Episode 401: Dr. Mark Hyman: Why Only 6.8% of Americans are Healthy + His Recommended Anti-Aging Solutions

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle.
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I wasn't just saying that on the story, the Instagram story. We have Dr.
Mark Hyman on the podcast today. Guys, I'm sure you know who he is.
He's probably the most famous doctor I think I know. I've known about you for a hundred years.
At least a hundred. At least a hundred.
He's written 18 New York Times, 19? 19 New York Times bestselling books. He is an MD and a functional medicine doctor, right? Same thing, yeah.
Same thing. Well, I mean, you have the both.
You have the Eastern and the Western. Well, functional medicine is fully Western.
It's fully science-based. It's not, you know, acupuncture and Ayurveda.
I'm going to explain that if you want. Yeah, well, only explain it because people always, I know it's maybe changed a little bit in terms of the perception, but like people are like, oh, I'm an MD or I'm a whatever I am.
But I want to go on about all your accolades. The biggest, by the way, is he walked in.
He looks like he's like 30 years younger than he actually is.

So everything you're doing, I need to know about it.

It is unbelievable.

He's like a fountain wealth of information.

So I don't even know where to begin, except for what are you doing every day to look this

good, this young?

You are a walking longevity poster child.

He'll only be 113 next week. No, no.
But do you mind saying how old you are? No, I'm going to be 65 in a month. Yeah.
And do you feel like you are aging backwards? I am actually. I just, in the last two years, I did my biological age test, which is measuring your DNA methylation, which looks at your epigenetics, which is how your genes are controlled and they're influenced by your environment and your lifestyle.
So they're highly modifiable. You can't change how old I am on the birthday calendar, but I can change what's going on under the skin.
And so when I was 62, I did my biological test and I was 43, which I thought was pretty good. And then I did a whole bunch of things over the last few years.
I wrote a book called Young Forever, which helped me actually get deeper into the science of longevity. And I implemented a whole bunch of treatments and I redid the test at 64 and I went backwards four years.
So now I'm 39 biologically. Are you kidding me? No.
Oh my God. So like Brian Johnson has nothing on you, right? Well, I got a bigger spread in my age, but he's younger.
So I don't know. Well, he's, yeah, that's my whole point.
Like that's a massive difference. So what did you do different in those few years? Well, I ramped up my strength training, my protein intake.
I increased my intake of a number of compounds that have been well-researched around longevity, like urolithin A and NMN. And I did also a whole bunch of senolytic herbs and treatments like vicetan.
I also started to do various treatments like plasmapheresis. I started rapamycin.
I did a whole bunch of things that I think are still in the research phase. I'm my own guinea pig.
I don't necessarily recommend it to all my patients, but just to try it. But I, I'm always willing to sort of put myself out there and see what happens.
So I was like, wow, that's pretty good. Wow.
Okay. So you said a bunch of things.
So you're, you're a lithon A. I was told by them actually, that it actually helps to build muscle after 30 years.
Is that true? Yeah. So, yeah.
So, know, it's a fascinating story. You know, backing up a little bit, you know, as I began to dive into the research around longevity, it was really clear to me that there was a biological system that we all have that's all built in from basically worms and yeast organisms all the way to humans that are conserved, that are survival

pathways, that are pathways designed to heal, regenerate, repair, renew, and upgrade our biology. So whenever we had stresses and we were starving, when we didn't have enough food or had too much of this or that, our bodies learned how to adapt in a way that made us stronger.
And so I call these, longevity switches. And they only recently have been mapped out.
And how they interact has been mapped out. And what affects them has been mapped out.
And they're part of what we call the hallmarks of aging, which are these fundamental things that go wrong as we get older that underlie all disease. So if I said to you, what are the biggest killers in the world? You'd say, oh yeah, heart disease and cancer.
And I said, well, if I had a magic wand and I could just get rid of heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, how much longer would we live? Well, probably only five to seven years longer. But if we address the root causes of aging itself, which is not a normal phenomenon, like the process of getting older, we can't do anything about on the clock, right? I was born a certain date.
I'm getting older every year. But the biological process of aging in the way we experience it in the West is not normal.
You know, you see people who are 100 years old or riding horses or hiking mountains, running races, you know, these are outliers. But no, they are people who actually are taking advantage of things because of what they've learned of their lifestyle to actually activate these longevity pathways so you know we we see people become decrepit frail diseased people spend the last 20 percent of their life in poor health their health span is shorter than the lifespan meaning they they they are okay for a bunch of their life and then they get sick and the last 20% of their lives are spent with chronic disease, which is affecting so many people now.
And when you address these hallmarks of aging, these fundamental mechanisms that we can talk about, you actually can extend life by 20 or 30 years, right? So for me, that would be maybe getting to 110 or 120, right? So maybe 40 years. So we're now discovering what those are.
There's been billions of dollars now spent on aging and longevity research. It was a neglected science.
It wasn't even something that people thought of studying. It wasn't considered a problem, but it is.
Yeah. Like the decline, decrepitude, disease, frailty that happens as we get older is not an integral part of aging.
It's a consequence of bad inputs that cause our biology to malfunction that we think is normal. So just at a high level, these longevity switches are part of these hallmarks of aging.
And one of the key pathways we call in longevity sort of hallmarks of aging is deregulated nutrient sensing, which is a big mouthful. But essentially it means how our bodies regulate different phenomena that have to do with what we're eating, right? So inflammation, insulin resistance, muscle building, autophagy or cell cleanup, antioxidant pathways, DNA repair pathways.
So there's all these incredible longevity switches, and there's four of them. And one has to do with insulin signaling and blood sugar.

One has to do with mTOR, which has to do with basically building muscle or inducing

autophagy, which is cellular cleanup.

One has to do with AMPK, which is also involved in blood sugar or sirtuins.

These are things that are now well-studied.

And so a lot of the interventions that I did were to regulate these longevity switches

in a scientific way.

So now backing into your question, urolithin A is a molecule that works on these longevity switches. And this is kind of mind-blowing.
When you think about like nature and how we evolve, like how does a molecule from a plant, like a pomegranate, end up changing our biology in a way that actually makes us live longer, that reduces inflammation, that builds muscle, that increases our exercise performance, that increases our VO2 max, that helps reduce muscle loss, that has all these incredible benefits. How does that know what to do? What happens when you eat pomegranate or similar plants like berries, they have something called the lactic acid.
And when you have a healthy microbiome, which most of us don't, that becomes converted by healthy bacteria into a molecule called urolithinate. Now, most of us don't do that because even if we eat pomegranate, we have a messed up microbiome because I did a talk the other day to 1,000 people and I asked everybody to raise their hand if they'd never taken antibiotics.
It wasn't a single person that raised their hand. Everybody, everybody's taking an antibiotic at some point somehow.
And so, you know, when you destroy your microbiome because you take an antibiotic or you affect it, then you can't make this. So if you take this as a supplement, it induces mitophagy, which is cleaning up of your mitochondria that make energy.
It reduces inflammation. It helps build muscle.
It inhibits mTOR, which reduces autophagy. So it has all these incredible benefits.
But is there things we can do without supplementing? I know you wrote a book about food for medicine and all these things. Like if we just eat a bunch of pomegranates, I know that's not going to be the answer.
But at the core root, you said something, and I was going to even ask you about it, was at the core, the root cause of a lot of problems, I was under the impression is inflammation, right? Yeah, for sure. And so, what can people do who don't have access to supplements, who don't have access to all the fancy latest and greatest, what are like easy strategies, let's just say like simple things that people can do to help reduce their inflammation? It's a great question.
So as a functional medicine doctor, which we can talk about what that is, but essentially by looking at root causes, it's looking at the science of creating health, is asking why, why do you have this problem? What disease do you have and what drug do do I give? It's understanding the body as a network, as a system,

and restoring the ecosystem

of your body to be healthy.

