The 7 KEY SIGNS You're NOT HEALTHY In Life! | Mark Hyman

Doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food. Oh my God. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food. And they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. That's what I, food is the most powerful drug on the planet. What I realize is that, you know, I think many people who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic. So if you're, for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're diabetic, which affects a lot a lot of people. I talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book, which is as a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant, like someone who's gluten intolerant. That means that they eat a lot of starch, that they have like two cups of rice, even have this brown rice or two cups of beans, it can adversely affect their sugar. So I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains and non-gluten grains in particular because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine, but not in large amounts. And then I think, you know, meat is a big, is the big issue, right? The meat is the big issue. So should we be eating meat? We just, we were just had dinner the other night.

Right.

We both had meat, right?

We had fish.

We had fish. Black cod. Yes. Which was awesome. I had a mahi-mahi. You had a black cod, is that what it was?

Yeah, I had the black cod.

Yeah, I had the black cod. The guy next to me had meatballs.

Yeah.

Got next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so, so the issues around meat also, I think are, everybody agrees and fish, everybody agrees that if, if anybody eats meat, It should be humanely raised, it should be sustainably raised, it should be grass-fed, it should be not harming the environment. The ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are big and they're real. I have many Buddhist patients. I have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot who's a diabetic and he's never going to eat an animal. So I need to help him understand how to never eat an egg, how to eat a high, higher fat protein diet which is low glycemic. so we can do that. Okay. Right. So more nuts and seeds, you know, less rice, more beans, you know, just there's strategies for doing that.

Sure.

And he did great. He lost 35 pounds, reversed his diabetes, and now I have like tons of bun people, you know, praying for me. That's great.

Yeah.

And then the meat thing is tricky because, you know, it's also an environmental risk if you're eating factory farmed animals. There's antibiotics in that. and is runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers that damages our water supply and rivers and lakes. There's climate change that happens from the methane produced. It's more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide. There's high energy use. One-fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption. Our water is being used up at incredible rates for feeding animals There's basically, I think 70% of all water use and there's basically only 5% of the world's surface is fresh water. Usable, right? It's fresh water, right? 1% is in Russia.

Wow.

And at least 4% for the rest of us. And 70% of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption. So there's real environmental issues. Sure. So I think, you know, a factory farming just should be not supported in any way and we need to change that. And that means we need to change our patterns of consumption around meat. We need to downsize our meat consumption. I call it having condiment.

Condiment.

Condiment. As opposed to like a condiment? Like condiment. It should be a side dish or a dressing if you're going to eat it. And I think, not a full plate of steak, you mean? You know, I think there's three issues with me, right? There's environmental issues, there's moral issues, and there's health issues. So we kind of talked about the moral. I think that's people are entitled to their beliefs and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy. The environmental issues are real. I think everybody would agree whether they're paleo vegan that we need to stop harming the environment. And I think even if you're not paleo vegan, everybody really believes that. In fact, the dietary advisory committee that was advising the government said we should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact. Now, if you have grass-fed meat, if you have sustainably raised meat, it's not as abundant, you can't produce as much, and so we all have to eat less of it. It's more expensive. But that's okay. And I think that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature and I did this in Eat Fat Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Because I was, I'm like, well, I don't know. I want to know for yourself, too. Yeah, I'm recommending to my patients, I'm a human, too, and I want to live a long time, and I don't want to be doing something stupid.

Yeah.

So I wanted to find out what does the science tell us about meat? So you did all the research. So I looked at all the research and I wrote 8,000 words in the book on meat.

Wow.

There's a lot of research in there. And I address all these issues, you know, environmental, moral, and the health issues were quite interesting. You know, when we look at the studies on meat and anybody can quote anything saying anything, right?

Right.

So you want the paleo people like a meat's healthy, here's all the research. And the vegan, like, meat's gonna kill you. Here's all the research. So it's like, and then you're at the average Joe, you're totally confused. And your average doctor, you're totally confused because we get no training in nutrition. And they haven't done the research themselves. So they're going off of their opinion or their theory. Yeah, they're like average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science. They don't know because it's not what we learn, right? I mean, I just am at Cleveland Clinic and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school. They had this integrated in, which is so great. And I helped Team Ryan, who's a congressman from Ohio, introduce him. He loves Tim. Has he been on your show? He's been on here, yeah. introduce a bill called the Enrich Act, which was a bill that is funding $15 million to fund nutrition in medical schools. Nutrition education for doctors. That's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time, I feel like could heal a lot of their patients with food.

Oh my God.

Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food and they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. That's what I food is the most powerful drug on the planet. I mean, that's why last week I was in Cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking class. Like that's what doctors should be doing. That's how I'm gonna get back to medicine. That's real medicine. Now, just a quick side note. What is your involvement with, what is functional medicine and what is your involvement at the Cleveland Clinic? Can I finish my meat? Yes, go ahead. I was still rolling on the meat. I was talking about functional medicine. Then we'll talk about Cleveland Clinic. Perfect, perfect. Because people wanna know, like they're like, well, what about meat? They're like probably listening. Let's do it. So the science, 8,000 words. I'm not going to give you 8,000 words. I'll give you a few hundred. Perfect. So the science of meat was fascinating. So when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, here's what they were. They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people, followed them, and then they asked questions of them. What did you eat last year? What did you eat last week? What did you eat last month? And they basically do these food frequency questionnaires, and then they correlate that with the risk of disease. And I try to control for all the confounding factors, but it's very tough. So the people who ate meat, yeah, they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death. But what else was... They were smoking, they were drinking, they were sleeping. Exactly, exactly. So if you look at the data, they ate 800 more calories a day. They almost eat no fruits and vegetables. Tons of sugar. They had tons of sugar and processed food, lots of fried foods, drank more, smoked more, didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals. Well, guess what? They weren't as healthy as the other people. So most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few this study, they were interesting. I found one was a study of 11, 000 people who shopped at health food stores. And they found there were, like, a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. Like, so who are the people who are, you know, like healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat or who? Because most of these studies were not on grass-fed meat either. They were on Factory Farm meat.

Right.

So then again, how do you generalize that? Sure. But then there were these 11, 000 people, and they filed them for many years, and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes. Exactly the same. So if you're a meat eater who basically eats a healthy diet and has grass-fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian, no difference in that. And you have a healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle, then there's no difference. So there's other factors like how it affects your gut flora and so on. And I think, you know, those are more complicated issues. I address all of them in the book, but at the end of the day, I think it's okay if you have no moral issues and you can eat sustainably raised meat and not in great quantities. and as part of your diet, I think it's okay.

Yeah.

Bottom line. So what does your daily diet look like? Oh, gosh. Doctor himself. So today I had, I was, I had a, I had a protein shake because I went to this friend of mine's company called Essential Foods, Living Foods, and he had this, it was like a hemp, coconut, chia, moringa, like coconut cream, like protein powder with lots of, yeah. And I had a couple of that with a spoon of coconut butter for fat, an almond butter for fat, and blended that up. That was my breakfast. And then lunch was a big salad with lots of avocado, olive oil, and some wild salmon, which has fat. And dinner I haven't had yet. So, awesome. And dinner I'll usually have, you know, a small piece of protein, and like I'll put 75% of my vegetable plate as vegetables. Really? So if I go out to eat, I'll order like three sides of vegetables, right? And if you look at your plate, by volume, 70 or 80% of your diet should be plant foods and non-starchy veggies, right? Potatoes.

Right.

And by calories, it should be 50 to 60% fat. But fat doesn't take up a lot of space, so you can get a lot of calories in a little space and still eat, like if you put a lot of olive oil on your thing or eat coconut butter, so you don't have to worry about it. You just have to eat. The trick is I don't worry about how much I eat, I just worry about what I eat. And I make sure I have stuff. I know that I'm going to be here and I know how long I was going to be, so I always bring stuff in my pocket. Almond butter. So I just have a pocket. I know I'm never going to be in a food emergency, so I'm not going to have to eat something crappy. And I think, I eat very little grains, very little beans. I do eat them. I eat mostly vegetables and some low glycemic fruit, and I eat lots of nuts and seeds. and I eat good quality fish and animal protein. What's low glycemic fruit? What does that include? So I'm not eating like tons of pineapple and grapes and those are sugary things. And I eat like berries and I eat mostly berries and then I'll eat like an apples or pears sometimes. Or kiwis or grapefruit or mangoes or papaya, things like that. Nice, okay. So let's go back to functional medicine. What does that actually mean? So functional medicine is- Compared to regular medicine. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I don't know if people listening really have a great understanding of like what's happening right now in science, but it's profound. The shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is, it's like Columbus going, Hey, the Earth isn't flat. Right now, the last few years. It's just like the last decade or two with our understanding of the human genome, of systems biology, of the body as a biological network, as a system, it's like an ecosystem where everything's connected, working together. And so, the way we organize medicine is according to these organs. You've got your cardiovascular system, your neurologic system, your GI system, and so you go to all these specialists. And everybody treats their part of your body. If you have a migraine, we're actually learning that it might be related to gut flora. Or if you have heart attack, I mean now we know that you might be getting cancer because of your gut bacteria. Well, no oncologist is asking you what what's going on in your gut microbiome. And so now we know, for example, like the microbiome is a great example of this disruption that's happening in healthcare. You know, the microbiome, which is your gut floor, it's really, it's like 10 times as many cells as your own cells. It's a hundred times as much DNA as your own DNA. So we're kind of lazy. We have about as much DNA as an earthworm. Okay. But we borrow the DNA of the microbes in our gut to do things for us. We borrow things from plants to do things from us, like, for example, glucosinolates. So the microbiome is this huge thing that's got two to three million genes. We only have 20,000 genes. And it regulates your weight. You can swap out poop from a thin person into someone with diabetes and reverse it. Amazing. We've seen people—I've heard stories of fecal transplants, not only curing things like that, but autoimmune diseases. Really? Parkinson's and people with MS and like crazy stories that I'm sorry to hear. And there's research now going on aggressively in looking at fecal transplants for all sorts of diseases. It's transferring poop from one person to another.

Yes.

How do you do that? How does that process? Well, they collect the poop. There's actually a- I've never heard of this. Yeah, you've never heard of this. Never heard of this. Oh my god, this is huge. What is it called? Fecal transplant. FMT, fecal microbial transplant. The way it came about was, Some doctor had a bright idea that there was this condition called C. Diff, which is a infection of the intestines happens after antibiotics is life threatening. And there's a huge amount of people are now resistant to antibiotics. We have all the antibiotics in our feed and in the animal production. So there's the drugs don't work. People die. And somebody thought, well gee, if I put the poop from a healthy person into a sick person, let's see what happens. And the doctor did it and the person was cured like that. Shut up. 98% effective. 98% effective. How do you do this? So, understand this process. You want to get into it? Give me the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. We can do the visual. So, basically they take a fecal transplant specimen, like a donor specimen from a healthy person, and they screen them for all sorts of diseases, and then they spin it up with some saline, and then they inject it in with a catheter or a colonoscope. And then they're actually also like shit. It just heals inside or what's it do when it's- well it goes in. It's like massive probiotics, right? Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And so, it's like an infusion of probiotics. And also they're actually pills now. They actually are making special encapsulated poop pills. Poop pills. And it's not, I mean, this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm not talking about like stuff that's wacky. I'm talking about serious medicine that people are doing. But it's not just for that. Now they're looking in for all sorts of things. So people are cured right after one infusion. Yeah, it's amazing. So functional medicine is really understanding that the body has a system and network and understanding that the focus should not be on treating disease, but on creating health. So it's the science of creating health. It's the ultimate biohacking tool. And it's interpreting all the data and the stories from your body that it tells through testing we do, for example, you don't have to do testing, but you can look into the body, look at your immune function and allergies and your gut flora and toxins and nutritional status. It's like doing a soil sample. So I'm like a soil farmer, organic soil farmer rather than an industrial agriculturist. I don't put all these chemicals on my plants to make them better like herbicides and pesticides. I create a healthy soil and then disease doesn't occur. Disease can't land in a healthy soil. So that's exactly what functional medicine is. We help people get in balance. We take away the things that cause imbalance. We put in the things that help create balance. So for example, I had a woman come, she had a whole list of problems. That's why I call myself a holistic doctor, because I take care of people, but they whole list of problems. So she had, like, psoriatic arthritis was on a drug that cost 30 grand. Oh, my gosh. Called Stella. And still was miserable. She also was overweight, had pre-diabetes migraines, sinus problems, ear, throat, reflux, depression, insomnia. She had, like, this whole list of things. Of course, she saw all these Specialists, the sinus doctor, the migraine doctor, the autoimmune doctor, the skin doctor, the depression doctor, the gut doctor, like, in you know, everybody's treating her with their best practices. Their best drug probably. But I mean, she's being seen at the top medical center, right? They're not doing bad medicine. They're doing standard of care. In fact, they're doing excellent standard of care. But the standard of care is not the way we're going to fix these problems. It's outdated or it's not. It's not. It's totally outdated. So rather than thinking about how all these were separate, I said, how are these all connected? Interesting.

Right.

How are these all connected? And so, there were connections. It was all inflammatory. And I said, well, why don't we put you on an anti-inflammatory low glycemic diet, a Pegan diet basically. Took away anti-allergens and I cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing Houston's bloating and she had yeast reactions. She had vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and itchy ears and yeast everywhere. Yeast from the yeast on her mouth and thrush. And so, I gave her herself to clear out the bad bugs in her gut. I put in good bugs. I put in enzymes. I put in things to heal the gut lining. I gave her fish oil, vitamin D, just some basic stuff, probiotics. But it was really eliminating the bad foods, eliminating the bad bugs in her gut, putting in new bugs, and putting in nutrients to help her body heal. Two months later, she comes back completely symptom-free. No way. No more arthritis, no more $230,000 drug, no more skin psoriasis, no migraines, no sinus problems, no oral bowel, no reflux, no depression. no insomnia and she lost 20 pounds.

All from food.

Totally. And what was food and her gut flora? I focused on her gut flora. Why? Because 60% or 50% of the immune system is in the gut.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Why? Why is it in the gut? Why is it there? Because you're sticking pounds of food, a foreign material every day in your body. You gotta fight it off in your gut.

Yeah.

And you've got, you know, you've got all the bed bugs in there and poop. It's like, it's like the danger zone, right? It's like you're, you're like, and it's one cell away because you're one cell away from a sewer every minute.

Really?

Yeah, it's one cell between you and that mass of food and poop, right? So your immune system is like if anything happens like right there. So when people have autoimmune disease, it's often a gut issue. It's often a gut issue. People didn't know this before, did they?

No. No.

So now like now all this is really coming to light and functional medicine is the operating system to interpret the data. It's a new set of lenses to think about how to solve it and it's a system of treatment that helps people get back in balance. That's what's powerful. And then at Cleveland Clinic, you know, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, I call him the Wayne Gretzky of healthcare. He goes where the puck's gonna be, not where it is. Smart, right? And he basically came after me to go set up a center there. Functional Medicine Center. Yeah, I'm like, I'm not going to Cleveland Clinic. It's like, I'm not gonna go to a place where I'm gonna have to bang my head against the wall where it's traditional medicine, where they don't get this, where they're in the dark ages. It's also known as one of the top hospitals in the world. Of course, but it's the top hospital in the old model.

Yes.

So I'm like, But he knows what's happening. He sees where it's going. He knows what's happening. He's like, We need this here. And so he's investing tons of money, millions and millions of dollars building this. We're building an 18,000 square foot facility. We started with a little space and we just outgrew it. We're hiring doctors. I have an interview with the doctor after this. And we're basically growing. We're doing research in all sorts of conditions. We're changing medical school education. We're changing policy. We're doing community work. So he's really putting us on the map in the traditional world. And, and what's he's gonna go out of business if he doesn't start doing this. But what's amazing to me, you know, Louis, I thought when I got there, people would be, you know, skeptical, negative, make it difficult for me and my team there. But it's the opposite. And I, at last, they want to learn. Last week, when I was there, I had two deans of medical schools, two chairs of Depart, two chairs of institutes, which are like. big deals and another doctor as patients. No way. Yeah, they're coming as patients. Because they're not being cured with the medicine. The executive team, the C-Suite team, is sending all their family members to come see us.

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 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 helped 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 flora. And yet, when you go to the doctor with arthritis, they don't ask you about your poop. 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? I feel this, 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? 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 Y? 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 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 them 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, 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 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 Health Nucleus, you can get your genes decoded for $1,000. Soon it'll probably be $100. And I went through 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. I had a full-body MRI scan, a total measurement of my echocardiogram, my body composition, everything was measured.

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 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 huge 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. 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, it'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 talk 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. He 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 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 bathhouse in New Mexico. So the power of biology to change at any age is really remarkable. You can reverse aging, and I see this over and over. So the supergene is your 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 hologen, but it's also your nutrigenome. 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 deficiencies, and I just 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. Now 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. and so one of the things that I learned was that I have areas of 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 stomach pain. He was on seven medications. 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, 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 were creating imbalance and put in the things that were 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, 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's 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, you know, 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 of that 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 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, since as high as 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, there are 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 and 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 woman said, Dr. Hyman, I had 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, in and out of psychiatric hospitals. In three days, I don't feel depressed 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 on 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 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 a 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. I know when I go out to eat with somebody, they're worried about what they're having for dinner, whether they're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 sure. So I said, let's have dinner afterwards. We had dinner. I said, tell me about your church because 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 and 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, it wasn't one doctor treating one patient. It was one doctor, it was a couple of us, it was actually Dr. Oz, another doctor, Dr. Amen, 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. 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's 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.

Today, more than ever, there's an epidemic for sure with sleep deprivation. And we're seeing this show its face in so many different areas. I think the first step is actually understanding the value of sleep. And so for example, you know, real talk, nobody's waking up in the morning like, you know what? I want to look terrible today. you know, everybody wants to look good. And if we understood just how much our sleep quality affected our body composition, I think it would start to push that conversation forward. So there was a really cool study that was done. Sleep and weight are connected.

Oh, my goodness.

University of Chicago did a really fascinating study. So they took folks and they put them on a calorie restricted diet, which is what I was taught to do in a university setting, which doesn't necessarily work, by the way. Exactly. But they put them on this calorie restricted diet, and during one phase of the study, they allowed them to get eight and a half hours of sleep. so sufficient sleep. Another phase of the study, same people, same exact diet, they're not cutting any more calories, they're not exercising more or less, and now they sleep deprive them. So now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep. They take three hours away. At the end of the study, they compiled all the data and they found that when folks were getting a sufficient amount of sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just from sleeping.

Yeah.

All right.

And I didn't say wait.

Lost actual fat mass, not muscle, which is crazy. Like how I'm not saying you're doing like eight days a week CrossFit, right? You're just sleeping better. And the question for me is immediate like, oh my goodness, how? How is that happening? And so it's during sleep that we release, this is crazy, melatonin, this super glorified sleep hormone, which it really isn't that. It's kind of a regulator of your circadian, Rhythms, period. But it actually is a really profound fat burning hormone as well. So the journal pineal research found that melatonin. That's that gland in your head that releases melatonin.

It's like pineal gland.

Correct. Which that's not the only place. We'll get back to that in a moment.

It's like your third eye gland, basically.

So the pineal gland and it responds.

To light and, you know, all the artificial light and the fact around it suppresses it.

It has to have darkness. So, Journal of Pineal Research found that melatonin increases your mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue or brown fat. And this is a type of fat that actually burns fat. That increases your metabolism. Yes, and the reason it's brown versus the white adipose tissue is kind of the stuff we think about when we're trying to get rid of fat. Brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria, right? These kind of energy Power Plants, I know you've talked about many times on the show, but it's such a metabolically active tissue. And so if you're not getting adequate sleep, you're not producing that hormone, nor you get your greatest secretion of human growth hormone during sleep. This is the most, it's also known as the youth hormone in a way. It's the repair hormone. Kids have so much HGH. This is why they have so much energy. It's muscle sparing and also it's a big component of you healing and recovering. And so you're missing out on that. And cortisol, that's another one. So if you're sleep deprived, one of the very first things we see is.

An increase in your cortisol levels.

That's the stress hormone. Exactly, exactly. And cortisol has this interesting ability to literally break down the muscle that you're working so hard to build. Oh, it's terrible. Gluconeogenesis, a process called gluconeogenesis, break down your valuable muscle tissue and turn it into fuel because it's this stressed hyper alert, cautious, dangerous state your body thinks you're in because you're sleep deprived. And I can go on and on.

I'll share one more. I always say stress is bad because when you have high cortisol, it does everything you don't want, right? It shrinks your memory center in your brain, causes Alzheimer's, it causes you to lose muscle and gain fat, it causes your sex hormones to get screwy, it has so many horrible effects and It's not worth getting stressed about stuff.

It doesn't matter.

You know, like stuff, there's stuff that does matter that you have to worry about. But the truth is most of the things we react to and stress about are just our beliefs or thoughts. They're not really real, right?

Yeah, that's a, and I even focused on that as well because a lot of folks have what we call clinically just a lot of inner chatter. You know, the brain is a very vocal and kind of noisy organ.

Yeah.

You know, and so the great thing is a lot of our needs are met, especially if people are listening to this right now.

It's like the crazy aunt that lives in your head, you know? Right.

Right.

But we have so many things covered in our lives that our ancestors didn't have to worry about. But the human mind is so expansive so we can manufacture things to worry about. And that worry can push us. And I often tell people, you know, when people are coming into my clinic, that you can overeat your way fat. You can under exercise your way fat or under move your way fat. You can under sleep your way fat and you can also over stress your way fat for sure. It has a huge component for our overall health and our body composition too. But I was going to share Stanford University. They found that just one night of sleep deprivation has a dramatic effect on suppressing leptin. And that's that kind of glorifies to make you hungry. I mean, I'm sorry, satiety hormone. and guarelin on the other side has this uptick and that's that hunger hormone. Yeah, right? So just one night and it makes you crave a ton of carbs.

I want to ask you this.

I was gonna say, I know you've been up late before.

Oh yeah.

But I don't know if it's me or if anybody else listening, have you ever been up at like two o'clock in the evening, maybe at a party, maybe just kicking back watching TV and you're like, you know what? I really want a salad right now.

Nope.

No.

If that's ever happened, please inform me. I don't get a craving for broccoli. I want salty, sweet, crunchy, carbs. Yes, yes, because your brain is literally starving for glucose. Just one night of sleep deprivation, we're.

Seeing about a 14% reduction in glucose reaching your brain. Yeah, I know it's true. I remember working many nights in the emergency room, delivering babies, being up all night, and the next day, all you want to do is eat carbs and sugar. You know, I'd go to McDonald's and get the apple turnovers and the french fries in the middle of the night. Apple turnovers. That was the only thing that was open in the hospital. So between, It was only closed between.

Two in the morning and six in.

The morning, otherwise it was open 20 hours a day. It was the only thing open in the hospital. Can you leave it? And I would go, you know, be sleep deprived and stay up all night.

And I totally craved carbs. Wow. And you did that work on that food. And now what you're made of now and the work that you're doing is just like exponential. Like you see that. I thought about this the other day. We're putting folks in space on vending machine consciousness, right? Astronauts. Just imagine if we can get people on really healthy, real food and what we can create as humanity. It's exciting.

So what's exciting about your book about sleep is that you break it down. You talk about 21 strategies that are very specific to actually fix your sleep. Because I'm sure many people listening, maybe even half or more, have sleep issues, whether it's not enough sleep, whether it's disrupted sleep, whether it's poor quality sleep, whether it's more serious things like sleep apnea, people often don't know they have.

It, so can you walk us through.

Some of the key strategies and what really matters?

Sure. So I've been really working to press this into public awareness for about five years now. And this was because seeing people in my office coming in and, you know, they're struggling with their blood sugar, for example. And we had about right around 75% success rate with, you know, getting folks off, you know, lisinopril and metformin and all this and working along with their doctors. those are blood sugar and blood pressure pills.

Yeah.

And here's the thing, that 25 of folks who weren't getting those results, ironically, that would really bother me.

And I know you've probably felt this. Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Ironically, kind of 20. What are you missing? Right. And so it took about five years in practice, maybe a little longer, before I had the audacity to ask, how was your sleep?

Yeah.

And what people would tell me blew my mind. I couldn't believe they're even sitting there.

Yeah.

And so. and this is another thing that we know is that folks don't really want to change too much to get the result they want. And I knew that. And so I just dug into the research, and I wanted to find clinically proven strategies that people don't have to turn their world upside down. And once I implemented those with the patients I was working with, it's the, like, the floodgates would come off. The weight would finally come off. Their blood pressure would finally come down. Their symptoms of depression would start to dissolve. And I was just like, this is really something special. I need to tell more people about this, and so. eventually it's compiled into these 21 strategies. And for me, again, some of these things are gonna be a reminder for folks today, but I wanna talk about something that a lot of folks still don't have a big awareness of. And this is the fact that your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality.

So your poop and sleep are connected? What a concept!

In a way!

Okay, let's dig into that one.

Don't do the two together.

I know that's not.

That's going to blow people's mind and even my mind.

Tell us how the microbiome and your gut affects your sleep and what you can do about it.

Absolutely. So let's start with the basic component. And I know, again, these are going to be things people have heard about before, probably on your show.

Yeah.

But let's start with serotonin.

Okay. So it's pretty well known.

By the way, there's more serotonin in your gut than there is in your brain. Exactly. Upwards of 80 to 90 of your body serotonin is actually located in your gut, produced by your enterochromaffin cells, by the way.

All right, so those are special cells.

In your intestinal lining.

Yes. I'm just translating all the big words.

See?

I like that.

We're like flipping places because I would do this for you. So here's what's so interesting is that serotonin, we talked about melatonin being important for our sleep and our circadian rhythm. Serotonin is a precursor or a seed to make melatonin. So already right off the bat, your gut environment, these cells in your gut are helping to make this compound that's related to your sleep quality. And with melatonin is what I want to liken it to. It's like that manual gear shifter for you to go through your sleep cycles properly and to actually get recovered. You need melatonin to be produced, and we'll come back to that. So that's number one, serotonin.

You can't just take melatonin.

I'll answer that in a moment.

Okay.

Okay. That's tricky.

Okay.

So, well, I'll just tell you. So, I looked around because some of our colleagues would feel that, and this was just a theory, that if you take supplemental melatonin, it's going to reduce your body's ability to produce it itself. And that's actually, I couldn't find that anywhere. There was no evidence of that. What I did find was taking supplemental melatonin, taking too much or too frequently, can down regulate receptor sites for melatonin. so your body can still produce it, but the receptor sites that actually do something with the melatonin can get down regulated.

The key is there, but the lock isn't. Yeah.

So we do need to be mindful of that, and we can come back and talk about that. But here's the biggest, probably aha moment, hopefully, of this episode, is that it's not just serotonin that's producing the gut. And so check this out. And I just came across this. I'm gonna share this with you today. This was in. The World Journal of Gastroenterology. Listen to this. They found that there's upwards of 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain. Because you talked earlier about the pineal gland. That's what I was taught in school. It's produced by pineal gland in the story. This study found that you can actually have a pinealectomy, which is a removal of your pineal gland, which I don't.

Recommend, by the way, don't do that.

But-- It's like a frontal lobotomy. Go there. And you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut.

All right, so you have a gut.

Brain and a brain brain. Exactly. And that's something really important to understand too. Your gut is really, it's often referred to as a second brain. You know, we can call it the enteric nervous system. There's like 30 neurotransmitters just like your brain.

It's like a mass of nerve tissue. 60% of your immune system and most.

Of the genes in your body as well. That vagus nerve, so UCLA research has found that The vagus nerve, which we thought was just kind of like the brain communicating more, telling the gut what to do, 90% of those, the communication from those nerve fibers from the vagus nerve to the brain is your belly, your gut telling your brain what to do in many ways. Totally nuts.

And the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed, not only is your cortisol high and you lead to more fat accumulation, it's towards belly fat, but it actually blocks your cells' ability to burn calories because the nerves from the vagus nerve help you metabolize your food, which is a relaxation nerve. It also has the effect of decreasing absorption of nutrients. So not only are you not absorbing, but your metabolism just slows down, which is amazing. It's just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function.

So profound. But this is just getting out of that isolation thinking, you know, this is what I was taught in school as well. It's like, well, that's functional medicine. The body's a system. Yes, everything is interconnected and it's a beautiful symphony if everything's working well. So Caltech researchers to kind of get to how does this all connect, they discovered that, and this was just, I mean, it's been around for years, but this is more of a recent like, okay, meta-analysis. Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it? How do we protect or support our microbiome? And that's one of the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality. So let's just go through a couple. The biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up.

All right.

So one of those would be eating processed foods. so that crazy amount of sugar has a tendency to feed pathogenic, opportunistic bacteria.

Right.

So that's one thing. Avoiding haphazard use of antibiotics. They have a place, but we shouldn't be using antibiotics every time you get the sniffles. All right. And that's literally what, when I was a kid, just give them some antibiotics.

Right.

We would even, like, if my mom had some antibiotics, you know, just totally negligent.

Yeah.

Give them whatever's in the COVID also. Pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides, metals. Yeah, these things, side literally means to kill, by the way. But these have a pretty, because they're meant to kill small things, guess what your microbiome is made of, you know?

And so, and how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers, which also terribly disrupt your gut microbiome.

Yeah, we're looking at that the wrong way as well. And so just avoiding those things. But also what I want people to do is support their microbiome by you know, and this should be just captain obvious at this point. And me working at a university for so long as a strength and conditioning coach before I did my clinical work, I worked with people from all over the world and I would ask them about their fermented foods and every culture had something.

Yeah.

Right. So whether it was like some kind of kefir or like pickled whatever, right? And so making sure that we're getting us at least, you know, every couple of days get a serving in of some fermented food or beverage.

I eat the kimchi. I got a jar in my fridge.

I love kimchi and my mother-in-law makes it for me. And she's from Kenya, so they had like fermented, a fermented, like kind of similar to kombucha. Like she knew about this like 20 years ago. And I'm like, what is this weird stuff she's growing? Yeah, yeah. And the kitchen is freaking me out. She had grass, like first time I came to visit and they were growing grass, you know, like it was wheat grass. But I was like, Hey, why has your mom got grass in here? she's like, did she get it high? I didn't know. So anyways, I didn't know. But that is a big component here is like shifting gears and having a more targeted perspective about supporting that gut microbiome. But also, and this is a really cool takeaway for everybody today is making sure we're getting in servings of what I call good sleep nutrients every day. Yeah.

What is that? Because eating first sleep, nobody really talks about that. so what does it look like?

The first one I'd share, and this one is from the Public Library of Science. And so they found that vitamin C, which we know about vitamin C, we tend to associate it with the immune system, right? That's powerful antioxidant. But they found that folks in their, in this particular study that were deficient vitamin C had a tendency towards waking up more frequently and getting vitamin C levels elevated, reversed their symptoms. All right, so that's just one example.

So Iron is the other one. If you have a little fairy.

Iron is another one. Yeah, that's, oh my goodness, that's huge. And especially more so for women. Yeah, it tends to be. And another one, this was published in the journal Sleep. All right, this is the big journal. And what they found was calcium. Right, so this goes back to that story that I was told about calcium. It is important for sure, but folks who are deficient in calcium, had more interrupted sleep patterns as well. And so by getting those calcium levels up. But how do we go about that? I'll just pass it over to you rather than drinking like homogenized, glow in the dark, you know, like from a mutant cow. What other sources of calcium do we have?

Oh my God, you know, when you look at the data on calcium, it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones, but the best absorbability in use is actually from greens like Rugula and greens that we can have dark green leafy vegetables. Also, there's some great sources like tahini which is basically ground sesame seeds. Also, different things people might like. I like which is sardines with the bones in them and salmon with the bones in them like canned salmon. Those are really great to eat because.

They have a lot of great absorbable calcium. Exactly. Calcium is kind of like an end product from this biological transmutation.

So, bones have a great source of it. You know, people say, oh, you don't, you need milk. I'm like, well, where do you think a cow gets their calcium from? It has strong bones. They eat a cow bone?

They eat grass. They should eat grass anyway. It's this really fascinating process. It's kind of like a biological transmutation of sorts where certain things come together to create bone, right? So like, you need silica, you need boron. Boron.

Boron. Boron.

Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron.

Boron.

Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron.

Boron.

Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron.

Boron.

Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron.

Boron.

Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron. Boron obviously, we know about citrus fruits like strawberries, sweet peppers, but there are these, quote, superfoods as well, like camu camu berry. This might be the highest botanical source of vitamin C. Super tart, tangy fruit. It's like an Amazonian thing. Amla berry, Acerola cherry, those are super, super high sources of vitamin C. Another one, and this was, this is the last one I'll share. There's a whole list in Sleep Smarter. So this was a study conducted by University of Oxford found that Omega-3s can help folks to get deeper, more restful sleep. So it helps with those modulating those rhythms, which it makes sense because it has to do with your brain. Your brain has these gates. You know, we have the blood-brain barrier, but the gate allows in certain VIPs. And it's only like 30 things.

And one of those is the Omega-3s. Although you can have a leaky brain.

And then you get more trouble.

Oh my goodness.

You know about the leaky brain?

This is like, you're already, you're getting into some territory here. This is super fascinating stuff, right? Leaky gut, leaky brain.

Who knew?

Who knew? So exciting. And also, there's some research that just came across that the brain kind of has its own nerve, immune system in a way. Yeah, it does. It has its own lymphatic system, which.

Is like to clean the brain every night and guess how you do that? Sleeping. Yep.

That's 10 times more active.

I mean, we know if you don't sleep, you're at much higher risk of Alzheimer's because you can't clear out the.

Garbage and your brain gets toxic. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's run by the glymphatic system.

Yeah.

So that's like little shout out to the glial cells that help to run it. The body is just incredible. So eat plenty of good sleep nutrients every day.

Magnesium, though.

Oh, that was the last one, actually. Okay. I was like, that's the first one I go to with my patients. This is the big one. I was saving the best for last. I first learned about the benefits of magnesium.

Probably from you.

Okay. This was again, like, you've been talking about this for, like, 15 years. Yeah, I'm getting old. And I was like, holy crap, because it's responsible for so many biochemical processes.

Oh, my God, 300 enzymes and.

Yeah. And so what that means for people is just like. So magnesium responsible for these. Well, now we know, like, over 325 processes. What that means is there are 325 things your body can't do or can't do properly when you're deficient on it.

Yeah. And by the way, magnesium deficiency affects 48% of Americans and it's caused by stress, chronic magnesium deficiency. It's caused by stress, it's caused by coffee, alcohol, and not having enough in our diet which comes from mostly plant foods, beans and greens, nuts and seeds.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things that we can do something about but like you said, it's kind of like an anti-stress mineral.

Yeah.

And so just the amount of stress that we're exposed, even. Even today, even our environment is stressful. It's different, you know, we're indoors a lot more processed air and we're not getting access to sunlight. Like, just our reality is more stressful. But then put on top of that.

Our work demands, relationship demands, you know.

How would you know if you're magnesium deficient?

You can get a test done, you.

Know, but I really always most of the tests. are very inaccurate. Red cell magnesium is better, but it's mostly symptomatic. And actually, the way we really have to diagnose it is called a magnesium load test, where you give people a high dose of IV magnesium and then you collect the urine for 24 hours. And if nothing comes out, it means their body sucked it all up. And if it all comes out, it.

Means they have enough. So I think, you know, magnesium testing is tricky, so you got to go by the symptoms. Exactly. Exactly. That's the thing. And what I was going to say is I always err on the side of. how do you look, feel and perform? You know, and in my practice, there were only a couple supplements I would recommend. Magnesium was generally, and maybe for 80% of the people that came in, because it, there's such a tendency for people to be in deficient in it. And so, but here's the issue. So food first, obviously, anything green is going to be a good source of magnesium. So just keep that in mind. Kale, collard, mustard greens, but Outside of that, supplementation can be tricky because we have this bowel tolerance. Yeah.

Right?

So even if you take a little bit more than your gut can handle at that moment, and you might need to really get your magnesium levels up, you're gonna activate what we call clinically disaster pants, which means the poop potentially pooping in your sleep.

Yeah.

Like the whole thing. This goes full.

It's laxative. Milk of Magnesia.

Right?

Magnesium Citrate, what they give people before. There you go.

They have colonoscopy.

To clean out their bowels, right?

It works. So, and there's different forms and some are going to be better for different people. But what I, I don't know if you've done this or looked into this, but like topical magnesium. Yeah, you can use topical magnesium.

Yeah.

That's what I do. Even brought some with me when I travel, you know, keep it in my, in my bag. And I love it.

I think it's fantastic. It's important. And people can, you know, overlook symptoms that are all caused by magnesium deficiency, right? sleeplessness, insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, muscle cramps, menstrual cramps, seizures, arrhythmias, palpitations, all those things are caused by magnesium deficiency. It's interesting in medicine, we don't really think about it, but it's used as a drug in the worst cases because drugs don't work. For example, preterm labor, someone comes in having a baby too early, you give them intravenous magnesium. Someone comes in and they're having high blood pressure, and seizures in pregnancy, they give them intravenous magnesium. People have cardiac arrhythmias where their heart is beating crazy beats in the emergency room and none of the drugs work, you give magnesium. It's pretty interesting and it's something we use all the time in medicine. We don't think about it in this.

Way but it is probably one of.

The most powerful things for sleep for people. Absolutely.

You're saying there's one cause which is C. diff for all neurodegenerative diseases? In order to prove that hypothesis, Two things have to happen going forward, two things. The first is we have to establish that there is C. Diff in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Guess what?

That study's been done.

Yeah.

It also showed that there was some- Poop for brains. Poop for brains. Is that like a true website or something? I thought Rudy made that up. Poop for brains.

Well, there's another way to say it.

But- But more importantly, clinically, clinically, I mean, look, people can say, oh, it's an epiphenomena, right? Like the brain is already decomposing, and of course you're gonna have the bacteria emerging when the person is dead. Fair argument, right? Maybe it's not that cluster B is causing the disease, but it's just it's there for the ride as it eats.

Your brain up after you're dead, right?

That's sort of the- Meaning they find.

An autopsy, but maybe it's- It doesn't mean that it was there when they were living.

Yeah. Right.

So fair enough that what that means is that we have to demonstrate.

So they ran for the hills as soon as a person died, is that it?

I guess.

I don't know.

True. Probably unlikely, right? Yeah, exactly. But in fairness to that sort of counter punch, what the medical community would ask for going forward is especially clinically, we make a decision that that we think that this is definitely C. difficile in a patient with a disease like Alzheimer's, right? To make that conclusion clinically, you have to have absolute 100% evidence that that bacteria is actually causing that disease. With some, you know, obviously not every disease is gonna test positive, and not only is the challenge here that the majority of patients who test for C. difficile who have dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and what have you, have negative tests for C. diff.

In their stool.

In their stools, right. And so people that are sort of looking at this picture with me, if you will, are saying exactly that. Well, it can't be C. diff because we're testing C. diff in the stool and it's not there. I say, well, guess what? It went uptown, okay? We used to live downtown, but it likes uptown more.

Why?

Because A, we give them PPIs, which they love that that alkaline environment.

Acid blockers.

Acid blockers.

Like Pepcid.

And what do we give them that they love most of all? Antibiotics. C. Diff loves antibiotics.

It's actually an antibiotic associated infection.

Exactly.

That's how I got it. I took an antibiotic for my bad tooth and I ended up getting C. Diff.

Yep. That's, I mean, if that's not a word of warning to all the listeners, I don't know what it is. Yes, exactly right. basically it's called antibiotic associated C. Diff. So I started asking patients with neurodegenerative diseases if they had a prodrome when they first started getting sick.

And all across the board, like symptoms.

That happened before they got. Of course, well you ask questions like that. I want to know what they did as a baby basically. Even though they're 70 years old, why ask? I don't know if I've asked my mom that question. But younger patients, you could ask them that question because they're with their parents. and I say to them, I ask them three questions. I go, Did you have a lot of antibiotic exposure before you got sick, sick? 100%. It's like I know the answer before you even ask the question. It's just a question of how many antibiotics they had and what course of antibiotics they had. And the second question that's worthwhile to ask clinically is, Do you have trouble actually mounting a fever? So that's a question that I was surprised by the answer. that most, I mean not most, but most, my patients basically have said, no, you know what? I've noticed I really never get a fever. I'm like, oh, okay.

Which is not necessarily a good thing.

That's right, it's not a good thing at all, because the only thing that actually will treat spores, right, is heat. Heat. That's why we get a fever, right?

Which is why you get a fever, because it's your body's mechanism for killing infections.

It's, you know, I make a joke I say them all the time. I said, Name one disease that humans have cured. Cured. Like, oh, you know, they always mention infectious diseases because that is the truth. We've cured infectious disease. But the only thing that actually cures disease is our endogenous mechanisms. You know, fever and sleep, basically, are the two endogenous mechanisms of holistic medicine.

And die just means stuff that you do yourself. Your body does that.

Your body's doing it for you. But you have to help the body do that. You can't be staying up late and taking PPIs to watch, you know, Seinfeld episodes.

You can't have your pizza followed by your Prilosec and stay up all night watching Game of Thrones.

Correct. Now, in perfect disclosure, I've done all of those, except I actually do eat the pizza when I'm watching those shows. I gotta work on myself, basically. Okay. Doctor, treat yourself.

Yeah. Right.

But anyway, yes.

So, this whole conversation is fascinating to me because from a functional medicine perspective, you know, many roads lead to Rome. In other words, just because you know the name of the diagnosis of the disease you have, doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you.

Exactly.

And the truth is there can be a 10 or 20 causes for the same disease. Right. And I think that's probably true even of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. So, I just want to make sure that we're not saying that every single person with Alzheimer's has C. Diff. Or that that's the cause because it could be something else.

Exactly.

It could be Lyme disease.

100%.

It could be heavy metals.

But the point is, no, but I think the sort of like the devil's in the details, if you will, meaning that, yes, I think there's very strong compelling evidence at this point that bacteria are the cause of neurodegenerative diseases.

Not my- yeah, we talked about Rudy Tanzi, who's a Harvard scientist, one of the discoverers of some of the presenilin genes, which are the genes that show that people are at risk for early Alzheimer's. He actually said they were discovering all these microbes in the brain, which we thought was sterile and that we had this blood-brain barrier that protects us. and you're saying, and he's saying that that barrier is not always 100% and that stuff can leak through. Not only can you have a leaky gut, but you can have a leaky brain.

Look, bacteria, not to scare people, bacteria love the brain. Why? 25% of the body's glucose is used by the brain. They know where to eat. They go into, you know, Le Pen or that fancy restaurant is downtown. Everyone else is eating downtown. They're getting, you know, our brains.

Bacteria live on ketones? 100%.

But not, wait, that's very important. They prefer simple sugars. Why? Because they're lazy, right? They want instant gratification. So they like sugar better than ketones.

But ketones and ketogenic diets work for some of these neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and even LS and brain cancer.

That's right. That's right. And I think one of the mechanisms, to be honest with you, is that ketones actually improve, first of all, they improve mitochondrial function, but they're not a good substrate for bacteria. They're a great substrate for us. Bacteria don't like them because they like eating fast food, basically.

Yeah, so eat them sugar, we eat fat.

That's right.

Okay, so this is just a breakthrough idea. And this isn't just an idea. You've actually treated patients using this approach. and seeing some really extraordinary things.

Yes.

So, can you share with us a little bit about this case you were sharing with me earlier about ALS, which is a horrible condition. Stephen Hawking had it. It was called Lou Gehrig's disease after the baseball player. Essentially, it's where your nervous system is affected by the killing of the neurons in your spinal cord, which makes you basically paralyzed. You got fasciculation, which is twitching. you eventually can move your arms and legs, you're in a wheelchair, you breathe, you need a respirator.

You wouldn't wash it off on your worst enemy, you would not work.

It's like a slowly getting paralyzed.

Yep, that's right.

And never has there been a treatment that has stopped or reversed it.

Right.

And you're saying that you've seen patients where this has actually happened.

So, well, we are in the process of validating that sort of that data.

Yes.

So, yes, we need more studies.

Yes, we need to do research on multiple patients. But even if there's one patient where you've seen a change, it raises the question. Oh, by the way, it's made me go crazy, by the way, because, you.

Know, I am so, I'm finally glad to be a neurologist. You know, being a neurologist is like being a nihilist or a masochist.

Diagnosing audios.

Right. Well, it's worse than that. It's like, diagnose and let me, you know, let me not tell the patient that they have ALS. Let me treat them for a CIDP picture because they don't want to actually make that diagnosis to people. It's the hardest diagnosis you could make for a patient because everyone knows ALS is incurable disease, right? I mean, it's 100%, even pancreatic cancer is better. Well, you have a 5% chance of living with pancreatic cancer. You have zero chance of living through this disease, zero.

So based on your hypothesis that it's infectious, Yes. That plays a big role, if not is the main role.

Right.

You know, I personally shared on this podcast that I went to a place in Mexico called San Antonio where I and my wife both went through this treatment called hyperthermia, which essentially is where they heat you up to 107 degrees, which sounds crazy and is scary. But actually, we did both fine and it killed a lot of infections that we had. Lyme, my wife, her viral loads of very tough to treat infection called CMV came plummeting down. She felt much better. I felt much better. And so this is a therapy that is not much used in the United States but is used widely in Europe, is used in Mexico and other countries as the therapy for some of these types of infectious diseases and even cancer.

Right.

So how does the theory work behind this with something like ALS?

Well, the idea is that fever is the way of actually denaturing spores.

That's a big sentence. Can you unpack that?

Sure. Human cells have their proteins that either fold properly or not fold properly at a certain temperature. Bacteria have their own temperature zone, like their ideal climate. And spores have another ideal climate, right? Meaning that to kill a spore- A.

Spore is like a baby bacteria.

A spore is a baby bacteria. And that's what I believe personally is the reason that patients have amyloid accumulation, that the spores are creating this protective cover against antibiotics that actually is in fact the amyloid being produced.

The amyloid is like the armor for the bacteria.

Yes, they're like the, you know, the- Bomb shelter. The biofilm is the bomb shelter for these little baby bacteria.

Yep.

And so how does hyperthermia work to disrupt that? And what is that procedure? Because.

Well, so it works, hyperthermia works by, it's a very narrow window of temperature. Meaning if you give too much temperature, you can actually hurt normal cells as much as bacterial cells. If you don't give enough temperature, you've done nothing.

So it's like Goldilocks.

It's like Goldilocks.

You got it, just right.

You have to get it exactly right, okay? And that's part of the way that the hyperthermia technology has been developed is by really understanding that the brain itself can provide feedback on the tolerability for human cells because brain cells are going to tell the brain, hey, this is pretty hot in here.

You don't want to fry your brain.

Can you turn the thermostat off now? So the part of the device actually is to get the brain temperature back into the feedback system where it's self-regulating so that you never reach a point where the temperature is harmful to your own cells.

And so, you know, they often In places where they do this, they'll give at the peak of the temperature, they'll give antibiotics or antivirals. Right. Does that make sense?

To give antivirals?

Or, yeah, to give antimicrobial treatment to patients when they're at the peak of the fever because the idea is that it sort of flows through something.

Yes, for acute infection, yes.

I would argue that.

Lyme or? Well, if the Lyme is acute, certainly. I mean, I don't think that, I mean, I think you'd be weary of the issue that by robbing Peter to pay Paul, for instance. Let's say that C. Diff is, let's say, let's probably say this is a polymicrobial disease, okay? As opposed to a- Like lots of different bugs. Lots of different bugs, as opposed to just one ringleader that everyone else is following, okay? So, Lombard believes that C. Diff is the ringleader, okay? And all these other guys, Lyme, HSV, they're just tagging along because it's such a great killer that's like, okay, great, we'll take the leftovers, no problem here. We'll take the leftovers. So my concern is clinically that if we start treating patients with bacterial drugs like Roseffin, whatever it is for chronic Lyme, yes, you're addressing chronic Lyme.

I mean, the C diff gets worse.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

So the heat alone is enough to disrupt the C diff?

Well, we haven't demonstrated that yet, to be quite frank, but what's been demonstrated is that by applying hypothermia, that we're able to actually see improvement in clinical symptoms of patients with ALS.

People's muscle strength, this is a progressive disease. So it gets worse and worse and worse. Every visit, they're worse. You're seeing patients that it stops or gets better, which never happened.

Correct.

Right. So this is a major breakthrough. I think so. Major breakthrough. And this is not something new. This has been around for a long time. Where in the world is most of the research being done on hyperthermia?

For ALS?

Period.

I mean, it's- oh, most of the research on hyperthermia actually is cancer research. So they call it chemothermia, chemohyperthermia. So people can look up a lot of data on how hyperthermia affects cancer, but as far as I know, there's zero data until now applying hyperthermia for ALS. We will be the first people to actually talk about applying hypothermia for treatment of ALS.

What about things like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or MS?

Well, the difference in those diseases are that in Alzheimer's, right, it's very difficult to induce hypothermia in a patient with Alzheimer's disease. Why? Because you need to be compliant. The treatment itself is, you know, it's fairly rigorous as you know from your experience. They put me to sleep. They put you to sleep, right? We don't want to put them to sleep though, right? we're concerned about protecting their brain. So, you know, if you have a patient who's got, you know, end-stage Alzheimer's disease, for instance, I don't see how this is going to be helpful. But early, 100%. Early. Early. In fact, I will talk later, not about the case now, because we're really just in the beginnings of this case. But yeah, I think it would be applicable for Alzheimer's disease as well.

Have you seen any patients reported or in the literature anywhere?

No, definitely not.

No.

But you serve as a Yes, still a theory.

And MS, what about MS?

MS, there's data on actually the opposite, right? Which is how do you induce hypothermia, right? Because in MS, it's an inflammatory disease obviously, right? Which by the way, I also believe is caused by Clostridium, but not C. Diff, where it's especially important to actually identify at that stage that this is bacterial. So, they're, I don't know what they're.

Yeah, so what is the idea with MS that you wouldn't want to use hyperthermia, that you wouldn't want to use heat because it makes it worse?

Well, because remember, when you heat up a patient with MS, what happens? They usually get worse.

So, the trick is, But maybe not enough, right? Maybe it's not enough.

That's right. Maybe you haven't reached the threshold to actually, you know, use the bodies fever mechanisms against... Because there's links to MS.

And Epstein-Barr virus and other infections. There's links to Alzheimer's and herpes virus infections.

Right.

So yes, the whole principle is applicable for all those diseases, but we don't know yet if it is applicable yet until we clinically demonstrate that. But yeah, I think that this is going to be a treatment that's going to be very important for a lot of different diseases, Mark.

So, there's this whole theory that the body has a mechanism for dealing with this and it has these own proteins that are produced in response to heat and they're things we learned about in medical school. They're called heat shock proteins.

I learned something very important about heat.

Shock proteins from Dr. Lesler because we remember that, you know, people looking at how to induce hypothermia, right? So, there's all sorts of research, there's actually even a drug in clinic for ALS. that is the mechanism of action is based upon increasing heat shock protein through a pharmaceutical agent. So I was at this lecture and I thought I knew everything basically and I learned that actually you can induce-.

Because you thought MD stood for medical deity, is that it?

Medical deity, yes, exactly.

We all got that training.

The truth is we know close to nothing.

That's why I said at the beginning of this talk, Thanks for inviting me, but I really know nothing. Just disclaimer. But anyway, so yes, actually in MS, the goal is to induce heat shock protein through hypothermia. Hypothermia.

So you get people cold?

Not people. The brain.

The brain.

Right.

How do we do that?

Chill the brain.

Chill the brain.

How do you do that? Ice blocks around the head?

No. No. Well, I'll invite you up and you could see for yourself what that looks like.

All right. Dunk your head in ice water.

Nope. Nope. None of the above.

Okay, so we have to be in mystery here?

A mystery about what the device looks like, you mean?

Yeah.

It's basically the same concept as building a hyperthermia device, except remember now that technology itself was developed basically for anesthesiologists. So this was developed at Yale. by Dr. Abreu who's the person who actually discovered a way of measuring brain temperature objectively externally. Okay, so that's kind of where this whole thing started from, to be honest with you.

You don't just stick an electrode in your brain, you can literally map it out from the outside.

You can map it out from the outside. So, the ability to do that now allows a clinician to not only, you know, heat the body to create hyperthermic states, but through other types of modalities to actually cool the brain safely externally with the same in the same way, meaning that you can actually apply a small device to a region of the skin, its periorbital location, and you can actually change the temperature of the brain through this, what's called the brain thermal tunnel. and that also creates heat shock protein 70.

Old shock protein.

And I didn't know that until I was in Australia.

That's amazing. So, you're hopeful about the future of neurology, it sounds like.

It's the first time I've been hopeful about anything in my life, to be honest with you.

That's a big statement.

Yes. It's true.

If you're exposed to glyphosate, it harmfully affects the bacteria in your gut that produce really important amino acids. that regulate your gene expression. And the pathway it disrupts is a shikimate pathway, and that leads to abnormal gene expression and not being able to actually do the things your body's supposed to do. And it also seems to deplete glutathione, which you mentioned, which is a critical molecule for regulating inflammation, detoxifying antioxidant. It's really the center of our biology. And if it disrupts that, we're kind of screwed.

Right.

Glutathione is so important. And we're seeing so many people talking about, you know, taking glutathione as a supplement, taking an anticytotoxic to as a precursor to glutathione. Methionine is the core essential sulfur-containing amino acid, and it is a precursor to cysteine, which goes to the thionine. Methionine synthesis is disrupted by in E. coli by glyphosate. There was a study that showed that. So it prevents the microbes and also prevents the plants from producing methionine from inorganic sulfur. So this gives you again a deficiency in the sulfur-containing amino acid. So we have a deficiency both in the aromatics and in the sulfur-containing amino acids. And they're so important for so many things. It's just uncountable practically the ways that that would impact, particularly your metabolism, of course, also protein synthesis, and of course, all the hormones that are affected, and the B vitamins, all of those things are going to be affected by these disruptions by glyphosate.

And, I mean, you're an MIT scientist. This is not some crazy fringe idea. You're an evidence-based scientist that's looking at hard at the data and coming to these conclusions. Well, first before we get into why the government hasn't figured this out yet, let's talk about other diseases and how good the evidence is. How good is the evidence around cancer, for example, or diabetes or autism or any of these autoimmune issues that you're talking about?

Cancer is actually the hardest one to explain. And maybe the weakest one, in fact, I would say, cancer, of course, evolves out of mitochondrial dysfunction, so eventually it causes it. Studies have shown that it enhances other chemicals effects that would lead to cancer. In other words, it's a secondary effect. There are studies that have shown that. And there are also studies that have shown that it causes cancer cells, breast cancer cells in vitro to proliferate when they're exposed to extremely tiny levels in parts per billion, per trillion, parts per trillion levels of glyphosate induced proliferation in cancer cells. I think it does cause several different cancers, but it's a much more difficult thing to explain than some of the other diseases. Liver disease is quite easy to explain. If you accept my theory, which we maybe should get into at this point, because that's crucial. My theory for its extremely unusual mechanism.

Of toxicity Just to back up for people, a liver is your detoxifying organ. And you hinted at how glyphosate interrupts sulfur metabolism, which is a critical part of our biology. And in functional medicine, there's a real focus on our sulfur biology because it's critical for detoxifying all the environmental compounds are exposed to, for metabolizing our own internal toxins. and people who have low glutathione, which is the sulfur based compound, are sicker. I remember reading one study that if you looked at people who are hospitalized versus not hospitalized, if you have this general lower levels of glutathione based on a gene that is important in regulating it, 50% of the time you're going to be more likely not up in the hospital. So it's kind of a marker for our overall health and well-being and I, I personally have a lot of experience with glutathione because I had mercury poisoning and it gets very depleted. And I had to learn how to restore my sulfur metabolism and also something called methylation, which is the B vitamins, because they're very interlocked. And, and you think of your biochemistry, for those listening, it's, it's, it's like this big network of biochemical reactions. But right at the center of it is these two core systems that run all the time, literally every second, millions and millions of times a second, billions of times probably called methylation and sulfation. And these Pathways I've written a lot about them in books and articles, but this is the key to health. It's the key to gene expression, to immune function, to detoxification, to cognitive function. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So when this is screwed up, it's not just like some sort of minor pathway that gets disrupted in human biology. It's a major pathway. So with that background, can you explain how glyphosate disrupts sulfur metabolism a little more clearly and explain what really the role of the sulfur is in maintaining health and why we should be terrified about glyphosate and sulfate.

Right, I mean, I think glyphosate disrupts sulfate synthesis, sulfate activation, sulfate transport, and sulfate delivery. It disrupts every step of the way for sulfate. As you mentioned, mercury actually gets sulfated to detox it. If you can't sulfate the mercury, you're in trouble. I think that we have a systemic deficiency in sulfate in the glycocalyx, which is this lining of all the cells, like in the blood vessels. There's all this sulfate that populates the sugar molecules, complex sugar molecules lining the blood vessels. Those need to be heavily sulfated to have the blood circulation work correctly. Also for the cells to be able to receive signals and to bring in different things they're going to take in to digest. It's just really central, having enough sulfate around the exterior of the cell. It also gives the red blood cells negative charge, which is important for the zeta potential in the blood. There's just all these things that are connected to sulfate. And I talk a lot about sulfate in my book. It's actually been central to my understanding of where biology has gone wrong. And I felt sulfate was in trouble with autism and with heart disease many years ago, long before I knew about glyphosate. So the sulfate and the glyphosate really came together very nicely for me, for me to recognize how glyphosate is causing autism and probably heart disease through sulfate issues. As you mentioned, the sulfation, sulfation is very important for detoxing many of these fat-soluble chemicals that they go to the liver, it takes them, it's the liver's job to detox them and it takes them up, it adds sulfate, oxidizes them, it adds sulfate. The enzymes that, the cytochrome enzymes that do that first step of detox are also suppressed by glyphosate. That's been shown in multiple studies. It suppresses the enzymes in the liver that modify these fat soluble molecules to make them, to detox them and to make them water soluble so they can be removed through the urine.

The oxidized form of glyphosate. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So, so what you're saying basically is when toxins come in the liver, they have to be detoxified by the liver. And there are enzymes that do that, that are like the helpers. What you're saying is that glyphosate screws.

Up those enzymes so those chemicals can't get processed down the assembly line of detoxification. Yes, and of course then those chemicals become much more toxic. So glyphosate makes many, many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them. And of course, glutathione is part of that problem because a lot of things get glutathioneated to get removed as well. There's methylation, glutathionylation, sulfation, these are all steps that are taken in the liver to make these, to change these molecules into something that's less toxic. and that process gets broken down by glyphosate. So it's really quite remarkable, all the things that it can do to disrupt your health. The sulfate, the whole sulfate story has, in part, it's because these chicken meat pathway, because the chicken meat pathway produces those aromatics. For example, serotonin gets produced in large amounts in the gut, actually, and also melatonin. They both are produced in large amounts in the gut. they are sulfated before they're shipped out, and then they arrive in the brain in a sulfated form. So I think the serotonin is actually transporting sulfate to the brain. This is something I talk a lot about. There's all these molecules that get sulfated in transit, not just the toxic chemicals, vitamin D, cholesterol, various sex hormones, they're all sulfated when they're shipped out. And then all these aromatics that come out of the shikimate pathway. So those molecules become deficient, which means that the sulfate transporters become deficient, which means that the brain doesn't get enough sulfate. And autism is very strongly linked to heparin sulfate deficiency in the brain ventricles. That's really been a core feature of autism that's been shown in both mice and humans. And I think it's just because there's not enough sulfate being delivered to the brain. And the body does something very interesting to get around that, which is quite fascinating and also quite disturbing, which is that it produces hydrogen sulfate gas in the gut. the autistic children produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which then floats up to the brain and then gets oxidized in the brain to make sulfate. So it's a way to transport sulfate, a very sneaky way to transport sulfate by turning it into a gas, turning the sulfur molecule into a gas, hydrogen sulfide.

It also makes the kids poops really smelly and stinky.

Yes, and it also gives them brain fog because hibernation is all involved with hydrogen sulfide gas. And it's basically people go into hibernation because they've got hydrogen sulfide floating in their brain. Their and then of course you have to have oxidizing agents to oxidize it to sulfate, which gives you the inflammations, the inflammatory process in the brain that's characteristic of autism, this kind of chronic low grade encephalopathy that's a feature of autism is because the autistic brain is.

Constantly trying to make sulfate from hydrogen sulfide gas. Okay, wow. This is just so much information. I'm just loving this. I think just unpack it a little bit for people. You know, when you eat foods with glyphosate, which is 75% of all or 70% of all crops, and often it's used on GMO foods like soy, but even non-GMO foods is used on like wheat. It is a whole host of different ways in the body that it screws things up, right? So what you're saying it screws up this pathway that makes the neurotransmitters that help regulate gene expression important for cognitive function. It disrupts glutathione, which is critical for detoxification. It regulates immunity and oxidative stress. It also affects protein synthesis and immune function and can create a leaky gut, destroy the microbiome. So you've got all these mechanisms, not just one, but many mechanisms by which glyphosate destroys human health.

Right.

Yeah, and people say, how can one chemical cause so many diseases? I showed all those charts. Nancy Swanson was the first one who started doing those charts. I don't know if you saw those of rise into various diseases strongly, absolutely, practically perfectly correlated with the rise in glyphosate usage on court crops over time. It was just stunning. And p-values are 0.0000, I mean several zeros before the first significant digit of correlations between these two trends in disease versus the rise in glyphosate usage. And, you know, people would say, well, they would say correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. And then they would say, how could one chemical cause so many diseases? And I was wondering that myself, but now I understand how, and it is this metal, it disrupts the whole minerals are completely messed up. In iron, manganese, zinc, they become both toxic and deficient at the same time because of its ability to bind to them. hold on to them, prevent the natural system from transporting them properly. And then it's the sugar mate pathway getting wrecked, and that's all these aromatic amino acids and all the derivatives that are so important for our health are getting reduced. And then it's actually the Sip enzymes in the liver. These have all been shown in multiple studies that it's doing this. The Sip enzymes in the liver getting suppressed, which is cytochrome P450 enzymes, which is stage one detoxification depressed. And then this inability for the gut microbes to convert inorganic organic sulfur into organic sulfur, which is going to give you methionine. And methionine, of course, is the methylation pathways, it's the sulfation pathways. Those are all going to be disturbed because of deficiency in methionine.

And instead, the sulfur gets reduced to hydrogen sulfide gas, which then causes all these other problems. So it just jams up your biochemistry. It's just like throwing a sand in an engine, basically. Right, right. Yes. Amazing. And there's a few other things I.

Want to sort of touch on, which is glycine.

Glycine is a very important nutrient. and it does affect our protein synthesis and tell us how our body has swapped out glyphosate for glycine and what that does.

Yes, and that's a central topic of my book. That's almost the point of my book is to try to convince the audience that that's true because I've been saying this Anthony Samsel was the first one who suggested to me that might be happening, that it's substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And at first I was skeptical because it has an extra piece attached to its nitrogen atom. It is a complete glycine molecule and it does disrupt glycine in various ways that's known. But it also potentially could be substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And there's no reason to stop it, it turns out, because proline is a coding amino acid that also has an attachment to its nitrogen and it's still able to find. There's another linkage that the nitrogen can hook up with the other because the amino acids have to hook up. in a chain, and the nitrogen is involved in the hook. They're like paper dolls holding hands, and the nitrogen needs to hold hands. It has something in the way, another molecule in the way, but if there's enough room around, it can fit. So it turns out there are specific circumstances under which it will substitute. And this gets a little complicated in terms of the science, but it's quite, quite interesting because the enzyme in the shikimate pathway that gets disrupted by glyphosate has a glycine residue. at the site where it binds the phosphate piece of phosphoenolpyruvate. So that enzyme binds that molecule at a place where glycine is highly conserved. And if you take that glycine out and replace it with alanine, which is just an extra methyl, a very small change, glyphosate can't affect it at all. All of a sudden, it's completely immune to glyphosate. Once you remove that glycine, and they've shown that it is at that place where that glycine is that it disrupts the protein. they've shown that that's the spot. And they know that if they can either remove that glycine or they can crowd it, they can put in other amino acids close by that'll crowd the glycine and then the glyphosate won't fit anymore. So the argument they say is that glyphosate is replacing the substrate PEP. What I say is that it's replacing the glycine. So we have a very different view of how that enzyme is getting disrupted. If you say it's displacing the glycine, and if you say it can displace the glycine and other enzymes that have the same property. And there are many, many enzymes with very important functions that have glycine at a place that's highly conserved, that binds phosphate, even that binds PEP, the same substrate. And I suspect it's affecting many of those enzymes. It's that particular group of enzymes that are getting extremely disturbed by glyphosate and that have enormous roles in metabolism. And that's how you're going to get.

Mitochondrial dysfunction, all kinds of things. It screws up your immune system, it screws up your mitochondrial energy, it screws up your gut, creates oxidative stress, it.

Screws up your detox system. What doesn't it do? That's the big question. Cancer is an interesting one, and there are cancers that are going up dramatically. Pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, liver cancer, and kidney cancer. It definitely affects a lot of the endocrine system, basically. The glands, that's what I want.

Yeah, it's huge. So there's 9 million kilograms of this stuff sprayed around the world, 300 million pounds or kilograms done on the United States. It's a lot. We're exposed to this in significant quantities, right? And so what is the amount that is going to cause harm?

Oh, I know.

That's the real question, right?

I think needs zero. I think we need to ban it worldwide and we need to work hard on figuring out how to get it out of the soil and out of the air and out of the water. We have a huge problem right now. We've got all kinds of glyphosate gathering up because it takes it a long time to. Well, it can get broken down quickly under optimal conditions. And of course, Monsanto says that that's what's always there. Two weeks later, it's gone. That's what they say. It is definitely not true experimentally in many different kinds of soils. It'll last for years. There was a study that showed that after two years, 60% of it was still there. so it stays in the ocean. If it gets deep and there's no sunlight, sunlight helps to break it down. There are certain microbes that can metabolize it, but most microbes can't. So it has to be specialized microbes. I think we need to do research to actually figure out which microbes can we safely put in the soil to help break it down, because actually many of the pathogens can break it down, like the fungus. We have all kinds of problems with fungus infections. in both animals and plants and fungus can break it down. So I think that's a reason why it's thriving.

Incredible. So the amount we need is not very much, right? If you were going to look at the data, is there any data on how much glyphosate is in people? And if you look at the population, have they studied like, what is the body burden of glyphosate? And is it in amounts that are really relevant or not?

Yeah, that's a big question. Of course, it's a question of what you think is relevant. And one thing, it has been found in people. It's been found in large amounts in, and in fact, it's been found correlated with disease. There was a study that showed people who had liver, fatty liver disease, which is an epidemic, and the people that had fatty liver disease, they were tested for glyphosate in the urine, and they had statistically more than the ones who didn't have the disease. And among the ones who the ones who had worse disease had statistically significantly more than the ones who had less worse disease. That's his fatty liver.

And there was a study- It's 90 million, by the way, 90 million people.

In America are affected by that. Yeah, it's huge. And I think liver disease is really dead on. And a study on rats exposed them to levels of glyphosate that were below regulatory limits and caused fatty liver disease in those rats at those levels. The other thing that's coming out lately, which is really shocking, is extremely low levels of glyphosate causing Endocrine effects that are long lasting. There are these amazing experiments coming out recently where people expose pregnant rats to glyphosate at levels that are so low the rat doesn't look like it has any problems. The rat is perfectly fine, the babies are born, everything's good, the pups grow up, they have their own offspring, they grow up and you see all kinds of problems. So in other words, it's showing up.

In the second and third generation. So in the grandchildren of the rats that got exposed, there's the epigenetic changes that are passed through the lineage to another generations. So you're not only dealing with what you're exposed to, you're dealing with your grandmother was exposed to.

Yes.

And of course, we're now getting second, third generation showing up because it's been since 1975.

Yeah. It's pretty terrifying.

It really is. I mean, I feel we have to ban this chemical worldwide right now. I mean, if we have any hope for the future, I feel like we really need to wake up and realize this is the thing that's causing all the problems that we're seeing. And it shocks me that we see all this obesity. Like this country is just, you know, so many problems with obesity. And we just think, oh, we're just watching too much TV and eating too much popcorn. I mean, that's just like really ridiculous to think that could be the reason why we have such a tremendous inability to keep the weight off.

Yeah. Well, there's a whole science field called the study of obesogens. and obesogens are environmental chemicals that cause obesity. I've written a lot about this over the years, even, you know, 15, 16 years ago, I wrote about it, because I used to see it in my patients. And when you start to improve their detoxification and get rid of these chemicals from their body, they actually do better. Their metabolism improves, their weight loss comes off. But what you're really saying is that most of us have levels of glyphosate in our bodies, including you and I.

That do impair human health.

Absolutely. And I'm sure people listening are wondering, What the heck can I do about it other than, you know, like if Dr. Hyman and Stephanie, who's an MIT professor who's made her life's work to study this, have high levels, what the.

Heck am I gonna do? I know. It seems really hopeless. I was so depressed when I found that I was really shocked, actually, that I was contended. It wasn't high, but it was there. It was measurable. And it's just really depressing that you can't avoid it, which I think is the case if you live in America. I mean, there are places in the world where you probably can, It's very difficult to find a place here that without it. It's in the rain. It's in the rain, it's in the.

Water, it's in the atmosphere, it's in their food.

There was a study in Brazil found it in the atmosphere, found it in the nanoparticles in the air in, you know, in Brazil.

Is the majority though from our food that we get it?

I think so, but I'm not sure. I mean, that's always been my big question. I think people who live next to fields where it's being sprayed are in serious trouble. and they're going to get things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because they're breathing, breathing glyphosate. But I think most of us are getting it through our food and possibly through our water. I mean, there's a question of a water supply and it could also be from the air. And I'm concerned about that with respect to biofuels because I'm really quite wondering if biofuels are introducing glyphosate into the air in cities where they're being burned because they're coming from, like for example, ethanol, bioethanol is coming from GMO roundup ready corn. or sugar cane sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest. So it could be in the atmosphere. I mean, it is in the atmosphere and it could be from the air that you're getting exposure into the lungs.

And that's another word that I have. So is there a way for us, is there anything we can do, eat, take supplements, anything that can help us reduce our glyphosate levels? Take a sauna, wheat grass enema, what are we gonna do?

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of sunlight and of course vitamin D is so important, but I believe sunlight also helps you to make sulfate in the skin. I talk about that in my book, quite fascinating science. And so sunlight exposure, I think, is extremely useful for improving your immune function. Your immune function is really central to your health. People, many people in America, have a weak innate immune system, and that's causing a lot of their diseases. Their diseases are actually there to help boost the immune function. They serve the immune cells to help improve their health. sulf, I believe, you know, all these diseases like arthritis and things, gut dysbiosis and Etc. But should we be taking, for example.

Sulfur producing some compounds that help boost Lutaphone, like lipoic acid and an acetyl cysteine and. Yes, right. We'll be taking the methyLating vitamin B.

Vitamins to help with that sulfur and.

Right.

Make sure you have a methylation pathway. Of course, I like to just eat really, really healthy foods, you know, certified.

Organic, Whole Foods, lots of green vegetables, lots of. But is that, is that enough, though? I mean, is that enough? Because I don't think you've been doing that. so I'm thinking, okay, from my functional medicine perspective, how can I fix these problems?

Dr. Glycine is another one, you know, taking glycine, that's one that I've talked to functional medicine specialists who like glycine as a supplement. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, because that's going to help to.

Counteract the glyphosate substitution for the glycine, which is so important to try to prevent that. You can take amino acids of glycine.

You can take sulfur boosting compounds like.

NAC, lipoic acid, selenium, milk thistle, Epsom salt baths. Probiotics, vitamin D, these are all things people can do. And plus just cut out your exposures as much as possible.

And then probiotics, yeah, cut out exposure is crucial. Try everything you can to cut out exposure. And then probiotics especially, it's curious that there was a study on cows that found that sauerkraut juice was beneficial for cows that were, I can't imagine these cows eating sauerkraut, but they were sick and they had glyphosate in their urine and they gave them several things with sauerkraut juice, was one of the things I gave them. And I don't know how they thought to do that, but I found that quite interesting because I was wondering whether, and it hasn't been proven, whether the microbes in the sauerkraut juice were able to metabolize the glyphosate. I feel like if you could get microbes growing in your gut that can metabolize glyphosate, you would be a lot better off. And so, there are species of acetobacter that can metabolize glyphosate. So one could hope they might be in apple cider vinegar, you know, fermented foods. It's a possibility. It hasn't been proven, but it's something that I find appealing.

So I sort of need a multi-pungent approach.

When somebody comes in and they complain of abdominal pain, maybe they get fullness or bloating after they eat. Maybe they have diarrhea after they consume or just diarrhea during the day, and they may feel nauseous or have excess gas. And so then you get a good detail history of what they're eating. Sometimes people, it throws somebody off because they may not have had problems with dairy prior to when they, you know, at a younger age, and then they developed. And so they're confused as to why they have started to have problems now. But as I mentioned, you can develop problems with lactose, issues with lactose and digesting dairy at any point in your life. it increases as we get older and it often can increase after we've had some sort of infection or inflammation or antibiotics in our system. And so you want to just figure out what is somebody dealing with, the abdominal pain, the bloating and gas. And then you want to say, okay, when do your symptoms occur? Because typically when there's problems with lactose, it's half an hour to two hours after you consume the lactose-containing food, so the dairy. And the symptoms usually resolve five to seven days after you've removed the dairy from the diet. And what's happening is there, if there's low levels of this lactase enzyme in the small intestine, then the carbohydrate component of dairy, the lactose does not get broken down. And when it's not absorbed as it should be, it goes into the colon and in the colon it gets consumed, the bacteria in the colon eat it and produce a lot of gas and a lot of water goes into the colon to deal with these food particles that are too large. And as a result, you get a lot of gas, and bloating and diarrhea. So it is a very hard food to digest and absorb. We see it all the time. And so it's, the reason we wanted to talk about it and do this podcast is because it's so common and patients are really struggling with it all the time. And even though, you know, to you and I, it's like, okay, we see, you know, of course go off dairy. People often come in in denial. They're like, oh, no, it's not the dairy, you know? And I'm like, yeah, you gotta give it a try.

You know, one of the things that often people wonder about is, well, what about black taste free milk? Or what about yogurt? Or what about cow or sheep? Or what about A2 versus A1 casein? How do we figure all that out? And, and, and how do we determine, you know, what people should be doing if they want to include dairy. Because I know, for example, if I eat regular milk, I'll be in trouble. But if I have goat or sheep yogurt, I seem to do okay. So I wonder, you know, how does that work? And can you explain a little bit about that?

It's such a great question. I mean, what we often start with is pulling away all dairy for somebody because that's how we can see, okay, how much is this going to improve your symptoms? but you're correct. There are some better quality dairies, like the A2 milk, that people tolerate better. If the dairy is fermented like yogurt, it's broken down. And so many times people can tolerate some plain, whole fat yogurt without problem, but they couldn't drink a glass of milk, for example. And because that fermented milk the fermenting process breaks it down. For other people, they can't tolerate anything. So some people even have to be a little, they have to watch even butter intake, and they have to go with something like a ghee instead. So there's many ways you can react to dairy. So we're talking about reacting to the lactose in dairy, which is the carbohydrate component of dairy. That's what we're talking about here. but people also react to the proteins in dairy, and they can have food sensitivities or food allergies to that dairy as well. So there's multiple ways people can react to dairy. So we always start with pulling it all out and then maybe adding back in some easier to digest dairy if somebody really wants it and they don't have a problem with it, such as a full-fat, you know, non-homogenized unsweetened yogurt.

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That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better. and live younger longer. Now back to this week's episode. And so what about people taking enzymes like lactase? Or is that a good idea? Should people just avoid dairy? Are there other issues that happen? And what are the consequences of sort of consuming dairy if you are lactose intolerant?

You know, that's a great question. So the enzymes that are in that, like the lactase enzyme is the enzyme in galactaide is a beta-galactosidase, and that can help people break down their dairy and tolerate it better. But that's a good question. Like, I typically recommend that people don't consume a lot of these enzymes if they're having problems and just avoid the food. But some people choose to have some of these digestive aids and then have a little bit of the dairy from time to time.

Yeah. And sometimes cheat and, you know, eat ice cream and then of course I pay for it later.

Yeah, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, it's, you know, I think that these enzymes may be helpful for some people, but I think the reason that we're so focused on dairy is, you know, everybody was like, you got to get your calcium, you got to get your calcium. It was a huge marketing campaign to promote the amount of dairy that we needed to consume. And so it's really important to remind people that there's so many other ways to get their calcium. Almonds, almond butter, great sources of calcium. Sardines, great source of calcium. Salmon in a can has bones in it, great source of calcium. Broccoli and your greens are a good source of calcium. And so there's lots of ways you can get good calcium in your diet and you don't have to feel like you need to be getting it from dairy products?

Yeah.

And, I would just underscore that anybody listening who wants to hear about dairy should listen to the podcast I did with David Ludwig where he dug into the article that he wrote with Walter Willett who was one of the leading scientists at Harvard called Milk and Health. And, if you want to Google it, it's New England Journal of Medicine, Milk and Health. We'll put it in the show notes, but there's also a great medium article he wrote about it as well. And, bottom line is that all the propaganda about milk needing for your bones, it actually increases fractures. It's, you know, it, it, it doesn't do a lot of things that it was promoted to do by the Dairy Council and the got milk ads. It's not a great sports drink. It's not great for weight loss. It's not great for, for osteoporosis and back. It may cause osteoporosis. It may cause allergies, digestive issues, as we mentioned, even autoimmune diseases, cancer. So I, I think there's a lot of reasons to be cautious about Dairy. And I, and again, I, I just underscore the fact that when we're talking about dairy, we're talking about sort of modern cow dairy. Sometimes heirloom cows have different, you know, or grass finished cows have different properties and better tolerated sometimes sheep and goat is better tolerated. So it really depends on sort of you and a personal decision. But it's not nature's perfect food unless you're a calf. And it's also, you know, problematic in many, many ways.

Absolutely. As we see here with some of these cases, like this first one here, there was a 25-year-old gentleman who came to see me and, you know, he was relatively, he was really healthy, actually. And he was doing well until about a year ago. And he had like a stomach bug. He was traveling and he got some stomach bug. He didn't really think much of it. He recovered from it. But at the time he had like a fever and some diarrhea. He recovered from the But then since that point in time, he still had episodes where he was rushing to the bathroom and had diarrhea and bloating and gas production. And he really couldn't figure out what foods were involved at all. And he didn't think any food was involved. And he was, you know, so he wanted to figure it out. So based on his timeline of symptoms and, you know, that we gathered, from him, we said, you know, even without any testing, we said, let's just do a trial off a dairy and see what happens. And within a week, his symptoms got all better. And he thought, I, you know, was just, you know, did a wonderful job. The owner genius. I know, right? I fixed his diarrhea and gas and bloating. And, you know, he just avoids really most dairy because he feels better at this point in his life. So it's, you know, It sometimes.

Can.

Make a huge difference and something that we really encourage a lot of people to give a trial for.

Yeah, I think we've all been sort of brainwashed that we can't live without milk and dairy and then it's important for all these reasons which turns out not to be. I would say that clinically practicing functional medicine for plus 30 years and you also, it's one of those foods that is really problematic for a lot of people. not just lactose intolerance, but eczema, asthma, just general digestive discomfort, acne, autoimmune diseases, all kinds of problems clear up when you stop dairy. So, if you've never done it, I would encourage people to think about just taking a holiday for three or four weeks and just then adding it back and seeing what happens. You'll know your body will tell you very very quickly whether or not you are intolerant of dairy. Well, I mean, because it may not cause lactose intolerance, but you can get other reactions like congestion, sinus infections, you know, all kinds of skin issues, eczema and so forth. And we did a, we did a Pegan diet challenge with Katie Couric, and she has eczema. She's like, I might, an arthritis, and she got off all that junk and.

And it got better.

Oh, good for her.

Good for her. You know, it is amazing. like you were mentioning, you can have a hard time digesting the carbohydrate in the dairy and have the lactose intolerance. And you can also have a sensitivity to the proteins in the dairy. And with a sensitivity with the proteins, a lot of times that will cause acne or it'll cause the eczema or asthma or inflammation in the skin. And of course, you can have an immediate to dairy too. You can have an IGE allergy. So you can have an allergy, a sensitivity, or a lactose intolerance. There's so many ways that people react to dairy. And in my second case here was a 20-year-old woman who came in and she got bloated every time she ate. She felt full and she sometimes had diarrhea and stomach pains. So she was just really struggling with her digestion. It was sometimes be constipated, but then sometimes diarrhea, sometimes rushing to the bathroom, really feeling bloated a lot. And when we got her history, we realized that she had this long history of acne. Well, that she's only 20, so it wasn't that long, but a few, you know, a history of acne. And so she was placed on antibiotics for the acne at age 18. And she had been on antibiotics for a couple years. And what we know is that even though those antibiotics may clear up the acne for, you know, immediately at that time, long term that's a huge concern because it's getting rid of all the good bacteria on our skin that prevents acne in the future. And it's also getting rid of all the good bacteria in our digestive system that is keeping our digestive system working well. And so that can really mess up the microbiome and results in lots of issues. And for her, over time, she started to have a lot more issues being on those antibiotics with her digestion. So, for her, we did a dairy-free trial just for both her skin and her digestion. And we saw a good improvement in her digestion and her skin, like her digestion got about 50% better her skin got 60 to 70% better, but she was not 100% better. So then we needed to do more testing. We did testing for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We did stool testing, and we found that she had this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that we needed to treat. And so, you know, I think a lot of times those long-term antibiotics like that can result in this overgrowth of bacteria. that then just snowballs into more and more problems. And so we needed to treat that with an herbal approach. And it was at that point when we kept her off of the dairy, treated her bacterial overgrowth, that she started to get much better in terms of her digestion. Her skin improved, her digestion improved, and her pain in her belly improved significantly as well. And you know what? She sometimes at this point cheats with a little bit of healthy yogurt, but she mostly stays off of all dairy and is doing much better.

Well, I mean, basically the message you're saying is when in doubt, cut it out.

There's a lot of the chemical sunscreens like avobenzone. I don't even know all of the names of them, the chemical sunscreens. and many of those are potential endocrine-disrupting chemicals as well. The flip side is, Mark, I'm one of those people who grew up in the South, had more than my share of sunburns, had my first skin cancer when I was 37. So I also want to slow down skin aging and wrinkles and skin cancer. So we kind of have to say, well, how do you get the protection you want without putting yourself at risk? I personally am a real fan of the zinc and titanium, the mineral sunscreens or even just a hat covering your skin staying out of the sun in the middle of the day. I mean I think there's a lot of other things we can do that are going to be safer for us and safer for the planet. One of my favorite one-stop shopping places to learn more about safety levels and which either skincare or sunscreens contain things we do or don't want is the Environmental Working Group and I know you've been a big big supporter of their work for years. I think they were some of the pioneers at really raising awareness. And what I love about them is they have a safe cosmetics database that you can search by type. So you could search sunscreens or you could search by brand, plug in your favorite brand and see how it rates to others on their list.

What about the sort of things like the tick stuff? Because people are worried about ticks and DEET is really common, which is a terrible toxin. It's used to kill insects, but also it's a neurotoxin that can affect humans. So, and then, you know, they say not to touch yourself, don't put your mouth, but, like, put in your skin.

It goes through everything.

So tell us a little bit about D and, and what to do about that.

Yeah.

So that, that's another one. I mean, you know, Mark and the Berkshires, ticks are everywhere. So for those of us who love to be in the woods, you always have to be mindful of enjoying your time in the beautiful woods and hiking without putting yourself at risk for getting a tick-borne illness. So how do we navigate that balance as well? You know, for people who are super concerned, I don't know how you feel about this, but you know, if you tuck your pants into your socks and put a little deet around where they join, maybe that's enough. I don't know. I don't do it. I mean, I hike all the time and you know, the other nice thing about being in the Berkshires, I can come home, strip on my front porch, leave my clothes on the outside, go in and do my tick check because I think that's probably the most important thing. The other interesting piece though is there's emerging science-based evidence that some essential oils may be almost effective as deep get repelling ticks. There's been some research on lemon eucalyptus oil, on thyme oil, on citronella. So I think that is another reasonable option to try to get some of the tick repellent benefits without causing harm.

So those essential oils are basically plant chemicals that are repellent. Okay, and it sort of loops back to, you know, the sort of view of functional medicine, which is that plants are highly intelligent. They, they're in fact sentient beings, believe it or not. They have 20 different senses, and they do all kinds of smart stuff that we, you know, we don't really attribute to plants, but they produce these molecules to deter insects from the cells.

So.

And they communicate with other plants. So if there's a caterpillar eating a plant, that plant goes, oh, I'm getting eaten by caterpillar. I'm going to produce this molecule. And by the way, I'm going to send a message to my neighboring plant friends over there through the mycelium network that you should secrete this chemical, too. And so these plants produce all these wonderful chemicals that we use, you know, for our own benefit, but they're really for their benefit. And, and, and I think the essential oils are great. And there's a lot of natural alternative products out there that are for insects, repellent, for skin care, for makeup. You know, one of the people don't realize the makeup is like lead, you know, and a lot of makeup and a lot of lipstick is leaded lipstick. Yes.

Oh my gosh.

And those things are really avoidable. It's just a matter of education. And I think the beautiful thing about it as we move in the right direction, as people start to become conscious, as we push those companies by our financial choices, we actually can drive the marketplace into a better set of products. And that is really what we need to be doing. Okay, so it's a big deal to think about what you put on your skin. remember, you know, learning that basically if you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your skin. And, and you and I both know that when we were in medical school, that we delivered all kinds of drugs to the skin. I mean, one of the quickest ways to get someone relief from chest pain, if they came into the emergency room with angina or, you know, heart disease, was to slap a toothpaste tube full of, like, nitroglycerin cream and put a, put a bandage over it. and that kind of went right through the skin. There's hormone patches for women, there's pain patches, there's all sorts of patches that people use because the skin is a vehicle for delivering medicine. So it makes logical sense to think that we should be aware of what we're putting on our skin in terms of sunblock, insect repellent, makeup, body care products, and yet most of us never give a thought about it. so tell us, Cindy, why should we really care? And I think it is, you know, because this seems to be like maybe a trivial issue, but how big of an issue is this? And why should we worry or should we?

Well, I'm glad you pointed out that we absorb things through the skin. So we think we put it on our skin and it's just going to stay on the outside, but it can potentially get inside our bodies. And one of the challenges, Mark, is trying to do good research to actually prove cause and effect when you're looking at some of the carriers or preservatives that are added to the things like the cosmetics that we put on our skin. You know, our old model of what happens with toxicity is the dose makes the poison. You know, you have to have massive amounts for it to have a negative impact. But there's so many things that are in our skincare products like phthalates, or parabens that have been dubbed endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And what that means is even tiny amounts, especially at critical windows, may actually muck up hormonal signaling and have long-lasting impacts that's less related to the dose but the cumulative exposure over time. So it's hard to tease out. I mean, you might be having exposures every day in teeny tiny amounts that seem immediately problematic, but down the road, when you're struggling with insulin resistance or breast cancer or uterine fibroids or thyroid issues, it could be related to these endocrine disrupting chemicals that have wreak havoc on our hormone balance.

I mean, yes, so why are all these compounds used in these products? I mean, why do we need all these petrochemical, endocrine disrupting, hormone busting, disrupting compounds? Why are they there?

It's a great question. So parabens typically are added as a preservative to extend the shelf life of your skin creams or your topical creams. Phthalates.

Yeah, so phthalates.

So you can keep it on your shelf for a year or two and it won't smell funny or it won't go bad. And so you don't get bacteria. I mean, some of them are trying to keep contaminants out. Phthalates tend be embedded with fragrances to make things smell pleasing to us and we put them on our bodies. And those are also endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

And is there a way to measure in the body whether there are these chemicals that are there from these products that people are using?

That's a great question, Mark. In studies that are trying to tease out how they influence our health, they often look at urinary levels to see how much people are exposed to. It's a little bit challenging, however, because it turns out that all of us show evidence of exposure to these chemicals. So it's a little bit hard to know what to do with measurements other than trying to do it from a scientific standpoint to say, do the levels track with health outcomes? In clinical practice, I have not done that. I don't know if you found it helpful or not, and when I first looking at it, we ended up coming back to the same recommendations anyway. We need to reduce exposure and find ways to support your body's getting rid of them.

Right. I mean, everybody should cut out toxins from their life and everybody should do all the things they can to upregulate their biology to detoxify these compounds, for sure. But sometimes it's really helpful. People just don't know about their exposures. I had one woman who was using a sunblock for years and her makeup recheck your urine. Super high levels of parabens. I'm like, oh, this isn't good. And other people, you have high levels of phthalates because they're drinking plastic water bottles or people have BPA because they're not aware of where it's coming from, which is best. Phenol a that comes from credit card receipts or restaurant receipts or, you know, just all kinds of, you know, gas station, all that stuff. It's, it's a lot. It's in Plastics, it's in bottles. So I think, I think we really can raise awareness by seeing that it's in your system. You know, I think, I think I find that often helpful for people to change their behavior, too. It's like, and, and then, then you can actually track it and see that it's coming down and see what's happening. And I think, you know, it is a little amorphous because, you know, when you look at, you know, on an individual level, it's hard to draw the connections in a one-to-one level of whether this caused the problem or not. But if you, but if you look at a population-wide level, these toxins clearly are linked to all sorts of harmful effects in of endocrine disorders, heart disease, cancers, and more. And I think it really is important for people to understand what they're doing, what they're putting on their body.

So.

The other thing I'd love you to talk about is some of the epigenetic effects of the toxins on the fetus when the mother is exposed to of products that could cause these hormone disruptive chemicals to get in the blood of the baby.

Yeah, I think that's really important to understand that there are critical windows or critical time frames that it's even more important to reduce exposure. And one of those classic time frames is when a woman is pregnant. Even little bits of exposures in utero may affect the fetus, and then those impacts persist into adolescence. adolescence. A study a few years ago, what they did, a lot of the data has to be correlative, but they measured urinary levels of phthalates and parabens in women at two different points in their pregnancy. And then when their babies were born, they tracked them for 9, 10, 11 years. And they found that higher levels of phthalates and parabens in the urine, the daughters of women with those higher levels ended up going into puberty earlier. which now that doesn't prove cause and effect, but you know sometimes you can't ethically design a study and when we see research like that that it does correlate with endocrine challenges down the road, we have to take that seriously. We have to take that seriously. There's been some other research linking exposure in utero in particular or early childhood to phthalates and parabens to higher incidence of ADHD-like symptoms in adolescents. So even neurodevelopment. Again, a lot of the data is correlative and epidemiologic, but we can't really design a placebo-controlled double-blinded trial to willingly expose one group of women and not expose another and track their children for 20 years.

Yeah. I mean, it's linked to ADD, to neurodevelopmental issues, behavioral issues, later stage symptoms of, you know, and obesity, even diabetes, heart disease, cancer, when they're exposed to these compounds in utero, which is kind of striking because I think people don't seriously think about what they're putting on their skin. But it is one of the most important things that you do every single day. Literally, you're doing besides eating, most of us put stuff on our skin every day, whether it's shampoo, whether it's face cream, whether it's makeup, whether it's sunblock, whether it's insect repellent. Like, these are things that we use a of in America. And unfortunately, they're really problematic. So let's say you go, oh geez, I've been using this stuff for a while. I'm going to switch to all these other products. But what do I do to get rid of these embedded toxins? Because if we did a fat biopsy of every American, you know, we wouldn't be too pretty. There'd be a lot of these compounds in there that are stored in there. How are we going to help get them down? And we've done podcasts on detoxification, but we're not talking about like water fast or some crazy thing. We're talking about you supporting the body's natural built-in detox pathways. How do we do that?

You know, Mark, before we jump into that, I want to come back to something that you just said about the fat biopsy. And I know that urine levels can sometimes be really helpful at motivating people to say, oh, my gosh, I need to look at this. But we have to be aware that even if they're not showing up in the urine, if we've had old exposures, they do tend to get deposite in fat, and we're not doing fat biopsies on people. I just want to point that out. So don't use an okay looking urine to say, okay, not a problem for me.

Right, right, for sure.

And it's been a concern as well if those are all residing as deposits in fat tissue. If somebody really rapidly loses weight and starts to all that, all those stored toxins, it could potentially put extra burden on a lot of different processes in the body. So it's just food for thought. And you have, and you have done a lot of podcasts on detoxification. It really is coming back to the basics. I mean, how do we get rid of things? We sweat by, we break a sweat by going out in the woods or exercising or sitting in a sauna. We you really have to focus on optimal gut function, hot fiber dense diet, a healthy microbiome, and specific foods that support all of our detoxification pathways. We can talk about a few of those. Drinking enough water. I mean, it's really, I don't know that there is a super magic for these endocrine disrupting chemicals, except it's really important to make sure our detoxifying enzymes nutrients they need to do their job.

And what are those things that our body needs most of to actually get rid of these toxins?

Yeah, we need B vitamins, we need magnesium, we need these sulfur containing amino acids that are rich in foods like broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, garlic, onions, the allium family. Antioxidant rich foods can kind of fill the gap with some of the deeply pigmented fruits and vegetables. you know, similar theme I think that's come up in other areas, but those are some of the foods that are most important. Prebiotic rich foods that can select out a healthy, robust, diverse microbiome that can also kind of, if we have detoxified and mobilized things, can help us get rid of it and clear it out of our system.

No, it's the same other practices that we can do to help our detox system, like saunas, exercise, lymphatic drainage, infrared saunas, hot and cold therapy, all those things help mobilize toxins from our system. Right. Right.

Do you have any favorites yourself?

Do I have any favorites? I I I do have a lot of things that I do to actually mobilize my toxins every day. I make sure that I eat brassicas every day. So last night we had a big bunch roccoli rabe for that. I have brussels sprouts, lots of garlic and onions. I use a lot of spices in my cooking. And I also make sure I do saunas. I do ice baths. I sweat. I actually like to sweat a lot. So my exercise is great. Yoga is great for lymphatic drainage, getting massages. It's great to mobilize tissue, lymph stores. So there's a lot of techniques you can use to actually help. And then I take the right supplements. I make sure I take a cocktail because I've had mercury poisoning. I have weak detox enzymes. I take N-acetyl cysteine. I take all the methylation vitamins. I take a lot of the things that actually help to mobilize these toxins, even the sulfurophane boosting compounds. I even use indole-3-carboxyl-methane as a way of sort of helping with some of the effects on hormone metabolism. So, I'm sort of pretty fanatic about it because I've been so sick from being toxic and I don't want me anymore. But, you know, the truth is, it's hard. Like, I, you know, I didn't stop eating fish. And I, you know, I've got my Mercury levels down years and years ago from, like, almost 200 to, like, you know, eight or five.

Wow.

And I was like, oh, you know, it's been a bunch of years, and I've been sort of a little bit lazy about fish. I don't eat tuna. I don't eat swordfish. But occasionally, occasionally, I'll have a piece of tuna when I go out. Occasionally, and I'll eat halibut. I never eat swordfish. occasionally I'll have, you know, more fish than I would think. And I thought, oh, I'm good, but I just checked my levels and I again, my level was super high. I have like 37 on a challenge test. You know, like I think we're just, we're just in such a toxic world and it's hard. It's hard. I mean, last night I made that delicious, you know, Spanishy kind of Greek baked cod with tomato sauce, but like cod is not terrible. It's not the worst, but it's definitely got mercury. And I'm just like, oh, what am I doing? Like, what are you gonna eat? You know, so I've come to believe that, you know, grass-fed regenerative meat or wild meat is probably the safest protein on the planet. I know it's maybe controversial to say that, but, you know, even, you know, even you've got, unless you've got really well grown whole grains and beans that are generally raised and have no glyphosate sprayed in them and are not, you know, genetically altered. I mean, there's, like, a lot of messy. in the plant world. So I don't know. But I definitely make sure I upregulate my system all the time.

You know, Mark, you raise an interesting point as well. I think everybody is different in terms of their genetic predisposition to handle a given amount of exposure or not. It's not that we're just going to let, okay, you're a good detoxifier, you can let yourself do whatever. But I think that's also an important point that some people need more support than others. We all want to reduce burden. We want to reduce what's coming in. But some of us have to go the extra step and really do more aggressive programs like you're doing.

If you love that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on getting to the root cause of all disease. There's so many things that drive inflammation and if you're overweight, you're inflamed. Most of our chronic illnesses start in the gut.

You need to address the inflammation in your brain in order for you to lose weight.