Dr. Mark Hyman
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We eliminated all the inflammatory foods, things that were causing fermentation that could kind of cause the bad bacteria in her gut to ferment the foods and cause a bloating and leaky gut. We basically took out dairy, gluten, grains, sugar, processed foods, put her on whole foods, anti-inflammatory, microbiome healing diet.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We gave her, I think, vitamin D, fish oil, some probiotics, really simple stuff. And I said, come back in six weeks and we'll do some diagnostics. And in the meantime, do this program and then come back. She came back and she said, well, all my symptoms are gone. And I stopped all my medication. I'm like, oh, I didn't ask you to stop your medication.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But she was on Stelara, which costs $50,000 a year. It's an immune biologic. She was on a host of other drugs from her psychiatrist, from her migraine doctor, for her irritable bowel, for her reflux. I mean, it was like, a whole pile of pills. She was off everything and she had no symptoms and she was all better and she lost 20 pounds. And it wasn't an anomaly or a miracle.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It was just following the principles of how the body works. And in that textbook, Network Medicine, they talk about how we need to understand mechanisms and causes, not just symptoms and diagnoses. And we need to understand that there's multi-causality for different problems. So it may be not just one thing that causes the disease, right? You might have toxins, it might be your diet, you might have
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
your microbiome issues, you might, you know, have some other trauma or stress and all those things like kind of are the soup that then breaks the system down so it gets sick.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so my job is basically to see where are the things that are broken down and how do I help repair them, how to remove the root causes, whether it's mercury or whether it's mold or whether it's, you know, your microbiome having dysbiosis or whether it's, a trauma that you need to deal with through MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, which hopefully will be passed soon.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's all sorts of things to do to help the body, but we have to have the framework for having the right assessment of someone. Otherwise, they don't get better. And I've had the privilege, working at Canyon Ranch, doing my own private practice, of doing tens of thousands of dollars worth of testing, potentially, on
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
tens of thousands of patients over decades and seen literally millions and millions of data points of their story and their labs and their treatment and their outcomes. And so I have this really deep understanding of all the ways in which these systems interact and connect. And so I think people can map out what's happening in their biology in ways that now tell them what's really going on.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And we're seeing that happening. The testing community is growing that people want to know what's going on in their bodies and they're using wearables and they're using CGMs and all kinds of self-diagnostic tools, which I think are important because people aren't getting the answer from the traditional medical system.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You look pretty good for 100, huh? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're saying the scientific process itself precludes us from really understanding things because we can't study things in the way that need to be studied?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I can tell people's blood work sometimes just by looking at them.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think that's a great question. I think that, you know, just to back up one second, I think, you know, you talked about, you know, putting a high dose of something in or a lack of sleep. Functional medicine is about understanding the answer to very simple questions and then designing a treatment model based on the answers to those questions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the questions are, one, what are you exposed to that's interrupting your normal function? Hence functional medicine. What is it that's bugging you? What's pissing your system off? And there's a short list, Andrew. It's toxins and it can be internal endogenous toxins or external toxins like heavy metals or pesticides or glyphosate or a million other things. It's infections or microbes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So it can be post-COVID syndrome with persistent spike protein. It can be Epstein-Barr virus that leads to MS. It can be Lyme disease. It can be your microbiome being off, which is the truth for most of us.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's allergens, which are things that your body's reacting to, both environmental allergens, or it could be food allergens or food sensitivities, which is not truly an allergen, but it's more of an adverse reaction to food from leaky gut. It can be poor diet, which I think most of us understand what that is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It can be stress, and that can be physical, mechanical stress, like being hit by a car, or psychological stress, or the meaning you make from a psychological stress, which is really what caused you to be sick. I know you've had Gabor on your podcast.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We haven't had Gabor on.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, so you have this list of five things. That interacts with your genome. And it's really what we call the exposome. What your genes are exposed to is far more predictive than your genome. Your exposome includes the sum total of everything you're exposed to on the positive and the negative, all the things I just listed, but also all the ingredients for health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So I identify what are the impediments for health, and then what are the ingredients for health? And the ingredients for health are not complicated. We're biological organisms, right? Despite trying to live outside of our biological constraints, we need the right kind of food. What does that look like? Michael Pollan said, eat food, mostly plants, not too much, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Or not too much, mostly plants, something like that. And it's basically eating food that's as close to nature as you can find it. Grew out of the ground or had a pulse. Yeah, yeah, basically right. He says, eat food that's grown in a plant, not made in a plant. And I used to lecture at these churches and I said, it's really simple to figure out what to eat.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Ask you, did God make it or did man make it? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did he make an avocado? Yes. Would our ancestors recognize it? Yeah, like would your great grandmother know what a lunchable was or a Go-Gurt was?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Like you look at the label. I read the labels. You look at it. Do I recognize this? Would I have this in my kitchen? Do I have butylate hydroxy toluene in my kitchen or red dye number three? Probably not, right? Unless you're a grandma making cupcakes that are really red. But so food. Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish. Fruit, vegetables, yeah. Quality dairy. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I've written so many books on this, The Pegan Diet, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? I wanted to call it Food, What the Fuck Should I Eat? But my publisher wouldn't let me. But nowadays they probably would. I feel like they curse everywhere. So there's like...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We can dive into nutrition, but just assume like you need, depending on your age and your sex and what you're doing with your life, you need the right nutrition of whole real food.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We should be eating whole food fats as much as possible, right? Avocados, coconut, nuts and seeds, omega-3 fats from fish, olive oil, which is the most minimally processed oil you can get. extra virgin olive oil. And we're eating nuts and seeds. We're getting a lot of omega-6s. So the big theory behind seed oils is that it's omega-6 rich. It's imbalanced with omega-3s. It causes inflammation.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
The way they're produced and grown is problematic. They're usually GMO crops like canola oil. They spray lots of chemicals on them. Those chemicals get in the oil. They're manufactured in an industrial way that oxidizes them, that uses hexane to get rid of some of the compounds in it, deodorizes them, bleaches them, and then they're easily oxidized.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So would I want to eat an industrial food product? Probably not. Do we know for sure that it's a problem? I think the data is mixed. I mean, there's some studies that show epidemiologically that People who eat more of these plant-based oils or seed oils have reduced risk of diseases.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, thank you, Andrew. You know, I would say that You know, I didn't choose what I'm doing. It chose me. I was super healthy, fit, you know, riding my bike a hundred miles a day. I was 36 years old and then wham, I got really sick.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So we don't know what they're doing, and there's food frequency questionnaires, and these studies are proving correlation, not causation.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't eat... like your butter with a bagel, put it on your broccoli. Because the saturated fat, refined starch combo is what's killing us.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, starch, sugar. Below the neck, your body can't tell if it's a bowl of sugar or a bowl of cornflakes or a bagel or a bowl of sugar.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You're doubling down on the sugar, yeah. And I think, you know, to answer your question about the seed oil, the data is not really completely answering this. And it's part of the problem of nutrition. It's not a nutrition science. The one large...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
randomized controlled trial that was done on like 9,000 people, not on 90 people or 50 people or 30 people, which a lot of these studies are, but on 9,000 people that were randomized in a psychiatric hospital. It would be unethical to do today. It was done by Ancel Keys. It was the Minnesota Coroner Experiment funded by the NIH.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
where they basically gave half the group butter and half the group corn oil. Now corn oil is a pure omega-6 oil, as opposed to soybean, which is mixed omega-3, canola mixed omega-3, six oils. And what they found was striking. They found that the group that had the corn oil, for every 30 point drop in LDL cholesterol,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
the risk of death from heart attacks or strokes went up by 22%, which is completely the opposite of what we think in medicine, which is LDL is the boogeyman. LDL is the bad cholesterol or L for lousy cholesterol. It's not so simple. And I think this oversimplification of let's say these seed oils lower LDL, therefore they're good, it's just too simplistic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I went from being able to memorize 30 patients in a day and dictate their notes and ride my bike a hundred miles to not knowing where I was at the end of a sentence and not being able to barely walk up the stairs. And I got hit with chronic fatigue syndrome. And I tried to figure out what it was.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But would I, for example, have a corn oil that was expeller pressed or that was organic or canola oil that was or sunflower or safflower oil? Yeah, I mean, I'm not worried about those in small amounts, but that's not what most people are doing. Most people are eating, most of their diet is ultra processed food. 60% of adults, 67% of kids is basically junk food.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the major oil in those are these refined oils. So is it the oils? Is it the junk food? They're just a vehicle for this. And we've increased our consumption, for example, the main seed oil or bean oil, it's not really a seed, is soybean oil by a thousand fold since 1900. Now, I'm sort of an evolutionary thinker. I'm like, how are our bodies designed? And what should we be doing with them?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And like, you know, You talk a lot about light, and that's like, you went to sleep with the sun, you woke up with the sun. It was just how things were. And you had circadian rhythms, and our whole biological clocks and rhythms are screwed up because of how we live.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, that's kind of my view. It seems so simple to me. That's my view. My view is if you have a new to nature kind of compound or a an unnaturally high amount of something that we're having in our diet. I mean, sugar was always around. We would get honey, whatever. But we'd have 22 teaspoons a year as Hunter gathers. Now we have that every day for every American.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, no contest. It's starch and sugar that's driving our metabolic crisis. Yeah. by a huge factor, by a huge factor. Does that mean no pasta, no bread? It doesn't mean no anything. It just means the volume of stuff we're eating. It's like we're eating pharmacologic doses. It's 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour, which has a higher glycemic index than sugar. Really?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, well, that's how it's set. It's set at white bread as 100, and then sugar's 80 because it's fructose and glucose. So you have to break that apart. And so your glycemic load, which is... how it affects your blood sugar. Fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar. Glucose raises your blood sugar.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I went to doctors at Harvard, at Columbia, here, everywhere, and they're, oh, you're depressed, take some Prozac, this and that. And I realized that traditional medicine wasn't having the answers. even though I sort of came from the perspective of like a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, you know, I studied Buddhism. Were you a yoga teacher? I was, it was back in the 80s.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We weren't allowed that stuff, but- Tang.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I wanna answer that and then I wanna come back to the loop of what I was trying to complete on the big thought of like, how does the body work and how do you create health and what do you do? Because you asked me that question, I wanna lose that question. What happened was there was this rise in cardiovascular disease in America
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And there was this thought that saturated fat and fat was the bad guy. And this was the McGovern report in the 70s that went on to be the dietary guidelines, that went on to be the food pyramid. And the food pyramid essentially told us that fat was the enemy. So it's only the very tippy top fats and all those sparingly.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Bottom of the pyramid was six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day. Which sounds like a recipe for being hungry all the time. And being obese. Right. Now, we didn't know at the time, but... it became really clear that that was a bad idea pretty quick. And the hockey stick rise in obesity, type two diabetes tracks perfectly with that information.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
The American public trusted the government. They trusted the scientists. And when they said fat's bad, Carbs are good. Everybody listened. Eggs are bad. Eggs are bad. Fat's bad. Cholesterol's bad. Red meat's bad. Red meat's bad. So people ate less red meat. They ate less eggs. They ate less fat. And then we got snack bowl cookies. We got low-fat ice cream. And the sugar just went through the roof.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so that's when you see this explosive rise. And then there's other factors, our microbiome affects our weight, environmental toxins affect our metabolism. So there's a whole bunch of things happen in tandem, but that probably is the single biggest thing. So if someone asking for me, should I worry about soybean oil or sugar and starch? It's 100% sugar and starch.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You're a tall guy, long mat. They didn't have yoga mats when I was doing yoga. He put a towel on the ground. There was no Lululemon. It was like... On top of like the East-West bookstore in New York City, there was like one yoga class in the early 80s. Okay. That was it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I studied Buddhism in college, but I also studied systems thinking and systems theory and Gregory Bateson and the nature of the network effect of life and biology and everything else. And so... I kind of went through medical school, but when I came out, I was pretty straight traditional medicine doctor.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
was a disaster. And I wrote a book called Eat Fat, Get Thin, where I cataloged the whole history of how we got there and what the problems were and what the science is telling us about what we should be eating, about the reconsidering saturated fat being bad. It's bad if you're eating it in the context of starch and sugar. For most people, it's not.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And if you're obese or metabolically unhealthy, it actually can be better for you. There's a lower risk of diabetes and epidemiological studies with butter and milk fat. So I think we have to kind of like... I know nutrition is a very complicated subject, but... Or not, right? I don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So the ingredients for health... Again, not a long list, because we're human beings. We need the right food, we need the right amount of nutrients, and it's different for different people. You might not know this, but Bruce Ames did an incredible paper, who recently died, one of the giants of science, saying that 1 3rd of our entire DNA codes for enzymes. All enzymes require cofactors.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But then I got sick, and it turned out that I had gone to China to live there for a year and work as a doctor to help start expatriate medical clinics, because there were no Western medical clinics in China, and people were terrified who were 60,000 expatriates to go to the Chinese hospital. So I spoke Chinese because I studied Asian studies. I went there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Most cofactors are vitamins and minerals. And there's a huge genetic variability in how much different people need. Some people need 1,000 units of vitamin D, some people need 5,000. Some people need 400 micrograms of folate. Some people need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so he kind of explained that very carefully. So you have to find the right amount of nutrients for you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You need the conditionally essential nutrients. Those people don't think are absolutely essential, but things like CoQ10 and various things that the body requires that we may not get enough. Then you need light. You need water. You need clean air. You need movement. You need rest. And I would say that in the parasympathetic state, kind of what I mean by rest, you need sleep.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You need connection, love, meaning, purpose. These are all ingredients for health. And any one of those can make you sick, whether it's just being isolated and alone or not having a purpose in your life. If you have meaning and purpose in your life, there's a gem in paper published that you're likely to live seven years longer.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, if you cut out all cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, the extension of life expectancy is seven years.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I was looking forward to this. Exactly. Well, these small things, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Most people need more than that. So the idea is basically with functional medicine, you take out the bad stuff and you put in the good stuff. And each person has a different set of bad stuff and a different set of good stuff. And you have to be detective.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's the opposite of traditional medicine, which is just use a single drug to treat a single mechanism with single disease and a single outcome. Like you have high blood pressure, take a high blood pressure drug to lower your blood pressure. We need multimodal treatments for multi-causal diseases. And so what English that means is we need to do a lot of different things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Like if you want to garden, you don't just say, I'm gonna put the plant in the air and not water it and not give it soil. Or you say, I'm just gonna plant it in the soil, but no light and no water. I mean, you know, and this is the way science is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I remember trying to do a study on Alzheimer's at Cleveland Clinic, and the top scientist there was like, we wanted to study these multimodal dimensional approaches to call it a black box approach. Everybody's getting a different treatment. It's super personalized, customized, based on their own unique biology. There's no one such thing as Alzheimer's or different Alzheimer'ses.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I don't know if that's a word, but you know what I mean? And that's why we failed so miserably with the amyloid hypothesis, because we're just looking at the end stage phenomenon, which is plaque... going into an area that's inflamed to kind of deal with the inflammation. What caused the inflammation is really the question. And it can be variable things. So we start to kind of map these out.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But what I inadvertently had happened was I got exposed to huge amounts of mercury from the air, because they burn coal, and coal expels lead and mercury and lots of other toxins. And there's 10 million people in Beijing and the city at the time, and they all heated their homes with raw coal. And I had an air filter that I would clean out every day and breathe the black soot in.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you do that and you actually get to the root causes and you try to treat all the things that are out of balance, people get better. So if you have a vitamin D deficiency and a folate deficiency and you have tons of small bowel overgrowth and you have heavy metals and you have all these different problems, you can't just treat one thing and expect the person to get better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You've got to look at all those things. And some are more primary, some are secondary, but that's the job of a functional medicine doctor. It's a detective. And for me, what's exciting is, you said how many people do this? Not that many. How many people are like experts who've done this for decades and have seen thousands of patients? a few hundred. We trained 100,000 people.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We have 3,500, I think, certified, another, I think, 3,000 or 4,000 in the pipe to be certified. Not that many people who can do this. And that's part of why I created this company called Function Health, which you've been so supportive of, which is to allow people to understand what's going on in their own biology, to be empowered to be the CEO of their own health,
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
and to get the data that's going to help them identify the different things that are going on to actually do something about it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You don't use that framing, but that's the framing. It's take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. The body knows what to do. It's got an innate healing system. Just give it a chance.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Great question. I thought you were going somewhere else. I thought you were going where, what are the things that if you did everything perfectly and you're still sick, what do you do? Oh, well, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Because there's a list of those things. We will get to that. 80% of it you can take care of, but there's some things you need help. We can talk about that. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So I got like a whopping dose of mercury. And it took a couple of years for it to kind of caused this problem. But from one day to the next, I went from being great to not being great. And my gut broke down. I had diarrhea for years. My cognitive function completely went south. It was like I had dementia, ADD, and depression all at once.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think because of how dramatically our diets changed after the industrial revolution and because of urbanization and our disconnection from nature, we have a lower nutrient intake than we did as hunter-gatherers. You know, I just came back from Africa and went to the Hadza tribe, which is one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes, and I got to spend a few days with them.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the nutrient density of the diet was so much higher. Omega-3s, vitamin D, you're outside running around on a loincloth. Or if you're not, you're living in some coastal area where you're eating extremely fatty fish, which is one of the great sources of vitamin D in the food. They were eating phytochemicals at an incredible rate through eating 800 different species of plants.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Now we have three main ones and 12 of them are altogether comprised probably 95% of our diet instead of 800 plants with all kinds of phytochemicals and vitamins and minerals. The soils we're growing food in have depleted the organic matter because of industrial farming and soil erosion. And the organics matter, the living soil is what actually helps to
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
allow the plants to take up the nutrients from the soil. So that there's a symbiotic relation between organisms in the soil and the plant. And it uses them to, help get nutrients free so they get into the plants. So where there's less magnesium, there's less zinc, there's less all these things in our diet.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you look at the surveys of the American population, there's an ongoing government survey called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It essentially goes around the country with vans, tests people's blood all the time. And this is like decades old survey. And it's incredible because you get all this data. They find that like 90 plus percent are low in omega-3s.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
probably 80% are insufficient or low in vitamin D, 50 something percent are magnesium deficient, about the same iron, zinc a little bit less, selenium a little bit less. And it depends on where you live and what you do and also depending on your diet. and what your stage of life is and what your age is and how your absorption is.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
For example, when you're older, you get decreased ability to absorb nutrients and decreased ability to absorb, for example, vitamin B12. So at different ages, you might need different things, right? And so what are the basics that I think everybody should take? I think everybody should take omega-3 fats, at least a gram or two of EPA, DHA.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Most people need between 2,000 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D3. I think a good multivitamin can cover the rest for most people. And when I say good multivitamin, I mean one with the right bioavailable forms of nutrients.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I was in the hospital recently for back surgery and this resident came by and he was, you know, attending, saying, well, I said, I think I need some, you know, magnesium because I, I, I'm taking all these painkillers for my surgery and I don't want to be constipated. He says, oh, you can get this one. I'm like, I said, that's magnesium oxide.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
That's not well absorbed and it doesn't, not the greatest for- You mean magnesium citrate? Yeah, so I said, and he was like, oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. He wrote it down.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I ended up having autoimmune stuff going on and just rashes and sores. And I couldn't think. I literally almost had to go on disability.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, and glycinate for also if you're not, you know, tend to be constipated, it's one that you can tolerate and not be constipated. It also helps with detoxification and sleep and other things. And so those are the big ones. And I think, you know, I've been diagnostically testing people for decades in nutritional testing.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
With function, we do deep nutritional tests, including omega-3 testing and... homocysteine, looking at methylation, which is a really important thing you've talked about in the podcast, B12, folate, B6, we do vitamin D testing, and we see over 67% are deficient, and this is important to understand, Andrew, 67% are deficient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Not the optimal level that you or I might think is good, like vitamin D over 45, or a ferritin iron store over 45, they're like, oh, if your vitamin is 30 or more, you're okay. Or if your ferritin is 16 or more, you're okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, if your ferritin is 16, you're gonna be tired, you're gonna have brain fog, you could potentially have hair loss, you could have insomnia, and that's just having low iron stores. And so when we're looking at that, we're like seeing what an incredibly depleted population we are in terms of the nutrients we have. So I wish we wouldn't need them and I wish we didn't need them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But the fact is that unless we're eating, a very structured diet, and I had a patient once who had OCD, and she's like, I don't wanna take any vitamins. I said, okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
She says, but I'm gonna eat, I know pumpkin seeds have zinc, so I'm gonna have like 14 pumpkin seeds a day, and I need 200 micrograms of selenium, so I'm gonna take four Brazil nuts a day, and she went on, and I'm like, I know I need this nutrient, so I'm gonna have this much liver a day. And so she was able to figure it out, but it's not easy, no.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I met a person who introduced me to this guy, Jeff Bland, who studied with Linus Pauling and had a very different view of health that really was more around the framework of the body as a network, as a system, as an ecosystem where everything is connected and that it wasn't reductionist, it was inclusive.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, for example, you're an older guy. You don't want to take a lot of iron because you're not getting rid of it and you can get iron toxicity. So if you're a menstruating woman, you need more iron. But what I think is the key is figuring out what's right for you. Tests don't guess. Most people don't know. And some people may need, you know,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
10,000 units of vitamin D to get the same blood level as somebody else with 1,000. And that's because there's different vitamin D receptors and they're genetically determined and you can't know by just guessing. Right. I totally agree.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And by the way, it's a stupid argument, because you're like, why drink water? I just pee the rest out. I mean, like, why I'm creating, you know?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And we're seeing iodine interesting because people are eating the iodized salt. So they're eating sea salt and Himalayan salt. We got too fancy with our salt. We need a table salt. We're not eating iodized salt. Now, iodine is not normally found in salt, but it was added to salt as a fortification to brand goiters or thyroid problems. But a lot of people have thyroid issues. One in five...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
women and one in 10 men have low thyroid function and 50% are not diagnosed. And sometimes just a little iodine supplementation can help. Or you can eat seaweed, you know, or fish. But a lot of people don't eat seaweed or fish. So, you know, that's how you would get iodine otherwise.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So I think people need to kind of figure out what's going on with themselves and based on their diet and their preferences. And if you're a vegan, I mean, you know, I think, you know, we're seeing tremendous deficiencies in vegans if they're not supplemented.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It depends on what you're taking. Mostly not, but you can over-methylate or under-methylate. And so you don't want to be doing too much of either or the other. And there's genetics that are involved in actually assessing how your methylation pathways work. So the genetics around B12, around B6, around folate, and you have multiple genes that regulate all these different pathways.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And when we go to medical school, we're taught to ask for the symptoms, look for the signs, do the lab testing and come up with a singular diagnosis to explain everything. And if there's extraneous symptoms that don't fit the thing we're looking for, then we dismiss it. If you go to the doctors for migraines and you say, well, I got irritable bowel, oh, go see the GI doctor.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So it depends is the answer. But for most people taking a good multivitamin, and when I say good, I mean it doesn't have any fillers or binders or additives. It's not blue. It doesn't have titanium dioxide in it. It has forms of the nutrients that actually can get utilized and absorbed better by the body. We talked about magnesium oxide versus glycinate or citrate.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And that you make sure the company has integrity, that they've third-party tested for the purity and the potency, meaning if it says 1,000 units on the label, it's 1,000 units, not 10,000 or 2,000. And then it hasn't had any cross-contamination with adders or chemicals. So sometimes you'll get something with an herbal product that comes from China,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
the company didn't realize it was full of lead or whatever, you know, like now we're seeing all these plant proteins with lead in them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, well, it was interesting. When I got to Cleveland Clinic in 2014, I said, let's do a survey There's 3,000 physicians. Let's do a survey of the physicians about their beliefs, practices, desires, goals, needs around supplements. I was shocked. We got a lot of answers. And I'm not remembering the exact percentages, but I'll give you the sort of ballparks.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It was over, do you take supplements yourself? Like over 70% of the doctors did. Do you recommend supplements to your patients? Probably like 20% or less did. Would you like to have a source where you knew the quality and had recommendations about the safety? Yes, we desperately want to do that. Would you prescribe them to your patients more if you did?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's used, if you look at every medical specialty, cardiologists are using CoQ10, right, and fish oil, and you've got gastroenterologists using probiotics, and obviously, OBGYNs recommend supplements for prenatal vitamins, and you've got, you know, pediatricians recommending certain vitamins for kids.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So you look across all the specialties, and you're like, well, they're already kind of integrated kind of on the margins, but integrated into their practices. I think there's this kind of weird thing where you'd go to a conference and I would do this, doctor, how many people recommend supplements to their patients? And you know, a few hands would go up. How many of you guys take supplements?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And like most of the audience would raise their hand. And I thought that was so peculiar because in medicine, we're told from a scientific perspective that they're probably expensive urine. And yet most doctors personally want to take them for themselves. That says a lot. It does say a lot. And I think we're entering an era where I think there's more and more science.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We're understanding more about the complexity of individuality and biochemical individuality. And this was, you know, this personalized precision medicine. This is where we're all headed, right? And one of the fathers of sort of the thinking in functional medicine was Roger Williams, who discovered pantothenic acid or vitamin B5. He wrote a book called Biochemical Individuality.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Or I have this rash, you go, oh, see the dermatologist. But the truth is the body's connected and everything's connected. And so functional medicine is really about understanding the body as a network, as a system. And it's a meta framework for understanding biology. I think of it as an operating system. It's not based on just diagnostic testing or supplements, which a lot of people think it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And actually, his book was the one that got me interested in this in college because I live with a nutrition PhD student who was talking about basically the gut flora of cows, which he was studying to understand fiber and the microbiome. And he gave me a book called Nutrition Against Disease by Roger Williams. And this is like in 1980.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I read it and I was like, oh, wow, nutrition is such an important thing. So I think doctors are beginning to understand the value of nutrition, the value of nutritional sort of supplements, the value of testing for nutrients. It's still slow, but I think we're going to get there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, yeah, maybe in the mountains in Colorado. Okay, so the air is dirty. I think, you know, compared to what is the answer? Like if you go to India or China or some of these developing nations or not even developing anymore, the air is so bad. I mean, they have... all kinds of petrochemical products they burn. They have coal factories. I mean, it's just, it's really bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's really based on understanding the network about... So we were doing microbiome testing. We didn't call it that. It was just poop testing back then. We were looking at hormones, at mitochondria, at inflammation, at insulin resistance, at all the things that are... toxic environmental toxins and their role in health. And we're trying to understand how the body started to sort of work.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So in America, I think the air quality in general is much, much higher. I think when you have things like wildfires, it's a different ballgame than just the wood smoke itself. If it's just trees burning is bad enough, but then you're burning houses and batteries and plastics. You've got PFAS chemicals. And we actually found that those chemicals go up
