MAKE THESE CHANGES To Your Diet to Improve HEALTH & LIVE LONGER | Mark Hyman

Combined with the diet and this protocol, within a few weeks people started to feel significantly better.

Really use your food as your pharmacy. So when you are eating, think of what you're eating as medicine.

Make sure that everything you are eating is as nutrient-rich as possible.

So when your gut breaks down, and the gut is really the central thing, because when your gut breaks down, everything breaks down. Because the microbiome is this extraordinary ecosystem of bugs within you that control a lot of what happens in your body. And when they're out of balance, you not only have digestive symptoms, but you can have everything from dementia to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to autoimmune diseases and lots more.

So I know you've talked a lot about the need for coaches and getting a health and wellness coach involved in your life. If somebody right now is at home listening, so now they understand the seven systems that are working together, How can they begin to diagnose what's going on? Are there simple questions that they can ask themselves? Like in Lisa's case, we sort of backed into there are probably several problems.

Including.

Bordering on an eating disorder when she was younger. That'll mess up your system. Yeah, for sure. And then a lot of antibiotics. And the threshold event ended up being she just got some sort of bug of some kind, but it was because she had taken antibiotics, I mean a lot. She was taking antibiotics probably four or five times a year for years because she had chronic chest infections. And so then she hits this bug, whatever, here in LA. In LA, yeah, yeah.

That was a tipping point. That's the triggering factor. So the whole point of functional medicine is about creating health. You know, regular medicine is about diagnosing and treating disease. I don't really care what disease you have. I want to know how do we create health? How do you get the best microbiome on the planet? How do you create a healthy inner garden? What do you have to do to do that? How do you diagnose what's out of balance there? And get rid of the bad bugs.

And then put in the good bugs.

But it's not just as simple as taking probiotics. You know, I actually had a- Do you think probiotics work? They're like tourists. You know, they come through the economy, they affect things a little bit, but they don't stick around that long. so you have to keep taking them, which is not bad necessarily, but what was really extraordinary is that I recently developed ulcerative colitis as a result of taking an antibiotic for a bad tooth I had, a tooth infection that led to C. diff, which is a deathly intestinal infection that then spiraled into colitis. And, you know, doing what I do, I was like, okay, well, this is kind of messed up. I got to rebuild my gut, and I, you know, took all the things I knew and I put together this cocktail of stuff. And there was one particular bug called Akkermansia, which is really important in regulating immune function and cardiovascular health and lots of things. And it protects the biofilm, it re-stabilizes your gut. And this is all really relatively new research. If you have low levels of this, for example, if you get those new checkpoint inhibitors that are anti-cancer drugs that are immunotherapy, they don't work. It's a checkpoint inhibitor. It's an immunotherapy drug which activates your immune system to kill the cancer. And this is like a 100%, like if it works, you're cured. You have melanoma like Jimmy Carter, that's stage four melanoma, you're gonna be dead in a few months, you take this drug, you're cured and he's still building houses at 99 years old or something. So these are amazing drugs, but they don't work on everybody. And it turns out if you don't have a healthy microbiome, they don't work. So all this research that's going on, I started looking at it and I realized, you know what? Taking prebiotics is good, which is fiber, feed the good bugs. Taking probiotics is good, but they also like polyphenols, which are these extraordinary compounds in colorful fruits and vegetables that the microbiome needs to grow. And so thinking about creating a healthy soil, you can put all kinds of chemicals on, right, and fertilizers and this and you have a damaged soil, it doesn't really grow good food. But if you have a healthy you know, rich soil, you can create health. And so we put in all these things like cranberry, pomegranate, green tea, and they are really great for akkermansia. Okay. And then I use prebiotics, fiber like acacia fiber to help feed the good bugs. And I also use a form of colostrum, which is immunoglobulin. So it's like passive immunity, helps regulate the immune system. And I use little collagen peptides. I took some, something called pro butyrate, which is a product that helps with the fats in the gut. And this is a general cocktail that I take. It's a shake, take it every morning, and within three weeks, my ulcer class was gone, like gone, and now I'm like, best poops of my life.

So that's very interesting. So first we had to kill the C. diff, then we have our magical cocktail. What if somebody has SIBO? Would you recommend doing a round of antibiotics to kill the SIBO first?

Yeah, SIBO, for everybody listening who doesn't know what that is, it's basically where the bugs migrate up in your small intestine from your large intestine. So you normally should have a sterile upper gut and your lower gut, your colon, is where your poop is and your bad bugs are or good bugs. When they migrate up, that's when you get bloating, distension, I call it food baby. You feel, you know, like every time you eat, you just feel bloated and full after. That's often a sign of bacterial overgrowth, really common. So you have to figure out why it's happening because if you just treat it without knowing that, it can come back.

That'S interesting.

Why would it happen? Well, it can happen because you have motility issues, you have low magnesium, you have a parasite, you know, there may be some reasons why you could have a bia, which is a tick infection. So you have to figure all that out. But then you can take herbs, or you can take special antibiotics that are only in the gut. And I also use antifungals that clear out the bad bugs. This is called, I call it the weeding, seeding and feeding program. You weed out the bad bugs. and you seed it with good bugs and you feed it with all this good stuff.

Okay, so if we're doing weeding, seeding, and feeding, what do you use to identify what the current state of your microbiome is?

Is there a particular test that you recommend? Yes, there's so many tests out there, but clinically I think the most useful one, I've been doing this for 30 years, and it's called GI Effects from a lab called Genova, and it looks at not just the microbiome from the measuring the bacteria, because you can do that, you can measure with new DNA testing, which is actually RNA testing for bugs. You can actually measure all the bugs in there, but then what does it mean how clinically relevant is it? So I look at the function of the gut. Are there the products, for example, in there that are made by healthy bugs called short-chain fats? If they're low, you know that there's no good fats, and that's the fuel for the colon. I want to look at you, are your digestive enzymes working? Are you absorbing food properly? Is there inflammation in your gut? What's your immune system doing in your gut? growing in your gut. You have a parasite or bad bugs. So I look at all that and then I can come up with a sense of what's going on. And often people have leaky gut and food sensitivities and this vicious cycle of these bad bugs and food sensitivities. And it's what makes so many people sick.

How long would you expect when done well, how long would you expect this repair protocol to take?

If you combine it with diet, you also have to eliminate the things that are in your diet that are driving gut problems, right? Because think about it, you're eating pounds of food every day and that is what's landing in your gut and feeding your bugs. And if you're eating processed food, sugar, starch, bad fats, it's going to be a problem. You're not going to get better. So you need a whole foods diet. I call it the Pegan diet, which is kind of a joke, but it's like, you know, less extreme, more inclusive, but whole foods focusing on quality, not so much worrying about quantity. And sometimes eliminating things like gluten and dairy and and other things that can trigger food sensitivities. And combined with the diet and this protocol, within a few weeks people started to feel significantly better. And then it takes about three months to really kind of reset the whole thing.

When somebody has a stubborn problem, like Lisa is insanely disciplined. If you tell her to do something, she's gonna do it for sure. Her diet is clean. In fact, I would probably consider that one of the things that became her problem was...

