Mark Hyman: Struggling With Brain Fog, Weight Gain, and Low Energy? It’s Likely Hidden Inflammation! (Do THIS to Reverse It)

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The average newborn baby today has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath.

Co-founder and chief medical officer of function health, Dr.

Mark Hyman.

What is inflammation doing to your body?

Inflammation is at the root cause of almost all chronic illnesses and aging itself.

Man, visceral fat is like an incubator for inflammation, a fire in your belly.

It causes heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes.

What are the highly inflammatory foods?

The sugar and starch.

In America, average you eat a pound of sugar and flour a day per person.

What do you think the U.S.

healthcare system needs to be focused on?

All the ultra-processed food, which is 60% of our diet.

You know, we have a whole food system that's turned into ultra-processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts.

It's 73% of what's on the grocery store shelves.

Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an autoimmune disease?

You might be a little bit tired, you might be a little constipated, you might have a little dry skin, your nails might crack a little bit.

You might feel a little depressed.

You might have lower sex drive.

You're getting a little bit of weight.

And people don't think of these as a disease, but when you add them all together.

If someone's listening right now and they're thinking, I feel like crap, what do they do?

The number one health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty.

The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed, where we talk to the experts and the the thought leaders who illuminate to us how we can truly transform our lives.

Today's guest is one of your favorites, one of our favorites here on purpose, someone that I know personally and grateful to know off the screen as well as on the screen, talking about none other than Dr.

Mark Hyman.

Dr.

Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician, founder of the Ultra Wellness Center, and founder of the Functional Medicine Center at the Cleveland Clinic.

A leader in functional medicine, Dr.

Mark Hyman authored 15 New York Times bestsellers and hosts the Dr.

Hyman Show, a podcast that you should definitely subscribe to if you haven't already.

And he's known for his food as medicine philosophy and work in addressing the root causes of chronic disease through nutrition and lifestyle.

Please welcome back to on purpose, Dr.

Mark Hyman.

Mark, it's always great to have you on the show.

I'm so happy to have you back.

Thanks, Jay.

It's good to be here.

I love this place.

Mark, I'm actually really grateful you're here because we actually had a date scheduled for you to be on the show.

Yeah.

And then I sadly learned from your team that it had to be cancelled, but it was for

because I almost died.

Yeah, it was really extreme.

Yeah.

Talk to us about this near-death experience because I've known you to be a longevity expert, a health expert.

You always look in great health.

You always feel in great health.

Every time I've been around you, your energy is radiant.

carry it with you.

I know you practice what you preach.

I know it's not made up.

You're an authentic person and the work that you do, it impacts millions of people worldwide.

And then you have a near-death experience.

Yeah.

Walk me through what happened.

Yeah.

You know, thanks, Shay, for asking.

I joke that my biological age is 39, but my back age is 139.

And when I was 32, I lived in Idaho in a logging town.

I was chopping wood and carrying heavy wood and I ruptured a disc.

And it

basically caused massive damage and a permanent paralysis of my right calf.

So I've limped for 30 odd years and my back's just degenerated and I develop a lot of degenerative disc disease.

And so I've had a lot of back pain and I ended up having an injection, which is a pretty common treatment to help relieve pain.

And

one of the risks of injections of any needle is infection.

And in a closed space of the spine, it just took off.

And very quickly, within a couple of days, I couldn't walk.

Within a week, I had surgery.

They opened me up.

They closed me up because they couldn't reach the abscess.

It was on the front.

And they said, we can't do anything and basically left me to die.

Gave me antibiotics and said, cross your fingers and here's some painkillers.

And they said there was no cure.

And then a friend of mine was a doctor called me.

He said, What's happened?

I heard you're sick.

And I told him, he said, you need a second opinion.

So I got an opinion from the top neurosurgery center in the world in UCSF.

And they said, get out here right away.

So I took an ambulance jet

and had another surgery a month later that really relieved the abscess.

But in that intervening period, I got septic.

I was feverish.

I lost 25 pounds from where I am now.

I was in bed.

I couldn't eat sitting up.

I literally had to lay down with four pills under my leg.

And after the surgery, thank God it worked.

But it was a, it was a Hail Mary surgery.

And they said I was maybe a couple of days away from dying.

And I remember going under anesthesia on the day of the second surgery.

And I was like, this could be my last moment of consciousness.

In the aftermath of that,

I was on a walker.

I couldn't stand up.

I couldn't brush my own teeth.

I couldn't wipe my own ass.

I was like, it was bad.

And I had to depend on other people.

But slowly, just determined, I.

clawed my way back to health and using every principle that I know of how to create health.

And I'm 65.

I'm not a spring chicken.

And I know what to do.

And I did it.

And I wasn't sure if it was going to work at 65.

You know, how much can you get back?

But I put on more muscle and I'm stronger than I was even before the surgery.

And I just did it every day.

It was like compounding interest.

Every day I ate the best I could.

I got in the gym with my physical therapist, a trainer every day, sometimes twice a day.

I got treatments and acupuncture and I just clawed my way back.

Took my supplements, took my creatine, took all the things I needed to do.

And it took about five months.

And then I really started to kind of come back.

And it's only been seven months from the recording of this podcast.

And so I'm back and I feel good.

And I feel actually better than I ever have because I've doubled down on my health practices.

Oh, my God.

And it sort of shows you, you know, if you, if you know the laws of nature, the laws of biology, how the body works, how it's designed, how to create health, right?

Because doctors don't learn about that.

They don't learn about how to create health.

They learn about how to diagnose and treat disease, which is important.

But if you say to your doctor, how do I create health, doctor?

And they're like, well, I don't know, just eat better, exercise.

But there's, it's a very specific methodology.

It's really what functional medicine is about.

It's about how do you create optimal function and how do you create optimal health?

And what is the science of that?

And so doing that, I was able to actually

build myself back up and create health and actually feel better now than I did before the surgery.

Oh my gosh.

What did it take for you to rebuild?

Because

we always talk about being proactive.

We always talk about being well first, which you focused on and you have.

And when you end up in a position like that, it's hard mentally.

And then, of course, it's harder physically.

As you said, your body is 65, even if your biological age is 39.

There's a reality to that.

What were the key things you had to work on?

You talked about building muscle again.

What were the things you had to do in order to get back to standing in front of me right now and looking great?

The biggest component, I think, of of your health is the thing that's between your ears it's it's your mindset something you talk about a lot it's your determination it's the belief that you can actually get better and and i was physiologically depressed i lost half my blood volume so my blood count was half of what it should have been i was super anemic

i my hormones all were in the toilet my testosterone my

thyroid nothing was working i was very very nutritionally depleted.

I hadn't really eat.

And so for me,

it was just the will to get up every day and do the little things,

even when my mind was like, just stay in bed.

Just give up.

It's not worth it.

And I think for a lot of people, it's hard to divorce your thoughts from reality.

I think

you lived in a monastery and that's basically what you learn is how you're not your thoughts, you're not your beliefs, you're not your body.

And, and so, you know, but when you're in it, like it's you're in a body, you're in a physical body that feels bad.

How do you, how do you fix that?

And so that's what I've done for 30 plus years with my patients with functional medicine is when they feel bad, a lot of Americans out there feel bad.

You know,

six out of 10 of us have a chronic illness and 93% of us are metabolically unhealthy.

Most of the population has what I call FLC syndrome.

That's when you feel like crap.

You know, whether it's just little things like painful periods or headaches or constipation or joint aches or skin rashes or whatever it is, you know, people suffer and there is a way through that.

And so for me, it was, it was a mindset of not believing my thoughts.

