Sugar Cravings, Migraines & Weight Loss: Answering Your Health Questions | Mark Hyman

The Cravings are not a moral failing. They're not a lack of willpower. They're a problem of biochemistry and hormones. You have to use science to fix it. You can't use willpower.

Let's jump in. This is Cheryl, who has the first question here.

Good morning, Dr. Hyman. I'm a long time Candida sufferer, and I also lived in a mold filled building for five years. I'm wondering if there's any kind of products that I can take. that would help with the sugar cravings that I struggle with on a daily basis?

Well, hi Cheryl and thank you for that question about three things. Yeast growth in your system, mold in your environment and sugar cravings. They're all a little different, a little related, but I'll tackle them all. The first is the yeast stuff. And it's an unfortunate situation that many in the alternative medicine space say, oh, you have Candida and that's the cause of all your problems. And that's just not true. That's not to say that many people do suffer from yeast overgrowth and it's a big problem that I treat. And in the right patient, a targeted treatment will really help. So yes, if you have yeast overgrowth, it's usually because you're eating a lot of sugar, and flour because you've taken antibiotics, because you're on the pill, because you're taking steroids, something's gone on that's caused you to have this problem. And so usually getting rid of the cause, whether it's the diet, starch and sugar, alcohol, processed food, whether it's lots of antibiotics and making sure you kind of don't stop taking those and reset, you can fix this. And it can be cured with both dietary approaches and also supplements which can be herbal that kill yeast like oregano, for example, or other combinations of herbs. Probiotics will help a lot. Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a very powerful yeast against yeast can be very effective as a supplement. I recommend one called Biome BOHM because it also has compounds that help break up the biofilm where the yeast live in the gut. So, those all are really helpful. And, sometimes you do need an antifungal, like prescription antifungal, like Diflucan or Nystatin or others. So, that's these. The mold stuff, yes, that's a whole big problem where probably half of all the buildings have water damage and many of those have mold and people, a lot of them are exposed to mold, don't know it and it can cause very low grade symptoms, brain fog, fatigue, muscle ache, sleep issues, mood issues, as well as other inflammatory symptoms, congestion, coughing. I had mold in my house and developed terrible cough. really bad, bad illness for me. But you can address that by removing the source of the mold, by helping your body detoxify from the mold with binders and various things. So that's, that's a treatable thing. Now, sugar cravings are something else. And, Cheryl, you know, they can be triggered by yeast overgrowth, for sure, but mostly it's, it's the diet causing the cravings. So it's a vicious cycle of cravings, be getting more cravings. and I remember teaching a workshop, God, 15 years ago, maybe at Kripalu on ultra metabolism, which was my book on nutrition at the time. And this woman came in and I was doing basically a detox. We got her all sugar, processed foods, elimination diet. It was a five-day workshop. And she's like, Look, I've been addicted to sugar my whole life. I crave it all the time. I know this is not gonna work. I'm willing to try it, but look, I just gave you a warning. I just might not do very well. I'm like, okay, just see what happens. You know, that's fine. And day two, she's like, I don't know what happened. I don't know what you did, but all my cravings are gone.

Wow.

And so the cravings are not a moral failing. They're not a lack of willpower. They're a problem of biochemistry and hormones. And you have to use science to fix it. You can't use willpower. Willpower will not work. You can white knuckle it for a little while, but then you're going to fail and you're going to eat more. So how do you address the cravings? Well, I wrote an entire book about this, about sugar addiction, which is what you're suffering from, Cheryl. And it's called the 10-Day Detox Diet. It's the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet. And essentially it eliminates all the foods that spike insulin and blood sugar. And when you do that, you literally shut off the system that's driving the craving. and it's essentially about 50% fat, lots of fiber, lots of phytochemicals, whole foods, no processed food, very little fruit, very little or no starchy vegetables. And what happens is very quickly all your biochemistry and hormones reset so you're not craving and hungry and want it all the time. So you might think it's challenging, but my joke is you have to go cold turkey. If you're addicted to heroin, you say, I'm just gonna have one shot today. or you're addicted to change. So I'll just have one line and I'll be fine. You can't do that. You gotta go cold turkey. And it seems crazy and hard, but if you follow the regimen in the book, which is designed to balance your hormones from right at the beginning of the day. So you start with fat and protein in the morning, lots of fiber, and you start to reset your brain chemistry and hormones from the minute you wake up and you do all the practices in the 10-day detox diet, literally you'll have no cravings within a day or two. And then you'll start to feel better, you start to lose weight, the inflammation goes down, and you get to reclaim your natural taste buds. And so we do these programs, I'm doing one in a little bit in Turkey, we do this program with people, and in 10 days we see even less, five days we see a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases, and all their inflammation goes down, their cravings go away, they feel better, they have more energy, lose weight. I mean, it's incredible. Blood sugar drops 20 points, weight often about eight pounds in five to 10 days. We see blood pressure come down 20 points. It's really quite amazing how quickly the body responds. So if you're trying to be incremental and say, well, I'm just going to cut down from, like, a loaf of bread to half a loaf of bread, or I'm going to cut down from, you know, a six pack of Coke to three Cokes a day, it ain't going to work because you're still going to be triggering the same mechanism. So you have to really one, go cold turkey, and two, you have to design an eating plan that's going to shift your hormones and your brain chemistry.

So first of all, you're making people in Turkey go cold turkey.

Yeah, I guess so.

Second of all, I've seen you take people through this program before. I've done programs like this. I've done your program. And the one thing I really want to make sure that not only Cheryl understands, but other folks that are listening, you still have so many foods that you eat that are enjoyable. You lose that craving and you still get a chance to have some low glycemic berries and other things like that and dabble. It's not like deprivation.

It's not a deprivation diet.

It's a really taking you off of refined carbohydrates and starchy things that throw you on that roller coaster of blood sugar.

Yeah, you get to even eat more. I mean, it's not a calorie restricted diet. It just takes away the foods that are hijacking your brain chemistry and your hormones and adds in foods that balance them.

That's it. So she should be excited because there's tons of hope. Yes. And just takes a little bit of rolling up the sleeves and figuring out the foods that work right for you within this framework and just jumping into it.

Absolutely.

All right, Mark, let's go to the.

Next question on our list and this is from Heidi. Hey, Dr. Hyman, would love to hear you talk about migraines and keto. Just started getting migraines after my third kid. Never had them in my life. Fun stuff, not really. Would love to hear you talk about migraines and keto. Aloha.

