START USING Food as Medicine To Heal The Body & LIVE LONGER! | Mark Hyman

Has anybody ever heard of FLC syndrome? You know what that is? That's when you feel like crap. Does anybody have that? Who here has some sort of chronic ailment or something that isn't right or doesn't feel good in their body? Anybody? A lot of you, right? You're all a young, healthy audience, but all of us are often walking around with something. And most of us, when we go to the doctor, they go, well, your tests are fine, your exam is fine, you know, I don't know what's wrong with you. And there's one or two answers to that problem. Either you're crazy or your doctor is missing something. And what's really extraordinary in this moment in time is that medicine is going through a paradigm shift that is profound and it completely is forcing us to reimagine biology and disease. For the first time in the history of our species, we actually are having insight into The wonder of biology, how things work. What are the laws of nature when it comes to our human biology? We never had a clue because most of our conditions that we have had are diagnosed in a way that doesn't make sense anymore given the information we have. You know, we used to go to the doctor, when we had a headache, we went to the head doctor. We had an elbow pain, we went to the joint doctor. We had a stomach ache, we went to the stomach doctor. But the truth is the body isn't organized that way. Just because medicine is organized that way, it doesn't actually match reality. It doesn't match reality. We have a very different framework now that we need to use to understand disease. It's based on systems thinking, how everything connects together, how our biology works as an integrated model. So if you want to biohack your health or biohack disease or create optimal functioning, you can't use our modern medical system of thinking because that system doesn't approximate reality. We are focused on symptoms and not causes. We're focused on the symptoms, not the system. We're focused on organs, not the organism. We're focused on what disease you have instead of why do you have this disease? So we need to reframe what we're doing. And I unfortunately had to learn this the hard way. About 20 some years ago, I was quite ill. I went from being very, very healthy, riding my bike 100 miles a day, being able to remember 30 patients at the end of the day without any notes and dictate all their charts, to not being able to walk up the stairs, not being able to remember where I was at the end of a sentence. And I didn't know what happened to me. I was 36 years old and my whole system collapsed. I'd been a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I ran five miles a day. I ate a healthy diet, which I thought was a healthy diet. And something just went terribly wrong. And I had to literally reverse engineer my health because every single doctor told me that I was depressed or I had chronic fatigue or I had fibromyalgia or whatever I had and no one actually helped me figure it out. And it turned out that my entire system broke down from living in China having mercury poisoning. I had mercury poisoning because I lived in China which has the worst pollution on the planet and I have poor genes that help me detoxify so I couldn't get rid of the toxins. And In that discovery of my biology, I literally cell by cell, molecule by molecule, system by system, had to understand what was going on. My immune system broke down. I developed sores and rashes all over my body. I developed terrible gut issues. I had digestive bloating and diarrhea for years. I had severe muscle pain and aches. I had cognitive dysfunction. It's like I couldn't remember anything, focus, pay attention. I was depressed. It was like I had depression, ADD and dementia all at once. And I was desperate to figure out what was going on, and through my own unwinding of my biology, I was able to figure out this model of functional medicine. And I found pioneers in that field, and I went and learned at their feet, and I began to discover there was a whole field of thinking that was reorganizing our thoughts because we don't actually have a model to describe disease today. It's really backward. For example, today we're learning that The microbiome has the capacity to connect to so many different diseases. It can cause heart attacks, right? The bacteria in your gut are a whole living organism that can create so many diseases: heart attacks, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, allergies, asthma, fibromyalgia, all these things can be the result of changes in your gut floor. And yet, when you go to the doctor with arthritis, they don't ask you about your poop.

Right?

