Incredible Anti-Aging Foods To Fight Disease, Inflammation & Cognitive Decline | Dr. Mark Hyman

The first category of superfoods I want to discuss are seeds. Not just any seeds, but three seeds. The ones I like are chia, hemp, and flax. Now, chia seeds are a great source of omega-3 fats. They have more calcium than milk, and they're a great source of anti-inflammatory compounds, and they're great for glowing skin and mental health and Clarity and much, much more. Chia seeds have 10 grams of fiber in one ounce. The fiber in chia seeds is insoluble fiber. It's the kind of fiber that feeds friendly gut bacteria, and that promotes gut health and it gets fermented into short chain fatty acids, which are super important for your gut. Feeding friendly intestinal bacteria is super important to keep your gut bacteria well fed for good health. Chia seeds are a great protein source too, and they're higher in protein content than most plants. I also love hemp seeds, which are another great source of fat, and they also pack a good amount of protein, B vitamins, as well as magnesium, zinc, and iron. And flax seeds are another great source of omega-3 fats and dietary fiber, as well as essential vitamins and minerals. They have powerful, powerful anti-cancer hormone balancing compounds called lignans. When someone tells me they're having trouble with constipation, I usually recommend adding ground flax seeds to their smoothies to encourage healthy bowel movements. So all three of these seeds can be added to your smoothies or you can make puddings, chia seed puddings awesome or add them as toppings on berries or coconut yogurt. Options are endless. Okay, my next superfood is MCT oil. That stands for medium chain triglycerides. Now, these are a type of fatty acid that's derived from coconut oil. See, MCT oil is a super fuel for your cells. because it boosts fat burning and it increases mental clarity. MCT oil can also help you lose weight because it gets quickly burned and metabolized and speeds up your metabolism. It also gets absorbed directly from the gut into the liver and doesn't get stored as fat but rather burned quickly and turned into energy. You can add it to your smoothies, your coffee, you can put it up to dress on your veggies, you can put in salad dressings, whatever you like. The next superfood, or shall I say super fiber that I use almost daily is called Glucomanin. You need to get fiber in your diet to keep healthy from top to bottom, as well as provide food for the healthy bacteria that are inside of you to promote health. See, most of us have about eight grams of fiber. We used to have about 100 grams or 150 grams of fiber as hunter-gatherers, and our bodies really need that. I mean, the African average hunter-gatherer poop is about two pounds, whereas the average Westerner is about four ounces. It's not very good. Fiber can actually prevent obesity and all chronic diseases of aging. Now, this is because fiber slows the rate at which food enters your bloodstream and increases the speed at which the food exits your body through the digestive tract. Fiber keeps your blood sugar and your cholesterol in ideal balance and also quickly eliminates toxins from your gut. Think of it like a scrubber brush that cleans out all the toxins and reduces your appetite. So it's like a win-win-win. Glucomanan is soluble, it's fermentable, and it's a highly viscous fiber. It sort of soaks up 50 times its weight in water, and it comes from the root of elephant yam, also known as konjac. No, it's not the kind you drink. The konjac tuber has been used for centuries as an herbal remedy, and it makes traditional foods like konjac jelly, tofu, and noodles. I like the Shirataki noodles because there's almost no calories, and they're all fiber, and they taste like noodles. There's a great way to take glucomannan and it's in the form of a supplement known as PGX. This is a lot of research on it, $20 million in research looking at diabetes and weight loss and cholesterol and you basically stir it into your water every day as an easy and effective source of fiber. Next I want to talk about mushrooms. It's a whole class of foods actually, not just one mushroom. When I went to China, I realized that the average Chinese person knows more about medicinal properties of food than I do after years of research. Medicinal foods are part of their everyday diet. And one of the staples in Chinese medicine are mushrooms. Reishi, shiitake, maitake, cordyceps, they all have powerful healing properties that boost your immunity and support your hormones. And they're antiviral, they're anti-inflammatory, they're anti-cancer, they can even help you heal your liver, they can lower cholesterol. The list goes on and on and on. And so if you have an experiment with mushrooms, I highly recommend it. I love to make reishi tea or cook with shiitake mushrooms or even maitake. You can put them in soups. They're awesome. Finally, let's talk about the superfood that you might be having today and you don't even know it. And that is plant foods. Yes, that's right. The vast array of colors in veggies represents about 25,000 chemicals that are super beneficial. These are called phytochemicals. Now, there's evidence that the interaction between the colors provides additional benefits, so that's why you want to eat the rainbow. It's important to have a whole diverse diet full of lots of different colorful fruits and vegetables. Now fruits and veggies are historically and biologically super important. Our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers, ate over 800 varieties of plant foods. Today, we don't even consume anywhere near that amount, so we need to make extra effort to include more of a variety in our diets. I always say eat the rainbow. And no, I don't mean skittles. Each color of fruits and veggies represents a whole different family of healing compounds. For example, red foods like tomatoes, they contain the carotenoid lycopene, which helps get rid of free radicals that damage our genes and can prevent cancer like prostate cancer. Green foods contain the chemicals sulforaphane and isothiocyanates. These are also powerful. They also contain indoles, all of which help ward off cancer, by inhibiting carcinogens and getting rid of them in your body. So I want you to try them all. Purple, yellow, orange, red, white, blue, green, whatever. They all have amazing benefits. I encourage you to eat your medicine every single day. Remember, the power of what you put at the end of your fork is far more powerful than what you'll ever.

Find in a prescription bottle. Eat a lot of foods that contain sulfur molecules. And there's basically I would say three main categories of food. The allium family, that allium means onions, garlic, leeks, that kind of stuff. Those are full of sulfur molecules. So you want to include a lot.

Of that in your diet.

And garlic is a powerful booster of detoxification as well as an antimicrobial and has many, many other benefits. So make sure you eat plenty of sulfur containing garlic, onions, and leaks. Second is the broccoli family. This is called the cruciferous vegetables or the brassicas. Broccoli, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts. There's a few other superheroes like arugula, watercress, cilantro. These are all very good detoxifying molecules and they help to boost glutathione in the body. And they have sulforaphane and glucosinolates and all these phytochemicals that upregulate glutathione which is super important. In fact, some of them are really great against cancer. There was one study I saw from China years ago where they looked at the urine in, like, on a bazillion Chinese people. And they, well, not quite a bazillion, but you know what I mean. And then they found that they had high levels of broccoli compounds in the urine of some people. And those people did not get cancer, whereas the people who didn't have high levels got cancer.

So it's, it's played such a role.

In all these things.

