REVERSE AGING: What To Eat & When To Eat For LONGEVITY | Dr. Mark Hyman & Lewis Howes

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.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

You've got a book, Young Forever, the Secrets to Living youg Longest, Healthiest Life. I'm curious, you've been studying this for a while now. You've gone all over the world and studied this with people who've lived the longest. You've been, you know, doctor for many, many years. You've researched this stuff for a long time. Do you think it's possible to live in our 90s, in our hundreds, fit, mentally sharp, healthy at that age still?

A thousand percent.

Really?

I mean, here's my plan. I want to be 120, maybe 150. We'll see how it goes. I want to go for a hike in mountains. I want to swim in a cool lake with my love. I want to go back to the cabin, make a beautiful dinner, have a glass of wine. make love, and just drift off into the Neverland.

At 150.

Yeah, why not?

120, 150.

Actually, yes, 'cause what we see as aging in this country is really abnormal aging. Decrepitude, decline, frailty, disease, disability, loss of cognitive function, faculties, and those are abnormal things that happen. They don't have to happen. I was in Sardinia and I met this guy Pietro who was 95 years old. and he literally just stopped being a shepherd where he was hiking up and down the mountains five miles a day, herding his sheep for, I don't know, 80 years probably. And he was like straight up fit, strong, bellowing voice, super strong handshake, eyes clear. I'm like, man, you know, it's possible to be very vibrant if we know how to take care of ourselves. And what we've done in our culture is activate all of our disease systems. and degradation and dysfunction. But we now know that we have an innate healing system and we can activate our healing system. When I was in medical school, I studied a book called the Pathologic Basis of Disease. We never had a book called the Scientific Basis of Wellness. We never took that class. But now we understand that the body has its innate mechanisms for repair and healing, rejuvenation, renewal, that can be activated at any point in life.

Okay, so what are the disease systems that most of us are turning on throughout the world?

Well, so listen, we have an extraordinarily sick society. America was 4% of the population of the world now, and it's 16% of the cases and deaths for COVID.

Why?

So America is 4% of the population- In the world. Of the world.

But we were 16% of the cases and deaths, four times what it should have been, and probably considering we have a great healthcare system, it should have been half of that, right?

Why is that you think?

Yeah, well it's not a question, there's a clear answer. It's because we are a very sick population. So we were pre-inflamed, we were overweight as a society, 93.2% of us are metabolically unhealthy, meaning we have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, have had a heart attack or stroke, or are overweight. That means 6.8% of us are healthy. So when COVID hits that population who is obese and pre-inflamed, who is chronically.

Ill, which is also a disease of inflammation, who is elderly, which is also.

A disease of inflammation, the COVID takes over and just kind of wipes these people out. And so we are suffering from diseases of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all the things we see as people get older. And these are all entirely preventable. They're relatively new. I mean, if you look back in the 150 years ago, in all the hospital records in Mass General or the hospitals in Boston, diabetes was almost nonexistent as an ending diagnosis. So there was a case of a heart attack, the entire medical school, the residents, the doctors would all come around to see this rare case. It's like if somebody had like just a sialosis today in a hospital. Really? They'd come in and everyone would say, what is this disease? Yeah, for sure. It was so unusual. So we now have an anxiety where six in 10 of us had chronic disease, where four in 10 have more than one, where if you're over 65, you know, 80% have a chronic disease. And probably even more when you look at things a little more subtly about dysfunction that happens. So what we see as aging today is something that gives us an impression that it's bad to get older because you're gonna become disabled, decrepit, dysfunctional, frail. But that's a model that is now being challenged by researchers in longevity and who are proposing that we may be able to even reach something called longevity escape velocity, meaning we can escape death by advancing science that will keep us living longer and longer each year we're alive. Really? I'm not sure I'm into that. I don't know if I want it to be a thousand, but I do think that it is pushing the boundaries of what we thought is possible. And we know in animal models, we've been able to extend life by a third, right? If we do certain interventions, we can take animals and make them live a third longer, which means for humans you'd look to be 120. So we've had women who lived to be very old, like Madame Clemenceau, who lived to be 122 years old, who was a French woman who was documented legitimately to be 122 years old. It's incredible. It's incredible. And she was a wine drinking, smoking, chocoholic. But I wouldn't follow her longevity plan.

She had other things going for her to go against that.

Yeah, for sure. So that was an anomaly. Cases of very vital, healthy people. And I traveled through the blue zones around the world where people lived to be well over 100. I saw this couple that had a combined age of 210.

Oh my gosh. How long were they married together?

Too long according to that. Maybe like 100 years. I don't know.

Oh my gosh.

You know, 90 years or something. It's really wild, right? So we see these pockets and we We've learned a lot from them about how to activate our longevity pathways. And they have a society and a culture that by default does it. We don't have it. We have a default society that makes us sick and overweight and creates early death.

What would you say are the three to five main causes of our society that causes us to get overweight and get sick easily?

I mean, hands down, it's the food. We are eating a diet, a toxic diet, that is unlike anything we've eaten in human history. It's 60% of our calories are ultra-processed food, which means they're made from basically food-like substances that are from soy, corn, and wheat, and other additives and ingredients and fillers and colors and dyes and thickeners that are highly toxic to our systems, and they're inordinately high in sugar and starch. We've talked about this, but we eat about a pound a day of sugar and starch per person per day in America, flour, sugar, and that's average. You might have a lot more. And it's just physiologically not something we evolved with. We used to eat 22 teaspoons a year as hunter-gatherers if we were lucky to find a beehive or a berry patch. No, we have that every day on average. And kids have like 34, which is like two and a half soda, like large sodas a day. So that's what's driving a lot of this, and that drives this phenomenon called insulin resistance, which is at the heart of the aging process. And that insulin resistance causes, inflammation and all the age-related diseases. So what is insulin for those who don't know what that is? So insulin is what your pancreas makes in order to drop your blood sugar and keep your blood sugar balanced. So we all know type 1 diabetics need to take insulin shots. But type 2 diabetics, I mean, by the way, there's, I think, been a 400% increase in type 2 diabetes in kids in the last 30 years, which is frightening to me. But they used to call it adult-onset diabetes. They had to change the name because little kids were getting it. 15-year-olds are now getting liver transplants because of fatty liver from drinking too much soda. It is really scary stuff. So insulin is important to keep your blood sugar in balance, but if you eat too much sugar, your body pumps out more and more insulin. And then just like the boy who cried wolf, your cells don't pay attention anymore. You get resistant to the effects of insulin. And then you need more insulin. And that causes the deposition of belly fat. And belly fat is this dangerous fat around your organs that is not just holding up your pants, but it's a whole, organ itself, it's producing hormones and inflammatory molecules and neurotransmitters that are regulating your appetite. So it makes you really sick and it's the central driver of all these age-related diseases. So that's a huge factor. There are other factors like toxins, our sedentary lifestyle, chronic stress, our sleep disruption. These are all things that are activating.

Our disease systems, not our healing systems.

So the food is the main thing. Food is for sure the main thing. 'Cause think about it, you eat pounds of this stuff every day. And it's not just calories, it's information. So the molecules in the food make a difference. So in Ikaria, for example, one of the blue zones in Greece, they eat tons of wild food. Wild greens, they have summer greens, winter greens, wild mushrooms. Every day they have wild sage tea, 'cause it's just free and cheap, right? They're poor over there. They don't go out in the backyard and they pull this in. And it's like, turns out I looked it up and it's full of catechins, which are these compounds in green tea that make green tea such a longevity compound. an antioxidant compound, an anti-inflammatory compound. So we really have this amazing carnucopia of drugs all around us in our plant chemicals that we don't consume very often. I mean, I think what 2% of the Americans eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables.

Sure, sure.

What would you say the five main ingredients or foods to support longevity? Whether it be like a, you know.

