Why Chronic Disease is Explonding w/ Daniel Schmachtenberber

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat.

We have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism. And there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story. Daniel Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher, consistent strategist, studying how collapsing institutions and exponential.

Tech are reshaping our health.

Some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution, cheaper healthcare or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect our bodies. And so we figured out organophosphates, napalm. Awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food. As you see in your clinic every day. It's all changeable. And it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take. And it's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes.

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Trial all right, Daniel, I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is a long time in coming. We had many conversations which I've tried to keep up with and understand how you think because I don't imagine many people have heard of you, know about you, or know who you are. But your background and your thinking is so remarkable in its depth and its clarity and its ability to bridge many different disciplines and come up with an overarching understanding of what's wrong in our society and where our existential threats are and how we can fix them. It's going to be straight. We're in a really shitty situation where we have more and more health care, quote, sick care and more and more illness, and it's exploding at such a rate that we can't even keep up with it. Just in my 40 years of being a doctor, I've seen just the acceleration of chronic diseases and both in the amount of suffering, the severity, the scope of them, the increase in new diseases, it's just, it's remarkable. But the last, you know, 100 years, we've seen this sort of inversion of, of, of the life expectancy curve. It's kind of got starting to dip down and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy and I think it has to do with the kind of rise of what you have termed anthropogenic disease.

First, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I followed your work for a very long time before we got to know each other through Institute of Functional Medicine and things like that. Obviously, over the 40 years you've been in practice, that was already after the better living through chemistry boom started and modern industrial agriculture started. So it would be even a more extreme picture if we went back further. You've obviously studied the history on going back further. A lot of people think, well, the rise in diseases is just a result of we're diagnosing more or something like that, as opposed to. No, there are ways, like we have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism and democracy and whatever. And there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story, right? There are areas where some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution or cheaper health care or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect the environment but help affect our bodies.

So. So let's talk about that. I mean, let's dive into what, you know, we're sort of set the stage for the fact that, you know, we're having increasing rates of these chronic diseases, increasing mental health crisis, increasing rates of neurodevelopmental issues, decreasing life expectancy. I mean, it's a grim. It's a grim situation. And we're spending more and more, getting less and less. So the question then is, you know, what is this context in which the disease occurring? Why is this happening, and what the anthropogenic reasons for this chronic disease epidemic?

So you were, as you were going through the list, you mentioned vitamin D, you mentioned mercury. That's obviously deficiency toxicity. You mentioned some pathogens, you mentioned stress. So you have a model of like, what the underlying categories are. And a lot of them are things like, everybody knows what acute deficiency is. What acute toxicity. You just got a bag of chemicals poured on you. You have acute poisoning, you're vomiting, you have to go in for toxicology. But there is something that is called toxicity that is not just a hippie nonsense idea. It's a real thing. It is not acute poisoning. That is chronic, that is subclinical or subacute. Same with infections. You have acute infection, you're producing symptomology versus kind of subclinical infections, which is in Lyme disease or in, you know, viruses that cause cancers or whatever it is. So the treatment of everyone's going to be personalized, not based on a disease diagnosis, but based on their actual medical history, their symptomology, their, their labs and what's uniquely going on for them. But it's going to be personalized within a framework that is kind of not that hard.

Yeah, that's right. I mean the laws of nature are pretty simple. Pierre Laplace said they're, they're the laws of biology. When I think we're describing them and I think we're getting toward approximation of what that looks like and they're just, you know, functional. Medicine is just a heuristic. It's not the end all and be all. It's just a framework that we're continually evolving to understand the complexity of human biology, which is infinitely unknowable. But even though it's so complex, you know, a rocket ship is complicated.

Right.

It's, it's, but it's knowable. It's a known, known.

Well, there's a blueprint that specifies it completely.

Yeah.

And DNA is actually not a blueprint.

Right.

It's a generator function which can make a new protein. It's never made exposed to a new thing. Yeah, right. And it evolved rather than was designed, which is why it's self repairing. Right. The, the rocket ship doesn't self repair, it doesn't self evolve.

Yeah.

And so biology is, is not mechanics. Right. It's like it's a different unique thing that to have a system that self organizes wasn't created by from the outside that has an immune system. Right. Like it'd be dope if our computer had an immune system, but it doesn't. Or right. Things itself evolve. And so we're like, okay, what's happening in a system that is building itself, evolving itself, repairing itself is obviously different in type than a system that doesn't repair itself, that doesn't evolve itself. So we have to make sure we're using the right epistemology. Right. The right kind of scientific framework. So you were talking about laws of biology and we're talking about anthropogenic stuff, which is like stuff in the current world that is different than the evolutionary environment. Even though our genes aren't different. Yeah, right. Like modifying the environment in a way that we are not actually genetically fit to.

That mismatch is really why we're sick.

So let's talk about that a little bit because I think the first thing is a lot of people are still suffering from the propaganda of Hobbes and Hobbes's descendants. Right. Man in the State of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty and mean, right? And as you already mentioned, the average life expectancy was 30 and their life was shit the entire time until they were 30. And you know, that's nature, right? That's just nature. That's human biology. That's nature. And our civilizing ourselves with technology is creating longer lives and everything's getting better and better. And this is like awesome propaganda. If you're colonialist and you want to.

Kill all the natives, we're helping them by killing them because they wanted to suffer so much.

I mean, Churchill has a famous quote that says, I'm gonna paraphrase it, actually have a whole list of quotes about Manifest Destiny of kings. I mean, Manifest Destiny in the US And Divine Right of Kings. And like, just stuff that when we look back, we say, wow, that was the most dreadful propaganda nonsense, but we still do the same kind of thing. But Churchill said something like, you know, I don't hold for one second that our treatment of the red man is a bad thing in any way, because evolution selects for higher life forms and a higher species replacing the lower species is good, right? And you're like, that's a big deal. So north and South America, the Americas before Columbus, etc, right? Before colonization was roughly, depending on who you look at, 140 million people. And within a short period of colonization, both from infections and war and driving them out of viable habitats, the population was decimated by 90%. And if you look at that and you compare it to whatever, 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, right? And you're like 190% of 140 million, which is so many different civilizations that had different languages and songs and art and pharmacologies and just gone. And similarly, so many ecosystems, so many species, like, we don't have the giant sloth, we don't have the mammoth. Those were largely, though many of those were early human extinction from over hunting, from destroying habitats. And. And of course it makes sense that, like, if the winner writes history, of course they're the good guy, right? The winner's not going to say we were the bad guys, but we were better at weapons than them. We destroyed them because they were peaceful and lovely. No, we're going to say they were. They were brutish and terrible and we brought democracy and Christianity and whatever. You know, you can say Christianity, you can say Islam, you can say whatever. The thing is that is justifying Wyatt won. So there's something where it's like the, the dominant narrative of a power system has to justify the power system. And so it's going to be apologism for the power system. We saw that through the, through the Dark ages, through the. And so history is hard, right, because we got to read this stuff that's written by the winners.

Yeah.

And you're like, in general, more peaceful cultures got slaughtered by more warring cultures. It's not like everybody that Genghis Khan slaughtered was a less good civilization. No, they were less good at war. But how many people that knew how to live in more peace got slaughtered in the process because they didn't build maximally lethal militaries? And yet we are the descendants of who made it through history, which you.

Are good at war and weapons and.

Killing, growing massive populations, not keeping populations in stable relationship with their environment, good at technology that can be used in competition and war. So it's a really interesting selection criteria. So then we tell the story, oh, they only live for 30 years and life was terrible. And. But you were just saying, like, hey, no, actually some of the planes Indians were living to 100. A lot of them were living to 100. This is such an important story because I think one of the things that I want to get across in this conversation is there's still this general idea that is a part of the progress narrative, that is a part of just propaganda. Say that is the diseases come from nature. Man in a state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty, at mean.

Right.

And the progress comes from science and the application of science, the technology brought to the world via the market, blah, blah, blah. And, and now look at how long we live. And you know, vaccines solved all these issues and whatever. It's not that there's no truth to it, but it is cherry picking the stats pretty heavily.

90% of measles was gone when they've introduced the vaccine because of better sanitation and health.