So it's really important to eat also those, those vegetables. The next one, and this is one I started to use more, and I'm not a huge fan of dairy, but whey protein is pretty unique. Now, my My preference is pasture raised grass-fed goat whey. It doesn't taste weird or anything, it's just whey protein. It's way better tolerated than regular grass-fed or even regular cow whey, although grass-fed cow can be fine for some people. Whey protein helps you boost glutathione significantly because it has a lot of these sulfur-containing amino acids like cysteine. So it should be made from bioactive non-denatured proteins, which is some of the highly processed ones aren't. But I love grass-fed goat whey and I use that on a regular basis. And I've noticed my body change. I've noticed my energy increase. I've noticed my muscle mass increase. So I think that's a really great way, especially as you age, because it's it gives you so many benefits. One, it helps with glutathione, which is important in the aging process. And two, it really helps build muscle, which is important. Glutathione is probably the most important molecule in your body. And I'm going to tell you why. So stay tuned. It is so important because it helps address everything from heart disease to cancer. to diabetes, to kidney disease, to Alzheimer's, to autism, I mean, you name it. So I'm gonna explain why glutathione is important, what it is, and special tips to help you boost your own glutathione levels and boost your detox system and help protect yourself from chronic illness. So what the heck is glutathione? Now glutathione is an amazing molecule. I'm just gonna give you a little biochemistry first. It's made up of three peptides, three little, sorry, it's a little tripeptide. It's made up of three amino acids, glycine, glutamine and cysteine. Now cysteine is an amino acid that.

Has sulfur in it.

Now if you ever like kind of crushed garlic and you know how it's like sticky, that's the sulfur. And garlic is one of the most powerful detoxifying compounds too 'cause it has a sulfur compound.

Now why is this sticky sulfur thing so important?

Well think of it like fly paper. that all the toxins stick to in your body. So we unfortunately have been exposed to so many toxins that we need to have a lot of detox capacity. There's 80,000 new chemicals on the market since the turn of the last century. 1% has been tested for safety. Heavy metals, pesticides, plastics, all kinds of stuff. Flame retardants, I mean, the average newborn baby has 287 known toxins in their umbilical cord blood. That means even before they took their first breath, they're already pre-tox pre-toxified. I don't know what the word is, but they're already poisoned before they come out of the womb because of the level of toxins in our environment. Now, what glutathione does is it basically sticks to all these toxins with the sulfur sticky molecule. So that's really important. It's like fly paper. It has a lot of other functions, too. We're going to get into them in a minute. Now, it's kind of recycled in the body. and, but sometimes when we're overloaded with toxins, our body can't keep up. So we just kind of overload our body's capacity for detoxification. Now, I also do a lot of diagnostic testing around glutathione. We can tell if your body's making enough glutathione. We can tell if your body is overloaded with toxins.

And I use various kinds of tests.

Like organic acids and glutathione tests. And we can look at reduced and oxidized glutathione. It's all this kind of fancy stuff you don't have to worry about. But the point is that A lot of us don't really have a good ability to detoxify with glutathione. And why is that? Well, think about it. 500 years ago, 10,000 years ago, all the toxins were underground, right? Heavy metals come from coal, which we've dug up and we created energy from it and it's created the Industrial Revolution, but it's poisoned us. And all that stuff goes in the atmosphere. and we get heavy metal rain. So we have all these toxins that we have to deal with. And so we genetically, a lot of us don't have a good array of these detox genes. They're called various kinds of glutathione producing genes. So there's enzymes in your body that turn one chemical to another and they make the glutathione and recycle it. Glutathione M1 transferase, glutathione S-transferase, which is a P1 transferase, all these different genes for glutathione, glutathione peroxidase, They're basically coding for enzymes to make more glutathione. But I mean, if you didn't need a lot of glutathione, you know, 500 years ago, so some of us don't have that, but half of us don't have the right genes. And in fact, I read one study years ago where half the people who were in most hospitals have this problem. So it's a big contributor to chronic illness in a lot of ways. And we don't have really good genes to help us do this. Most of us, I certainly don't. And I, in fact, I know this very well personally. I mean, honestly, I learned most of the stuff I learned on myself because I I don't know why God gave this gift to me of getting sick and then having to figure it out, but that's what he's done or she's done, whoever's done it. And essentially I got mercury poisoning from living in China. I ate a lot of tuna fish sandwiches growing up. I had a lot of dental fillings and my body just couldn't handle it. And I ended up learning I had impaired glutathione genes, which makes it hard for me to produce glutathione. So I'm always eating all the things, and I'll tell you what those are coming up, so don't go away. All the things that help me boost my own glutathione. and I got chronic fatigue syndrome. It was really, really bad. My body broke down. I got super ill because I couldn't get rid of all the heavy metals and toxins. So that's why glutathione is such an important molecule and why you should pay attention to all the things I'm going to say about how to boost your glutathione. So the question is how does glutathione protect against illness? It does so in three main ways. One, it's your body's main detoxifier. Your body's main antioxidant and your body body's key regulator of immune function. Let's just talk about each one of those. The first is the detoxifier, and we talked about that, how it's like fly paper and it's sticky and it gets rid of things. The second one is it's an antioxidant. And how does that work? Well, most antioxidants in your body work by donating one of their electrons to some damaged molecule. We call those free radicals. And this is oxidative stress, free radicals. You might have heard these terms antioxidants. basically what it means is that your car rusts, your apple turns brown, fat and nut goes rancid, your skin wrinkles from the sun damage and ultraviolet radiation. This is all free radical damage. So, your body has its own system of antioxidants. You don't have to always get them from food, but you have a system and you need to get them from food like vitamin C and vitamin E and so forth. Now, glutathione is basically the last stop on this hot potato chain. So, what happens is let's say the vitamin C finds a free radical and gives one of its electrons. And then, then the vitamin C is damaged and the vitamin E has to come on and protect that. And then it goes down this kind of hot potato handing off these hot potato free radicals until it gets to glutathione. And that's the final stop and then your body gets rid of it. The problem if you're depleting glutathione, you're going to have trouble with your antioxidant system and your detox system. It's also really important in immune function. A lot of our immune system is regulated through glutathione and its effect on many, many different functions in our body. It also helps with muscle function and it helps to reach peak mental physical function. So we know, for example, that glutathione levels, if they're high, actually lower muscle damage, reduce recovery time, increase strength and endurance, and make you shift from fat to production to muscle development, which is all good. And I'm very interested in that as I age. So these are really important to think about. How do we upregulate and increase our glutathione levels? Okay, what else boosts glutathione? Well, exercise also is effective in boosting glutathione. and it helps to boost your immune system, it helps boost detoxification, your antioxidant system, all that stuff. So exercise boosts all of those things. That's why exercise is so critical. I mean, I just wrote my book on longevity, and in the book I talk about the power of exercise to work on almost every single one of the longevity pathways. And, and glutathione levels is one of the key pathways. So glutathione is so important. So I encourage you to do something. if you're doing nothing, doing something is a huge benefit. So from doing nothing to doing something that you get a huge benefit, even just walking 20 minutes a day. And then you can keep increasing benefit by longer periods of exercise, by interval training, by strength training. Just do what's fun, right? I like to ride my bike, I like to play tennis, I like to swim. Strength training is super important also for muscle building. And with the goat way, you'll get a double whammy of boosting glutathione and building muscle. Now, what else can you do to boost glutathione? And I have to do this every day because I have those crappy genes and I don't want to get full of toxins. So I reduce my toxic exposures. I use the Environmental Working Group EWG's website to reduce my toxins and skincare, household products and food and sunblock, all that stuff. So you kind of want to reduce your exposures, but there's a lot of things you can do to boost your glutathione levels. The first is a really important product, which I honestly thought was a drug. Cause I, in medical school and residency, and when I was an ER doctor, I learned about it and I used it all the time. It's called N-acetylcysteine. We call it mucolytic. And we would use it inhaled for inhalation, for example, with asthma, but we'd also use it for Tylenol overdose. So Tylenol, why Tylenol damages your liver and why if you take Tylenol, you can, you know, it's a big cause of liver damage for many people is because it depletes glutathione. and when you deplete glutathione, your liver can't do its job and it gets overloaded with toxins and that causes your liver to fail. So what do we do to save the liver? If someone comes in, let's say, does an overdose of Tylenol, what do we do? We give them N-acetylcysteine. Now, this is actually a supplement you can buy in the health food store. It's really cheap and it's something I take every single day because it's the building block of glutathione, N-acetylcysteine, that cysteine molecule, the sulfur we talked about, super important. It also has been shown in peer-reviewed journals like JAMA, that if you give it before, for example, injection with dye, which we used for different kinds of x-ray procedures, that it will protect the kidneys from damage. A lot of dye can cause kidney damage, but it'll actually protect the kidneys from kidney failure, which is kind of cool. the next one I use is called alpha lipoic acid, another really important thing that your body makes to some degree you get from some food, but it's really important. Alpha lipoic acid also boosts glutathione, energy productions helps in blood sugar control, helps your brain function better, and it's really awesome. I take that every day as well. And then the next is there's this important cycle in your body called methylation. I've written a lot of articles about it. We'll talk about it on the Health Bite soon, but it's a chemical process that's at the center of your biology. And if it's not working, so many things go wrong, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, autism, I mean, you name it, it's a problem. And it's run by these vitamins, B6, B12, and folate. And a lot of us have genetic variations that are problematic. And you want the right forms of these nutrients. And methylation and sulfation are like two cogwheels that go together. So sulfur, the glutathione production, the methylation, all of this one kind of system and it's the center hub of your biochemistry. So I always make sure I take N-Acetyl Cysteine, I take the right B vitamins. Selenium is another important one. Selenium is a cofactor for an enzyme called glutathione peroxidase. That enzyme, again, one of your main antioxidant systems because you have antioxidants from food but you also have your own antioxidant systems which are way more powerful. So taking the selenium helps boost that. And then there's also obviously various other antioxidants that you can use to support it like C and E, but milk thistle is another herb. Milk thistle is an incredible herb that also helps with liver disease and boosting glutathione. So that that's really what you can do like N-acetyl cysteine, lipoic acid, the B vitamins, B6, B12, folate, selenium and and milk thistle.