Well, this is great. It's a great question. Right, so what should we be eating? We shouldn't be eating ultra processed food. We shouldn't be eating too much sugar. We shouldn't be eating refined oils. We shouldn't be eating additives and chemicals. We each about five pounds of additives per person a year. We shouldn't be eating pesticides, herbicides, all that crap. So that's just a given. But what should we be eating? Well, start out with the most important things for longevity, which are these phytochemicals in plant foods. So the majority of your diet by volume should be colorful fruits and vegetables and weird stuff if you can, you know, eat dandelion greens, eat seaweed, eat all this weird stuff because that's where all the medicine is. So the more colorful it is, the more heirloom it is, the more regenerative it is, the more organic it is, the more wild it is, the better it is. So if you had a wild strawberry, it's about the size of a, you know, a peanut, but it tastes like an explosion of flavor if you ever ate a summer wild strawberry. Sure, sure. But you can go to the supermarket and buy this giant strawberry that look great, but they put in your mouth, it's like, I think it's a strawberry. It's so sh. It's like an apple. Yeah, they're gonna have an apple, you know. But it's not very tasty because the phytochemicals aren't there. So we know that you want to include a rich array of these phytochemicals. And the special ones for longevity are things like fisetin that's in strawberries. From pomegranate, you can produce urolithin A, which improves your mitochondrial function. So you can have green tea, which is epigallocatechin gallate compounds, which I talked about in the sage. You can have resveratrol, which is in red grape skins. There's a lot of plant compounds that you can start to include, curcumin, which is a powder powerful anti-inflammatory. So you can have a wonderful time having a delicious diet. And then mushrooms, they're not really a vegetable, they're in their own category. And mushrooms have an incredible array of compounds, these polysaccharides that turn out are immune modulating, anti-cancer, adaptogenic. And so we need to be including a lot more good mushrooms. And you can take mushrooms as supplements, but you can also eat a lot more of the good mushrooms. Also, garlic and onions are really important for sulfur in the broccoli family specifically because they upregulate glutathione, which is important for detox. So you really want to have a wide array of these medicines in these plant foods. The second thing you want to do is eat the right fats. So omega-3 fats are key, olive oil is key. Those are real longevity foods. And then protein, and this is where it gets sticky for people in terms of controversy because A lot of longevity researchers saying, well, we shouldn't eat protein because it activates this pathway that inhibits the body's own ability to clean itself called autophagy. Autophagy means self-cleaning, self-cannibalism. It's like a Pac-Man that runs around cleaning up old cells. We've all heard about now time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, and all these things. Ketogenic diets, well, they activate this process which is built-in. It's a built-in recycling, repair, and regeneration renewal and longevity pathway. Now, when we eat all the time, we inhibit that pathway. So it's like making food in your kitchen for a month and never washing the dishes, right? It's gonna be a mess. So you don't want that to happen. You want the cleaning crew to come in every night and clean up. And so that's what we have to have. But if you eat protein all the time, that pathway is inhibited. I mean, that pathway is stimulated, so you can't actually get the autophagy to happen, the cleanup to happen. So, the key is you want to inhibit this pathway called mTOR, which we can talk about. mTOR is this really amazing kind of key longevity switch. I call it a longevity switch that is inhibited by fasting. It's inhibited by certain plant compounds. It can be inhibited by drugs like rapamycin. And so, this is being looked at as a key strategy for enhancing longevity. In animal models, they can extend life again by a third by inhibiting this pathway. but it's stimulated by protein and by sugar. So many longevity researchers say, well, no, you shouldn't have protein. But, well, the other part of longevity is muscle.

You need the muscle. You need grip strength, you need muscle, you need to be able to get.

Yourself off the ground if you fall.

Exactly.

Like all these things.

Muscle is the current bone density, right?

For sure.

So, you know, muscle is the current of aging and longevity. And what happens as we age is we lose muscle. So we can be the same weight as we were at 25, at 70, but be twice as fat, like a rib eye instead of a filet mignon. Yeah, that's very good. And that marbled muscle filled with fat doesn't work right, and it causes inflammation and aging and diabetes and heart disease and cancer and dementia and all this stuff is coming from this. Plus you can't get out of a chair and do the normal things you want to do. I mean, most of the reason people end up in nursing homes is because they can't do their daily functions. They can't tie their shoes. They can't get out of bed. They're kind of weak. They can't get out of a chair. It's not because they're sick. So sarcopenia is real. So you have to figure out the balance between building muscle and having the cleaning and repair crew come in at night. So you want to have at least a 12 to 14, even 16-hour overnight fast. We used to call it breakfast. Sure, sure. If you eat dinner at 6 and you eat breakfast at 6 in the morning, that's a 12-hour fast. But we just keep eating all night and then we eat in the morning. So we really got to give yourself a body of break to do the cleaning. and then you want to load protein in at the right times, like when you wake up and have done this overnight fast, a good dose of protein, like 30, 40, 50 grams, to activate muscle synthesis. And you need the right quality protein. Now, this is where it's controversial because a lot of people are saying be vegan because it's going to save you and save the planet. But the truth is that plant proteins are low in leucine, which is a really important amino acid that's needed to turn on muscle. So if you want to turn on the switch to build muscle, you got to have the right amounts of this. It's like the rate limiting step. But plant proteins, you don't have that much. You can eat six cups of brown rice, but no one's gonna do that. You have a four ounce piece of chicken, people can eat that.

So you want to have a balance of protein and fasting is what I'm.

Hearing you say, right? So time on and time off. So it's like that Goldilocks, right? You want the demolition crew and the construction crew. And so that's the beauty. So you don't want to stop protein synthesis because it's essential for life and if you start to lose muscle, that's when you start to become frail and disabled. so I think I write a lot about this in the book. It's not my opinion. This is a group of protein experts from around the world who got together and wrote this paper surveying all the literature in the world looking at this.

And what we should be doing.

And it was called the ProteAge study.

What's it called?

P-R-O-T-A-G-E study. It's in the book. And essentially it says, look, as you get older, we need more protein, not less. And as you get older, we need more protein.

Yeah, because the body, it's harder to keep the protein.

That's right. It's harder to keep the muscle, right?

Right.

Anabolic resistance where anabolic means to build, to build muscle. So we want to build muscle, but there's resistance of the muscles to build more muscle. So you need more exercise and more protein. So key is to eat a good dose of protein about an hour or two after a workout. That's the best way. And then you can add some things to it like creatine and other things. Now if you're vegan, you can also add amino acids. You can add, you can eat your plant proteins, but then you need to add amino acids. And I've seen these really jacked up bodybuilders who are vegan. I'm like, how do you do that? It's like, oh, you like, you know, so much plant protein shakes, these highly processed, pulverized things that are jacked up with all sorts of amino acids. It's cheating a little bit. Sure, sure. So, you can't really get it directly from the plants. Yeah, I mean, it's just a science. I'm not making this up. I wish it was different. I mean, I was a vegetarian vegan for 10 years. And, I have a picture of me when I was 40 and 63, I'll show you the difference. You won't believe it. Really? Yeah, you can post it on the--.

Well, post it up.

But it's like, what? Who's who? 'Cause it's like, I look like so jacked up at 62 compared to 40. Come on. Yeah, really?

Yeah.

What are you doing differently at 60?

I just changed my diet and I did a little bit of band resistance training. So I was always doing yoga, running, biking. I thought, oh, that's enough. But then I started doing a little bit resistance training. I started doing this strategy of, you know, this time-restricted eating and then adding a bunch of protein after my workouts.

And it just, and it worked. Now, what is, what's, you want to see?

Let's see it. Yeah, yeah, do you want to see? Okay, I'll show you.

You have to send it to me a while. I'll send it to you. It's like, it's pretty, it's pretty wild.

Like, I can't even quite believe it. Will the same strategy be at 60 in your 60s as in your 80s? Yeah, I think the possibility of staying young longer is amazing. The research has shown that if you take even 60 years old, they can perform at the level of 30 year olds if they're trained right. So they don't have to lose that much function. And there's an amazing study on the Tarahumara Indians. The Tarahumara Indians live in Mexico and they were really very, here's the picture.

Oh my gosh. That's crazy.

The Tarahumara Indians had this belief that if you were older, you were a better runner. These were runners. They would run 100 miles a day. They would just do these ultra marathons before there was anything like that. They would run from village to village, mountain to mountain. And so they went down from Harvard and they tested these people. This is the power of mindset and the beliefs and what that does. And so they believe that as you got older, you got better. So the 20-year-olds are good, the 40-year-olds are better, and the 60-year-olds were better by every objective metric. pulmonary function tests, their VO2 max, all their performance metrics that were objective, not just how fast they could run, but all the objective measures of fitness were better than the 20 year olds, which is unbelievable, right?

What do they do? What do they do differently?

You know what? It's a great question. I just think they had this belief and they trained themselves. Incredible. It's really quite incredible.

That's incredible. 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. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today.

Okay, let's get back to this video.

Okay, I want to complete this five foods for longevity. We talked about more colorful vegetables and phytochemicals. Phytochemicals. Then we talked about the right fats. I think he said protein was the next thing. Is that right?

Yeah. And I think the other thing is to understand how to eat for your microbiome. Because we didn't get into this yet, but there's a called the Hallmarks of Aging, which are these underlying things that go wrong as we age. And these are phenomena that seem to underlie all disease. So the idea is if you treat these things, or if you correct these problems called the Hallmarks of Aging, that it will dramatically extend life. So if we cured all the cancer and heart disease from the planet, how many years extra do you think we'd live?

Probably an extra 10, I don't know.

Three to five.

Three to five.

Maybe push it seven.

Okay.

If you address the hallmarks, we'd go to 120 or 150.

So if we eliminate diseases, the number.

One and two killers in the world, we got rid of them, it's only gonna give us a few extra years of life.

Yeah.

What are the other hallmarks then?