When you go to the heart doctor, they're not asking you about what's going on with your gut flora. You have three pounds of bacteria in there. There's 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells. There's 100 times as much bacterial DNA in you than your own DNA. And that's dynamically interacting with you. You have 20,000 genes. You have about 2 million bacterial genes. And they're dynamically interacting with you all the time. And when you don't understand that the definitions that we have of disease don't make sense. We can't fix it. So I was able to repair my biology, to fix myself, and to transform my biology by using the science of functional medicine, which helps me map out the way the body actually functions. And instead of looking at the signs and symptoms and the organs at the top of the tree, I go down into the roots. What are the fundamental drivers of disease? What are the underlying causes of illness? How do we actually get to what's making us sick? And for one in two Americans, pre-diabetes and about 70% of us obese. And by the way, this is not just an American problem. 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics are in the developing world. China's number one, India's number two. The Middle East has the most per capita diabetics, about one in four to one in three of the population is type 2 diabetic. So we really need a new way of thinking about this. And so I, rather than going down, to the branches and the leaves and the organs, I go down into the roots and I look at the fundamental factors that are driving disease. What's the underlying lifestyle factors? The environmental factors? What's your diet? What's your stress level? What are the ingredients for health? So it's actually quite simple. Rather than just focusing on the symptoms, I go to the cause. And this is a timeline we use to help us map the story of your life. I want to know what happened in the womb. I want to know what happened with your mother, whether she was sick, whether she took antibiotics, whether she had immunizations, what she ate. I want to know what happened at your birth. Was it a C-section? Was it something that had trauma? Were you breastfed or bottle fed? Did you have early antibiotics? All these things set up the conditions for your life. And what were the insults or traumas along your life that led to you having this problem in this moment? And then we map this out in what we call the matrix. Now, this is the model that we use to basically biohack any disease. So people say, Dr. Hyman, do you treat X? or why? And I'm like, well, yes, I treat the human body. I don't actually treat disease. The extraordinary thing about functional medicine is that you don't have to know the disease that you're treating in order to optimize health. You follow this model and you can see tremendous transformations in biology. For example, there was a guy came in to see me, I mentioned yesterday, who had dementia. He was seven years old. He was pretty desperate. his wife was very upset and basically went from being a CEO of his company to not being able to basically almost tie his shoes or function in any way. He had to quit work and was at home basically drooling and depressed and demented. And he came in and it turned out he had a whole series of problems that were causing his brain to not function properly. He had heavy metal poisoning because he lived in Pittsburgh and there was coal burning there in Pittsburgh because of the steel plants. He had insulin resistance or pre-diabetes because his diet was high in sugar and starch. He had severe gut issues. He had bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in his gut that was leading to his brain dysfunction because his gut bacteria weren't working. And he had a bunch of genetic things that set him up for problems, problems with methylation and sulfation, which are these basic biochemical reactions that have to function for you to be healthy. And rather than say, I'm going to treat your dementia, I said, why don't we optimize your gut flora? Why don't we optimize your biochemistry and methylation with the right foods and nutrients? why don't we fix the insulin resistance with the right higher fat, low glycemic diet? Why don't we help get rid of the heavy metals and get your feelings replaced and chelate you and get you full of glutathione and all the things you need to upregulate your detox system? And I said, let's see what happens. Well, he had this extraordinary transformation where he went from being basically demented and depressed to being back to work, functional and happy again and having his ability to be in life. And his grandkids weren't scared to be around him anymore. And it wasn't, it wasn't because, it wasn't because we were treating the dementia. I was simply optimizing his biological systems using this model. So on the left-hand side there's the predisposing factors, all the triggers, and on the bottom there's the underlying fundamental lifestyle factors which are all the things that help us to provide inputs into the body to create health. So Dave talks about biohacking and all these little things that he's tweaking in the body. It's all based on this model. His next book is on mitochondria, which is one of the systems, energy system. JG talks about eliminating the seven foods. That's based on dealing with your gut and food sensitivities and allergies that create inflammation in the body. We're all basically coming from the same paradigm. And yet, this is not something that's something I invented or that's a new trick or technique or some little biohacking thing. This is the future of healthcare and medicine. This is actually now being invited into the Center of Cleveland Clinic, where the CEO of one of the greatest healthcare centers in the world has invited me to come in and create a model that transforms healthcare because he knows that we can't solve our current problem of chronic disease using the same system. And it's very powerful. So I want to sort of go into a little bit of a story about a recent experience I had and then share with you why I think it's not the whole story. I went to this place called Health Nucleus, which is part of the Human Longevity Institute, which is started by Craig Venter. Now, Craig Venter is the guy who decoded the human genome. He basically took our genes and he analyzed every gene of his own, sequenced it, and he did it faster and better than the NIH, the National Institute of Health. And he did it for $300 million. And now at HealthNucleus you can get your genes decoded for $1,000. Soon it'll probably be $100. And I went to an entire workup where I had my genome mapped, I had my metabolome mapped, my microbiome mapped. I had all sorts of blood tests, 20 vials of blood. a full body MRI scan, a total measurement of my echocardiogram, my body composition, everything was measured. And it was a lot of data. And the problem with a lot of data is that you have to make sense out of it. How does it connect? Where are the dots that connect everything together? Well, functional medicine is the filter. And someone said to me, How do you actually think about this differently? Well, if you think about physics, we have laws of physics that can explain explain the workings of the universe, gravity, the rotation of the planets, all these phenomena that are quite extraordinary. We can interpret through the filter of math and physics. But human biology, we don't have any natural laws that we've discovered about how the human body works. It's very descriptive. It's like you have these symptoms, you have this disease. It doesn't talk about why or what the mechanisms are, what the causes are. So functional medicine is like the natural laws of biology, and you can explain a whole host of different phenomena by means of a very few number of general laws. So when I went to Craig Venter's Institute, I had this whole thing mapped out, and yet I got all this data, and unless you have a filter to understand how it all connects and what to do with it, you can't actually create health. And so I kind of had my whole genome map. This is my genome here. This is all me. You can see everything right into me here. And, well, it's more interesting to me than this is actually what I call the super gene. Now, the super gene is much more important, which is not what is your genome, but how is your genome working? What is causing genes to get turned on or off? You can't change your genes, but you can change the expression of your genes. You can change how those genes work, which ones are turned on or off. And there are a whole host of things that influence that. And it's not just your genes. that's the food that you eat that changes your gene expression. It's your social interactions and connections that change your gene expression. We now know that if you have somebody who you're with and you have a deep heart connection with them and a positive interaction, you literally can change each other's gene expression in the moment. And if you have a negative interaction, you can change your gene expression in the moment. The same thing with food. With every bite of food, you're changing your