Those are really my go-to's for boosting glutathione. The highest quality food is going to create the highest quality input. to your biology. If you're running, for example, your car on dirty fuel, it's not going to run well. If you run on premium gas, it's going to run better. So what is a premium gas for our bodies? It's high quality food, which is defined, in my view, as the nutrient density of the food. So that's phytochemical richness, the fiber, the vitamins and minerals, the quality of the fats, the quality of the protein, the.

Quality of the carbohydrates, the quality of.

All the things that are our food.

Really matter?

And that's because food is information and it's literally sending instructions with every bite to regulate every function of your body, including the biological process of aging. The second thing is when you eat, think about your food as medicine, not just calories. Think of it as actually medicine that's going to heal or harm you. And it can be good medicine or bad medicine. So make sure you're thinking about your food as medicine. and we'll talk about what that means and also personalize your approach because we're all different. We're all different genetically, metabolically, we're different in terms of our preferences, our culture.

What we like, what we don't like.

It's important to personalize your approach to diet. There's no one size fits all. So, and also, by the way, your needs for in change over time, your.

Needs change as you age.

So it's important to make sure you focus on what works.

Now, I've jokingly called my approach to.

Eating the Pegan diet, which was basically a joke cuz there were so many diet wars and I was on a panel with a cardiologist who was a vegan and another doctor was paleo doc.

And they were fighting.

I'm like, wow, if you're vegan and you're paleo, I must be Pegan. Everybody laughed, thought it was a good joke, but then I realized it had some staying power because they're really the same in terms of their principles, except for where you get protein, right? Equality, lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of nuts and seeds, good quality fats. no processed food, sugar and starch are.

Not so great for you.

Really simple principles that we can all agree on. And the whole idea is that it's inclusive, flexible framework that's built on quality principles, basically food is medicine and based on personalization. And it's designed to be low glycemic, low in starch and sugar because those drive aging, as we talked about in the last podcast, Don Young Forever. It's rich in good fats, which we need for our health, it's anti-inflammatory. It's detoxifying, it balances your hormones, it boosts your metabolic health and energy, it heals your gut microbiome.

These are things we know how to do with food.

We know what foods are detoxifying, which foods are anti-inflammatory, which foods help your microbiome, which foods balance your hormones. It's not that hard. We have the science of this. So you want a nutrient dense diet.

That'S rich in a whole host of.

Phytochemicals that we now know are critical in activating some of these longevity switches and pathways in the body. things like polyphenols and antioxidants and also things that help our microbiome, which is really important. So we can eat foods that regenerate human health and also planetary health, which are really not separable. I mean, we really have to understand our bodies are part of the Earth. We are the Earth. The Earth is us. And if we're growing food, that's destroying the planet. That food's also destroying us. Think of, like, all the cornfields and the processed soy and. and the immense amounts of ultra processed food that comes from wheat, corn, and soy that are killing us, but also harming the planet by our industrial agriculture. All these principles are really important in terms of what we should be eating. Let's talk about what we should eat from the plant world. Well, pretty much everything. Most of our diet should be plants, lots and lots of plant foods with lots of colors, lots of variety. and lots of diversity and even wild foods. So most of your plate should be veggies, 70-80% and lots of colors, right? Non-starchy veggies are the best, but sometimes winter squash, sweet potatoes are fine in moderation if you're not diabetic. Lots of colors, green, blues, purples, yellows, oranges, all that stuff. Try organic when you can, regenerative when possible, which is being more available. Eat wild foods when you can, which are way higher in phytochemicals. use the dirty dozen and clean 15 lists from the environmental working group, ewg.org, so you can learn which foods you can consume that aren't all contaminated with pesticides and some foods like bananas or avocados doesn't matter so much because you can peel them, but things like strawberries are terrible if you eat them that are not organic. Really important. So we can, we can really upgrade our diet by focusing on a nutrient dense, colorful diet full of plants. And I mean, if you can grow your own, great. If you go to farmers market, great. If you can get them from a community, supports agriculture system, that's great. But the closer they are to their original heirloom forms, the closer they are to being grown in a way that is, is actually regenerative and organic, much.

Much better for you.

What about fruit?

Fruit's great.

Fruit isn't bad. It's what you eat. That's, that's got fructose in it that's not fruit, like high fructose corn syrup, that's bad. So, you know, for some of us who are diabetic or very overweight, you got to be careful, more careful with things like, for example, bananas or pineapples or grapes, which are super sugary. You stick with more berries and Kiwis, watermelon. Those tend to be, be lower glycemic.

