115. Dr. Mark Hyman: The Truth About Why Americans Are Getting Sicker

The number one killer today is not smoking, it's not war, not infections, it's food. When you look at the Global Burden of Disease Study, which looked at 195 countries, they said that 11 million people die from ultra-processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods.
And I think a lot of people don't even realize it. We make GLP-1 in our bodies and it responds to satiation.
And if you eat nutrient-dense foods, you actually release the GLP-1 that stops you from overeating. Ultra-processed food is what makes people hungry.
Our gut is the gateway to optimal health. Now people get it.
And when I started on this, people thought I was crazy. You were early on talking about the importance of gut health and its myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis.
Basically, our intestines the size of a tennis court is laid out flat, but it's only one cell thick is the lining.

So it's one cell between you and a sewer.

That's a very important dynamic.

And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick.

And when you get to the root, you don't have to treat each thing separately.

You know, it's somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do realize the importance of my gut health.

Where do I start?

Functional medicine is where we start.

You start with nutrition and gut repair. And if you do that...
Today on The Ultimate Human, we have a true pioneer, a personal mentor of mine, and an absolute icon in the wellness and functional medicine space. With decades of experience, Dr.
Hyman has really redefined how everyone approaches health. He's shown millions of people that food can be your medicine.
He's a 15-time New York Times bestselling author and a champion for health as preventative practice. We'll dive into his groundbreaking work on reversing biological age, the true impact of our dietary choices, and practical steps that you can take to live a longer, healthier, happier life.
Let's welcome Dr. Hyman to the podcast.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecca, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.
And as you just heard, today's guest is an extraordinarily special guest because he's very special to me. He doesn't know this, but he doesn't know this, but he is actually a mentor of mine, 15-time New York Times bestselling author.
I think he's just an icon in the functional medicine space. And when I was looking for people early in my career, which is only 10 years ago, that agreed philosophically with what I was preaching so I could latch my wagon to somebody that was saying the same thing I was that had some credentials, it was definitely Dr.
Mark Hyman. So I'm very, very excited to have you on the podcast because you have liberated me

from a lot of the chicanery and charlinetry that people accuse me of. Is that a word or did I just make it? I think it's a word.
Charlonetry? Okay. Yeah.
Let's put that in there. Google it.
Um, because, you know, I just believe so much in foundationally what you preach, which is,

you know, I just believe so much in foundationally what you preach, which is, you know, essentially that, you know, we can take charge of our cellular biology and we can cure reverse chronic disease and we can even extend our life. And that is a very exciting concept to me.
And we just did a podcast where we talked about a lot of the simplicity and the complexity and, you know, about getting back to the basics. So I'm really excited for today's podcast.
I want to actually start with something, you know, out there a little bit because I just did this gut reset challenge. And every month on The Ultimate Human, I run these free challenges, like three-day water fastday water fast cold plunge challenge 10 000 step challenge we've done lots of these sleep challenges and the idea is to just introduce some of these concepts to people where they can use fasting or sunlight or grounding or breath work or um cleaning up their food their water to to really you know heal heal their bodies and just did a gut challenge.
And when I was doing some research for the podcast, I stumbled on a podcast you did with Andrew Huberman. I think it was Huberman.
And you were talking about a gut bacteria that was present in high volumes in patients that were really responsive to immunotherapy and its absence reduced the responsiveness of immunotherapy and since i just yeah acclimancia that's i couldn't think of it it's one of those keystone bacteria like the keystone species like the wolves in yellowstone it's like one of those important species of bacteria if don't have it, the cascading effects are quite significant. You increase leaky gut, you increase inflammation of the body, autoimmunity, metabolic diseases, diabetes.
It's critical for gut health and maintenance. And we basically killed it off with all the antibiotics we've taken yeah so uh you know i think that people

generally accept the notion that you know our gut is the gateway to optimal health you know our immune system sits right outside of our gut you know it's now and now people get it and when i started this people thought i was crazy yeah yeah talking about gut and leaky gut it was you and dr perlman were the only ones like talking about this story i read his um gut brain connection and Grain Brain and some of these other books that he wrote.

And that's what I really want to touch on. I mean, we only have, what, single cell layer separating us from our basically our intestines the size of a tennis court is laid out flat in terms of surface area but it's only one cell thick it's the lining it's one cell between you and a sewer yeah you know you got that's a great way to think about food and it's like that that's a very important dynamic because essentially your gastrointestinal system

is outside your body.

It's a tube that goes from your mouth to your butt,

but it's sort of got all this foreign stuff in it.

No one in your body is there all this foreign stuff.

And your body has to sort through,

like what's friend or foe?

What can I live in?

What have to keep out?

And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick.

When the whole ecosystem of bugs,

of which there's at least as many as our body's own cells,

Thank you. I live in, we'll have to keep out.
And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick. When the whole ecosystem of bugs, of which there's at least as many as our body's own cells, probably more, 40, 50 trillion.

Trillions.

There's 100 times the DNA in the bacterial DNA in our body has our own DNA.

We're outnumbered 101.

Wow.

And they're producing all these metabolites.

Probably a third or half of our blood metabolites are from the microbiome.

They all affect all of our body functions.

And if you have good bacteria, you're creating healthy metabolites. And if you're creating bad bacteria, you're getting bad metabolites.
And that's what's leading to this cascade of disease. In fact, in terms of longevity, it's now understood as one of the hallmarks of aging, a dysfunctional microbiome.
Wow. And so if, if, if, if they're new to this subject, somebody who's new to this subject, I mean, where, where do they start? I know that, you know, at functional health, you guys do a whole myriad of testing.
I'm actually very impressed with function health or function health, um, of the caliber and the breadth of testing that you do quite honestly for the price. Um, and, um, you know, $15,000 worth of testing for $499.
It almost sounds too good to be true, but it's not. We talked about it on a previous podcast, but, um, so, you know, it's somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do.
I realized the importance of my gut health. Um, where, where do I start? Well, first is to understand what what is going on there why is it important let's just sort of do a little primer on the gut right so you you've got this whole ecosystem in you you're basically just a host for the bacteria they outnumber you in terms of their what they do and and uh there's probably a thousand species of bacteria in there so maybe more we're just figuring it out.
They have all kinds of jobs from helping you digest your food to helping produce vitamins, to preventing leaky gut, to modulating inflammation, to affecting your brain chemistry and mood, to regulating your appetite, to regulating your weight, to regulating your risk of autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, Parkinson's. I mean, you name it.
It's connected to everything. Autism, ADD, depression.
So you name a disease or a condition in our modern society, at some level it's connected to the gut. Even our mitochondrial health is connected to our gut.
And so what's happened is that we've gone from an era where we're all hunter-gatherers. We're all eating wild food.
We were all eating, I mean, I visited the Haza tribe in Africa last year, and they're the one of the few

hunter-gatherer tribes.

Yeah, we lived with them for a few days,

and we went hunting with them.

Did you really?

Yeah, it was super fun.

When you say we, who went on those?

It was a whole crew of sort of friends and entrepreneurs

and creative people who are just sort of part of this trip

called Wow, It's Now, which is pretty fun.

