarket.com/hymen. That's thrivemarket.com/hymen.

My main goal with diet is to.

Use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Our soils have become depleted and our digestive tracts just aren't working so great. They're compromised by stress and toxins and they just can't absorb nutrients as efficiently as they should. And that's why I always use, and I recommend to my patients, a multivitamin mineral as nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all our day-to-day body functions, all the things that we need that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients, and you have to be pretty picky. The one I trust and take myself is Athletic Greens. They use high quality, highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from real whole foods. Athletic Greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies, and specifically supports my gut health, immunity, energy, and recovery. And it's not just vitamins and minerals. It has phytonutrient-rich superfoods and adaptogens, pre and probiotics, and even digestive enzymes. I love that they add the digestive support in their powder, since so much of our immune strength and overall wellness starts in the gut. It's really one supplement that covers so many bases, and you'd be hard-pressed to find something else in this comprehensive form in any single other product. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine, and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet friendly, whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy-free, or gluten-free. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my audience a full year's supply of their Vitamin D3K2 liquid formula free with your first purchase. These two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones and many of us are not getting enough of them. I use the Athletic Greens powder and their D3K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. They're also going to give you five free travel packs as well. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hymen to get your free year supply of vitamin D3 and K2 and five free travel packs with your first purchase. you'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/heimann. Now let's get back to this week's.

Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Heimann, that's Pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. if you ever struggled with your weight, you've ever tried to figure out why it's so hard to lose weight or tried a million different things and want to know how your body really works, you better listen up because today's conversation is with Shawn Stevenson, who is a master of the human body. He's investigated in ways that most Physicians haven't, most nutritionists don't know, and will give you insights into how your body works that are pretty remarkable. So I would pay close attention to this podcast. Sean is an incredible guy. He's the author of Sleep Smarter. He's been on the podcast talking about that. He's the creator of the Model Health Show, which has been listed as the number one health podcast in the US, has millions of downloads. He's done so many great things, but the most important thing he's done is care about us, care about you and how to fix what's going on. And he came to this the hard way, growing up in really difficult circumstances, not knowing anything about food and experiencing all the bad stuff. that the food, toxic food world has brought us. So welcome Sean to the podcast.

Mark is an honor to be here. I love talking with you.

All right, me too. All right, let's get right into it. I'm gonna open up by reading from the opening of your book, Eat Smarter. And your book is titled Eat Smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and transform your life. Sounds like a good plan. I think I'm up for that. out late December 2020. All right, here we go. In the book, you start out by saying food is complicated. It's one of the most valuable multifaceted things in our universe. And I completely agree with that. It's a key controller of our state of health or disease. It's a social centerpiece that complements the most important moments of our lives. It's the building blocks that create our brain, enabling us to have thoughts and feelings and emotions. It's the very stuff that makes up our bodies. We literally are what we eat. And what we see looking back at us in the mirror, food isn't just food, it's the thing that makes us who we are. But food is also ridiculously simple because you just put it in your mouth, your body handles the fine print after you chew. It's because of food's simple side that we sometimes miss just how miraculous it actually is. Still, even if we don't know the details, food is able to work on us to change us to literally shape our lives. So, Sean, this is a beautiful opening statement for your book. Tell us how you got into this. What is your journey? Because you had your own struggles with food and this really shaped your life's work and inspired you to do what you're doing today.

Yes. Thank you so much for that, Mark. And that was my mission really is to bring about the dynamic aspect of food. Because as you know in this field, we tend to put food into this pithy box or diet. Most folks link up diet, the word diet, to body weight. And we don't really get an analysis or overarching understanding of how food impacts every single area of our lives. And of course, I grew up, I had no idea that food mattered at all. I just thought it was just stuff you eat. And that's the end of story. You know, I grew up in what you referred to, and you've shared so much information about in a food desert. you know, we oftentimes, we were on WIC food stamps. We got our food from local shelter oftentimes and, you know, just trying to find ways to get by.

You know, food stamp Christmas, you said.

Yes, yes. Lovingly referred to as food stamp Christmas that would come around.

I would like to know, what was that? What did you eat at food stamp Christmas?

