1075 How Food Heals or Harms Your Body, Aging & Mental Health w/Dr. Mark Hyman

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I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders often caused by the food we're eating.

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

Oh, that's not hard. So.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Shonda Rhimes said, you can't say yes to everything and not say yes to taking care of yourself. And Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the first wealth is health. My guest today is my good friend Dr. Mark Hyman who has written many new York Times best selling books. And we've had Mark on a few times in the past because every episode he has on here is extremely powerful and insightful. And Mark is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator and advocate in the field of functional medicine. And today we talk about Mark's new book, the Pegan Diet. And and these are 21 practical principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confused world, which was written to provide clarity in a world of 100 conflicting diet philosophies and to address the frightening burden of chronic disease and obesity that we face. In this episode, we discuss the foods you should avoid to better your mental health. What the Pagan diet is and what it consists of, how food can actually act as medicine, what Mark believes is the key to anti aging and all the different things he's doing for anti aging, what insulin resistance is and how we can either prevent it or treat it, the seven systems of functional medicine and why Mark is an advocate for it. And I want you to share this with someone who needs to hear it because there's a lot of people in the world who, even if they feel like they look healthy, they might be doing things internally to themselves with the food they ate, the habits they have, their sleep patterns, their thoughts, all these different things that could be hurting them long term. So make sure to share this with a friend that you want to see live a long, healthy, happy life. Lewishouse.com 1075 you can send them that link or just copy and paste wherever you're listening to this episode right now. And also if this is your first time here, welcome to the School of Greatness. Very excited. Make sure to click that subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts right now or over on Spotify. And in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome everyone, back to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about my guest. Dr. Mark Hyman is in the house, one of the most recognized functional medicine doctors in the world and a good friend. Mark, good to see you, my man.

Good to see you too, Louis. How you been?

I'm doing good and I'm always grateful when you come on because so many people have confusion around diet, nutrition, disease, chronic, chronic illness, and there's so much information out there and it seems a little overwhelming at times. I bring on different people who share different facts and data and research as well. So sometimes I'm confused, even though there seems to come to a consensus that if you have whole foods, you sleep well, you move your body, you let go of stress that takes care of a lot of challenges in life. I'm oversimplifying it, but I'm curious, is there with a lot of the mental stress and depression and anxiety that has been overwhelming, especially in the last year, how much does food play a part with mental health in your mind?

Absolutely. You know, Louis, we are in a mental health crisis, we are in a immune crisis, we are in a food crisis, we are in a social crisis that is sort of likes of which I don't think we've seen in our lifetime. Maybe back in the 60s, it was a little bit riotous. I was around then, but I was like 8. And I think what's happened is that we've gotten so confused about what to eat and our diet has changed so much that it's driving so many chronic diseases. And most people don't understand the connection between food and mood. So to your question, how does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called the Ultra Mind Solution about how the body affects the mind. We often know about the mind body effect, which is real, but there's also the other direction going on. And it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood, behavior, attention, memory. And this is not just sort of hypothetical, but there's a whole department, for example, at Harvard of nutritional psychiatry. There's a whole department at Stanford of metabolic psychiatry. I've had both of them on my podcast, the Doctors Pharmacy. The doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain and the mood. And we see depression, anxiety, irritability, stress. It turns out that when you eat the American diet, otherwise known as a sad diet, a standard American diet, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. You know, when you cut yourself and you get an infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, predominantly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients, additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our Diet, I mean 95% of us are deficient probably in omega 3 fats. You know, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play a role in mood like folate, magnesium is credible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues, you know, that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And the clinical trials have been really staggering, showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders, often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example, when you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone, your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber toothed tiger.

Wow.

And, and that, and that can create.

Anxiety internally with the insulin internally.

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

So what happens to the brain when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it goes into your gut, does it send signals to your brain? And then it starts to, you know, what does that do? Is it inflame it in that moment? Does it take time to inflame something?

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

Wow.

A pound like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour. You add that up and it's. And I know I'm not that eating that much and you aren't, so a lot of people are making up for the difference. Right, right.

So food affects your mood for sure.

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

Come on.

If you look at kids, and this is in juvenile detention centers, they've done clinical trials because he's got these people locked up. So you've got. It's a really great kind of study. Now, these kind of studies are hard to do because mostly we're free. We call them free living humans who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they want. They don't follow the study protocol. When you're locked up, you get what you get, right? And so they took these kids.

The environment's the same for everyone. Yeah, all that stuff.

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

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

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

What is that? What's really, what's that in? What foods is that in? Is that processed packaged foods, what hydrogenated fats? Or is that french fries?

Yeah, so hydrogenated fats have literally been. Have been banned by the fda, essentially ruled not safe to eat. But they're still out there. Okay, you can still find them. It's less, but it's. And they used to be really. That makes Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a baked good or any processed food. And the third thing would be you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad, which is also known as bht? It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer. It's banned in Europe. We have it in everything here. So if you wouldn't have azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries, you probably shouldn't eat it. And yet this is in so much of our foods. In fact, in America, it's legal. This is ingredients used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwich.

Didn't they have to take it out?

Didn't Vari get it taken out? So our friend ashamed them into taking it out. But it's still legal here. It's not illegal. She just shamed them publicly by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the Subway and got them. But in Singapore, for example, if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15 year jail sentence and a $450,000 box.

No, you do not.

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

So she would eat sugar as well?

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

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

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

Yourself, Right?

Yeah. Like, how do you feel? Do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How you're clear, you have energy? Are you. I mean, what is happening to you? So I think it's important to understand that, you know, we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition. And how do you identify your particular needs? By various kinds of testing, whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing. And how do you actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet?

Everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way, but it seems so extreme in my mind, you know, and I. I empathize with vegans. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hurt animals either. And, you know, but then I've tried it for a while, and I'm also like, gosh, but I miss meats. And it's like, yeah, yeah, what is the way? And what I'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all. You have to really figure out what works for you.

Yeah. The one size that fits all is quality is understanding food as information. Just meat for example. So feedlot meat is an abomination. It's horribly cruel to the animals. It grows the animals in ways that are extremely destructive to the environment by these monocrop corn and soy fills we use to grow feed the feedlots that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the hormones and antibiotics that we use and the quality of the meat is very different. And the so it's basically bad for you, bad for the planet, bad for the animals. So it should be banned 100%. But that doesn't necessarily mean that eating a wild buffalo is bad for your health. Or eating a fully grass fed. Yeah, or eating a fully grass finished regeneratively raised cow or animal is bad for you. In fact, there's a chapter in the book One of the principles is Meat Medicine.

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See site for details Right and it's kind of a joke in a way, like a little bit of provocative comment. But what's really fascinating to me there's just published a couple of days ago another one about how if you look at, you know, feedlot meat, it produce inflammation in the body. It, it, it actually is is really not that great for us. But if you look at these animals that have foraged on hundreds of different plants with all different phytonutrient compositions and all different vitamin and mineral contents, they literally seek out and forage medicines in their diet. And there's a guy I had on my podcast, Fred Provenza, who has studied rangeland animals his whole life and is working with researchers at Duke and they've discovered in properly raised meat, actually phytochemicals. And this blew my mind. Meaning you have plant compounds like catechins that you find in green tea at the same levels in certain meat, depending on what they eat.

Wow.

So you have all these antioxidant, anti inflammatory detoxifying compounds found in meat that's raised properly. And the other argument obviously is climate. And yes, you know, I think the factory farming of animals is an abomination and it is a huge contributor to climate change and environmental degradation, ecological collapse. However, that doesn't mean that, you know, we had 169 million ruminants roaming around the plains in America hundreds of years ago. I mean, we shot them all. Like we like, basically Buffalo Bill said for every buffalo killed is an Indian dead. And they literally decimated like 60 million buffalo to down to a few hundred.

That's crazy.

Yeah. And so those, those buffalo and those ruminants put in 50 to 8 to 50ft of topsoil across America, which is why we had such rich agricultural lands. Now we've lost over a third of that topsoil because of our farming methods, like monocropping and tilling. It's degenerated the soil so that the soil can't hold the carbon, because plants breathe carbon from the atmosphere. They suck it into the plant that goes down to the ground, into the roots, and it feeds the microbiome of the soil, and the microbiome of the soil then feeds the plants because it's this beautiful symbiotic relationship where the nutrients from the soil cannot be extracted unless the microbiome is healthy in the soil. So we get all these nutrient depleted plants and then we lose the carbon in the soil and we end up with climate change at accelerated level. In fact, the food system itself, end to end, is the number one cause of climate change by about 50% of it. Not. Not even fossil fuels.

Wow.

Yeah. More than fossil fuels. Because when you look at end to end, you know, factory farming, deforestation, soil erosion, food waste, you know, refrigeration, transport, all that stuff, it's huge. And so, yes, factory farming should be banned, but it turns out that regenerative agriculture, and I talk about how to be a regeneratarian in the book, which is a really interesting concept that nobody can disagree with. Right. You want to regenerate human health, you want to regenerate planetary and ecological health. Who's going to be against that? You can be vegan or paleo. But, like, you can't be against that. It's like being against motherhood or apple pie. And so I basically create a framework of understanding the science around how if we use animals in a ecosystem on a farm, we can dramatically accelerate the production of soil. And Gabe Brown, as a farmer in North Dakota, who was a traditional farmer, monocrop, went through cycles of destruction of his farm, through hail and storms and droughts, and was going to go bankrupt, and then discovered the writings of Thomas Jefferson and discovered that the practices that they used a long time ago to preserve and conserve soil cover crops, crop rotations, putting in animals as part of the ecosystem and having roots in the ground at all time, all these very simple ideas that are regenerative agriculture. And he was able to turn his farm around and has built 29 inches of topsoil, makes 20 times what his neighbor does in terms of profit. Makes more food, better food, does not use any chemicals, inputs or water. It's unbelievable. And it's something that is now scaling up across the country. And the UN says that if we took. And by the way, 40% of agricultural land around the world is not suitable for growing crops. So even if you're a vegan, you want to grow crops, you can't do that on that land, then it's just going to waste. And what animals do is they have like all these stomachs and the ability to eat stuff that is inedible to us and turn into incredibly high quality nutrient.

Dirt and grass and.

Yeah, yeah, right. Like, we're gonna be. And we're not gonna be sitting like a gorilla, you know, eating 400 pounds of food every day just to get the nutrients we need. So I think, you know, they go, guerrillas are strong. Yeah. But they eat all freaking day. And they eat an enormous amount of food in order just to get, like a little bit from it. So we have to understand that the UN says that if we took these 2 million of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world and we converted them, regenerative agriculture, we could stop climate change for 20 years. So it's not like, eat vegan and save the planet. It's like, not. Someone, someone, Russ Konzer is a farmer, said it's not the cow, it's the how.

Right.

And. And their studies have shown that, for example, if you eat kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat, all your inflammatory markers go down. Whereas if you eat the feedlot meat, your inflammatory markers go up.

Kangaroo meat.

Well, and it was done in Australia, where they had a lot of kangaroos. Wow. You can actually go in the grocery store and buy kangaroo meat. Yeah. Yeah.

I wonder what that tastes like. That's interesting.

Have you had a. I've. No, but I've had. I've had. I've had the llamas from South America.

What was that?

The guanacos. Incredibly delicious. This Patagonia, I had the guanaco. That was the closest thing I've had to a kangaroo.

That's interesting.

But I've had ostrich, I've had buffalo, I've had elk. I've had venison.

What's the best tasting meat you've ever had?

I like elk. Elk chop is like the best. I just don't know why, but it's so good. Interesting.

It tastes better than a steak.

I really do think so. And there's this company. I have nothing to do with this company, but a friend of mine turned me onto it called Wild Idea Buffalo, which is basically grass finished wild buffalo. And they harvest in really humane ways. And it's super yummy and tasty and tender and delicious and, you know, you're eating basically like the Native Americans did.

So. Wow.

Honestly, the Plains Indians and Native Americans, they lived very long. They were at the turn of the last century. They were the longest lived people. Had the highest number of centenarians. Yeah. In 1900. And pretty much all they ate was buffalo with a few berries and seeds and stuff that they gathered.

Did they have fruit or did they not have fruit?

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

What's that?

Pemmican is basically dried. Dried meat and fat from like, usually was buffalo or other animals with a little bit of berries.

Okay.

And it. And it was super nutrient dense. And when Lewis and Clark went across America, they carried pemmican because one pound of pemmican a day would feed. Would feed you. If you're a woman. It would Half a pound. And so they literally could bring 30 pounds of food for a month. And they had this. It was dried. It lasted forever. So it was the food that the Native Americans used, which is dried pemmican.

So it was like some buffalo meat dried with. It was kind of like a beef jerky type of thing with some nuts.

Yes. But high in fat. Very high in fat. So very high in fat and meat and. And berries.

Interesting. So Native Americans lived on that. They probably had much smaller fruits back then as well. Like little baby apples.

Wild, right?

Wild like Two bites.

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

So what are those plants?

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

Of broccoli or that's the least nutrient dense.

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

So not all. Not all broccoli is created equal.

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

What's that?

I had pancakes.

Ooh, that sounds good.

But I didn't have just any pancakes. And you're like, Dr. Hyman's having pancakes for dinner. What is up with him? No, I had special pancakes made from Himalayan tartary buckwheat. Himalayan tartary buckwheat is a plant that has been almost forgotten that was grown in the Himalayas under extremely rough conditions. Right. No water, high altitude, basically crappy soil, cold weather. I mean, you name it, it was the worst place. I mean, you don't want to grow something. You don't want to grow it in Tibet. You want to grow it in Iowa. Right? Yeah.

Yeah.

But this plant, as a result of all these stresses, this special type of buckwheat developed all these defense mechanisms, and it is one of the most powerful superfoods on the planet. It's developed over 130 or 40 phytochemicals, some which are not found anywhere else in the world, that regulate your immune system and literally can rejuvenate your immune system.

What's called Himalayan buckwheat.

Himalayan tartary buckwheat, like the tartars.

I got to get this. Where can we get it?

You can't yet, but you will.

How'd you get it?

Oh, I have an inside track. My. My. My mentor and my friend Dr. Jeffrey Bland is a nutritional biochemist student of Linus Pauling, who has, you know, taught all of us about food is medicine and food is information and functional medicine, and discovered this almost by accident. There was. He read about it in a journal. It was some obscure reference. He tracked it down. Long story short, he found this farmer who'd gotten some of these seeds by accident from the usda, grew a little bit of it, and he started working with him. And this summer, they produced the first hundred thousand pounds of Himalayan tartar buckwheat. So he sent me a couple of pound bag of this flour, and so I made pancakes from that flour. And it's basically higher in protein, higher in vitamins, minerals, and higher in. It's the highest protein of any grain. And it's not really a grain. It's a fruit. And it's got all these phytochemicals that rejuvenate your immune system. So here's just to take you down the rabbit hole for a minute and explain that. How does food act as medicine? I'm. Okay, it sounds good, Dr. Hyman, but how does it actually work? Okay, so here's what happens as we age. This is a little complicated story, but it's worth telling. As we age, our immune systems age as well. It's called immunosenescence, the aging of our immune system. And part of that happens because in our bone marrow, we have stem cells, and we have stem cells for white blood cells. Now, if you are eating the typical American diet and you're exposed to all the crap in our food and the toxins in our environment and all that, these stem cells get injured, literally get mutated, and they produce their progeny, which are their white blood cells. We produce a million white blood cells in our bone marrow every minute. One million. And then they go out in the periphery and the rest of your body, and they do their job right. When you have these mutated, funky white blood cells, they're called chips. They get into circulation, and they become zombie cells. You might have heard of zombie cells, which create aging and These zombie cells create cancer and heart disease and inflammation and autoimmune diseases and all kinds of stuff. And they're very hard to get rid of because they just live forever. They're like zombies. How do you get rid of them? Well, it turns out by some magical to the twist of nature that the Himalayan tartery Buckwheat phytochemicals target and kill.

Come on.

The cells that are zombie cells. So literally, I had an immuno rejuvenating pancake dinner last night. I'm so proud of myself. It was the first time I ever had breakfast for dinner. It was so good. I made it with berries, put a little cinnamon in there, which is good for your blood sugar, you know, it's so high in protein. I put an egg in there, macadamia milk. Really simple. No, it wasn't super starchy and it just, it was delicious. And it was rich, almost yellow color to the flower with all the phytochemicals. So that's an example of how food is medicine. So I think we are just beginning to understand this. In fact, the, the Rockefeller foundation has funded hundreds of millions of dollars into studying what they call the periodic table of phytonutrients, which means they're classifying the 25,000 plus phytochemicals found in plant foods. And everybody's heard about this. Oh, wine has risperatrol and green tea has catechins and broccoli has sulfluorfane and, you know, Himalayan tardy Buckwheat has, you know, a whole list of stuff. Right. So we're kind of familiar with the idea of phytochemicals. Why do you eat blueberries? Because they have proanthocyanidins. Right. But they're cataloging all of these and there's many unknown ones. Like in Himalayan and Tartary Buckwheat, we're discovering ones we never even knew about before. And we want to be eating these. These are the, these are the medicines that are in food. This is when the animals are foraging around eating this. They literally can get these in their meat. And the thing about the climate change thing, when you actually look at the regenerative agriculture model for raising animals, now, you have to eat them or not. You don't have to eat them, but you have to include them in the cycle because without them, you cannot build soil at a rapid rate. We've lost a third of our topsoil. We are projected to lose all of it within 60 to 80 harvests. This is according to the UN and also an Obama report from soil. So the only way to really build soil is to include animals in the process of agriculture.

By having the manure. By having.

Yeah, yeah. So you poo and pee and move around. They move around. Like in this, we call it adaptive grazing or there's different terms for it, but essentially it's a way of raising animals in herds and moving them around quickly in different fields, not letting them overgraze and they chomp down like the buffalo did or the elk did. They'd move, they'd eat and then they'd move to the next spot and they wouldn't ruin the land. And that peeing and pooing and their hooves digging in the saliva from their mouth. That saliva would literally fertilize, makes the plants grow more. It's like fertilizer for the plants. So they get all the saliva and then the plants come back stronger and they put more roots down and pulls more carbon in the atmosphere and it creates this virtuous cycle. So if you're looking at, for example, eating a vegan burger. Plant. Plant based burger, like an impossible burger. Yeah, it's better than a feedlot burger. But they're growing the soy with glyphosate, rich monocrop culture soy cultures. And it's destroying the soil, it's destroying the microbiome of the soil. The glyphosate destroys your microbiome, but in terms of climate change, it adds three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment. Whereas a regeneratively raised beef burger removes three and a half kilos of carbon. So it's seven kilos of carbon, kilograms of carbon less than a impossible burger. So we have to sort of get into the nuances a little bit. And that's why I like to just people to eat real food and follow the principles of nature. And it's amazing, not only will it be good for the animals and good for the planet, but it will regenerate your health. And that's really what I see with my patients, that the food is the most powerful drug on the planet.

What are you doing personally to help with staying young, anti aging beyond food? Are you doing stem cells?

Yeah, so I actually, actually.

Bone marrow.

Everything you're doing, I have a, I have a. In the book, I have a whole section on how to eat for longevity. So that's, you know, that's a lot of the principles there. But in addition to the food, and I think if you were to pick the number 1, 2 and 3 thing around longevity would be Your diet? Yeah.

Really?

And then, you know. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet.

I hope I look as good as you when I'm your age.

I'm 61.

It's unbelievable, man. Great.

You should. I've been working out. Yeah. So I think exercise, obviously, is really important. Sleep, meditation, all those things. Those are the foundational things. And then there's all the hacks. Right. And I think there's a whole class of things that people are using, from things like nad to peptides to exosomes to hyperbaric chambers to ozone. I think these are. We're all where. These are all around the corner. And I use a lot of them personally. I use ozone, I use peptides, I'll use exosomes. I'd like to get a hyperbaric chamber, but I can't get that, you know? But there's a lot of. There's a lot of really cool things out there on longevity. And I think we just launched our Longevity Roadmap docu series, which discusses all this sort of emerging technology around aging and people. I think it's called Longevity Roadmap. I think they just Google it.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's interesting. What would you say are the three things you. You would keep doing for as long as you could to help you with anti aging and living longer and staying? Would it be the peptides would be something else?

I listen, I think it's like those are. Those are like, there's the 80, and that's the 20. So that's the 20 is all that fancy stuff, and the 80 is food, your food and fit exercise. And I've been doing more strength training, and I've been doing more cardio and. And I think sleep and meditation. And then the other thing that people often don't think about for longevity is community love. Because love is medicine, just like food is medicine.

Absolutely. If you stress in your heart you're gonna die, I mean, it's gonna make you sick.

It's really true. And what's really striking is when you look at the data, some of the most potent predictors of longevity is not your diet, actually, it's whether you are socially connected.

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Of a knitting club or a bridge club or a bowling club, like, the longevity numbers just go crazy, even. And there's a great study that was done years ago in a little town called, I think it's called Rosario, what was it? Rose Something, Pennsylvania. And it was basically a community of Italians from this one little village in Italy that all kind of moved over to this one town years and years ago. And they kind of left their old Italian diet behind and adopted the American diet. But this community was so tightly knit, and there are all different economic spectrums in the community, but they were always there for each other. They were at birthdays and parties and holidays. There was a sense of connection and love in the community. It was really unique. And what was striking is even though they adopted all the American lifestyle habits, they didn't get the same mortality as the the rest of Americans because they had this incredible social fabric that was providing them a foundation of love and connection and meaning and purpose. And what's striking is I just saw an article, even one of the major medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical association, that was striking to me because it was so clear that meaning and purpose are also predictive of longevity. So if you have no meaning and purpose in your life, what's the point of being here?

I'm Miles Wayne.

Right. You kind of have nothing to live for. Right. So I think. I think it's really quite interesting. And I think we're in this moment where we're learning so much about medicine and well being and health and we are in a massive paradigm shift. That's what functional medicine is. That's what this book is about, the pig and diet. It's really a functional medicine view on food and nutrition and health and longevity.

You talked about insulin resistance as one of the leading causes of chronic disease today. What is insulin resistance? How do we prevent it and then how do we treat it?

Yes, well, great question and I think we hinted about it a little bit before, but you know, 88% of Americans are in poor metabolic health, right? That's staggering. That's almost nine out of ten of us. And that is poor metabolic health means insulin resistance. And I'm going to unpack that in a minute. 75% are overweight, 42% are obese, 40% of kids are overweight. I mean, it's terrible. One in two Americans has pre diabetes or type 2 diabetes. All this is caused by the amount of starch and sugar in our diet. Broccoli is a carbohydrate that's fine to eat, but white flour is also carbohydrate. It's worse than sugar in your body. So the volume of starch and sugar that's predominantly our calories is driving this poor metabolic health. And what happens when you eat Sargent sugar, which by the way, we really didn't have right for most of our human history. We basically were hunters and gatherers till 10,000 years ago. And then, you know, if we had grains, we had whole grains. The milling of flour didn't happen till about 150 years ago. And when that started and they started to actually refine the flour is when we saw these nutritional deficiencies like, like beriberi and pellagra and these horrible vitamin deficiencies. It was really terrible. And they actually discovered vitamins because they started depleting the food. So when we eat in a way that has all this starch and sugar, it causes our blood sugar to go up. That causes our insulin to respond to try to keep the blood sugar down so you can have normal blood sugar. If you go to your doctor, you can have a normal A1C, which is your average blood sugar. But if your insulin's high, you're in big trouble. I saw a guy who was 400 pounds, his blood sugar was perfect. His average blood sugar was perfect. His insulin was like 20 times normal because it was keeping everything down.

Oh man.

Now insulin gets that high because the Body becomes resistant to the effects of the insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf. So you need more and more and more insulin to get the blood sugar down. More and more insulin, what does that do? Well, insulin has a number of roles. In a small amount, it's good, keeps your blood sugar good. If you're healthy, fine. If you have no insulin, you get type 1 diabetes, you need insulin shots. But most people have what we call type 2 or pre diabetes or insulin resistance. And it turns out that this is the driver of cancer, like the most common cancers, prostate, breast, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, heart disease. Most heart attacks are caused by this diabetes, obviously dementia. They're calling type 3 diabetes, depression. So so many issues are driven by this insulin resistance that are burdening our society with chronic disease, which affects six out of 10 people. And so when you have this phenomenon in your body, it drives inflammation, it drives fat storage in your belly, it causes more hunger, it slows down your ability to lose weight, and it creates this vicious cycle of muscle loss and fat gain that just, it's like super fuel on, on the aging process. That's why you see diabetics, you know, have, you know, far more heart attacks. They're four times the risk of dementia, they're more likely to get cancer. It's just all related to this phenomena. And if you're talking about the game of longevity, you know, I remember this lecture I heard like 20 plus years ago from a Harvard professor who was talking about, you know, preventive cardiology. He said, mark, if you could take a group of 100 year old people who have perfectly clean arteries, they'd have one thing in common. I said, what's that? He says, they're insulin sensitive, meaning they are able to easily regulate their blood sugar with very minimal amounts of insulin. But most of us, well, most, because they're basically healthy, or they have genetics that help them or they eat, you know, well, but the key is to keep your, the game of aging is to keep your insulin low, right? And if you keep your insulin low, you're going to be activating all these anti aging mechanisms in your body. If your insulin is high, you're going to accelerate all the aging. So that's why starch and sugar are poison.

When insulin is high, it's weakening immune system, it's increasing inflammation, which is making you age faster, essentially, and get sick, right?

Yes. And not only that, Louis, what is happening now with COVID in America? Why are we the worst country in the world? With COVID it's Not just political mismanagement. The fact is, is that we where the sitting duck. Perfect place for Covid to land and cause havoc. Why?

Because we're obese.

Because we're obese, we're overweight. We have chronic diseases, and these are all diseases of inflammation. So we are pre inflamed. And when Covid hits, it just. It's like gas on the fire. Right. It just blows up your immune system, which is why you've seen these cytokine storms and this overwhelming inflammation in the body. It's not the virus that kills people, it's people's own bodies. Overactive inflammation because it's primed because of our inflammatory diet. And so nobody's talking about this. I think Bill Maher is the only one I've seen talking about in the media who says, hey, guys, the thing we can do, yes, maybe we need to be protecting ourselves and practicing social distancing, maybe getting vaccines. That's a whole rabbit hole we shouldn't go down. But nobody's talking about getting healthy our diet or losing weight or immunorejuvenation or even things like vitamin D, which are so cheap and simple. I mean, if I were president, I would literally give free dose of vitamin D to every man, woman, child in America. Just, boom, give it to them.

There's a lot of research showing that vitamin D is defending the body against Covid, right?

Yeah. If your vitamin D is low, you're 80% more likely to end up in the hospital and die. If your vitamin D is high, you're 94% less likely to end up in the hospital or in the ICU. 94%. That's better than vaccines, right? With a lot less hassle and risk and side effects.

Yeah. Wow. Okay, so how do we, how do we treat it then? What are the things that we need to do when our insulin is high?

Well, it's. Guess what? I wrote a book. It's a really good book. It's called the Vegan Diet. And it helps you. It helps you do that. And essentially the principles are, you know, things that. I'm almost embarrassed, Louis, that I have my career telling people to do stuff that's so self evident. Right. Like we all know, yeah, eat real food. Don't eat crap. You know, eat lots of vegetables, eat lots of good fats, get good quality protein. It's not that hard. And the key to insulin control is fat. And here's why. If you look at protein, if you eat a lot of protein that can spike insulin, because there's a Process called gluconeogenesis, where the protein gets turned to sugar when you meet your protein needs. If you eat sugar or starch, yes, you'll jack up your insulin. If you eat fat, there's zero insulin response.

Really.

So what's interesting, if you look at the fat thing, they'll go, fat's fattening, it's going to make you fat. It only makes you fat in the context of insulin. So if you look at type 1 diabetics, their pancreases are gone, they can't make insulin. These people are starving all the time because insulin gets the fuel in the cell. So they literally are metabolically starving and they're losing weight. So they can eat 10,000 calories a day and would lose weight. It's not the calories, it's the insulin. So the foods to help you in terms of insulin and the fats are avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds. Those are all sources of great fats. Macadamia nuts, you know, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, all the great nuts. And then depending on your metabolism, your genetics, you might tolerate saturated fats like coconut oil or grass fed ghee, or grass fed butter. Those are all fine. I would stay away from all the refined oils, which are called plant based oils. They're problematic for a number of reasons because they're extracted with hexane solvents, they're oxidized easily, they're unstable, and we eat them in huge quantities that we never ate to before.

Right.

So I'm sort of a little bit of an evolutionary eater in the sense that, you know, like we Never, we had 22 teaspoons of sugar a year when we were hundreds gatherers, we found a honey thing somewhere.

Now we have how many a day?

22 a day. Wow. And some kids have 34 teaspoons of sugar a day or more. And, and so, you know, the fats we're eating are totally different than we used to eat. 10% of our diet is soybean oil, which is something that's increased a thousand fold in the last hundred years years. And it's not something our bodies really handle. So I, I think my fats that I have in my kitchen are olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, ghee, and a little grass fed butter. And then, you know, I have a little toasted sesame oil for flavoring for Asian dishes. And you can get, you know, various kinds of nut or seed oils that are, you know, processed with expeller, pressed or cold pressed. So they're not highly refined. And you can Use those as flavorings like walnut oil or macadamia oil, so forth. So I. But I think the majority of oil should be that.

And can you share. There are seven systems of functional medicine, is that right?

Yes.

What is. So people are.

Yeah. So, okay, well, at high level, what is functional medicine? I always joke it's the opposite of dysfunctional medicine. And the, the body is not organized the way that we all learned in medical school. In medical school, you know, you have your head doctor and your joint doctor and your stomach doctor and your heart doctor and your lung doctor. You're this doctor, that doctor. One patient said, I have a doctor for every inch of me. None of them talk to each other. And the truth is that these are all connected. These body systems are all connected. Your body is a network, it's an ecosystem. And so the siloed approach to medicine based on diagnosis and symptoms really has nothing to do with the natural laws of biology. They're just things we've observed. And we're in a very primitive state of medicine right now. Now we're going to look forward in maybe 5, 10, 20 years and go, what were we thinking? So functional medicine goes right to the root cause. So we're treating the symptoms. Functional medicine treats the causes. You know, we're suppressing symptoms. Functional medicine is addressing the mechanisms of these diseases. So if you know, for example, you can take all the diabetes drugs you want, you can take all the blood pressure drugs you want, but if your, if your lifestyle and your diet is causing the diabetes, it's not going to work. Right. And you can. The joke is, if you're standing on a tack, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. The treatment is take out the tack. Right?

Sure.

So, you know, that's what Western medicine, so functional medicine has these, this framework which is your predisposing factors, genetics, triggers, stresses, exposures, toxins, whatever allergens, infections interact with your lifestyle to drive imbalances or to create balance in seven key systems in your body. And this is the key to health. So we treat these systems by getting rid of the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff, whether it's food or whether it's meditation or sleep, whatever nutrients. And it's really what this book is found on is how do you activate and optimize these seven functional systems that are all interconnected, that are web like, they're biological networks. It's one big network. How do you activate them? Through food. And I talk about how food influences each of these systems. Like for Example, your microbiome is one of them. Your immune system is another. Your energy system is another. Your detoxification system is another. Your communication systems, hormones, neurotransmitters, another. Your structural system is another, which is your biomechanical structure all the way to your cell structures and so forth. So these are the systems we focus on. But let's just take, for example, one, the microbiome. Well, we know that, and this is striking to me. I used to talk to gastroenterologists all the time, like, well, don't you think food has something to do with maybe what's going on with the irritable bowel or reflux or, you know, like, oh, yeah, well, eat more fiber or. Yeah, don't eat. Drink coffee or alcohol or eat spicy foods or whatever. Don't eat fried foods. Like, that was the extent of their advice. I said, didn't ever occur to you that, you know, you've got this entire tube there with all this stuff in it. You're putting pounds of foreign material in every day. Don't you think that would have something to do with what's going on in there and your digestive diseases? And they're like, wow, what a novel idea. I just never thought of that. I'm like, wow, so. Which is really striking, actually. And, you know, the microbiome, turns out, is the big regulator of most of your bodily functions. Your immune system, your mitochondria, your brain function, your levels of inflammation, vitamins and mineral production. It really controls so much of what's going on in your body. Detoxification. And we just are. It's like the new frontier, because we thought it was just poop. Who cares? It's just poop. It's just waste. It doesn't matter. Turns out it is the most important organ in your body that controls everything. In fact, probably a third to a half of all the metabolites in your blood come from the microbes in your gut. You've got 10 times as many bugs in your gut as your own cells, 100 times as much DNA. So you might have 20,000 genes. There might be 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 million genes of bacteria in your gut. And those genes are producing proteins. Those proteins are being absorbed in the body, and they're interacting with your biology and they're regulating all these chemical pathways for good or for bad. So if you have bad bugs growing like weeds, it's going to kill you, make you sick. If you have good bugs, it's going to make you healthy. So here's an example again, how food is medicine. So it's not just eat more fiber, have probiotics or whatever. Turns out that there's a bacteria in your gut that's super critical. It's called Akkermansia mucinophilia. This bug creates a mucus coating lining on the gut so you don't get a leaky gut and you don't have damage to the barrier. Think about, like, a second skin. Like, if your skin is damaged and you put it in the dirt, you'll get infection, Right? But if your skin's intact, you can stick it anywhere. It's fine like that with your gut. So this bacteria helps produce this sort of barrier layer in the gut.

How do we create that bacteria?

Good question. So you set me right out, Louis. So this bacteria likes certain foods. It turns out you can't take it as a probiotic, and taking probiotics or prebiotics doesn't help that much. But it loves we call polyphenols. So what are polyphenols? These are these thousands of phytochemicals. And there's certain ones it really loves, like pomegranate and cranberry and green tea. Now, what's really fascinating is, is that there's a new drug class called checkpoint inhibitors that are used for immunotherapy, which is to help your own immune system fight cancer. And they can be very effective. So you got a stage four cancer, you get this drug, and boom, you're cured, like, in a month with no side effects. It's like. It's pretty miraculous. Advancing cancer therapy. However, it turns out that most checkpoint inhibitors, as immunotherapy drugs, require Akkermansia in your gut in order to be effective, because Akkermansia regulates so much of what's going on in your immune system. So many people have very low levels of Akkermansia. And what is amazing is I've heard stories from one of my colleagues, for example, William Lee, who said his mother had stage four uterine cancer, not responding to the checkpoint inhibitors. On her way to dying quickly, he did her stool test, because he knows about this, because he's into food as medicine. He wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease. He found no Akkermansia, gave her all these polyphenols, and then got her. Retreated, got her Akkermansia up, and she's completely cured of cancer.

Come on.

Yes. I'm not kidding. So this is the power of food is medicine. It's that specific. So these seven functional systems, like your detoxification system. How do you get rid of internal waste and environmental toxins? Well, certain foods are powerful upregulators of your own body's detox systems. So, for example, glutathione is one of the most important detoxifying compounds in the body. When you eat broccoli or the cruciferous vegetables, collards, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, all that, garlic, onions, certain other foods, all these foods will help to boost the glutathione levels in your body to help you detoxify. For example, if you look at, in Asia, if you have like green tea, they eat a lot of sushi and stuff in Japan, but they also have green tea. Green tea is a chelator for heavy metals. So the body has, has this innate intelligence that can be activated by these phytochemicals. So we think, what do we need to eat? We need protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and we stop there. But maybe it turns out these 25,000 phytochemicals, like all these things we've been talking about from the Agkermansia or the Himalayan tartary buckwheat or the, you know, the. All these things that glucosinolates and broccoli, these compounds turn out, they may be the key to really good health. So you might not get a acute disease, but you'll get what we call a long latency deficiency disease. Meaning, you know, if you don't get enough vitamin C, short term you might, you know, you won't get skirt, you'll get scurvy if, you know, but if, or let's say, let's say vitamin D is a better one. If you don't have enough vitamin D in the short term, really aggressively, you'll get rickets. But in the long term, it might cause cancer. If you're low in vitamin D, it might cause osteoporosis, it might cause other problems. And so these phytochemicals I think are, we're going to find out pretty essential if we want to optimize our health and performance and become great.

Yeah, man, you're giving it to me today. I love this.