But the idea is that we kind of camped with them,

and they have huge amounts of fiber. So they eat about 150 grams of fiber a day they were you know went under this tree and they they knew this yam was there this wild yam that's and they dug it out and it's like you know you'd think it was like very tough to eat but they cook it they mash it down and and they eat all these foods that are extremely high in fiber they don't eat processed sugar they don't have artificial foods they don't have emulsifiers and additives food dies they don't have antibiotics you know so we've kind of changed our diet so radically in the last 100 years even 100 years ago wasn't so bad we're eating you know a lot more foods just close to the earth and and so what's happened is we've taken, you know, our diet and turned into an ultra-processed diet, which contains compounds that cause a leaky gut, that feed the bad bacteria, that cause inflammatory bacteria to grow.
Two, we've, you know, C-section rates have gone through the roof. Probably third of all births are C-sections.
The baby doesn't get inoculated with bacteria as it's going through the birth canal. The mother's probably taken antibiotics, so she's knocked out a lot of her healthy bacteria, which then the baby doesn't get it, even if it's vaginally born.
Then we bottle feed, and what's really fascinating is when you look at it, and look, some women need to formula feed their babies, so the formula needs to be improved. Somebody's got to figure that out.
Oh, my gosh. They require seed oils.
Yeah, it's seed oil, it's sugar. And what's really important is that 25% of breast milk, the calories in breast milk, are not digestible by humans.
There's oligosaccharides that are complex sugars that can't be broken down that are the fuel for bacteria. Formula doesn't have any of that.
And so when you look at the bacterial strains and the short-chain fatty acids, which are the fuel that the bacteria produce that are keeping your gut healthy, that are using to run everything in your gut, there's higher levels of propionic acid, which has been linked to autism, and there's lower levels of butyrate, which is the really critical fuel for your gut lining and also for regulating so many biological processes that's absorbed in the body it's used as an anti-cancer compound in the body so you you form a feed you don't get these the good bacteria you get all these bad bacteria producing all these bad short chain fatty acids so everybody and then you know you then you add in all the processed food and these kids are having these guts that are causing high levels of food allergy we never had the food allergy rates rates we have. True food allergy, not just food sensitivities.
We're seeing rates of, you know, allergy and asthma and eczema and then all these behavioral issues and ADD and autism. Rates have gone up 1,000%.
You know, the use of ADD drugs has gone up like 400%. I mean, it's just, it's insane what's happening.
And then we see kids with depression. Why is that happening? Because their microbiome is messed up.
And, and the microbiome needs to be taken care of. Just like if you had a garden, you have to take care of your garden.
You have to take care of the soil. Yeah.
And if you don't take care of your microbiome, you're going to end up with so many different chronic illnesses. And we see this story, you know, as functional medicine practitioners, we see this all the time.
We just, when you take a history and you watch the timeline, okay, you have an autoimmune disease when you're 40 well what was your story well i was you know my mother uh you know i had a c-section i was bottle fed i took lots of antibiotics i had colic when i was a kid you know and then i started getting this and that allergies and asthma and herbal bowel and eventually it all ends up in something bad you know right and so tending our inner garden is a huge is a huge factor and in functional medicine is where we start start with nutrition and gut repair and if you do that like 80 percent of things will get better yeah it's quite remarkable yeah what's amazing is um i think unbeknownst to you we've actually shared some clients who have you know since disclosed to me that that that they were also working with you and some of them had serious gut dysbiosis. And, um, when I was working with them and my clinical team was working with them, we had real difficulty, um, with absorption of nutrients, getting levels corrected in the blood.
Um, and then they did a stint with you. And once the gut microbiome was, was corrected, you see these dramatic shifts in how they respond to the more, let's call it traditional therapies that we were applying.
Still not traditional therapies in terms of allopathic medicine. We don't use chemicals, synthetics, pharmaceuticals.
But even the basics approach that we were taking that a lot of people respond to, these clients were having real difficulty. And it just sort of further heightened my awareness to the work that you're doing.
Yeah. It's so important.
So important. So when you, when you're starting with the gut, I mean, do you say, um, test, treat? Um, and so how, how, how, how does somebody walk through this process? Because if you've got trillions of bacteria in the gut, Hey guys, Gary Brecka here.
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Well, there's some simple things. You know, if you have real issues, you probably need to get some testing, right? Yeah.
But empirically, you can actually get a lot done without actually a lot of testing. So they used to call me Dr.
See Every Poop because I used to get everybody. It's floating too much fat.
It's sinking. It looks good.
Right. Yeah.
And I know, but I would literally do stool tests on everybody. You came to see it was like getting your blood pressure right give me your poop yeah let me know what's going on in there and then in that you know we looked at um your pancreatic enzyme function we looked at absorption of fats we looked at inflammatory markers things like calprotectin eosinofal protein x which are markers of inflammation we looked at your antibody levels because your gut is the lining uh line with antibodies that are your first line of defense right there yeah you got 60 of your immune system right under the gut and that's because it's where you're getting less foreign material we also look at short chain fatty acids to get a sense we look at the bacteria including acromansia which we can see based on PCR testing we look at stool cultures look at levels

of healthy bacteria yeast overgrowth parasites we look at zion levels we can look at a whole series of things not just looking at the bacteria itself but like what is the ecosystem like because you can check the bacteria and you can kind of kind of sort of guess but you want to look at not just the bacteria you want to look at all the functions that the bacteria are doing and see if they're working right right and and so we do that we also if people have uh bloating uh it's it's really common to have what we call bacterial overgrowth where because of motility issues because of our crappy diet because of various drugs we take like acid blockers we get overgrowth of bad bugs in our small intestine basically you're most of the bacteria in your large intestine or the bottom of your small intestine they're not in the upper part right so when you when your food goes to your stomach and down your small intestine it just gets digested but if there's bacteria that have sort of migrated up there they ferment the foods and you get what we call food baby yeah people know that is when you just like bloating distension and sure feel full after a meal that's because you have bacteria or yeast. We call it SIBO,

small intestinal bacterial overgrowth,

or SIFO, small intestinal fungal overgrowth. Which they usually hit with high amounts of antibiotics.

Yeah, so you can use antibiotics,

you can use herbs,

you can do any fungals,

depending on the person.

But you can test for that with breath testing.

