Let Food Be Thy MEDICINE: Eat These Foods To LIVE LONGER! | Mark Hyman

Really use your food as your pharmacy. So when you are eating, think of what you're eating as medicine. And 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? 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 foods to use. You didn't know the dose, you didn't know the frequency. 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 a really good digestible read for people who want to learn more about foods, the various prophecies and different foods and the various principles. And as you say, 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. That'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 peag and everybody cracked up. And, I thought, okay, well, there's something here. And, I went home and thought about it as I was flying home and 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 grains 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. and 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, is really often a big problem. And the modern cows we have are pretty harmful. And then there's some guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you, but not only good for you, but good for the planet. good for society, like eat like a regjunatarian or, you know, think about sugar is fine, but it's like recreational drug. You know, how do you personalize your nutrition or detox or eat for your gut or eat for longevity or mood or, or how do you afford what you're, what you're doing in a way that actually is, makes it doable because it doesn't have to be expensive. So it really guides people through a way of thinking about food that it will last them as a roadmap for their life.

You mentioned meats there. You mentioned phytonutrients. So let's just, let's just start off explaining what and nutrients are. And then I agree that that selection on meat is really fascinating. And, you know, 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 a 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, you know, kind of getting back to, like, what is meat and phytochemicals, 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, 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 really full of hormones, antibiotics, and it's mostly corn. But wild or grass finished animals can forage on hundreds of different plants, each with 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 forging on the 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 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, but 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, you know, it's sort of a triple whammy 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 that it's moving in this 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 the animals, food waste, transportation, refrigeration, all of it, end to end, probably half of all climate change. And so the question is, 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 is 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 the 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, it causes and 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 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, you know, put their slime 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, 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, 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 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, I'm not convinced that meat is bad for you. In fact, there are many large reviews recently 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. you know, 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? So, 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, 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, for example, 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, 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, you know, veganism. These are things which are becoming, people are becoming very 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 going to 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 of thousands of patients, they teach you, you soon very quickly learn 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 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 ecosystems. Rabbits, moles, mice, birds, I mean, 50% of the bird species have been killed through agriculture in this country. 90, 75% of our pollinator species are gone. And there's been estimates that just growing vegetables in this country for people to eat healthy food, and plants 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 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. 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. 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 of the soil. 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 just 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 I grew up completely divorced from where my food was coming from. 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, 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, is don't let your, you know, 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, about it. And then actually listen to our bodies.

As I say, the, 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 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. If someone comes in with diabetes.

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 wider 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, at what is what's 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? 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 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 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 often 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 maybe are just throwing 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. And the airports is 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. And it's something that the government's working on across America and across the world. There's governments that are really focusing on food waste. And France, you know, I think you can't throw out your garbage. You have to recycle it. Or if you're a company, you can't just fill your food waste out. and you do, you get a fine. I think you get a five year, five year jail sentence or something, a big fine. So it's really important. And in Europe, they have way, they have the anaerobic digesters, which they don't have so much here, but 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 grocery store, restaurant, or 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 so 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 1,500 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 food, 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, you know, it's like a potato that's not perfectly round.

But it's like what we were saying before, isn't it? 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 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, 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 and 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 are, you know, there's legislation helping with compost and there's companies that are sort of, you know, made to sort of change their ways because of these regulations, which is all a good thing. And there are cities 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 2x4 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 and 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 their food waste into their dustbin. 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 there's also 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 shapes. 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 so they last longer or fresh paper, which is actually like this is an Indian woman who developed this concept because she would go. She went home to India and she got very sick from, I think, traveler's diarrhea or something. She ended up getting her grandmother to give her all these spices and herbs and fixed her whole system. And then she thought about all these rotting vegetables and she put this herb infused with cloves and all these medicinal herbs into this paper and you put it in the drawer of your 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. Hey YouTube, if you like this video, you're gonna love the next one. Click on it to check it out today. 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.