And we go to doctors

for every different part of our body.

Every organ has a different doctor.

Exactly.

But they're all connected.

Your body's one system.

And so functional medicine

is really systems medicine.

And it's a way of thinking.

It's not a particular specialty

or modality or treatment.

It can be anything

from exercise to exorcism. Whatever the treatment is that works for the patient, I'm going to use it.
So in functional medicine, the framework really that we use is looking at these fundamental systems that go wrong. And one of them is our immune system.
And inflammation is really the underlying biology of almost all chronic diseases and most diseases, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, autism, depression, autoimmune disease, allergies, gut issues. I mean, the list goes on.
Skin problems. It's all inflammation.
So the question is, you know, what's causing inflammation? That's really what functional medicine does. It gets to the why, what's the cause? And, you know, the big cause for most of us is really our diet and our gut microbiome.
It's gone awry and environmental toxins. Those are the three right toxins are harder to deal with you can really address your gut microbiome and the diet is the biggest factor and so i i and practicing functional medicine for almost 30 plus years now more more than 30 years i guess i've really come to understand that you know if you do a short term reset with an elimination diet an anti-inflammatory diet that supports your microbiome, that lowers your blood sugar, that gets rid of all the excess inflammation in your body, that so many things get better.
So I wrote a book 10 years ago called The 10-Day Detox Diet. Do you remember all the titles of the book? There's so many.
Barely, barely. I know.
And essentially, it grew out of my experience with my patients,

where I was treating people with complex chronic illness, and it was trying to get them to reset their body to the original factory setting. See, if we clean up their diet and took away every possible thing that could be driving inflammation, what would happen? And how fast would they get better? And so, it was so profound in the results that I wrote a book about it so that everybody could access it.

Yeah.

And actually, it's fine.

In January,

they should be launching

an online program to help people do this together in a community called the 10-Day Detox. And you can go to drhyman.com to learn more about it.
But basically, what this is, is eliminating the foods that are the most inflammatory. So ultra-processed food, which was 60% 60 of our diet which is not really food

by definition it's just right science projects sugar and starch which are really the drivers of

so much inflammation in our body gluten and dairy which are the other two big factors and as and

also we get rid of grains and beans not that they're bad but for some people they create

inflammation and it's like just trying to get everything off rather than just doing incrementally. Do you do it one at a time or everything together? No, no, no.
Everything together. Because people say, oh, I'm just going to do one thing and then see what's happening.
Do another thing. But if you have three or five things that are bothering you, you just take out one or two, you're not going to feel better.
Right? Right. There's a rule in functional medicine called the TAC rules by my mentor, Sydney Baker.
Basically, if you're standing on a TAC, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. So take out the TAC.
my mentor sydney baker basically you're standing on a tac it takes a lot of aspirin make it feel better so take out the tech get rid of the cost and you're standing on two tax taking one of them out doesn't make you 50 better right so if you're if you're allergic to gluten and dairy or you have sensitivity to gluten and dairy and you take out gluten you're not going to get 50 better because you're still reacting to dairy right right right this diet is really a. It was basically protein, veggies, lots of good fats, nuts and seeds, berries, whole foods.
Delicious, non-deprivation diet, not a calorie restriction diet. You can eat as much as you want.
And what happens in 10 days is remarkable in terms of inflammation. Not only do people lose a ton of fluid and weight and inflammation, but they have a reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by between 60 and 70%.
Whether it's a migraine or a low bowel or depression or joint pain or headaches or whatever it is, congestion, sinus issues, it's remarkable how fast it works to just get inflammation out of your system. So you can just do this food base and after 10 days, you'll know.
Now, if you don't get better, there's something else going on. You could have Lyme disease, you could have a mold exposure you're gonna have metal toxicity you could have severe gut issues that need to be treated more directly you know but most people will get a significant improvement so what are they eating instead if they're taking out that's like everything if you're not eating good everything no you're what are you eating air drinking water oh you eat what I mean basically uh you asked how I'm like look what I, tell me what you eat every day.
In the morning, what are you eating? In the morning, I have a protein shake, usually after a workout. What do you put in the protein shake? Well, I use goat whey, which is dairy, but it's a very low inflammation type of dairy, but you can use other forms.
Goat whey. Where do you get this from? Amazon.
Really? Yeah, regeneratively raised goat whey. There's Mount Capra, there's Naked Goat, there's a lot of brands out there.
And what's the benefit of goat way versus regular? Regular way is usually factory farmed cows, which is just criminal. Yeah.
Two, it's got lots of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides they use in the growing of it. Three, it's coming from cows that are more modern cows that are hybridized to produce a certain type of casein in the milk, which is A1 casein that's very inflammatory.
So goats have A2 casein, so the sheep, less inflammatory and better tolerated. So that's what I use.
But then you don't have to have dairy. You could make it with nuts and seeds.
Okay, hold on. I've got so many questions.
I mean, there's so much information. Okay, so goat whey.
How about, like, what would you say compared that to, let's say, almond milk or, you know, cashew milk, alternative milk?

Well, those are really just not high-protein things.

Protein is key.

So as you get older, you need about a gram per pound of ideal body weight.

Okay.

Which is a lot more than people are eating.

Right.

The RDA, the recommended dietary allowance, is 0.8 grams per kilo, not per pound. Oh, wow, yeah.
Right? So it's far less. Now, you have to understand how they came up with these guidelines.
These guidelines are designed to prevent a deficiency disease. So how do you not get protein deficiency? You don't need that much.
How much you need for optimal health, very different number.

Right.

How much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets? Not much, 30 units. Wow.
You know, rickets is when your bones bend and you get, you know, it's just vitamin D deficiency. Yeah.
How much vitamin D do you need to not get osteoporosis or to build your immune system or not get COVID or the flu? Probably 4,000 to 5,000, over 100 times that dose. Wow.
Right? Right. So the deficiency, the numbers for the recommended dietary intake or allowance are based on deficiency disease.
How much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Not what you need for optimal health. Right.
Optimization and deficiency is very different. Very different, right.
And so protein is really key. And you need bioavailable protein, especially as you get older.
You need a certain amount of an amino acid that stimulates one of the longevity switches called mTOR to make muscle muscle is the currency of longevity