It was too restrictive.

Too restrictive. So, and then once the SIBO kicked in, once she encountered the parasite and had the threshold event, it's like the weed, seed, and feed thing. I don't know that we've ever gotten perfect.

Like.

Is there any particular thing that creates a stubborn problem when the person is being disciplined, but it continues to nag on you?

It goes away.

Absolutely. almost 30 years ago, I had another problem, which was mercury poisoning, and that messed up my gut big time. And I got a triggering event, which was some bug I picked up somewhere in a lake in Maine, and then my entire gut broke down. And I literally had diarrhea, bloating, pain for years. And I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, my whole system broke down, and it wasn't until I got rid of the mercury that my gut sorted out. So if she has mercury poisoning, if she's mold toxic, if she has a tick infection, some underlying thing, it can impede people getting fully better.

Yeah.

So now let's say that we've identified the problem, we've done the weeding, what should somebody be eating? So obviously in your new book, what the Heck, you go into, it's all whole food based, but there's obviously a lot of whole foods in the world, so what should people be aiming at?

Well here's the thing, you know, there's so many diet wars. Nutrition is often based on ideology, not on good science. And there's so much conflicting information and people are buffeted about by the media. One day it meets bad, then it's good. One day eggs are bad, then they're good, then they're bad. I mean, it kind of makes people crazy and give up and what a scientist's doing and it's just a mess, right? But I've been studying nutrition for 40 years and I've been not only studying it, In a book, I've been using food as medicine for 30 years as a doctor. And I'm humbled by it because I realize everybody is different. Everybody needs different approaches based on their genetics, their preferences and so forth. But there are some common principles. I call them the Pegan principles that are universal that no one will argue with. And I was sort of joking because I was on a panel with a friend of mine who was vegan. It was a cardiologist. Another guy was a paleo doc and they were fighting and I was in the middle. And I'm like, well, if you're paleo and you're vegan, then I must be Pegan. And it was like just kind of a goofy joke. And I realized, wait a minute, they agree on about everything except where you get your protein from. So they all agree that we should be eating whole foods. They all agree we should be eating any industrial processed foods. They all agree we should be eating a ton of vegetables, lots of good fruit, lots of nuts and seeds, lots of good fats. Everybody agrees that. The things that are different are should we have our protein from animals or from beans and grains? That's the only difference. And I thought, you know, well, not everybody has a problem with beans and grains, and not everybody has a problem with animal protein. In fact, it can be a very important source of food for most people. The question is what?

Right?

What grains? What beans? What meat? What fish? And so that's really what those principles are about. It's focusing on quality. So, for example, Do you want to eat a feedlot burger? Heck no.

Because they're raised on grain?

For many reasons. One, they're raised in a way that is inhumane for them. They're raised on foods that create bad metabolic profiles in the animal. So you're eating a lot of inflammatory stuff. They feed them chicken shit, they feed them candy, they feed them corn. And then there's how they grow the food for the animals, which creates massive environmental destruction. you know, loss of biodiversity in the soils and animals, loss of water resources because of all the irrigation, the growth of crops for the animals, the deforestation that results, the destruction of our soil, the use of fertilizers, pesticides, the fertilizers run off and destroy all their rivers and lakes and oceans and create dead zones, the size of a new journey in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 212,000 metric tons of fish a year, and there's 400 dead zones like that the size of Europe around the world that are in coastal areas that are killing the food supply for half a billion people. You know, that's because of the consequences of how we're growing our food. And not only that, it's a giant source of climate change for all those reasons. So, no, but he should be eating factory farmed animals. On the other hand, you look at regenerative animals, which means regenerative means you farm or grow animals in a way that is bringing the ecosystem back to health, which is restoring soils, reducing water use, reducing eliminating fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides. And there was an interesting analysis. Everybody's in these plant-based burgers now. And, you know, I think, yeah, it's better that we eat plants, and that's great. But what plants? Should it be a highly industrial product, like Impossible Burger, for example, is GMO soy? so it's grown in a way that you're getting lots of glyphosate, which is not good for you, it destroys your gut. The food is grown in big monocrops intensively with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, destroying the soil, using up water and so forth. It's way better than a feedlot beef, but when you compare it, this was done by an independent life cycle analysis company, Quantis, that looked at both Impossible Burger and a regeneratively raised beef burger from White Oaks Farms in, I think, Missouri. And they found that you literally had to eat one regeneratively raised burger to offset the carbon emissions of a plant-based impossible burger.

To offset it.

In other words, the soy burger added three and a half kilos of carbon in the environment. The grass-fed burger took out three and a half kilos of carbon from the environment. Because soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. It can hold three times the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere if we took care of it and built organic matter in the soil, which only happens through the use of animals.

Right.

That dig and pee and poo and move around and chew down the grass, and that builds soil. And that doesn't use fertilizer, it doesn't use pesticides, it doesn't use herbicides, it uses rainwater, so you're not using 1,800 gallons for every pound. It's called green water, and it's producing higher quality meat with high levels of antioxidants, high levels of omega-3 fats, better for the animals, and you're not destroying ecosystems. When you grow soy, you're destroying ecosystems. You're destroying the habitat of animals and rabbits and mice and birds when you're making these giant mega farms. So, I mean, probably eating a regenerative grass-fed burger is probably the most vegan thing you can do. So, you know, it's like, and it's just, we get this false dichotomy.

I mean, like, all meat is bad or only vegan or.

Oh, you should only, you know, it just doesn't make sense, right?

That's really interesting. The green argument is fascinating seeing sort of the balancing out that's going to happen between whether there is some amount of farm raise that's actually necessary. I've heard you talk about the topsoil before and that that's actually something that without animals you're going to erode the soil and that in and of itself causes some dramatic issues.

We lose 200,000 tons of soil every hour.

Every hour?

Every hour. We lose a country the size of Nicaragua or North Korea of soil every year. We have 60 harvests left according to the UN before we run out of soil and can't grow food. No soil, no food, no humans. Forget climate change.

This is a... That sounds relatively problematic.

And by actually using the strategy of regenerative agriculture, we can draw down carbon, not add to the carbon in the environment. Even if we stopped all fossil fuels tomorrow, we still would be screwed. We need strategies that draw down carbon out of the environment and the food system is the number one set of solutions.

Let me ask you, so even just forgetting anything ecological, why plants? So that when you were saying everybody agrees we should eat more vegetables, obviously I would say Steven Gundry probably doesn't agree that we should eat more vegetables. Maybe if there's certain, yeah, the right vegetables. Do you have a take on that?

Like what's your vibe about lectins? Yeah, yeah, okay. So I think it's really personalized. And so for some people who have serious illnesses, getting off of inflammatory foods, including lectins, can be helpful. But look, 60% of our diet is ultra-processed food. That's the first priority to have is get people off that stuff. Don't restrict vegetables, you know, because unless you're really sick and you if you want to try it as a therapy, fine. But I'm really not a big fan of telling people to not eat vegetables because I think there's so much value in them. And I think if we actually have the problem of restricting unnecessarily for people, it's not great.

