Use Food As MEDICINE To Heal Your BODY & MIND! | Mark Hyman & Lewis Howes

It turns out that when you eat the American diet, otherwise known as the SAD diet, the standard American diet, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. When you cut yourself and you get an infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, predominantly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients, additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our diet, I mean 95% of us are deficient probably in omega-3 fats, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play a role in mood like folate, magnesium is incredible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues, you know, that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And, and the clinical trials have been really staggering, showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example, when you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone. Your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber-toothed tiger. And that can create anxiety.

Internally with the insulin.

Internally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal, but if you eat all that crap, your brain is going.

To feel it, your body's going to feel it. So what happens to the brain when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it goes into your gut, does it send signals to your brain and then it starts to, you know, what does that do? Is it inflaming in that moment?

Does it take time to inflame something? So there's a whole cascade of things that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar that's 60% of our diet, right? It's ultra-processed food. It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. And what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar, which then creates a spike in insulin. At the same time, you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline. That's the first phase of response. Of course, it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol and all that. But what happens next is even more concerning. It drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten, sugar and starch and whatever bad fats, drives it into your fat cells. And it's a one-way street into your fat cells, called your adipocytes, around your belly, those belly fat cells. Those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals, hundreds of chemicals, hormones, inflammatory markers and messengers, neurotransmitters. It's quite striking when you look at, they're not just like holding up your pants, it's fat there, it's actually doing stuff. And when you eat in that way, it drives hunger, it stores fat, it shuts down your metabolism, and it literally slows your metabolism. And even worse, it locks the fat cells so that fat can't get out. It's like a one-way turnstile. It won't get in. And then on top of that, it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules. We call them adipocytokines. They go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So, it's kind of a downstream effect of a chronic eating this way. If you have one cookie or one bagel, it's not going to kill you, right? But if you're constantly eating this stuff, and we're talking about the average American eats a pound almost of flour and sugar a day. Wow. A pound. Like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour. You add that up, and I know I'm not eating that much and you aren't, so a lot of people are making up for the difference. Right, right.

So food affects your mood for sure.

Yeah, and not only that, it's not even just, you know, it was striking and I don't know if you had David Perlmutter on the show, but he wrote a book called Brainwash and it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this American diet that we're all eating. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala. Now, what does that mean in English? The frontal lobe is the grown-up it's the adult in the room. It's like you think you're gonna punch that guy, but you go, I better not punch that guy. Right? Right. It's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self. And the amygdala is your reptile brain. It's your lizard brain. It's gonna just run or fight or flee. And what happens is literally physiologically these parts of the brain are connected, but when you eat crap, they get disconnected. And so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grown up in the room. which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred and I mean, just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now. I think a large part of that has to do with our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian insult that is driving behavior change. And when we look at the fact of other data to support it, it's not just a theory. In prisons, if you give prisoners healthy food, swapping out all the crap they eat in prisons, which is pretty darn bad. There's a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons. If you add a multivitamin, it's an 80% reduction. Come on. If you look at kids, and this is in juvenile detention centers, they've done clinical trials, 'cause they've got these people locked up, so it's a really great kind of study. Now these kind of studies are hard to do, 'cause mostly we're free, we call them free living humans, who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they.

Want, and they don't follow the study protocol.

When you're locked up, you get what you get, right? and so they took these kids. The environment's the same for everyone.

Yeah, all that stuff. That's right.

And they took these kids and they, and they, these were kids who were disruptive, violent, aggressive, oppositional, suicidal. It was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods, it was a 91 reduction in all violent behavior. You know, oppositional behavior, need for restraints went down, suicide went down 100%. I mean, it's the third leading cause of death in that age group. It went down 100%, no suicides. And so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry and you'll wait a minute, maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems with obesity and the problems with chronic disease and the fact that COVID is landed on a perfect laboratory for spreading in America because we're all so unhealthy and our immune systems are so sick because of our diet, but it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our mood and our behavior, which we're seeing at rampant in society today.

What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health?

