Let Food Be Thy MEDICINE: How It Can Heal The Body! | Mark Hyman

There is no more powerful lever you can pull to change your biology in real time. Literally days or minutes, you are changing your biology with every single bite of food.

Why is food the number one key to longevity? And what foods do people not include enough? What foods do people not include enough in their diet to help heal the body and encourage longevity?

Well, the single most important thing you do every day to control every single one of your biological functions that determine health or disease that will make you live to a hundred or make you die at 50 is what you eat. There is no more powerful lever you can pull to change your biology in real time. And I'm not talking about something that takes decades or even weeks, literally days or minutes. You are changing your biology with every single bite of food. And that's because food is not just calories. It was just energy and fuel, it's just gasoline. It would be fine. You'd burn it. Doesn't matter what you eat. You could eat Doritos, you could have a Coca-Cola, you could have a Coca-Cola, you could have a broccoli, it doesn't matter. But what we now know is that food contains, particularly plant foods, contain powerful compounds that drive your biology. and help you stay healthy and prevent reverse disease. So, what is food anyway? Like people don't understand food. Oh, it's just energy, it's just calories. Yes, it's calories. Like, oh, it's protein, fat, and fiber and carbs. Yes, it's all that, but what kind of protein? What's the quality? What's the quality of the carbohydrate? Is a carbohydrate from a broccoli sprout the same as a carbohydrate from A can of soda? Well, obviously not, but they're both carbohydrates. What about fat? Is the fat from margarine or Crisco the same as a fat from fish oil? No, they're both fats, profoundly different effects on your biology. Same thing with fibers, all kinds of different fibers, soluble, insoluble, different effects on your microbiome. So everything depends on the quality of the food you eat and the information in the food. The second thing is that there's this class of compounds that are in plant foods and actually also, by the way, in animal foods, believe it or not, called phytochemicals. These are plant-based compounds. Phyto means plant, phytonutrients, phytochemicals. They are regulatory molecules that I think have been critical in our evolution. And I actually, I've never heard anybody talk about this except besides me, except David Sinclair, who's one of the leading aging researchers on the planet, at Harvard. And, I call it something different than he does, but I think we've evolved with these plants to help us run our biology. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation. We've literally adapted our biology to use the plants to work with us to create health. And, they're all the compounds you might have heard about that are kind of healthy compounds in food like resveratrol or curcumin or green tea extracts like catechins. maybe the broccoli spouts, sulforaphane, these are all these compounds in plants that are their defense mechanisms. They're their mechanisms to stay healthy and protect themselves against disease and predation and adversity. And, you know, why should we be using these molecules in our biology? Well, because we've evolved eating these plants and so our bodies are lazy. We don't make vitamin C because we can get it from food. so we don't make these compounds, but they're critical to our long term health. You're not going to get a deficiency disease in the sense of a vitamin deficiency, but you're going to get chronic illness if you don't eat these plant compounds. And there's 25,000 of them. The Rockefeller Foundation is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create the periodic table of phytochemicals and how they work with our bodies, what they do. I've written a lot about this and they regulate every single system in our body. And we're going to go into how that works. but one of the important things to understand is that these phytochemicals are not just found in plants. New research from Dr. Fred Provenza and Steven Van Vleet, who's at Duke and now is at Utah State University, have found that animals eating a wide variety of wild and even domesticated, but of a wide variety of plants, contain those compounds from the plants in their milk and meat. so if you eat a regeneratively raised grass-fed meat that's been eating maybe 20, 50, 100 plants, it's very different than eating a cow that's fed the silage in a factory farm. It's full of ground up animal chicken feathers and Skittles and who knows what the hell else, plus corn and refined oils and all kinds of weird stuff they put in it. Very different composition of the protein in a factory farm meat. than a regenerative cow, for example, or a wild elk or whatever. And we know this is true even from interventional studies that if you eat protein for protein, gram per gram, the same amount of wild meat versus feedlot meat, it has profoundly different effects on your biology, even though it's the same grams of protein, the same calories and everything else is the same. So we have to sort of expand our idea of food from just being fuel and energy to being information that regulates everything in our biology that determines health and disease, whether you're gonna live a long time or die quickly. And that's really the power of food.

Mark, let's talk about the seven systems of functional medicine and how we think about food impacting or interfacing with all of those seven systems. This is something that hasn't been talked about a ton, but you've written a little bit about it and I think it would be useful in the context of today's conversation.

Well, you know, maybe we can put in the show notes, but for my last book, the Pegan Diet, I wrote 15,000 words explaining how this works. Unfortunately, it was too long for the publisher, so it got mostly taken out, but we have that content. I'm happy to share it in the show notes. People who want to learn about Food.

Is Medicine, we can provide that.