This is pretty important part of the story. And so if you rewind a little bit to say Dark Ages Europe, this is not an indigenous culture. And then if the indigenous cultures you're studying post science, which is very recently are post Trail of Tears after you've already slaughtered most of them, move them to an area where they don't understand the plants or animals and that were like crap areas and then they're drinking and whatever, like you're like, this is not a study of indigenous people. So there's a lot of indigenous scholars that are like, come on, this is ridiculous. Like, no, we had a lot of people that were 100 years old. There's a lot of diseases we just didn't have. So this idea that like that diseases just come from nature, our genome is a bummer, right? Like nature's a bummer. Tech is going to solve it. As opposed to like actually technological agriculture has really made a lot of people sick. Technological mining and et cetera that has caused ubiquitous pollution made a lot of people sick. So when we say anthropogenic disease, we're not just talking about iatrogenic, right? Anthropogenic, meaning diseases we have that are a result of our own action as a species. So if you take mining, for instance, right. There's. There's 2 billion tons of municipal waste produced every year. Waste that, you know, like comes from our house. It's a lot. Two billion tons, like mind blowing when you think about it. There's about 190 billion tons of mining waste produced every year. It's a lot because you mine stuff. But that rock isn't. It's not all the thing you want, right. You want a particular metal. All the stuff you don't want is waste is tailings. That stuff is almost all super toxic and it gets put in some big dam that eventually breaks and all goes in the water. This is comprehensively undoing what took the biosphere a billion years to do that made life possible in the first place. This is. You had actually mentioned something. I want to. It's a tangent, but I want to double down on is maybe there's aliens, who knows? We're not going to get into that part right now. But when we look out at the universe, we see a lot of planets that are not habitable and we don't see a lot of places that look habitable. This place is pretty awesome.

Any.

Right. Carl Sagan's pale blue dot is as relevant today as it was back then.

Yeah.

So this, like the fact that it's habitable to life is a big deal. We should want to protect it more than anything. Anything.

Not move to Mars.

Obviously. If you deal with radiation and other issues, 0.4g is a pretty tricky issue to deal with. Right. As you see the people who go into zero G and they do a lot of resistance training and everything to try to deal with it. Bone density goes down, neural density goes down, neural density drops pretty massively. So, you know, like, obviously we evolve it to this planet. We have a planet that supports life. It's rare as can be. Right. It's everything we care about depends on that. And it took a long. Like the other planets didn't do that, at least in the time period that we can see, that's very special. It took whatever a billion ish years for geological hydrological processes to make a space where abiogenesis could start to happen. Right. Where life could start to emerge. And that was trapping all the super toxic stuff in which life couldn't emerge in rocks, in the lithosphere and making a certain temperature range and you know, whatever that life could emerge in. And then it took like a billion years of just single cell creatures to make a biosphere in which multicellular creatures could emerge and on and on and, and then you look at the biosphere, a complex biosphere, and you're like, it's pretty much six atoms. Right. Like there's 92. Table. Yeah. Oxygen first. Right. Like 65% of our body by weight is oxygen. Because water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium make up 96% of our weight.

Yeah.

And you add the few electrolytes in there and it's 99% of our weight. And then you have trace minerals. And the trace minerals are important, they're a tiny bit. But roughly every animal, plant, whatever, has the same distribution of trace minerals, the same building blocks, the same type of molecular bonds. This is a humongous deal to understand me and you and a dog and a mouse and a scorpion and a tree and a fungus are made of the same stuff, same atom, same molecular bonds, which is why any of them can die, go on the soil, turn into soil, turn into new stuff. A tree can fall, body can fall, an animal can defecate. Rattlesnake poison. Right. Like super duper poisonous stuff. Still, the nature of the bonds, it dies, breaks down, doesn't stay as an enduring toxin.

Unlike plutonium, which stays around forever.

Yes. Or PFAS or whatever. Right. Seraphim. Because those are either atoms that were not part of the biosphere that we got through mining, or molecules that we made up in a chem lab that nothing in nature knows how to break down. Right. Like your bond. So just to get a sense of like, part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all made of the same stuff. Hmm. And we need the same physics. Right. Obviously, the North Pole to the equator are different temperatures. So polar bears don't do very well in the savannah and cheetahs wouldn't do very well in the Arctic. But the temperature difference from the North Pole to the equator is almost nothing compared to everywhere else in outer space.

Right.

Well, some things are very hot, some things are very cold. But like everything here operates with the same pressure, the same physics, the same ionizing radiation, the same chemicals, the same temperature ranges. That's a big deal to get. And the same chemicals and the same molecular bonds. A huge deal. And it's part of why co evolution works, why there can be mutual symbiosis, is we are literally recyclable into each other.

Yeah.

Now if you think about from that perspective, how rare life in the universe is, how rare the biosphere is, how it's all based on basically these same six atoms, same molecular bonds and a little bit of trace minerals. You think, then you start to think about how mind blowingly stupid mining is.

Taking other weird things out of the earth that should be buried in there. And things that we should be protected from because they don't do well with our biology.

Things that are omnitoxic to all life forms, right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms, cadmium is bad for all life forms, lead is bad for all life forms, etc. So fortunately for us, the earth has a lot of those. But they're all bound in rock in the lithosphere under the biosphere, not part of the biosphere. We don't have to deal with them. So what do we do? We say those are useful for industrial purposes. So let's actually destroy the biosphere on top to make a mine. Let's pull this rock up, let's pull that super toxic thing out through smelting and metallurgy and whatever. And if we just kept it all in a perfect metal and recycled, it'd be one thing. But we burn the coal and put the mercury and lead in the air, we put the lead in the gasoline, you know, and aerosolized it, we. And then the also the rest of the part that is toxic tailings also goes out. So you're like, we have one planet that we know is habitable, it's habitable because of specific chemistry. And we are as fast as possible making omnitoxic shit that chemistry can't deal with.

And that's a big part of what's making us sick. And it's something that medicine sort of ignored, which is this chronic low level burden of toxins that we're all exposed to and we're all basically accessible. If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat. You know, the average newborn has 287toxins in their milk and cord blood before they take their first breath.

We see the same thing in the mother's breast milk. Right. And in our blood. Like just people need to have this sink in mother breast milk, mother's blood, baby umbilical cord, 2 to 300 petrochemical and industrial toxins.

It's crazy. I mean, and you should still call.

It low level is ridiculous.

I've thought of a business of creating a breast milk filter. How you do that? But.

Well, the lymphatic system is a filter, but it can only fill. Like in our evolutionary environment, we were not exposed to organophosphates. So what evolutionary process can deal with organophosphates? And so we figured out organophosphates. Napalm. Awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food.

Yeah.

To think about this thing that we invented as a chemical weapon to destroy nature at scale, napalm, which is toxin, same molecular class. We figure out, oh, we can kill weeds in agricultural settings, but we're going to spray it on all the food and humans are going to eat trace amounts of all of it. And the pesticides, like the thing that blows my mind about pesticides, you're like, okay, nuclear modeling, nuclear war happens, nuclear winter, almost everything dies. The only things that make it are bugs with exoskeletons. We want to make something poisonous enough to kill bugs that can make it through a nuclear winter, and we spray it all over our food and then eat it. And just because we're bigger, we. It's. It's not a lethal amount, but it's a lot.

But it bioaccumulates and it's additive. And over time, it's sort of like, that's what I see. So many, so many of the times that we see in, in many of the diseases of aging and chronic diseases we're talking about, including autoimmune diseases, are all the result of this total load phenomenon. It's not just one thing. It's a total load of everything. And you keep adding and adding and adding.

So when you say low level, it's important to say so we're talking about lead poisoning, right? There's like, you have acute lead poisoning, you have Mad Hatter syndrome. Okay? That happens because you're working in a lead mine or some industrial source. Right. But how much was there in an evolutionary environment? None. So what amount is good for you? None.

Right? So that's why I laugh when I see the reference range on the lab of like, the level of mercury that's considered normal is 10 to 10. I'm like, well, there's no biological requirement for mercury.

It's zero.

Is the normal level.

Yes. Yet that would mess up so much industry that the industry is going to lobby the EPA to make a number that doesn't mess up the industry too much. And the cost, the externalized cost is your children's health and your grandparents health and your health and the cancers that everybody's going to get.

Yeah, I see this. I mean, I saw this kid, my practice years ago, his mother was just so, such a good, attentive, observant mother. And she saw this kid who went from a normal little kid to being extremely difficult, extremely aggressive, violent, learning difficulties, dysgraphia, dyslexia, just a whole bunch of things, neurodevelopmental things. And you know, she, she said, we live north of Albany in this town where there's a cement plant across the street from the school. This is, this is why the history is so important. How many doctors ask their patients if they live near a cement plant or a coal plant or not? Nobody asked that. Right. But it's part of the history that we find really essential. And she said every day after school the cars would be coated, like in Austin here when it's pollen season, like your car is just coated with pollen. Their cars every day were coated with dust from the cement plant. And that dust was a toxic soup of chemicals. And when I actually did a chelation challenge test, which again is something we don't do in traditional medicine, but we look at your blood levels and that can tell you if there's an acute exposure. And often there, there are levels that are significant. You see kids, for example, with high lead from environmental exposure, but it's, it often is stored in the tissues. And so we give a drug called dmsa, which is a FDA approved drug for chelation. That's a Greek word that means to claw, to bind some things, it binds the metals and then we collect the urine and we saw this kid was just, everything was just lit up, you know, arsenic.

I just want to specify that one thing, one of the things you said is you had to use a different testing method. Yeah, right. Because of course, if there's something that's circulating in the blood, it's going to cross the blood brain barrier that's going to go into the kidneys and hurt the nephrons. It's so dangerous to keep in the blood. The body will excrete it as fast as it can. If it can't excrete it fast enough, it wants to get it out of the blood.

Yeah.

So you do a blood level. The blood level is the wrong thing to do. Right. If you're not looking at tissue levels, which is what. But tissue biopsies are not a non invasive thing to do. This is just important to be like, people could say, oh, this is nonsense. I've ran the labs and nobody has heavy metal. Well, are you running the right labs? Very important topic. And again, there's some theory under it, right?

And one of the, one of the, you know, one of the gold standard tests for lead, for example, is looking at bone levels through various specialized types of imaging that are used in research. And that's what you should be looking at. It's sort of like the joke I always tell that, you know, that this guy drops his keys on the street and he's looking for him on this light post and his friend's like, what are you doing? He said, I'm looking for my keys. He says, where'd you drop him? He's like, drop him down the street. Why are you looking here? He said, the light spit are here. And that's what we do in medicine. We tend to do testing that we have available, but not the right testing. And I even remember an article in the New England Journal of Medicine or a JAMA was one of those, was talking about like mercury and, and they said when we check the blood because that's the easiest thing to do. I'm like, well that's not where you want to check, you know, to see what's really going on. And, and so this kid, these kids who were living at some implant were, were severely affected by these. And by treating them and getting rid of the metals and decreasing their toxic burden, they were able to actually recover and do well.

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So everybody, most people know the story of leaded gasoline, tetraphyl lead being added to gasoline. Most people don't know the story. Well, there's actually a exceptional video on this made by Veritasium, a YouTube channel online that describes the, you know, tetra ethyl lead story. It was an additive for gasoline in the early phases of internal combustion engines that stopped engine knocking, as in not even absolutely crucial heaps of other chemistries that could stop engine knocking, as obviously we know because we don't have lead anymore. The early studies that were done on tetraethyl lead, on toxicity, the people did get sick, including the researcher, and the results were hidden. So it wasn't that we couldn't have possibly known. It was we actually knew hit it and brought it out anyways because the economic interest and then to think about like what what adding lead to gasoline means, which is you're aerosolizing it, right? You're not just putting it in the water or the soil. You are literally atomizing one of the most toxic chemicals that exists and putting it into the air at scale. Right. So of course even though it was already known toxic, that was hidden. And then the companies that were producing the tetra lead fought really hard to keep it there and not ban it. And it only finally got banned after the preponderance of how much harm it was causing got proven. Decades later the effects when you look back in just America are estimated at a billion points of IQ loss for Americans. Yeah. And that's staggering. I just would like people make Americans dumber. Yeah. A billion points of IQ loss for a population that was less than 300 million people.

Yeah.

Is a lot of IQ loss. And then there were also studies on increased violence and aggravation.

Yeah.

That showed that populations that were heavily exposed had something like 4x the impulse.

Control disorders, impulse control, school performance, cognitive.

Deficits, not to mention the bone issues, the osteoporosis, the cancer, everything else. But if we just look at even the psycho cognitive elements. Because one of the like again one of the stories that is real politic is like it goes back to the Hobbesian stories like humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why we need rule. Right. Humans are kind of dominant. Well empirically we made humans dumber and nastier with just the aerosolizing lead. And you're like, who would the humans be?

Yeah.

If we weren't. If we hadn't done that. So then you say okay, well that's an old story because we got rid of lead. Well no, those effects are enduring. And lead doesn't go away.

It's in the soil still.

It's still in most of the pipes.

It's in the pipes.

Right. It's like we still see it in.

Water, the whole thing that happened in Flint, Michigan.

But Albany's worse than Flint, Michigan.

Yeah.

Even though we supposedly banned lead and gasoline, it's still used in prop planes. It's still used in certain military and farm equipment and other kinds of things. So we're still using it. It's supposedly banned around the world, but it's still used because not enforced in the third world pretty heavily. But then the lead that comes from mining, specifically mining affluent. There's a study I saw in 2019 that showed children under five lost 780 million IQ points just in 2019. Just from lead.

Well, it's interesting. It's not just it affects your cognitive function, it affects everything. You know there was a really pioneering study that I saw in American Journal of Cardiology where they found that anybody with a lead level of over 2 and by the way the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over.

Yeah.

Then it was 20, then it was 10, now it's 10.

But that was not based on proving that they weren't. That was based on lobbying from the company, from the industries that produced the lead, that wanted to not have that much restriction.

But still, the lead levels that, quote, normal is 1 to 0 to 10.

Right.

And in this American Journal Cardiology study, they found that.

Excuse me, I was saying the arguing for it being higher was the lobbying side, the proving the toxicity brought it lower. But it's still, as you're mentioning, 1 to 10.

Yeah. Still 1 to 10. So it's still pretty bad. And what they found was, in terms of kids cognitive function, it was a continuum from 0 to 10 still causing a problem. It wasn't like you had no effect. So that's been well proven. But what was really interesting was the American Journal of Cardiology found that if your lead level was over 2, 2 out of 10, which is 39% of the population of adults and kids, it was a bigger risk factor for stroke and heart attack than having abnormal cholesterol, which nobody talks about. So you go to the cardiologist, they're not checking your lead levels. And one of the.

And even if they did, that's only one fifth of the allowable level.

Right.

And what's really interesting is that there was this whole movement in the 70s and 80s for chelation therapy, which was thought to be quackery. And the NIH did a $30 million trial called the TAG trial, where they use EDTA IV chelation. EDT specifically removes lead. And they found that it was very. Actually effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks. And yet it's not part of standard medicine.

Lead increasing heart disease more. Use it more than cholesterol markers. Yeah. And how much do people hear about the safe, quote unquote, safe levels of lead compared to cholesterol when it comes to heart disease? From the cardiologist? Right. Nobody, but. And again, we're not just saying within the safe range. We're saying not even close to the top of the range.

Yeah.

Right. Someone would look at and they'd be like, oh, I'm near the bottom of the range. Except the range. You're like. In evolutionary levels, it's not even the right scale, because we're calling one to ten is actually like one to a million in terms of what should be the right part per.

I mean, there were moments in human history where there were volcanoes and there was exposures but not. Not much, right? Not much. Yeah.

In terms of like the famous topic people like to talk about right now of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire. There's a whole lead pipes hypothesis. Well, lead was added to sugar to make a particular kind of sweetness, and lead was actually added as a food additive and to alcohol. Plus the lead pipes. Plus the lead.

Actually, I love the story. I have a few patients who, you know, wealthy and, you know, they. They get fine crystal where they, they have wine out of leaded crystal. I remember buying wine glasses once and I went to the store and I'm like, you know, these are $5 a piece and these are $50 a piece. I'm like, what? Why is this 50 wine glass? She said, well, it's, you know, it's leaded crystal. I'm like, leaded crystal? Why? He says, well, because the lead makes the wine taste sweeter. That's why. Kitty paint chips, because it tastes sweet. I was like, wow. And then they have fancy glazed plates which are from Italy or France, which is. The glaze is full of lead. So you can get it in lots of different ways.

The fact that in 2019, children under five globally had 780 million points of IQ loss. That's like, that should be up there in crimes against humanity is like, whoever the did this needs, like the whole industry needs to be punished, like, because those kids. Lives are ruined, right? Like massively ruined forever. The civilization that those kids run.

Yeah.

With less cognitive power. As we're moving into an increasingly complex world. And the IQ is obviously just one thing. It's increased heart disease, increased cancer, increased osteoporosis and increased impulse control disorders, aggression. Like, there's psychiatric components so sicker, dumber, and meaner. And we're just talking about one, one compound.

And you're right. I mean, you know, they looked at, at the children of the farm workers in California who were exposed to large amounts of pesticides and herbicides that, that cohort of kids that they studied lost 41 million IQ points just from exposure to pesticides. It was not just.

So you add the pesticides up, you add the lead up, you add the mercury up, you add the. The. There's 350,000 chemicals that are in regular industrial use, that are regulated, something like that. There's 280 million chemicals in the database of the American Chemical Society. And we're talking about, like, things that were not part of our evolutionary environment are not part of the makeup.

The thing that I think we have a way of talking about disease in medicine, I got cancer, I got heart disease, I got diabetes, I got Alzheimer's. You don't get it. It's not like a bug that you catch or a cold. It's a consequence of the environment in which we live. And that's sort of what you're talking about, about. Because a lot of, a lot of populations looked very old. I mean the, the, the Plains Indians had a highest number of centenarians at the turn of the century of any population. They were hunter gatherers. And so it wasn't like every hunter gatherer died at 40, but the last, you know, 100 years we've seen this sort of inversion of, of, of the life expectancy curve. It's kind of got, starting to dip down and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy. So I think, you know, we, we, we're not taught that these things are, are fixable. But if you understand the underlying root cause model of medicine and understand how to identify the root causes and figure out also how to create a thriving human and provide those conditions. Because right now, as you know, you sort of talk about this anthropogenic disease, this really means we've created an environment in which disease flourishes. It's sort of a disease causing culture, society, environment, food, environment, toxin, environment. When you kind of remove those things as best you can, these diseases can reverse. I had a guy who was living in Pittsburgh who was 7 years old and he. And I didn't know this, but Pittsburgh, you know, they, they had the steel plants and they use coal to make steel and they use the coal ash to cover their fields and to, when there's snowy icy roads to put them on these snowy icy roads. And coal ash is full of lead, mercury. And he was extremely mercury toxic and also had other issues. He had insulin resistance, he had gut issues his whole life. So he had a lot of dysbiosis and gut inflammation. He had methylation issues, he'd be vitamin problems. We had a whole series of things. It wasn't just one thing. But you add all that together, plus his APOE double four status, which puts him at risk. And he was presenting with Alzheimer's and yet, but by a very aggressive detoxification program, by getting the metals out of his system by chelation, which is heresy in medicine, by giving him methylating support, optimizing his gut function, fixing his insulin resistance, he reversed his cognitive decline and he was actually able to improve his mental status and go back to work, which was again, something you just never see. I mean, who's seen a survivor of Alzheimer's.

Well, I know that you have for a long time known Dale Bredesen and his work in the space. And I think you are friends with someone. I'm good friends with Dr. Heather Sandison, who wrote the book recently Reversing Alzheimer's. And I think that was a number one, you know, New York Times bestseller for a while. And that particular study that she did there was an inpatient using a Bredesen like protocol. Yeah, that was reversing the moca scores in 70% of the people that went in within six months with pretty basic stuff like largely diet, lifestyle and a little bit of functional medicine.

And the MOCA score is a sort of a cognitive assessment that's easy to do and it's pretty predictive of where you are in the trajectory of memory loss and dementia.

Now this is another one. If you look at Alzheimer's historically versus now, that is really a disease of modernity. Do you want to say anything?

I mean, Alzheimer's did diagnosis way back when in the turn of the century with, you know, this patient he had. But the rise in dementia is staggering. And it's, and it's one of the most costly conditions for humanity, not because of the direct medical care, because of the long term care that they need, and because of the loss of the ability to work for their caregivers, their family members. I've seen a dramatic increase in dementia and cognitive decline. And it's sort of paralleled the rest of the chronic diseases that we're seeing increasing. And people say, oh, we're winning the war heart in heart disease. I mean, nonsense. We're seeing less deaths because we have better advanced medical treatments like bypasses and stents and trauma last thrombolytics and blood clot dissolvers. But we, we are seeing more and more people getting heart disease, more and more people getting cancer, more and more people getting diabetes, more and more people getting dementia. So despite the fact that we're spending trillions of dollars on healthcare, we're not getting much for our money. And this is, this is why people.

Need to understand Statistical warfare as part of information warfare is that you can cherry pick your stats, right? And you can lie with facts, you can mislead with facts, you can say less people are dying. And what you're alluding to is the issue is getting better as opposed to. There was even one case in which the stats were used that less people were dying of gun violence. And they were suggesting in that the gun violence went down. Gun violence that Went up just emergency care so people didn't die.

That's right.

So it's entirely possible just to speak to the larger political environment, and this is a bipartisan kind of universal, marketing driven issue, is people who are pushing a narrative at scale usually have a motive to push the narrative. Political motive, a capital motive or something. Right. And so you can take the whole story, just take parts of it and you can have facts that make it through the most rigorous fact checker that are true but are still misleading.

Well, I would have Mark Twain said, he said there's liars, there's damn liars and they're statisticians.

Yes. As you're mentioning winning the dis, winning the war on heart disease, what you're actually seeing is the rates of heart disease are increasing. And so this is like this mortality morbidity trade off. Yeah, right. Which is. Oh no. Where people are living longer. And recently there's been a downturn in, you know, living longer. But like that kind of doesn't matter if the latter part of their life is on, is on polypharmacy is on a huge amount of meds with decreasing quality of life and only being kept alive kind of artificially. Like if someone gets off their meds, they die. That's kind of like they're on life support.

Yeah, exactly.

Which speaks to quality of life. I think a lot of people don't understand the mortality morbidity trade off and that the stats that are cherry picked to say longevity is going up or heart disease is going down. What it's not indicating. Is there more on that you would say?

Yeah, I mean I think we're, we're losing the battle on disease. We're spending more and more. I mean we spend twice that of any other nation, often three, four, five times as much. We're 48 life expectancy and going down are. Or a lot of our statistics are worse than most other countries.

That's just, it's worth saying again, 48, 48.

I think we're going down. It's getting worse. And that's crazy.

With a 5 trillion dollar a year healthcare.

Yeah. We're I think 30th among the top developed nations in health care metrics like infant mortality. And you know, we're, we're spending huge amounts. I think 40% of people who are over 65 take five or more medications a day. 20% take 10 or more medications.

I think some of which are for the side effects of the other meds.

Yeah, yeah. You know, 81% of Americans are on at least one medication. So is this making us healthier? I don't think so. I mean, it's mitigating symptoms sometimes, maybe it addresses issues sometimes. But we know that our healthcare system itself is the third leading cause of death through prescribed drugs given for the right reason, at the right dose for the right patient, not mistakes. Medical errors is another huge category. But I mean, let's put those together.

Because when Ralph Nader was kind of popularizing this topic, some of the issues have gotten better on iatrogenesis. But if you take iatrogenesis to mean diseases that come from interaction with the healthcare system writ large, the broadest definition. So then it includes, as you mentioned, prescriptions that are rightly given, prescriptions that are wrongly given in allergic reactions to meds and drug interactions and whatever surgeries, infections, you get well in the hospital, etc, if you add those up, many people add those up and it's the number one cause.

Yeah.

Of death of Americans in the country.