gene expression. So we talked about the exposome, which is what are your genes exposed to? Right? It's the environment, toxins and light and air and water and community and connection and food, all the inputs that we're constantly feeling, EMF, everything around us is always giving us input into our gene expression. That's called the exposome. And that accounts for over 90% of the result that we see as our phenotype, which is who we are in this moment, whether we're sick or healthy, is related to these inputs to our genes. so you have control over those inputs most of the time and you can change your gene expression very quickly. Someone said, you know, how can you reverse disease even at late stages? Is it possible? I said, well, yeah, I had a guy named George who came to see me who was 300 pounds. He was 63 years old. He had heart failure, diabetes, he had angina, he had reflux, he had prostate problems, erectile dysfunction, and sinus issues and, you know, all kinds of problems. I always say I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. so he, he said to me, can you help me? I said, yeah, I can help you, but you have to do everything I say. So he did everything I said. A year later, he was 300 pounds. He came back, he lost 150 pounds. Every single one of his diseases was gone. Now he's 70-something years old, and he's starting a bath house in New Mexico. So the power of biology to change at any age is, is really remarkable. You can reverse aging, and I, I see this over and over. So the Super gene is your genome. It's your exposome. It's your microbiome, as I said, because your microbiome, those two million genes are constantly interacting with you and your own genes, and it's called the hologene, but it's also your nutri genome. What are the foods doing that are affecting you? And how are those affecting your gene expression? It's your proteome, which are the proteins that are produced from your genes. Your metabolome, which is all the metabolites that are produced from your genes. I had my metabolome measured there. Instead of like 20 blood tests, there was 2,500 blood tests I had measured. So that's really more important is how are your genes being influenced and how do we map all those influences in a system that makes sense? That's what functional medicine is. It's sort of an operating system. It's a way of thinking. It's not a new test or modality or specialty. It's a way of thinking about solving the puzzle of disease. So this is some of my genes here. You know, I was happy that I had more genes than mostly anybody else. I had over 7 million or 6 million variants. So we all have variations in our genetic code. I had more than average. I was happy about that. And I had a telomere length of 43 years, and I'm 56 years old, so that made me happy. So what I'm doing clearly is working. And I found out that I actually, genetically, I'm more diverse than I thought. I thought I was a Jew from the Middle East, and that's where I came from. But turns out I am from the Middle East. I'm also from Asia, I'm part Asian, from West Africa, and I'm even half a percent Native American. And I'm one, I think, and a half percent Neanderthal. So that explains why I have a big butt like Chinese food, like sweat lodges, good filth deficients, nice pull women's hair out. And you can see this is interesting, they can map your dad's, ancestry. So my dad's from West Africa, my mom is from the Middle East and all over Asia. And here's my Neanderthal genes, you can see right there. It's kind of exciting. Then this is my metabolome. Now my metabolome is this map of 2,500 metabolites, but it's just data. How do you make sense out of all this data? How do you make big data small? How do you create big insights out of big data? Well, that's the beauty of functional medicine. One of the things that I learned was that I have areas in my mitochondria that are not working as well. And I know that's probably true as a sort of consequence of the mercury poisoning and the illness that I had. And so I know how to tweak this by basically biohacking my biochemistry and using a few nutrients to upregulate various pathways. Now that's kind of cool, but at the end of the day, what really we need to know is how do we undo the things that often are happening to our biology. Now this is Clayton. Now Clayton was a little boy who had severe ADD. He also had asthma, he had anxiety, he had abdominal pain, he had anal itching, and that was just the A's. He had a whole list of other problems. He had eczema and hives and insomnia and muscle cramps, and he had severe ADD and dysgraphia. He couldn't write. His penmanship was so bad. So rather than give him Ritalin and rather than give him asthma medications and medications for his stomach pain, he was on seven medications. you know, he was on a pill for every ill. Instead of asking the question, why? These doctors were like, what disease do you have? What drug do I give you? And with Clayton instead, I said, what's going on? Why is he having all these different diseases? Why does he have so many different problems at 10 or 12 years old? Why is this going on? So I began to dig in his story, and we found all sorts of imbalances in his biology. We found that he had severe gut issues. He had overgrowth of yeast in his gut from eating a diet that was full of sugar and processed food and taking antibiotics for years. He had lead poisoning from having lead in his environment. He had severe nutritional deficiencies which were from his diet. He ate a processed food diet, processed meats, lots of sugar, trans fats. So he had trans fats, he had no omega-3 fats, he had low levels of zinc, magnesium, antioxidants, he had low levels of B vitamins. And we were able to map all this stuff out. He had food sensitivities, he had reactions to gluten, he had all this total system breakdown. so rather than treat his ADD and rather than treat his asthma or his irritable bowel or his hives or his eczema or his anxiety with all these different drugs, which is what we learned to do in medicine, I simply got his system in balance. And what was really shocking to me, this is sort of when the light bulb went off in my head, this was his handwriting when he came in to see me. He was 12 years old, you couldn't read anything, right? And after two months, his mother brought his homework back and it looked like this. Now, I didn't try to biohack his handwriting or treat his brain. All I did was basically take out the things that we're creating imbalance and put in the things that we're creating balance. So it's really a very simple equation. When you want to create health, if you want to biohack your health, it's actually quite simple. I only ask two questions when someone comes to the office to see me. One is, what do I need to take away that's bothering this person? Is there something that's pissing their system off, it's irritating them, it doesn't work for them? that isn't right, that I need to remove. And it's a short list. These are the causes of disease. It's toxins, allergens, microbes, poor diet, stress. There's five causes of all disease. And those interact with your genes to create imbalance. And then there's ingredients for health. What are the ingredients for creating a healthy human? I mean, whoever here is in healthcare, you probably didn't have a class in school that says creating a healthy human 101. Did you? Probably not, right? So we-- We have to actually go back and say, well, what is it that creates a healthy human? What are the inputs that create health? I mean, if you have a racehorse, you know how to get that horse to a high performance level. You have to feed it the right food, you have to exercise it the right way, get it the right amount of rest. All those things are scientifically designed to create phenomenal performance in racehorses. But we don't treat ourselves that way. I mean, most of the stuff that we eat, we shouldn't even be considered food. It's like a food-like substance. So with ingredients, we have to think of what are they? It's the right food. You know, when you heard a little bit about it just before, about what our indigenous foods were. It's just low processed, real, whole, fresh food. It's low in sugar, high in the right fats. I've written a dozen books about it. It's pretty straightforward. Everybody has the basic same concept of what is a healthy diet. The second is the right nutrients. It's also light and air and water. You're going to get a lot out this afternoon. And love and connection and community. All those are ingredients for creating a healthy human sleep restoration. And when we don't have that input, we actually get sick. Now, with this kit, I used a powerful new drug that I didn't tell you about fully. This drug has the power to optimize dozens of hormones. to improve the expressions of tens of thousands of genes, to optimize hundreds of thousands of protein networks, to balance your immune system and cytokines, to optimize your gut flora. And it works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug ever discovered. It has no side effects since it's available to almost anybody on the planet. You know what drug it is?