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
on their function testing and people up in LA who've actually been in the fires.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, not necessarily. I mean, for example, and just to help people understand that air moves. It's not like there's just LA air or Colorado air. In Seattle, they had a big mercury problem in the air because of China.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Because Northeast China, like Beijing and Harbin, in the winters, they just burn huge amounts of coal and it goes up in the air and it goes across in the Gulf Streams and the airstreams, whatever they call them, And it gets all the way to Seattle and it rains heavy metal rain. And so no matter where you live, you're kind of exposed to the collective air.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's some for sure areas that are much cleaner, but I think that most people, if they have an air filter in your house where you spend most of your time, you're probably okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You can get one for your house, which most houses have, and make sure you change the filters, or you can get a special HEPA air filter if you live in a more urban area or more environmentally toxic area.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, and the question is, what's going to be a problem for you? Like, all of us are toxic soups, right? So it's just the amount over time that builds up. And then eventually, sometimes things can happen. It causes problems. cardiovascular disease, it causes dementia, it causes cancer, it causes diabetes. So toxins are direct causes of these things, among other things, diet and other things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So I think, you know, you can't go crazy about it. I mean, we're living in the 21st century. We are where we are unless you want to move to like some remote island in the South Pacific or something. Iceland's looking pretty nice. Iceland's looking good, yeah. I mean, like... Greenland seemed to be the 51st state. Is that going to happen? I don't know. I'm just joking. I'm making fun of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But I mean, you know, like there are places. But I think for most of us, we have to just manage it. And like we filter our water. I wouldn't drink tap water. There's an average of 37 or 8 wastewater contaminants, including drugs, including pesticides, including glyphosate. I mean... like hormones, if women are taking the pill or taking hormone replacement therapy, where does that go?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And through that process, I literally had to reverse engineer my way back to health by understanding all the systems. So my adrenal shut down, my thyroid wasn't working, my mitochondria were terrible, my muscle enzymes were super high, like CPK were super high because I had a mitochondrial injury, which is the little factories in your cells that make energy.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's some amount that gets excreted in the urine, it goes into the water treatment plants. They don't filter that stuff out. I mean, they get the bugs out, but you're getting all that stuff in your water. So having a reverse osmosis water filter is a good idea. But I think the costing is really important, Andrew.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think one of the problems people think about is that, oh, it's expensive to be healthy. And I think that's a myth. I think... You mentioned a lot of foundational things like eating real food, exercising, getting up sleep, managing stress, breath work. These are things that are free. Your breath is free. You can move your body. You can do body weight if you can't even afford bands.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Food is interesting because the food industry has been very good at brainwashing Americans that they need highly processed, cheap junk food. not accounting for the actual cost of that food, which is $3 for every $1 you spend on that food. You're gonna spend $3 in collateral damage to your health, to the economy, to the environment, to social fabric.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, this is a Rockefeller report on the true cost of food. But if you actually just look at the actual price of the food, if you eat real food, it doesn't have to be expensive. Now you might not be getting a $70 ribeye that's grass fed from New Zealand. You might be getting like a short ribs that aren't organic or grass fed. That's okay. Like whole grains, beans.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I grew up, you know, like poor and we used to like, you know, have, you know, liver and onions, you know, which is like the cheapest. I mean- And that's chicken liver. Chicken liver, yeah. Chicken, chopped liver, you know, what are you gonna say? Chicken liver, not for me. But, you know, there's been studies that it may cost the same or maybe 50 cents extra a day to eat well.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's a guide from the Environmental Working Group called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which is how to eat well for you and for your wallet and the planet. And there, you know, we grew up, we have borscht, like it was short ribs, which is like the cheapest kind of meat. onions, cabbage, carrots, tomato, a can of tomatoes. It's pretty darn cheap.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And you could feed like a family of like six for a few bucks, you know? And there's been a lot written about this, but the food industry is great at convincing us that it's elitist, that it's expensive, that it's all organic. Forget about organic, not organic, regenerative, not regenerative. If you don't have a lot of resources, just focus on eating real food.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And you will do better and feel better and be more productive and walk around not feeling like crap.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I had severe cognitive issues and neurotransmitter issues and sleep issues. I mean, immune issues, rashes, so my whole system broke down. So I literally had to learn every system of the body and how it worked and how it connected to every other system and then create a healing plan for myself and that allowed me to recover.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true. What happened was, and it was after the World War II, because my mother and grandparents were pre that generation, so they had an incredible food culture. of real food. My grandmother tells me stories, or told me a story, she died, of plucking chickens at the local butcher so she could get a nickel to go to the movies.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Fair enough, fair enough. But still, what happened was the industrialization of the American food system. So after World War II, there was all these bomb making factories and all these chemical biological warfare factories. So they got turned into bomb factories, got turned into fertilizer, which was nitrogen, and the biological weapons were pesticides and herbicides.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically pesticides are biological weapons, they're neurotoxins. That's how they kill the insects. Or sterilized. Yeah, and then we thought everything industrial is good. Remember in the 60s, you probably remember, they had better living through chemistry through DuPont and didn't realize it was killing everybody, right? And the World's Fair.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I grew up in Queens, and the World's Fair was in Queens in 1965, and I went, and I didn't obviously remember that skit, but I've seen things about it. So the industrialization of the food supply, the agricultural industrialization with mechanization, the destruction of the soil, the production, Grover growing of starchy carbohydrate crops defeated growing hungry world. We wanted that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Like we now produce 500 calories more per person in America than we actually need to eat. And we export a lot of that. So the industrialization was a thing. And then in the 50s, the food industry started to make a lot of processed food. And they were completely taken off guard because there's this woman named Betty who was a home ec teacher
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
who was part of the federal extension workers that was a paid for federal program to send people out to young families to teach the mothers how to, and it was sexist because it was the mothers, how to cook and how to garden and how to grow their own food and how to be independent and how to eat real, it was like really great. And there was a big meeting in Minnesota around that time.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So that really taught me that there's this new way of thinking and I remember when I was working at Kenya Ranch as a medical director, And I would see all these patients coming in and I started to think, well, I'm gonna try to do this on my patients and see what happens and just apply these principles. I call them the laws of biology, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
General Mills sponsored, but all the big food companies came. And they decided convenience had to be king. And we had to make that a value. And they invented Betty Crocker. Not a real person. Betty Crocker cookbook. You might remember that cookbook. But it was like, oh, add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to your casserole. Or add one roll of Ritz crackers to your broccoli casserole.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So they insinuated that. And there were TV dinners. And I grew up in that area. And then there was like... you know, the food of astronauts like Tang and Fleischmann's margarine, better than butter. And it was cup of noodles. Yeah, yeah. So we basically got this whole culture of like convenience and then you deserve a break today from McDonald's.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And we basically disenfranchise people from their kitchens. We have whole generations of Americans who don't know how to cook, who don't know anything about shopping or where vegetables come from. I mean, Jamie Oliver did a whole television show series in West Virginia where kids didn't know what a tomato was and they saw a tomato or a carrot or they couldn't name a vegetable, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Because they had never seen one. And now most of America's like that. And so they have succeeded in disenfranchising ourselves from our kitchen. We need to, they've hijacked our kitchens, our brain chemistry, our metabolism, our hormones. We need to take it back. And it's like the body snatchers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Like we really need to take our bodies back, own our own biology, understand that we're in charge, understand that we shouldn't abdicate our help to anybody else, including the doctor. You have a doctor as a partner, as an advisor, as a collaborator, but like they're not God and they don't know everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And now with the advent of, you know, self-testing, like function health is like $1.37 a day. It's still money, but it's affordable for most people.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, and we do $15,000 for the test for $4.99 a year, and you get a panel of tests that tells you what's really happening, and people can own their data and own their biology and be proactive and preventative and actually understand what's happening way before they get into real trouble.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We don't have laws of biology that we can easily describe or laws of medicine. We have laws of physics, but that doesn't mean there aren't laws of biology. And what functional medicine, I believe, is, is the first clinical application of this understanding of the laws of biology.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's like scientists like Leroy Hood, who created the Institute for System Biology, and folks like at Harvard, like Hazem Barbasi, who was studying and wrote a book called Network Medicine about the body as a network. But for me, I had to start to, you know, apply this in clinic. And so I would, people would come into autoimmune diseases or with intractable depression or with,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Great question. And it was funny to me, I was thinking as you were talking about how, you know, when Michelle Obama started her Let's Move campaign, it was a blue issue. A lot of the people who were like pushing this agenda was Shelley Pingree, who's a Democrat from Maine or...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
McGovern, Tim McGovern, who's from Massachusetts, or Cory Booker, who issues all these bills about food safety in the last Congress. And all of a sudden, it flipped and became a Republican issue, which is staggering to me. And we now see bills in a few dozen states or more, actually. Now, every day, I hear about new bills that are helping push forward an agenda to fix our food system.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, listen, my friend Rick Warren said, I'm not left-wing or right-wing, I'm for the whole bird, otherwise you'll fly around in circles. I like that. Who said that? Rick Warren. Who's Rick Warren? Rick Warren is the head of Saddleback Church, which is an evangelical church in Southern California.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
terrible gut issues, or dementia, or autism, or you name it, diabetes, and I would apply these principles and they'd get better. And literally I would say, eat this way, don't eat that, you know, simple stuff. Like it was not that complicated. And six weeks later, I'd say, their follow-up visit, I'd say, oh, so how are you doing? Oh, all my symptoms are better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We did a whole program with this church where we got 15,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year by doing health together in groups. And it was amazing, actually. I love that quote. It was a great quote. And... Health isn't red or blue or purple. It's like a human issue. And to make it partisan, it doesn't make any sense to me. And yet we live in a partisan world.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And anything the Democrats do, the Republicans are going to hate. Anything the Republicans do, the Democrats are going to hate. It's like, hey, guys, can't we just talk to each other and have civil discourse and agree on the things we can agree on and disagree on the things we're going to disagree on? And I know behind the scenes there's collaboration bipartisan on these issues.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, it's unfortunate because Americans are suffering. Americans are really suffering. 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction. Psychiatric illness is on the rise in both kids and adults. Autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing. Obviously, obesity is a huge problem. Diabetes is a huge problem. Heart disease, deaths are going down, but the incidence is going up.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Meaning there's more people getting it, but because we have better treatments, they don't die from it. Same thing with cancer. So we're not winning on the health front in the war on chronic disease. We're losing disastrously. And so we have to come together as a country to solve this. And it's unfortunate it's been polarized.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think the good part about COVID was that people became aware that this edifice of science and medicine had cracks in it and that they needed to be more empowered around their own health and to start questioning things. And I think That's part of the genesis of this bigger, wider movement around Make America Healthy Again, and why Bobby Kennedy was able to catalyze a huge base.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
He was Democratic candidate at first, then he was independent, now he's in the Republican administration. It doesn't mean he shares all the ideology that they have, but he cares about this issue. And so I think what's happening behind the scenes is there's a lot of bipartisan interest in how do we begin to address this. Look, the healthcare bill is $5 trillion.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Of that, the government, federal government pays 40%. It's one in three federal tax dollars. So one in three dollars that you pay for your taxes goes to healthcare. Of that, 80% is mostly for chronic disease that's either preventable or reversible through intensive lifestyle therapy. and some things around the margins.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm like, what, really, your migraines are gone? Like I didn't believe it. Like it was such a shock to me as a traditionally trained physician that people were actually getting better. And so then I knew, I knew this was something real, even though it was sort of 30 years ago, it was just sort of not even on the radar. It still is pretty, pretty much not on the radar.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
For example, if you get on to Medicare Advantage, that's a government program, but it's administered by Humana or by Cigna or by these insurance companies kind of deploy federal resources to deliver healthcare. But if you actually look at the end-to-end,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
with Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, federal employees, Children's Health Program, you just add up all the things that the government pays for, it's almost $2 trillion a year for healthcare. And most people don't realize that. So the government has enormous levers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And when I was sitting in my office treating my patients who are just endless stream of people with chronic illnesses coming, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, this, that, the other thing, I'm like, why is this patient sick? Well, it's mostly because of the food they're eating. And if that's the problem, then what's the cause of the food they're eating? Well, it's our food policies.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And what's the cause of our food policies? It's the food industry that has pressured our government into creating a food system that's harming us. And we have very different policies than they do in Europe. For example, they don't allow many GMO foods or glyphosate. High fructose corn syrup? They have it there, but it's limited. I mean, more limited.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's toxins, there's 10,000 additives to food in America. There's 400 that are allowed in Europe.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's dose, frequency, and duration.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the interactions. Like, you know, when these things are studied, they might be studied one at a time. But what if you put thousands of them together, whether it's environmental chemicals or food additives? And I don't think the food additives themselves, although there are many that are problematic, that are linked to cancer, linked to allergy, linked to ADD.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think there are a lot of data about this. But the real issue is, where do you find these? You find these in extremely low-quality, health-destroying foods that are ultra-processed foods that are high in starch and sugar, high in refined oils, high in these additives. Right, they're not creating orange steaks.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, you're not getting these chemicals when you order broccoli at a restaurant, right? So how do you tease out all of it? How do you do human trials on this? It's very hard. But in Europe, they have the precautionary principle was you have to prove it safe before we add it to the food supply. Crisco is a great example. Crisco was invented in 1911.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Although like New York times is doing articles about it now.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It was shortening, because there was a butter shortage. And so they basically created this product, which is blowing hydrogen atoms into liquid vegetable oil that makes it act like an animal fat, like lard or butter. And it was cheap and it was good. So it was in the supply from 1911 to 2015.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It wasn't until 50 years after the data started to become clear that this was a cause of heart attacks, that this was very dangerous, we shouldn't be eating margarine. I remember a tub of that in our cupboard when I was a kid. Yeah, I grew up on Fleishman's margarine, you know?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And it wasn't until the scientists who'd been studying this for 50 years, it was 90 years all the time, sued the FDA and forced them to really do something about it that it got taken off the generally recognized as safe list, which is called the grass list. Now, you asked about Maha.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, one of the first things Robert F. Kennedy did, and I helped advise him on this, was to help address the grass problem, because there's something called the grass loophole. If you're a food company, you can go to the FDA and say, hey, I got this great new chemical. We checked it out. Totally safe. Not a problem. We're going to add it to the food. Just take our word for it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the FDA goes, great, no problem. You go right ahead. Imagine if a drug company did that and said, oh, we have this great new drug. We've done all our tests. It's perfectly safe. It's very effective. Can you please give us approval? And we're not going to give you any data. That's exactly what happens in America. Now, that's different than in Europe, which they do the opposite.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You have to prove that it's safe before it's added to the food supply. Here, you're innocent until proven guilty, which is fine for humans, but not for chemicals we put in our food.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Lunch or food stamp? SNAP program. SNAP is the food stamp. Okay. It's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but there's no N in there. Okay. Our goal is to put the N back in SNAP. Got it. Okay. Just to clarify for people, food security is having enough calories. Nutrition security is having enough nutrients.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We provide it for food security, meaning you can get all your calories from soda and sugar, but that doesn't mean you have nutrition security. And we see many of the people who receive these federal aid programs are the ones who are most sick, the most using our healthcare system. Thanks for that clarification.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
100%, yes. So I was telling this story about how I was in my office seeing patients with diabetes. I'm like, what caused the food policy? And then I started to go down that rabbit hole. And I wrote a book called Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Community's
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time, where I mapped out from field to fork the problems with our food industry, how it's making us sick, how it's costing us trillions of dollars, and how to fix it. And then I started a nonprofit where I'd been in Washington doing this work over the last five years, way before Maha was a thing.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And, you know, what you just described is part of a large, cohesive strategy by the food industry to undermine science, manipulate public trust and information, to control the government and academic institutions and many things. So I'll just kind of lay it out for you. Sounds conspiracy. It sounds like it is. And it kind of – I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's just their business strategy, right, which is to circle the wagons.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They fund – the American Heart Association. So the food and pharma industry spent $192 million that they give to the American Heart Association. What does the American Heart Association do with it? They educate people about nutrition, they hold meetings, they have scientific panels.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
If you get $20 million from the soda industry, I mean... It's like that, Andrew.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
This is like 40% of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which is the national nutrition organization, comes from the food industry. The American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Family Practice.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, Coca-Cola gave a multimillion-dollar donation. donation to the American Academy of Family Practice. And there were family doctors that quit in droves because of this. When did this start? I think it's been growing. And so there's multiple strategies they have. One is massive lobbying. Two is funding professional associations. But was this in the 80s, the 90s?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it's been slow creep since probably the 70s, is my guess. If you look in the 60s and the beach pictures, like there's nobody overweight, right? When I was growing up, there were probably two fat kids in school. Yeah, yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They've done all these strategic things around lobbying, around funding professional associations, funding academic research, 12 times as much academic research on nutrition as the federal government spends. They co-op social groups like NAACP and the Hispanic Federation so they won't oppose things like – things that they care about or they'll oppose things they care about like soda taxes.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And they fund – fake science groups like the American Council on Science and Health that's attacked me, maybe attacked you too. I'm buying science and all these great sounding organizations that are simply front groups for misinformation, crop life. And so they have a whole strategic approach that is very detailed. And I map the whole thing out in my book.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
and how it's so insidious and how it happened while everybody else was asleep. And I know personally now that some of these big associations that are the lobby groups for these big food companies and ag companies and seed companies, that they're circling ranks, that they're creating a war plan, that they have a complete strategy of how to put forth this kind of, I would say, manipulative science.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They have grassroots lobby efforts where they're activating fake grassroots movements. They're lobbying. They're looking at how to pressure state governments to not do what they're doing.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I know personally the governor of West Virginia who has now, there's a state bill to actually, which probably hopefully passed by the time this podcast comes out, that gets rid of the chemicals in the food in West Virginia, which is the fattest state in the nation. And I know the amount of pressure, millions and millions of dollars of pressure they're putting on him to not do it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's going to destroy their businesses. It's going to destroy the economy. That's going to create the people of West Virginia suffering. I mean, so much pressure on politicians who don't actually understand these issues.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's- It's not confusing. I'll give you an example. So I was working on a bill. that was with Andy Harris, who's a doctor in Congress, to do a pilot study to see the impact, not to change policy, just to see the impact of what would happen if you took soda off the list of acceptable things you could buy with food stamp dollars. Just to do a pilot in a couple of states.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We think, well, let's just do a scientific study and see what happens. The Democrats were completely opposed to it. They shut the whole thing down. On what grounds? The hunger groups. It's based on this idea of like we're going to take care of the poor. It's discriminatory. It's aggressive. It's going to hurt the poor.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the hunger groups that are these big groups that try to deal with hunger in America are funded by and their boards of directors are staffed by people from big food. So if you just follow the money, you see how it all is connected and how it all flows together. And what are big foods? So like, what are the companies? Okay. So there are companies you know about.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's even things like Primal Kitchen, which you think is like a great natural brand and started by Mark Sisson and it's salad dressings and ketchup without high fructose corn syrup. It's a great product. It was, they're all bought up by the big food companies like Mondelez or by Kraft. Kraft Heinz, for example, bought that or
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Hugh Chocolate, which thank God will stay the same forever because Jason Karp was a friend, made sure they would. But they bought Hugh Chocolate, which we think is a natural brand. It's the biggest selling premium chocolate in America. So they buy all the other companies. So it's Nestle, it's Junilever, it's Danone, it's Mondelez, it's Kraft Heinz.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's a few companies that really probably 10 or so companies that basically are the big companies. And then there's all the ag and seed and chem companies. It's all consolidation. So the So there used to be like hundreds of seed companies. Now there's five. There used to be like dozens of fertilizers companies. Now there's just a few.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, they do. They do. But also without – if there's like Jason Karp with Hugh Chocolate, made them in the contract promise they would never change the ingredients ever. I see. And, and when you often get these other products that have been bought up by these big companies, they modify the recipes, they make it cheaper, they squeeze their margins to be bigger.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's, it's not like you're going to get like, you know, Amy's whatever pizza or whatever sounds like great, healthy pizza, but they modify it. I see. And so I think, you know, it, As a whole, they still get most of their profit margin from their legacy products of junk, right? So they don't want to cannibalize that, but they also want to suck up the rest of the market so they have a monopoly.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I see. But there's probably a few dozen CEOs that are in control of everything from what seeds are planted to what chemicals are sprayed. to the food companies that process the food, to the fast food companies. It's not that many companies. And it's a few dozen CEOs that control the biggest industry in the planet that employs more than everybody else because everybody eats. It's like $16 trillion.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So are you and Bobby going to change the... the way that works? I mean, that's the goal. I mean, the idea is to raise awareness, to create transparency, to help people understand what's what, and to take the veil back and say, you can choose whatever you want to eat. We're not taking away your McDonald's, we're not taking away your soda, but at least you should know what's going on.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
If you go to South America, you're from Argentina, I'm sure you've been there, not too recent past, If you pick up something that's not good for you, it tells you on the label. It's like black warning signs and hazard signs and stop signs.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Some are, some aren't. Like if you look at, there was a whole series in the New York Times a few years ago about how, for example, Nestle went into the ghettos of, I think, Peru and Colombia, and they were just, Brazil, and they were just pushing
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I remember talking about leaky gut almost 30 years ago and talking to allergists and immunologists. People thought you were crazy. And people thought I was a loony tune.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
through local like community members and reps would drive around like with little carts or push the carts around where there's not even a street to sell all this crappy processed food to people for pennies, right? And so that's what they've done. They've infiltrated everywhere in the planet. It was as far back as 1986, and I did a public health expedition with Johns Hopkins to Nepal.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We got off the plane at some remote airport on a grass strip, and then we walked for a week up into the, almost to Tibet. And... you know, there were no roads, there were no cars, there was no electricity, there was no running water, but there was Coca-Cola.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And you see these Sherpas literally with like probably, I don't know, 100, 200 pounds of Coca-Cola on their back, climbing up the mountains, bringing it to every little village.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, there's even a TED Talk on this by, I think it was somewhere, Melinda Gates or something about how Coca-Cola is a business model for how we get safe stuff around the world because they have the incredible distribution. So even where you can't get water, you can get Coca-Cola. Where they actually need water. Protein is what's scarce.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's often cheaper than water in many countries, like in Mexico. So I think we have to face the fact that we've had this sort of unadulterated, uninhibited run from the industry, and now there's somebody talking about why they need to think about doing things differently, how they need to reformulate, how they need to be partners.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, there was a big meeting with the Consumer Brand Association and Robert F. Kennedy last Monday in the White House where he said to them, essentially, here's what you need to do. Do it or we're going to make you do it. Get the crap out of the food and let's get focused on the harm that this is causing in terms of the amount of
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
starch and sugar and processing and products in there that are not good for human health. And if you don't, we're going to do something about it. They can create better front of package labeling to transform people's perception of what's good or not. And labels are super confusing in this country.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I know how to read them, but you have to be a PhD or study this your whole life to understand how to read the nutrition facts label, how to read an ingredient list, what it means, what the serving size is, what the calories are, what the this and that is. It's like, you know, It's not easy for the average American. It should be easy.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