Basically, we shut down all the doctors and hospitals, got rid of all the drugs. We do better.

We're not saying that because of course we don't want to do statistical warfare because they're also saving lives. Yeah, right. But we can say, damn, we should be able to do better on that side and we can. Right. Like you have plenty of clinical cases where you're saving more lives and causing much less iatrogenesis and it actually costs less money when you factor all the matriculated things. There's obviously absence of acute symptomology does not equal a good definition of health. Because we all know cases where someone went to the doctor for a routine checkup and they find out that they have cancer and not that long to live and that cancer has been developing for a long time. And as you're mentioning with pre diabetes, a long time before the acute diagnosis of now you have diabetes and you have to take a med for it. You were in metabolic syndrome and a long time before the autoimmune disease that produces enough symptomology, you had inflammatory markers that you could see. Like how many years ahead can you see signs?

Decades.

Exactly. Now if you see it decades ahead and you haven't had a humongous amount of tissue damage, you can do stuff about it. By the time you've got to advance tissue damage, it's a lot harder. Yeah, right. You can still do stuff about it, which is amazing and you know, your clinic will attest to that. But I mean, in med school there's this stages of disease which is you start with Health is all the homeostatic systems. And homeostasis is kind of a silly term because it's not stasis. Right, Homeodynamics. So you have all these homeodynamic systems in the body that are responding to various stressors, and the level they're at matters less than their responsive capacity. Right? You want to be able to respond to hot and cold and to pathogens and whatever. Well, so you've got homeostasis or homeodynamics, then you've got deviation from homeodynamics. Something comes that takes you out of range and you don't respond properly. What is that something? Right, we'll get back to that. If that doesn't come back into range, if it comes back, great, you're still healthy. If it doesn't come back in, then you have pathophysiology. Right. The physiology is operating differently as a result of that. If you keep operating differently for a long time, you'll start to get pathomorphology. The structures will start to change. And oftentimes it's not until after that that the symptoms occur. And that's when you go and you get the diagnosis. And you've been in a very advanced development of illness that whole time. So obviously you don't want to wait till symptoms. And most people are walking around with a lot of symptoms, which means actually pretty advanced disease relative to what good health would be. And so obviously the an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure thing.

I did a podcast recently with someone who's studying this compound that comes from pomegranates and walnuts and berries called Elijah tannins that gets converted in the gut through the microbiome to a combo called urolithin A that helps recycle old mitochondria. And there's not very many things that do that. So maybe we've kind of evolved with these plants to help us do our body's work. And then there's, you know, the right balance of hormones that can be hormonal deficiency. There can be deficiencies of light and circadian rhythm and clean water and clean air, which are all things we need. And movement, exercise, rest, so could be like parasympathetic activities like meditation that restores our nervous system's function. Asleep, adequate sleep, connection, love, meaning, purpose. These are all, you know, belonging. These are all things that we need. And if you. Even something as, as. As obvious as belonging, if you're lonely, you know, you're. It's like smoking two pack of cigarettes a day in terms of your risk. So you kind of go through that whole list and you can kind of see where people are. And some of those things are just a consequence of our modern world, like the increasing isolation, lack of connections, lack of belonging, lack of being part of a tribe. And it may be is why we see such an increase in tribalism and divisiveness in society. Because people are wanting to be part of something, even if it's bad. You know, like a gang. Right. Or could be aa, or it can be Weight Watchers. It's all still a club. So I think. I think we have this kind of interesting moment where we're starting to kind of map out what these things are that impair human resilience and function. And that's really why we call it functional medicine.

I think everything you're saying is kind of intuitive. If someone is not excessively indoctrinated in an alternate thought process and makes sense. But I want to formalize it a little bit. The first thing is that you're mentioning disease having many causes, and that's in distinction to the idea that it has no cause, it's just whatever we don't understand.

Universe. Yes.

Or single cause. Cause. Right. In which a single molecule for a single molecular target would make sense.

Okay, you eat saturated fat, you get high LDL cholesterol, you get heart disease. It ain't that simple.

Complex causation versus simple causation is a major part of the story. Right. And simple causation is usually immediate. Right. You're exposed to something, a pathogen, a poison, you're starving. And a disease that correlates to it. Exactly. Starts to happen immediately. Delayed causation, as you mentioned, certain diseases, you can find early signs that we're moving in that direction in utero, or even the predispositions in the mother's body that are going to affect the developmental environment of the baby. So acute versus kind of chronic is a major part that we want to make a distinction. The other is single cause versus multifactorial. Because you're mentioning this person's dementia was a whole suite of toxins, lead and mercury and whatever, and a whole suite of deficiencies and a whole suite of maybe subclinical infections and maybe behavioral patterns and maybe psychological patterns.

I'd be very curious of what you think about this, because the entire medical research paradigm has been set up for drug discovery. It's the randomized double blind I want to go through.

I want to get to reductionist medicine. But before we go there, you already Explained kind of subacute toxicity, but subacute infection you didn't get into yet. Most people are like, dysentery is very obvious, but there are things where there is a chronic GI infection that isn't dysentery. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Yeah. You know, I think. I think we think of infections as something that, you know, come and go. But the truth is an aids. And I grew up in the era of aids. I went to medical school in that era. I did residency at ucsf, which was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic with the gay community there. And it was the number one admitting diagnosis to the hospital where I trained in my residency. Nobody died of HIV infection. People died of all the other bugs that happen to live in us and on us that get unleashed when your immune system isn't working. So whether it's pneumocystis, infection of your lungs, or cytomegalovirus, which is a common virus that we all carry, like, you know, people have herpes, and people know this, right? You have herpes and you get a cold sore when it's.

People know it for oral herpes or genital herpes, but they don't know there are more kinds of herpes.

No, there's a lot of kinds of herpes. CNB is herpes, EPC bars, herpes. They're just herpes, a whole family of viruses. But people know, oh, I have herpes, which means when I'm stressed or when it's cold out, or when I'm tired, or when I get a cold, I get a cold sore. People understand that there's this latent infection in their body, but there's so many of those. And there are. There are often hidden and they're latent and they're maybe marginally symptomatic or not symptomatic. Even tick infections can cause all sorts of issues and be latent. And then they. They emerge. Or, you know, even. Even with COVID we're now seeing these. You know, when we're seeing replicating Covid viruses in people who've recovered months or years later in. In their bodies that are producing ongoing effects that lead to long covet and. And persistent disease.

So just so people have a sense, what percentage of people have cmv? What percentage of people have Epstein Barr? What percentage of people have some strains of HPV that are part of pathogenic predisposition?

It's a lot. I mean, I would say everybody's walking around with something. Probably. If you look, most people have some Epstein bar. That's kind of hanging around. That can emerge and be problematic. Probably half the population has CMB know. It's. It's a lot of people.

There was a. There was a study I found interesting that was looking at removed prostate cancers that were removed for cancer and that were biopsied and doing virome assessment on it and found that the combination of EBV and HPV was present in the vast majority of them.

Yeah.

And so that's not one or the other. It was actually the combination.

Yeah.

And obviously we know HPV causing cervical cancer, causing throat cancer. That's kind of new, though, right. That people really understand that. And H. Pylori causing stomach cancer and obviously like EBV causing chronic fatigue. But it's pretty reductionist to say EBV causes chronic fatigue. There are people who have EBV who get other diseases, Ms. or something. There are people who have EBV who never get chronic fatigue, and there are people who have chronic fatigue who have a load of other viruses or pathogens that aren't ebv.

Yeah. We talk about, like, the infections can cause a myriad of problems, like herpes, can lead to increased risk for Alzheimer's, which doesn't just cause a cold sore, but maybe something more serious. And that doesn't mean all Alzheimer's is caused by bacteria. But look at Rudy Tanzi's work and who's an Alzheimer's researcher, and he talks about how they do brain biopsies, are finding all these bugs in the brain from the microbiome, from viruses, from other bacteria that may be causing an irritation that leads to the deposition of the amyloid plaque that everybody sees on the microscope, but is only a secondary response to some other triggering factor that if you dealt with that triggering factor, you might not actually get Alzheimer's.

So this is something that Rudy Tansey's work is good at, Bredesen's work is good at. Is Alzheimer's isn't one disease.

