How To Use FOOD AS MEDICINE To Heal The Body & PREVENT DISEASE! | Dr. Mark Hyman

It's supposed to be not safe to eat according to the FDA, but it's still everywhere in the grocery store. There's a few key tips that you should just stick to 100%. So my fridge is my medicine cabinet. The grocery store is my pharmacy and the farmer's market too, for that matter. And there's all these colorful medicines in there and not the kind of blue pills and green pills and yellow pills, but actually phytochemically rich foods that have so much power to make you healthier. So I want to share a little bit more about this with you today. Okay, so how do we personalize our diet? for us? What should we be eating? What's an optimal diet? It doesn't really have to be complicated. Listen to your body. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. How do you feel when you eat this? And I just talked to him yesterday. She said, when I eat dairy, my nose starts to run immediately. Well, guess what? Your body's telling you something. Listen to it, right? Don't eat the dairy because you're having some reaction. Or if you're eating, you know, if you eat a ton of pasta and you feel like you go into a food coma, probably good clue, you probably shouldn't be doing that. So listen to your body. And it's amazing to me after decades and decades of being a doctor that people, even the smartest people I know, do not connect what they eat with how they feel. It's just mind boggling to me. And then when you start to connect the dots, they go, wow, this is powerful. So you need to customize what you're doing. You need all the bad stuff. You gotta take it out, processed food, sugar, junk food, refined oils, all that stuff goes. I mean, just take out the bad stuff. We know what all it is. I've talked about it. And then add in a ton of good stuff. I went to the farmer's market and bought all this stuff the other day. And it's just, it's yummy, it's fresh, it's local, it's way more tasty than stuff you buy in the supermarket. If you can do that, do it. If you can't, find, even with SNAP or food stamps, you can get double bucks so you can go to the farmer's market and afford it even if you're struggling with food security. So, really important to customize your diet. and then what actually is a good diet? And I've written a lot about this. I wrote Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? and the Pegan Diet. There's no guessing what I think, but essentially it's whole real food. I used to do a lot of speaking in churches with the Daniel Plan I did, and I used to say it's really easy to figure out what to eat. And I just asked you to have one question. Did God make this or did man make this? Did God make an avocado? Yeah. Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did man make an avocado?

No.

It's pretty easy. Even a kid in kindergarten could figure out what to eat. So ask yourself next time you go buy something, who made this? Was it coming from nature and God or was it just coming from a factory somewhere? And then you should probably stay away from the stuff that's not actually made by God or nature. So you want to eat whole foods, real foods, lots of plant foods. 80% of your diet should be unprocessed whole plant foods, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds. Obviously some grains and beans are good, some aren't. Gluten is a problem, especially modern wheat. you want to probably want to stay away from that. You need to eat foods that have good fats in them. Avocados, nuts, olive oil, fatty fish like sardines, mackerel, herring. You also want to eat a lot of fiber. So that's going to happen naturally as you eat a lot of plant foods. You want to make sure you have Prebiotic Foods like plantains and artichokes and asparagus. And, and I even sometimes add that from a microbiome. You also want polyphenols for your microbiome, things like cranberry and pomegranate and and green tea and all these prickly pear and olive leaf extract and all these different things that you can use to actually increase the growth of the good bugs in your gut because that determines so much of your health. You're not only feeding yourself, you're feeding all those guys in there. And then you can also take fermented foods, things like tempeh and sauerkraut and miso and kimchi. These are all foods that are traditionally made in diets because we had to preserve our food in the past. We didn't have refrigerators, so we had a way of preserving all this stuff. and also protein is important. Now, especially as we get older, now you don't want too much protein, but you want enough protein and you want the right kind of protein. And I've written a lot about this, especially in my book Young Forever, but there's basically a few, the rule is a palm size full approach size amount of protein and most meals. And this can be plant proteins, but often you need a lot more. Nuts, seeds, grains and beans are okay, but they're lower quality. They don't have all the amino acids you need for or in the right volumes for building muscle, particularly as you get older. So I like grass-fed meat, I like pasture-raised chicken, I like pasture-raised eggs, I like small wild fish, I like goat whey. These are my kind of go-to proteins. So that's what I think tofu tempeh are probably the most dense plant-based proteins, but you want to eat the right protein. Now, what should we not be eating? Well, it's stuff that's not food, right? Obviously, there's another thing is junk food. There's junk and there's food. So obviously, if you see a label with 45 different ingredients, don't eat it. If you can't pronounce the ingredients, don't eat it. If you don't recognize what the ingredients are, don't eat it. You can shop around the outside of your grocery store. There's a few key tips that you should