Love.

Love? Well, it could be love. It's actually food. Food is the most powerful drug. It's not like a drug, it actually is a drug. And if I had to go to a deserted island and I only had one drug to use, it would be this drug to reverse disease. It's the most powerful drug. I wrote something called the 10-Day Detox Diet. And in that program, I basically synthesized functional medicine. I eliminated the foods that create disease, put in the foods that create health, and gave people a few simple practices to do. In 10 days, their scores on the FLC quiz, which is when you feel like crap, went down by 62%. That means all diseases improved. Migraines, asthma, irritable bowel, depression, joint pain, insomnia, anxiety, whatever it was. Autoimmune disease. One guy came up, he said, I have rheumatoid arthritis. In 10 days I feel better. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug. I had one who said, Dr. Hyman, I have type 2 diabetes. I got off 56 units of insulin in three days. How is that possible? Another one said, I've had lifelong depression, on and off medication, and I have psychiatric hospitals. In three days I don't feel depressed for for the first time in my life, is that possible? I said, yes, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug on the planet. And it's not just calories. Food is actually information. It's literally instructions, like code. So you can upgrade or downgrade your biological software by what you put in your mouth every day. So next time you take a bite of food, just remember that it's not energy, it's not just fuel. It's actually instructions, it's information, and what you want to be telling your body to upgrade or downgrade your biological software. Now, there's one more thing I want to share with you, which is, yes, food is medicine. And yes, we can understand functional medicine and go into the details of biological networks and understand how everything connects together. And I've spent my life studying biochemistry and physiology and genetics and the connections and the patterns and everything. And I've seen more data than most physicians, because for 20 years, I've had a unique practice where I've been able to do $5,000 worth of testing on almost everybody and see millions of data points on tens of thousands of people and look at the patterns and connections, and I was just so focused on this. And then one day, the earthquake in Haiti happened, and it changed everything for me. To make a long story short, I basically ended up in Haiti after the earthquake, and it was pretty intense. We arrived in this massive destruction in the main hospital, and I met a guy named Paul Farmer. Paul Farmer is an extraordinary man. who went to Haiti when he was in medical school in one of the poorest countries in the world. It's the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where most people live on less than a dollar a day and don't have clean water or sanitation. And most people had given up on these people because they had TB and AIDS and there was no way to treat these people because you need complicated drug regimens. And he said, no, no, we can help these people. We can solve this problem. What seemed insoluble, we can solve. And it wasn't by better drugs or surgery that Paul fixed these people. It was by the power of each other. He called it accompaniment. We accompany each other to health. He used friends, neighbors, community health workers that he trained who were just their neighbors to help each other, to go to each other's houses and make sure they had enough food to eat and water to drink and took their pills on time and had a place to sleep and just basically took care of each other. And it was through the power of that social connection that was able to drive this transformation. It's been used for the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation. It wasn't through better improvements in medicine, it was just through the power of our social connections. And I realized that it wasn't our genetic threads that were making us sick, it was our social threads that were making us sick. That just as our social connections can make us sick, they can also make us well. I realized that this was also true of chronic disease. That actually not just infectious disease was contagious, but actually so was chronic illness. Diabetes is contagious. Heart disease is contagious. Obesity is contagious. And this work has been shown over and over to be true. This is the guy from Harvard named Dr. Christakis who's looked at the social networks and our patterns in life. And he's found that when you looked at huge amounts of data, that there are clusters of people who kind of group together in social networks that drive disease. So he found that if you're overweight and your friends are overweight, sorry, if you're overweight, if you have a friend who's overweight, you're more likely to be overweight than if your family is overweight. if you have a friend who's overweight, who's a close friend, you're about 170 times, 70% more likely to be overweight than if your sister or brother is overweight, you're only 40% more likely to be overweight. So it's those social threads that connects us that are more important than our genetic things. But there's also the happiness clusters. So people who actually cluster together and are happy together do better. So what really became evident to me was that we have to reframe our idea of how we change biology using the understanding of functional medicine and biological networks, but we have to change behavior by dealing with the social drivers of disease. Because I know when I go out to eat with somebody, they're worried about what they're having for dinner, whether they're going to order dessert or not, and I don't have to say anything, right? Because it's that power of peer pressure. When I'm around Dave Asprey, I'm not going to be eating bread, right? So I think we all feel that experience in that. So if your friends are having all these bad habits, you're going to have those habits. if your friends have good habits, you're gonna have good habits. So I'm pondering all this, and then one day, this guy comes to my office who was very overweight, and this guy named Rick Warren, who you might have heard of, he wrote a book called the Purpose Driven Life, which sold 32 million copies. He put 10 million people in small groups around the world who live better lives, purpose-driven lives.