without muscle you become frail and weak and disabled the reason people end up in nursing homes is not because they're sick it's because they can't have their shoes or get up out of a chair or get up out of bed right right it's because they've lost muscle if you don't do anything you will lose muscle steadily and progressively every year starting in your 30s right so you've got to get on it and strength training and protein is the magic sauce so so you got to do that yeah that's my breakfast so what are you putting in it you're putting i put in yeah i put in my wh put in a MitoPure, actually the, the pure lithium A. I put in creatine, which helps do muscle.
I also put in, you know, nut milk, like macadamia milk. I like to put in berries and then blend it up.
Every day. Every day.
Do you eat eggs? I eat eggs. So for example, when I'm traveling, I'll eat omelet or I'll have eggs.
So that'll be my breakfast. So I'll have more, more other proteins in the morning.
And then, you know, lunch and dinner can be like just tons of veggies and protein. So like lunch, I can make a salad.
It's really quick. I can make three meals in half an hour total.
So like I'm busy. I got a lot going on and I like to cook.
So my shake takes me three minutes in the morning. All the ingredients are there in my kitchen.
Make it easy. Set myself up for success.
Lunch, you know, I'll get pre-washed arugula. I'll get little cherry tomatoes, organic.
I'll throw in pumpkin seeds. I'll throw in avocado.
I'll throw in olives. I'll throw in a can of wild salmon or mackerel or have sardines as my protein.
And then pour olive oil, vinegar. And you've got a lot of fat.
I call it my fat salad. Yeah.
Lots of fat and lots of veggies, different cucumbers, whatever you want, carrots. And then dinner is usually a piece of protein and regeneratively raised meat.
If I can get it, bison, elk, venison, or just a regenerative raised beef, chicken, pasteurized chicken, small fish, and then usually two or three side dishes of veggies. So my main courses are veggies, meats is a side dish, but it's at least, you know, six ounces to something, eight ounces of protein.
And then I'll have roasted mushrooms. I'll have, you know, usually every day some form of the cruciferous vegetables.
So two or three cups of broccoli or collards or kale or Brussels sprouts. Right.
And then usually like a Japanese sweet potato, like a purple sweet potato. I love that.
And that's kind of what I eat. And then, you know, a little dark chocolate if I want something sweet.
But this is if you're like, this is for people who are home 24 hours a day. Most people travel, they're working, they're going.
You especially. You're from your business schedule.
You know, I always carry, if you look in my bag, I've got enough calories in there, but I don't have to worry about eating anything the rest of the day. I've got macadamia nuts.
I've got, you know, other nuts and seeds in there. So I have basically enough food in my bag so I don't get enough food emergencies.
I don't have to eat crap if I don't want to. Right, and you don't get, like, that, like, feeling of, like, yeah.
And then, you know, usually wherever I go, you can order protein and veggies. You know, give me a salad, give me extra veggies, three sides of veggies.
It's not that hard. You just have to ask.
Right, you just have to ask. What about fruit? You didn't mention any fruit.
No, fruit's fine. So I have berries in the morning.
I'll have fruit. I don't think fruit can be fine.
You know, I think fruit juice is not good. Right, right, right.
Of course. Yeah.
You can eat an apple, but don't have apple juice. Right.
But in terms of like grapes, mangoes, like things are high, high, high sugar. Well, yeah.
So if you're eating fruit, you know, it depends on the volume, right? Especially there's like grapes and certain melons and pineapple and things like that bananas higher glycemic index so you want to be careful with those you can enjoy them but don't like pig out right well i ask because you know there's that controversy kind of because people like don't eat fruit because it's very high in sugar obviously others are like you never see a fat person who only eats fruit but i will say i'm a massive fruit eater i love fruit and i And I do gain weight. I love grapes.
I can have five pounds of grapes in two seconds. You gain weight.
That's a problem. So it's just a dose.
Yeah, it's all about how much you're eating of everything, right? Exactly. Okay, so let's go back then.
So that's what you eat every day. That makes sense.
Now, what about strength training? You say you're doing it how many times? Because you're very, very lean and thin.

Well, I mean, I do probably four times a week.

I have a routine.

I do different bands, and I do a whole bunch of different routines.

So I travel with it.

So when I'm home, I have a home gym.

So I have equipment.

I have weights.

I have all this stuff.

But when I travel, I just bring my bands, which basically takes about a pound, maybe

or less.

Right.

Takes up this much space. I put in my suitcase suitcase and all I need is a door and a floor.
So if I can hook the thing to doorknob, I can get resistance. That's what you're doing? Yeah.
How about cardio? There's all this controversy over cardio, especially as we age, right? People say that cardio breaks down muscle mass, right? So as we age, do you believe that cardio is something that we should all be doing? I mean, you can't just pick one form of training. You need, you know, VO2 max is a really important number.
This is a number that measures your mitochondrial function. Your mitochondria are the key to healthy aging, partly why your lethine works and exercise works and strength training works.
VO2 max is correlated directly with longevity. So if you look at your ability to burn oxygen per minute, which is a measure of how they see, like if you look at Lance Armstrong, for example, he had a VO2 max in the 90s.
I mean, he can just go, go, go like a, you know, like Energizer Bunny. Whereas, you know, the average 30-year-old has a VO2 max in the 30s.
Right, right, right, exactly. By the way, Lance still has a crazy VO2.
Like he's an animal. Yeah, mine's like 45.
Wow. Even at 65, you can train to get it to go up.
And the longer, the higher it is, the longer you live. And in order to do that, you need to do cardio and you need to do interval training.
So you kind of push and stress yourself. So you can do half an hour, two or three times a week of that.
And that'll get you pretty good. You do as fast as you can for 45 seconds to a minute, then slow for three minutes.
Do it can do a treadmill on a bike it's like sprinting you know we used to call wind sprints in high school right right right remember that do you so okay so let's just talk about the long about and we're still on inflammation okay so for inflammation that you said all the things about that is there anything else we can do because like supplements i know like you know is there let's let me listen if you just take multivitamin, fish oil, and vitamin D, less than a dollar a day, you can take the basics. You can do all these things.
Yeah. I mean, a dollar a day is not nothing, but think about what people spend on their coffee, or their just junk, or their Netflix subscription.
I mean, what do you want to invest in your health? You pay now or pay later? Well, I think the problem is that right now we're so inundated with information, right? Especially with social media. Everyone talks about this supplement, that supplement, do this, don't do that, do more of that.
And things ebb and flow and trend, right? So like things that we talked about. Remember when carbs was a thing that we should be doing and not eating all this protein? Are there things that kind of like you've learned in your whole, in your evolution that you're like wow this is i was totally wrong about this i was completely this is the way and what are things like intermittent fasting for example like what is your what's your thoughts on things that are so trendy now that i feel have had a little bit of a backlash to some people well you know you know, I think what sells books and what gets people to click on social media is extremes.
So you've got carnivores on one side, the vegans on the other side. And, you know, like it's kind of extreme.
And I think I take a more middle of the road position based on the science, which is, you know, one, you know, there's certain principles that you follow that allow you to have a wide variety of diets, culturally different diets, personal preferences that you might like. But the principle should be the same.
One, food is medicine. So you have to understand every bite you take is information and it's regulating your biology with every single bite and changing your gene expression, yourigenome your hormones your brain chemistry your metabolism your microbiome immune system everything is literally affected in real time by every single bite of food you have so the quality of your food matters second is and that food is information and it can upgrade your downgrade your biology with every bite second is that we should think about nutrition from the perspective of personalized nutrition.
Because everybody's different. Some people are great on a vegan diet.
Some people get really sick on a vegan diet. Some people need more protein.
Some people need more fats. Some people need more carbs.
And there's no genetics we can do to actually see what people do better on or worse on. And what people respond better to or worse to.
And then, you know, thirdly, it's really a simple principle to eat real food. Like, don't eat stuff that's not food.
like you know right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right

right

right

right

right do better on or worse on. And what people respond better to or worse to.
And then, you know, thirdly, it's really a simple principle to eat real food. Like don't eat stuff that's not food.
Like, you know, ultra processed food is not food. A Pop-Tart is actually not food.
It's made from deconstructed science ingredients that have been processed from commodity crops, broken down to their chemical individual components. The chemical structures have been changed.

So it's not actually even the same molecular structure.

Right.

And it reassembled into all sizes, color, shapes of chemically extruded food-like

substances that have nothing to do with nutrition, don't actually meet the definition of food.

If you look at the Webster's definition of food, it's basically something that supports

the health and growth of an organism.