These are things I've been working on for years. You're just being you. I'm just being me, whether it's medically tailored meals or raising the awareness around chronic disease or the effective toxins in our environment or the role of sugar and starch in our metabolic crisis. I mean, these are things that are not new. I've talked about these for decades. Right.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Now all of a sudden it's a political issue. I don't understand why. You're not putting on a new hat.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They've always been involved, but they just have been involved unknowingly by allowing policies to be implemented that support things like soda and junk food. If you look at other countries' food assistance programs, you can't buy that shit. Right, right.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Look, I mean, I think that, like you said, this is a molecule that the body naturally makes to regulate appetite, but it's being given at doses that are far greater than that which our body naturally makes. And when you overdo something, there are downstream consequences. Insulin is a peptide. Ozempic is a peptide. GLP-1, these drugs are peptides. These are small mini proteins.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Think of that as what a peptide is. And insulin, if you take too much of it, will kill you. Like literally you'll go into hypoglycemic shock. So when you start messing with big doses, it has not side effects. We call these side effects. These are just effects we don't like, and we call them side effects. They're effects of the drug.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And they can lead to everything from things you mentioned like muscle wasting, which is a big problem because you lose the weight and you lose muscle and fat. And if you lose half of this muscle, then your metabolism slows down. because muscle burn sometimes as much calories as fat. And when you gain the weight back, if you stop, which over 65% of people do. Is that right? Yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They just start eating more again.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And they have lower muscle mass. And then you're in a worse situation because you have a lower muscle mass. So you could eat literally the same amount of calories as you were before you lost weight and gain weight because your metabolism is messed up.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I personally think it should be illegal to prescribe these drugs unless they're combined. with a nutrition consult to educate people about their protein requirements that are increased and with an exercise or a trainer, a physiologist or a trainer to help them develop a strength training program. And then I'd be more okay with it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I think doses also, do we need the doses that people are prescribed through pharmacologically approved drugs or there's a whole black market of GLP-1 peptides you can buy for 20 bucks a month, not 16 or 1,700 bucks a month. People are starting to discover those.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They're very inexpensive, and you have to know what you're doing, and you have to probably get the guidance of a physician, and there are doctors who do prescribe these sort of sub-pharmacologic doses that are being given, and they work, and they can be a useful tool, but they're a tool like anything else. And I was mentioning my nonprofit Food Fix.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I think it's crazy how things have changed. And so now we have people who are talking about mitochondria in medicine. Christopher Palmer, who's a Harvard professor, a psychiatrist who's studying psychiatric disease and the application of diet and nutrition to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
The woman who's working with us there lost 112 pounds in the last few years working with me without GLP-1s.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I've had literally probably dozens and dozens and dozens of patients who've lost a hundred pounds or more without these drugs and naturally keep their weight off and regulate their appetite when they understand how to use food as medicine to regulate their hormones, their peptides, their brain chemistry, their microbiome, all of which regulate our appetite and weight. So there's ways to do it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's harder and some people are stuck and I'm not opposed to using these drugs, but we have to understand they come with risks and they have, increased risk of bowel obstruction, increased risk of pancreatitis, increased risk of potentially thyroid issues, of kidney issues. And I think people need to, if they're monitoring themselves, fine, you should get a DEXA scan before and during and after.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You should be checking your kidney function tests and your amylase and your lipase, because it can cause pancreatitis. You'd be checking what happens to your other hormones and what happens to your liver function tests, which can be affected by these drugs. And the longer you take them, the more the side effects are. So for example, initially we were seeing very little data
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And then the data started coming in. And for example, if you're on it for four years, your risk of bowel obstruction goes up by four and a half fold. That's by 450%. Or your risk of pancreatitis goes up by 900%. That's, you know, it seems like a lot. It is a lot, but pancreatitis is a more rare condition. But it does have an adverse impact.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And a lot of people have nausea, vomiting, all kinds of other side effects that are sort of more mild, not as serious, but they come with side effects. So I think, can they be used as part of an overall strategy with nutrition counseling, exercise counseling, and integrating lower doses and modifying the dosing regimen? Yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
but I don't think most people need it if they understand how to change their hormones and their brain chemistry and their biology without that. And that's the power of food is medicine. And when I say food is medicine, I'm not saying that as a sort of a general, oh, food can be healthy or not healthy. I'm saying food literally can be used as a drug and different foods have different properties.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And again, you don't use the same drug for every disease. You would prescribe different diets for different problems. Such as? For example, if you look at the crisis in mental health in this country, we have a severe mental health crisis. And we've used ketogenic diets in neurologic conditions, like epilepsy, in medicine for decades.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We now know, for example, that ketogenic diets can be very effective for schizophrenia, for things like autism, for Alzheimer's, for people with bipolar disease or depression or anxiety. And this has to do with its effect of the metabolism and the way it affects our brain and our mitochondria. And I wrote a book about this Ultra Mind Solution. I say this, I wrote a book about everything.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I pretty much have. You've written a lot of books. I've written like 20 books.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But Mayo Clinic just got funded over $3 million to do research on... the role of ketogenic diets in serious mental illness. You mentioned Stanford has a department of metabolic psychiatry. At Harvard, they have a similar department of nutritional psychiatry.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Again, you know, when you look at the data, cancer rates are going up and it's because our metabolic crisis is going up and many cancers are obesity related. colon cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, many, many prostate cancer, and they're driven by insulin resistance. And we know the cancer has a metabolic capacity to only burn carbs, it can't burn fat.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So if you stop carbs and you eat fat, you can often change the trajectory of cancer.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I don't think that's true for all cancer. For certain lymphomas, I probably don't think it is. But Siddhartha Mukherjee, I don't know if you've had him on the podcast, but he's an incredible giant in the field of medicine and brilliant scientist at Columbia. He was actually an oncologist who wrote a book called The Emperor of All Maladies. Oh, yeah. He wrote that book?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, he wrote that book. He wrote The Cell. He wrote The Gene. That was a book about cancer. Yeah, yeah. He wrote a book called The Gene, The Cell. And he talks about his research on ketogenic diets for reversing stage four melanoma, stage four pancreatic cancer. Very impressive stuff. Yeah, you probably couldn't like a connection to it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, but there's a whole metabolic theory of cancer. So I think that's key. And certain cancers like brain cancer responds incredibly well. If you have a glioblastoma, which there's really no treatment for, it can be very effective.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And so, so metabolic psychiatry is about, you know, the role of sort of insulin resistance and inflammation in the brain is causing depression and causing anxiety and more severe things like bipolar disease since born, schizophrenia. And these are the things that I saw like in my patients. So I wasn't an academic, but I, I would just look at their story and listen to it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like Warren Buffett. He says, I don't care if I eat this shit. If it makes me live a couple years less, I'm still going to do it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You got like your 19 tests and They have the same old stuff and you get your regular cholesterol. It was like height, weight, you know. I mean, the regular cholesterol panel is what most doctors use to manage cardiovascular risk, which is your total, your LDL, HDL, and triglyceride levels. That's just like so 20th century.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
The way we look at cardiovascular risk now is way more complicated, and we need to look at the quality of the cholesterol, which is the particle size and number. And we were talking earlier about sugar and starch, insulin resistance.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Insulin resistance is essentially a metabolic state where your body can't respond like it normally should to insulin, and you need more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. That has secondary consequences. which causes your cholesterol to become abnormal.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So it may not raise your LDL per se, but it'll lower your good cholesterol triglycerides, or HDL, which there's good and bad HDL, so it's a little more complicated than that, but it'll raise your triglycerides, and it will raise your ApoB, It'll raise your particle number of LDL particles, and it'll make the size of those particles small. These are all things that people should be testing.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Do all these biomarkers, including ApoB. But ApoB, if all you can get is an ApoB from your doctor, even the American Heart Association recognizes this as a better predictor of your risk of having a heart attack than your LDL cholesterol. And yet they're trying to include soda. Sorry, I had to go back to it. And the way I think about it, because there's really cool tests now.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I would look at the underlying biology because I, You know, you talk about this intersection of the biohacking kind of wellness and medical community. Lee Hood has a term for this. He calls it scientific wellness. And when people ask me what functional medicine is, I say it's a science of creating health as opposed to the science of treating disease.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You can use mass spec to look at C-peptide and insulin to look at your insulin resistance, which is really cool. But if you can't get that, you can ask your doctor for an ApoB because it's sort of a surrogate marker for every non-good type of cholesterol particle. Does that make sense?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, so you can test yourself. Everybody's in one. So the next thing I was going to say was that we treat... All lipids as sort of a uniform approach, which is everybody should drive their LDL under 70. Under 70. Under 70. That's what cardiovascular recommendations are. How do you do that? Exercise, nutrition? It can be diet. It can be exercise. It can be drugs. Are you a fan of statins?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Not a big fan, but they're a tool. It's like, am I a fan of hammers? Well, yeah, when I need one. But not for everybody. And I think the key thing to understand is that If you're looking at your cardiovascular risk, you have to look at the quality of these cholesterol particles. And there's also a large amount of variation or heterogeneity in the population in the response to the exact same food.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I'll just tell you a quick story. I had one patient, she was overweight, couldn't lose weight, pre-diabetic, inflamed, and she was really struggling. And I said, well, look, you know, let's try a ketogenic diet. There's good data on it. Let's see what happens. Her cholesterol dropped 100 points. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. Her HDL went up 30 points. She lost 20 pounds.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
She felt great. Her inflammation levels normalized. She did great. Another guy heard about a ketogenic diet who was in his 50s, one of my patients, elite athlete, was like riding his bike 50 miles a day. He was in his mid-50s, super fit, thin, lean. He said, I want to try it. I heard it's good for performance. I'm like, okay, but let's monitor your numbers. And we did. And the opposite happened.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
His total cholesterol went through the roof. His LDL went through the roof. His particle number went up through the roof. I'm like, wow. Same diet, different response. And I've talked to Ron Krause about this. He's from Oakland. You might know about him. He discovered the particle size concept.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
He basically used MRI machines and now he's got a different technology, which measures the quality and the number of your cholesterol particles, not just the weight of them, which is what you get with a regular test. And so we saw this variation and we realize now in the population, it depends on who you are. So there's a whole category of people called lean mass hyper-responders.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You're maybe one of those where you're fit, you're healthy, you're athletic, and you eat saturated fat and boom, your numbers kind of go wacky. or you could be an overweight diabetic person and they do the opposite. Like you'll lower your LDL like this woman. So it depends on your metabolic type, on your level of insulin resistance, on your overall health, and people can switch over.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
When you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. So if you optimize your basic body systems, your gut, your immune system, your mitochondria, your detox system, your hormonal regulatory system, when you optimize those things, symptoms go away. And you don't have to treat all the different branches of the trees and the leaves on the trees.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So let's say you're an overweight diabetic and you become ripped and healthy and fit, then the same food might have an opposite effect on you at that point. And it all has to do with cholesterol transport, cholesterol synthesis in the liver. It's kind of a little complicated scientifically. I know you might have a guy named Nick Norwitz from Harvard on the podcast who's great.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
He can talk about this all day long.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Very smart kid. Very smart guy.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, he's great. He's an Oxford PhD in metabolism. Harvard. He's got a Harvard MD. He's graduating medical school this year. And you're not afraid to go against the grain. No.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, you're explaining about different diets for people. He had colitis and almost died. He went on a carnivore slash keto diet and actually ended up curing it and is fit and healthy now. But his cholesterol, his LDL went up to 500. Is that where it sits now? Yeah. And so there's a whole group of these people that have LDLs that are through the roof.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It would make most cardiologists have a heart attack just looking at the number.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
What do you do? Well, the NIH basically is great. They now said that the N of one research is among the highest quality research. And what that means is you compared to you, right? I don't want to compare myself to a 70 kilogram white male from Kansas or some, you know, a five foot tall woman from like, you know, I don't know, like Afghanistan, like we're all different.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so we need to see what happens to our biology. That's why I believe tests don't guess and do something, follow it up and track it. How often? Depends on what you're doing. Lipids change very quickly.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Lipids can change within a month. So I give people a month of changing a diet or changing a lifestyle or behavior to see what happens. Vitamin D can take longer. If you're low, it can take up to three months to rebuild. If your iron is low, it can take three months to rebuild your iron. So it depends on the test.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But you can quickly see changes in your insulin resistance, in your insulin levels, in your blood sugar levels, in your lipid levels by changing diet. But you have to be systematic, right? Yeah, yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I had a patient who was, I have a program called the 10 Day Detox Diet, which essentially is a whole foods diet, which eliminates a lot of the inflammatory foods that are problematic for people. And it creates an incredible, like quick response. It's like, I call it setting your body back to its original factory settings. And she was like, I want to check my blood after 10 days.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm like, no, it's going to be a waste of money. We shouldn't do it. Your numbers aren't going to change that much. But she insisted. And I was like, okay. And she did. And the numbers just dramatically changed. Your lipids or insulin or blood sugar, inflammation levels. So the body is like you change the inputs and the outputs change dramatically.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You treat the root and the trunk, which is what functional medicine does.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So I think it's really about finding out what's going on for you. So, Andy, I'll say, well, try to go off of meat and see what happens to your ApoB or try to add more this kind of fat.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And then I did a function test and I discovered my mercury was elevated.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, considering it's the most potent toxin known to humans other than plutonium, I would probably avoid all forms of mercury.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Rarely. Oh, I love tuna sushi. And rawly. Okay. But I actually... you know, have little hacks where you can take a chelating drug after you go to a sushi restaurant. Like what? DMSA, it's FDA approved drug for heavy metal chelation. Prescription. Prescription. DMSA? Yeah. Okay, what dosage? Depends, you can do like 500 milligrams or 200 milligrams. You'll take that after you go out to sushi?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a doctor hack I can do where you can ask your doctor for it. I don't recommend it. It's like, you know.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
By the way, I almost died from mercury poisoning. So I know how to manage it, how my body works. I've checked my genes and why I don't detox. This is from the China. Yeah, I know how to upregulate my detox pathways through food, through supplements.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Upregulates glutathione, which is the body's main detoxifying compound. So do you also take an acetylcysteine? I do, yeah. Daily?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, considering we live in a toxic soup, I mean, we just can't get away from it in the air, the water, the food.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
For sure. I mean- You know, what's really frightening, Andrew, is that because of the diet we have, which is hormonally regulating, sugar and starch tend to screw up both men's and women's hormones. It makes women more like men and men more like women. So you get PCOS in women, which is hair growth on your face, loss of hair on your head, and in androgen. Yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And then for men, their testosterone goes down, the bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone. So when you start your sugar, you get belly fat. So, I mean, young, young men have low testosterone. I would have, I would have said, if you asked me 20 years ago, I said, well, you know, you start checking in your forties and seeing the changes that happen.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But now I think we got to start looking earlier.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's going on? Well, also there's endocrine-disrupting chemicals. So heavy metals, pesticides, a lot of these are what we call xenobiotics, meaning they're foreign kind of compounds that are biologically active.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's a whole book on this that I read like almost 30 years ago called Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn, which lays out, it was kind of like the Rachel Carson Silent Spring version of a few years ago, which talked about the reproductive effects of these petrochemical toxins that are everywhere.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
and our food and our water and our air, and they affect fertility rates, they affect birth rates in terms of male and female.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Just to answer your question about what you should be testing, I think most people should be testing, depending on where you are and what age you are, but your hormonal panels on a regular basis. So sex hormones, male would be free testosterone, total testosterone, estradiol. DHT as well. DHEA, DHT. Sometimes if you have hair loss, that can be treated for men. For women, same thing.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We have tens of millions of biological data points. And we can see anonymized data showing the trends in the population. And it's not good. And then the good news is you can do something about it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes, if you get your health savings account or your FSAs, you can use those for function health testing. But if you don't have that and you can't use that, regular insurance doesn't cover it yet. I'm hoping we're going to change that. Yeah, is that in the cards? That's in the roadmap for sure.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Because once we can prove that we create value, and we're seeing this, when people use function, they get their lab tests done, and then we follow them for every six months, and we can see the changes in the biomarkers toward the positive, how many people go from abnormal to normal. And it's not just by knowing their tests.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's tens of thousands of pages of content that have been highly curated and scientifically referenced on what to do if you have this or that normal biomarker. So you ask me, what do I do for mercury? If you get a positive mercury and you double clicked on that, you would get a very deep analysis of what you need to do. Here's the way to reduce your exposures through your water and air.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Here's how you reduce your exposures through food by reducing these kinds of fish, eating more of these kinds of fish. Are you a fan of using charcoal as a chelator? I don't think charcoal is great for heavy metals, no. I think it's good for binding anything.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You can take it as capsules. When I was in the ER, though, we used to use it if people came with a drug overdose. We'd make them drink a cup of charcoal. Literally. Their teeth would turn black. It was awful. You try to kill yourself and it's punishment for trying to kill yourself.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You have to. You have to because you're like in situations where you otherwise go crazy.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
No, you can take a tablet, but I wouldn't do that. What I would say is one, reduce your exposures, number one. If you're eating tuna, big fish, it's basically the bigger the fish, the more the mercury. I don't eat much tuna anymore. So small fish, salmon, I call it the smashers, small wild salmon. Mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. I hate all those. All your favorite fish.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
All your favorite fish.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So here's what I would do. I would, you know, there's a, I don't have any relation with this company. It's called Seatopia.fish. It sources fish from around the world from regeneratively. Oh, yeah, I've seen their stuff. Regenerative. fish farms. So it's farmed, but it's healthy and it doesn't have all the heavy metals and you can get good fish.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There are some small tuna farms that are like smaller tunas where they actually do this too, but they don't source from there. Second is I would upregulate all of your endogenous detox pathways. So your body has a system of elimination. And doctors say detox is bullshit. Baloney, you poop, you pee, you breathe, you sweat.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Like this is your liver has a whole series of pathways that are detoxification pathways, your kidney does. Your gut does. I mean, this is what your body does, right? Your poop, pee, sweat, you know, all these things. So you have to up regular body's own system. So you need to take foods that up regular liver. You mentioned eating more surface vegetables. You could add more garlic.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You could actually juice cilantro. It's a great hack for getting rid of heavy metals. Really? Yeah. It doesn't taste very good. I like cilantro. But juicing like a couple of bunches of that every day will help bring it down. And then there are things like fiber to help bind it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So you talked about charcoal, that's a binder, but just eating a higher fiber diet will help you eliminate things faster through your colon, like heavy metals.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I think it depends how you do it and what's causing it. But it can disrupt your gut flora. So your gut will really repopulate often with the flora that it had. But part of the reason we're so sick is our gut flora is so harmed by C-sections, antibiotics, lack of breastfeeding. The infant formula itself is a microbiome harmful compound for many reasons.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Not saying women shouldn't use formula, but there's better formulas and worse formulas. And so we kind of had a lot of gut issues. We've taken antibiotics, we've eaten food that's harmful to our microbiome, we were exposed to toxins. So somebody might want to flush their system. I think it can be helpful.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And for example, we do this, for example, if people have liver failure and you're an alcoholic and you have liver failure, now liver failure comes mostly from eating sugar and starch. They changed the name, by the way, from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to... metabolic associated fatty liver disease, which is just kind of, so yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so those people, if they come in with liver failure, they get crazy. Literally, it's called hepatic encephalopathy. They get delirium. They are seeing things. They literally go nuts. The treatment, you give them a sterilizing antibiotics. You kill everything in their gut called neomycin. And then you give them lactulose, which makes you poop your brains out.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And then they basically flush all that out. And all the toxins that you can't metabolize from your microbiome get fleshed out, and you come back to normal cognition. And it's a standard medical treatment. It's like basically what you learned in medical school. So there is an argument, and I've done this with autistic kids who've had gut issues with certain different issues.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Parkinson's, if you're constipated, your risk goes up by 400%, and that's a toxin-related problem. neurologic disease.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, so you want to be careful of that. But I think in terms of answering your question about metals, so you want to upregulate, you reduce your exposure, you want to upregulate your pathways by food, and then you can upregulate the pathways by nutrients. So we talked about N-acetylcysteine, so anything that boosts glutathione, lipoic acid,
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
all the methylating B vitamins, B12, folate, B6, making sure you have enough protein, because a lot of the phase two pathways in your liver that help you detoxify are dependent on amino acids, like euclidionidation and glutathione. It's an important detoxifying compound, and you want to basically open up all the pathways to get rid of it.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So I have a very specific detox protocol for heavy metals, includes all that, and sometimes DMSA, and binders. But I use silica, I use alginates from seaweed and others. I don't use charcoal for that. But you can safely remove metals from your body. That's what happened to me. I was able to do it and I'm not demented anymore. I don't have chronic fatigue syndrome.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And if you look at pictures of me in my 30s, you're like, wow, you look terrible. Well, I met you 10 years ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And it depends on what your needs are, what's happening with your health and like anything you're using, it should be used for a purpose, right? And peptides are simply mini proteins that have biological effects. And I think of them as your body's superhighway of information and connectivity that drives everything.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So they regulate your sex hormones, your growth hormone, your metabolic health, nerve function, I mean, sexual desire. I mean, there's a million peptides, like GLP-1 is a peptide. Insulin's a peptide, right? So there are tens of thousands of peptides that are made by the body that are used to regulate everything. And so there's a number of them that have been available that have been studied well.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Some of them are on the market like, you know, Ozempic or insulin or by Lisi, which is something called PT-141. It's for hyposexual women, right? Yeah, for women. But you use it for men. It works well.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It's FDA approved for women. It works for men too. Is it Kispeptin?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
No, it's not Kispeptin. It's, I'm going to butcher the name. It's like, it starts with a B, Blemelitide or something like that. And, you know, it does make you nauseous. So you need to take, be careful. You don't want to throw up while you're having sex. Definitely not. Not too sexy, but it does work. But there's a number of, depending on your needs.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
For example, if you're athletic and you're, you know, in the gym a lot, you want to increase recovery and repair. There's peptides like BPC-157 and TB-500 and GHK that are regulatory peptides for tissue repair and healing. there are peptides that you can use for immune function, like thymus and alpha-1, which is great if you're getting a cold or you have an immune issue or you have COVID.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So basically, when you're born, you have a giant thymus gland, which takes up your whole chest. Really? Yeah. If you look at a baby, just take a Google image and put it up there. It's like basically like your whole sternum, it's like this big. But it involutes or shrinks as you get older and it kind of becomes smaller.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's still a source of your immune function and it helps with building your immune resilience. And as we age, it gets worse and worse. And so the thymus alpha-1 does increase your white blood cell function and number and it helps improve that. Um, then there's peptides that are like a great, like PT 141 for sexual function. There's peptides like kiss a peptide that increases testosterone.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's ones like epimoralin that intestinal that it may help growth hormone.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Some of them, I think, but you have to be careful because they're, they're, they're not like just taking a vitamin. I mean, if you take an overdose of vitamin E, you'll get in trouble or, If you have other fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A, you can get in trouble. Most water-soluble vitamins, you're not going to get in trouble. Although B6, you have to be careful with in overdose.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And magnesium, if you take too much of it, you'll just poop your brains out. And vitamin C, the same thing. So your body can manage. But peptides are very powerful compounds. I mean, look at Ozempic. I mean, look at insulin. I mean, these are very powerful compounds. Not to be messed around. No. So you really need someone who's educated.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And it, well, and they should be usually a doctor or some licensed professional who has studied and understands this. And they should be used with monitoring to the side effects, the effects, the effects on your lab work and hormones. What about cycling them? Yeah.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So, so you don't want to necessarily always take them all the time and you want to do cycle them, particularly ones that will stimulate things like growth hormone. You don't want to be on that all the time.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Although that's another thing, cancer screening is so antiquated, right? We do such poor jobs of cancer screening with a colonoscopy, a pap test, a mammogram.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
There's a new technology that has been developed using fragments of DNA that are released into the bloodstream from cancers way before it ever shows up on a scan or an imaging device. which you can pick up cancers a year, two or three, before they ever show up on any kind of other test. And it's called Gallery. It screens 50 of the most common cancers, many of which there's no screening test for.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And the false positive rate, which is what you worry about, is very low, like half a percent. That means it shows you have a cancer when you actually don't, which can be very terrifying. It's about 75% accurate in finding the cancer early if you find it. And it's great. I mean, we've picked up so many people with issues.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
One in 188 of our members who've tested with this test have a cancer that they wouldn't have known about otherwise, and they can catch it in early stage before it kills you.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They're going to become commoditized. They're going to become cheap. Just like we're able to get like $15,000 a test for $499, we're going to be able to get a whole body scan for $300. It's happening. It doesn't have to be $3,000. So that's coming, and I think we're going to lean into that and function in the future.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's really important to understand that you want data on your body as much as you can have and as much as you can afford. And the health care system should pay for it. They don't because they don't.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
they don't understand the value of this because they don't see the benefit as the people transfer insurance companies so regularly and jobs so regularly that they figure, oh, if I invest in somebody's health, then the next guy's going to get the benefit. You know, if I'm United, then Aetna will get the benefit or Signal will get the benefit. I see.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, it's kind of like a, it's a perverse incentive system. But I think, you know, data-driven healthcare is the future. Really, imagine a place where you can have all your personal health data.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And this is where we're going, where you can have all your biomarker testing, where you can have all your wearable data, your full genome, your microbiome, all imaging data, not just the whole body scan, but looking at your body composition, looking at AI heart scans that tell how much plaque you have and much more.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
with your medical history, with all the world's scientific literature informing it, with knowledge experts also overlaying their knowledge and expertise onto it, in a platform that allows you to query it So think about like an AI chat bot that's just based on you. Like it's your data.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And what now in medicine is so amazing is we try to like make diagnoses and understand what's going on with people with such limited data sets. About them. About them. They're so antiquated. And so you've got guys like Lee Hood, who's literally measuring thousands and thousands of data points on patients. And he's using his project called the Phenome Project.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it's called Phenome Health, where he's being able to say, oh, geez, I can detect this from a few molecules in the blood. I can see what's going on with your microbiome. Or a few molecules in your blood, I can see if you're gonna be at risk for Alzheimer's. And now we offer this for, you think there was no test for Alzheimer's, right?