And no matter how physiologically depleted I was, to just do the baby steps every day that got me to where I am now, which is feeling awesome.

And I was in the gym at Equinox working out for an hour this morning.

I was like, right.

That's amazing.

And

I'm so glad that you've, I mean, you've helped so many people over the years, but it's a special feeling when you reuse your own work to rebuild.

I mean, you must have so much conviction and confidence in everything you're about to share in this episode now to help everyone else.

You must have a double sense of affirmation that this stuff works because you've had to do it in the most dire of circumstances.

Absolutely.

And I had to track all my blood work and I had to track my

nutrient status and

adjust it and customize it.

But it was having the knowledge that I have and the data I have, which really now is

through the magic of technology and the explosion of the changes in our scientific framework of how we understand the body.

We're in this.

like paradigm shifting moment in in medicine and healthcare.

And

the promise of actually reversing chronic disease, of creating health, of people getting free from a lot lot of the suffering, the needless suffering that they have, is now really possible.

And that's really what I'm so excited about.

I mean, I'm just like 65 and I'm working harder than I've ever worked because I believe that there's this moment where all the things that I've done one-on-one with people or through my books,

you know, people come up and say, oh, Dr.

Hyman, you saved my life or whatever.

I'm like, it's one by one by one.

But what if this can scale through

the ability of technology to make sense of all your personal health data, customize an exact plan for you and guide you exactly on what to do, when to do it, and how to adjust it over time.

It's like where we are.

It's pretty, it's pretty cool.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

If someone's listening right now and they're saying, Dr.

Mark Hyman, I feel like crap.

Yeah.

Like if someone's listening right now and they're thinking, I feel like crap.

Yeah.

Where should they start?

What do they do?

That's a great, great question.

You know, there's a more serious version, Jay, it's called FLS.

That's when you feel like shit.

Yeah, right.

But, you know, I,

you know, have found that food is the most powerful tool to change your biology.

It's basically code or instructions that changes your physiology with every single bite.

It changes your gene expression.

It changes your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, neurotransmitters.

Everything has changed, not in like years or

decades, but literally in minutes.

And so food is the most powerful way to quickly shift your biology.

And most people, Jay, have no clue that what they're eating is making them feel bad or that their sense of how they are and their conditions that they're suffering from are caused by food.

And so

what I've done through functional medicine is

it's often called an elimination diet, but I like to call it an addition diet because you're adding in all the healing medicinal foods in your diet and you're taking out the inflammatory foods.

And so I created a program that I've used my patients called the 10-day detox diet.

And sometimes I would have people on it for a year.

You know, if I call it the 10-year detox diet, nobody would do it.

No one's going to sign up.

No one's going to sign up.

But I call it the 10 days because in 10 days, it's kind of miraculous.

And I run programs around the world where I have people come together, we spend a week.

And the average reduction in symptoms from the FLC syndrome, whether it's sinus issues or allergies or...

irritable bowel or headaches or joint pains or acne or insomnia or depression or all the little stuff that isn't like you know cancer or dementia or you know heart heart attack that's more serious.

All that stuff, literally, you don't have to suffer from.

In 10 days.

Yeah.

And there's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days.

I mean, I was like, when I first got to Cleveland Clinic, I gave a talk and this gentleman comes up to me and says, Dr.

Hyman, I have rheumatoid arthritis, but I did your 10-day detox and it went away in 10 days.

Is that possible?

I'm like, yeah, it's possible.

It happened to you.

Walk me through the two types.

What are the medicinal foods and what are the highly inflammatory foods?

So the highly inflammatory foods are obviously all the ultra-processed food, which is 60% of our diet.

You know, we have a whole food system that's designed to produce commodity crops that's turned into ultra-processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts.

It's 73% of what's on the grocery store shelves.

It's hard to get away from it.

And it's, you know, stuff that, you know, you wouldn't.

have in your kitchen.

You wouldn't have butylated hydroxytoluene to sprinkle on your vegetables or monoindiglycerides and bottle it to put on your salad dressing, right?

It's maltodectrin, like all the crab that's in there is super inflammatory, emulsifiers, additives, colors, dyes.

And then there's just the sugar and starch.

I mean,

we each, in America, average, eat a pound of sugar and flour a day per person.

That's an insane amount of sugar and flour.

And that's incredibly inflammatory.

Some people react to dairy.

Some people react to gluten or grains.

And so I take away all the things that are potentially reactive, not that they're necessarily bad foods, but a lot of people have gut issues and that people have gut issues have trouble with grains.

And gluten in this country is very different than other places like in Europe, where we were just talking about where you both were this summer.

And

it's a different genetic strain.

They don't.

use the same chemicals on it.

They don't spray it with glyphosate, which is a microbiome destroyer.

And so that often is a factor in causing leaky gut and inflammation.

So I remove

all that sugar, processed food, flour, grains,

and add in all the foods that are healing, alcohol, caffeine, sometimes, and then add in lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, you know, good quality protein, lots of good fats, avocados, coconut,

all that stuff.

It's just pretty simple.

It's like, it's not that hard.

And it doesn't have to be that expensive.

And

in a very short amount of time, people feel bad.

The first few days, people feel bad because what happens is when you stop eating the foods that you're reacting to,

you get what's called a die-off reaction.

So, basically, all the immune cells that are busy dealing with all the crap you're eating all the time have nothing to do.

So, they form these things called immune complexes, like they glom together, and then it's like you feel like you have the flu.

And that lasts maybe a couple of days.

And then, after like day three, four, five, you're like sleeping better, you have more energy, your head's clear, your symptoms are getting better.

And even in five, six days, 70% reduction.

And,

you know, we have an online program.

It's called the 10-day detox diet.

You can go to 10daydetox.com.

We've done it with thousands of people.

It's like, I'm always astounded when I see like, does this really work that well?

You know, because it's like, it almost sounds too good to be true.

That's incredible.

But it's just, it just shows you that food is medicine.

And it's not metaphorically medicine.

It literally is medicine.

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and back to our episode i want to dive into each of those three areas of the inflammatory foods first of all for anyone who's not aware or doesn't totally understand what is inflammation what is that doing to your body why is it important to have medicinal foods and avoid inflammatory foods yeah well you know

inflammation is is something that now is being understood to be at the root cause of almost all chronic illnesses and aging itself.

You know, you don't know if you have inflammation, right?

You have a sore throat, you get an infected finger from a splinter, you sprain your ankle.

You know, those are signs of inflammation.

Yeah, those are signs of inflammation.

But there's another kind of inflammation that's a little more silent.

And we can measure that through blood tests, like C-Ractid protein, which we do through Function Health.

And the amount of people who are inflamed is just so massive because of our diet.

And so that creates this elevation in these molecules in our body called cytokines.

And you, from COVID, everybody heard about the cytokine storm.

What killed people was this overwhelming inflammation.

And why did Americans die at a far greater rates?

We are 4% of the population, but 16% of the deaths and cases of COVID in the world.

So four times what we should have been.

It wasn't wasn't because we didn't have access to medical care or we didn't have good doctors.

It's because we're all pre-inflamed.

We're all metabolic and healthy.

And the worst kind of inflammation is that that comes from your belly fat.

So I just saw a guy a couple of days ago who was 52 years old and

looked pretty healthy, but he had like a little gut on him, like not big.

And he had 32% body fat in his belly.

And that visceral fat is like a incubator for inflammation.

It's basically a fire in your belly.

And that visceral fat causes heart attacks, strokes, cancer, obviously diabetes.

And

he had a blockage, a 90% blockage in his heart.

And it was because he had this inflamed, silent killer inside of him.

And so it's not just the inflammation that you know.

by getting a sore throat.