So the other hallmarks are really well driven around these 10, I call them, 10 things. One of them is the microbiome and we'll get back to how to take care of your microbiome, but I'll just sort of list the hallmarks and then we can come back to how to eat for your microbiome. But the first thing that happens is you get damage to your DNA. So, every day there's little insults, toxins, that diet or eating, whatever it is, stress, causing little death by a thousand cuts. But thank God you have a repair system. You have a DNA repair system that goes out on a mission and starts to fix all the damages. Now, over time, you may have 99.9% fixing, but then there's that 1.1% that keeps getting worse over time. So that's one thing. Seconds we get damage to our telomeres, which are these little things at the end of our chromosomes that keep them safe and intact and they shorten as we get older and if they're too short, the cells stop replicating and you die. Then there's epigenetic changes and epigenetics are really important because it helps us distinguish between our chronological age and our biological age. So, our chronological age is how long we're alive. I was born in 1959. I can't do anything about that. I just can't. I'm 63 on the calendar and I can't do anything about that. But my biological age is how old I am on the inside.

So, how do we reverse the biological age while we continue to age chronologically?

That's the plan. So, I did my biological age and I at 62 and I was 43. Wow. So biologically I'm 43, I'm going for 25, but I'm chronologically 62.

That's crazy.

We can get biologically younger as we get chronologically older. And studies have found even in eight weeks with a high intensity dietary intervention, some lifestyle stuff, you can reverse biological age in eight weeks by three years.

That's incredible. What's the biggest gap that has been.

Recorded, do you know, in terms of chronological and biological? Well, this is really new because we really only started measuring the epigenetic ages through a biological clock over the last couple of years. Oh my gosh. Because this is really new science. So now we have a metric to determine interventions and how they work on affecting your biological age. Because before we say eat better, exercise, take this vitamin, okay, whatever, take this drug, how do we measure how it's really affecting you and your biological clock? Well, now we have metrics. How do we measure that? So it's measured by taking a blood sample. and looking at the epigenome, which basically means above your genes. Your genes are fixed. You've got 20,000 genes. They're like the keyboard on a piano. There's 88 keys. You can't do anything about that. But the epigenome is like the piano player. You know, the piano player can play jazz, rock, classical, Mozart, you know, reggae, whatever. You want blues, ragtime, all on the same piano. So that's the epigenome, is the piano player. And what determines which songs get played in your book of life, in your songbook of life, Is everything washing over your genes throughout your life? Your thoughts, your relationships, what you eat, your exercise, sleep, how you handle stress, environmental toxins, your microbiome, literally everything is washing over the genes constantly and regulating the epigenome. So by living a healthy lifestyle, by doing some of the things we're going to talk about around how do we sort of hack longevity, we can actually improve the expression of our epigenome and reverse our biological clock. So that's one of the hallmarks of aging, the epigenetic degradation happens as we get older, but we can fix that. And then there's damage to proteins. So you have proteins that are the communication systems in your body, and it's like, you know, having kind of a scratched CD or, I don't know if anybody knows what a CD is anymore. Sure, a record. Yeah, yeah, it's a record. And these proteins get misfolded or misshapen, they don't work right, And so you have this damaged protein. So we have to fix that. And then there's problems with stem cells. Stem cells get tired, they don't produce as well, you can't rejuvenate your body as well. So they get what we call stem cell exhaustion. And then there's these horrible things that happen called zombie cells. Zombie cells are called senescent cells. Senescence means aging. So basically these cells are supposed to die, but they don't die. And they just continue to spew out nasty chemicals inflammatory chemicals and produce inflammation. And that's another one of the hallmarks of aging is inflammaging. Inflammaging. Inflammaging, right? Everything that happens as you get older connects to inflammation. So inflammation is kind of the disease of aging. And it's why so many people were susceptible to COVID because we really were all pre-inflamed. And then the COVID hit, it's like gasoline on a fire. So we have inflammaging is about hallmarks of aging. And then we have Mitochondrial changes. Mitochondria are the energy factories in your cells or in your muscle, they're in every organ, every cell, and our mitochondria poop out. That's why you see like a two-year-old running around like a jackrabbit and someone who's 90 kind of moving kind of slow because their mitochondria are not working right. But those are things we can regenerate, repair, renew, recreate, we can build through like the protein and exercise and various supplements and foods all help rejuvenate mitochondria. And then there's a Another group, which is of Hallmarks, it's really one class, but it's called Deregulated Nutrient Sensing. And that's a big mumbo-jumbo of words, but it basically means how your body senses food. And that screws up as we get older. And there's basically, this is really the crux of a lot of the interventions around longevity, is how do we properly activate these nutrient sensing pathways to enhance our health and extend our life versus the opposite. So, your body's constantly picking up signals from the food you're eating, right? Proteins, fats, sugars, all that. And these four pathways are influenced by what you're eating. We talked about one of them, mTOR. So, that detects too much of protein or sugar. And then that can be important. And if that's overstimulated, your body's going to age faster. if it's inhibited periodically, right? Like fasting is good, but if you fast all the time, you're gonna die of starvation.

Right? Right.

Cold plunges are great. And I know you did Wim Hof's thing. I know that.

If you're in there for two hours.

You might, yeah, if you're in there for like three days, you're gonna die, right? So like you can, there's a Goldilocks dose, right? So that's really important to remember. So there's mTOR, there's also something called insulin signaling pathways. So insulin, Signaling is really important to regulate your blood sugar, but if you're constantly eating starch and sugar, it's like an avalanche of starch and sugar that over activates this pathway and drives cancer, heart disease, dementia, disease, inflammation, mitochondrial damage, DNA damage, all the things that we don't want to happen. All the epigenetic changes that we see, all the hallmarks of aging are all driven by these pathways. And then there's two other pathways. They detect insulin signaling and mTOR detect too much of stuff, right? Too much sugar and protein. And then the other two pathways, sirtuin pathways and AMPK are important for sensing lack or scarcity that turns them on. So sirtuins are really amazing because they get activated and they send out an army of repair team throughout your body to repair all your DNA, to make new mitochondria, to shut off inflammation, to improve insulin sensitivity, to do all kinds of great things to increase your antioxidant systems. and that's activated by resveratrol. We might have heard about, you know, the work of David Sinclair and how red wine and red, you know, red berries, resveratrol might extend life. Well, it did in these mice. It's extended by a third, but it was the equivalent of 1500 bottles of red wine.

Right.

So you don't want to be doing that. So they were getting- the 1500 bottles of red wine would remind you to be dead. So basically, you can activate these pathways, but NAD, people have heard of NAD and NAD shots and eye drips and that works on their sirtuin pathways. So this is how this works. You might have heard about metformin as a drug for longevity. That works on AMPK to help improve insulin sensitivity. So there's other ways to activate that through plant compounds and through exercise and all sorts of things. So we don't really need the drugs. I'm not a big fan of metformin. We can talk more about that if you want. But I don't know if I got to all 10, but I think those are the 10 hallmarks of aging. And the last one is the microbiome. And the microbiome is really important. It's not on the classic list of hallmarks of aging. I added it. But when you look at the literature, it's really clear that as we age our microbiome degrades, we get what we call dysbiosis, imbalances in our gut bacteria, and those gut bacteria become toxic and inflammatory. So part of the diet you have to have is to take care of your inner garden. We need pre and probiotic foods and polyphenols. So prebiotic foods are things like asparagus, artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, jicama, plantains, these are foods that feed the good bacteria. And then there's probiotic foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh, these ancient foods that have been around forever that are fermented foods that are prebiotic foods. I grew up on pickles, I'm Jewish, I didn't even know that was a probiotic food. And then there's polyphenols, and this is an incredible discovery, that there are certain compounds in plants that your gut bacteria love. So you're not only eating for yourself, you're eating for the trillions of microbes that almost outnumber your cells in your gut. And those microbes, when they're bad, cause inflammation and disease and diabetes and cancer and everything else. But when they're good, they regulate inflammation, they help you stay healthy, it's super important to feed them right. So you have to learn how to tend your inner garden. And there's a couple of ones that are really important like green tea, pomegranate, cranberry, And pomegranate, it's an interesting one. I talk about this in the book. Most people have pretty crappy microbiomes, pun intended. And the truth is that you've lost a lot of important species that you need to work with your diet to make good stuff. So if you eat pomegranate, it has a compound in it that gets converted by good gut bacteria to something called urolithin A. Now, urolithin A you might not have heard about. but you will. It's really amazing, and there's millions of dollars of research on this compound that is derived from pomegranate being metabolized by your gut bacteria and producing this compound. But you could also make it and give it externally. And in studies, they found that without exercise, it increases fitness level through VO2 max, increases muscle strength, and increases mitochondrial cleanup or a mitochondrial autophagy.

Without exercise.

Without exercise, and also increases mitochondrial renewal and biogenesis. to make new mitochondria. So basically, you're taking, think about it, you're taking this like pomegranate, your gut's metabolizing it, you create this magical longevity compound, and that's just one example. So we need to feed our gut bacteria with lots of these colorful vegetables.