Oh, that's not hard. So, I mean, you know, in my book, the Pegan Diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world. And it's really practical. And there's a bunch of steps at the end, but I think the real dangers are one, high fructose corn syrup. Because anything with high fructose corn syrup, almost by definition, is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other brad crap. So if you're reading labels, if you just can eliminate that, that would be like number one. Number two would be trans fats, hydrogenated fats, Which- what is that in?

What foods is that in? Is that processed packaged food?

What? Hydrogenated fats?

Or is that french fries?

Yeah, what's that? So hydrolyzed frats have literally been banned by the FDA, essentially ruled not safe to eat, but they're still out there, okay? You can still find them, it's less, and they used to be really, it makes Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a baked good or any processed food, And the third thing would be, you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard, can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad? No. Which is also known as BHT. It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer. It's banned in Europe. We have it in everything here. So if you wouldn't have azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries, you probably shouldn't eat it. And yet, this is in so much of our foods. In fact, in America, it's legal. This is an ingredient used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwich. But if they take it out, didn't vary get it out? Yeah, yeah. So our friend, our friend, shamed them into taking it out. But it's still legal here. It's not illegal. She just shamed them publicly by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the Subway and got them. But in Singapore, for example, if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15-year jail sentence and a $450,000 fine.

Oh, you do not.

Yes, you do. I swear to God. In Europe, a lot of these chemicals are banned. So basically, just eat real food. So get rid of all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble. And then, you know, there's another hierarchy of how do you even upgrade the quality. But the whole principle of the Pegan diet is that, one, food is medicine. Food is medicine and quality matters. And it's not just calories, it's information. And it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite. And so when you're putting something in your mouth, you're literally speaking to your genes. You're speaking to your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, your mitochondria. Everything is controlled by what we're eating. So the book is really focused on two key principles. One is food is medicine and the other is personalized nutrition and medicine. Because, you know, I call the Pegan diet as a joke between Paleo and Keto, right? Sure. You know, and I had a, I was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist and another one was a Paleo doc and they were just fighting. And I was in the middle and I felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth. And I was sort of, I was like trying to break the, break the tension a little bit. And I said, hey, if you're Paleo and you're vegan, I must be Pegan. and it was kind of a joke and everybody laughed and I was like, oh, wow, that was good. And then I thought about it on the way home and basically they're identical except for where you get your protein, animals or grains and beans. They both agree that we should eat whole foods. They both agree we should eat lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get rid of processed foods and low sugar and even agree that we should not be eating dairy, which is a whole controversial subject, but they're pretty identical. And so the goal of this book is not to to create a dogma, but to create a Big 10 inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different belief systems? And I think, you know, I always encourage people to listen to their body, not to dogma. You know, a lot of our nutrition advice is based on, oh, be keto or be paleo or be vegan or be this or be that. Be raw. And the truth is, it depends on you. if you are, if I do keto, my body doesn't respond great. I mean, I do higher fat, but another person who's a diabetic, they might do great on it. One person on a vegan diet, like Rich Roll, may be able to run triathlons. I mean, just incredible Ironman stunts of heroic effort, but he may be a unicorn or maybe he's figured out how to do it. And other patients of mine see are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of they're nutrition depleted or they don't have protein in their body. Their body doesn't like it. I just had a patient, for example, this week, who was a young woman, 26 years old, who's been a vegetarian vegan.

She was basically a vegetable and sugar vegan.

And she didn't even like to- so she would eat sugar as well. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, a lot of people who are vegan eat sugar because the body starts to crave the carbohydrates and sugar. So it's not uncommon. And so she wasn't overweight at all, but metabolically she was super unhealthy. acne and her gut was a mess and she had very low protein, very, very low amino acids. She had very low vitamin D, extremely low B12, very low iodine, very low zinc. She was extremely unwell and her diet was just not fit for her. We had to upregulate it and change it a little bit. I had to get her on some different protein shakes which she needed. I had to upregulate her vitamins. I had to sort of get her off the sugar. But it takes a lot of work. So the key is how do you personalize the diet and get away from the basically religious nutrition that we have.

Which is either all vegan, vegetarian, keto, carnivore. There's all these extreme diets.

Exactly, yeah. And again, I only encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body.

Themselves, right? Yeah, yeah.

