The KEY SIGNS You're Not Healthy & How To Fix Them To LIVE LONGER! | Dr. Mark Hyman

And your house is one of the biggest sources of toxins, both off-gassing of VOCs and chemicals, whether it's paint or.

Furniture, carpets, and also household cleaning products. Excited to jump into the questions. We have our first one on the topic of fasting and hair loss from Tanya. Let's go ahead with the first question from our community.

Hi, Mark. My name is Tanya Mandich. I am doing intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet, and I've been losing some hair. since August. So wondering what your thoughts are on that. Thanks.

Hi. Well, that's a great question. I think intermittent fasting is something that is in vogue. Ketogenic diets are in vogue, and they're not necessarily for everybody. When you have hair loss, there are many, many causes. And it may be related to what you're eating. It may be a coincidence. It may be related to your gut amino acid intake. whether you're doing enough protein on a ketogenic diet. Sometimes, you know, amino acids are critical for hair growth. So you kind of got to look at the whole picture of what you're doing. When someone has hair loss, I tend.

To look at a number of different things.

One, I look at thyroid. That's a big one. First easy one to do. And often most doctors miss thyroid. It affects one in five women, one in 10 men. Most of them are poorly diagnosed or not diagnosed, about half of them. And the ones who are diagnosed, often are not treated optimally. Doctors don't tend to check T3, which is really important, free T3, and that can be off even if you're on Synthroid or level of thyroxine, which is the most common treatment. It may not be enough. You may need to add T3, and that can often be a miracle worker. It can be gluten. Gluten is a huge cause. I just ran into someone at a conference and they're like, My daughter has alopecia, which is a more serious autoimmune hair loss, but that can be a huge cause of it. And she's like, well, my doctor says food has nothing to do with it. And I said, Look, go on the National Library of Medicine, don't listen to me, look at the National Library of Medicine, all the research ever published basically, which fit the print that's been peer reviewed and have a look, just put gluten and hair loss and see what you find. And it was like hundreds of articles or celiac disease and hair loss. So I think many doctors are not aware of the connection between food and hair loss. So it's important to look for leaky gut, for gluten issues. Biotin can play a big role. Biotin is made by the bacteria in your gut. So if you have a bad microbiome, you might not be making enough biotin, which is necessary for hair loss, amino acids are critical. You might make sure you're getting a protein in the right amino acids. And if you're doing a ketogenic diet, there may be something going on with your microbiome or there might be something going on with, you know, different factors of what you're choosing to eat or not eat because you can be a healthy ketogenic diet, you can be on an unhealthy ketogenic diet. So I, you know, I need more information to actually determine what your cause of your hair loss is, but it's important to look at all these factors as you begin to think about it. Also for women, it can often be a problem with their endocrine system hormones. For example, PCOS, which we've covered on the podcast, polycystic ovarian syndrome is a common symptom of hair, is a common cause of hair loss. Women will get high levels of androgens or male hormones, they'll get male pattern kind of hair loss on the top of their head. And that's very concerning for women. They might get hair growth on their face. If that's happening, it may be a hormonal issue. You don't always have to be overweight for that. It can be often caused by insulin resistance or pre-diabetes or sugar. So there's a lot of things to think about when hair loss, But you kind of got to go dig down the rabbit hole and really take a comprehensive view.

That's great, Mark. And I know you've had Dr. Sarah Gottfried on your podcast before and in her last book, she talked about the challenges with women in particular being on the ketogenic diet for longer term. So I'm not sure how long the last questionnaire community member has been on it, but that could also be something to look into. And that's the whole interplay of hormones.

That you were just mentioning. For sure. I mean, your diet plays a huge role in your hormones. And I would say, ketogenic diet, it's interesting. you know, 300 pounds, type 2 diabetes, for sure, go for it. It's gonna take a year, you know, get yourself reset. But when you think about historically what happened to our body, and I just, you know, I'm finished writing a book on longevity and I went deep into this subject. What's interesting is that historically we would have periods of starvation, you know, where there wasn't a lot of food around. So we would go into a ketogenic state, meaning we would use the fat on our bodies to use that for energy because you might have 2,500 calories of glycogen, which is carbohydrates stored in your muscle, that'll last you a day, or you might have 40 or 50 or 100,000 calories of fat stored in your body, and that'll last you for a long time. So, the body is very good at adapting to starvation, but historically we would go through periods of scarcity and then periods of abundance, summer and winter. And the problem, is when you're in a ketogenic state, it's not your body's long-term state. So people talk about cyclical keto, going on and off it. It can be a therapeutic diet. I typically don't recommend it as a maintenance diet for people.

All right, Mark, our next question is from Camille and she wants to know about liver cleansing.

Hi, Dr. Hyman. My name is Camille and your podcast has helped me immeasurably. Can you please advise the best liver cleanse to use on a daily basis? Thank you.