You can look at also not just breath testing,

but you can look at urine, actually,

to see metabolites of yeast and other things, for example, in the urine or bacteria in the urine because your body's absorbing it and then you're trying to get rid of these metabolites. And you can see non-human metabolites in the blood and you can also see them in the urine.
So we use a whole variety of tests to see what's going on in that ecosystem and looking at things like low ecromancia, which is really important and we we then create a regimen to help people rebuild their gut and in functional medicine called the 5r program and it's a it's a methodology for helping reset the gut it's remove the bad stuff like what is the bad stuff well obviously all the crappy food reading yeah processed food it could be removing the bad bugs that are in there like bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. How do you just remove those bugs? Well, you can use herbs.
So there's a lot of herbal formulas that do it. Sometimes you need medication like rifaximin or fluconazole, which are antifungals, antibiotics that are used to actually treat SIBO.
There may be cocktails for certain SIBO. For example, if you have methane SIBO, we can measure the gases.
We can see which gases are being produced. You have methane or hydrogen or sulfide, and they all require different treatments.
So you can have bloating, but you don't know what's causing it. Sometimes there's diarrhea that's more prominent with irritable bowel, and that may be more hydrogen-related SIBO, where you can have constipation-related irritable bowel, where you're mostly constipated, like that.
Then you need maybe treatment for methane-producing bacteria that you can find that are causing constipation or fungus, which can cause constipation. So it's really looking at all the different kind of biology down there and using whatever tools needed to kind of reset the gut.
So you kind of have to reset it. Kind of like almost like wipe the so you get a profile of everything that's in there these guys are bad we need to get rid of them these guys are non-existent we need to populate them yeah exactly and then these guys levels are low we need to enhance those so that's kind of removed was removing the bad foods emulsifiers food items emulsifiers are really common and things that make food creamy all processed food has them in them they're highly damaging to the gut lining they cause a leaky gut and leaky gut basically is the idea that you have these cells this one cell lining and it's stuck together like legos and it's an energy dependent process it requires energy from the mitochondria and what happens is when you have um various insults whether it's a change in the bacteria whether it's you know gluten which is the biggest cause of leaky gut whether it's emulsifiers you get these cells separating and the food leaks between them and also bacterial toxins and products leak between the cells instead of going through the cells like a like a filter right it's like right think about like you know a coffee filter you know you put the coffee in you don't get any grounds in your in your coffee because you have the filter but the right you know the same thing when the when the food goes through in, you don't get any grounds in your coffee because you have the filter.
But, you know, the same thing.

When the food goes through our cells, you don't get into trouble. And the immune system has nothing to react to because everything's broken down into its fundamental amino acids, fatty acids, sugars.
And then you just, they're just de-identified. So when you eat a piece of chicken, you don't become a chicken.
Yeah. Because your body breaks it down, right? Yeah.
And so then you have this incredible damage to your gut from all these various insults and even toxins, heavy metals also can cause leaky gut. That's what happened to me.
And then your immune system starts reacting and this creates inflammation. And you get this chronic sterile inflammation where your body's reacting to the toxins and antigens and bacteria there.
And you're creating the systemic immune response. And that's how it's linked to all these diseases.
Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is.
Diabetes is. Obesity is.
Dementia is. Autism is.
ADD is. Depression is.
Autoimmune diseases are. Allergies are.
These are all cognitive decline. They're all inflammatory diseases.
And the source of most of the inflammation in our body is coming from, aside from our diet, is coming from dysfunction in our gut. And so healing your gut, taking care of your gut, tending your inner garden is so important.
That's the first step is remove. And then if we find a parasite, we might have to give you an antiparasite drug, right? And then I had a kid with Giardia, for example, and he had bad autism.
And we treated Giardia as autism dramatically improved. Wow.
That's not to say every kid with autism has Giardia because there's no such thing as autism. They're autisms.
Like we put these people in buckets of labels which have nothing to do with the cause. It just has to do with the amount of neural inflammation, right? Right.
And so this is the problem of medicine. We have a label like depression or autism or breast cancer or whatever it is.
And it's the same pathology, but the causes are different. Functional medicine, you say, you know, one disease can have many causes and one cause can create many diseases.
Like gluten can create a hundreds of diseases. Right.
So first you kind of got to do the remove step and, uh, and then you got to do the replace step, which is replacing digestive enzymes, prebiotics, and I'd also probably say polyphenols, which are important. And I think this is fairly new discovery of how important the, the colorful, the colorful compounds in plants fertilize the bugs.
They're also kind of a prebiotic. So for example, acromantia, if you've people green tea and pomegranate and cranberry, it loves that stuff and it grows the acromantia.
Wow. So you can see even, you know, this is my friend, William Lee, his mother had stage four uterine cancer, was failing immunotherapy and any other kind of treatment.
And he knew about this literature about acromantia and he tested her and she was very low. He gave her all these foods that had high polyphenol content to increase the acromantia levels.
And then she responded and was cured of cancer. Wow.
So that's how powerful it is. I've about that and and this was and what is it about the acromantia that is is it is it's calming the immune system well it's it's called acromantia mucinophilia mucin loving mucus loving what is on the lining of your intestine is this thick mucus layer it's kind of like a filter like a mucoid yeah yeah that protects your lining from getting damaged when you have low levels of mucin then your gut is more susceptible to be leaky so so then we we do the second stage and the third step is to re-inoculate that's probiotics and there's a million of them they're they're all have different uh properties they all have different effects on the body they're used in different ways for different things so there's a whole science and that's like it's not just there's a probiotic right many species and they all have different effects on the body.
They're used in different ways for different things. So there's a whole science.
And that's like, it's not just there's a probiotic. There's many species and they all have different impacts.
You can take acromantia now. You can take bifidobacteria, you can take lactobacillus, but there's different strains like plantarum or rhamnosus or other ones that have different modulating effects.
So you kind of have to understand how to use them. So you have a whole universe of probiotics that you can select from.
Yeah, depending on what you're reading. Yeah, so someone has, for example, fungal overgrowth.
I'll give them something called Saccharomyces, which is actually a yeast that fights other yeast. And so there's, for example, Bifidobacterium infantis, which is used for babies to help inoculate the gut and colonize the gut, which prevents all these autoimmune analogy diseases, which I think every woman who's having a baby should use this product.
I have no association with or affiliation with it. And what is it, an infant probiotic? It's basically Bifidobacterium Infantis, the company that makes this, called the Vivo, E-V-I-V-O.
I have seen them. And they spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research.
It's very impressive data. And I think, you know, I recommend that every woman, if she's breastfeedingfeeding she puts on her breast if they're obviously bottle feeding and put in the formula but really important um and and so you've got to kind of re-inoculate with the right bacteria and then you've got to repair the lining of the gut you know the gut requires glutamine and zinc and vitamin a and omega-3 fatty acids and uh and phytochemicals and things to help repair the gut.

And last is restore, which is to kind of reset the kind of gut-brain connection

because a lot of stress will affect the gut, right?

You can literally create a leak.

The vail nerve is just enveloping that.

Yeah, your whole nervous.

Yeah, your gut brain has more neurotransmitters than your brain brain.

Yeah.

And so-

Yeah, the majority of them are in your gut, right?

Yeah, serotonin.

So if you really don't have them here, it's hard to have them upstairs.

Yeah, exactly.

Like when people take, you know, psilocybin, which increases serotonin,

they often get gut symptoms, right?

Because it's often related to the kind of serotonin in the gut.

And the beautiful thing is, you know, by using, you know,

whether it's breath work or meditation or any kind of practice

that resets the nervous system, we'll reset the gut.

So it's a very systematic process.

It's got to be personalized, though.

It's not like one size fits all.

Although there is a way to just sort of do a basic gut reset, like I'm sure what you did.

It works for most people.

But if it doesn't work, then you got to go back, oh, maybe I have SIBO.

And the results are amazing.

I'll just tell you a quick story of a patient I had.

