Dr. Mark Hyman: The Truth About Why Americans Are Getting Sicker | TUH #115

The number one killer today is not smoking. It's not war, not infections, it's food. When you look at the Global Burden of Disease study, which looked at 195 countries, they said that 11 million people die from ultra processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods.

And I think a lot of people don't even realize we make GLP1 in our bodies and it responds to satiation. And if you eat nutrient dense foods, you actually release the GLP one that stops you from overeating.

Ultra processed food is what makes people hungry.

Our gut is the gateway to optimal health.

Now people get it. And when I started, people thought I was crazy.

You were early on talking about the importance of gut health and its myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis.

Basically our intestines the size of a tennis court laid out flat, but it's only one cell thick is the lining. So it's one cell between you and a sewer. That's a very important dynamic. And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick. And when you get to the root, you don't have to treat each thing separately.

You know, it's somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do realize the importance of my gut health. Where do I start?

Functional medicine is where we start. Start with nutrition and gut repair. And if you do that.

Ultimate Human. Today on the Ultimate Human, we have a true pioneer, a personal mentor of mine, and an absolute icon in the wellness and functional medicine space. With decades of experience, Dr. Hyman has really redefined how everyone approaches health. He's shown millions of people that food can be your medicine. He's a 15 time New York Times best selling author and a champion for health as preventative practice. We'll dive into his groundbreaking work on reversing biological age, the true impact of our dietary choices and practical steps that you can take to live a longer, healthier, happier life. Let's welcome Dr. Hyman to the podcast. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecke. Where we go down the road of everything anti aging, biohacking, longevity and everything in between. And as you just heard, today's guest is an extraordinarily special guest because he's very special to me. He doesn't know this, but he doesn't know this, but he is actually a mentor of mine. 15 time New York Times best selling author. I think he's just an icon in the functional medicine space. And when I was looking for people early in my career, which is only 10 years ago, that agreed philosophically with what I was preaching so I could latch my wagon to somebody that was saying the same thing I was, that had some credentials. It was definitely Dr. Mark Hyman. So I'm very, very excited to have you on the podcast because you have liberated me from a lot of the chicanery and charlotte tree that people accused me of.

Yeah.

Is that. Is that a word or did I just make.

I think it's a word.

Charlotte tree. Okay. Yeah, let's put that in there. Good. Google it. Because, you know, I just believe so much in foundationally what you preach, which is, you know, essentially that, you know, we can take charge of our. Our cellular biology and we can cure reverse chronic disease and we can even extend our life. And that is a very exciting concept to me. And we just did a podcast where we talked about a lot of the simplicity and the complexity and, you know, about getting. Getting back to the basics. So I'm really, really excited for today's podcast. I. I want to actually start with something, you know, out there a little bit because we. I just did this gut reset challenge, and every. Every month, I. On the ultimate human, I run these free challenges, like three day water fast cold plunge challenge, 10, 000 step challenge. We've done lots of these sleep challenges. And the idea is to just introduce some of these concepts to people where they can use fasting or sunlight or grounding or breath work or cleaning up their food, their water to really, you know, heal. Heal their bodies. And we just did a gut challenge. And when I was doing some research for the podcast, I stumbled on a podcast you did with Andrew Huberman. I think it was Huberman.

Yeah.

And. And you were talking about a gut bacteria that was present in high volumes in patients that were really responsive to immunotherapy.

Yeah.

And its absence.

Yeah.

Reduced the responsiveness of immunotherapy. And since I. Yeah, clementia, that's. I. I couldn't.

It's one of those keystone bacteria, like the keystone species, like the wolves in Yellowstone. It's like one of those important species of bacteria if you don't have. The cascading effects are quite significant. You increase leaky gut, you increase inflammation in the body, autoimmunity, metabolic diseases, diabetes. It's. It's critical for gut health and maintenance. And we basically killed it off with all the antibodies we've taken.

Yeah. So, you know, I think that people generally accept the notion that, you know, our gut is the gateway to optimal health. You Know, our immune system sits right outside of our gut.

You know, it's now, now people get it. And when I started this, people thought I was crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

Talk about God and leaky guy.

It was you and Dr. Pearlman were the only ones like, talking about this story. I read his Gut Brain Connection and Grain Brain and some, some of these other books that he, that he wrote. And, and that, that, in fact, that's how, what led me to you. And you were early on talking about the importance of gut health and gut function. And it's myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis. And that's what I really want to touch on. I mean, yeah, we, we only have what, a single cell layer separating us.

From our, like a. Basically our intestines the size of a tennis court, laid out flat in terms of surface area, but it's only one cell thick. It's lining. It's one cell between you and a sewer. Yeah. You know, you got a great way.

To think of it.

And it's like, that's a very important dynamic because essentially your, your gastrointestinal system is outside your body. It's a tube that goes from your mouth to your butt, but it's sort of got all this foreign stuff in it. Nowhere in your body is there all this foreign stuff. And your body has to sort through, like, what's friend or foe? What can I let in, what I have to keep out? Right. And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick. When the whole ecosystem of bugs, of which there's, you know, at least as many as our body's own cells, probably more, 40, 50 trillion trillions. You know, there's 100 times the DNA in the bacterial DNA in our body has our own DNA. We're outnumbered 100 to 1.

Wow.

And they're producing all these metabolites. Half of, probably a third to half of our blood metabolites are from the microbiome. They all affect all of our body functions. And if you have good bacteria, you're creating healthy metabolites, and if you're creating bad bacteria, you're getting bad metabolites. And that's what's leading to this cascade of disease. In fact, in terms of longevity, it's now understood as one of the hallmarks of aging, a dysfunctional microbiome.

Wow. Um, and so if, if, if they're new to this subject, somebody's new to this subject. I mean, where, where do they start? I know that, you know, in functional health, you guys do a whole myriad of testing I'm actually very impressed with function health. Yeah, our function health of the caliber and the breadth of testing that you do, quite honestly, for the price and, you know, $15,000 worth of testing for 499. $499 almost sounds too good to be true, but it's not. We talked about it on a previous. So, you know, it's somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do. I realize the importance of my gut health. Where. Where do I start?

Well, first is to understand what is going on there. Why is it important? Let's just sort of do a little primer on the gut.

Right.

So you've got this whole ecosystem in you. You're basically just a host for the bacteria. They outnumber you in terms of their. What they do. And. And there's probably a thousand species of bacteria in there, so maybe more. We're just figuring it out. The. They have all kinds of jobs, from helping you digest your food, to helping produce vitamins, to preventing leaky gut, to modulating inflammation, to affecting your brain chemistry and mood, to regulating your appetite, to regulating your weight, to regulating your risk of autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, Parkinson's. I mean, you name it, it's connected to everything. Autism, add, depression. So you name a disease or a condition in our modern society, at some level, it's connected to the gut. Even our mitochondrial health is connected to our gut.

Wow.

And so what's happened is that we've. We've gone from an era where we were all hunter gatherers, we're all eating wild food. We're all eating. I mean, I visited the Haza tribe in Africa last year, and they're the one of the few. Did you really other tribes? Yeah, we lived with them for a few days, and we went hunting with them.

Did you really?

Yeah, it was super fun.

When you say we, who went on.

This trip, it was a whole crew of. Of sort of friends and entrepreneurs and creative people who are just part of this trip called wow. It's now, which is pretty fun. But the idea is that we camp with them, and they have huge amounts of fiber, so they eat about 150 grams of fiber a day. They went under this tree, and they knew this yam was there, this wild yam that's. And they dug it out and it's like, you know, you'd think it would, like, very tough to eat, but they cook it, they mash it down, and they eat all these foods that are extremely high in fiber. So they don't eat processed sugar, they don't have artificial foods, they don't have emulsifiers and additives, food dyes, they don't have antibiotics. You know, so we've, we've kind of changed our diet so radically in the last a hundred years, even a hundred years ago wasn't so bad. We were eating, you know, a lot more foods just close to the earth. And, and so what's happened is we've taken, you know, our diet and turned into an ultra processed diet which contains compounds that cause a leaky gut, that feed the bad bacteria, that cause inflammatory bacteria to grow. Two, we've, we've, you know, C section rates have gone through the roof. Probably third of all birth are C sections. The baby doesn't get inoculated with bacteria as it's going through the birth canal. The mother's probably taking antibiotics, so she's knocked out a lot of her healthy bacteria which then the baby doesn't get it, even if it's vaginally born. Then we, we bottle feed. And what's really fascinating is when you look at, and, and look, some women need to formula feed their babies. So the formula needs to be improved if somebody's got to figure that out.

Oh my gosh.

Because it's, you know, it's, it's, they require seed oils. Yeah, it's seed oil. It's required, it's, you know, and you know, what's really important is that 25% of breast milk, the calories in breast milk are not digestible by humans. These oligosaccharides that are complex sugars that can't be broken down, that are the fuel for bacteria, formula doesn't have any of that. And so when you, when you look at the bacterial strains and the short chain fatty acids which are the fuel that the bacteria produce that are keeping your gut healthy, that are using to run everything in your gut. The, the, there's higher levels of propionic acid which has been linked to autism and there's lower levels of butyrate, which is the really critical fuel for your gut lining and also for regulating so many biological processes. It's absorbed in the body, it's used as an anti cancer compound in the body. So you, you formula feed, you don't get these, the good bacteria, you get all these bad bacteria producing all these bad short chain petty acids, same by time. And then you know, you, then you add in all the processed food and these kids are having these guts that are causing high levels of food allergy. We Never had the food allergy rates. We have true food allergy, not just food sensitivities. We're seeing rates of, you know, allergy and asthma and eczema and. And then all these behavioral issues and ADD and autism rates have gone up a thousand percent. You know, the use of ADD drugs has gone up like, 400. I mean, it's just. It's insane what's happening. And then we see kids with depression. Why is that happening? Because their microbiome is messed up.