But make sure you, if you're going.

To eat food, you eat the whole food, you don't eat obviously an empty stomach or fruit juice, which is terrible because that actually can absorb sugar more. Dried fruit, not a good thing. For most people, it's like think of it as candy. It's okay a little bit, but not too much.

If you're not sure about how food's.

Affecting you, you can use a continuous glucose monitor and this, they're going to become more and more available. There's a company called levels that I'm an advisor for and basically wear this patch on your arm and it can measure your blood sugar continuously. And you'll be surprised. Oh, God, you know, I didn't, if I eat plums, my blood sugar goes off the chart, but if I eat a, you know, strawberry, I'm fine. So I think we, we can learn a lot about how our individual bodies respond to different things by, by using these continuous glucose monitors. Next up is fat. What should we eat in terms of fat? Well, I've written a book about this.

Eat Fat, Get Thin.

But basically you want fat from whole foods, nuts, seeds, avocados, pasture-rich eggs, small fatty fish, like sardines, mackerel, herring, anchovies. Certain processed foods are fine. Olive oil is a processed food, extra virgin olive oil, you know, made in a special way that doesn't degrade the oil. Important. Make sure you don't leave it out in the light. Avocado oil can be used for higher heat cooking. I mean, I think coconut oil can be fine, organic extra virgin. But for example, I'm what we call lean mass hyper responder, where I've got very, I'm very lean, but my body doesn't like as much saturated fat. So if I eat too much saturated.

Fat, I spike my cholesterol.

Many people don't. I've had people drop their cholesterol 100 points eating a diet of coconut oil and butter. It really depends on your own biology, so it's important to check that. Lots of nuts and seeds. They're great for weight loss, diabetes, heart disease, dementia. They're full of minerals. They've got protein, they've got good fats, lots of fiber. What should you eat? Almonds, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, macadamia, pumpkin seeds, chia, hemp. sesame seeds, all great, include those in your diet. If you know, I had a salad the other day, I put avocados, I put olive oil, I put pumpkin seeds in it.

What about meat?

Well, that's really controversial. I could do a literally a three hour podcast just on meat. I'm not going to, don't worry, at least not right now. But, you know, meat is not bad. If you're eating industrial meat, that's bad. If you're eating factory farmed meat, that's bad. if you're eating meat or dairy from animals that have been raised in ways that are destroying the environment and the climate, that's bad. But if you're eating meat that's regenerative, if you're eating wild animals, for example, your Hunter deer or elk, if you're eating animals that eat more of a natural diet of grass and a wide variety of plants, they actually can be rich in phytochemicals. They can be inflammatory, they can be very and it's important to get quality protein as you age because you lose muscle. So it's really critical that you don't have a deficit of protein as you get older because one of the keys to longevity is keeping muscle. And the only way to build muscle is with other protein or other muscle. Muscle is the best way to gain muscle eating muscle, which is essentially meat. So I think it's important. You can actually supplement with plant protein plantarines can work. For example, I'm in, I'm Costa Rica now, one of the blue zones, and I couldn't find the goat whey protein I like, but they had this plant protein. But it was sort of jacked up. It actually was jacked up with extra amino acids and extra leucine. So it had 30 grams of protein, but it had two and a half grams of leucine, which is important for building muscle. So you can hack plant proteins, but it's much harder to use those for, for building. building muscle. If you're going to eat meat, make sure it's regenerative, grass-fed, organic, impossible, better for you, better for the planet, more humane. And, and you can get these now. There's a lot of places, force of nature, wild pastures, North Star bison. I mean, you can get a lot of these incredible online services that will ship to you directly and aren't really that expensive. So, really important. What about eggs? Eggs are okay. Don't be afraid of eggs. even though they have cholesterol, that's been debunked. Even the dietary guidelines have gotten rid of that recommendation. They're a great source of protein, vitamins, B12, lots of choline, which is great for your brain, liver, obviously by pasture raised eggs when possible, really important, not pasteurized, but pasture raised. What about fish? Fish is great. Unfortunately, it polluted the oceans. Most fish is full of microplastics and and, and, and, and Mercury. There is a company that I recently found out about called Seatopia.fish. Seatopia.fish, when they've sourced aquaculture that's regenerative, it's clean fish, it's tested for every metal, it's super low. So I think it's important. There's also small fish you can eat like anchovies, mackerel, herring and sardines, which people don't like, but I love them. What about, what about grains and beans? Grains and beans are okay, but it depends on your biology. if you are diabetic, if you're massively overweight, if you have trouble with belly fat, you might want to go for a short time without them because they can actually trigger insulin spike. You have to be careful. And you can wear a continuous glucose monitor, see what happens. Oh, I have a cup of rice. What happens? Or I have, you know, pasta.

What happens?

You can see what happens as you eat these foods instead of just guessing. And, and, and rather than, you know, be connected to some ideology, look at your own biology and find out what's really going on inside of you. so if you're going to eat grains, eat whole grains, not whole grain flours. Like, you know, you can eat black rice, quinoa, teff, buckwheat, Himalayan, tarweed, buckwheat is amazing. You can, you can actually get these ancient forms of wheat, like einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, if you're, if you're not gluten sensitive. So lots of these are fine. Be sure not to overdose on them because even, you know, a lot of grains can be trouble if, unless you're just exercising like crazy, then you can tolerate more carbohydrate. Same thing with beans.

You know, beans are great.

Make sure you cook them right. You need to pressure cook them, soak them. You can cook them with kombu, which is a seaweed that prevents some of.

The gassy stuff that you go on.

They have lectins, they have phytates, which can be modified by how you cook them.

But.

But I think most time it's okay to eat beans as part of your diet. And a lot of longevity, blue zones eat a lot of beans, and they're fine, like ministrone soup, which they eat in Sardinia. What about sugar? Well, sugar is pretty much the devil if you want to live a long time, not to say. Do I never eat sugar? No, I eat sugar, I promise you, but I make sure I exercise plenty. I eat it in a way that minimizes any spike in blood sugar by eating it sort of it with food that's got fat and protein and fiber. But be careful. If you are insulin resistant at all, if your insulin level is over five and you can check that with your doctor, you can go to functionhealth.com, it's a company I co-founded to look at lab testing. You can actually measure your insulin level, but it's over five, I'd be very careful with eating. too much Sargento sugar in your diet. I mean, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cereal of corn flakes and a, you know, a bowl of sugar. So think of. Think of pretty much anything that turns to sugar in the same way. Be careful of liquid sugar calories. They're everywhere. Whether it's sodas or caffeinated teas that are sweet teas, coffee with, like, the junk in it. I mean, it's everywhere. Fruit juice is terrible. Don't drink fruit juice.

What about oils?