That's beautiful. Wow, okay. So eat for your microbiome is something you said to come back to. Is that what we're talking about here? We just did.

And then what would be the fifth.

Thing to add to this?

I think, you know, the five main.

Things, foods for longevity.

Yeah, I think, you know, I probably would say it would be eating with joy.

You know, I love that.

I think people get so screwed up about food and get so obsessive and so rigid about it that, you know, part of the key is celebration, enjoyment. You know, it's my birthday soon. I'm having a crew over. We're having a friends Thanksgiving. you know, it's gonna be yummy and delicious, we're probably gonna overeat, there's definitely gonna be some pecan pie. Oh man. You know, that was incredible. So that's okay. So it shouldn't be too rigid, but I think the key of community and eating with joy and eating with pleasure.

And savoring your food, and it's really, really important.

Enjoying it.

Yeah.

Not being so stressed and overwhelmed about it. For sure.

And also eating in celebration with joy, like with community, with people. In celebration with joy, with people. Yeah. What was the things that you saw when you went to these Blue Zones? that they did that maybe you weren't even thinking they would do? Like what were the surprising things they did? Or the unsurprising things? Yeah, I mean, there were a few.

Things I saw that were kind of.

Striking to me that made sense. But one was that in Korea, which was one of the Greek blue zones, they eat so much wild food. So they had wild greens, summer greens, winter greens, they had wild mushrooms, they had wild sage tea, they had wild fish, they had so much wild food in their diet. We know that wild foods are much more nutrient dense. Why? Because they're stressed. And stressed plants make more protective compounds. Those protective compounds are called phytochemicals. They give the color and the richness and the flavor. What people don't understand is the more flavorful a food is naturally, the more phytochemicals it has.

Interesting.

If you go to your garden at the end of August and pick a cherry tomato that's ripened in the hot sun, explodes in your mouth like the most incredible flavor. But if you go to a store-bought tomato and you cut it, it's like cardboard tasteless. What's the difference? It's the phytochemicals. So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness of a food. So not the stuff you put on it or sauces or salt or fat or sugar to make it taste better, which food industry does, but just the natural flavor. So, you know, the more flavorful the food is, the better it is. So it's, it's wild. They eat a lot of wild food and it's so flavorful. The other thing that was interesting was that shepherds had this culture of going and knowing exactly which plants to feed their animals at which time of year to graze them. So we'd shepherd them, they'd eat all these wild plants, but they knew if this herb was coming in at this time of year, they'd go eat this herb. And if this plant was coming in this time of year, they'd go eat that thing. I'm like, why are you doing that? They said, We know because the meat and the milk tastes better when we- yeah. It kind of, you know, they were not doing it because it was better for them or because it was for longevity or because- It tastes better. Right, the cheese, yeah, it tastes better. So it turns out that we know now that phytochemicals are not just in plants and phyto means plant. They're not just in plants, they're also in animals. So the work of Fred Provenza and Steven Vander Wall from Duke have clearly shown that When animals are eating a wide array of wild plants or a wild array of, you know, you know, planted grasses and flowers and different things, they will seek out medicine in the food. So they will literally go and eat major, like, you know, calorie crops, let's say, but then they'll go and sample from like 100 different plants to get their medicines. And so these these wild animals, these wild plants are being eaten and the phytochemicals are accumulating in the meat and the milk of these animals. So studies have shown, for example, that you can have as high levels of the catechins in green tea in goat milk that's from goats eating certain wild foods. Really? Yeah. So it's mind-blowing and there may be ways that even these get transmuted. So eating where generally raised meat, I went to a restaurant here in LA last night called Matu where they have regeneratively raised meat.

Was it amazing?

It was amazing. Now it wasn't as fatty and kind of marble-like corn-fed meat. but it was delicious and it was tasty and yummy and amazing.

What was this place called?

Matu, M-A-T-U. I'll have to check it out. Really good to Beverly Hills. And you'd love it. It's so good. And you can eat that and know you're eating from an animal that's been well taken care of, that's living out in its natural habitat, that's regenerating the environment, that's storing the ecosystems, increasing biodiversity, conserving water in the soils, that's reducing climate change, producing more nutrient dense food that enrich in phytochemicals and good fats and more antioxidants and more minerals and.

Just pretty much everything.

So it's incredible. So that was a sort of a, I think a key part of their longevity was they lived on this stuff. You know, they basically were shepherds and.

Goats and sheep were their livelihood. What was about their relationships?

Yeah.

How did that play in? Did they have certain types of relationships with family members? Did they have intimate relationships? Were they married for long periods of time? Did they have 10 wives, you know, what was the whole process?

One couple I saw had a collective age of 210.

That's crazy.

So I don't know. I think being married is definitely a key to longevity for men. For women, not always. Depends on if they're happy or not.

Oh man.

So I think having a happy, healthy relationship is such a key part of longevity. and they were very much in the realm of community. It wasn't just like this isolated relationship. They were embedded in a context of a community that was totally supportive, that celebrated together, that played together, that worked together, that harvested together, that shared sheep together, that made cheese together. They were just doing stuff together as part of the way of life. And they would just stop and talk and hang out and chill, and it was like, Nobody was like starting a company or, you know, nobody was like, you know, getting ahead in social media for likes and followers. They were just living life. They weren't striving or trying to get anywhere. They were just being. And so their culture was all about the power of these incredible moments where you share with people you love and care about and celebrate life and enjoy life and talk. we were driving out of this one town in Sardinia, because I had these two guides that were really great, and they were local Sardinians. And this car stops in front of us and blocks us. And this old guy gets out, he walks over to this stone wall, and he waves us to come over. And I'm like, what's going on here? And he just, the wave is over, he wanted to talk. He saw us in the car behind. He's like, he just wanted to talk. So we sat on the stone wall for an hour or so, and chatted about life and about his life. Carmen, he was 85 years old and super vibrant fit guy. And he started telling us about his life and how, you know, there was a mudslide that destroyed the village he grew up in, which they moved the town a little bit higher on the mountain. But he still had his farm on that old area, his old family land. So he took us down, he had like six sheep and he had a pig and he had some chickens and he had orchards and he had a whole garden where he grew eggplants and peppers and tomatoes and zucchini and herbs and spices. It was amazing. He literally took care of his entire property by himself at 85 years old. I mean, I don't think I could do it. And I'm chasing this guy up this hill after his sheep and I'm like, I can't keep up with this guy. He's 85 years old. And so he was super vibrant, mentally sharp, you know, he lived with his family and they just had this incredibly deep culture. There wasn't nursing homes. I mean, Julia, who was 103 months, you know, like, oh, my God. Like, you say, I'm 100 and I'm five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months. And she was like, you know, didn't have kids and lived with her niece and nephew who loved her and took care of her. And she was still working. She was still working, making all this stuff for weddings, all the little tablecloths and doilies and embroidery stuff. I don't know how about how to do that, but she was making all this stuff, and she was so bright and still was walking around every day and taking her walks and hanging out with everybody and her friends and. It was really amazing to see this culture where people were not ostracized or excluded, but they were included in life.

It doesn't sound like they're hustling for something. They're working hard to maintain their life, their home, their farm, their land, whatever they have. Maybe they're a small business, but they're not hustling for something greater, is that right?

Yeah.

No.

Why can you live long and still hustle? Hustle or just want more, want to build something greater in your life.

I think you can. I think it's really about what happens on the inside because one of the biggest things that regulates your epigenome is your mind. So your biggest pharmacy in your body is between your ears. It's the most powerful pharmacy in the world. And you can activate it for good or bad. So when we are having thoughts that.

Are.

Stressful thoughts when we're in toxic relationships, when we're worried or anxious, when we aren't in harmony with ourselves. It activates all these really nasty pathways that drive inflammation and harm your mitochondria and destroy. I mean, your microbiome is listening in on your thoughts. It's eavesdropping. So those bugs don't like it when you are not happy. Really?

Yeah. What is the process of that from an idea, a thought? into the mitochondria, how does that transfer into a healthy information, into a physical manifestation versus unhealthy information, data and a thought into physical unhealthy?

So, what's the biochemistry of it? Well, for example, if you're stressed, you're producing cortisol and adrenaline and all these other hormones and proteins that then will trigger a whole cascade of downstream effects that activate transcription factors that transcription factors that turn on genes that cause inflammation and all these other problems. So you're basically creating inflammatory thoughts are creating inflammation in your body, literally. Isn't that crazy? And you have receptors on your immune cells, for example, for neurotransmitters. So if you're stressed, your immune system is eavesdropping on your thoughts.

Wow.

That's why If you're stressed, you are more likely to have an infection or.

Get sick or have other bad health consequences. Why do you think it is that our body is built this way that a thought can either make us feel and physically transform into joy and health or feel sick and then become sick? Why do you think our body- why from an evolutionary point of view?

