How To Look & Feel YOUNGER At 60 Than You Did In Your 30's! | Dr. Mark Hyman & Lewis Howes

I kept learning about this pattern, and until I really healed that I was. I wasn't able to just be ready for love.

Wow.

So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person. I think you gotta have a dream. The school of greatness, really. Yeah. Please welcome Louis Howis.

How important is it to, you know, relationships then sound like a massive part of longevity and you're the person you choose to be with. Yeah, intimately. Sounds like it could play a big part in you living longer or also dying quickly if that person's not there. If you don't have the tools to recalibrate once that person is gone, or something happens to them.

Right. Yeah, but what happens is we're also part of a society where when you're like nuclear family, meaning your primary partner goes, you're not embedded in a network of people. Right. So in Sardinia and Nicorea. Yes. People died and spouses died. So Carmine's wife died, but he was living with his family and his kids and his brother and his.

Like, he had a whole ecosystem, a community of tribe, where it's like, okay, one person's gone, and it's really sad and you're grieving, but you've got grandkids, you've got kids, you've got parents, you've got uncles and aunts involving you in the community still.

Right.

Creating a process of integration in life.

Exactly.

Meaning, purpose, community. So in the Americas, what I'm hearing you say is we isolate ourselves more totally.

Right.

It's like, find your house in the suburbs and your parents go here and your kids go away, and they look.

Their neighbors, you know, they looked out that they somebody for 20 years. They don't even know who they are.

Sure. What do you think we could do differently? And is it. Do you think American society will ever change with this? You know, parents leaving and. Because I hear about some of the. I think it's in India. It's like they fight over who's going to have their parents sometimes, is what I hear. It's like, which siblings are going to get to have the parents stay with them.

Yeah. It's like this is the same thing.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard society we live in, and it's such an individualistic society. It's not a communal society. And I think it costs us a lot. And I feel like there are little pockets of people who are building community, whether it's online communities, whether it's in person communities, whether it's, you know, communities that Are, you know, in cities. And so there is a sense of people starting to build community. And I'm involved in a lot of these and I'm starting to see it pop around. But I think it's, it's definitely not mainstream yet.

I talked to one doctor on here and he said he got sick two different times in his life. He's an older guy in his 70s and 80s, and then he recovered from it. I said, what happened? How did you recover? He said, I found love. He's like, I found love. And it gave me that sense of meaning, that belonging, that purpose again got me back in shape, it got me making better decisions, it got me living life to the fullest. Why is love such a strong healer?

Love is medicine. I mean, I think, you know, it's the same reason that community is the same reason belonging is because, you know, when we have a deep connection relation with someone, it literally changes our gene expression. So if you're in a loving connection with someone. Yes, it's this whole scientific field of sociogenomics. Right. How our social relationships affect our genes. And we know if you're in a conflictual relationship, you will turn on genes of inflammation which cause disease and aging. If you are in a loving, connected, heart centered relationship, you are activating all the repair genes. You literally, through cuddling can change your epigenome. Right.

It's amazing.

So stay in bed for an extra five minutes and cuddling.

I love cuddling. I got home last night and I just like laid there with Martha, just like hugging her for like 30 minutes. Is like, just want to relax and it feels healing because your body relaxes. Yeah. It feels like whatever's going on, you can calm it down and just be peaceful.

Totally.

It's a beautiful thing. So you've been married a few times, right?

Married and divorced a few times, yeah. I'm an expert in relationships.

Expert in relationships.

Three times.

What would you say is the biggest lessons from marriage and divorce that have taught you about health and longevity?

That's a great question. I think, you know, everybody's different and for me, the key to really finding happiness and the key to finding love, that is a really good, healthy, solid love, which I have now was really dealing with my original traumas and wounds. Really? Yeah. And I think, you know, you wrote a book about toxic masculinity and I think, you know, we all, whether we're men or women, throughout our childhood have big or small traumas. You know, Gabor Monte talks about micro trauma, macro trauma. You know, micro trauma could just not being seen by your parents and not being loved well enough or neglected or not actual abuse, whereas, you know, there's actual real emotional or physical abuse or sexual abuse. So all that registers in our nervous system. And for me, I had corrupted love software, and I had to heal that.

Corrupted love software?

Yeah, definitely.

What did that mean for you?

Well, you know, I'll tell you the brief stories. You know, my mother was a child of deaf parents.

Deaf.

Deaf. They couldn't hear. So she was their ears and their eyes.

Wow.

That's a lot of responsibility.

She became a parent to them. Yeah. She became somebody who thought that love was taking care of people who needed help or were broken.

Wow, that's interesting.

Right.

So she picked my dad and my stepfather, who were very broken, and they were in very, you know, damaged emotionally. And that was because, you know, that's what she knew.

That was her familiarity.

Familiarity. And my, you know, my dad was broken because his mother, you know, was a child of 13 and accidentally killed her sister when she was 2, pushing her off to swing. And it was the pariah of the family, had to sit at a different table, was completely neurotic and anxious. And that epigenome goes in through. It's translated through generations. And so, you know, it all makes sense. And so then I. My mom was super depressed and unhappy, and she used me to be her therapist.

Oh, man.

As a little kid, which is.

You repeated the pattern.

And I thought, oh, love is taking care of someone who's needy and broken. Right.

Who needs me?

Oh, yeah. So I would. Had the savior complex, and I would try to fill this hole that I had, this emptiness that I had, because I thought that if I did that, I could kind of feel this emptiness that I have picking these people in a way that filled me up because I was serving them or taking care of them or. It wasn't always exactly like that, but I kept learning about this pattern, and until I really healed, that I wasn't able to just be ready for love. Wow. So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person.

So true. What allowed you to heal it and what allowed you to recognize it and then start the healing journey?

Yeah. Well.

Which is a journey.

Yeah. I've been doing it intellectually, understood it, but, you know, physical. Yeah. But I really went through a process of using psychedelics to heal a lot of the trauma, which, you know, is now emerging as a really valid way to start to re. Pattern your neurology that literally changes the structure and function of your neurons in your brain, these compounds. And I began to sort of do some inquiry. I decided to take like a break from relationships and really do a deep in. Dive into looking at my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs every day, writing them down, kind of rewriting it, the story from my higher self. And then I kind of unpacked my whole life with a friend of mine who's a coach, really amazing woman, Lauren Zander. And I was able to kind of see my whole childhood very differently and talk about incest that happened to me and things that I just had buried for 50 years. And then I saw this movie, Coda, which was a best picture academy award winning film last year about children of deaf adults. Coda means children of deaf adults. And it was my mother's story, not actually her story, but it was the same. She was a child of deaf parents.

Because the child in the. I still haven't seen it yet. But the child has got a deaf family, right? Yeah.

She's hearing and it's about her struggle to become, like, disentangle from the dependency her parents had on her.

Right.

Holy cow.

So what else opened up for you that was like. That just like hit me like a lightning bolt. And I just was sobbing and sobbing. It took me hours and hours to watch the movie because I had to stop because I was just being like on the floor just in this cathartic process. And it never really happened to me like that before. And after that happened, I kind of got what happened to my mother. I got what happened to me. I got what was going off in my own nervous system. And then I just felt free and like I felt light. And I healed a lot of that. So it took me a while. I'm a slow learner. I'm good with medicine, but it's not okay.

We all have our things.

It took me a minute. It took me a minute. But now I just feel like I have such a different wiring and a different nervous system and I feel way calmer and way less anxious in relationship. And.

I mean, where would you be had you not talked to that therapist friend and kind of looked back at your entire history of your life and assessed it. If you didn't watch that movie, if you didn't do the psychedelics, kind of all those medicines in one, where would you be had you skipped it after your last relationship?

Maybe. Still, I always made a joke. I said I had a broken picker. I still have a broken picker. I still would try to find someone who isn't really the person that's going to be able to meet me, that's an equal and, you know, have a healthy attachment style that can, you know, be independent but come together and just like, really, it really was powerful. So. Yeah.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

This all happened in the last couple years.

Yeah.

There's hope after 60, even if you keep choosing poorly.

Yeah, totally.

Totally.

That's incredible.

Yeah. And it just got me free. Yeah. And I think a lot of these cultures don't have to deal with this stuff. I mean, of course there's always family drama and this and that, but I think there's such a level of connection and community and mutual support and happiness and joy as part of living that we've sort of lost. And I think that was a big learning for me.

And how did you feel beforehand? Like, in the previous 40 years of different marriages and relationships, you said you feel free and lighter. Did you never feel free?

No, I didn't. In marriage or in relationship, I didn't. I always felt. What was the feeling? I didn't know until afterwards. You know, you don't know a horse is standing on your foot until it gets off. It was kind of like that. Like, wow. I was always so anxious and kind of trying to hold on to love and keep love and be afraid of losing love and want someone to love me. And it just was like such a weird dynamic that I was embedded in that I didn't even fully see.

Really?

Yeah. This is fat.

I'm so excited you're sharing this. This is powerful.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people need to see this and hear this from you, Mark, because they see you as this. I don't know, what do you. 30, 30 time New York Times bestselling author. You know, this individual who's done so well and been so successful in many areas of life. And I'm not saying that, you know, the marriages and the relationships you in were all, like, failures. I'm sure you had great love and connection and moments and things like that, but they weren't. You know, it sounds like the right fit and you didn't feel like you were free inside.

Right.

And maybe they didn't feel the same thing either. So I'm not saying they were bad and wrong or something, but to hear you talk about this, this healing journey at this stage, as someone who studies healing and as someone who studies medicine and that studies all these things, even you had to learn how to heal relationships. You knew about the body stuff and food and medicine, but it was the healing of the relationship and the childhood wound that you carried with you all those years.