Yeah.

Right. Some people have described it as type 2 diabetes of the brain, some people as rheumatoid arthritis of the brain, some people as infection of the brain. These are all true.

Yeah.

Different times, which means different treatments. So if you hear that somebody has rheumatoid arthritis or Ms. Or Alzheimer's, you don't instantly know what you're going to do.

No, I don't. I don't. I know. I know. There's a. There's a group of things I'm going to look at.

Yes.

Like, I'm going To look at things that piss off the immune system. Right. Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet. Right. All the deficiencies of certain things like vitamin D we know is increasing risk for Ms. Because it's important in neurologic function and immune function. So you know, I think we kind of have to come to terms with this framework of multi factorial causes and multimodal treatments. And we just, we just have failed to be imaginative in how we do research.

I think we're saying. You're saying two things at once that are important. One is the disease doesn't have one cause. So but you're saying think about causal stuff, but the disease doesn't have one cause. So it could seem overwhelming. Like what? It's this, all these things.

Rather than just labeling disease and then treating the label with a drug, we call it the name it blame and attainment system. We name the disease, then we blame the name for the problem, then we tame it with the drug. So we say, oh, you're hopeless and helpless and sad and depressed and I know what's wrong with you, you have depression. Well no, that's just the name we give to people who share those symptoms. It's not the cause of those symptoms. Symptoms, it could be a myriad of things from what you're eating, your microbiome, from nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D or folate, or excess of toxins like heavy metals or mercury or gluten that created plane inflammation. So there's a lot of reasons why you can have any particular disease. And we just, we have it all wrong. And I think it's a real shift, it's a real shift in thinking. So medicine needs to move from this name it and blame it process to what we call thinking and linking where we start the thinking process. Once we make the diagnosis, we start to try to create an understanding of what are the patterns in the data, what are the story that's being told? How do you take a deeper diagnostic history, how do you do deeper diagnostic laboratory testing and work to kind of see what's at the root cause of everything. And by peeling back that layer, you can start to see emerge a picture of chronic disease epidemic, that it is rooted in things that are caused by, I would say man. And I think that's something in a way it's good news because it means we can have agency over it. It's not something that just falls from the sky that hits us on the head, that we get struck with some illness. It's actually now something we understand, what it's about. It's not just better diagnosis, trust me. Like the autism epidemic is an example. We went from 1 in 10,000 when I was born to 1 in 130. Even if 50% is better diagnostic or 75% is better diagnostic criteria, still something's going on.

I think it's worth just going into this a little bit because vitamin D deficiency in terms of acute causation is rickets. And not many people have rickets, but there's a pretty big level between you have rickets and you have optimal levels. And the same is true for vitamin C and scurvy or beriberi or whatever. The idea that deficiency means you don't have an acute disease that is killing you in a fast way from it, but that as soon as you're above that, we're fine, as opposed to what are optimal levels? Would you speak to that a little bit in terms of also what you find in your practice and what you find when you take someone above rickets? Treat them and treat them and they get better.

I think this is just a really important idea that medicine is trying to catch up with. You know, we used to talk about having type 2 diabetes, and then we said, wait, wait, there's pre diabetes. And then we talked about having hypertension or high blood pressure. Now there's pre hypertension. And we say, oh, you have an autoimmune disease. Oh, now there's pre autoimmune disease. And the reason it's pre anything is because we're understanding there's consequences even at levels we thought were, quote, normal. And so this idea of disease being an on or off phenomena is wrong. It's a continuum from mild in biochemical imbalances which are barely detectable, which we might be able to now screen for with metabolomic testing and proteomic testing and, you know, more subtle things that we can measure to sort of pre symptomatic to symptomatic disease symptoms to finally full blown disease and death. And so there's a whole long continuum that can start in utero or even, you know, with your mother's health before she was born that impacts your health through epigenetics and through the, you know, intrauterine experience and through early childhood influences and all those things you can start to map out if you listen carefully to somebody's story about what's happening early and pick these things up. And so, you know, the fact that we have these sort of arbitrary cutoffs for, you know, blood sugar, blood pressure, vitamin D, you know, folic, Acid. I mean, Function Health, which is a company talked to you about that. It allows people access to comprehensive lab testing and have their own personal health data set. You know, the, the reference ranges there are ridiculous list for some of the things that they have, like homocysteine, which is a measure of your B vitamin status, very important in methylation and genetic control, neurotransmitter function, detoxification, mood. I mean, a lot of things. Their cutoff level is like, I think 15 or 16 or something. And any level over 14, according to the literature, increases your risk of dementia by 50%. The optimal level should be 6 to 8. Same thing with insulin. I think we see insulin levels being reported as normal, anything up to 16 or 18. That's because we're. We have a sick population and, and the, the way we determine what's, quote, normal is basically on a bell curve in a population. So if the bell curve is shifted to the right or the left because people are sick, you're. You're picking up what's normal in the population, not what's optimal. Because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with that person.

And the name of the disease is that person might be missing some of the symptoms that usually go. They might be missing some of the biomarkers, they might have other biomarkers, they might have other symptoms. We just said there's enough of a cluster to meet the diagnostic threshold for insurance to cover it.

That's right.

But this person, this unique person who we say has rheumatoid arthritis and this other person we say has rheumatoid arthritis don't have the same presentation. They don't have the same medical history, but they don't have the same presentation. Right. You run enough labs, they have totally different stuff going on in their blood. They have a toe, and they have different symptomology.

Right.

So what does rheumatoid arthritis mean?

Yeah, it just, it's just the name we give to a group of people who share certain criteria that have been established that create the diagnosis based on symptoms, morning stiffness, certain joint pattern of inflammation, certain lab tests, but it doesn't tell you anything about why. It could be a intamoe histolytic, a parasite that causes it, or it could be gluten that causes it, or.

But it's almost never one of those. Right?

Right. No, it's usually not. Right. It's usually not. You know, we were just chatting earlier before the podcast, and I remember this Book I read when I was in college by Ivan Illich called Medical Nemesis. And it really influenced me because it talked about the failure of our healthcare system back then and talked about this idea of iatros which means physician and genesis means origin. So the origin of disease being caused by the physician, that's something that I think is sort of underappreciated by most people. Doctors don't intentionally cause people to be ill. They're not bad people, they're well intentioned, they're trying the right thing, but they're trained in the wrong paradigm.

This is not actually a critique of doctors, it's not even a critique of hospitals. It's a critique of some systemic mistakes that affect what the doctors are even allowed to do. Sometimes the doctors are really upset about it and it affects how the doctors are trained. And so where the critiques we're giving are systemic and even pretty late stage.

Things like heart failure and Alzheimer's and autism and.

Will you tell a couple diabetes just so we can wrap it together, I know you have another place, but tell like a couple stories about that, of things that people used to think were totally unreversible. And most people still do.

I mean, in medical school and throughout my medical training and even in continuing medical education and postgraduate training where you go CME courses, the orthodoxy is pretty rigid about certain beliefs. If you have heart failure, it doesn't go backwards, you can't improve it. If you have dementia, you can't reverse it. If you have type 2 diabetes, it's not reversible, you can manage chronic diseases, which is great for the medical industrial complex because it provides the ability to have a pharmaceutically driven healthcare system that makes huge amounts of profit off of long term chronic use of medication. What I've seen is surprisingly, when you apply these principles of creating health, which is what functional medicine is, it's not about treating disease, it's trying to understand what is health, what are the deviations from health and how do we measure those dysfunctions and the lack of resilience and balance and function in the body and kind of tweak things to correct it. You can actually see reversal of these diseases, complete remission, reversal of type 2 diabetes. That's, that's easy. That's an easy one. And there's now know that.

So that's a humongous deal because like what is the curve of type 2 diabetes from when you were born to now? How many upstream diseases does that contribute to and how many people, how many doctors treat it like it's reversible.

It's the thing that's causing everything. So the phenomenon of insulin resistance which underlies type 2 diabetes is causing dementia, for example, your risk of dementia is four times higher if you have a type 2 diabetes. Your risk of heart attacks was dramatically higher. Risk of cancers. Many of the most common cancers, breast, pancreatic, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer. These are diseases of insulin resistance.