Well, these don't. They do the opposite, right? And so technically, we're not actually eating food.
So eat food. Right, eat food.
I mean, Michael Pollan said, eat food, not too much, mostly plants, you know? Yeah, that's what he, I bet he says all plants. And there are people who think.
No, he didn't say all plants. Mostly plants.
Mostly plants. He said mostly plants.
What about microwaving your food? Because it changes the molecular structure. You know, heating stuff up for a few seconds is fine, but like if you're cooking food, a microwave is a bad idea because you get the production of something called ages or advanced glycation end products.
Essentially, it's like, think about like a crispy skin on a chicken or creme brulee. This is the proteins and sugars combining in a way that creates a harmful inflammatory compound in the body.
And so a lot of aging is caused by these compounds. And hemoglobin A1C, which is your blood sugar average, is an example of one of those, but there's many.
And they bind to receptors, they activate inflammation, and so they just create this vicious cycle. So for sure, don't cook in a microwave.
For sure, don't even heat up anything in plastic in a microwave. That's a disaster.
If you're putting microwave stuff in plastic with the plastic cover on it's like oh my god it's terrible so bad but do you would

you ever microwave your food for like a minute like that's yeah so like i'm lazy and like i'm

in a hurry i might like throw a sweet potato in there or something for this that's already cooked

i might warm it up or something like that but i got rid of mine thinking that it was like

very dangerous.

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you're not so,

you're not so,

you're not so, you're not so, you're not so, you're not so, you're not so, you're not so, i mean listen it's a ideally probably no but like you know okay so you're not so crazy one way or the other like you're are you are you do seem a little bit more like middle of the ground yeah i mean like just it's it's here's the deal you want to optimize your health you want to become resilient you don't want to live in a bubble right like you don't want to be a bubble boy no and so there are people who are so fragile like you they can't you know go anywhere and they can't travel they can't stay in a hotel room like there may be people who truly have chemical sensitivities and are that sensitive and i i know i'm not saying they're crazy and i treat them as patients and you can get them better but if you're resilient and healthy your body can handle a lot so for example if you're a diabetic and you have a can of Coke, it'll send you over the limit. Right.
But if you're like someone like me and you work out five times a week and you strength train and your diet's predominantly like super low sugar and starch, you're insulin resistant, super dialed in. My insulin level's two.
My blood sugar is perfect. My A1C is very low.
I can have some sweets once in a while. It's not going to kill me.
So you're saying all these numbers, right? Which means that you're monitoring all these things and stats. So that tells me that you are a big believer in wearables, right? Like, are you wearing a glucose monitor? Are you wearing an Oura Ring or a Whoop? Or what is your...
Yeah, test don't guess is my motto. I like that.
Test don't guess. In fact, I co-founded a company called Function Health to allow people to go deeper.
The Oura rings are great. CGMs are great.
Woo, Apple Watch, but skin deep. They're just skin deep.
Glucose monitor is a little better because you get a continuous feed of your glucose, but there's so many other biomarkers. So what I realized was that most doctors aren aren't checking these things most patients don't know what to ask for right if they do they have to argue with their doctor to order it because they usually don't know what it is and then they argue with their insurance company to pay for which they usually don't so we co-founded a company called function health that allows people for a dollar 37 a day to get twice a year testing of over 110 biomarkers it gives you you a profoundly deep view of your health.
That's a lot. Yeah, and it's a bunch of tubes of blood, but basically it's giving you a deep insight in your metabolic health, and it's checking things that don't get checked that are the most relevant things.
Like what? For example, your metabolic health. People get their cholesterol checked, and they just look at the basic numbers.
So today I had a patient this morning before I came here who had perfectly normal cholesterol on the regular cholesterol test, but she had severe metabolic dysfunction because she had high number of lipid particles and cholesterol particles and small particles. And so we look at a more advanced cholesterol test to look at the size and number and the quality of your cholesterol, not just the weight.
We look at, let me call it ApoB and lipoprotein A, which are really the most important and the most important biomarkers for your risk for a heart attack, not the ones you're getting at your doctor's checkup. That's like a 50-year-old test.
We're looking at inflammation. We look at autoimmune markers and 30 plus percent of people have an autoimmune biomarker, 13% of autoimmune thyroid disease.
We have 46% with high levels of CBR protein, which is inflammation. So we check your immune system.
We check your toxin levels of heavy metals like mercury and lead. We check your hormones like male sex hormone, female sex hormones.
We look at your cortisol and we look at your metabolic health, insulin, which, you know, we're working with Quest as our provider of the lab testing. So it's not some, you know, it's not some crazy thing.
This is like the biggest lab in the country. In the world.
So basically, how does it work? That's what I'm curious about. Do people walk into a Quest? I'll tell you, yeah.
I'll tell you, it's pretty easy. I just want to finish with the testing.
So we do nutritional testing. 67% of people have nutritional deficiencies at the minimum level.
We're seeing, you know, so much going on in the dysfunctions that are not being looked at. So the process is very easy.
Just go to functionhealth.com. We're in beta now.
So with your listeners, we provided early access code, which is Hustle100. So if you go to Hustle100, the first 100 listeners to sign up will skip the waitlist, which is 300,000 people.
Okay. Well, listen to that, guys.
That's very big. So if you guys use the code HUSTLE100, you skip the 300,000 people.
Okay. Well, listen to that guys.
That's very big. So if you guys use the code hustle100, you skip the 300,000 people wait list and you get early access.
Yeah. That's amazing.
And then once you sign in, it's a few minutes of questionnaire to sort of get your basic demographics and everything. And then you'll get a text from our team.
They'll say, okay, you're living this zip code. Your closest lab is a mile away.
When do you want your appointment tuesday okay i'll go into tuesday eight o'clock and you go in you show them your there's a little scanning machine you put your driver's license in there they register your second you walk in they draw your blood 10 15 minutes you're out and then the all the data gets loaded up into your dashboard which is data you own it's your it's your data you can track it over time i mean i mean i wow it's so frustrating for me as a doctor because medicine is so analog yeah you know we don't use tech in medicine at all like even an electronic medical record it's just a paper record in the office yeah and and so you know if i want to know okay let me look at your cholesterol what was it last year and or the year before and what are the trends i have to like open a pdf i have to look at it try to remember what it said then i'll come to the new one and look at that one compare them all on my head or write it down which takes me time it's just a pain in the ass so this is a beautiful dashboard you can see your trends over time you get a deep set of insights so it's not just a data because that you know the average person doesn't know what to do with their data right doesn't know the tests mean but we spent you, enormous amounts of time sifting through all the scientific literature, bringing knowledge experts in, including me, and writing, you know, tens of thousands of pages of content that are then become delivered to you based on your biomarkers. Let's say you have an inflammation and your CRP is high.
Okay, what does it mean? Why does it matter? Why would it be high? How do you figure it out? What do you do about it? What would you do from a lifestyle perspective, from a supplement perspective? What are the diagnostic tests might you need? When do you need to go to the doctor? And what do you need to be informed with to be able to actually be the best advocate for your own health? Because I believe you should be the sea of your own health. Totally.
Not abdicating that to the healthcare system. You know, my friend Chris Carr had cancer.
She's an incredible woman. And she was like, she had some really weird, rare cancer.
and they told her she was going to die and she's like well that's not okay yeah yeah she she sort of said joke that she started a new company called save my ass technologies inc you know like oh my gosh basically her owning her own health and that's what we all need to do and our goal at function health is help people do 100 healthy years, which I think is achievable for most people. That's amazing.
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so wait so after you get all the testing and you have the dashboard do you have someone who helps you kind of understand like do you get like a doctor assigned or is it all just your own clinician summary of all your results it's generated and then you have the insights that are delivered to you personally like what should you be eating that says this is what you should be doing what lifestyle changes do you need to make what toxins do you need to avoid what you need in terms of exercise how do you optimize your microbiome if you need to do that how do you what supplements might be helpful for the particular issue you have if your vitamin d is low how do you know which vitamin d to take what form of vitamin d what dose you take how do you pick a right supplement we don't recommend products right just we aren't selling anything other than the service of owning your own data. Yeah.
Right. So we're not like hawking different companies or product stuff.
And so it just provides you the scientific information. Everything's deeply referenced with scientific literature.
All the data is there. You can look at it yourself.
And then it guides you into a personalized program. And then, you know, there's an interactive app that we're about to launch, which will kind of help, you know, support you in implementing the recommendations.
That's amazing, actually. And I can't believe how many biomarkers you're checking for.
That's a lot. And then, of course, we already added almost another 200 that if you want to do extra stuff, you can.
For example, let's say we have a family history of Alzheimer's. There's now blood biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, which you don't even need a brain scan for.
And you don't have to wait to have memory issues, but you can actually detect things and then do interventions that will reverse those biomarkers and normalize them. We were also measuring, for example, cancer screening.
We offer one of the biggest providers in the country of something called Gallery, which is a multi-cancer detection test using fragments of DNA that kind of come off cancer cells that you can detect in the blood. It's like a liquid biopsy.
And it picks up about 50 different cancers. 75% of the time, it'll detect it.
There's only half a percent false positive rate, which is much better than all their current screening tests. In other words, well, I'm going to do this test.
Is it going to show positive, but it's really not a cancer? Very rare to have that happen. One in 188 people who we've

