The Missing Link that Keeps You Lean & Healthy

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is, Hey, Dr. Hyman, I have a lot of friends who are not so healthy and they're always telling me to eat this and eat that, and no, come on, just have a soda, or just come on, have a piece of cake, or what's the big deal? It's just one piece. You know what I call those? I call those food pushers. So it's very hard, we know, to change your behavior if your environment and your friends and your community is not so healthy. Because everybody else is doing the wrong thing, it's hard to do the right thing. That's what we call the power of community, the power of social connections. You know, we know that for example that if your friends are overweight, you are more likely to be overweight than if your parents are overweight. In fact, you're about 171% more likely to be overweight if your friend's overweight. then about 40% overweight if you're likely to be overweight if your family is overweight or someone in your family is overweight. And you know what's even crazier? Even if you don't know them, your friend's friend's overweight, you're still more likely to be overweight. Why? Because it's the social threads that connect us that are more important than the genetic threads. That the social determinants of health are what drive so much of disease. And you know what? Most healthcare systems and most doctors and most healthcare programs completely ignore this really critical fact about how we change our lives. Now, if most chronic disease is caused by what we eat and what we eat is determined by our social environment and our friends and our social networks, we gotta fix that. So how do we do that? Well, let me tell you a story about how I figured this out. I went to Haiti after the earthquake. It was pretty traumatic in 2010. And I ended up meeting a doctor named Paul Farmer, whose an extraordinary guy who discovered that he could treat TB and AIDS in some of the poorest countries in the world, not through better drugs or medication or surgery or some great new medical innovation, but through the simple power of connection. He called it accompaniment. It's where we accompany each other to health. So in Haiti, where we went, he had been there and I went down to Haiti with Matthew Quick. We saw the trauma and the destruction. It was awful. We were one of the first doc groups on the ground in the hospital, in the main hospital in Haiti, and we did amputations, we had hacksaws and vodka. It was really frightening. And if you really want to know more about that experience for me, I'd encourage you to read my blogs about it that are on DrHyman.com, but it's not for the faint of heart. And as part of that experience, I got to know Dr. Paul Farmer, and I got to understand his work, and I read his book about him called Mountains Beyond Mountains, and what he did with the power of community. And he literally trained thousands and thousands of community health workers, neighbors, to deal with what he called structural violence. Those are the social, political, and economic conditions that drive disease. And when I was there, I realized that, gee, it's not just for infectious disease like TB and AIDS, but for chronic diseases. Because guess what? Obesity and diabetes, those are social diseases and they need a social cure. It's not going to be fixed with going to the doctor's office. I mean, how many hours do you spend in the doctor's office here? Maybe a couple. How many hours are there in a year? Like 5,750, 60 something, right? So if that's true, then where does health happen? Health happens in your community. It happens in your kitchen. It happens in your schools and your workplaces. in your community centers, in your faith-based organizations. It happens where we live, where we work, where we eat, where we play, where we pray. That's where health happens. So if that's true and it's not going to happen in the health care system, we have to turn health care upside down and put people and communities at the center of health care. And there was a really important book I read around this time after I came back from Haiti called Turning the World Upside Down about this exact idea that we can learn from the developing world of how to use community-based networks to help support people in their health. And then one day, this guy walks in my office named Rick Warren, who's a pastor from a church in Southern California, and he was overweight. He's like, I want to get healthy. And I'm like, okay, great. So we gave him his program. I saw him, I did his diagnosis, and I tested him and told me his story. And I said, why don't we have dinner? So we had dinner and we were talking, and I said, well, tell me about your church. He's like, well, I have 30,000 people. I'm like, wow, that's a big church. He's like, yeah, we have 5,000 people that meet every week in small groups to help each other live better lives. And I had the insight, I'm like, well gee, why don't we actually do a healthy living program and put it through these small groups and actually see if we can get people to get healthy together. And he's like, great idea, because I was baptizing my church last week and after about the 800th one, I'm like, wow, we're a fat church and we need to do something about it and I'm fat. So he agreed to do this. We launched the program. We called it the Daniel Plan after Daniel from the Bible who resisted the king's temptation of rich food. And we thought a few hundred people would show up at the rally that we had to encourage people to get healthier. We had 15,000 people show up that time. We had to turn 2,000 people away from the campus and 15,000 people signed up for the program. And we built it literally as we were creating it. And it was a six-week program initially, 40 days. We created, Rick wrote the Purpose Driven Life, which is 40 days of purpose. Well, we created 40 days of health. And we use the principles of functional medicine. We use the principles of social connection. We use the principles of how to optimize biological networks through what we eat and through exercise and through meditation and optimizing your nutritional status and We use the power of social networks to help people change their behavior, to hold them accountable to each other, to support them when they were down, to encourage them when they were struggling, and to celebrate them when they succeeded. And guess what? We didn't know what happened, but within the first 10 months, the congregation as a whole lost a quarter of a million pounds. That's an enormous amount of weight. And they had all sorts of other benefits. Their depression lifted, their acne got better, their asthma, their migraines, their autoimmune disease. Even people who had all kinds of crazy symptoms that were plaguing them for years, when they got off the junk and ate real food, everything changed. They stopped feeding them ice cream socials and pancake breakfasts. They were just trying to get their Agoges to heaven early, which is kind of crazy. But we stopped all that. We got rid of the sodas, processed food. They changed what was in their refinery. They made exercise courses. They started having a farm and a garden on the campus of the church. And so all of a sudden the culture changed. It was cool to be healthy instead of cool to drink big gulps and eat at IHOP. So we actually changed the whole environment. And we ended up writing a book about it called the Daniel Plan. I wanted to call it the Jewish Doctor's Guide for Christian Wellness. That didn't go over so well with the publisher. And in fact, the book won the Christian Book of the Year Award. And it's been profoundly impactful by changing the way people think about health. It's not about doing it on your own. The group is the medicine. It's not just a better delivery system for information. I mean, the people who use the same information in the church, but didn't have a group, lost half as much weight and didn't get as healthy because they didn't do it together. So we know those social connections are important, that it's a social cure, that everybody, as Rick Warren likes to say, everybody needs a buddy. That getting healthy is a team sport. It's not about doing it on your own. and it's about getting with your friends and your community members to do it. So I encourage you to do this and you should find someone who's interested to do this with you, whether it's one person, whether it's a health coach, a community health worker, whether it's just your doctor charging you and encouraging you on or helping you, you need to find someone who's your teammate on this journey. And better yet, find a small group, get a small group of people together, do it together, do the 10-day detox together, do the blood sugar solution together, find the communities to do this with and you'll see a tremendous change. And also you can do it online. We have great Facebook groups, online community. We're launching our new online community soon so check it out. And I also want to tell you, I'm also doing this not only at church but I'm also partnering with Zumba which is one of the largest fitness companies in the world. They have thousands and thousands of instructors and have trained millions of people in Zumba every day. You know what? They can act like community health workers. So we created a program called Plate by Zumba, which is a nutrition curriculum that I helped develop with Zumba and a few other experts, and we created a fantastic program to train them to just do simple things. And you don't have to be an expert. I mean, the community health workers in Haiti were not health experts. They just were there to accompany each other to health. And that's what I encourage you to do. Find someone, find a group, online, offline, accompany each other to health because getting healthy is a team sport. So I encourage you, if you like this video, share it with your friends and family on Facebook. If you're interested in hearing more from me, check out my weekly newsletter at DrHyman.com and submit your questions because next week I may make a house call to you.