And to say all those diseases are largely, not perfectly, but largely preventable with some pretty basic stuff.

Yeah.

And oftentimes even reversible is a really important thing. Everybody should know and start to update.

Yeah. I mean, they're even taking, you know, some. I mean, I've talked to Siddhartha Mukherjee about this. They're doing, you know, Studies of stage 4 pancreatic cancer using ketogenic diets and seeing remissions in some of these patients, which is almost like heresy in medicine. For medicine, there are no laws. You can say, well, evolution, that's a kind of a law. Okay, well, that's one. But how does that apply to human health? What are the laws of biology when it comes to human health? Medicine really hasn't described those. Pierre Laplace, who was a incredible scientists back in the, I don't know, 17th century, he had, you know, Laplace's law and all that was a law of physics. But he. He talked about how you can have a great number of observed phenomena from a small number of general laws, and medicine has failed to produce those laws. So instead of having like a few principles that explain everything, we get more and more granular about the diseases we describe. For example, the diagnostic manual for diseases is called ICD10, International Classical Classification of Disease, Volume 10, or Version 10. And there's 155,000 diseases. You know, it's gone up from 12,000. We used to have things there like visitation from God. We got rid of those. But, you know, it's basically descriptive, it's phenomenological, it's based on symptoms, not on our understanding of the disease or the pathogenesis of the disease. And so functional medicine, I think, is the first attempt to create a set of principles of laws and the equals MC squared that explains what you're asking, which is what is anthropogenic disease? Are you suffering from exposure too much of something that your body doesn't like, it doesn't agree with you? Or are you lacking certain things that your body needs to thrive and be resilient? And so for me, being a functional medicine doctor is just a detective work for Figuring out what you have too much of or too little of. And it's not just one thing, it's often many things. So you can't just treat one thing, which is what we learned in medical school. Just Occam's razor. Just single disease, single drug. That's the best practice of medicine. That's your gold standard, that's what you should shoot for. And that's just unfortunately not how the body works. It's a complex dynamic system and it's, it's infinitely unknowable. But you can, you can actually determine from these basic laws and principles how to treat disease, even if you've never seen it before. In the Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, he talks about this idea that, you know, following these basic principles, you can treat diseases and be successful, even if you've never seen them. So often people say, well, have you treated this? Have you treated that? Have you fixed this or that? I'm like, maybe not. I've seen that. I've never seen it. But I know what to do. I know how to get to the bottom of this problem. And so my job is to go through that list and it's a really short list and maybe you can add to it, but you know, it's toxins. And these can be environmental toxins. All the petrochemical based toxins like the forever chemicals or pesticides, phthalates, PCBs, dioxin, flame retardants, the list goes on. It can be elemental toxins like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and they're, they're buried in the earth and we've kind of excavated them and industrialized different processes that, you know, liberate these things. Like coal burning is a great one. They can be biological toxins. Right. If you, your, your liver, kidneys aren't working, you're going to be pretty sick and die pretty quick. I mean, and, and then there's, there's allergens, which are, can be both environmental allergens, food allergens. Toxins can also be things like mycotoxins and mold toxins, which I put in that category, although it can also be an allergen. So some of the things cross over. It can be in that allergen category, can be sensitivities or imbalance, like, you know, things that you might not think as a true allergy, like we'll call an IG allergy, which would be a food sensitivity, which is like gluten, for example, and then there's microbes. So it could Be infections that are persistent like Covid or Epstein Barr or cmb, which kind of burden your immune system and lead to all kinds of symptoms. Or it could be a more subclinical but. But debilitating conditions like tick infections. Or it could be an acute infection like, you know, I had an abscess recently in my back that was an acute infection that almost killed me. So it can be micro. It can be micro, microbiome. So imbalances or dysfunction in your microbiome, which is we're all suffering from in modern society as a core driver of disease. And it can be stress, as a physical stress or psychological stress and. And that creates physiological change in your body, or it can be poor diet.

This nutrient deficiency that is part of the detox processes compounds on that. So the key is you get a compounding effect of a lot of things that are. Some of them happened a year ago. The thing that might have caused it, seemed to have caused it was actually just a trigger that was the last step of a causal cascade that took.

Somebody over the camel's back.

Yeah, yeah. So I think these concepts of delayed causation as opposed to immediate causation, multifactorial as opposed to single factor subacute issues, things that cause no symptomology immediately but are part of a compounding effect also unique patho etiology. Right. That two people's Ms. Or two people's rheumatoid arthritis are not the same.

Yeah. And as opposed to how you can have one cause, it creates many diseases like mercury or gluten and you can create. Have one disease that has many causes.

Yes. I think just maybe speak to that a tiny bit more. In terms of when people think cause and effect, there is a reductionist thing where they think billiard ball, one thing caused one effect immediately. And yet when you're talking about a complex organizational system where you know, a circuit board or a computer or a car, you can take a part out, put another part back in, upgraded, it didn't grow. It's not self organizing. It was built. And we apply that methodology from clocks to computers to something that grew and self organized where each. There's no such thing as a lung outside of a body or a liver outside of a body. Right. So when you try to separate gastroenterology and oncology and neurology, you get still a bunch of diseases that make no sense.

Yeah, it is. It's such a failure of imagination and thinking that we have these specialties in medicine and we divided up the body into these Organs and parts, which is still how we teach medical students. My daughter just finished medical school and it's just so antiquated. And you know, there's emerging from the scientific community, not, not necessarily the medical community, but I would say the scientific community, this emerging paradigm of multi causality and multimodal treatments. In other words, there's multifactorial causes, many causes for any condition, and there's multimodal treatment treatments that are needed, not just one thing. And the body is seen to be a network and a web where everything is inextricably tied to everything else. And you can't separate all these things out, but you can start to understand how they influence each other and are dynamically acting together to create dysfunction in the body and disease.

You know, you were mentioning what does it mean in another podcast, to eat not ultra hybridized. What's the term? Ultra processed food?

Ultra processed food, yeah.

One of the people who I got to study with when I was young that influenced me the most was Dr. Everett Loomis. Healing for Everyone. I don't know if you ever came across. He was one of the other early naturopaths, Dr. Christopher and those guys. Yeah, my family had actually had some quote unquote incurable illnesses that got help through alternative processes that kind of got us in that path. And we actually got to go live with that guy, Dr. Loomis, on his healing clinic. When I was a kid and I got to see people coming in. In wheelchairs and leaving non wheelchairs just having really radical kind of change. It was very old school. It was kind of Anna Wigmore like stuff and. But it was real interesting to hear. He was also a medical doctor, but like he was 85 by the time I met him. And he had boiled it down to a very simple thing. And he's like, number one principle of nutrition is eat as close to that living ecosystem as you can. Number two is pay subtle attention how the foods feel in your body. Everything else, whatever, like nightshades and ratios of macronutrients and whatever.

Yeah, I agree.

So he had these gardens, these kind of huge gardens and orchards. And he told people, go pick the food you feel called to and eat it right there. Don't even like just stand outside with your feet in the dirt and eat it and that. And that's it. That's your diet while you're here. It's an inpatient thing. And it was amazing how much people got better if the only food they could eat was standing by the tree or the plant that they Picked it off of while they ate it. And of course, he emphasized heirloom species and good soil and no pesticides or herbicides.

Well, you know, there's. There's a guy who kind of looks like you a little bit with the beard. His name's Fred Provenza. He's a. Someone I got to know recently who's a professor for years at Utah State University and studied rangeland ecology and the relationship between plants and the soil and animals and humans. And basically he wrote a book called Nourishment what Animals Can Teach Us about Rediscovering our Nutritional Wisdom. And he basically said that animals intuitively know what to eat, when to keep themselves healthy. So they forage on some major food crops, but then they'll forage if they're left their own devices, and there's enough variety of wild plants around on different plants that have different medicinal properties or different nutrients. And in the book, he talked about this study that was done, I think, in the 20s in an orphanage in Canada where they took kids who really hadn't been exposed to a lot of whatever junk food or American diet, and they gave them, like, weird stuff like brain and organs and all kinds of weird food that we wouldn't think would be things we want to eat and the kids would want to eat. And these kids actually were eating completely in harmony with what their bodies needed and seeking out those foods and nutrients and the food that they needed and were far healthier than kids were. Control group that were fed a regular diet.