It's the quiet inflammation that you don't know you have.

And that leads to all these things, like

not just the obvious things like autoimmune diseases, which we can talk about, allergies, but things that are more subtle, whether it's

hormonal issues like menstrual cramps or

issues like migraines or headaches or fatigue or all these things are signs of this fire raging through your body that you don't know about that's killing you.

And so by eating an anti-inflammatory diet and removing the inflammatory foods, like your body will quickly reset.

I mean, your body has this innate intelligence.

This is what's such a miracle for me when you think about it.

Your body is a healing machine.

Like, look what happened to me.

Like, I mean, I was in bed.

I was, I couldn't walk.

I was on a walker.

I was emaciated.

I was close to death.

And when I put the right inputs in, my body healed.

And it's amazing.

And I've had patients who were 65 with heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, kidneys failing, liver failing, who actually...

didn't take 10 days, but like, you know, three months, they were off all their medications, they reversed all these conditions.

Even at 65 or 66 years old, the body can do that.

And so that's really what I want for people.

I want them to have access to the knowledge, the ability, and the tools to be able to do this for themselves and to try it.

And I don't say the smartest doctor in your room is your own body.

If you listen to it, gee, when I eat this, my stomach doesn't feel good.

When I have that, I get a headache.

But most people don't connect the dots between what they eat and how they feel.

Yeah, we base it all on lifestyle.

And we also, like the gentleman you were treating, we still live in this world of, oh, I'm not that big, small.

We're looking at this physical attribute when actually the inflammation is all happening on the inside.

Yeah.

Like he was jogging every day.

He was eating healthy.

He was active.

Yeah.

He's doing all the right things.

Yeah.

But there's this hidden part.

One of those hidden things is sugar.

I find it really shocking when I was playing pickleball the other day and someone said to me that, oh, let's have this drink.

Like we didn't have, we, we, we didn't have any water accessible at the time.

We were all feeling thirsty it was pretty hot yeah and and he had these like packs of drinks and so he handed to me my wife has trained me to look at look at liquid labels and i turned it around and it was like 40 of your daily sugars in this little pack right it was tiny it was i don't even know what it's called yeah 40 of your daily sugars had all these other non-natural ingredients that i didn't recognize at all yeah massive list and and i said to him i said dude like I'm not drinking this.

Yeah.

I was like, I'm not going to have it.

I was like, I'm not going to have 40% of my sugars in this.

And I try and avoid refined sugar anyway.

And, but to him, that was crazy.

He was just like, oh, dude, it's fine.

Like, we're running for like three hours.

Like, we, you know, it's just a hydration.

I was like, yeah, but you don't need the sugar with it.

And, and I find that sugar is something I still get a lot of pushback on.

Really?

Yeah, people.

Even that's, that's my reaction.

Because I feel like I've been so like well educated by yourself, the other experts on the show, my wife, who are constantly, because I used to be addicted to sugar.

Wow, easy.

And all of a sudden, you get, so talk to me about sugar, because I think there's a way in which we've been brainwashed to think it's okay.

Yeah, no, actually, Jay, you know, we know alcohol is addictive, right?

But there's been large studies done using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a scientifically validated metric that measures food addiction.

And it's primarily sugar and starch.

And 14% of people in this country are alcoholics.

But 14% are also addicted to food.

And 14% have kids, which is a lot of kids.

So it's biologically addictive.

A little bit, it's not going to hurt you.

If you're healthy, if you're fit, you can have some.

It's just the volume that we have in this culture.

I mean, it's something that our biology doesn't know what to do with.

Historically, we were hunter-gatherers.

We had 22 teaspoons a year.

Now the average person has 22 teaspoons a day.

Wow.

Yeah.

And that is mind-blowing.

Yeah.

22 teaspoons a year.

So you were a hunter-gatherer.

You'd like get some honey.

Oh, my God.

I found honey, you know,

and you'd eat it but it was hard to get sugar and you were more active then too yeah and you were running yeah all the time because you're looking for that jar of honey once a year no jar sorry it was actually I was I was in the Hadza tribe which is one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in in Africa and they eat a lot of honey they eat like about 20% of calories of honey but they're super fit and healthy because they're just like eating tons of fiber.

So they basically, all the roots and the tubers have massive amounts of fiber.

Americans eat about eight grams of fiber fiber a day.

We were historically as hunter-gatherers having 150 grams a day.

And fiber basically is like a sponge.

So for example, if you take your Coca-Cola and you throw in a bunch of metamucil, it's going to have a very different effect on your blood sugar.

It's going to turn to gel, first of all, if you leave it there for long enough.

And then if you drink it, it's not going to cause the same spike.

So

it's just the whole context of our diet.

It's just become highly processed, lots of sugar, and it drives the visceral fat.

So sugar and starch.

And by the way, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of corn flakes and a bowl of sugar or a loaf of bread and a

bowl of sugar.

It's the same.

In fact, sometimes in terms of glycemic index,

the bread is worse because it's pure glucose, whereas sugar is fructose and glucose, which has different effects on your blood sugar.

But basically, they're both the same.

And what that does is that drives the deposition of belly fat.

And that belly fat, which is not just holding up your pants, it's metabolically very active.

It produces tons of inflammation, screws up your hormones.

It causes infertility.

It causes Alzheimer's disease.

It causes cancer.

It causes diabetes.

It causes heart attacks.

It causes aging itself.

And when you look around in America, 93% of us, well, 93.2 to be exact, have this metabolic dysfunction.

That means 6.8% of us don't, which is frightening.

Frightening, yeah.

Frightening.

And that's not how how humans evolved.

We didn't evolve like that.

People go to the Native Americans, they're genetically diabetic.

Well, no, they're not.

Like the Pima Indians 100 years ago had no diabetes, no obesity,

no heart attacks.

And now they're, you know, get 80% get diabetes by the time you're 30.

And even two-year-olds get type diabetes because they're just drinking tons of sugar, sodas, and flour, and all the commodities that we send to the reservations that are all the crap we shouldn't be eating.

So, yeah, if you put your genes in the wrong environment, the genes may load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.

I want to give a shout out to this incredible company that you brought my way, Function Health.

When you first brought it to me, I was so impressed at what it does because I think everything we're talking about, the challenge is we don't know until we feel something in quite an extreme way.

Right.

So we just don't know as humans.

We don't know these things.

We were never taught them.

If I didn't meet my wife, if I didn't have this podcast, I wouldn't be educated.

I just how would i know this yeah and when you talk about the 93.2 percent that's all of us who just don't know yeah and then you my wife and you and people like that are the the 6.8 percent i love your wife by the way she's great and all of a sudden you get educated and then that's what function health does the fact that you can take these

you can get all the results you know from being at home or or you know popping to get a get a test done you have access to actually know what's happening inside your body And I became a proud investor in the company when you first brought it to me because I'd never seen someone make

that kind of data available at mass and at scale.

I was going to some concierge services, which I'm very fortunate to have access to, but I didn't see how the world, the 93.2%, could have access to these things.

And that's what Function Health's doing.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine driving your car.

You don't have any dashboard.

You don't know how fast you're going.

You know how much gas in the car.

You know how much oil is in there.

You don't know if the engine light's good.

You don't have your tire pressure is good.

I mean, think of the amount of sensors and information you get from your car these days, right?

We practice medicine today, like

listening to the noises a car makes and hoping we can figure it out instead of looking under the hood.

And so, you know, I believe we should be testing and not guessing on what's going on with our health.

And the wearables are great, you know, Aura Ring or Fitbit or, you know, Apple Watch, awesome, boop.

They tell you a lot, but they don't go under the skin.

And so you need to know what's happening in your biology.