Make it a PDF, and people can download it. Yeah, I think. Yeah, for sure. I think it'd be great. So, here's the Metaview. Our current view of disease is outdated. It's based on symptoms, it's based on diagnoses. You have heart disease, you have cancer, you have autoimmune disease, you have dementia. It tells you nothing about the cause. It's just a name. It's like saying, well, I have a headache. What's causing your headache? Did you get hit in the head with a hammer? Do you have a brain tumor, an aneurysm? Do you have a migraine? Did you eat gluten? Do you have a cold? Do you have a flu? Like what's causing your headache? Saying you have a headache doesn't mean anything. And it's the same for every disease, whether it's depression, or cancer, or heart disease, or diabetes. Just the name tells you what the symptoms are. It doesn't tell you the root cause. And when we look at the reimagining of medicine through the lens of functional medicine, systems biology, network medicine, this is the future of what's happening. Okay, this is not my idea. This is not Dr. Hyman's view of the world. This is actually what's happening in the science. At Harvard, they published a textbook called Network Medicine. describing this phenomena of the radical change that's going to happen as we begin to understand the root causes, the multifactorial causes of disease, and the multiple things we need to do to correct that disease. And, and then so excited about this because it's actually finally hitting mainstream science. It's not hitting mainstream medicine yet. It's still on the fringes and unfortunately, it's going to take a while because it takes about 20 years from scientific discovery to implementation of medical practice or longer. and this is a big paradigm shift, so who knows, maybe we'll have a fast one or a slow one, I don't know. Anyway, the key is that the body is organized in a very different way than we learned in medical school. It's not organized into organs and specialties, it's organized into these seven basic systems that are the functional networks in your body that control every single thing in your body. So every disease that exists today, I mean, obviously not getting hit by a car, I mean, that's a different kind of thing, but pretty much every disease, is determined by imbalances in seven basic functional systems in your body that are controlled by your genes, by your environment, and your lifestyle. So all that dynamic interaction between your genes, environmental lifestyle is regulating these systems and is determining whether they're in balance or out of balance. And the single biggest thing you can do every day to positively or negatively affect these seven systems is picking what you eat properly. if you pick the wrong foods, you're gonna damage these systems and cause inflammation and damage to your microbiome and impaired detoxification and hormonal dysregulation and all kinds of stuff happens as you eat the wrong foods. And we'll go through each one. So what are these seven systems? There's your gut, we call that assimilation, your immune system, your defense and repair, your energy system, how you make energy in your cells from food and oxygen, your detox system, how you get rid of internal, external waste, your transport system, which is your circulation and lymph, your communication system, which is hormones, neurotransmitters, other messenger molecules, peptides, all kinds of stuff, your structural system, which is your biomechanical structure, your body, your musculoskeletal system, all the way down to the subcellular structures of your cells and your membranes. And those are all affected by your lifestyle, your diet, and various insults like toxins and allergens and microbes and radiation, all kinds of stuff. So Our goal is to figure out what are these seven systems? Were they out of balance? How do you get them in balance? That's the key to understanding disease and the key to fixing what's wrong with most people. What is so beautiful about food is that we're finally understanding how food interacts with each of these systems. I'm going to take you quickly through an example of each one, positive and negative. The gut. If you eat our Western processed diet, you're going to grow really nasty bugs in there. and those bugs are going to produce really nasty compounds that make you sick and even make you gain weight. If you eat the right kinds of foods full of polyphenols and fiber and probiotic foods like sauerkraut, you're eating cranberry and pomegranate, you're having a prebiotic foods like asparagus and plantain and through some artichokes and artichoke hearts, these are going to help create a healthy microbiome so you can harm or heal the system by choosing the foods you eat. your immune system the same thing. Our diet is very inflammatory. We eat sugar, processed food, refined oils. These are highly inflammatory foods that are driving our biology towards inflammation, which is at the root of most disease. On the other hand, if you eat a whole foods, plant-rich, anti-inflammatory, phytochemical dense, high fiber diet, you're gonna be reducing inflammation. If you are looking at energy, for example, if you eat an excess of calories but not enough nutrients, which is what most Americans do, and this is kind of frightening, actually, we should look at it. We were eating about 500 calories more per person per day than we did about 50 years ago. All that has to be processed and it's processed in these little energy factories like your car engine called the mitochondria. And these mitochondria are very sensitive to an overload of sugar and starch and chemicals and processed foods. If you're dumping all that in there, you're going to slow down your energy production. On the other hand, if you're having good fats and you're having phytochemical rich foods and antioxidants in your diet, you're gonna be helping the energy production. And detoxification is another great example. If we're eating foods that are full of pesticides and chemicals and all kinds of stuff and that are full of sugar, which is damaging liver, by the way, one of the biggest cause of liver failure in the world is sugar, fatty liver. It's the biggest problem affecting 90 million Americans. If you're eating all that, it's damaging your liver. But if you're eating, for example, broccoli sprouts or lemon peel or green tea or any number of these plant compounds, polyphenols and phytochemicals, they upregulate your detoxification system. So if you have, I, every day I make sure I have at least a cup or two of some family in the broccoli, collards, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and so forth, kohlrabi, and I try to include that in my diet on a regular basis, which actually helps to enhance detoxification. same thing with circulation, lymphatic flow. You know, you want to make sure you're having foods that are, that are not making your circulation sluggish and inflamed, which is processed food. And you're eating lots of phytochemical rich foods. Same thing with hormones. If you're eating, for example, a lot of sugar and starch, you're driving insulin up, you're driving your adrenaline up, your stress hormones up. If you eat a Whole Foods plant rich diet, a Pegan diet, you're doing the opposite to your hormones. You're balancing your hormones. We know, for example, that if if women are eating a lot of sugar, they actually can get a lot of estrogen and that causes them to have all kinds of hormonal issues and infertility and menstrual irregularities and all kinds of problems. And that can be fixed, for example, by having them eat lots of fiber and flax seeds and soy foods and things with lignans in them that actually help to balance the hormones and getting rid of all that food. Same thing with your structure. If your structure is abnormal, you're not going to be healthy. We used to have a terrible word. It was kind of pejorative that we used in medicine when we were operating on people who were pretty unhealthy and had crappy diets because their tissue, tissues would just fall apart in your hand. So you'd be operating them and you try to sew them together and this tissues would just like fall apart. We call it PPP, piss, poor, protoplasm, which is terrible. But doctors, you know, have to, I guess, keep themselves amused while they're dealing with really difficult situations. and it's because their nutrition was so bad, that their tissues and their structure was so bad. Whereas now, you know, if you take some with a healthy diet and you can look at their tissues, they're very different and they stick together well, they're structurally sound. And I can go into way more examples, but food influences every single one of these things. So every bite of food you take changes your gene expression, your epigenome, which controls the master switches around aging, longevity, it affects your microbiome, your hormones, your immune system, your brain chemistry, your structure, everything is affected by the quality of the food you eat. That's why the most important thing you need to understand around food is medicine is that food is information. And what information or what code are you putting in your body? If you're putting corrupt code in your operating system, your software is going to be glitchy and that's called disease. And if you're putting good code in, you're going to have, you know, a really awesome functioning operating system, which is going to create health and vitality. And food is the single most important thing that can do that.

Mark, there was a great stat that you shared in Food Fix and also the marketing that you were doing around the book about just how many chronic diseases and deaths from chronic diseases every year have been attributed back to largely food. Can you share that stat with us and walk us through some of that information?

Yeah. Well, there's the global burden of disease study that was been done. It's a really profound study. It's still ongoing. It's massive study that's constantly collecting data.

And.