She was a 50-year-old business coach. She was depressed.
She was overweight. She was pre-diabetic.
She had severe psoriatic arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease. She had severe reflux.
She had severe double bowel syndrome, bloating. She was seeing the gastroenterologist, the rheumatologist, the psychiatrist, the endocrinologist.
She was on metformin. Of course.
She was on drugs for $50,000 a year for autoimmune disease. she was on acid blockers for reflux her old bowel drugs i mean she was on antidepressants she was on the pile of meds right and i said gee what are all these things having in common you know what is her depression and psoriasis and her overweight issue or insulin resistance and gut issues have in common well they're all, right? So where is it likely coming from? Well, she had all these gut issues.
I said, let's start there. We put her on an elimination diet.
So we get rid of the most common foods that cause a problem. What is an elimination diet? So elimination diet is basically eliminating foods that are more likely to cause a problem.
It can be based on testing or just empirically. And then you add foods back slowly to see what's happening.
And the most common foods that are a problem for people are gluten and dairy. Gluten and dairy.
And then there's a whole sort of cascade after that, whether it's grains or beans or sometimes people react to eggs. And, you know, there's extreme versions.
For example, autoimmune paleo would be like an extreme elimination diet where you get rid of, you know, grains, obviously sugar or processed food obviously right but you also get rid of nuts and seeds also get rid of nightshades um i i my 10-day detox side is essentially an elimination diet you know you add in nuts and seeds there's there's also um um you know eggs you can have and so forth and nightshades that's a little bit more liberal but you know the results are pretty profound people are really really sick i might put them on an autoimmune paleo diet but for most people a 10-day detox which is a reset it's where you get like we see 70 reduction in all symptoms from all diseases wow and then we we actually have an online program called the 10-day detox where people are seeing a 70 reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days. And I've done this program with thousands of people.
That is incredible. In retreats around the world.
It's quite amazing whether you have a headache. And it's mainly food-based.
It's just food. Almost entirely food-based.
It's just food. It's just food.
It's just get rid of the shit and add in the good stuff. It's not that hard.
Yeah. You know, you and I get paid a lot of money for just telling people to do simple stuff that's so obvious and common sense.
Yeah, I do too. Yeah.
But it's basically just, you know, eating whole real food, nutrient-dense food um a lot of phytochemicals a lot of fiber low glycemic lots of good fats and and so they're not starving on this no you're eating a ton of food you're eating a ton of food raw food vegan overnight no no no protein vegetables nut seeds you know um we get rid of them for and and you can add things back to see maybe dairy doesn't bother you i know that dairy bothers me but if i have goat or sheep i'm fine oh right so i can tell uh and when you reintroduce it you have to get a worse reaction than you had when you were eating it all the time because your body actually has these stored antibodies that it just goes out and attacks it right so basically we do an elimination diet and on her we we basically treated her SIBO and SIFOIFO. So she'd taken lots of steroids, lots of antibiotics in the past.
So I knew she had bacterial overgrowth. So I gave her a drug called Rifaximin, which is a non-absorbed antibiotic.
I gave her a diflucan or fluconazole, which basically kills all the fungus. And then I re-inoculated her again with healthy bacteria.
I gave her some prebiotics, just gave her vitamin D, some fish oil. Very simple, some probiotics.

Comes back six weeks later, and I'm like,

I never tell people to stop their medication.

I said, let's just try this and see how you do.

Came back six weeks later, I stopped everything.

I have no more sorority arthritis.

My skin's clear.

I have no more heartburn, no more reflux, no more irritable bowel,

no more depression.

I lost 20 pounds.

I don't have pre-diabetes.

Wow. And I got off all my medication.
Yeah. we did amazing six weeks six weeks all we did was reset her gut wow my joke is i'm a holistic doctor because i take care of people with a holistic problems yeah you know and and when you get to the root you don't have to treat each thing separately right and i think unfortunately modern medicine has so many.
I forget how many specialties and subspecialties are now, but it's mind numbing. They're basically a doctor for every interview these days.
Yeah. And, and, and, and, you know, we used to see this in the, in the mortality science space, you know, patients go into the primary care doctor and they get referred to cardiology or refers them to psychology or refers them to gastroenterology, you know, refers them to autoimmune.
Then they got a hematologist and a nephrologist. And the next thing you know, it's so, and everything's so segmented.
And even, um, in this, in this, uh, client that we talked about earlier that had this, this stage four colon cancer that, that, that was, you know, cured in five months on the immunotherapy. Um, she had, I think she was seeing 13 different specialists at any given time.
And, you know, for most people, they didn't really realize there were 13 subspecialties in medicine. And interestingly, you know, the cardiologist would have her on a non-potassium sparing diuretic.
And then the kidney, the nephrologist also had her on a diuretic that was potassium sparing diuretic they didn't know that they both had her on the diuretic and and there was all this duplicity and and compounding effect because there wasn't this systemically holistic approach like i i i liken it to the hub of the wheel yeah right i mean you got all these spokes and if you start chasing the spokes yeah you'll just spend the rest of your life just, you know, running around that wheel. But if you find the hub, which very often is the God, then, you know, you found the panacea.
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Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. And the key to this is what we're doing is restoring a healthy gut ecosystem.
Right. And you and I both do this.

The work we do is basically helping people create health.

We don't treat disease directly.

When you remove the conditions that cause disease,

add in the things that help prevent or reverse disease,

the body is very smart.

It knows what to do.

So true.

You don't need to, like,

even though we may not understand everything that's happening when we do

these things,

because it's impossible to know there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second in the body. Yeah.
You and I, no matter how much we studied, could never learn them all. Exactly.
You know, the reality is that just doing some simple practices can make profound impact. And so really, you know, functional medicine, I think, is one of its greatest contributions to humanity, is the understanding of the microbiome, is understanding how to reset it and treat many

chronic- you know, functional medicine, I think is, is one of its greatest contributions to humanity is the understanding of the microbiome is understanding how to reset it and, and treat many chronic illnesses through, uh, improving the health of the microbiome. Yeah.
And, you know, we've been doing this for decades and we, before it was even called the microbiome, you know, and it, and I think it's, it's, it's really the center of the practice we do. You know, and I think what's really interesting is that, you know, if you look at the blue zone research um there's really not continuity in any of the diets right the centenarians you know there's high carbohydrate consumption in sardinia for example there's high meat consumption in singapore there's there's high uh you know there's fatty fish and oils in the mediterranean diet yeah but the commonality is that they are all whole foods yeah no none of them were eating a process high highly processed diet i mean maybe they were making bread but they're eating bread or pasta but they were eating bread and pasta yeah but i went to caria they made bread but it was from zeo wheat which is ancient wheat that alexander the great used to consume and is to fuel his you know campaign to conquer the world yeah but but it was very long, super nutrient dense, lots of phytochemicals, lots of fiber, you know, and, and, you know, maybe isn't, wasn't a problem for them.
Yeah. You know, it's funny.
I, I, well, maybe it's not so funny, but I was actually, um, I'm watching one of those history channels, um, the other night and, and it talked about in the 1800s, how they did, they had this thing called fencing and, um, it was, they would feed prisoners that they were transporting certain diets. And like, you ever heard that, you know, when you go to, uh, jail, it doesn't happen anymore, but they just feed you bread and water, um, as a bread and water diet.
Um, there's actually some history to that and that they, because they would transport these convicts on horseback over long distances um what they didn't want them to do was on foot was to to run and get away from them so they fed them bread and water to weaken them and it weakened them it actually just gummed up there they they didn't know why i mean they didn't know the bifidobacteria cycle you know the single cell layer of the gut but they but but these mounties knew enough to know yeah that if i only fed them bread and water they wouldn't die but they couldn't go more than a couple hundred yards yeah and and and that was it so they didn't ever have to hunt them down um and so i i just it just struck me when i was watching this thing that they would you know they, they put them on, on horseback. And now those guys are eating beef jerky and, you know, shooting animals and cooking them on a fire and things like that.
But then the prisoners, they just gave bread and water to. And after a few days of just on a bread and water diet, they were just so sick.
They weren't dead, but they certainly were not in any kind of condition. And you think about what we're doing in modern societies, we're essentially fencing ourselves.
Yeah, it's most of our diet. We're, we're, we're, we're.
And any kind of condition and you think about what we're doing in modern societies we're essentially fencing ourself yeah you know we're we're we're we're taking away all these nutrients because the foods we're eating are are so one depleted of nutrients and two they're full of compounds that actually actively damage the gut right so and i think this is sort of the you know we're switching topics here i mean you and i are both big believers that if we're going to fix chronic disease in this country, that we have to fix the food supply.