Oh man, I mean, we didn't have Cheerios, we had Toastios, you know, so we take those food stamps and we go buy a bunch of off-brand food. and these were the things I was making my body out of. And of course, we were habitually eating fast food as much as we possibly could. And some of the things we'll talk about today, the economics made it very affordable and made what we call higher quality food, something that was much more complicated for us to get. And so being that I was making my body out of these things, which I had no idea that it mattered, I thought that I can eat whatever I want if I just work out. But I grew up in a family of folks who were obese and it was just our culture was the nature of what I was around. And that played out for me kind of a genetic predisposition, but we of course we know about epigenetics today. But I ended up at track practice just 15 years old and I was an incredible inspiring athlete and I was doing a time trial and just 15 years old, I ended up running, doing a time trial and I broke my hip. just from running around the track because my bones were so brittle, my bone density. And, you know, for a lot of folks, we just get the marketing side of bone density. Calcium is like at the front door and we don't realize that your bone density dozens, if not hundreds of different compounds come together to make your bones. And if you're deficient in these things, what do you think your body's going to do? But I had no idea. And it wasn't.

There's also a lot of things you were doing to dissolve your bones, right? You were drinking lots of soda. which has phosphoric acid. And that actually is one of the biggest drivers of osteoporosis is the phosphoric.

Acid that leeches out the calcium from your bones. It was just a daily part of my life, you know, drinking soda, drinking, you know, so-called punch, Hawaiian punch, you know, it's like 1% juice. And of course, sugar has an impact on your bone density and so many other factors. Omega-3s. I had no idea that any of these other things mattered, but I was deficient in so much. And so fast forward the story. At the age of 20, I was finally diagnosed with degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease. So it's essentially arthritis of the spine. And my physician told me I had the spine of an 80-year-old man when.

I was just 20 years old.

You're 20 going on 80. Yeah, right. I was like Benjamin Button, like the wrong way. And so I also had two herniated discs that were causing me a tremendous amount of pain. and unfortunately, he told me that this situation was incurable. There's nothing I can do about it. And I went about my life for the next two years just in a lot of pain and suffering. I, my fat jeans, I was kind of this, the skinny kid in my family, but my fat jeans kicked on with a vengeance at that point. And so I gained a bunch of weight, and I was scared. I was scared to move around because every physician I see, and by the way, I want to encourage everybody, whenever you do get bad news like this, I highly encourage you to get a second, third opinion before taking any type of action. And in most cases, if you have time, and I did that, but it was the same bill of goods. And to put a bow on the story, because obviously it turned out okay. It wasn't until the final physician that I saw telling me the same thing that I started to change the question that was going on in my mind habitually. and I talk about this in the book as well. There's a brain reflex, it's called instinctive elaboration, and your brain is really running off the questions that you ask constantly, and oftentimes they're unconscious because it helps to filter out the trillions of bits of data that your brain is trying to process to basically give you the most important information that you need to survive in your environment. And so I was habitually asking, why me? Why did this happen to me? Why won't anybody help me? And so I'm just looking, scanning my environment constantly to affirm those questions and answer those questions on how much my life sucked and why I was so alone. And in an instant, after I really realized like, truly they do mean well, but they don't walk in my shoes. I finally asked, what can I do to get healthier? Just like a light bulb got turned on and I started to ask different questions. Okay, my spine is degenerating. what is my spine made out of? And started asking these questions.

Obvious question, right? Right.

And it started to send me down this wonderful journey. And long story short, I used several different protocols. I started off trying to lose weight with Slim Fast.

All right.

I was drinking a shake a day, you know, two shakes a day, and then a healthy dinner, all that. But eventually, by asking different questions, the right data showed up, and I started to really look at food. as one of the primary inputs to get these raw materials my body needed, my bones needed, my spine needed. And I completely reversed the condition about nine months later when I got a scan done. And it really just set in place a very strong passion to help other people and to serve and it really transformed my world. But Mark, I got to share this one little nugget. It wasn't just that my body changed, the way that I thought changed. My mind changed. Yeah.

Okay, tell me about that because- it's.

A huge change as well.

Okay, this is really important because right now we're seeing so much violence and anger and hatred and divisiveness that we've never seen in our society. And if you look at the mirroring of that with our obesity epidemic and with our increased consumption of processed food, there seems to be for sure an associative link. But when you look at the research on behavior, violence, mental health, depression, anxiety, you know, disruptive behavior, ADD, Even gun violence, it's connected to our diet because our diet shapes our thoughts, our feelings, our moods, our brain function, and activates the fight or flight response. Literally, when you eat junk food, you activate cortisol and adrenaline. It's literally like you're being attacked by a tiger. When you eat this food, even though there's no immediate threat or danger, your body doesn't know the difference.