Well, I would encourage people to eliminate most processed oils. I think there's some controversy about this, but, you know, if you want to use a little sesame oil or macadamia, walnut oils are fine. Avocado oil is great for cooking, but stay away from canola, safflower, sunflower, grapeseed, corn oil, soybean oil. We've not eaten these for most of our evolutionary history, and we should be eating more of our traditional fats, particularly whole food fats, which we talked about. What about dairy? Well, I would say most conventional dairy we should not be eating goat and sheep are tend to be better. There's A2 casein, which is a different form of casein in the, in the sheep and goat that doesn't cause much inflammation or issues. Um, so you want to, you know, if you're going to do that, most people tolerate that better, like goat yogurt, sheep yogurt, goat cheese, sheep cheese. If you want to eat dairy, a lot of people don't do well on dairy. I encourage people often to do an elimination to see how they feel, but it can cause congestion. congestion, sinus issues, asthma, digestive issues, acne, I mean a lot of stuff. So make sure you're aware of what you're doing. Also, all the nut milks and all that stuff. Be careful because those can have a lot of sugar in them. So lastly, let's talk about what we.

Should not eat, right?

We shouldn't eat stuff that's not food, right? Packaged food, processed food, all these color size shapes of chemically extruded, colorful, food-like substances, just know, don't eat them. Whether it's Twizzlers or Oreo cookies, they don't grow on trees. Basic rule is if God didn't make.

It, don't eat it. If man made it, if man made.

It, probably not a good idea to eat it, right? So I talked about this a lot, but get away from foods with pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, hormones, processed ingredients, chemicals, additives, dyes, artificial sweeteners.

They're just not good for us and there's no reason to eat them. What's really striking is that most doctors don't know how to apply food as medicine. so if you have a headache and I would say, well, I'm gonna give you, like, one milligram of aspirin. You think it's gonna work? Right? It's like you need 600 milligrams of aspirin to get your headache to go away. So we said, well, you know, food didn't work. Well, it didn't work because you didn't know the right medicine, which wolf foods to use. You didn't know the dose. You didn't know the frequency. You know, like, it's really sophisticated. That's why the Pegan diet isn't really like a fixed diet. It's really a set of principles that allows you to sort of eat in a way that meets your dietary preferences and cultural preferences, but also helps you to figure out which are the foods in each category that you should be eating that have the most medicine. And what are the principles that we might want to learn about personalized nutrition or how to eat like a regentarian, which we can talk about, or how to eat for your mood or longevity or how to feed your kids or how to eat in a way that's affordable. So it's a really practical guide. it's sort of one of those things you can refer back to over and over again to see exactly what's the digestible bit. It's sort of like little snacks of information that allow you to really get the point and follow through on it. There's a ton of theory I've written about before in the science, but this has a lot of science in it, but it's really a very, very practical book.

Yeah. And on the book, I agree. It's really good digestible read for people who want to learn more about foods, the various properties in different foods and the various principles. And as you say, it's kind of, it's called the Pegan diet, but it's kind of not really a diet in the conventional term, right? It's that the way we think about diets, it's really not that, as you say, it's 21 foundational principles, which frankly, are going to be helpful for so many of us.

Yeah.

I mean, that's sort of the joke of it all. It's like when we're in these different diet wars and diet camps, we're all fighting with each other. And that's how this whole name came. I was sitting on a panel with a vegan cardiologist and a sort of a militant paleo doctor and they were fighting. And, I'm like, hey, if you're paleo and you're vegan, I must be peagan. Everybody cracked up.

Okay, well, there's something here.

And, I went home and thought about it as I was flying home. I was like, wait a minute, they're identical. They're exactly the same principles except for one, which is where you get your protein, which is animals or greens and beans. Otherwise, no dairy, no sugar, no processed food, whole foods, vegetables, good fats, all the same principles except that one. And then the truth is they have far more in common with each other than the traditional American diet. And so I began to sort of realize, maybe we can all come together with a movement that actually helps to crystallize what we do know and then personalize it. And that's really the whole point of the Pegan diet, instead of an un-diet. It says, wait a minute, if you're focusing on, I mean, the traditional American diet, yes, that's an easy sort of win. But if you're, you know, keto or vegan, I mean, how do you be a healthy vegan? I see people running into trouble with that all the time. And so, you know, I talk about how to do that in the book. So I think it's really kind of a fun little sort of kaleidoscope. And it's actually someone has said to me after, Dr. Hyman, there's no chapter on weight loss. I said, that's right. I said, there's no chapter on weight loss because I never tell patients to lose weight. I just don't. I don't actually think it works and I don't think it's helpful advice. And I think what I teach them is how their body works, how to work with it. And the weight loss is automatic. I don't say starve yourself, restrict calories, and eat these foods, don't eat these foods. This is really what is going to help you thrive. And people just have the most amazing results. I mean, literally 100 pounds, 50 pounds, 75 pounds. It's really pretty amazing, but it was never a goal. And I think it was sort of shocking to people that there's a book on diet with no mention of weight loss. That's how it goes.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So there are all these principles in the book. I want to sort of dive into some of them. And you mentioned eat like a regentarian, and I think that would be I think it'll be a good place to go into. Before we do that though, Mark, can we just sort of set out the foundations of the Pegan diet? You sort of touched on a few of those principles of the people who are coming to your work for the first time and are trying to understand, well, what is the component? Is it paleo? Is it vegan? What is it? What are these sort of foods that you're recommending? How would you sort of simplify the concept for them?

Yeah, it's really pretty easy. I mean, it's embarrassingly easy actually because it's like people aren't going to really be able to sort of disagree with anything because it's all pretty common sense and straightforward. So, the first thing is, you know, really use your food as your pharmacy. So, when you are eating, think of what you're eating as medicine. Are you eating a french fry that's fried in rancid oils? you know, got 14 different ingredients in.

It that is going to kind of.

Fry your arteries and, you know, cause all kinds of problems. Or are you going to eat, let's say, a wild blueberry and it has all sorts of phytochemicals and so forth? So how do you, how do you begin to sort of think of food as your medicine? The second is you want to eat a lot of medicine. So eat the rainbow, which is essentially all the colors in plant foods are where all the benefits are. So the more deeper, darker colors and pigments, that's where all the phytochemicals and also think about your diet is mostly vegetable, like it should be 75% non-starchy veggies, which is really what the majority of your plate should be a little side of protein. When you're picking any kind of category food, whether it's beans or grains or nuts and seeds, it's important to understand which ones in each category are the best. For example, peanuts might have aflatoxin, which you want to stay away from or be careful when you source it or, you know, you probably don't want to eat a lot of the gluten in grains here, but if you're having heirloom grains like rye or maybe heirloom wheats, that might be okay because they're less inflammatory and so forth. Or maybe you have gluten issues and you shouldn't eat it at all. Or which beans are the best beans or which seeds are the best seeds and so forth. And then I have a whole section there on meat, which is, I think, a little shocking for people, but it's talking about how to eat your meat as medicine. And some of the research on this is just stunning that these grass-fed animals have high phytochemical contents just like plants and have all these health benefits. So we're learning more about it, but this is out of Duke. So whether you're eating any kind of protein, how do you pick the best eggs or chicken? How do you, how do you understand what are the right fats to eat? How do you think about dairy, which is, you know, really often a big problem. And it's, and the modern cows we have are pretty harmful. And then there's some, you know, just guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you, but not only good for you, but good for the planet and good for society, like eat like a regentarian or think about sugar is fine but it's like recreational drug. How do you personalize your nutrition or detox or eat for your gut or eat for longevity or mood or how do you afford what you're doing in a way that actually makes it doable because it doesn't have to be expensive. It really guides people through a way of thinking about food that will last them as a roadmap for their life.