And what's interesting now, Louis, is in our culture, we're starting to have a language for this and the acceptance of this, and, you know, the sort of not seeing mental illness as a stigma, but as a consequence of a lot of cultural and personal trauma. Right? I mean, just living in our culture today is traumatic. You open the newspaper, listen to the news, or the amount of conflict and strife and, you know, just economic inequities and all the things that we're dealing with. Climate change. I mean, it's a very psychologically stressful moment of history. But, you know, we. We also can shift a relationship to that by understanding how our brains work and our nervous systems work and start to actually not necessarily get caught up in all that and kind of reset our systems. So one of the key things I talk about in the book is mindset, you know, is how our minds really play a role in our longevity. And if we don't get that straight, we're screwed. When people kill themselves by their thoughts, right? Literally.

Give me some examples. What do you mean? How do they kill themselves?

I mean.

I mean, they have suicidal thought. I mean, they'll lead themselves to killing themselves.

I mean, it's all about belief, right? So when you look at voodoo, for example, I mean, you put a voodoo hex on somebody, boom, somebody can drop dead. You know, like, one of my mentors who very much inspired me for I went to medicine was Bernie Siegel, who. I love medicine and miracles, who's this kind of Yale oncologist, bald guy, so cute, writes with a purple pen, letters. He used to write me and that before email. And he talked about these studies where they would tell this cancer patient that they found this great new cure and they gave them this pill that was a placebo, and their tumors shrunk overnight. And then they told them, like, a month later, two months later, oh, they found it didn't work so well, and the tumors came flying back. So, like, that's the power of the pharmacy in our mind.

This is fascinating. I'm so. I'm still kind of amazed that this all happened the last couple of years. So after the movie, you had this Cardiff catharsis experience, Right. And you felt lighter after that?

Yeah.

You felt. You released.

I felt free right after this.

On the floor, sobbing moment.

Yeah. It's hard to explain it, but I just felt like I was flying. Like, I just felt like I'd been carrying this weight my whole life. They just was gone.

Do you feel like, it was completely. You feel like your body has. Your nervous system was fully healed after that, or have this been moments of, like, triggers and kind of the PTSD feelings in your nervous system?

Or like, I think it's echoes and shadows more that come back now, like, that I can recognize and go, oh, all right, whatever. It's not like it. It grabs me like it used to.

Wow. Yeah.

This is fascinating. This all happened in the last couple years.

Yeah.

Pretty cool.

And as you know. And then I. I began to think about, you know, just aging and longevity in general, and how do we. How do we build a life that creates healing in our body, whether it's healing or trauma. And I have a whole section in the book about healing trauma, because that's a key part. Huge. And some of the things that are now available, like ketamine and ganglion blocks and increasingly, probably by 2024, MDMA will be available legally for psychedelic assisted therapy and maybe psilocybin, I think was legalized in Colorado now and in Oregon. So it's all coming. And I think there's so many different modalities for people to choose from that we never had before. Sure.

How important is expressing your emotions, Crying, laughing, in living longer and healthier?

Well, I do a lot of laughing, and I do some crying. And I think in my current relationship, I'm the crier. Like, if we're watching a movie or a show, you know, like, whatever, where we listen to a speech at a wedding, I'm the one crying. Right.

It's so funny because yesterday I was on a flight and I watched Coco, the movie Coco. Literally, there's an older guy next to me, and I'm literally. I kid you not, I cried four times watching Coco. The music and the storytelling, I'm like.

This is a cartoon and I'm crying. Right.

But it was so beautiful. I was telling Martha about it, and she was like, yeah, it's such a beautiful. Because it's all about family. It's all about connection. It's all about, like, sharing your music with the world and this, you know, beautiful story. But so you feel like you're the crier in the relationship.

That's right.

But how powerful is crying as an emotion and laughing?

And I think it's being able to be free and expressed, whatever it is. Like being able to not have to shut down and shut off and to learn how to do it in a way that's not destructive.

Right.

To do it in a way that's loving and kind and thoughtful. There's there's always a way of getting expressed without hurting somebody else.

Yes.

So I think we tend in our culture to lash out and to be reactive, and that's not good.

So it's like.

It's sort of like. It's like Viktor Frankl's idea of slowing things down. Like, in between stimulus and response, there's a gap or a pause. Right. And then that pause lies the choice. So you can choose to slow down the whole process. And I friends with Tom Brady, and he's like, you know, when I snap the ball, everything's in slow motion. Like, everything just slows down. It's like.

It's amazing.

And you think it all happens, like, in seconds, but, like, he's like all the time in the world. Right. Everything just goes in slow motion because he's so present. So we can do that in every moment. It just takes practice.

It's a skill.

If you want to lift 50 pounds, well, you have to work at it. Right. If you want to train your mind to work differently, you have to work at it. You have to investigate your mind. That's what, you know, all these practices that are ancient. You know, we in our culture are really good with outer technology, but places like Tibet, they were really experimenting with inner technology for thousands of years and learned all sorts of skills about mastering the mind. So mastering your body is key, but mastering your mind is also a key to longevity.

And sounds like mastering your emotions and your heart is a key as well.

Yeah.

But your mind is what regulates your emotions. Now, people argue with me about this, but what happens first is your thought and then the feeling. Right? And then the emotion. Sure. Right. Because you have. Even if it's an instantaneous thing, there's some thought that precedes it, even if it's a subconscious thought that precedes the feeling or emotion.

So you never have the feeling first unless you don't have the ability to think. But then you probably want to be here.

So it's like some people don't have that, but. Yeah.

So it's always a thought.

Yeah.

Or it's a. So it can't be a feeling, huh? Because you have to think it first before you feel it?

Yes, I think so. I think always. Whether it's. It's. It's like.

It's like if you smell something that brings back a memory.

Right.

Is that a thought?

Or if you. Yeah. Or if you, you know, you see you're about to get in a car crash, you have the thought, I'm going to die, and then Your body goes into reaction and it can happen in a millisecond, but like you could have a millisecond thought, but it's always going to precede whatever it is.

Sure, sure. So I'm curious about relationship stuff because I think, I think you don't talk about this a lot.

I do a little bit. We can do it.

And I think I'm starting to believe more and more that the relationship you have with yourself is massive. The way you view yourself, your beliefs, you're talking about this now. How you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself is key towards living a healthy life now, but also extending your life totally. And the way you view and think about relations, your intimate relationship. I used to feel like I was trapped all the time. You know, I was fearful and I felt like I was trapped and there.

Was no way out.

I couldn't be myself.

Yeah.

And that would make me feel unhealthy inside. It made me feel like I was a six out of a ten every day. Yeah, I felt like trapped. Right. No, I'm doing that to myself. No one is, no one is trapping me. It's my fear and insecurity of like leaving the relationship or whatever it might be or having the courage to communicate all these things. And so the relationship we have with ourselves and with our intimate partner, I'm starting to learn, is the most powerful, one of the most powerful things for longevity. Because we're going to, going to shape the actions we have, the decisions we make on a daily basis, how we show up, what we eat, the environment, all that stuff. Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset and I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science backed strategies and step by step guidance, the Greatness mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life, to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality.

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Okay, let's get back to this video.

What is the some of the conversations you're having in your relationship about longevity and about, you know, you're entering a new relationship from a different space, a healed space. Are you having different types of conversations than you never had before? If so, what are those?

Yeah, I think they're really different. I mean, I think, you know, and.

Are you Showing up as your whole self, finally. Is that what's.

I think I'm able to. I think I'm able to be free and independent and still fully connected all the time. So as opposed to feeling dependent or needing.

So you're unattached, you're highly engaged, but you have low attachment.

You're fully committed, but not like low attachment. Yeah, I'm securely attached. What they say is securely attached as opposed to being insecurely attached or avoidant or like there's all these styles of attachment, but there's a healthy attachment style. A lot of us have attachment disorders because we weren't loved well as kids or we, you know, we had various kinds of traumas. So we have these attachment disorders. And I think I had more of an anxious attachment disorder. And, and I think that through healing that I'm able to sort of be able to just be present to whatever is and not be in reaction. And that's such a powerfully different way. Whatever it is we're doing. My partner is also extremely self aware and extremely talented at communicating.

That's beautiful.

And she has her own stuff that she works through, but we do it together as if it's a gift that we are able to unpack together as opposed to something that's oppositional. Like, you have to fix this, you have to do this. You did this, you did that. Like, that's terrible. So we go, oh, here's a trigger. I felt triggered by blah, blah, blah.

How do you handle it if you're in that if space?

We really deeply listen to each other. We don't react and then we take it as a third entity. That's something for us to take care of together as opposed to something, you better fix this or I'm out. You know, and it's like, oh, you know, like today I was like, I learned from my partner that she doesn't like hosting parties. You know, we're having a party and I asked her to help with something and she was like, I don't like hosting parties.

I was like, okay, now I know.

But like, it's like I could have reacted and got upset and mad and it's like I kind of told a whole story in my head. It's this, but I'm like, oh, okay, well, this is what she needs. She's like, I don't like doing this and that. So, like, rather than having to like fix it or figure out why or she doesn't like chocolate, or she doesn't like strawberries or whatever, it's fine. I don't like doing everything either. I don't, I don't really like, you know, whiskey, but I like tequila.

It's fine.

Who cares?

You know, do you think you'd be able to analytically heal, like just thinking, if you would have just thought about these things versus the, the physical releases that you had as well?

