Food As Medicine, The Blood Type Diet and The Ketogenic Diet

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. Now we're going to mix things up a bit now so that we can cover a lot more topics and feature even more questions. Now on today's show, we're going to discuss the concept of food as medicine. We're also going to talk about the blood type, diet and personalization of food. And we're going to talk about the ketogenic diet. So let's take a look at our first question, which is a video submission. Now we got a great video from Chrisann from Texas. Let's watch it.

Hi, Dr. Hyman, this is Chrisann in Texas. And thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I love your 10 day detox, your eat fat, get thin. And the last couple of years I've learned so much from you. So I still have my question, I guess is in regards to fat food matters. And I still have a lot of people who question whether it's really worth it or not to spend extra on good whole food. And it's, it's a little bit hard, I think, for people who don't cook. So could you talk a little bit about that and the difference that good whole food makes in our general health and the importance of that? So thank you again and you take care.

All right. Now that was a great question, Chrisann, because I get this question all the time and the question is, is it really worth it to spend extra money on good whole food? And it's hard for people who don't cook. Could you talk a little bit about that and like what the difference whole foods make anyway in our health? Now this is really important because most people think that cooking is hard, that eating real food's expensive, and then it's difficult. And the truth is that we are given that line by the food industry, which is essentially telling us that you should leave the cooking to us. Eat processed food. Convenience is king. This was their strategy to disenfranchise from our kitchens and from real food. Now, I can go into that later, but it's a huge political issue. Now I'm going to tell you a little story about a family who thought it was hard, who thought it was difficult, who actually lived on food stamps and disability, had $1,000 a month to eat for a family of five. And they were struggling. And the father had diabetes, needed a kidney transplant. The mother was well over 100 pounds overweight. The son was 16, almost had type 2 diabetes or adult onset diabetes. And, and I went to their home and sent them something to eat better. I showed them how to cook a meal. We got real ingredients from real food. No processed anything. Even the dressing we made from scratch with the salad dressing. And they did not know how to cook. They lived. Everything they had in their kitchen was processed. It was full of high fructose corn syrup trans fats and it was full of processed flour. It was terrible. We cooked one meal from real food. They saw how fun it was, easy it was, didn't take that much time and, and how inexpensive it was buying real whole ingredients. You don't have to buy a $50 grass fed steak. Buying real food is key. And I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group. We have a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget. And it shows you how to eat food that's good for you, good for the planet and good for your wallet. There's one more short point I want to make which is that food is not just calories. If it was just calories, you could drink 1800 or 2000 calories of Coke every day and it wouldn't matter. But it matters because food is not just calories. It's information. It's instructions that turning on or off health or disease. And that's important. So you either pay now a little more, which is really not that much more, maybe 50 cents a day more per meal and you get healthy as opposed to eating processed food where you pay maybe a little less now, but you pay later by needing medications and being sick and the quality of life goes down. So I recommend cooking and learning how to cook because you have a body and I recommend eating whole real foods. So the next question is from Jenna. Now she tweeted a question which we're going to read here. She said, eating for your blood type. Peeps say that O's shouldn't eat or drink anything with coconut, but it's so good for you. Thoughts? Okay, well, this is a great topic, which is really about a deeper subject, which is the personalization of diet. We are evolving into a field where we are learning more and more about how to customize diets based on your genetics, your metabolic type and much more. So the blood type diet was the first diet that said we should customize our diets to our personal genetics or various kinds of markers like the blood type. Now what's important is that idea. The blood type diet by itself I think is one of the early versions of personalization, but it's really not adequate to understand what's really going on. So I look at a lot of things to personalize your diet. I look at your genetics. Do you have a predisposition to diabetes? What is your ability to process fats? And are you lactose intolerant? And there's so many things we can learn about how to personalize that. Even if your genetics aren't great around detoxification, I can tell you what foods to eat to help you detoxify. I also look at your other factors, whether you have type 2 diabetes, whether you have heart disease, whether you have dementia, whether it was for cancer. Well, if you have gut issues, if you have a leaky gut, if you have food sensitivities, or all these are factors that I use to really look at how to personalize diet. Now, if we fast forward five years, maybe it's going to be less. At the speed of technology, we're going to figure out how to actually customize your diet even more. You'll be able to take a drop of blood, do some analysis, look at your genetics, and come up with a customized way of eating that's going to support your health the best. So I'm excited for that time. We do that now at Functional Medicine at the center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic at the Ultra Wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is great. We don't have so many people on the waiting list at Cleveland. There's about 3,000 people on the waiting list there. But we really customize diets matching it to you, and it's really amazing when you do that and you see the results. So, Jenna, in answering your question, I would say if coconut works for you, I would use it. I wouldn't be so restrictive. The smartest doctor in the room is your own body. See how you feel. See if it makes you feel strong or weak, if it affects your cholesterol worse or not. How does it work for you? And that's what you should be asking all the time. So the answer is, don't worry about the coconut. All right, the next question is from Deanna and let me have a look at her tweet here. She says, is there such a thing as a vegetarian or vegan ketogenic diet? Which carbs are to be reduced? Well, here's the deal. It's tougher to be a vegan ketogenic diet person, but you can do it. So there was an amazing study by this guy, Dr. David Jenkins at the University of Toronto, who looked at high fat, vegan or vegetarian diets to low fat. And it was surprising. He found that the Higher fat vegetarians lost more weight. By the way, eating fat makes you thin and there's a lot of data that shows it speeds up your metabolism. And they even lost more weight and they had better cholesterol eating more fat, which is pretty amazing. So the question is, if you're a low fat, I mean a high fat vegan or vegetarian, what do you eat? It's easier if you're vegetarian because you can eat eggs and you can eat dairy. But if you're not, then what is? What are you going to eat? Well, the thing is you need adequate protein and that is really from, I would say tofu or tempeh, but it's hard to eat that all the time. Beans and grains are harder because they have more starch and it's harder to do on beans and grains. Nuts and seeds are a great source of protein too. And the fat should eat are extra virgin olive oil. You can have coconut oil, you can have macadamia oil or macadamia nut oil, you can have avocado oil, you can have grass fed ghee if you're not vegan, but you're vegetarian, you can have whole fat eggs if you are a vegetarian and not a vegan. So you can do this a little trickier, but you should try it and see what happens. I can't tell you how many vegetarians or vegans I've switched to a high fat form of it. And they all do so much better. Hey everybody. Well, that's all the time we have today for questions. If you like this video, be sure to share it with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter. And if you have any questions, you can tweet them to me or send your video submissions to Dr. Hyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you. Thanks for watching.