Well, let's talk about so what do you think about the carnivore diet? Is there any logic there?

Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, you know, like Jordan Peterson's doing that and his daughter did it to cure autoimmune disease. and yes, if you are really sick, sometimes it can be profoundly helpful. I mean, if you have autoimmune disease, if you have severe obesity, I mean, there can be real benefits. But I, again, you know, we used to eat 800 species of plants as hunter-gatherers. We ate animal products when we could find them, you know, or hunt them. And it was a part of our diet. It wasn't a staple. Some cultures, like the Plains, Indians like this Lakota, they lived mostly on Buffalo and they were the longest lived people in history. They were had more centenarians per capita than any other population at the turn of the century.

Yeah.

So you've talked about, you know, one.

Thing that medicine really has got to start doing is looking at the laws of biology. So, you know, physicists are looking at the laws of the universe. What are the laws of biology? I'd love to hear what are some of the laws of biology? How does that play out in terms of plants because I can walk you through, it's admittedly like a lay person's understanding, but when I walk through the notion of the plant paradox and you start thinking of a plant as having a, basically a chemical evolutionary advantage or the way that they stop predators is by creating these chemicals that either upset their stomach or they're bad for them or they're bitter tasting or whatever. It's like, oh, that makes sense. When you have something, it has to have a mechanism against predation. And humans are one of the predators and so, okay, it didn't develop claws or whatever. It developed these chemical signals. You've talked about food being signals more than just calories. So it's like, okay, well there's actually some logic, whether it's true or not is a totally different question, but there's a followable chain of logic to why plants potentially have issues. And so it's like, is there anything that they all share that for somebody with the sensitivity, they're an issue? Or no, no, no. There's so many other nutrients in vegetables if you're not eating them, you're committing a cardinal sin of the laws of biology.

Well, if you're eating nose to tail, like you're eating the liver, which has more vitamin C, more vitamin A than any vegetable on the planet, right?

You can get by, but- you- can get by or it's ideal?

I don't think it's ideal. I mean, I think your gut microbiome feeds on carbohydrates, feeds on phytochemicals. So, it feeds on fiber, right?

Which is- what does happen to your microbiome if you're only eating Carnivore.

Diet.

Nose to tail.

It changes.

But in a bad way?

Potentially. Potentially. I think there's some interesting experiments. I think we're still in the exploration of what happens when you eat different diets. But I have a little different view about vegetables. And I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation. Fascinating. Which is a fascinating concept. But essentially, yes, there are defense mechanisms in plants that help the plants. but also can help us, right? So for example, we don't make vitamin C, we get it from plants. We need things to help us detoxify. So when you eat broccoli, you upregulate the glutathione, the pathways of detox in your liver through phytochemicals called glucosinolates. Your microbiome loves the polyphenols in pomegranate and cranberry, right? So I think we have evolved co-evolved with plants. So we use these compounds, these phytochemicals, to regulate all sorts of biological functions from inflammation to our microbiome to detoxification to brain function, neurotransmitters and so on. So I think there are plants you wouldn't want to eat. You don't want to eat poison mushrooms, right? You don't want to eat foxglove, which will kill you. But there are a lot of plants that we've evolved with that we use in our bodies to regulate our biological.

Functions and I think they're really necessary. Talk to me about soy. I heard you say something, which I'd heard before, but I don't know, there's something about the way you said it that really hit me, that you see women drinking or young girls drinking soy milk going out of style, and then it will put them into premature- yeah.

It happened to my stepdaughter. Soy milk was the big rage, and she liked to drink, I mean, she was allergic to dairy, so she just drank quart of soy milk a day, and she ended up at nine years old getting little boobs.

Whoa. And we're like, oh.

Because it's upping her estrogen?

Yeah.

So, soy is a very controversial topic for many reasons. There's all the environmental issues, obviously, of big monocrop fields, of tearing down rainforests in Brazil, of all the consequences of climate change and all that. But from a dietary perspective, it's been a staple in diets for millennia in Asia, and it's always been processed in a way that makes it more digestible. Tofu, tempe, miso, soy sauce. Those are traditional foods. When you start making soy hot dogs and soy burgers and eating all these processed things, even soy milk is not something we used to consume. You get one trouble with digestion, two, increased risk of allergy, and three, you get extra hormonal effects when you have these massive quantities of these things.

Yeah, thinking of food as a signaling molecule and then all the talk around soy, what is the mechanism that's happening that makes soy trigger an estrogen response? I've never understood that.

Well, you know, all food is information, not just calories, it's all information. It's instructions. It's literally like code that programs your biology with every bite.

At like an epigenetic level, it's- In every level.

So every bite of food you take can change your gene expression across a whole range of genes. So you eat green, you drink green tea or eat broccoli, you upregulate the gene called glutathione is transferase that helps you detoxify heavy metals, environmental chemicals, metabolic toxins. So it regulates your genes. It regulates your hormones. So if you lose starch and sugar, it increases insulin, lowers testosterone, increases estrogen, for example. It affects your brain chemistry and what your hunger hormones are, your craving levels are, and what foods you're attracted to. It affects your immune system. It regulates inflammation or it's anti-inflammatory. It regulates your microbiome with every bite. So every single system of your body is regulated by the quality of the food you eat. And when you realize you shouldn't just focus on calories, you should focus on quality and the information you're eating changes everything. So that's really what I have people focus on. And I think when people do that, then you have a different relationship to your food. You go, well, I'm eating. Am I going to eat toxic information or am I going to eat healing information.

So if you were to put together a few groups of the sort of healing signals, what would they be like? What would be if you were so in investing, there's this thing called the all-weather strategy. And they say, okay, look, I'm sort of blindly talking to my grandchildren. I'm gonna pass away and all I can leave behind is a strategy that will work in any environment. But if you had to just put together an all-weather eating strategy, what would the ideal in air quotes be? I wrote about it.

I wrote a whole book about it. It's called Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? And it's about these principles, I call them the Pegan principles. And it's really focused on quality first, right? Nobody thinks we should be adding additives and hormones and antibiotics and pesticides and glyphosate to our food. It's in it, but nobody's like, yeah, it's in it. Can we avoid it at the grocery store? You know, if you look at the label of something, if it has something you can't recognize pronounce, then you shouldn't have it. Or if you don't have it in your cupboard at home, like butylated hydroxy toluene, which is in almost every processed food, is BHT, it's illegal in Europe. You wouldn't sprinkle that on your salad, would you?

No.

No. So that's a good rule. The second principle is, you know, We should be eating a plant-rich diet. And across the spectrum from fruits and vegetables to do you treat fruits and.

Vegetables as sort of one and the same? No, it should be vegetables and fruit, right?