been testing actually has a cancer we've identified and we've saved people's lives that they didn't even know because we pick it up early. And this detects cancer a year to three years before it shows up anywhere else.
By the way, just in that alone is worth doing it. Yeah.
I mean, you know, my sister died of cancer, my father died of cancer. You know, they would have not both had died of cancer if they'd had this test.

So you can pick up cancer, you know, my sister died of cancer, my father died of cancer. You know, they would have not both had died of cancer if they'd had this test.

So you can pick up cancer.

You can pick up potential Alzheimer's.

Yeah.

And we're, you know, we're doing a whole bunch of stuff on autoimmune testing, on nutritional testing, on toxin testing.

We're now able to test things like PFAS, forever chemicals in your blood, heavy metals, BPA, other chemicals that are pretty common.

I'm going to get this test. I'm going to, seriously, I'm going to, by the way, even before you were on this show, podcast, I was told about your program, like a few people told me about it because I was told it was like way above other programs out there.
Because everyone now is all jumping on these bandwagons, right? Like personalized health, telemedicine, all the things. But yours does sound like super extensive.
Yeah, it's very deep. Yeah, I mean, it's because I sort of am the kind of intel inside.
Yeah. You know, my background has been, you know, I was a doctor at Canyon Ranch, which was a health resort for almost 10 years.
And there we did, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 dollars worth of testing on everybody. Is that how you started at Canyon Ranch? Yeah, I was, yeah.
My joke is I'm a resort doctor because I worked at a health resort and the doctor of last resort. That's funny.
So that's how you started. And then 20 years ago, I started my own practice after that.
And again, had a clientele who could afford to do deep testing. And we've done really extensive testing.
And I've seen millions and millions and millions and millions of biomarkers on tens of thousands of people. And so I really understand what's going

on in there and things that doctors were not checking. And we're always like looking to the

future. Like what does the science say? Because in the scientific literature, this discoveries get

made. And, you know, for example, we've known about lipoprotein fractionation, which is the

test we do at Function Health for your cholesterol. This is the standard of the care.
This should be

the state-of-the-art test that everybody gets. It's not expensive, not hard to get.
And yet,

Thank you. which is the test we do at Function Health for your cholesterol.
This is the standard of the care. This should be the state-of-the-art test that everybody gets.
It's not expensive, not hard to get. Yeah.
And yet, we ask Quest, how many cholesterol tests that you get are from doctors around the country, and you're the biggest lab, are for this test? What do they say? Less than 1%. And this test has been around for decades.
I've been doing it personally for 30 years. The science is over 40 years old on this.
So what happens is it takes decades for the science to turn into clinical practice. That's crazy.
It is crazy. So my daughter's in medical school now.
She's not learning anything about insulin resistance, nothing about the microbiome, nothing about nutrition, nothing about environmental toxins. These are the things that are causing people to be sick.
She knows nothing about how to take care of mitochondrial problems. I mean, it's just, it's astounding to me.
Where is she going to medical school? Well, it's a very good medical school. It's the University of Utah.
It's a great medical school. And it's pretty much what is going on because we have a pharmaceutically driven healthcare system that is in large part funded by the pharma industry.
So a lot of academic centers, they're not getting money from the government. Sometimes they're getting NIH grants, but a lot of their funding comes from pharma that is funding the professors to study a statin or study the Ozempic or study what? Ozempic is a great example.
We've got a drug now that's like the panacea for weight loss and everything. Everybody's sort of like, we should be all taking this.
And, you know, they're studying it for everything. So they're studying it for depression, for autoimmune disease, for neurodegenerative disease, for obviously heart disease, for obesity, for diabetes.
And these companies, these pharma companies are just raking in the money. And Novo Nordisk, which is the maker of Rosempic in Denmark, is the single biggest contributor to the gross domestic product or GDP of Denmark.
That is crazy. And yeah, it's a huge, huge.
And it's like, it's the Eli Lilly, the number one selling drug is Monjaro. There are billions and billions of dollars a year from these drugs.
And they're pouring billions into research to prove the benefit of these drugs across a wide range of health conditions. They work not because there's some magic to the drug.
They work because they give people to lose weight and the weight loss is what's working. It's like a study that they did on gastric bypass.
They said, well, gee, gastric bypass, you can reverse diabetes in two weeks if someone has a gastric bypass. It's a miracle.
Even if they're still overweight and you're still 400 pounds, two weeks later after you do the surgery, you don't have diabetes anymore and your inflammation goes down and your numbers get better. Well, how does that happen? It's because of the food they're eating because they don't eat what they were eating.
They don't eat what they were. But they did a study where they just, instead of giving them the gastric bypass, they did a randomized trial where they gave half the people a gastric bypass and another match control group, not the bypass, but just fed them the food as if they would have had the bypass.
So on the same diet. Right.
Same result. Same result.
No different. So it's not the ozempic.
And so, you know, I was talking to my friend who was the head of cardiology at Harvard and he's like, I said, no, why don't you study lifestyle changes in heart disease? Because they work better than the medication. He said, hey, no, Mark.
He says, but I can't get $5 to study diet and lifestyle. I can get $150 million from pharma that funds my department, that funds my programs, that funds my fellowship, that funds everything.
So I'm going to do that study that they want me to do because, you know, they're paying the bills. That's how it works.
It's super corrupt. That's so crazy so crazy to me and the funny that not funny at all is that now you have people who are on these these these ozempics and grovis who shouldn't be on them they're like thin people yeah it's like oh god and i see it it's like oh wow i can tell you know they get that they get that look they get that ozempic face is thatic face? Yes.
And you lose subcutaneous fat and you lose muscle. And this is a catastrophe because I do not think, I think it's personally, I think it's malpractice to prescribe one of these drugs unless that person has diet counseling and understands they need to eat a gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight and they're taught how to do it.
Right. And that they do it.
And two, that they commit strength training at least three times a week. Because if you don't, what happens is this, you lose the weight, but up to half of the weight is muscle.
Now muscle is your metabolic engine. It burns seven times the calories of fat.
And when you lose muscle, your metabolism slows down. So then what happens? Then you stop the drug because it's side effects or you can't afford it forever.
And then what happens? You gain back the weight. So let's say you start out and you lose 20 pounds and then you gain back the 20 pounds.
When you gain back the 20 pounds, you're going to gain it back all as fat, which means your metabolism is going to be slower, even at the same weight that you were when you started, which means you need to eat less in order to just stay at that weight. So you'll gain more weight even.
And it's a disaster. So there's got to be, listen, these drugs, like any drug, are a tool.
You know, a gun is a tool. You can go hunt a deer and get dinner, or you can kill somebody.
Exactly. It's a tool.
I'm not opposed to these drugs. What I'm opposed to is their widespread use, is the lack of research on other interventions that work better.
And there's really clear data on this. I mean, Virta Health is a company that a friend of mine started, Sammy In innikin that basically uses ketogenic diets for reversing type 2 diabetes and they they've scaled this up they're covered by medicare advantage they save an average of 6 000 per patient and they've compared the results they get using that for type 2 diabetes they reversed completely type 2 diabetes it's pretty advanced in 60 of patients the average of 12 weight loss which is astounding amount weight loss.
And they have 100% get off the main diabetes medication, almost 90 plus percent get off insulin or dramatically reduce their insulin. And all the lipid bar markers improve.
And all the secondary things that are being measured by these drug companies that are saying there are the benefits of Ozempic, all those get better. It's not the Ozempic.
Right. It's the diet.
It's the diet. So it basically does come down to what you eat, your food, and how much you eat of it.
It's not- How much is not as much of an issue. It's really the quality of what you eat.
The quality. Because if you eat the right food, you can't overeat.
In other words, if I said, you know, I want you to eat 10 12-ounce steaks, no way. If I said eat 10 avocados, no way.
If I said eat 10 chocolate chip cookies, no problem. If I see a quart of ice cream, no problem.
You know? That's true. And our bodies, when we eat the stuff that's not really food, doesn't know how to regulate it.
And the studies have been done on this. The NIH study by Kevin Hall looked at this very carefully.
And he did what we call a crossover trial, which is one of the best types of study designs, where he took the same people, gave them a diet, and then let them have a break, call a washout period, and then give them another diet for a few weeks, and then measured what happened. First part of the diet was eating real food.
Wow, yeah. Match for protein, fat, carbs, calories.
Then they gave them ultra-processed food, and they can eat whatever they want. Eat whatever you want, eat as much as you want, there's no restrictions.
When they were eating ultra-processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day because their biology was dysregulated. Kids who are iron deficient will eat dirt.
The body is going to crave more food and want more food because it's looking for nutrients. But we're looking for love in all the wrong places, right? Yeah.
And so what happened is that you get dysregulated. I mean, think about that.
500 calories a day in a week is 3,500 calories. That's a pound of weight gain if you don't offset it with exercise.
In a year, that's 52 pounds of weight gain. If you eat all your processed food, why is America the fattest country in the world? Like we have 75% of us that are overweight, 42% are obese.
It's increased fourfold since I was born. And you've seen diabetes increase 400%.
I mean, it's in the last 30 years, it's insane. know the metabolic dysfunction yeah even if you're not overweight because you can be skinny fat in other words you look thin but you're right actually bad on the inside right your percentage is fat yeah your body fat you're just where the fat is if it's in your belly visceral fat that's 93.2 percent of americans have metabolic dysfunction that means that 6.8% of us are healthy.
And what does that mean? That 93.2% has either high blood sugar, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, all, by the way, caused by too much starch and sugar in our ultra-processed diet, or they've had a heart attack or stroke, or they're overweight. Yeah, that is unbelievable.
Yeah, it's unbelievable. And so we're killing ourselves, and the costs are staggering.