How do you feel? Do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How are you clear? Do you have energy? I mean, what is happening to you? So I think it's important to understand that we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition and how do you identify your particular needs by various kinds of testing, whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing, and how do.

You actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet? Everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way, but it seems so extreme in my mind, you know? And I empathize with vegans and I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hurt animals either. But then I've tried it for a while and I'm also like, gosh, but I miss meat.

And it's like, what is the way?

And what I'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all. You have to really figure out what works for you.

Yeah, the one size that fits all is quality. is understanding food is information. Just meat, for example. So feedlot meat is an abomination. It's horribly cruel to the animals. It grows the animals in ways that are extremely destructive to the environment by these monocrop corn and soy fields we use to grow feed, the feedlots that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the hormones and antibiotics that we use, and the quality of the meat is very different. So it's basically bad for you, bad for the planet, bad for the animals. So it should be banned 100%. But that doesn't necessarily mean that eating a wild buffalo is bad for your health. Or eating a fully grass-fed, yeah. Or eating a fully grass finished, regeneratively raised cow or animal is bad for you. In fact, there's a chapter in the book, one of the principles is meat medicine. and it's kind of a joke in a way, like a little bit of provocative comment. But what's really fascinating to me, there's an article just published a couple of days ago, another one about how if you look at, you know, feedlot meat, it produces inflammation in the body. It actually is really not that great for us. But if you look at these animals that have foraged on hundreds of different plants with all different phytonutrient compositions and all different vitamin and mineral contents, They literally seek out and forage medicines in their diet. There's a guy I had on my podcast, Fred Provenza, who has studied rangeland animals his whole life and is working with researchers at Duke. And they've discovered in properly raised meat actually phytochemicals. And this blew my mind. Meaning you have plant compounds like catechins that you find in green tea at the same levels in certain meat depending on what they eat. So you have all these antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, Detoxifying compounds found in meat that's raised properly. And the other argument obviously is climate. And yes, you know, I think the factory farming of animals is an abomination and is a huge contributor to climate change and environmental degradation, ecological collapse. However, that doesn't mean that, you know, we had 169 million ruminants roaming around the plains in America hundreds of years ago. I mean, we shot them all. Like we, like basically Buffalo Bill said, Every buffalo killed is an Indian dead. And they literally decimated like 60 million buffalo to down to a few hundred. That's crazy. Yeah. And so those buffalo and those ruminants put in 8 to 50 feet of topsoil across America, which is why we had such rich agricultural lands. Now we've lost over a third of that topsoil because of our farming methods like monocropping and tilling that's degenerated the soil. so that the soil can't hold the carbon because plants breathe carbon from the atmosphere. They suck it into the plant, it goes down to the ground, into the roots, and it feeds the microbiome of the soil. And the microbiome of the soil then feeds the plants because it's this beautiful symbiotic relationship where the nutrients from the soil cannot be extracted unless the microbiome is healthy in the soil. So we get all these nutrient-depleted plants, and then we lose the carbon in the soil, and we end up with climate change at accelerated level. In fact, the food system itself end to end is the number one cause of climate change by about 50% of it. Not even fossil fuels. Wow. Yeah, more than fossil fuels. Because when you look at end to end, factory farming, deforestation, soil erosion, food waste, refrigeration, transport, all that stuff, it's huge. And so, yes, factory farming should be banned, but it turns out that Regenerative agriculture and I talk about how to be a regenitarian in the book, which is a really an interesting concept that nobody can disagree with, right? You want to regenerate human health, you want to regenerate planetary and ecological health. Who's going to be against that? You can be vegan or paleo, but like you can't be against that. It's like being against motherhood or apple pie. So, and so I basically create a framework of understanding the science around how if we use animals in an ecosystem on a farm, we can dramatically accelerate the production of soil. And Gabe Brown is a farmer in North Dakota who was a traditional farmer, monocrop, went through cycles of destruction of his farm through hail and storms and droughts and was going to go bankrupt, and then discovered the writings of Thomas Jefferson and discovered that the practices that they used a long time ago to preserve and conserve soil cover crops, crop rotations, putting in animals as part of the ecosystem and having roots in the ground all the time, all these very simple ideas that are regenerative agriculture. And he was able to turn his farm around and has built 29 inches of topsoil, makes 20 times what his neighbor does in terms of profit, makes more food, better food, does not use any chemicals, inputs or water. It's unbelievable and it's something that is now scaling up across the country. and the UN says that if we took, and by the way, 40% of agricultural land around the world is not suitable for growing crops. So even if you're a vegan, you want to grow crops, you can't do that on that land. Then it's just going to waste. And what animals do is they have like all these stomachs and the ability to eat stuff that is inedible to us and turn it into incredibly high quality nutrient-rich food. Grass and yeah. Yeah, right. Like we're gonna be, and we're not gonna be sitting like a gorilla, you know, eating 400 pounds of food every day just to get the nutrients we need. So I think They go, oh, gorillas are strong. Yeah, but they eat all frickin' day and they eat an enormous amount of food in order just to get a little bit from it. So we have to understand that the UN says that if we took these 2 million of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world and we converted them to regenerative agriculture, we could stop climate change for 20 years. So it's not like eat vegan and save the planet. It's like someone, Russ Konsler, as a farmer said, it's not the cow, it's the how. Right. And there's studies that have shown that, for example, if you eat kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat, all your inflammatory markers go down. Whereas if you eat the feedlot meat, your inflammatory markers go up. Kangaroo meat. Well, and it was done in Australia. We didn't have kangaroos. Wow.