Oh, so Heidi, thanks for that question. It seems to be one question, it could be two questions. What about migraines? What about keto? What about migraines and keto? So maybe it's three questions, I don't know. I'll just tackle them each separately so we kind of COVID it all. Migraines are a huge problem because so much disability, so much stress for people and they're debilitating. And if you've ever had one, it's the worst. You basically have to be in a dark room, light bothers you, you get nauseous, vomiting. It can last for days, hours. Thank God there's some migraine drugs you can take to abort it. There's some preventive drugs. But none of those approaches address the root cause of migraines. And I've written a lot about this. We're linking the show notes to articles I've written that are on drhyman.com, Cattling, one of the big triggers of migraines. And I'll just go through them. and it can be 29 different things, but we'll go over the big ones. The big ones are food. So often there are food triggers. Now, the typical neurologist will say, yes, there are certain foods like tyramines, like cheeses and aged foods, certain chemicals like aspartame, glutamate, MSG, we know can be triggers. So those excitotoxins, there's certain tyramines in food and so forth. So they'll tell you to avoid those wine, cheese, that kind of thing. Those are reasonable recommendations. But then there's a whole other class of foods that are more around food sensitivities. or food reactions. And they can be very real. So, you could have sulfites, for example, that make you sick that are in dried fruit or they're put on salad bars. But it can be things like gluten and dairy and eggs. I mean, I had a patient who had migraines for 40 years. They were so debilitating she couldn't plan her life and go out. Turned out she was sensitive to eggs. She quit the eggs and the migraines are gone. Another patient, it may not be what they're eating. Maybe something else, maybe their gut microbiome. I had somebody with bacterial overgrowth in their gut that was so bad and we treated her with antibiotics, her migraine went away. Her migraine is just gone. There are also patients who, for example, have mitochondrial issues where they can't produce energy in the cells and they need riboflavin and high dose of vitamin B2, which is riboflavin, like 400 milligrams, which is like thousands of times more than the RDA, are the recommended dietary allowance, and even things like CoQ10, which help mitochondria. Magnesium deficiency is very common. I had a patient once with a magnesium deficiency where she was so debilitated. She was a radiation oncology resident at Mayo Clinic and she was about to have to quit her residency because she was literally living on narcotics and Zofran, which is a chemo drug for nausea because she was so sick. And I talked to her and I'm like, well, what's going on? She says, well, you know, I get migraines and I get them all the time and it's just debilitating. And I said, okay, what else is going on? Do you have other symptoms? Oh, yes, and I have palpitations, I have anxiety, I have insomnia, I have muscle cramps. constipation. I said, how often do you go? She said, well, I'm pretty regular. I said, well, how often do you go? She said, oh, I go once a week. I'm like, that's not regular. She's like, go. Well, yeah, I go every week. I'm like, no, you have to go every day. So we, we. All those symptoms, muscle twitches, constipation, anxiety, insomnia, palpitations, they're all magnesium deficiency symptoms. So she had severe magnesium deficiency.

They gave her, like, a thousand milligrams.

Or more magnesium for a bunch of days. All her symptoms went away. Her migraines went away, and that was her problem. it's different for different people.

What about insulin resistance? Does that play a role inside of this as well?

I mean, I don't think there's a lot of data on insulin resistance and migraines as far as I know. I'm maybe just unaware of it, but I think it's not so much that. I think it's really foods, it's the gut, it's chemicals, it's a whole host of things, mitochondrial dysfunctions that can really trigger migraines. and the treatment is really getting to the root cause, whatever it is. And figure out whether it's magnesium deficiency or mitochondrial issues or food sensitivities or bacterial overgrowth or reactions to these various Foods, like tyramines in food or sulfites that are in wine or other things. So you have to be really careful. And, and I've written a lot about it, and I almost, you know, universally can cure migraines. I really have had a pate, not a patient who hasn't either completely gotten rid of them or reduced them so dramatically they're in trivial event and if they happen they're not that severe. So, I think it's really a manageable problem using functional medicine. It's one of the home run treatments.

If somebody doesn't have access to a doctor like yourself, again, functional medicine can be expensive and they may not have somebody in their region area.

What's the next step for them to do? Yeah, the next step is there's a lot of this can be done by self-care. So, it's not that hard in my articles and blogs, a lot of it's written with the intent to be a guide for you to do this for yourself. Try this elimination diet, take magnesium, take CoQ10, take riboflavin.

Which all, by the way, are going.

To make you healthier. Yeah, and maybe want to try an herb like feverfew. There's other things that are available too. So, a lot of this is in my writing and blogs and a lot.

Of it can be done without a doctor. Okay, great Mark.

That was the first part of the question. Let's go to the second part of the question. So the second question is more about migraines and keto. And I just want to sort of back up a little bit and say that we now know that the brain, which we were taught loves sugar and has to run on glucose and requires 25% of our body's glucose, is actually not really accurate. The brain runs far better on a different fuel, which is fat. And in a lot of neurological diseases, we know this. In fact, the ketogenic diet in medicine was first used to treat epilepsy. when all drugs failed. So, when nothing else works, we give them a ketogenic diet. I don't know why I didn't start with that instead of avoiding all those medications, but that works. In kids with brain disorders, it's been very effective. In cancer, for example, of the brain, glioblastoma is used. Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's, profound impacts of ketogenic diets on these conditions. Now, in migraines, it's also a disease of inflammation of the brain, and ketogenic diets are very anti-inflammatory. So by trying a ketogenic diet, if you have migraines, if none of these other things that I suggested work, it's worth a try. My guess is most of the time you don't need to go on a ketogenic diet if you find the root cause or causes, which is the ones that I just listed. But if you need to try it, it can be a very effective treatment and it's something you can take and use over a couple of months, I would give it a two or three months trial and to see what happens. But you might notice changes right away.

All right, Mark, perfect. So that was keto and migraines. Let's go into the next question. This one is from Rebecca.

Hi, Dr. Hyman. I'd like to see an episode where you told us, what do you think of the anti-inflammatory properties of mushrooms like lion's mane, reishi? So Rebecca, this is a great question because now is the era of mushrooms. Everybody's into mushrooms, magic mushrooms, psilocybin treatments, lion's mane, cordyceps, you know, shagga mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, maitake mushrooms, you know, I use them all. And I think they have very different kinds of properties that are multi-dimensional in medicine.

Especially with psilocybin, multi-dimensional.

