Dr. Mark Hyman: Everything You're Eating Is Toxic, and Big Pharma Likes It That Way

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So, okay, Bobby Kennedy, your longtime friend, looks like he's going to be the HHS secretary.

Assess.

Did you think that was going to happen in your lifetime?

Not in my lifetime.

No, Tucker.

We're in this historic moment where, you know, America's waking up to the fact that it's been the frog in boiling water, slowly getting sicker and sicker and sicker, bankrupting our country with almost $5 trillion in healthcare costs, one in $5 of our economy, 80% of it or more is preventable, 99% of Medicare dollars are spent on preventable chronic disease.

And never this conversation has happened in the political discourse until now.

Which is a little crazy because you hear people talk about healthcare all the time.

Well, they talk about healthcare as a way of like limiting entitlements or Medicare for all.

Exactly.

Everybody's upset about healthcare on some level for some reason, but I haven't heard anybody until recently in the public sphere address why it's so expensive.

Right.

So the question, I know, I'm a functional medicine doctor.

My focus is on why.

What's What's the cause?

What's the root cause of the cause, the cause, the cause?

Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show.

We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else.

And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers.

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Here's the episode.

Shouldn't that be every doctor?

Well,

ideally, yes.

But I'm sitting in my office years ago and I had a diabetic patient come in.

I realized, you know, I can't cure diabetes in my office.

It's cured on the farm and the food we grow.

It's cured in the food manufacturing process.

It's cured by what people buy in the grocery store.

It's cured in the kitchen.

And so we really have to look at the root causes of our food system and say, why are my patients eating this food?

Well, it's because the food system.

Well, why do we have the food system we have and the way in which it's operating that drives this chronic disease epidemic, which now is the biggest killer on the planet and is caused by food?

Food has outpaced smoking as the number one killer in the world.

It kills 11 million people a year.

11 million.

It's the biggest killer in the United States.

Why did that happen?

It's because our

policies are driven in large part by industry, by the food industry, the ag industry, the chemical and seed companies, and those are the companies that are profiting.

This is the biggest industry in the world.

It's over $16 trillion when you aggregate all the food companies, the fast food companies, the agricultural, chemical, and seed companies.

And this is an enormous force that's driving our political process.

And so a lot of the policies we have, either by, you know, just kind of...

misalignment of our expectations and incentives of what happened, or because of deliberate actions in the food companies, have actually driven a food system that's making us sick.

And we have an illness industrial complex.

We have a system that's driving disease and everybody's profiting from it.

And no one's addressed that before.

And this is why we have the system.

So we're supporting commodity crops, wheat, corn, and soy that get turned into ultra-processed food, which is basically chemical science projects that our bodies are not used to.

They're not technically defined as food.

Food is something that helps nourish a human being, supports life and growth.

These things don't.

They do the opposite.

They cause disease.

And so we've sort of slowly getting in this system where we're seeing an enormous rise in chronic diseases over the last 50 years.

You know, Tucker, when I graduated medical school, the cost for health care in America was half a trillion dollars.

Now it's almost 10 times that in my lifetime.

When I graduated from medical school, there was not a single state with an obesity rate over 15%.

Now there's not one with one under 30, and almost all are over 40.

42% of Americans are obese.

We've seen a fall.

In all 50 states.

In all 50 states.

Yeah, we see.

And you know what?

The highest diabetes mortality rates are in red states.

14 out of the 15 states with the highest diabetes mortality are red states.

So this is affecting everybody in America.

It doesn't matter whether you're red or blue or purple.

Biology is bipartisan.

You know,

heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, they don't know what, who you voted for.

So what radicalized me was, so when I grew up, I'm a little younger than you, but roughly the same generation.

There were no fat people where I grew up, none.

No.

Zero.

No, affluent area, but still, no fat, zero fat people.

And I always thought that it was like a failure of will.

It was a kind of sin.

It was gluttony.

Yes.

100%.

And then I came just from my own experience to realize that if you just go about your life is the way Americans do, just eat what's presented you

and you don't make any effort to fight it.

Yeah.

If you just sort of, all things being equal,

you're going to be like 70 pounds overweight.

100%.

That happened to me.

I was like, wow, I'm going to be super fat.

Yeah.

And I, if I don't really struggle all the time.

Yeah.

That's weird.

Well, it's, it's, we make the hard choices,

the, the, the healthy choices, and the easy choices, the unhealthy choices.

So that, well, that just

made me think that actually

people who are obese are not the perpetrators, but the victims of this problem.

This is really important, Tucker.

You just hit on something that is so critical, which is that we have blamed the victim for this problem.

I have.

It's your fault.

You're fat.

You're a glutton.

You're lazy.

Yes.

And it's your fault.

So just stop eating that crap and get healthy, and you'll save America.

That's bullshit.

Okay.

So I kind of

obviously feel better to hear that, but it's here's, I think that's true.

It's absolutely true.

The NIH did an incredible study where they took a group of people and they fed them for two weeks a whole foods diet matched for protein, fat, carbs, fiber.

Then they fed them an ultra-processed diet and they saw what happened to their biology.

The ultra-processed food, which is what 60% of our diet is, it's 67% of kids' diet.

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

When you eat that food, it dysregulates your appetite.

You eat 500 calories more a day in a week.

That's 3,500 calories.

3,500 calories equals a pound of weight gain in a year.

That's 52 pounds.

So if Americans are eating this food, which is everywhere, which is ubiquitous, which we're marketed to death on, I mean, kids get targeted.

$14 billion.

The food industry spends on marketing junk food to kids.

They see an average of 30,000 ads a year.

You could talk to your kid breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and snacks about healthy food, and you're not going to be marketing.

And this to me is criminal.

Most countries have banned this.

Most

countries don't allow this.

And for example, Chile has gotten all the food marketing to kids off between six in the morning and 10 at night.

They have no more Tony the Tiger on frosted flakes, no more toucan on the food.

So you're saying frosted flakes are a highly processed food?

Of course they are.

I mean, I'm a cereal killer.

Let's tell the truth.

I am a cereal killer.

I think cereal is the worst thing ever invented for humanity.

It's basically 75% sugar.

It's sugar for breakfast.

It's dessert for breakfast.

That's not what we should be eating.

And so what's happened is there are

ways in which we are making it so easy for people to make the wrong choice.

And when you're exposed to these foods, you're going to gain weight.

You're going to be dysregulated.

You're going to destroy your microbiome.

You're going to create inflammation.

You're going to drive heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, autoimmune diseases.

All these things are coming at explosive rates.

And, you know, I've looked at the data, and even though we're spending more and more, it would be fine if we were spending $5 trillion and America was getting healthy.

It would be fine if we were spending $485 billion on drugs if they were working.

But Tucker, the drugs that we're using for the disease that we have are not the right treatment.

The right treatment is changing what we're eating.

And if you look at heart disease, it's up 50%.

Cancer's up 30%, 60%

higher in those under 50%.

So we're seeing cancer rates rising in the young at rates we've never seen before.

Even though young people don't smoke cigarettes.

No, it's the food.

Colon cancer is the biggest thing.

But it's just a little crazy.

Again, this is the benefit of being in your 50s because you sort of remember what the previous lies were.

But like, if we get rid of smoking, not endorsing smoking,

then cancer is just going to like cease to exist.

Aaron Trevor Aaron Trevor Brandon, well, certain cancers like lung cancer and other cancers have gone down.

But when you see cancer rates increasing in children like by 30%, you see autoimmune diseases up 100%.

You see mental health issues up 80%.

You see autism up 1,000%, ADD up 200%, diabetes up 400%, Alzheimer's up 150%.

So we are screwing up here big time by not dealing with the root cause.

And we're spending on all those conditions 200 to 300% more on drugs.

So we're almost like, you know, we're increasing by one or two fold these diseases and the drug use has gone up two or three fold and we're losing.

So if it was working, great, but it ain't working.

And what's happening is that now most people don't realize it, but that one of every dollars of your taxpayer dollars goes to fund our healthcare costs in America of that $4.9 trillion,

which was half a trillion when I graduated medical school.

That's paid for by the taxpayer and it's mostly preventable.

We're probably adding $2 trillion to our federal deficit every year because of this.

And also

the amount of money we're spending is 40% of all health care bills.

So if you look at the total health care bill, when you add in everything the government, not just Medicare, but the Indian health service, the military, all federal employees, all the programs that the government is funding around healthcare, it's 40% of the total health care bill in America is paid for by the U.S.

government.

And we have enormous power to change how those dollars are spent and how chronic disease is addressed in this country.

And for the first time, take this on and not just try to find a pill for every ill, but to get to the root cause.

And it's really from changing our food system from field to fork.

And it's addressing the conflicts of interest in government.

It's addressing the NIH funding.

It's addressing what we pay for with food stamps.

It's so many areas that we have policy levels.

So before we get into that, let's just define a couple of terms.

So when you say ultra-processed foods, can you be precise?

Yeah, for sure.

So the ANOVA classification, and there's many different classifications for different kinds of food processing, and there's pros and cons with each one.

So there's no perfect system.

But the ANOVA classification was developed by scientists in Brazil.

It's now their standard of care for their food programs and dietary guidelines.

So, you know, non-processed food is a tomato, an egg, an apple, you know, an almond.

You know what that is, right?

But if you make almond butter, well, that's a little bit of minimally processed food.

If you make a can of tomatoes, that's minimally processed.

There's another level of, you know, processing that you use in cooking.

It's a little more

sort of processing of things, but it's not made from anything other than real food ingredients.

The fourth classification is ultra-process.

And this is essentially where they take commodity crops, which are funded with our federal dollars, supporting farmers who are losing the game.

And that's corn, soybeans, and wheat.

Corn, soybean, and wheat.

And by the way, the farmers are suffering so bad, you know, Tucker.

There's a 350% higher rate of suicide in farmers than there are in the rest of the population.

There's $435 billion of farmer debt that they carry to support us.

And they're stuck between the crop insurance that the government's paying, the banks, which are providing them

the loans, and the agrochemical and seed companies that are providing the fertilizer, the seeds, and the chemicals that they're spraying on the farm.

And they can't get out of that toxic loop.

And they're struggling.

Those rural communities are struggling so bad.

And that can be fixed.

And so

when you look at...

Shit, I lost my training.

Ultra processed.

So processed is any food that's been changed in its company.

So

what happens is they're growing these commodity crops that the government's basically supporting them funding of wheat, corn, and soy.

But you're not eating wheat berries or whole grain.

You're not eating true whole soybeans.

You're not eating just corn on the cob.

These are deconstructed

in factories and science, basically science labs, into their molecular components are torn apart and rebuilt into these chemically extruded food-like substances of all colors, sizes, and shapes that are not by definition food.

If you look up the Webster's area definition of food, it's not actually technically food.

And so what most Americans are eating is stuff that actually is harmful, that's causing disease and killing people.

It's literally, think about it, the equivalent of two Holocausts a year are caused by the food we're eating, according to the emergency setting.

You said 70% of our grocery store offerings are ultra-processed food.

You know, the labeling, food labeling is a big issue and is one of our key initiatives, I think, if we move forward in this administration.

It has to be addressed.

People need informed consent.

They need to be empowered with the right information.

They need to know what they're eating, whether it's good or bad for them.

And now you need to be a PhD scientist to read a nutrition label or read the ingredients and know what it means.

Right, so I avoid the nila wafers.

That's, I guess,

if you look at the ingredient list, it should be stuff you know.

It should say tomatoes or salt or so that's the measurement?

Yeah.

If you see stuff like a butylated hydroxytoluene, probably not something you want to be eating.

And many of these chemicals that we use in America are outlawed in other countries.

In Europe and Singapore and many other countries, these compounds that...

that have been validated to show that how harmful they are to human beings have been removed from the marketplace.

And we should follow those standards here.

So labeling is really key, and we're going to work on that.

But right now, if you're just trying to figure it out, look at the ingredient list.

If there's stuff there that you wouldn't have on your kitchen counter or you wouldn't have in your pantry, don't eat it.