You can actually go in the grocery.

Store and buy kangaroo meat. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. I wonder what that tastes like. That's interesting. I've had, I've, no, but I've had, I've had I've had the llamas from South America. What was that? Guanacos. The guanacos. It was incredibly delicious. It was Patagonia. I had the guanaco. That was the closest thing I've had to a kangaroo. That's interesting. But I've had ostrich, I've had buffalo.

I've had elk, I've had venison.

What's the best tasting meat you've ever had? I like elk. Oh, God, a good elk chop is like the best.

I just don't know why, but it's so good. Interesting. It tastes better than a steak.

I really do think so. And there's this company, I have nothing to do with this company, but a friend of mine turned me onto it called Wild Idea Buffalo, which is basically grass finished wild buffalo and they harvest in really humane ways and it's super yummy and tasty and tender and delicious and you're eating basically like the Native Americans did. Honestly, the Plains Indians and Native Americans They lived very long. They were at the turn of the last century, they were the longest lived people, had the highest number of centenarians in 1900. And pretty much all they ate was buffalo with a few berries and seeds and stuff that they gathered.

Did they have fruits or did they not have fruit?

A little bit, yeah. You've heard of pemmican, right? You know what pemmican is?

What's that?

Pemmican is basically dried meat and fat from, like, usually it was buffalo or other animals, with a little bit of berries. And it was super nutrient dense. And when Lewis and Clark went across America, they carried pemmican because one pound of pemmican a day would feed you. If you're a woman, it would half a pound. And so they literally could bring 30 pounds of food for a month. And it was dried, it lasted forever. So it was the food that the Native Americans used. which is dried pomegranate.

So, it was like some buffalo meat dried with kind of like a beef.

Jerky type of thing with some nuts. Yes, but high in fat, very high in fat. So, very high in fat and meat and berries.

Interesting. So, Native Americans lived on that. They probably had much smaller fruits back then as well, like little baby apples. Well, it's wild, right?

It's wild. Like two bites. Yeah, well all those foods were so more nutrient dense. I mean, another example of food is medicine. You know, we talked about the meat is medicine. But now one of the most exciting things I've heard about recently is, you know, well here's a concept. When you look at plants, the harder or animals, the harder they have to work to survive, the more nutritious they are. So, so what are those plants?

What are those plants?

So if you're eating a monocrop vegetable or plant or grain, it's the worst. It's almost devoid of nutrients. It's bread for starch and sugar. Monocrop means Meaning like you have a giant cornfield or a giant soybean field or one crop acres. You have like 2,000 acres of broccoli.

That's the least nutrient dense broccoli.