And, you know, our soil has become so nutrient deficient.

People say, no, you can get everything that you need from foods.

And I go, well, theoretically, I guess that's true.

Right.

But the truth is, in modern society today, it's really, really hard.

I mean, if you had a farm and you're growing your own, you know, chickens and your own eggs and you had your own hydroponic facility and you had grass fed cows, you probably could get there. But I think the chances, even of people that are as conscious as you and I are with our travel schedules and everything else, you know, there has to be certain supplementation.
And, you know, I was actually looking at a research article on soil depletion, you know, the difference between the soil and the forest, the soil. And, and this was 2016.
Um, I haven't seen another one in the last, you know, eight or so years, but I'm sure it's gotten worse. Um, but so to talk a little bit about the food supply and depletion in the food supply and, you know, it's linked to this pandemic of chronic disease because we are the sickest, fattest, most diseased nation in the world.
And we spend the highest amount on health care, which is the ultimate dichotomy because we know that spending doesn't equate to outcomes. Or else the four and a half trillion we spend, we would be the leanest, health you know it's highly functioning humans on the planet

for four and a half trillion dollars we should be yeah and we're spending more and more and getting less and less absolutely true we're like uh i think more than twice per capita in the other nation and we're 48th in life expectancy we're 30th drop the 60th now 20 yeah who knows it's going up and down yeah we're we're i'm a mortality scientist we're like i think south of angola or something in terms of life expectancy.

And I think, you know, we also are 30th among all developed nations, last among all developed nations in all the major healthcare metrics like infant mortality. So we're doing something wrong.
And in terms of, you know, the food supply, yes, it's depleted of nutrients. The soil has been damaged by our industrial farming practices.
And my joke is nobody really needs to take any vitamins, but only under certain conditions. You have to hunt and gather your own wild food.
You have to be exposed to no environmental toxins. You have to drink only pure, clean water, breathe pure, clean air, sleep nine hours a day, wake with the sun, go to bed with the sun.
And have your own garden. Have no chronic stress.
No, then you probably don't need vitamins. Because it's true.
We have know thousands hundreds of thousands of years maybe if you're amish right yeah hundreds of thousands of years humans never took vitamins never needed vitamins but if you look at um um cordain's work uh around paleolithic diets you know the nutrient density was so much higher they had 150 grams of fiber we have maybe 8 to 15 and for mer per day you know their their vitamin levels and mineral levels and consumption, the omega-3 fatty acid levels, so much higher than all the foods they're eating. And the ratios were different, too.
The omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios. Yeah, and the salt and the potassium.
Now we have like 12 times as much or 10 times as much salt as potassium. So salt is good, but it's not, you know, it's like you need the potassium, which comes from plants and foods.
So I think we're in this really crisis moment. And, you know, we're six out of 10 Americans have a chronic illness.
Four out of 10 have two. When you define chronic illness a little more broadly, you know, not just one out of two have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, but 93% of us probably have some form of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
Because that's based on these. It's the gen of metabolic dysfunction right i mean we talked about the criteria pre-diabetes it's like if your triglycerides over 50 150 if your hdl's under 40 if your waist it's over 40 if you're a man or whatever for a woman your blood pressure is 140 or 90 so the the numbers that are used to define pre-diabetes are i think are a low bar yeah yeah all your blood sugar is over 100 these are low bars by the time you get there you're already anyone sees like 5.7 yeah you're already in trouble so when you look at metabolic dysfunction uh through to a broader definition only 6.8 percent of americans are are healthy.
That means metabolically healthy. Yeah.
Yeah. And

that means they don't have some degree of pre-diabetes or insulin resistance. And now

with function health, we're seeing just extraordinary dysfunction. And that's what

we call function health. There's a lot of people functional.
Uh, and we have, you know, it's

basically a lab lab, um, a platform, a health platform where we allow people access their own

data through lab testing. And, and we're testing over 110 biomarkers on first flush.
And we've

See you go up. Your A1C, we can see that's going your blood sugar.
So you can see the insulin resistance, but for the heme 1C, it starts to react. And we can also look at cholesterol differently.
We look at the particle number, particle size, things that are not looked at. Less than 1% of all cholesterol tests actually measure what should be the gold standard of cholesterol testing, which is looking at particle number and particle size and quality, not just the weight of the cholesterol.
Because you can have a cholesterol 150 and it can be terrible. You could have 2,000 particles and small particles or you can have a cholesterol of 300 and it'd be completely fine because you're all large, fluffy particles and your triglycerides and hdl are fine there's no heart disease right so you we're doing diagnostic tests that are so antiquated at your regular checkup where you have maybe 19 biomarkers yeah even even the lipid panel now is is just that i see on the majority of all testing is is very basic yeah it's triglyceride hdl ldl, VLDL.
Yeah, no, it's not, yeah, it's not what we should be doing. And, and we're, we're, we're also not looking at, um, the, the, the other biomarkers that are important for metabolic health, like uric acid and, and inflammation, CRP, ApoB, which is super important.
The most predictive biomarker for, yeah, like the most predictive marker for RDCs, doctors don't check it. So we measure all.
And we're seeing like 96% of the people who we test, and this is a health forward population, have some degree of metabolic dysfunction based on these biomarkers. Holy cow.
You know, so we're in deep doo-doo. And it's why we have this crisis of chronic disease caused primarily by insulin resistance, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all on the rise.
Diabetes got up 400%. Heart disease, 50%.
Cancer, 30%, but over 60%, those under 50, primarily caused by our diet and the mess in our microbiome and colon cancer. We're seeing 150% increase in Alzheimer's.
We're seeing increase in cancer rates. We're seeing in cancer rates.
We're seeing over a hundred percent increase in, in depression and mental illness, a thousand percent increase in autism, a hundred percent increase in autoimmune disease. And at the same time, we're seeing two to three to 400% increases in all the drugs that treat all those diseases.
Yeah. So we're spending more and more.
We're doing more and more. We're getting sicker and sicker.
What's wrong with this picture? Yeah. It's like, it's really the root cause is our food system.
So as a doctor treating people for decades, I'm sitting in my office going, geez, I just have all these patients with chronic disease. And as a functional medicine doctor, I'm trained to ask why.
Functional medicine is the medicine of why. Not what disease you have, what drug do I get, but why is it? How'd you get here? And I started thinking, okay, why is my patient have diabetes? Why do they have heart disease? Why do they have autoimmunity? I'm like, it's the food why do they have heart disease why do they have autoimmunity like it's the food stupid right yeah yeah like okay well if it's the food well why do we have the food we have well it's our food system it's our industrial food system well why do we have that food system it's our food policies well why do we have those food policies it's the food industry that's driving most of those policies globally and most of the research most.
Most of the research. And I'll unpack that for you in a minute.
Leading to nutritional outcomes. Yeah, I really want to unpack that.
It's really stunning. And I wrote a book in 2000.
It came out in March 2020, which was a terrible time to publish a book right at the end of COVID. Right when nobody could go to the shelf and get it.
People were occupied with other things things than the fate of our food system but i started a non-profit at food fix campaign where we were working on policy change in washington but in that book i i answered the question for myself is why am i patients sick and and how is the food system responsible for all this and why is this happening and what are the policies and it was really clear to me that it was the food industry driving a lot of this and obfuscating the truth, corrupting the science, corrupting public health agencies, confusing lawmakers with, you know, nonsense data. And I'll tell you in a minute, but there's a new report that's coming out next year.
And I recently talked to one of the scientists