I think it's somatic. I think a lot of this is buried in our tissues. You know, the body keeps score by trauma, and I think, you know, if we, if we don't learn how to somatically release this stuff, it just, it is an intellectual exercise that doesn't happen.

It doesn't work.

It helps, but it's not. It's not enough. Wow.

I'm curious about the. In terms of the things that will decrease your lifespan at night. You know, a lot of people talk about the morning routines, but I'm curious about the evening routines that will decrease lifespan at night.

Holy cow. Well, that's a great question. You know, there's a really amazing book I read years ago called Lights out. And it was a book that was looking at the research on the harmful impact of the light bulb on human health. And it was pretty convincing in showing that because we're not following the natural rhythms of the sun, we're actually altering our biology in ways that damage our health. So when you're exposed to LED nights at light, to fluorescent lights at night, to full spectrum light bulbs at night, incandescent light bulbs, it's not normal for our physiology for 200,000 years.

Sure.

And all of a sudden, the last hundred thousand of the last, I mean, the last hundred of the 200,000 years, we're all of a sudden exposed to this light bulb. Our brains don't process it properly, and so we inhibit melatonin, we don't sleep as well, we increase cortisol. And there's really crazy studies on how this increases obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and that's just being exposed to light at night. So now there's this advent of an understanding of how we might block blue light, which is what you need in the morning, right? You want to be exposed to bright light from the sun first thing in the morning, 20 minutes with no sunglasses, that's great. But at night it's not a good idea. So there are now red light bulbs that only have red light and a blue light. There's blue blocker glasses where you can put on glass at night and wear those at night around the house. Screens are the worst thing at night. So that's A horrible thing that people do. They go to bed with their phone, they wake up with their phone. It's like they spend more time on their phone with their partner. My nephew is like, look, my screen time is only five hours today. I'm like, five hours. Imagine what you could do with five hours if you had five hours, right? You could, you could make all the food for your week, you could exercise, you could write a book, you could make a song, you could whatever, you know, every day. And I think we also are not actually winding down. So we go, go, go, go, go, then hit the bed, expect to sleep, but we can't do that. So having a routine and I talk a lot about the power of sleep and longevity and the power of sleep in the brain, but we're probably sleeping a couple hours less than we did throughout most of you history, and some people even less than that. And that has a huge impact on our cognitive function, especially at night. We have a brain cleaning system called the glymphatic system, which is like the lymph system for the brain. So it's like the cleanup crew comes at night and cleans up your brain from all the garbage that accumulates from metabolic waste and stuff for the day. Well, you can. If you don't sleep, that's not working. And you get that. If you like, go to bed and you wake up and you don't sleep enough, you feel foggy and tired. If you get a good 8, 9, 10 hours sleep, you wake up and you're like, boom. Everything's crystal clear and your brain's working. And I mean, it's not rocket science. So it's not just because you haven't slept. It's a biology of what's happening. So you're producing nasty proteins and inflammation and all kinds of stuff. And also, I think we are exposed to way too much sound and light and stimulus at night. Temperature regulation is not good. So there's a lot of really cool devices like the eight sleep bed and another one, I forget the name of it, but cooler or whatever it is, and basically you can put in your bed and lower the temperature. We do better sleeping at about 65 to 68, 78, 70, 67 degrees. And if we do that, our bodies work better, we sleep better. I know for me, if it's hot, I don't sleep well.

I can't sleep well. Yeah, yeah, we put it at 67, 68, the AC, but then it's like your face is like cold. So you have to figure that's why the cooler. The chili pad or whatever.

Yeah, the chili pad.

Chili pad allows you to.

Yeah, and that's great. And the eight sleep, you can have one side that's hot for your, for your partner and one that's cool for you.

Is that what eight sleep does? It's like cold on one side and.

The other one, you can do whatever you want. It can progress. Like I put on a king sized bed. You can, it's divided in half so you can control your half.

It's pretty nice.

And you can. And also you can control it through the night. You want it cooler in the morning, cooler at night, hotter in the middle of night, Whatever, that's cool. The best sleep I ever have is when I go camping and I'm like winter camping. Really? I sleep like, I just feel like I slept like this.

Because you probably go to bed at like 8:00 clock at night.

Yeah. You say like 10 hours. Yeah. It's like I see you watch the.

Stars, you have a fire, you like tell some stories, pass out.

Exactly. That's what we always did. Historically, you know, we don't just like work, work, work, watch tv, go to bed, or be on our phone or write emails to the last minute and text and then go to sleep. It's just our brain, our bodies are not designed for that. So in the book, I talked a lot about evening routines and what you can do and, you know, the temperature, the sound, the light, hot baths at night, Epsom salt, meditation, whatever works for you.

Warm bath at night works well too.

Oh yeah, hot bath, Epsom salt brings it right down.

Boom. What about in the book, you also talk about the seven core biological systems and how we can use them to stop and reverse biological aging.

Yeah.

What are some of those?

Yeah, so.

So functional medicine is a very important paradigm shift in healthcare, which looks at the body as an ecosystem, not as a bunch of different separate parts. So as I was talking about earlier, the hallmarks of aging. Yes. Are what scientists are now saying underlies all disease. That's a huge advance because instead of like 155,000 diseases, there's like 10 things that go wrong. And if we fix those 10 things, we get rid of all the rest. Right. But then the question comes, what's the cause of those hallmarks of aging? So functional medicine is the medicine of why not what disease you have and what drug to give, or even what hallmark is there? But why is there a problem with this particular hallmark? Why are there epigenetic changes? Why are your mitochondria not working why are your nutrients not being sensed properly? Why are you making zombie cells? Why do you have inflammation? Why do you have damaged proteins? Why do you have stem cells getting pooped out? That's the important question, right? So in functional medicine, we think that there are really simple answers to these questions. You're either dying of two much of something that's bugging your system you need to get rid of, or too little of something you need for health. What are the ingredients for health that we need to get and help us thrive? Like I said, I took the class on what causes disease, but not what causes health. So functional medicine is about the science of creating health. In the framework of science and functional medicine, there are seven biological systems, or networks. And it's a network of networks. They're not all separate, right? And these seven systems, again, underlie all disease. And the imbalances in these systems cause disease. And it's either too much of toxins, allergens, bad food, stress, microbes, microbiome stuff, and not enough of the right ingredients for health. Nutrition, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, sleep, exercise, deep rest, community, meaning, purpose, love, relationships. These are all the ingredients for health, right? When those are too much or too little of those things, it causes disturbances in these seven systems. And what are they? Well, there's your microbiome in your gut, there's your immune inflammatory system. We call that defense and repair, your energy system, how you make energy in your cells and mitochondria. And by the way, these are also, in a way, some of the hallmarks of aging. Right? Sure, sure, sure. And then detoxification, which isn't really talked much about the hallmarks of aging, but it's key because toxins cause a lot of the hallmarks of aging. So how do you detox your body? How do you process your metabolic toxins, environmental toxins, then your transport system, which is your circulation and lymph system, and then there's communication systems, which is your hormones, neurotransmitters, the nutrient sensing systems, how it all works. And lastly is your structural system what you're made of. You know, from your subcellular structures, your mitochondrion, your cell membranes, all the way to your bones and muscles and everything else. So that's what we think of. And so my job as a functional medicine doctor is to understand what's causing the imbalance in this particular person. So if you have. Just because you know the name of the disease does not mean you know what's wrong with you. You could have, you know, 10 people with heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's or rheumatoid arthritis. And each of them might have different causes. One person with rheumatoid arthritis might have gluten sensitivity. Another person might have a parasite. Another person might have mercury poisoning. Another person might have a problem with their microbiome. Another person might have some other factor. So it's really about looking at the personalized approach to understanding the root cause of each person's dysfunction. And yes, there are certain ways the body manifest dysfunction, and there's a limited number of ways. Right. I would say there's only so many ways your body can say ouch, but there's a myriad of causes. But from this functional medicine perspective, we look at what are these root causes of the hallmarks of aging? How do we get these seven systems in balance and that will fix those call marks of aging? Because a lot of scientists now in the longevity space, and by the way, there's billions of dollars flowing into this space because a lot of very wealthy billionaires don't want to die. So they're putting billions of dollars in, like Jeff Bezos and, you know, Calico, Google, and, you know, Yuri Milner. All these people are just pouring money.

In because they want to live longer.

I think it's great. I think it's great because the government isn't funding it. They spend, like a couple hundred million dollars a year on aging. So. Which is ridiculous because that's, you know, we spend 6 billion on cancer, and yet if we cured cancer, we'd have a couple years life expense. If we fixed aging, we'd get 100, we'd get 30 years. And it's not just about this hedonistic pursuit of living longer and this selfish idea, I don't want to die. It's about. Think about a society where you have the value of the wisdom and experience and the knowledge that comes from living a while. Now, not everybody gets wiser as they get older. I found that out for sure. But a lot of y' all do. And then any contribution they could make, if they're fit and healthy now, if they're sick and disease, it's gonna be a huge drain on society. But the truth is that these studies have shown that if you are taking care of yourself, you live a lot longer. And your health span equals your lifespan, Meaning you basically don't spend the last 20% of your life decrepit and disease, which is what is average now. So let's say you live to be 80, the last, let's say 20 years. Of your life, you're on the downhill. Whereas with the studies on healthspan, if you. And this was one by James Fries I talked about, the book was published years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine. They basically looked at three habits. Keep your ideal body weight, don't smoke and exercise. Right. Not a ton of stuff. Right. And they found that when people did that, they not only lived longer, but they died quickly, painlessly, and cheaply. Really. And didn't cost a lot to the healthcare system.