Yes, yes. And then if you get organic, a little better. If you get regenerative, it's even better because the soil is so nutrient dense. Because the soil, think about like these traditional crops are growing now, they're grown basically in dead soil. Yeah. And all the nutrients have to go in. So it's like they're getting them NPK, which is essentially the basic nutrients for plants, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. But they don't get all the other stuff, right? And so they don't get all the rich things that come from the microbiome of the soil extracting all these incredible minerals, nutrients. I mean, your broccoli today is 50% less nutritious than it was 50 years ago. So they don't get all these incredible nutrients. from the soil. And so when you're looking at these incredible stresses on plants that happen, for example, in a regenerative system, which is a little harder for them to grow, or a wild system, the nutrient content is so much higher because there's this phenomena in science and medicine called hormesis. Hormesis means stress, but then that stress makes you stronger. So it's essentially, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? lift weights, you're gonna tear your muscles, but then they'll get stronger. If you do interval training, you're gonna feel like crap and it's hard and stress on your body, but it'll make you stronger. Or if you do any kind of stress to your system, it actually can create a rebound effect, like ozone does that, and many other therapies will literally create a stress and then the body will come back and fight it. Wild plants are the most nutrition. So wild blueberry is better than a regenerative blueberry better than organic blueberry better than a feed lot, I mean, a monocrop blueberry farm, right?

That's full of pesticides and chemicals and so on.

So, not all broccoli is created equal. No, not all plants are created equal. I like to eat weird food. I like to eat strange food. I'm here in Hawaii and I'm going to the farmer's market and I'm eating stuff I never ate before. I don't even know what half of these fruits are. I hit a Surinam cherry, which was like an explosion of flavor and color. I'd never even eaten or heard of it in my life. So, I'm like big on eating weird food. We eat about three crops, 60% of our diet is three crops, basically corn, wheat and soy, and in the rest of the world it's often rice. And then about 12 plants comprise the other part of our diet. And there's like 800 species of plants we used to eat, there's many livestock species, we lost 90% of our edible plant species, 50% of our livestock species, so we're eating all this mono junk. When you go to Europe, you get a lot more artisanal stuff. So anyway, what's amazing about food is that when you eat the right foods and you're eating quality foods, You literally can activate all these healing mechanisms in your body by using the plant's defense mechanisms to help you. So here's a really cool story that explains how food is medicine. And last night, you know what I had for dinner? What's that? I had pancakes.

Ooh, that sounds good.

But I didn't have just any pancakes. And you're like, Dr. Hyman's having pancakes for dinner? What is up with him? No, I had special pancakes made from Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. Himalayan tartary buckwheat is a plant that has been almost forgotten. It was grown in the Himalayas under extremely rough conditions, right? No water, high altitude, basically crappy soil, cold weather. I mean, you name it. It was the worst place. I mean, you don't want to grow something you don't want to grow it in Tibet. You want to grow it in, like, Iowa, right? Yeah, yeah. But this plant, as a result of all these stresses, this special type of buckwheat developed all these defense mechanisms. And it is one of the most powerful superfoods on the planet. It's developed over 130 or 40 phytochemicals, some of which are not found anywhere else in the world, that regulate your immune system and literally can rejuvenate your immune system.

So, it's called Himalayan buckwheat?

Himalayan tartary buckwheat, like the tatars.

I gotta get this. Where can we get it?

You can't yet, but you will.

How'd you get it?