just stick to 100%, never fall off of this. There's no high fructose corn syrup every period. Why? Well, one is sugar and two is a special form of sugar that does a lot more damage and is a lot more likely to cause harm. The next is hydrogenated fats. Never eat anything with that. And it's supposed to be not safe to eat according to the FDA, but it's still everywhere in the grocery stores. I don't know how they'd get away with this, but seven years ago they said it's not safe to eat and it's still in the grocery stores. You go figure. Anyway, I won't get into that. Refined vegetables, want to stay away from that. Stay away from additives, chemicals, preservatives, pesticides. I mean, if you wouldn't sprinkle it on your salad or on your, vegetables at night, well, why would you eat it? I mean, who has butylated hydroxytoluene in their cupboard? But that's the most, a common preservative found in most processed food. Also, artificial sweeteners really bad, they tend to cause bacterial overgrowth in the gut, they actually increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. You don't wanna do that, and they'll wreck your health. So what's the number one take-home philosophy? Just that simple question, did God make this or did man make this? And ask yourself that next time you pick something up at the grocery store. Okay, so why is food the most important medicine in your medical toolbox. Why is it the most important thing you could be focused on for your health? And, you know, I actually was watching a podcast the other day with Rich Roll, a friend of mine, and there was a guy who was a hundred years old on there. And he's like, the most important thing is diet. And he is right. Now, it is the most powerful tool you have to change your health. What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you'll ever find in a prescription bottle. It works faster, better and cheaper. It has the power to influence and improve the expression of tens of thousands of genes, to optimize tens of thousands of protein networks, to balance your hormones, improve your brain chemistry, to upregulate your immune system and even to enhance your microbiome. And it works without any side effects except good ones. So this is really a drug. And I just want to give you a quick story. I've told this story before, but it's so important to understand how how quick and fast this is. I had a patient, this patient illustrates this more than anything. She was part of our program at Cleveland Clinic. She came to one of our groups called Functioning for Life. She was 66, she had heart failure, she had angina, had multiple stents, she had type 2 diabetes on insulin for years, hypertension, I mean you name it, she had it. Her kidneys were failing, her livers were failing, her liver was failing. You only have one liver, right? I do remember that from medical school. And she was so sick and she was this big, her body mass index was 43, 30 is considered obese. 40 is severely obese and she just was enormous. And she took insulin shots every day. She came to see us and she changed her diet and she did exactly what I'm gonna tell you to do today in this Doctor's Pharmacy Health Bite. And within three days of changing her diet, she was off insulin. And by the way, she was on a pile of pills that cost $20,000 a year for her copay. In three days she was off insulin. In three months she was off her medications. Her A1C, which is your average blood sugar, went from 11, which is like almost hospitalized to five and a half, which is normal. Her heart failure reversed, her kidneys normalized, her liver normalized. She got off her blood pressure pills and she lost a bunch of weight. And after a year, she lost 116 pounds and had none of those conditions and was off all her medications. There is no drug on the planet that can do that. All those drugs were managing her diseases. Food, I don't even think we should call medicine. It's like a miracle cure because it's so powerful. And I've seen this over and over and over in my practice. And I honestly, as a doctor, I've been doing functional medicine for a long time, decades. And I think I was the first one to say, you are not allowed to see a doctor in my practice unless you also see the nutritionist. Because if I'm a doctor and food is medicine, then how am I gonna practice without a nutritionist? That is fundamental, fundamental to the premise of functional medicine. And there's five nutritionists that work with me in my practice. They're awesome. So, anyway, let's get back to it. So, what is food? Okay, it's protein, it's fat, it's calories, it's carbohydrates, it's fiber, it's vitamins, minerals, but it's so, so much more. In every bite of food, there's literally thousands of informational molecules like code that can upgrade or downgrade your biological software with every single bite. literally, you change your biological software, you change your genetic expression, you change the way your hormones work, the way your immune system works, you change which bugs you're growing in your gut, depending on which foods you eat, literally in real time, not over decades or days, but literally within minutes. So it's so powerful and we have the ability to speak to our genes through food. And I think this is why it's so important to understand how to use food as medicine. But, by the way, okay, by the way, it's not suffering here. I'm not talking about, you know, eating, you know, wheatgrass shots and a bunch of, you know, oat bran or something. I'm talking about yummy, delicious, tasty, amazing, gorgeous food. I had a party for my office staff last night and we had the most unbelievable array of vegetables and foods and dishes and flavors and, I mean, Nobody went away going, oh, this was healthy food. They're not thinking, oh, this is healthy