My Personal Health Crisis

Hi, I'm Jason Wakab, Founder and CEO of mindmuddygreen, the best selling author of wealth and your host for the mindbodygreen podcast where I'll be bringing you deep and insightful dialogues with some of the greatest minds in wellness. If you like what you hear, please give us a five star review, comment and share with your friends and family. And don't forget to Visit us@mybodygreen.com for your daily dose of wellness. Thanks and enjoy the podcast. So I wanted to tell you about our new sponsor of the podcast, Thrive Market. As many of you know, I recently became a dad. My wife Colleen and I have an 8 month old baby girl, Ellie. It's not an exaggeration when I say that as a new parent, Thrive Market has been a complete lifesaver. Which is why I'm so excited that we've teamed up with them to offer you $60 of free organic groceries, free shipping and a 30 day trial membership. Yep, you heard that right. $60 of free groceries. It's a crazy good deal and it's going to save you a ton of money on food and products that'll make you feel absolutely amazing. I and you can get all the details by going to thrivemarket.com mybuddygreen again. Thrivemarket.com mybuddygreen if you haven't heard of Thrive Market, it's an online marketplace that's made up of 100% healthy and organic products. The type of premium food, household cleaners and bathroom products you'd see on MPG. Except on Thrive everything is 25 to 50% off retail price. They do this by taking out the middleman. They work with brands directly and then pass those savings onto their customers. For Colleen and I, the convenience has been a huge part of it. Everything on Thrive Market is hyper curated, so we're not scrolling through endless lists trying to find the one or two brands that meet our admittedly stringent standards. In Brooklyn, where we live, you often find yourself going to one store for collagen powder, another store for organic soap, another store for the right brand of BPA free canned beans. It can take hours and as someone running a major wellness media company, that's time I simply don't have. Thrive Market is one stop shopping. Everything on the site is amazing, but beyond that you can click to sort by vegan, gluten free, non GMO, organic, paleo, etc. You can even sort by more out there things. For instance, as you know, we're big into gut health on MBG and as you might not know, Colleen is actually a big snacker. So on Thrive Market you can go to the snack section and click to filter by snacks that contain probiotics. That was how we actually discovered the Farmhouse culture Kraut Crisps, which contain billions of probiotics and are dangerously good. Check them out@thrivemarket.com mindbuddygreen we've also been loving the lifestyle categories. Browsing the mom section was how Colleen stumbled across the organic gripe water that's been a game changer for Ellie's teething pain. I didn't even know what gripe water was, to be honest, and I definitely didn't know that there was an organic version. But thanks to Thrive Market, we now have a happy baby on our hands. And get this, it's normally $12.50 at your local health food store, but only $8.50 on Thrive Market. We recently held our annual Revitalize event in Arizona where we debuted our new motto, you we all at mbg, we think it's so important to reap the benefits of wellness on an individual level. Sure, we all want to feel amazing and live our best lives, but recently we've really focused on expanding that message. We believe that wellness can change the world and that people who feel good amazing change. Which is why I'm so excited to hear about Thrive Market's one for One program for everyone that signs up. They donate a membership to a low income family veteran or teacher to help make healthy living affordable for everyone. Okay, so here's the deal. Right now you can get up to $60 of free organic groceries, free shipping and a 30 day trial membership by going to thrivemarket.com mybuddygreen I'd start in the Staples section where you'll find the kind of wellness essentials that we recommend on mindbodygreen daily and then work your way out from there, depending on your own needs and preferences. Keep in mind all their prices are already up to 50% off and now they're giving you an extra $60 free. Go to thrivemarket.com mymuddygreen but be careful with the Kraut Crisps though. Don't say I didn't warn you. Okay, now let's get into today's episode. Dr. Mark Hyman is a pioneer in the field of functional medicine. Nine time number one New York Times bestselling author, internationally recognized leader, speaker and educator. He's also director of the Cleveland Clinic center for Functional Medicine and is one of the leading voices in wellness today. He's a man that's leading the charge to help us all take back our health one step at a time. Mark, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here in Brooklyn. So I'd love to go back in time and start. You have an incredible health journey. You're not just a doctor who practices on other people. You practice on yourself. I do.

It's how I learn everything.

So let's start. You had a serious health challenge years ago, and I want to catch up about the health challenge you just overcame. But take us back.

Yeah. So I've been interested in health my whole life, ever since I visited my sister at Amherst College when I was 15 and went to the veggie room and I discovered chunky peanut butter and whole wheat bread and honey. And so I started eating healthy. I ran pretty much every day as I was a teenager. And then I started yoga in 1979 when it was crazy and weird and odd, and became a yoga teacher before I became a doctor and studied integrative health and global health, healing systems and Chinese medicine when I was in college. So I was thinking about this, and I lived with a nutrition student who was a PhD student who studied fiber in the gut flora. So all this was sort of running around my head and reading books about it. And then I went to medical school.

And throw out all this nutrition.