So it's like you don't want to be consuming only fruit because that's full of sugar. And if you're diabetic or you're overweight or have issues, you might want to cut back on the sugary fruits or eat berries, which are less glycemic. Lots of nuts and seeds. Everybody agrees with being lots of seeds. You want to soak them, reduce lectins, that's fine. If you're going to eat beans and grains, pick low starch ones, right? And also- Give us a few examples. So like black rice, which is like the blueberries of rice, quinoa. What does that mean? Well, the black rice was called the emperor's rice or forbidden rice, and it's full of these dark, it's black. So anytime you see color in nature, there are polyphenols and phytochemicals in there. so it's got more antioxidants per serving than blueberries. And then you want to make sure if you're eating grains, gluten grains are interesting. So most of the gluten we eat is wheat. It's 133 pounds per person per year. That's a pharmacologic dose. It is worse for your blood sugar than table sugar.

Really?

Yes.

What?

Yes.

When you look at the glycemic index, which is how much the fixed amount of the food will raise your blood sugar. Table sugar is 80, bread is 100.

Whoa, I had no idea why.

Because it's so processed and so quickly absorbed. And if you want to eat, like, if you're not gluten sensitive, you want to have farro or einkorn wheat, or you know, spell, you might tolerate those because those aren't highly altered genetically. But the new, the wheat we eat is super starchy, has a lot more gliadin proteins, create more gluten sensitivity, is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest to defoliate the plants. And it also has preservative called calcium propionate, which causes autism in animal models and is shown to cause behavioral problems in kids. So ADD, all that stuff could be all the flour. So I'm not a big flour person. Plus it's just like sugar. So if you want to have other grains, if you're not going to say like rye or barley, that's fine. And then beans again, you know, lime beans, kidney beans, if you're, if, look, 75% of Americans are overweight. So most people should be eating a lot of starch. And that, you know, you have to eat three cups of beans to get the equivalent of like four, six ounces of protein. So I have this lentils and things like that, which are lower starch beans, the Zuki beans, other kinds of beans I talk about in my book. And then if you're eating animal products, you want to animal products that are not going to hurt the animals, not going to hurt you and not going to hurt the environment. Right. So for Beef, it should be regeneratively raised ideally, which is hard to find, but you can actually get more and more of that around and there's ways to do it by looking online to get it. Thrive Market is a great resource for regeneratively raised beef. And again, chicken should be pasture raised, pork and all that should be raised in ways that are more organic or sustainable. Fish, you want to eat fish that's sustainably harvested or, you know, sustainably organically aquacultured. 'cause we over harvest the fish and then we don't eat big fish. It's like full of mercury and tuna and swordfish. Just 'cause they've lived longer? Well, what happens is the coal and all the fossil fuels go in the ocean, go into the algae, get stored in the algae. The little fish eat the algae, then the bigger fish eat the little fish and it goes on up the food chain. And you got a swordfish or tuna. These are monster fish and they bioaccumulated all this.

And so you want to eat the right animal products.

You want to eat the right grains, the right beans, the right vegetables, the.

Right fruits, the right nuts.

Give me the right vegetables. Are we just looking for color, so non-starchy vegetables. If you want to cut out nightshades and get rid of lectins, that's fine. I don't care. But I love tomatoes.

I'm not going to do that. And they don't make me feel bad. So there's no point in restricting your diet necessarily if you're not sick, right?

Tart really fast just because you mentioned that you eat nightshades, which are problematic for a lot of people. I've heard you say that your body is the best doctor. What do you mean? Yeah, exactly. So, man, you listen and watch my stuff. I'm impressed. The whole idea is that you can listen to all the nutritional advice you want, but pay attention to how you feel. Your body's going to tell you if you go vegan and you stop having your period, you lose muscle, you feel tired, you're B12 deficient, you feel like crap, you develop autoimmune diseases, you gain weight, whatever, maybe it's not for you, right? I mean, I literally just did a whole analysis on a very well-known celebrity, and he's a vegan. And he's massively nutritionally efficient. No Omega-3s, extremely low vitamin D, extremely low B vitamins, extremely low zinc, I mean, it was frightening to see in a young guy how depleted he was. But other people it works really well for. And then see how you feel. If you get rid of gluten and dairy, do you feel better? So I have people do a detox, essentially a dietary cleanse, which is get off all the junk, get off all the sugar, get off all the processed food, eat whole foods, get rid of gluten and dairy, even get rid of grains and beans for a while and see how you feel. And if you don't feel good, try to add things back. If you feel amazing and your autoimmune disease goes away, your digestive problems clear up, your brain fog is clear, your migraines are gone, well, then that's probably.

A sign that your body likes that way of eating. Walk people through really fast your 10-day detox.

What does that entail? How do they take advantage of it? So one of the central, therapeutic approaches of functional medicine is food is medicine. And in that thinking, one of the ways we treat people is taking away the most inflammatory foods. So gluten and dairy are number one and two for most people, for a lot of reasons. But then there's a whole host of other ones like eggs and soy and some nuts for people. so the 10-day detox essentially is whole foods based. It's high quality animal protein, lots of veggies, but non-starchy veggies. So it's extremely low glycemic, so there's not starch and sugar and flour. It cuts out grains, cuts out beans, cuts out fruit except for berries. And it's got a lot of good fats.

Avocado.

Not fruit except for berries. Just you're trying to get. Well, the diet is designed to be like. It's not one size fits all, but it's close because it's low glycemic, so it helps you lose weight. It's anti-inflammatory, it fixes your gut, and it's highly nutrient dense, and has lots of fiber, lots of phytochemicals, lots of good fats. So it's high fat, low starch, and sugar. So it works for autoimmune diseases, for gut issues, for weight issues, for diabetes. I mean, I should show you this picture of this woman who literally had type 2 diabetes for 10 years on insulin, heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, high blood pressure, tons of medications, 65 years old on her way out. She came into one of our group programs at Cleveland Clinic, went on the 10-day detox, took basic supplements like a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, not a lot of stuff. And within three days, she was off her insulin. Whoa. In three months, she reversed her heart failure, her kidney failure, her liver failure, high blood pressure, got off all her medications, lost 43 pounds, and in a year she lost 116 pounds and is off everything. And she saved $20,000 a year in co-pays for her medications because insulin's so expensive.

And that was food.

I mean, it was, you know, she was seeing so many doctors, she was seeing the best in the field, and they were managing her disease. And I don't really want to manage people's disease. I want to get to the root of it. And for so many people, food is really the root.

What I like about that approach is that it's a detox, right? So it's more about what you're removing even than what you're adding. And I find a lot of times, that's interesting. I want to hear more about that. Because what I find a lot of times is that people want to just add like, oh, if I add broccoli to my Twinkie diet, that I'll be fine. So where do you think that balance is? Like how much of this is a removal? How much of this is an addition? I think, you know, we have the.

Most inflammatory diet in the world right now. And all the diseases that people suffer from, whether it's gut issues, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, these are all inflammatory diseases. So the foods that we're eating, 60% of our diet is considered ultra-processed food made from corn, wheat, and soy, mostly in the form of white flour, high fructose corn syrup, and trans fats or soybean oil now.

And.