I mean, the government, the U.S. government,

pays 40% of the national health care bill,

which is now $4.9 trillion.

Probably a good $2 trillion of that is totally preventable and is now being added to our federal deficit every year.

And imagine what that $2 trillion can do for the economy, what we could do with social programs, how we could improve our infrastructure, how we could improve so many innovation, how we could fund different kinds of research. I mean, we're wasting that money.
And most people don't realize that. You know, it's one out of every three taxpayer dollars is for healthcare.
What I find to be unbelievable is that everyone seems to look for these quick fad diets or quick fixes, but yet like it's pretty, again, what you're saying is pretty basic, right? Like it's the same things that like if they watch what they eat, quality of the food, inflammation, like these, it's not that hard, but yet people are trying to over, or they're overwhelmed with like all this like noise, you know? The other thing I wanted to ask you about Ozempic or any of these, or Govies or whatever, can your body acclimate over time anyway and so you end up even eating what you ate before you even started taking it? Sometimes. These drugs affect people differently.
I had a patient who, I didn't prescribe it, but he was telling me he lost, he did Ozempic for six months. He lost two pounds.
It didn't really make him feel great. He had all these side effects.
He switched over to what I told him to do. he lost uh you know he did i was epic for six months he lost two pounds it didn't really make him feel great he had all these side effects he switched over to what i told him to do he lost 60 pounds and he's reversed his diabetes and you know he's on his way back to full full health you keep on saying patients do you still see patients yeah i saw two this morning i had a whole patient day yesterday yeah so you actually still see like doctor yes you know but yes.
I don't just play one on TV. No, you don't just play one.
Listen, this is very refreshing. I thought of all the people, of all the doctors, you wouldn't have time because do you know how many times I've seen doctors sit in the same chair you are and they're doctors, yeah, I guess they have a certificate, but they don't practice, they write books and they like to do media and they like to do all these other things.
It keeps it real. It keeps you humble.
It keeps you learning. But people don't like to do it.
Like it's impossible to find. Like the big joke is I can't find a doctor.
I love it. I mean, I love taking care of people.
It's so, I mean, it's amazing. You actually are like, would you take another, another patient? I need a doctor because there is such a shortage of doctors.
You're a long girl. I know.
Like what is the waiting list for that? Like, do you have like a crazy waiting list? I wish I could see everybody. I really wish.
I mean, it's the heartbreak of my life. And I can tell you, I probably get five to 10 texts, emails, requests every day.
Oh, easy. My mother this, my friend this, I'm sick this.
And like people who are close to me, and I'm like, I just wish I could help everybody. And I can't.
And so that's really why I co-founded Function Health. Right.
Was to take what I know and make it accessible, not to a few hundred or thousand people, but to millions and millions. We have an 8 billion person problem.
That's exactly true. And what we're creating at Function is something that is revolutionary.
It's why we're the fastest growing healthcare company in the world.

We're creating something called medical intelligence.

You know, you have chat, GPT and all this.

But think about where you take all your own data and all your data is sorted through

with the use of technology.

Because now we can process,

I mean, just in your microbiome alone,

there's 100,000 terabytes of data.

I don't even know what a terabyte is,

but it's a lot of information.

It's a lot, I guess, yeah.

So no human mind can comprehend all that.