You know, I was like, I got a little brainwashed, but I still had that thread inside of me and really always took care of myself, ate well, exercised, never had junk food. And then because I spoke Chinese and studied, you know, Asian studies in college, I was very interested in the east and China, and I got an opportunity to go work there for a year and ended up living in this hotel in Beijing which was polluted, it was the winter, and there's over 10 million people at the time who were heating their homes with raw coal. So the air was black even on a sunny day, completely, you know, terrible. You have to wear a gas mask to literally live in that city. And someone told me to get an air filter because the air was bad. So I did, and stupidly, I cleaned it out every day and took it to the window and banged out all the dust. And it was basically thick, black coal dust, which was full of mercury and didn't know it. And got home, was doing okay, worked in the ER, but really stressful. I mean, really stressful, working 15 shifts all night long, not sleeping much, raising two kids, difficult marriage, and. And then I went up to Maine for a summer and got some weird intestinal infection and My gut just went crazy. And then everything collapsed. Basically my whole system collapsed. And it took me a long time to figure it out. And I learned that I had mercury poisoning, which is sort of extraordinary high levels of mercury. And it affected every system of my body. It affected my gut, led to chronic diarrhea, and I developed rashes, allergies, all kinds of stuff I'd never had before. I developed autoimmunity. I developed liver function problems. My muscles were damaged. They were. The muscles were seriously, like, damaged and had muscle enzymes very elevated. I couldn't really focus. I couldn't think. I couldn't remember anything. I couldn't sleep. I was like. I was depressed. I couldn't function. And slowly I began to understand what was going on.

And the mercury went on for a while?

Yeah, it went on for years and years and years because there was nobody helping me at the time. And I had to literally, you know, sort of cell by cell, reverse engineer what happened. And how to reset my hormones, how to regulate my immune system, how to detoxify, how to help my mitochondria, how to, you know, rebuild my whole system. And that was really, really where I discovered functional medicine. And that journey led me to fix myself and I started helping patients. As I was going through this, I started applying the learnings I had of myself to my patients, and they started getting better. And I'm like, wow. You know, I would. I didn't quite believe it because, you know, I wasn't getting better that fast because I had such a deep problem. And some of my patients would get better very quickly. I call them up after a few weeks. How you doing? You change your diet? Oh, my lifelong migraines are gone. My joints don't hurt anymore. I've lost 15 pounds. My irritable bowel is gone. I'm like, really? Because I didn't believe it because I didn't learn that in medical school. And so the power of this model of thinking about disease, which is really looking at root causes, it's looking at the body as a system. Instead of asking, what disease do you have? We want to know, why do you have it? How do you restore balance? It's really the science. Science of creating health. I was able to reverse engineer what was wrong with me and also to create abundant health.

So you discover this at a young age, and this is the birth of functional medicine. You start to incorporate this in your practice. And then before I come back, I want to fast forward to today. So, you know, a lot of people don't know, you had another health scare, and I want to talk to you about that. And I did what that was like.

Yeah. No, I mean, last summer, I was, you know, feeling pretty healthy, exercising, riding my bike 50 miles a day.

And you're like, 57, going on, like, 35. Something. Like, if you look at Mark and you're like, this guy's healthy. Like, he's the picture of health now.

But I didn't look so good early this year. I had a perfect storm of insults. I discovered my 120-year-old barn was infested with mold, which I'd been living in, and had a cough and had to completely remediate my home and remodel it.

So you're coughing and you're like, what's going on?

Yeah. Yeah. And I figured it out. But I had been living in it already for a bunch of years, and I realized I had mold exposure for years that I didn't pay attention to. And then I had a root canal earlier in the year, and it went bad, and I had to get the tooth removed, and the dentist said it was infected. I had to take an antibiotic, which probably shouldn't have, but it was one that tends to cause an infection in the gut called C. Diff, or C. Difficile, which kills thousands of people every year. And then I seemed okay, and I went to. I was a little tired, but I went to New Zealand to go traveling with my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, and.

Congratulations.

Thank you. And we. We rode horses, and the horse spooked and tripped, literally fell over. I've never been on a horse that fell over before. And I jumped off and broke my arm. And so was all these traumas that happened. And I came back, and my gut just went crazy. And I developed C. Diff in and out of the hospital. Then it will turn into colitis, then internal gastritis. I was in 24, seven, pain. I lost 25 pounds. If anybody knows me, I'm already thin. I'm already a skinny dude. So, you know, I'm 6 foot 3, 180, and I went down to 158, and it couldn't function. I couldn't work. I couldn't answer an email. I couldn't answer a text. I could basically eat, sleep, go to the bathroom and watch Netflix.

Right.

A little hbo. Go here and there.

Okay.

And it was tough. And I. I had to use. You know, I had to. In the fog of being sick, I had to try to think about what was going on. I consulted many Doctors and I saw specialists, and I saw. I had, you know, in and out of the hospital. I had tests. I thought I had cancer. It was really a frightening moment.

Yeah. What does the guy do who usually has all the answers when you don't?

Right. Well, I knew what to think about. I knew it was happening. So I was in this catabolic state. Total body breakdown. My arm was broken. It was just my whole system was in this state of acute inflammation. And I couldn't break it. I really couldn't break it. And I was able to get my gut a little better using functional medicine, but it just wasn't enough to get me back to work. And I began thinking about all the patients I've had and all the tools that I've used over the years. And one of the things that could be helpful and how do I hit the reset button on my immune system? How do I, you know, use the nuclear option and so stop this fussing around with diet and supplements. So I. And I was sort of shocked what I found. I, you know, I put together my own plan, which was intravenous ozone, which is very experimental. And.

Yeah. Talk to people about what that is.

Yeah. So people think of the ozone layer and how we use aerosol cans and how that destroys the ozone layer. But ozone is produced when, for example, lightning happens. You get that smell after lightning and the rain. That's ozone. And it's O3 instead of O2. It's a very volatile gas, and it's a powerful oxidant. We think we should be eating antioxidants. Yes, but we also need oxidants. In fact, our white blood cells kill infections using oxidants. They release hydrogen peroxide. They have chlorine chloride, hypochlorite. They actually produce ozone. Even so, your white blood cells are using oxidants to kill bacteria, but the immune system gets overwhelmed and can't really do the job of killing infections. I found I had Babesia as well, which is a tick infection that I got probably from living in the Berkshires. And I had this perfect storm. And the ozone seems to help kill infections. It helps. Seems to boost your immune system. It increases your antioxidant enzymes. It may increase stem cell production. So I just heard the stories of my patients over the years as this is a modality to help them when they had these chronic issues. And I also knew about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is where you go in a tank, like if you have scuba diving illness called the bends or nitrogen illness, you basically go in this thing and they pressurize the tank to below sea level, probably one or two atmospheres below. And they pump in 100% oxygen. And that hyper oxygenates your tissues. And oxygen is also very toxic too. Infections and bugs and helps increase circulation, brain function. And I also did a lot of intravenous nutrients like vitamin C, high dose and glutathione. And within two days of the ozone, I started feeling better within a week.

So just what is that therapy? Like you're getting a shot, like explain to people what that is. What is this?

There's three different major types that are intravenous and then there's applications through rectal ozone and other things. But the traditional type has been called mah or major autohemotherapy, which is essentially taking a catheter, putting it in your vein. You put the bottle of glass bottle on the floor, it drains into the bottle, your blood. About 200cc is a cup of blood. You stick ozone in it and then you hang it up and you let it drip in. Takes about an hour. There's another kind called 10 pass, which is a hyperbaric ozone therapy where they essentially, under pressure, push ozone into your system through the blood. So it's the same idea. You, you take a catheter and you take the blood out into this bottle, but it's by a vacuum, so it's vacuumed out. And then you inject ozone into the bottle of blood with oxygen and then you, under pressure, push it back in and you do that 10 times if you can get it. And then there's direct iv, which is very controversial and many people think it's dangerous. It's actually what I had where you inject direct ozone and oxygen gas into your vein, like a 50cc syringe or full of gas. And I did that twice a day.

Wow.

And it was the thing that really shifted.

What does it feel like after you do it? Are you a little like.

Well, you know, I mean, initially you might cough and feel a little chest pressure, a little out of it for a bit, and then it lifts and you feel better. And after a while it felt like being on crack, but without all the side effects.

Right. And so what type of. It's just this is like real cutting edge stuff. I think people are interested in, like, who should explore this type of therapy.

Well, I think, I think it's, you know, still needs a lot of research to be done on it. There's a lot of work done in Italy and Spain and Cuba, Russia, and it's been used in Germany extensively In fact, I talked to a physician from Harvard the other day who runs a Lyme clinic there and she sends patients to Europe to do ozone therapy because it's so effective when drugs don't work. So I think people who are chronically ill have tried everything and don't get better with chronic tick infections, chronic fatigue. We're thinking about doing a trial at Cleveland Clinic on this. So I think we, we really have to look at, you know, how do we test, test this, how do we study it and how do we actually show that it works? Because I think there's, there's very little sort of awareness in America about this therapy. And I think it's potentially a very powerful therapy.

So for you it was ozone and.

Hyperbaric chamber and IVs.

And IVs.

And you know, high dose vitamin C, which is also anti microbial and, and also I did stem cells.

Yeah, talk to us about that too.

So partly that was for my arm, which wasn't healing cause I was in such a breakdown state and I, I had my own fat cells and I had my own bone marrow cells taken out and then injected into my blood and as well as, as my arm. And it, I don't know if that was part of it, but I think I just did a blitzkrieg and nuclear option and it worked.

Which arm is it, the left or the right? I'm looking to see if there are any differences.

No, my left arm, you can't tell now.

Oh, wow. It does look like it has a little bit superhuman strength.

No, no, no. My left arm has a wedding ring.

And so, and so couple days you start to feel significantly better.

It was shocking. I mean, I already had done all the basic stuff, I already cleaned up my, I already had a great diet already was all taking all the nutrients I needed, all the probiotics, everything was, I was sort of prepped. It wasn't like I went from having a crappy, awful diet and terrible lifestyle to, you know, better without sure putting that foundation down. So that foundation is really important. And, and then this really had dramatic impact. And I interviewed a lot of people when I was in the office and many people had dramatic experiences getting better. Not everybody, but I think it was impressive.

So you went from like lying down, couldn't get up, and you feel great today?

Yeah, no, yeah, I just ride my bike, you know, 30 miles. I played tennis for an hour, was swimming, did hot yoga yesterday, you know, just. Yeah, I went for a run in Brooklyn this morning.

And so nutrition. I want to talk about that like, in that. In that process, like, did your protocol with diet change or. No, I couldn't eat.

I mean, I was. I was. You know, I'm. I complete nausea all the time, severe stomach pain, and so I just ate very simply. And I Like, you know, chicken vegetable soup. I went. Had tried to gain some weight. I had Kitchari, which is rice and ghee and some beans. You know, no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar, no processed food, which I don't usually much anyway, although I drink alcohol from time to time, and I just try to get enough calories in. And in fact, in order to gain weight, I worked on principle. My old book was Eat Fat, Get Thin. So I was like, eat carbs, get fat. And it worked. I ate rice, spice, sweet potatoes. I just carved up, and I was.

Able to gain a little weight, then become more lethargic.

Yeah, I mean, I ate good carbs, but it's still. It's like, you know, you eat the starch and your body can start. And then I got a little. So I got little love handles, and I can have my stem cells. And then I stopped eating that, and boom. And they just went away, you know.

So you mentioned your book, which is an incredible book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, which everyone has to pick up, if you haven't already. Let's talk about fat and where we are today and how nutrition has evolved and how fat has evolved.

Well, I just got back from giving a lecture at the annual heart summit. The Arkansas Heart Hospital, which is one of the top heart hospitals in the world because they have so much heart disease, because it's the number one obese state in the nation.

Wow.

And I thought, you know, gosh, I'm going to be talking about fat, and saturated fat's not so bad. And, you know, these are. I mean, the American Heart association, the American College of Cardiology, recommend that we cut our saturated fat to less than 5% of calories and that we eat a lot of vegetable oil, refined vegetable oils, which is probably the worst advice that any organization can give. And I thought, this is what they're gonna follow down there. And they didn't. They were like, the head of cardiac surgery was on a ketogenic diet. I'm like, what? And they were recommending very low carbohydrate diets, higher fat, low carb diets to their patients and cardiac rehab and in bariatric surgery. And I was just sort of stunned about it. And they were like, well, you know, we don't think the whole statin thing is Right. We don't believe in the whole LDL hypothesis of cholesterol. I'm like, wow. I mean, I was just sort of shocked. And I same thing happened at Cleveland. I went to the top cardiac guy there, Steve Nissen, who's world famous and leading researcher, and I said sheepishly, here's my book. You know, I just want to let you know, I know this is the number one heart hospital in the world and I'm writing about fat. And you know, he's like, mark, what are you talking about? We got the whole story wrong on fat. In fact, I think we got the story wrong on saturated fat. In fact, this is how I eat. And look at me. And he's thin and healthy. I think the tide's changing and there's still holdouts who believe that we should be eating a low fat diet, that that's the best way to reverse heart disease. But the evidence just is not there. In fact, it's not just my opinion. The US Dietary Guidelines in 2015 reversed 30 plus years, 35 years of advice which told us to eat low fat. I said, sorry, we got it wrong on fat. You don't have to restrict fat in any way except saturated fat, which I think is a mistake. And two, by the way, cholesterol. We told you to eat those egg white omelets and avoid shrimp because they're full of cholesterol. Well, that has nothing to do with heart disease. And sorry, guys, but it's no longer a nutrient of concern. So that's from sort of the national guidelines, which have challenges but are still. The evidence is just overwhelming.

Sure. So it doesn't mean, though, that people should just run out and eat, you know, a pound of bacon every meal. I think, and I think there's a misconception there. Like, how should people. Like, what does that mean?

Like, I think, I think, I think we shouldn't be afraid of it. But it's not our. It's not our staple. Right. You shouldn't be eating sticks of butter and pounding down the coconut oil all day long. I think, you know, when you think about it, it's actually, I mentioned this before, but you know, the government, I mean, guidelines are to eat less saturated fat, about 10%. The American College of Cardiology is 5%. Breast milk is 25% saturated fat. Does that mean we should ban breastfeeding? I think if nature designed us to consume that much saturated fat at birth to help us develop our brains and develop our hormones and our immune system and our whole body. I mean, there's something to think about in there. And when you look at the evidence on saturated fat, it's pretty shaky. It's a lot of it's observational, which means they look at populations, they see what people eat, they try to do correlations, but correlation is not causation. Sure, right. It doesn't mean that. In other words, I could do a study of 55 year old women who had sex and I would conclude that sex never leads to pregnancy. It's true in that age group, but it's not true. Right. So we can be misled. You know, I just, you know, looked at a sort of study that showed that people who are vegetarian did better in this large cohort of people. Physicians, health study, nurses health study. But the truth is that it's the healthy user effect. If you look at people who are vegetarians, they're health conscious. There's coke and chips, vegetarian. But most people are more health conscious. They exercise more, they're thinner, they have better lives, they don't smoke, they don't have a lot of bad habits. Whereas the people who aren't just didn't care about themselves. So the meat eaters smoked more, drank more, ate less fruits and vegetables. So you can say yeah, the people who are vegetarians were healthier, but what's the context of the population? We call this confounding factors. And I looked at a study where they did 11,000 people who shopped at health food stores. Half were vegetarian, half were meat eaters who were eating meat in the context of a healthy diet, who were probably eating more grass fed meat. And there was no difference between them. In fact, both of them had their risk of death cut in half. So it's really the context, it's compared to what? And I think interventional studies with saturated fat are impressive. You see, people change their biology. Their good cholesterol goes up, their triglycerides go down, inflammation goes down, their muscle mass goes up. So very, very low carb ketogenic type diets, they increase muscle mass, they decrease body fat, they decrease belly fat. So all these things are measurable when you intervene in a patient or a patient population. And that's much better than these population studies. So it's like experimenting with people and see what happens.

Sure. Well, one thing so I was mentioning earlier, my wife and I have bulletproof every morning we have the MCT oil, grass fed butter. We end up doing intermittent fasting, not eating until lunch, like assuming that's okay, right? Yeah, I think as long as everything else is fine.

But here's what I would say.

I'm not gonna have bacon for lunch.

And bacon for lunch. I mean, by the way, that study about meat causing cancer, and particularly was processed meat like bacon, you know, it was like this dramatic increase, like 30% increase or whatever it was in cancer risk, or 25% increase. What that means is that if you have four pieces of bacon every day your whole life, which I certainly don't recommend, your risk of colon cancer would go from 5% to 6%.

Wow.

That's a 20% increase, right? Sounds bad, 20% increase, but it's just a very low amount of increase. And yeah, you probably shouldn't eat a ton of processed meat, but I think if you, if you have your bulletproof and you're fine, check your numbers. Everybody's different. I think this whole idea that everybody's the same, needs the same diet, it's just nonsense. Different people thrive in different ways. And there's going to be genetic testing, which you'll be able to sort of check and see what you should be eating and what you shouldn't be eating.

So what are the new numbers? You know, if cholesterol is outdated, like, what if we go to a doctor who's. Who's not you, you know, not a function, you know, top, top of the game, functional medicine doctor. And you say, okay, doc, here are the tests I want. I don't want these tests. I don't give a shit about them. Like, here are the five tests I want. What are they?

Well, the funny thing is when you go to the doctor and you get your checkup, they do basic blood count and metabolic panel and a lipid panel. And unless you're dying, you know, your. Your numbers, or you're really sick in the hospital, those numbers don't change. You're severely anemic, or you have electrolyte imbalances, or you have kidney failure or renal failure. Those are the things that those tests show. And the blood count, you know, you could have a little bit of anemia. It would be helpful to check, but it's not really that much of a benefit. When looking at, are you healthy? Right. Should you be in the hospital? Yes or no? Okay. I can tell you that cholesterol, the panel they do is pretty outdated. It should be. It should be completely replaced by looking at the quality of the cholesterol, which means looking at it through an MRI machine. It's called NMR cholesterol testing or something called cardio IQ. They're done by Quest and LabCorp, and they look at the size of the particles, the number of the particles, the kind of triglycerides you have, the kind of HDL you have, and those matter. And most of the heart disease we have in this country is caused by what we call atherogenic dyslipidemia. That means you have high triglycerides that are big, fluffy ones. You have low HDL, which is small, dense HDL, not even good HDL. And you have small LDL, so you could have a cholesterol of 150. It sounds great. But if your triglycerides are 300 and your HDL is 30, I'm far more concerned than if your cholesterol is 300 and your HDL is 100 and your triglycerides are 50. Right. So I think, I think we have to look more sophisticated in a sophisticated way at the cold lipid issue and cholesterol issue. And there's a lot of heterogeneity. Some people have genetics that make them more sensitive to saturated fat or maybe they should be having more carbohydrates. But it's really unique to each individual. I mean, I've seen people switch from high carb diet to, and I mean sugar, starch, even grains and beans actually to a higher fat diet. Good quality fats and their numbers all dramatically improve. You see large, fluffy cholesterol particles. Coconut oil raises the ldl. Yes. But the LDL isn't the worst thing in the world. It's there for a reason. And it's light and fluffy. When you get coconut oil, the HDL goes up even more and the triglycerides go down. So your overall ratios get all better.

So coconut oil is okay?

Yes. Okay.

Avocado is okay. Avocados, as long as avocados are okay, I'm on board.

Avocados are okay. Nuts and seeds are okay. Olive oil, extra virgin olive oil is okay. Grass fed meats are okay. Grass fed, butter, ghee, grass fed, all those are fine.

But this doesn't mean your diet should be 100%.

No.

And talk to me about. You defined this word. I think it was pegan.

I came up with that with you.

Yeah, talk about that.

That was kind of funny because I was sitting on a panel with Joel Kahn, who's a vegan cardiologist, and Frank Lippin, who's more on the paleo side. And they were going at it and I'm like, God, you guys, if you're vegan and you're paleo, I must be pegan. And then I kind of went home and wrote an article about it and it was like stuck. And then people wrote books about it and it was articles written in all sorts of newspapers about it and people came up with some products related to it. I thought it was hysterical. And essentially it's just common sense. It's like, okay, we should be eating a very high plant based diet. We should be eating very low glycemic diet which means low starch and low sugar, which can be even grains and beans. I mean there's some vegans who recommend eating two cups of grains and cups and cups of beans. I think that's problematic if you have a tendency towards prediabetes, which about half or three quarters of the population does.

Sure. Or if you have gas.

Well, that's that. Yeah, that's another thing. But it should be high in quality fats, things like we mentioned olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, grass fed meats, whole pasture raised eggs and so forth. And it should be very low in anything processed. You want to eat food in its natural state. I mean, I always say, you know, if something has a barcode, a label or an ingredient list, you probably don't want to eat it. I mean an avocado doesn't have an ingredient list. An almond doesn't have a nutrition facts label and you know, an egg doesn't have a barcode on it. It's just food. And I think we also want to avoid toxins in our food when we can, which is from pesticides and glyphosate in our food and GMO foods which are problematic for many, as well as pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones that are used in factory farming of animals, which is horrific. So we can reduce all those things we can eat. Quality food and protein is a question for a lot of people. There's good quality vegan proteins, there's grass fed meats and it's, you know, we don't need a ton of protein. It's not like we should be eating huge amounts. But we, most of us probably need, you know, one, we need more than we thought we needed, which was 0.8 grams per kilo. We need about 1 to 1.2 depending on what we do and how active we are. But I think, you know, it's important to think about just balance. And there's questions. There's dairy questions. Is dairy healthy or not? There's questions about grains and beans and lectins.

Where are you on dairy lectins? Our friend, Mr. Gundry.

Yeah, yeah, Dr. Gundry, there's some controversies around some of these issues, but most vegans and paleo agree on the same principles. Whole food, real food, low toxins, no processed food. You know, plant foods are important. And then, you know, you get into gray zones like dairy and meat and then grains and beans. Those are the big flashpoints in nutrition.

So where are you on dairy these days?

You know, I think that I've written a lot about this. One article was called six Reasons to Avoid Dairy at All Costs, which I encourage you to read. Another one was called Got Proof? Which is, you know, is milk really healthy? And I think the FTC came down against the dairy industry, which by the way, was supported by our government and tremendous amount of government funds to create a campaign for Americans to consume more milk.

Sure.

And, you know, those mustache ads and all those things, there was just no evidence that, that, that's true. And I think there's been more and more research on the challenges with dairy in terms of increasing cancer risk, in terms of creating autoimmunity like type 1 diabetes, in contributing to bone loss. And especially like, you know, when you have skim milk, it just, it's, it's, there's no adequate satiety. These kids get fatter on, on milk. And, and also, you know, there's concerns about its contribution to autism and gut issues and allergies and eczema and asthma. And, you know, when you think about the gut, it's, you know, this, this new molecule called casein, which is an, a different form of it, this used in dairy production now it's from hybridization of the cows. So you're not eating the dairy that your great grandparents ate, which was all heirloom, all grass fed, all organic. There wasn't anything else. And so these are starting to create issues for people. Plus, you know, 75% of the world is lactose intolerant. It's abnormal to be lactose tolerant. It's mostly northern Europeans.

I was going to say, do you buy into the northern versus southern European dairy? Sure.

I think just check with people. I mean, I test people's genetics. You see the lactose intolerance gene very frequently. Frequently. And I think people will know what. When they have a problem.

Sure. So something you mentioned earlier, ketosis. Talk to us about that. A lot of exciting.

So, you know, you know, when, when we, you know, look at nutrition, I mean, there's, there's just foundational healthy nutrition, which I think most people can agree on the basics, but then there's therapeutic nutrition, which is how do you treat diseases with Food. Because food is medicine. And I know you created this great new course, the Mind BodyGreen Advanced Functional Nutrition Program, which I'm part of.

And everyone has to buy back to that.

Yeah. Which I'm part of. This is really important. But there's a whole concept of food as medicine, as a drug, as a therapeutic agent. In fact, in functional medicine, it is the main drug. It's the main thing we use, and it's curative or reparative for most people. And what we're exploring now is this whole field of ketogenic diets as a therapeutic tool. So it's been around for a long time. It's used in epilepsy when none of the drugs work. We use ketogenic diets to stop these kids having epilepsy. My health coach at Cleveland Clinic, she came to me and said her brother was 12, is autistic and was having 12 seizures a day, and she put him on a ketogenic diet, and they went away just like that.

Wow.

And that's been well established, and now we're seeing it in, for example, brain cancer, in autism, in Alzheimer's disease. There's research going on in diabetes. There's a company called Virta that started an online digital ketogenic diet program for type 2 diabetics, reversing 75% of diabetes, getting off the medications, normal blood sugars. So I think this is a very powerful tool. And it's interesting that the brain seems to work better on ketones. They also are a different fuel that helps speed up your metabolism. They may be related to why animals who are calorie restricted live longer because it stimulates mitochondrial function and mitochondrial regrowth and rebuilding. So I think there's a lot of amazing research now emerging around ketogenic diets.

Explain to people briefly who maybe not familiar, like what it is.

Yeah, sure.

So I think there's a lot of misconceptions, too. People like, oh, wow, it's just bacon all day, and.

