My guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., a physician and world leader in the field of functional medicine. We discuss a systems-based framework for diagnosing and treating the root causes of disease, rather than simply managing symptoms. We also cover cutting-edge health and longevity tools such as peptides, NAD/NMN, exosomes, proactive blood testing and cancer screening, as well as nutrition, supplementation, detoxification, and strategies for addressing specific diseases and health challenges. This discussion will benefit anyone seeking to improve their vitality or combat specific health concerns. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Mark Hyman 00:01:48 Functional Medicine, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Mercury; Systems Medicine 00:08:51 Metabolic Psychiatry; Medicine, Creating Health vs Treating Disease 00:12:19 Sponsors: Joovv & Eight Sleep 00:15:06 Wholistic View of Body, Root Causes 00:19:48 Medicine & Research; “Exposome”, Impediments & Ingredients for Health, Whole Foods 00:26:30 Seed Oils, Starch & Sugar, Ultra-Processed Foods; Obesity Rise 00:36:27 Sponsors: Function & ROKA 00:40:05 Tool: Ingredients for Health, Personalization; Multimodal Approach 00:46:25 Essential Supplements, Omega-3s, Vitamin D3, Multivitamin, Iodine, Methylated B12 00:56:54 Supplements & Traditional Medicine; Limited Budget & Nutrition 01:02:54 Air, Tool: Air Filters; Tap Water Filter; Tool: Health, Expense & Whole Foods 01:09:03 Food Industrialization, Processed Foods 01:14:23 Sponsor: AG1 01:16:18 Declining American Health & Nutrition, Politics, MAHA 01:26:03 Toxins, Food Additives, Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) 01:29:25 SNAP Program & Soda, Food Industry & Lobbying 01:36:58 Big Food, Company Consolidation, Nutrition Labels 01:44:21 GLP-1 Agonists, Doses, Risks; Food as Medicine, Ketogenic Diet 01:51:29 Cancer, Diets & Alcohol 01:54:03 Blood Markers, ApoB, Cholesterol, Tool: Test Don’t Guess, Individualization 02:02:54 Mercury; Tool: Detoxification, Sulforaphane, N-Acetylcysteine (NAC) 02:04:56 Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, Fertility, Tool: Hormone Panels; Heavy Metals 02:11:36 Upregulate Detox Pathways, Gut Cleanse, Tools: Cilantro Juice, Fiber 02:17:08 Peptides, PT-141 (Vyleesi), BPC-157, Thymosin Alpha-1; Risks, Cycling 02:22:03 Cancer Screening, Data & Personalized Health; Alzheimer’s Disease 02:30:45 Longevity Switches, NAD, NMN; Exosomes, Stem Cells 02:39:50 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Mark Hyman and what is functional medicine?
And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome. Thanks, Andrew. It's so good to be here. Great to see you. We go back a few years. Yeah, like almost 10. Yeah, it's been awesome to see your arc and you were at it long before I met you. I think to kick things off,
probably best if you explain to people what functional medicine is and what your orientation towards health and medicine is. Because I think there are a few misconceptions out there, both about functional health and you, but I think also you provide a very unique perspective. You've been at this vista that no one else has had where you,
know people who are deans of medical schools, you know people who are biohackers, you know the general public, you've treated and treat patients, and you also are an experimentalist with yourself to the extent that you find and can make suggestions about things that can help people.
So yeah, tell us how you parachuted into this whole thing and how you look at this whole thing that we call health and medicine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Dr. Hyman's personal health journey shape his approach to medicine?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the core principles of functional medicine and systems biology?
Maybe in this new- I didn't know cells had a political ideology. That's right. That's right.
No, that's right.
I got the red cell and the blue cell.
Exactly.
And that's what I love about you is that you have friends in both camps and you're willing to trudge forward. What did the medical establishment think? Yeah. And how many of you are there now?
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.
Same thing with chronic fatigue, by the way. I remember when chronic fatigue syndrome was considered psychosomatic. Yeah. It's, you know, people are crazy if they think they have this. Yeah.
And we now know, like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and leaky gut, this all used to be, for those that are listening that are a little bit younger than Mark and I, that that was considered pseudoscience, just the whole notion. There are now departments at major university medical centers devoted to each one of these. Maybe not whole departments, but sectors within departments.