Yeah, exactly. You know, microdosing, Paul Stamets are using microdosing for example, for treating dementia. They're talking about it for migraines and cluster headaches. So there's a lot of anecdotal and early studies showing that it's low dose psilocybin, actually microdosing can have an impact on headaches too. So it changes the neural pathways, neural inflammation. So there's a lot to be said for the use of mushrooms. They've been used throughout history in cultures like China, which they're highly prized as therapeutic. medicines and are in a lot of the medical products. So, they're really important. And, I think they're now accessible as products that you can get as powders or you can buy now Lion's Mane. I buy Lion's Mane when I go to the grocery store and make it for dinner. And, you can start to incorporate these mushrooms in your diet or as supplements to help improve your overall health. And, what do they do? Well, they contain a group of compounds called polysaccharides which are these multifunctional sugar compounds that actually regulate immunity. They can be anti-cancer, they can help boost your own immune system to fight infection. They have different properties. For example, lion's mane can be healing to your brain, cordyceps is great for adrenal stress, you know, shagga, and there's all kinds of other mushrooms that have benefits. Reishi is really good for its adrenol adaptogen and it's helping with also chronic stress. So there's, these mushrooms are really a wonderful thing to actually include in your diet. Personally, I use them every day. I have a cocktail of adaptogenic mushrooms that I stick in my smoothie every morning. So, it's, I call it, this one called Stamet 7, which is a combination of ones, but I'll add lion's mane and cordyceps and reishi and shagga into my shake every morning to just keep my system optimized. now, whether it's. Whether it's true or not, I mean, it does have anti-cancer packs. I just got my cancer test back, which is called Gallery or the. The gallery test by Grail. The Grail test by Gallery, I think it's called, which looks for liquid biopsy, 50 different cancers. And I don't have any, thank God. So that's good. But, you know, who knows if it's the mushrooms or just I'm lucky, but no cancer. Thank you. That's great. You're stuck with me for a little while longer, Drew. I've stuck with you forever, Mark. Another 100 years, maybe.

Let's go. Let's go. All right, Mark, the next question is.

From Grace from the High HO app. Hi, Dr. Mark. My name is Grace. My husband and I are big fans of yours. Your books are amazing. It's changed our lives. Your podcasts are awesome. My big question is on pea protein.

And just what does it do to your body? Is it a starchy vegetable? Grace, thank you. That was a great question because it's a much bigger question than just about pea protein, which is should we be eating pulverized, processed plant proteins as a health food? And I do have some concerns about this, and I'll just kind of give you a high level. You know, they're the most common protein that's used. And I'm not gonna, I'm gonna talk about pea protein in a minute. The most common protein that's used is soy protein. It's isolated hydrolyzed soy protein. And if you understand what this is and what it's made from and how it's made, you understand that it's a byproduct, a waste product of making soybean oil. So when they get soybeans, they take the oil out, which is the high priced commodity that's used from this. And we consume about 10% of our calories as soybean oil. It's an all added processed food. and it used to be hydrogenated now it's just in there and it's highly oxidized and not great for you anyway, that's the oil. But they remove the protein part and the way they do it is through a process that creates a lot of structural damage. So proteins are functional molecules that are working through the shape of the molecule. So the protein has to have a certain shape to bind to the receptor to do its job. if you screw up that protein shape by a chemical reaction process, this hydrolysis process and heat that they use to make the protein, that actually is a different entity than eating a whole soybean. So if you look at data on people who eat soy, like tofu and tempeh and traditional soy foods, they're fine. They don't cause problems. They don't cause cancer. In animal studies and lab studies, they give the mice the hydrolyzed soybean protein versus eating whole soy. The whole soy animals are great. They're protected against cancer. The animals that eat the processed soy protein, they all get cancer. So, same product in a sense, but one's a whole food and one's some extract which has been changed chemically. It's really important. Now, with pea protein, I think it's a little bit better. clearly you want to have organic pea protein, you want to hopefully have a generally raised protein, you want it not sprayed full of glyphosate and chemicals, you don't want fertilizer and herbicides and pesticides, that's not good. And then you want to make sure, you know, if you're eating it, it's made from whole soy and it's processed minimally, I mean from whole pea protein, it's processed minimally. So it can be okay, but again, you know, the general problem with vegan proteins is that you need them. In other words, you cannot get the volume of protein you need as a vegan unless you supplement with processed protein powders. And so, if you see all these guys in these movies like Game Changers, they're all jacked up and super strong, you talk to them, how do they get like that? They have to pound huge amounts of highly processed concentrated proteins, powders in order to get the enough amino acids to build muscle. Or they have to take extra amino acids such as branched-chain amino acids to jack up the leucine levels, which is very, very low in pea protein and other proteins. And leucine is the amino acid you need to generate muscle synthesis. So it's the rate limiting step. You can have all the protein you need, you could have 4,000 pounds of pea protein, but unless there's enough leucine in it, it won't get turned to muscle, which is important because protein can get turned to sugar in your body and just be a calorie that makes you gain weight or it can be turned into muscle if you have the right amount of leucine. So I really worry about a lot of these plant proteins that are low in the right amino acids unless they're supplemented. So we created something called the Pegan powder. What was it? Pegan shake. Pegan shake. And in the Pegan shake, we added leucine to up with pumpkin seed protein and bovine collagen. It was grass-fed regenerative and also with p protein that was organic. So we jacked up the Lucy in order to make sure that when you take the protein, it's not just burn his calories that is actually building muscle.

All right, Mark, great answer on the P protein. Let's go to Emma now, who has a question about acupuncture.

Hi, Dr. Hyman. I'm wondering if you could speak to the role that acupuncture might play in people's healing journey. I'm an acupuncturist and training to be a functional medicine practitioner, and I'm really interested in the overlap and how they.

Might complement each other. If you could speak to any experience you've seen with this, that would be great. Thanks so much. I actually love this question because I studied Chinese and Asian studies and theoretical foundations of Chinese medicine in college, the Huangdi Neijing, the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine. I've actually lived in China. I've had acupuncture. My sister was an acupuncturist. So, I have a lot of familiarity with this.

You still speak a little Chinese.

I still speak a little Chinese.

Jen Joe.

Show us a little something. That's okay. Jen Joe, that's how you say acupuncture in Chinese. means gold needles. And so, I actually wrote an article called Systems of Correspondence about the similarities between functional medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, which are based on the idea of a body as a system, not a bunch of different organs. And this whole concept of or Bisonography in Chinese medicine, which essentially means they talk about your spleen and your liver and your kidney. They're not actually talking about the the physical organs. We're talking about the energetic spheres of function of these different systems. And then they talk about their interpenetration and how they're dynamically connected and interacting, which is very similar to functional medicine. We have these basic biological systems and they're all interacting all the time, creating health disease. And it's about balance. So if they're out of balance, we get sick. If they're imbalanced, we're healthy. If our guts out of balance, we get sick. If our immune system's not out of balance, we get sick and so on. So basically it's very similar in its framework. language is different, the words are different, but the frameworks are very similar. It's really about understanding the balance that needs to be created to promote health. And they're both systems of health creation. So I'm super excited that you're doing this and laying over functional medicine. I think it's really great. My friend Chris Kresser is an acupuncturist, also a functional medicine doc, so he'd be an interesting one to talk to about it.