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You had to do a brain biopsy, or you had to wait till you got, you know, you forget your name of this or that or the other thing. And now we can, through blood testing, look for things like P tau 217 and amyloid 42, 40, made amyloid 42, 40 ratios. What can you do in response to that? Let's say somebody is- That's a good question.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
They're not, but they're not looking at the problem the right way, right? It's sort of like the blind man and the elephant. They're looking at their one thing and they don't see an answer. But you guys, guys like Richard Isaacson, who was at Cornell and now he's in Florida,
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
who, if you haven't had on your podcast, you should, who was a neurologist studying Alzheimer's and looking at deep diagnostics and personalized approaches to address the root causes and seeing remarkable outcome reversals. He had a special on, I think CNN with Sanjay Gupta, where they literally showed that you can take these biomarkers and you find them early enough, you can intervene.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And again, I've done this with dozens of patients who had dementia who were able to stop or reverse it. With diet? Not just diet, it's everything. So, Alzheimer's is, it's like saying, it's like just saying you can't remember stuff. Like, you know, we have all these fancy names we give to diseases and then we say, oh, I know why you can't remember things, you have Alzheimer's.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
No, Alzheimer's is the name we give to people who can't remember things. It's a certain specific type of problem. But then the question is, what causes it? And there are multiple causes. It's called type three diabetes of the brain, or it's caused by insulin resistance. We know diabetics have four times the rate of Alzheimer's. It could be caused by environmental toxins like heavy metals.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It could be caused by mold, or it could be caused by Lyme disease like Kris Kristofferson had, or it could be caused by change in the microbiome, or by nutritional deficiencies. I had one woman who was diagnosed with early dementia, and she was older. brilliant woman, but was starting to lose it. Turned out she had severe methylation issues and B vitamin deficiency and folate deficiency.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I treated her with a vitamin B12 shot and some B vitamins and she came right back. So it's a multi, again, multi-causal, multimodal treatments. You got to figure out all the causes and you got to treat all the problems.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
If someone has mercury issues and mold issues and they have Lyme disease and they have gut issues and they have prediabetes and they have methylation issues, you gotta treat all those things. And then you can see real change in people's biomarkers.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Ketogenic diets have been affected, but it's not like a keto diet will fix everybody with Alzheimer's or that chelation will fix everybody with Alzheimer's or that fixing their diabetes will fix everybody with Alzheimer's. You have to find all the things and treat all the things. Like if your roof has 30 holes in it and you plug 25 of them and it rains, it's still gonna get wet in your house.
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How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's the opposite of how medicines practice. And I ran into this at Cleveland Clinic and we were trying to study Alzheimer's and we had a guy who really wanted to look at the black box of functional medicine. People come in, you do personalized care, Out the other side, what happens? And the head of science there was like, no, no, we can't do that. We can only study one thing at a time.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Vitamin D, we'll do that study. Then we'll do fish oil study. Then we'll do diet study. Then we'll do exercise study. Then we'll do whatever study. I'm like, that's not how the body works. If you want to grow a plant, you can't just say, I'm just going to give it water and soil, but no light. Or I'm going to give it light, but no soil. It just doesn't make sense. The whole context. Yeah, function.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Social medicine is really about understanding this model and how do you apply it in a personalized way. And Richard Isaacs has done it, Dale Bredesen has done it, and their results are amazing. And I personally have seen this in my patients where they either stop progressing or they reverse it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, sometimes they do progress and it's hard, but I've had patients who've done incredible for years and years and years.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I think he- The joke about neurologists is you diagnose an adios. Like, there's nothing to do. You could do a diagnosing problem, but you can't do anything about it. So exactly to that point.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
For example, can I tell you a quick story? Please. I want to tell a story about a patient I had at Cleveland Clinic. Which actually, by the way, was amazing that Toby Cosgrove, who's one of the most renowned figures in medicine and was the CEO of Cleveland Clinic for years, invited me to come start a center for functional medicine there. And we've been 10 years now, we've done a ton of research.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And why? I think when you look at the data, and I wrote a book called Young Forever, I talk about longevity and the pathways. And when you look at the fundamental regulatory systems in the body around cellular repair, healing, renewal, regeneration, We have a built-in healing system. Everybody understands that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
If you cut your skin, you don't go, oh, would you please heal and please recruit these stem cells and read these angiogenesis factors and bring cytokines over here to do that. Your body knows what to do. Same thing, you break a bone. It's got its own healing system. In the body, I call these longevity switches. But they regulate not just longevity, but they regulate chronic disease and much more.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And they're embedded ancient pathways that exist from worms to humans. mTOR, AMPK, sirtuins, and insulin signaling pathways. And NAD, in the body works to activate one of those longevity switches called sirtuins, which are involved in DNA repair.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
So when you get 100,000 hits a day to your DNA as it's unraveling and re-raveling and it kind of gets damaged, you need an army to go out and like fix it, right? A bunch of carpenters kind of like repair the broken DNA. NAD stimulates that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
It also stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis, forming new mitochondria, improves mitochondrial function, improves insulin sensitivity, improves mTOR-induced autophagy. So there are a lot of redundancies in these pathways, but it's really quite amazing when you see how the body is organized.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so NAD is one of the things that's not gonna make you live forever or cure every disease, but it's an optimization tool because as you get older, NAD levels decline, And so your mitochondria decline, your energy declines, and it's great for all of that. So I take it and I think- How do you get NAD- I get 1,000 milligrams of NMN.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
What are they and why would you get them? So again, the body has this amazing healing system and it's part of the body's healing system. And this whole field you're talking about, whether it's peptides, whether it's exosomes, whether it's NMN, it's part of this field of regenerative medicine. How do we regenerate and heal
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
and repair by activating our body's own built-in systems, which are way better and way stronger and work way faster than most medications, if you know how to use them. So exosomes are essentially the little packets of healing information that are inside stem cells. And there's thousands of them and they get released
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Think of like little kind of like, you know, when you blow bubbles when you're a kid, it's like these little bubbles of stuff that go out into the body and then they go to where they're needed and then they release the packets of information that contain growth factors, healing factors, anti-inflammatory factors, tissue repair factors. And that's how the body tends to repair and heal.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so I remember once I had COVID really bad. And afterwards, I've never really felt depressed. I may have been sad, obviously, in my life and lost parents and had things happen that were life issues. But I felt physiologically depressed. My brain felt terrible. I couldn't think.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
This one patient came to see me and she had a whole list of problems. And that's why I jokingly call myself a holistic doctor, because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. I want to know everything. And functional medicine is inclusive rather than exclusive. It's like rather than discarding things that don't fit your...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, cognitive issues. I was like, I'm an idiot, and I'm depressed, and I want to kill myself. And my higher self is like... This is not me. And I took a load of exosomes, IV, I just got them, because I'm a doctor, I can get them, and I gave them to myself. And literally within hours, I was resurrected. It was amazing. Yeah. And I've used it for my knee. I have a meniscus injury.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I've used them in my knee. I've used them in my back. So I think they can be very effective. I use them intravenously for- Is it done in the United States?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. But they're approved for skin issues or this thing. So there's like an off-label uses what they use them for. A lot of things like stem cells, you have to go out of the country to do it. And there's a regulatory issues or safety issues. I'm still scared to do stem cells. I understand.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's, you want to not play with this stuff, but you also, you know, can be, it can be used effectively. Like my wife, for example, is a runner and she kind of tore her knees up and had patellofemoral syndrome and couldn't walk and I mean, she's younger than I am, and she shouldn't be feeling that like she's 80 years old on her knees.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
We went to Costa Rica to a very reputable center, and I knew the founders of it. I inspected the laboratory. I met with the scientists who harvested them, who grew them, what they did, their testing practice. I did my homework. And she ended up having no knee problems after she got her stem cells in her knees. And I was like, that's amazing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And this is like, you know, probably close to two years later.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm like, what are we talking about? No, no.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
My joke on that is this. I said, people say, do you need supplements? I'm like, no, you don't need supplements, but only under certain conditions. You drink pure, clean water. you breathe pure, clean air, you wake up with the sun, you go to bed with the sun, you have no chronic stress, you're exposed to no environmental toxins, and you're only hunting and gathering your own wild food.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
diagnosis, we wanna know everything about you, how you were born, whether you were breastfed, whether you took antibiotics, any traumas, any toxins you're exposed to, whether you eat fish, like we wanna know everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
If that's you, you don't need any supplements. And it's the 1930s. Right.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Or just having seaweed and fish, you know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
Transparency, education.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And so this woman came to see me, she has psoriatic arthritis, which is a terrible disease where your joints break down, you got those heartbreak of psoriasis, the rashes and itchy plaques on your skin, but she had a whole bunch of other stuff too. She had migraines, she had prediabetes,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I just don't like people suffering when they don't need to. I feel like I have a glass of water, they're thirsty, and there's a giant glass wall between us. And that's why I've been working my whole life to kind of get the message out about how people can heal, whether it's on their own or whether through my books or through a free education, my podcast, your stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's a public service because people are suffering and they don't need to.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
She had depression, she was a 50 year old health coach, I mean life coach and business coach who was very successful, but was struggling. She had terrible reflux, irritable bowel syndrome. So she had all these clusters of diseases. And I said, gee, what do these things have in common? What's the root? Inflammation.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
And I know you've talked a lot about this on your podcast, but inflammation is sort of the root of many chronic illnesses, whether it's obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, autism, depression. I mean, the list goes on and on. Autoimmune, allergy, obviously. And I said, why don't you look at your gut? Because you're having a ton of gut symptoms.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman
You have terrible bloating, distension, what I call a food baby. You know when you eat something, it's like get a food baby. And she also had been on a history of lots of antibiotics and steroids for her psoriatic arthritis. And so I said, look, why don't we just treat your gut and then see what happens? So we put her on an elimination diet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. Someone once said to me, you can either be right or in relationship. And I think a lot of us are very attached to being right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
The way you said there was really important. I want to just sort of double click on it because when most of us are in a conversation, we're already rehearsing our response before that person has actually finished their sentence. And what you're saying is, You have to pause that if you want to be in relationship. Otherwise, you're just in relationship to yourself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You're not in relationship with the other person, whether it's a friend or colleague or your partner or your spouse, your lover, whatever it is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So if you're looking to support your muscles and want to feel younger from the inside out, my friends at Timeline are offering 10% off your first order. Check it out at timeline.com slash drhyman. Your future self will thank you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's right. That's so powerful. And I think most of us don't even know how to do that. We know how to do math. We know how to work. We know how to read. We know how to do all the stupid stuff we learned in school, which can be helpful. It's good stuff. I don't really use math that much anymore. I do use reading and writing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
But other than that, it's like the fundamental life skills we don't learn about how to be in relationship. And that creates a lot of sort of unhappy people and bad relationships and understanding requires you to pause your own narrative. It requires you to sort of stop. And that, that's not easy to do for most people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Like when you're triggered or you're in a conflict or something's come up and you're like, you know, we just got a new dog and, um, And I'm, I'm very much like, you gotta stick to the rules and the dog has to be trained and then you get free. Cause when you train like your mind, just like you train your dog, then you can take your dog everywhere.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
But if it's a brat and you can't take it anywhere, then it's like no fun.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
My wife is like, well, she's like, oh, he's so cute. I'm like, yes, but you still have to correct him and train him. And so I found myself getting very agitated. I think that's a, I mean, it's a silly example, but it's, it's fundamental to sort of any, it's a real, any communication. And I'm curious how you think people can actually get that skill. Cause it's not, we're so like in a hair trigger.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Like we literally, we have a thought, We have an emotion. We have a reaction. We have a reaction.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
The breathe is the key thing. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
There's this incredible book called The Body Keeps Score. And it's really about how childhood traumas and wounds and stresses and beliefs we create out of those, the meaning we make out of what happens to us. Like as Gabor says, it's not what happens to us, it's the meaning we make. And we're meaning making machines. And when we're kids, we create all these
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
sort of narratives about how life is based on our little tiny universe and the people around us and our parents and the small world we live in. And that then shapes our whole life. And unless you kind of understand that you have to go back and excavate, I call it soul archeology, you have to excavate
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
the the traumas the wounds the beliefs the ways of being the automatic kind of triggers and kind of you're going to stay in it and whether you're you know 25 or 65 it doesn't matter you know just because you're older doesn't mean you're wiser right and that's really true and it's absolutely you know we're very largely shaped by what happened in our childhood but i think the buddhist teaching shows us that it even goes a step further where it's not just what happened when you were young but any
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to Dr. Hyman Show.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And how do we train ourselves? Meditation, you mentioned, is a way that you've found successful, but is that the only way? Are there other ways that people can?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So if people are wondering and listening, this sounds good. And in this beautiful book, How to Love Better, sort of a roadmap to kind of thinking about these things. What are some of the ways in which people can actually sort of stop to kind of this sort of powerful, impulsive narrative that comes up when you're under stress or in a relationship where things are in conflict?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You have to kind of pause. You have to break it down. You have to take it in steps. And it's not easy for people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever struggled with love or want to learn how to love better, this is going to be a great podcast because it's with an incredible man, young Pueblo, as he's known on social media. His real name is Diego Perez. He's a meditator, that's a great way to describe yourself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in there. I mean, I think that the part about understanding is really important. And I think I, again, I want to double click on that because it's about curiosity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Are you looking for a simple science-backed way to boost energy, feel younger, and improve your health without pills? Infrared therapy is a game changer. Sunlight and infrared saunas deliver the highest level of infrared absorption, helping to reduce inflammation, increase energy, and support deep cellular repair.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I mean, I think you're right. It's curiosity, which is about really understanding and also vulnerability on the other side, being able to willing to really share from not a place of, and then point your finger, but from like what you're really feeling. I'm scared.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That reminds me that almost the two schools of Buddhism, one is, you know, they call it Theravada Buddhism or Hinayana, which is kind of a pejorative term. He's lesser vehicle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Or Mahayana, which is greater vehicle. But the first one is, you know, a lot of in Southeast Asia, it's all about self-realization. Whereas the Buddhist tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and some Chinese Buddhism is this tradition of compassion.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Number one New York Times bestselling author who's widely known by his pen name, Young Pueblo. He's sold over a million and a half books and had been translated to 25 languages. He's got a huge audience online, a billion views per year of his content. And he focuses on self-healing, creating healthy relationships, the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's the Dalai Lama, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And then if you even get to the gates of enlightenment, you got to turn back because you got to help everybody else. Yeah. That's the bodhisattva path. And so it's like, you actually realize that salvation comes in that practice of being willing to be curious and compassionate and and kind and loving for another, right? That's sort of an element, but that's what Buddhism is, just loving kindness.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Did you know that chronic inflammation is at the root of almost every disease? That's why I'm always looking for natural ways to support a healthy inflammation response, like turmeric. There's just one problem. Turmeric isn't easily absorbed on its own. That's why Paleo Valley includes organic coconut oil and black pepper to enhance bioavailability.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Plus, it's packed with organic ginger, rosemary, and cloves, powerful ingredients that support brain, cardiovascular, and immune health, as well as digestion, joint comfort, and even PMS symptoms. Turmeric has been used for centuries in Ayurvedic medicine to support overall health, and modern research confirms its incredible benefits.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
It's been shown to help maintain a healthy inflammation response, which is essential for brain function, joint health, and even longevity. If you want a simple, effective way to promote wellness and a healthy inflammation response, check out Paleo Valley Turmeric Complex today. Head to paleovalley.com slash hymen to get 15% off today.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Did you know that staying hydrated isn't just about drinking water? It's about replacing both water and electrolytes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
here's the thing when you sweat you're losing water and sodium and if you're only drinking water without replacing those electrolytes you're missing a key part of hydration in fact over drinking plain water can actually dilute your blood sodium levels leaving you feeling off think muscle cramps headaches or dips in energy that's why i'm such a big fan of element it's a science-backed electrolyte drink that gives you the right amounts of sodium potassium and magnesium to help you stay hydrated and perform at your best
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
When I rode my bike all over Greece, Element was a game changer. It kept me energized, clear-headed, and feeling great. And the best part? Element has zero sugar, no artificial colors, and none of those dodgy ingredients you'll find in most electrolyte drinks. Plus, the flavors are incredible.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Whether it's watermelon salt, grapefruit salt, orange salt, or one of their other options, there's something for everyone. Right now, Element is offering my listeners eight single serving packets for free with any order. It's a great way to try it out. Just go to drinkelement.com slash hyman to grab yours. Trust me, your body will thank you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And his new book, How to Love Better, is out now, so check it out. He and I get into a deep conversation about love, relationships, where we go wrong, how we can straighten things out, and what we need to do to actually start to listen and communicate in ways that work. We talk about... emotional freedom, about self-love, boundaries, impermanence, Buddhism, pretty much the gamut.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
When you mentioned Vajrayana, that's like the diamond path.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's like more Tibetan Buddhism. Yeah, yeah. We won't get into all that, but it's a lot. If you want to know about how do I have a better relationship? In summary, what you said was that you have to know yourself. You have to slow down. You have to be aware of your mind. You have to be aware of your own emotional patterns.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
where they came from and that's what i call like the soul archaeology i had to go back and excavate why was i continually being in these relationships and choosing people or being in relationships that just didn't work some of them were great people it was just like i just it wasn't it wasn't them it was me when i realized that i was like i'm not doing this ever again i don't care if i'm ever in a relationship again or not but i got to figure this out and that really got me to a place where i really had to go deep yeah and find out what those emotional wounds were that that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
those patterns as beliefs were. And you talk a lot about this concept of emotional release and freedom, how holding on to suppressed emotions prevents you from being free in yourself. And you think you're being right and you're righteous in your relationship and you're telling the truth with a capital T, but most of the time it's not.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And so the question is, how do you kind of get to that place of emotional release and actually get free from those destructive patterns that you talk about?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
it's not an easy task. Like it's, it's like, but love is not easy, right? It's the hardest practice, right? It's like, I think Rilke said, you know, love is difficult, but it's sort of the, all other tasks I'm, I'm butchering this quote, but it's something like all our tasks are just preparation for love. You know, it's like,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And ultimately, it's a place where we can either suffer or we can get free. And then when you get a free relationship, it doesn't mean you're off gallivanting around. It means you're emotionally free and you're spiritually free and you're able to actually engage in life in a way that doesn't come with all this friction and pain and struggle and conflict and arguments. Yeah. bickering.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I think that's a really powerful thing. And when you do end up in a situation, then there's tools, right? So let's say you and your wife are in a conflict, like if something has come up, like what do you guys do?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And we end up in a place where I think you'll find very helpful around maybe applying some of these principles to your own relationships and to the challenges you find in love and war and all that comes after that. So let's dive right into the podcast with Young Pueblo or Diego Perez. Should I call you Young Pueblo or should I call you Diego? Diego's just fine. Okay, Diego.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Like a few minutes, really.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Let's say there's something bigger than one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You both go back and forth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah, I find curiosity one of the most powerful tools. If your partner's upset or they're angry about something or they're mad or whatever's going on and you're like, I don't deserve that and they're wrong and whatever, you can have whatever narrative. But if you stop and you go, gee, what's going on for you? I'm really curious. This seems like a big thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Well, you're known as Young Pablo online. And, you know, I followed you for years and found during difficult moments in my life that your work was so inspirational and helped me to see through dark periods. And I really appreciate it. I know millions out there has felt the same thing. And I didn't really know you at the time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Tell me what you're really feeling, and then listen, and then not actually respond by giving your point of view or your perspective or your solution, but actually just kind of helping them to be gotten. And it's like all you have to do is then reflect back what they're saying. It's a really powerful technique, and I don't know why people don't use it, But it's like you get to both go.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You both get to have turns. You don't have to actually agree on anything. You could both have totally different worldviews on whatever. But at the end of the day, you've actually come to start with your premise of understanding, of curiosity, of seeking to understand rather than being understood. And in that process, you actually free the other person to kind of relax and not feel