Mm.

And. And the microbiome needs to be taken care of. Just like if you had a garden, you have to take care of your garden. You have to take care of the soil.

Yeah.

And if you don't take care of your microbiome, you're gonna end up with so many different chronic illnesses. And we see this story, you know, as functional medicine practitioners, we see this all the time. We just. When you take a history and you watch the timeline, okay, you have an autoimmune disease when you're 40. Well, what was your story? Well, I was. You know, my mother, you know, had a C section. I was bottle fed. I took lots of antibiotics because I had colic when I was a kid, you know, and then I started getting this and that. Allergies and asthma and irritable bowel. And eventually it all ends up in something bad, you know.

Right.

And so tending our inner garden is a huge. Is a huge factor. And in functional medicine is where we start. Start with nutrition and gut repair. And if you do that, like, 80% of things will get together.

Yeah.

It's quite remarkable.

Yeah. What's amazing is I. I think unbeknownst to you, we. We've actually shared some clients who have, you know, since disclosed to me that. That they were also working with you, and. And some of them had serious gut dysbiosis. And when I was working with them and my clinical team was working with them, we had real difficulty with absorption of nutrients, getting levels corrected in the blood, and then they did a stint with you. And once the gut microbiome was. Was corrected, you see these dramatic shifts in how they respond to the more. Let's call it traditional therapies that. That where you know, that we were applying still not traditional therapies in terms of allopathic medicine. We don't use chemicals, synthetics, pharmaceuticals. But even the. Even the basics approach that we were taking, that a lot of people respond to, these clients were having real difficulty, and it just sort of further heightened my awareness to the work that you're doing.

Yeah, it's so important.

So important. So when you, when you're starting with the gut, I mean, do you say, um, test treat?

Yeah.

And so how, how, how, how does somebody walk, walk through this process? Because if you got trillions of bacteria in the gut. Hey guys, Gary Brea here and I want to talk to you about something I consider a true game changer in my health regimen. Kettle and Fire bone broth. When it comes to bone broth, Kettle and Fire is simply the cleanest on the market. They use only grass fed and grass finished beef bones, ensuring you get 19 grams of high quality protein per serving. It's the ultimate fuel, especially for those of you diving into extended fasting protocols. In fact, this is the only bone broth I trust and I use for all of my fasting challenges. And now you can experience it for yourself. Just head over to kettleandfire.com and use the code Ultimate Human to save 20% off your entire order. Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

Well, there's some simple things. You know, if you have real issues, you probably need to get some testing, right?

Yeah.

But empirically you can actually get a lot of done without actually a lot of test testing. So they used to call me doctor See Every poop because I used to get everybody, everybody exploding.

Too much fat, right? Yeah.

Like, and, and I. No, but I would literally do stool tests on everybody. You came to see me, it was like getting your blood pressure right. Give me your poop and let me know what's going on in there. And then in that, you know, we looked at your pancreatic enzyme function. We looked at absorption of fats. We looked at inflammatory markers, things like calprotectin eosinophyl protein X, which are markers of inflammation. We look at your antibody levels because your gut is the lining line with antibodies that are your first line of defense.

Right there.

Yeah. You got 60% of your immune system right into the gut and that's because it's where you're dealing with less foreign material. We also look at short chain fatty acids to get a sense. We look at the bacteria, including Akkermansia, which we can see based on PCR testing. We look at stool cultures, look at levels of healthy bacteria, yeast, overgrowth, parasites. We look at Zion levels. We look at a whole series of things. Not just looking at the bacteria itself, but like, what is the ecosystem like? Because you can check the bacteria and you can kind of. Kind of sort of guess. But you want to look at not just the bacteria, you want to look at all the functions that the bacteria are doing and see if they're working. Right, Right. And so we do that. We also have. People have bloating. It's really common to have. We call bacterial overgrowth, where because of motility issues, because of our crappy diet, because of various drugs we take, like acid blockers, we get overgrowth of bad bugs in our small intestine. Basically, most of the bacteria in your large intestine or the bottom of your small intestine, they're not in the upper part. Right. So when you. When you food goes to your stomach and down your small intestine, it just gets digested. But if there's bacteria that have sort of migrated up there, they ferment the foods and you get what we call a food baby.

Yeah.

People know that is when you're just like bloating, distension, and sure, you feel full after a meal. That's because you have bacteria or yeast. We call it sibo, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or sifo, small intestinal, which they.

Usually hit with high amounts of antibiotics.

Yeah. So, you know, you can use antibiotics, you can eat herbs, you can do any fungals, depending on the person, but you can test for that with breath testing. You can look at also not just breath testing, but you can look at urine actually to see metabolites of yeast and other things, for example, in the urine or bacteria in the urine because your body's absorbing it and then you're trying to get rid of these metabolites and you can see non human metabolites in the blood and you can also see them in the urine. So we use a whole variety of tests to see what's going on in that ecosystem, and including looking things like low ekermansia, which is really important. And we then create a regimen to help people rebuild their gut and in functional medicine called the 5R program. And it's a methodology for helping reset the gut. It's remove the bad stuff. Like what is the bad stuff? Well, obviously all the crappy food, reading ultra processed food, it could be removing the bad bugs that are in there, like bacterial overgrowth or fungal over.

How do you just remove those bugs too?

Well, you can. You can use herbs. So there's a lot of herbal formulas that do it. Sometimes you need medication like rifaximin or fluconazole, which are antifungal antifungals, antibiotics that are, you know, used to actually treat sibo. There may be cocktails for certain sibo. For example, if you have methane sibo, we can measure the gases. You know, we can see which gases are being produced. You have methane or hydrogen or sulfide and they all require different treatments. So you can have bloating but you don't know which what's causing it. Sometimes there's diarrhea that's more prominent with irritable bowel, that may be more hydrogen related. Sibo where you can have constipation related irritable bowel or you're mostly constipated like that. You know, then you, you need maybe treatment for methane producing bacteria that you can find that are causing constipation or fungus which cause constipation. So it's really looking at all the different kind of biology down there and, and using whatever tools needed to kind of reset the gut. So you kind of have to reset it. It's kind of like almost like wipe the say clean.

So you get a profile of everything that's in there. These guys are bad. We need to get rid of them. These guys are non existent. We need to populate them.

Yeah, exactly.

And then these guys levels are low. We need to enhance those.

So that's kind of removed is removing the bad foods. Emulsifiers, food additives, Emulsifiers are really common and things that make food creamy. All processed food has them in them. They're highly damaging to the gut lining. They cause a leaky gut. And leaky gut basically is the idea that you have these cells, this one cell lining, and it's stuck together like Legos. And it's an energy dependent process. It requires energy from the mitochondria. And what happens is when you have various insults, whether it's change in the bacteria, whether it's, you know, gluten, which is the biggest cause of leaky gut, whether it's emulsifiers, you get these cells separating and the food leaks between them. And also bacterial toxins and products leak between the cells instead of going through the cells. Like, like a filter. Right. It's like, right, think about like you know, a coffee filter. You know, you put the coffee in, you don't get any grounds in your, in your coffee because you have the filter. But right, you know the same thing when the, when the food goes through our cells, you don't get into trouble and the immune system has nothing to react to because everything's broken down into its fundamental amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, and then you just, just de identified. So when you eat a piece of Chicken. You don't become a chicken.

Yeah.

Body breaks it down. Right?

Yeah.

And so the, the, the, then you have these incredible damage to your, your gut from all these various insults. And even toxins, heavy metals also can cause leaky gut. That's what happened to me. And then, then your immune system starts reacting and that creates inflammation and you get this chronic sterile inflammation where your body's reacting to the toxins and, and, and antigens and bacteria there and you're creating the systemic immune response. And that's how it's linked to all these diseases. Right. Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is. Diabetes is, obesity is. Dementia is. Autism is. Add, is. Depression is. Autoimmune diseases are. Allergies are.

These are all cognitive decline.

They're all inflammatory diseases. And the source of most of the inflammation in our bodies is coming from, aside from our diet. It's coming from dysfunction in our gut. And so healing your gut, taking care of your gut, tending your inner garden is so important. That's the first step, is remove.

Okay.

And then, you know, if we find a parasite, we might have to give you an anti parasite drug. Right. And then I had a kid with giardia, for example, and he had bad autism. And we treated the yardia. His autism dramatically improved. Wow. That's not to say every kid with autism has giardia, because there's no such thing as autism. They're autisms. Like we, we could put these people in buckets of labels which have nothing to do with the cause.

So it just has to do with the amount of neural inflammation. Right. I mean.

Right. And so, so it misses the problem with medicine. We have a, we have a label like depression or autism or breast cancer or whatever it is. And it's the same pathology, but the causes are different. Right. Train functional medicine, you say, you know, one disease can have many causes and one cause can create many diseases. Like gluten can create a whole hundreds of diseases. Right, Right. So first you kind of gotta do the remove step and, and then you gotta do the replace step, which is replacing digestive enzymes, prebiotics, and I'd also probably say polyphenols, which are important. And I think this is fairly new discovery of how important the, the colors.

These are mainly plant polyphenols.

Yeah. The colorful compounds in plants fertilize the bugs. They're also kind of a prebiotic. So for example, Akkermansia, if you feed people green tea and pomegranate and cranberry, it loves that stuff and it grows the akkermansia wow. So you can see even, you know, this is my friend William Lee. His mother had stage four uterine cancer, was failing immunotherapy and every other kind of treatment. And he did, he knew about this literature about Akkermansia, and he tested her and she was very low. He gave her all these foods that had high polyphenol content to increase the Akkermansia levels. And then she responded and was cured of cancer. Wow.

So that's how powerful I've heard you talk about that. And this was. And what is it about the Akkermansia that is. Is it is what's calming the immune system?