from the World Health Organization who's leading this.

Wow.

Of 20 scientists, leading researchers in science

around the world, who've come together

to write a report on the commercial determinants of health.

We've heard of the social determinants,

which is poverty and lack of access to food and so forth.

But the commercial determinants of health

are the ways in which multinational corporations food you know ag tobacco alcohol corporations privatize profits and subvert public health deliberately yeah and as i began to unpack the story in my book i began to see you know when i did the research i was like i knew there was just shit going on but i didn't know how bad it was. You know, like, like I, as part of my work in Washington, we got the government accountability office, which is the government watchdog to do a report through friends who are congressmen that can ask for these things.
Nobody looked at this. What is the impact of our food policies on disease in America and the costs and our health care costs? No one looked at it.
Right. So they looked at it.
They did a couple of your study. They analyze it and they found that there were 200 policies plus in 21 different departments and agencies in our government, all working in cross purposes, telling people to do different things.
So on one hand, we say in dietary guidelines, eat healthier whole foods. And on the other hand, with SNAP, their biggest food program, we spent $125 billion, 75% of that is for junk food pre-altered processed food 10 for soda wow so we're spending 12 billion dollars for soda for the poor which is probably 15 billion servings of soda that the government's paying for 20 of coke's profits in the u.s come from food stamps no yes from food stamps yeah so and this is the population that's the most underserved that has the least awareness of what's going on and they're the most susceptible to you know government and regulatory bodies dictating what they're going to that's right what they're going to eat and what's exciting to me gary is the first time in a presidential campaign and probably when this podcast airs we're going to figure out who's president i don't know who's going to be president right now.
Well, we're 24 hours away, right? But yeah, the first time any candidate talking about chronic disease. Yeah.
You know, President Trump in 2023, even before Bobby Kennedy kind of joined him with this Make America Healthy Again movement, put out a five-minute video about the chronic disease epidemic, particularly in children, that we have to do something about. And I was like, Whoa, this is amazing.
And, and I think there's so many forces that are pushing against doing it right. And what the food issue has done.
And I include the ag industry, the pharma industry, uh, and the processed food industry, the fast food industry, it's, it's basically probably 20 CEOs around the world that control the biggest industry on the planet, which the food industry it serves as food which is we all eat on on the planet so right it's it's i think last time i looked it was 16 17 trillion dollar a year industry wow okay and and so what they've done is is both uh i think deliberately and just through historical you know kind of um know, the kind of practice that they had that weren't necessarily malicious. They deliberately create a food system that makes us sick and they profit from and we get sick and the government pays for it.
So, number one, they fund 12 times the number of studies on nutrition as independent scientists. Even though they're directly conflicted.
Right. So, like the American Beverage Association funds a study on dietary sweeteners and artificial sweeteners they're finding they're fine well should we believe that study probably not yeah they fund academic institutions to do research um and so a lot of the medical school curriculums are pretty much pharmaceutical school curriculums yeah you know my daughter's in medical school i see that really clearly.
We see also how they fund the professional associations. So for example, the American Heart Association receives $192 million in funding from food and pharma.
You're kidding. A year.
$192 million a year? Yeah. Wow.
The Diabetes Association, American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, American Academy of Pediatrics. I mean, there are a whole bunch of family doctors that quit when the American Academy family practice took $3 million from Coca-Cola.
Wow. So they're funding all these groups.
They're also funding fake front groups, like the American Council on Science and Health, which did a hit piece on Callie and Casey Means. Oh, they did? They've done many hit pieces on me.

And it sounds great, American Council on Science and Health, but who funds them?

It's Pharma.

It's the Pesticide Makers.

It's Monsanto, or now it's Bayer.

Did they do a hit piece on Callie and Casey?

Yeah.

I knew it was coming.

I mean, I take it as a badge of honor to get these pieces written about me because it means

I'm touching a nerve.

Yeah.

They don't want.

And they're the organization that says that pesticides are safe, that trans fats are good are good smoking tobacco doesn't cause cancer i mean i'm not joking here yeah the guys who were the doctors and people fill you with it's all funded by these big corporations and many of these guys are corrupt some of these guys have been in jail and they came out after dr oz and once the new york times and said they wrote a letter to columbia saying he should be taken off uh the columbia faculty because of his crazy views. And it was all this group.
And there's many, many of these front groups, like Crop Life, which sounds great, but it's basically an industrial agriculture front group. And so they fund research.
They fund our academic institutions. They fund our professional associations.
They fund front groups that are infusing people with misinformation and propaganda. And then they also fund social groups like the NAACP and the, the Hispanic Federation.
Wow. Uh, and for example, they, there was a, I was in a movie called fed up, which was about childhood obesity with Katie Couric and Lori David, we did about 10 years ago.
And I met Bernie's King was Marley King's daughter. And I said, why don't we show this film at the King Center?

And she's like, great idea, let's do it.

Because you know, violence, nonviolence

also means nonviolence to the self.

I'm like, great.

And so a few days later she called me and said,

Mark, we can't show the film.

I'm like, why?

Because Coca-Cola funds the King Center in Atlanta.