Oh, I have an inside track. My mentor and my friend, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, is a nutritional biochemist, student of Linus Pauling, who has taught all of us about food is medicine and food is information and functional medicine, and discovered this almost by accident. He read about it in a journal, there was some obscure reference. He tracked it down, long story short, he found this farmer who'd gotten some of these seeds by accident from the USDA, grew a little bit of it, and he started working with him. And this summer, they produced the first 100,000 pounds of Himalayan tartary buckwheat. So he sent me a couple of pound bag of this flour. And so I made pancakes from that flour. And it's basically higher in protein, higher in vitamins, minerals, and higher in, it's the highest protein of any grain. And it's not really a grain, it's a fruit. And it's got all these phytochemicals that rejuvenate your immune system. so here's just to take you down the rabbit hole for a minute and explain that how does food act as medicine? I mean, it sounds good, Dr. Hyman, but how does it actually work? Okay, so here's what happens. As we age, this is a little complicated story, but it's worth telling, as we age, our immune systems age as well. It's called immunosenescence, the aging of our immune system. And part of that happens because in our bone marrow, we have stem cells. And we have stem cells for white blood cells. Now, if you are eating the typical American diet, you're exposed to all the crap in our food and the toxins in our environment and all that, these stem cells get injured, literally get mutated, and they produce their progeny, which are their white blood cells. We produce a million white blood cells in our bone marrow every minute, one million. And then they go out in the periphery and the rest of your body and they do their job, right? When you have these mutated funky white blood cells, they're called chips, they get into circulation and they become zombie cells. You might have heard of zombie cells, which create aging. And these zombie cells create cancer and heart disease and inflammation and autoimmune diseases and all kinds of stuff. And they're very hard to get rid of because they just live forever. They're like zombies. How do you get rid of them? Well, it turns out by some magical twist of nature, that the Himalayan tartary buckwheat phytochemicals target and kill the cells that are zombie cells. So literally, I had an immuno-rejuvenating pancake dinner last night. I'm so proud of myself. It was the first time I ever had breakfast for dinner. It was so good. I made it with berries, put a little cinnamon in there, which is good for your blood sugar. It's so high in protein, I put an egg in there, macadamia milk, Really simple, no, it wasn't super starchy and it was delicious. It sounds good. It's rich, almost yellow color to the flour with all the phytochemicals. So that's an example of how food is medicine. So I think we are just beginning to understand this. In fact, the Rockefeller Foundation has funded hundreds of millions of dollars into studying what they call the periodic table of phytonutrients, which means they're classifying the 25,000 plus phytochemicals found in plant foods. And everybody's heard about this. wine has resveratrol and green tea has catechins and broccoli has sulforaphane and, you know, Himalayan tartary buckwheat has, you know, a whole list of stuff, right? So we're kind of familiar with the idea of phytochemicals. Why do you eat blueberries? Because they have proanthocyanidins, right? But they're cataloging all of these and there's many unknown ones. Like in Himalayan and tartary buckwheat, we're discovering ones we never even knew about before. And we want to be eating these. These are the medicines that are in food. This is when the, the animals are foraging around eating this, they literally can get these in their meat. And the thing about the climate change thing, when you actually look at the regenerative agriculture model for raising animals, now you don't have to eat them or not, right? You don't have to eat them, but you have to include them in the cycle because without them, you cannot build soil at a rapid rate, right? We've lost a third of our top soil, we are projected to lose all of it within 60 to 80 harvests. This is according to the UN and also an Obama report. from soil. So the only way to really build soil is to include animals in the process of agriculture. By having them manure, by having... Yeah, yeah.

So you poo and pee and move.

Around, they move around like in this, we call it adaptive grazing, or there's different terms for it. But essentially it's a way of raising animals in herds and moving them around quickly in different fields, not letting them overgraze and they chomp down like the buffalo did or the elk did. They'd move, they'd eat, and then they move to the next spot and they wouldn't ruin the land. and that peeing and pooing and their hooves digging in the saliva from their mouth, that saliva would literally, like, makes the plants grow more. It's like fertilizer for the plants. So they get all the saliva, and then the plants come back stronger and they put more roots down and it pulls more carbon in the atmosphere, and it creates this virtuous cycle. So if you're looking at, for example, eating a vegan burger, plant-based burger, like an Impossible Burger, yeah, it's better than a feedlot burger, but they're growing the soy with glyphosate-rich monocrop culture, soy cultures. it's destroying the soil, it's destroying the microbiome of the soil, the glyphosate destroys your microbiome. But in terms of climate change, it adds three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment, whereas a regeneratively raised beef burger removes three and a half kilos of carbon. So it's seven kilos of carbon, kilograms of carbon less than a Impossible Burger. So we have to sort of get into the nuances a little bit, and that's why I like to just people to eat real food and follow the principles of nature, and it's amazing not only will it be good for the animals and good for the planet, but it will regenerate your health and that's really what I see with my patients, that the food is the most powerful drug on the planet. Hey YouTube, if you like this video, you're gonna love the next one. Click on it to check it out today. Because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health. What you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way. Well, if we can get food reimbursed by healthcare, it's a game changer. I actually am working on that at the clinic with the food pharmacy, which is the idea of actually paying for.