And it's a really powerful model for how to really help people. So I encourage you to follow that track. They're both systems that have a lot in common. What do you think each one of those systems could learn from each other? What could functional medicine learn more from acupuncture in its traditional sense? And what could acupuncture, and a lot of acupuncturists who don't have any training.

In functional medicine, learn from functional medicine? Yeah, and I think acupuncturists can learn a lot from functional medicine around diet and supplements and how to optimize systems to support as an adjunct of therapy the acupuncture and the work they're doing underneath it. And from functional medicine, I think There's a lot to be learned from traditional Chinese medicine about how to optimize health and how to deal with energy systems and how to move energy in the body through acupuncture and cupping, gua sha, and a lot of the modalities that really are adjunctive to what we're doing. So I always recommend acupuncture. If someone's got certain conditions that identify with functional medicine, like certain hormonal disorders, adrenal disorders, I often will recommend acupuncture. If they have structural issues or pain.

To actually help them recover, from those problems. Okay, beautiful. All right, Mark, next question is from Angie.

Hey, Dr. Hyman, I feel like my.

Passion for healthy living and healthy eating.

Keeps me from having that community that.

You and Dan Buettner talk about in your podcast. And I just wondered how you deal.

With that on your wellness journey.

So Angie, this is a big problem. You know, sometimes you need new friends. You know, it's much easier to do the right thing when all your friends are doing the same thing. if all your friends are eating cheeseburgers and fries and drinking beer and watching TV and you want to drink green juices and go to yoga class and meditate, you're going to have a problem. So sometimes we need to cultivate new communities, new friendships and go to places where there are people who have similar values, you know, hang out at Whole Foods, you know, go to yoga class, you know, join a club of people who exercise or a cooking club. just get connected with other people who care about the same things and share the same values. We know from Chris Dox's work at Harvard and he wrote a book called Connected, that you're more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than your family is overweight. In other words, if your friends are overweight, you're 171% more likely to be overweight than if your siblings are overweight, which only gives you a 40% increase. And get this, if your friend's friend is overweight and you never even met them, through the power of the social connections, you're 20% more likely to be overweight.

Crazy.

Yeah, so it's really important to build a community around you that supports and encourages you with the right behaviors. And then I feel like I've created the best life because I work with a lot of people, I've inspired a lot of people, and so I go to their homes and they all are eating food that I would like to make. And so I don't have to worry that I'm gonna have to eat junky food or they're gonna serve me bad food because they already had them brainwashed and converted. So it's the best.

Yeah, I think the other thing about it for Angie is that also when you start to shift in your life and you have new goals and you're trying to make yourself a better person and step into maybe even it's not even diet related, it could be less complaining, it could be being a more kind person giving back to the world a little bit more. One of the challenges is the people that are closest to you, they're afraid they're gonna lose you because you used to bond over a lot of the old behaviors. So if that was drinking, Well, that was a bonding exercise. If that was complaining and watching reality TV, no shade on reality TV. Sometimes there's some interesting shows that are out there. Now you're not watching that anymore because you're into more positive stuff. There's a feeling and a sense that that person is going to lose you. So have some compassion for your friends, right? Still do you at the end of the day, you have to do the right thing behind you, but have some compassion because sometimes people will poo poo your new lifestyle because they're afraid that they're going to lose you and that you're not going to have anything to bond over. And if you slowly, without judgment, start to introduce them to some of the things and activities that you're doing in a fun way. There could be a way to bring them along for the journey and not have to leave them behind and only have a whole group of new friends. All right, Mark, let's go to the next one. This question is from Coach JP.

Why do family doctors, general practitioners and specialists not prescribe more cell nutrition programs as part of their treatment plans and overall healthcare? And why do they still rely on outdated measures?

Like BMI.

So, your question, it makes me smile because it's why do doctors not recommend nutrition as part of their treatment plans? And why do they rely on outdated metrics for health like body mass index or BMI? They're kind of unrelated but similar questions. The reason the doctors don't recommend nutrition.

As part of their treatment plan is very, very simple.

We don't get taught anything about it. In fact, we get taught the opposite, that food has nothing to do with health. If you eat too much and exercise not enough, you're gonna get fat, but otherwise there's not much to it. And if you eat too much saturated fat, you might get high cholesterol and that's it. But basically we're nutritionally illiterate as physicians. Doctors have no curriculum in medical school for the most part. I think less than 25% of medical schools have the minimum required hours and of those hours, most of those hours are about outdated science that has to do with nutritional deficiency diseases or malnutrition, like kwashiorkor, marasmus, rickets, sarcoid, thalassemia, you know, pellagra, berry-berry, I learned all this stuff in medical school, which I've never seen in my entire life. You know, it's like, I mean, I actually saw a little bit of when I was in Haiti actually with the malnutrition. So I did see a little bit of that, but, you know, it's such a rare thing. and yet doctors don't get taught about how food plays a role in chronic disease to cause it, or conversely how food is the most powerful tool we have to cure chronic disease. So doctors know nothing about it, and that's the problem. And we have a system that doesn't train doctors, and then the problem with the training is that since it's not in the curriculum, it's not on the test. And if it's not on the test, it's not in the curriculum. So the best way to change nutrition education overnight would be for the government to require 10% of the questions on medical licensing exams to be about nutrition around chronic disease. That would change everything. And the other part is that doctors aren't paid to give nutrition advice.

No reimbursement.

No reimbursement.

Or very little.

I mean, there was a program started in New York City about education for diabetes. They had 800,000 diabetics and they create a program where they gave them free nutrition consults, and did all this support. And it was extremely successful. Diabetes was going down, complications, surgeries, admissions to hospital, medication use was saving huge amounts of money, developed her system, but the hospital had to shut it down because they were losing money because they weren't doing amputations and all kinds of stuff. So they'd make like a hundred bucks on a nutrition consult, but they'd make 6,000 if they had to take off somebody's toe. so the whole economic incentives were so corrupt that it led to the closing of this program that was actually very successful. We know that in the Geisinger study we've talked about on this podcast that in the Geisinger health system, they gave food insecure diabetics $2,400 worth of food a year and some social support, and they saved 80% healthcare costs from basically $248,000 a person a year.

You said 248,000.