The study was shocking. For the first time in history, obesity and chronic disease is caused by food outstrips smoking as the number one cause of death in the world. And I think conservatively it's estimated that it kills 11 million people a year. Now think about it. I mean, of 11 million people died every year from something else, we would be up in arms trying to deal with it. If, for example, there was a new virus or something that was killing 11 million people, we'd be like, COVID, look what we've done with COVID We go crazy trying to deal with COVID We're not even talking about this. We're not even addressing the fact that in America, we are a minority of the world's population, about, I think, 5%, and make up up to 20% of the COVID cases and deaths. Why? we have the best healthcare system in the world because we're the unhealthiest population driven by our modern American diet. And so when you look at the globally, you know, the deaths from chronic disease, it's about double that of infectious disease. So we have about, you know, probably 40, 50 million people a year dying globally from chronic disease. And some of it's smoking, for sure, like lung diseases, but the majority of it is actually somehow related to diet. So diet is the number one killer in the world. And what's amazing to me is that the number one killer is food. And yet the National Institute of Health, our government's research organization, spends almost nothing on nutrition and chronic disease. It's staggering. And I'm involved with a campaign that derived from the book called the Food Fix Campaign. It's a nonprofit that I created to drive policy change. And one of the things we're advocating for is a National Institute of Nutrition, which many other countries have. We don't.

Well, that begs the question, you know, why don't you think, especially here in America, why don't we have that? And why is food largely ignored by conventional medicine? It's, you know, most doctors, as you know, most people, most human beings for that matter, are good natured. They want to help people. They want to make a difference. But why is it that we've lost sight of the impact of food when it comes to health?

All I have to do is look at the medical school curriculum. I mean, I had nutrition. It was about a couple of hours devoted to quasis your core, marasmus, your aphthmia and rickets, which are vitamin deficiency diseases you see no longer in the developing, in the developed world and rarely in the developing world anymore. It was an sort of like historical. tour through the history of vitamin deficiencies. And there was no mention of anything related to chronic disease. It was just staggering. And yet, food is the number one cause of chronic disease, the number one cure, and doctors are nothing about it. So, they're completely uneducated. The last place you want to go to get advice about nutrition is your doctor. Unless, you know, there's someone like me who spent their life studying nutrition. But it's really a problem. And so, we have this blind spot. The other thing is that doctors don't believe that it works. Why? They go, well, you're a little overweight, your cholesterol's a little high, why don't you improve your diet or your blood pressure's a little high, why don't you eat healthy, exercise, and come back in three months and we'll decide what to do. Now, that means almost nothing to people. What does eat healthy mean? What does have a balanced diet mean? What does eat in moderation mean? Nothing to most people. They have no clue about how to navigate the nutritional landscape we live in. And we live in a toxic nutritional landscape where the easy choice is the worst choice for you and the harder choices are good for you. In other words, you have to go hunting gather to find something healthy to eat, which is tough. So, I mean, I've traveled all over America and it's like it's bad out there. I mean, unless you get into some pockets where there's some awareness and consciousness of good food, It's mostly a nutritional wasteland. And so doctors really can't be faulted because it's not part of their curriculum. And one of the efforts I've been involved with is called the Mean Rich Act, which is a act in Congress to fund nutrition education. The other thing we need to do is to actually change licensing exams so that doctors cannot become a doctor unless they pass a test which includes a whole section on nutrition. Now, I hate to say this, Drew, but most of the curriculum in medical school is driven off the licensing exams. What you need to know to pass the test to become a doctor. And if there's zero on nutrition, that's what they're gonna learn, zero on nutrition. So if you make 10% of the questions nutrition related and chronic disease related, guess what? The medical schools are gonna have to include it in their curriculum. So we have a long way to go to fix this, but the other thing is that doctors don't actually ever see it work. and like, you know, if I have a patient with heart failure and kidney failure and liver failure and diabetes, and I say to a doctor, well, I'm gonna reverse all that using food, they're gonna go, good luck, buddy. I mean, I, you know, I don't, I've never seen it. Can't happen. In fact, I had one patient at Cleveland Clinic who came to see me who was overweight, diabetic, high blood pressure, kidney failure, and he followed everything I said. He lost a bunch of weight, his kidneys reversed, his heart failure got better, his, his cholesterol normalized, the blood sugar normalized, everything was corrected. He went to see his kidney doctor and his doctor was like, what the heck did you do? I've never seen this before. I've never seen kidneys actually improve. We can slow it down, we can medicate it, we can manage it, but they are untrained in how to use food as a drug. And it's not the same for everybody. It's not like one diet fits everybody. What I treat an autoimmune patient with is different than I'll treat a diabetic patient with, different than I might treat an Alzheimer's patient with, different than I'll treat someone who's got chronic fatigue, it's very, very different depending on what is going on. And, I literally, just like there's hundreds or thousands of drugs, there's thousands of different permutations of diet that can be personalized and prescribed as a drug that works better, faster, and is cheaper than any drug on the planet.

Let's switch over to some practical takeaways. People are always curious, what does Dr. Hyman eat? and what are some of the top foods that he might want to call out that are super beneficial to be including in the diet, especially if somebody doesn't have these foods or isn't eating them in the right quantity. So you already gave us one previously. You talked about the broccoli family and the importance of cruciferous vegetables that are there and how you try to at least get one serving of those a day. Are there any other foods like that that you think of as being super healing to your overall health that you'd also recommend to the listeners of the podcast.