And the truth is that disease doesn't just happen like that one day, you get a heart attack.

It's a slow progression over decades.

And you can see the continuum of what happens.

And you can see slight changes and variations that will compound over time and make you ultimately very sick.

And the beautiful thing about functional health is you can actually get your biomarkers done.

There's over 110 biomarkers, your initial test.

You do a second test mid-year.

You can add-on tests for looking at other things, whether you want toxins or allergens or Lyme disease, whatever you want to know about yourself.

And then you get this beautiful dashboard that shows you exactly what's going on.

Like, you know, you get like on a car dashboard and you can see the change over time.

And then you can learn what to do about it and what's going on with your body and how to make adjustments.

And you get all the information that's supported by all the scientific literature in the world, by knowledge experts, by your own personal data set.

And it's really medicine designed for you.

And it's, it's really quite a remarkable thing.

And people seem to have taken to it because we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of members and people are learning so much about their health.

And I've been shocked at the data that we're finding, you know, like we found all these cancers.

I was just reviewing our cancer screening and God, you know, people don't know they have cancer.

I mean, I had a friend who just died like a month ago from breast cancer at 45 years old.

It was heartbreaking, you know, and now through the blood tests you can get through function health, you can actually see like a liquid biopsy for 50 different cancers.

And I was reviewing the spreadsheet of all the people and what they found and in a follow-up.

And I'm like, they didn't know they had cancer.

And then they found it in an early stage.

And then it saves their lives as opposed to waiting until too late.

So, you know, it's always, and the whole thing about the metabolic health.

I mean, most doctors don't check insulin, which is extremely important to know about because insulin is what goes up first, not your blood sugar.

And most doctors don't look at the right cholesterol test.

Apo B is the most important.

I just had a friend send me an article.

He said, Dr.

Hyman, look at this article.

It's about this latest new test for predicting heart attack risks.

It's better than any other test.

I'm like, what is it?

I'm like, I looked it up and I was like, oh, it's called APOB.

I'm like, I've been testing that for 30 years.

It's the most predictive, but people check your LDL cholesterol.

That's not the thing that matters.

And so we do that and we do.

deeper analysis of your metabolic health, your nutritional health, looking at toxins, your hormones.

And we're finding autoimmune diseases.

I mean, I looked it up before I came on the podcast.

I was curious because,

you know, about 8%, according to the CDC, of Americans have an autoimmune disease.

But when I looked at our data, we're seeing 33% have a positive autoimmune antibody,

which is incredible.

I mean, that's a third of Americans have some either autoimmune disease or pre-autoimmune disease.

And there's stuff you can do about it and get to the root cause.

And what's beautiful about it is that we use root cause medicine, not just, oh, you have an autoimmune disease, take this drug, or you have high cholesterol, take this drug.

It's like, well, how do I solve this using all the world's scientific knowledge about how to best do this through lifestyle and dealing with root causes and creating health rather than just mitigating symptoms or suppressing symptoms?

So it's pretty exciting.

And I think, you know, we

now have full body imaging for $4.99.

You know, you can get your whole blood test for $4.99, $1.37 a day.

I'm really impressed by what you offered.

And I love what Function Health has done so much that I didn't just invest.

I got every member of my team a membership.

That's amazing.

Because I couldn't think of a better gift

to give people than

accessing their knowledge and knowing what's happening inside their body.

Like, if I want people to perform at work and feel their best and care about their health, to me, it felt like the right thing to do.

And so, and I know you've actually created a

discount for our community.

Yeah, yeah.

For us, what are you doing for us?

It's functionhealth.com/slash Jay Shetty, and you get $100 off your membership.

It's a membership, twice your testing.

So it's, you know, 400 bucks or 399.

And

you get to know what's going on.

It's, and the gift of health is, you know, what you did for your employees is amazing because there is no better gift than the gift of health.

Yeah, you only realize that when it when it goes away.

Yeah.

And I've had many episodes in my life where my health has not been great.

Yeah.

And that's when you realize just how valuable it is to know sooner, know earlier, and know before.

And, you know, I'm glad.

So that's great.

So functionhealth.com forward slash Jay Shetty.

that's right $100 off yeah and as I said I'm an investor and you know really proud to be involved and really excited to to get it out I want to talk about the autoimmune diseases yeah because it feels like

I feel like right now I'm at that age where I'm either hearing about autoimmune or cancer yeah or sadly people dying yeah

more than I ever have in my entire lifetime that's not just because I'm getting older though

it's becoming more prevalent it is I mean the the the hockey hockey stick of chronic diseases is going like this.

It's really striking.

I mean, things that were rare 150 years ago or

120 years ago, turn of the 1900s.

If you had a heart attack in a hospital, it would be like seeing this rare case of malaria in like Manhattan.

Like all the doctors would rush around to see this unusual case.

Wow.

diabetes wasn't even the thing in type 2 diabetes.

If you look at the records of Mass General in the 1850s, it wasn't even a diagnosis.

You know, people didn't have it.

So why are we seeing this explosion?

Autoimmune disease, there are over 100 different autoimmune diseases,

everything from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is affecting one in five women.

That's an autoimmune thyroid condition, one in 10 men,

lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, colitis, Crohn's disease.

There are over 100 different autoimmune diseases and people are suffering from these things.

And the drugs that we use are incredibly toxic.

They basically suppress your immune system.

They have all these side effects and they're extremely expensive and they don't necessarily always work that well.

And the question then is, why are we doing this?

I mean, this is what functional medicine is about, is what function is created on the basis of this idea of why, not what disease do you have and what drug do I get, but why.

And the reason why we're seeing such an explosion of autoimmune disease is a combination of different factors.

One, Our diet has changed dramatically over the last 50 to 70 years because of industrialization of agriculture, the use of pesticides, herbicides.

The increasing rates of C-section means you don't colonize your gut.

And 60% of your immune system is in your gut.

And a lot of autoimmune disease is caused by trouble with the gut.

The increasing rates of formula feeding, you know, not breast milk, which protects the baby's immune system, is necessary for the development of them.

I mean, 25% of the calories in

breast milk is not digestible by the baby.

It's to feed the microbiome, which is amazing.

Yeah, it's crazy.

And when you eat, have formula, you don't have that in there.

And so the microbiomes are disturbed and then you get leaky gut.

We use lots of antibiotics in children.

We have accelerated vaccine schedules.

Vaccines I believe in.

I think they're important.

But like when I was a kid and when my kids were kids, which is that long ago, there was a limited set of vaccines.

And now it's free-for-all.

That's like you got to take 15 or 16.

Yeah, it's like 72 different different jabs of shots.

And so that affects your immune system.

And

they do things that affect your immune system by putting in irritants like aluminum.

And then the exposure to environmental chemicals has exploded, heavy metals, pesticides.

The average newborn baby today, Jay, has 287

toxins.

in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath, including stuff that's been banned for years like DDT and dioxin, PCBs, phthalates, flame retardants, lead, mercury, pesticides, herbicides, I mean, you name it, it's in there.

And so all that has an impact and they're called autogens.

There's a whole science around this.

These are environmental toxins that cause autoimmunity.

And I've seen many patients with

autoimmune diseases that I cured by getting rid of their heavy metals or detoxifying their bodies.

And so these toxins are a huge factor.

And then you've got all the modern stresses.

You know, we don't sleep, you know, we're under too much chronic stress, you know, light pollution who knows what emf i don't even know if that's a thing but i'm not saying it is i'm saying like it's just all this stuff that we never had to deal with and we're just seeing our immune system become so dysregulated and the ultra processed food revolution has been another huge factor because in ultra processed food there's all these emulsifiers emulsifiers are basically the things that make stuff creamy and you know like if you ever got some of the like nut milks and they separate out when you put in your coffee it's because they don't use emulsifiers right and emulsifiers basically make things creamy and they're using almost all ulster processed food and they damage the gut lining and they cause a, what we call a leaky gut where the cells come apart and then food and bacteria leak in between your cells.