The people who eat the most of it are the sickest. And the people who eat it for every 10% of your diet that's ultra processed foods, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So we eat 60%. And so we have to get rid of that stuff that's destroying our biology because it's like literally putting poison in our body. And our bodies don't die immediately. It's a slow, long, prolonged, painful death, right? Yeah. So it's taking out all that stuff. It's taking out things that are often inflammatory, like the wheat we eat isn't the wheat that our ancestors ate, right? The dairy we eat is not the dairy that our ancestors eat. It's been highly altered through genetic breeding, the changes of quality, the fats, the proteins, the allergens in there. so like we used to have heirloom cows which were, you know, if you travel around the world and you see these cows, you're like, wow, that's a weird looking cow, you know, like I never was like that, because they're all like these same cows in America. They're all these white and black Holstein cows, they're all bred by like three bowls and they're pretty much genetically the same and they have high levels of A1 casein which is super inflammatory, whereas heirloom cows don't or cheap and goat also have A2 casein which is less problematic. Wheat, same thing, the way they've created the dwarf wheat, they breed the wheat for all these properties that are drought resistant, more starchy and so forth. And the guy won the Nobel Prize for this. But the unintended consequences is when you breed plants, it's not like humans. You get your 23 pairs of chromosomes. Every human has 46. If you were a wheat plant and you have 46 chromosomes and you breed with another wheat plant that has 46, you get 92 chromosomes. And then what that means is you're making extra proteins because chromosomes genes make proteins. and you're making way more gluten proteins, they're much more likely to cause celiac, which is why we've seen such an increase in celiac disease.

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 wanna 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 kind of refer back to over and over again to see exactly, you know, 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 and the science, but this is has a lot of science in it, but it's really 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 properties and different foods and the various principles. And as you say, it's kind of, it's called the Pegan Diet, but it's kind of not really a diet in the conventional term, right? It's that the way we think about diets, it's really not that, as you say, it's 21 foundational principles. which frankly are going to be helpful for so many of us.

Yeah.

I mean, that's sort of the joke of it all. It's like when we're in these different diet wars and diet camps, we're all fighting with each other. And that's how this whole name came. I was sitting on a panel with a vegan cardiologist and a sort of a militant paleo doctor and they were fighting. And I'm like, Hey, if you're paleo and you're vegan, I must be Pegan. 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 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, and eat these foods, don't eat these foods. This is really what is gonna help you thrive. And people just have the most amazing results. I mean, literally a hundred pounds. 50 pounds, 75 pounds. It's really pretty amazing, but it was never a goal. And I think it was sort of shocking to people that there's a book on diet with no mention of weight loss. That's how it goes.

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

Yeah, it's really pretty easy. I mean, it's embarrassingly easy actually, because it's like, People aren't gonna really be able to sort of disagree with anything because it's all pretty common sense and straightforward. So the first thing is, you know, really use your food as your pharmacy. So when you are eating, think of what you're eating as medicine. Are you eating a french fry that's fried in rancid oils that's, you know, got 14 different ingredients in it, that is gonna kind of fry your arteries and, you know, cause all kinds of problems. Or are you gonna eat, let's say a wild blueberry and it has all sorts of phytochemicals and so forth. So how do you, how do you begin to sort of think of food as your medicine. The second is you want to eat a lot of medicine. So eat the rainbow, which is essentially all the colors in plant foods are where all the benefits are. So the more deeper, darker colors and pigments, that's where all the phytochemicals are. And also think about your diet is mostly vegetables, like it should be 75% non-starchy veggies, which is really what the majority of your plate should be a little side of protein. When you're picking any kind of category food, whether it's beans or grains or nuts, seeds, it's important to understand which ones in each category are the best. For example, peanuts might have aflatoxin, which you want to stay away from or be careful when you source it. Or, you know, you probably don't want to eat a lot of the gluten grains here, but if you're having heirloom grains like rye or maybe heirloom wheats, that might be okay because they're less inflammatory and so forth. Or maybe you have gluten issues and you shouldn't eat it at all. Or which beans are the best beans or which seeds are the best seeds and so forth. And then I have a whole section there on, on, you know, meat, which is, I think, a little shocking for people, but it's talking about how to eat your meat as medicine. And, and some of the research on this is just stunning that, that these grass-fed animals have high phytochemical contents, just like plants, and they have all these health benefits. So we're learning more about it. This is out of Duke. So whether you're eating any kind of protein, how do you pick the best eggs or chicken? How do you, how do you understand what are the right fats to eat? How do you think about dairy, which is, you know, really often a big problem. And it's, and the modern cows we have are pretty harmful. And then there's some, you know, just guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you, but not only good for you, but good for the planet and good for Society. Like, eat like a regentarian or, 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 doing in a way that actually makes it doable because it doesn't have to be expensive. It really guides people through a way of thinking about food that will last them as a roadmap for their life.

You mentioned meat there, you mentioned phytonutrients. Let's just start off explaining what phytonutrients are. Then I agree that selection on meat is really fascinating. Meat has become one of these controversial items as well. 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. 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 these are the, 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, what is it saying? What is it not saying? And really, there were three issues. One was moral and ethical. and, and the other is in, it's 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 that, and everybody should be vegan because that kind of deals with all that. But unfortunately, it's not so simple. And, and, and, you know, kind of getting back to, like, what is meat and, and phytochemicals. so 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, the effect on the environment and 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 barbage and is really full of hormones, antibiotics, and it's mostly corn. But wild, 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, goat milk, if the goats are foraging on different shrubs, you can have the same level of catechins, which is the powerful anti-cancer, antioxidant, detoxifying compound in green tea, as green tea. So it's like drinking green tea when you're drinking goat's milk that's fed on certain bushes. That's just an example. But we're learning more and more about these powerful medicinal properties and how it affects your biology. 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 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, Yeah. 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 is bad for the environment. I mean, just Tyson chicken alone is the second biggest polluter in the United States after U.S. steel. And the health of the animals, the moral ethical issues, and the health of the meat that it produces or lack thereof. So I think it's sort of a triple whammy for the planet, for the animals, and for humans, and it should be banned. And there's no question about that. And I do think that there's evidence that It's moving in this 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, you know, is it all animals that will do that? And I think that there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture which sort of focused on a really simple idea, which is not the cow, it's the how, right? So it's not the fact that you're actually raising animals 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 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 is, well, 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 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 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, we live on milk and meat. They live very long, they have very healthy, but they also do something really interesting was they actually, it's not even necessarily how you, how you raise the animals, it's maybe how you prepare the meat. If, for example, if you're cooking it on a high char grilling, that's probably not good. There'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, 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, I'm certainly, I'm only 20 years into my clinical career. You are, you've got a lot more clinical experience than I do. But within that time, if you are a practicing clinician and you have seen thousands and thousands of patients, they teach you, you soon very quickly 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. 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 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 I think if we kind of drew the chain back, we'd see that we're all involved in this essentially destructive agricultural system, whether we're eating vegan or not, and that may be a problem. And 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 creates 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 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. 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, look 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'm guessing, approach that differently from someone who just generally wants to eat better for their overall health and their longevity, or is it the same?