For sure. I mean, it's so second nature to me now, Drew, but when I go to the drugstore, I mean, the pharmacy, I mean, the grocery store, which I actually think of as my drugstore, I go through the vegetable aisle and I go through the grocery store and I'm like looking at all the drugs. I'm like, oh, I want this drug and I want that drug. Okay, this olive oil has got high polyphenols 'cause it's special olive oil and it has the ability to be antiviral and it actually helps my blood vessels and arteries. So, oh, here's a mushroom, this shiitake mushroom or my take mushroom is gonna help my immune system. Oh, this artichoke over here, this one's a prebiotic food and the artichoke plus it helps my upregulate my detox pathways. Oh, and this particular fiber, this prebiotic fiber from plantain, if I like plantain, actually gonna help my microbiome. Oh, this one, It's got extra CoQ10 in it and it's gonna help my mitochondria. Oh, I'm gonna get this fat because this fish oil helps to improve my membranes and help my structural system. And so, it's kind of a, I'm probably annoying to go shopping with because I have this, if you could literally have like the thought bubble in my head over in my head as I'm going to the grocery store, you see as I, what I'm thinking and it's so fun. And I think I break it down into a bunch of categories. there's protein, fat, carbs, and fiber. And then there's the phytochemical world. And then there's the seven systems in our biology. So I literally, every day I'm eating the best quality of the protein, fat, and fiber and carbohydrate. But I'm also thinking about how do I, oh, how do I help my detox system? How do I help my microbiome? How do I help my immune system? How do I do that? And so I'm picking the foods from from the grocery store that are helping me with each of these aspects. For example, I had kudzu noodles, which are amazing. Kudzu is a Japanese starchy thing that they made into noodles. But they're not like starchy noodles. They actually are incredibly helpful for your microbiome and gut soothing and healing. Or I'll have like the Shirataki noodles, which are made from konjac root, which have zero calories but are an incredible prebiotic and also help to slow the absorption of sugar and glucose. So I can have pasta without actually having any guilt. So I think about this as I'm going through grocery. I think about, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at the vegetable world. I'm gonna buy all the colors. I'm gonna buy prebiotic foods, which are the fibers. I'm gonna buy, I mentioned a few of them. I'm gonna buy probiotic foods. I'm gonna include maybe some sheep yogurt or I'm gonna have a, a sauerkraut. or get pickles or I'm gonna have seaweed because it's full of minerals or I'm gonna have these class of phytochemically rich foods that are full of polyphenols to help my microbiome and buy pomegranate or I'm gonna get some cranberries and throw in my smoothie. So I'm literally thinking about how do I, for each of these foods that I'm buying, what is it doing to my body and how do I construct a diet that tastes yummy and is delicious but also is the right medicine? and so I think about should want colorful fruits and vegetables, you want mushrooms, you want the right quality protein. So that would be obviously you can have plant proteins, which are fine, but you also, I think most people will need animal proteins in the form of regenerative raised beef or, or other animal products, fish, chicken, but should be organic and regenerative and fats. You want to have all the good fats, olive oil, avocado oil, fish oil. Those are really the basic foundational things. And then that's all that's in my kitchen. And also I have nuts and seeds, so I like lots of nuts and seeds. I like, I buy mushrooms, I buy nuts and seeds, I buy colorful vegetables, I buy the right fats, I buy the right proteins. And, and I just, it's just second nature to me now. And after I learn how to do it, and we actually have a guide, I think we have a guide on food is medicine that we did for one of our public television shows, which is like a shopping guide that we could probably post as well.

It kind of goes through all the categories of the different foods and which are the best ones in each one.

To do all these things so we can provide that for people listening.

Yeah, we'll definitely put that in the show notes. All right, Mark, this is the part of the podcast where we take questions from our community. Questions from our community. All right, first question. Can you explain the benefits of bitter foods and why they're so healing for the body?

Yes. Okay, so any of the strong tasting compounds in food, phytochemicals. Flavor follows phytochemicals. Phytochemicals cause benefit in the body. So if you want to eat medicine, the best way to do it is eat the most flavorful food. And what we've done in America is bread food to be tasteless. Okay? If you ever have gone into your garden, and maybe have an organic garden, you have a cherry tomato plant, and it's late August and it's summer and it's warm out, and you go out there and it's like ripe and you stick it in your mouth. It's like an explosion of flavor because it's rich in phytochemicals. If you eat one of those cardboard tomatoes that they bread to ship in boxes and not squish, it looks good, but it tastes bad. Okay. And so flavor represents phytochemical richness in a food. So we want to make sure we're eating foods that are really rich in these phytochemicals and these flavor profiles, which are full of these compounds like alkaloids, polyphenols, and bitter tasting compounds. So things that are strong actually are good for you. So bitter melon, for example, is a great example of a very bitter food that they use a lot in Chinese cuisine. and it's an acquired taste, okay? But I actually really like it. And it turns out that this is incredibly powerful in balancing blood sugar, so it's great for diabetics. Other bitter foods might contain other alkaloids or compounds that also affect your health beneficially. Now, the body is very smart in regulating how much you eat, because it's like you can't eat too much of it. Like you could eat a whole bag of cookies, but you probably couldn't eat four pounds of broccoli rabe because it's a little bitter and you kind of get sick of eating it after a while. And the body does that naturally because if we regain our nutritional wisdom, which is I want to talk about this in a minute, we actually can direct ourselves to finding the right food. What's happened to Americans and increasingly globally to the population is that our nutritional wisdom has been hijacked by a highly processed toxic food system. that has removed from our palates all the normal regulatory sensing pathways in our brain. So we don't have a sense of what's good for us anymore. So we'll crave all the wrong stuff and not the right stuff. And there's a wonderful book called Nourishment by Fred Provenza. He's one of my heroes. Nobody's probably ever heard of him, but it's one of the most beautiful, profound books I've ever read called Nourishment about reclaiming our nutritional wisdom from animals who know exactly what to eat. So if you take an animal, a legendary graze, there might be 100 plants. Now, some of them contain toxic compounds. These phytochemicals are not there to actually help you. They're there to help the plant, and they're deterrence. They don't want to get eaten, or they want to protect themselves from this or that. So if you take too much of them, they can be toxic. So for example, certain animals will graze on sagebrush when there's nothing else to eat. But the sagebrush is kind of a bitter plant, and it has a lot of terpenes. Now, the terpenes can be toxic when over consumed. So, what they found is that these animals will stop eating it once they've consumed a certain amount and the blood levels get a certain level. They then repeated a study where they actually just injected it into their vein and when the blood levels got in a certain level, they stopped eating it. So, even though they weren't actually eating the food, it was like a way that the body had its own set point for how much you should eat of this stuff. So, bottom line, is all these weird tasting foods and all these funny foods are actually really good for you. You want to eat as many of them as possible. Seaweed, bitter melon, broccoli rabe, bitter foods, weird foods. I have a Japanese friend, all these incredible different flavors and tastes, umami flavors that are just not part of our culture but have a lot of powerful medicinal products.