Well, it's. It's called Akkermansia mucinophilia. Mucin loving. Mucus loving. What is on the lining of your intestine is this thick mucus layer. It's kind of like a filter, like a mucoid layer. Yeah. That protects your lining from getting damaged. When you have low levels of mucin, then your gut is more susceptibly be leaky. So, so then we, we do the second stage and the third step is to reinoculate. That's probiotics. And there's a million of them. They're. They're all have different properties. They all have different effects on the body. They're used in different ways for different things. So there's a whole science of nuts. Like, it's not just there's a probiotic, there's many species, and they all have different impacts. You can take Akkermansia now you can take Bifidobacter, you can get Lactobacillus, but there's different strains like Plantarum or, or Rhamnosis or other ones that have different modulating effects. So you kind of have to understand how to use them.

So you have a whole universe of probiotics that you can select from.

Yeah.

Depending on your deficiency.

Yeah. So someone has, for example, fungal overgrowth. I'll give them something called saccharomyces, which is actually a yeast that fights other yeast. And so there's, there's, for example, Bifidobacterium infantis, which is used for babies to help inoculate the gut and colonize the gut, which prevents all these autoimmune analogy diseases, which I think every, every woman who's having a baby should use this product. I have no association with or affiliation with it.

And what is it? An infant provider?

It's basically Bifidobacterium infantis. The company that makes this, called the Vivo E V I v o I have seen them and they spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in research. It's very impressive data. And it's, and I think, you know, I recommend that every, every woman, if she's breastfeeding, she puts on her breast. If are obviously bottle feeding and putting the formula but really important. And, and so you've got to kind of reinoculate with the right bacteria and then you've got to repair the lining of the gut. You know the gut requires glutamine and zinc and vitamin A and omega 3 fatty acids and, and phytochemicals and things to help repair the gut. And last is restore, which is to kind of reset the kind of gut brain connection. Because a lot of us stress will affect the gut. Right. And you can literally create a leak.

The veal nerve is just enveloping that.

Yeah. Your whole, your whole nose. Yeah. Your gut, your gut brain is, is, has more neurotransmitters than your brain. Brain.

Yeah.

And so.

Yeah, the majority of them are in here.

Yeah.

Serotonin. It's hard to have sex.

Like when people take, you know, psilocybin, which increases serotonin, they often get gut symptoms. Right. Because it's often related to the kind of serotonin in the gut. And, and the, and the beautiful thing is, you know, by using, you know, whether it's breath work or meditation or any kind of practice that resets the nervous system will reset the gut. But it's a very systematic process. It's gotta be personalized though. It's not like one size fits all. Although there is a way to just sort of do a basic gut reset. Like I'm sure what you did, yeah, it works for most people. But if it doesn't work, then you gotta go back. Oh, maybe. I have sibo and the results are amazing. I'll just say a quick story of a patient I had. She was 50 year old, business coach, she was depressed, she was overweight, she was pre diabetic. She had severe psoriatic arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease. She had severe reflux, she had severe double bowel syndrome, bloating. She was seeing the gastroenterologist, the rheumatologist, the psychiatrist, the endocrinologist. She was on metformin. She was on drugs for $50,000 a year for autoimmune disease. She was on acid blockers for reflux, iRobot drugs. I mean she was on antidepressants. She was on the pile of meds. Right. And I said, gee, what are all these things having in common? You know, what is her depression and psoriasis and her overweight issue or insulin resistance and gut issues have in common? Well, they're all inflammatory diseases. Right. So where is it likely coming from? Well, she had all these gut issues. I said let's start there. Put her on elimination diets. We get rid of the most common foods that cause a problem. And, and what does an elimination diet look? So elimination diet is basically eliminating foods that are more likely to cause problem. It can be based on testing or just empirically. And then you add foods back slowly to see what's happening. And the most common foods that are problem for people are gluten and dairy.

Gluten, dairy.

And then there's a whole sort of cascade after that, whether it's grains or beans or sometimes people react to eggs. And there, you know, there's extreme versions. For example, autoimmune paleo would be like an extreme elimination diet where you get rid of, you know, grains, beans, dairy, obviously, sugar, processed food, obviously.

Right.

But you also get rid of nuts and seeds, also get rid of nightshades. I, I, my 10 day detox side is essentially an elimination diet. You know, you add in nuts and seeds, there's, there's also, you know, eggs you can have and so forth. And nightshades is a little more liberal, but, you know, the results are pretty profound. People are really, really sick. I might put them on an autoimmune paleo diet. But for most people, a 10 day detox, which is a reset, it's where you get like, we see 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. Wow. And, and we, we actually have an online program called the 10 Day Detox where people are seeing a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days. And I've done this program with thousands of people that is incredible in retreats around the world. It's quite amazing whether you have a.

Headache food based, it's just food entirely.

Just get rid of the, and you add in the good stuff. It's not that hard.

Yeah.

You know, you and I get paid a lot of money for just telling people to do simple stuff that's so obvious. But it's basically just, you know, eating whole real food, nutrient dense food, a lot of phytochemicals, a lot of fiber, low glycemic, lots of good fats.

And, and so they're not starving on this. No, you're eating a ton of food.

You're eating a ton of food, raw food, vegan overnight. Protein, vegetables, nut seeds. No, we get rid of them for and, and you can add things back to see maybe dairy doesn't bother. So I figured, I know that dairy bothers me, but if I have goat or sheep, I'm fine. Ah, right. So I can tell. And when you reintroduce it, you have to get a worse reaction than you had when you were eating it all the time because your body actually has these stored antibodies that it just goes out and attacks it.

Right.

So basically we do elimination diet. And on her, we, we basically treated her SIBO and sifo. So she'd taken lots of steroids, lots of antibiotics in the past. So I knew she had bacterial, so I gave her a drug called rifaximin, which is a non absorbed antibiotic. I gave her diflucan or fluconazole, which basically kills all the fungus. And then I reinoculated her, go with healthy bacteria. I gave her some prebiotics, just gave her vitamin D, some fish oil, very simple, some probiotics. Comes back six weeks later and I'm like, I never tell people to stop their medication. I said, let's just, you know, try this and see how you do. Came back six weeks later, I stopped everything. I have no more psoriatic arthritis. Skin's clear. I have no more heartburn, no more, you know, reflux, no more irritable bowel, no more depression. I lost 20 pounds. I don't have pre diabetes. And I got off all my medication.

Yeah.

And all we did, amazing.

Six weeks.

Six weeks. All we did was reset her gut. Wow. My joke is I'm a holistic doctor because they take care of people with a whole list of problems.

Yeah.

You know, and, and when you get to the root, you don't have to treat each thing separately. Right.

And I think unfortunately, modern medicine has so many silos, I forget how many specialties and sub specialties are now, but it's mind numbing.

And basically a doctor for every interview these days.

Yeah. And, and, and you know, we used to see this in, in the, in the mortality science space. You know, patients go into the primary care doctor and they get referred to cardiology or refers them to psychology or refers them to gastroenterology, who, you know, refers them to autoimmune, then got a hematologist and then nephrologist and the next thing you know it's so, and everything's so segmented and even in this, in this client that we talked about earlier that had this, this stage four colon cancer that, that, that Was, you know, cured in five months on the immunotherapy. She had, I think she was seeing 13 different specialists at any given time.

Yeah.

And, you know, for most people, they didn't really realize there were 13 subspecialties in medicine. And interestingly, you know, the cardiologist would have her on non potassium sparing diuretic. And then the kidney, the nephrologist also had her on a diuretic that was potassium sparing diuretic. They didn't know that they both had.

Her on the diuretic.

And there was all this duplicity and, and compounding effect because there wasn't systemically holistic approach. Like I, I, I liken it to the hub of the wheel.

Yeah.

Right. I mean, you got all these spokes, and if you start chasing the spokes.

Yeah.

You'll just spend the rest of your life just, you know, running around that wheel. But if you find the hub, which very often is the God.

Yeah.

Then, you know, you found the panacea. One of my favorite things about these bars is that I formulated it in conjunction with Body health because they formulated the perfect blend of amino acids. That's why they're called perfect aminos. So to get 30 grams of protein, if you look at one of these bars and it says 30 grams of protein on the back, the chances of you getting even 10 grams of protein are very, very slim. About two thirds of the caloric intake that you're putting in as protein is actually turning to sugar or turning to fat. With these bars, 99% of it is absorbable. It has a blend of the exact, necessary essential amino acids that you need to fuel your body. Yes, we use amino acids to make, to build muscle, but we also use them to build collagen, elastin, fibrin in the skin. We use it to make cellular structures in the body, things like natural killer cells. So we want to be eating whole food ingredients that taste great, that actually fuel our body at a cellular level. There is no other protein bar like this on the planet. This was years in the making. Just trying to find a manufacturer that would take whole real foods and press them, put a little CO2 into the container so it doesn't spoil, and then seal it and package them for the shelves was a difficult task. You know, most of the manufacturers we talked to wanted to add seed oils, they wanted to add preservatives, they wanted to add food dyes, all the cheap ingredients that make these saleable and palpable. But don't feed our cellular biology. I Can't wait for you guys to try these. You're going to love them as much as I do, so click the link below and be one of the first ones to get this delicious new way to fuel your body. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

And the key to this is what we're doing is restoring a healthy gut ecosystem. Right. And you, you and I both do this. The work we do is basically helping people create health. We don't treat disease directly. When you, when you remove the conditions that cause disease and you add in the things that help, you know, prevent or reverse disease. The body is very smart. It knows what to do. So true. You don't need to like, even though we may not understand everything that's happening when we do these things, because it's impossible to know, there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second of the body.

Yeah.

You and I, no matter how much we studied, could never learn.

Exactly.

You know, the, the reality, just doing some simple practices can make profound impact. And so really, you know, functional medicine, I think is, is one of its greatest contributions to humanity is the understanding of the microbiome, is understanding how to reset it and, and treat many chronic illnesses through improving the health of the microbiome.

Yeah.