I did say 248,000. That's how much they spent on each person. On each person. And they saved $192,000 per patient. Wow. And so that's an 80% reduction in costs. And yet, even though they would save $192,000, they wouldn't spend $2,400 because education is not covered. So we have a very corrupt system with perverse financial incentives. As far as the BMI issue, BMI means body mass index and it's basically a way to equalize height and weight. So basically, if you have a high BMI, it means you're overweight. But it doesn't really accurately describe if you're over fat or under lean. So you could be a 65-year-old woman who's 30 or 40% body fat, but they look skinny. They're what we call skinny fat. because they've lost muscle and accumulated fat and their metabolic health is the same as someone who's obese. On the other hand, you can have someone like Shaquille O'Neal who has extremely high body mass index that would be considered obese, but he's got huge amounts of muscle mass, and he's a big dude. So, he's got the extra weight, but it's not fat. And so, we need to look at body composition and waist to hip ratio as a much better predictor of your cardiovascular and metabolic risks, which is basically a super cheap test. You just take a tape measure and you put it around your belly button and then you put it around the widest part of your hips and you just divide your waist under your hips. And if your number is less than 0.8 as a woman or less than 0.9 as a man, you're okay. If it's more than that, you're in trouble. And then if you want to do body composition, there are scales you can get and there's cheaper versions. There's also a true DEXA body composition, which looks at the distribution of fat. That's my favorite, because you can tell where it is. And people that have skinny arms and legs, so if you do a caliper test, it might be fine, but then you do their DEXA scan, you see huge amounts of visceral fat or belly.

Fat, which is the organ fat that's so dangerous that kills us all.

Awesome.

All right, Mark, next question from Patty on the High OH app. Good morning, Dr. Hyman. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about Armour thyroid and Do you ever use it to treat any of your patients? Yeah, hi Patty.

Well, I'm with thyroid. Let's talk about thyroid. And if you're interested in my thoughts about thyroid, I wrote years ago, which I think is still very up to date, a little ebook called the Ultra Thyroid Report. And I did talk about how to pick thyroid hormones and so forth. But, you know, when your thyroid is off, you need to find out why. So not everybody who has an off thyroid needs to take thyroid medication. It could be eating gluten, it could be heavy metals, it could be other toxins. could be nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D, selenium, zinc, really important nutrients that the body needs to iodine to run thyroid function. So you gotta make sure all that's right. But if you do need thyroid hormones, it's important to look at the right tests and do the right treatment. Most doctors will only look at the test called TSH. If that's normal, they don't look any further. However, that can be normal and you can still be low functioning in your thyroid. and the normal range is not the optimal range. So the normal range is 0.5 to 5. But the American College of Endocrinology said, well, if it's over 3, it's a problem. And the higher the TSH, it means the lower your thyroid function, because the TSH is from your brain, basically your pituitary telling your thyroid to make more thyroid. So if it's high, it means your body thinks you need more thyroid. But That again isn't enough. You need to check the thyroid hormone levels, T4 and T3 and the free levels, which most doctors don't do. And you need to check the thyroid antibodies to see if you have an autoimmune condition. So all that needs to get done up front. And then you need to make sure your vitamin D level is okay, selenium is okay, iodine is okay, zinc is okay. Take your amount of fish oil, make sure you're not taking things that scrub thyroid toxins, environmental toxins, gluten, pesticides, all that stuff is in my UltraThyroid report. then if you're deciding on thyroid replacement, most commonly doctors will give Synthroid or T4 or Levothyroxine. These are helpful, but they're limited in their effect because most people have trouble converting T4 to T3. And so you're giving a preformed hormone, I mean a precursor hormone that isn't the active hormone. So if you're taking synthroid, where you're taking levothyroxine, which are all the same, that's T4, that has to get converted by an enzyme called 5 prime deiodinase, which takes off an iodine molecule, that's why it's T3, and then that has to work on the cells to create the effects of thyroid. That works on the nucleus of your cells and your metabolism and everything else. If you don't have enough selenium, for example, or you have something that interferes with the conversion, or you don't have enough zinc, or you don't have Omega-3s, or you have environmental toxins, or you have yeast, that will all interfere with that conversion. And so you think you're taking a good amount of thyroid and you might still be symptomatic. And then if you don't check your free T3, you don't know what's happening. So your T4 could look okay, your TSH could look okay, but if your free T3 is low, that's a problem. So Armour thyroid is basically bovine, sorry, is porcine thyroid. Now historically when we started to make hormones, we would grind up the gland and then we'd give it to people. So we would grind up adrenals glands as steroids. We'd grind up the thyroid gland and give it as a thyroid replacement. And that's essentially what Armour thyroid is. It's ground up pig thyroid, which is exactly the same as our thyroid. And the beautiful thing about it is it contains T4 and T3 and T2 and a whole complex of other things that seems to work better for most people. so I do recommend it for most people. Some people say, oh, you can take Synthroid plus Cytomel, which is T3. Yes, but the Cytomel is very quick-acting and cause a lot of side effects, not that great in older people because it gets too stimulating and cause more bone loss. So I like Armour Thyroid or Nature Thyroid or the, what we call the desiccated porcine thyroids. And those are much better. And I think for most people, they do better on them and their symptoms get better. And often doctors will say, well, your tests are fine, you're okay, your levels are good, so you must be fine. and you say, well, I still have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They go, oh, it's fine. It must be something else. No, it means you're not adequately treated.

So it's important to get adequately treated and be on the right thyroid. That was a great answer, Mark. Very thorough on the thyroid. All right, a couple more questions here to wrap up today's episode.

This one is from Lisa, who is a fan and a follower of your work and has had some tremendous success so far. Hi, Dr. Hyman. I read your book, Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? at the beginning of the pandemic. and since then I've lost 25 pounds, but I still need to lose those last five pounds for optimal health. Help.

Well, Lisa, thank God you followed the program and you lost 25 pounds. Good for you. That's amazing. That's not easy. And often those last five to 10 pounds can be super stubborn. And, you know, often say you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet, but if you're stuck, you need to shift your metabolism because what happens as you lose weight is you lose muscle and fat. And so the more weight you lose, you actually end up slowing your metabolism unless you build muscle at the same time and you increase your aerobic fitness. And lastly, when you start to lose weight, your metabolism can get interfered with because in our fat tissue is stored a lot of environmental toxins and we're all toxic waste dumps. and those toxins interfere with our metabolism. They're called obesogens and they screw up our biochemistry and make us hold on to weight.

So a couple of things.

One, take another look at your diet. If you're struggling, go back to a more extreme approach, which would I would say the Tendi detox diet, which essentially is getting rid of grains, beans, sugar, alcohol, flour, starchy veggies, and just protein veggies, nuts, seeds, a few berries, that's it. That can often take you over to where you want to be. Second, start a strength training program because that will help. I like TB12, which you can do at home. It's with bands. It's inexpensive. You can do it by the app. It's super easy. Third is cardio, and that can be bursts of short intensity exercise. So do sprints for 20-30 minutes. You do sprint for 30-45 seconds a minute, slow down, walk for three seconds. Three minutes and then do the same thing until you're done for a half an hour. That will speed up your metabolism. That'll help you lose their extra weight. And if you watch out for those things that you're doing that maybe on the edge, like you're kind of cheating a little bit and go back to.