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You know, because often we're in our amygdala, right? Which is our primitive reptile brain when we get into these situations with our partners. It's like, how do you get out of that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Well, you get out of that by feeling safe, by feeling you're in a safe environment, a safe space with someone who cares about you and loves you, is curious about you, wants to know how you're feeling, doesn't want to challenge you, make you wrong. Because even if you think they're wrong, like I get with my wife, she's like, she really doesn't like rules.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And so I get why she's struggling with the dog. But for me, I'm like, this is important. So how do I kind of understand what's really underneath that for her? Why didn't she, why does she like that? Why does this come for her? How does her reality been shaped so that she feels that way? And why does she have these beliefs?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And just getting curious together, sometimes it allows your partner to go, well, I don't know why I believe that. Or that's not actually my values, but it's actually my beliefs. And our beliefs and our values are often at war with each other, right? We have certain values, but then we have these beliefs that often are interrupting our values.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah, and then it goes away. It's like the other trick is like, you know, if both triggered, one of you is probably a little bit less triggered. Yeah. It's sort of like, you only check in and be aware and go, okay, well, there's only one crazy person allowed in the room at a time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I didn't have a relationship with you, but what you posted online and what you wrote was so simple, so clear, and so elegant, and rang so true at so many levels. And now you've created this great new book, How to Love Better.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So let's like not both be crazy because that's not going to go well.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And it's not easy, but it, uh, it's, uh, how do you hit the pause button on your reactivity?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. That's beautifully said. When you guys are in this, in like in a place of conflict and you both feel activated, how do you navigate that moment? You, you, take space until you both can come back to you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Take a break. Yeah. Someone once said to me, you can either be right or in relationship. And I think a lot of us are very attached to being right. How do we give up this incredible desire to be right, which is connected to the illusion of I that you referred to earlier, this kind of false illusion.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I want you to kind of dive a little bit more into this whole idea, this illusion of I and how we give up this sort of identity where we have to be in our ego and be right.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I'm just excited you've done that because I know you've used your own practices as the way in which to sort of metabolize your life to create nuggets of wisdom for humanity and for others to learn from. And that's such a beautiful skill. It's such an incredibly rare talent. It takes a lot to distill things in that way. And that's one of your superpowers.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. And what you said else is important because you have to allow your partner to evolve and change just as you evolve and change.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And you were living in the past reality of what she said two years ago. And she had moved on or maybe.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
She's ready to go. She's been stuck in the middle of nowhere in the Massachusetts for too long. And she's like, let me get to a city. Yeah, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I want to see some concrete, yeah. You know, one of the things that I think people have a hard time with is we often have broken pickers. Meaning we pick people. based on our conditioning, our past, our beliefs, our traumas. And so I certainly had one. That was the biggest thing I had to fix, was fix my broken picker.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And meaning, how did I know how to be in a relationship without choosing someone who wasn't the right person for me? And it wasn't actually just in relation with me because it was sort of dealing with some wound I had and trying to fix that. And you talk about sort of red flags that people should look out for. And you also talk about green flags, which is kind of interesting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So can you kind of break that down? What are the red flags and the biggest red flags people have? And what are the green flags?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Not how I think you should be loved.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
This is, I want to be loved. So I'm going to do that to you. Yeah. It doesn't often go well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's powerful. One of the things that I think is challenging for people in relationships is honesty. And I don't mean like lying, truly lying about like, oh, I'm having an affair. I'm not telling you. That's kind of betrayal. That's clearly bad. The small lies, like not telling someone how you actually are feeling or kind of omitting things that may be bothering you or not being honest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I think many of us have different superpowers. That's your superpower.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
transparent about who you are and what's happening for you in the moment. Can you talk about how important sort of honesty is and what your framework is around honesty in relationships?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So people pleasing is the kind of inverse of honesty, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
think that's such a subtle thing we don't really think about it and i i remember you know one of my you know childhood wounds was i had a rageaholic father and i had to learn how to ease him or please him or people please him in order to not get the wrath and the rage coming at me which was scary because he was very loud Very deep voice, big chest, and kind of scary guy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And so I learned that people-pleasing was how you navigate the world. What it led me to do was to not actually say what was true for me in the moment in relationships. And that was very destructive. People-pleasing sounds like a nice... a nice thing, but it's actually a lie. It's a flat out lie.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And for me, that was a big thing that I had to kind of realize was that honesty, I was gonna be 100% transparent and honest about everything in my relationship, whatever relationship I got into. And it's been pretty remarkable to see how powerful that is as a force for understanding, as a force for connection, as a force for intimacy, as a force for love.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And that most of us don't even realize we're doing. We don't realize we're not being fully transparent and honest. And I think it's important. And I think we don't learn how to do that. So how do you help people think about that? I mean, in How to Love Better, which is a great book. Everybody should get a copy of it. It's out now. What is the way to get through that place?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
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The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I think the other golden rule, you didn't really talk about it so much yet, but it's this idea of don't think things personally, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
If your partner needs to go off and do something, or if you're like, look, babe, I just want to have some time with myself. I want to go to Boston by myself and just have my alone time. It's not a reflection on her. No, no, totally. And I think when you take things personally, it kind of blows up a relationship.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You know, we're like- No wonder you don't answer my texts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So control, alt, delete is kind of a key part of relationships.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's amazing. In terms of self-love, which is sort of talking about loving your partner, but self-love is a core part of having love together with somebody else, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Life. This is a crash course in life. My hope is that I hope I figure it out by the time I die. Just in time, you know? And I think kind of a lot of, in a way, that's kind of like what meditative practice is. It's like, preparation for death. And it's preparation for life, obviously, it's how to live better. But in some ways, it's a way to navigate your own mind.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So how do we elevate each other, right? Rather than take each other down, right?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Well, yeah, it isn't. And I think one of the things that Trix, quote Trix, that helped me is to help, and I said this right up in the beginning of our relationship with my wife, I said, there's you, there's me, and there's us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
It's a third entity. Yeah. A friend of mine, you know, Annie Lala, she's a health love coach and she talks about, you know, giving it a name. We haven't done that, but, but each of you have to care for yourselves individually. We all have to do that. We have to care for each other and we have to care for the relationship.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Which has its own needs. Right. And I think we often lose focus of that. It's like me, I, you, instead of this other place where we can kind of anchor ourselves as a, as a sort of a North star to serve.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I think that's a powerful framing for a relationship. It's really helped me a lot.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
What have you been thinking about?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's the curiosity piece. One of the things I think is foundational you talk about in the book is emotional maturity. It's not an easy thing to get because most of us are basically like 25, 35, 55, 65 year old people walking around with an eight year old inside of us that's running the show.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And so developing that maturity is not something we learn or trade in that we have any cultural or educational frameworks for. And yet it's like the most fundamental thing to actually being happy is actually becoming an adult. A lot of us stay anchored in our past because of wounds or childhood or just because we want to be that 20-year-old who... did whatever they wanted.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And it's not, it's, it's, it's a really a challenging thing. And we're to actually have a relationship with someone that is going to work. You have to have two emotionally mature people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And a lot of the meditative traditions, you know, and I had the really incredible privilege of knowing some incredible meditation teachers, like the 33rd Abbot of Manri, who was the Bon teacher of Dzongchen, which is a Buddhist meditation tradition. It actually predates Buddhism. He was the Dalai Lama's meditation teacher, and he came from the Bon tradition.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
How do you, how do you help people under that? And how, how does, so what are the clues that there's emotional immaturity that hurts relationships?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah, it's key. It's so key. And I think it's a constant, it's a constant work. I wonder if some people thinking in listening to this are thinking that, well, this sounds great, but this is a lot of navel gazing. And how does this help the world and all the problems we're having in the world?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And, you know, it's, and I think this is, this is fundamental because, you know, in order to actually, and we saw.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. We, we see, we saw this in the sixties, you know, everybody's out to like change the world and fix it, but no one had dealt with their shit, you know? Yeah. And there was a lot of really dysfunctional communes and dysfunctional things that were just... When you don't deal with your shit, you end up recreating the thing that you were fighting against.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And a lot of their work is how do we navigate life, but also how do we navigate this transition that happens as we come closer to the end and do it in a way that we become free. The whole purpose of life is to get free, right? Is to get free in your soul and your emotional life and your relationships and your work and to be unencumbered.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Even doing psychedelic assisted therapy, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And you have kids? Not yet. Not yet. Less incubator.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. Wow. I mean, I think you're right. I think people have to understand that the world is made of individuals, and individuals have beliefs, and individuals have points of view. And what we're seeing today is this total disconnection from each other, this total lack of ability to talk to each other, this total lack of understanding, this lack of ability to connect.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And so what you're talking about, in a sense, how to love better, is not just about how to be in a relationship better, but it's how to be in relationship to everyone in the world better and everything that's going on. So, you know, I... you know, had a certain sort of very sort of set of beliefs as I was younger, very progressive.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I, you know, didn't want to talk to anybody who thought, you know, otherwise. It wasn't really like a conscious thought that I didn't, but I realized I gravitated towards people who thought like me, who felt like me, who were like me, who had the same beliefs and the same worldviews.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. And what I found was like by actually developing a culture and relationships with people who had very different views and beliefs, that I've grown, that I've learned, that I've actually been able to actually humanize the other, right? Because we always like to otherize everything, and this was happening in the world today. We're otherizing everybody.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You're Republican, you're Democrat, you're pro-life, you're pro-choice, you're whatever it is. You're Jewish, you're Muslim. It's endless. And curiosity sort of gets lost, and any kind of relational way of navigating through this gets lost, and it's really about this massive conflict we're seeing today. And I mean, I mean, we saw in the Oval Office the other day, which was astounding to me that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
We have world leaders who are literally bickering and fighting with each other, and nobody's stopping for a minute to listen, to slow down, to understand. There were valid perspectives on both sides, but nobody was even listening. They were talking over each other. And I'm referring to President Zelensky from Ukraine, who was in the Oval Office with President Trump and J.D. Vance.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat, just like that in and of itself you know, wasn't how we want to demonstrate to the world our leaders behaving. And in a sense, you're sort of these leaders who are under stress, who are dealing with difficult things, who have a lot to deal with. They weren't able to actually listen to each other.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And the first step is really to listen and to understand. And you might not agree. You might have different perspectives. You might want to solve a problem a different way. But at least if you start to build on a foundation of understanding, you don't end up in a situation like that. And I think in a way your book is sort of the antidote to that, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And that's what sort of I think is so striking about your work is that that's what it aims to do is help us get free.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
How to love better, how to communicate better, how to be in a relationship better, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And in this book, How to Love Better, the implication there is how do you have a better way to love that lets you be free and happy and unencumbered by a lot of the challenges we find in relationships? So maybe you can kind of start off by sort of telling us about how, because we talked about a lot about your past history in the previous podcast.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That's good. Well, Diego, Young Pueblo, it's been amazing to have you on the podcast again. Everybody definitely check out your book, How to Love Better. They can find you on social media. Where is the best place to find you online?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah. Yeah, I would highly recommend them. They've really impacted me and they were kind of like medicine or a Sabbath, a tough moment in my life. So I really appreciate you and all you've done to bring a little bit of understanding, a little bit of compassion, a little bit of love to the world, the world that is in desperate need of that. So thanks for being on the podcast.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
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These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top quality premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
I encourage people to go back and listen to that because it was a very good one. We talked about how you got into this work and your meditative practice and where you came from. But I want to sort of explore more around love because a lot of us struggle with love. I certainly have. I was married three times, divorced three times, married four times. This was a keeper. I learned a lot.
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And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
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This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I had to go through this really dark night of the soul, which I actually talked about in the Diary of a CEO. I had to kind of come in to confront the ways in which I was not free. And that I had wounds and things that I hadn't dealt with from my childhood that kept me from actually loving better.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So when you mean attachment, you mean attachment from the Buddhist perspective? Totally.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Not attachment theory, attachment disorders, like anxious attachment. Totally, totally.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
What does the Buddha mean when he said attachment is the root of all sufferings?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Visit sunlighten.com and save up to $1,400 on your purchase with code HYMAN. At 65, I'm still pushing my limits, cycling long distances, trekking through Patagonia, and living life to the fullest. But staying active as I age isn't just about willpower. It's about giving my body the vital support it deserves.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Well, that's the third noble truth, right? So first one is life can be stressful and difficult slash suffering. Two, suffering comes from our beliefs and our conditioning and our conditioned mind that wants things to be a certain way, which is attachment. And the third is- The end of suffering.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Well, the third is there's a possibility and it's suffering, but the impermanence is really what is causing so much stress because things change all the time.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
And I'm 65 and I know that because I can tell you that life is constantly changing and I have perspective, which is actually a nicer thing that happens as you get older. You realize, oh, if I'm having a shitty moment right now, it's not going to be forever.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Or if I'm having a fabulous moment, I'm on the top of the mountain right now, it's also not going to be forever. And not having your well-being, your happiness, your joy, your ability to be present in life and engaged, be conditioned by what and where and who you're with. That's kind of getting free.
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You mean your partner's not supposed to just act and do things in the way that you want them to do?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Why don't you blah, blah, blah?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
So getting free is sort of the goal here. That's like the last chapter.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
That sounds great. How do you do that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
awareness non-reaction and compassion so it takes time to be able to like literally design and shape your mind like the body in a way what you're saying is is the meditation helps you sort of be a witness and slow down the way in which we normally operate which is yeah thought emotion action but they're collapsed into one yeah and what you're saying is you can separate those out
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
so that you can be aware of the thought. You can even be aware of the trigger that might happen in you. And you can then slow that down so you don't have to actually act from that. You can then be non-reactive in a way that allows for a greater freedom in love. But it's also in your own life. It's not just for, I mean, you get better at life, you get better at love, right?
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
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How to Love Better: Emotional Healing, Attachment, and Real Relationship Skills with Yung Pueblo
You get better at yourself, you get better at love. So how do you do that? Because I mean, most people are saying, oh, that sounds good. But, you know, I don't really have 50 days to go into a meditation retreat. So, I mean, I don't know. That's a lot of time in the gym.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And what's the sort of hazard ratio? In other words, with traditional cigarettes, it was like 10 to 20 times an increase in risk of lung cancer. So on an observational study, that's a slam dunk. If it's over two or three, you usually probably have some causality. And that's two or 300%. And smoking was 2,000%. And so the question is, how big is the delta on them?
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Is it like a 20% increased risk, 100%, 200%?
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And just for those who are not scientists, like who are not scientists, when you do an observational or population study, you know, there's a lot of things called confounding factors or variables where, for example, in the meat studies that I've talked about on the podcast before, it found that, you know, meat was harmful, but the people who ate meat in these large trials who are just population studies where they follow people over a long period of time, they get their dietary records and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Ask them a food frequency questionnaire, which is super unreliable. It turns out that the meat eaters weighed more, smoked more, drank more, didn't eat fruits and vegetables, didn't take their vitamins, didn't exercise. And that was why they had more heart attacks and disease. It wasn't because of the meat. And another observational study showed that people who shopped at health food stores who
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
were vegans or who ate meat, both have their risk of death reduced in half. So it's a context of what your overdialysis pattern is, your lifestyle is. And so I think that's what these various factors are being looked at in these ultra processed food studies and they're being controlled for as best you can.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But you're saying even if you take into account all these variables that could mess up the results, you still see a signal for ultra processed food independent of the fact that it's got high sugar, salt, fat, or whatever else it's got crap in it, right?
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
That's a good one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I mean, I think it's worth stopping for a second and defining what is ultra-processed food. And the NOVA classification, just briefly, that was developed by Montero in Brazil, that's now used as a standard in many countries for their dietary guidelines. And I think it's a very useful way to think about things. Because we've been processing food for thousands of years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Making sauerkraut is processing food. Making miso is processing food. Making tofu is processing food, but these are still relatively whole foods. There's also cooking and food added, things you add to your cooking at home that makes it more complex. The ultra processing is quite different and it's an industrial process that breaks down the commodity crops, basically soy, wheat, and corn,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
into these sort of chemically different molecules that then are reassembled into what looks like food, but technically by the definition of food is not really food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, it's basically something that supports the health and growth of an organism.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I mean, canned tomatoes is processed food. It's just tomatoes, waters and salt now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I'll just give an example. I think people can go bake a chocolate chip cookie at home from real chocolate, regular flour, butter, eggs, right? But if you go get a Chips Ahoy cookie, the ingredients are unbleached enriched flour. OK, you could say that's OK. Chocolate. But in the chocolate chunks, they have dextrose and soy lecithin, which are not things you have in your kitchen.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It has weird things like ammonium phosphate, high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin, caramel color, artificial flavor. These are the things that are kind of invisible. It looks like a chocolate chip cookie that you make at home, but it's not. And you're saying this is materially different in terms of what we're talking about.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to the Dr. Hyman Show.
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I kind of, you know, having you explain all this because I recently read a paper that was published in 2022. It was a debate between Montero, who developed the NOVA classification, and Dr. Astrup, who's from Scandinavia, who, you know, have opposing views. And the argument from Dr. Astrup was that this is just...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
sort of not a very helpful classification because it can all be explained through other things that we, you now kind of refuted. And I went and actually looked up the conflicts of interest of Dr. Astrup. And, you know, he worked for Nestle and other big food companies. And I'm like, McDonald's. I'm like, oh, okay, okay.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Well, this is a really important point because as the world is getting sicker and fatter, And America is tanking because of this. I think this is going to be the end of us, literally, because the economic burden of it is huge. We have over 60% with a chronic illness. We have 93% who are metabolic and healthy. We're 48th in life expectancy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We spend 40% of the dollars that are spent on health care from the federal government, sort of almost $5 trillion. It's about 30% of the entire federal budget, $1 and $3. It's both affecting us from an economic perspective, from a health perspective, from a social perspective, and it's a crisis. And so now, recently in America, Trump was elected president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. Today, our guest is an esteemed physician from the UK, Dr. Chris Van Tulleken. who is a physician, scientist, and broadcaster known for his expertise in public health. And he has written a book, which I think you all will find very interesting, called Ultra-Processed People.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
is going to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, and he's been all about ultra-processed food. And so the question is, when you have the keys to the kingdom and you're trying to make a difference, How do you use the framework of ultra processed food to drive policy or don't you?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And recently the FDA came out with a ruling for front of package labeling and it's not been adopted yet, but it's out there for comment, which is to me kind of a throwback to the past, which is this concept of nutritionism that you talk about. This idea that most of nutrition science has broken down the effects of food based on their individual ingredients, salt, sugar, fat, whatever.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And then you can dial it up or down. So we found fat was the enemy back in the 70s and 80s. So we basically said everybody should eat low fat. That led to the rise, I think, of obesity and increased sugar in food. So instead, you got snackable cookies and all these foods that were ultra processed that actually had huge amounts of sugar, but no fat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And so we kind of can invite food companies by having this new ruling, which basically says just the amount of saturated fat, sugar, and salt as metrics, high, medium, or low. To me, it doesn't go far enough to help educate people. I think it doesn't really tell people the degree of processing or how it's going to affect them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And what you're saying essentially based on the data is that salt, sugar, and fat are not enough to explain the full impact of ultra-processed food. There's something else. There's another element that makes it even worse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And so the question is how would you take this framework of ultra-processed food and use it to help inform policy, whether it's dietary guidelines, whether it's front-of-package labeling, whether it's school lunches, or what we do with our food stampers or sort of assistance program. That's kind of where I'm sort of struggling to figure out how do we – because to me it's like if you put –
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
you know it's class one to four four is like really bad for you that would be an easy thing to do for a front of package labeling but you're saying it's not really the thing that we should be doing okay uh it's really you're really good at asking 10 very hard questions at once let me let me you're too smart mark I want to talk to you about protein, a critical nutrient that's often misunderstood.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Many people don't realize that when we consume protein, our body doesn't use it in its current form. Instead, it breaks the protein down into amino acids. The building blocks a protein and then reassembles those amino acids into the specific proteins our body needs. That's why I'm so impressed by Perfect Amino.