And he was very overweight.

He's like, I want to get healthy, can you help me? I'm like, sure. So I said, let's have dinner afterwards. We had dinner. I said, tell me about your church, 'cause I'm a Jewish doctor from New York. I don't know much about churches in Southern California. I said, what's going on with your church? He said, well, we have 30,000 people. I said, wow. He said, we have 5,000 small groups that meet every week to live better lives. I'm like, oh my God. And the light bulb went off. I said, why don't we create a healthy living program delivered to these small groups? and see what happens. And we thought a few hundred people would show up. 15,000 people came to church. We had to turn 2,000 people away. They signed up for this program. We created a 40-day program, then a year-long program, and the first year they lost a quarter of a million pounds. And all sorts of diseases went away, right? People's diabetes went away, their autoimmune disease went away, their reflux went away, their migraines went away, their autoimmune disease went away. It wasn't because we treated disease. one doctor treating one patient. It was one doctor, it was a couple of us, it was actually Dr. Oz, another doctor, Dr. Aman, and me, it was a Jewish doctor, Christian doctor, and a Muslim doctor. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But it was quite extraordinary. So we wrote this book called the Daniel Plan. I wanted to call it the Jewish Doctor's Guide for Christian Wellness. And it won the Christian Book of the Year award last year. which is really cool. I think I'm the only Jewish guy to ever win the Christian Book of the Year Award. Well, there was this one other guy. There was one other guy. And I found this profound change because when people started to do this together, when they connected together, when they worked together and played together and ate together, everything changed. They changed what was acceptable in the culture. They no longer had ice cream socials and pancake breakfasts. and donuts and soda everywhere. It was like they were trying to get their people to heaven early eating all that stuff. I went on stage in the church and I said, listen, if you had Jesus come to dinner, what would you feed him? A Big Mac, fries, and a Coke? I said, listen, if you believe God lives in you, why are you feeding him crap? I said, what you have to eat is very simple. You just leave the food that man made and eat the food that God made, right? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Actually, I have a slide in one of my lectures I put up, which is showing that label of a Twinkie, and I said, if anybody can guess what this food is, I'll give you $1,000. And nobody has been able to guess. Because you can't tell what it is if you cover up the front of the package, because all the ingredients are the same processed stuff. So we created this program that we've now expanded to hundreds of churches around the world. And I realized that it's really the power of each other that's going to solve our global health problem. That we have to connect with the power of love. And that's why we're all here, right? We're all here because we want to be part of a community. We want to be part of a tribe. We have a longing to belong. It's part of our ancient DNA. E.O. Wilson called it the social conquest of the earth. It's this powerful drive for us to connect with each other and that drives our behavior. So we have to basically love our way out of our chronic disease epidemic. We have to use the power of functional medicine to change biological networks and the power of love and community to change our biology. And that's really, at the end of the day, what it all matters. So I'm gonna leave you with a quote from an African proverb which says, if you want to travel swiftly, travel alone. But if you want to travel far, travel together. So let's all do this together.

Thank you. What are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system? And what are those things we can use to actually activate health within it.

Great. So angiogenesis is a term that actually talks about how the body grows blood vessels. Blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body.

That's what keeps us healthy.

They say there's 60,000 miles of blood vessels. So, if you were to pull out all the blood vessels in your body, line them up and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice. So, that's one of this enormous organ system, right? So, you know it's going to be important. and we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart, you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease, clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes. And if you don't have enough blood vessels, you can't heal your wounds. And if you actually have too many blood vessels, you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration, and you can grow cancer.

Right?

So this is a system that is required to keep every cell and organ healthy, it's a health defense system. And, if it's out of balance, you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels, you wind up having in trouble. So, what are the things that can damage angiogenesis? Well, it turns out high fat diets damage angiogenesis. Any fat or just-- you- know what? Actually, mostly saturated fats, but I think that it's really high fat, overall high fat diets can be damaging. And, hypercholesterolemia, for example. If you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood, like the damaging bad cholesterol, LDL. It actually impairs the function of these blood vessels. If you have second cigarette smoke, tobacco, whether your people shouldn't smoke, but even secondary smoke can actually damage your blood vessel response. And then you think about heart disease, you think about cancer, things that are your blood vessels out of whack, out of balance.

The fat thing is interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils. And it's hard to separate out, are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil or they're having trans fats and toxic fats and inflammatory oils?

So the science actually says is not actually talking about what you actually eat. It's about what the net-net, the effect it's in the body. So, if you wind up actually going from, you know, the researchers have studied for example, in the lab, animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic. These are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat. That's a genetic thing for sure. And those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis. So, I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good. We know that, for example, that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good. the polyunsaturated fats are good for you. But I'm talking about after what the body actually processes it, what actually results in your body can be. So, what are the things that actually can help restore healthy angiogenesis? Well, think about angiogenesis balance like a lawn that's growing, right? Or a garden that's growing. You want to prune the garden. make sure things don't overgrow, pick out the weeds, and if you're mowing a lawn, you're kind of just getting everybody, all the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height. Yeah. So you don't wind up having the scraggly lawn. That's what the body does to keep angiogenesis in balance. Not too much, not too little. And so the food we eat is actually like a lawn mower. It kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body. Not too much, not too little. So the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea, which is really good soy. Actually, genistein is a bioactive found in soy. It's really good. Tomatoes are really good for helping to keep angiogenesis in balance. Many fruits and vegetables also can do that. So the brassinins are really good. So many of the things we already know are good for us, we know actually also help our blood vessels.