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

There's a theme in the work over the last years, Mark, that there's a real big mission I sense from you about talking about food, not just for individual health, but for wider population and planetary health and the environments and the climate. 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 farm 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 landmass the entire size of China. We throw out $2 trillion or more of food every year. It's different reasons in the developing world versus developed world. The developed world is mostly what we throw in our trash in the house and the developing world is often lost in the food chain because there's no refrigeration and it's difficult to transport food. But when you think about it, when you look at food waste, just for example, if it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. that's how bad it is. If you think, well, those factory farm animals and the methane and that's causing greenhouse gases from the cow farts, well, guess what? The greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, from the off-gassing of the rotting vegetables which produce methane, is three times as much methane, three times as much methane as cows. So if you're vegan and throwing out all your vegetables that you've got let rot in the fridge or you maybe are just drunk over food scraps, you know, that actually adds up and it is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. I encourage everybody to compost. We should not be, I mean, in certain countries you cannot, you cannot throw out your garbage in San Francisco, you can't throw out food waste, you have to put in compost. In the airports, there's a compost bucket. It's not that hard to do. It's just another trash, we have recycling, we have garbage and we have like compost and it can be a huge benefit. 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. In France, I think you can't throw out your garbage, you have to recycle it or if you're a company, you can't just throw your food waste out and you do, you get a fine. You get a five-year jail sentence or something, a big fine. So it's really important. And in Europe, they have anaerobic digesters, which they don't have so much here, 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, you know, grocery store, restaurant, whatever, you can't throw it out. You have to do something with it. You have to give it to the farmer, you have to compost it, you have to something. And, and so they, they, this company was developed called Vanguard Renewables that built these anaerobic digesters, basically like a kind of furnace. They throw in the food scraps, they throw in manure, and it kind of cooks and it provides electricity for 1500 homes. The dairy farmers who are losing money are now making 100 grand a year. The Vanguard Renewable sells the excess electricity up the food, up the 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 it is a huge problem. and I think also, you know, 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, you know, if there's funny shaped things, they just go, they 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, it's like a potato that's not perfectly round or. 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 and 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, 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, closer relationship to our food.

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

Absolutely, yeah. And there 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 that have, you know, ordinances for compost. So that 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, you just can build like a little two by four little box and just throw the stuff in there. 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 that 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 and what we shouldn't be eating, but at the same time be throwing out there food waste into their dustman. And it's, you know, and I don't say that with, I'm not judging anyone for that or criticizing, I'm just saying sometimes we just can't see the perspective, can we? That actually, you know what? This will make a huge difference if I could just start doing it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, and so there's, and there's 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 shape. And there's other companies as well that do the same. So there's a lot of ways for us to get involved, whether it's buying ugly food or whether it's composting or whether it's just being more careful or using various strategies. There's a company called the peel that creates a second coating on plants vegetables. They last longer or fresh paper, which is actually like, this is a, an Indian woman who developed this concept because she would go, she went home to India and she got very sick from, I think, Traveler's diarrhea or something. And she ended up getting her grandmother to give her all these, like, spices and herbs and fixed her whole system. And then she thought about, you know, this rotting vegetables and she put this herb infused with cloves and all these medicinal herbs into this paper and put you put in the drawer of your fridge and the vegetables last two or three times longer. So there's all kinds of innovation happening, but you can all be part of the solution. with fasting.

And they've done controlled trials with this where they'll take people and say, okay.

Eat as much as you want of.

Nutrient dense food, like eat 14, 000 avocados or 10 pounds of broccoli or.

20 chickens, whatever you can eat as.

Much as you want.

And, and then they say, okay, another group, you eat, you know, all this other food, which is, you know, the typical American diet, which is more processed food, and you can eat as much as you want. And what they found was that the people who ate the processed food were hungrier and they ate 500 calories more a day. Which is interesting that when you eat nutrient-depleted food, you want more food. And this is the body's natural intelligence trying to accommodate for looking for nutrients, but they're looking in the wrong places. So we remember there's this thing we learned about in medical school called pica, which is where kids will eat dirt if they're iron deficient. Just like animals, we'll go to a salt lick or a lick. I mean, I remember being in Bolivia and Peru on the beach and there was this mineral rich deposits on the beach and the birds and the animals just were flocking to go get these minerals and nutrients, which they knew they needed. Well, we try to do the same thing, except when we go to get the Twinkies or we get the Doritos or we get the whatever, Coca-Cola, there's nothing in there. And so we keep looking and looking and looking. We're looking in the wrong place for the nutrients that we need to optimize our health. And I think, you know, I just so frustrated with, you know, even, you know, highly educated doctors, nutritionists, and even the government is just not talking about this sort of incredible pandemic we're having of malnutrition in this country. And in fact, some of the most rampant malnutrition is in the most obese populations.

Especially in kids.

Now, I mean, I'm like shocked when we, you know, we rarely get virgin patients in our clinic, you know, which is what I mean by virgin is someone who's not already focused on their health, who's not already eating well. Like, we already, we already get the people who are trying to do all the normal stuff. So we get the cases that are the hardest cases. But a few, few times in my career, I've had these, you know, sort of virgin patients who just show up and they're like, well, I'm just sort of the average Joe, and I want, I'm eating American diet. this one kid, I just, well, he had ADD and I was just like blown away by the level of deficiencies that this kid had and his poor nutrition because he ate junk food and processed food. He had severe omega-3 deficiency, severe folate deficiency, B6 deficiency, zinc deficiency, magnesium deficiency, vitamin D deficiency. And I was like, wow. And then he had all these other things in his blood, like trans fats and all this inflammatory stuff. And I was like, this is just incredible that we're seeing this level of.

Malnutrition in America today. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. It is impressive, negatively impressive. It's really sad just to see the level of malnutrition that we are seeing. And I think that because our food is so processed and devoid of nutrients and people are just eating more and more of it to get what their body needs, that's why we're seeing so much obesity. So the first thing we always focus on with people is to say, Make sure that everything you are eating is as nutrient-rich as possible because, you know, unfortunately, like you mentioned, our mineral deficient soil and the farming practices and everything, it's really stacked up against us. So we really need to think about it. You don't want to waste your calories on food that doesn't have all the nutrients that your body needs because that's just going to help you feel better and help everything work better. and help our skin look better and help make it easier to maintain a healthy weight and have better energy and be able to go out for a run and be able to focus in school. I mean, it's impressive what we see when we just clean up somebody's diet, but also do those special evaluations to really look and see. And I am like you, I'm always amazed by the deficiencies we see and what gets missed when somebody just goes in for their yearly physical and they have a CBC and a metaboolt pianel and people aren't looking. Yeah.

Douxil your tests are fine, you're great, everything's good, donn't worry, I'll see it next year. But when you lift up the, uh, hood and you look underneath, which is what we do with the Ultrawa Center, we test for Omega three fats, we test for vitamin D, we test for zinc, we test for magnesum, we test for the B vitamin pathways, B twve Fly B six. We do all sorts of sophisticated testing using blood and urine. We look at the genetics that are involved in nutritional cts. I mean, how do we know if you need more or these B vitamins.

Or whatever, vitamin D, you might have.