So we're able to take all this data

I'm sorry. terabytes of data i don't even know what a terabyte is but it's a lot of information so you no human mind can comprehend all that so we're able to take all this data and actually understand what's happening to you and input it all into the system and then gives you a predictive model of where you are the trajectory from wellness to illness because things don't happen overnight right for example we were mentioning some of these alzheimer's tests like p-taus 217 or or AD4240 or neurofibrillate light chain.
There's other biomarkers. And we're now able to see from a blood test that you could be developing early cognitive injury, brain injury that you don't even know about because you're not symptomatic.
You can tell with brain imaging up to 30 to 40 years before you get Alzheimer's that you're starting to get trouble in the brain. But now with these blood tests, we can detect it.
And then you can do something to intervene and actually reverse that trajectory. That's never been possible before.
How is it even possible? I thought there was no cure. Can you give us a couple? Well, there is.
Of course there is. I mean, you know.
Like what? Give us some things that we can do for our brain health, brain fog. This is not my opinion.
This is actually you look at uh the studies being done at europe the finger trial the pointer trials these are large-scale clinical trials using aggressive lifestyle intervention risk factor modification and actually slowing not showing not just reverse slowing down or or delaying the progression of alzheimer's but reversing how can we reverse al can we reverse Alzheimer's? What you eat. I mean, exercise, dress management, sleep optimization, nutritionals optimization, hormone optimization, addressing all the root causes, toxins, gut microbiome.
I mean, it's a process. It's a deep, involved process.
And I've written a book about this called The Ultra Mind Solution about 15 years ago. It was way ahead of its time and still ahead of its time.
And colleagues of mine like Dale Bredesen had taken that and really upgraded it. And he's got a recode program now.
He's written a book called The End of Alzheimer's, which talks about the root causes. This is not just happening in a vacuum.
It's not just a random event. Why have we seen Alzheimer's increase by 150%? Why? Tell us.
Why? Because we have the shitty diet, which is sugar. I mean, they're calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes now, which is insulin resistance.
Why? We have 93% of the population have some degree of insulin resistance. But why? That's what I don't understand.
Toxins, environmental toxins. There's more education out than ever before, right? We're more educated, you'd think, like there's information out there.
How is it instead of getting less obese, we're getting more obese. Instead of getting healthier, we're getting more sick.
When all we, we are overloaded with people and information, like the health industry, longevity industry, it's a trillion dollar business. Yeah, we live in a toxic cesspool of food and toxins.
I mean, it's just the truth. I mean, the food industry has produced food that is making us sick and making us die early.
And we also have completely unregulated environmental toxins in this society that people are just polluted. You know, if we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat as human beings are so polluted.
Why is it different here than the UK? Well, in other countries, they don't allow the same ingredients. I mean, you might've heard the the recent uh yeah about kellogg's and these are friends of mine i was going to ask you about that yeah i mean like you know it's ridiculous like in in europe

they have regulations they have something called the reach legislation in the european union which

limits the use of chemicals so here the way it works is you if you're a company you get to use

whatever you want and you get approved as generally recognized as safe and then you only get company, you get to use whatever you want and you get it approved as generally recognized as safe. And then you only get to have it taken off the market if it's shown later to be harmful.
So innocent until proven guilty. Wow.
As opposed to you have to prove this is safe before you put in the food. For example, trans fats is a great example.
Right. Crisco was invented in 1911, shortening.
Yeah, I remember it. You know why they call it shortening? No, because it's short no because it's your life yeah no that's not why they call it that way oh i thought that's why you call this okay no why did you call it that i don't know oh but anyway um that was a joke a doctor joke doctor joke like a dad joke it's like yeah i don't eat red meat i don't eat it well done yeah so the reality is that the science started coming around in the 60s and 70s and 80s.
And it was just really a compelling data that it was killing people, hundreds of thousands of people a year. And the FDA still did not change its policies.
And there was a scientist that was researching this for 50 years. He finally, in his 90s, sued the FDA.
And based on that suit, they changed the regulations to recognize it as something that was not safe. So they took it off the safe list.
And then they encouraged companies to remove it from the food supply. But it's still out there.
And again, we should have never had that for that long in the food. So we're having, you know, butylate hydroxychloroquine and adders and colors are added to food here like kellogg's fruit loops that you don't get in the crap macaroni and cheese in this country it's got all kinds of weird dyes and if you go to europe it's got you know basically carrot dyes to make it orange not weird orange you know neon all these chemicals yeah which of course i grew up on craft me too right we all did i mean that

was the first thing i learned how to cook me too i think that was like kind of like every child you

know like my my daughter right you boil the noodles and you put the cheese in and the milk

totally totally where did you grow up by the way i all over i was born in spain grew up in new york

city and queens and then moved to toronto and uh i'm from toronto you're canadian no my mother

married a canadian after my parents were divorced i meant like you grew up in toronto yeah from

Thank you. And Queens, and then moved to Toronto.
I'm from Toronto. You're Canadian? No, my mother married a Canadian after my parents were divorced.
I meant like you grew up in Toronto? Toronto, yeah, from 8 to 18, yeah. Where? Davie and York Mills.
Really? Yeah. Oh my God, that is hilarious.
Where'd you go to medical school? University of Ottawa. I'm from Ottawa.
Are you serious? Does anybody know this about you? All the Canadians? So are you surprised? I have to ask you because like when you started all this stuff, your career, it wasn't like trendy and cool to be a doctor. It wasn't trendy.
It wasn't like a massive industry like what we were talking about earlier. And then it blown up to be like the hot thing.
You know how there's all these different trends. We're talking about entrepreneurship, health, entrepreneurship health longevity like are you surprised of how like you've become so popular in the trajectory of your career did you expect this i don't know i i i don't know i just i just saw the issues wait i mean i studied nutrition 45 years ago and college and wrote or read a book called nutrition against disease by roger williams that got me thinking this.
It was given to me by a PhD student on nutrition that I was living with. We shared a house together.
Oh, okay. And so I got, you know, kind of- In Ottawa? No, in Cornell.
Okay, Cornell. Cornell.
Yeah, where I went to undergraduate. And, you know, I just got into health and wellness and herbal medicine and yoga.
And I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. You were? Yeah.
And know you're into buddhism and all that stuff too right are you still do are you still into that stuff i mean it definitely is very much informed my way of thinking about the world and my mind and suffering and you know compassion and why why are we getting all the mess we get into right although that's a good that's a good way of putting. What do you think about all the other modalities that can help, like meditation,

all the other things that help with lowering your,

I guess, your stress levels that help?

I mean, look, functional medicine is a way of thinking.

It's an operating system, and it's agnostic,

and it's whatever the right set of tools.