All right, next question, Mark. Any long-term advice to avoid a reoccurrence of cancer specifically when it comes to thinking about the foods that I'm eating and the diet that I'm consuming.

I mentioned this before, but when I was in residency, I had a rotation on the oncology ward and I asked the oncologist, I said, Doctor, how much of cancer that we see today is related to diet? 1%. And I thought he would say 10%. He said 70%. I was shocked. And I think we are really underestimating the role of diet in cancer. Yes, it's environmental toxins. Yes, it's probably genetics. But sugar in our diet is the number one cause of cancer, period. And the lack of the good medicines and food that we've been talking about, the good nutrients, is also a factor. So we want the protective foods and eat more of those, and we want to get rid of the harmful foods and not eat those. And the truth is that cancer is happening all the time in all of us. And our immune systems are on constant surveillance and trying to address it. But if you are eating a crappy diet, you're not providing your body with the basic raw materials to just function and regulate your immune system. Zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin D we know is highly related to cancer if your vitamin D levels are low. And so we can actually help our bodies create a different environment in which the cancer has trouble surviving. So, at an extreme level, a ketogenic diet shuts off the fuel source for cancer. And, it's been shown in many studies to actually improve the outcomes of chemo, radiation, and so forth. It's been shown to sort of help even reverse cancers in some animals like stage 4 melanoma, pancreatic cancer stage 4, which are death sentences, have been shown to be completely reversed by ketogenic diets. So, we know that Cancer, diet plays a huge role and we want to create a terrain that is inhospitable for cancer. The difference between functional medicine and traditional medicine is the whole idea of the biological terrain, the host. Not everybody who is exposed to the flu gets a flu, not everybody who's exposed to COVID gets COVID, not everybody who gets COVID gets in the hospital or sick.

Why?

The terrain. We see that more with COVID than anything else. the people who are ending up in the hospital are the ones who are chronically ill or obese or overweight. Those are the ones who are susceptible because their terrain is unhealthy. And so we want to create a healthy biological terrain for people, which allows them to be more resilient and deal with the constant changes and mutations that happen all the time in our body that we're adapted to deal with. But if you don't have a healthy biological terrain, you're screwed. And the way to get a healthy terrain is by what you eat. I mean, I'm amazed at, you know, I mean, I don't brag or anything, but like, I mean, I got wrinkles and stuff and I'm gray a little, but I'm getting older, but that's mostly sun damage from the sun. But I look for myself from the neck down, my tissues, my skin, my muscles, my body is like a 30 year old or 20 year old because I've been feeding it all the right stuff for my whole life. I've been interested in this. I've never eaten junk food. I've never had soda. I never went to McDonald's. of course, I went to McDonald's a few times in my life, but it's not like, it's not like I've been eating crap my whole life. Even as a kid, my mother, you know, we grew up in Europe and in Europe, then they went to the fresh market every day. They didn't basically, you know, have big refrigerators, so they would just go to the market and they get their fresh meat. They go to the butcher, they go to the dairy guy, they go to the vegetable guy, the fruit guy and the bread guy, whatever. And, and they would get, they would just eat real fresh whole food. And that's all they ate. And so I grew up like that. And I, and I'm, like, amazed. Look, it's people my age without clothes on, you know, a shirt and a gym or whatever, and I'm like, wow, their bodies are just degrading. And it's not inevitable. And if we put the right fuel in, we literally, we are made from the stuff that we eat. It's just that simple.

All right, Mark, those are the questions that we had for today. I'd love to pass it back to you to talk a little bit about a recap on the topic of food being healing and food being medicine. And then you can go ahead and conclude us out.

Well, I mean, a recap would probably take a couple of hours because food and food is medicine is one of the most foundational ideas that can change your life. That can change the course of their health trajectory. They can change your health span, your lifespan. That determines pretty much everything about the quality of your life. because if your diet is crap, you're gonna feel like crap. Your body is gonna become degraded and decrepit. And if you understand that food is medicine, that food is information, that you have the power to upgrade or downgrade your biological software with every single bite, that the food you eat regulates all of your basic systems, your immune system, your gut, your detox system, your energy system, your structural system, your communication hormonal system, your detox system, all those systems are regulated by what you eat. and you want to put good quality ingredients in because that is the single most important thing you can do every day to control your destiny. I heard a great quote from Eric Adams, I think the new mayor of New York. He says, he was diabetic, he was going blind, he had all these medications, he was taking all these heart disease things he struggled with. And his doctor says, you know, you're just going to have to live with this. and he goes, he says, I realized it was my dinner, not my destiny that was causing the problem. I think that's a great line. It's my dinner, not my destiny. I think that's what we should be thinking about. What's for dinner? And it should be medicine. And it should be medicine. It tastes good. And the good news is, as I said before, flavor represents the medicine in food. The more natural flavor something has, I don't mean I don't mean slop an MSG on something to make it taste good. I mean natural flavors that are in food comes from the quality of the food. The quality of the food is determined by the quality of the compounds in the food and the compounds in the food, the phytochemicals are determined by how it's grown, where it's grown, all sorts of variables.

And this is a lot of what.

I talked about in food fix, but I think it's such an important concept that we reframe our relationship to food from being just a source of energy to being source of information. and the truth is that disease is an information problem. Aging is an information problem. And if we have the right information, we can improve the quality of our lives and our health. And if we put in the wrong information, we're gonna degrade our health. So, understanding that food is medicine, how it works, where it works with all these various things, and I think it doesn't have to be complicated. Like you just need to bring that little guide with you that's gonna be in the PDF. There's show notes that's gonna actually say, okay, well here in each category are the best foods in each of these categories. what are the best nuts? What are the best proteins? What are the best seeds? What are the best veggies? What are the best fruits? What are the best grains? And so on. How do we pick the right foods that have the highest nutritional density? And that's really the thing you should be thinking about. Where am I going to get my medicine?

How do I change my grocery store.