Wow.

Whereas people who didn't do those things died earlier, but died long, painful, expensive deaths.

So three things. Keep the ideal body weight, don't smoke and exercise, and you'll die better.

Exactly. So, you know, I want to have my health span equal my lifespan. I want to be able to go for a hike on my last day of my life at 120. Like you said at the beginning. That's amazing. You know, make love and go to bed and that's it.

And then just don't wake up.

Say goodbye.

That's amazing. And do people do that in the blue zones? Do you see that? They're. They maybe. It's like.

Yeah, it's very. It's very interesting. I mean, my friend Jeff Bland is the father of functional medicine. Tells the story of his grandfather, who was, I think, almost 100, and they had a big Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody was here, happy. He's like, hey, everybody, it's been a great life. I love you all. This is it. I'm gonna go. And he, like, went to bed and like, after a great dinner and walked to bed and went to sleep and never woke up. Come on.

He was happy and everything was good.

Great.

Yeah.

I think he didn't.

Wait, I'm done. I'm done. No way.

Yeah.

And I've heard this story many times. Come on. I've heard this story many times.

That's incredible. He was healthy, though.

He was fine.

Healthy enough. I mean, he was.

He seemed healthy. Like, I mean, you know, he was able to get up from the table and do his things and hang out with his family.

And he was like, thank you for the last great dinner and see you pretty much. That's incredible.

So, yeah, your health span can equal your lifespan. That's what the point of this book is. If you keep working on your biological age through the. All the strategies and the tools and very practical application, the science in the book, Young Forever, you can increase your health span. You can reverse your biological age. And we know how to do this. It's not hard. Yeah.

What do you think is something that you're going to learn in this next decade? You know, you've learned so much in the last decade. With all the new research and science and studies that have come along in the last decade now, going from 60s into, you know, decade from now to your 70s, what do you think is going to happen for you personally?

Yeah. Or in science and medicine?

Both.

I mean, I think, you know, it's the most exciting time right now in medicine science because even as we're all getting sicker and dying younger and life expectancies going down in America, the acceleration and pace of scientific advances and the convergence of a number of different phenomena from systems biology to artificial intelligence to the genomic revolution to functional medicine, systems biology to big data computing, is just blowing up. How we're going to be understanding the body. So imagine a future where you'll be able to get a panel of lab tests, put your body through a whole body mri, sequence your entire genome, your microbiome, have a biosensor implanted that will track everything in real time over thousands of biomarkers and give you feedback in real time about exactly what you should do, how much you sleep, what you should tweak, what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat. It would be so mind blowing to completely keep track of everything all the time. Like your computer has billions of sensors, right? And if your tires are low, oh God, my tire's low on the left back tire. Like, how great is that? We don't have that, right? We go to your doctor, you get a checkup, he does your exam and checks the panel of blood tests. It hasn't changed in 100 years. You know, it's like, go on. You know, like we are in a very different era of medicine and it's happening at such a pace. So the clinical practice of medicine today is not that, but it's coming very fast. So I'm excited about that. I think I'm going to learn a lot about more about how the body works through the use of these big data analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to literally gigabytes and gigabytes of your own personal health data, which we're soon to be able to access. It'll be in the cloud and you'll be able to sort of learn so much from it and compare it to others. And so I think that's really exciting on a personal level. You know, I'm sort of excited about continuing to experiment with my own biological age and my own well being and my own Health and my own spiritual growth and to feel like I'm just beginning. I honestly feel like I'm 20 again. Wow. I feel like, you know, when you're 20, you go, God, what am I gonna be when I grow up? What am I gonna do? Really? Kind of, yeah, because I kind of check the boxes, you know, I had my family, have my kids, you know, have meaning and purpose, have a great relationship. I'm like, career, career is good. I'm like, I don't have any more mountains to climb in the way of proving anything. And yet I have the health and the vitality and the resources to actually reimagine the rest of my life the next 60 years. Right?

It's incredible.

What do the next 60 years look like? What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? What do I want to be? So, like, I'm getting better at surfing. I'm going to go heli skiing this year. I'm going to go, you know, we're going to go climbing the mountains in South America and Patagonia. I'm going to, you know, just. I just do whatever I want to do.

It's amazing.

But the truth is, I'm 63 and I think back when I was a kid, man, 63 was fricking old, you know, 63, they weren't doing too good. The pot bellies and the gray hair and the puffy face, pain. I'm like, I'm like, no way. Like, I'm like, it just doesn't have to be that way, you know. And you know, I had friends over in Hawaii visiting me last year. And you know, I was riding my bike every day, working out and you know, I had like 30 year old friends and let's go for a bike. We're like, okay. And like. And these are not people who are out of shape or overweight or unhealthy. These are really healthy people. One of them was like a, you know, like a college, you know, college D1 soccer player, you know, and I'm riding my hill straight up, seven miles up the hill and she's like, you know, and one of them had to turn back and I'm like, wow. You know, it's amazing to see that if you learn the science of how to create health, that you can continue to evolve and improve and optimize your health at any age.

That's beautiful, man. It's exciting. I'm going to be. I'm going to turn 40 next year.

Oh, wow.

If you could go back to your 40 year old self and give me advice for three things to focus on from 40 until 60. What would those three things be that you would tell me or tell your younger 40 year old self that you wish you would have done?

I would say really, really, really invite play and joy in your life. You know, don't wait. You know, I'm reading this book called Die with Zero, which is a great, a great book. Meditating on the idea that we save our money and we squirrel our nuts away and we don't have all these experiences. And you know, in my life I haven't done a lot of stuff. You know, I have one house, my car is five years old, I paid for it, it's a little Volvo. I've been like, I don't have a lot of stuff, you know, but I love experiences. So I will spend money on experiences. You know, I'll go on safari or I'll go, you know, learn how to surf in Costa Rica for a month or I'll, you know, go to do some, you know, incredible backcountry skiing experience with friends. Or I'll invite, you know, I'm inviting like 30 of my closest friends to Italy to go in a villa for a week and you know, have all kinds of, you know, fun experiences together. So experience is really what matters and what brings the joy to life. So building relationships, building connections, building community, it's so central to health and, well, being in life. I did that, but I definitely worked too hard. I definitely did not give myself enough time for that. The second thing is I probably would have started working out sooner. I mean, I always had bike riding and tennis and yoga gyms are stinky. I don't like weights. If I do 10 push ups, it hurts the next day. I don't like this. So when I was 50, I couldn't do 10 pushups. Wow. And now I can drop and do 80 without a stop.

Incredible.

Yeah. So it's like, like, you know, it took me a minute, but I actually didn't think maybe that long. And I use a Tom Brady TB12 sports training bands, which is a lot easier on the body and it's amazing. So I feel we, you know, I would have probably doubled down on that a little earlier. I think I also would have probably done more work on my own, on my own. Trauma that I couldn't really identify then, I think. So we didn't have the language for it. It wasn't in the zeitgeist like it is now. There weren't people talking about it. The world of psychedelics wasn't really a thing. So I think there's a bunch of stuff that I probably would have done around that I think I've always eaten healthy. I've always done well. I think the other thing, I definitely did that. And you can see from the picture that I was a vegetarian, vegan, and I was kind of thin, but I had no muscle and I was acting like I could run five miles, I could ride my bike 100 miles. I wasn't unfit, but strong. I didn't have the kind of muscle mass that I think is so essential to longevity. So the sooner you start building muscle, the better off you are. It's really a key part of longevity.

Yeah. This is beautiful. Mark, I appreciate you your book Young the secrets to living your longest, healthiest life. You guys can get this. It's got a step by step program.

And by the way, the book's not all about relationships and trauma. Just so you know.

It's not about that, but I think it's an important component.

It definitely includes that.

And I love how, you know, I've got a book coming out as well after yours called the greatness mindset. And the first book section of it is about healing. I think it's really, you know, for me learning the lessons of healing and how it's set me free as well. I feel like now I can go much higher in every area of life with that was before it was like this grinding it to get there, you know, and it was harder.

Yeah.

So I think it's all about our beliefs and our healing and the mindset of it first, about longevity and about relationships and life and everything. Yeah.

You look brighter and happier and younger than I see.

I feel good, man.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm a little tired. I was on a trip, but yeah, I feel good in general, but yeah, it's good to be alive, man. Every day I'm grateful. There's so much joy, peace, love, affection, you know, freedom feels incredible.

I think it's also also key is like living in the moment, like as much as possible. Whatever you're experiencing, you know, whatever you're doing, be in it. Because we live so much of our life distracted and disconnected. And so whether you're, you know, washing the dishes or making love or, you know, working or climbing a mountain, like do that thing. Yeah, you know, Absolutely.

I want people to get your book Young Forever. Make sure you guys pick up a copy. Where can we go to support you for it?

Everywhere. Go To Young Forever book.com if you want to learn more and get goodies. Come along with the book. Go to Dr. Mark Hyman, social media, Dr. Hyman.com any bookstore, online, offline, you can get the book.

It's exciting. We're going to throw up a photo as well. You have to send me that photo of you. We'll put it up on screen for.

You guys to see the process of this.

But this is amazing. Make sure you guys get a copy for your friends as well. Powerful book, powerful information. I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for your transformation. It's incredible because I think healing is one of the hardest things to do, especially, you know, healing the wounds of our past, the inner child wound, whatever you want to call it. But especially as men, I feel like it's hard, harder for us to go back and address the things that we're most ashamed of or afraid of or insecure of or guilty around or whatever it might be and start doing the work. So for you to do that in your early 60s is really inspiring.