And now we know how.

And now we know how.

Yeah.

Now, what about stem cells and regeneration? This is a big topic that I think people are hearing about in the news. They're confused about it. There's controversy about it. There's laws about it that prevent adequate research. I mean, it's really quite a messy area, and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. And it's, I don't think something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells, that there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells. And what are stem cells anyway? What do they do and how do.

We understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them? Yeah, well, stem cells are really simple. We're made of stem cells. So, when our moms and dads got together and created, you know, us in the womb, we started out as stem cells. They actually made every single one of us. A nematode sperm. A nematode sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory. and then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells. And after we were born, a few of those stem cells stuck around, about 700,000 of them. They stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines and they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate. So, when you and I were growing up, right, in grade school, we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate, salamanders can regenerate, but people can't regenerate, right?

Can'T grow a new arm.

Yeah, well, it's true. You can't grow a new arm, but we do regenerate. We regenerate every day. We know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back. Our gut lining grows back. Our livers can grow back. If you actually remove part of your liver, it'll grow back. Yeah, our skin grows back, you know? So we. Our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Now, what can injure stem cells, you know, high doses of alcohol can damage.

And blunt your stem cells.

So I'm okay with the one tequila I had last night, you know? Having a tequila every now and then is not bad, having a glass of wine. But, you know, the thing is on balance, what you want to do is people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells. Diabetes is another state, a metabolic state that, you know, it really impairs, it cripples our stem cells.

Sugar.

High blood sugar cripples our stem cells. So, the excess of anything can be harmful, including to our stem cells. So, what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells. This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that, though, let me just. Stress affect your stem cells. Stress can definitely affect our stems. High stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells. You know, it's just like stunning them. So they're like, wait a minute, what do I do now? You know, maybe I'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs. We got to rebuild our blood vessels. We got to rebuild our hearts. You know, our hearts turn around. Like, we actually have stem cells in our hearts and our brains and re-grow our nerves. Every single day, something in our body is regenerating. Actually, a lot of things are regenerating. So, what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies that you inject into the body. So, taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them. And, someday, that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine someday. We're not there yet. I've been involved with some of those efforts and what I've seen is very exciting. But more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells. And, here's the research. You can actually take-- It's a lot cheaper. And, it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable.

Getting a stem cell injection is like 20 grand or something, right?

Well, you know, I would say, why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table? So, the Mediterranean diet, it's been studied by Spain, looked at elderly people on the Mediterranean diet, and those who were on a Mediterranean diet compared to not on a Mediterranean diet had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. So, again, it's not one magic food. it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, when you can actually do the research on specific things as well. So, for example, tea, green tea will increase your stem cells. But guess what? So can black tea. Right? So here's what the support.

Is that why the Japanese live forever? You know, all the green tea.

You know, people in Asia drink a lot of tea. People in Britain drink a lot of tea as well. We used to say green tea is good, black tea is fermented, so it's not going to be that good for you. we're changing our minds. We have to keep our minds open. Black tea can also double the number of stem cells. And then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study by UCSF in San Francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease, so they had kind of crappy blood flow, and they gave them hot chocolate.

Yeah, I was gonna say the chocolate stem cell story.

I want to hear about that. It's amazing, right? So the darker the chocolate, the higher the flavonols. These are the bioactives that are naturally present in cacao.

And, there was a study done- this is the food as medicine. This is the food as medicine. There are literally these chemicals in food.

Called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties. They are made by Mother Nature, they're packed in the food, growing on the plant, and every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactives. So, in cacao, which is a bean, which then you process to actually get kind of the cocoa powder. If you take the really dark chocolate, like 73% cacao, the really dark chocolate, and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink, and you have it twice a day, this was a clinical study. They found in people who wound up actually having drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month, they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate, right? And so, okay, so the question is, is that important? Well, when they measured their blood flow, what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which, you know, kind of like lowers the circulation of the blood, they let it go. They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved. Wow. So here's the functional results that actually means it makes a difference. So, who's gonna complain about chocolate? Who's gonna complain about tea? Who's gonna complain about a Mediterranean diet? I mean, you go out to eat, These are the things we love.

Yeah, well it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block, interfere, inhibit some medical process, some biological process. And there's toxicity to them, there's side effects to them, you can take too much which will harm you, whereas foods don't work like that. But you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food. So if food is medicine, what's the dose? one cranberry is it a thousand cranberries?

Right.

Well, so my book Eat to Beat Disease, I specifically have a chapter on food doses. It's important to me.

Which nobody talks about.

Well, I know that because when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale, I'm always asking, well, how much should I actually eat? And, that always struck me as something that needed an answer. So, here's how we've approached it. you can actually get food doses. That's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health. The best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies, these epidemiological studies. There's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times, right? So in Europe, there's something called the EPIC study. EPIC study. And Haines is in the United States. Bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients. In Europe, they're studying 500,000 patients. over 20 years, and they're tracking everything they eat, and they're asking them how much are you eating? And then on the tail end, looking at what happens to their health, what's their cancer rate, what's their heart disease rate, what's their diabetes rate? And when you actually combine those two, the result that we want, lower cancer, less heart disease, and you go back into their research and you figure out what foods they ate, you can actually calculate how much they ate of it.