Thank you so much for that question, Camille. It's really important because we all need to learn how to love our livers. They do a lot of work for us. They clean our blood, they keep us healthy, and when they don't work, we get sick. And people think that, you know, unless you have liver failure, it's fine, which is not true. The liver needs a lot of support to do its work. And I know this personally because I had mercury poisoning. and I had to take care of my liver if I wanted to get better. The liver requires a lot of support to do its job of detoxification. And also, unfortunately, we are in a sea of toxins. So what is the worst toxin now affecting the liver? You might say pesticides, you might say industrial chemicals, you might say heavy metals, and you would be wrong. the biggest problem affecting the liver is sugar. It's the number one cause of liver disease today in America. In fact, it's the number one cause of liver transplants. Drew, I don't know if I ever told you this story, but I went to a conference on childhood obesity. It was maybe, maybe, maybe eight years ago. And there was a doctor there who was chatting with in the hall. I'm like, hey, what do you do? He says, well, I'm a, I'm a pediatric gastroenterological surgeon. I'm like, what are you doing here? He's, oh, we do liver transplants. I'm like, what do you mean? Liver transplants for what? He said, when I was seeing teenagers with cirrhosis of the liver from fatty liver, from eating sugar and soda, and I'm like, you're kidding. This is just horrific. We see kids little as five years old with what we call non-alcoholic steatohepatosis, which basically means fatty liver, and eventually ends up with scarring the liver and cirrhosis. We think it's alcoholism, it's not, it's sugar and starch. So this is the biggest driver of a toxic liver. So the first thing you need to take care of your liver is really dramatically cut down or cut out starch and sugar. Obviously alcohol is a problem. You next want to make sure you're avoiding as many toxins as possible. get rid of the toxins in your food. Obviously processed food for sure, additives, preservatives, but also pesticides and chemicals in food. I am on the board of the Environmental Working Group and it's important to check which vegetables you're eating that are contaminated. For example, strawberries, which I love, the worst, I would never eat a non-organic strawberry. It's number one on the Environmental Working Group's list of most contaminated fruits and vegetables. You can Google it, ewg.org, you can find the dirty dozen list, stay away from those. and then there's a clean 15. So if you don't eat organic avocados or bananas, it's okay, right? Save some money there. But for sure, if you're having celery, if you're having nectarines, if you're having strawberries, you do not want to eat those if they're not organic. Next is clean up your house. Your house is one of the biggest sources of toxins, both indoor air pollution from off-gassing of VOCs and chemicals, whether it's paint or furniture, carpets. I mean, there's so much plastics and chemicals out there. So try to use natural materials in your house. and also household cleaning products. And if you can't make sure you redo everything in your house, get an air filter and clean your air with a HEPA filter. We use one called Air Doctor, which is really great. Next, I would say you want to make sure you are using household cleaning products that are not making you sick. I mean, think about it. When you read these products, if ingested, go immediately to the hospital. You don't want those in your house. So the Environmental Working Group has, what are they safe household cleaning products? Skin care products, they have a wonderful database called Skin Deep where you can see what are you putting on your face? Your lipstick has got lead in it? Well, don't use it. If your topical creams have parabens and plastics in them, don't use it. You're absorbing it. If you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your skin. And next, you want to make sure obviously the fish and the meat you're eating has low mercury and toxins and there's again guides on the EWG.org so it's a great resource to lower your exposures. The next thing I would do, is make sure you're eating foods that upregulate all your detox pathways. So the most important categories of foods are the Brassica or cruciferous vegetable family, which is broccoli, collards, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, that whole family, and the garlic and onions and family. And so I would eat those on a regular basis. For tonight, I'm having broccolini with garlic. So I do it pretty much every day. I make sure I have these foods next. You can actually start to do kind of more fancy stuff. You can have green juices, celery juice, watercress juice, cilantro juice. I had a who had heavy metals and he just juiced cilantro and had a cup of cilantro juice every day. And cilantro is a great detoxifier that helped his liver flush out the metals and he got rid of his metals. You also want to eat herbs and spices like rosemary, curcumin, which like turmeric, which you for curries, you want to make sure you have things like rosemary, lemon peel. You know, we throw away the lemon peel, but if you get organic lemons, you can, you can kind of, I like to, to kind of grate the lemon peel and put it in salads. It's great with, like, my kale, pine nuts, a lemon peel, lemon juice. olive oil, salt and pepper, it's delicious. That's why I like summer because we go fresh kale, it's really good with a fresh kale. And then, once you've kind of upgraded your diet, include all the phytochemicals, and I'm literally just like touching the surface. There's whole books written about this. I just got picked from Icaria, which is in Greece, one of the blue zones. And, every morning they and all day actually they had this stuff called wild sage tea and I'm like, wow, what is this stuff? Why do they live to be 100 years old? Why do they have the longest lived population in the world? I'm like, is it anything to do with the tea? Well, I think it does because when I looked up the tea in the phytochemical content, it was full of something called epigallocatechin gallate, which are these incredible compounds that are detoxifying, that are anti-inflammatory, that help your immune system, that activate all these longevity switches. In fact, there's some theory that, and in fact, there's data on this, that these catechins in green tea and also in this wild sage tea upregulate glutathione and help your body detoxify, which is the main detoxifier. Then, after you've done all that, obviously, exercise is important. Making sure your gut's healthy is important. Making sure you're sweating. I call it the three p's. Poop, pee, poop and perspire. You want to make sure you're flushing your system. Lots of water, lots of sweating, saunas. I mean, I did hot yoga. I was just in New York.

I do.

I love hot yoga. Kind of flushes your system out, moves your lymphatic circulation. All that's great for detox. And then lastly, you want to kind of beef up your supplement measurement. So a good multivitamin. the reason, and the reason is, oh, before I go to the supplements, I just want to kind of loop back to the food. You know, a lot of people don't realize how important amino acids are from protein. So protein is so important for detoxification because a lot of the pathways, and I'm not going to bore you with all the fancy chemical names, but a lot of the pathways in the liver to get rid of toxins require amino acids. So you have to have a good complement of amino acids. And if you're just eating plant foods, you might not get those. So important to make sure you're getting enough. of the right amino acids. And then supplements. What should you be taking? A good multi is important. But then there's the number ones that are really key. Methylation, B12, folate, B6, very critical. Zinc, very critical. Selenium, important for the liver detoxification and boosting glutathione. Magnesium. So you want to make sure you have adequate levels of these nutrients. Then there's all the herbs like milk thistle and other compounds that can really be helpful. Curcumin, artichoke, There's a lot of these compounds, ellagic acid and pomegranate, so all these things that we can use as part of our diet to upregulate these pathways that are phytochemicals. And then there's the supercharged ones like glutathione boosting supplements like N-acetylcysteine, which works so well the government wants to ban it, which makes me laugh. You know, anything works too good, they wanna turn it into a drug. I'm like, no, it's just a supplement. And then lipoic acid also is very important. and there's a host of other things, but those are the main things I focus on. And I've learned to incorporate these. It sounds like a lot, but I've learned to incorporate these into my life every day. This morning I had a green juice. I make sure I took a sauna today. I have one in my house, a steam. I'm having broccolini and garlic tonight for dinner. I'm taking my supplements with n-acetyl cysteine, lipoic acid, and my methylating supplements. So I just sort of work it into my life. It sounds like a lot, but once.

You kind of learn how your body.

Works, You kind of just do it automatically.

All right, Mark, super robust answer, really great and thorough action items that you shared over there. Okay, let's go to the next question that we have here. And this is from Flora.

Hey, Dr. Mark, I'm a big fan of your podcast and I'm looking to help my husband who had some life-changing events before we met.

He suffers from alopecia, areata, and restless legs.

Just wondering if there was a connection between those.

Those two? Oh, wow. Great question. Alopecia and restless legs. Alopecia, for those who are listening, don't know what it is. It means you lose all the hair in your body. No eyebrows, no eyelashes, no pubic hair, no hair obviously in your head. You lose all the hair on your body. That is an autoimmune disease, and that is usually because of gluten. Now, it can be other reasons, leaky gut, other factors, and there's other causes of inflammation, autoimmune disease. But we approach it the same way we approach autoimmune disease. I remember I had a patient come in once years ago, I treated with it. I do a lot of virtual consults over the years. I would see people in person and then I would talk to them on the phone. This was before Zoom.

And I would help them with their.

Health over the year. Then after this year, this woman came back and she'd gotten off gluten, we'd fixed her gut, we'd done all the normal functional medicine things, and she was wearing a hat. you know, and she came in wearing a hat and like halfway through the consult, she pulled off her hat and she had a full head of hair. And I was like, what happened to you? It was pretty wild. And I've seen this many, many times. And then restless leg syndrome is kind of inflammation of the brain. So, it can be often caused by magnesium deficiency, but it's come kind of neurologic irritability and it can be other things like heavy metals, mold, lime, other things. And it's very horrible for people who have it and they can't get comfortable at night, they don't sleep well, you can detect it by sleep studies. Often I'd start out with magnesium as a sort of initial treatment, but there are many other things that can cause it that I would check with your functional medicine doctor about. But they may be related, but they may not.

Okay, great. Awesome, Mark. We have a next question here from Mary.

I am a nurse who often works 12 or 16 hour shifts trying to stay hydrated, and eat healthy is nearly impossible. Any tips?

Tell me about it. I get it. I definitely get it because I worked in the hospital for years. I delivered babies, worked in the ER, worked overnight shifts, tried to stay healthy. And it's not easy, but now more than ever, it's easier. So honestly, you know, honestly, what I would do, it sounds goofy, is I would get a camel back, which are those little backpacks you could buy for, you know, 30, 40 bucks. And it's got a bladder in it. You can fill with water. You can put electrolytes in it. It's got little pockets. You can kind of throw stuff and zippers in it, like, so you can store a little food in there. And I would carry around your little survival pack, literally your hydration pack on your back. You can kind of put in your mouth, drink water, it Clips in so it stays out of the way. And then, and then I would. invest in snacks. So I would get things that are high in protein and high in fat. I like nut butter packets, macadamia nuts are great, they're super high in calories, almonds, walnuts. You can get certain kinds of jerkies, beef bars, grass-fed, not grass-fed beef, regenerative beef now jerky, that kind of stuff you can just carry with you and it's super nourishing, super satisfying. Fat and protein lasts a long time. If you go for the sugar, and the carb snacks, you're gonna go, you're gonna spike your energy and then you're gonna crash and you're gonna feel awful and you're gonna be hungry and then you're gonna get gain weight and become diabetic. So it's not a good idea. And by the way, you know, most nurses are not that healthy and it's because of the stress of the job is because of what you're saying and it's because of the crappy food in hospitals and lack of access. So it takes a little bit of planning, but I do, I mean, I, you know, work in the hospital, clean with the clinic and, you know, my drawers, you know, people laugh at me, but in my drawer, my office, I have a whole, like, I have a whole enough food for, like, a week in there. I have canned salmon, I have canned sardines. Nobody wants to come in there when I'm eating them. You know, I make sure I have all the, the, the nut butters. I have jars, little jars, nothing in a spoon. I can just take a bunch of spoons of it. So there's a lot of ways to hack this. If you want to laugh and have a good time, go Google on drhyman.com, find the Dr. Hyman's food emergency pack, and there's a whole video of me.

Showing what I put in my pack. But it's, it's kind of fun, but it's, it's not easy.

But you have to do a little planning and it's totally doable.

Yeah, it seems Mark, another part of this that Mary is asking about what I'm reading between the lines is also your community and the people that you work with. A lot of my brother-in-law is a nurse and often he'll say that there's always cookies and there's cupcakes and there's candy. Sometimes, again, it's all well-intentioned. Oftentimes, it's even patients coming in and giving a little care package to the nurses saying thank you for taking care of my family member. How do you think about the community component and wanting to eat healthy, but also not wanting to, you know.

Present.

Yourself as somehow better than the people around you? You just want to do your own thing, but you don't necessarily want to poo poo on their lifestyle if they would choose to eat those foods.

I mean, I just leave by example. I don't criticize people. I don't make fun of them. I had lunch with some people I didn't really know very well, and we were at a restaurant, and it was like an Italian restaurant. There was tons of bread. they threw bread on the table. There was pasta, tons of, it's, like, famous for its pasta. And I'm like, well, what do you guys have? It's, like, protein and vegetables. Oh, we got, you know, bronzino, and we got broccoli Rob, we got some mushrooms, we got some zucchini. I'm like, great, I'll have that. And so they all waited for me to order, and then they all, or they looked around, they ordered all that, and you can tell they wanted the pasta and the bread. They just didn't eat it. So I don't say anything, and I kind of laugh, you know, but it's really the power of peer pressure. And when you see someone who's, wow, how come he has energy? How come he's healthy? How come he's 62 and isn't got a pot belly and, you know, look like look like crap. It's because I take care of myself and I, you know, I probably run my engine too fast is the truth. I mean, I love life. I like to do things. I enjoy people. And so I often pack too much into a day and into a life, but I still maintain my health. And I, you know, I do it by just creating these habits that I've started to accumulate over the years and sometimes I go off the rails for sure. But I come right back. You know, like today I was like, okay, I'm gonna get back on track. I had a green juice this morning. I had some protein for lunch. And I just, you know, I got my activity in and I worked out and I took a little steam. So I feel like it just, even though I'm busy, I can kind of fit in the things that help support me. And not every day, but most days.

Great, Mark. Love that. All right. Our next question is from Emmanuel. in the community and she has a question about pet allergies as well as some food allergies that her kids have.

I have allergies to dogs and cats and was wondering if there's anything I could do to heal from them. My kids also have food allergies which happen to be severe. Anything that could help them?

Thank you. Thank you for that question. So I don't think I've ever been asked that question, but I've seen a lot of patients who have this problem. of both having food and animal environmental allergies. And most people don't think they're connected. And just, I want to sort of define terms a little bit. Allergy typically in medicine means IGE type 1 hypersensitivity reaction. That means that's the kind of allergy you get when you eat a peanut and your tongue plos up, you can't breathe and you get anaphylaxis or you get bee sting and you get a pines and swelling up. that's what we call allergy. Food allergy can be that or it can be what we call a delayed response or a delayed food sensitivity, which is not the same part of your immune system. That's not as severe. It's not life threatening. And you may, you know, let's say, I don't know, you might have dairy on Monday, but you might get a headache on Tuesday. So you can't often connect the dots. If you eat a peanut, you know, within a few minutes you're going to die if you got a peanut allergy. So I think I think we've just sort of defined terms. If it's a food sensitivity, that's a little bit different. But what I found is that there's been a really dramatic increase in environmental allergies and true food allergies over the last number of decades, three or four decades. And why is that? It's not like we've changed our genes. It's because we've had a toxic environment because we have a leaky gut because our diet's bad, stress. All these factors cause increased allergy. Now, one thing I discovered many years ago was that I had patients with really severe IgE food allergies, which are real allergies. And when I, we also had environmental allergies, you know, like dust or pollen or animals. But when I treated their leaky gut, when I got their immune system sorted, their overall allergies went down. So their environmental allergies went down and their overall reactivity went down. And, and so we were able to really sort that out. Now, I'm going to tell you something else that's going to be a little shocking. But it's very fascinating and it's not actually that wacky because there's a lot of science behind this. In fact, there's a number of books called the Epidemic of Absence, which is about the idea that we co-evolve with bugs in our gut. And if you go to countries where kids grew up in the jungle or they're super indigenous tribes or underdeveloped countries or in Amazon, there's no allergies, there's no autoimmunity. It just doesn't exist. but there's what they do have is a lot of worms. And in fact, IGE, which is the what I was talking about before, that part of immune system is designed not to make you allergic to peanuts, but to help you kill worms and manage worms in your belly, 'cause we didn't have antiworm medicine, so our immune system kept them in check. And so when we eliminated all these worms and stuff we started getting out imme disease in fact or or or or and the part of your immune system, the white blood cell that fights these worms called eosinophils, it's one of your white blood cells, is the same white blood cell that gets activated and causes allergy. And I saw this little kid with, and you're gonna kind of go, wow, Dr. Hyman, you've really gone off the deep end here, but I'm telling you, this is actually a legitimately researched field of medicine, which is helminthic therapy, which basically means worm therapy. and this kid was, like, super allergic. And I'm like, oh, I tried all this normal stuff. It's like, listen, I I know about this treatment. I know how to get it. It's pretty easy to do. You just swallow this tasteless vial of fluid, which has worms in it every two weeks for six months or so, and it often can fix your IgE allergies. And the mother's like, okay, anything. And so he took it, and. And his IgE level, which is that anybody that affects the. the immune system in this kind of allergy, in the hypersensitivity allergy was like a thousand. It should be like a hundred or less. And in the number of months, it went down from a thousand to like a hundred to normal. And I was like, holy crap, this stuff works. And I began to start using this on select patients. I know it's for everybody, but for select patients, and these are actually, it sounds gross, but they're rat tapeworms. They don't actually stay in your system. So they kind of go through they kind of talk to your immune system. They say, hey, guys, you know, it's okay. Let's focus on me. Ignore the allergens. Like, over here, guys. So, like, you know, kind of like somebody, you know, being, being kind of a deflector. And, and it seems to work. And, and there are actually studies on using it for Crohn's disease and, and other, other, other Colitis diseases, allergies, asthma. And so if you're really interested in this, topic. I'd read the book, Epidemic of Absence. There's also, if you want to get a short version of it, the New York Times had an article at the time. You can kind of find it online about the epidemic, the absence of the absence of these microbes that we grew up with historically, evolutionarily, and that have now been eliminated for the most part. And, and, and what the consequences are, which is this increasing allergies.

So I think there's, this is maybe a little crazy sounding, but actually it's really not. Yeah, and actually this American Life, one of the top podcasts on public radio, they did a whole episode on this as well that we'll link to inside of the show notes where they had people because it's illegal for doctors to prescribe that up here and you can't really get it. But there's places in Mexico and I think one of the world's leaders in it is from Israel. And he's coming to America and giving some lectures on it as well and talked about it.

Yeah, in the UK, you can buy them from the UK.

Yeah, well, so we'll link all those in the show notes. Fascinating. Who knows? Maybe in the future we'll have clinics that have worm dispensaries. Maybe, maybe not. For sure. All right, Mark, we got another question here from Jessica. Goes back to kind of how we originally started that episode, and that's on the topic of fasting. So let's play this question from Jessica.

Hey, Dr. Hyman, what do you think? Is it more beneficial to fast for longer and work out maybe later in.

The day, or to get my morning.

Workout in when I feel my best and have a shorter fast? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Well, that's a great question, Jessica. I don't think you have to choose. My view of life is when there's a fork in the road, take it. So I would say you can design your life so that you can work out in the morning and still have a 14-hour fast. For example, I did that today. I had dinner last night, maybe finished around eight o'clock. I got up early at six, went in my workout, and then, you know, around eight, 8 30 had some, some, some breakfast and a juice, like a green juice. So that was a 14 hour fast overnight and I got my workout in. I didn't have to go through some gyrations to like figure out my workout day. So I wasn't, messing up my fast. So I think, I think it's, it's good to work out in the morning. If you feel like it, if you work out late at night, it often can be activating. prevent you from sleeping, jack up your cortisol, blood sugar. So I think, you know, you have to feel what's good for you, but I think that it's fine to, you know, just, you know, 12-14 hour fast. If you want to do 16 hour, you can do that. You can just shift your eating schedule a little bit. But I think workout when you, you know, people say, when should I take my supplements, doctor? I said, when you remember, you know, when should you exercise? Whenever you can. So I think that's kind of the bottom line.

Yeah, there may be some nuances there for women, as you mentioned previously. And it's good to find a community of other women that are out there that are also experimenting and depends on your life stage and your goals. There's a friend of Mark's, yours, it's in Toronto who has one of these communities where they talk about fasting and working out. Dr. Stephanie Estima, she's a chiropractor up there, really sweet woman, has a whole community called Betty Body. And they specifically are thinking about a lot of aspects of working out. We'll link over there to the community as well. So hopefully that's helpful, Jessica. All right, Mark, the next question here is someone who has high LDL and is confused about cheese. Her name is Kathleen.

Hi, Dr. Hyman.

I just finished your book.

What the heck should I eat?

I'm 72 years old with high LDLs and I'm missing the diabetic two range. I'm confused about cheese. Can you explain that again? Thank you.

Fat is something that can raise your cholesterol. Saturated fat will raise LDL cholesterol. But what I'm more concerned about and the thing you said that was most important was that you have type 2 diabetes. So if you look at what matters, it's not the LDL cholesterol, it's the quality of the cholesterol. Is it large fluffy cholesterol or is it small dense cholesterol? Small dense cholesterol particles, and a lot of them are what causes heart disease. We call this atherogenic dyslipidemia or basically heart disease causing cholesterol problems. And saturated fat will raise LDL, but it typically also raises HDL. And if you look at the pattern of most people who have heart disease, it's they have high triglycerides, low HDL, small particles and lots of particles, or something called ApoB. These are really the concerns that we should be focused on. Not LDL as an isolated number, but as a picture, as part of the overall picture. So I've seen people with a cholesterol 300, but their HDL is 100 and their triglycerides are 70, they're fine. And their LDL might be 160, but they have no small particles and their particle number is low and they just have a lot of large fluffy particles. Because when you look at the cholesterol measurement you get with your doctor, it's the weight. It's like, is it a golf ball or is it a ping pong ball? They're different. Ping pong ball doesn't want anything. A golf ball is heavy, same size. So you really need to kind look at the quality of what you're talking about. And so there's a new test, not really, it's about 40 years old. Most doctors haven't caught on yet. It looks at the lipid particle number and the particle size. From LabCorp, it's called NMR. From Quest, it's called Cardio IQ. It's not that expensive. Your doctor can order it. The problem is they don't want to order it for the most part because they don't know how to interpret it and they should figure it out because it's really the there's really no other cholesterol test that really is relevant at this point. So I think if you have type 2 diabetes, likely you have to look at these other particle numbers, the particle size, the triglycerides, the HDL, and actually saturated fat might be good for type 2 diabetics. In fact, work from Sarah Hallberg, who sadly just died, she was a friend of mine, an amazing doctor who led up a lot of the work on ketogenic diets and diabetes and has published lots of research papers on it, showed through her data that not only did Were they able to reverse diabetes, type 2 diabetes in 60% of the patients get 100% off the main diabetes medication, get over 90% plus of people off insulin and have an average weight loss of 12% which is a dramatic amount. I mean, normally if you get a 5% in a weight loss study, that's like everybody's jumping up and down thinking.

So exciting, great results.

But it's really, it was a dramatic result. Found when they looked at over, I think, 30 biomarkers for heart disease and cardiovascular disease that that none of them were bad, that they all got better by eating a lot of fat. Now, there are some people like me who are skinny. We call them lean mass hyper responders. I exercise a lot. I have low body fat, high muscle mass. I have some genetics and my cholesterol will go up, my LDL will go up and my profile will not be better if I eat more saturated fat. So you have to be careful. And when you say about cheese, saturated fat is where, what you get in cheese. And now goat and sheep cheese Milk might be better, but I would not be worried about it. I would be worried about eating conventional dairy though. I would stay away from regular cow dairy. I would stay away from for sure if it's not a regeneratively raised A2 cow for sure. Don't consume it or anything from it. Goat and sheep are easy to find. Sheep yogurt, goat yogurt, goat cheese, sheep cheese, easy to find. I would stick with that. But, I would really look more carefully at the overall cholesterol profile. And, I've written a lot about this. I wrote a book called Eat Fat, Get Thin. I wrote too many pages about it, so you can kind of learn more there. There's again more and more articles about this all the time. So, I would not be too afraid of cheese, particularly organic regenerative sheep and goat cheese.

All right, Mark, our next question is from Raffi and it's about dry skin. Hi, Dr. Hyman.

It's a pleasure to talk to you. My question is, I suffer from dry skin.

Very badly and I would like your.

Advice and what I should do first.

Thank you. Well, thanks, Rathi. Dry skin is not uncommon and it is relatively easy to treat. And it's usually, you know, we dermatology is so backwards. They treat you from the outside in instead of the inside out. Now, it's not necessarily bad to put things on your skin, but it, you got to start with what's happening on the inside. One of the most common causes of dry skin is omega-3 fatty acid deficiency, which is where you get dry, patchy, flaky skin that comes from not having enough omega-3s which come from wild fish. So if you're, for example, a vegan and you're not taking some kind of fish oil supplement, you're going to get omega-3 deficiency. If you don't eat fish because you don't like fish, or if you don't eat mushrooms, you don't like mushrooms, or, you know, you're not having certain compounds in your, in your diet, if you're not having wild herring or sardines, you're going to get omega-3 deficiency. So the first thing to do is look at that. And there's a test called omega-3 index. You can do it from your regular lab. Make sure you're not. And just take fish oil. That's the first thing to do. In fact, I remember had a patient with terrible dry skin, and I, I told her to, instead of putting, like, cream on her skin, to put a combination of flax and borage oil on her skin. Borage is omega-6 oil that's actually very anti-inflammatory great for your skin. You like evening primrose oil. There's another version of it. And flax oil is omega-3s and she literally in the winter, she put on her skin, her skin, like, turned beautiful. Also, thyroid is a big factor. So I would make sure you check your thyroid gland and make sure your thyroid is good, because if your low in thyroid function, you can get significant dry skin. Those are the two most common reasons. Eczema is another reason. This can be from gut issues, from leaky gut, from food sensitivities, often dairy, gluten, big ones. So I tend to think about all these things and usually people's skin can get beautiful from the inside out, not only the outside in.

Mark, let's do one more last question here. We have a question from Heath in the community who is asking about recommendations from her practitioners to want to put her on medication. Hi, Dr. Mark.

I'm a young, healthy 26-year-old female who has been told multiple times that I need medication for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. They keep attributing it to genetics since my lifestyle would not reflect that I need the medication.

I'd love to know your thoughts. So you're talking about high blood pressure and high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar. they often go together and they're often treated separately. I know it's a, gee, maybe they're all connected. The truth is they're all connected. In fact, 88% of Americans have this problem, which is poor metabolic health, and it's manifested by high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and high cholesterol, or abnormal cholesterol, I should say. And it's almost always caused by too much starch and sugar. So they call it essential hypertension, which means essentially they don't know what causes it. fun fact, it has a very clear cause. It's an inflammatory oxidative stress disease of the blood vessels. And, and this is in the most, most of the times caused by insulin resistance. So I hate to sound like a broken record on these podcasts, but insulin resistance is one of the biggest problems we have today in the world because it's driven by starch and sugar, and this is what people are eating, and it causes your blood vessels to be inflamed. So I would for sure make sure you cut out starch and sugar as number one, two and three. I think some people are salt sensitive, so you have to watch for salt for some people. Often it's not so salt you're eating, it's the lack of potassium. Potassium and salt should be in better balance and so you can increase your potassium intake by eating lots of fruits and vegetables and bone broth and lots of vegetable broths which have lots of potassium. Magnesium deficiency also is a big cause of high blood pressure. It's the relaxation mineral and we know this as doctors. I mean, when women come in who are pregnant who have malignant high blood pressure that can cause seizures and kill them and the baby. It's called preeclampsia. What do we do? We give them intravenous magnesium because it relaxes the blood vessels. So why don't we tell our patients with high blood pressure to take magnesium? I have no clue. So the, the, there are many things that cause high blood pressure. It can be heavy metals, it can be kidney disease, it can be a lot of things. So you kind of have to look at the spectrum. but most of the time you can really get to the root cause and fix people's high blood pressure pretty quickly.

What is the general approach of traditional medicine to dealing with high blood pressure?

And why should we care? Well, we should care because, you know, in the worldwide scheme of things, there is about 1 billion adults, which is about 25% of the adult population in the world that has hypertension.

1 billion people have high blood pressure?

Yeah, 25%. And it's by 2025, they think it's going to be closer to almost 30% of the world adult population. And it's also considered one of the leading causes of mortality to mankind. So it's a big deal. And in our country, it's about 75 million Americans that have hypertension. That's one in three. And an additional one in three have what we call pre-hypertensive condition.

So, they're like pre-high blood pressure.

Yeah, pre-high blood pressure. So that they, the way it's staged, you, you can, you know, there's a.

Category that's pre-hypertension well, it was interesting, George, is like, we constantly change the goal post. So when I graduated from medical school, the blood pressure we wanted was anything under 140 over 90. Then I was 120 over 80. Now we're down to like 115 over.

75 as being normal.

Right. So why are we do, why are we changing the bullet post constantly? Well, that's, that's interesting.

That's interesting. And quite honestly, I'm not we're not sure why we changed the blood pressure. Why we changed it, George, is this reason. Because we keep doing the research that's finding that even at lower blood pressures, people are experiencing the consequences of high blood pressure.

Right?

So what are the consequences of high blood pressure?

Why should we care if our blood pressure is high? Because it's a silent killer, we call it. Yeah, that's the key. It's a silent killer. You don't know you have it. People won't know they have it. And what it causes, it's one of the leading causes of heart disease, that's considered like heart attacks, congestive heart failure, arrhythmias, which is abnormal the way, the abnormal electrical activity in your heart that can lead to critical events. So, it's a big cause of all kinds of heart disease. Heart disease, it causes end-stage renal disease.

Kidney failure.

Yep, kidney failure and stroke, you know, and stroke creates a great deal of.

Mortality and morbidity for adult population.

Even blindness, Right?

Hypertension.

Microvascular disease and blindness.

Can lead to dementia because of its effects on the vascular system in the brain. And also affects things lower down, right? Like sexual function. Oh, yeah.

Right.

Oh, yeah. Blood vessels get problematic in your sexual organs.

You're not doing things normally. Microvascular disease in the penis can definitely result in erectile dysfunction and that's not a good mid state.

Nobody likes that. It also causes stiffening of the heart of your arteries.

You get vascular problems in your legs and blood flow issues. Peripheral artery disease is a major issue and particularly if you have diabetes and you have two things that you have to deal with, the diabetic changes that.

Create the peripheral vascular disease and also the hypertension. And you can get literally blood flow issues, you need amputations. So this is a serious problem. And a billion people have it. In America, a lot of people have it.

Yeah.

50 to 75 million Americans.

And growing.

And how many people are actually like treated well? It's probably like 14 million out of those 50 million.

As we talk about that treatment is primarily medication. It's not always effective. It has lots of side effects and there's so many other ways to treat hypertension besides just using pharmaceutical agents.

And we have determined that by treating people's blood pressure with medications that people do reduce their risk of these complications. So it's important to understand that if you have high blood pressure, you need to treat it. Absolutely. And whether it's with the things we're going to talk about or medication, you can't let it go. And it's something you should do as a preventive strategy. You can go to the drugstore, they have blood pressure machines, you can stick your arm in, or you can buy one for next to nothing in the drugstore, 29 bucks, and you can monitor your blood pressure. Now, part of the problem with diagnosing blood pressure is but it's often hard to know if you have high blood pressure because one, it fluctuates all day long. Two, just getting one blood pressure reading in the doctor's office may not really tell you what's going on. You might have white coat hypertension, meaning you get nervous and stressed, it goes up. I mean, when you exercise your blood pressure goes up. When you're stressed, your blood pressure goes up. But what's your average blood pressure? So one of the diagnostics we do is a 24-hour blood pressure test. which I found really effective because you can see what is happening when they're sleeping, when they're active, when they're inactive, and you get a really good sense of what their pattern is day, night, and average. And that'll tell you what your real risks are.

Right. So doing 24-hour ambulatory monitoring is something that is really important to do, particularly if you have any concern that the readings you're getting in your office are inappropriate. And you mentioned white coat hypertension, and that is not uncommon. It actually is fairly common. and so we will oftentimes recommend ambulatory blood pressure readings and that gives us the clearest picture possible.

Yeah, it's true. And sometimes you can just get a cuff at home and have people monitor their blood pressure out there day and that'll help too. You know, I want to just dig into a little bit before we get talking about the difference with functional medicine and traditional medicine, right? Traditional medicine, you check your blood pressure, it's high, you get medication, you're moderate. We call it essential hypertension. Now, there are other causes of hypertension that we know of that are kidney diseases and other problems, but for the most part, people call it essential hypertension, which I joke and I say it means essentially we have no idea what's causing it. But we know that's not true. We know that's not true.

So, everything has a cause.

Nothing is just random. If you have diabetes, it's not a random event. It's not like, oh, I got a virus.

It's just a random thing.

Right, something happened.

Type 2 diabetes.

Now, we know some of the major causes of high blood pressure are never addressed. And the two biggest ones that I see treating patients is insulin resistance.

Sleep apnea.

And sleep apnea. So one of the biggest factors is insulin resistance, which is an epidemic in this country. We have one in two Americans who have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. 75% are overweight. 42% are obese and they all have some degree of trouble regulating their blood sugar which is causes them to get belly fat. And that belly fat is such a big factor in driving all sorts of diseases, everything from high blood pressure to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to dementia to depression and so on. But the insulin resistance drives inflammation and it drives inflammation throughout the body because those belly fat cells aren't just sitting there holding up your pants, they're dynamic hormonal and immune organs. Your belly fat is an immune organ and it drives inflammation throughout your body and that causes oxidative stress, which is really what causes rusting. So it's like your arteries and your pipes are rusting and stiffening called hardening the arteries. And that happens as a result of this inflammation and oxidative stress. And so insulin resistance is probably the biggest cause of that today in America and it's really driven by diet. So I think people don't understand how powerful that is.

Diet is very powerful and you know, I call it, you mentioned the adipose tissue we have around our waist, I call that the toxic waist dump of the body. And that fat just does have a metabolic effect that is toxic to the body. As you said, it creates the hardening of the arteries, which is is one important cause of high blood pressure.

Yeah, and the other big thing is often misdiagnosed. And by the way, insulin resistance affects so many people, 90% are not diagnosed. So the way you diagnose it is you do a test for insulin and blood sugar. And it's a fast glucose tolerance test.

That we do, I do on almost every patient. Yeah, and this is the other test.

It's a little more advanced where you take a sugar drink, basically drink the equivalent two Cokes, check your blood sugar and insulin fasting, and then every one and two hours after. But most doctors just check blood sugar.

But that's a very late finding. You want to check insulin early on.

Even doing a fasting insulin isn't going to give you an answer.

It'll help.

But by the time your insulin goes up, fasting, it's already down the road pretty far, right? So I agree. And then we have this other issue, which is sleep apnea, which is so underdiagnosed.

Diagnosed. Yeah. So, sleep apnea, there are about 25 million Americans that have sleep apnea. It is underdiagnosed. It's not just a disease of people that are overweight. Most people think about obstructive sleep apnea being related just being overweight, but you also can have upper respiratory anatomy and muscular relaxation that even if you're thin.

You can have obstructive sleep apnea. Yeah, you have a narrow palate, a small airway. you have sinus issues. And when you have sleep apnea, that.

Means you're just not getting enough oxygen to your body, particularly your brain, also to all your blood vessels and your cortisol levels rise. And then you get into that whole cycle you talked about before, which is an inflammatory cycle, which is an oxidative stress cycle, which can lead to hardening of the arteries. And when you're not getting oxygen to those blood vessels, then they actually can't perform the work they need to do and create the energy they need to have. And so they can't contract and expand the way they should, and that can result in high blood pressure.

Yeah. And then it also drives insulin resistance. So if you have sleep apnea, it also causes you to be pre-diabetic.

Yeah, it causes independent of what you're eating. Weight gain, weight gain, it leads to.

Insulin resistance, it leads to diabetes, which complicates everything. I mean, I had this guy who couldn't lose 50 pounds. He was a lawyer. And he told me the story. He was like, he said, Look, I need to lose the weight. I don't know what to do. I'm trying to eat right. It's not working. I'm trying to exercise. I said, what was your life like? He said, well, I'm a lawyer and.

I work really hard.

But every day I have to stand up at my desk. I can't sit down.

And this was before standing desks.

And I'm like, why? He says, well, if I sit down, I fall asleep. And I'm like, Gee, maybe you have sleep apnea. So, if you're falling asleep at work, if you're falling asleep in front of the TV, if you feel tired during the day, if your wife says you're snoring, and now there's apps you can get that actually record your on your phone, they record your snoring so you.

Can see because people don't believe it, I don't snore.

I love that app by the way. And then, it's one called Sleep Cycle that I like, it's a great app. And it's something that is easy to treat. I mean, there's different methods, there's CPAP and there's but it is a treatable condition and the weight loss then will happen and you'll feel better.

So that's really important. I just want to talk about a.

Few other causes that I think are really important and worth noting because those are the two biggest ones, but there's.

A lot of other ones.

People who are nutritionally deficient in certain things can cause high blood pressure. Like magnesium. Right.

And magnesium, studies show that there's a very large percentage of people in our country have low magnesium.

45% of people have low magnesium, which.

Is- and you know magnesium, it's not magic but when we replace magnesium in patients, we see amazing things happen. We see blood pressure come down. We see them being able to sleep better. We see muscle twitching and cramping go away. We see mood improve. Magnesium has a very important role in the body and certainly plays a big role in lowering blood pressure.

Yeah, but I call it the relaxation mineral. It's funny how in medicine we have these blind spots, but when I was training in obstetrics and gynecology, I was a family doctor, I deliver lots of babies, there's this common condition that women get called preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure in pregnancy. When they come in and their blood pressure is high, which can cause seizures, the treatment isn't high blood pressure pills because they don't tend to work. We give them intravenous magnesium to relax their blood vessels, and save their life. So, it's just a strange thing to me, we don't think about it that way. The other thing that is important is omega-3 fats and fish oil because it helps relax your blood vessels, make them more pliable. But there's other causes that we also see. For example, environmental toxins, heavy metals in particular, lead and mercury are really common, they're underdiagnosed. And when you go in your high blood pressure visit, your doctor's not checking your mercury and lead levels, Not even in your blood and probably not on the most important test which we do at the Ultra Wellness Center which is a challenge test where we give people a drug to pull out the metals, the chelator, and then we check their urine and see how much dumps in there and if they have high levels, that's often a big factor as well.

And I think you're really hitting on all the things that I think about and I tell people when they come to me and hypertension is part of what they want me to work with, I said we're going to get your hypertension better by not treating your hypertension. We're not going to treat your hypertension. We're going to treat everything else that's causing your hypertension. We're going to find the sleep apnea. We're going to find the nutritional deficiencies. We're going to work on your stress levels. We're going to help you lose weight. You know, when you lose weight, I mean, you actually are going to drop your blood pressure. I think. I think the number is per pound. I think for every two pounds you lose, you drop your blood pressure by a mercury. So if you lose 20 pounds, you can drop your blood pressure by close to 10 points.

So, a diet is so key.

You know what?

We created a program called the 10-day reset, which you can find in getpharmacy.com, we put a thousand people through it, tracked their blood pressures. It was incredible. Their blood pressures dropped an average of 20 points. Yeah, in 10 days.

Well, if you think about it, if you think about that most Americans are at least 25 pounds overweight, weight or, you know, so let's say, it's better than medication results. Exactly. If you get them to drop that 25 pounds, they're going to drop their.

Blood pressure by, you know, near 15 millimeters of mercury. Yeah. So, we have insulin resistance, sleep apnea, low magnesium, low omega-3 fats, which about 90% of Americans have. You have heavy metals, environmental toxins, and we now are learning that the gut microbiota, the microbiome in the gut, if it's altered through our bad processed diet and all the nasty drugs we take, it actually causes inflammation throughout the body that drives high blood pressure. Anything that causes inflammation or oxidative stress will cause high blood pressure. And the thing that struck me as I, and this is stuff that's in the traditional medical literature, is that high blood pressure is an inflammatory disease.

And we treat it like a plumbing problem. We do. And going back to the nutritional piece, A little potassium can be another reason why you can have high blood pressure. And that speaks to where do you get potassium, get it from green leafy vegetables. So having a vegetable-based diet is very, very important.

I love my green smoothie in the morning.

Absolutely. Yeah, more kale. More kale.

Yeah.

So this is very important. I think people also think about salt. So people think high blood pressure is salt. But what's the deal with salt and high blood pressure?

Is it something we should worry about? Is it as big a deal as we thought? It's not something everybody needs to worry about. There's certain populations that are going to be more salt sensitive than others. And so we can actually do genetic tests and we do them here at the Ultra Wellness Center that lets us know if you have those genes that make you more sensitive to salt, more likely to have high blood pressure. So we do need to be concerned about it in certain populations and limit it. Salt actually, it's the salt we add to our food that is the problem because it's processed, all the natural nutrients are taken out of it. It can be iodized and iodine can cause problems.

So, it's not the salt that we personally add in our kitchen. It's the salt that's added in factories to process food. Yeah, exactly. That allows huge amounts of intake of salt because how do they make junk ingredients taste edible? Salt, fat, sugar.

Yeah, and sugar and processed fats, right? Yeah, so we know that. But if you get really good salt, sea salt that you've purchased that actually has nutrients in it, that can be valuable to you. Minerals and so forth, yeah, exactly.

So these are some of the common causes we see and they're often things that aren't looked at. When you go to your doctor with high blood pressure, they're not checking your heavy metals, they're not checking your insulin resistance, they're not checking necessarily sleep apnea, although some might be thinking of that.

You know, it's interesting.

We're not checking your magnesium or.

And the reality is that, you know, and just because when I was practicing private medicine before I started functional medicine years ago, I was being graded on if I had a high blood pressure patient, if I had them on certain medications to lower the blood pressure. So, my reimbursement was based on whether or not I was using medications. not whether or not I was finding the root cause of the problem, not whether or not I was helping somebody lose weight, not whether I was counseling them on how to lower their stress with meditation. That didn't drive it. And so in contrast to what we do in functional medicine, we focus on making those changes that really get to the root of the problems and the causes we just talked talked about.

It's absolutely true. I think, you know, the traditional approach in medicine is you diagnose and then you treat.

Yeah.

When we diagnose, you say you have high blood pressure. That's the first step in our thinking.

Yeah.

Then we start to ask why, why, why. And everybody gets treated differently. Right. In some patients, the treatment for high blood pressure is getting off the sugar and starch. Another person might be treating their sleep apnea. Another person might be detoxifying from heavy metals. another person that might be giving them extra magnesium. And then we have a lot of techniques that we can use to help mitigate this. Sleep, stress management, exercise, exercise lowers blood pressure. So it's often frustrating to me understanding how the body really works.

Yep.

When I see this knee-jerk response in medicine, it just feels like we're missing the boat. And you know, this is not stuff that we're making making up.

This is all in the science.

It's all in the literature. You just listen to the patient because the clues are always going to be there. I can't tell you how many of my patients that come here to the UlTRE Wellness Center, I ask them, so they're fatigued. We have a lot of patients that come with chronic fatigue where fatigue is part of their complex of complaints. And I ask them if they snore.

Well, they don't know.

Yeah, they say, yeah, my wife tells me that I snore all the time. so how long has that been going on? And they said, Has anybody asked you whether you snored before? Has anybody asked you if you wake up refreshed? Has anybody asked you if you have daytime fatigue? And no, they've gone years and nobody has really explored it. So you have to listen to the patient and ask why and ask it again and keep asking questions so you make sure you have the whole terrain mapped out.

Yeah, that's beautiful about it. functional medicine, we really do a very detailed history. So, how do you diagnose? Mostly history. I mean, we do a 32-page questionnaire, which is annoying for patients, but it.

Allows us to get a really deep sense of what's going on. So, Mark, how many times have you had a patient come in who has, let's say, high blood pressure, and maybe they're having headaches, they're having migraines, but they have the high blood pressure, they may be a little bit overweight, they have high cholesterol, but they have heartburn. where they have, yeah, I get occasional heartburn, I take a PPI, I take an H2 blocker, these are, you know, acid blocking medications. Acid blocking medications. And they don't connect it to their high blood pressure.

Right, why is PPI or acid blocking medications a problem? Because it inhibits acid production, which you need to absorb magnesium.

Exactly.

Right, and so you owe it to that. And calcium and vitamin D, right? which can be impacted, but, you know, and they have, oh yeah, I also have difficulties with constipation or I get loose stools. You know what? There's a connection between the gut and the blood pressure.

So, tell us about this patient you had who you treated.

Well, I'm glad because that's a perfect segue because he had gut issues and that sort of is what really was leading to his high blood pressure. So, here's the gentleman that came in.

Because gut issues leads to inflammation.

It leads to inflammation. And it's not just inflammation in the blood vessels. It's inflammation in the gut lining. So you can get this non-specific lymphocytic infiltration.

It's basically inflammation that means a lot.

Of white blood cells show up in the gut and it makes it inflamed. Exactly.

So.

And so what happens, though, is then you get a malabsorption of minerals and. that's when you don't absorb vitamin D, that's when you don't absorb potassium, that's when you don't absorb your calcium, that's when you don't absorb your magnesium. Those are the things that can help regulate blood pressure. So with this particular patient that came in, he was a 52-year-old gentleman and he had been diagnosed with blood pressure, high blood pressure, about almost a year prior to coming. And they tried multiple blood pressure medications. and he had different side effects, which is one of the issues with blood pressure medicine. Oh yeah, there's that. We forgot to talk about it. Exactly. So, you know, that's a big problem. Lots of people have side effects. They get dizzy, they get tired, they get erectile dysfunction, they get lower libido. They've been hair loss associated with their high blood pressure medicine. So he had been put on different medications that resulted in loss of libido, fatigue, brain fog, one of the medications actually caused dehydration that resulted in him being in the emergency room where they found his potassium to be really, really low and it had to be replaced. So he was like, I'm coming here because I want a different approach to my blood pressure. So as we were, you know, we go through our new patient packet that's very long, some things that started to stick out were that he was, you know, he did have fatigue and he also had irritable bowel syndrome. And I asked him to explain that to me. And when I hear irritable bowel, I don't hear this like again we talk about like- Dr. That's just a syndrome. Dr. Yeah, like essential hypertension. We essentially don't know what's causing it. It's like we say irritable bowel, it's like you know what, your diarrhea is irritating me.

I don't want to talk about it. We don't want to get to the bottom line. Dr. Well, it's not even that. They don't know. It's like in other words, when we say people have irritable bowel, oh, the reason you have bloating and gas and diarrhea and constipation is because you have irritable bowel syndrome. Right. No. That's just a name we give to people who have those symptoms. It doesn't tell you about the cause. And that is what's unique about functional medicine is we have a methodology, an operating system, to navigate to the root cause. And we treat that.

And we don't have to treat the hypertension. We treat the cause and the disease goes away as a side effect.

Right.

So in this particular case, we do testing for the gut microbiome and we can also do testing that tells us some things about the gut. So we can find out if there is inflammation in the endothelial lining and that's basically if you look down a really big stainless steel tube and it's really shiny. Imagine that shiny layer is basically a very thin membrane that protects the rest of the tube from anything that's going in the tube. So that's the endothelial lining. very shiny stainless steel.

Basically like a one cell layer between you and the sewer, right?

You got it. Exactly.

Your immune system and they'll poop inside of you.

That's a great way to put it. So when that membrane gets inflamed, it cannot function to absorb nutrients the way it should, and that can lead to all of the things I just spoke about earlier in regards to low magnesium, low vitamin D, low calcium, calcium. And so we know that people who have irritable bowel, there's a good percentage of them have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. And so that triggered my thinking. And that's why I ordered that test that will look at whether you have leaky gut, whether you have gluten sensitivity, and whether you have crossover to other foods like gluten that can create gluten-like impact on the gut. And so With this particular gentleman, I also did a whole host of metabolic tests that included a glucose tolerance test. I also looked at his magnesium levels. I looked at inflammatory markers.

Omega-3 fats.

Omega-3 fats that we look at. So, it did a comprehensive metabolic evaluation. I looked at a very expansive profile that looks at macronutrients, micronutrients, organic acids, amino acids, that gives us a really good clear picture of what his nutritional status is, whether the very important energy making systems in his body are actually working the way they should, are they getting the nutrients that they need, are they being blocked from doing their work by toxins. We do this panel that gives us all that information. It is a very unusual panel in.

Traditional medicine but we're looking not for disease, we're looking for imbalances or dysfunction that we can correct that will help the body do what it supposed to do.

Exactly. So, I gather all that information with the lab test, but the most interesting thing about this gentleman is that he had one gene positive. It's a gene that would express for celiac disease. But, the tests that we do to see if he actually had celiac disease were negative. And, what we know about people who have at least one or both of the celiac genes, that do not have active celiac disease is they're more likely to be sensitive to gluten. And indeed he was. He had two things going on on that panel that we do to evaluate inflammation and antibody interaction or the immune system creating antibodies against gluten in the body. So he did have leaky gut, meaning that endothelial lining, that one thing saving you from the poop in the the center of your intestine from the rest of your body was leaking. And so the immune system was creating antibodies. So we knew there was inflammation. And the second thing was he had enormous numbers that showed that he was sensitive to gluten. And so that gluten sensitivity- It's not.

Celiac because people understand that there's celiac and most traditional medicines like you have celiac or you're fine. But now there's an increasing body particularly by Dr. Alessio Fasano from Harvard, that shows that a lot of people have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which you can tell through antibody testing a little bit, but it's a milder case, but it still causes leaky gut, inflammation, and many, many problems. And then there's a whole another category which you can't measure on lab tests called the innate immune system response or cell-mediated response to gluten, which means you can't measure it because it's just a generalized irritation of your immune system. So that can be a case even though these other things are normal. So gluten is often driving leaky gut.

And it's often overlooked, very overlooked, and particularly in a case like this.

And the normal doctor will check your levels and if they're normal, quote normal, like it's 0 to 20. Is 19 the same as 1?

No.

Is 5 the same as 0?

No.

So I think we have to understand that if there's any level of anybody, it means there's some irritation of your immune system that's causing potential symptoms.

Yeah.

So in his particular case, I put him on a gluten-free diet. And I also, and the great thing, honestly, I didn't put him on a gluten-free diet. I identified the gluten sensitivity. And here at the Ultra Wellness Center, we have amazing nutritionists. And when I discuss these types of cases, then they develop a program for a patient that is going to be customized to what their needs are. So in this particular case, he was on a Mediterranean diet that was gluten-free and that made all the difference. And when he tried to re-introduce gluten back into his diet, his blood pressure went back up. So it was driving the inflammation that was driving his blood pressure. And he was also low in vitamin D, which was impacted by his gluten because gluten will keep you from absorbing iron and magnesium and potassium and calcium and it can have impacts on lowering.

Vitamin D. And vitamin D regulates inflammation. So, you're in this inflammation.

Interactive dynamic biology where everything is connected and that's really what we do in functional medicine. And, there's a lot of observational studies that show that vitamin D in people that have low vitamin D and you replace it, you can lower their blood pressure, particularly in people over over 50. So, I replaced his vitamin D, put him on a gluten-free diet, and gave him things that we know that work. He wasn't eating a lot of fish, so we gave him Omega-3s. I also added in some CoQ10 and magnesium. And, he did phenomenally well. He never went back, well, I shouldn't say never, he's been my patient for about eight months now, but his blood pressures have been normal.

Yeah.

So this is really incredible story which which no medication, no side effects. Here's the view in traditional medicine. Essential hypertension is a one-way street. Once you got it, you got it. You got high blood pressure, you can't get rid of it. You just got to treat it. And that is just is not true. If you address the root causes, which is what we do with functional medicine and what we do at the Ultra Wellness Center, we can often get to the bottom of the If you love.

That last video, you're gonna love the next one.

Check it out here. You go to the grocery store and.

It says vegetable oil. What is it? Broccoli oil? No, it comes from seeds.

It comes from sometimes even cotton seed.

Oil, which is highly toxic. It's canola oil, it's soybean oil. 10% of our calories come from soybean oil. It's increased a thousand percent.