And then right underneath your cell lining, which is just one cell thick, is most of your immune system.

And think about why is most of your immune system in your gut?

Well, it's because we're exposed to most of the foreign stuff every day.

You're putting pounds of foreign food in there and you're putting

all the bacteria from your microbiome.

There's three pounds of bacteria in there that is, you know, basically a sewer, you know, and it is like one, you're one cell away from a sewer.

And so when that breaks down, your immune system goes, this isn't me, what's going on?

And it starts attacking things, and then it creates just a lot of mistaken identity, things we call molecular mimicry, where it thinks it's attacking a bacteria or food, but then it'll attack your joints or your eyes or

your nerves and get MS and your thyroid gland.

So basically, we're seeing this explosion.

And the beautiful thing is by understanding the root causes that you can actually reverse it.

I had an autoimmune disease.

I actually had mold in my house.

I've gotten everything known to man.

I've gotten Lyme disease, mold disease, and I lived in an old barn.

I got really bad mold poisoning.

And then on top of that, I had a root canal,

had it removed, had an antibiotic.

The antibiotic called something called C.

diff, which is a bacteria that causes really bad gut infections.

That turned into ulcerative colitis.

My whole intestinal tract was just one big red mess, and I had to heal it.

And so, you know, there is a methodology for creating health.

And

that's what I want people to know.

That's why functional health is so important because it teaches you how to turn on your own innate healing system.

You've got a healing, regenerative repair, and renewal system.

That's why I could come back from the dead because I knew how to turn it on, you know?

And that's what I want everybody to know.

And that's really why I do what I do, why I have the podcast, why I write books, why I travel around speaking like you.

It's the same, it's the same movie,

different story.

What are the signs for someone who's listening of a weak immune system and a strong immune system?

How do they tell?

I mean, you know, the inflammation and immune system are a little bit different because

you can be inflamed, but have a weaker immune system.

So

frequent infections, frequent colds,

feeling run down.

I mean, there are signs that your immune system is not not working.

And you get

less resilient to stress.

You get sick more easily.

And so those are signs that there's problems.

And one of the things we find through function health is that so many people have nutritional deficiencies and nutrients like zinc and vitamin D and iron.

These play a big role in your immune function.

It's actually even supplements is such a bad word for supplements because it sounds like something that, you know, you're just supplementing, but it's like...

Like it's not necessary.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what I mean, right?

The word supplement in and of itself feels like it's an add-on right rather than like this is necessary right right like i think we're still living in this time where supplements haven't become the norm yeah people see it as some health hack tip as opposed to no this is just what your body needs as nutrients my joke is i don't think anybody needs supplements only under certain conditions they have to hunt and gather their own wild food they have to drink pure clean water be exposed to no environmental toxins have no chronic stress sleep nine hours a night go to bed with the sun wake up with the sun.

Then if you do all that, you might not need something.

I'm good with the last six, but bad in the first three.

You haven't gone hunting today?

Yeah, I didn't go hunting today.

And so our soils have become damaged because of industrial.

And the way your plants get nutrients is because of the organic matter in the soil.

It has a symbiotic relationship with the microbes in the soil and with the plant roots that then allows it to extract the nutrients.

if you basically grow plants in dirt, not soil,

where there's no nutrients or they're not accessible because the body, the plants can't get them because they don't have the right organic matter to create the symbiotic relationship, your broccoli today is 50% less nutrients than it did 50 years ago.

Plus, you know, we do a lot of things to cause more stress for our bodies.

We need more nutrients.

And like magnesium is a very big nutritional deficiency because when you're stressed, you pee out magnesium.

And then we we don't eat a lot of magnesium-rich foods like nuts and seeds and beans and leafy greens, right?

It's not a big part of Americans' diet.

So a lot of people are low in magnesium and low in vitamin D.

We see 80% of people being insufficient or deficient in vitamin D, which is incredibly important for immune function.

And I mean, COVID, if your vitamin D was low, you were 75% more likely to end up in the ICU and die.

Whereas if your vitamin D was over 50, this big Israeli study, there were no deaths.

So it's that powerful.

There are things that regulate almost every biochemical reaction in your body.

And you've got 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second happening.

Every one of those, and that's a big number.

I don't know how many zeros that is.

Slot is zero.

I think it's 27 zeros.

And every single one of those reactions requires a nutrient to work as a cofractor for the enzymatic reaction.

And most of us are deficient.

In fact, with function health, we do deep nutritional testing, omega-3s, vitamin D, all the B vitamins, iron, so forth.

And we're finding 67% of our members who you'd think would be forward thinking about their health are deficient in nutrients, not at the level that I would think would be optimal, but at the level that prevents a deficiency disease.

So like not the ideal amount, but the bare minimum so you don't get like rickets or scurvy or, you know, like, and that's not, and that's 67%.

So if you expanded the criteria to be what's optimal, it would probably be even more.

Yeah.

It's, it's scary to think about it, but it's so important to start being aware right now.

Can someone know

that they have some symptoms of an autoimmune disease?

Like, is it possible?

Well, there's pre-autoimmune disease, like there's pre-diabetes or pre-hypertension.

And I don't like those terms because they imply that you haven't gotten into trouble yet, but you are in trouble.

There is something bad happening.

And so you have to actually look at...

the blood work to help you identify if you're heading in the wrong direction and you can see.

But then you could be somebody who's suffering from low-grade symptoms.

You might not know it.

Like, thyroid is really common.

You might be a little bit tired.

You might be a little constipated.

You might have a little dry skin.

Your nails might crack a little bit.

You might be losing the outer third of your eyebrow.

You might feel a little depressed.

You might have lower sex drive.

And these things people don't really

gain a little bit of weight.

People don't think of these as a disease, but when you add them all together, it's an autoimmune thyroid issue, right?

And even gut issues, you know, irritable bowel, a lot of people have digestive issues.

And it's really a continuum from irritable bowel to autoimmune bowel disease, which is where you get colitis or Crohn's disease.

And so it's a continuum.

A lot of people have this low-grade inflammatory stuff going on in their bodies.

And it's really, it's unfortunate because we know how to fix it.

And this is really what we do in functional medicine.

It's why I think testing and understanding what's going on with your body before you get in trouble.

It's like, you know, the first symptom of a heart attack, you know what it is for most people?

For 50% of people with heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death, drop dead of heart attack.

Like this guy was telling you about he was jogging and he kept having chest pain and he was ignoring it and then he finally decided to go check it out because his girlfriend made him go and and uh turned out he had a nine percent blockage and he wouldn't know anything he could have literally just dropped out of a heart attack like that before we dive into the next moment let's hear from our sponsors

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Thanks for taking a moment for that.

Now back to the discussion.

What are the shifts we should be making right now?

If someone's listening, they're going to go get the test if they can.

If they can't, because, you know, for whatever reason, they don't live in the States because we're not available internationally.

No, not yet.

Yeah, not yet.

Yeah, I get a lot of that in my comment section.

Like, hey, Jay,

yeah there's a lot of people i know in uk and europe who really want it and and australia and other places but uh you've got your results you know what's going on where would you encourage people to begin if they on they don't have anything serious right now but they want to make sure they get this yeah i mean i'm not trying to sell anything here but i i think doing a um a short-term reset is powerful i i the way i think about it is

How do you turn your body back to its original factory settings?