If it says maltodectrin, where's your maltodectrin jar in your spice jar?

Where's your butylated hydroxytoluene?

Do you sprinkle that on your salad?

No.

If you don't understand it, don't eat it.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, things are going to have a long list of ingredients.

If you eat Indian foods, they have lots of spices.

That's fine.

It's real food.

But if it's something that is

in Latin that you don't understand, can't pronounce, or it has a health claim on the label, it's probably not good for you.

I mean, like, Lay's potato chips now says they're gluten-free.

I mean, that's ridiculous, right?

Oh, it's gluten-free, it's healthy.

No, it's not, you know, gluten-free.

It's gluten-free because there's no wheat in it, right?

Of course, but it's Coca-Cola is gluten-free.

So, like, my rule is that it has a health claim on the label, don't eat it.

If there's a health claim on the label, yeah, if it says, if it's low fat, high fiber, low cholesterol, you know, you know, if it's no sugar, if it's you know, gluten-free, it's hiding something.

They're hiding something, right?

It's just food.

I mean, you know, tomato doesn't say gluten-free on it, right?

It just says tomato.

So that, I mean, that limits your options.

Well, you know what?

You're going to lose weight just from

that.

You know what?

It's amazing.

I had this view that it was people's fault they were fat.

And I went down as part of this movie called Fed Up that I did with Katie Couric and Lori David about 10 years ago.

And we went to South Carolina and I went to Easley, South Carolina, one of the poorest areas in America, one of the worst food deserts in America.

There's something called the Retail Environment Food Index, how many fast food and junk food and bodegas there are compared to grocery stores.

They're like 10 to one.

And this family of five lived in a trailer.

They were on disability and food stamps, and they wanted to sort of get healthy.

And I asked them, why do you want to get healthy?

Because I'm like, why do you want to be in this movie?

They said, well, my dad's 42.

He has type 2 diabetes from the food he ate.

He has kidney failure.

He's on dialysis.

He's going to die unless he loses 40 pounds.

And we can't get him to lose 40 pounds.

We don't know what to do.

The mother was well over 150 pounds overweight.

The son was 16 years old, almost diabetic, 50% body fat.

It should be 10 to 20%.

I went, I said, rather than giving a lecture about what to do and what to eat, I said,

let's go to your house.

Let's go shopping, get some simple foods that are inexpensive, that are whole foods, that are healthy to eat.

So we made turkey chili.

This was from Good Food on a Tight Budget, a guide from the Environmental Working Group.

I said, here's turkey chili.

Here's how to roast some sweet potatoes.

Here's how to fry asparagus.

Here's how to make a salad from not just iceberg lettuce, but some real lettuce.

Here's olive oil and vinegar dress.

Iceberg is not real lettuce?

No, no, no, no.

It's

pretty much nutritionally vapid food.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, it's fine if you want to eat it, but it's not fully dense with phytochemicals and nutrients.

And so we basically showed them, and I went through their cupboards, everything in their cupboard.

They had

low-fat this and cool whip they thought was healthy because it said no trans fats.

But the FDA, with the inclusion with the food industry, allowed a food to say no trans fats and have less than half a gram per serving.

So basically they're just duping the American public.

And we need clear transparency and information.

So they didn't know what they were eating.

And everything was frozen or packaged or canned or boxed.

They never cooked anything.

They didn't have cutting board.

They didn't have knives.

They never cooked anything in their kitchen.

And so we made turkey chili.

We made this whole meal.

We sat down and ate it and it was so delicious.

And the son goes, Dr.

Hyman, do you eat like this for your family every night?

I'm thinking, yeah, I do.

And it wasn't hard.

It wasn't difficult.

It didn't take much time.

And I said, listen, you know, I don't know if you can do this, but here's this guide on how to eat well for less.

Here's my cookbook on how to actually eat healthy.

And try it.

And on the plane, I sent them cutting boards and knives because they didn't have anything to cut.

I mean, we were cutting like with a butter knife trying to cut sweet potatoes.

It was ridiculous, hard sweet potatoes.

They had no utensils in that.

Nothing.

Not for cooking, right?

And so the first week, the mother texted me back.

She said, Mark, we lost 18 pounds.

I'm like, amazing.

And a year, they lost over 200 pounds of the family.

The father lost 45, got a new kidney.

The mother lost 100 plus pounds.

The son lost 50, but he went to work at Bojangles

and gained it back.

He said it was like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar.

And then he gained all the weight back.

And then he called me a few years later.

He said, Mark, can you help me?

I was like, yeah.

He said, Dr.

Hyman, but

I said, yeah.

And so I coached him and got him.

He lost 132 pounds.

And he's the first kid in his family to go to college.

He wrote me a letter.

He said, Mark,

can you write me a letter of recommendation for medical school?

And now he's a doctor.

So, and now he lost all that weight.

So what that taught me was that it's really about education, about information, about skills.

You know, I don't know if you know this story, but in the...

Wait, but hold on, hold on.

There's...

Yes, but you can know the right path and not take it.

There's a compulsion attached to certain kinds of food.

100%.

And this is well-documented, Tucker.

It is well documented.

Well documented.

The studies are published.

There was a large study published reviewing all the literature on food addiction.

And there's something called the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is questions you can look it up online.

You just answer the questions, and it tells you if you're a food addict, just so that you can do a question here to tell if you're an alcoholic.

14% of the adult population are alcoholics.

14% of people are food addicted, and 12% of children are food addicted by the scientific definition of food addiction.

Not just, oh, yeah, this is addictive, but actually biologically addictive,

measuring the things you need to measure to determine addiction.

And so if that's true, you know, you say compulsion, but it's really a hijack of our biochemistry.

So the food industry has designed foods to hijack their biology.

There's a book written by Michael Moss called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, where he interviewed 300 food industry executives and whistleblowers and scientists.

And basically they said, look, we have taste institutes where we hire craving experts, these are their own terms, to create the bliss point of food, which is the maximum lighting up of your brain.

And then we go for targeting marketing to heavy users.

So they're not going to get me to drink a can of Coke, but they're going to get someone who's already having Coke to try to drink a two-liter bottle, right?

And they know how to do that.

And so

the effects of these foods are so harmful on us.

And

they know what they're doing.

And they actually designed them to be this way.

I mean, the tobacco companies bought a lot of the food companies back in the 70s, RJ Ernabisco, Phil Morris Craft, and

they built this whole industry of ultra-processed food.

There's now 600,000 ultra-processed food products.

80% of them are full of sugar.

And they're the things that are driving most of the things that are wrong with America.

If you look at food, it's the nexus for everything.

One, obviously chronic disease, all the things we mentioned, heart disease, diabetes, cancer,

Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, I mean just digestive disease, all the things, depression, mental health now is linked to ultra-processed food.

There's really well documented science on this, that these foods cause depression, anxiety.

So we have all these foods that are being causing disease.

Then we have the economic burden, which we've talked about,

almost $5 trillion.

We have the effect on national security because 77% of military recruits are rejected because they're unfit to fight.

So we have a national security crisis and 72% more evacuations were for obesity compared to war injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Think about that.

In a war, more soldiers were evacuated because of obesity than because of war injuries.

Academic performance, we're 30th something in the world in math and reading.

Where kids are suffering, our kids are on ADD medications.

So food makes you dumber, certain kinds of 100%.

Makes you cognitively impaired, behavioral issues.

I mean, there was one study, Tucker, where they took kids in juvenile detention centers, and they gave them healthy food, swapped it out for the junk food.

97% reduction in behavioral issues and violence, 75% reduction in restraints, and 100% reduction in suicides, which is the third leading cause of death in teenage boys.

This is documented science.

This is not stuff I'm making up.

And I wrote it in my book, Food Fix, which is really how to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time.

And it talks about the nexus of all these issues.

And then we and then we have the effect on

our soil.

We've lost so much soil carbon.

The soil has to be healthy to grow a healthy plant.

And a healthy plant is what creates healthy humans.

And the nutrients in plants have gone down by 50%.

So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's less nutritious than it was 50 years ago.

She's got to eat twice as much.

Maybe.

Yeah, you can do that.

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And then, you know, we have also the effect on biodiversity because of all the chemicals we're using.

We have 75% less pollinators.

No pollinators, you know, it's hard to have agriculture.

We have a 50% loss in bird species from the growing food.

We have destruction of our waterways because we use fertilizer that runs off into the rivers and lakes and streams and causes eutrophication, which basically grows the algae because of the extra fertilizer and then sucks all the oxygen out of the water and all the fish die.

There's dead zones the size of New Jersey and the Gulf of Mexico.

There's 400 around the planet that feed half a billion people.

So this is all from the fertilizers, which uses actually 2% of the world's global energy to make fertilizer.

But you don't need to do that if you use regenerative agriculture, which is what actually one of the things that I think this new administration should focus on, which is how do you fix the farming?

Because you've got to start at the field to fix food.

And, you know, I think Wendy's Berry said it beautifully.

He's a poet and a farmer.

Amazing man.

Amazing man.

He said, we have a health system that pays no attention to food and a food system that pays no attention to health.

We need to fix that.

So you've referred a couple of times to

the connection between what we eat and cancer rates.

Can you be a lot more plastic?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So the data is really clear.

You want to scare people into eating better.

Cancer is a good way to do it.

Well, you know, cancer is on the rise.

And

we've got to.

You just can't get over that.

I thought we were going to defeat it with our war on cancer.

Yeah, well, that was Nixon.

He wanted to.

But the problem is

we're barking up the wrong tree.

And if you look,

there's a real clear data on two drivers of cancer.

One is food, and particularly sugar and starch.

And two is environmental toxins, carcinogens, which are ubiquitous.

We're exposed to toxins everywhere, and we can reduce those.

But

the food part is really interesting because when you look at the growth of cancer cells, they feed on sugar.

There's a whole metabolic theory of cancer where if you use a ketogenic diet, and this is work being done at Columbia and by Sid Mukherjee and others, ketogenic diets as a treatment for cancer to actually shut down the cancer cells because they can only feed on sugar.

We are like a hybrid engine.

We can go electric or we can go gas.

We can go carbs.

We can go fat.

Cancer only goes sugar.

So you start the sugar and you kill the cancer.

So the amount of sugar and flour eating is about 152 pounds of sugar.

per person per year and 133 pounds of flour.

That's a lot.

That's almost three quarters of a pound a day of sugar and flour for every American.

And what that does is it fuels the cancer cells.

And so pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer, prostate cancer, even some lung cancers.

And the data is documented go up with some resistance, go up with obesity, and go up with diabetes and metabolic dysfunction.

93% of Americans, Tucker, are metabolically broken.

This is extraordinary from the American Journal of Cardiology.

And what this means is that we're somewhere on the degree of what I call diabetes.

Diabetes is pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes.

And

we cut off at prediabetes, but that's, you know, one in two Americans has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

That's bad enough.

38% of teenage boys.

I mean, when I graduated medical school, there was no type 2 diabetes.

There was no type 1 diabetes.

It was juvenile diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease, or adult on diabetes, which is a foodborne disease.

And so now we've changed the names to protect the guilty.

And so now we see kids.

Really?

Yeah, three.

The names were changed to mask the cause of type 2 diabetes.

I mean, yeah, I mean, because kids were getting it.

So how do we call it juvenile diabetes if kids are getting type 2 diabetes as young as two or three years old it's not their fault they're being fed you know soda and i i once was working in an urgent care in california in an underserved community and this woman comes in with back pain she's got a baby in her baby carriage and he's drinking this brown liquid and i'm like what is this seven months old i'm like what is that she says coca-cola i'm like why are you giving baby coca-cola she likes it i mean this is what's happening and so we're turning our our our whole society into this metabolically broken society and and this is the driver of all the disease we're seeing Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia.

They're calling Alice Telemer's type 3 diabetes because of how it's connected to sugar and insulin resistance.

You know, and I co-founded a company called Function Health, which allows people to get insights into their own biology.

And what we're finding, Tucker, is that 96% of the people we're testing have metabolic dysfunction.

96%.

96, yeah.

So how do you get insight into your own biology?

What is that?

So basically, you know, the healthcare system is broken.

And I believe that, you know, I could work for another 50 years.

And maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe with this new administration, we'll leapfrog and things will change, which I'm very hopeful for.

But I created a company with a number of other co-founders called Function Health that allows you easy access to your own blood test.

It is simple, five minutes to sign up, 15 minutes to go into a Quest lab to get your labs drawn.

You get over 110 biomarkers or lab tests that gives you insight into everything that's going on in your body that you're not being checked for at your regular doctor's office.

You get five times more diagnostics.

You look at your hormones, your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, your nutritional health.

I mean, your immune health.

We've seen 46% of Americans have some degree of autoimmunity, which is crazy.

It's one of the biggest cost drivers, whether it's thyroid autoimmunity or other autoimmunity or pre-autoimmunity.

We're seeing 67% have nutritional deficiencies.

And these are the lab reference ranges that are quests.

These are not what I would think that optimal.

So vitamin D, for example, should be over 50.

45, 50.

The reference range is 30, but still we've got a huge amount of people deficient at that level.

And when you're under 30, your risk of getting sick and dying of COVID is 70% higher.

If your vitamin D is over 50, your risk of death is zero compared to looking at these.

A dumb question.

No dumb question.

So a basic question.

So you get blood, your company does this.

Maybe others do it, but you get a blood test.

Yeah.

You get all these markers, all these measurements of what's in your blood.

How do you know what they mean?

Well, that's a great question.

So we really

used the technology.

to help us build a database of the most up-to-date scientific information informed by all all the scientific literature.

And you have a clear description of what every biomarker means.

So if your insulin or blood sugar or your cholesterol particles are abnormal or you have positive autoimmune antibodies, we tell you what it means, why it happens, what the root causes are, not necessarily just what traditional medicine thinks, but what the new science thinks around root causes.

We give you all the self-care things you can do yourself to optimize your health.

So you can upgrade your biology with insights from scientific literature, from knowledge experts.

We've brought in the top scientists and doctors to help inform the content.

So it's like having a thousand doctors in your pocket.

Remember the iPod was a thousand songs in your pocket?

This is a thousand doctors in your pocket.

And it gives you the ability to do self-care.

And like I said, diabetes isn't cured in the doctor's office.

It's cured in the kitchen.

And that's really what most chronic diseases can be fixed.

And I see this over and over.

I've been doing it for 30 years.

I've written almost 20 books.

And what I see is when people follow the guidance without having to go to the healthcare system, they can correct these things and they can fix these things.

Really?

Yes.

It's quite amazing, Tucker.

And by these things, diabetes, diabetes reversible, heart disease reversible, Alzheimer's.

Now Richard Isaacson has done amazing work showing how we can reverse Alzheimer's using aggressive lifestyle interventions.

What?

Yes.

This is incredible data.

That's why I just want to speak up as a non-doctor.

We know for a fact that Alzheimer's is incurable.

Nothing can make it better.

Well, that's actually not true.

I know, but I've been told that a lot.

Of course, of course, because, you know, we've spent, this is a great example.

We've spent about about $2 billion in over 400 studies trying to find drugs for Alzheimer's, and nothing has worked.

The drugs that are approved are extremely expensive, have marginal benefit, a lot of side effects, and cost a huge amount of money and may delay your entry into a nursing home by two or three months.

That's a win.

That's not very good.

Now, there's a couple of trials that have been done, the finger trial out in Europe and the Pointer trial, which is emerging, that showed aggressive lifestyle intervention, diet, exercise, managing stress, sleep, optimizing all your risk factors, was able to not just slow the progression of Alzheimer's and dementia, but to reverse it.

This is published data.

This is not my opinion.

Richard Isaacson also has published this data.

And so by now using biomarkers, and we can actually test with function, soon we'll be adding biomarkers for Alzheimer's.

So now there's blood tests

for Alzheimer's.

So you don't have to wait until you forget your keys.

And also for cancer, you're asking about cancer, we do a multi-cancer test.

Wait, at what age is Alzheimer's detectable in a blood test?

That's a great question.

So on imaging, which is very expensive and difficult and not so-brain imaging.

Yeah, brain imaging.

You can see the changes up to 30 years before you got Alzheimer's as a symptom.

With blood tests, it's not as far as that.

We're still figuring out

what those times are, but you can see these proteins start to develop in the blood that indicate there's something happening.

And you can then intervene early.

And the thing about Alzheimer's is that if you intervene early, you can have an incredible benefit to help slow the progression and delay it and actually reverse it.

Now, I've seen this in my patients.

I wrote a book about this, the ultramind solution, 15 years ago.

Dale Bredison has written a book called The

End of Alzheimer's and documenting that we have to get to the root causes.

Is NIH on this?

No, they're not on it.

And this is what drives me crazy.

I don't understand.

So I'm saying we spent so much money.

We've gotten really no results.

Because I don't think you're a crackpot, but if, I mean, here you are sitting on camera saying, no, Alzheimer's is reversible.

Yeah.

Talk about a headline.

Why isn't that in the New York Times?

Good freaking question.

No, I'm serious, though.

Good freaking question.

So either you're crazy or they're dishonest.

Yeah, I think, I think

it's a medical paradigm shift.

You know, think is

most doctors are in a world that's flat world.

They don't understand that the world is round.

We've shifted a paradigm scientifically from

a disease-based diagnostic system to understanding the body as an integrated ecosystem.

And so the work of people like Leroy Hood from the Institute for Systems Biology, his Phenome Project, is mapping out how our understanding of disease is completely wrong.

It's based on labeling people according to symptoms and where it is in their body rather than on mechanisms and causes.

So I wrote a book called Young Forever, which is about longevity.

We talked about it, I think, last time I was on your show.

And in the book, I talk about the scientists who come up with this model of what are the root causes of aging?

Because we think aging is just, it's going to happen inevitably.

We're going to get sick.

We're going to get older.

We're going to get frail.

We're going to get weak.

And they've identified the underlying biology behind that.

So if we cured heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, we might extend life five to seven years.

You can get the same thing with meaning and purpose or playing tennis.

But if you actually dealt with the hallmarks of aging, the things that really go wrong, inflammation, medicondrial injure, nutrition, you can actually, and your microbiome, all the things that underlie disease, you could extend life by 30 or 40 years, which means living to 120, which is a crazy notion, right?

So we now understand biology in a very different way than we did before, and it hasn't translated into the clinic.

And so

why I co-founded Function Health with my co-founders was to help accelerate this gap, to kind of leapfrog over this ossified system but we need to change but it's just kind of crazy what you're saying if you take three steps back and it's like the whole point of medicine i presumed was to extend and improve life yes right keep you from dying yeah doctors keep you healthier keep you happier

and so if there is science that

shows that that's possible and everyone's ignoring it then i'm trying not to use profanity but like what is that yeah well it's a good question because the we have a we have a illness medical industrial food ag complex that profits off of people being sick But so you write a book saying, or someone else, several doctors write books saying, I can show that Alzheimer's is reversible.

And what is every other doctor in America?

They just don't read the book.

They haven't heard of it.

It's like.

That's kind of a provocative thesis.

Because I think of Alzheimer's as like AIDS in 1986.

Like it's the worst thing.

Oh, it's big.

And there's nothing you can do about it.

No, it's.

Do you remember that with AIDS?

100%.

It's scary as hell.

The scariest.

And I can tell you that

this is not my opinion.

You know, I was at Cleveland Clinic.

I worked with Marwan Sabah when he was there.

He was the head of the Dementia Research Center.

He understood this.

He understood these mechanisms, these biology, the science is there.

But there's no funding for it because what are we talking about, Tucker?

We're talking about providing lifestyle interventions that are intensive, that people need support.

They need to change their diet.

They need to exercise.

They need to optimize their sleep.

They need to manage stress.

They need to take the right nutritional supplements.

They need to modify their risk factors aggressively.

This requires a very different reimbursement system.

We don't have evidence-based medicine, Tucker.

We have reimbursement-based reimbursement-based medicine.

Doctors do what they get paid to do, not what the right thing is.

The right treatment for diabetes is not more drugs or Zempic.

The right treatment is diet.

So it sounds like doctors aren't really in control.

I mean, they're doing the best they can.

But they're responding to forces bigger than themselves.

Yeah.

Medical education is a great example.

Like, you know, doctors graduating

in the 50s or 40s were dealing with infectious disease and acute care medicine.

And we have the best acute care medicine system in the world.

Far none.

If you have an acute infection, if you have sepsis, if you guys see you,

you're in a car crash, damn right, I'm going to the hospital.

But that system doesn't work for chronic illness.

And that's what we're facing now.

And so the 80% of the conditions that doctors are seeing are chronic diseases, for which drugs are not the right therapy most of the time.

They can be helpful as adjuncts, but the fundamental drivers of our chronic disease epidemic is the food we're eating and also environmental toxins that are adding to that.

And when you add those two things together, it explains most of the chronic disease epidemic.

It's just, I mean, a lot of smart people you included, you're definitely one of the earliest, but are saying varieties of what you're saying now.

So, I mean, it was, you know, 30 years ago or so that the Congress hauled the heads of the tobacco companies, Reynolds and Philip Morris and Laurel Lard and

humiliated them on camera.

And like, you knew you were hurting people, you did it anyway.

That's right.

Is that going to happen with Nabisco anytime soon?

I mean,

there are class action lawsuits that are being now

raised around these companies to look at holding them accountable for what they're doing.

And they know, and there's been FOIA requests and information requests that I actually wrote about in my book that show their nefarious behavior, for example, targeting minorities and targeting

lower-income people to focus on buying more junk food.

Well, the food stamp program is a perfect example of that.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy, Tucker, when you think about it.

You know, when the American taxpayer is paying through the nose for everything all the way along, the companies are privatizing profits and we're socializing the costs.

So we basically fund the growth of commodity crops with $20 billion of subsidies in crop insurance for corn, wheat, and soy to the farmers, which puts them in a really tight bond because they can't change their system without support to changing to a more

regenerative system that they're going to make more money, they're going to grow better food, they're going to have better resuscitation of their real economies and not hopefully commit suicide at the rate they're doing.

We pay for that.

And then we pay for those foods for our SNAP program.

So we have about $125 billion in SNAP, which is our food stamp program.

It's supplemental nutrition assistance.

But there's no N in there.

It's just food security, which means calories.

So

when you get your EBT benefits in the beginning of the month, these food companies know to advertise in the bodega.

So they'll get your two-liter bottle of Coke with your EBT, and they put these giant ads in there, and they know exactly when they're getting their carts.

So we basically fund

75% of the food bought on SNAP

is junk food.

10% is soda.

So you think about $12 billion on soda, the Americans paying.

Why would soda be federal?

Why would, if we're giving out nutritional assistance to the poor, why would we pay for soda?

What an obvious question, Ducker.

Yeah.

Well, that's just crazy.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

And we know.

If you wanted to hurt the poor, you would do that.

I mean, we know beyond a doubt.

And, you know, we can talk about ultra-processed food.

There's arguments this and that way and this way.

But the food industry will say, oh, we're going to take away people's choice.

We're going to take away convenience.

We're going to take away affordability.

We're going to make food less safe if we don't ultra-processed processed food.

These are their talking points.

It's all about calories.

It's not moderation.

So you can have soda as part of your diet as long as you don't exceed your calories.

It's basically your fault that you're fat.

So you fix it.

That's the messaging, right?

It's the messaging from every food industry sort of

message from every professional association, message from the medical sort of.

But that doesn't mean that we have to pay for it.

What are we paying for?

Well, that's it.

So we pay for probably 30 billion or more servings of soda for the poor every year.

And then we pay for taxpayers are sending all this money to Coca-Cola.

The biggest

profit center in America for Coca-Cola is 20% of their profits is SNAP, food stamps.

Walmart gets, I don't know, something like, you know, 40 billion of that food stamp bill.

I mean, it's crazy.

And we pay, we pay on the...

Are those numbers real?

Yeah,

I can get you the Walmart numbers, but yeah,

it's really high.

And then we, and then we, we have

to pay for Medicare and Medicaid on the back end when people get sick from those foods.

And then we pay all the other people.

You pay off the Coca-Cola and the Azimpa.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, the price we pay at the checkout.

The Pop Tarts and the insulin.

I mean, that's right.

The price you pay at the checkout counter is not the true cost of food.

The true cost of food, the Rockefeller Fellow Foundation report is for every dollar you spend on food, there's $3 in collateral damage to health.

Pay for the crack and the rehab.

Yeah, exactly.

It's totally enough.

Pay for the hookers and we can fix this.

We could fix this.

And Andy Harris,

who's

a congressman, wanted to do a simple pilot study, just a pilot study to see what would happen if we eliminated soda from food stamp benefits in a couple of locations, just to monitor the impact on the health of those people.

And he couldn't get it through as a pilot, not to change the entire USC policy, just as a pilot study.

So imagine how anti-science this is.

This is truly anti-science.

It's just, I really believe in naming and shaming.

It works.

Just call people out, bring some sunlight in and let them defend it exactly so i'd love to know who's behind that and by the way i'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to buy coca-cola i'm saying i don't want to pay for it right you know that's fair isn't it a hundred percent i mean we the government of the united states should not be funding the the chronic disease epidemic which they currently are they are they are they are either by uh policies that were put in you know that were innocent or by malignant but it's so perfect it's like when i learned that we were funding isis in syria i was like that's kind of perfect, actually.

Like both sides are taking American money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's kind of crazy.

But we, we have the opportunity to change that.

For example, WIC, which is Women, Infants, and Children's Food Program, is based on only allowing people to buy food that's going to be healthy for the mother and child.

Why not apply that to WIC?

You know, why not school standards being changed so that.

actually kids can have healthy food.

Well, I know that I think WIC is like the center of profit for the formula makers, isn't it?

Yeah.

Well, that's true.

That's another problem.

But yeah, for example, in Chile, they outlawed formula marketing for kids.

They outlawed advertising to kids.

They got rid of all the junk food in schools.

They put it front and pack Chile blankets.

Why would the federal taxpayers, me included, you included, be paying for baby formula?

Why would we be encouraging formula over breast milk?

Well, it's a huge industry.

I mean, it's all into, it's really, it's,

you know, there's a group from the WHO has put together some initial papers and is coming out with a report next year about the commercial determinants of health, which is how multinational and transnational corporations in food, ag and alcohol, tobacco are essentially driving our chronic disease epidemic.

And they're privatizing the profits, subverting public health, and socializing the costs.

And the governments are the ones who are struggling with this.

And so, so, there are many other countries.

The governments are paying for it.

Yeah, governments are paying for it.

And you look at the healthiest countries, they're the ones like Japan, Singapore, and Spain, Italy.

They actually have policies that are protecting their citizens, that are educating them about food, that are not allowing the same.

What about just don't pay for it?

I mean, let's we can start there.

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And it does raise some pretty interesting questions.

The smartest thing I've heard this year, I think it's a common phrase now, is that the point of the system is its outcome.

So if you're wondering about motive, look at what the system produces and that describes the motive.

Yeah.

Right?

We don't have to guess.

So

if governments are making their citizens more unhealthy,

I think we can assume that they want that outcome.

No, they don't.

They don't.

This has been the frog in boiling water slowly that's hit them so fast.

Because, oh, yeah, bring all these fast food companies, bring all these American companies in to help us with our food nutrition.

Let's get fast food everywhere.

It's kind of the

Americanization of the world, right?

We basically created the worst diet on the planet and exported to every country in the world.

Oh, I have no idea.

And we see now, even in the developing world,

they call it the double burden of disease, chronic disease and infectious disease.

So they're dying of diabetes and tuberculosis.

They're dying of diabetes and malaria.

I hate to say it, but I've traveled a lot of countries this year, and the best food I had in any country was in a country under such severe U.S.

sanctions that no U.S.

companies can

operate.

I'm not going to name the country, but I'm just saying.

I don't want to be too controversial.

Yeah.

And it makes me sad.

Too controversial, Tucker?

Well, it makes me.

I mean, I'm.

You always color in the line.

I think of myself as a truly a loyal American.

I'm all in on America.

I'm never leaving.

But to go to a country whose food is the best I've ever had in my whole life.

And it also happens that that country has no American food of any kind because it's not allowed.

Maybe there's a connection?

Maybe there's a connection.

Yeah.

So exactly.

And so these countries have been unwittingly

participating in what they thought was growth and economic development.

But what it's done is sicken their populations.

And so now a lot of these countries are standing up.

Like the UK just banned advertising of junk food.

France has clear labeling on their front of package to make it really clear what you're eating.

You know, Chile and South America, you go there and there's big just warning signs on the front of labels.

They've done all these policies that have actually been studied and worked.

So we have cover in the United States.

Why should we be allowing things in the United States that we don't, these other countries have determined are informed.

What are he paying for?

Let's just stop paying for it.

You know, people are into some weird self-destructive behavior.

Not interested in rooting it out or showing up at your house, making sure you're not going to be able to do it.

Absolutely.

No, no, no.

People should be informed.

We definitely don't want to pay for it.

I have to pay for it.

People should be informed and we should be not having to pay for it.

I agree.

Yes.

Yeah.

And, you know, government procurement, $166 billion the government spends on food for military, for correctional facility, for schools, for everything.

When you look at the fat bill, do you know how much that could change the food system?

If we said based on these set of nutritional principles, which are, I think, well accepted in the nutritional science community of being what is food?

If we just followed that and didn't pay for all the junk food and the ultra-processed food, we just took that out, It would change the food system in America because all the industry would change.

If you take $166 billion out of the food economy and say, we're only buying healthy food from farmers that produce healthy food, it's going to change everything from field to fork.

These are simple things that the government can do that's easy.

Yeah, because they control it.

So people I know, I've known a lot of people who go to prison more now than ever.

And they get fat in prison, a lot of them.

Oh, yeah.

Is that, I assume that's because of the food issue?

Of course.

I mean, in prisons, they did another study I mentioned about the juvenile detention centers.

They swapped out prisoners' food for healthy food, and they found there was a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons and an 80% reduction if they added a multivitamin.

So, oh, there's so much nutritional deficiencies.

In countries like Japan, they put people on a super healthy diet in prison, and then all their violent behavior goes down.

It's pretty amazing.

Really?

Yeah, it's really interesting.

Yeah, their diet's totally different.

It's kind of like a macrobiotic, like very kind of like healthy diet that gets them completely reset.

And we know the mental health crisis also.

Why don't we do that since it's a captive population?

We should.

We can.

I mean, the problem is

this is a very,

I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I'm telling you, there is

a very loose organization of

industries that are working together to keep the system status quo.

They don't want changes in our agricultural subsidies.

They don't want changes in farming practices.

They don't want changes in how we fund SNAP.

They don't want changes in.

how we reimburse health care.

They don't want any changes in our food labeling.

They don't want changes in ingredients that are in our food.

This is stuff that's so entrenched that it's essential for their profits and their successes.

I mean, prisons, if you think about it, have been used as, because it is captive, the population of a prison, they've been used as testing populations for syllabus and vaccines and LSD and all kinds of horrible shit.

And you feel so sorry for the men who had to endure that.

Why not use prisoners?

I'm not sure the LSD was bad for them.

No, Whitey Bulger was at Alcatraz.

Whitey Bulger, the head of the Winter Hill Gang in Boston, a mass murderer.

And he got dosed really hard with LSD at Alcatraz in the early 60s and wound up effectively a serial killer.

And his brother didn't.

Oh, he wound up the most powerful politician in Massachusetts.

That's incredible.

So I'm just saying, but

maybe flipped him.

But anyway, here's the point.

Why not use prisons?

as

a kind of federal prisons, as a national test for the outcome of the diet you're suggesting.

Yes, you could do that.

I mean, you could do that.

I mean, there were studies that were done in mental institutions years ago, but there's ethics.

And so

informed consent.

Yeah.

Not feeding people Oreos is unethical?

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I think you're right, Tucker.

I mean, the ethical considerations are really around informed consent and medicine.

We gave them syphilis.

You can't.

Okay, it's okay to give Oreos away.

Now there's rules about that.

No, and I'm just saying, like, but we could, we could.

We could get informed consent.

We could ask them.

Pay them 15 cents an hour to work.

I mean, they're prisoners.

They can't vote.

They can't own firearms.

They can't

see their wives.

Like, everything about it is horrible.

Why wouldn't you use the opportunity to improve their health?

I 100% agree.

And I think we need to do that at every sector of society where the government has a hand.

School lunches, the military, all our federal food programs.

These are easy interventions.

But the food industry blocks it by huge lobbying efforts in Washington.

You know, in my nonprofit Food Fix campaign, which is really about educating and advocating for policy change to really improve the health of Americans, we've met with over 150 senators and congressmen, both sides of the aisle, and everybody seems to get this issue, and they're not hearing about it, and they're starting to hear about it because people like me are talking about it.

But I'm just one guy.

I'm a little nonprofit.

I'm not funded by industry.

I don't have any like conflicts of interest.

And I'm just trying to, you know.

What are the big lobbies?

Everyone says the big food lobby.

What companies is that?

I mean, you've got the American Beverage Association.

You've got, you know, all the, you know, the pharmaceutical lobbying groups.

You've got...

all the ag lobby groups.

I mean, collectively, they're the biggest group of lobbyists in Washington,

exceeding all the other lobbying.

And they're very powerful, and they control a lot of what happens in Washington.

I detailed a lot of this in my book, Food Fix, where

Congressmen are funded by Coca-Cola or these big companies, and they fund both sides.

They fund everybody.

Of course they do.

And so they've got a lot of it locked up.

And they're miseducating.

It's the misinformation and miseducation of our

policymakers and government officials because they're only hearing one side of the story.

They come in with their briefing books, with their scientific papers, with their justification, with the regulations written, with the legislation written, and they literally give it to them.

I've been in Congressman Senator's office saying, this is amazing, Mark.

Could you write the legislation for me?

I'm like, what?

I don't know how to do that.

I mean, I have people on my team if we have to do that.

But it's like,

it was sort of a startling kind of revelation that the people in Congress need help and they need guidance, they need direction.

And they're overwhelmed.

And they're overwhelmed and they're good people and they want to do the right thing.

And they're not hearing the other side of the story.

And so when you lay it out for them, they're like, that was with Senator Boozman from Arkansas.

He's a great guy.

And he's like, yeah, I'm seeing the changes in my rural community.

I'm seeing what's happening on the farms.

I'm seeing the degradation of these, and I'm seeing the processed food.

I'm seeing what it affects my population.

And he gets it.

And he wouldn't let me.

I was off there 45 minutes.

Usually get like a senator who pops in, hi, five minutes in and out.

But it was an incredible conversation.

I've seen this with Randy Fenstra, who's really interested in regenerative agriculture.

I've seen this, you know, on the Democratic side with people like Corey Booker and

Richard Neal and James McGovern, who are trying to advocate for food policies.

So

Roger Marshall and Cassidy, both doctors, full in on this stuff.

So there's so many allies in Congress on both sides of the aisle that are sort of sick and tired of how this thing is going and realize we can't continue to do what we're doing.

And I think, Tucker, we have a historic opportunity with Trump and Bobby Kennedy.

And Dr.

Oz now is the head of CMS and other people, I think.

Hopefully Casey Means will be Surgeon General, Senator General.

I think we can have a shift in the thinking and educate America just like we did with smoking, and we can win.

It's just so funny that, I mean, whatever, life is irony.

Everything is irony.

But the Big Mac president is ushering in.

It's just crazy.

No, I'm sorry.

But it makes sense, right?

It's incredible.

Johnson was one of the biggest bigots.

He signed the Civil Rights Act.

That's fair.

Reagan was the most staunch anti-communist.

He's the one who ended the Cold War.

So there's a historical.

No, that's very deep.

What you're saying is deep.

No, that is the way life is, actually.

It's the opposite of what you expect.

Yeah.

And I've talked to Trump about it, and he means it.

I would say Bobby Kennedy is one of the nominees he's proudest of.

He hasn't backed down at all.

I think Bobby's going to get confirmed.

I want to ask you about the thing for which Bobby is most famous, but I don't want to say the word because YouTube will monetize this.

You're not even allowed.

Even now,

YouTube, biggest company, most powerful company in the world, Google,

has an AI program that will literally knock out your video if you use the V-word.

So let's call it the shot.

The V-word.

If you don't mind.

The V-word.

The V-word.

Not the good V-word, bad, the bad V word.

So Bobby Kennedy became infamous 15 or 20 years ago when he wrote a piece in Rolling Stone

suggesting that, I mean, he just got exiled from America, basically, for suggesting that the shot might cause really bad outcomes, health outcomes in children.

I never hear...

anybody bring that up anymore.

Have we accepted that there may be truth in that?

Well, listen, I think, you know,

we get sort of religion around certain topics in medicine.

And I don't understand this.

You know, medicine is supposed to be about science.

Yes.

It's about

asking questions.

And to say a subject is settled and we need no more science doesn't make any sense.

Like aspirin is a great example.

We thought aspirin was the greatest thing on the planet Earth, that everybody should get an aspirin to prevent a heart attack.

But as we started to look at the data, Very carefully, we saw that, gee, no, actually, it increases the risk of certain problems like brain hemorrhage and gastrointestinal bleeding and death.

And 30,000 people die every year from taking aspirin for prevention of heart attacks.

What?

Yeah.

I didn't even know that.

Right.

So, so I think you're supposed to take a baby aspirin every day.

Well, that's right.

But it causes,

it causes bleeding.

It thins your blood.

That's why it's good for preventing heart attacks, but it also can make you have a brain hemorrhage or a gut bleed.

And so now the guidelines have been revised, and it's not recommended for everybody, only certain high-risk populations, right?

And yet we change our mind based on the data.

We look at the science.

We update our data.

The V-word is, you know, listen, I'm just going to say it.

I think vaccines are one of the greatest advances in medicine in history.

They have eradicated many serious diseases, polio, smallpox.

I mean, I was in Haiti during the earthquake, and I was working at the journal hospital there, and there was a guy with tetanus, and I'd never seen a full-blown case of tetanus before.

It was one of the worst things I'd ever seen.

What is it?

I don't know.

Tetanus is, you know, you step on a rusty nail.

Right, lockjaw.

They used to call it.

Yeah, lockjaw, but you like basically go into total paralysis.

Like your body's in a con, it's like one big giant spasm and you can't get out of it.

And you like basically have to give them IVs and oxygen and hope they survive.

And there's tetanus antitoxin, but it's it were it was the worst thing I'd ever seen.

So so vaccines have a role.

And the problem is that a tetanus shot is a vaccine.

Yeah, tetanus shot is a vaccine.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Polio is a vaccine.

Of course, well, famously.

Yeah.

But a tetanus shot is a vaccine.

Yeah, it's a vaccine.

Yeah, you're supposed to get every 10 years.

Yeah.

And, you know, diphtheria.

There's some really good things we've done in medicine to reduce a lot of the childhood illnesses and childhood deaths.

Yes.

Measles.

Vaccines aren't a problem.

The problem is that we need to study long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs like any other drug.

You know, one of the problems with medicine is that is, and I think this was a huge failure during COVID, and I think Bobby was right about this.

You know, we did not actually give the American public the benefit of the doubt that they were smart enough to understand the nuances around this treatment.

So they said, vaccines are safe, they're effective.

Well, not really.

Like any drug, it's sort of safe and it can be effective, right?

Aspirin is effective for certain things, but it also has side effects, right?

And so vaccines worked to prevent the mortality rates and reduce death rates and reduce the severity of infection, but it didn't prevent infection.

And that was very clearly early on.

And there's this concept called sterile immunity versus disease immunity.

Sterile immunity is you get a measles shot when you're a kid, you never need it again.

You're sterile.

You're never going to get measles.

The flu vaccine, you have to get every year because you basically don't get permanent immunity.

You get sort of a reduction in the risk of disease.

That's what the COVID vaccine was.

So it reduced the risk, but it didn't prevent you getting it, didn't prevent transmission.

And it also has side effects.

And we were pushing on young kids.

And now the data is really clear.

It caused increased myocarditis, heart inflammation.

So what we need is just good science.

And I think this is all Bobby's asking for.

He's not anti-vaccine.

He's been vaccinated.

I've been vaccinated.

We vaccinate our kids.

I think it's propaganda that says he's an anti-vaxxer.

That's really just a way of dismissing him.

But I think we have to understand that we just need to do good science.

And that's all he's asking for.

He recently came out and said he's not taking vaccines.

He's pro-vaccines.

He wants good science.

And I think that's what we need around everything.

I mean, this, and it's whether it's Alzheimer's, or whether it's diabetes, or whether it's whatever it is, we're studying the wrong things.

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Why do you think it became Verboten to ask any questions about this one category of medicine?

That's a very good question.

I don't know the answer to that.

There was a religious fervor that scared me.

I didn't understand.

I have exactly the same view that you just articulated on the subject.

I'm not a zealot either way.

But the zealotry was 100% on the other side, and it was really scary.

It ended friendships.

It divided families.

I've never seen anything like it.

Why was that?

I think, you know, as a public health effort,

I understand the public health mission, which is to sort of work on the health of the entire population.

And so you're willing to kind of simplify things and put out messaging that may not be completely scientific in order to get people to do stuff, right?

Which is what happened during COVID-19.

Oh, you lie to manipulate people.

Well, that, yeah.

You can't do that.

No, but I think lying.

We need informed consent.

I mean, listen, when you prescribe a drug as a doctor, you're supposed to say, if I give you this drug, here's the benefits and here's the risks.

You know, it's really clear we're supposed to do that in medicine.

It's called informed consent.

Yeah, and we should have informed consent so people understand here's the benefit, here's the risk, and you can decide for yourself.

But why would

I mean, of course, everything became in the politically charged year of 2020 election year became super partisan.

Okay, so there's that.

But it was deeper than that because Trump was out there.

He was pro-vaccine.

And then the Biden people, of course, are pro-vaccine, but the media

became like, I've never seen that level of intolerance.

Like anybody who asked any question was not just wrong or misinformed, but evil and deserving of death.

As a doctor, is that the view of doctors?

Like anyone who questions this,

I think, what is that?

It's quite astounding, Tucker.

It's one of those areas in medicine where it's become a religion and you can't question it.

But why, was that the case when you were in medical school?

Not really.

Like, I just, I don't understand what happened.

I think there was

a sense that

we're being

not given the whole story and the whole truth.

And I think this is true.

And I think most people don't know.

Well, whenever they attack you for asking questions, then you can be certain you're not getting the whole story.

Absolutely.

And you know, and people have attacked me.

There's this group called the American Council on Science and Health, which has gone after me.

And they're basically funded by Monsanto and pesticide companies and pharma and the tobacco companies and the fast food companies.

And so

I'm pretty googled.

It sounds like a fun group.

Yeah.

And they sound great.

And this is one of their strategies.

So the way in which the food, and you asked how this has happened, it's not by accident.

So the food industry and the agency have deliberately set up a series of actions and strategies across all sectors of society to take over the narrative.

One, they fund most of the research.

So there's 12 times as much research quote on nutrition from food industry.

In other words, the American Beverage Association does a study on artificial sweeteners.

They find they're fine.

And

they do a study on soda.

They find it doesn't cause obesity, right?

That's kind of garbage science.

And there's 8 to 50 times more likely to show a benefit for their product if they're funding it.

So they take over the research infrastructure.

They take over the professional associations.

The American Heart Association receives $192 million a year from Pharma and Food.

American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition, Dietetics,

all the major professional associations, which we think are independent, giving us independent advice, are funded and co-opted by these.

And I mean, it's

a lot of people.

What are the autism groups?

Because I always wondered, there's been this massive increase in autism.

I don't know what's causing it.

It's not genetic.

That's not true.

It's not because we broadened the classification of autism.

That's not true.

It's not better than just data detection.

It's 1,000%.

I mean, I I think that's right.

Okay, right.

So, and it's a life-ending crisis.

Yeah, it went from one in 2,500 to 1 in 26 kids, 239 kids.

Of course, we all know people who have autistic children, and it's really a tragedy.

So there are all these autism groups, and they're incredibly pompous and self-righteous.

But all of them have sort of shot down the idea that we should ask any questions about where this comes from.

Well, not all of them.

Some are asking.

The big ones have.

Yeah, of course.

I know someone who worked on it.

I was like, what's causing this?

Shut up.

That's right.

It's like, you work at an autism group.

Why aren't you interested?

Exactly.

I mean, this is...

So who's funding them?

Do you know?

We should take a class.

I don't know.

But there's autism groups.

And then they fund not only professional associations, not only they fund nutrition research, but they obviously also create these front groups like the American Council on Science and Health and Crop Life and all these

nice sounding things.

The American Council on Science and Health sounds very legitimate.

It sounds legitimate.

And you're looking at these guys, half these guys were in jail.

Are you against science and health?

No, but one of these guys was like in jail for Medicare fraud for $8 million.

You're looking at these guys, you're criminals.

Well, he knows a lot about science and health.

Yeah, exactly.

And so, and then

I'm serious.

And then they fund social groups.

So get this, Tucker.

They fund like the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.

Oh, I'm aware of that.

And I was working.

So Al Sharpton, that's where he got his suits taken out of it.

That's right.

And I was with Bernice King

in Washington, in Atlanta.

Nice woman.

We were going to show the movie Fed Up, which is about childhood obesity and how our sugar industry was causing this and our food industry was causing this.

And she said, nonviolence is just not non-violence to others, but it's non-violence to yourself.

And I think this is important.

And I want to show this film in the King Center.

So I said, great.

And so a few days later, she called me back and said, Mark, I can't do it.

I said, why?

Coca-Cola funds the King Center.

And obesity is not a problem in the black community.

You know, if you look

at African Americans in the 60s, they were healthier than white Americans.

If you look at that movie, Amazing Grace with Aretha Franklin,

it's a great movie.

She was thin, and every black person in that calculation in Oakland in 1970 was thin.

And now 85% of African-American women are overweight.

It was L.A., I think, not Oakland.

Really?

Was it L.A.?

Okay.

Was she recording the gospel album?

It was, yeah, it was the Amazing Grace.

I don't remember.

It was a great documentary.

Oh, it's the most incredible album, too.

So they fund social groups to help oppose things that they don't want, like soda taxes.

Or they fund like the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which is one of the premier children's hospitals.

Chop was going to actually come out in favor of a soda tax, but Coca-Cola gave them $10 million, and they pulled back.

This is the kind of stuff they do.

They fund science, they co-opt professional associations, they fund the social groups, they create front groups, and they are huge lobbyists.

And so they're very deliberate in how they do this.

In fact, it was illegal.

They got a huge lawsuit against it from Secretary of the Attorney General of Washington State because they colluded.

A lot of the food industry groups colluded to fight against GMO labeling, which they wanted to do in Washington.

Now, America and Syria are the only countries that don't allow GMO labeling.

It's a pretty good company.

Syria's company problems.

China and Russia are transparent about this, and they're not known for their not allowed in Russia.

Right.

And so basically they funded this campaign for a ballot initiative to defeat the GMO labeling.

And they won, but they did it illegally and they spent huge amounts of money doing it.

And they were then fined and had the biggest fine ever, which was trivial for them.

It was like, I don't know, $18 million or something that they had to pay, but it was was trivial.

But they got a big slap on the wrist for doing this, but they won.

Same thing in California.

When Jerry Brown was governor, and he's governor Moonbeam, I mean, he's as left as you can get, you know, and there were soda taxes being passed all around California, and the soda industry got together, American Beverage Association.

They said, we're going to create a ballot measure that's going to require two-thirds majority for every vote in any state or local government for anything.

It would basically paralyze the government of California if they passed this ballot measure.

And they were funding it with millions of dollars.

It had nothing to do with food.

They said, look, Jerry, we're going to pull this ballot measure, but you've got to put in a permanent ban on soda tax in California.

And he did.

That's what's going on behind the scenes.

That's how this is.

There's a permanent ban on soda taxes?

In California.

There's no permanent ban on any other kind of taxes.

So that's also what bothers me is I do think there should be one standard for everyone in every category because we're all American citizens.

Nobody should be exempt from taxes,

very much including college endowments.

And nobody should be exempt from lawsuits unless all of us are.

And so I don't understand.

Like one of the reasons orthopedic surgeons don't do knee replacements drunk is they can be sued for it.

Oh, they, yeah.

But drug makers for a certain category of drug have blanket immunity.

Where do I get, but do you have blanket immunity granted by Congress?

Because I don't.

I wish.

That would be nice.

How do we get that?

So I don't, but okay, I don't understand

$20 million.

I'll donate.

Maybe I can get that.

No, but like, this is absolutely nuts.

It is.

How does one category of product have blanket immunity from law, statutorily blanket immunity?

And they're like, well, we provide a vital, a vital service.

Well, everybody who works thinks he provides a vital service.

Like who doesn't think he's you think you're providing a vital service?

I do.

I mean, you want to

incentivize innovation.

You want to incentivize science.

You want to

accelerate things that may be really necessary in ways that

are probably not possible within a normal course of how we develop drugs.

Well, then let's do tort reform.

Right.

But

we all benefit from it.

Because vaccines, you know, some of them were not that profitable and some are very profitable.

But what's happened is that in 1980, 80, I think it was 86, the U.S.

government indemnified vaccine makers.

Oh, I know.

So that meant that they could make...

vaccines and never be sued and they created a vaccine court to deal with vaccine injury and they paid over five billion dollars in vaccine injuries so the drug companies paid over five billion no no no the u.s taxpayers paid wait wait wait wait wait so you're saying that the drug companies can never be sued but if they are sued taxpayers have to pay the damage that's right federal federal vaccine court Yeah.

So that's the biggest scam I think I've ever heard of ever.

I mean, in a way, I understood the thinking behind it because, you know, you want to incentivize rapid development of drugs that aren't going to be that profitable, right?

So, but it turns out that many of these drugs are profitable, like rotavirus, which is a new vaccine.

And we've known when we were kids, there were like eight shots.

Now there's like 72 shots you get.

And many countries, for example, don't allow, for example, hepatitis B at birth is a vaccine we're recommending in America.

And it's what you get from IV drugs or sex.

Now, I don't know any newborns that are doing IV drugs or sex.

And, you know, if you

probably not a lot.

But in many countries, don't actually have it on their vaccine schedule.

You know, we do.

And so with rotavirus, for example, they profit $100 billion.

It's $100 billion profit for them.

That's nuts, right?

Do you have any idea why the trial bar, which has always been one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington and definitely the most powerful in the Democratic Party, haven't said anything about this?

I don't know.

So their argument has always been, look, if you want safer goods and services, you have to apply a penalty to people who are negligent.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what, that's their argument.

It's not a crazy argument, by the way.

And Coca-Cola, by the way, for all its faults, can be sued if they poison you with a can of Diet Coke.

That's right.

So they don't.

Right.

So why wouldn't that, and by the way, if you're saying, well, I can't make enough money selling my product, why don't you convince people to buy it then?

Just convince people that it's a good product and they'll probably pay for it.

Yeah.

I know.

I understand that.

I mean, it wasn't a completely stupid idea, but it's ended up being a bit of a disaster.

And I think, I think all we need is better science, good science.

And I.

Well, if you have a government that's like, you must use this product, you have, you've got no choice.

We'll punish you if you don't use the product.

And then you get injured by the product.

Yeah.

Most people got injured, like had no idea they could be injured because nobody told them.

They do get injured.

Yeah.

You're told to shut up and just suffer or die in silence, and then you've got no recourse.

And then the people who sold you the product at gunpoint become billionaires.

That seems like a very flawed system.

It's a bit messed up.

I mean, it's a bit messed up.

Kind of a perfect system for the drugs.

But it just sort of underscores the bigger problem in our society, which is that we really have

multinational and transnational corporations profiting from creating more sickness.

You know, the food companies create illness, the pharma companies pay for the illness, drug treatments, and the whole thing just works for them.

But we have to change this.

And we can, as a federal government, change the policies because other countries have done this.

They've been successful.

They're winning the war on this problem.

And we need a focused effort.

And I think there's so many things that could be done in this administration.

Okay, so tell us about Bobby Kennedy, who you've, for viewers who haven't followed this for a long time, you've known him for a long time.

You wrote a book with him.

He's not just like some guy you met at a cocktail party.

No, no.

You know him really well.

You told me at dinner last night you were just staying with him.

Yeah.

Do you want to say where you're staying?

Because I thought it was hilarious.

Oh, we were staying at Dr.

Oz's house.

Okay.

So we got Mark Hyman, Bobby Kennedy.

Were the means is there too?

Callie was there.

Yeah, Callie Means and Dr.

Oz all staying together.

Yeah, yeah, it was a huge.

So it's a conspiracy of light, I would say.

But anyway, you know Bobby really well, personally and professionally.

What do you think his strengths are going into this job?

I think

he has the right focus and perspective, which is that we have a crisis, which is our chronic disease epidemic.

It's been neglected by the scientific community predominantly.

It's been neglected by the federal government.

It's bankrupting us.

It's causing destruction of our environment.

of our social structures, of our academic competitive and global competitiveness of our military.

And he understands that these needs to be addressed.

And so I think that's a huge strength.

I think he wants to focus on rooting out corruption, rooting out conflicts of interest in agencies.

I think he wants to implement policies that are going to transform the health of America.

And we're working on a whole series of different ideas, but I think the NIH needs to be reformed.

They should basically

fund nutrition research around chronic disease, which they don't.

A very small amount of money goes to them.

They still do that.

Like 5%, but it's 80% of the diseases we're seeing.

They should have a mandate, for example, that all medical schools and academic institutions that receive federal funding from any source should have a nutrition curriculum and that it should be mandated.

And there's a reason for that because doctors graduating today, my daughter's in medical school.

She's in fourth-year medical school.

Not a single thing on nutrition.

I'm like, what did you learn?

Well, I learned about amino acids and fatty acids.

I'm like, what are you going to tell your patient to have for lunch?

And so zero education, that could be changed over time.

Was that true when you were in medical school?

Of course.

Yeah.

I learned about quasi-R score and Erasmus and ricketts and xerophthalmia all these rare diseases from vitamin deficiencies in africa and protein malnutrition berry berry yeah berry berry and pellagra i'm like i never seen any of that you know like i i didn't see any of that so i i think i you know i did see some malnutrition when i was in haiti but but it was you know really really rare and and what what we're not doing this the nih could do a lot and then the the HHS could fund with Medicare nutrition services in medicine in medicine, which it doesn't pay for now.

So if you have diabetes or heart disease or auto diet cause diseases, very hard to get nutrition services.

And we at Cleveland Clinic created a lifestyle change program where we got people to work together to change their behavior and change lifestyles.

It was based on this sort of work I did with Rick Warren and Saddleback Church, where we got 15,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year by

actually getting healthy together.

So really, it's about behavior change and also what to do.

So they changed what was in the refineries.

They got rid of the pancake breakfast, the ice cream socials.

They got everybody jogging for Jesus.

It was great.

and then they lost a lot of weight Rick lost a ton of weight they got healthy and we showed how people doing this in groups actually works and this could be funded by the federal government well schools used to do that yeah they I don't think they do anymore no and so so we know we know actually how to change behavior we know how to change these chronic diseases with food and that needs to be funded so like I said we don't have evidence-based medicine we have reimbursement-based medicine there's a company called Verta that reverses type 2 diabetes in 60% of their patients using a ketogenic diet they do it with a continuous care online model They reverse all the biomarkers for heart disease.

They get those better.

They have about a 12% weight loss which is

so they reverse 60% of diagnosed type diet.

Yeah, fairly advanced type to diabetes.

Like insulin-dependent?

100%.

They get 100% off the medication, the main medication for diabetes.

They get 90 plus percent offices.

When is part of this?

They save $6,000 per diabetic patient.

And if you apply that to the Medicare diabetes population, just doing that alone would save $100 billion a year.

Not even counting all the amputated limbs and

the suffering that goes wrong with it.

So

roughly when is the average type 2 diabetic diagnosed as such?

Depends.

I mean, if you're a Pima Indian, it could be three years old.

80% of type 2 diabetes Pima Indians, by the time they're 30, have type 2 diabetes.

80?

80%.

80%.

In certain communities, it's rampant.

And in African Americans,

it's much higher than whites.

In Hispanics, it's much higher than whites.

So

the age can vary, but the the pre-diabetes starts early.

So we're measuring with function,

my company, Function Health, insulin resistance, and we're measuring insulin.

And most doctors never measure insulin.

I asked Quest, how many doctors are measuring insulin?

Probably less than 1% of the lab data.

Quest is the testing company.

Yeah, the Questing Tompy, yeah.

Like less than 1% get measurements for insulin, which is the single biggest thing we have a problem with in America, which is our insulin levels are spiking because of sugar.

Insulin, when it's high, causes you to store belly fat.

It makes you hungry.

It locks the fat in your fat cells, cells and it slows your metabolism so you're screwed.

And you get stuck in this vicious cycle where you have hungry fat that makes you eat more, that makes you want to exercise less, and you get in this cycle of weight gain.

Nobody wakes up every day and goes, I want to be diabetic, I want to be overweight, I want to gain.

Nobody says that.

People do wake up craving sugar cereal and pain.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because their metabolism and biochemistry has been hijacked by the food industry.

How long does it take to get out of that cycle?

Very quick.

Very quick.

Like how quick.

Well, I actually.

Let's say you're on a typical American diet and you're waking up with frosted flakes,

hitting some kind of big sandwich and then having pasta for dinner.

You're doing that for 10 years.

How long does it take you to get out of the cycle?

I actually have done this with my patients for decades, and I created a program called the 10-day detox diet.

And essentially, it's 10 days of treating food addiction.

And I wrote a book about it called the 10-day detox diet.

I have an online program starting actually in January.

If you want to go to 10daydetox.com, and essentially it guides people through how to reset your biochemistry, your hormones, your gut microbiome, your metabolism very quickly through food.

So one of these patients I had in a Cleveland Clinic,

she started the program within three days she was off her insulin.

So the cravings go away in two or three days.

You feel shitty for two or three days, and then you start reducing symptoms.

And what happens is when you take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff, you see changes across your whole system.

Because

when I talk about food as a root cause, it's root cause for so many of the things people are suffering from.

So depression and autoimmune diseases and uh gut issues and anger anger i mean yeah it's it's amazing and we know sugar causes anger

yes actually the data on this what is that pretty interesting so the amygdala is the reptile brain fight or flight it's your yeah it's your reptilian lizard brain we all have one yeah and

We have a frontal lobe, which is the grown-up in the room.

So you've got the reptile kind of, and you've got the grown-up.

The communication there is important.

So when you're walking down the street and you see if a beautiful woman you say gee i'd like to kiss that woman you don't do it because you know it's not a good idea for your marriage right yeah right you have the frontal lobe going that's probably not a good idea or gee i like that car over there i'm going to just take that car i mean my car was stolen from my driveway two days ago it was crazy but that's another story but but you know people don't have control over their behavior because the amygdala and the frontal lobe communication is interrupted by inflammation inflammation in the brain is the root cause of so many of brain issues so depression is inflammation autism is inflammation add is inflammation alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain and chris palmer is a harvard psychiatrist who wrote a book called brain energy talking about this and how he cured schizophrenia using a ketogenic diet being getting people off of sugar curing schizophrenia yes yes So so we have,

I'm saying these things that sound like crazy, heretical.

We can reverse Alzheimer's, reverse diabetes.

Well, they are heretical.

By definition, they're heretical.

It doesn't mean they're crazy, though.

No, I mean, the science is there.

It's like if you actually look online, there's a National Library of Medicine database called PubMed.

Anybody can search it, and you can look at these things and you can look them up.

They're online.

There's studies done.

There's plenty of studies, but they don't translate.

So it sounds like you said so far the ketogenic diet can cure

diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, and now schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia, yeah.

So will you describe the ketogenic diet just to be...

Yeah, yeah, sure.

So basically, this is something that was developed for epilepsy years ago because when no drugs work for epilepsy, neurologists realized that if they put people on a diet where their brain was just running on ketones, which is the fuel instead of sugar that the body can run on.

Maybe I said we're hybrid ACDC.

The gasoline is carbs and the hybrid electric clean-burning fuel is ketones.

So when you switch to ketones, it activates...

the brain's repair systems.

It improves mitochondrial function.

It reduces inflammation.

It helps cognitive function at every level.

So I've seen it work from autism to Alzheimer's to schizophrenia to depression.

This is just an all-protein diet.

It's not all protein.

It's fat.

It's actually 75% fat.

Olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, animal fats, dairy fats.

And it basically should be a healthy version of it because you can, you know, eat bacon and that's not a good idea.

But you can do healthy ketogenic diets that actually improve health and reverse disease and work across all these things.

So sugar is really driving this big problem, sugar and starch.

And by the way, flour, bagel.

I mean, I had a

lecture the other day and a woman said, you know, I had a bagel for breakfast.

I noticed I had a glucose monitor and my sugar spiked 70 points.

You know, she's got a metabolic problem.

And you can start to see when you eat these foods,

your body gets dysregulated.

And when you use a diet that actually shuts off this cravings, that repairs the metabolic dysfunction, that improves insulin sensitivity.

It doesn't take long.

So it's shocking.

In five or 10 days,

we get a 70% reduction from all symptoms and all diseases by people just changing their diet.

And most people, Tucker, don't connect how they feel with what they're eating.

They don't make the connection.

And so they think they're suffering from all these problems that are related to what they're eating.

Why is it so hard for people to maintain a ketogenic diet?

Well, it's a very extreme diet.

I don't think you need to be so extreme.

Like a 10-day detox is not keto, but it does like probably 80 or 90% of the benefit.

So you get to eat more starchy food.

Well, let's just say you decide I'm going on a keto diet from now until I die.

Yeah.

Well, probably,

you know, what you want to do is use it to fix the problem and then come off it.

We were always doing this historically because we were hunting and gathering and sometimes we didn't hunt and gather very well.

We couldn't find anything.

So we would switch into burning fat because we probably have 2,500 calories of sugar stored in our muscles.

That doesn't last very long.

That'll last a day.

But we probably have 30, 50, 60, 100,000 calories of fat in our body because we just naturally have fat in our body.

And that's a great source of fuel.

So what happens is the body starts to break down the fat and uses that.

And that's what happens when we overnight fast or we do a ketogenic diet.

You swip into this alternative metabolic pathway.

And that pathway is incredibly helpful for

longevity.

It's helpful for reversing chronic diseases.

And across all these diseases, we're seeing the same thing happen.

So really, the bottom line here is that sugar and starch is the problem in America.

And it's in every processed food.

It's in what people are eating every day, and people have no idea how much they're consuming.

So if you take out all the sugar and all the starch, is that the same as keto?

Not necessarily.

I mean, for example,

if you can take out ultra-processed food and you can stop your liquid sugar calories, if you can eat more good fats, eat good quality protein, lots of fruits and vegetables, most of our problems will go away.

This is not complicated science.

And so you don't have to be super extreme.

But if you are in an extreme situation and you have an extreme disease on your far end of the spectrum of type 2 diabetes, yeah, you might need to do that for a a while until you fix your metabolism.

So once you fix your metabolism, will the metabolism return to balance?

100%.

I mean, yeah, I mean, you've got,

like I showed you the picture last night of that woman, she had type 2 diabetes, she had heart failure, she had hypertension, she had kidneys failing, she had fatty liver.

She changed her diet.

In three months, she was off all her medications, off all her insulin, reversed her diabetes, reversed her heart failure, reversed her kidney failure, reversed her liver failing.

She was on her way to heart and kidney transplant.

This is not a patient who's like just slightly broken.

She's 66 on her way out.

And in a year, she lost 116 pounds and off all her medication.

And it wasn't through rocket science or

through some great new advance in medicine.

It was just through applying the basic principles of nutrition and how this is.

Can you take pretty much so like any insulin-dependent patient in his 50s, can he be cured?

Type one, no.

Type one is an autoimmune disease.

I understand.

No, I'm sorry.

Type two,

if you're on insulin, you know, you can probably get 60 to 70% of those people off of insulin or dramatically lower on insulin and you can reverse completely diabetes in about 60 to 70 percent of those patients and this is well documented science I'm not you know pulling this out of thin air so why wouldn't that be a goal well that's one of the ones one of the things I think that's one of the things I think the new administration needs to do is I mean we spend over a billion dollars a day on diabetes

And this is a completely avoidable problem.

And it's the biggest driver, again, of all these problems.

If you have diabetes, you're four times likely to get Alzheimer's, more likely to get cancer, more likely to get heart attacks.

All the things are caused by this fundamental problem of sugar and starch in our diet.

And so I think that the federal government should initiate a diabetes reversal campaign.

across HHS and Health and Human Services and fund these trials and demonstration projects, show this works, and then scale it up.

Because this is a solvable problem.

You know, I can't fix Middle East crisis.

I can't, you know, end the war in Ukraine.

I can't prevent

war, but this is a solvable problem.

The answers are clear.

The solutions are clear.

We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means.

She's a Stanford educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.

In the interview, she explained how the food that we eat, produced by huge food companies, Big Food, in conjunction with Pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country.

The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief.

What Casey means, who we've not stopped thinking about ever since, is the co-founder of a healthcare technology technology company called Levels.

And we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels.

And by proud, I mean sincerely proud.

Levels is a really interesting company and a great product.

It gives you insight into what's going on inside your body, your metabolic health.

It helps you understand how the food that you're eating, the things that you're doing every single day are affecting your body in real time.

And you don't think about it.

You have no idea what you're putting in your mouth and you have no idea what it's doing to your body.

But over time, you feel weak and tired and spacey.

And over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick.

So it's worth knowing what the food you eat is doing to you.

The Levels app works with something called a continuous glucose monitor, a CGM.

You can get one as part of the plan, or you can bring your own.

It doesn't matter.

But the bottom line is big tech, big pharma, and big food combine together to form an incredibly malevolent force pumping you full of garbage, unhealthy food with artificial sugars and hurting you and hurting the entire country.

So with levels, you'll be able to see immediately what all this is doing to you.

You get access to real-time personalized data and that's a critical step to changing your behavior.

Those of us who like Oreos can tell you firsthand.

This isn't talking to your doctor at an annual physical, looking backwards about things you did in the past.

This is up to the second information on how your body is responding to different foods and activities, the things that give you stress, your sleep, et cetera, et cetera.

It's easy to use.

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And over time, it'll have a huge effect.

Right now, you can get an additional two free months when you go to levels.link slash tucker.

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So I buy everything you're saying.

I think it's demonstrably true.

You can feel it in yourself.

And, you know, one anomaly does not disprove a general truth.

Yeah.

But Donald Trump is that one anomaly, I would say.

Disgusting.

I don't know if you remember U.B.

Blake.

He was a musician and he smoked and drank and did all these aid craft.

He says, if I would have known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself.

And I think, you know, there are people.

I have a father like that.

I mean, there are people who just like Madame Clemas, she lived to 122 years old.

She smoked, she drank, she ate tons of chocolate.

She was never married.

Maybe that was her secret, but she was the oldest living human ever.

Yes.

And, you know, some people just have genes that make them go no matter what.

And so I would like to see what his blood work says.

I would like to know what's going on under the hood.

I mean.

That would be amazing and certainly would like to help anybody be healthy.

I take care of everybody.

You know, one day in my office, I had a

Muslim, I had a chief rabbi, I had a top Democrat, a top Republican, I had a Christian pastor.

It was like, you know, know, it was so funny.

But I'm a doctor.

I take care of humans.

And, you know, biology is bipartisan.

We all are human.

We all suffer from the same things.

But there are genetic anomalies.

Yeah.

I just had an ice cream Sunday with Trump like three days ago.

I'm off the ice cream Sundays for a while.

Thank you, Tucker.

Got to get off him.

But he's 25 years older than I am.

Yeah.

And I'm not just saying this.

I'm not sucking up.

I wouldn't say anything if this weren't true, but the guy's sharp, actually sharp.

Really precise recall, fast, funny.

Yeah.

And, you know,

pretty good shape, 79 chat.

Like,

that's just a freak of nature thing.

I think it is, you know, I think it is.

I mean, I think, you know,

would I love him to get healthy and everybody to get healthy?

Yes.

That's my job.

I'm a doctor.

But if he's managing and doing great,

what can I say?

But for most of us, that's not.

No, I can feel that it's not going to work.

No, yeah.

No, it's not.

Most of us are more in the human realm.

He's an anomaly.

That's wild.

Sorry, I just had to say that because I was like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

I don't know if anybody's really had a chance to talk to him about his health and health risks and how he could do better.

But, you know, I don't know.

I don't, I don't know how you do, how you do that job at 78 years old, but he's, he's crushing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's not like, and by the way, most, I've known a lot of people who've been president and none of them are kind of normal.

Yeah.

It's an unusual job.

It takes a lot to get there.

It's a certain kind of person.

Yeah.

I don't know the last time we had a president die in office.

It's been quite some time.

But it seems to kind of suspend.

Maybe it's the intensity of.

Warder Wilson had a stroke, but that was it.

Yeah, no, but he made it.

Out of all.

Well, his wife was president for it.

Yeah, well, right.

Right.

Oh, we have that now, actually.

But they still keep going.

I don't know.

So you think that after all the

powerful forces you've described to raid against him, Bucky Kennedy can still work.

I do.

I think what's going on now in America is an awakening.

I think there's an awareness that the trust in our medical system and science system has been broken.

It needs to be repaired.

It needs integrity.

It needs someone calling out the conflicts of interest.

It needs

good science being produced.

And I think, you know, with the understanding that now we're in this crown disease crisis that he's so well articulated and people like Casey and Callie on your podcast have done, that I've done for decades, that somehow it's getting through, that this is never an issue.

This was never an issue in any, I've been crying from rooftops for 30 years.

I feel like I've been a voice crying in the wilderness.

And now it's unbelievable to me to see.

It must be pretty cool for you to see this.

Unbelievable.

And I see that there's an awakening in America, that people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

They're seeing everybody in their family sick.

They're seeing the rise of all the diseases.

They know something's broken.

They know the drugs and the current system is not fixing it the way it is.

It needs to be fixed.

And we need somebody to lead this.

And I think, you know, Bobby has his issues and his controversies and his questions, but at the very heart, I think he's focused on the right thing, which is focusing on the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic, focusing on the problems with our food system, with our ag system.

And that is the right thing to be doing.

And I think the federal government has enormous power to actually change this through a whole series of different actions across different agencies that all can work together to make a difference.

And I'm thinking this is now going to happen.

I think we can provide for these things across all the agencies.

And

they're not like hard things, right?

We can improve SNAP.

We can improve school lunches.

We can improve our dietary guidelines and fund those.

And we have dietary guidelines for Americans.

There's no funding for them.

The Congress mandates that they are produced every five years.

I met with the guidelines people in HHS.

They said, we have to go around with a tin cup to the other departments to beg for nickels to actually fund our work because we don't get any federal funding to create the dietary guidelines.

Nor does NASEN, the National Academy of Science, Medicine, and Engineering, which is supposed to review the literature and be an independent scientific body looking at the nutritional research, doesn't have the funding to do basic literature reviews and science reviews to actually inform the dietary guidelines.

So there's no money in the process.

And then there's no money to implement the guidelines to actually create.

awareness and implementation across America for what we should be eating.

So the whole system is sort of broken and we need to sort of rejigger that.

We can find, I don't know how many billions of dollars we spend on forever wars.

I mean, we're talking about a few million dollars.

Like a few millions of dollars could make a profound difference in actually getting the right things done.

So we have the ability to change what's happening in the DOD as well.

with the military readiness and performance and performance enhancement.

And I've been working with special ops forces on some of this stuff.

And

the military is starting to understand that this is an issue and shift some of their policies.

The NIH needs to fund, again, nutrition research.

We should probably have a National Institute of Nutrition like many other countries have.

We shouldn't allow funding for medical schools that don't actually provide nutrition curriculums.

We should

have our agricultural system supporting farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture and produce healthier food and revitalize those communities and stop their extreme decline into sort of financial ruin and suicide.

I mean, why is there a 350% higher risk of suicide in farmers?

You know, that's ridiculous.

And that's because of our policies and what we're doing and how they're squeezed.

So we have across all the agencies such tremendous power to make simple changes that can really transform America.

Front-to-package labeling.

We can do front-to-package labeling, inform people about what's in their food like they have in other countries.

You know, get out the stuff.

And the European Union has really clearly identified the most harmful chemicals in our food.

Get them out of our food.

I mean, you go to Europe or you go to Canada, you don't see the same products with the same ingredients like Fruit Loops.

You know, there's a big 400,000 person petition against Fruit Loops because their U.S.

product was full of all kinds of dyes and colors.

Whereas in Canada, they used, you know, there's carrot dye or use, you know, blueberry dye or other things to make it colorful, not harmful dyes that are banned in other countries.

So So these companies already do it.

Why shouldn't they do it in America?

If you get craft macaroni cheese in America, it's got dyes in it that they don't allow in Europe.

So they do the same companies are making the products.

They just don't do it here.

Because it's cheaper.

Yeah.

So we need to just enforce these standards and we should adopt the precautionary principle.

You know, we shouldn't allow things in our food that we don't know are healthy.

or

that we don't know are good for you.

If they're harmful, we should know about it.

So the study should be done to prove that they're safe and effective rather than just approving them and then waiting and seeing if they're harmful and then taking them off the market, which is kind of what we do.

It's different than the precautionary principle, which is, you know, you're guilty until proven innocent.

Here, you're innocent until proven guilty, which is fine in the court of law for a human being, but not for a food additive or chemical that could harm human health.

What do you do about doctors?

I haven't been to the doctor in a long time because I'm so distressed because I've seen so many doctors recklessly prescribe drugs that have destroyed people's lives.

Adderall or benzodiazepines or SSRIs, vaccines, all this stuff.

It's like, it seems like an incredibly reckless group of people.

They have no moral authority left from my perspective.

But we need doctors with moral authority who practice science.

Like, how do you change that?

Listen, I would say, Tucker, that most doctors went into medicine to do good.

I think that's right.

And there's a didn't go because it's easy.

I mean, the well-meaning are often ill-doing, and they're caught up in a system that

is kind of co-opted them.

And I, and it took me a while to get deprogrammed.

I was programmed by medical school.

I was taught that

this is this bastion of science, that everything is pure and clean.

There's no conflict, that everything you read in a scientific paper is true, that the pharmaceuticals are the solution to our problems.

I mean, this is what we were taught.

And we were taught...

Pharmaceuticals are the solution to our problems?

Yeah.

I mean, what is the doctor's toolkit?

It's a knife and a prescription pad.

That's it.

Yeah.

And if you have cancer, it's radiation, right?

So basically, we don't have a hell of a lot of tools.

And if you take away a doctor's prescription pad, how do they practice medicine?

But I almost never pull out my prescription pad.

I don't need to because lifestyle and food are the best drugs on the planet.

They're not like drugs.

They work better than any other drugs like exercise, diet, sleep.

These are profoundly foundational to our health.

And we have a disease system, not a health system.

We don't have a medical system that's based on the science of creating health.

We have a system that's based on the science of diagnosing and treating diseases rather than looking at their root causes.

So part of the problem is in education.

And I think doctors want to do the right thing and they're frustrated.

And I can tell you being on the inside, because I'm a Clinton Clinic for 10 years, people come out of the woodwork.

They're like, this is great.

We want to change.

We need to understand how to do things differently.

Toby Cosgrove, who is sort of the most visionary CEO in medicine, he was asked by the Biden administration, the Trump administration, everybody to work for him.

Everybody wants him.

And he brought Clinton Clinic to be the number two center of healthcare in the world, Mayo Clinic, you know, and him they're in competition.

He said, Mayo is what you put on your sandwich.

It was very funny.

But he, I met him at the World Economic Forum and I said, Toby, what if I could empty out half your hospitals and cut your angioplasties and bypass it in half?

And they're the number one heart hospital in the world.

He said, that would be a great idea.

I said, why?

You're going to cut your revenue in half.

What are you going to do about that?

He says, we'll figure it out.

It's the right thing to do.

So he invited me to come.

And I would, I mean, look, I didn't want to go to Cleveland.

And he had a good life.

And he says, I want you to come and I'll give you whatever you you want, but let's do this.

We need to address chronic disease differently.

The way we're doing it is wrong.

We need to think differently.

And he gave me carte blanche and we built a center.

We had done tons of research and we showed that the model works and it really gets.

you know, gets into the root of the problem.

And so there is a shift in medicine.

There are doctors who are flocking to this.

There are people who are understanding the system is broken, but it's a tough sell for some people because they're so brainwashed.

It's like if the earth is flat, you convince the earth is flat.

And you can't convince people otherwise.

And we're still arguing over things like evolution, you know, 150 years later.

I mean,

we're still arguing over the worth is flat.

There's people who are flat earthers, you know.

It's like, so this is the problem in medicine.

There's a scientific paradigm change that needs to happen.

And doctors are starting to get that this is true.

And I think

it's not that they're trying to do something harmful or bad.

They're just stuck in a system and they need to get liberated.

And I met with Kathleen Sebelius when I was going around trying to get these policies in Obamacare around lifestyle change.

She said, this is a great idea.

You know, if we create these lifestyle change programs for Medicare, people are going to get better.

They're healthier.

We're going to reduce healthcare costs and improve healthcare outcomes.

She said, but who's going to know how to do it?

I said, don't worry about that because if you pay for it, people will figure it out.

If you pay for an angioplasty,

if you pay for an angioplasty, doctors are going to learn how to do angioplasties, right?

You don't have to worry about that.

If you pay for a lifestyle intensive change program that works better than I mean, this woman I was telling you about, she had $20,000 of copay.

I don't know what her other medications cost for the insurance or the healthcare system.

Plus, she was in and out of the hospital all the time.

We probably saved the healthcare system a million bucks.

I got paid $200 for the visit.

We don't get the benefit as doctors for doing the right thing.

We get benefit for doing the wrong thing.

We get benefit for paying more, I mean, for doing more, not doing the right thing.

So it's a reimbursement-based system based on fee for service and throughput, not based on outcomes.

Imagine if you were making cars and you had a car company that produced cars that didn't work or that, you know, you drove off the lot and they just fell apart after a few years, or they had to come back constantly to get fixed every month.

You wouldn't have a car company, but that's what we do in medicine.

That's what we do in medicine.

We have a system that doesn't really fix the problem.

And people, you know, are not, are not, are not actually getting the solutions that the science says work, like the things we've been talking about on the show.

So I think we have a historic opportunity now.

I mean, it's fraught, right?

There's going to be

trillions of dollars at stake here, Tucker.

Trillions of dollars in the food industry, in the ag industry,

the fast food companies.

All these companies

are going to be frightened about this.

And they are already circling the wagons.

They're already coming around Washington, working on discrediting everybody in this administration.

They're pushing back hard

because they know the day of reckoning is coming.

And I think it's time.

I mean, the American people should not be the victims of this system.

Like I said, 93% of us are somewhere in that spectrum of pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes.

That's frightening to me as a doctor.

I mean, that's just like

when I was in medical school, this wasn't a problem.

There was no juvenile diabetes where kids had type 2 diabetes.

This doesn't exist.

And I'm not that old.

I mean, oh, I'm not that old.

I'm still walking.

Look at the pictures of Woodstock from August of 69.

Yeah.

You know,

150,000 shirtless

in the Americas.

The year I was born.

And you can see their ribs all over.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, so this is not a genetic problem.

You've got, you know, scientists from Harvard saying this obesity is genetic.

It's not.

I mean, there are genetic predisposition.

Where is that?

And what is the celebration of unhealth that you've seen for the last four years?

And attacking people who try to stay fit is right wing, that it's a political category to be healthy.

Yeah.

What is that?

I mean the body positive movement?

Or you mean?

Yeah, it's the most negative thing I've ever seen.

Of course, it's mislabeled like everything.

How is it positive to encourage people to be unhealthy?

I mean, you know,

do you know there was a number, I think it was in the who's paying for that?

It was a Washington Post or Wall Street street journal they did a whole sort of series of articles on how the food industry has sort of hijacked thing uh the media so they talked about how 40 of the nutritionists who are on social media are paid by the food industry to promote false concepts like don't worry about how many calories you're eating eat whatever you want indulge yourself you know it's it's really quite striking how how deliberate their actions are and and so i think i think the sad the sad thing is that people are are actually being manipulated by the food system in a way that they can't 40% of the nutritionists on social media are paid

by food companies.

Yeah, this was an expose that I think was in the Washington Post.

And it was like, and you see it.

And so

they're not.

Sarah Lee is paying nutritionists.

I don't know if it's Sarah Lee or who is, but it's, you know, I mean, 40% of the budget of the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is paid for by the food industry.

And they have panels where you've got people from McDonald's and Coca-Cola on the food.

Okay, so you're saying that most physicians want to do good in the world and health.

They want to do good.

But if you're, I'm sorry, if you're a nutritionist taking money from, you know, the baked good

industry.

Yeah.

It's not good.

I mean, I want to.

You must know that you're corrupt because that's corrupt.

That's so obviously corrupt.

I guess I'm.

I'm not taking money from George Soros.

No.

And if I were, I would know that I was corrupt.

Right, exactly.

So

it's how the system's rigged.

And unfortunately.

But the people participating in that system are also culpable.

Sorry.

I think so.

I mean, I think, you know,

I think for sure those nutritionists, I think doctors are stuck because they want to do the right thing.

They don't have the education of what to do.

They don't know how to do it.

And they're only told one thing, which is these drugs work for these problems and give these prescriptions.

And like I said at the beginning, we've seen dramatic rises in all chronic diseases and an even more dramatic rise in the use of prescription medications for those diseases, which we're not getting better.

We're 48th in life expectancy.

We spend more than double any other nation.

On Joe Rogan, I gave a slide to a friend of mine, Callie, and he gave it to Trump, or gave it to somebody else to give it to Trump that he used on Joe Rogan, which showed the life expectancy in America and the cost of our healthcare expenditures were completely kind of

off the chart.

So life expectancy is going down.

Other countries are high.

We're spending twice as much as anybody else.

It must be nice to live long enough to be vindicated.

You know, Van Gogh never got that, but you have.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, I'm optimistic, Tucker.

I think we're in a moment where the country is ready for change, where the country understands we have this health crisis, where they're willing to sort of make changes.

And I think

if the politicians in Congress understand these issues, I think they'll make the right choices.

I think if they have

the support of the American people, which I think they do, they can make choices that are difficult.

And often against the people who are funding their campaigns or funding their super PACs.

And

we have to realize we have a bought and paid-for system, and it's unfortunate.

But I think that the problem's gotten big enough we have to face it and deal with it.

Dr.

Mark Hyman, thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

My pleasure.

Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show.

If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.