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It contains the precise ratio of essential amino acids your body needs to build new proteins without the excess amino acids that turn into calories. This means you get better results. Faster lean muscle creation, improved recovery, reduced soreness, stronger bones, and no unwanted fat gain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why we can't stop? It's an incredible book that examines the pervasive impact of ultra-processed foods on health and wellbeing. He's had a lot of global conversations sparked around this book around food systems, industry practices, and the urgent need for dietary reform. Really pretty, pretty important book.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But more importantly is his work really around changing policy. He's a huge advocate for public health initiatives in the UK that address systemic issues and healthcare nutrition. And he's really gotten into tremendous work on ultra processed foods and publications around that. He's presented at the parliament in the UK. He's won many awards.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
He has found that ultra processed foods are not like other foods in the way they affect our biology. Now we can debate what's the definition and so forth, but we all kind of know it when we see it, you know? My professor in medical is called the Aunt Millie sign. How do we know it's the Aunt Millie sign? Well, it walks like Aunt Millie, it talks like Aunt Millie, it must be Aunt Millie.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Maybe if you take the, on the front of package, you just change the proposed rule. Instead of having it say low, medium, or high, you put low as green, you put a medium as orange, and you put the high as red, like a stop sign.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So you're in charge of the FDA. You get to decide how it's going to go. You have full autonomy. What's the solution? Because literally, we're in this conversation right now about how do we really change the labeling and what other policies need to happen? And you mentioned ending marketing. You mentioned taxation. These are extremely unpopular ideas in America.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think free speech and First Amendment is about the marketing. And I don't agree with it. I think, you know, we don't allow smoking advertising anymore. We don't allow Joe Camel on the package front of cigarettes anymore. advertise to kids about smoking. You know, we've done a lot to kind of roll those things back, but it's a tough sell. And the taxation issue is a very big concern.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
In other words, when you see an ultra-processed food, whether it's a Dorito or a Twinkie or a Cheez Whiz or some weird thing that we don't even know that it's food, we know it's ultra-processed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And what I hear a lot is a pushback from the industry, you know, and there's hunger groups that I know you you know, and talked about are co-opted because a lot of big industry food companies are on the boards and fund those organizations. But the talking points are pretty kind of obvious. They go, well, you know, we're going to be taking away safe, affordable, convenient food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We're going to be penalizing the poor. We can't tax the poor. It's regressive. There's all these arguments that seem socially conscious and forward thinking and, you know, very elevated. And of course, no, we don't want to take away food from people. We don't want to make it hard for them to eat. We don't want to takeaways to safety and food. Who's against that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's very smart and it's propaganda from my perspective. It's sort of like the old marketing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We're going to get into why it's an issue, why we should be concerned about it, and what we can do to protect ourselves, and maybe some policy issues that also need to be addressed when it comes to how do we protect ourselves as a society from the harms of these foods, which, by the way, can comprise about 60% of adult calories and 67% of kids' calories and about 73% of everything that's on the store shelves today.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Yeah. I mean, the taxation works. You know, they've demonstrated this in California and other states or cities in America where they've actually implemented this and the consumption goes down and health gets better. I mean, there is data about this already.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So I think it's unpopular, but I think some kind of strategy that's progressive taxation based on the framework you talked about makes a lot of sense to me. I think it's going to be a tough sell in America. I think the thing I want to dive into now a little bit is we've established that ultra-processed food is different than just home-baked cookies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And that it's these weird ingredients that are not in your kitchen cabinet that are put in food to make it addictive, to make it palatable, to make it easy to consume lots of. It makes it uniquely different than just regular processed food. And there's something kind of particularly harmful. And I would say I would agree with that based on my experience.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I would also say that it brings up the question that you kind of hinted at of how these corporations are operating in the world and what they're doing and what they know and what they don't know that are producing these foods and how it impacts our health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You kind of touched on the fact that these big companies put people in functional MRI machines to look at the effects of different foods on the addiction centers of the brain. in order to optimize what they call the bliss point of food, which is something Michael Moss talked about actually on my first podcast I ever did.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
He really kind of was like, wrote this book called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, where he interviewed all these food industry experts and executives and scientists and kind of whistleblowers. And they kind of peel back the sort of the layers of how they do this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And they have taste institutes where they hire craving experts to create the bliss point of food and find out ways to create heavy users, meaning taking people who are already using it and get them to eat more. And it's a very deliberate thing. And there are many other examples of pernicious ways in which the food industry and big ag and other industries like alcohol, tobacco,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
actually push their products. And you introduced me to a gentleman from the World Health Organization that I had a conversation with, where they talked about this white paper they're creating on the commercial determinants of health, the ways in which transnational multinational corporations subvert public health and privatize profits.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So this is an important issue. Listen up. Here we go. So Chris, it's amazing to have you on the Dr. Hyman show. I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. We had a chat last year and your work around ultra processed food, your advocacy policy work, your intention to sort of shift consciousness around what's killing us. It's been tremendous.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I didn't call it that in my book, Food Fix, but essentially that's what I was writing about, which is the ways in the various ways in which they use funding of research, They use funding of front groups. They use funding of social groups. They use funding of academic centers, universities.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
They fund they use heavy lobbying and in every particular tactic they can come up with to undermine our public confidence and to actually confuse us, confound us and kind of make the whole thing worse. Messy when it's really quite simple. These foods are bad for us and we shouldn't be eating them. And there's no argument really to say that they're healthy or safe.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And if you eat it once in a while, fine. If you have a bag of Skittles once in a while, it's not going to kill you or Reese's peanut butter cup. But if you consume these things on a regular basis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Well, the Super Bowl was on because we're recording this just after the Super Bowl. And it was on last night. And I was watching. And there was a commercial for Lay's Potato Chips. And the whole thing was about this organic farm. It looked like this little girl and this potatoes and how beautiful this bucolic scene was. And at the end, it was for Lay's Potato Chips.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I was like, oh God, it's just like, they are so good at just kind of capturing our imagination and they don't really help us understand what's really going on. So I was kind of like, yeah, it's bad.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I think, you know, this whole narrative around ultra-processed food is catching steam. It was sort of invisible until recently with the Maha movement in America and Bobby Kennedy talking about it and now Trump talking about it. It's a thing. And ultra-processed food has become the new cigarette and the target for a lot of potential policy changes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So the commercial determinants of health framework, tell us how you see that playing out and unpack that a little bit. Because I think people don't understand the way in which they're being taken advantage of, the way in which they're being manipulated by both commercials, marketing, the design of the food, the pernicious ways they subvert policy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I mean, this is not just, oh, we just made these foods and we didn't know that they were a problem. They're actively trying to protect their territory and to... to kind of advance their products in the face of overwhelming research that they're harmful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We have our- What does Coca-Cola make that you eat, only drink?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, I'm not making this up. Well, I know McDonald's paid a friend of mine who was sort of a healthy eating proponent a million dollars to be their advisor. A year. That's so painful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And yet there's still some controversy about the definition, whether it's the right classification to use, whether or not it's valid, and whether we should be focused on other aspects of nutrition like glycemic load or fiber content or other macronutrient ratios to actually explain what ultra-processed food is. does or doesn't do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think you're right. I mean, just speaking truth to power is key, and I think exposing the nefarious ways in which the food industry acts often can help people understand that this is not their fault. And the big talking points of big food has been essentially, it's your fault you're fat. Number one, all calories are the same. It's all about moderation. Eat less, exercise more.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And implicit in those talking points, which, by the way, have been used by government leaders, by scientists, by doctors that have bought it, is that all food is the same. You could have 1,000 calories of Coca-Cola or 1,000 calories of almonds, and it's exactly the same. Now, that's true in a laboratory. If you burn them, they release a certain amount of energy. which is what a calorie is, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one liter of water, one degree centigrade. It's just a scientific term. But when you consume them, it's very different. A calorie burn is a calorie burn, but a calorie eaten is not a calorie eaten, to quote my friend Robert Lustig.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And when you actually get that, it's like, wow, well, when you eat a food, it has to go through your microbiome, the molecules that regulate your hormones, the immune system, neurotransmitters, all are affected by the kind of food you're eating. And then people don't realize that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
What's strange to me also is that the food that they make in the United States is far worse than the food that they make, the same kind of food they make in Europe or even the UK. Like Kraft macaroni and cheese is full of artificial dyes and chemicals in the US, but it's not in the UK.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Or if you look at the amount of ingredients or additives we have in the United States, it's like 10,000 different food additives, where in the European Union, it's about 400. Maybe 10,000 are somehow more broken down into subclassifications and maybe it's not 10,000, maybe it's 5,000, but still a lot of things that are unregulated, that are not proven. And by the way, people don't understand this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And there's a lot of data that you've kind of write about in your book, Ultra Processed People, which is by the way, a great book, everybody should get a copy of it, that kind of outlines a lot of the harms that are done.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The way these things get into the food is the food company goes, hey, this food, the ingredient we've found is safe, FDA. And FDA goes, oh, great, cool. Well, regulate it as a safe to eat substance. Generally recognize as safe. Whereas imagine if they did that for drugs. Imagine the drug company said, hey, we just developed this new drug. It's safe. And the other thing goes, oh, cool, great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Let's just prove it. That's exactly what happens with food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Yeah. And there's things that are in foods that are ultra-positive that aren't even on the label, like microbial transglutaminase is basically gluten. It's put in foods to make the food hold together. Gluten is like glue. And so they use it in industrial food and they grow it in bacteria and it's a form of gluten.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And then we've seen this incredible rise in gluten sensitivity and celiac disease, you know, potentially can create leaky gut. And We know that also ultra processed food has adverse effects in the microbiome, increases inflammation and so forth. But that transglutaminase is something that's not on the label.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Or there's emulsifiers in food that are most of these processed foods that, you know, make the food have a good mouthfeel and make it all sort of the right texture. And these compounds have been shown to cause leaky gut, autoimmune disease and many other inflammatory conditions. And yet, you know, we don't regulate them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And there's just even more recent studies that showed that ultra processed food is linked to 32 different kinds of health conditions from heart disease to mental health issues to type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer, sleep issues, GI issues, dementia, the list goes on and on. And if
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
If that's accurate, and these are observational studies usually mostly, which are population studies, don't prove cause and effect. But if that association turns out to be causal, then this is a huge nuclear bomb when it comes to our health. It's kind of the smoking gun of why we're getting sicker and fatter and costing our governments around the world more and more money.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think that getting rid of the conflicts of interest and the reverse incentives that exist is a big part of the solution. I think about this a lot, and you're right. There's not just one policy solution that's going to fix it all.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We need to start from the field and how we grow food, what we grow, how we subsidize agriculture, to how we incentivize companies to make better food, to how we educate people about what's in their food, how we warn them with labels, etc. Anybody, my wife was in Mexico.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
She sent me a picture of like some food product and said, you know, here's all the warning labels that this is not safe to eat for children at the bottom. Like it was all these warning labels. I was like, that's really good. You know, that'll probably stop a mother from buying that food for their kid. And yet, you know, in America, we don't have any of that. And people don't know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I think this is what makes me so upset is that people really don't understand. So if you're an individual who's listening and you want to not be caught in the web that the food industry has spun to catch you to eat these foods, what are the few things you can do personally to actually empower yourself to stop doing this?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And how do you sort of take back control of your diet and simple changes they can make to kind of actually not eat these stuff?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
This is independent media. This is a podcast. No one tells me what to say or do. I can say whatever I want. I can say any words I want. I can name any companies I want.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And the question for you is, how did you first come to understand that this was an issue? And then I'd love you to share your own personal experience, because you actually decided not to just research this issue, not just talk about it and write about it. You did something that I would never do, is you ate ultra-processed food for a month.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
They pay attention. I mean, they write articles about me. The Corn Refiners of America sent me nasty gram letters. I mean, it's interesting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
That's a great experiment. Actually, actually, just before we go to the lawsuits, I just want to tell you a story. I had a friend of mine who's a, worked as a nutritionist and he was a psychologist of nutrition. And he had a patient who was trying to help lose weight. And the patient's like, I'm really busy. I want to lose weight, but I'm really going so fast in my life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I just stop it like Burger King. I get my, you know, whatever big whopper every night. And I, this is what I do. And I have to do that because I can't, I don't have time to do anything else. He's like,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
okay, what I want you to do is you don't stop eating it, but I want you to go in there and I want you to sit down in the restaurant and I want you to take each bite and savor it and take like at least, you know, 20 chews on each bite and just experience the food you're eating. Think about it, yeah. And he's like, he came back and he was like, this was gross. I couldn't eat it after I did that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, and he just stopped eating it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Yeah, no, I can't bring myself to do that unless it's like actually real food. And then, you know, if it's tortilla chips and some like whatever, it's fine. But it's like, I definitely, it's just, it doesn't look like food to me. It looks like a rock or a piece of wood. Like I wouldn't just eat it. You know, like it's really, my experience has really changed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And it's kind of like supersized me, but kind of a little different. And to try to see what the consequences were. So I'd love you to kind of unpack, you know, first, what was it that got you kind of started thinking about this? Because you're an infectious disease doctor. And two, you know, what was the experiment like and what happened to you? And we'll start with that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
When I go buy like a case of delicious looking processed things, like you see in like the window of a Starbucks, you know, kind of, at the front of the store. It doesn't look like food to me. And I just, I don't, I don't even, I'm not even attracted to think about it. And it's because I think I've reset my nervous system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So this has to get fixed. And if it doesn't get fixed, the consequences are pretty grim for society, for the world, not just America, but everywhere, which is now being the receptacle of the inventions that happen here and elsewhere. And it's like America's created the worst diet on the planet and exporting it to every country. It's our biggest export.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The countries, there's a few countries that don't have
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
fast food i don't know if it's like minimar minimar or like what used to be burma or it's north korea north korea right like they don't have any of these problems it's quite interesting right like we've we've we've embargoed them and and and had sanctions on them and we don't allow them to trade with us and so they can't get all this stuff that that is in all over china by the way now and you've got you know i remember when i i
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I went to China in 1984 and there wasn't anybody overweight. And then I went back, you know, a few years ago and it's like, wow. And now they've gone from like, you know, one in 150 people with type 2 diabetes to one in 10, which is almost approximating what we have in the U.S. And it's because we basically exported our Western diet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think I had to dive into the data and the research a little bit more.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Same thing in the Middle East, you know, they were nomads, you know, healthy, fit, drinking camel milk and, you know, eating camel meat and herding their sheeps and goats. And then within a generation, they had enormous wealth and they were able to purchase a lot of the things that we have in the West today. just not genetically adapted to that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And they have now one in four people there have diabetes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
so the lawsuit yeah well that's really important i mean because that's how tobacco was stopped wasn't through legislation and regulation it was these class action lawsuits that brought them down and it painted the industry as acting in a corrupt and criminal way and i in the it's astounding to me in the u.s we don't have to have a there was a cigarette was the boogeyman is ultra processed food the boogeyman we should go over and attack or is it something else
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
gut barrier integrity, and even heart health through the gut-liver axis. But here's what's really exciting. Research now shows that gut health directly impacts skin health through the gut-skin axis. Seeds DS01 contains targeted strains clinically validated to support clear, hydrated skin from within. As a member of Seeds' clinical board, I've seen the science behind their formulations.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
In the US and the UK, it is- Just go to Appalachia where Mountain Dew is the beverage of choice.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Yeah, no, I've been involved with talking to some lawyers who are doing class action lawsuits against ultra processed food and these companies. And I think the discovery is key. And I think as I was researching my book, Food Fix, I got a lot of FOIA requests for documents, which, you can get from the government.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So in other words, all government documents, unless they're classified or available to the public, a bit of a pain in the ass. You have to go through the Freedom of Information Act and ask for them. But for example, you can get emails from the CDC with Coca-Cola. Like Coca-Cola is not going to give you their emails, but the CDC has emails from Coca-Cola and you can read their
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And they have to release them. And they're like, yeah, well, we're funding you and we're doing this and we're doing that. It's like, it's kind of crazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think when people start to understand that they're being taken advantage of, that they're being used, that they're being manipulated, that they're being controlled, that their health's undermined, that their well-being's undermined, their financial security's being undermined because if you're sick, you can't work and be a productive member of society, both on an individual level and also on a societal level, what we're doing to society with this burden of chronic disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, I've been a doctor for 40 years. This has all happened in my lifetime. I graduated from medical school. There was not a single state with an obesity rate over 20%. Now there's not one under 30 and most are over 40. It's astounding.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I know, 40 years is a long time. Like, wow, I'm old, you know, but that's okay. I'm still kicking.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I mean, there are problems with the definition and there are arguments and You know, often we'll get disputed by the food industry. But I think if you're going to have a catalyzing concept for Americans or for the world, I think it's useful. And I think it somehow has to be embedded in the way we think about policy and how we shape policy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And we'll have an offline conversation because, you know, I'm involved in some of the policy conversations of what do we do next in America because policy We have this opportunity, whether we like who's in power or not, to actually do something. And with people who are very aware, like I know the commission of the FDA very well. You know, I know Robert F. Kennedy very well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I know Dr. Oz, who's head of Medicare, very well. We've been friends for 22 years. Like all of a sudden, the kids have the keys to the candy store. What are we going to do? And how do we how do we do the right things and not do the wrong things? Which is, you know, this is fraud. It's a landmine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
kind of covered territory where we're trying to navigate to the right policies that make the biggest difference with the most leverage that have the greatest impact on the health of the population and not be too punitive or too oppressive to the population or to taxation. So it's a very interesting moment. And, you know, this concept has been around for a while, but now it's sort of like
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It sort of caught the national imagination here. And I think I'm happy for that. I'm a little concerned that, you know, the food industry is so big, so powerful. They're so on target. I mean, they're so deliberate about their messaging. They're so good at their propaganda to confuse and confound people, to sort of discredit people who are making these claims like you or me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So it's pretty interesting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think it's like nine big food companies really control almost all the market. And they own all the other companies that you might think are healthy brands. And they buy them up. Like General Mills, for example, bought up Epic meat bars, which are, you know, regenerative, organic, you know, grass fed, you know, bison bars, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And so they're like, they kind of have this sort of... It's like buying innocent smoothies, you know?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Chris, I could talk to you for hours about this. We haven't had to do it again. It's an exciting moment because I think both in the UK, around the world, governments, people are starting to pay attention. I'm very interested when this report comes out on the commercial determinants of health, if it'll sway governments to change their behavior.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But we can see across South America, they've been extremely forward about this. Canada, Countries like the UK already are doing things like banning a lot of marketing. They're already kind of doing better food labeling. So we have a lot to learn from what's going on around the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And I think you're right about the political framing of this as a choice, as autonomy, as freedom of speech, all these things that people care about. You can actually kind of frame it in the right way so that it actually makes sense. And again, nobody's talking about banning anything. It's about how do we tell people what's what so they make a choice that's good for them. I love that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So it's such a delight. Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Yeah. Keep up the good work. Let's care notes. Let's talk about policy more. Let's talk about lawsuits. I'll get you offline. I want to talk to you about the right strategies going forward because we have this very moment that's both filled with possibility and fraught with danger.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think it's an interesting moment and we're at the precipice of potentially doing something that could shift things and we'll see. I'm very pleased you're in the discussion and thank you so much for having me on today. And everybody definitely check out Chris's book, Alter Process People.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Hopefully that's not you, but if it is for sure, you want to read the book and keep up with his academic work and his policy work. Do you have a place where people can find you or learn more about what your work is?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Great to talk to you, Chris, and we'll see you soon. Mike, it's such a pleasure. Fatigue, bloating, heartburn, stubborn fat. Are you sick of feeling like crap? I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and I have a remedy that's helped thousands eliminate these frustrating symptoms and more almost overnight. It's called the 10-Day Detox and it can be seriously life-changing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
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Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
That's drhyman.com forward slash detox. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And new research shows Seeds DS01 supports short-chain fatty acid production, which is key for gut barrier function, immune health, and healthy aging. If you're ready to optimize your gut health, Seed is offering my community 25% off your first month. Just head to seed.com slash hyman and use code 25-hyman at checkout.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So you just didn't rely on your subjective feeling about how hungry or full you were. You actually measured the hormones like ghrelin and leptin that actually tell you whether or not you're full or hungry biologically.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Yeah, ethically, you know, it's like you're feeding people what you know is hurting them. It's a little tricky, but people are willing to do it. I think for science, that's amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
That's interesting because I think, you know, people would say, well, it's not the ultra processing. It's just the crappy food. And it's the high glycemic load or the lack of fiber or, you know, the macronutrients that are different and the calories that are different. And if you just ate a high glycemic diet, like sugar and white flour that was organic or, you know, like...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
That's seed.com slash hyman with code 25-hyman for 25% off your first month of Seeds DS01. Did you know there's a newly discovered essential nutrient that could be the missing piece to your long-term health? It's called C15, and it's changing the way we think about aging.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And this is the NOVA classification developed by Montero from Brazil, which is now part of their standard dietary guidelines, as well as Canada and other countries that are using this as their metric for food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Yeah, which people crave. It's hard because they crave those foods when they have insulin resistance.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So the body actually does not need them biologically to thrive even though it's our main fuel source. So historically we've been adapted to a whole range of diets from the Inuits and the basic ketogenic diet to the Pima Indians who were 80% carbohydrates but it was all high fiber plant-based carbohydrates that were really nutrient dense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
I mean, it's such a simple notion, and yet it's bucking against the establishment paradigm that we should be using drug therapy in high-carbohydrate diets and diabetics. I mean, I think the ADA is starting to come along, the American Diabetic Association, but it's really tough.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, when you look at the data, to me, it's pretty clear that if you use drug therapy, that it is a progressive chronic disease and you can mitigate or slow the complications, but it's not going to prevent them. And if you use the dietary therapy, it goes away.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And, you know, I think people might be listening going, well, you know, Gary, you're giving these people a ketogenic diet when 75, 80% of their diet is fat. What about their heart? and maybe say their diabetes, but actually they looked at over 20 cardiovascular biomarkers as part of the Virta study and they were all improved. Actually, they got better. And I've seen this over and over.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
I had a patient which was really struggling with weight loss and she had prediabetes, she had triglycerides of 3 plus 100 or HDL was very low and her total cholesterol was over 300, very high insulin levels. rising blood sugar, and I'm like, why don't you try a ketogenic diet? And she did it. Not only did she lose 20 pounds, but her cholesterol dropped 100 points.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So the body can survive and thrive on many different things and the quality of the calories matter, which is really the thesis of your book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. And I think most people don't understand that they actually can regulate their biology if they figure out what their particular metabolic type is, because everybody's different.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. Her H2O went up 30 points. Her blood sugar normalized. Now, that may not work for somebody else who's a thin guy who is an athlete. And I've seen people who use the ketogenic diet like that who actually don't do well. And I'm one of those guys. If I eat too much of the wrong fats, my cholesterol goes off the rails.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
We don't, we don't, unless we look inside your arteries and then we can tell.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Yeah, so it's just fascinating. I think this is really an important moment in history because we have this craze of Ozempic, of Agobi, Manjaro. It's the golden child of the moment of pharmacology. And nobody's really talking about the issue that matters, which is what we're eating and why we're eating what we're eating.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
No, it's not a willpower problem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Well, no, I mean, we know there's real addiction with these foods that the, whatever you call them, food like substances or ultra processed food or high starch and sugar foods, they activate the brain centers for pleasure. And we can map that on brain imaging studies. So there's no doubt that these have biological effects on the brain that drive our behavior, our cravings, our appetite.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But I think what's really remarkable as a doctor treating these patients is that when you do the right thing, their brain chemistry changes, their hormones change, their metabolism changes, and they don't actually have those cravings. It's not like they have to use willpower to fix it, use science.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And for example, I need a little more carbohydrates because I'm kind of thin and if I don't eat them and I go keto, I'll lose too much weight. But if I take a patient who's overweight and type 2 diabetic, they're going to do really well if I do that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
I take it every night and I notice the difference. Try it for yourself at bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMEN10 for 10% off your order. When you have diabetes, you become carbohydrate intolerant. It doesn't mean all of us are born that way, but we become that way because we live in a sort of a soup of sugar and starch that's washing over us for decades.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And that leads to the development of this metabolic dysfunction. And the solution is to kind of reverse that trend by restricting carbohydrates and increasing fats. And tell us sort of how... that works and why we kind of got so far away from it. Cause it was the treatment, you know, a hundred years ago, and now we're coming back to it as the treatment.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Um, and explain the biology behind the science of, of ketogenic diets as a diabetes reversal treatment.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
What if I told you there's a mineral that acts like a spark plug for your body, powering your brain, heart, muscles, and even your mood, and most of us are running on empty? That mineral is magnesium, and it's involved in over 600 biochemical reactions, from regulating stress to boosting energy, sleep, and digestion, but not all magnesium supplements are created equal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And the way you do that is by basically restricting carbohydrates and adding a lot of fat. Now, it's not the bacon and, you know, kind of cheeseburger diet, right? There's a healthy way to do this. It doesn't mean you have to be eating a lot of food that may not be great for you. And so I think people are often thinking, oh, fat is bad. You know, fat makes me fat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
You know, if we eat fat, you get fat. And there's this whole mythology we had about that. And in fact, that was sort of the prevailing theory for so long. And now it's shifted. And we understand that actually for these metabolically dysfunctional people, which is most of America, that we're eating way too many refined starches and sugars. I mean, carbohydrates are also vegetables, so there's no...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
harm in eating vegetables, but the starch and sugar and the refined carbohydrates are the ones that are driving this problem. And so the solution is restricting those. And you're saying you don't always have to be fully ketogenic. You can be very low carb. And I've seen this too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
I mean, I had a patient at Cleveland Clinic who was type two diabetic on insulin for 10 years, you know, had heart failure, had kidney starting to fail, fatty liver, hypertension, had multiple stents put in for cardiac disease and was on 20,000 of coping medications. Her body mass index was 43, which is huge. person and her A1C blood sugar average was 11.2.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And, and, and we just didn't put on a keto diet, but since she just took off, you know, grains and beans, sugar, processed food, put her on lots of good fats, olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds, healthy protein, lots of veggies, fiber. And it was about 50% fat, not 75 or 85% fat, which is what most keto diets are. And within three days, she was off her insulin.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
In three months, she was off her medications. Her A1C went from 11.2 to 5.5, which is normal. Her ejection fraction went to normal. Her kidneys got better. Her fatty liver got better. Her blood pressure got better. In a year, she lost like 116 pounds.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So without Ozempic, without a gastric bypass, simply by getting the group support, which we did, and by using kind of a very low-carbohydrate diet that was a very anti-inflammatory diet. So what I'm hearing you say is it doesn't have to be always ketogenic, but it has to sort of be matched to that person's state of metabolic dysfunction.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And the more sick you are, the probably the higher dose of drug you need in a sense, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, and again, it's interesting when you're talking about how you, you, you're, um, sort of able to execute on things in the sense that you learned when your research around these hormones and molecules that regulate appetite, like adiponectin and leptin. and the inflammatory molecules that are produced by your fat cells. And that was sort of where your Wecho's was.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And what we're learning is that the application of the right nutritional approach in metabolic dysfunction actually automatically regulates those hormones. Rather than having to take Ozempic, which artificially does this, your body can naturally change the levels of the appetite and fullness hormones that are driving this overeating behavior that is driven by the carbohydrates.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So like when you eat more sugar and starch, you want more sugar and starch. When you eat I mean, I would say nobody can, you know, eat, you know, 12 avocados, but anybody can eat, you know, a whole bag of Chips Ahoy cookies, right? So it's just like no limit on that. And I think the body has this natural ability when you feed it in a way that it's designed to work.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But they don't meet the actual criteria of the definition of food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
It actually resets and it's not willpower. It's just science. So can you explain how that works?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So what's interesting is that you said something that I want to highlight and double click on, which is that when you eat in the right way, you naturally increase your GLP-1 peptides, which are regulating your appetite and that you don't have to take Ozempic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And what you also said, Sammy, earlier was that you're achieving Ozempic-like results without taking the drug, without all the side effects and without all the costs.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And so can you kind of explain what, and we talked about this when we were hanging out in person in Aspen, you know, the data that shows that, you know, out there, the pharmaceutical companies are funding billions of dollars of research on these GLP-1 agonists and other related peptides.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
around a whole spectrum of diseases from depression to autoimmune disease, to neurodegenerative diseases, to longevity, to obviously weight loss and diabetes, to cardiovascular disease. And they're trying to get all these studies done to get indications for these other applications of these drugs.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But what you're saying when I heard you say was that using this nutritional approach, you can actually achieve all the same types of outcomes. And it's not the drug itself. It's actually... the change in your metabolic health. Can you explain more about that, maybe, Grishman, how that works?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Just like sugar, when you think about sugar, we never had exposure to the amount of sugar we're eating now historically as species. We never had 10% of our diet being refined soybean oil before. It's a new phenomena for humanity. And maybe it's okay, maybe it's not, but I think it should be questioned.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
That's right. Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I'd love to hear your perspective as an endocrinologist, Grishma, about the GLP-1s and their utility, but also their risks. And I sort of
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
whether or not they're really necessary if we actually got our nutrition right and we got the delivery system right, which is this continuous care model to support people and behavior change, because that's the biggest thing. And this sort of conversation you just mentioned, Sammy, reminded me of a study I read that looked at gastric bypass.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And they did a controlled study where they took a group of obese patients. Half of them got bypass and half of them didn't. But the diet that the bypass patients got after their surgery was the same diet that the non-bypass patients got And they both reversed their diabetes within a couple of weeks. It wasn't the diet. It wasn't the surgery. It was the food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And I hear you saying the same thing about the GLP-1. So I'd love for you to share from an endocrinologist's perspective what your thinking is about this, where they play a role. And actually, is this approach of very aggressive nutritional intervention with the continuous care model of lifestyle support and behavioral change actually better? And how do we think about that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Can you talk about that? Like you talk about the Virta Health work and Sarah Halberg's work and the sort of work on advanced type 2 diabetes, where they actually were able to reverse it, not just slow it down or delay the complications or to manage the disease, but literally to reverse it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But is your belief that if people were able to adhere to a diet that was right for them, that these drugs are redundant?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Yeah, I know. Absolutely. I mean, the health disparities are huge. And there's a whole food inequity issue and nutrition security issue.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So how do we think about type 2 diabetes from a functional medicine perspective? What's the root cause? Functional medicine is all about root cause. The root cause is something called insulin resistance. And this comes from eating a diet that's high in sugar, refined flour, grains, ultra processed food. There's no doubt about this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Also from lack of exercise and being sedentary, not moving enough, or being under-muscled, right? Muscle is your metabolic spanks, according to my friend JJ Virgin. And how do you address that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Well, you eliminate ultra-processed food, processed grains, refined grains and starches, sweets, sugar, sweetened beverages especially, and that improves your blood sugar balance and your insulin sensitivity. And what should you be eating then? Good quality protein, and it can be meat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
That's my view of the literature, not my opinion, but it's pretty much evidenced by the randomized control trials. Fiber, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, sometimes whole grains. If you're not fully blown diabetic, healthy fats, olive oil, avocado oil, macadamia oil, none of these will affect your blood sugar.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And then you want to use testing to test your fasting glucose, your fasting insulin, your A1C, triglycerides, and other markers to understand of your insulin resistance. Now, I co-founded a company called Function Health. You can go to functionhealth.com. We've created an initial test of over 110 biomarkers. It's $4.99 a year membership and includes testing twice a year.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And you get all the metabolic markers you need. You get insulin, which your doctor almost never tests, A1C, your blood sugar, but you also look at lipid particle size. We call it lipoprotein fractionation. Not just your regular cholesterol profile, but whether or not you have small particles, dense particles, large or small triglycerides or HDL.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
All these will tell you about your cardiometabolic health. We also measure inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein and others. So you get a really good understanding of where you're at. So go and check it out. Go to functionhealth.com. You can use the code YOUNGFOREVER if you want to jump the wait list.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But it's really a way to get testing to see what's going on with you and what's going on with your diet. So again, test, don't guess. Now, it's no secret that navigating the realm of nutrition has become a challenge for the general public and even for people like me and health professionals who've been studying this for 30 years. One week, eggs are good for us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Only to be vilified for allegedly raising cholesterol levels the next week. The narrative on dietary fats is no less tumultuous. And I wrote a whole book on this called E-Fat Can't Get In. Some experts say that it's the chief culprit behind heart disease. Others say it's critical for overall health and well-being.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Well, more recently, a study made headlines linking red beet consumption to an increased risk for type 2 diabetes, leaving the public once again confused and understandably so. And that's why in today's Health Bytes episode, we're diving deep into the findings from this paper and unpacking the study's design flaws. It's inaccuracies. And where the researchers got it straight up wrong.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
The study was entitled Red Meat Intake and the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in a Prospective Cohort Study of United States Females and Males, published in October of 2023. Now, this was a type of study design. It's important to understand study design because you have to understand science before you can interpret science.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And you have to understand the type of studies that are done and which can show cause and effect and which can show correlation, not causation. For example, every day I wake up and the sun comes up. It's 100% correlated, but it's 0% causal. If I die tomorrow, the sun's going to keep coming up. If I slept through the middle of the day, the sun's going to keep coming up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So it has nothing to do with each other. And essentially, that's what these observational studies like this particular study did. They looked at correlation, not causation. And that means that we can't prove cause and effect. So when you hear the headline red meat is linked to causing type two diabetes, it's BS. Okay. We have to look at what the data show when it doesn't.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And these studies are not wrong. They're not bad to do. They're done in order to help us understand what might be a useful avenue for further research, right? They're not the end of the research. They're useful for generating hypothesis. For example, in the study of smoking and lung cancer, they did observational studies, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
They weren't going to do a randomized controlled trial because they're not going to have people on cigarettes and have people not on cigarettes. So basically, they found that there was a 20-fold increase, maybe 10 to 20-fold increase in the risk of lung cancer in smokers. Now, to put that in perspective, that's a 1,000 to 2,000% increase in your risk of having a particular disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And that ended up being correct because it was such a strong correlation. Whereas in this red meat diabetes study, to cut to the punch, it was about a 20% increase, right? Which essentially is relatively meaningless. And let's just say 200% increase in a correlation study, you pretty much want to ignore the data. And Dr. Ioannidis from Stanford has written a lot about this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
is an incredible scientist whose I dissected the value of different types of studies and what we can learn from them and what we can't. So we have to start out really understanding that the study was not designed by its very nature, which all scientists would agree to prove cause and effect. It's just the nature of science. Okay, so let's get into the study.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
This is what we call a prospective cohort study. And it's an observational study, a population study, an epidemiological study, all means the same thing. Essentially, it studies a group of individuals over time to look at the association between certain exposures, behaviors, diets and risk factors on specific outcomes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So basically, they track thousands of people over many, many years, looked at what they ate and saw if there was a correlation with diabetes. And lo and behold, they found one. But let's talk about the problems with why this may not actually be as clear as the study seems to generate. Now, in this type of study, basically, people are
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
identified based on their exposure status, and then they're followed over time to observe and record outcomes. In other words, what did people eat over many decades and what was that diet and was it correlated with any bad outcomes later in life?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So you follow people for 30 years, you have them track their diet records, which we'll talk about in a minute, and then you see whether or not a particular food or types of food
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
seems to correlate not cause correlate with some bad outcome like diabetes and that's what they did and basically the goal is just to assess relationships between various insults exposures toxins smoking diet whatever and outcomes so it essentially looks for things that may be worth further studying with a randomized control double-blind trial. Okay, this was not done here.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, it can be helpful, but they say, well, we're going to control for variables we call confounding variables, which means things that kind of can throw the study off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
In other words, and we'll talk about this, but for example, there was a study done many years ago by the NIH and the ARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, that looked at meat eating and chronic disease and death and cancer and so forth. They found a big correlation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But that study showed also that the people who ate meat didn't care about their health and smoked more, drank more, ate more calories, about a hundred more a day, were more overweight, didn't eat fruits and vegetables, didn't exercise, drank more alcohol, didn't take their vitamins. Of course they had more disease. It wasn't because of the meat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
It was just a problem that was shown because of these confounding variables. And we'll talk more about that. Now this study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and it was published by folks at Harvard who are great scientists, but they're focused on epidemiology, particularly at the School of Public Health, which is where the study was published out of.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And unfortunately, people have bias, and the study authors are very biased toward a plant-based diet. And so right off the bat, you kind of look at, all right, well, they already have a bias, and that affects the study, the outcome study. So basically the objective of the study was to assess the link between total processed and unprocessed red meat intake and type 2 diabetes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And then to estimate the effect of substituting different protein sources like vegetable proteins, nuts, seeds, beans, grains, for red meat and type 2 diabetes risk. So work doing, but again, just a hypothesis generating study. Now, again, this was a population study.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
It was based on the Nurses' Health Study, which was about 216,000 participants, the first and the second one, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which was including men. Now, the first study started in 1976, female nurses, and then another one in 89, female nurses, and the Health Professionals Study was started in And they followed people for a long period of time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
They calculate the amount of years and people, and they come up with a number called about 5.4 million person years. So that's pretty good. And what they did was really interesting. They looked at something called a food frequency questionnaire. And this assesses that people's diet every two to four years from the baseline.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
now can you remember what you had last thursday for lunch okay do you remember the amount of this or that you had over the last week probably not right and so these are are flawed uh tools and this is a lot of research and science about how flawed these tools are and how imperfect they are and how often they are very misleading we see that in this study so the study findings right just to to be clear and this is association
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
correlation, not causation. They found between the lowest and the highest red meat intake, there was a risk of diabetes that went up by 62%, right? Not 200%, 62%. Processed meat associated with 51% and unprocessed red meat was about 40% risk. If you substituted one serving of nuts or beans, then your risk was 30% lower.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
If you substituted for processed red meat, the risk was 41% lower, and unprocessed meat was about 29% lower. So they're basically saying if you had one serving of dairy for total processed or unprocessed red meat, you had a lower risk of type 2 diabetes. Now, this study is really important because it kind of misses a lot of the point. What is the mechanism here?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, they try to explain some of the mechanisms, but it's pretty weak. We know that the sugar that you eat, sugar and refined carbohydrates, is the primary cause of type 2 diabetes. not red meat. And ancestrally, we've been eating meat for as long as we've been human. I just came back from the Maasai population in Africa, as I mentioned on different podcasts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And these people ate the blood, the milk, and the meat of their cows. That was their main diet. They were healthy, they were super thin, they were very fit, and they had no diabetes. I recently visited their community, and the Coca-Cola truck drives up every day. They get processed cookies from the local town that are made by the industrial food system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And now they're gaining weight and type 2 diabetes is rampant in this Maasai community in Africa. And it's just heartbreaking to see that within minutes, this entire Coca-Cola truck, a big truck, just was emptied out by the local population, not knowing what they were doing themselves. And they didn't even know that it was connected.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So, you know, basically this study fueled a lot of click-plate headlines. For example, a WebMD said, just two servings of red meat per week raises diabetes risk. Well, that doesn't. It shows that it's correlated, but not causing. Eating red meat more than once a week is linked to type 2 diabetes risk. That's CBS. This is just bad reporting and bad journalism.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And the social media was just all over the place, right? Some people were pro-red meat, some people anti-red meat. People were super confused. And then nobody knows who to believe. And everybody's distrusting public health and dietary guidelines. And it's just a mess.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So I'm going to try to unpack it for you so you really understand how to think about this and also how to actually know what to believe around this whole issue of red meat and diabetes and what we know. So... Basically, the problem with this study, as we mentioned, is an observational study. And we just cannot draw conclusions from an observational study. It doesn't prove causality.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And we have to look at also the limitations of the study. There are a lot of limitations. The study authors, for example, as I mentioned, are very biased toward a plant-based diet and veganism. how they pick the participants of the study, which may not be an issue. Industry funding, we want to look at. That probably was an issue here.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
That's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough by Bioptimizers. It's the only full-spectrum magnesium supplement that includes all seven forms of magnesium your body needs to function at its best.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But there's this thing called recall bias, which is common with food frequency questionnaires. People are more likely to report healthy food than unhealthy food. And desserts, sugar, sweetened beverages, alcohol are underreported. We're going to put all the references for everything I'm saying in the show notes. So have a look at those.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Everything I'm saying is documented, is well researched, and you can kind of dive in. But it would take me about 10 hours if I covered every study in detail. So basically, you know, I thought it was my practice. People overestimate how much extra they exercise and they underestimate how much they eat. It's pretty difficult. My humans are pretty flawed. Now, the 2012 study
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Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
from red meat consumption and mortality, looked at prospective cohort studies, found that people that eat a lot of red meat, about the highest 20%, had a 45% high risk of dying from heart disease compared to those who ate the least red meat, the lowest 20%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
However, when they looked more closely at the people in these extreme groups, they noticed that besides eating red meat, they had other habits that made them more likely to have heart disease, like don't exercise, they ate too much, they smoked, their cholesterol was worse, or they maybe had fish consumption, which affected their health and risks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
For example, maybe the people in their lowest risk group exercised and didn't eat meat, but they also didn't smoke and they also ate healthier food. So you can't quite tell what's going on. So the study supports the idea that eating a lot of red meat is linked to high risk of heart disease. People who choose to eat more or less red meat have other lifestyle issues that influence their health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, there are other factors, these confounding variables I mentioned. When you look at confounding variables, they try to control for these, but it's really tough. And they only control what we just think to control for. And it basically makes it really hard to determine true cause and effect.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Like I mentioned with the ARP study, they smoked more, they drank more, they ate less fruits and vegetables, they didn't exercise and all these other issues. That's why they had more disease, not because of the meat. So it's basically other issues with the study could be design flaws. And maybe the study population is different from the regular population. So it may not be widely generalizable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And also, they do all these weird statistical calibrations to normalize the data. And we're going to talk about what that means. And they did this in that study. There was, I think, a scientist named Roger Williams who said there's... Liars, damn liars, and statisticians. Or maybe that was Mark Twain. I don't know. But I think it's true.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
You can kind of manipulate the data to make it show what you want. And that's clearly been done here. And the other thing this study does is it actually supports dietary guidelines to limit red meat consumption. And why does it say that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
I mean, the study basically said, our study supports the current dietary recommendations for limiting the consumption of red meat intake and emphasizes the importance of different alternative sources of protein for type 2 diabetes prevention. But dietary guidelines, just like this study, are heavily based on observational data, the data that can't prove cause and effect.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But while this is happening... But this is an important point, they lost weight and they got worse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And the systematic reviews and meta-analysis of observational data are the weakest types of studies, right? There's confounders, there's bias, there's a lot of problems in the studies. And often the researchers have ties to industry, the expert panels are not independent. It's kind of a mess. So how do we know what to do in science?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Well, randomized control trials are the gold standard for drawing causal inferences between exposure and the outcomes. For example, You know, you give people placebo or blood pressure drug, high blood pressure, and you follow them for three months and you can see, OK, well, the people taking the placebo lower their blood pressure or the people on the pill.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
That's a randomized control trial and you randomize people. So they're not not stacking the deck in favor of, you know, healthier, sicker populations. Now, they're hard to do in nutrition, because you need to control everything. And it's really hard to do. It's great in a lab rat, but it's not really easy in humans, because they're what we call free living, and they do whatever they want.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So you say, well, I want you to eat a low-fat diet, or I want you to eat a low-carb diet, or I want you to exercise 150 minutes a week, or I want you to not smoke, or I want you to sleep eight hours a night, or whatever you want, you tell them, they're not going to probably do it. And it's hard to do. You'd have to basically put people in a locked metabolic ward and put them there for years,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
and give them the food that they eat and track everything they do in order to actually know what's going on, like a lab rat. But we really can't do that. We can't take 10,000 people and feed them a vegan diet and 10,000 people and feed them an omnivore diet, including red meat and healthy foods, follow them for 30 years and give them all the food and track that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
It would be billions and billions of dollars and impossible to do. So it's not practical. It's not ethical. It's expensive. It's hard to recruit volunteers for this. And people just, it's hard to do these nutritional studies. So we have to do the best with the data we have, which are systematic reviews and meta-analysis of randomized control trials, mechanistic studies, lab studies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
There's many different levels of evidence. And you have to look at the total cumulative benefit of all the evidence. So now let's dive into this problem of study design. and what was wrong with this paper and why it does not prove that red meat causes type 2 diabetes. So what they did, as I mentioned before, they gave them a food frequency questionnaire. They're highly inaccurate, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Every two to three years, people get asked, what do they eat? And they get a questionnaire. What's their average intake of food and beverage over the last 12 months? Do you know what you ate over the last 12 months? I couldn't have a clue. I mean, how often do you remember eating X and Y food, right? Do you eat chicken with the skin on it or without the skin?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Do you eat hamburgers, hot dogs, processed meats? They give all these questions. They also, you know, kind of weirdly track things like beef, pork, and lamb as a sandwich or mixed dish. But no serving sizes were noted. You know, sandwiches and lasagna have also bread and pasta, processed carbs. So is that part of it? We don't know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So they basically kind of looked at, you know, what they were eating. The second issue is, and by the way, I can go way more into these food frequency questionnaires, but just trust me, based on the data, we'll put the links in the show notes. They're really highly inaccurate. They've really been proven to not be a good tool for looking at a nutritional difference.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Was it because of how they lost weight?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
intakes over time and don't really correlate with a valid metric for tracking outcomes. So right off the bat, it's a tough study to do. The second issue, and I kind of mentioned it, is that the red meat definition included sandwiches and lasagna, which basically were counted twice as processed and unprocessed red meat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, processed red meat is hot dogs, bacon, meat sandwiches, sausage, unprocessed meat is like hamburgers, beef, pork, lamb, a sandwich. So it's kind of weird. They kind of included other foods in the meat. So we have to be clear. The third issue is the serving sizes change over time. And why? Because the food frequency questionnaires were different in the different parts of the study.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So one was in 1980, one was in 84, one had 61 items, one had 120 items. And they basically change the definitions of what a serving is, even in these food frequency questionnaires. So it's super confusing. So the nurses in the study asked how often they consume two slices of bacon. Now the serving size of bacon is one slice, but before it was two slices, right? How do they adjust for this?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
One serving of processed red meat is considered 45 grams. How do they measure it? Did they weigh their lunch meat? Did they take their bologna or salami and put it on a scale? I doubt it, right? What about chicken, beef, pork, or lamb? They say six to eight ounces was a serving. Today, one serving is three ounces. Did they know this?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Did they translate a three ounce serving to a six to eight ounce equivalent? Probably not, and it creates more error in the studies. Issue four in the study was that this is really crazy. They use statistics to massage the data to have the outcome they want. It calls this process calibration.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
We're calibrating the results using a seven-day weighted diet record and food frequency questionnaires from two other population studies. In other words, they kind of acknowledge that food frequency questionnaires are not that accurate, so they're going to use other ones to correlate and see if they can kind of create this mishmash of data to show what they want.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So what they found was that this is kind of crazy. The calibration doubled the effect for total red meat, processed meat, and unprocessed red meat. So before the calibration, for example, one serving, an increment of total red meat was associated with a 28% high risk of diabetes. After the calibration, it was 47%. Before the calibration, one serving increment of processed red meat
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
was associated with a 50% high risk of diabetes after it was 101%. So it's like, what are you doing here, right? So guess what number was reported in the headlines? Not the uncalibrated, but the calibrated number, right? Too much red meat is linked to a 50% increase in type 2 diabetes. Well, in NPR, they didn't really do a good job of doing a review of the study.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
They didn't do investigative journalism, which I think is sorely lacking. And basically they found that there's a 50% increase in red meat. So like I said, before the calibration, it was 28%, after it was 47%. So the next issue was the authors compared the lowest intake of red meat to the highest intake, but have historically reported the risk using servings
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And for example, which is a more quantitative metric. So to explain what that means, in the 2011 paper, another one called Red Meat Consumption and the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes, three cohorts of US adults and an updated meta-analysis, they reported 12% increased risk of diabetes for one serving and 32% for processed meat and 14% for total red meat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
But this paper compared the highest and lowest intakes, claiming a 51 percent increased risk for eating unprocessed and 101 percent increased risk for processed and 40 percent for total. But basically, this method using qualitative versus quantitative generated a lot more headline worthy statistics.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So in other words, the way they reported this, it just makes it more sensational and look better for the agenda of having a study show that red meat causes diabetes. Another thing with the studies, the women in this study, right, the NERCEL study compared to the men in this study, show that the women ate more red meat than the men. Now, this is the first study ever to claim this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, typically, every other study has shown the opposite. So what does that mean? Well, I don't know, but it just seems to kind of be a clue that maybe the study is a little wacky and doesn't comport with all the other data we have around meat consumption and being female and male.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
The next issue was the total red meat intake had a higher risk of diabetes than both processed and unprocessed red meat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
that doesn't make sense right if you if you how could this the total red meat be worse than the individual types of red meat when the total is the sum of both of them right so you don't get like one plus one equals three it doesn't make sense so most studies are looking at the risks associated with red meat show that the processed meat is riskier than unprocessed red meat and total red meat
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
the sum falls in between, right? So if you have processed ready meat being a higher risk and unprocessed lower risk, the average risk is gonna be lower, right? kind of a combination. But in this study, they found the opposite, which doesn't make any sense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
If red meat, this process makes you have a higher risk of diabetes and unpressed breast meat lower, then if you add them together, you shouldn't have a higher risk when you combine them. So it doesn't make sense. The next issue of the study was what we call healthy user bias. And I think this is really, really important. Essentially, it's talking about
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
what I mentioned earlier, which is the idea of confounders. This idea of why were the people in the study having more diabetes or not? Was it because of the meat they were eating or a bunch of other habits, right? The people in this study, when you look at their characteristics, they had much higher body mass index. In other words, they were heavier. They were less physically active.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
They were more likely to be smokers and they were less likely to take vitamins, right? So, hmm. Well, of course, they're gonna have more risk, right? So the healthier people didn't eat red meat. Why? Because they thought that red meat is bad. That's the propaganda that we have in our society, which is red meat causes heart disease, red meat causes cancer, so we should be eating less meat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
In fact, we are, which is really another really important point. When you look at the amount of meat we're eating, it's dramatically decreased over the last 30, 40 years, dramatically, because the message in the public health domain has been to eat less meat. But at the same time, what's happened? The risk of diabetes has skyrocketed, right? Just doubled, tripled in different populations.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So how could that make sense? Red meat's going down, diabetes going up. Okay, well, that's a problem. How do we explain that with this study? What was so interesting to me in this study was that they didn't adjust for body weight. or what we call BMI. That's nuts because the group that actually had more diabetes was more overweight. Now, was that attributed to the red meat intake?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
That's what they say, that red meat causes you to gain weight, but there's just no data to support that. I mean, they basically said because the likelihood that weight gain mediates at least part of the association between red meat intake and type 2 diabetes, we did not adjust for adiposity in the primary analysis. In other words,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
they did not actually account for the fact that the people who ate more red meat were more overweight. Now, a lot of other things can cause that, and particularly they do, particularly ultra-processed foods, sugar, and refined carbohydrates. That's clear from the data, not meat. The next issue was grains and sugar were excluded from the characteristics table. That's crazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
How do you actually evaluate the effect of diet if you exclude the very thing that's causing diabetes, namely sugar and refined carbohydrates? They just said, oh, we're not going to include that. Okay, we're not going to look at that. Why? Well, I don't know, but it doesn't make any sense to me. The next problem with the study is that calorie intake was reported extremely low.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Now, this doesn't make sense because people we know eat a certain amount of food. They're not all starving themselves. And in the study, they basically excluded people who ate less than 500 calories a day for women or more than 3,500 calories. They just got rid of them from the house. It's the same thing for men. Men who consume
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
less than 800 calories a day or more than 4,200 calories a day were excluded. And you can see, how do you get these numbers? Well, it's because food frequency questionnaires are so problematic. People will do all kinds of things that show that they're not actually truly reporting on how much or what they ate because they're getting all these extremes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Oh, men are eating 800 calories a day or 4,200 calories a day. It doesn't make any sense. But what was really interesting is the average calorie intake for women was 1200 calories and for men it was 1600 calories. That's not a sustainable diet for people. They're not going to eat that much. They're going to be starving all the time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So it just shows you the flaw in these food frequency questionnaires. They don't show you what people are actually eating. You have very low averages for healthcare practitioners. People, especially nurses, are on their feet all day. So that just kind of makes me want to throw out the study altogether. Because again, how do you rely on data that's so imperfect where your calorie count is so off?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N.com. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at DrMarkHyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions.