So there's a whole bunch of tools in the toolkit,

from meditation and yoga, to breath work, to ac to drugs, to supplements, to diet, to plasmapheresis, to whatever. What is that? You said that in the beginning of the podcast.
Plasmapheresis? Yeah. It's basically filtering your blood to get all the crap out.
And it's one of those therapies that's being heavily researched for longevity. So as we get older, it's like, you know, think about your car.
If you don't change the oil, it gets crap in it. And it's sort of like that.
It's like you filter your blood out, you take out the cells, you take out the plasma, you throw it out, you put a new... How do you do it? You take blood out of one arm, you put it through a machine that filters everything out.
It's like dialysis, you know? Yeah. And it goes back in the other arm.
And so how accessible is this to the average person? Not that accessible. It's expensive.
It's, you know, between $5 $10,000 time, it's going to come down in price and it's going to be more accessible. And there's a lot of research going on now.
I mean, a convoy is one of the leading researchers out of, you know, on the Palo Alto area in this field. And it's pretty exciting.
So I think it's one of those therapies that can be used for long COVID, for autoimmune disease, for cognitive issues, for Alzheimer's, for longevity. So I think we're just beginning to understand it's been around forever in medicine.
Yeah. As a dialysis, as you were saying.
It's not dialysis. It's used for different kinds of autoimmune diseases and neurologic problems in hospitals.
But this is a broadening the use of it to different kinds of indications. And I think it's one of the most exciting therapies.
And I know it helped me. I had long COVID.
Not super long because I caught it early, but I basically had COVID and I developed arthritis afterwards. My hand blew up and I felt like crap and I was exhausted and my brain wasn't working.
And I just did a course of plasmapheresis and the next day I woke up and I was completely better. In one session? One session, yeah.
Wow. And how long does it take to do it? Usually two to three hours, depending on your veins, an hour and a half, two hours, three.
Wow. A friend of mine developed long COVID and he had a horrible gut problem and it was terrible.
Yeah. Would you suggest, would this type of thing that you just said be good for all different sorts of long COVID? 100%.
In fact, there's some good data out of Europe, Germany, where they looked at long COVID patients and they measured all the autoantibodies and all the inflammatory compounds before and after. And they did plasma-free cysts.
And then they looked at their clinical outcomes and they found that actually it worked to actually help people recover and to reduce all these biomarkers of long COVID. Wow.
Okay. And then you said something else in the beginning about what you do.
You said you were riffing off a few. You said that, and you said another thing that you do that's kind of on the cutting edge.
What was that? Rapamycin? No, not rapamycin, but you can talk about that too. Isn't that just a supplement though? No, it's a drug.
Oh, wait, isn't that the drug that people take for COVID though? No, rapamycin is a drug that's used for immune suppression for transplants, but in low doses and intermittently, it seems to work for longevity. Really? So would you suggest people trying it? I don't think the data is there for the average person to take it, but like I said, I'm willing to try it on myself as a guinea pig, and if they're a longevity enthusiast and they understand the risks.
Is there risks? I mean, there are some risks. It can suppress immune system function if taken in certain ways, and it depends on the person.
So you have to monitor. Okay.
What was the other thing that you said that you're doing that's a little bit more unique? I don't know. Exosomes, what did I say? I don't remember.
No, exosomes. What do you think about exosome stem cells in the U.S.
versus outside the U.S.? Are they different? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of regulation in the United States that makes it difficult to get younger stem cells or umbilical stem cells exosomes are easier to get right but still not quite regulated and i think you know it's unfortunate but in other countries they're doing far more advanced work than we are yeah yeah and so okay so exosomes anything else that you do oh i do a lot of stuff exercise take all my supplements do allomes, anything else that you do? Oh, I do a lot of stuff, exercise, take all my supplements, do all my stuff.
What supplements are you taking? Oh, I take a cocktail of stuff, you know, my malty, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium. But then I also take my longevity stack, which is urolithin A.
I take Himalayan tartarine buckwheat, which is incredible. This compound that has quercetin and all these immunorejuvenating properties.
I take the sprout powder I put in my shake every morning. I take probiotics.
I take this senolytic compound, which is a cocktail of different herbs and things like phycetin, curcumin, green tea that helped you kill zombie cells. Yeah, where do you get that from? A company I use called Qualia.
I don't have any relation with them, but they're. Qualia? Yeah.
I know them. Okay.
I'm going to write this down. And I take NMN and I take.
Why NMN and not NR? Like why don't you take. They're interchangeable.
Do you think they're similar? Yeah. Really? I heard that NR, from what I understand, it gets into your cells easier.
Yeah, it depends who's doing the research and making money, I was telling you. Exactly.
That's a good point. And who's selling what.
I know, but isn't NMN Sinclair, right? Yeah. Okay, you must be friends with Sinclair.
Are you friends with him? I'm friends with David, yeah. He's a character, but I love him.
Okay, so that's why. Okay, so you're taking that.
What else would you say you're doing besides all those stacks? And I want to listen to it. I think, you know, one of the killers that is really not talked about a lot is loneliness and isolation and disconnection.
And, you know, when I went to the Blue Zones, it was amazing there. You know, there were no nursing homes.
Right. Even if people didn't have kids, you know, they were taken in by their niece and nephew if they were old or you know it was just quite an amazing thing and they had the deep sense of connection and community and belonging meaning purpose those are more sort of intangible things but but you know investing in your friendships and your relationships in your community is one of the most important things for longevity i actually think that loneliness is our biggest pet.
It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Yeah, people can die from loneliness.

So I totally agree.

I know you need to get out of here.

Is there anything else that you want to,

we can talk about that's a little bit,

like what's the number one question people ask you?

Oh, I don't know.

I mean, what's the one thing that you hear

the most people say?

Is it the gut?

Is it brain? What's the one thing right now that you're getting the most text messages, the most DMs about? Not like even maybe check your own DMs. I mean, it's just chronic illnesses.
People have, you know, autoimmune diseases, you know, have mood disorders, have gut issues, have just, people are just struggling. In our traditional healthcare system, we're getting sicker and sicker.
We're making more and more drugs, which aren't working. And we're spending more and more.
We're getting less and less. You know, we're now spending, you know, more than twice any of the nation in healthcare costs per capita.
And we also are 48th in life expectancy. It's crazy.
So I have one question, focus on ADHD. Do you think that that's a real thing? do you think that we can eat better to actually have a better focus being more alert oh my god yeah i mean adhd now affects about you know 10 of kids um it's something that's now diagnosed in adults you know there's a lot of reasons for it you know nature deficit disorder nutritional deficiencies microbiome issues environmental toxins nature deficit? Is that more like you're on your social media too much? Yeah.
And technology? You're not out there playing and being in nature. A hundred percent.
This is why I'm asking the question because I have kids. And I think, you know, it's a real problem.
Massive. And I wrote, again, I wrote a book about this called The Ultramind Solution, the same book, talking about the brain.
So how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first, right? So your body affects your brain. And I had a kid I talked about in that book who was severely ADD on Ritalin for years, kicked out of kindergarten, you know, like his behavior.
Had all these other health issues, had asthma and allergies, had gut issues, had headaches, had this and that. Totally crap diet, processed food, did a bunch of testing, had severe nutritional deficiencies, had a totally messed up gut, had gut had bad bugs growing too much yeast had lead also in his system so he basically just got his gut healthy put him on a nation diet kind of got his body he was 12 years old at the time and it was like a miracle like two months later he came back completely normal and what was amazing and you know you can get you the link to look at the yeah imaging but you can see his handwriting before and after two months and it was the thing that got me going oh my god what's going on here because his handwriting you know is was illegible a lot of these kids have what we call dysgraphia they can't they're writing it's just terrible penmanship and then two months later it was perfect writing it wasn't because he had occupational therapy and handwriting lessons it was because his brain went from being chaotic and dysfunctional and incoherent to being synchronized and coherent and functional.

And that was what got me to really understand that the body was influencing

the brain in ways that we could modify and change,

whether it was depression or ADD or OCD or autism or Alzheimer's,

whatever it was.

And so much, you know,

the joke in medicine is that, you know,

neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. They're both wrong, right? There's no brain, there's no brain, mind thing.
It's all one thing in the body, brain, body, mind, mind, body. It's just, it's all the same.
And so, you know, basically what happens below the neck is pretty much ignored by most other, you know, kind of neurologists or psychologists. And you can't talk your way out of, you know, a gluten intolerance that's causing brain dysfunction or heavy metal toxicity or vitamin deficiency.
You've got to treat that. Yeah.
And also exercise overall, just moving your body, going outside, all these things are so good for your overall productivity. Mark, you're amazing.
Thank you for being on the show, on the podcast. You guys, so we said for Dr.
Hyman's new and most, his new company, Function Health, which is probably now the fastest growing health company, you said, on the planet, he's giving everybody, the first hundred people, the code is a hustle 100. You're going to skip the line and you are going to get early access.
Yes, functionhealth.com. Functionhealth.com.
Tell them everything. Tell them everything.
All your 90,000 books and all the things, you know? Well, that's where I'd go. I'd get yourself checked because most people don't realize how bad things are under the hood.
And so that's really important. So just, you go to functionhealth.com,

you can log in, bypass the wait list,

get in the beta.

And it's, you know, it's easy to do.

Just use the code HUSTLE100.

If you want to learn more about me,

you can go to my website, drhyman.com.

Social media is Dr. Mark Hyman.

And podcast is The Doctor's Pharmacy,

although I might be changing the name soon, so.

They know all about you.

Like, you're like a million followers.

Okay, thank you so much.

You're an awesome, awesome guest.

And I appreciate you being here.