Dr. Mark Hyman explains how lifestyle factors turn genes on and off, determining whether you get sick or stay well. Your environment and choices matter more than your DNA itself. This is the first in a series on optimizing your body's core systems.
Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. How do you get sick? What happens? Is it an accident? An act of God? Is it bad luck? Do you just catch disease like you get a cold? No. I'm going to tell you how you really get sick. Now welcome back. I'm in my second week of my blog on Ultra Wellness. I'm excited you're back. And I want to talk to you about something that happened last week. I was at a medical conference. I gave a keynote speech on solving the puzzle of chronic illness in the 21st century and chronic disease. And I was talking to a friend of mine, Frank Littman, a physician from South Africa afterwards. And he said, what's going on in medicine today is like medical apartheid. He said, We're living in a system that's broken and it's a broken healthcare system based on outdated ideas that don't address the roots of illness. That's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to teach you about some of the roots of illness. Now, how did we first come to the idea that we're in now, which is that the disease is somehow outside of us, that a bug causes disease? This is from Dr. Louis Pasteur, who was a scientist in the 1800s who discovered the bug, the germ. And he made us all think that disease is outside of us. Now, since antibiotics were discovered about 70 years ago, the entire medical establishment has been rushing in the wrong direction. They've been looking for a pill for every ill, a bug for every drug. Unfortunately, that's the wrong track. It ignores the real causes of disease, which I'm going to tell you about. How do we get sick? It has to do with the environmental factors that we are surrounded by interacting with our genes. This is our diet, This is stress, our lack of exercise, exposure to toxins in our food, in our air, in our water, and radiation trauma. We can't change our genes at all. No, we can't change our genes, they're fixed. But we can change our phenotype. We can change the way our genes turn on or off. And this has to do with our environment interacting with our genes to create the physiology that we experience right now that's either health or disease. This is the way we can move from disease to health by understanding this. We can move from illness to ultra wellness. Now, let me give you some examples. This whole concept of the biological terrain or the soil or your constitution is really gaining ground now. It's really the root of your health, which is how is your system functioning? And there's some great examples of this. If you look at, for example, Africa, children who die of infectious disease at increasing rates over there can have their death rates dropped by 75% simply by taking a zinc supplement, which helps your immune system. They found that in HIV patients in Africa, they can dramatically reduce the progression to AIDS simply by giving them a multivitamin. Why? Because it helps build their nutritional status. That's one of the core essential cornerstones of your health, as is the health of your immune system, your detoxification system, your digestive system in your gut, your ability to produce energy in your cells, your hormonal system. These all determine your risk of illness or disease. So by understanding how to create optimal function in each of these areas, which is what I'm going to do over the next six weeks with you in Ultra Wellness, you'll be able to really get to the roots of disease. Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit about a quote that I love. It's from the New England Journal of Medicine. I call it my favorite alternative medical journal because They talk about some great things in there, but they're often ignored by the average doctor. They wrote an article recently called Diet, Lifestyle, and Longevity. This is Drs. Rim and Stanford from Harvard School of Public Health. They said, you, know, although understanding the relation of lifestyle and health outcomes will continue to be refined, information is now sufficient to take action. So they're saying we have enough scientific information today to do something about the chronic lifestyle diseases we face. They said it's cheaper. So the deaths we see are not from something outside of us. 435,000 deaths, the number one cause of smoking. 400,000 deaths occur from poor diet and lack of exercise. And then there's a whole trail of other lifestyle and environmental factors that are the major causes of disease: alcohol, toxins, car accidents, sexual behaviors, and illicit drugs. those are the real causes of disease. So how do you check your soil? What do you do? I ask detailed questions of every patient. I want to know the quality of their diet. I want to know the stresses they're under. I want to know what toxins they're exposed to, whether they exercise, if they've had any traumas. These are the things that tell me about their underlying constitution, about their soil, about the basic biological terrain, their health. So knowing the story is so important to me. I want to know every detail. I want to know what are those predisposing factors to illness. That's the key to discovering the origins of illness. That's the key to ultra wellness. Learning how your environment affects your genes and how to reshape your health and your destiny. You don't have to wait until you're sick to get well. You don't have to wait for a disease to achieve ultra wellness. So you have to recognize that environmental factors influence each of the core systems I'm going to talk about over the next six weeks. So, I'm going to teach you how each of these keys of these core systems in the body hold the understanding to why you're sick and how to navigate your way to ultra wellness. Next week, I'm going to tell you about a blood test that could save your life and that most doctors never check.