Yeah.

And I was like, that's fascinating that humans have lost their ability to understand their sort of nutritional wisdom and. And to understand how things affect us.

I mean, I want to add one thing, and then we'll do good notes, leave on, you know what a racket is, right? Like a protection racket.

Yeah, Racketeer.

Let's say I've got a protection racket where I'm the mob, and you're doing business in my turf. So I have some guys go rough you up, and then you're scared of those guys, and there's not enough law enforcement here. Then I have some other guys say, hey, we can protect you, but you're gonna have to pay us a certain amount every week. Right. But they're from the same group.

Group.

That's. That's a racket. Right. Which is you're manufacturing the demand and then offering the supply. If you make a food system that creates addiction so that people need to keep getting more of it, but then it also makes them need medicine. That they wouldn't need otherwise, that is profitable, or the side effects of the medicine make them need other medicines. That's a systemic racket.

It is a racket for sure. It's like, it's like Bear, they, they, they bought Monsanto, which makes glyphosate, which causes lymphoma, and then they make the drug to treat the lymphoma. That's a racket.

So that's a direct racket. If it's the same company, if they're separate companies that are just all owned by the major private equity or whatever, it's a, it's a systemic racket. Think about, just from a logical perspective, I'm trying to solve a problem. First thing I want to ask is, did we always have that problem? No, no, It's a new problem. Oh, when we didn't have it, what was happening? Then? Let's reverse something. The first thing should be, if it's a new problem that was caused by something, reverse the call cause. How often in medicine do we do that? Anything that looks like a racket should be investigated. Anything that looks like, oh, there's a problem. Let's not look at what the root causes were. Let's not look at when we didn't have it. Let's, let's say that we got this problem forever now, and we can't possibly not have it when we didn't have it for most of human history. Then let's come up with a new thing that we can make money on that will then itself cause new problems that we will also cause a new solution for that will cause new problems. That is a systemic, exponentially escalating bracket.

Yeah.

This is not a good method of problem solving. This is solving problems in a way that doesn't solve the cause that symptomatically addresses it and makes worse problems in the process. Let's start actually trying to solve problems. What is the cause? How do we undo the cause?

And how do we get people incentivized to do that? Because right now everything's.

Everyone is actually incentivized if they pay attention to. We're talking about your own health.

Yeah, I mean, like the guy who's running Coca Cola or Bear is not necessarily thinking about these things.

I remember talking to someone who's the CEO of Pepsi once, and they said they were thinking about categorizing it as an entertainment company because they're like, we know this is not food. This is something people do for fun. It's like, jesus, what good does this thing do? Well, it causes diabetes and increases likelihood for Alzheimer's and everybody. But what real good does it do? Well, it cause addiction. The world would be better if that company didn't exist. Any company where the world would be better if it didn't exist. We should figure out how to have it not exist. Yeah, the number of companies that fit in that category are high.

Yeah, that's a problem.

Now, derealization. Derealization is this very serious thing that happens when you. Someone goes through a severe trauma where like, nothing feels real. I would say almost everybody I know is in some degree of. Feels like that derealization because. And here's how I can tell. If I tell somebody something about. It doesn't matter what it is. Whether it's about health care or whether it's about the increasing likelihood towards World War III or AI, whatever, it doesn't matter what it is. The environment, their tomorrow will be identical. They cannot be moved by real information about the real world they're in. They are derealized. The real world does not matter to them. And they're like, no new information could change my life. Yeah, well, you're being a doomer. Wait, no. The Mongols are coming. If the Mongols are coming. Do you want to know? Know? Oh, I can't do anything. Did you try?

Most people don't. They're just so.

So I want to just say, let's break the out of ubiquitous derealization and learned helplessness and say, problems that didn't used to exist, that we caused, we can solve. Your own health and your parents and your children are an incentive, but you just have to act like reality is real and reality matters and your life matters, as opposed to the nihilism of like, I can't do anything. I've already given up on my life mattering. It's hard.

And the problem is that so many people are not just derealized because of the trauma, the psychological trauma of our society, but also the way in which our diet and lifestyle environment affects our cognitive function and brain and mood. So it's sort of a double problem because you're sort of stuck.

If you look at the American Revolution and the condition of the people who were involved in the American Revolution. One, they were doing labor jobs. Using a pitchfork all day translates to a much hardier body that can do rebellion and whatever. But also, they weren't obese. They weren't on opiates and benzos, and they didn't doom scroll. I have found that I don't care how outraged someone is or how Horrified or how depressed. That emotion will not make it through 15 minutes of doom scrolling. They will actually forget they ever heard the thing. They'll forget all the emotion because in that 15 minutes I see something that makes me excited and something that makes me feel left out and something that makes me feel belonging and something that makes me horny and something makes me scared and something makes me outraged and then something that's kind of funny. And I just flushed my entire system of continuity. Now I can go back to my life exactly the way it was. A small number of people ensure that they don't do that so they can actually work on controlling things at scale. Yeah, and everybody else lets them.

Well how do we have more agency? That's it, that's what you're talking about is creating a society where there are people feel agency in that their actions, that their thoughts, that their voice matters.

So find all the things that damage your agency and get them out of your life. Take the social media apps off your phone. Even if you're going to still have it, have to do it on the computer. Don't have a, don't have it in your goddamn pocket all the time, just take them off your phone. If you're on psych meds, go to a Cleveland clinic, go to an integrative doc who can see if maybe there's a better solution for you. I'm not telling people get off their psych meds. I'm saying go talk to a doctor.

But there's ways to do it.

Talk to someone who knows other possibilities because you're not going to be self regulating or think well or whatever while you're intentionally altering your neurochemistry. Now I will say I know people high up in most of the major news companies. They are not news. Not on the right, not on the left.

It's not news.

No, it's not news.

Propaganda.

Yes it is. Information war. I can criticize the most erudite journals because, well, they'll lie with facts. But they cherry pick their facts, they lay cough frame them in a particular way. So you either call it an illegal alien or an undocumented migrant. It means the exact same thing, but you have a totally different emotional valence. You cherry pick your facts and you say this thing is getting better when it's actually getting worse, but you're treating the symptoms or whatever it is. Who puts narratives out there? Again, it takes a lot of money to fund research. Takes a lot of money to put a narrative out there. Typically capital streams associated with goals that support Those capital streams are the political institutions and agendas that support the capital streams. Put out narratives that support. They do. So you should understand whenever you're watching a piece of news or reading something, what you should be thinking about is this tells me what some people want other people to believe.

Yeah. Not what's actually true. Someone gave me a link to a website. I forget what it's called. Which basically had the same news item, but reported from the right and the left and then the middle. And it was totally different stories.

To just realize you cannot let someone spoon feed you your narrative on what is true. Cannot. No one has the right incentive here. So you have to work at it a little bit. But you can't have a meaningful life devoid from understanding what's real because you to make meaningful choices, they have to be in relationship to reality.

And I think what you said was really important is to take away the things from your life that interrupt your ability to have agency. And then whether it's the food you're eating, the news you're watching, the social media you're scrolling, the friends you hang out with, the things you care about, like, you know, we need to sort of have more agency, as you see.

In your clinic every day. It's all changeable. And it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take. And it's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes.

Thank you. That is. That's a good point to end on. We each can do it for ourselves and we have to do it systemically. And I think I'm working on both ends of the problem. So are you. So thank you. You are and you're doing.

I really hope that function can bring a lot of these concepts and tools to everybody because they have been very niche and they shouldn't be. And I love that you're making it not only medicine for the rich, but like medicine that everybody can afford. It's super important. And then I hope the policy work can really gain some success and gain success that can keep working across administrations because science has nothing to do with political parody.

And that's the plan. That's the plan. That's the plan. And for those who want to learn more about Daniel's work, look at the consilience project. It's consilienceproject.org we'll put links in the show notes. We'll put links to a lot of references we talked about today. This has been an incredible conversation. And I feel like we could talk for another 10 hours and still keep going. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Likewise. Thank you my friend.

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