And so your emotions respond like that. Absolutely. And this is some of the most important data for me personally that I wanted to really get out to the world. and I'm so grateful, you know, Eat Smart is gonna be available at a prominent feature in Target stores across the country.

Oh, that's good.

For everyday folks to get this information, because there was one fascinating study, and this was conducted by researchers at the Ohio State University, and they want to see what it was like in couples trying to problem solve and perspective take and solve their issues when they had big swings in their blood sugar, which is largely related to the food that they're eating. and they found shockingly, or not so shockingly, that this term we use today of being hangry had a massive impact on their ability to communicate with each other. They found that test subjects were much more angrier and aggressive towards their problem and less likely to resolve their conflict when they were having these swings in blood sugar. And we think this is a joke. We think this is some small thing, but how often do we create conflicts in our relationship on the smallest, silliest things. And there's a checklist that I go through in the book of like really tuning in with yourself and asking, am I hungry? You know, is my partner hungry or deficient in something? Yeah, yeah. Are we sleep deprived?

Are we sleep deprived? You put like snacks in your pocket so in case you're gonna fight, like you feed your dog snacks, just give your wife a little snack.

Here's some motivation. You don't wanna throw Scooby snacks at your lady.

But you know, you just wanna be aware.

Well, you eat them yourself. Right, or give yourself myself a few, you know, to do the shaggy thing. And so, but that's just a small slice of it. And as you mentioned, right now we're living at a time when there's an incredible amount of divisiveness and a lack of empathy because we can solve so many of our problems if we can communicate and talk.

Yes.

And my point being, and the data clearly shows that it's not that it's impossible, but it's much more difficult to communicate with other people. when you don't feel well. And so the data, one of the things that you kind of pointed to, and this was a fascinating study done by researchers at Oxford University, they had to look at prison inmates, which ironically, it's a really great way to track these results because it's a ward study. Everything is controlled, unfortunately, at the same time. But after what they did was they took a group of inmates and they gave them more nutrition. They gave them essential vitamins and minerals and omega-3 fatty acids. and track them against a control group who got a placebo. And at the end of the study, they compiled all the data and they found that there was about a 37% decrease in violent offenses simply by getting higher quality nutrition into people's bodies.

I mean, they were just giving them multivitamin and not even changing their diet that much, right? And when in the same studies were done with dietary change, there was a 56% reduction in violent crime with the food alone and you add a multivitamin, it goes down by 80%. I mean, imagine if there was something we could do that 80% would reduce the anger, violence, divisiveness, gun violence, I mean, all of it, you know, it's crazy.

And this is the situation we're in right now. We have folks who are deficient and unhealthy who are battling it out and trying to communicate with other folks who are deficient and unhealthy. Now, I'm not saying this to be mean. I'm saying this on the strength of a recent study, massive meta-analysis determining that only 12% of United States citizens are metabolically healthy. We see the numbers, but we don't really get it. And I'm going to continue to share these numbers because they're important. We have over 200 million folks here in the United States that are overweight or obese. We have about 135 million folks who are type 2 diabetic or pre-diabetic right now in this country.

It's crazy.

It's continuing to grow. And we have about 115 million people who are chronically sleep deprived. what are we doing? And this is just some of the numbers. This is just some of the numbers.

Yeah, pretty bad. But in your book, you describe some of the solutions to this problem, right? And Eat Smarter, you talk about our idea of calories being a little bit misconstrued, that the whole science of calories in, calories out, something I've talked a lot about, is kind of not really true. And just so you know, Sean, even though you and I have looked at the science, and we're not PhDs in nutrition. We don't work at big academic centers, although I do work at Cleveland Clinic. And there are endocrine societies and specialists and so forth that look at all the data. But I was having a conversation with my colleague from Harvard, David Ludwig, who's been researching the science of calories and glycemic load and index for 30 years, and it's really clearly established through very carefully designed experiments, not just population studies, but carefully designed interventional experience with randomized control groups looking at different effects of metabolic health of different calories. He did one study where he literally found they were, if you ate exactly the same calories, but low carb and higher fat, you would actually burn 450 calories more a day than the control group eating exactly the same calories just because the different effects of these macronutrients on your metabolism. And, and what, what I, I, I was shockingly informed of by him the other day were two position papers by the Endocrine Society that reiterated that weight loss is all about calories. Why is this so wrong? Yeah.