Into a pharmacy with an F? Hey, YouTube, if you like this video, you're gonna love the next one. When you change the diet, you're gonna change the microbiome. That's, you know, the change the microbiome and and then ecologists were also very interested in that and making the point that the more diverse the diet of the animal, the more diverse the microbiome is going to be. So it just lines up from the.

Soil.

Through the animals, right through to us, right? And the plants are benefiting from that as well. More diverse microbiomes help all those plants. it's, it's amazing work, but it all links back to health, right? To the doctor's pharmacy and feed as medicine for livestock and wild animals. Food is medicine for us.

But it's, you just said something that, like, that light bulb went on my head, something I'd never really considered.

And I'm just gonna unpack it because.

It was, it was so rich and you covered it really quickly. So I thought that, you know, the microbiome of soil was important for the plants. But the microbiome of the soil is also determined by the plants.

Yes.

And the plants, the plants in a symbiotic relationship with the soil put stuff in the soil that feeds the microbiome. And the more diversity of plants, now think about these massive millions of acres of monoculture, what that does to the soil, right? You have hundreds of different species of plants on rangeland or farmland, that's putting information in the soil that feeds the silvery medicine for the microbiome of the soil. And then the microbiome in turn helps the plants by extracting compounds from the soil that it couldn't otherwise extract. So we're seeing two phenomena here. One is over the last 50 years we've seen a dramatic reduction in mineral and nutrient content in plants, even if you're broccoli today it's not as nutritious which it was 50 years ago, okay? They were up to 50% lower levels of minerals and also a 10 to 50% reduction in phytochemicals. And it's all because we've disrupted this natural relationship between plants and soil.

Yes. And we didn't understand, right? I mean, when people started into all this, nobody understood. And the silos that we live in, right, that we were talking about last night. So you have these that are going down this path and learning about all these things we're talking about. You have agronomists that are thinking we need yield, yield, yield. And now those worlds are coming together. How we're starting to say, look, we did this. Nobody's to blame. It was just good intentions, but we need to have a think. And then these phytochemicals going back to the soil microbiome, they're health promoting for all those bacteria and mycorrhizae and all, it's so symbiotic and so health promoting all the way across the board. And you can't extract one frame from the other. They're intimately interrelated and we're interrelated with all that, right? And we've forgotten that that's so fundamental to our health. We really need to wake up to that, right? And that appreciation of of how beautiful and amazing it is for one thing, and then how important it is fundamental for our health.

Totally.

And the phytochemicals that are in these plants that have been grown in ways that feed the microbiome of soil, that increase their nutrient density, that increase their phytochemical richness have profound effects for our health. And they're profound effects for the animals. So I'm a doctor. you're sort of a rangeland behavioral ecologist, right? We're studying different things. It seems like how could they come ecological doctors? But it's, yeah, but it's really, when you look at it, it's exactly what's happening in human health and animal health. So we're seeing the need for massive inputs to animals to keep them growing and healthy from feed lots using supportive nutritional support, antibiotics, certain kinds of feed. It just, and, and they're not, and they're not that healthy. Whereas if you take a grass-fed, fully grass-fed finished animal or a wild animal, they're eating foods all the time that are treating their bodies with medicine. That's right. And they're less likely to get sick. They don't need as much support. And so the costs are way less to raise grass-fed regenerative beef than it is to feed a lot of animals. And people think, oh, it's more expensive. Turns out it's not more expensive. It turns out they gain weight in the right way. and what was fascinating to me reading your book was that some of these papers was that it was shocking to me that they could eat far less and gain the same weight because, and.

This is just fascinating because we eat.

A nutrient replete diet, our bodies know what to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely the case. The, the whole notion of, of the nutritional wisdom of the body, of everything from the bacteria in the soil through to plants themselves through to the livestock and on us as well. You know, I want to go back to a point too. It's about our reliance on fossil fuels and that all these inputs that plants did naturally, now we have to make up with herbicides, herbicides to protect plants and monocultures, glyphosate and all the downstream effects of glyphosate. plants did that naturally. They produced their own herbicides and we didn't.

And they're called phytochemicals.

Right, and they're called phytochemicals. Then insecticides to protect plants from the insect world. Well, that's what plants did. That's also phytochemicals. Fertilizers, we've been talking about this symbiosis below ground. When we got rid of that, then we've got to do the fertilizing. Well, there's cost to every one of those things.

And then, like you said, and then a lot of plants, if you have the risk of plants, they put nitrogen into the soil, so you don't have.

To put it in.

Right, absolutely.

Nitrogen fixing plants. So, we shot ourselves in the foot and then there's this huge cost that we've talked about. You know, when you take into account-.

So, I just something occurred to me, sorry to interrupt, but it just occurred.

To me, it was just that the reason we need GMO foods is because we've depleted the plant's natural ability to protect, defend itself by the breeding we've done. That's the idea. That plants for yield and protein energy. And then go, wait a minute, these are all getting eaten and they're not striving and they're getting sick and we need to give them all these drugs.

To keep them healthy, which is kind.

Of silly because naturally these phytochemicals are the plant's defense mechanisms. They provide them with needed radiation. They help treat different problems that they.

Have with their own health.

They help communicate with other plants of dangers.

They have all these incredible benefits, right? Yeah, and that's the supreme irony is now we're trying to genetically engineer back into plants all the things that they originally had, you know, so it puts the emphasis, as we were talking, on programs, and there are some in this country that are really trying to think about phytochemical richness and how do we get that back into, into the production system in, in really viable ways so that when you go to the grocery store and you pick up the lettuce or the kale or the tomato or whatever it is, and you pick something that's phytochemically rich, and you take a bite of that and every cell in your body saying, hey, this is wonderful.

Rather than, you know, eating broccoli on the store, even it's organic broccoli from, you know, a great store. If I go and pick it in my garden and eat it, I'm like, wow, what's that? Or if I eat asparagus that I buy in the store, if I eat.