Like the 10 day detox diet, I think you'll drop the weight.

That's great.

I'll add in one more other thing is that often when you hear people talk about those last five to 10 pounds, they have a number in their head that they're trying to get to. And that number could be, this is what I used to weigh before. This is what I used to weigh in college. And not saying anything arbitrary. If people want to lose weight, they want to lose weight. There could be a lot of different motivations and reasons behind and do all those things, do all those recommendations and sometimes step into the fact of like you made so much progress, you've done so well and do not wait. And I'm not saying that I got this from her message or not, but I often see this, do not wait for those last five to 10 pounds before you say, now I'm going to enjoy life. Enjoy your life, live it, have fun, do all the things that you thought that you're going to do once you hit your ideal weight. Just do them now and start to bring more joy and less stress into your life around whatever those pounds are. Then they get lost, great. They don't get lost, you still are enjoying life and can still make progress. So it's both. It's not either or, it's the mindset piece with all the recommendations that are being brought in. For sure. So Mark, our last question here is from Victoria and she's been struggling with chronic pain and is confused about where to go next.

Hi, I'm 28 years old and I've been struggling with chronic pain for the past 10 years. I've done all the possible tests, I have no inflammatory markers in my body and I've been diagnosed with chronic Chronic pain syndrome, which doesn't leave me with any solution. I would love your insights on chronic pain.

Well, Victoria, chronic pain is a real thing. And it's a huge burden on our society. It causes so much suffering, disability, and there really aren't great solutions. A lot of the drugs are addictive or they have side effects. And unfortunately, our current medical approach is pretty backwards about it. However, it's important to think about a broader approach. And I'll just share a couple of thoughts with you. A lot of pain has to do with our minds. So there's pain and there's suffering. Pain is a physical sensation. The suffering is the meaning we give to that sensation. So if you're in a cold plunge, you could be thinking, this is the best thing for me. It's rejuvenating my health and making me great. Or you could think, this is cold as F and I'm like gonna die and want to get the heck out of here, right? So it's all about your approach and meaning to that you give to the experience. That said, I've been in chronic pain. I've had chronic pain for 30 years. I get it. And I don't know where your pain is or what it is, but if it's a structural problem, if it's a structural back problem or neck problem, you know, there are all kinds of modalities that can help. obviously things like chiropractic or osteopathic medicine, massage, acupuncture and so forth, all are helpful. But there's a whole new field of regenerative medicine, which is really what saved me plus exercise. And regenerative medicine uses different modalities to help deal with the source of the pain, whether it's using exosomes, placental matrix, ozone, peptides, all these things that are kind of outside the normal practice of medicine, they can be very, very helpful. In fact, ozone is relatively inexpensive and can be great depending where the pain is, if it's a knee or arthritis or something. On the other hand, there's a colleague of mine named Ari Roka who works at the VA in Little Rock, Arkansas. And the Veterans Administration is a lot of people who are soldiers, veterans who suffer from severe pain and chronic pain. And he's had remarkable success by changing the environment and the inputs to the patient. The first thing they do is put people through a coaching program to really become more aware of how they can become more actualized humans, how they can essentially deal with becoming the center of their own lives and have agency over themselves, which a lot of people don't feel in that situation. It's really coaching and helping them understand what their choices are, their patterns, their behaviors, their habits, so they can start to shift those. The second is an immersion program of a lifestyle change program. So it's changing the foods they're eating to be anti-inflammatory. It's gentle exercise, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, very simple practices that are profound and effective. And what he found was that most of the people who go through this that have been chronic patients for years and years and years get better. So at the end of the program, they're pain free or their life isn't impaired by the pain. that's huge when you think about it. So it's both dealing with whatever structural physical things there are as well as dealing with the mindset and the approach. And third is creating a different biological environment in which inflammation doesn't have a place to kind of flourish. So that's why, you know, the dietary part is so important, anti-inflammatory diet. The right nutrients can be really important, whether it's fish oil or magnesium or other things can be helpful with pain. and then of course movement and meditation and mindfulness all work. And John Kabat-Zinn has done a lot of research on this, on the mindfulness-based stress reduction program. And that is a very well researched program that again shows dramatic reductions in pain just through simply meditating. So there's a lot of ways through. You don't have to suffer. And I think our current approach has been pretty backward, but using some of these modalities and approaches can make a big difference.

You and I are now in a few two others are now moving into, you know, sort of generating this field of complexity. And I think historically it was ignored because people said, it's food. Yeah.

Right.

What the hell could it possibly do? Right.

And now, now it's the most powerful drug on the planet.

It's the most powerful drug, but it's very complicated and the response is very complicated. So now it's probably the one of the most complicated fields in medicine.

Right.

Because the food is thousands and thousands of components and the body's got thousands and thousands of genes and now all these join, you know, get together. This is where nutrigenomics, nutrigenomics, the word comes from. It's like what the hell happens when all these happen?

When you think about it, you've got 20,000 genes but about 5 million variations in those genes, all affected by food. You've got, you know, the microbiome which is a hundred times as many genes as our own genes, which is another two million genes that get affected. And, you've got the chemical reactions in the body that happen every second. And, most people don't know that there's 37 billion billion, that's 21 zeros, chemical reactions in the body every second, all of which interact with food. So, that's just mind-boggling. How do you even do the math on those numbers of what's actually happening instead of a single pathway, a single drug? and that's the beauty of food and why it's so effective. And I want to dig into this complexity a little bit with you because the protein issue and the protein story is fascinating. In your models, there's a gene that gets activated or pathway that gets activated called mTOR. And this pathway seems to be activated through protein and it seems to accelerate aging.

When you're older, you need more protein.

Like Emma Morano, she had 150 grams of raw meat. Why didn't that make her age faster if the protein activates mTOR?

Yeah. So it's actually what we call axis. And the axis is multiple pathways joined together. So it starts with growth hormone releasing hormone, growth hormone, IGF-1, AKT, TOR, or possibly TOR without AKT. So there's a whole series of genes that are involved. And what happens is during aging they go down naturally. So if you're 25 years old, IGF-1 is going to be very high. If you're 90 years old, IGF-1 is going to be naturally very low. So what we showed in the paper a few years ago is that if you put an adult younger than 50 on a high protein, mid protein, low protein diet, IGF-1 and as a consequence TOR are gonna be associated with the level of proteins, okay? So high protein, high IGF-1, high TOR, low protein, low IGF-1, low TOR. If you look at a 65 and older person, you no longer saw any significant difference.