Well, I'm a little slow, but it's.

Inspiring to see that it doesn't matter what age you are.

It's true.

You can go back, you can revisit, and you can start the healing process and the journey.

That's true.

It doesn't mean you're a perfect human being. And I'm sure you're gonna have challenges and flaws and things like this in the future, but to do that work and give yourself more healing energy for a longer life and a happier life, it's a beautiful thing. So I acknowledge you for that, my friend. It's inspiring. Thank you for the wisdom, for what I need to do when I hit 40. It's really doing it right now. But from 40 to 60, where are you spending the most time on social media these days? And how else can we be of service to you besides getting the book?

I have a great team and we put out tons of content that's free about how to upgrade your life and your biological software. So I think Instagram and podcast, Doctors Pharmacy podcast I have, which is always up there with yours, back and forth. It's great to see up there. So it's, I think that's a really beautiful form for exploring ideas in depth like you do on the podcast here. And I think it's a, it's a, It's. For me, it's a labor of love because I don't find it work to sit with extraordinary people and learn things that I want to learn and hear. You know, things that expand my mind and my heart and it's like it's the best job in the world.

It's amazing, right? It's so much fun. I love it. Well, final question. What's your definition of greatness?

My definition of greatness is freedom. If you can be free physically, spiritually, emotionally in your community, if you can have a free mind, you know, it's like that Bob Marley song, you know, I can't remember the exact line of it. I'm bad with lyrics. But it's like only ourselves can free our minds, you know, and it's like we have to free our minds to free and unlock all this stuff. Absolutely. What I'm telling you is not hard. I mean, there's some things that are really easy and inexpensive and great to do. There's something a little more, you know, advanced, but. But these things are not difficult. And it's step by step and you can follow it. But if your mind's locked up, you're not going to do it.

Sure.

Right. You're going to want that donut.

Exactly, man. It's my challenge. Actually, I have one more question for you, since I've asked you this before, but I feel like you're in a new space in your life with the healing process you've been in. So it's the three truths question. Imagine it's your last day on earth.

You live 120, maybe 150. I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly however you want.

To live, you live that long. You have the Thanksgiving dinner with all your friends and then you go to sleep and that's your last day. But for whatever reason, you got to take all the work you've done with you or go somewhere else. All your books, your podcast, everything you've created. For whatever reason, that's gone. But you get to leave three lessons behind to that table of people and to the world. What would those three truths be for you?

That's a beautiful question. I think the first one is. Learn how to love yourself and to love others really well. I think it seems like it should be obvious and easy thing to do, but it's not. Most of us have lack of self worth and self love. Most of us struggle to fully be present and love others. So I think that's really the core of life. I think the second thing is don't wait to do what you want to do in life. Just go for it. Whatever brings you joy, find those things and follow them. Because that will not only make you live longer, but actually make your life way better. And the third is kind of work on understanding the owner's manual for your body because it's the. It's the chassis that you carry around with you to be able to do all the rest of it.

Yeah.

So you can't love, you can't serve, you can't do all the things you want to do unless you understand how to care for this human frame that we were all gifted that has the capacity to have ecstatic extraordinary experiences, but only if we take care of it. If we're in a fog from eating crap and sitting around watching TV and mind numbingly scrolling on social media or binge watching Netflix, we're not going to be living the full human experience. So learn how to elevate your biological software, which is really why I wrote the book Young Forever, to help people get a roadmap and a very practical step by step guide to activating all of their ancient healing systems, their longevity switches, and being able to have the opportunity to be a contribution to the world.

Mark, appreciate you, my man. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now. Tell me again the stat on diabetes. How many people have it or are pre diabetic and what. I'm uneducated on this. So how many different types of diabetes are there?

Okay, good.

How is it called? Pause?

Okay.

Okay. So type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Pancreas fails. It's called, we used to be called juvenile diabetes. And you need insulin. It's just, you need it, it's. You need insulin.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin.

Yeah, your pancreas dies because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced, keeps.

That's the blood.

It's sort of the gatekeeper, lets the glucose into your cells. Okay. So it's really important.

So how does that die, how people die from that? I mean, how does the pancreas die? Oh, well, how does it get to that point?

It's an auto. Like, an auto. Like you get multiple sclerosis or arthritis. It's basically your body attacks your pancreas.

Is that from eating a lot of bad foods?

Well, there's been links to dairy and actually as a driver of type 1 diabetes, gluten. 29% of people who have type 1 diabetes have celiac that are undiagnosed. So celiac is a big cause of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes. So that's a very small number of people.

Very few.

One out of two Americans have what we call type 2 diabetes. We used to call it adult onset, except now kids as young as three are getting type 2 diabetes from drinking soda from the crib. Oh, my gosh. I was working in when I was a resident in urgent care center, and this woman comes in for back pain. She got her baby in a carriage, and I see her feeding this baby this brown liquid in a bottle who's seven months old, and I'm like, what is that, soda? I'm like, what is that? That's Coca Cola. No, I said, why are you feeding your baby Coke? She said, well, he likes it.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my God. Listen, my wife showed me this video on social media the other day. It was of a baby, looked like it was maybe 8 or 9 months old. Baby having ice cream for the first time, having sugar for the first time. And you watch the baby eat the ice cream, light up the eyes, and then the baby like stuff in his face. I was like, oh, my God. It was just so crazy. And it's highly addictive. So, yeah. So now we're seeing 1 in 2Americans suffer from either pre diabetes or type 2 or type 2 diabetes. And that is when you eat too much sugar and starch. And every time you do that, it raises your insulin. Your body becomes resistant to the insulin, and so it doesn't work as well. So you need more insulin. And insulin does what? Insulin makes you hungry. It makes you store belly fat. It locks the fat and the fat cells, and it slows your metabolism. It's like a quadruple threat for your body to gain weight. So it's why we're seeing, you know, and that goes back to what we're growing. Right. So why are we eating all this food that it's. Because that's the food we produce. Right. And so that's the other part of the problem. So we have the chronic disease, we have the echo economic impact. And then we're like, well, why do we have this food? So as a functional medicine doctor, I'm always asking why? Well, why are my patients sick?

Because it makes money, right?

Well, no. Yeah. But I'm going even further, like, why I got interested in this because why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I was thinking about my patients, diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food, something. Well, how many?

How many are most of them? Is this like 50, 70, 80 of anyone that comes in to the hospital or your patients.

Yeah.

Who has some type of disease or Some type of sickness.

Unless it's like an environmental thing like mercury or lime or mold. You know, most of the cancer. Cancer. Cancer is caused by food.

Really? 70% percent of cancer is caused by food.

And sugar is the number one culprit. Heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease.

The big killers are by sugar and food.

Yes, yes.

So if you change your diet, you should be able to prevent or cure sometimes. Sometimes cure. Depends how far along things are, I guess. Yeah, you can prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's.

Yes, 100%. I mean, the studies are there. Even people already have Alzheimer's. When they improve their diet, they can more functionality back.

So.

So you've got me thinking, okay, well, if the patient's disease are caused by food, what's causing the food? It's the food system. And I'm like, well, what's causing the food system? It's our food policies. Like, what's causing our food policies? It's the food industry that's lobbying Congress, got money. It's the biggest lobby group in Congress is agriculture and food by far, like, by twice as much as the, the.

Next lobby group by, like gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

And it's like, what? So then I began thinking, well, if I'm going to help my patients, I can't do it in my office. Like, I can. It's like. It's like I'm like in the boat bailing the boat with a hole. Instead of plugging the hole, you're not.

Going to the source.

Right.

So then I'm thinking, okay, well, what do I need to do as a functional medicine doctor? I need to go to the root cause.

Right?

The root cause and why. And then it became clear to me that it's our, our agricultural system is driving so much of the problem. And what we grow has been based on good intentions that were in the 50s and people were hungry. There wasn't enough food, There was a lot of poverty. And so we figured out a system to produce an abundance of starchy calories.

So we can have food.

So we can have food. And we were great at it. And we have cheap, abundant corn and wheat and soy, which are the commodity crops that are turned into industrial products, processed food, which is now 60% of our diet. And for every 10% of that you eat, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Yeah, so you're crazy. So you're basically, you know, feeding Americans a diet we know is going to kill them. The research is so clear on this. There's no scientific debate and yet we don't do anything about it because we have these dysfunctional food policies. And then the way we grow the food causes climate change. We'll get into that. But the number one cause of climate change is our food system. Really, People don't realize that. I didn't know it. I'm like, it's oil and, you know, gas and all this stuff.

Like, what is it? Is it the trucking? Is it the animal feast?

Okay, so first of all, deforestation is devastating. Not only do we, like, destroy the soil on which we cut down the trees, but the trees are carbon sink. So we lose that.

So they're not sucking in the bad air. Sucking, Putting out good dioxide.

Right. I mean, basically, plants suck out carbon dioxide. That's what they breathe. We breathe oxygen, they breathe carbon dioxide. So that the perfect antidote. Right? And then the soil, also. We're damaging, by the way, we're farming. We've lost a third of our topsoil. It's responsible. And people don't know this, but of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of soil organic matter, like healthy, rich soil, is responsible for 30 to 40% of all greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Does that mean.

Why is that? Does it suck up the.