And you know, we've been doing this for decades and we. Before it was even called the microbiome.

Yeah.

You know, and it, and I think it's, it's, it's really the center of the practice we do.

You know, and I, I think what's really interesting is that, you know, if you look at the Blue zone research, there's really not continuity in any of the diets. Right. The centenarians, you know, there's high carbohydrate consumption in Sardinia, for example. There's high meat consumption in, in Singapore. There's, there's high, you know, there's fatty fish and oils in the Mediterranean diet. Yeah, but the commonality is that they are all whole foods.

Yeah.

No, none of them were eating a process high, highly processed diet. I mean, maybe they were making bread, but they eating bread or pasta. But they were eating bread and pasta.

But I went to Ikaria bread, but it was from Zaya wheat, which is ancient wheat that Alexander the Great used to consume and is to fuel his, you know, campaign to conquer the world. Yeah, but, but it, but it was very long gluten, super nutrient dense, lots of phytochemicals, lots of fiber, you know, and, and you know, maybe isn't, wasn't a problem for them.

Yeah, you know what's funny? I, I, well, maybe it's not so funny, but I was actually watching one of those history channels the other night and, and it talked about in the 1800s how they did. They had this thing called fencing and it was, they would feed prisoners that they were transporting certain diets. And like you ever heard that, you know, when you go to jail, it doesn't happen anymore, but they just feed you bread and water. It was a bread and water diet. There's actually some history to that and that they, because they would transport these convicts on horseback over long distances. What they didn't want them to do was on foot was to, to run and get away from them. So they fed them bread and water to weakened them and it weakened them. It actually just gummed up there. They, they didn't know why. I mean, they didn't know the bifidobacteria cycle, you know, the single cell layer of the gut. But they, but, but these Mounties knew enough to know.

Yeah.

That if I only fed them bread and water, they wouldn't die. But they couldn't go more than a couple hundred yards.

Yeah.

And, and that was it. So they didn't ever have to hunt them down. And so I, I just, it just struck me when I was watching this thing that they would, you know, they put them on, on horseback. And now those guys are eating beef jerky and you know, shooting animals and cooking them on a fire and things like that. But then the, the prisoners, they just gave bread and water too. And yeah, after a few days of just on a bread and water diet, they were just so sick. They weren't dead, but they certainly were not in any kind of condition. And you think about what we're doing in modern societies. We're essentially most of our diet, ourselves.

Yeah.

You know, we're, we're, we're.

And it's even worse because the foods we're eating are, are so one, depleted of nutrients and two, they're full of compounds that actually actively damage the gut. Right. So.

And I think this is sort of the, you know, we're switching topics here. I mean, you and I are both big believers that if we're going to fix chronic disease in this country, that we have to fix the food supp.

Supply. And yeah.

You know, our soil has become so nutrient deficient, people say, no, you can get all, everything that you need from, from foods. And I go, well, theoretically, I guess that's true. Right. But the truth is, in modern society today, it's really, really Hard. I mean, if you had a farm and you're growing your own, you know, chickens and your own eggs and you had your own hydroponic facility and you had grass fed cows, you probably could get there.

Yeah.

But I think the chance is even of people that are as conscious as you and I are with our travel schedules and everything else, you know, there has to be certain supplementation. And you know, I, I was actually looking at a research article on soil depletion. You know, the difference between the soil and the forest and the soil. And, and this was 2016. I haven't seen another one in the last, you know, eight or so years, but I'm sure it's gotten worse.

Yeah.

But so to talk a little bit about the food supply and depletion in the food supply and you know, it's linked to this pandemic of chronic disease because we are the sickest, fattest, most disease or nation in the world and we spend the highest amount on healthcare.

That's right.

Which, which is the ultimate dichotomy because we, we know that spending doesn't equate to outcomes.

No.

Or else the four and a half trillion we spent, we would be the leanest, healthiest, most highly functioning humans on the planet. For four and a half trillion dollars we should be.

Yeah. And we're spending more and more and getting less and less. Absolutely true. We're like, I think more than twice per capita any other Nation. And we're 40th in life expectancy. We're 30th.

Drop the 60th now 20.

Yeah. Who knows? It keeps going up and down.

Yeah. I'm a mortality scientist.

We're like, I think south of Angola or something in terms of, and I think, you know, we also are 30th among all developed nations, last among all developed nations in all the major healthcare metrics like infant mortality. So we're doing something wrong. And in terms of, you know, the food supply. Yes. It's depleted of nutrients. The soil has been damaged by our industrial farming practices. And my joke is nobody really needs to take any vitamins. But only under certain conditions. You have to hunt and gather your own wild food. You have to be exposed to no environmental toxins. You have to drink only pure clean water, breathe pure clean air, sleep nine hours a day, wake with the sun, go to bed with the sun and.

Have your own garden.

Have no chronic stress. No. Then you probably don't need vitamins. Like, because it's true. We for, you know, hundreds of thousands.

Of years maybe, if you're Amish, right?

Yeah. Hundreds of thousands of years, humans never took vitamins, never needed vitamins. But if you look at Cordain's work around Paleolithic diets, you know, the nutrient density was so much higher. They had 150 grams of fiber. We have maybe 8 to 15 per day. You know, their, their vitamin levels and mineral levels and consumption, the mega 3 fatty acid levels, so much higher. All the foods are.

And the ratios were different too. That's omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids.

Yeah. The salt and the potassium. Now we have like 12 times as much or 10 times much salt as potassium. So salt is good, but it's not, you know, it's like you need the potassium which comes from plants and foods. So I, I think we're in this really crisis moment. And, and you know, we were. Six out of ten Americans have a chronic illness. Four out of ten have two. When you define chronic illness a little more broadly, you know, not just one out of two have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, but 93% of us probably have some form of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When you, because the cause, that's based.

On genesis of metabolic dysfunction.

Right. I mean, we, we talk about the criteria prediabetes, it's like, yeah, if you're triglycerides over 50, 1, 50, if your HDL is under 40, if your waist is over 40, if you're a man or whatever. For women, your blood pressure is 140 or 90. So the, the numbers that are used to define pre diabetes are, I think are a low bar.

Yeah, yeah.

Your blood Sugar is over 100. These are low bars.

By the time you get there, you're already 5.7.

Yeah. You're already in trouble. So when you look at metabolic dysfunction through to a broader definition, only 6.8% of Americans are, are healthy. That means metabolically healthy.

Yeah, yeah.

And that means they don't have some degree of pre diabetes or insulin resistance. And now with function health, we're seeing just extraordinary dysfunction. That's what we call function health to help people functional. And we have, you know, it's basically a lab lab, a platform health platform where we allow people access drone data through lab testing. And, and we're testing over 110 biomarkers on first Flush. And we see all the metabolic things. Insulin, which never gets measured. The first thing you go up your blood sugar is the last thing you go up your A1C. We can see that's going. Your blood sugar.

So you can See the insulin resistance before the heme1c starts to react.

And we can see also look at cholesterol differently. We look at the particle number, particle size, things that are not looked at. Less than 1% of all cholesterol tests actually measure what should be the gold standard of cholesterol testing, which is looking at particle number and particle size quality, not just the weight of the cholesterol. Right. Because you can have a cholesterol 150 and it can be terrible. You could have, you know, 2,000 particles and small particles or you could have cholesterol 300 and it'd be completely fine because you're all large fluffy particles and your triglycerides and HDL are fine. There's no heart disease. Right. So you. We're doing diagnostic tests that are so antiquated at your regular checkup where you maybe 19 biomarkers.

Yeah. Even, even the lipid panel now is, is just that I see the majority of all testing is, is very basic.

Yeah.

It's triglyceride, hdl, ldl.

Yeah, no it's not. Yeah, it's not what we should be doing. And, and we're, we're also not looking at the, the, the other biomarkers that are important for metabolic health like uric acid and, and inflammation. Crp, apob, which is super important. The most predictive biomarker. Yeah, like the most predictive marker for Bard sees. Doctors don't check it. So we measure all that and we're seeing like 96% of the people who we test, and this is a health forward population, have some degree of metabolic dysfunction based on these biomarkers. Holy cow. You know, so we're, we're in deep doo doo. And it's why we have this crisis of chronic disease caused primarily by insulin resistance, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all on the rise. Diabetes got up 400%. Heart disease 50%. Cancer 30%. But over 60%. Those under 50, primarily caused by our diet and dismissing our microbiome and colon cancer. We're seeing 150% increase in Alzheimer's, we're seeing increases in cancer increase in cancer rates. We're seeing over 100% increase in, in depression and mental illness. A thousand percent increase in autism, 100% increase in autoimmune disease. And at the same time we're seeing 2 to 3 to 400% increases in all the drugs that treat all those diseases.

Yeah.

So we're spending more and more, we're doing more and more. We're getting sicker and sicker what's wrong with this picture? Yeah, it's like, it's really the root cause is our food system. So as a doctor treating people for decades, I'm sitting in my office going, geez, I just have all these patients with chronic disease. And as a functional medicine doctor, I'm trained to ask why functional medicine is the medicine. Why not what disease you have, what drug do I give? But why is it?

How did you get here?

And I started thinking, okay, why is my patient have diabetes? Why do they have heart disease? Why do they have autoimmunes? I'm like, it's the food, stupid.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, okay, well, if it's the food. Well, why do we have the food we have? Well, it's our food system. It's our industrial food system. Well, why do we have that food system? It's our food policies. Well, why do we have those food policies? It's the food industry that's driving most of those policies globally.

And most of the research.

Most of the research. And I'll unpack that for you. In fact, I really want to unpack. It's really stunning. And I wrote a book in 2000, came out in March 2000. Sorry, in March 2020, which was a terrible time to publish a book. Right, Right.

When nobody could go to the shelf.