You mentioned meats there and you mentioned phytonutrients. Let's just Let's just start off explaining what phytonutrients are. And then I agree that selection on meat is really fascinating. And meat has become one of these controversial items as well. And one thing I do know, Mark, like myself, you're very respectful of people's individual choices, their ethics, and how they choose to live and their cultural beliefs. So, yeah, just walk me through phytochemicals, but then also Let's then go from that into meat and how meat potentially might be medicine for some people.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, before we get down in the weeds, I just want to say that my personal goal is to live healthy and vibrant to be 120 at least.

So, I don't want to eat meat.

Or anything else if it's going to hurt me. So, I took the time to really dive into all the research. I locked myself away for a week with a stack of scientific papers four feet high and went through it all. And, I mean, there's 100,000 papers online on meat. on the National Library of Medicine. But if you find the major ones, you can find, you know, what is it saying? What is it not saying? Really, there were three issues. One was moral and ethical, and the other is climate, environment, and the last is health. And so they're all kind of smushed together, right? So if you want to be saving the planet, if you want to be healthy and you want to do the right thing morally and ethically, you should be a vegan. And everybody should be a vegan because that kind of deals with all that. But unfortunately, it's not so simple. and, and, and, you know, kind of getting back to, like, what is meat and phytochemicals, it, it also sort of speaks to the theme of the book, which is meat is not meat is not meat, right? If you're eating a feedlot cow, it's different than eating wild elk in terms of your health, the well-being of the animal, you know, the, the effect on the environment climate. So people need to understand that quality matters in every aspect of what you're eating. And that's the whole premise of the Pegan diet, is how do you pick quality in each area. So in terms of meat, you know, most of the meat that's eaten and consumed and even that we have done research on is feedlot industrial meat, which is fed all kinds of weird garbage and is, is really full of, of hormones, antibiotics, and it's mostly corn. But wild, wild or grass finished animals can forage on hundreds of different plants, each with the medicinal properties. And those chemicals from the plants, these phytochemicals, we call them phytonutrients or phytochemicals. Phyto means plant, they get absorbed and they start to become part of these animals' tissue and you eat them, you actually can get, for example, for example, goat milk, if the goats are foraging on different shrubs, you can have the same level of catechins, which is the powerful anticancer, antioxidant, detoxifying compound in green tea, as green tea. So it's like drinking green tea when you're drinking goat's milk that's fed on certain bushes. That's just an example. But we're learning more and more about these powerful medicinal properties and how it affects your biology. And if you look at kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat, in a study in Australia, they found that when they eat the feedlot meat, same portion, they got inflammation. When they eat the kangaroo meat, their biology was totally different. They actually reduced the inflammation. So that's kind of striking to me when you see, you know, eating identical.

Amounts of food, kangaroo, feedlot, profoundly different effects on biology. On that, Mark, in the spirit of the book, which is Pegan bringing in Paleo and vegan and where the sort of similarities are. And where do we all agree? I think one thing we can all agree on, no matter what side you sit on and the dietary wars potentially, is that factory farming is a bad thing. Would you agree with that?

I mean, listen, the moral ethical issues really have to do a lot around that. Factory farming is an abomination. It's bad for the cows and the animals that are raised in these confined animal feeding operations. It's bad for the environment. I mean, just Tyson chicken alone is the second biggest polluter in the United States after US Steel. And the health of the animals, the moral ethical issues, and the health of the meat that it produces or lack thereof. So I think it's sort of a triple whammy for for the planet, for the animals, and for humans, and it should be banned. And there's no question about that. And I do think that there's evidence that it's moving in this right direction, that there's a bill produced by, I think, a couple of senators who put forth the idea that we should get rid of factory farming by 2040, which is, you know, 20 years from now. So I think we're heading there. But I think, yeah, it's an abomination, and we should never eat factory farming.

So I think the other consideration around.

Eating animals is what is the effect on ecology and climate? And I think we know that factory farming is a huge contributor that traditional farming is probably the number one contributor to climate change when you add in deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming animals, food waste, transportation, refrigeration, all of it, end to end, probably half of all climate change. And so the question is, you know, is it all animals that will do that? And I think that there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture which sort of focused on a really simple idea, which is not the cow, it's the how, right? So it's not the fact that you're actually raising animals, it's how you're doing it. And the truth is that most of the land we now farm is used to grow food for animals, about 70%, and it is soy and corn, all this sort of stuff that we feed them that's highly different than their normal diet, which is grass, and it creates all sorts of secondary problems, changes the quality of the meat and so forth. but the way we grow these foods actually destroys the soil, uses tons of water from irrigation, causes collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity because of the use of pesticides and herbicides. The nitrogen fertilizer runs off into the rivers and streams and oceans and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish every year. So we really have this sort of destructive agricultural system that is often used to produce food for animals and then that's just a bad idea because the way we grow it is the number one cause of climate change and how we do that. So I think we need to sort of change what's happening with the animals and put them back where they belong, which is on rangeland. And 40% of our land of agriculture, we should just grow vegetables. Well, you can't. 40% is not suitable for growing crops. It's only suitable for grazing. So what do you do with that? Well, you have to put animals on it. Turns out that they will build soil, they'll conserve water, they'll reduce it or eliminate the need for pesticides or herbicides, and they will draw down carbon out of the atmosphere because the soil gets built and produce better quality and even more scalable than traditional agriculture right now for animals. So we have this potential, and everybody's talking about it. There's movies like Kiss the Ground, there's books on it, there's conversations that are happening in Washington, D.C. now about it. So I think we're on the precipice of a real sea change around thinking about how we grow food. food in a way that's regenerative. And meat has got to be a key part of that. You can't have an ecosystem on a farm that actually builds soil without actually having animals poop and pee and put their saliva on the grass, which makes it grow. It's actually a growth factor for the grass. So we want to keep building roots and building soil. And that's really through the kind of reuse of animals rotating through a farm ecosystem. So I think we have to sort of think about all these pieces now. the last piece is health. So if people are thinking, oh, well, meat's going to kill me. I don't want to eat it. It causes heart disease and cancer. Pretty much you can go and find any study that, you know, supports any belief that you have, and you can ignore all the rest. But when you look at the totality of the evidence and you look at the kind of ways in which studies were done, you know, I don't, I'm not convinced that meat is bad for you. In fact, you know, there are many large reviews recently that that sort of refuted that idea and looked at all the data. And when it turns out when a lot of studies were done on meat, they were population studies, they looked at groups of people over time, they really can't prove cause and effect. They say, well, what did you eat for the last 30 years? Oh, you ate more meat than this guy? Okay, you had more heart attacks, it's probably the meat. But you can't prove that. It doesn't create proof. And it may be something else, right? When you look at the habits of the meat eaters in those studies, because this was done when we were told meat was bad, so if you ate meat, you were basically somebody who probably didn't care about their health, right? So, yes, it was true. You smoked more, drank more, ate less fruits and veggies, more processed food, more sugar, didn't exercise, didn't take your vitamins. So, of course you had more disease. Was it the meat or was it all the other stuff? And then when they looked, like as I mentioned, when they looked at people who shopped at health food stores, who both were eating healthy food, some ate meat in the context of a whole foods diet, others just didn't. and there was the same reduction in death in both groups by half. And when you look at cultures like the Masai, you know, we live on milk and meat. They live very long, they have very healthy, but they also do something really interesting was they actually, it's not even necessarily how you, how you raise the animals. It's maybe how you prepare the meat. If you're, if you're cooking it on a high char grilling, that's probably not good. It's slow cooking with tons of spices. Those spices have phytochemicals that alter any kind of harmful. reactions that can happen from cooking meat. So there's a lot of incredible science around how we actually can include meat as a helpful part of our diet. In fact, probably for most of us, we probably need to, especially as we age, because it's very difficult to build muscle without adequate protein.