I walk onto the campus of Spelman College,

which is a black women's college in Atlanta. And there's Morehouse, which is the men's and Spelman.
Dean of the university said to me, Mark, 50% of the entering class of 18-year-old African-American women have a chronic disease. Hypertension, diabetes, obesity.
50%. 50% of 18-year-olds.
And I look at the campus, it's just blanketed with Coca-Cola. I'm like, what's going on here? Yeah.
She's like, well, Coca-Cola is our biggest donor. You know, you look at the board of directors of Spelman college or on the trustees, it's someone's a vice chair of some big position at Coca-Cola.
It's just so corrupt. And, and, uh, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was involved with the recent dietary guidelines that you might have heard about were mandated to look at ultra-processed foods.
I heard about this. Lucky Charms came out.
Well, that was different. That was different.
That was my favorite. But this is a dietary guidelines committee, which is supposed to be an independent group of scientists that have to review the literature that the USDA then can kind of authorizeizes them to look at and you got a bunch of people in the usda you know may or may not be paid off if something's going on but they're basically the way they designed the whole process was so set up to fail because they was like you know they didn't define processing properly like a can of tomatoes is processed food a can of sardines is processed food right so it like, when you kind of look at the data on it, it's very clear.
And this is the British Medical Journal came out with a paper a few years ago, showed that 32 different diseases were caused by or worsened by ultra processed food, all the major illnesses we have from autoimmunity to cancer to heart disease, diabetes. I mean, the list goes on.
Depression, clearly depressions and mental health is caused by ultra processed food. And he said he was one of the reviewers on this sort of guidelines and he pointed out all the flaws and they just completely ignored it wow they completely ignored it and they came out with a ruling and saying there's no data to support the fact that ultra processed food and i've seen is causing obesity and so we're not going to make a determination the dietary guidelines.
This is the guidelines that set the standards for all nutrition programs in the country. And when you look at the global burden of disease study, which looked at 195 countries, the number one killer today is not smoking.
It's not war, not infections. It's food.
It's 11 million people. And I think that's conservative because about 75 million people die a year in the world.
And I would say probably 60% of those are from chronic lifestyle preventable illnesses globally, not even in the developed world. But even in the developing world, there's twice as many deaths from chronic lifestyle preventable diseases like diabetes and heart disease than there is from infectious disease or malnutrition.
Wow. They call this a double disease burden in the developing world.
And so they said that 11 million people die from ultra processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods. And I think it's probably more.
It's like two holocausts a year. Yeah.
And this is 100% preventable. It's unbelievable.
So we have a system that's set up for everybody to fail. So for people to do what you want to ask them to do, to eat better, to live a healthier life, it's very tough because there's so many forces pushing against them.
Totally see that. And when you look on television, what are the ads? When you look at the media, it's junk food ads and it's pharma ads.
So it's like eat this and then take this. Yeah.
I actually, on my gut challenge, I actually played one of the one of the farmer's ads pharma ads and and just listen to the the side effects and um well they seem really fast at the end they seem really fast and it's always like you know it's like grandpa's like pushing his daughter on the you know granddaughter on the swing and it's like liver failure blindness right you know um mental mental decline and occasionally death um contact your physician immediately if you experience a sudden loss of consciousness, I'm like, what? Yeah. But they say they, they show this beautiful, you know, life, you know, giving thing.
And then they show like the end is like super fast. Like just rip through it.
Um, you know, and I've even heard that the reason why, um, they spend so much money advertising direct to the consumer that it's actually the worst ROI, the worst return on investment marketing expense, like in marketing history. It's like they actually lose money advertising directly to the consumer.
So then it begs the question, well, why did they spend so much money advertising the consumer? And then, you know, I've heard people talk about it and it's to control the media. You know, just like you were saying, like you couldn't show your movie at, what was it?

The college.

Not because they actually wouldn't have benefited from the movie, but because the purse strings were controlled by.

I was sitting with one of the top journalists at CBS who kind of agrees with us.

And I said, you know, why can't we get more content around these issues on the media?