It occupied with other things than the state of our food system. But I started a nonprofit at Food Fix Campaign where we're working on policy change in Washington. But in that book, I, I answered the question for myself, is why my patients sick and how is the food system responsible for all this and why is this happening and what are the policies? And it was really clear to me that it was the food industry driving a lot of this and obfuscating the truth, corrupting the science, corrupting public health agencies, confusing lawmakers with, you know, nonsense data. And, and, and I'll tell you an anecdote in a minute. But the, the. There's a new report that's coming out next year, and I recently talked to one of the scientists from the World Health Organization who's leading this. Wow. Of 20 scientists, leading researchers, sites around the world who come together to write a report on the commercial determinants of health. We've heard of the social determinants, which is poverty. Wow. Lack of access to food, so forth. But the commercial determinants of health are the ways in which multinational corporations, food, you know, ag, tobacco, alcohol, corporations, privatize profits and subvert public health deliberately.

Yeah.

And as I begin to unpack the story in My book, I begin to see, you know, when I did the research, I was like, I knew there was just shit going on, but I didn't know how bad it was. You know, like, like I, I. As part of my work in Washington, we got the Government Accountability Office, which is the government watchdog, to do a report through friends who are congressmen that can ask for these things. Nobody looked at this. What is the impact of our food policies on disease in America and the costs and our health care costs? No one looked at it, Right? So they looked at it and they did a couple year study, they analyze it and they found that there were 200 policies plus in 21 different departments and agencies in our government, all working across purposes, telling people to do different things. So on one hand we say in dietary guidelines, eat healthier whole foods. And on the other hand, with SNAP, their biggest food program, we spend $125 billion, 75% of that is for junk food culture, processed food, 10% for soda.

Wow.

So we're spending $12 billion for soda for the poor, which is probably 15 billion servings of soda that the government's paying for. 20% of Coke's profits in the US come from food stamps.

No. Yes, from food stamps.

Yeah.

So, and this is the population that's the most underserved, that has the least awareness of what's going on, and they are the most susceptible to, you know, government and regulatory bodies dictating what they're going to, what they're going to eat.

And what's exciting to me, Gary, is the first time in a presidential campaign and probably when this podcast airs, we're going to figure out who's president. I don't know who's going to be president right now.

Well, we're 24 hours away.

Right. But yeah, the first, first time. And there's any candidate talking about chronic disease.

Yeah.

You know, President Trump in 2023, even before Bobby Kennedy kind of joined him with this Make America Healthy Again movement, was put out a five minute video about the chronic disease epidemic, particularly in children, that we have to do something about. And I was like, whoa, this is amazing.

Yeah.

And, and I, I think there's so many forces that are pushing against doing it right. And what the food industry has done, and I include the ag industry, the pharma industry, and the processed food industry, the fast food industry. It's basically probably 20 CEOs around the world that control the biggest industry on the planet, which is the food industry. It serves it's food, which is, we all Eat on the planet. So it's, it's. I think the last time I looked at was 16, 17 trillion dollar a year industry. Wow. Okay. And. And so what they've done is, is both, I think, deliberately and just through historical, you know, kind of, you know, the, the kind of kind of practices that they had that weren't necessarily malicious. They literally create a food system that makes us sick and they profit from and we get sick and the government pays for. So, number one, they fund 12 times the number of studies on nutrition as independent scientists, even though they're directly conflicted. Right. So like the American Beverage association funds a study on dietary sweeteners and artificial sweeteners. They're finding they're fine. Well, should we believe that study? Probably not.

Yeah.

They fund academic institutions to do research. And so a lot of the medical school curriculums are pretty much pharmaceutical school curriculums. Yeah, you know, my daughter's in medical school. I see that really clearly. We see also how they fund the professional association. So, for example, the American heart Association receives $192 million in funding from Food and Pharma.

You're kidding.

A year.

192 million a year.

The. Yeah, the. The Diabetes Association. American Diabetes Association. Academy Nutrition Dietetics, American Academy of Pediatrics. I mean, I mean, there are a whole bunch of family doctors that quit when the American Academy family practice took $3 million from Coca Cola. Right. So they're funding all these groups. They're also funding fake front groups like the American Council on Science and Health, which did a hit piece on Cali and Casey Means.

Oh, they did.

They've done many hippies on me. And it sounds great. American Council on Science and Health. But who funds them? It's pharma. It's the pesticide makers. It's Monsanto, or now it's Bear.

Did they do a hit piece on Cali and Casey? I knew it was coming.

And I mean, I take it as a. I take it as a badge of honor to get these pieces written about me because it means I'm touching a nerve. Yeah, they don't want. And it's. And they, they're. The, They're. The organization says that pesticides are safe, that trans fats are good, smoking tobacco doesn't cause cancer. I mean, I'm not joking here.

Yeah.

And the guys who are the doctors and people fill it with. It's all funded by these big corporations. And many of these guys are corrupt. Some of these guys have jail. And they came out after Dr. Oz. And once in the New York Times and said they wrote a letter to Columbia saying he should be taken off the Columbia faculty because of his crazy views. And, and it was all this group. And there's many, many of these front groups like Crop Life, which sounds great, but it's a basically industrial agriculture front group.

Yeah.

And so they do, they fund research, they fund our academic institutions, they fund our professional associations, they fund, run groups that are confusing people with misinformation and propaganda. And then they also fund social groups like the NAACP and the, the Hispanic Federation. Wow. And for example, they. There was. I was in a movie called Fed up, which was about childhood obesity with Katie Couric and Lori David, who did about 10 years ago. And I met Bernice King, who's Marlon King's daughter. And I said, why don't we show this film at the King Center? And she's like, great idea, let's do it. Because, you know, violence, nonviolence also means nonviolence to the self. I'm like, great, yes. And so a few days later she called me, said, mark, we can't show film. Like, why? Because Coca Cola funds the King center in Atlanta. I walk onto the, I walk onto the campus of Spelman College, which is a black woman's college in Atlanta. And there's more houses such as the men's and Spelman dean of the university said to me, Mark, 50% of the entering class of 18 year old African American women have a chronic disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, 50%, 50% of 18 year olds. And I look at the campus, it's just blanketed with Coca Cola. I'm like, what's going on here?

Yeah.

She's like, well, Coca Cola is our biggest donor. You know, you look at the board of directors of Spelman College, on the trustees, it's. Someone's a vice chair of some big position at Coca Cola. It's just so corrupt and. Wow. And you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was involved with the recent dietary guidelines that you might have heard about, were mandated to look at ultra processed foods.

I heard about this. Lucky Charms came out more nutritious than grass fed Stage.

That was different. That was a, that was my favorite. But this is a dietary guidelines committee, which is supposed to be an independent group of scientists that have to review the literature that the USDA then can kind of authorizes them to look at. And you got a bunch of people in the sga, you know, may or may not be paid off if something's going on, but they're basically the Way they designed the whole process was so set up to fail because they was like, you know, they didn't define processing properly. Like a can of tomatoes is processed food, a can of sardines is processed food. Right, right. So it's like when you kind of look at the data on it, it's very clear. And this is the British Medical Journal came out with a paper a few years ago, showed that 32 different diseases were caused by or worsened by ultra processed food. All the major illnesses we have, from autoimmunity to cancer to heart disease, diabetes, I mean the list goes on depression. Clearly depression and mental health is caused by, by ultra processed food. And he said he was one of the reviewers on this sort of guidelines and he pointed out all the flaws and they just completely ignored it.

Wow.

They completely ignored it and they came out with a ruling and saying there's no data to support the fact that ultra processed food and I've seen is causing obesity. And so we're not going to make a determination with the dietary guidelines. This is the guidelines that set the standards for all nutrition programs in the country. Right. And when you look at the, the Global Burden of Disease study, which looked at 195 countries, the number one killer today is not smoking, it's not war, not infections, it's food.

Yeah.

It's 11 million people. And it's, I think that's conservative because about 75 million people die a year in the world. And I would say probably 60% of those are from chronic lifestyle preventable illnesses globally, not even in the developed world, but even in the developing world. There's twice as many deaths from, from chronic lifestyle preventable diseases like diabetes and heart disease than there is from infectious disease or malnutrition. We call this a double disease burden in the developing world. And, and so they said that 11 million people die from ultra processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods. Wow. I think it's probably more. It's like two holocausts a year.

Yeah.

And this is 100% preventable.

It's unbelievable.

So, so we have a system that's set up for everybody to fail. So for people to do what you want to ask them to do, to eat better, to live a healthier life, it's very tough because there's so many forces pushing against them.

I totally see.

And when you look at television, what are the ads? When you look in the media, it's junk food ads and it's pharma ads. So it's like, eat this and then Take this.

Yeah, I, I actually, on my gut challenge, I actually played one of the, one of the farmers ads, farm ads, and, and just listen to the, the side effects.

And well, they seem really fast at the end.

They seem really fast. And it's always like, you know, it's like grandpa's like pushing his daughter on the, you know, granddaughter on the swing. And it's like liver failure, blindness.

Right.

You know, mental, mental decline and occasionally death. Contact your physician immediately if you experience a sudden loss of consciousness. I'm like, what?

Yeah, but they say they show this beautiful, you know, life, you know, giving thing. And then they show like the end is like super fast.

You know, And I've even heard that the reason spend so much money advertising direct to the consumer that it's actually the worst roi there was a worst return on investment, marketing expense, like, in marketing history. It's like they, they actually lose money advertising directly to the consumer. So then it begs the question, well, why do they spend so much money advertising the consumer? And then, you know, I, I, I've heard people talk about it and it's to control the media. Just like you were saying, like, you couldn't show your movie at, at what was it? The, the, the college. Not because they actually wouldn't have benefited from the movie, but because the purse.

Strings were controlled by, I was literally sitting with her. So one of the top journalists at CBS who kind of agrees with us, and I said, you know, why can't we get more content around these issues on the media? And as well, Mark, you know, we are pretty tightly controlled by our advertisers. Yeah. I'm like, leak. You're all freaking honest.