I'm trying, I'm trying.

I've got one or two final questions, and I'm gonna let you go. I want to make sure people get this, though. The pegan diet, the 21 practical principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confused world. It's very confusing right now for a lot of people, so make sure you guys get this book. You can get it online. Amazon. You can go to your site as well. Is there any bonuses for people if they pick up the book or anything?

Yes. If they go to pegandiet.com they can get a whole list of amazing foods. We've partnered with all sorts of like Regenera farmers and our great food suppliers and wonderful bonuses. So you can go on pigandiet.com and check it out and there's a nice video there explaining a little bit what it is and some bonus material as well. I love it.

If you guys have enjoyed this and this is just the beginning of what you'll get inside of this book, treat sugar like a recreational drug. I need to always remind myself that that's one of your chapters. Lots of good stuff about eating, brain boosting foods, balancing blood sugar, all the things you need to know to heal yourself with food. So make sure you guys get this book. I'm curious, final question for you. And we've had Mark on a few other times. So if you guys want to hear his three truths and his definition of greatness, we'll link up the previous episodes. You can check those out. I'm curious, you're 61, you said Mark, is that right? Yes, yes, 61. You're about to be a 14 time New York Times bestselling author. Thank you.

I hope you're right.

You're extremely educated on so many things about the body, the mind, about food, nutrition. You're well connected to some of the brightest minds in the world in medicine, religion, spirituality, business. What's your biggest personal challenge right now at this stage of your life that you have yet to figure out how to overcome or something you're dealing with that you're still struggling with, whether it's personally, professionally health, whatever it may be.

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, an interesting moment, right, for all of us because Covid has really forced us all into introspective time to think about the meaning of our lives, what we're doing, what's important, what's not important, how we spend our time, who we spend our time with. And for me, I've gone through some personal challenges, recent, you know, separation from my wife, which is fine. I mean, it was really loving and great and but it's still hard. And I had a recent back surgery last summer that I fully recovered from. And I'm working out, you know, two, three hours a day sometimes. But what was more important is sort of at the stage of my life where, you know, I've accomplished a lot and you know, 13 New York Times best sellers. I have a clinic in Cleveland, a clinic in Lennox, you know, online, online presence, doing all sorts of wonderful things. And I sort of decided to take a minute to stop and sort of reassess what I want for the next 30 years. So my first 30 years were essentially becoming who I was. The next 30 were doing what I was right. Really full on, 30 plus years of grinding it out. But in a way that actually was great for me because it led to so much goodness. But I was working really hard to a question of what's the next 30 years look like for me. So I took a moment to, instead of becoming somebody, to become nobody for a minute.

Wow.

So I've gone to Hawaii and I'm still doing a little bit of work, but I've taken more time off and I'm looking forward and saying, how do I design my life in a way to create the most impact, which will bring the most healing and love to the world, but also do it in a way that helps me to be fully fulfilled and happy and regenerate my own well being? You know, because I sacrificed myself and my body at the altar of service for way too long. I mean, I was on the road 50% of the time. You know, I just, I was a master of hotels, car services, airports. Like I was just, you know, I was an expert at things I didn't want to be an expert at. And I just realized how much of a toll that took on my social connection, on my own health and, well being, on, you know, my ability to really savor life. And so my challenge is how do I sort of change gears a little bit and start to design a life that allows me to have the most leverage and impact to change the things I want to see change in the world, but at the same time help me thrive and live in a way that I can savor life, that I can, that I can inhabit the moment and I can have more spaciousness to do the things that are the most important that I think, you know, I can do for the next phase of my life. So it's going from being like a warrior on the battlefield to being more of like a Merlin king position where I can, you know, but I'm sort of working through it all and I feel like I'm getting close, getting close. And it's just a, it's just an interesting moment for me in this, in this time to think about how do I, you know, how do I struggle with letting go of the things that define me and actually reimagine things that will redefine me to be who I want in the next phase of my life.

Ooh, man. Yeah, I'm gonna have to learn that someday. I'm sure. I'm in that stage too.

Where you're at, where you were at.

I'm in the let's build and grow and create and make it happen mode so well. I acknowledge you, Dr. Mark, for constantly showing up in a way to serve the world and now reimagining your life to serve yourself and the world in a different, unique way. So thanks for sharing that and thanks for giving us so much wisdom and practical principles in this interview. I appreciate you very much. I'm always grateful for your wisdom and our friendship and all of that you do for me. So I'm sorry for the challenges and the changes that are happening. But I also know that they're happening in your favor and they're all benefits you for the future. So appreciate you very much. Make sure everyone get the book. Get it for a couple friends you think could use this for their health as well as we could all use more. And thank you so much, my man. I appreciate you.

Of course, Louis. Thank you. Hope I get to see you in person, give you a big hug soon when this nonsense is over.

Let's do it, man. My friend, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it and you have people in your life that you care about, then make sure to share this episode with one or two people that you want to see live a long, happy, healthy life. There's some powerful wisdom in this episode from Dr. Mark Hyman and I want you and your friends to enjoy it, to share it, to live it, to practice it. So make sure to share this with some friends, post it on social media, make sure to tag me, Lewis Howes, as well as Mark Hyman. And the link for this is Lewishouse.com 1075. You can just share that out, text it to a few friends and say, hey, let me know what you thought about this.

What was powerful for you.

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