Why do you think that is?

Isn't that crazy? It's a crazy thing. You think something, it's not actually, it's in your mind.

Right?

Where it, you know, it's like, and then it transfers into your body.

Well, I think, I don't know, Louis, but I think we have a built-in stress response system, which we need it. If we're getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger, well, we need to get on the move. And we need to jack up our cortisol and pump our blood sugar up and get our blood pressure up and our heart rate up and flood our body with glucose and just all this stuff that needs to survive. It's like the story of how someone's sees her kid under a car and can lift up a car. Like, why can that happen?

Because we have the system built in.

To deal with acute stress. That's a good thing. The problem is we have a society and a life that drives chronic, unmitigated, unrelenting stress. So unless you are very clear about how to discharge that stress, because we can't avoid it, but how do you discharge it? How do you not react? And how do you have a different perception of relationship and what's happening to you? It's all about perception, right? So I always say stress is the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a tiger chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife's cheating on you but she's not. And you get the same physiology. Or you can have the same input, let's say you're James Bond and I put a gun to your head versus Woody Allen, it's going to be a very different set of responses, right? Same input, very different response. That's the beauty of our minds, is we have the power over our thoughts. You remember Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning? He said, Between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause lies a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom. For those of you who don't know about Viktor Frankl, he was an Auschwitz, and he was a psychiatrist in Auschwitz, and he chose not to let even the most horrific thing that's almost ever happened to human beings affect his own well-being and happiness in his life. That just blows my mind, right? Unbelievable. So when you think, oh, my life and this and that, we always have a choice, you know? And whether you have stuff or don't have stuff, it's all about our perceptions. So mindset and your thoughts are a key part of longevity and health and having meaning and purpose. That was the other thing in these cultures. They had so much meaning and purpose. Carmine had such purpose. He had to go and take care of his sheep and he had to feed his family and he wanted to support the other members of the community by giving them food and he fed his animals the extra. And so he had a meaningful life and he also had a very active mind, was reading books and learning all the time. So, you know, that extends your life by up to seven years. Wow.

Having meaning and purpose. Because you hear the story sometimes of like, you know, someone in their older years, their husband or their wife dies and then within six months or a year later, they die.

Or a week later.

A week later, right? You hear that story often.

All the time.

And is that because their meaning has lost or just when they have a broken heart and they don't know how to... Both.

I mean, there actually is a phenomena of a broken heart. I had a patient with this once who had this incredible wife. They were deeply in love. They were married for decades and decades. She got breast cancer and died. And he was relatively healthy and all of a sudden he went into heart failure.

Come on.

Like boom. It's in the medical literature. It's literally a broken heart and it causes actual clinical heart failure where your heart muscle can't pump the blood around.

That's from, what is that from? Is that from thinking and then feeling the heart, the pain in your heart?

Yeah, it's the physiological phenomena that happen when you have a stress response, the flood of all these stress molecules in your body that damages the heart. and we were able to get him better, but it was through energy healing, which sounds kind of wacky and weird, but it was really through his own, you know, getting back in his body, being touched, being held, being energetically reset. He was able to reverse the heart failure. It wasn't by taking some fancy drug.

Or getting a heart transplant. So he didn't pass away from that.

No, he didn't.

But some people do. We fixed it, yeah. But some people do. They might isolate themselves even more, and.

Then their body just starts to shut down. Loneliness is the biggest killer. Really? Loneliness seems to be a bigger risk factor than smoking or bad food or almost anything else.

What happens when we're lonely?

Again, it's a stress. We're social creatures, Louis. We all are meant to belong. We have a longing to belong. And if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, you stick a human out in the desert or a forest by himself. Yeah, they're not going to last long. Forget it. And so this is not true just of humans, but it's all of creation. And E.O. Wilson, who was a Harvard professor, wrote many, many books. He just died, but he was a very, very thoughtful guy. And he wrote a book called the Social Conquest of the Earth. And it's about how from ants to humans, we all work together, like ant colonies, right? They're all working together. And so we have to work together to survive. And that's why altruism is actually a medicine. Altruism and serving and helping others actually activates healing mechanisms in our body. It activates dopamine in the same way.

That cocaine or heroin does. Altruism and serving, giving. It's the best thing to be addicted to. It is.

It's way better than heroin. Exactly.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now. 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 what's happening right now in science, but it's profound. The shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is, It's like Columbus going, Hey, the Earth isn't flat.

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've got your cardiovascular system, your neurologic system, your GI system, 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 it might be related to gut flora. 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's going on in your gut microbiome. 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 a hundred 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 microbes in our gut to do things for us. And we borrow things from plants to do things from us, like for example, glucosinolates. So the microbiome is this huge thing that's got two to three 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.

Amazing.

We've seen people, I've heard stories of fecal transplants not only curing things like that, but autoimmune diseases and really Parkinson's and people with MS and crazy stories that 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 does that, how do you do that? Well, how does that 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 because of all the antibiotics in our feed and in the animal production. So there's the drugs don't work. People die. 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, 10, 10.

We can do the visual. So basically they take a fecal 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 actually also, it just heals inside or what's it do when it's- well it goes in, it's like massive probiotics, right? Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

It's like an infusion of probiotics. Infusion of probiotics. And also they're actually pills now, they actually are making Special encapsulated poop pills. And it's not, I mean, this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm not talking about 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. 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. you know, 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, 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 a 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?

You just, 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. That's why I call myself a holistic doctor because I take care of people but they whole list of problems. So she had like, psoriatic arthritis was on a drug that cost 30 grand. Oh my God. Called Stelara. 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 gonna fix these problems. It's outdated or 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 they said, well, why don't we put you on an anti-inflammatory low glycemic diet, a Pegan diet, basically, right? Took away anti-allergens and I, and I cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing Houston's bloating and she had yeast reactions. She had, like, vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and itchy ears and yeast everywhere from the yeast on her mouth and thrush. And so I gave her an antifungal. I gave her stuff to 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 way. No more arthritis, no more, no more to $230,000 drug, no more skin. Pleurisy, no migraines, no sinus problems, no oral bowel, no reflux, no depression, no insomnia, and she lost 20 pounds. All from food. Totally. And what was food and her gut flora? I focused on her gut flora. Why? Because 60% or 50% of the immune.

System is in the gut. Interesting.

Yeah, why is it in the gut? Why is it there? Because you're sticking pounds of food, a.

Foreign material, every day in your body.

You've got to fight it off in your gut. Yeah, and you've got you know, you've got all like bed bugs in there and poop. It's like the danger zone, right? It's like you're like, and it's one cell away because 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 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 call him the Wayne Gretzky of healthcare. He goes where the puck's gonna be.

Not where it is.

Smart, right? And he 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. But it's the top hospital in the old model. Yes.

Right.

So I'm like.

But he knew.

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 of 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 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. Amazing. So, we're really, he's really putting us.

On the map in the traditional world.

And, because 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, at 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.

Right.

And another doctor as patients.

No way.

Yeah, they're coming as patients because 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. Lissa Rankin by any chance?

Yeah.

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

Exactly.

It's all about the mind.

And she's like, oh, I got off all the medicine. That's right.

And then I stopped giving medicine to my patients. I started asking those deeper questions. It's so powerful. So we're at this fulcrum. 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. Amazing.

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 it's scary.

It's scary, right?

Well, here's the thing about these stuff, just like looking up anything and googling it and seeing all the nasty photos and just like, ah, 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. 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 only have so many hours in a day. And there's not that many functional medicine. I've written books and programs to help people operationalize this in their own life. So, each of that 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 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 Eat Fat, Get Thin is a great program that I put together to make people have no friction. It's easy. It's very straightforward. 21 days, right? 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 had 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 the 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 is pretty incredible in how it can heal itself very quickly.

Once you change habits.

Unbelievable. We did the survey of 1,000 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 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 fill out this whole score and zero to four for every symptom, and you get a score. They do want it before and after. And now 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. So the information in food is so powerful that 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 don't want to be on an app all day figuring it out. I just want to know how to get my body to 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. 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- You're young, man.

You're like fit, healthy, energetic.

I know.

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 to eat low fat, and I did that. And, I also ate a lot of things that I thought were healthy. Pasta was a health food. Pasta was a health food.

I used to eat so much pasta.

Yeah, health food, right? Low fat.

Pasta all the time.

Yeah, exactly. And so I basically changed that and I started eating a lot less starch, a lot less sugar, a lot more fat. And I noticed my body, without any exercise, I'm so lean, so fit. I'm like, wow, I got a six pack and I didn't even work out. It's just stunning what happens when you do, and my brain is clear, I have more energy, my moods better. I mean, I know, I saw you're drinking a bulletproof coffee, you know that?

It works. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I started 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. 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 the bandaid.

Pulling the bandaid off slowly.

I should have just done it all at once. It's better to do it the other way. The way I do with my patients, 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. I feel amazing.

Because one of the rules of-- I.

Should have talked to you before this. I don't want to stick-- 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 a tack, it takes a lot of aspirin to 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 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 in the mornings when I would do the coffee. And I would only have half a cup only. And I would be fine until 1:30 to 2:00.

MCT oil puts you in ketosis, which is medium chain triglycerides. It's a super fuel. It 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. It actually makes your metabolism work faster and burn more calories. And it also affects your brain. Your brain is more alert, focused and clear. So I wrote most of Eat Fat.

Get Thin on MC2 and coffee in the morning. I love it. And why did you get, I want to ask you a few more questions.

Why did you get into medicine in the first place? What inspired you? That's a great question. Plus years ago, whenever this was.

Yeah.

So, you know, I actually majored in Buddhism at Cornell. Wow. So, I did not even think remotely about medicine or science. In fact, I only took science classes because they were required for my degree at Cornell, but I didn't even do that well in them. I got a C in biology and I think a C in chemistry. I think I might have got a C+ in biology. But it was like the pre-med courses that everybody like, you know, jumps off the bridge for. Sure. And I didn't take it that seriously. So then I just wanted, I got my degree in Buddhism. But when I studied Buddhism, I found that it was actually a healing system. It was a therapeutic system for the mind. And in fact, it was a way of looking at our perceptions, our beliefs, our attitudes, our thinking in such a way that freed us from suffering. And it was powerful. And it also had a tradition of healing. All the doctors in the Buddhist tradition were monks. so I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I. And then I kind of, you know, got this. This idea in my head. I was a young, idealistic kid, and I had this concept of a bodhisattva, which is this. This being who kind of betters themself, but rather than, you know, going to be living in a cave and being by themself and having a happy life, they come back in the service of others to help others also to reach Enlightenment.

Right.

Okay. So I kind of always had that in my. My head, and I just. I always felt better when I was of service. Sure.

Most people feel better when they're in service.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Liz, when we look at the science of this, altruism stimulates the same area in the brain as cocaine or sugar or heroin. Crazy.

Right?

So I get high from helping people.

I think Stephen Kotler talks about that.

In his book, Flow, or about flow.

It's so true. When people get into flow, and when they're in service, you become in flow and that triggers the same type of chemicals.

Yeah, absolutely. you get out of your head. Like I went to Haiti after the earthquake and was, you know, up to my elbows and pus and amputations and blood and disaster and just it was like the worst scene you could imagine. But like, I didn't think of myself for one second.

Right, right.

Just in service.

I was just in service and I felt good. Like I felt and I'm like, you know, just grateful and happy. Not happy like as I was there, it was a miserable place that was happening with the earthquake. But I but I actually had this sense of inner peace and inner happiness and gratitude and service and Yeah. You know, I think that's really, in the way it's a little selfish.

Sure, sure. No, giving is like the most selfish.

Gift you can receive. It's like the best gift you can give. Yeah, so that's sort of how I got it. And then I realized, gee, maybe I should practice medicine because it's all about healing.

And I said, well, I'll try it.

And I was a yoga teacher before.

I was a doctor.

Back before yoga was cool. Yeah, that was like in 1979. Wow. Yeah, I took my first yoga class and amazing.

I just went to yoga before I came here, so it's been going on a long time. Holy cow, that's awesome.

Awesome.

Cool. Well, a couple final questions and I want to make sure everyone gets this book, Eat Fat, Get Thin.

Why the.

Fat we eat is the key to sustained weight loss and vibrant health. Essentially, everything we've said growing up is the opposite of what we were talking about.

Sorry, guys, we kind of blew it.

But Eat Fat, Get Thin, 21-day process for discovering and healing yourself essentially.

Yeah, I mean, it's not just for weight loss.

It's actually for anybody who wants to reset their system. and gain back control of their body. So you actually naturally want the things that make you feel good, that you don't crave the bad things, that it's not difficult. I mean, you can't use willpower. It doesn't work. You have to use science. It's so great. I like it.

I got three questions for you. One is, if you had an unlimited amount of money that you could spend on one thing to cure one thing in the world, what would that be?

One disease or one One thing in.

The world that you think needs curing or solving one issue?

Oh, gosh.

I mean, so many things flooded into me when you said that. I mean, I think, you know, the thing that I think is driving so many of our economic and social ills is our food system. And if I had a magic wand, I would put in a, and I'm working actually on a petition right now that I've got 150,000 people on our Fat Summit, which is an online summit on, and we interview over 30 experts on fat, and it's available. And we can go to fatsummit.com and get to see this. And to kind of list, what are the policies that would really radically change things, not just in America, but around the world if we became the beacon for this. And I met with the Surgeon General a couple of days ago, and he asked me to come to Washington to help change and shape this policy. So the things that matter are, you know, ending food subsidy, ending agricultural subsidies for commodity products like corn, soy and wheat that go into all our processed industrial food, subsidizing fruits and vegetables and things that actually promote health. Ending food marketing to kids, right? We market junk food to kids. I think we're one of only 50 countries that we are one of the only countries that doesn't do this. 50 countries control food marketing to kids.

Really?

Regulate?

Yeah.

Us and Syria, no, are the only ones.

Oh my gosh.

I would end all use of antibiotics in animal feed except in animal husbandry except for treatment of disease. Full stop. I would have clear food labeling so that people know what they're eating. Is it good for you? Green. Is it maybe a little tricky? Well, eat with caution. Yellow. Is it bad for you? It might kill you. Red. Like, simple.

Like when you have cigarettes now, there's this will cause, this will kill you.

And this is controversial, but I would put a tax on junk food and soda, which has been proven to work and reduce consumption. This was just done in Mexico, was super effective. Done in Berkeley, first place in America, very effective.

Interesting.

It's like cigarettes. Tax cigarettes. If a Coke was actually $10, I would actually make things cost what they really cost. The only reason that McDonald's meal is so cheap is because the government pays for and subsidize it. I met with the vice chair of Pepsi, he said, why are you using high fructose corn syrup in your soda? He says, because, Mark, the government makes it so cheap for us by subsidizing agriculture and the growing of corn that's turned into high fructose corn syrup.

That's why we're using it.

It's good business. I wouldn't use it if the government didn't make it so cheap. So it would end subsidies. I would end any food that wasn't promoting health in any federally funded program. Food stamps. You can buy $4 billion now of food stamps are spent on soda for the poor. $4 billion. It's the biggest single amount of item that's bought. Yeah, yeah. You can buy a two-liter bottle of soda, but you can't buy a rotisserie chicken. You can't buy with food stamps online because of some stupid regulation. We're trying to change that. So I would implement a whole series of policies like this. I would also make sure that we really promote science and nutrition in school. So kids know very early on what's going on. There should be no food that doesn't promote health in schools. We know that there's clear evidence that kids who are fed poor foods, and I'm not talking about school lunches that are quote healthy, right? I mean, pizza is considered a vegetable. Pizza is a vegetable. According to Congress, pizza is a vegetable. Oh my gosh, that's all I ate every day. Yeah. And so, you know, we need clear policies that we could change all this in America. And I think people are ready for it. People want it. People know the issue is here. we need to end in the kinds of industrial agriculture we're doing that are actually promoting degradation of the environment. And we need to label GMOs because the centralization of seed production has caused huge problems. Glyphosate is now Roundup is used on soybeans, 98% of soybeans are Monsanto soybeans.

98%?

I think it's something like 98% of the world.

Oh gosh.

So the centralization of seed production, you know, even if you debate GMOs are good or bad, they're using all these pesticides and herbicides. because of these that are actually now getting into the water. Now we know that glyphosate now, according to the World Health Organization and an international board of scientists, is a cancer-causing agent.

What we categorize as sick.

That's a great question.

What's obese, what's sick, what's... So at the top level we have to understand that over the last 40 years a tsunami has come, that we.

Weren'T aware was coming, that we weren't.

Prepared for and still haven't grappled and that tsunami is chronic disease and food related illness.

-In 40 years. -In 40 years.

Did we have chronic disease prior to this? -We did, of course we did, but not the magnitude. We used to have like 5% obesity rates in this country in the early 60s.

It's 40% now in most states.

-I thought it was like 30 like.

A few years ago.

-No, no, no, no. It's like 40%. -Many states are 40% and many are just pushing 40. So, it's 35 to 40 depending on where you look at it, like California's probably less, Colorado's less, but Mississippi and Alabama are, you know, 40 plus. So we have six out of every 10 Americans who's got a chronic illness, four to 10 who have more than one. By 10 years from now, we're gonna have 83 million with three or more chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, dementia, you name it. We are having 11 million people, and this is, I think, a conservative estimate, 11 million people around the world die every year from bad food, from ultra processed food and not enough good food. Now, I think it's more like 50 million when you look at all the related conditions and so forth. It's a staggering number that beats out smoking, war, violence, accidents, you name it. Nothing else comes close. Not malaria, TB, AIDS, all that is a fraction, a third of the deaths that are caused by chronic illness. and they're mostly preventable and they're mostly caused by food and they're mostly caused by the ultra processed food that our food system produces en masse. It's the biggest industry on the planet. It's $15 trillion, about 17% of the world's global product, and it is controlled by a few dozen CEOs that are in monopolies around seed production, agrochemicals, fertilizer, processed food companies. It's, it's staggering how the system has sort of just over the last 40 years completely transformed.