When a baby comes out, it's generally perfect, right?

It's beautiful, it's healthy, everything works, right?

And then things break down.

But imagine it, like if your computer is, you know, not working or it's on the fritz and like my WhatsApp wasn't working today and I just had to reboot it, right?

Or reboot my computer.

How do you do that with your body?

And that's really what this dietary change that I call the 10-day detox diet is about.

It's about really putting your body back to its original factory settings.

For most people, it will create a dramatic shift.

If you don't get better from it, it's usually because there's something more serious, like you have Lyme disease, you have mold exposure that's causing toxicity, you have maybe environmental toxins or Lyme disease or something serious that needs another treatment.

But for most people, just a simple 10-day approach to resetting your system by getting enough sleep, by cutting out the bad stuff, by taking walks, by doing a little...

breathing exercises and radically changing your diet you'll go oh my god you can do that at home this isn't you don't you and it's basically afford to go on a retreat.

You can do it at home.

100%.

Most people do it at home.

And it's so, it's, it doesn't really cost you any extra.

Maybe it'll cost you less because you're not buying all this extra crap.

And so it's

10 days, right?

And if you try it, it's like the body just has this desire to be healthy.

And illness is just your body's best attempt to deal with a really shitty set of circumstances.

Change the circumstances, meaning what you're exposed to, your diet, lifestyle, and then you'll change.

You know, because 93% that's been determined of our health issues are not genetic.

They're from our collective environment, what we call the exposome, not our genome.

Our exposome is what it sounds like.

It's everything that we're exposed to.

It's what we eat, it's movement, it's sleep, it's stress, it's our gut microbiome, it's environmental toxins, it's our thoughts.

Our thoughts actually transform our biology, literally.

It's the biggest pharmacy that's between your ears.

And so all those things you have control over, which is what's so exciting to me.

It's about being empowered to actually make those changes.

And people just suffer so badly.

I mean, I think I told you maybe that I did a program with a faith-based wellness program with Rick Warren at this church where we got a quarter of a million pounds lost out for 15,000 people in a year.

by doing a faith-based wellness program.

And the amount of people that had radical changes in their health was just so remarkable.

This one woman had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

She'd been on every psychiatric medication you could imagine, from antidepressants to anti-anxiety medications to antipsychotic medications.

She was, you know, about to commit suicide.

You know, she, she was also overweight.

And she did this dietary change.

Essentially, I did the faith-based wellness program, included the 10-day detox diet.

And she's like,

I'm completely cured.

Like, I don't have any depression.

I'm off all my medications.

I feel good.

How is that possible?

And, you know, that's the other thing, Jay.

You know, there's so much mental illness.

There's so much depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, you know,

more serious things like severe OCD or even schizophrenia.

These things actually are physiological problems.

They're not always emotional problems.

So sometimes they are, like, you know, your spouse dies, you're depressed.

Yeah, I get it.

You know, but

a lot of times, and for many people, there's actually a physiological reason.

You know, we talk about the mind-body effect, which is how the mind affects the body, which is profound.

But there's also the body-mind effect.

So if you're magnesium deficient, you can be anxious, right?

If you're vitamin D deficient or omega-3 deficient, you can be depressed or you can have ADD.

If you don't have enough folate or B12, you can get depressed.

I mean, these are things that you can fix.

If you have heavy metals, which I did, it can cause you to have depression and insomnia and anxiety.

I mean, I'm treating a little girl right now who's got severe OCD, and it turned out she had a strep infection that turns into this autoimmune reaction against your brain that's causing her to have OCD behaviors like ticks and weird things that we think is psychological.

So I think, you know, I often call myself the accidental psychiatrist because I was treating people for all these physical things and then the psychiatric problems would get better.

And I wrote a book about it called The Ultra Mind Solution, How to Fix Your Broken Brain by Fixing Your Body First.

And you can just get that off the table.

And then, you know, if you have other deeper trauma or things, yeah, I think the revolution now in

metabolic psychiatry nutritional psychiatry and then psychedelic medicine and psychiatry are i think going to change the face of mental health care for the long term absolutely what what are some of the mistakes you see people making in curing autoimmune diseases what are some of the mistakes what are the things we get wrong well because they don't treat the cause is the biggest thing you know i had a patient when i was at cleveland clinic who was a business coach she was 50 years old and she had a a lot of problems and i jokingly call myself a holistic doctor because i take care of people with a whole holistic problems, you know.

And she had everything.

You know, she had irritable bowel, she had reflux, she had migraines, she was depressed, she had pre-diabetes, and she had this horrible autoimmune disease called psoriatic arthritis, you know, the heartbreak of psoriasis, these horrible, thick, scaly, red, itchy plaques on your skin.

And it also could attack your joints, and it was attacking your joints.

She was on a drug, and she was seeing it by the top doctors.

And she was on a drug that cost $50,000, and it wasn't really fixing her.

And she was seeing the top specialists for neurology for her migraines, psychiatry for depression, gastrology for her gut, an endocrinology for her prediabetes, a rheumatologist for her arthritis and her skin issues and a dermatology.

I was like, right, she had a doctor for every inch of her.

And I said, gee, you know, you're getting all these medications.

You're not really better.

You're mitigating your symptoms a little bit.

Maybe we think about treating the root cause.

And so because she had so many digestive symptoms and she'd been on lots of antibiotics, she'd been on lots of steroids for her authoritarian.

That really messed up the gut too.

I said, you have reflux.

You have bloating after eating.

You have all these gut issues.

Why don't we treat your gut?

So I basically gave her an antibiotic to kill off all these bad bugs that were in her gut.

And I gave her an antifungal because she had a lot of fungal overgrowth from all the...

steroids and the antibiotics to kill off the bad bugs.

I gave her some probiotics.

I put her on the 10-day detox diet, basically, got rid of all the inflammatory foods, got rid of the sugar, processed food.

She comes back in six weeks and she's like, I'm all better.

I mean, what do you mean?

She says, well, I stopped all my medications.

Well, I didn't tell you to do that.

She's like, no, I just was feeling so good.

I stopped everything.

I don't have migraines.

I'm not depressed.

My lost 20 pounds.

My skin's cleared.

My joints don't hurt.

My reflux is gone.

My irritable bowel is gone.

And so if you treat the root, which was her gut in this case, and I just gave her, you know, I just gave her the inlation diet and I gave her the antibiotics and the antifungals.

antifungals.

I gave her probiotics, vitamin D, some fish oil, not a lot.

And in six weeks, not only was she feeling better, but she like saved the healthcare system, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.

Yeah, it's, it's almost like it sounds like magic when you're listening to it and you go, yeah, no, it's not because we've just been trained to believe that this way makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, it's, it's, it's funny.

We're more convinced.

that a manufactured pill will solve our body than the things that our ancestors have lived off

for years and years and years.

That's right.

So if you, if you, if you don't know how to turn on the body's healing system, then yeah, you need medication.

And what's so exciting to me, Jay, is like we're in this revolution in medicine right now where we're finally understanding root causes.

And it's in the scientific literature.

But it takes decades for that to get into clinical practice.

I mean, to change medical education, to change reimbursement, to change how doctors practice.

It's just such a, it's like, it's like we're all walking around thinking the earth is flat when it's really round.

And so this paradigm shift is, is such a profound change in how we think about disease that it's going to revolutionize everything we do.

And it's, and it's only now

accessible to people through things like function because we're able to, through technology, be able to get the amazing amount of world scientific literatures.

You know, AI can read it in like five seconds, right?

And it can synthesize it.

And then it's your own personal health data set.

It's not like your, you know, doctors treating you based on a study that was on 70 kilogram white men from Kansas, which doesn't apply to an Indian guy, you know, or somebody who's in like, you know, Vietnam.

Right.

And so basically we are treating to the masses where we should be treating to the individual.

We call this precision medicine, personalized medicine, but medicine should be personalized.

It should be predictive.

It should be preventive.

And it should be proactive that you actually don't have to react like we do in medicine, but be proactive.

And that's really, you know, my last work is not only, you know, taking people with very serious illnesses and reversing them, but actually getting people earlier.

I mean, Benjamin Franklin said it, right?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And so I can give a pound of cure, but it's a lot harder than an ounce of prevention.

What are you most excited about at the forefront of medicine and functional medicine at the moment?

Yeah.

Is it AI?

Is it?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I said to you, like, there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body.

It's the body's so complex.

Its physics is complex.

Think about how complicated a rocket is.

I can't even understand that, but that's a knowable thing, right?

Scientists and physicists can figure it out and then send a guy to the moon or build a spaceship that goes to Mars like Elon Musk.

But like the body is so infinitely complex.

And we see it in this reductionist way where every different organ has a different specialist and the body is all these different parts.

But that's not how we're designed.

Everything's an ecosystem.

Everything's connected.

You know, we're one whole web-like organism

where everything's interacting with everything else all the time.

And so that paradigm of thinking that way, and functional medicine isn't a test, it's not a supplement, it's not a new specialty.

It's literally a meta framework for thinking about the nature of health and disease based on root causes and based on the body as a system and based on asking the question, why, not what disease do you have and what drug do I get, but why do I have this?

And how do I create health, not treat disease?

And when I create health, disease goes away as a side effect.

And so that scientific paradigm is now emerging.

And before,

you know, it was frustrating for me doing this work for 30 years because

it was hard to convince people.

Like, look, the earth is round.

Like, no, no, no, it's flat.

See right there, it's flat.

And they go, there's that disease and it's real.

Like, yeah, you know, rheumatoid arthritis is a thing, but it's not how we.

think about it.

We're thinking about it the wrong way.

And so I'm so excited now because of AI and the ability to synthesize massive data sets.

I mean, you have 100,000 petabytes of data in your microbiome.

A petabyte is a million gigabytes.

Okay, your computer has four terabytes, maybe, right?

Which is a thousand gigabytes or something.

I mean, it's just such a massive amount of information.

That's just in your microbiome.

And so your body is so complex.

And we need technology and AI to help us start to understand that and then apply it to you as an individual and then help create a roadmap for looking at at where your weak points are and how do you correct those and then how do you optimize and so that's what i'm so excited about and that's that's why at 65 i'm like doing the startup i mean i was i was with uh one of the uh one of the investors on a panel and i'm like she's like somebody said well how do you how do you uh figure out what companies to invest in they go well we invest in the founders I'm like, well, have you ever had a founder that's been on Medicare before?

And I'm like, what am I doing?

I mean, like, I mean, hope to live to be 100 and something, but, you know, I'm doing this because I don't want to see so many people suffering that don't have to suffer.

And I get these calls every day from friends and would you help this one?

They help that one.

No one can help me.

And I'm like, I'm only one guy.

I could like work 24 hours a day for the rest of my life and I wouldn't make a dent in the amount of suffering there is in the world.

But imagine if we could put, you know, a thousand or a hundred thousand doctors in your pocket that are trained on the future paradigm of medicine and make it accessible to you in real time on a day-to-day basis to guide you and coach you and support you.

That's what functional health is aiming to do.

And I'm so excited about it because it's like, wow, we couldn't do this before.

We couldn't take this amazing complexity of human biology and help a single doctor understand.

It's just hard.

Like, I see the patterns.

I can look at something quickly and I know in a few minutes like what to do.

But it's only because I've seen tens of thousands of patients and millions and millions of biomarkers that I can make those connections.

And I'm not that good compared to like what technology is going to be able to do.

Yeah.

What do you wish doctors were taught today?

Oh my God, don't get me started.

My daughter just graduated from medical school.

She's brilliant and she's now going to be an orthopedic surgeon, which I think is great because you need that.

Like, you know, if you break your hip, you need a new hip.

So that's a kind of medicine that I think is, we're really good at is acute care medicine.

But what she didn't learn about was nutrition, which, okay,

we have

a chronic disease epidemic in this country.

It's caused primarily by food.

It can be cured mostly by food, and yet doctors know nothing about food, right?

So nutrition didn't learn about the microbiome, didn't learn about environmental toxins, didn't learn about how to create health, didn't learn about the body's networks and systems, didn't learn about mitochondria.

I mean, yes, she got like her first, you know, semester, she learned about the Krebs cycle in biochemistry, but didn't understand how to diagnose people with mitochondrial issues, which is our energy's powerhouse and how everything works in our body.

So those are things that doctors don't learn anything about.

Didn't learn about how to optimize your immune function.

Didn't learn about how to treat gut issues in the right way by fixing a leaky gut.

So there's so many areas that are part of the framework of functional medicine that they don't learn anything about.

Yeah.

So no wonder when you go and talk about how you're feeling,

you're not getting the information that you need.

I mean, you know, you go, doctor, you know, I feel this and that and the other thing.

And they go, well, you know, I did your exam.

That's okay.

Your lab tests look okay because they do a very limited set.

And, you know, you're fine.

Just go home and take Prozac, you know.

But

there's only one of two things.

It's true.

One, either you're crazy and making it up or your doctor is missing something.

And nine times out of 10, they're missing something because they don't know how to think.

They don't know how to think about the human body except in a very reductionist way.

And it's just not how things are.

You know, we are a dynamic ecosystem and everything is interacting with everything else in real time and changing.

And how do you play with that?

How do you, as a, as a, as a practitioner or even as an individual, learn how your body works?

I mean, most of us have no clue how our bodies work and how to create a better functioning body.

You know, we take better care of our animals than we do of our dog, our health, right?

I mean, you wouldn't feed your dog a Big Mac fries and a Coke, would you?

Definitely.

And And a milkshake.

No.

But we give that to our kids.

Yeah.

Right.

As someone who grew up in London, England, and had the National Healthcare Service, and then you moved to the United States.

And of course, most of it's private, and there's not really any healthcare available as far as I know.

What do you think the U.S.

healthcare system needs to be focused on?

Yeah, 100%.

Well, I'm excited.

I mean, I'm working right now with Medicare and with the NIH on how do things need to change because they're very open and they're very interested in changing the way we look at things.

And I think, you know, the even having access to good health care, which we don't in this country, I mean, in the UK, you have the NHS, the National Health Service, great, but, you know, maybe the quality isn't always as good.

The reality is that, you know, most of your health is not happening in the doctor's office.

80 to 90% of it happens.

with things that you can have control over.

It happens in your kitchen.

It happens, you know, where you play and eat and pray and work.

That's where health happens.

I mean, my wife's now studying at Columbia for her master's in public health.

And she's just so excited telling me that how she's learning about how they're talking about the real drivers of disease.

And it's like 80 to 90% is not.

stuff that the doctor has control over.

It's the environment that you live in and it's your choices every day.

And so those things you don't really need health care for.

And so I think if we can build a health system that activates people around that, then you won't need the doctor most of the time.

And then they're there for acute care medicine.

You know, if you like, I had back surgery.

Thank God there's some guy who knows how to deal with a spine infection and can put in hardware and like, you know, kind of build my backup.

Great.

Thank God.

But,

you know, but if I if I said to him, like, what do I do to recover and become stronger than I was before?

He's like, I don't know, just do physical therapy or eat better.

Yeah, it's a great answer.

Very helpful.

It's a great answer.