Well, first of all, in Eat Smarter, we go back and look at the inception of the calorie. And I'm a big fan of doing this. Like, where did this whole thing come from? And looking at how this became such the focal point in nutrition. It really revolves around the calorie, which when it was invented, it wasn't even utilized. Nobody was looking for anything to measure energy in food, by the way. It was used in physics and engineering, but it made its parlay into the nutritional world thanks to Wilbur Atwater, which we have the Atwater system, which kind of goes on a lot of food labels right now, which is very skewed, by the way. But what really impressed it upon our culture, it was a massive bestseller in the early part of the 1900s. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, and it sold like 2 million copies, which is like a billion copies today. You know, it's just like everybody had this book. And she made the shift in that point as a popular paradigm in the culture of looking at food in terms of numbers, no longer looking at food in terms of food and the dynamic aspects that it has on our bodies as far as its relationship to our endocrine system and our neurotransmitters and all those other things. Mm-. So she said from this point forward, we would no longer look at a slice of bread. We'll no longer say a slice of bread, we'll say 100 calories of bread. We'll no longer say a slice of pie, we'll say 350 calories of pie. And within that indoctrination, she also began the widespread association of food with morality and impressing upon culture as a character defect if you're not able to manage your weight and using terms like, punishment and sin. And this was also during the time of World War I. So it's widespread food rationing going on too. And so one of her quotes, and I went back and read this old fangled book. I just couldn't believe some of this stuff in here. But she said that essentially for every hunger pang you feel, you should have a double joy in knowing that you are preventing the pangs in another starving child. Or you support, basically you're supporting your country and making sure other people can eat. and this also is very important because it associated weight loss with hunger. You know it's working when you're hungry. And these things have continued to proliferate in our culture unchecked. Now, just going back to your point with calories in particular. Now, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of this because it's not that calories are not valuable. It's a measurement of energy. It's a tool of measurement, but it's different because A meter is a measurement of distance, but that's consistent. Right. Within the human body, it's completely eliminating the complexity of digestion. And so one of the fascinating things that I want folks to know and starting to really evolve the concept of calories is that the type of food matters. And one of the studies highlighted in Eat Smarter, this was from the journal Food and Nutrition Research, and they took test subjects and they had them to consume a meal of either whole foods or processed foods to see what it did on the rate of calorie burn. And it was shocking.

Yeah, yeah.

The whole food meal was what they called this whole food meal, multigrain bread and cheddar cheese. While the processed food meal was white bread and cheese product, which is cheese product, by the way, that's Kraft. All right, it's Kraft.

Well, you know, we can't actually call it cheese. It's cheese product. Yeah, it has to be 51% cheese. that's why it's called American slices, not American cheese. And it shouldn't be your first warning. It's a cheese-like substance.

Exactly. And so they compiled all the data. They had, you know, test subjects eat either or. And after they compiled the data, this, listen to this. This is what happened. The folks who consumed the processed food sandwich, even though it was the same amount of calories, the same amount of protein, carbs and fats on paper. The folks who ate the processed food sandwich had a 50% reduction in calorie burn after consuming that meal of processed food. It changed the way their body was managing the calories they consumed and it caused their body to retain and hold on to more of that processed food energy. All right? That's just one aspect. And we go through about five or six of the different dynamics.

So what you're saying is what you eat, is probably more important than how much you eat.

It is definitely a major factor. And if folks can start to make this shift and just evolve, take it up a notch, because we tend to get into this, unfortunately, like you just mentioned, we have amazing colleagues who do work in this field. I just taught a neuroscience class at NYU yesterday. I get to do all of these really cool things. But the science on food and metabolism and weight loss, it tends to be very lopsided, even for the experts, the best in the business, who are just like, you need, just need to be in a calorie deficit. You need to be in a calorie deficit and completely ignoring the complexity of the endocrine system and digestion. And also, one of the things we really dive into and provide the cutting edge research is the effect that your microbiome has on rate of calorie burn. Dr.