Yeah.

Right.

So, and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this. By the way, this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well. It's, you know, just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work. You gotta correlate what works with what actually the amount is. So, smaller studies, there was a study called the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study done at Harvard, which looked at 70,000 men, and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week, that's a half a cup of cooked tomatoes, not that much, you have pasta, lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39%. So that's a dose, that's an outcome, and that's a particular food. And you can do that systematically, you gotta hunt and peck for it, but it's there. And it doesn't give you the exact answer, it's not like a medicine, actually, frankly, even penicillin. You don't always get the right result, but you have a good approximation. So, that's the beginning of food doses.

Your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease, but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that I didn't even know about like fish roe or razor clams or different kinds of Chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that maybe haven't been studied in large randomized controlled trials, but have clinical studies, have epidemiologic studies, and we can start to include these. And there's very little downside, right?

Right.

Unless you don't like clamps.

Well, look, what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another. And my approach is really a global approach. My work spans around the world. We're in Asia, Europe, Asia. I mean, America and Americas. And here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go, right? So what interests me is what are the common denominators? So, for example, you mentioned razor clams. Well, that's actually a category of seafood. We know from most epidemiological studies, including studies in Europe and Asia, that people who eat more seafood, about three times a week actually have lower all-cause mortality and they just survive longer. So, then you sort of say, well, what could be possibly responsible for that? Well, we do know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat.

So, if you- what is the omega-3s.

In razor clams or something else?

Well, there's probably other things as well. So, I can tell you another example that that I was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually not only have some omega-3 fatty acids, but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system. Yeah. So again, so it's like the mushrooms.

Of the sea, because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms, anti-cancer compounds.

And now they're in oysters.

Wow.

I didn't know. And, you know, by the way, these are long sugar chains.

That's right.

And, and your body digests them. they've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce. So, you know, the kind of sauce, the brown sauce you see in a Chinese restaurant, right? Chinese food that they've studied that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system.

Does that actually come from oysters?

It comes from oysters. Yeah, they boil them down and they caramelize them. So again, this is where food is medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things, really. Yeah, you incorporate culinary side, the chefs get into it. I mean, this is really, I think, us as a society coming together and saying, what do we love? And by the way, in my book Eat to Beat Disease, it's really not about what to cut out of your life. It's about what to add to your life and what do we really enjoy. It's all about our preferences and making the right decisions.

So, this is incredible. So, stem cells are not some weird thing. You have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat. maybe get it from some placenta somewhere, you can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power. And, you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate them. That's so powerful and it's a very encouraging message. Now, let's talk about the microbiome. Now, this is a whole other world that most doctors really are not schooled in. That certainly wasn't part of my medical education. That is something that I've been focused on for almost 30 years in functional medicine because we know the gut is where the seed of your health help is. It's what ancient traditions like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, they all recognize this. We just were like, oh, well, it's just poop. It's this brown stuff that comes out as waste.

Who cares?

Whatever. And now, we're seeing it linked to so many different conditions from autism to depression to cancer to heart disease to obesity to Parkinson's. I mean, the list goes on and on and we probably haven't even finished the list yet. And yet, we know very little about it. So, could you tell us a little bit about the microbiome? and why it's so important and what we can do to protect it, to feed it, to help it, and also what are those things that we're doing that screw it up?

Right.

So, the microbiome is an entire new discipline that's going to change humanity. I think that we've always thought of humankind as just humans, but in fact, we're 50-50 with bacteria is really kind.

Of like a 90-10.

Well, they've actually done some new calculations on us, right? about 40 trillion cells, about the same number of bacteria as the latest calculation on this is sort of the up to date numbers. And it makes a lot of sense, right? So basically when we evolved as humans, we were hunters and gatherers picking stuff up, you know, nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that had bacteria in it. There's more bacteria in the planet than living than animals. And when we ate those, the bacteria naturally colonized the body. And by the way, the gut, of course, but not just the gut. Our skin, our mouth, our nose, every orifice has got bacteria and our tears have bacteria. Breast milk has bacteria. Even in the womb, which we, you know, when you and I were medical school, they said, oh, the womb is sterile. Wrong. In fact, babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb. Amazing. Okay, so we're beginning to rewrite the playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body. The next thing about bacteria, I'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome is In the Middle Ages, bacteria was responsible for the plague. And so we sort of developed this fear and repulsion to bacteria. Fast forward to the 1940s, the discovery of antibiotics that really was a medical revolution. And then everybody went willy-nilly with antibiotics, which can be life-saving. Let's be clear about that. But the overuse of antibiotics, not just in humans, not just in children, but also in our animals.

Yeah, which is where most of the antibiotics are. We have 24 million pounds of antibiotics that are used every year. 19 million are used in animals for helping them grow and preventing infections.

And getting into our drinking water. So we've sort of invisibly impaired our environment so that we're exposed to antibiotics. That changes the ecology, the coral reef, that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body. so that's one thing is antibiotics. The other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our lifestyle, you know, physical activity. Yeah, we know that if you're not active, your microbiome kind of suffers. I mean, we exercise on the outside, the bacteria get the benefit, too. They get that workout.

Right.