Asparagus that I go pick in my garden, I'm like, that tastes so different, right? Absolutely. Tastes so different. So that's where we would encourage everyone to, you know, growing gardens, getting yourself, getting your hands in. And I talk to a lot of people anymore who haven't done that historically, but they listen to these kind of things and they start doing that. And they say, you know, it's a spiritual kind of thing in the one sense that it connects you back with, with our being kind of. But then the, the rewards of eating, like you say, it's, it's wonderful how we pick it fresh and you bring it in and you eat it and, and then to realize, what we're talking about, some of this science that's been dug into, that it actually is very, very healthy for you. And all these phytochemicals that were, you know, I'll say a word to, over my career, I was so involved with natural products chemistry and ecologists and learning all these different compounds, all of them, jillions of them. And I don't worry about that anymore, Mark, for two reasons. One, my memory doesn't hold these things anymore, I'll be honest. but two, you realize it's so complex. I mean, plants will produce tens to hundreds to even thousands of these. Strawberry will produce 5,000 of them. So I think we can become bogged down if we try to think about, you know, well, is it to have resveratrol or does it have phenolics of this sort of one? Not to say they're, but if you just appreciate that it's that phytochemical richness, that's really what matters. And then the miracle is that the level of the cells and organ systems in your body, your cells and body know what to do with all that. That's incredible, you know? And you're never going to study that in a reductional sense.

No, it's so complex, right?

Because you're literally eating thousands of compounds, not just protein, fat, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals, all these other compounds. And your body knows what to do with them. They regulate all these quirky functions. It's what I do in functional medicine. When I treat patients using food as medicine, I tell people to have green tea, which helps get rid of heavy metals, or have them have broccoli, which increases their detox capacity of glutathione from the glutathione, or whether I'm having them eat proanthocyanidins from berries to increase their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant capacity. So, I'm thinking all the time about how do I use these, but it really never occurred to me these deep interrelations between the plants, animals, and the soil that are driving the phytochemical richness. And so, your work has really explained how that all works and why we've so gotten so screwed up. So essentially, we bred plants to remove these compounds, and then we have to use all these agrochemical and industrial inputs to compensate for that. And two, we built an agricultural system, a legacy of the Green Revolution that ended up damaging the soil in ways that we never even understood and turned it from soil to dirt. And you wrote in a paper you recently read that the Green Revolution helped feed billions of people, but had many unintended consequences, including loss of land and social changes in the culture because of how it affected the farmers and with the displacement of land and poverty for countless small farmers. And in India, you know, suicide rates are really high among farmers, even in this country, loss of biodiversity, which we talked about, and food quality, the degradation of the land from soil erosion and loss of minerals in the soil, adverse effects from synthetic fertilizers on soil organisms. So when you put nitrogen on the soil, it kills the bugs in there. The pollution from fertilizers has been pesticides in the overall environment and more salt in the soil from irrigation and dependence on fossil fuels. So it really created a system that has so many inputs and so many changes in destructive problems that happened to the ecosystem that we've sort of stopped living in ecological way that it's supportive and sustainable. And we're now calling regenerative, which is how do we regenerate ecosystems? How do we regenerate soil? How do we regenerate the phytochemicals in plant? How do we regenerate human health? Those are all the things that people care about. And yet, we've developed an agricultural system that puts a lot of food that makes people sick and kills people.

I mean, I mean, just the one.

Fact around COVID that's just staggering to me is that 63% of hospitalizations for COVID can be linked back to poor diet. The poor diet that caused diabetes, obesity, heart disease and so forth. that led to the hospitalizations. Absolutely. That should get everybody stopping in their tracks and going, wait a minute, if we are susceptible to pandemics of our diet, and we've not only seen that in deaths and sickness, but also the loss of food security, nutrition security in so many communities during the pandemic, we've sort of got to get back on track here.

Yes, and that, and as everything we're saying, it relates to all the organisms in the system, right? As you get rid of the phytochemicals, chemical diversity and diversity of different plant species. That makes all the wild and domestic animals more susceptible to diseases as well. We're seeing it in a pandemic. It's become very real for humans, but that's the same kind of thing that happens in wild and domestic animals as well.

And it's not just an animal agriculture, plant agriculture. Even if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you're eating plants, and if they're grown even in organic ways, they can be using killing methods in the soil. They can be doing things that actually decrease biodiversity. And it's not necessarily going to solve the problem. If you're looking large monocrops of soybeans or the new plant-based means, you've got GMO soy going in huge monocrop cultures that are destroying the ecosystem. We're pouring billions of pounds of, you know, millions, I don't know, billions or millions of pounds of glyphosate. That's on soil, which is destroying the cell, the soil microbiome, which destroys our microbiome. And we're ending up having these, these food products that aren't what they were. And our health is really degraded as a result.

Yeah. You know, glyphosate was originally developed as a, as an antibiotic, right? It's to kill bacteria.

So I thought, I thought it was to kill, to clean out. the lead pipes, and then they put it in the pipes and the runoff from the pipes, they found all the plants died around where the runoff was out of the pipes.

Yeah, that's part of the history of that whole thing. That's right. It wasn't deliberate, right? I mean, it was an unintended consequence, observation, and turned it into the end of the herbicide it is today.

Yeah, it's crazy. as a doctor, I understand, and as a functional medicine doctor, I understand the power of food is medicine and the power of phytochemicals and phytonutrients in plants to actually activate our health and address both the treatment and prevention of disease. That's so clear to me. And your work has really highlighted how we've lost our ability to be in right relationship with the land and with animals that will lead to more of these phytochemicals being in our diet, including not only in plants but in animals. And we'll talk about phytochemicals in meat a little bit. What really strikes me from your work is how we really lost our natural wisdom of what to eat. And one of the studies that you wrote about in your book, Nourishment, which everybody should get a copy of, is this study that was done in the 20s. by a woman, I think in Canada, who took kids from an orphanage. And I don't know if you can get this through an ethics committee today, but she took these kids from an orphanage and she fed them an array of foods. She offered them these foods so they could naturally select what their bodies wanted. And these kids would eat stuff that you wouldn't even think they would. For example, dinner might be orange juice and liver and some weird thing and brains. And so talk about this study. what was learned from it, and how as humans living in a world with a disconnection from our food supply and a disconnection from the kinds of foods that helped us maintain our nutritional wisdom, how has led to all this chronic disease. So this study really informs a lot of the thinking about why we are all so sick and overweight.