Because soil can hold more carbon than is in the atmosphere. Right now, there's a trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, which is a lot. I don't know. Trillion tons. I don't even know how to measure that. And the soil can hold 3 trillion tons of carbon. And how does it do that? It's an ancient carbon capture technology that is available all over the world. That's free. Free. That can be more effective than all the rainforests on the planet, than all the forests and trees on the planet. It's called photosynthesis. And if you have, like, grasslands, for example, like we had big prairies in the United States, they suck down carbon, they breathe it and they put it through the plants into the roots. Feeds the mycorrhizal fungi, which then make healthy soil, feeds the bacteria. And you get this incredibly rich live soil that holds tremendous amounts of organic matter that is carbon.

Right.

I mean, carbohydrates comes from the word carbon, which comes from carbon dioxide.

Wow.

Right? Ding, ding, ding. It all connects. And so we've lost.

So we don't have the soil for it to consume. Then we. It just bounces off back into the air, I guess, and we're just. In other ways.

Yeah. And the soil can hold so much carbon. The UN estimated that if we took the 5 of the 5 million hectares of degraded farmland around the world, if we took just 2 million of that and spent 300 billion, which is the total military spend for 60 days around the world, which is not much, 60 days, two months of everybody's military spending, we literally could stall climate change by 20 years. Wow. Because of putting back the carbon in the soil. And not only that, it holds water. You see in Iowa, in the Midwest, there was floods that just destroyed a million acres of cropland that otherwise could have been fine if the soil could hold the water. But it just sits on the top where it runs through and we lose all this water. So that when you have organic matter in the soil, it holds 27,000 gallons for every 1% organic matter in the soil per acre. So it's an incredible water sink. It's a carbon sink. And we've lost all these soils. And it's because we're growing these commodity crops in ways that destroy soil.

Soil.

We're tilling the soil, we're turning over soil erosion. It runs off into the rivers. We kill all the life in the organic matter by poisoning it with fertilizer. Right. With pesticides, with glyphosate, herbicides. And it's staggering. And then we have all these sort of unintended consequences. We started growing all this food and we thought this agricultural revolution was great. All these chemicals are great, fertilizer is great. We can do all this good stuff. Trackers, big farms, more food. Feed the world. It's backfired on us and it's producing the worst food on the planet. This co causing devastating environmental damage. Staggering climate change. So it's the soil loss, it's. You said the deforestation, it's the factory farming of animals, which should be banned. It's the transportation, storage, refrigeration, and the food waste. I mean, food waste, a lot of waste. Yeah. Well, we waste 40% of our food. We believe it's not our plate.

We don't have.

Imagine going to the grocery store, buying a bunch of groceries and getting home and throwing 40% in the garbage. The average American waste 1800 dollars of food a year, and it's about a pound a day. And that goes to landfills. The landfills. Then it rots and creates methane. So you could be a vegan throwing out your food waste and scraps, and you could be contributing to climate change. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US And China.

Wow.

Yeah. It's Methane to produce and we need to compost, we need to have community garden, like there's always a fix it. But it's like when you look at the whole end to end food system, it is the number one source of climate change, about 50% of greenhouse gases. And people just don't appreciate that.

So why, I mean, if this information is public and it's out there and policymakers are aware of it.

They're not. They're not aware of it? No. I spent two hours on a sailboat this summer with a senator, a smart senator. He wasn't aware of it and I literally, his jaw was hanging open the entire time.

Are they not presented with this research and information?

No.

Because they got so much money sent to them by the lobbyists probably.

Right? I mean, listen, if all the people who are walking their office are Monsanto and Cargill and you know, McDonald's and Pepsi and like, and they're all donating millions of dollars, I would say billions of dollars. They're not hearing the other side of the science. And you know, how do you, how do you find. Fight that. So you know, I always said deride a lobbyist, but I, I plan on, you know, of creating a food fix campaign which is a non profit along with an advocacy organization to start to literally lobby senators, congressmen, key people in the administration around these issues and start to drive policy change.

Because in the UK and you were talking about, I think in Australia, New Zealand there or in, I think in Asia, you were saying that you can't do certain things with the food, otherwise you'll go to prison. You'll go, you know, you'll get killed. You'll.

Well, yeah, I mean like in the.

UK they don't have a lot of these dyes and. Right.

Yeah. So it's so funny, you know, the fda, you know, is so influenced by the, the food industry. And, and I was once with the, the former head of the Federal Drug Administration, Food and Drug Administration. Peggy Hammer. Former. She was, she was, you know, she, but then she was the FDA commissioner. Yeah, but, but now she's former and I was at the World Economic Forum. I said, Peggy, how, how come, you know, we have so much trouble with, with getting advances in food labeling or dealing with toxic chemicals in our food or antibiotics and animal feed or, you know, it's like she's like, well, when we try to make too aggressive change, Congress threatens to shut down our funding because of the food lobby.

They threatened to shut it down?

Yeah.

Then what if they shut it down? What would Happen.

Well, they're limited in their ability to do their job. And so the FTC, the same thing happened in the 70s. There was a movement by the Federal Trade Commission to have negative, I mean, education campaigns around sugar and how bad it was. But the Congress says, we're going to pull all your funding and shut you down if you do this. And so they pull back. So, so, you know, in, in, you know, for example, you asked a question about Asia. We have this thing called grass, which is generally recognized as safe. So the food additives we have, you know, we have, you know, thousands of food additives. Only about 5% have actually been tested for safety in the US some of them are grandfathered in. Right. Like, so Crisco, for example, trans fat was grandfathered in as a safety food to eat. But it took 50 years for, for researchers to finally prove to the FDA that it wasn't safe because it was the basis of all processed food. Right. Crisco shortening, you know, shortens your life. Oh my gosh. And, and so they, they, they literally had to be sued by a scientist in order to actually turn it into a non safe substance. And then of course, they gave their food industry years and years to get it out of the food. So. Right, but, but, but in this country, there's so many things that are used in, in our food supply that are banned in Europe, like bht, butylene, hydroxytoluen, food additives, various dyes, and something called azodicarbonamide, which is a softener that makes like bread, more like fluffy and soft. And it was used in Subway Sandwich. Our friend Vani Hari outed them and said, this is your yoga mat material in your Subway Sandwich.

And they got it.

They tended to eat her. Yeah, and she got it out. But the FDA still says it's fine to eat. And in Singapore, if you use it and you're a food producer, you get a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail for putting in the food that same ingredient.

The same ingredient that anyone can use in the U.S. right?

In the U.S. yes. And most of the things that are safe, quote, safe here are banned in Europe. So it's like, yeah, they're not doing their job. And then antibiotics, you know, we have 30 million pounds of antibiotics are used in animals feeding about 37 million people total. So about 7 million for humans to treat disease and 30 million for animals.

Why?

For growth. It's a growth factor.

Right.

It makes them fat and it makes humans fat too. And it is used for Prevention from overcrowding. And. And the FDA says, well, this isn't a good idea. I mean, nobody thinks it's a good idea, but they go, would you please, pretty please not do it? It was a voluntary guideline that the FDA produced. Not mandatory.

Please don't do it.

Yeah, you have to have a vet certify that the animal's sick before you give them antibiotics.

Oh, man.

And now they, you know, continue to do it and just laugh. You know, they had voluntary. The fda, FTC put in voluntary guidelines around junk food marketing. Would you pretty please not advertise the bad stuff and advertise more good stuff? It was just voluntary. And the food industry went ballistic and had it overturned. So even the voluntary guidelines are nullified. Like, no. Wow. And it just, it's.

I mean, sugar. I mean, it's like I'm the first one to raise my hand when I say, like, I love sugar. And it's my. Everybody, my biggest vice.

Right.

I love cookies and candies and cakes and brownies and anything you think of, I love it. Right.

You know, we programmed.

I don't know why I don't. Diabetes. So much sugar. I've had my whole life. But I can't be having that much.

Because you look pretty good.

Well, I train hard too.

Right.

I go through waves and. But as a kid, I would drink like nine, ten Dr. Peppers a day. I remember what, like some days in the summer, you just sit there.

President. Is that what our president?

Exactly. I would just. I mean, I would run around and work out and play sports, but then I just drink because I thought that's.

You were 16, 18, you know, like.

Now I was like 9, 10. Right. So I was like. But it was. You'd see it on commercials, like your NBA superstar drinking Dr. Pepper or Sprite or whatever after. On the basketball court. And I don't know if it was just like subconscious or just it tasted good and you didn't think about it.

I mean, this is where the food industry is. So I mean, I talk about in my book Food Facts, but the food industry is so strategic about how it advances its mission and goals. And it does it through multiple channels. And I'm just going to go through them because it just. People just don't know.

The celebrity endorsements, right?

Yeah. First, you know, obviously, you know, celebrity endorsements, which is the obvious one, they co op social groups, so they fund groups like the NAACP and Hispanic Federation. The African American and Latino communities are the most affected by diabetes and obesity. And they co op them by Funding them. I want to show the movie Fed up at the King center in Atlanta. And Bernice King, Martin Luther King's daughter, was all about it and she was excited. But once we got it scared schedule. A few days later I got a call that we couldn't show and I'm like, why?

She's.

Because Coca Cola funds the King Center.

No.