Unique needs that we can actually test for by looking at some of these enzymes that are requiring you to have increased amounts of these nutrients. And what's really exciting to me is we really have the potential to really change the health of America by focusing on nutrition quality. In my first book, Alt's Prevention, I talked about the nutrient to calorie ratio. how many nutrients, how many calories? Coca-Cola is terrible. There's no nutrients, tons of calories. Broccoli is awesome. There's tons of nutrients, no calories. So it's pretty simple way of thinking about it, but it helps you sort of crystallize the fact that we need to really upgrade the quality of our diet and to do the right diagnostic tests. What I like to do, Liz, just as kind of for sort of a mental exercise, is to go through with you the common nutritional deficiencies and talk about how they show up for us in terms of symptoms and signs. You are really critical in the nutrition curriculum at the Institute for Functional Medicine. You're an RD as well as an MD, and you helped design the nutrition physical exam, which is kind of a novel concept for a lot of people. But in Cleveland Clinic, we started teaching it to the medical students, which was great. And essentially it's a way of looking at what are the common ways we can tell for people listening, how do you know if you're nutrient deficient? I mean, yes, you can go to a functional medicine doctor. Yes, you can come to the UltraWellness Center. You can see one of us. We can get all the testing, but there's some kind of simple things that you can do to test and simple questionnaires that you can fill out to figure out are you deficient in D or zinc or B vitamins or omega-3 fats? So take us through some of them. Let's just start with omega-3s, magnesium and vitamin D. Those are big ones that we see.

Tell us about how you would include in people whether they had a risk.

For that and whether that's a problem?

So omega-3 deficiencies are so common. In fact, we check so many people for their omega-3 levels. So we do a finger prick that is called an omega-quant. And what that measures is the amount of omega-3s within the red blood cell membrane. And even with people on fish oil supplementation or people who eat a good amount of fatty fish, salmon and sardines, we still see low levels, we still see them being below what we we optimally want them to be at. So you want to be at at least 8% of your red blood cell membrane made up of those omega-3 fats. So I'm amazed at how frequently we see that. But what signals to me, okay, we've got to think about omega-3s other than everything. So we think about it so much. But if people have brain issues, right, problems with focus and cognition and mood memory issues. We think a lot about Omega-3s we think about Omega-3 fats when people have inflammatory disorders like asthma because, because low levels of Omega-3s can result in increased inflammation in the body. And we think about Omega-3s when we're dealing with people with issues with their hair and their skin. If their hair is dry, if their skin is dry, if they've got the bumps on the back of their arms, we I'm thinking, okay, what's their omega-3 levels like? Chicken skin, right?

Yeah.

Is it just, are they not getting enough or are they not absorbing enough? So those are the reasons, of course, if their cholesterol pattern looks bad, if they look like they have signs of insulin resistance, high triglycerides, low HDL, I'm thinking, what's their omega-3s? I've got to give them more. So those are just some of the reasons why I know I need to give somebody more Omega-3 fats.

Yeah, right. If you have dry, itchy scaling skin or flaking skin or cracked or brittle nails, my nails are so strong because.

I take Omega-3 fats.

Earwax, you have really hard earwax, dandruff, joint pain, constipation, like you said, mood, attention, memory, blood pressure issues, PMS, all these things are kind of clues that you might have a deficiency. And then, of course, we test through the OmegaCheck or other lab tests. that's really helpful. So you can literally, by virtue of just looking at your own symptoms, tell a lot about what's going on. So let's talk about magnesium, which is so common to be deficient. It's like, and, you know, it's one of those miracle things in functional medicine where you like, it's easy to diagnose if you know what you're looking for, and it creates such a dramatic change in people's own health and feeling.

It's not just sometimes you take vitamins or I don't feel anything.

Magnesium is one of those things where, oh, my God, it changed my life. So how do we know from a symptom point of view, if you have low magnesium, how do we actually test for it?

Yeah.

So what do people feel like when they have low magnesium? They may come in with headaches, anxiety, muscle cramps, high blood pressure, more irritability, trouble with sleep. Those are all signs that you may be low in magnesium, constipation, so those are all signs that you may be low in magnesium. And you can check magnesium levels. We look at a red blood cell magnesium level, and that can be somewhat helpful. But serum magnesium is very well regulated by the body, so it's typically not a very good biomarker to let us know if somebody is low in magnesium. So many times when people have- In.

Other words, your doctor test is usually not the right one, right?

Right?

The one that your doctor gives you normally is not the right test is what you're saying, right? Oh, your magnesium is fine.

Well, maybe not. Exactly. Sorry, I apologize. So, this is one that you know we need to... No, you're good. This is one that we need to actually, you know, sometimes just treat based on symptoms. So, when somebody is having a hard time with sleep or they're irritable or they're anxious or they're having muscle cramps or constipation, we will add in some magnesium. Magnesium is important to look at the type of magnesium because some types of magnesium are going to loosen up the stool like magnesium citrate and oxide are going to pull water into the intestines and cause more loose stool. So some people don't need that and so they want to go more toward our magnesium glycinate which is a little bit better absorbed magnesium and less likely to loosen up the stool. But you also want to just talk about magnesium-rich foods. So really just getting more whole foods is critical. Like what?

What has magnesium?

Oh, my goodness.

Yes. So magnesium is in lots of our whole foods. In our vegetables, it's in our whole grains. You know, brown rice has a lot more magnesium than white rice or kasha, buckwheat. You know, those whole grains, quinoa, have magnesium. Beans and legumes have magnesium. Nuts and seeds have magnesium. Yes. great sources of magnesium.

Yeah. Well, it's fascinating.

You mentioned some of the symptoms. They just reminded me of some patients. Remember, Sid Baker said to us, anything that spasms or twitches or is irritable in the body is probably a magnesium deficiency problem. And I think this is so common and we just completely disregard magnesium as a real clinical problem. But it's one of those medicines we do use a lot in traditional medicine. we use milk of Magnesium for constipation. We use IV magnesium. If people are in the emergency room, they have coated. In other words, if they've died, we're trying to bring them back to life and stabilize their heart. We'll use IV magnesium. If women come in with preterm labor and an irritable uterus, we in spasmy uterus, we give them magnesium to stop the preterm labor. If they're having preeclampsia, which is essentially like a seizure-like disorder, which is spasm of the brain and the blood vessels, high blood pressure. we give them magnesium. Magnesium is basically the relaxation mineral. I mean, if you have restless leg, if you have palpitations, like you said, headaches, if you have reflux, if you're sensitive to loud noises, if you're, you know, constantly triggered by stress, you lose magnesium. And what's fasting is what causes us to lose magnesium besides just not eating it from coffee. I mean, from, from the food we're eating is, is actually stress and caffeine and alcohol. So a lot of the things that Americans just sort of survive on, which is caffeine, alcohol, and stress causes depletion of magnesium. So it's kind of a, it's one of those miracle things that we give people magnesium, all these symptoms tend to go away. The constipation, the irritability, the cramps, the palpitations, super, super powerful intervention.

Yeah.

