This is a YouTube video titled "Mark Hyman FineCut" containing an English interview recorded in February 2012. The interview features Dr. Marek Hyman and Ask AI Mark discussing public health issues, comparing social and medical challenges in Haiti and America, the impact of industrial food addiction, and the importance of community and lifestyle changes for improving health.
Good morning Dr. Marek Hyman. It's good to be with you. This morning you spoke a little bit about how Haiti can help America heal. What an interesting paradox or not. So please tell us about that.
Well, I went to Haiti after the earthquake. I woke up in the morning, like many, who watched the news and realized that I had to do something. And so I went down there and the diseases that were afflicting the Haitians, TB and AIDS, were diseases that were not medical puzzles or complicated things to treat. They were simply social diseases that were driven by the social, economic and political conditions that gave rise to these illnesses and then prevented people from actually be able to get medical care or get the right care. We have the same problem in reverse. We don't have poverty, but we have excess. And that's a structural problem. That's a social problem. the fat, sugar, and salt that's designed into industrial food is biologically addictive. It's not just that people like it. It's actually like heroin or cocaine. And this has been shown on many studies including neuroimaging studies that look at brain patterns of addiction. So when people are consuming these industrial foods, they are literally food addicts. So yes, it's a problem and we are actually marketing these addictive foods to children and are driving even more addiction. It would be like marketing heroin and cocaine to little children or marketing cigarettes and alcohol to little children. Even adults can't control it. And so there's a lesson there. The lesson is that we have to take back our health from where it's been taken from us and we can't wait for the health care system or the government or anybody else to do it for us. We have to take back our kitchens and learn how to cook and feed our families. We need to take back our health care system and retrain doctors to think differently about health and disease, to learn about the actual causes of the diseases they're treating. They don't even know about it. They don't know how... If you go to your doctor with diabetes and obesity, they can give you a prescription. They don't know how to implement a lifestyle program. They don't know how to help you develop a social network or a community or a group where you can get healthy together. That's the solution. That's what works. But doctors don't know how to do this. Do a whole series of things that are going to change us from the bottom up. This is a bottom up solution. This is a solution where we all have to work together, where we have to connect to change what's going on in America.
Community.
Community.
Here's a question I have for you. In Paul Farmer's book, one of the simple things that he said, but that was so touching, was that it wasn't enough to give a person medicine over there, but you had to give them money because if you can't eat and you can't feed your family, who cares about medicine?
That's right.
And here, perhaps in America, there is a different kind of poverty. There is a different sort of thing that needs to be given to people because there is an emptiness that comes with excess.
Yeah, well we're social beings. You know, we're social beings. We've evolved in groups. We've supported each other groups. We have to live in groups and we've completely isolated ourselves in the white picket fences with nuclear families that are even more disintegrated than they've ever been. And we don't live in community anymore. And we are better in community. We are social beings. and it triggers powerful biological responses. So I think you're right in the sense that we need to provide a solution that's a comprehensive solution that you can't just fix one problem, you can't just put a pill into the system and hope it's going to work. You have to provide the social solutions.
So you talked about, and I love that expression, surviving the American supermarket. Are vegetables not more expensive?
Of course they are because When the government is standing beside you when you're buying soda, but not when you're buying vegetables, how can you compete? But that can change when people make different choices. I think the most important thing we need to do individually and as a society is take back our health. That's in a thousand little choices we make a day about what we eat, how we live, who we work with, how we connect with people, and the communities we build. A hundred or a thousand little choices we make today will transform our own health and transform society and create a better planet.