Yeah, I mean, super fascinating. And this is one of those very emotive and divisive topics, meat, plant-based eating, veganism, these are things which are becoming, people are becoming very solid in what they believe, very sort of entrenched in their views, to the point where even saying something like that, Mark, is potentially gonna really inflame some people who believe that actually everyone on the planet should only be eating plants. And, you know, something you said right at the start of this conversation, Mark, and it's something that's been very clear to me from observing you for many years is that you are a clinician. You have seen tens of thousands of patients. And, you know, I'm certainly, I'm only 20 years into my clinical career. You are, you've got a lot more clinical experience than I do. But within that time, if you are a practicing clinician and you have seen thousands and thousands of patients, they teach you, you soon, very quickly learned that I cannot subscribe to one ideology because the patients are proving that ideology wrong all the time. Different people are coming back saying, oh, really? That's working for you? Well, I didn't think that would work, but this is working. And so, if somebody is 100% plant-based and they're listening to this conversation or watching it on YouTube and they're thinking, well, you know what? People shouldn't be eating animals because actually, it's compassion to animals. We shouldn't be killing animals. What would you say to them? Listen, I guess that I have monks.

And abbots that are my patients and I don't force them to eat meat if it's against their religious or spiritual or moral beliefs. And I think that's a perfectly fine choice that anybody can make. However, I would make sure that people fully understand that if you're a human being or and living on this ecosystem called planet Earth, that there are consequences to everything, including any type of agriculture. So unless you're gathering all your wild foods, you're basically in a destructive act. So most traditional agriculture, they destroy natural habitats, they till the fields, they use machinery to harvest your cabbages or your grains or your beans or whatever you're eating. And guess what? There's a lot of animals that live in those ecosystem, rabbits, moles, Mice, you know, birds, I mean, 50% of the bird species have been killed through agriculture in this country. 75% of our pollinator species are gone. And there's been estimates that, you know, just growing vegetables in this country for people to eat healthy food, you know, and plants has kills over seven billion animals a year. And is the life of a rabbit any less valuable than the life of a feedlot chicken or a pig or a cow? I don't know. So we just gotta have to be real about you know, what we are doing in terms of our behavior as humans, we can't avoid the cycle of death and life and birth and renewal. I mean, it's just sort of what we're doing, you know? And I think that fooling yourself to think that you're not part of that, even if you're at a distance from it, it's like, well, people say, well, I'm not going to go shoot an elk, but I'll eat a cow. You know, I think we were so divorced from the sources of our food and what we're eating, but I think if we kind of drew the chain back, we'd see that, you know, we're all involved in this essentially destructive agricultural system, whether we're eating vegan or not, and that that may be a problem. And, you know, there may be sort of other levels of destruction. For example, you're looking at these brand new fake meat companies, and some of them are okay, but some of them are like using GMO soy, which is highly destructive to the soil, uses tons of glyphosate that's creates, you know, harmful effects on humans, destroys the microbiome. soil, you know, uses lots of irrigation and causes all sorts of issues as a consequence of growing these GMO soybeans that we're using for plant-based meats. So I think we have to kind of get the whole picture instead of just kind of looking at a sliver of the truth from here and there.

It isn't what you just said there, that we're divorced from where our food comes from. Isn't that... It strikes me that that's at the heart of this problem, that, you know, I grew up completely divorced from where my food was coming from. You know, it arrived in packets, If you go out, let's say, to an extreme, to a hunter-gatherer tribe, they know where their food is coming from. They know that's their raison d'être every day is to acquire food, to live. Their diet is dictated by geography, by the climate. They don't have the choices that we've got, whereas we're just disconnected. We're disconnected from so much in the world, but we're disconnected from our food supply. which leads to these ideologies and these sort of theoretical concepts that actually, when you go out into nature, maybe they're not quite as clear cut as we might have thought.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the divisiveness and I don't understand it. I just, you know, I'm like, Hey, we're all here just trying to do our best and let's work together to find out a way to live better for ourselves, live better for the planet. and the world. So I think everybody has a good intention for sure when they're trying this or that or different approach. But the advice I'd give to people is don't let your ideology trample your biology and end up in trouble. And I've seen many people who do this. I think I should be keto and that's what I need to do. And then it doesn't work for them or something. I should be vegan and it's like, well, it doesn't really work for them. So I think we need to be honest about it and actually listen to our bodies. As I say, the smartest doctor in.

The room is your own body.

Yeah.

And that's the theme I get from the Peak and Diet Mark is that, you know, you are, you're trying to give the reader the ownership, those foundational principles say, Hey, look, this is the science, these are the principles. Play around with it a little bit, find out what's working for you, right? That's kind of, you know, because, you know, we can talk about therapeutic diets, for example.

So.

Let's say somebody comes to see you in your clinic and they've got type 2 diabetes. You may, I'm guess, approach that differently from someone who just generally wants to eat better for their overall health and their longevity, or is it the same?

No, it's totally different. I mean, if someone comes in with diabetes, it's like they need a rescue mission. As opposed to someone who's just generally fit and healthy, can have a more robust, resilient metabolism, we'll be able to tolerate a wide variety of foods. For example, if I'm riding my bike, you know, three hours a day, I might tolerate a lot more starch, right? I might tolerate more sweet potatoes or rice or even a little sugar. But if I, if my metabolism has been screwed up for 30 years of eating sugar and soda and starch, and I can't even regulate my blood sugar and my insulin goes sky high, then I, I'm really carbohydrate intolerant. I should really avoid those. so it's really about looking at what is each person's biology doing? What's their gut doing? Do they have leaky gut? Do they have food sensitivities? What is their metabolism like? Are they tend to be more carbohydrate intolerant kind of pre-diabetic spectrum? Or are they more sort of the lean kind of guy who sort of maybe doesn't do that well on saturated fat? So I think we have to really understand that we're all so different and the dietary approaches can be customized based on what really is needed. And I talk about that in the book. And, there's many other resources in functional medicine that are available to help people understand how to personalize diets. If you have an autoimmune diet, for example, there is an autoimmune diet that actually works really great for colitis, but that's a very specific diet. It might be very different than I'd give a diabetic, for example, or someone with Alzheimer's. So, it's very important to understand that it's personalized.