Absolutely. I mean, this is really functional medicine, right? Food is information. It's not just calories. When you eat and it's different than if you burn a calorie in the lab. I mean, if you burn a calorie, in a lab, and 500 calories of soda and 500 calories of broccoli are exactly the same. They both release the same amount of energy, and that's defined as how much energy it takes to raise one liter of water, one degree centigrade. That's a calorie, and it's fine. When you eat them, it's very different because when you're eating the foods, they're going through all sorts of different mechanisms that change what happens. So they alter your microbiome, which changes your weight. You literally can swap out bugs from a thin mouse to a fat mouse, and that fat mouse will lose weight because of the thin making microbiome, right? So you're feeding the microbiome, you're driving inflammation or cooling it off, which drives weight gain. You're regulating hormones like insulin, testosterone, estrogen by what you eat. You're regulating your mitochondria, which really about how much energy you burn. You're regulating all these various factors that are so critical for weight regulation, your brain chemistry, your hormones, and you write all about this in Eat Smarter, which is why it's such a smarter book because you actually address these scientific issues that still are staggering to me that most traditional doctors, nutritionists, academicians, and nutrition societies and the government all don't buy into. And it's really honestly, I hate to say this, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that the food industry wins by all calories being the same because then you can have 100 calorie soda, or 100 calorie bunch of blueberries, and there's no difference. But that's just absurd. Even a fifth grader or a kindergarten kid would understand that 500 calories of soda and 500 calories of blueberries are.

Pretty different when you eat them.

And it's your fault. It's your fault. Yeah, it's your fault. It's your fault.

You're overweight, right? Because if you just ate less and exercised more, everything would be great. Manage those calories and you'll lose weight. And the entire paradigm is really skewed. And I got to reiterate this because when you just mentioned the research in mice, for example, now we have paralleled research in humans. This is cutting edge data that is getting out to the world right now. And one of the fascinating studies, this was published in Cell, they was looking at, they looked at what's happening in mice depending upon their microbiome cascade. And they found that there's specific, sorry, specific, I'm so excited, specific bacteria that is found in mice that actually reduced the amount of calories that they were absorbing from the food that they were eating. Now, you take that piece of data and marry that with the human data that we have now, and this was conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science. And what they did was they were taking, this is well known right now, guys, but I want everybody to get it today, that once our bodies start to venture into being overweight and obese, our microbiome changes massively. and now we know that there's a kind of a bacteria cascade that is associated with being overweight. It's like a fingerprint. It's a very unique kind of dynamic thing, all of our metabolism, but there is a very specific spectrum that you see when folks start to become obese. And what they did was they took these human fat bacteria associated with obesity and put them into lean mice, and then the mice inherently gained weight their insulin sensitivity went down and they gained body fat versus taking the bacteria from a healthy human subject and putting into the mice and the mice continue to stay lean. Changing the bacteria in our bodies has a massive impact. And one of the other studies took two, took a set of twins. All right. And all they did was they had them on the same calorie reduced diet, but one of them had a microbiome associated with obesity and one had a microbiome associated with leanness. on the same diet and they're twins.

Wow.

On the same diet, the one with the microbiome associated with obesity continued to gain weight while the other one didn't. This is real stuff. So what do we do to fix this is where we really got to put our focus.

I agree. And I think, you know, I just want to sort of summarize a few key elements here that are worth underscoring. And then I want to talk about the three major things that cause problems when you want to try to lose fat, so. if you eat ultra-processed food, by the way, it's 60% of our calories. It's most of what Americans eat, all the starch, sugar, processed food, anything sort of made in a factory that's not from real ingredients. One, if you're eating it, even if it's the identical same calories as whole food, your metabolism's slower. That's what you just said. Two, in another study, they found that if you let people eat ultra-processed food compared to regular whole foods, they'll eat 500 calories more a day. So they'll eat more and they'll be hungrier. And three, it changes your microbiome in ways that increase bad bacteria that cause weight gain. And of course, there's a lot of other things that drive inflammation, hormone, and appetite issues, which are really the things that really you talk about that are the three major things when it comes to fat loss. So let's dig into those three things, inflammation, hormone dysfunction, and apetite problems, which is, you know, I mean, I had a, I had a doctor call me about one of his patients for advice, and he says, just this guy really exercises a lot of time. You, you know, really focus on eating healthy, but he's just hungry all the time. And I'm like, well, it's probably because of what he's eating that's driving his brain chemistry and his immune system and all the mechanisms that drive hunger. So we have to change that, and it's not that hard to do. so tell us about those three things.