Stress can change our microbiome. I mean, how many times have, you know, you've, I'm sure you and I have done the same thing. We stayed up all night. We've had to pull some all-nighters. Next day, you feel like crap. Your gut doesn't feel so good. That's because of microbiome is having a riot. They pulled the all-nighter, too. So, what we're realizing- Dr. Our diet, obviously. And our diet plays a huge role.

Putting in pounds of stuff every day in that, too.

Yeah. Well, you know, something really interesting. So, when I look at the ingredients of any food that I actually get, and I try to do fresh, food, whole foods. But, every now and then, you have to take something and you look at all the ingredients. The stuff you don't recognize, you can't pronounce. Those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria. You pick a mushroom and you eat it, you know that the fiber in that mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria. The pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria. What we need to worry about is what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our- We have.

3,000 food additives in the market that are FDA approved and we don't know what most of them do. Very few have been tested. And it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect your microbiome.

Well, and you know, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time. The difference is probably in their microbiome. In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super agers. These are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar. They were almost identical. Amazing. So, health is clearly governed by our microbiome. So, what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier. It turns out that pomegranates actually can make a big difference. Cranberries can make a big difference. Nuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, things that we actually know.

Almonds.

Almonds, yeah. Okay.

And so, you- I'm checking because I.

Had almonds for breakfast. I want to make sure I got it. Well, you know, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think nuts are one of nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, American Society for Clinical Oncology, the big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three colon cancer, undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease.

Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down, it's a billion dollar blockbuster drug, and you're talking about a couple handfuls of walnuts for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000 is actually better?

Well, it's not an either or, it's together. And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment, if you look at that data, that's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies. I would actually strongly advise patients to use, have nuts if they can, if they can take it. And what do they serve in the hospitals?

Right.

So again, we're in the middle of a revolution.

Yeah.

It's slow, but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine.

Hey, YouTube, if you like this video, you're gonna love the next one. Click on it to check it out today. Inflammation, which is what I had, right? Widespread inflammation in my nerves, inflammation in my gut, inflammation in my brain, in my thyroid, exactly.

It doesn't qualify as a treatable disease. Inflammation.

Right. That's what I was joking, say functional medicine doctors are inflam- Low levels of zinc, magnesium, antioxidants, he had low levels of B vitamins. And we were able to map all this stuff out. He had food sensitivities, he had reactions to gluten. He had all this total system breakdown. So rather than treat his ADD and rather than treat his asthma or his irritable bowel or his hives or his eczema or his anxiety with all these different drugs, which is what we learned to do in medicine, I simply got his system in balance. And what was really shocking to me, this is sort of when the light bulb went off in my head, this was his handwriting when he came in to see me. He was 12 years old. You couldn't read anything, right? And after two months, his mother brought his homework back and it looked like this. Now, I didn't try to biohack his handwriting or treat his brain. All I did was basically take out the things that we're creating imbalance and put in the things that we're creating balance. So it's really a very simple equation. When you want to create health, if you want to biohack your health, it's actually quite simple. I only ask two questions when someone comes to the office to see me. One is, what do I need to take away that's bothering this person? Is there something that's pissing their system off? irritating them that doesn't work for them that isn't right that I need to remove. And it's a short list. These are the causes of disease. It's toxins, allergens, microbes, poor diet, stress. There's five causes of all disease. And those interact with your genes to create imbalance. And then there's ingredients for health. What are the ingredients for creating a healthy human? I mean, whoever here is in healthcare, you probably didn't have a class in school that says creating a healthy human 101. Did you? Probably not, right? So we have to actually go back and say, well, what is it that creates a healthy human? What are the inputs that create health? I mean, if you have a racehorse, you know how to get that horse to a high performance level. You have to feed it the right food. You have to exercise it the right way. Get it the right amount of rest. All those things are scientifically designed to create phenomenal performance in racehorses. But we don't treat ourselves that way. I mean, most of the stuff that we eat, we shouldn't even be considered food. It's like a food-like substance. So with ingredients, we have to think of what are they? It's the right food. You know, when you heard a little bit about it just before, about what our indigenous foods were. It's just low processed, real, whole, fresh food. It's low in sugar, high in the right fats. I've written a dozen books about it. It's pretty straightforward. Everybody has the basic same concept of what is a healthy diet. The second is the right nutrients. It's also light and air and water. You're going to get a lot out this afternoon. And love and connection and community. All those are ingredients for creating a healthy human sleep restoration. And when we don't have that input, we actually get sick. Now, with this kit, I used a powerful new drug that I didn't tell you about fully. This drug has the power to optimize dozens of hormones. to improve the expressions of tens of thousands of genes, to optimize hundreds of thousands of protein networks, to balance your immune system and cytokines, to optimize your gut flora. And it works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug ever discovered. It has no side effects and is available to almost anybody on the planet. You know what drug it is? Love. Well, it could be love. It's actually food. Food is the most powerful drug. It's not like a drug, it actually is a drug. And if I had to go to a deserted island and I only had one drug to use, it would be this drug to reverse disease. It's the most powerful drug. I wrote something called the 10-Day Detox Diet. And in that program, I basically synthesized functional medicine. I eliminated the foods that create disease, put in the foods that create health, and gave people a few simple practices to do. In 10 days, their scores on the FLC quiz, which is when you feel like crap, went down by 62%. That means all diseases improved. Migraines, asthma, irritable bowel, depression, joint pain, insomnia, anxiety, whatever it was. Autoimmune disease. One guy came up, he says, I have rheumatoid arthritis. In 10 days, I feel better.

Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug.