Food As Medicine Preventing & Treating | Dr. Mark Hyman

Has anybody ever heard of FLC syndrome? You know what that is? That's when you feel like crap. Does anybody have that? Who here has some sort of chronic ailment or something that isn't right or doesn't feel good in their body? Anybody? A lot of you, right? You're all a young, healthy audience. But all of us are often walking around with something. And most of us, when we go to the doctor, they go, well, your tests are fine. Your exam's fine. You know, I don't know what's wrong with you. And there's only one or two answers to that problem. Either you're crazy or your doctor's missing something. And what's really extraordinary in this moment in time is that medicine is going through a paradigm shift that is profound, and it completely is forcing us to reimagine biology and disease. For the first time in the history of our species, we actually are having insight into the wonder of biology, how things work, what are the laws of nature when it comes to our human biology. We never had a clue because most of our conditions that we have had are diagnosed in a way that that doesn't make sense anymore, given the information we have. You know, we used to go to the doctor when we had a headache, we went to the head doctor. We had an elbow pain, we went to the joint doctor, we had a stomach ache, we went to the stomach doctor. But the truth is, the body isn't organized that way. Just because medicine is organized that way doesn't actually match reality. It doesn't match reality. We have a very different framework now that we need to use to understand disease. It's based on systems thinking, how everything connects together, how our biology works as an integrated model. So if you want to biohack your health or biohack disease, or create optimal functioning, you can't use our modern medical system of thinking because that system doesn't approximate reality. We are focused on symptoms and not causes. We're focused on the symptoms, not the system. We're focused on organs, not the organism. We're focused on what disease you have instead of why do you have this disease. So we need to reframe what we're doing. And I unfortunately, had to learn this the hard way. About 20 some years ago, I was quite ill. I went from being very, very healthy, riding my bike 100 miles a day, being able to remember 30 patients at the end of a day without any notes and dictate all their charts, to not being able to walk up the stairs, not being able to remember Where I was at the end of a sentence and I didn't know what happened to me. I was 36 years old and my whole system collapsed. I'd been a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I ran five miles a day. I ate a healthy diet, which I thought was a healthy diet, and something just went terribly wrong. And I had to literally reverse engineer my health because every single doctor told me that I was depressed or I had chronic fatigue, or I had fibromyalgia or whatever I had, and no one actually helped me figure it out. It turned out that my entire system broke down from living in China having mercury poisoning. I had mercury poisoning because I lived in China, which has the worst pollution on the planet, and I have poor genes that help me detoxify, so I couldn't get rid of the toxins. And in that discovery of my biology, I literally, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, system by system, had to understand what was going on. My immune system broke down. I developed sores and rashes all over my body. I developed terrible gut issues. I had digestive bloating and diarrhea for years. I had severe muscle pain and aches. I had cognitive dysfunction. It's like I couldn't remember anything. Focus, pay attention. I was depressed. It was like I had depression, ADD and dementia all at once. And I was desperate to figure out what was going on. And through my own unwinding of my biology, I was able to figure out this model of functional medicine. And I found pioneers in that field, and I went and learned at their feet. And I began to discover there was a whole field of thinking that was reorganizing our thoughts because we don't actually have a model to describe disease today. It's really backward. For example, today we're learning that the microbiome has the capacity to connect to so many different diseases, it can cause heart attacks. Right. The bacteria in your gut are a whole living organism that can create so many diseases. Heart attacks, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, allergies, asthma, fibromyalgia. All these things can be the result of changes in your gut flora. And yet when you go to the doctor with arthritis, they don't ask you about your poop. Right. When you go to the heart doctor, they're not asking you about what's going on with your gut flora. You have three pounds of bacteria in there. There's 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells. There's 100 times as much bacterial DNA in you than your own DNA, and that's dynamically interacting with you. You have 20,000 genes, you have about 2 million bacterial genes, and they're dynamically interacting with you all the time. And when you don't understand that the definitions that we have of disease don't make sense, we can't fix it. So I was able to repair my biology, to fix myself, and to transform my biology by using the science of functional medicine, which helps me map out the way the body actually functions. And instead of looking at the signs and symptoms and the organs at the top of the tree, I go down into the roots. What are the fundamental drivers of disease? What are the underlying causes of illness? How do we actually get to what's making us sick? And for one in two Americans, pre diabetes and about 70% of us obese. And by the way, this is not just an American problem. 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics are in the developing world, China's number 1, India's number 2. The Middle east has the most per capita diabetics. About 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 of the population is type 2 diabetic. So we really need a new way of thinking about this. And so rather than going down to the branches and the leaves and the organs, I go down into the roots and I look at the fundamental factors that are driving disease. What's the underlying lifestyle factors, the environmental factors, what's your diet, what's your stress level? What are the ingredients for health? So it's actually quite simple. Rather than just focusing on the symptoms, I go to the cause. And this is a timeline we use to help us map the story of your life. I want to know what happened in the womb. I want to know what happened with your mother, whether she was sick, whether she took antibiotics, whether she had immunizations, what she ate. I want to know what happened at your birth. Was it a C section? Was it something that had trauma? Were you breastfed or bottle fed? Did you have early antibiotics? All these things set up the conditions for your life. And what were the insults or traumas along your life that led to you having this problem in this moment? And then we map this out in what we call the matrix. Now, this is the model that we use to basically biohack any disease. So people say, Dr. Hyman, do you treat X or Y? And I'm like, well, yes, I treat the human body. I don't actually treat disease. The extraordinary thing about functional medicine is that you don't have to know the disease that you're treating. In order to optimize health. You follow this model and you can see tremendous transformations in biology. For example, there was a guy who came in to see me, I mentioned yesterday, who had dementia. He was seven years old, he was pretty desperate. His wife was very upset and basically went from being a CEO of his company to not being able to basically almost tie his shoes or function in any way. Had to quit work and was at home basically drooling and depressed and demented. And he came in and turned out he had a whole series of problems that were causing his brain to not function properly. He had heavy metal poisoning because he lived in Pittsburgh and there was coal burning there in Pittsburgh because of the steel plants. He had insulin resistance or pre diabetes because his diet was high in sugar and starch. He had severe gut issues. He had bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in his gut that was leading to his brain dysfunction because his gut bacteria weren't working. And he had a bunch of genetic things that set him up for problems. Problems with methylation and sulfation, which are these basic biochemical reactions that have to function for you to be healthy. And rather than say, I'm going to treat your dementia, I said, why don't we optimize your gut flora? Why don't we optimize your biochemistry and methylation with the right foods and nutrients? Why don't we fix the insulin resistance with the right higher fat, low glycemic diet? Why don't we help get rid of the heavy metals and get your fillings replaced and chelate you and get you full of glutathione, all the things you need to up regulate your detox system. And I said, let's see what happens. Well, he had this extraordinary transformation where he went from being basically demented and depressed to being back to work, functional and happy again and having his ability to be in life. And his grandkids weren't scared to be around him anymore. And it wasn't because we were treating the dementia. I was simply optimizing his biological systems using this model. So on the left hand side, there's the predisposing factors, all the triggers, and on the bottom there's the underlying fundamental lifestyle factors which are all the things that help us to provide inputs into the body to create health. So Dave talks about biohacking and all these little things that he's tweaking in the body. It's all based on this model. His next book is on mitochondria, which is one of the systems energy system. JG talks about eliminating the seven foods that's based on dealing with your gut and food sensitivities and allergies that create inflammation in the body. We're all basically coming from the same paradigm. And yet this is not something that's something I invented or that it's a new trick or technique or some little biohacking thing. This is the future of healthcare and medicine. This is actually now being invited into the center of Cleveland Clinic, where the CEO of one of the greatest healthcare centers in the world has invited me to come in and create a model that transforms healthcare, because he knows that we can't solve our current problem of chronic disease using the same system. And it's very powerful. So I want to sort of go into a little bit of a story about a recent experience I had and then share with you why I think it's not the whole story. I went to this place called Health Nucleus, which is part of the Human Longevity Institute, which is started by Craig Venter. Now, Craig Venter is the guy who decoded the human genome. He basically took our genes and he analyzed every gene of his own, sequenced it, and he did it faster and better than the nih, the National Institute of Health, and he did it for $300 million. And now at Health Nucleus, you can get your genes decoded for $1,000. Soon it'll probably be $100. And I went through an entire workup where I had my genome mapped, I had my metabolome mapped, my microbiome mapped. I had all sorts of blood tests, 20 vials of blood. I had a full body MRI scan, a total measurement of my echocardiogram, my body composition, Everything was measured. It was a lot of data. And the problem with a lot of data is that you have to make sense out of it. How does it connect? Where are the dots that connect everything together? Well, functional medicine is the filter. And someone said to me, how do you actually think about this differently? Well, if you think about physics, we have laws of physics that can explain the workings of the universe, gravity, the rotation of the planets, all these phenomena that are quite extraordinary, we can interpret through the filter of math and physics. But human biology, we don't have any natural laws that we've discovered about how the human body works. It's very descriptive. It's like you have these symptoms, you have this disease. It doesn't talk about why or what the mechanisms are, what the causes are. So functional medicine is like the natural laws of biology, and you can explain a whole host of different phenomena by means of A very few number of general laws. So when I went to Craig Venter's institute, I had this whole thing mapped out, and yet I got all this data. And unless you have a filter to understand how it all connects and what to do with it, you actually can't create health. And so I kind of had my whole genome map. This is my genome here. This is all me. You can see everything right into me here. Well, it's more interesting to me than this is actually what I call the super gene. Now, the super gene is much more important, which is not what is your genome, but how is your genome working? What is causing genes to get turned on or off? You can't change your genes, but you can change the expression of your genes. You can change how those genes work, which ones are turned on or off. And there are a whole host of things that influence that. It's not just your genes. It's the food that you eat that changes your gene expression. It's your social interactions and connections that change your gene expression. We now know that if you have somebody who you're with and you have a deep heart connection with them and a positive interaction, you literally can change each other's gene expression in the moment. And if you have a negative interaction, you can change your gene expression in the moment. The same thing with food. With every bite of food, you're changing your gene expression. So we talk about the exposome, which is what are your genes exposed to? It's the environment, toxins and light and air and water and community and connection and food. All the inputs that we're constantly feeling, emf, everything around us is always giving us input into our gene expression. That's called the exposome. And that accounts for over 90% of the result that we see as our phenotype, which is who we are in this moment, whether we're sick or healthy, is related to these inputs to our genes. So you have control over those inputs most of the time, and you can change your gene expression very quickly. Someone said, you know, how can you reverse disease even at late stages? Is it possible? I said, well, yeah. I had a guy named George who came to see me, was 300 pounds, he was 63 years old. He had heart failure, diabetes, he had angina, he had reflux, he had prostate problems, erectile dysfunction and sinus issues and, you know, all kinds of problems. I always say I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. So he said to me, can you help me? I said, yeah, I can help you, but you have to do everything I say. So he did everything I said. A year later he was £300, he came back, he lost £150. Every single one of his diseases was gone. Now he's 70 something years old and he's starting a bathhouse in New Mexico. So the power of biology to change at any age is really remarkable. You can reverse aging, and I see this over and over. So the super gene is your genome, it's your exposome, it's your microbiome, as I said, because your microbiome, those 2 million genes are constantly interacting with you and your own genes. And it's called the hologene, but it's also your nutrigenome. What are the foods doing that are affecting you and how are those affecting your gene expression? It's your proteome, which are the proteins that are produced from your genes, your metabolome, which is all the metabolites that are produced from your genes. I had my metabolome measure there. Instead of like 20 blood tests, there was 2,500 blood tests I had measured. So that's really more important is how are your genes being influenced and how do we map all those influences in a system that makes sense? That's what functional medicine is. It's sort of an operating system. It's a way of thinking. It's not a new test or modality or specialty. It's a way of thinking about solving the puzzle of disease. So this is some of my genes here. You know, I was happy that I had more genes than mostly anybody else. I had over 7 million or 6 million variants. So we all have variations in our genetic code. I had more than average. I was happy about that. And I, and I had, I had a telomere length of 43 years and I'm 56 years old. So that made me happy. So what I'm doing clearly is working. And I found out that I actually genetically am more diverse than I thought. I thought I was a Jew from, you know, the Middle east and that's where I came from. But turns out I am from the Middle East. I'm also from Asia, I'm part Asian, from West Africa, and I'm even half a percent Native American. And I'm one, I think, and a half percent Neanderthal. So that explains why I have a big butt like Chinese food. Like sweat lodges, filth deficiencies, nice. Pull women's hair out and you can see, this is interesting. They can map your dad's ancestry. So my dad's from West Africa. My mom is from the Middle east and all over Asia. And here's my Neanderthal genes. You can see right there. It's kind of exciting. Then this is my metabolome. Now, my metabolome is this map of 2,500 metabolites. But it's just data. How do you make sense out of all this data? How do you make big data small? How do you create big insights out of big data? Well, that's the beauty of functional medicine. So one of the things that I learned was that I have areas of my mitochondria that are not working as well. And I know that's probably true as a sort of consequence of the mercury poisoning and the illness that I had. And so I know how to tweak this by basically biohacking my biochemistry and using a few nutrients to upregulate various pathways. Now, that's kind of cool, but at the end of the day, what really we need to know is how do we undo the things that often are happening to our biology? Now, this is Clayton. Now, Clayton was a little boy who had severe add. He also had asthma. He had anxiety, had abdominal pain. He had anal itching. And that was just the A's. He had a whole list of other problems. He had eczema and hives and insomnia and muscle cramps. And he had severe ADD and dysgraphia. He couldn't write, his penmanship was so bad. So rather than give him Ritalin and rather than give him asthma medications and medications for his stomach pain, he was on seven medications. You know, he was on a pill for every ill. Instead of asking the question why? These doctors were like, what disease do you have? What drug do I give you? And with Clayton instead, I said, what's going on? Why is he having all these different diseases? Why does he have so many different problems at 10 or 12 years old? Why is this going on? So I began to dig into his story, and we found all sorts of imbalances in his biology. We found that he had severe gut issues. He had overgrowth of yeast in his gut from eating a diet that was full of sugar and processed food and taking antibiotics for years. He had lead poisoning from having lead in his environment. He had severe nutritional deficiencies which were from his diet. He ate a processed food diet, processed meats, lots of sugar, trans fats. So he had trans fats. He had no omega 3 fats. He had low levels of zinc, magnesium, antioxidants. He had low levels of B vitamins. And we were able to map all this stuff out. He had food sensitivities, he had reactions to gluten. He had all this total system breakdown. So rather than treat his add, and rather than treat his asthma or his irritable bowel or his hives or his eczema, his anxiety, with all these different drugs, which is what we learned to do in medicine, I simply got his system in balance. And what was really shocking to me, this is sort of when the light bulb went off in my head, this was his handwriting. When he came in to see me, he was 12 years old. You couldn't read anything right. And after two months, his mother brought his homework back and it looked like this. Now, I didn't try to biohack his handwriting or treat his brain. All I did was basically take out the things that were creating imbalance and put in the things that were creating balance. So it's really a very simple equation when you want to create health, if you want to biohack your health, it's actually quite simple. I only ask two questions when someone comes to the office to see me. One is, what do I need to take away that's bothering this person? Is there something that's pissing their system off, that's irritating them, that doesn't work for them, or that isn't right that I need to remove? And it's a short list. These are the causes of disease. It's toxins, allergens, microbes, poor diet, stress. There's five causes of all disease, and those interact with your genes to create imbalance. And then there's ingredients for health. What are the ingredients for creating a healthy human? I mean, whoever here is. In healthcare, you probably didn't have a class in school that says, creating a healthy human 101, did you? Probably not. Right. So we. We have to actually go back and say, well, what is it that creates a healthy human? What are the inputs that create health? If you have a racehorse, you know how to get that horse to a high performance level. You have to feed it the right food, you have to exercise it the right way, get it the right amount of rest. All those things are scientifically designed to create phenomenal performance in racehorses. But we don't treat ourselves that way. I mean, you know, I mean, most of the stuff that we eat, we shouldn't even be considered food. It's like a food, like substance. So with ingredients we have to think of, what are they, it's the right food. You know, when you heard a little bit about it, Just before about what our indigenous foods were. It's just low processed, real, whole, fresh food that's low in sugar, high in the right fats. I've written a dozen books about it. It's pretty straightforward. Everybody has the basic same concept of what is a healthy diet. The second is the right nutrients. It's also light and air and water. You're going to get a lot out this afternoon. And love and connection and community, all those are ingredients for creating a healthy human. Sleep restoration. And when we don't have that input, we actually get sick. Now, with this kit, I used a powerful new drug that I didn't tell you about fully. This drug has the power to optimize dozens of hormones to improve the expressions of tens of thousands of genes, to optimize hundreds of thousands of protein networks to balance your immune system and cytokines to optimize your gut flora. And it works faster, better and cheaper than any drug ever discovered. Has no side effects since it's available to almost anybody on the planet. You know what drug it is? Love. Love. Well, it could be love. It's actually food. Food is the most powerful drug. It's not like a drug. It actually is a drug. And if I had to go to a deserted island, I only had one drug to use. It would be this drug to reverse disease. It's the most powerful drug. I wrote something called the ten Day Detox Diet. And in that program, I basically synthesized functional medicine. I eliminated the foods that create disease, put in the foods that create health, and gave people a few simple practices to do. In 10 days, their scores on the FLC quiz, which is when you feel like crap, went down by 62%. That means all diseases improve. Migraines, asthma, irritable bowel depression, joint pain, insomnia, anxiety, whatever it was autoimmune disease. One guy came up, he said, I have rheumatoid arthritis. In 10 days, I feel better. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug I had. One woman said, Dr. Hyman, I had type 2 diabetes. I got off 56 units of insulin in three days. How is that possible? Another one said, I've had lifelong depression on and off medication and out of psychiatric hospitals. In three days, I don't feel depressed for that first time in my life. Is that possible? I said, yes, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug on the planet. And it's not just calories. Food is actually information. It's literally instructions, like code. So you can upgrade or downgrade your biological software by what you put in your mouth every day. So next time you take a bite of food, just remember that it's not energy. It's not just fuel. It's actually instructions. It's information and what you want to be telling your body to upgrade or downgrade your biological software. Now, there's one more thing I want to share with you, which is, yes, food is medicine, and yes, we can understand functional medicine and go into the details of biological networks and understand how everything connects together. And I've spent my life studying biochemistry and physiology and genetics and the connections and the patterns and everything. And I've seen more data than most physicians because for 20 years, I've had a unique practice where I've been able to do $5,000 worth of testing on almost everybody and see millions of data points on tens of thousands of people and look at the patterns and connections. And I was just so focused on this. And then one day, the earthquake in Haiti happened, and it changed everything for me. To make a long story short, I basically ended up in Haiti after the earthquake, and it was pretty intense. We arrived in this massive destruction in the main hospital, and I met a guy named Paul Farmer. Paul farmer is an extraordinary man who went to Haiti when he was in medical school in one of the poorest countries in the world. It's the poorest country in the western hemisphere, where most people live on less than a dollar a day and don't have clean water or sanitation. And most people have given up on these people because they had TB and aids, and there was no way to treat these people because you need complicated drug regimens. And he said, no, no, we can help these people. We can solve this problem. What seemed insoluble, we can solve. And it wasn't by better drugs or surgery that Paul fixed these people. It was by the power of each other. He called it accompaniment. We accompany each other to health. He used friends, neighbors, community health workers that he trained who were just their neighbors to help each other, to go to each other's houses and make sure they had enough food to eat and water to drink and took their pills on time and had a place to sleep and just basically took care of each other. And it was the power of that social connection that was able to drive this transformation. It's been used for the Gates foundation, the Clinton Foundation. It wasn't through better improvements in medicine. It was just through the power of our social connections. And I realized that it wasn't our genetic threads that were making us sick. It was our social threads that were making us sick. That just as our social connections can make us sick, they can also make us well. I realized that this was also true of chronic disease, that actually not just infectious disease was contagious, but actually so was chronic illness. Diabetes is contagious. Heart disease is contagious. Obesity is contagious. And this work has been shown over and over to be true. This is the guy from Harvard named Christakis who's looked at the social networks and our patterns in life. And he's found that when you looked at huge amounts of data, that there are clusters of people who kind of group together in social networks that drive disease. So he found that if you're overweight and your friends are overweight. Sorry, if you're overweight, if you have a friend who's overweight, you're more likely to be overweight than if your family's overweight. If you're. If you have a friend who's overweight or a close friend, you're about 170% more likely to be overweight than if your sister or brother's overweight, you're only 40% more likely to be overweight. So it's those social threads that connects us that are more important than our genetic traits. But there's also the happiness clusters. So people who actually cluster together and are happy together do better. So what really became evident to me was that we have to reframe our idea of how we change biology using the understanding of functional medicine and biological networks. But we have to change behavior by dealing with the social drivers of disease. Because I know when I go out to eat with somebody, they're worried about what they're having for dinner or whether they're going to order dessert or not. And I don't have to say anything, right, because it's that power of peer pressure. When I'm around Dave Asprey, I'm not going to be eating bread, right? So I think we all feel that experience in that. So if your friends are having all these bad habits, you're going to have those habits. If your friends have good habits, you're going to have good habits. So I'm pondering all this, and then one day this guy comes in my office who was very overweight, and this guy named Rick Warren, who you might have heard of, he wrote a book called the Purpose Driven Life, which sold 32 million copies. He put 10 million people in small groups around the world to live better lives. Purpose driven lives. And he was Very overweight. And he said, like, I want to get healthy. Can you help me? I'm sure. So I said, let's have dinner afterwards. We had dinner. I said, tell me about your church. Because I'm a Jewish doctor from New York. I don't know much about churches in Southern California. I said, what's going on with your church? Well, we have 30,000 people. I said, wow. He said, we have 5,000 small groups that meet every week to live better lives. I'm like, oh my God. And the light bulb went off and I said, why don't we create a healthy living program delivered to these small groups and see what happens? And we thought a few hundred people would show up. 15,000 people came to church. We had to turn 2,000 people away. They signed up for this program. We created a 40 day program, then a year long program. And the first year they lost a quarter of a million pounds. And all sorts of diseases went away, right? People's diabetes went away. Their autoimmune disease went away. Their reflux went away, their migraines went away. Their autoimmune disease went away. It wasn't because we treated disease. It wasn't one doctor treating one patient. It was one doctor. It was a couple of us. It was actually Dr. Oz, another doctor, Dr. Amen, and me. It was a Jewish doctor, Christian doctor and a Muslim doctor. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it was quite extraordinary. So we wrote this book called the Daniel Plan. I wanted to call it the Jewish Doctor's Guide for Christian Wellness. And it won the Christian Book of the Year award last year, which is really cool. I think I'm the only Jewish guy to ever win the Christian Book of the Year award. Well, there was this one other guy. There was one other guy. And I found this profound change because when people started to do this together, when they connected together, when they worked together and played together and ate together, everything changed. They changed what was acceptable in the culture. They no longer had ice cream socials and pancake breakfast and donuts and soda everywhere. It was like they were trying to get their people to heaven early, eating all that stuff. I went on stage in the church, I said, listen, if you had Jesus come to dinner, what would you feed him? A Big Mac, fries and a Coke. I said, listen, if you believe God lives in you, why are you feeding him crap? I said, what you have to eat is very simple. You just leave the food that man made and eat the food that God made, right? Did God make a Twinkie? No, actually I have a slide in one of my lectures I put up, which is showing that label of a Twinkie. And I said, if anybody can guess what this food is, I'll give you $1,000. And nobody's been able to guess because you can't tell what it is if you cover up the front of the package because all the ingredients are the same processed stuff. So we created this program that we've now expanded to hundreds of churches around the world. And I realized that it's really the power of each other that's going to solve our global health problem, that we have to connect with the power of love. And that's why we're all here, right? We're all here because we want to be part of a community. We want to be part of a tribe. We have a longing to belong. It's part of our ancient DNA. E.O. wilson called it the social conquest of the Earth. It's this powerful drive for us to connect with each other, and that drives our behavior. So we have to basically love our way out of our chronic disease epidemic. We have to use the power of functional medicine to change biological networks and the power of love and community to change our biology. And that's really, at the end of the day, what all matters. So I'm going to leave you with a quote from an African proverb which says, if you want to travel swiftly, travel alone. But if you want to travel far, travel together. So let's all do this together. Thank you.