This is a YouTube video titled "The overwhelming evidence of the healing power of food..." created in October 2007. It features Dr. Mark Hyman discussing scientific research from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that supports the role of food and nutrients in preventing and treating chronic diseases. The content critiques pharmaceutical advertising and highlights nutrigenomics studies showing how different carbohydrates affect gene expression related to health. The video is a monologue focused on nutrition science and medical research biases.
There are no studies proving the benefits of nutritional or integrative therapies. Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome back. Now that's the refrain I hear from so many of my colleagues who've just not done their homework or maybe they're just reading the wrong medical journals. Now one of my favorite medical journals is the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which every month publishes over 300 pages of research with no advertising. And that is unlike many other medical journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine which have pages and pages of color glossy drug ads. So today I thought I would take you on a journey through just one issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to see just how much research is being done on how food and nutrients affect our health. Now the sad thing is it can take 20 years before this knowledge becomes commonplace or is used in medical practice. Unfortunately there is little money available for large scale studies or to publicize the findings of the role of nutrients in food and health and disease. I mean there are no food reps that drop off food samples in doctor's offices. Well maybe except for me, right? I've been sent walnuts, whole food bars, wild salmon, even whole kernel rye bread from Germany, all of which I like much better than the pens and cups and post-it notes with drug names all over them and the free drug samples which get my patients hooked on the latest and most expensive, although not necessarily the best medications. Now, before, advertising medications directly to patients was illegal. Since it has been allowed, we are seeing a dramatic increase in the use of those drugs. In fact, when a person sees an ad for a drug on TV, and then they ask their doctor for it, they're likely to get it about half the time. In fact, in a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, they said that from 1996 to 2005, pharmaceutical advertising and promotion grew from $11.4 billion to $29.9 billion, but direct-to-consumer ads grew by 330%. Now these ads, like junk food ads to children, are actually banned in Canada and the European Union. I can assure you that no one is spending $30 billion promoting the benefits of food and nutrients to support health and cure disease, even if they are more effective. You don't hear about the best or the most effective treatments, just the ones that are most heavily promoted. Okay, so back to the nutritional journal and a sampling of the types of research out there that demonstrate the power of food to heal. Now these are all from the May 2007 issue. Okay, I'm a little behind on my reading. And the most important study in that journal was on nutrigenomics. And that is a concept that's foundational to my book, Ultra Metabolism. And the basic idea is that food is information, not just calories. It's giving instructions to your genes, not just energy for your body. So here's what happened. The researchers from Finland took two groups of people with metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes, and they gave each group a different diet. Well, sort of. It was only different in the type of carbohydrates they consumed for 12 weeks. The rest of their diets were absolutely identical, right? The same calories, same amount of fat, same amount of protein, carbohydrate, and fiber. Now the first group had as their carb source wheat, oats, and potatoes. The second group ate rye as the source of their carbs. Now as I mentioned in my book, Ultra Metabolism, rye has some very special properties because because it is slowly absorbed by the body and has special phytonutrients that help you lose weight and improve your metabolism. After the 12 weeks, they took a fat sample, a biopsy of their fat tissue and they analyzed it to find out which genes were turned on or off. In the wheat and oat and potato group, 62 genes were turned on that increased the stress response, inflammation, oxidative stress and worsened blood sugar balance and generally amplified all the forces in the body that lead to obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's. It was a 100% effect. No good genes were turned on. Now, that's wheat, oats and potatoes. Now in the Rye group, 71 genes were turned on that prevent diabetes, lower cholesterol, reduce inflammation and improve blood sugar. Again, This was a 100% good gene effect. Now let me tell you, that should have been headline news, but the rye lobby is just not that powerful. In fact, in an accompanying editorial, Putting youg Genes on a Diet: the Molecular Effects of Carbohydrates, Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard researcher said that molecular pathways involved in hormone action have been a target of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical effort. However, many of these pathways may be normally under dietary regulation. That means we're trying to get these drugs to do what food already does. Now if there was a drug that could turn up all the disease promoting genes and could turn on all the health promoting anti-aging genes, it would be a blockbuster. But you don't see ads on TV for eating more whole kernel rye. And there's a few more studies I go over in my written blog and I encourage you to read those. But what are we to learn from all these studies? This is just a smattering of the research out there, only a few out of the many in the one issue alone. And it's the stuff you're not hearing about. So if you hear from your doctor that while eating better and taking supplements has no real scientific evidence to support it, ask them if they've read the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition lately. It's also interesting to note that in the main medical journals, mostly positive studies on drugs are published, and mostly negative studies on nutrients, food and herbs are published. and the findings correlate 4 to 1 for a positive outcome for a drug if it was funded by the drug company. The same is true actually for nutrients and Dr. David Ludwig published a study that showed if a food company or industry like the dairy industry for example funded a study, there was a zero, zero percent chance that the outcome was unfavorable to the funder. But if it was independently funded, the negative outcome was 40%. Now that's exactly what happened in many, many studies that I see published. So I encourage you to be aware. When someone tells you there is no research to back up the use of food or nutrients as the primary mode of treatment of disease and prevention for chronic illness, tell them that the evidence is overwhelming. It's just ignored. Thank you. This has been Dr. Mark Hyman. [Foreign].