Yeah. At least you're honest about it. And they're stuck too, because I mean, if 75% of my budget to, to pay for my family's well being came from one source, be hard for me to bite that hand.

Yeah. And we, and we pay so much for drugs in this country. And they go, oh, it's because the R D is so expensive and takes so much money to develop a drug and do this. They spend twice as much money on marketing as they do on R D. Wow. Yeah. And, and while they may, may, may or may not see the return on investment, I think they probably do 40% of the time. This is based on published research. 40% of the time that people see an ad on television and go to the doctor and say, I, they get that truck.

Really?

Yeah. That's why they do it.

Wow. Hey, they control the media with the Amount of ad spend. I mean, if you're 75 of anybody's budget, you go, listen, let's not.

So. So we. We gotta address the food system. You know, from. Feel the fork. And, you know, if I were king, which I'm not going to be, or a dictator.

You want to run for president?

No, I'm not old enough. I'm only 65. I have to wait a little bit. So if I were king, there would be a whole set of sweeping things that could transform the food system.

Yeah.

Develop a National Institute of Nutrition and fund it adequately to really deeply research the root cause of our chronic disease epidemic, which is primarily food.

And make it independent.

Make it independent.

Truly independent. If it has any effect on public policy, it has to be independent in nature. Because I think the challenges that our public.

Remove conflicts of interest are not.

Yeah.

Remove conflicts of interest across a whole segment of government that's dealing with these issues, because right now there's so much conflict of interest. So the NIH has a big role. The NIH also could say, and this. I think this would make a big difference, say, to all academic institutions. You're getting zero money from NIH grants unless you change your medical school curriculum to incorporate nutrition. And we're not also at the federal level because we fund graduate medical education. $17 billion. We're not giving that $17 billion unless you have a nutrition lifestyle curriculum in your graduate medical education programs.

Wow.

So that's, you know, big thing. Second, I would. I would reform our HHS policies and Medicare policies to reimburse for lifestyle change programs and for nutrition and medically healed meals and nutrition services. Really important.

Yeah.

Change what's paid for because doctors do what they get paid to do, not what the science says are supposed to do. Right. We know, for example, there's not a doctor on the planet that's going to say to you that lifestyle isn't a better treatment for diabetes. Right, Right. Everybody knows that. We know that food causes it. It's not a secret.

And we know that food can fix.

It, and we know the food can fix it, although there's still some controversy because people haven't seen it that much. But, I mean, Virta has shown this very clearly that you can reverse 60% of diabetes with a ketogenic diet.

We've seen it. We've seen it.

I've seen it in my practice every day.

But, you know, one of my favorite biohacks outside of Breathwork by far, is mineral salts, Baja gold, sea salt. It's got all of the Trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass fed steak with grass fed butter. And I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary and I sprinkled Baja gold sea salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a 15 or 20 bag of this will probably last you five years. This is literally the world's best biohacking secret. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

Doctors do what they get paid to do, not what works. Right. And so they, they get paid to give all these diabetes drugs. So we can give Ozempic for 1600amonth, but we can't put people in a nutrition lifestyle change program, which is pennies.

Yeah.

You know, in a group model program that works effectively, which will actually take.

The pressure off of the healthcare system. Because, you know, I, I heard Casey about it and she was saying, you know, the, we're, we're about to approve OIC as a frontline defense for obesity, not just diabetes. But yeah, diabetes, which is like when you start to become, you know, it's not morbid obesity, it's just obesity. So, you know, you get a little, little fat and we don't. Hey, don't stop bathing your cellular biology in the toxic soup. We're just going to press down on, on that with a GLP one. And you know, and I think a lot of people don't even realize that GLPO, we make GLP1 in our body, the hormone we make in our gut and it responds to satiation and, and I'm amongst other things. But if you know what makes you satiated. Nutrients. And if you eat nutrient dense foods.

That's right.

You actually release the GLP one that stops you from over.

Yeah. Ultra processed food is what makes people hungry.

Yeah.

Right. And it's like, you know, no one's gonna eat 12 avocados or, you know, four 10 ounce steaks.

You just can't, you can't overeat a ribbon.

You can't. But you can, you can easily eat a bag of cookies. Right?

Yeah.

A sheet cake. Right. And drink a, you know, A liter bottle of soda.

And what's interesting is, you know, when you look at the dichotomy about how people present it, they're like, no, it's just calories in, calories out. It's calories and calories and calorie. Well, that's maybe true from, you know.

It'S true in a lab. When you burn the calories, they release the same amount of energy. When you eat them, they're different.

Yes.

A calorie burn is a calorie burn. A calorie eaten is not a calorie.

Whatever the kilojoules is that, you know, raises a, you know, cubic centimeter of water, 1 degree centigrade. So, you know, you compare an ultra processed food to, you know, another calorie source, but. Exactly. Yeah, I totally agree with you. That's not where the example can stop. Because if I get hungry from the other calories, if I, if I have an insulin spike in an insulin crash and if I actually overeat. So now I'm, I'm on a, you know, two identical 1500 calorie a day diets. One's ultra processed one's, one's nutrient dense. The nutrient dense diet is going to release more GLP1. It's going to actually cause a greater sensation of satiation. It's going to reduce cravings.

Yeah.

The other one is going to actually trigger the cravings.

Yes, that's right. I mean, it's this.

Well, doctor, this person wants to eat 3,000 calories.

Yeah, I mean, that's sort of validated in the NIH study by Kevin hall where he basically gave people whole food or ultra processed food. The same group. And two weeks they had ultra processed food, two weeks they had whole foods. The ultra processed group ate 500 calories more a day because they said eat whatever you want till you're full. Right. And so they ate 500 calories more a day. That's in a week. That's 3, 500 calories in a year. That's, you know, 52 pounds of weight gain. Wow. Right. Just from that one little effect of ultra process. That's why America's so obese. It's like insane. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't like that.

We wanted to treat obesity as a disease as if it happened to us, not happen within us. And then we want to bring in more pharmaceutical intervention on the back of the taxpayer. Paid by, paid for by Medicaid and Medicare. It is. The bill is, I think, 4818. That's really dangerous one. The end all Obesity Act.

Yeah.

Which they all sound so ultra.

Sounds great. It's a pay for Ozempic.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not the best solution. I mean, listen, if we covered these drugs for everybody who's overweight or obese in America, it would be $5.1 trillion, which is more than we spend on healthcare. It'll be like literally more than double our healthcare, which is already twice as everybody else in the world.

Yeah.

So if I were king. Back to where I was king.

Yeah, yeah, I like this.

We agree that with nih, the hhs, then, then we. The Dietary Guidelines, usda, those have to be updated to include all the relevant science, which means we have to fund the process. And I'm working with people in the agencies saying we don't have any money to do this. We're mandated by Congress to develop this. We don't have the money to review the data, to put side panels together. There's no money for the National Academy of Sciences. I said, why aren't you publishing the evidence around the effect of higher carbohydrate diets and the adverse effects on our health? He says, well, the National Academy of Sciences hasn't reviewed the literature yet that it costs a million dollars. And we, they don't have a million dollars and there's no funding for that process, so we can't actually review and revise our dietary guidelines. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like we're talking. I mean, a rounding error, right? Which is. Has ability to make huge impact on how we understand nutrition health. So reform dietary guidelines to match the science. We need to change our school lunch program so only. Oh, my God. In schools. We need, we need to upgrade the quality of the food and put more money in that. We need to, to change our SNAP program. It's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. It is not nutrition. It's food. Not really. If you actually look at the definition of food in the Webster's dictionary, it's not even food because that's something that supports the growth and health of an organism. Ultra processed food by definition does not do that. It was actually not food. And it's food security, it's calorie security, but it's not nutrition security, which is getting enough nutrients.

It keeps you from dying and, well.

It keeps you from dying from starvation, but you die from diabetes. And it's interesting, you know, the people who are most obese are the most nutrient deficient. If you're, if you have the most food insecure, you're more Likely to be diabetic. Right. So we need to provide real nutrition security and get rid of all the junk in SNAP and make it like wic, which is Women's Infants and Children program. You can buy fruits and vegetables, you can buy meat, you can buy, you know, whole grains, you can buy beans, you can buy a lot of good stuff. We already have those restrictions for women, infants and children programs. Just apply that to snap. Yeah, okay.

I'm going to say listen, if you're.

Simple ideas, so much resistance, right? Yeah, so much resistance from both, you know, both sides, even you know, Democrats, Republicans, because of the food industry, then we need to also change the marketing. So we need to end marketing of junk food to kids at least. Right. We can say first amendment, whatever. In Chile they don't allow any Market from 6am to 10pm UK just banned junk food marketing. You shouldn't be able to see ads if you're a kid for this crap that's going to cause you to be addicted. It it's just like advertising cigarettes like Joe Camel. Right. It should just be banned. It kills more people than cigarettes every year. You should just be banned. So that's a huge one marketing. And then we need to look at the FDA around what they're doing in terms of food additives. Let's just meet what other countries have come to the conclusion based on the science are not safe additives.

Yeah.

BHT and all these red dye fires, all these things, they just have no place in our food supply. And then we need to actually have clear labeling of food. The fda, these are not hard policies, they're hard to implement because of resistance, but they're simple ideas. Yeah. You know, put front of package labeling on so you know, stuff is good for you. Put the amount of servings of fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains on the label and put warning labels like they have in other countries. If it's bad for you, it's like red light is bad, green good, yellow, eat with caution. Or they're stopping giant stop signs or like cigarette labels. They have the ability to do this and they've done this in other countries and it works.

Right. So you don't interrupt free choice. Right. You know what, we're going to just.

Regulate what people eat. But you educate people, educate them. Don't take. If you want to eat crap, that's fine. But. But like tell them what they're doing. Like in you go to Europe, the cigarette package, the entire cigarette package is basically a warning. It's so funny. And then we have a few Other things I think would make a big difference. So we have the FDA, we have the NIH, we have the HHS, USDA. Then we need to reform agriculture.