food, 'cause it just tastes so good. So if it doesn't taste good, no one's gonna eat it, right? But actually food tastes good. And by the way, you might not know this, but flavor in food, and the reason why the food industry puts so many chemicals and additives and colorings and flavorings and sugar and salt in food is to make it taste good. How do you take processed ingredients and make them taste edible? You have to add all this crap. but if you eat real food, inside the food are the molecules that give food its flavor. So think about this, if you ever grew a garden or had a fresh tomato grown in your organic garden and you went like a cherry tomato or something, you went at the end of the summer in August and stuck in your mouth, it's like an explosion of flavor. Whereas if you take a tomato that was like grown in some hothouse and shipped across the country and it was designed to be fit in a box in a certain size and square and not squish. I mean, it looks like a tomato, but it doesn't taste very good. And the reason for the difference in taste, the reason is the phytochemicals, these plant compounds that produce the flavor. But guess what? Those phytochemicals that produce the flavor are also the medicines in food. So flavor and medicine in food go together, not the flavor that you add with all kinds of crap, but the actual flavor of the food, right? think of a ripe peach at the end of the summer that melts in your mouth and squishy and juicy. I'm drooling already. Okay, so it is the end of summer and peach season. So you want to just understand that you want to seek out flavor. And Dan Barber actually did a company called Row 7 Seeds where he created a company to improve the flavor of foods by breeding them to produce more flavor. But as a side effect, the way they get the flavor is through the phytochemicals. So I want to sort of help you really understand this. so important. Now, the next question I want to answer is, what is this whole field of nutrigenomics? You might have heard about personalized nutrition or nutrigenetics, nutrigenomics. This is the science of how food regulates your gene expression and your epigenetics. When you eat, it's literally sending messages to turn genes on or off. I'm going to turn on the antioxidant genes, or I'm going to turn on the anti-inflammatory genes, or I'm going to turn on the genes that cause cancer, or I'm going to turn off the genes that cause cancer, or I'm going to turn on the genes that cause heart disease, or turn off the genes that cause heart disease. So we really think of them as the food as the little signals and the code that is regulating your biological software. And you want a new operating system that's an operating system of health and well-being. Well, you have to put in the right code and the right code is the right food. So, I mean, what messages are you sending to your biology when you eat a double cheeseburger fries and a coke? Right, what messages are you sending to your body? if you're eating, like we had last night, this watercress salad, we had this incredible watermelon gazpacho with mint, we had, oh my god, so many different things, eggplant with all kinds of spices and sauces on it, it was so delicious, and spices also are full of these phytochemical flavor things. So, there's so many ways that we should be thinking about how we regulate our body. What if you had, you know, fresh wild salmon and wild berries, maybe wild strawberries, every time a wild strawberry is bursting with flavor, and fresh wild greens like they had in Icaria where they lived to be 100 years old, and that's a very different set of molecules that you're putting in your body that regulate what's going on. So this is really about personalized nutrition. It's about understanding how genes are affected by what you eat. And then also we have to think about how each of us are different. But as a whole framework, the power of food as medicine is huge and the power of understanding the phytochemicals in food is huge. And here's another interesting phenomena that's going on around food. is you would think that all the phytochemicals were in plant foods, right? So you need phyto means plant, not dog, not phyto the dog, but plant foods. And the phytochemicals come from plants. So how would you get them in animal food? In milk or meat? Well, turns out that those animals that are eating industrial feedlot food, corn and silage and all kinds of weird things they feed them like skittles and ground up feathers, that doesn't do very well for those animals in terms of the quality of their meat or their milk. But if you have a grass-fed cow or sheep or goat or a wild animal eating all these wild plants or even, you know, grass-fed pasture raised animals that are foraging on a lot of varieties of plants, that will be taken. Those compounds in those plants will be taken up in the milk and meat. And now this is being studied. And we're seeing these phytochemicals in the meat and milk of these animals. So, for example, if you look at a A wild, animal like a kangaroo, and they did a study in Australia, and they're starting to do more of these studies here. They, they give them, to people and see what happens to their blood chemistry versus the same amount of meat from, let's say a feedlot cow versus a kangaroo. And the kangaroo meat, same ounce for ounce of meat will reduce inflammation where the feedlot meat will increase inflammation. Why? It's because of what the animal's eating, right? That's the message.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. All of these things we tend to medicate. We're like, symptom, medication, boom. But actually, these symptoms are your body telling you, Hey, hello, there's actually glucose spikes happening in here. There's something you can change and heal from within.