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Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
The doctor's going to the bookstore to read self-help books because it's not in the textbooks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code hymen10 for 10% off your order. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And how he got the pre-diabetes was he was using all those goos and energy things that athletes use. To fuel their bodies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Adjusting their medications if they need to.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. There are essential fatty acids. There are essential amino acids. There are no essential carbohydrates.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
That's true. I mean, our practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, I've seen that over and over again. People just don't, on insulin, get off insulin, on meds, get off meds, normalize their weight, normalize their metabolism. Then once he goes down, they went from 11 to five and a half in a few months. I mean, it's quite remarkable. It's quite remarkable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Reversing Diabetes Naturally: The Science Big Medicine Ignored
Who done it and who didn't do it?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
that it's the imbalances in the gut flora that are causing the brain to become irritable. And that's really what you're talking about here is that if you've got imbalanced flora, that your sleep isn't good.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Well, I had a patient And NF1, or maybe actually NF2 now, because both people have said this to me, there's probiotic companies making sleep probiotics. Yeah, I've seen them too. And they said it dramatically increased their deep sleep. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. And I was like, how does that work?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And I think, you know, inflammation also will drive dysfunction of the brain. And most of the brain diseases, and you could argue that sleep is a brain disease, right? Yeah. I mean, it's the brain not doing what it's supposed to do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, autism, ADD, depression, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, these are all inflammatory brain diseases. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
For sure. Rudy Tanzi, actually, you know Rudy Tanzi? He presents an amazing set of data which has to do with a certain population that they've studied that have a gene mutation that prevents inflammation. And on autopsy, these people were cognitively perfectly normal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
On autopsy, their brains were just filled with amyloid, like the worst end case, terminal case of Alzheimer's, but they were perfectly normal cognitively. Which was so striking to me, and it was the inflammation that's really the... The trigger.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
you're with the right doctor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is how the body works. It's just common sense, right? We're one integrated ecosystem. And that's what Leroy Hood has really pioneered, which is the idea of systems medicine and systems biology, where we're a big network of networks. And everything's talking to everything all the time. And so, sleep disruption is sort of
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
the thing that actually, I think, is influenced by so many different factors, like toxins. And I personally had this happen to me. I was the greatest sleeper in the world, and then I got mercury poisoning. And we know mercury toxicity, one of the symptoms is insomnia.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And I don't know how it works, I don't know how it causes it, but we were talking earlier before the podcast started about mitochondria and how many of the things that we are exposed to in the environment are mitochondrial toxins, and that it's energy. The body needs energy to run everything, and I imagine it's critical in sleep regulation as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
That makes me so intimidated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
If you're struggling with stress, poor sleep, or low energy, you might be magnesium deficient, like 75% of people. That's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough by Bioptimizers. Unlike most magnesium supplements, Magnesium Breakthrough gives you all seven essential forms of magnesium for better absorption and real results, deeper sleep, less stress, and more energy.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I take it every night and I notice the difference. Try it for yourself at bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMEN10 for 10% off your order. A lot of times people have restless sleep. They wake up with it all night. They can't go back to sleep and it really affects the quality of your health, their life and everything else.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So sleep is critical to our health, to longevity, to our mental health, to basically every physiological function we have. And it really is important to fix it. So let's talk about what you can do to stay asleep and to sleep more deeply. So we know that poor sleep makes us less productive and makes us tired, hard to focus.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Basically, having sleep deprivation is basically equivalent to being drunk in terms of your performance. I read a study once where there were snipers who were excellent shots and if they had eight hours sleep, they were like 100% accurate. If they had seven hours sleep, they were like 95% accurate. If they had six hours sleep, they were like 70% accurate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And if they were like less than six hours sleep, they were basically like 50%. It's like almost a hit and miss. So not good. Even when you're an expert in something, you can't function when you're tired. So next to sort of nutrition exercise, and maybe even before it's somewhat argue sleep, maybe the fundamental foundation of health and disease prevention and even weight control.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So why, why is it so important? How to, how to the sleep dysfunction lead to changes. Well, there's a very important hormone called cortisol, which is your stress hormone. And, and it helps, um,
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
when it's imbalanced to go up in the morning to get you energetic and focused and do the things you need to do for the day, and at night it's supposed to go down and you're supposed to calm down and relax. Now a lot of people have an inversion where their cortisol's low in the morning, they can't get out of bed, and at night they're tired and wired. Sound familiar?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I bet you have some big experience that I certainly have at different moments in my life. When you get down in bed, you're exhausted, but you can't fall asleep because you're just wired.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It has to do with your adrenal glands and they they're designed to keep things in balance, to regulate your weight, to moderate your stress response, to control blood sugar, regulate inflammation and regulate sleep and wake cycles. So when we're constantly in a state of stress where we're actually often struggling with sleep because of the way in which it affects our sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So when you're, when you're thinking about it, when your cortisol is high, you're running from a tiger, you're in danger, you don't wanna be sleeping, you wanna be alert. And that's the problem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So if your cortisol levels are balanced and they're high in the morning and then low at night, and your blood sugar stays even, we'll talk about why that's important, because fluctuations in blood sugar often will cause midnight or middle of the night wakening.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
But when your cortisol and your body stress response imbalanced, then your pineal gland produces something called melatonin that pulses really strong in the afternoon and the evening, which gets you ready for sleep and lets your cortisol drop off. And then you can feel calm and go to sleep at night and feel sleepy. And if you're healthy and balanced in your circadian rhythms,
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
in your cortisol and melatonin cycles, you'll be fine. But if your cortisol is high in the afternoon or high in the evening, you might feel tired and wired. You want to sleep, but you can't. Or you might fall asleep because you're really tired. And then you wake up in the middle of the night, like between one and four.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And that happens when you sort of go, go, go, go, go, do your email, you're working, working, working and busy. And then you go to bed and you're like, and then you fall asleep because you're exhausted. But you end up, waking up because your body is still in a stress state, there's still high levels of cortisol. So how does stress affect your sleep-wake cycles?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Well, it works in a lot of different ways. Psychological stress can be a big factor, right? Worries about family, work, money, physical stresses, lack of exercise is a stress, believe it or not, too much screen time, junk food, toxic lifestyles, hormonal imbalances, environmental toxins, all these drive increased inflammation, increased brain inflammation, and also increased cortisol.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Because by the way, do you know this? That when you eat sugar or starch, your body responds by jerking up the adrenaline and cortisol levels. So literally eating sugar is a stressful experience to your body. Even if you're getting pleasure and you don't think it's stressful and you're meditating while you're eating sugar, you're still gonna have high cortisol and high adrenaline.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So what are the things that are the two most common things that are screwing up your sleep-wake cycles? It's probably blood sugar imbalances and spikes and crashes in blood sugar and chronic stress. So what should you do to optimize nutrition so you can regulate your stress hormones through food and lifestyle?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And how do you deal with actually regulating sleep throughout the whole night and get high quality sleep? So first thing is our bodies, whether we like it or not, are biological organisms and they run in circadian rhythms and they need to be balanced. So you have to live in rhythm. And I experienced the dangers of not being in rhythm when I worked in the emergency room.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I would sometimes work a seven in the morning till five at night shift. Then I'd work at two in the afternoon till the two in the morning shift. Then I'd work an 11 o'clock at night to a seven in the morning shift. Then I'd work an eight in the morning to an eight in the morning shift, 24 hour shift. I was all over the place. And my whole system became dysregulated.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And ultimately it led to chronic fatigue syndrome and a bunch of other stuff. My system just kind of collapsed because I was pushing through all these circadian rhythms, which have to be in balance for you to be healthy. And whether we like it or not, we tend to do a lot better from our health perspective.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
If we go to bed at the same time, if we wake at the same time, if we eat at the same time, our bodies are designed like that. So you want to make sure that you actually don't eat before bed because that's the worst thing you can do. But you need to make sure you're having meals during a regular time space. So don't eat three hours before bed.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Don't eat a heavy meal before bed because I guarantee you that'll screw up your sleep. Also carbohydrates. I think if you want to actually eat some starchy things like sweet potatoes or some more starchy foods and you can handle it metabolically, Make sure you do it at night because the serotonin levels go up and it helps with sleep when you have your carbohydrates.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
But still, don't eat white flour, sugar, all that processed food. Also, not eating enough is stressful. If your body's not getting enough food, it's also considered a stress. Now, you can do time-restricted eating and you can sort of narrow the window in which you eat for longevity purposes and so on.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
But you also want to make sure you're getting enough food and not actually starving because that will increase cortisol and you'll wake in the middle of the night. Now, if you want to lose weight, you can use what I think is probably the most effective treatment I've ever found, which is the 10-Day Detox Diet. It helped people lose 120, 130, 200 pounds
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It's like a gastric bypass without the pain of surgery, vomiting, and malnutrition. Another thing you can do is get stuff out of your head. Write your worries down at night. So get a little piece of paper or journal or maybe in your phone. Write down all your worries, what you have to do. Your day should be organized for the next day.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Free up your mind so you can actually let go of things and go into a deep, restful sleep. Next, you can try a number of supplements and things that I found very helpful. Magnesium is super important. It's the relaxation mineral. It helps regulate the stress response, helps you regulate cortisol, helps relax your muscles. I recommend two to 400, even more of magnesium glycinate before bed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Glycine also helps with sleep. So you can use glycine and you can use that to help relax the nervous system and your muscles. Next, try some melatonin. Mellow out with a little melatonin. You can use half to up to two to three milligrams of melatonin at night. And that can often help you reset your circadian rhythms, particularly with travel.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Also ashwagandha is an Ayurvedic herb that can be really powerful for resetting cortisol. I use a product called Cortisol Manager, which helps at night to reduce the stress response and improve sleep quality. Also make sure, as I said, to get in rhythm, you know, where you can sleep at the same time. Try to go to sleep before 10. That's the best sleep you can have is before midnight.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Believe it or not, so get in bed by 10, try to be asleep shortly thereafter, 11 at the latest, and try to wake up at the same time every day. Also, make your bedroom completely sleep supportive. For example, make sure you have eye shades or blackout shades on your windows or eye shades on your eyes, earplugs if it's noisy.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Make sure you really take care of creating a carefully controlled environment. Next is caffeine. Some is tolerated okay and metabolize it, others don't. So I encourage you to sort of maybe stop after breakfast, coffee, don't have coffee throughout the day. That's particularly important. If you're still struggling, I would probably just stop coffee and caffeine altogether.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Alcohol definitely screws up sleep. So if you wanna sleep well and you're not sleeping well, quit alcohol, just get off it. It can interrupt sleep, it creates poor sleep quality. Also sunlight is basically great medicine. You know what I mean? Sunlight, I'm gonna go to sleep. No, but 20 minutes of sunlight in the morning
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
without sunglasses on, outdoors, not behind a window, has a big effect on your circadian rhythm. So we are photobiomodulating organisms. The light affects us. It regulates our biology. And it's important to make sure you have a good 20 minutes of light exposure in the morning.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I mean, I remember, honestly, Matthew, because I was in residency and working hard and I was delivering babies, working as a family doctor. I mean, I spent many, many, many nights not sleeping at all. So not even having... two hours of sleep, just not sleeping, and working 36 hours straight. One shift was 60 hours.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So what's... There's deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep and... Exactly.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, and the truth is we're sleeping two hours less than we did 100 years ago per night. And that is an interesting stat. And also the quality of sleep is terrible. And tens of millions of Americans have sleep problems. And it's something that we don't really deal with very well in medicine. We say, oh, take Ambien or take Ativan or take Xanax or whatever. And those have serious consequences.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And they reduce the quality of your life. They increase mortality. They increase... the likelihood of cognitive impairment and cognitive dysfunction, dementia. I mean, these are real issues where people are dependent on these pills. So how do we get from our sleep deprived and disrupted sleep culture? What's causing it to fixing it?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And I remember how I would feel, and I was like, when you force yourself at first, your body's just shutting down, and then you learn how to caffeinate and override your body's sense of needing to sleep. And then you kind of will yourself through. And, you know, the idea is, you know, you're a doctor. You have to be ready to go at any time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And it responds to light and all the artificial light and the fact that we're on screen. It suppresses it. It has to have darkness.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It causes you to lose muscle and gain fat. It causes your sex hormones to get screwy. It has so many horrible effects, and it's not worth getting stressed about stuff. It doesn't matter. There's stuff that does matter that you have to worry about, but the truth is most of the things we react to and stress about are just our beliefs or thoughts. They're not really real, right?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
You have to deal with crisis and pick the right answer and do the right thing and be able to function in the worst conditions, which it's kind of like a Navy SEAL, you know?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, I know it's true. I remember working many nights in the emergency room, delivering babies, being up all night. And the next day, all you want to do is eat carbs and sugar. You know, I'd go to McDonald's and get the apple turnovers and the French fries in the middle of the night. Oh, the apple turnovers. That was the only thing that was open in the hospital. Two for 99 cents.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It was only closed between two in the morning and six in the morning. Otherwise, it was open 20 hours a day. It was the only thing open in the hospital. Can you believe it? And I would go, you know, be sleep deprived and stay up all night. And I totally craved carbs. Wow.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Astronaut food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So what's exciting about your book about sleep is that you break it down. You talk about 21 strategies that are very specific to actually fix your sleep. Because I'm sure many people listening, maybe even half or more, have sleep issues, whether it's not enough sleep, whether it's disrupted sleep, whether it's poor quality sleep, whether it's other more serious things like sleep apnea.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
What if I told you there's a mineral that acts like a spark plug for your body, powering your brain, heart, muscles, and even your mood, and most of us are running on empty? That mineral is magnesium, and it's involved in over 600 biochemical reactions, from regulating stress to boosting energy, sleep, and digestion, but not all magnesium supplements are created equal.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I mean, my daughter's in medical now and she, you know, she called me one morning after one of her first shifts where she had to do this. She's like, I don't want to do this. This is horrible. And I'm like, and I think it's a...
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
People often don't know they have it. So can you walk us through some of the key strategies and what really matters?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Those are blood sugar and blood pressure pills, right?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
What are you missing? Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
You know, the sleep deprivation crisis in America, it's like, it's sort of parallel to the lack of exercise, the crappy diet we have, it's degrading our health, and you combine all those things together with all the chronic stress, it's no wonder we're the sickest and fattest nation in the world, pretty much.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
In a way. Okay, let's dig into that one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
No, that's not a good thing. You know, that's called accident city. That's going to blow people's mind and even my mind. Tell us how the microbiome in your gut affects your sleep and what you can do about it. Absolutely.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Okay.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
All right, so. Those are special cells in your intestinal lining, yes. I'm just translating all the big words, see.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Totally nuts. And the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed, not only is your cortisol high and you lead to more fat accumulation, it stores belly fat, but it actually blocks your cells ability to burn calories because the nerves and the vagus nerve help you metabolize your food, which is the relaxation nerve. It also has the effect of decreasing absorption of nutrients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So not only are you not absorbing, but your metabolism just slows down, which is amazing. It's just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function. So profound. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers, which also terribly disrupt your gut microbiome.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah. What is that? Because eating first sleep, nobody really talks about that. So what does that look like?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I remember that. I mean, when I was like, you know, two in the morning, I'm working in the ER, I'm exhausted. I'm like, give me the sugar.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
What other sources of calcium do we have? Oh my God, you know, when you look at the data on calcium, it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones, but the best absorbability and use is actually from greens, like arugula and greens that we can have, dark green leafy vegetables. Also, there's some great sources like tahini, which is basically ground sesame seeds.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Also, different things people might like, I like, which is sardines with the bones in them. and salmon with the bones in them, like canned salmon. Those are really great to eat because they have a lot of great absorbable calcium. Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
People say, well, you need milk. I'm like, well, where do you think a cow gets their calcium from and has strong bones? Have you ever seen a cow bone? They eat grass.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Although you can have a leaky brain and then you get more trouble.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, it does. It has its own lymphatic system, which is like to clean the brain every night. And guess how you do that? Sleeping. It's 10 times more active. I mean, we know if you don't sleep, you're at much higher risk of Alzheimer's because you can't clear out the garbage and your brain gets toxic. It's fascinating.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Okay. I was like, that's the first one I go to with my patients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah. And it, by the way, magnesium deficiency affects 48% of Americans and it's caused by stress. Yeah. Chronic magnesium deficiency. It's caused by stress. It's caused by coffee, alcohol, and, you know, not having enough in our diet, which comes from mostly plant foods, beans and greens, nuts and seeds. Yeah.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Well, you want to get energy and you want it quick.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah. I remember that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
By the way, most of the tests are very inaccurate. Red cell magnesium is better, but it's mostly symptomatic. And actually, the way we really have to diagnose it is called a magnesium load test, where you give people a high dose of IV magnesium, and then you collect the urine for 24 hours. And if nothing comes out, it means their body sucked it all up.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So, you know, it's, it's, the question is, you know, is, is a sleep deprivation, um, a big part of the cause and I, and because of the decline in sleep, it seems like it may, because I've, I've read these studies, they take young college kids and they basically sleep deprive them and they, they're healthy, but then the ones who get sleep deprived just eat more and eat more sugar and carbs.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And if it all comes out, it means they have enough. So I think, you know, magnesium testing is tricky. So you got to go by the symptoms. Exactly, exactly. That's the thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It's a laxative, milk of magnesia, right? Magnesium citrate is what they give people before they have colonoscopies to clean out their bowels, right? It works.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It's important, and people can overlook symptoms that are all caused by magnesium deficiency, right? Sleeplessness, insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, muscle cramps, menstrual cramps, seizures, arrhythmias, palpitations, all those things are caused by magnesium deficiency. It's interesting, in medicine, we don't really think about it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
But it's used as a, quote, drug in the worst cases because drugs don't work. For example, preterm labor. Someone comes in having a baby too early. You give them intravenous magnesium. Someone comes in and they're having high blood pressure and seizures in pregnancy. They give them intravenous magnesium.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
People have cardiac arrhythmias where their heart is beating crazy beats in the emergency room and none of the drugs work. You give them magnesium. It's pretty interesting. And it's something we use all the time in medicine, but we don't think about it in this way. But it is probably one of the most powerful things for sleep for people.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It's not negotiable. Yeah. So in terms of the reasons we're not sleeping, and it's clear we're not sleeping. Is it because we're too busy, too stressed? Do we have too many obligations? Is it because we're watching too much Netflix? Is it because we're scrolling on our phones? Is it some other factors?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Like what are the main factors that are leading to the sleep deprivation crisis and that are causing, you know, last I heard was like 70 million Americans having serious sleep issues, right? What are the main causes?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
That's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough by Bioptimizers. It's the only full-spectrum magnesium supplement that includes all seven forms of magnesium your body needs to function at its best.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Most magnesium supplements only give you one or two forms, but magnesium breakthrough ensures maximum absorption, so you get real benefits, better sleep, improved mood, reduced stress, and enhanced recovery. I take it every night to wind down and support my body, and I highly recommend it. Try magnesium breakthrough today and feel the difference.
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I'm trying to get my wife to stop scrolling on X every night to figure out what's happening in the world. I'm like, why are you doing that?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMEN10 for 10% off your order. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, there's a couple of things I want to drill down into because I think that, you know, in your article, you talked about gut dysbiosis and gut dysfunction and the microbiome is playing a role in sleep, which is something that most people have never thought of.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And it was a substantial part of your article, and we'll link to the article in the show notes, but it was interesting to me because I think that inflammation plays a big role in sleep disruption. And the gut microbiome plays a role. And also, environmental toxins may play a role. Nutritional deficiencies may play a role. And there are things, hormonal dysregulation plays a role.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And these are things that are not really well investigated by conventional doctors and not well understood. Sometimes it's as simple as just giving someone magnesium because 45% of the population is low in magnesium and you give them magnesium at night and they're sleeping like a baby. Right.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Or their iron's low and they have iron deficiency and people don't realize that a low ferritin is correlated with sleep.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Restless leg syndrome and sleep deprivation and nobody checks that. So can you kind of walk us through some of those unusual kind of things that may be contributing besides the social factors and the stress and the adrenal and the... the things that we just talked about?
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That's V-A-G-U-S. That's for relaxation. That's the relaxation nerve.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Interesting. You know, I'm wondering, this thought popped in my head, because we know as we get older, our sleep degrades. That's right. And we also know that as we get older, our gut microbiome degrades. and the diversity degrades. I wonder if there is a link there because why do people who get older not sleep as well? It's an interesting question.
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I don't know if it's been answered, but maybe it's correlated.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, I just was listening to Lee Hood's talk for the Human Longevity Institute yesterday. You know Lee Hood?
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
He's an assistant biologist, and he was talking about how pretty soon we'll be able to look at just a few metabolites in your blood to look at the diversity and health of your microbiome. So through a simple blood test rather than collecting your poop, which isn't really fun for most people.
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So, I mean, there's ways where you can actually see these patterns and see the biomarkers. And also the gut dysbiosis drives inflammation and it drives activation of an irritable brain. I think we used to think that irritable bowel in medical school was what we called the supertentorial problem, which in English means it's all in your head.
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It's above the part of your brain called the tentorium, which just keeps your brain on the top. And it's like it was a pejorative view that we doctors had, which is if you have irritable bowel, it's because you're just a neurotic person and you're crazy and that's why your tummy's upset. And it turns out that the opposite is true.