Really?

Either high or low protein, there was no change in the mTOR or the.

Mtor trend, but no significant difference. I mean, overall, you cannot say that there is a change. no matter how much protein you eat.

So stay away from a lot of meat when you're younger, but once you hit 65, you can have the grass-fed steak, is that it?

That's what a journalist will say. And that's exactly what journalists say, at least some of them.

No.

So the idea would be that as you get older and older, you can measure your IGF-1. And let's say that you're 72 and your IGF-1 is 280, you should lower your protein.

That's a measure of growth hormone.

Yeah, in a sense. Insulin-like growth factor one, right? So the one that they're circulating is pretty stable, right? So it stays stable in the blood. So it's better than measuring growth hormone because growth hormone is volatile and it's very hard to follow. But IGF-1 now, most clinics can cheaply measure it. And so if somebody's 72 and has got 280 IGF-1, they're eating too much protein.

Yeah.

And so you can still knock it down. And these people are at risk for multiple Prostate.

Where should you be?

You should be, we see the ideal level 140. 140 seems to be ideal, whether you're young or old. Now it could be very old that may not be that easy to keep 140, but in general in the adult population 140 seems to be ideal.

But exercise increases that, right?

No, exercise does not have a big effect on IGF-1, either way, either up or down.

Fascinating.

So in, in the, in the research, you, you're really talking about some really interesting things like Alzheimer's. So how would this approach benefit Alzheimer's?

Yeah.

So a few years ago, we published on the first paper on how just the essential amino acids. So if we took mice, they had, they were, they had mutation, human mutation to develop Alzheimer's. So all these mice develop Alzheimer-like like symptoms. They become cognitively impaired. They don't learn anymore and they do very poorly.

So they're mice that can't find the cheese.

Exactly. And so if we alternated this, if we affected IGF-1, this growth factor, and we make it go up and down by controlling just the essential amino acids, so these are the ones that you need to have. to have a normal function, right? The ones that people are building blocks.

Of protein, the amino acids.

Yeah, let's say we'll just simplify by saying, let's say we have the high protein, no protein diet, alternating. High protein, no protein, high protein. And we saw that this was sufficient to reduce their cognitive impairment and to keep them protected for longer as they were getting older. So now we're doing both multiple mouse studies and a human clinical trial in Europe. A USC multiple mouse studies with two different Alzheimer model. One is called triple transgenic model. It has three different mutations that promote Alzheimer early Alzheimer in, in humans. And then we're doing another mouse model, so EPOE mouse model for Alzheimer. And yeah, so we'll see, but our hope is that because the fasting mimicking diet, the revolution, and by the way, the Alzheimer one is a very special one where we do it only once every two months because we're worried about frailty and we're worried about muscle loss. So we do it every two months and we give them for 55 days, actually for all the days of the month, we give them a ketogenic supplement. so we're pushing the ketogenic state and we want to ensure that they don't lose weight, but we also want to give them the benefits of the extra ketogenic chronic push.

Yeah.

So which is important because, you know, when brains are damaged with Alzheimer's, that basically it's like type three diabetes in the brain, and it can't utilize glucose or sugar as well, but it can utilize fat or ketones, which is why you see patients.

And the studies show, and I've had.

My own personal patients significantly improve when they have cognitive decline when you put them on a ketogenic diet.

Yeah, yeah. The problem that we saw in the early approaches was the frailty. So if you take an 85-year-old and you put them on a ketogenic diet, you might end up seeing them pass out the day after, right?

So, well, you need to get enough fluid and salt.

Yeah, so it's tricky. So we're thinking about, as you get it out there as a treatment for everybody, I mean, not everybody has Mark Hyman following them, right? So, yeah, in that case, I think you can experiment much more on things that are more extreme. And I'm not saying, I think eventually, I mean, there is already studies that have been published on ketogenic diet and Alzheimer's, and I think eventually there's going to be ways to do it that are safe. The question is, how long can you keep a patient on that diet? and how frail are they gonna be after, you know, two or three months on that diet?

So those are, I mean, those diets increase muscle mass, increase body fat, all right? They activate less.

Yeah, the question is, if you took, say, 200, 85 year olds, and this is gonna be really what you're looking at, or 80 year olds, and then you put them on this ketogenic diet, how many problems are you gonna see? And is it possible that if you just do a much lower ketogenic and maybe alternate it with the FMD every two months, you get the same effects. I don't know, maybe not. Maybe you need to put them on a 90% fat diet. And so, I mean, those are the things that need to be determined. I was always very afraid, and I know the neurologists in Europe and in the USC were very afraid to take people with close monitoring and put them on putting them on, say, 90 fat diet, revolutionize their diet, because they're all were saying, not with my patients. So, you know, there's the same war that we had. I mean, listen, by the time someone's.

Got Alzheimer's, they're going downhill.

It's a desperate time. And doing desperate interventions sometimes you can have amazing results.

Yeah, we were in the same choir, right? We're in the same choir. But, I mean, when we first did this with cancer patients, It was a war. I'm talking screaming wars with oncologists.

Because they tell them, oh, eat pasta.

And eat tons of ice cream and have cake.

We just published in Nature Reviews. We just published in Nature Reviews Cancer. And immediately after the publication, the complaint from the nutritionists in cancer centers.

Oh, yeah.

And the complaint was official and said, well, but in the standards in the European Association of Nutritionists and Dieticians says this at least 1.2 grams of protein per day should be between 1.2 and 2 and on and on and on. And we responded and we said, look, if you look at the days where chemotherapy was first approved, chemotherapy did tremendous damage. Forget the restriction of protein and restriction of fat. It did incredible damage and even killed a lot of people, you know, Dr. Rubinstein, for example, severe cardiotoxicity. and we approved it. Why? Because, you know, everybody agreed that it was worth to have some side effects, even they could be deadly, potentially deadly, which is not the case for the diet. And everybody agreed. And nobody, you don't hear any oncologist complaining about chemotherapy. I say, why are you now saying that we're not allowed to even test? And we, the words we had used was potentially promising. they attacked the potentially promising, officially with a letter to Nature reviews.

-Unbelievable.

-Potentially promising intervention. What we were trying to do is stimulate clinical trials, and they managed to go after it. And so this is the world we live in.

Yeah, it's called, you know, there's a great book called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, where he talks about the idea of normal science. The normal conceptions and views and theories are very hard to overturn, because people are stuck on their old way of thinking and when someone comes out with a radical idea like you are, I'm sure you get a lot of attacks.