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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Chapter 4: What role do nutrition and diet play in improving health and vitality?
because the goal in good science is to isolate variables, you can't, by definition, actually look at a whole system. Although now with AI, maybe you could explore how adjusting one variable impacts pretty much every major system of the brain and body. But it's just very hard to do. And as somebody who has done laboratory science for, gosh, well over 25 years,
and instructed other people how to do it and graduate students and postdocs. I mean, it's an art, but it's limited in terms of what it can reveal. And we work as a system. So I think this is what we're getting at here.
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?
Well, yeah, let's say you come into my lab and I want to study how increasing L-carnitine, for instance, impacts your mood, immune system function and sleep. I can do that study, but even that is just an infinitely complex study. I could do dose response, I'll probably do oral versus injectable.
And then I can't control, unless it's in laboratory animals, on a same genetic background, I can't control whether or not one person's having a Snickers and the other person... is having a Snickers and telling me, and then one person's lying. I mean, it is so hard to do controlled science.
So what we end up doing is we end up creating very artificial environments, very artificial conditions and isolating variables and outcomes. And at the same time, genomics, sequencing, proteomics have allowed us to identify interesting genes that have a potential role in longevity or stem cells and Yamanaka factors. And so I feel like it cuts both ways.
And so as a physician, when somebody comes in and I'm asking this question so that people can think about their own health, if people are feeling like not well, right? Where do you start? Like this thing, like where do you start? You start with how you're sleeping, how you're eating, skin tone. I imagine you can look at somebody and kind of get a sense of their vibrancy at the level of their eyes.
Like where do you start?
I can tell people's blood work sometimes just by looking at them.
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Chapter 5: What are seed oils and how do they affect health?
While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing my blood, urine, and saliva to get a fuller picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune regulation status, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.
Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had an elevated level of mercury in my blood.
Function not only helped me detect that, but also offered insights on how to best reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, And frankly, I had been eating a lot of tuna at that time while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification.
And by the way, it worked. My mercury levels are now well within healthy range. Comprehensive lab testing like that is super important for health because basically a lot of things are going on in our blood and elsewhere in our body that we can't detect without a quality blood and urine test.
And while I've strived to get those tests for many years, it's always been overly complicated and frankly, quite expensive. Function dramatically simplifies all of it and makes it very affordable. I've been so impressed by Function that I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring this podcast.
If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman. For this week only, April 14th to April 20th, 2025, Function is offering a $100 credit to the first 1,000 people to sign up for a Function membership. To get this $100 credit, use the code Huberman100 at checkout. Visit functionhealth.com slash Huberman to learn more and get started.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka. I'm excited to share that Roka and I recently teamed up to create a new pair of red lens glasses. These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down. They filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights, which are the most common indoor lighting nowadays.
I want to emphasize Roka red lens glasses are not traditional blue blockers. They do filter out blue light, but they filter out a lot more than just blue light. In fact, they filter out the full range of short wavelength light that suppresses the hormone melatonin. By the way, you want melatonin high in the evening and at night, makes it easy to fall and stay asleep.
And those short wavelengths trigger increases in cortisol. Increases in cortisol are great in the early part of the day, but you do not want increases in cortisol in the evening and at night. These Roka Red Lens glasses ensure normal, healthy increases in melatonin and that your cortisol levels stay low, which is again, what you want in the evening and at night.
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Chapter 6: What supplements does Dr. Hyman recommend for optimal health?
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.
I love to exercise outside. Is running and breathing harder outside? In L.A. ? Or in general. Well, I like to do that wherever I go. But when I'm in New York City, I love to run along the freeway, probably breathing in a lot of junk.
You are.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: How can air and water quality impact our health, and what tools help mitigate toxins?
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.
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.
And so they're like, and you know, I remember- What's confusing, even as somebody who is fairly versed in health and nutrition, like I'm- I'll give you an example.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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Chapter 8: What are the political and cultural challenges in improving America’s health?
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.
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.
He can talk about this all day long.
Nick has great online content. Folks should check out Nick Norwitz's X and Instagram handle.
Very smart kid. Very smart guy.
Very smart kid, very spirited. I've encouraged him from the first time I saw his content to keep going.
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.
He just goes with his experience and the data.
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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