Absolutely. And the thing that I really wanted to usher in and bring to the forefront because it sounds the most like ghostly, it sounds like cast with the ghost, like it's not even a real thing is inflammation and how inflammation has an impact on your body composition. And the data exists, it's just that a lot of folks don't know about it. And the way that it really manifests when we're talking about inflammation, is that it has this very detrimental impact on our organs that are related to our body's production and utilization of our fat, kind of fat loss related hormones. So namely, let's take our liver, for example. Your liver is incredibly important in regulating your metabolism. You know, we're talking about a relationship with how it manages insulin, even the production of fat. takes place in your liver too. The storing of glycogen can take place in your liver. You know, if your liver is, if your body's overburdened by glucose, your liver can literally convert that into fat right there on the spot. And so if something is damaging your liver, it's going to inherently damage your, your endocrine system and your process of metabolism. So inflammation, and I've just kind of shared some of the data in the book. dAmaginG your liver. And this is one of the most fast growing issues in our country is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Yeah, this is really a kind of chronically inflame in inflamed situation taking place in our liver. And also, how do we, how do.

We get fatty livers? Because I think people should know we go to fancy restaurants and they give you foie gras, which is French for fatty liver. And, and it's, how do they get the ducks to be like that? And how do they get us humans to have 90 million Americans with fatty liver?

Everybody should know by now. Very simple. The fastest way to, to damage your liver and to create that fatty liver. And by the way, it's called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease because we associate it with alcohol. But sugar.

Sugar. Absolutely. Sugar, starch, flour. It's, it's so bad. It's so bad, particularly.

Your liver has to take on the brunt of it because your liver is really, even the name, live, it's responsible for so much. Like every minute, it's filtering your entire blood supply. You know, it's so important.

That's right.

But to take this one step further, and I'll just drop this little nugget so we can move on to the other topics, but also the master regulator often referred to, of course, you know, I've even taught this in my conventional university setting. But your hypothalamus, all right? Your hypothalamus is one of the major regulators and communicators with your thyroid, with your liver, with your adrenals. All the organs related to fat loss and fat storage, the governing kind of master gland, it's called the master gland, is your hypothalamus.

That's in your brain.

You hate it. Right. And now we've got data that this new term, neuroinflammation, inflammation specifically regarding the function of your hypothalamus can damage what's happening with your metabolism. But nobody's talking about that in these cookie cutter diets that you need to address the inflammation in your brain in order for you to lose weight. Right? So these are all, and the beautiful part is it's possible. It's not just possible, it's probable when you have the right information and we avoid the things that create the inflammation. and namely you just mentioned sugar, but we go through a whole subset of the different things. Yeah, in functional medicine, we also look.

At, you know, food sensitivities and environmental toxins and the microbiome and all, there's so many things that drive inflammation. And if you're overweight, you're inflamed. And for those listening, you know, think, oh, you know, I'm a few pounds overweight, a little extra belly fat, you know, maybe I need to lose 10, 20 pounds, or maybe you're over more overweight or obese. You should really pay attention to what Sean's saying, because right now during this COVID pandemic, what we're as those people who are overweight or obese or have even a little bit of extra fat are much more likely to get sick, much more likely to end up in the hospital, the ICU, and to die from COVID-19 because of poor metabolic health. And what's so beautiful about the body is that you think, oh my God, I've taken years and years to get here. Within a couple of weeks, you can change all of that. You might not lose all the weight in a couple of weeks, but you can change your inflammation markers, your hormones, your brain chemistry. literally in a couple of weeks of changing your diet and following the principles that are in Eat Smarter, which is.

Shawn's new book, which you should all get a copy of. Thank you, Mark. And just to reiterate what you just said, it's so important. You know, the CDC's recent report found that about 90 folks, 94% of the folks who've lost their lives had an average of 2.6 chronic diseases or comorbidities, you know, and we've gotta get our citizens healthier. And the big thing in the beginning of this was, well, we can't get people healthier overnight.

When?