Yeah.

So that's USDA, but mostly USDA should be. Is mostly food programs. You know, there's 20 billion spent on supporting agriculture. There's 125 billion spent on food stamps alone.

Really?

Yeah.

125 billion. Yeah. On food.

It's the biggest program in food program in the country.

Yeah.

And so the, the, the regenerative agriculture movement is gaining steam and that's going to create more money for farmers, more productive farms, restore ecosystems, restore biodiversity, restore the soil, restore water tables, produce more nutritious food. The farmers make more money, we eat healthier food. It's a win, win, win. The people that lose are the fertilizer and the seed and chem companies.

Right.

So they're not. Nobody's gon, what I'm saying is very heretical.

Right.

It's not, it's not going to happen likely. Unless, you know, maybe, maybe President Trump or Bobby Kenny could do it. I don't know. But, you know, we need to put in these policies that have been studied that are validated that, that work that will actually change the health of America from the ground up.

Yeah. And, and, you know, I, I first of all, could not agree with you more. You know, in medicine, there's something called informed consent, you know, which isn't like a physician doesn't, A physician doesn't have to educate a patient to the point where they, they thoroughly understand the procedure, certainly not how to conduct the procedure, but they understand the risks. Like, and, and the benefits. Like, what's the upside? What's the downside? What, you know, if I do the surgical procedure, I take this medication, what is the potential downside? I mean, I, I like what you're saying in the food labeling because it's, you know, it's their choice about whether or not they, they proceed. I mean, you can still go to the store and buy cigarettes and, but if you buy cigarettes, you know what you're getting yourself into. And, but if you're an adult and you're, you're aware of the risk. You're aware of the risk, but I think the truth is that the majority of us have been so conditioned to believe that these are foods. And, and, you know, what we've seen in our practice is that people's palates actually change. They actually really don't like whole foods. No, they don't actually like, you know, you make A like a bone stock grass fed chili, which is what we're gonna have after the podcast. And they taste it and it doesn't taste good to them because, you know, it doesn't taste good to them because they're, they're used to.

Yeah.

Highly processed ingredients and that palate changes. And then, you know, when I started.

She'S hijacked her taste buds for not.

Only hijacked our taste buds, but actually designed a lot like. And Casey means talks about this a lot, but our Cali means talks about this a lot. Designed to create an addictive response. You know, ding. The dopamine receptor, the R1A2 receptor in the back of the tongue to really hammer that and give you a dopamine reward. So now you're not just liking the food, you're addicted to.

100%. That 14% of adults and 12% of kids are biologically addicted to processed food. Ultra processed food, according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale. This is a, this is a global study.

Wow.

That and 14% of adults are alcoholic. So it's like the same. Yeah, it's frightening. And, and, and Michael Moss wrote a.

Book called Biologically Addicted. They don't like the food.

They're addicted to the, they're addicted to it. Literally. They, they, by definition, all the behaviors that they have around food, they have cravings, they have withdrawal symptoms, they, you know, they can't control themselves. It's all the same behaviors as addiction.

I've seen kid go, kids go DEFCON 9.

Yeah. I mean Yale has done a lot of the work on this. Kelly Brunel is very compelling research. And I mean there's whole textbooks on this. This is not just sort of like, oh, they're making food addictive. This is like a deep science. And my book 10 Day Detox was basically about that. And what, what they, what they found was like the, the, the, the. Michael Moss and his investigation, he's a journalist in New York Times, investigated the food industry and we talked to 300 industry scientists, experts, executives, you know, whistleblowers, and found that, you know, this is deliberate, that they have taste institutes where they hire craving experts to create craving. This is their own internal language. Taste institutes, craving experts to create the bliss point of food, meaning the maximum dopamine response and the most mouthfeel taste response to create heavy users, which is their own terminology, heavy users. Like, like an addict.

Right, of course.

So it's easier to get someone who's drinking a 12 ounce soda or 10 ounce soda to drink a 2 liter soda than it is to get you or I, Gary, to start drinking a 10 ounce Coca Cola. Right, right. And so they focus their marketing on these communities of mostly of color, underserved communities who are, are targeted far more with ads. Black kids drink twice as much soda as white kids. And it's because there's so much targeting of these communities by these, these food industry. And also when they get their EBTs or bend it, their food stamp, you know, SNAP benefit cards and they, they kind of up at the beginning of the month they go, they know, they, they go to all the convenience stores, the little bodegas and they have all these giant ads, you know, two user EBT two liter bottle soda and soda 99 cents. Yeah. It's like it's really bad job.

Wow. That's, you know, and what's interesting is the taxpayer is funding that.

Oh yeah.

And then the taxpayer is also funding the Medicaid Medicare bill to actually treat the disease that's caused by that. So it's like no wonder it's called the Food and Drug Administration because the food leads to the drugs.

Yeah.

And, and now we're funding the foods and the drugs.

So it's really bad. You're right. 100. I mean the, the Rockefeller foundation put out a report that for every dollar we spend on food, we spend $3 in collateral damage of costs. And they didn't even include all the things that are happening. So. Right. Yeah. Think about how much taxpayers are covering. We privatize the. Prof. The cost. Then soil gets destroyed, the pesticides go on, the waterways get eutrophy eutrophication which kills all the wildlife and the seafood in the water. We drain our aquifers. We, we damage the soil, we lose carbon to the atmosphere and then we produce food from that. That's commodity crops that goes into ultra processed food that we pay for with the SNAP benefits that go to the poor. Then we pay for that with Medicare, Medicaid. So we're literally paying so many times, either directly or indirectly for the harms from our food system and the, the government is holding that bill. Wow.

I love how you say we privatize the profits and we socialize the cost. The cost. Wow. When you say socialize the cost, I mean that's, that's taxpayers.

So listen, I mean like who's paying for the, the fact that our aquifers are draining dry? Who's paying for the fact that our soils are damaged and there's, there's no carbon in the soil anymore and we don't have organic matter to grow nutrient densers. Who's paying for all the dead fish in 400 dead zones around the world the size of New Jersey that are killing, that are feeding half a billion people? Who's paying for the, the loss of biodiversity and the killing of 75 of our pollinators and half of all the birds? Who's paying for all that? Yeah, well, nobody. It's all, it's all our collective commons. We call it, you know, the commons, which is. Oh, you know, and for the people.

That are so interested in green energy and, and global warming and you know, the Green New Deal. I mean this is at the episode 100 regenerative farming and, and in less expensive food. You know, it's interesting and it works.

For the farmers too. Everybody should see Common Ground and Kiss the Ground, two films I was in.

That are talking about Common Ground and Kiss the Ground. I'm gonna put links.

Yeah, they're great films. They're going to be, I think I'm on Amazon coming up soon. But they're, they're, they're really telling a story of how we can move to a more regenerative system.

Yeah, you know, I, I have a friend of mine, his name is Alfie Oaks. He owns a huge grocery store in Naples called Sea to Table. And we actually got on a helicopter one day with my film crew and we, we parachuted into, to some of his organic fields and he was showing me how he's going organic produce.

You literally parachuted.

Well, not parachuted.

You're hardcore. That's really good.

I'm doing it like investigative background, Mark. You know, I'm committed, you know, like nights. My AR15.

You got your, your night vision glasses, night vision goggles, paragliding in. There's a tomato dropping in from 30,000ft with oxygen. Mission impossible.

Yeah. So, so we, we, we took a hillock out there and we, we, we dropped it on a bunch of his fields and, and he was showing me how he's actually growing organic produce at less than the cost that it would be to spray it with herbicides and pesticides, insecticides and all this. And, and some of it was really ingenious. Like they ran these reflective foils. So they have, you know, imagine just these long rows and they, and they would wrap the roots in these reflective foils because they realized that these white flies were photosensitive. They, you know, they were, they don't have real eyesight. They, they're photo dynamic. And what would happen is the, this reflective foil would just bend and Scatter the light and it would confuse the insect. And they all went to the woods. I mean, and the fields looked so pristine.

Yeah.

They were beautiful.

And then that's the irony. Farmers will make more money.

Yeah.

Produce better food, restore the ecosystem. It's a win, win, win. It's like a triple bottom line.

Yeah. And I watched the produce get picked at 9 o' clock in the morning. I watched it myself. Picked, washed, processed. And it was on the shelf by 2:00 clock that afternoon. So there's a strawberry that was in a field at 9 o' clock in the morning that's on the grocery store shelf at 2 o' clock in the afternoon. And. And it's a profitable grocery store. So, I mean, this can be done in a way that creates jobs, creates profit, creates nutrition that actually fixes the dynamic in the food supply. And he was saying that some of these fields are. So. They have been sprayed for so many years with these herbicides and pesticides.

Yeah.

That there aren't pesticides for three states away.

Yeah.

Like, you know, there's true. We're not even, we're not even protecting them against the pesticides that exist, the pests that exist anymore because the overspraying has just.

And we're all, we're all poisoned. Like, you know, one of the things I love about Function Health, this company I co founded, which is practicing.

I want to talk about that.

We're including testing for pesticides, pfas, chemicals, bpa, and we're finding glyphosate. We're saying incredible toxic load in the population.

And what do you do? What do they do for. Because I've read that there's now testing for microplastics. And the only thing that I'm aware of that gets those out is this new Serif filter, this Exterra filter by Lumati that actually filters the blood in. In it in a dialysis type format, which I'm a big fan of. They use these heparin binding sites and they pull the toxins out of the blood. But what do you do for people that have heavy toxic loads? I mean, first you got to remove the toxic load. Right. But what do you do for all these things that are embedded in the body, the heavy metals, the microtoxins.