And, you know, I, you know, I remember, like, I was in this, I.

Was in some store or Cafe, and I saw this picture of Woodstock, and I'm looking at the, all the sea of people and the 60s, right? 69.

There wasn't one overweight person. I watched this movie, I think it.

Was called Amazing Grace about Aretha Franklin. African-American church. Now, African-Americans, 80% of African-American women are overweight. It is, you know, 80% today.

80%.

Why is that?

Well, because they're targeted by the food industry, because they're in a vicious cycle of economic stress, of social stress, of unfair targeting and manipulation by the food industry. This is well documented by, for example, studies from Yale where they looked at the amount of advertising and targeting to poor and African-American and Hispanic communities, it's staggering. And there was not one overweight person, this sea of African-Americans in 1970. And so it literally just happened.

I was 11 years old in 1970.

And in my lifetime, you see this change. So we have this staggering problem of chronic illness, which people suffer from, this bankrupting people, this bankrupting our country.

I mean, think about the amount of economic stress.

We talk about- well, insurance too.

I mean, so much insurance money that's involved in this too. People are having to go to the doctor so much more probably now because of these issues, right?

Absolutely. And then many people are not adequately covered. So there's a lot of co-pays. I mean, you know, people can have 10, 20,000 in co-pays. I had a patient the other day who, you know, had diabetes and I.

Fixed his diabetes through food. and he says, I save $10,000 a.

Year on co-pays for my insulin and.

My- Just the drugs. Yeah, and when you look at the.

Amount on diabetes spend in this country, which is basically one out of every two Americans has pre-diabetes or type two diabetes, one-third of Medicare spending is on diabetes. One-third of Medicare is on diabetes. Yes, Medicare, if it was a company, would be the biggest company in the world, a trillion dollar budget a year. Shut up. Yes, one-third of our total federal tax revenue expected to grow to 100% of our mandatory spending by 2048. And in 6 years, Louis, 6 years, the Medicare Trust Fund, which is sort of the bank account that we use to make sure we cover Medicare. It's a little complicated how it works. But the Medicare Trust Fund is going.

To be out of money.

So that means that we're going to have to get a trillion dollars a year out of our tax revenue. We're not covering... -Oh, my gosh. -This is a threat to to our economy. It's a threat to our political stability. It's a threat even to national security, those because seven out of ten kids who apply for the military get rejected.

Can't get in.

Because they're too fat or unfight. Yes, it's a, it's, there's 700 admirals and generals that published a report called unhealthy and unprepared about the threat in our military and national security. And not only that, soldiers are overweight. So we're feeding them crap. They go in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number one reason for medical evacuations was not war injury, was obesity related problems. Yes, 100%.

Obesity related problems. What does that mean? Like they're- Injury, like a heart injury.

Injuries from being overweight.

And you can read about this. I didn't make this shit up.

In that report, unhealthy and unprepared. Just Google it. You can read it yourself. Wow, it's staggering. So we have a $22 trillion debt. We have this threat of chronic disease exploding. It's getting worse and worse. Medicare for all is kind of a silly idea and so is repealing Obamacare. Now they're going to help the problem unless we figure out how to stop people from going into the system in the first place.

Into the system, meaning getting unhealthy.

Yeah, if they don't need medical care, it's cheap.

So let's go back to diabetes for a second. Tell me again, the stat on diabetes, how many people have it or are pre-diabetic? And what, I'm undereducated on this. So how many different types of diabetes are there? Okay, how is it caused?

Okay, okay.

So type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Pancreas fails, it's called juvenile diabetes, and you need insulin. You need it.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin.

You need insulin. Your pancreas dies. because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced. Keeps, that's the blood, it's not of.

The gatekeeper, that's the glucose into your cells.

So it's really important.

So how does that die?

How does it die from that?

I mean, how does the pancreas die? Oh, well, how does it get to that point? It's an autoimmune, like an autoimmune, like you get multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid 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. Okay. 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 when I was a resident in an urgent care center, and this woman comes in for back pain, she's 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 eight or nine months old baby, having ice cream for the first time.

Oh.

Having sugar for the first time. And you watch the baby eat the ice cream. I light up.

I. And then the baby like, I want more. Wraps the thing. Stuffs 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 one in two Americans suffer from either prediabetes.

Or type two.

Or type two 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, 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 in 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 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.

Right.

Well, why are my patients sick?

Because it makes money, right?

Well, no.

Yeah, but I'm going even further. Why I got interested in this. Because as a, why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I was thinking my patients' diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food.

So I'm thinking, well, how many are most of them? Is this like 50%?

80%.

80% of anyone that comes in to the hospital or your patients.

Yeah.

Who has some type of disease or some type of sickness?

I mean, unless it's like an environmental.

Thing like mercury or lime or mold.

You know, most of the things.

Cancer. Cancer is caused by food.

Really?

70%.

70% 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.

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, they got more functionality back.

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. They're 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.

It's got money.

It's the biggest lobby group in Congress. it's agriculture and food. By far, like by twice as much as the next lobby group. By gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Right.

And it's like, what? So then I began thinking, well, if.

I'm gonna help my patients, I can't.

Do it in my office.

It's like I'm 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 agricultural system that's driving.

So much of the problem. It's like, I'm the first one to raise my hand when I say, like, I love sugar and it's my biggest vice, right? Everybody loves cookies and candies and cakes and brownies and anything you can think of. I love it, right? I don't know why I don't have diabetes.

I have so much sugar I've had.

In my whole life. You can't be having that much because.

You look pretty good.

Well, I train hard, too. I go through waves. But as a kid, I would drink like 9-10 Dr. Peppers a day, I remember.

What?

Like some days in the summer, you're just sitting around.

I was the president, is that what it was?

Exactly. I would just, I mean, I would run around and work out and play sports, but then I would just drink.

Because I thought that's what presidents do.

You were 16-18, you know? And 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's 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, you know, 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 King's daughter, was all about it. And she was excited. But once, once we got a few days later, I got a call that we couldn't show it.

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? She's because Coke funds no. And one of the people on the.

Board of trustees is one of the highest Executives. I call Coca-Cola oh, man, 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 dollars worth of research a year to study nutrition. What would be the steps that someone could take to help?

Well, I think, you know, it seems.

Like such a big- It is, it is.

It's a little bit.

So let's talk about some of the solutions. So we know, you know, food is causing chronic disease. It's destroying our economy. It's crippling our environment and killing all the pollinators and all biodiversity. And it's causing social injustice because it targets poor minorities who suffer from problems. It prevents kids from learning in school because they're eating all this crap. It threatens our national security. creates political instability.

So we know all these things.

But the good news is that by fixing the food system, we can solve these.

And how do we do it?

Well, it's going to need citizen action, it's going to need business innovation, and it's going to need policy change. And of course, other philanthropists and governments to help get on board.

And I think that's what's really exciting.

To me, because there's so much hope. So, for example, on a personal level, you can shift what you eat and what you do. to drive change in the marketplace. Why are companies like Nestle and Unilever and Danone creating regenerative ag programs within their supply chain? Why are they trying to up the quality of their food and take out chemicals? Because consumers are demanding it.

Well, they're buying companies like Primal Kitchen that have like- Like Kraft, right.

Bought Primal Kitchen, which is basically a, you know, Whole Foods, you know, really high high quality, nutritious product with no junk in it.

I'm curious, you said something about nut milk and about dairy. Has dairy been declining? In the last five years?

Yes, dairy consumption has been declining dramatically.

Do you know the percentages or the...

Yeah, I think over the last few.

Years it's gone down about 25%. Borden, which is a big milk producer, has been around since 18, I think 87, has gone bankrupt.

What?

Yeah. A lot of these bills, milk produced.

Now people are still eating cheese, they're eating yogurt, they're eating cheese, but actual milk consumption has gone down and then.

That milk has gone up.

Why is that?

Is that because of education? Is that because of the internet? I think probably a lot of reasons. I mean 75% of the population is lactose intolerant.

So they don't feel good.

I used to drink so much milk every day.

And how did you feel?

Fine?

I always had like a stuffy nose.

Right.

Right. I was always tired and workout. and practices. I was always blowing my nose.

Milk is nature's perfect food, but only if you're a calf.

I mean, we're the only species that.

Consumes milk after weaning. There are very few populations that seem to thrive on milk, the Masai and some of the Northern Europeans. The other problem, the dairy we're eating.

Today is not the dairy we ate.

So there are heirloom cows. I mean, you travel around the world, you travel, I travel.

And you go see these really weird.

Looking cows in other countries, and I'm like, what is that? And it's a cow. But these are, you know, complex breeds that have different types of protein in the milk, different types of casein, and the Holstein, the sort of the homogenized cow, I don't mean homogenized milk, but they're all the same.

Not the same.

They're all fertilized by like this three bulls, I think they get the sperm from the bull, and it's like, they're all the same. And they have bred out the beneficial or the safe casing, which is A2 casing, and then A1 casing, which causes more inflammation, more congestion, more irritable bowel, more autoimmunity, more skin issues. So people are getting that milk isn't always the best. And, and I think then, you know, people are eating nut milks now. They're not.

Are those good for you, though? Because a lot of people have still, like, yeah. Skin problems.

Yeah.

Well, nut milk That's very problematic. So, one, almond milk is great, but.

You know, almonds are-- you- can't have too much of it. I started to get like a rash after it. Like I switched from milk years ago, and I started to get like eczema, like a little eczema right here and there. And then when I stopped drinking it.

It would go away, and I was.

Like, huh, maybe I'm drinking so much almond butter, almond milk, everything. Well, everything had karyogenin in it, which is causes leaky gut. You get leaky gut, you get eczema. So it's a thickener. into these milks. They put a lot of sugar in these milks. They put a lot of gums in these milks. So you have to be very careful about which one you're having.

Because it's healthier doesn't mean it's healthier.

Yeah, and I don't want to be like again drinking tons of soy milk. It could be GMO soy. It could be full of glyphosate. If not, it could be, you know, getting huge amounts of these phytoestrogens, which our bodies aren't really meant to get. Eating traditional foods and traditional amounts are fine. Tofu, miso, tempeh, those are fine. Really? Those are how people have consumed soy soy over a Millennia, but not 10 pounds a day and not three lots of gallons. No, I had a stepdaughter once. She loved soy milk. Just drinking it all day. And she started, like, at, like, nine years old, getting little breasts. And I'm like, well, that's not good.

Oh, you know? Yeah.

And so, yeah, we have to be smart about it.

And I think, you know, if you're.

Using a little here and there, but I, I don't recommend people drink it as a drink.

Really?

You know, if you want to put a little coffee, almond milk or soy milk.

There's soy.

Coconut milk, don't drink it. No, I mean I think have it sometimes.

You have a glass once a week, maybe. It's okay, but not like drinking glasses every day. Yeah, probably not. But you could add it to things.

Sure, you know, put in a smoothie, you know, you can mix them up, you know, it's macadamia milk, you know, cashew milk, there's hazelnut milk, there's all.

Kinds of milks now.

So, I like, you know, I like macadamia nuts. So good, it's like sweet tasting. Yeah, you can make your own nut milk. I have cookbooks, like food, what the heck should I cook and others teach you how to make your own nut milks at home. You soak the nuts, you put them.

In a blender with some water, there's.

No additives, ingredients, sugar.

It's great.

But not too much of it, is what you're saying.

Yeah, that's the challenge. It's like anything. Drink a lot of water. Yeah, I mean, listen, anything, it can kill you, right?

Water can kill you.

You know, Marathon Runners who overhydrate their body is diluted. Their blood is diluted with too much water, and they get what we call low sodium or hyponatremia, and that causes seizures and death. So, yeah, you can die from drinking too much water. So it's all about, like, eating stuff.

In complex amounts and in a complex variety of foods.

So a variety of food is.

Yeah, it's good.

Huge.

We used to eat 800 species of plants.

That's good.

Not having the same, like, three things every day. Well, listen, most of our diet is, is corn. soy and corn, soy and wheat, most of our diet. And in other countries, rice in there. And those are all mostly turned into processed food. I think we used to have, like I said, 800 species of plants we ate. Now there's 12. We've lost 90% of all our edible plant species, half of all our livestock species. We've lost them.

What do you mean? Those plants are gone?

Oh my God. I mean, there are- We can't make-.

We can't create- There's no seeds anymore.

There are seed banks that are there. There's seed vaults.

Those are valuable.

Yeah, the USDA has a lot of seeds. Actually, a friend of mine was trying to develop different varieties of plants. He was trying to get some old seeds and got to the USDA and by accident he got a packet which was numbered like 43216, whatever. and he was like, called him and said, what is this? Like, because he was working with an agricultural guy to grow, you know, healthy food. And he goes, these are these Himalayan buckwheat, Himalayan buckwheat, which is kind of a rare buckwheat from the Himalayas. It grows in really rough conditions, and it's one of the most nutrient, phytochemically rich, dense foods, high protein, low starch, full of phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals on the planet.

And it's almost extinct.

Pretty much. Maybe there's a few villages in Himalayas that grow it.

So, you know, how we bring that back? How do we start to create different sort of more beneficial grains? There's Kernza wheat, which has been developed by Russ Jackson out in West Jackson out in the Midwest, which is a perennial wheat that grows roots that go, you know, tens of feet into the ground. breaks up the soil, creates organic matter, and creates incredibly delicious wheat that's heirloom wheat. It's actually a new form, but it's actually doesn't have all the gluten in it. It's less inflammatory, less sugar.

Oh, man. So we need to kind of bring.

Back some of these different kinds of foods in these complex farms that actually restore soil, restore human health.

Amen.

So, you know, I spent 30 years doing functional medicine. and just seeing the power of food.

To actually heal people.

And people often don't understand how close they are to feeling good or how bad they feel. It could be like one or two days switch.

Yeah, what you did Dr. Hyman, I.

Didn'T know how bad I was feeling.

Until I started feeling good.

I was joking, I think I had FLC syndrome, which is when you feel like crap.

Right.

Well, it's just like the information, the pain, the achiness, the tiredness.

You said you had congestion, nose, your digestion is not right, you have a little headache, you're sluggish, you have brain fog. you're tired, you're achy, you don't sleep.

Well, you have skin problems, blurry eyes, all that stuff.

And people are like, oh, this is normal. This is just normal. I have irritable bowel, I have sinus issues. I'm like, my joints are a little sore.

Oh, it's your food.

It's what you're eating. And so for 10 days, you do a 10-day reset. It literally, like, it's like when your computer's not working, you hit the reset.

And it reboots everything.

It's like a reboot. And then you get to see within 10 days how powerfully food Impacts you.

Yes.

And then you go, well, now I can choose. Now I can feel like crap or.

I can feel great.

But now I know. Yeah. And the serious form of what we call feel like crap, which is FLC syndrome, called FLS.

Right.

Exactly.

And then you go to the doctor.

And the first time I ever created.

Anything, because I really want people to have the experience, it's called this company called Pharmacy, and you go to getpharmacy.com with an F. F-A-R-M-I-S-Y. and you get the 10-day reset. It's a whole program that's really integrated and it's powerful and it involves lifestyle change and diet change and the right nutrients and supplements and shakes.

It's just awesome.

-Wow.

-10 days. -10 days.

-Reset it. -I mean, I didn't do it. You know, I came back from the holidays, you know, and I try to do well. I cook Christmas dinner. I'm Jewish. My wife's family and I made it all healthy.

But, you know, when it was their.

Mom'S house, we were here, it was like, a little ice cream. cream all this. And I didn't go too far, but you know, I didn't feel great and I came back and I just did the whole 10-day reset. It's like, I feel amazing. I mean, you don't crave bad stuff.

Your energy's up, your sleep's better, your joints don't hurt, your digestion's good. I gotta get it.

I gotta get it for me and the team. Make sure we reset it.

Amazing. So getpharmacy.com, yes.

FoodFixBook.com and your podcast, Doctors Pharmacy.

Yeah.

We need everybody on the team here to fix it. food system because it's an existential threat.

If we don't do it, we're screwed.

I mean, we're just, you know, we know the decline of the Roman Empire was because of some bad stuff that was going on there. Well, our food is the decline of our empire. Really?

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, for all sick and dead, we can't do anything. I mean, yeah, I mean, the amount of disability and suffering. A lot of pain. Mental illness, mental illness connected to depression, depression, obesity, chronic disease, it limits our productivity, our ability to engage in life.

Like we all want to feel good.

We want to have energy, we want to be able to love the people we love in our life, to do the work we want, have the mission we want, to be energetic and engaged. And I just want to sit around all day and binge on Netflix, right?

Yeah.

I mean, watching Netflix is fine, but like not in a way that avoids life because you feel so bad. And I think what's frustrating for me is, Louis, is that I see so much needless suffering.

You know, some things we can't change.

Now we can't change, you know, natural disasters. You know, I can't end war. But this is a solvable problem. Yeah, solvable.

Yeah.

The number one rule would be to eat real food. And people don't even know what that is anymore. 60-70% of calories consumed are white. White flour, white sugar, and flavorless, semi-synthetic.