When are we gonna start? And truly, it's up to us in conversations like this. So I just wanted to share that. But also leaning into this topic and just, you mentioned environmental toxins, but I'm gonna share something that's a little bit controversial. And this has to do with supplements because there's been a big shift taking place that it went from about seven percent to 20 of hospitalizations related to liver damage are related to supplements because this is because, like, Mark, when I was trying to turn my health around, I became a natural pill popper first. I didn't get it with the food. And so I'm taking, I've got, like, my grandma's, like, pill full of, like, 20, 30 different things that I'm trying to take to get these nutrients. And so, yeah, not to say that the right supplements aren't helpful, but it's a largely unregulated field on top of that.

Yeah.

But also we need to Target and understand that your liver is responsible for Metabolism of all these supplements. And it's also responsible for drug metabolism. And now we've got about 70% of the United States population on pharmaceutical drugs right now. And your liver is responsible for that drug metabolism. So just want to throw those things out there. But to shift gears to go from inflammation, that's one of the major causative factors behind an inability to lose weight. And the other one is, hormone dysfunction. Yeah. And your hormones or response. This is where the real magic happens. This is where the show is going on. Your hormones are like the little chemical Messengers that are communicating with all the cells in your body and really create communicating the message on what they need to do. And so there are hormones that are specifically related to fat storage, and there are hormones specifically related to fat utilization. Yeah. And just to give a super overarching Look at this insulin. Insulin is our body's major kind of energy storing hormone. It's a beautiful thing. Insulin's not a bad guy that is storing energy slash fat. It's helpful. We need it. It's part of our evolution to have it. Now it's being hyper utilized and put to work chronically and it can get overworked and it can just be like, I quit. So we've got insulin, but on the other side, insulin has a brother. glucagon. Glucagon really does the opposite. And they're both produced at, you know, from their loving mother, Miss pancreas. And so they each have opposing roles, but glucagon can't do its job unless insulin sits down. You know, these two things is a binary process, but insulin literally triggers the cell to open up to use that energy. And there are specific nutrients involved in these Communications and these Pathways. and nutrients that make these pathways kind of suppressed and create hormonal clogs. So a big mission with the book is taking folks through and teaching them about all of these fat loss and fast storage related hormones to give them really good education, but in a way that's fun and it makes sense. You know, we get a conversation about thyroid hormone, your adrenals, all those things. So hormone dysfunction, regardless of what diet you're on, we have to find ways to optimize what's happening with your hormones.

And then they play a huge role in regulating your metabolism, as you said, and they're driven in large part by what you eat. People don't understand their testosterone levels and your sex drive is controlled by what you eat. If you're a guy, if you're a woman, your level of estrogen and fat is determined by what you're eating. Certain foods increase estrogen like sugar and alcohol. That's why they give estrogen to male steers to fatten them up, marble their fat before they take them to market, right? There's no lack of science about this. We just don't understand it. And then of course, there's the appetite issue, which is such a big thing for people.

Yeah, oh Mark, and this is so important. This goes back to when I mentioned Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters impressing upon society that hunger is related to weight loss. And unfortunately, millions of people still believe this. and hunger is a biolot, like biofeedback, it's biological feedback that something is awry here, all right? And this could be a nutrient deficiency. This could be related to some form of like habitual, you know, addictions, things like that. But our hunger isn't the issue. We want to make sure that we're not hungry because that hunger is associated with overeating, of course. And we could try to battle our biology But eventually it's going to win out against our willpower, which is finite. And so with that said, let's get folks educated on how our appetite works. And now these terms that we've been talking about, you and I probably for over a decade at least, but now a lot of folks know about the power of leptin and the power of ghrelin. These are kind of the major players, but we go deeper than that. And now we know that leptin, for example, leptin is your body's major satiety hormone. and it's actually produced by your fat cells. Now, here's the catch folks. And this is one of the studies that I put into Eat Smarter as well. And this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that folks who are overweight and obese actually have plenty of leptin.

That should make them satisfied. Well, they have leptin resistance. Exactly.

And inflammation causes leptin resistance. Exactly. It all starts to go together. They're still getting the DM. The leptin DM is being sent. but it's going to spam. You know, it's just like been spam.

So.

And so that's what creates that leptin resistance. Yeah.

That's just one aspect.