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you know, detoxification is another core modality that functional medicine uses to treat patients. So metal detox, cellular detox. And there's many methods to do it, but one is, you know, reducing the exposures. Right. Filtering Water filtering air, eating organic common sense stuff, changing your household care products, your skin care products. And environmental working group has a whole set of guides on how to do that. So I would go to EWG.org and that's great just for reducing free information.

Too, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. Second thing is you've got to upregulate all your detox systems. So pee, poop, sweat, you know, like saunas, lots of fiber, you know, lots of water, just flushing stuff out. And then there's a lot of molecules that help to increase your body's own endogenous or built in detox systems. Glutathione boosting compounds, whether it's the broccoli family of foods, whether it's taking an acetylcysteine or lipoic acid, other or even glutathione. Glutathione, you can think of glutathione, selenium, all the nutrients that help boost glutathione. And then you know, there, there's other co factors like zinc for metal, metal binding proteins that mine metals. So there's, there's a lot of things you can do nutritionally to upgrade your biology. And then sometimes you need chelation and then saunas are another big thing. And then there's another protocol which I've been using with my patients, it's a little harder to access, called the PK protocol. Essentially uses, uses phosphatidylcholine to flush out cellular toxins and rebuild mitochondria.

And how are you taking that?

Orally. It's an IV treatment. You also can take oral phosphatidylcholine, but it's the structure of your cell membranes and all these toxins are embedded in our fat tissue and their cells are all made up of fat.

So.

Yeah, like that's where the cell membrane. Yeah, so that's where it is. So basically, you know, there's this incredible protocol. I'm sure you have to, it's like really quite profound. It helps with mold toxins, with cells, pesticides and.

Yeah, and we, we live in the mold capital of the world here.

Yeah, pretty bad physician just told me. So I'm, I'm excited about, you know, this company that I co founded because it really gives people agency over their health. It helps them identify what's out of balance. We talked about nutritional health and metabolic health and a lot of things that people are just not catching and they wait until they get really sick and then they find out. And so our goal at Function Health is to help People live a hundred healthy years and we provide a really deep analysis of what's going on with your biology. And we're going to be able to track more and more data from your wearables, from your medical records, from imag, from your omics, from stool testing, toxin testing, and use that information to create a personalized set of recommendations that tells you where you are, where you're headed and what to do about it.

Yeah.

And so it's very empowering. And I think, you know, we, we just started and we had like a hundred thousand people sign up.

100,000.

We have 300,000 people on the wait list. Although your podcast listeners can jump the wait list and use Ultimate Health 100 as the code.

Ultimate Health 100.

I have my own Ultimate Health 100. Yes.

I'm going to be the first one.

You'Re going to see, Gary 100. For the first hundred listeners. Just set signing. You can jump the wait list.

Yeah.

And, and use that code as the early access code. And it just, you get incredible data on your biology and you know, people using wearables and glucose monitors and all this. Great. But this is like, this is next level diagnosis.

Amazing. And I'm going to put links to function, health and everything that you're doing in, in, in the show notes on the podcast. I'm also going to put links to your books. I'm really excited to be also, you know, part of trying to make, make America healthy again.

Yes.

This, this movement to really be apolitical about how we try to influence public policy in the country.

Disease doesn't know if you're red, blue or purple.

It doesn't, you know, I mean, I don't know how people could be on the other side of, you know, making our children more sick. But so, you know, I, I, I wind down every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. I definitely have to have you back because it literally might just get started. How was an hour and a half happened last time? You know, it was like, God, I got so many more questions I have for you. But we'll definitely, we'll definitely do a follow up podcast. But I ask all my guests, yeah, come to Austin.

We'll do a double back to back again.

Let's do it. No, for sure. I'm, I'm, I want to go back for Rogan. So. Yeah, we will, we'll do another double back to back. I asked my guests, you know, what, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human to me? What does it mean to you?

Know, I think it's. It's being able to show up fully in your life feeling good and able to do what matters to you, to love the people you want to love, to do the work you want to do in the world, have the energy to show up for your friends and family and your kids, to be able to actually be. Be fully here. Because if you feel like crap, yeah, you want to just sit and scroll Instagram or watch Netflix and not be engaged in life. And at the end of the day, it's about the quality of our life and the quality of our, Our. Our experience. And I don't care what age I am, I want to be able to do what I want to do. I want to go play tennis, I want to ride a bike, I want to make love. I want to go for a hike, I want to jump in a lake. I want to do all those things, you know, and I count on doing those until my last day, you know? Yeah. And you're crazy. You're 65. Why are you riding horses across Mongolia without a helmet? Like, you know, Because I can. Because I can, you know? Yeah, it was crazy. We went on this Mongolian horse trip, and that's like, for me, you know, like a dream to be able to go into the. The tundra in Mongolia and be in the middle of nowhere and ride Mongolian horses, you know, at full gallop across crazy terrain. I've been riding since I'm a little kid, so I'm experienced, but, you know, it was just like, I don't want to not be able to do that because I'm 65 years old. I mean, most. 65 years old, and you're so much.

Pain and you can't get out of bed and you can't. You don't like the long flights and you. That's right. Well, I, I have thoroughly enjoyed this podcast. I mean, this is going to be probably one of my most popular episodes and, you know, and my audience is going to absolutely love this, and I, I really just can't thank you enough for coming on.

Thanks, Gary.

Huge fan and big follower of your work and I wish you all, all the success and I hope that I can be a small part of giving you a bigger voice.

Thanks, Gary. Appreciate that.

You got it. And as always, guys, that's just science.

Food, meaning the maximum dopamine response and the most mouthfeel taste response to create heavy users, which is their own terminology. Heavy users. Like, like an ad addict.

Right, of course.

So it's easier to get someone who's drinking a 12 ounce soda or 10 ounce soda to drink a 2 liter soda than it is to get you or I, Gary, to start drinking a 10 ounce Coca Cola. Right, right. And so they focus their marketing on these communities of mostly of color, underserved communities who are, are targeted far more with ads. Black kids drink twice as much soda as white kids. And it's because there's too much targeting of these communities by these, these food industry. And then also when they get their EBTs or bend it, their food stamp, you know, SNAP benefit cards and they, they kind of up at the beginning of the month they go, they know, they, they go to all the convenience stores, the little bodegas and they have all these giant ads, you know, two user EBT two liter bottle soda, soda 99 cents. It's like, it's really bad.

Wow.

Really bad.

That's. You know, and what's interesting is the taxpayer is funding that.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And then the taxpayer is also funding the Medicaid Medicare bill to actually treat the disease that's caused by that. So it's like no wonder it's called the Food and Drug Administration because the food leads to the drugs.

Yeah.

And, and now we're funding the foods and the drugs.

So it's really bad. You're right, 100%. I mean the, the Rockefell foundation put out a report that for every dollar we spend on food, we spend $3 in collateral damage of costs. And they didn't even include all the things that are happening, so. Right. Yeah. Think about how much taxpayers are covering. We privatize the profits and socialize the costs. The soil gets destroyed, the pesticides go on, the waterways get eutropy eutrophication which kills all the wildlife and the seafood in the water. We drain our aquifers, we, we damage the soil, we lose carbon to the atmosphere and then we produce food from that. That's commodity crops that goes into ultra processed food that we pay for with the SNAP benefits that go to the poor. Then we pay for that with Medicare, Medicaid. So we're literally paying so many times, either directly or indirectly for the harms from our food system. And the government is holding that bill. Wow.

I love how you said we privatize the profits and we socialize the cost. The cost.

Wow.

When you say socialize the cost, I mean that's, that's taxpayers. Yeah.

I mean like who's paying for the, the fact that our aquifers are draining dry? Who's paying for the fact that our soils are Damaged and there's, there's no carbon in the soil anymore and we don't have organic matter to grow. Nutrient dentist. Who's paying for all the dead fish in 400 dead zones around the world the size of New Jersey that are killing. They're feeding half a billion people. Who's paying for the, the loss of biodiversity and the killing of 75 of our pollinators and half of all the birds? Who's paying for all that? Yeah, well, nobody. It's all, it's all our collective commons. We call it, you know, the commons, which is. Oh, you know, and for the people.

That are so interested in green energy and, and global warming and you know, the Green New Deal, I mean this is at the episode 100 regenerative farming and, and in less expensive food. You know, it's interesting and it works.

For the farmers too. Everybody should see Common Ground and Kiss the Ground, two films I was in.

That are talking about Common Ground and Kiss the Ground. Yeah, I'm gonna put links.

Yeah, they're great films. They're going to be, I think I'm on Amazon coming up soon. But they're, they're, they're really telling a story of how we can move to a more regenerative system.

Yeah. You know, I, I have a friend of mine, his name is Alfie Oaks. He owns a huge grocery store in Naples called Sea to Table. And we actually got on a helicopter one day with my film crew and we, we parachuted into to some of his organic fields and he was showing me how he's going organic produce.

You literally parachuted or you.

Well, not parachuted. We landed in a helicopter.

You're hardcore, Gary. That's really good.

I'm doing it like investigative background, Mark. You know, I'm committed night with my AR15.

You got your, your night vision glasses on, vision goggles, paragliding in. There's a tomato dropping in from 30,000ft with oxygen. Mission impossible.

So, so we, we, we took a hillock out there and we, we, we dropped it on a bunch of his fields and, and he was showing me how he's actually growing organic produce at less than the cost that it would be to spray it with herbicides and pesticides, insecticides and all this. And some of it was really ingenious. Like they ran these reflective foils.

Yeah.

So they, they have, you know, imagine just these long rows and they, and they would wrap the roots in these reflective foils because they realized that these white flies were photosensitive. You know, they were, they don't have real eyesight. They're photo dynamic. And what would happen is the. This reflective foil would just bend and scatter the light and it would confuse the insect. And they all went to the woods. I mean, and the fields looked so pristine. Yeah, they were beautiful. And then.

That's the irony. Farmers will make more money.

Yeah.

Produce better.