Yeah, and so I'm saying for the neurologist, exactly the same, right? But we already knew we had learned from the oncologist. So we came in very careful, we don't want to get in worse. Let's try to get in there with real data, mouse data, human data, let's collect preliminary and then say, look, they're fine. So now with the ketogenic, let's push this 400 calories a day, I think it is, and see what happens. If they're fine, then we maybe we push it to 800 calories a day and combine it with the FMD. So, but then we'll see the results of other trials that are being done on Alzheimer's and lots of groups are doing that. And then we decide.

I think it's a good way to do it. This is a radical change in our thinking about medicine, which is that we can treat the underlying mechanisms of diseases that are all linked together through a simple common pathway, which is food and certain types of eating that actually activate all these healing pathways.

One thing I want to come back.

To though is the idea that carbohydrates are good or bad. And I think this is a debate out there now that's really on fire, whether it's ketogenic or, you know, the high carb vegan community. And there's just complete polar opposite views.

You know, I follow the work of.

A guy named David Ludwig who's a professor at Harvard who's done a lot of work on insulin and the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis and of course has been attacked for it. But he did a fascinating study looking at, it was a $12 million study, it was a feeding study where they gave everybody the food for a period of time and they looked at what happened to their metabolism and they found that they gave them a 60% fat diet. It wasn't a high protein, it was 60% fat. 6-0. 6-0 or 60% carbs. and then the protein was like 20% and the rest was switching over carbs and fat. And they found that the ones who had the high fat diet had much faster metabolisms. In other words, they burned an extra 250 calories a day. And if they were insulin resistant, they burned an extra 400 calories or 450 calories a day.

And that would lead me to believe.

That the carbohydrates that we're eating are stimulating insulin which is really, I think one of the main drivers of aging is activating insulin and activating all the inflammatory pathways that go with it and the insulin resistance in the brain and cancer and insulin resistance and heart disease and insulin resistance. How do you kind of explain that?

Because it just, the data seems all over the place. No, no, it's not. It's not. The data seems all over the place until you look at all the pillars, right? And the pillars again, epidemiology, clinical studies, basic research, studies of centenarians. And so, for example, if you look at the work by Simpson in Australia, take mice, and you give it exactly what you said, a high fat or a high carb diet. And if you give it a high fat diet, they start losing weight. They look great for a little bit, and then they die earlier than the other mice, right?

So you look good, but you die.

You look good. You look good, and then you die early.

I'm like, six percent body fat. Now, what am I gonna do?

Yeah.

No, no, this is not to do with.

We're gonna have some pasta tonight.

The body fat, you're gonna have lower with high fat diet. Yeah, well, I guess that's your point.

Yeah.

My muscle mass is increased, my body fat's down. That seems like a good thing when it comes to Aging.

Well, you know, it is and is not. Right. So. So I. I think that they're probably, for example. fat stores a lot of the stem cells, right? And to the point that a lot of the stem cells for treatment are taken from fat. So what don't we know about these organs? Fat also protects organs from stress and from movement. And so there is all kinds of things that could happen not in somebody your age, but let's say, you know, 70, 75, 80, Right? So what about that fat? Is it hurting them or is it helping them? Even in the mice, the mice that respond the worst to calorie restriction. Earlier you mentioned calorie restriction and the extension lifespan. Actually it turns out that a third of the mice live longer on calorie restriction, a third of the mice have neutral effects, and a third of the mice live shorter.

Really?

And guess which one live the shortest? The one that have the lowest fat storage capability. so it's tricky, right? On one side you can have central adiposity, the visceral fat driving and the liver fat driving lots of diseases. And inflammation. On the other side, potentially subcutaneous fat and other forms of fat, this could be helping an individual, an animal, live longer.

That's true, but the carbohydrate load, particularly.

Starch and sugar, not vegetable carbohydrates, which.

Are all agree are good, those drive.

Visceral fat or belly fat.

Yeah, so there is no doubt, there is no doubt that when the carbohydrate, the starches and the sugars, right, let's say, or the carbohydrate in general, but, you know, because also the fruits, right, fruits, people talk about fruits, this is like some great food, but a fruit is packed with sugar and some of them packed with fructose. And so, There is no doubt that that eventually are going to cause a problem. There is no doubt. So the question is, when is that eventually? So for the centenarians of Okinawa, they used to eat 70% of their calories from sweet potatoes, purple potatoes. They never reached that eventually because they were fairly active. They didn't overeat. These Okinawans are pretty behaved. Exactly. Get up when you say, and the Italians, you know, lots of these little villages that have super longevity, including Molochio, you in the old days, lots of these centenarians, they're not obese, you know, they may be a little bit overweight. Now their sons and grandsons and granddaughters, you're starting to see much bigger obesity problem. So now they went from a great use of the carbohydrate to a poor use of the carbohydrate and absolutely, once you make that switch and you have lots of pasta, bread, pizza, etc.

Etc.

Rice, then I think you're now generating a much bigger problem. That's when I think the ketogenic diet, the low carb, now becomes beneficial. The question is, how long should you keep it? Keep that? And maybe that you keep it until you, you reset and then you learn how to behave and you don't do yo-yo either, right? Because that seems to be bad too. back and forth. So you just maybe have one or two shots, right? Use the ketogenic diet to go to get to the longevity diet, right? Use the ketogenic diet, get there because it's probably, and I'm becoming convinced that for people that have real problems, maybe that's the only way. But then move to a more long-term longevity diet, which is fairly high carb of the good kind, only of the as much as possible the good kind. So I saw, you know, tons of vegetable and legumes, and much little, say in the ideal dish is to me 50 grams of pasta and 500 grams of legumes and vegetables. I mean nobody eats like this anymore, but everybody used to eat like that 60-70 years ago, right? So I'm just saying if everybody could do it, we can go back to it. And they did not have insulin resistance.

No.

They did not have, they had these people in Okinawa and Italian towns zero.

Cardiovascular disease, food and they weren't exposed to toxins. They were not exposed to, they weren't.

Had the chronic stress we have.

Yeah, exactly. But I don't think that, I think going back to their diet is not gonna, so I don't think that by being low carb you're gonna counterbalance more the other problems that we have now, right? So I think that, you know, whether it's low carb or high carb, you know, we have to see. But certainly, if it's a vegan pescatarian diet and it's high carb of the legume and vegetable kind, seems to be very, very good. Now, the question is, what if it was low carb vegan pescatarian? Some data suggests could even be better, right? But some data suggests could be worse. So it's really tricky still.

Yeah. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. So cereal is basically 75 sugar and it shouldn't be called breakfast, it should be called dessert. Not only that, what else do people eat for breakfast? They have their frappuccino, lattes with a million calories of sugar in there. I think the average large, you know.