Yeah. I went to Spelman College, you know, which is African American women College in Atlanta. And the dean said to me, half of the 18 year olds coming into college have a chronic illness, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, 18 year old women. And I'm like, why is there soda machines all over the campus? Why? Just because Coke funds. No. And one of the, one of the people on the board of trustees is one of the highest executives at Coca Cola, an African American woman. It's like, so they co op social groups and that's why they, for example, oppose soda taxes. Because they're, they're in the, you know, in the funding of these, these big soda companies. And then of course they, they fund research. So they fund 12 times as much research, $12 billion worth of research a year to study nutrition. So. So Gatorade gets studied by Pepsi. Really? Gatorade's the best thing in the world. It's not, it's just sugar. Right, right, right. So it corrupts and pollutes science. So people are confused. Why is there so much confusion about nutrition science? Third, they, they create front groups, call them spin doctors. So they create front groups that seem like they're independent groups. Like Crop Life. Yeah. Or you know, like, and they're tweeting center for Consumer Freedom or the American Council on Science and Health, which by the way is run by a bunch of doctors who suggest that pesticides are safe, that high fructose cornp is great for you, that smoking isn't cause disease. And you know, why do they do.

Why would they do that? Because they get paid a lot.

They're funded by Monsanto and Big Food and Pepsi. Just look at their funders. And I mean they spend $30 million fighting GMO labeling and California. This front group, it was all funded by Monsanto. Right. And then you, so we got these front groups and then you have them co opting scientists and academies. So the nutrition academies, the American Heart Association, American Diabetes association, their funding in large part comes from industry. And, and so the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, which is our main nutrition association, 40% of their funding comes from the food industry. You know, they have sponsored, you know, lectures at their meetings that are you know, with people saying, well, high fructose corn syrup is good and diet drinks are good and like. Right. It's just completely corrupted. And so these professional societies give guidelines and they're, they're corrupt. And Dr. Ioannides from Stanford, who's a scientist who looks at, carefully at the research and conflicts of interest, as you know, these professional societies like the American Heart association and Diabetes association should not be making guidelines. And then so you've got all these ways in which they sort of screw things up. And then of course they, they are aggressive in advertising and marketing, which is illegal in most countries. And then they have lobbyists running around Washington driving policy that supports all what they do. So you've got this massive effort and it's often subversive and illegal. And they, it's, you know, it's of kind of shame.

What does your daily diet look like?

Oh, God.

Doctor himself.

So today I had, I was, I had a, I had a protein shake because I went to this friend of mine's company called Essential Foods Living Foods, and he had this. It was like a hemp coconut chia moringa, like coconut cream, like protein powder with lots of.

Yeah.

And I had a couple of that with a spoon of coconut butter for fat and almond butter for fat and, and blended that up. That was my breakfast. And then lunch was at a big salad with lots of avocado, olive oil and some wild salmon, which has fat. So that was. And dinner I haven't had yet.

So.

Awesome. And dinner I'll usually have, you know, a small piece of protein and like, I'll, I'll put 75% of my vegetable plate is vegetables, really. So if I go out to eat, I'll order like three sides of vegetables. Right. And if, if you look at your plate, you know, by volume, 70 or 80% of your diet should be plant foods and non starchy veggies. Right.

Non potatoes and.

Right. And right. And by, and by calories, it should be like 50 to 60% fat. But fat doesn't take up a lot of space. So you can get a lot of calories and a little space and still eat. Like if you put a lot of olive oil in your thing or even coconut butter. So you don't have to worry about it. You just have to eat. And you know, the trick is I don't worry about how much I eat. I just worry about what I eat and I make sure I have stuff. Like I know that I'm going to be like here and I know how long it's going to be. So I always bring stuff in my pocket. Almond butter. So I just have a pocket. I know I'm never going to be in a food emergency, so not going to have to eat something crappy. And I think, you know, I eat very little grains, very little beans. I do eat them. I eat mostly vegetables and some low glycemic fruit, and I eat lots of nuts and seeds and. And I eat good quality fish and animal protein.

What's low glycemic fruit? What does that include?

So I'm not eating like tons of pineapple and grapes and those are sugary things. And I eat berries. And I eat mostly berries. And then I'll eat an apples or pears sometimes, or kiwis or grapefruit or mangoes or papaya, things like that. Nice.

Okay, so let's go back to functional medicine. What does that actually mean?

So functional medicine is compared to regular medicine? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I don't know if people listening really have a great understanding of, like, what's happening right now in science, but it's profound that the shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is. It's like Columbus going, hey, the Earth isn't flat. Wow.

And right now, the last few years.

It'S just like the last decade or two with our understanding of the human genome, of systems biology, of the body as a biological network, as a system. It's like an ecosystem where everything's connected, working together. And so the way we organize medicine is according to these organs. You know, you've got your cardiovascular system, your neurologic system, your GI system, your, you know, and so you go to all these specialists, right? And everybody cheats their part of your body. If you have a migraine, we're actually learning that might be related to gut flora, but. Or if you have heart attack, I mean, now we know that you might be getting cancer because of your gut bacteria. Well, no oncologist is asking you what. What's going on in your gut. Microbiome.

Right.

And so now we know, for example, like, the microbiome is a great example of this disruption that's happening in healthcare. You know, the microbiome, which is your gut flora, it's really, it's like 10 times as many cells as your own cells. It's 100 times as much DNA as your own DNA. So we're kind of lazy. We have about as much DNA as an earthworm.

Okay.

But we borrow the DNA of the bichromes, the microbes in our gut to do things for us. And we, we borrow things from plants, do things from us. Like, like, for example, glucose in lights. And so the, the microbiome is this huge thing that's got 2 to 3 million genes. We only have 20,000 genes. And it regulates your weight. You can swap out poop from a thin person into someone with diabetes and reverse it. Right. Amazing. We've seen, we've seen people. I've heard stories of fecal transplants not only curing things like that, but like, you know, autoimmune diseases and really Parkinson's and people with Ms. And like crazy stories. And I'm starting to hear. And there's research now going on aggressively in looking at fecal transplants for all sorts of diseases.

Transferring poop from one person to another.

Yes.

What is that? How do you do that?

Well, that's a process.

Well, they collect the poop. There's actually a. Yeah. You've never heard of this?

Never heard of this?

Oh, my God. This is huge. So, so the.

What is it called?

Fecal transplant. Fmt. Fecal microbial transplant. The way it came about was some doctor had a bright idea that there was this condition called C. Diff, which is a infection of the intestines, happens after antibiotics, is life threatening. And there's a huge amount of people are now resistant to antibiotics of all the antibiotics in our feed and they're in the animal production. So there's. The drugs don't work, people die. Wow. And somebody thought, well, gee, if I put the poop from a healthy person into a sick person, let's see what happens. And the doctor did it and the person was cured like that.

Shut up.

98 effective. 98 effective. How do you do this?

So understand this process.

You want to get into it. Give me the 10. We could do the visual version. So basically they take like, they take a fecal trans transplant specimen, like a donor specimen from a healthy person, and they screen them for all sorts of diseases and then they spin it up with some saline and then they inject it in with a catheter or a colonoscope. And then they're actually also, like, it.

Just heals inside or what's it do when it's.

Well, it goes in. It's like. It's like massive probiotics. Right?

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. And so probiotics. And also there are actually pills now they actually are making special encapsulated pills, poop pills. And it's not. I mean, this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm not talking about like stuff that's wacky. I'm talking about serious medicine that people are doing. But it's not just for that now. They're looking at it for all sorts of things.

So people are cured right after one infusion?

Yeah, it's amazing.

So functional medicine is really understanding the body as a system and network and understanding that the focus should not be on treating disease, but on creating health. So it's the science of creating health. It's the ultimate biohacking tool. And it's interpreting all the data and the stories from your body that it tells through testing. We do. For example, you don't have to do testing, but you can look into the body and look at your immune function and allergies and your gut flora and toxins and nutritional status. It's like doing a soil sample. So I'm like a soil farmer, organic soil farmer, rather than industrial agriculturist. I don't put all these chemicals on my plants to make them better, like herbicides and pesticides. I create a healthy soil and then disease doesn't occur. Right. Disease can't land in a healthy soil. So that's exactly what functional medicine is. We help people get in balance. We take away the things that cause imbalance. We put in the things that help create balance. So, for example, I had a woman come. She had a whole list of problems. I call myself a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. So she had like psoriatic arthritis, was on a drug that cost 30 grand. Oh, my God, Stellara. And still was miserable. She also was overweight, had pre diabetes, migraines, sinus problems, irritable bowel reflux, depression, insomnia. She had like this whole list of things. Of course, she saw all these specialists. The sinus doctor, the migraine doctor, the autoimmune doctor, the skin doctor, the depression doctor, the gut doctor, like, and you know, everybody's treating her with their best.

Practices, their best drug, probably, but I.

Mean, she's being seen at the top medical center. Yeah, right. They're not doing bad medicine. They're doing standard of care. In fact, they're doing excellent standard of care. But the standard of care is not the way we're going to fix these problems.

It's outdated or it's not.

It's not. It's totally outdated. So rather than thinking about how all these were separate, I said, how are these all connected? Interesting, right? How are these all connected? And so there were connections. It was all inflammatory. And I said, well, why don't we put you on an anti inflammatory, low glycemic diet? The Pegan diet, basically. Right. Took away anti allergens. And I cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing huge bloating. And she had yeast reactions. She had like vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and itchy ears and yeast everywhere. Yeast on her mouth and thrush. And so I gave her an antifungal. I gave her stuff to call clear out the bad bugs in her gut. I put in good bugs, I put in enzymes, I put in things to heal and got the gut lining. I gave her fish oil, vitamin D, just some basic stuff, Probiotics.

Yeah.

But it's really eliminating. Eliminating the bad foods, eliminating the bad bugs in her gut and putting in new bugs and putting in nutrients to help her body heal. Two months later, she comes back completely symptom free. No more arthritis, no more. No more $30,000 drug, no more skin psoriasis, no migraines, no sinus problems, normal bowel, no reflux, no depression, no insomnia. And she lost £20.