How do we hold ultra-processed food manufacturers more accountable for getting away with putting excess sugars, emulsifiers, unidentifiable objects into our food?

Yeah, yeah, good question.

I mean, I think, you know.

We've had a pretty lax system of regulation in this country.

And, you know, we have, I think, 10,000 chemicals that are allowed in our food here.

And Europe is about 400 chemicals.

And they go through a very different standard of regulation in terms of ultra-processed food.

And they are very restrictive around GMO and around herbicides and lots of things that we don't do here.

And I think, you know,

that's changing.

There's this whole Maha movement.

People are waking up.

And I was with my friend a couple of days ago, Jason Karp, who

really founded Hugh Chocolate, if people like Hugh Chocolate.

And he's been, was very vociferous writing a letter as a shareholder of Kellogg's.

to the company saying, you have fruit loops that you make in America that have all these dyes and chemicals that are known to cause hyperactivity or immune issues or other problems in kids.

And in Europe, they don't allow it.

And you make the same fruit loops, but with natural colorings, like from blueberries or whatever.

And basically they were ignoring him.

And then my friend Vonnie Hari, they all went to Battle Creek, Michigan, and they had a protest in the fall and October of 24.

And finally, this week, Kellogg's agreed they were going to actually take all that crap out.

Wow.

Yeah.

And, And, you know, the FDA has now said they're working with food companies to either voluntarily or mandatorily have them remove food additives and colors and dyes.

That's brilliant.

I mean, I have a nonprofit called the Food Fix Campaign.

I wrote a book called Food Fix, and

a new one's coming out called Food Fix Uncensored next February.

And it basically talks about how this problem needs to get fixed from field to the fork and what regulations need to happen.

But I've been working with my nonprofit for the last five years, and it's been amazing.

And the woman who was my key person, who's my seeing eye dog in Washington, is now the governor wife of West Virginia.

She's the first lady of West Virginia.

And that was the first state because of her to ban food dyes.

Wow.

And then they also got snap waivers, which means they are going to limit what you can purchase with food stamps to not be allowed to buy soda or certain kinds of junk food.

And this is happening across the country.

There's like over 30 plus states where now there's, there's uprisings.

And I'm living in Texas right now.

And

this woman,

Senator Kohlgorst, is the head of the Health and Human Services Committee.

She listened to my podcast.

She was a huge fan.

And she got so excited about this that she introduced a bill called SB 25 in Texas that limited the crap in the food, that limited crap in schools, that mandates nutrition education for doctors, that starts a chronic nutrition advisory group.

And it passed the Senate, it passed the House there, and it got signed by the governor into law.

And I testified at the hearing.

And so there's this movement happening now, which I never thought would happen in my lifetime, that there's a shift.

And I think the food companies want to do the right thing, but they're all in competition with each other.

So no one company can act independently because their competitors will eat their lunch.

So literally.

And so they, they, now that this is happening at a nationwide level, they're, there's, they're fighting and they're kicking and screaming, but it's going to happen.

And the new dietary guidelines are going to come out, which I've helped advise on.

And that is really exciting to me to actually have something out there that's going to help guide people on what to eat.

Food labeling is changing and working with the FDA on food labeling.

Hopefully we can make progress on food marketing.

That's a big one.

Like in Europe, if stuff has some diet in it or that's going to cause a problem with kids, it'll say, you know, this is bad for your kid.

And if your kid eats it, they'll get ADD and whatever, hyperactivity.

And so the food companies don't want that.

So they change their formulations.

So food marketing is a big, big driver of behavior.

And these companies know it, and they spend $13 billion marketing junk food every year.

And there's a lot of ways to fix that.

You know, the First Amendment might prohibit us from limiting the advertising, but they could have warnings like they do in drugs.

They could, you know, prevent them from being having a tax deduction for spending all that money on food marketing.

And there's a lot of ways to put pressure.

Changing medical school education, also important, because I think doctors are more engaged in this.

So

it's a multi-headed hydro that needs multiple solutions across a lot of government policies.

And also people making different choices at the checkout counter.

You can vote with your fork.

Mark, I am so grateful that you survived.

Oh, me too.

I got more work to do.

Yeah, you've got so much work to do.

And I'm so thankful that you're doing it because,

you know,

you are a startup founder at 65.

You've got so much renewed energy and enthusiasm.

It's such important work.

And I'm so grateful that you came back on the show to share it because it's important work all the way from the micro level of the individual to the macro level of talking about government level change and national level change.

And I'm so excited for people to listen to this conversation because I think there's some really quick fixes that people can take.

Completely.

And there's been a lot of warnings in this episode that I really appreciate you shared.

Just, I think sometimes we need to feel a sense of

just

how challenging it will be

if we don't make changes now.

And I feel like you've really headlined some of them for us.

So thank you so much.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, Jay, for me, it's like people, people have all these things that they suffer with, and they just think that they're

going to live with that.

And for me, I've been so sick so many times from so many different things, and I've had to recover.

And

I see so many millions of people suffering needlessly.

I mean, I can't end war.

I can't end floods and

famine.

And I mean, but like, this is a solvable problem.

And they're not hearing about it.

They're not learning about it.

And that's why I'm obsessed.

And that's why I'm a founder of a company at 65 years old.

Yeah.

Well, so grateful, Mark.

Thank you so much.

And again, I'm encouraging everyone to head over to functionhealth.com forward slash Jay Shetty to get $100 off to get all your 110 biomarkers.

Of course, as I said, I'm an investor in the company.

So very excited to give access to the knowledge and information that you need to manage your health better, to take to your doctor, to have healthier conversations, to actually be aware.

And I think all of our change, as we know, starts at awareness.

And that's the baseline.

That's the foundation.

So very excited for you all to check that out.

I hope you'll make the most of it.

I want to give a big shout out to Dr.

Mark Hyman again for being here.

And thank you so much for sharing so many incredible insights.

I hope you keep coming back.

Please.

I hope you stay well.

And again, let me know what you're trying, what you're testing, what you're giving a go.

Maybe you're going to try the 10-day detox, whether you're going to do it at home or with Dr.

Mark Hyman.

Maybe you're going to go off and get all the access to the data through Function Health and you're going to take a look at what you can avoid for you and your family.

Or maybe you're going to just start making little changes, whether it's to your diet by adding more fiber, taking out ultra-processed foods, getting better sleep.

All these tiny shifts can make such a huge difference.

Tag me and Dr.

Mark Hyman on Instagram, X, TikTok.

Let us know what you're changing, what you're shifting, what you're working on.

I love seeing how you're turning these episodes into action.

And I'll see you again on another episode of On Purpose.

Thanks for listening.

And thank you, Mark.

Thanks, Jay.

If you love this episode, you will enjoy my interview with Dr.

Daniel Eamon on how to change your life by changing your brain.

If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain.

You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers, and their brains are very damaged.

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I've been seeing a lot more EVs lately, parked in driveways, passing on the road, friends making the switch.

And they all say the same thing.

These cars are simpler, fewer parts, fewer repairs, fewer headaches.

That's what makes EVs worth considering.

Less to break, less to fix.

Even if you haven't made the move yet, it's hard to ignore the shift.

They're more affordable, more available, and honestly, just make sense for everyday life.

The way forward is electric.

Learn more at electricforall.org.

Kevin and Rachel and King of MMs and an eight-hour road trip.

And Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And his packs glistened in the moonlight.

And Kevin feeling weird because of all the talk about pecs.

And Rachel handing him peanut MMs to keep him quiet.

Uh, Kevin, I can't hear.

Yellow, we're keeping it PG-13.

MMs, it's more fun together.

This is an iHeart podcast.