Yeah. There's a theme in the work over the last years, Mark, that there's a real big mission I sense from you about talking about food, not just for individual health, but for wider population and planetary health and the environments and the climates. Clearly you went in a deep dive in your last book, Food Fix, on that. But that theme still is very present in the Pegan diet. It's something that is clearly very important to you. You mentioned regenerative agriculture. In the book, you also talk about food waste and just how problematic that is. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on food waste and what that's doing for the climate. Sure.

I mentioned that when you look at the food system end to end, it's probably the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions, estimated 30 to 50% or more. And one of the biggest contributors is not just soil erosion and factory farming of animals and deforestation is food waste. We throw out about 40% of our food around the world. If we actually were to have to grow that food again, we'd need a land mass the entire size of China. We throw out $2 trillion or more of food every year. It's different reasons in the developing world versus developed world. The developed world is mostly what we throw in our trash in the house and the developing world is often lost in the food chain because there's no refrigeration and it's difficult to transport food. But when you think about it, when you look at food waste, just for example, if it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. that's how bad it is. If you think, well, those factory farm animals and the methane and that's causing greenhouse gases from the cow farts, well, guess what? The greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, from the off-gassing of the rotting vegetables which produce methane, is three times as much methane, three times as much methane as cows. So if you're vegan and throwing out all your vegetables that you've let rot in the fridge or you or you maybe are just droning over food scraps, you know, that actually adds up and it is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. I encourage everybody to compost. We should not be, I mean, in certain countries you cannot, you cannot throw out your garbage in San Francisco, you can't throw out food waste, you have to put in compost. In the airports, there's a compost bucket. It's not that hard to do. It's just another trash, we have recycling, we have garbage and we have like compost and it can be a huge benefit. Something that the government's working on across America and across the world, there's governments that are really focusing on food waste. In France, I think you can't throw out your garbage. You have to recycle it or if you're a company, you can't just throw your food waste out. And you do, you get a fine. I think you get a five-year jail sentence or something, a big fine. So it's really important. And in Europe, they have anaerobic digesters, which they don't have so much here. there's ways to handle it, not just, you know, for example, you making compost, but there are large companies that can be mandated to actually deal with food waste differently. So in Massachusetts, they're like, hey, if you make a ton of food waste a week from your, you know, grocery store, restaurant, whatever, you can't throw it out. You have to do something with it. You have to give it to the farmer, you have to compost it, you have to something. And, and so they, they, this company was developed called Vanguard Renewables that built these anaerobic digesters, basically like a big kind of furnace. They throw in the food scraps, they throw in manure, and it kind of cooks, and it provides electricity for 1500 homes. The dairy farmers who are losing money are now making 100 grand a year. The Vanguard Renewable sells the excess electricity up to the grid. And so basically, it's a win-win-win for everybody, and there's only five of them here. There's like 17,000 of them in Europe. So there's a lot of ways to solve the food waste problem, but it is a huge problem. and I think also we're so strange in this country. We only want to eat perfectly shaped vegetables or perfectly shaped fruit. I mean, I don't know what it's like in the UK, but if there's funny shaped things, they just go in the garbage. Like, if it's a funny shaped apple or funny shaped carrot or if it's got two legs or it's like a potato that's not perfectly round.

But it's like what we were saying before, that we're divorced from where the food comes from, because if you had grown it yourself, you would know that they're not all perfectly round, beautiful. That's half the problem, isn't it? We're presented shiny pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables in stores, and we, from a young age, think that an apple should always be perfectly round and ripe and red.

You know, it's interesting that, that when I was a kid, my mom had a garden and we had fruit trees in the backyard. We lived in the middle of suburbs. And in America during World War II, and I know it was like in the UK, but we were implored to grow our own food. And so the 40% of food in America was grown in victory gardens, literally in people's backyards. So I think we need to get back to figuring out how to have a better close relationship to our food.

If someone's listening to this, Mark, and they've never thought about their food waste before, because it's just not the cultural norm, I think, in many countries still. Certainly, I think in the UK, it's, yes, we're talking about it some of us, but we've not been grown up, we've not grown up with that as a concept, as something that we do, right? So people might be listening, go, yeah, okay, so if something's rotten in the fridge, I might just throw it into my regular dustbin. Can you explain to them why that's problematic and what they should be doing instead of that? Because yes, there's societal, there's things that companies can do, but individuals can play a role here as well.

Absolutely, yeah.

And there's legislation helping with compost and there's companies that are sort of made to sort of change their ways because of these regulations, which is all a good thing. And there are cities that that have, you know, ordinances for compost. So that's all happening. But at an individual level, you know, it's one of the most powerful things you can do to sort of help address climate change, which is don't throw your food scraps in the garbage, start a compost pile. Now, if you live in the country, it's easy. You just can build like a little two by four little box and you just throw the stuff in there and you can throw in leaves or garden waste or whatever in there. And then over time, it just, like, I'm really lazy about it, but over time it just turns into this incredible soil. There's ways to do it in a more sophisticated way, but it's pretty simple. And if you live in the city or an urban environment, there are Amazon or other places you can buy these home composters where you just put the food scraps in and it's a little thing it doesn't smell in your house, and then it turns into soil. You can drop it off at the local farms. I mean, even in New York City, you can drop off your compost scraps in the local farmers market. So there's definitely a way to sort of help encourage people to start to think about doing this because this is one of those things, particularly in the developed world, where we have control over it. And the food is often, most of it, 30 plus percent is wasted in the home.

It just strikes me that there will be some people who are fighting on social media about the climate and what we should be eating, what we shouldn't be eating, but at the same time be throwing out there food waste into their dustman. And it's, you know, and I don't say that with, I'm not judging anyone for that or criticizing, I'm just saying sometimes we just can't see the perspective, can we? That actually, you know what? This will make a huge difference if I could just start doing it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, and so there's, and there's other ways to join in. For example, there's a company, a couple of companies, one's called Imperfect Foods. which basically takes all the ugly food from farms that are going to be thrown out and sells them direct to delivery. So you can get funny shaped carrots and potatoes and veggies that are kind of weird looking, but they're the same veggies. They just taste the same. They're just different shape. And there's other companies as well that do the same. So there's a lot of ways for us to get involved, whether it's buying ugly food or whether it's composting or whether it's just being more careful or using various strategies. There's a company called the peel that creates a second coating on plants vegetables. They last longer or fresh paper, which is actually like, this is a, an Indian woman who developed this concept because she would go, she went home to India and she got very sick from, I think, Travelers diarrhea or something. She ended up getting her grandmother to give her all these, like, spices and herbs and fixed her whole system. And then she thought about, you know, all this rotting vegetables and she put this herb infused with cloves and all these medicinal herbs into this paper and put you put in the drawer of your fridge and the vegetables last two or three times longer. So there's all kinds of innovation happening but you can all be part of the solution.

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Because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health. What you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way. Well, if we can get food reimbursed by healthcare, it's a game changer. I'm actually working on that at Cleveland Clinic with the Food Pharmacy, which is the idea of actually paying.