No, it's why. You know, it's why people who did Atkins had bad breath. But I think when you look at ketogenic diets, your body can either burn carbohydrates as fuel or it can burn fat as fuel. And most of us burn carbohydrates through this process called glucose oxidation. But there's fat oxidation that can be done as well. And so your mitochondria can burn fat. And it seems to me that they work better on fat. In fact, a friend of mine, the guy I went to college with, At Cornell, it was a nutrition student, became a professor at University of Buffalo studying exercise physiology. And he was studying the mitochondria. And he told me, mark, we used to think that people who wanted to be athletes should carb load. Now we realize they should fat load. That the fat run much better on mitochondria. Boosting the mitochondria work better on fat. In fact, I just heard of a guy who was an Everest guide and summited Everest many times, but had to use oxygen. And he never could summit without oxygen. And he was using all these high carb gels and goos and carb loading and he decided to go ketogenic. And this guy was super fit to start with, but he was able to summit without oxygen on a ketogenic diet. When you think about it, you've got 2,500 calories of glycogen of carbs stored in your muscle. And if you're doing endurance exercise, you're going to run through that pretty quick, whereas you probably have 40 or 50,000 calories of fat in your body that you can mobilize. So it's a challenge, though. You can't just do it automatically. You actually have to switch from carb.

Burning to fat burning and something you mentioned before, two things which, which happens when life happens. Processed foods and alcohol. And so what do you do? You know, processed foods have to have. You know, I travel a lot. You know, I can bring nuts, I can bring all that stuff, but, you know, bars have to happen and then alcohol happens. So what are your advice?

Well, I have a whole piece I've written on your emergency food pack, your travel pack, and I did a video on. It's on my website, drhyman.com and it's kind of goofy and funny, but I go through, like, what I do, and it's real. I live this life. I travel on the road. I mean, I was just flying from Little Rock, Arkansas, where there was no edible substances to be found.

Did I ever tell you when Colleen, my wife, went there for Walmart, she went out to eat and they said at the time she was a vegetarian. Not anymore. They said, we know you're vegetarian. So we ordered you a turkey sandwich.

Is that supposed to be vegetarian? Turkeys are vegetarians. That makes sense. So, yeah, so I, you know, I've, you know, really written a lot about this and thought about it. But I bring food with me, so I bring nuts, like cashews or almonds. I'll bring nut butters and packets. I like Artisana Cashew butter, walnut butter, almond butter. And also I bring bison bars that are meat bars that are from bison and which are all grass fed. And they're small little bars. I put them in my, in my bag and you know, I experiment with different bars, but I only eat ones that have food in them if they have a whole list of ingredients.

Which ones do you like?

Most of them are pretty sweet. That's the challenging thing. So I tend to sort of avoid them. But you know, some of the kind bars have less than 5 grams of sugar. I'll go for that in a pinch. You know, I also carry with me cans of wild salmon or sardines. They don't make me too popular when I'm in my office, but sardines, yeah.

Must be a popular guy.

I know jerky is awesome. Awesome. You can get grass fed jerkies. Turkey, you can get fish jerky, you can get grass fed beef jerky. Those are really great portable foods.

Go ahead.

No, I just make sure I have at least a day's worth of food in my bag whenever I'm traveling. I have food in my desk in my office. I have food in my desk at work, at Cleveland Clinic. And I have food in my bag here as well. Just in case you guys didn't female it.

Go through your bag. What about alcohol?

What about it?

Do you bring that with you too?

No, I do not. I don't have a flask. I don't do that. There's a lot of interesting research on alcohol and there seems to be a U shaped curve where a little bit's good and a little more is really bad. So just because one glass is good doesn't mean two is better. In fact, it may be worse than nothing at all. And so I tend to look at one sugar in this alcohol. So wine is high, beer is. Someone said it's like seven slices of bread having a glass of beer. I don't know if that's true, but it's a lot of carbs. So I stick more to very low, allergenic, sort of gluten free.

It's like you're dry.

Tequila.

Oh, tequila. All right, now we're talking.

Tequila, Mezcal. There's some great stuff out. German bolt is a great name. Mezcal with, with damiana, which is a calming herb. I like good tequila so it gets expensive, so I just have a little bit.

What's your favorite good tequila? Dr. Hyman approved tequila.

This is expensive. It's not for everybody. I, I, I microdose it. It's a Don Julio, 1942.

Oh wow, that. Well, when you say 1942, that sounds.

Expensive, but yeah, that's not how much it cost.

So. Tequila, mezcal, dry red wine. Stay away from the.

You have to be careful with some of the wines. I've been seeing patients who drink a lot of wine. They have high levels of arsenic because they grow them on pressure treated lumber and particularly in America.

Oh, interesting. So like, what has you excited right now? The world is evolving. You know, what's like, where is nutrition going? Where is wellness going? What has you excited? And the flip side, what keeps you up at night? What, what is going the wrong way? What's going the right way and the wrong way?