So let's talk about vitamin D. How do you know if you're vitamin D deficient?

Or did you want to say something else about magnesium? No, let's go on to vitamin D. I like that. So vitamin D, we think a lot about when we're talking about bone density. So if somebody is has a fracture that we're not thinking, why they just get that fracture? Or we think a lot about vitamin D with mood. So if somebody has low mood, we think about a vitamin D deficiency. In addition, if people have bone pain and body pain, so, you know, we can check for vitamin D by doing a blood test for vitamin D, but you can also just press on their their shin bone. And if they have pain when you press on their shin bone, you're like, okay, this may be signs of low vitamin D. So vitamin D is something we're looking for often because it improves our immune system, it improves our bone density, it improves our mood, and it can be pretty darn powerful.

Yeah, it's interesting. People don't think of how do you test for vitamin D, but like you said, people have seasonal affective disorder who are having muscle weakness or tender bones. One of my favorite tests is as part of the nutrition physicals, you take your thumb and you press it on your shin. And if you feel tenderness on your shin or softness, that is a sign.

Of vitamin D deficiency because you'll get.

Tender bones or osteomalacia. And obviously if you're living inside, working inside, if you don't live in Florida or Texas or California, you really are at high risk of vitamin D. It's probably 80% of the population I mean, even with COVID your risk of COVID is up. If you have low vitamin D and if it's good, you have lower risk of getting sick. Anybody who's dark skin will have a lower vitamin D level. If you're older, your skin doesn't convert to vitamin D. So, you can, through a medical history, you can tell so much about whether someone's at risk for vitamin D. And, of course, testing is so critical. And, it's really pennies a day to replace it and it makes such a huge difference for people. so, I mean, we could go on and on about all the vitamin deficiencies, zinc and other ones, but, but, you know, magnesium, vitamin D, Omega-3 fats, you know, such, such critical nutrients that we're deficient in and are, are often clinically so relevant and can make such a difference for people when we actually optimize those levels.

I have a whole list of superfoods, but today I want to discuss five that I enjoy almost daily now. The first category of superfoods I want to discuss are seeds. Not just any seeds, but three seeds. The ones I like are chia, hemp and flax. Now, chia seeds are a great source of omega-3 fats. They have more calcium than milk and they're a great source of anti-inflammatory compounds and they're great for glowing skin and mental health and clarity and much, much more. Chia seeds have 10 grams of fiber in one ounce. The fiber in chia seeds is insoluble fiber. It's the kind of fiber that feeds friendly gut bacteria, and that promotes gut health and it gets fermented into short-chain fatty acids, which are super important for your gut. Feeding friendly intestinal bacteria is super important to keep your gut bacteria well fed for good health. Chia seeds are a great protein source too, and they're higher in protein content than most plants. I also love hemp seeds, which are another great source of fat, and they also pack a good amount of protein, B vitamins, as well as magnesium, zinc, and iron. And flax seeds are another great source of omega-3 fats and dietary fiber, as well as essential vitamins and minerals. They have powerful, powerful anti-cancer hormone balancing compounds called lignans. When someone tells me they're having trouble with constipation, I usually recommend adding ground flax seeds to their smoothies to encourage healthy bowel movements. So all three of these seeds can be added to your smoothies or you can make puddings chia seed puddings awesome or add them as toppings on berries or coconut yogurt. Options are endless. Okay, my next superfood is MCT oil. That stands for medium chain triglycerides. Now these are a type of fatty acid that's derived from coconut oil. See MCT oil is super fuel for your cells because it boosts fat burning and it increases mental clarity. MCT oil can also help you lose weight because it gets quickly burned and metabolized and speeds up your metabolism. It also gets absorbed directly from the gut into the liver and doesn't get stored as fat but rather burned quickly and turn into energy. You can add it to your smoothies, your coffee, you can put it up to dress on your veggies, you can put in salad dressings, whatever you like. The next superfood, or shall I say super fiber, that I use almost daily is called Glucomannan. You need to get fiber in your diet to keep healthy from top to bottom as well as provide food for the healthy bacteria that are inside of you to promote health. See most of us have about eight grams of fiber. We used to have about 100 grams or 150 grams of fiber as hunter-gatherers and our bodies really need that. I mean the African average hunter-gatherer poop is about two pounds whereas the average Westerner is about four ounces, not very good. Fiber can actually prevent obesity and all chronic diseases of aging. Now this is because fiber slows the rate at which food enters your bloodstream and increases the speed at which the food exits your body through the digestive tract. Fiber keeps your blood sugar and your cholesterol in ideal balance and also quickly eliminates toxins from your gut. Think of it like a scrubber brush, it cleans out all the toxins and reduces your appetite. so it's like a win-win-win. Glucomannan is soluble, it's fermentable, and it's a highly viscous fiber. It's like a sort of soaks up 50 times its weight in water, and it comes from the root of elephant yam, also known as konjac. No, it's not the kind you drink. Okay. The konjac tuber has been used for centuries as an herbal remedy, and it makes traditional foods like konjac jelly, tofu, and noodles. I like the shirataki noodles because there's there's almost no calories and they're all fiber and they taste like noodles. There's a great way to take glucomannan and it's the form of a supplement known as PGX. And this is a lot of research on it, $20 million research looking at diabetes and weight loss and cholesterol and you basically stir it into your water every day as an easy and effective source of fiber. Next I want to talk about mushrooms. It's a whole class of foods actually, not just one mushroom. When I went to China, I realized that the average Chinese person knows more about medicinal properties of food than I do after years of research. Medicinal foods, reishi, shiitake, maitake, cordyceps, they all have powerful healing properties that boost your immunity and support your hormones. And they're antiviral, they're anti-inflammatory, they're anti-cancer.

They can even help you heal your.

Liver, they can lower cholesterol. The list goes on and on and on. And so if you have an experiment with mushrooms, I highly recommend it. I love to make reishi tea or cook with shiitake mushrooms or even maitake. put them in soups. They're awesome. Finally, let's talk about the superfood that you might be having today and you don't even know it.

And that is plant foods.

Yes, that's right. The vast array of colors in veggies represents about 25,000 chemicals that are super beneficial. These are called phytochemicals. Now there's evidence that the interaction between the colors provides additional benefits. So that's why you want to eat the rainbow. It's important to have a whole diverse diet full of lots of different colorful fruits and vegetables. Now fruits and veggies are historically and biologically super important. Our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers, ate over 800 varieties of plant foods. Today, we don't even consume anywhere near that amount, so we need to make extra effort to include more of a variety in our diets. I always say eat the rainbow. And no, I don't mean Skittles, okay? Each color of fruits and veggies represents a whole different family of healing compounds. For example, red foods like tomatoes, they contain the carotenoid lycopene, which helps get rid of free radicals that damage our genes and can prevent cancer like prostate cancer. Green foods contain the chemicals sulforaphane and isothiocyanates. These are also powerful. They also contain indoles, all of which help ward off cancer by inhibiting carcinogens and getting rid of them in your body. So I want you to try them all. Purple, yellow, orange, red, white, blue, green, whatever.