Yes, Clara Davis was the the scientist who did the studies. She was in Chicago and she, I would have loved to have met Clara. I have to say, she's a petite little lady and so much on the same page. But she obviously had this belief in the nutritional wisdom of the body, but wanted to, wanted to study that and see what happens. So she had 15 children that were given up for adoption. or put in an orphanage. And she ran the study over a six-year period. And they had 34 different foods that were offered seasonally and some of the things like you mentioned. And, and then they simply recorded what each child ate. Meal in, meal out, day. Can you imagine that amount of data?

They just got to pick whatever they wanted.

Yeah. The kids could pick whatever, whatever. whatever they wanted. And they had pediatricians that were involved in that study and they wrote papers about it and they said they'd never seen a healthier group of kids ever in their careers. And the kids did things and this was interesting.

So there's no nutritionist telling them what to do, no dietary guidelines, no nutrition facts labels with all the right stuff that kids need for breakfast.

And Clara made it clear she told the people who were helping on the study, you're not to any indication to those children of something to eat. You put it on that, put it in front of them. And it was interesting when they first started, started this study, they said the kids sampled everything. Everything went into their, into their mouth, the napkins, the silverware, the, you know, anything that was on there. But given a little bit of time, each child would figure out what, what worked for its body. And I just love this because she said, no child, no two children ever selected the same combination. of foods and no child ever selected the same foods from day to day. But they all selected diets that met their needs. And they knew when some of the kids would come in with deficiency symptoms, they paid particular attention to what they would select. And they would select things that they needed.

So they're vitamin A deficient, they'll go for the liver.

That's right. That's absolutely the case. they come in with rickets, they're gonna go for vitamin D testing. Yeah. So they documented all of that. And, it's just amazing to think. And we were talking about that. We did studies like that with livestock, with sheep and cattle, where we'd give them choices of foods or no choice at all. These, these rations that they, that are fed in feedlots, these, what are called total mixed rations, where they're designed for the average animal. And you try to make uniform groups of animals in terms of age and sex and so forth. And then you formulate a ration, you grind it and mix it up. So one group would get that in our study. The other group was simply offered the choice of the ingredients. And it was amazing to, to compare what they did. And that's where, going back to the point that you made, the animals that were given a choice actually ate less food.

But gaining the same weight.

But yeah, they gain weight just as readily. They finish, you know, what people talk about finishing and you slaughter them. And we did that and you look at their carcass characteristics, they were the same, but it cost less. It was efficient, more efficient, it cost less if you're thinking just in an economic sense, because they ate less food. Here's the most- I put out a.

Buffet for them instead of giving them a set meal. That's absolutely right. And then they got to pick from.

The buffet what they actually for their health. And they did exactly what Claire Davis kids did too. No two animals ever selected the same combination of foods and they varied it from day to day to day, you know, and we understand a lot how that works. We don't need to go into those details, but it was, it's amazing. And one of the most amazing things to me. So you can look at different characteristics, but one thing that nutritionists like to look at is protein to energy ratio in the diet. And that varies a lot as a function of need. And so for the total mixed ration, there's a set protein to energy ratio, right? It's set by what that ration is. And when we looked at protein to energy ratio for the individual animals given choice, they were all over the place. Some were really high, some were really low, they were, but when we averaged all those animals, they were exactly where the nutritionists had formulated the ration, but none of them were that. Do you know there was no animal average animal?

They had their own intelligence.

Yes.

Even a cow.

Yeah.

It's not like a wild elk or buffalo.

That's right. That's right. It was still, they had not lost that. And that's a key point because when we started our work 45 years ago, there was the notion among ruminant nutritionists that wild animals must still have this nutritional wisdom in their bodies. Otherwise, how could be surviving, but domestic animals had lost it as a result of 10,000 years of domestication and selection. And our work just shows in the 300 papers we published over and over again, it hasn't been lost. But it's the choices that you give them and are you giving them wholesome choices that allow that risk to no different from a human, right? If you're raised on an ultra processed diet, then that's your choices. It's not going to work. work out well for you, right? But if you have all these wholesome choices and they're grown under the kind of conditions we're talking about, then that wisdom can be expressed. And the amazing thing is you don't even have to think about it. It's not so hard.

That's right. We've lost all that.

And we've gotten in a world where.

We are over consuming ultra processed foods in ways that make us the most obese nation in the world and are staggeringly undernourished. Even though we're overfed. Overfed and undernourished. We have significant nutritional deficiencies in this culture. Forget about phytochemicals. So I think probably 99.9% of Americans are deficient in phytochemicals because they have less than 9% of the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. That is a minimum, like five cups is minimum, five servings, which is basically two and a half cups. I would say people shoot more like eight or nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day.

Right. Right.

So we've lost that. And the, these, the, and we, you know, on these, these, these compounds we're, we're not getting and we don't know we need, but we're so deficient in our diet. And the, the cravings we have and the overeating we do often is an attempt to try to replace those nutrients that we're not getting from our food. And one of the studies by Kevin Hall and some others was fascinating to me. You talked about it, which is that when given an unlimited amount of ultra processed food to eat or a whole food to eat, that the people who ate the whole foods felt satisfied on far less food.

They ate 500 calories less a day.

Now that is a massive amount of calories. If you were 100 calories off for 20 years, you're going to gain 20 or 30 pounds. So 100 calories, let's say 3,500 calories, right?

Right, right, right.

Which is basically a week of the calorie excess would be equivalent to a pound of weight gain a week.

Yeah.

Access food. So that's why we're so overweight because.

We'Re looking for love in all the wrong places. You know, we're looking for nutrients in nutrient-depleted food. Forget about phytochemicals. Like the whole idea of phytochemicals regulating our appetite and our desire for food was something I just, you know, didn't fully understand until I read your book. And the thing that struck me was some of the experiments you did where you help explain how flavor and nutrient needs and the animals feeding behavior are all related. So they will find the foods that they need and will eat enough of those to meet their needs and then they'll go eat something else. They won't eat too much or too little. they have this natural intelligence and that flavor is associated with these phytochemicals.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. Sugar is not only harmful in the sense of the volumes of sugar we're eating and the consequences, but it's also highly addictive and we'll get into talking about that. So in short, when you eat starch and sugar, it turns on all the mechanisms in your body.