Well, I'm really excited by what I call the convergence, which is within the next few years going to revolutionize medicine and science and teach us things that we just never knew about, how to create scientific wellness. What is wellness? How do we define it? What is going on? And there's a number of companies that are innovating in the space of scientific wellness, including Craig Venter with human Nucleus looking at, you know, testing thousands of biomarkers, your genome, microbiome, metabolome. Viome also is a new startup that's looking at how do we test the same things. And arivale, which is a derivative of the Institute for Systems Biology. Leroy Hood, who was the guy who discovered the machine that decoded the human genome. These guys are smart dudes and they're all looking at these biomarkers and these patterns, these extensive big data sets, this complex dynamic big data that's going to actually help inform what's going on right now. It's just information, it's not knowledge. And they've hired functional medicine doctors to help them interpret what to do and recommendations to give. So that's all going to happen. So you've got all this data from personalized medicine, from your genome. Metabolome, microbiome, proteome, transcriptome, nutrigenome, all this stuff, right?

Gnomes.

All these gnomes, yeah, the metabolome of your microbiome. That's the thing that's gotten me really thinking lately because to take a digression, people talk about the microbiome. What that means is you've got 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells. You've got a hundred times as much bacterial DNA as your own DNA. You've got 20,000 genes. There may be 2 or 3 million genes in the bacteria that live in you. And those genes do what? They produce proteins, one of Those proteins do. They get absorbed in your body and then they affect your biochemistry, they affect your metabolism, they affect your brain function, they affect everything. So the metabolome of your microbiome is fascinating and we're just starting to look at that. And that's a huge area of research that no one's really dug into.

So where are we going to be in like five years?

So this convergence is, you know, the sort of omics, right? Personalized medicine, the quantified self, which is measuring all of our real time numbers as we go around. You can measure your blood glucose through a contact lens or through a little thing on your skin. And we're going to get more sophisticated about that. It is artificial intelligence, which take all this big data and all the omics and personalized medicine and then make sense of it. Look at machine learning and artificial intelligence will help us to actually decipher this and then filtering that through the other big advance, which is this idea of systems biology, functional medicine. How do we interpret the data? What are the laws that are governing all these dynamic interactions? And how do we make sense of it and apply that when that happens? I mean, Google's trying to figure this out and you've got all these startups trying to figure it out. You've got Amazon 1492, you know, discovery, looking at the same thing. So this is happening and it's super exciting and I think it's going to inform the whole idea of scientific wellness and how we create wellness. So that's, that's kind of cool stuff.

So one thing that probably doesn't make.

Sense to anybody, but it's happening. And I just, I sense that, you know, the body is so dynamic, so complex, and it's so beyond the average doctor's capacity to actually think about it, that they're just in this rote of disease, drug, disease, drug, which it's just so, so outdated.

So what about stress?

What about it? I'm going to go do yoga right now. Where's that going?

And how do we measure? You know, we talk about measuring stuff and measuring stuff. Like what?

I think we're in trouble. Like, I think the level of stress in people's lives, the benefits and the curses of our connected digital world are really present for everybody. I mean, you know, think about it. The average person spends two hours on the Internet. What did you do with that? Two hours before you took a walk, you, you did yoga, you talked to a friend. I mean, the amount of social disruption and the disconnection and the loneliness and isolation is Huge. And the amount we're expected to do, to produce, to actually perform is really unreasonable. And I think, you know, we have to sort of start to look at how do we. How do we redesign life? It was exciting. And now we go, wait a minute. You know, like, digital detoxes are drop. Are rising all over the place where people have to put their phones away and, you know, just be together.

So I want to circle back. We have this amazing nutrition program that we just shot with you. So talk to. Talk to people about what you're going to talk about in the program and why everyone has to pick it up.

Well, the overarching theme is that, you know, in healthcare, we pretty much ignore nutrition, and yet the most powerful drug is food. And it has the power to optimize tens of thousands of genes, to improve the function of tens of thousands of protein networks, to balance your hormones, to optimize your immune system, to even improve your gut microbiome. With every single bite of food. It works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug that's available to almost everybody on the planet. And yet, as healthcare system, we don't use it. And this is what we're doing at Cleveland Clinic. We're implementing food as medicine trials, research trials, and having extraordinary results, I think outcomes that they're all shocked about because it's such a good drug. And so this course is going to focus on how to use food as medicine and deal with the other factors that are driving autoimmune disease, which is an increasing epidemic. I mean, it's the number one disease collectively, when you add them all together, it's over 80 million Americans. And then, of course, I'm doing a course on the brain because most of our brains are challenged. We're not focused. We can't remember. We're tired. We have brain fog. And we have more serious issues like depression, depression, dementia, and ADD and autism. These are serious brain disorders. And so how do we think about those differently? How do we use the science of functional medicine to actually help navigate, find the causes, and how do we restore health and balance? And so I'm really excited for people to be empowered with the knowledge of how to do this for themselves, because I believe that, you know, we have to make ourselves obsolete as doctors. We. We may be needed for acute injury or for surgery or for specific things, but most of the stuff we deal with now is just. It's just gonna go away if we actually understand how to create health.

Amen to that. So, last question. If you could go back in time to you know, early Dr. Mark Hyman in his 20s. What advice would you give yourself back then?

I think I've been pretty good at this. But the advice I would give is show up, be present, be yourself, be authentic, and don't worry, because it all turns out. Rule number six is everything always works out.

I like that.

So if you start with that, you don't need to. Rule 1 to 5.

Thank you so much.

Sure. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.