And then, guerlin is this glorified hunger hormone. There are specific things we can do with our nutrition, obviously, that encourages leptin sensitivity and really helps to get ghrelin in check. But there's so many other players. Adiponectin is one that you're going to be hearing a lot more about related to satiety. And adiponectin has been found to help to move more of the kind of troublesome body fat in the visceral fat area and actually transfer that to the subcutaneous fat area, which makes it a little bit more protective. We still want to address both of these kind of white adipose tissues, but the visceral belly fat is what's really dangerous, the most dangerous from the.

What's fascinating about adiponectin is that when you have high levels of adiponectin, you can't actually mobilize fat. And what causes high levels of adiponectin is insulin resistance, which is pre-diabetes, which is eating too much sugar. So it all comes down to the starch and sugar. So your book is just filled with wisdom and information about these key mechanisms about how different foods and nutrients affect your brain function, about the microbiome, how it affects relationships, how it impacts our communities and stress levels. I mean, it's just, it's so full of beautiful things that are far beyond just what to eat. You talk about love languages in the book. It's such a fantastic book. And I just want to sort of close by talking about the research around sitting down for a meal with people you love and what that does to your health, your food choices, to your body composition, because we've kind of lost that. I think the idea of a family dinner, the idea of cooking together, eating together, being together, it's like I think the average family has dinner together a couple of nights a week, usually all while eating different foods made from different factories, heated up in a microwave that are eaten while watching TV or being on their phone. not exactly conducive to health. So tell us about this, this researcher about eating together.

Yeah. And this is incredibly powerful because it's not just what we're eating, but it's also how we're eating and who we're eating with has a major impact on our overall health. And I share this story in Eat Smarter that I grew up, it might sound a little far-fetched for some folks, it's like people aren't sitting down to eat together. I can count on my hands how many times I sat down and ate a meal with my family growing up. Wow.

All right. Wow.

This was an incredibly rare occasion. This is usually if it wasn't a holiday, by the way, holidays a little bit different, but it's usually just a free-for-all we might eat at the same time, but we're not eating together and or we're not we're eating in front of the television or playing a video game or something like that. And so this is not abnormal, by the way. Yeah, this is really shifting to be the and here's some of the healing factors of this. Researchers at Harvard University uncovered that folks who consistently eat dinner with their families frequently consume more fruits and vegetables and less processed foods and sodas. And one of the most, I think this can get overlooked in the study, they found that folks who consistently eat dinner with their families also had higher intakes of some of the most important nutrients that regulate our fat storing hormones and your fat burning hormones as well. So things like calcium, folate, B vitamins. Also, they found they had a generally higher lower intake of dangerous compounds, you know, like trans fats and yeah, yeah, and toxicants in our food. So this is really powerful. But one other study, and this is the most important for myself personally in this mission, and this was published in the Journal of Nutrition, Education and Behavior. and they found very similar results. And now it gets into numbers. They found that folks who eat with their family, and this could be any meal of the day, breakfast, lunch or dinner, just four times a week, dramatically increased consumption of fruits and vegetables and reduced consumption of soda and chips. And what was so beautiful about this study is that this was done on folks who would be considered higher risk which was minority children, minority families. So this isn't just about fixing the environment around the thing, it's the personal responsibility as well knowing you have leverage because the simple act of eating together as a family helps to increase, improve the health outcomes for the children and the adults as well.

It's so true. My friend Laurie David who was involved with the movie Fed Up that I was in years ago, I wrote a book called the Family Dinner and she talks about the research on if you have family dinners where you're eating food together and you're making it together and you're enjoying real food, that the kids have less likely to have obesity, eating disorders, violence, do better in school, have less drug use. I mean, just so many benefits that you wouldn't even think, I mean, better grades. I mean, just by eating dinner together. So I think that's really important and I think it's it's beautiful how you combine the understanding of the deep science around food and how to optimize your metabolism with the science around relationships and love and connection. And that's really what food's about. It's about joy and pleasure and connection, but it's also about having us live our best lives because the tagline in the book title, Transform youm Life, actually is true. And food has the power to do that. And eating smarter we'll teach you how to do that. So I encourage everybody to get a copy of Eat Smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain and transform your life. You can check it out at eatsmarterbook.com Sean is the man. I love him. He's doing the real work and you should all check out his stuff. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. If you know anybody who struggles with weight, that's probably 90% of Americans. Share with them. Leave a comment. Tell us what you've learned about your body and how food can help you be smarter and eat smarter and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

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