All from food.

Totally. And what was food? And her gut flora.

Right.

I focused on her gut flora. Why? Because 60% or 50% of the immune system is in the gut.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Why? Why is it in the gut? Why is it there? Because that you're sticking pounds of food of foreign material every day in your body.

You got to fight it off in your gut.

Yeah.

And you've got, you know, you've got all the bugs in there and poop. It's like. It's like the danger zone. Right. It's like you're.

You're like.

It's one cell away. Like you're one cell away from a sewer every minute.

Really?

Yeah.

It's one cell between you and that mass of food and poop. Right. So your immune system is like, if anything happens, like, right there. So when people have autoimmune disease, it's often a gut issue. It's often a gut issue.

People didn't know this before, did they?

No. No. So now, like, now all this is really coming to light. And functional medicine is the operating system to interpret the data. It's a new set of lenses to think about how to solve it. And it's a system of treatment that helps people get back in balance. That's what's powerful. And then at Cleveland Clinic, you know, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, I come the Wayne Gretzky of healthcare. He goes where the puck's gonna be, not where it is smart. Right. And he's basically came after me to go set up a center there, and I'm.

Functional Medicine center.

Yeah. I'm like, I'm not going to Cleveland Clinic. It's like a. You know, it's like, I'm not going to go to a place where I'm going to have to bang my head against the wall where it's traditional medicine, where they don't get this, where they're in the dark ages.

I just. It's also known as one of the top hospitals, of course.

What is the top hospital in the old model?

Yes.

Right. So I'm like. But he know. He knows what's happening. He knows what's happening. He's like, we need this here. Wow. And so he's investing tons of money, millions and millions dollars building this. We're building an 18,000 square foot facility. We started with a little space and we just outgrew it. We're hiring doctors. I have an interview with the doctor right after this. And we're. We're basically growing. We're doing research in all sorts of conditions. We're changing medical school education, we're changing policy, we're doing community work. So we're really. He's really putting us on the map in the traditional world, and. And he's gonna go out of business.

If he doesn't start doing this.

But what's amazing to me, you know, Louis, I thought when I got there, people would be, you know, skeptical, negative, make it difficult for me and my team there, but it's the opposite.

And I last.

They want to learn.

Last week when I was there, I had two deans of medical schools, two chairs of depart, two chairs of institutes, which are like big deals, and another doctor as patients.

No way.

Yeah.

They're coming as patients.

They're not being cured with the medicine.

The executive team, the C suite team, is sending all their family members to come see us.

Do you know Dr. Lysa Rankin, by any chance?

Yeah, she.

She's been on as well. And she talked about how she had all this medication, she was treating herself, and then. Yeah, started saying, oh, let me just change the way I eat and my relationships and my emotional health. Exactly. It's all I got off all the medicine.

That's right.

And then I stopped giving medicine to my patients.

I started asking questions. It's so powerful. So we're. We're at this. But we're at this fulcrum. It's not. It's not just. I'm like one lone doctor With a crazy idea. There's a whole movement going on here. We had dinner with James Maskell. He's helping move that movement forward. I'm the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine, where we train doctors all over the world in this model and operating system of how to actually do this in practice. So we are literally building an army of doctors that change healthcare. And it's pretty exciting. And it's actually starting to really hit that hockey stick point where it's changing. People want it. I mean, people are desperate for this model.

So if someone is listening and they're on some type of medication or they're just feeling, like, constantly sick, you know, something's constantly happening to them, what do you think is. Because there's so much information online that is scary.

It's scary, right?

Stuff just like looking up anything and googling it and seeing all the nasty photos.

And just like, what is an approach.

That someone should take if they have some challenge that's constantly happening in their health? Should they first analyze the food they're intaking and do, like, an analysis? Do you have, like, a process?

Absolutely, absolutely.

It's a great question, Lou. So, you know, what I am is a doctor. And what I do is see patients in my office. That's my main job. Yes, I've written a dozen books. Yes, I do a lot of stuff, but that's my main job. And so I've learned over 30 years of doing this. How to create sustainable, practical programs to help people get from sick to well very quickly. And what I've done, because not everybody can come see me, and there aren't that many of us out there yet.

You have so many hours on the.

Day, and there's not that many functional medicine. So I've written books and programs to help people operationalize this in their own life. So if I get thin and I look, I'm, you know, you know, I could say, you know, do my program, but I don't really care what program you do, as long as it's based on the basic principles. And there are a lot of my colleagues who are writing great books about this. It's all. It's all the same information because it's all the same science. And if you're telling the truth, there's only one story here. The truth. Right. And so this effect get then is a great program that I put together to make people have no friction. It's easy. It's very straightforward.

21 days.

21 days practical goof proof. And it tells you what to eat and when you get to the end of that, you'll see how you feel. Because Most people in 21 days will change their habits, but they'll also allow their body to reset. It's like putting your body back to its original factory settings. Right. And then if something's left over, then, you know, gee, maybe I need to go deeper. Like, if you still don't feel great, maybe you have Lyme disease. Maybe I've heavy metal poisoning. Maybe your thyroid's not working. Maybe you have a parasite. Maybe, you know, like, you could be eating the perfect diet but still feel bad. So do that 21 days first. Yeah, but most. 80% of the time, you're gonna cure yourself. Yeah, 80%. I mean, 80% of the time, this works for people. And then the 20% who have to get extra help, they need to come see somebody.

And the body's pretty incredible in how it can heal itself very quickly once you change habits.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. We did the survey of a thousand people who did this. I mean, they lost weight.

Yes.

And they lost inches. Yes. And that's all impressive. And their blood sugar dropped 20 points and their blood pressure 10 points. But the thing that really matters to me is I have everybody fill out what I call the FLC quiz. You know what that is? That's when you feel like crap. Okay, so it's a quiz. How do you, like, you know, do you have your bloating? Do you have asthma? Do you have headaches? Can you sleep? Like, joint pain, muscle pain? What's your mood? Are you depressed? Like, so you feel this whole score. And 0 to 4 for every symptom, and you get a score, they do one before and after, and the before and after score, There was a 69% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases.

Whoa.

Because you don't have to treat everything individually. If you put in the right information, like I said at the beginning of the show, the body knows what to do. Wow.

Right?

So the information in food is so powerful. If you figure out what to eat, you don't have to worry about how much. You don't have to count fat, grams, carbs, calories, nothing. I don't do that.

I don't have time for that.

Right, right, right. And I want to be on an app all day. I just want to know how to get my body and naturally do what it's supposed to do. If you're off by 100 calories a day, you're going to gain, like, 50 pounds in 30 years. Right. You can't. You can't do it by willpower. You have to use science and the science of using fat and low glycemic food, like low sugar food, is really powerful. It's magical. I mean, I noticed my own body. I'm like, 56, and I noticed, young.

Man, you look fit, healthy, energetic.

Well, I can tell you I was always been focused on health, but I was the doctor who was trained to eat low fat and to tell my patients, eat low fat. And I did that.

And I also ate a lot of.

Things that I thought were healthy. Like pasta was a health food. Pasta was a health food.

I used to eat so much pasta.

Yeah, Health food. Right? Low fat all the time.

Yeah, exactly.

And so I basically changed that, and I started, you know, eating a lot less starch, a lot less sugar, a lot more fat. And I noticed my body, like, without any exercise, I'm like, so lean, so fit.

Yeah.

I'm like, wow, I got a six pack and I didn't work out. It's like. And it's just stunning. What happens when you're. When you do. And my brain is clear, I have more energy, my mood's better. I mean, I know I saw you drinking, like, a bulletproof coffee. You know that it works.

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I started doing testing some different things at the beginning of this year in January, and the first week.

I did no sugar.

The second week, no sugar, no gluten.

Yeah.

Third week, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy. Fourth week, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy, no meat. That was last week. And I was just to see what happened with that.

Pulling a band aid off slowly.

Yeah.

I should have just done it all.

It's better to do it the other way. The way I do with my patients.

You.

You do a detox. Basically, you get off everything at once. You feel bad for a couple of days, and then you see how you feel.

Amazing.

Because one of the rules of I.

Should have talked to you before this.

And then you can add things back one at a time and see what bothers you.

Interesting.

So. Because the rule in functional medicine is if you're standing on attack, takes a lot of aspirin. Make it feel better. Right. So if something's bothering you, you have to get rid of the cause. But if you're standing on two tacks, taking one out doesn't make you 50% better.

Interesting.

So if you're. If you're allergic to dairy and gluten, but you just take out gluten, you're not gonna feel better. Right, right, right.

So I did the whole wrong way. Oh, well, it was an experiment. But the thing what I was gonna mention was I started doing bulletproof in the morning and fasting until 1:30 and not eating after 9:30 or whatever it is at night. And I realized that I wasn't hungry.

No, in the mornings when I do.

The coffee and I only have like half a cup only.

Yeah.

And I would be fine until 1:32 mct.

Oil puts you in ketosis, which is medium chain triglycerides. It's a super fuel. Comes from coconut, which is in the coffee. It's what I recommend as part of my eat fat, get thin program. Speeds up your metabolism, your burning fat. Yeah, it actually makes your metabolism work faster and burn more calories. And it also affects your brain.

I believe humans are made to eat meat, so I think that's a foundation for humans. I think our ancestors were hunter gatherers and it doesn't really matter of what you eat. I think meat, lamb, pork, fish, poultry.