And he says, well, Mark, you know, we are pretty tightly controlled by our advertisers. Yeah.
I'm like, at least you're freaking honest about it. Yeah, at least you're honest about it.
And they're stuck too because, I mean, if 75% of my budget to pay for my family's well-being came from one source, it'd be hard for me to bite that hand. Yeah, and we pay so much for drugs in this country.
And they because the r&d is so expensive and takes so much money to develop a drug and do this they spend twice as much money on marketing as they do on r&d wow yeah and and while they may may may not see the return on investment i think they probably do 40 of the time this is based on published research 40 of the time that people see an ad on television and go to the doctor and say i want that drug they get that drug really yeah that's why they do it wow hey i already control the media with the amount of ad spend i mean if you're 75 of anybody's budget you go listen let's not so so we've got to address the food system you know from feel the fork and you know if i were king which i'm not going to be, or a dictator. You want to run for president? No, I'm not old enough.
I'm not old enough. I'm only 65.
I have to wait a little bit. So if I were king, there would be a whole set of sweeping things that could transform the food system in America.
One, develop a national institute of nutrition and fund it adequately to really deeply research the root cause of our chronic disease epidemic, which is primarily food. And make it independent.
Make it independent. Truly independent.
If it has any effect on public policy, it has to be independent in nature. Because I think the challenge is that our public policymakers are not.
Remove conflicts of interest across a whole segment of government that's dealing with these issues. Because right now there's so much conflict of interest.
So the NIH has a big role a big role the nih also could say and this i think this would make a big difference say to all um academic institutions you're getting zero money from nih grants unless you change your medical school curriculum to incorporate nutrition and we're gonna also at the federal level because we fund graduate medical education 17 billion. We're not giving that $17 billion unless you have a nutrition lifestyle curriculum in your graduate medical education programs.
Wow. So that's a big thing.
Second, I would reform our HHS policies and Medicare policies to reimburse for lifestyle change programs and for nutrition and medically healed meals and nutrition services. Really important.
Change what's paid for. Because doctors do what they get paid to do, not what the science says they're supposed to do.
We know, for example, there's not a doctor on the planet that's going to say to you that lifestyle isn't a better treatment for diabetes. Right.
Right. Everybody knows that.
We know that food causes it. It's not a secret.
And we know that food can fix it. And we know that food can fix it.
Although there's still some controversy because people haven't seen it that much but i mean virta has shown this very clearly that you can reverse 60 of diabetes with a ketogenic diet we've seen it we've seen it i've seen it in my practice every day but you know one of my favorite biohacks outside of breath work by far is mineral salts baja gold sea salt it's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient.
We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning, we'll make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need.
It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today.
I actually made a grass-fed steak with grass-fed butter and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary and I sprinkled Baja Gold Sea Salt all over the top. Try it.
It'll be your new favorite for cooking, too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks.
I don't know, a $15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. It's literally the world's best biohacking secret.
Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Doctors do what they get paid to do, not what works.
Right. And so they get paid to give all these diabetes drugs.
So we can give Ozempic for $1,600 a month, but we can't put people in a nutrition lifestyle change program, which is pennies. Yeah.
You know, in a group model program that works effectively, which will actually take the pressure off of the healthcare system. Because, you know, I, I heard Casey means talking about it.
Um, and she was saying, you know, the, we're, we're about to approve, uh ozempic as a frontline defense for um uh not just diabetes but yeah diabetes um which is like when you start to become um you know it's not morbid obesity it's just obesity so you know you get a little little fat and we don't hey don't stop bathing your cellular biology in the toxic soup um we're just going to press down on on that with with a GLP one. And you know, and I, and I think a lot of people don't even realize that GLP, we make GLP one in our body.
It's a hormone we make in our gut and it responds to satiation. And, and I'm amongst other things, but if you know, what makes you satiated nutrients and if you nutrient dense foods, you actually release the GLP one that stops you from overeating.
Master processed food is what makes you satiated? Nutrients. And if you eat nutrient-dense foods, you actually release the GLP-1 that stops you from overeating.
Yeah, ultra-processed food is what makes people hungry, right? And it's like, you know, no one's going to eat 12 avocados or, you know, four 10-ounce steaks. You just can't.
You can't overeat a rib eye. You can't.
But you can easily eat a bag of cookies, right? Yeah. And a sheet cake, right? Yeah, a sheet cake.
And drink a you know a liter bottle of soda and what's interesting is you know when you look at the dichotomy about how people present it they're like no it's just calories in calories out it's calories a calorie is a calorie well that's maybe true from you know it's true in a lab when you burn the calories they release the same amount of energy when you eat them they're different yes a calorie burn is a calorie burn a calorie eaten is not a calorie whatever the kilojoules is that you know raises a you know cubic centimeter of water one degree centigrade so you know you compare an ultra processed food to uh you know another calorie source um but exactly i totally agree with you that's not where the example can stop because if, if I get hungry from the other calories, if I, if I have an insulin spike in an insulin crash and if I actually overeat, so now I'm, I'm on a, uh, you know, two identical 1500 calorie a day diets. One's ultra processed, one's, one's nutrient dense.
The nutrient dense diet is going to release more GLP one. It's going to actually cause a greater sensation of satiation.
It's going to reduce cravings. The other one is going to actually trigger the cravings yeah that's right i mean it's this well this person wants to eat 3 000 calories yeah i mean that's sort of validated in the nh study by kevin hall where we basically gave people whole food or ultra processed food the same group and two weeks they had ultra processed food weeks they had whole foods the ultra processed group ate 500 calories more a day because they said eat whatever you want till you're full right so they ate 500 calories more a day that's in a week that's 3 500 calories in a year that's you know 52 pounds of weight gain wow right just from that one little defect of yeah that's why america's so obese it's like insane yeah i mean it wasn't like that we wanted to we want to treat obesity as a disease as if it happened to us not happened within us and then we want to bring in more pharmaceutical intervention on the back of the taxpayer paid by pay for by medicaid and medicare it is the bill is i think 4818 that's really dangerous one the end all obesity act uh yeah which they all sound so altruistic you know it's like it's a pay for ozempic yeah it's not the best solution i mean listen if we covered these drugs for everybody who's overweight or obese in america it would be 5.1 trillion dollars which is more than we spend on health care it would be like literally more than double our health care which is already twice as everybody else in the world yeah so if i were king back to where i was king yeah yeah i like this with nih the hhs then then we we attack the uh dietary guidelines usda those have to be updated to include all the relevant science, which means we have to fund the process.
And I'm working with people in the agencies saying, we don't have any money to do this. We're mandated by the Congress to develop this.
We don't have the money to review the data, to put science panels together. There's no money for the National Academy of Sciences.
I said, why are you publishing the evidence around the effect of higher carbohydrate diets and the adverse effects on our health? He says, well, the National Academy of Sciences hasn't reviewed the literature yet. It costs a million dollars and they don't have a million dollars and there's no funding for that process.
So we can't actually review and revise our dietary guidelines. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like we're talking, I mean, a rounding error, which has a huge impact on how we understand nutrition and health.
So reformed dietary guidelines to match the science. We need to change our school lunch programs to only allow whole foods in schools.
We need to upgrade the quality of the food and put more money in that. We need to change our SNAP program.
It's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. It is not nutrition.
It's food. Not really.
If you actually look at the definition of food in the Webster's Dictionary, it's not even food because that's something that supports the growth and health of an organism. Ultra-processed food, by definition, does not do that.
It was actually not food. And it's food security.
It's calorie security, but it's not nutrition security, which is getting enough nutrients. It keeps you from dying.
Well, it keeps you from dying from starvation, but you die from diabetes. And it's interesting, you know, that people who are most obese are the most nutrient deficient.
If you're the most food insecure, you're more likely to be diabetic, right? So we need to provide real nutrition security and get rid of all the junk in SNAP and make it like WIC, which is Women's Infants and Children Program. You can buy fruits and vegetables, you can buy meat, you can buy, you know, whole grains, you can buy beans, you can buy a lot of good stuff.
We already have those restrictions for women, infants, and children programs. Just apply that to SNAP.
Yeah. Okay.
Listen, if you're going to have that stuff, it's just not going to be on the back of the taxter. These are simple ideas that have so much resistance, right? Yeah.
So much resistance from both sides, even Democrats, Republicans, because of the food industry. Then we need to also change the marketing.
So we need to end marketing of junk food to kids, at least. Right? We can say First Amendment, whatever.
In Chile, they don't allow any marketing from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
UK just banned junk food marketing. You shouldn't be able to see ads if you're a kid for this crap that's going to cause you to be addicted.
It's just like advertising cigarettes like Joe Camel. It should just be banned.
It kills more people in cigarettes every year. It should just be banned.
So that's a huge one, marketing. And then we need to look at the FDA around what they're doing in terms of food additives.
Let's just meet what other countries have come to the conclusion based on the science are not safe additives. Like BHT and all these.
Red dye 40. All these things, they just have no place in our food supply.
And then we need to actually have clear labeling of food. The FDA, these are not hard policies.
They're hard to implement because of resistance, but they're simple ideas. Yeah.
Put front of package labeling on. So, you know, stuff is good for you.
Put the amount of servings of fruits, vegetables, beans, holes, grains on the label and put warning labels like they have in other countries. If it's bad for you, it's like red is bad, green, good, yellow, eat with caution, or there's giant stop signs or like cigarette labels.
They have the ability to do this and they've done this in other countries and it works. Right, so you won't interrupt free choice, right? You don't come in and just regularly what people are going to eat, but you have to educate them.
Educate them, don't take it. If you want to eat crap, that's fine, but like tell them what they're doing.
Like you go to europe the cigarette package the entire cigarette package is basically a warning label it's so funny and then we have a few other things i think would make a big difference so we have the fda we have the nih we have the uh hhs usda then we need to reform agriculture yeah so that's usda but mostly usda should be is mostly food programs the you know There's 20 billion spent on supporting agriculture. There's 125 billion spent on food stamps alone.
Really? Yeah. 125 billion on food stamps.
It's the biggest program, food program in the country. Yeah.
And so the regenerative agriculture movement is gaining steam and that's going to create more money for farmers, more productive farms, restore were biodiversity restore the soil restore our water tables produce more nutritious food the farmers make more money we eat healthier food it's a win-win-win the people that lose are the fertilizer and the seed and chem companies right so they're not nobody's gonna like that so what i'm saying is very heretical right it's not it's not going to happen likely unless you know maybe maybe president trump or bobby ken do it. I don't know.
But, you know, we need to put in these policies that have been studied, that are validated, that work, that will actually change the health of America from the ground up. Yeah.
And, you know, I, first of all, could not agree with you more. You know, in medicine, there's something called informed consent, you know, which isn't like a physician doesn't have to educate a patient to the point where they thoroughly understand the procedure, certainly not how to conduct the procedure, but they understand the risks like and the benefits, like what's the upside, what's the downside, what, you know, if I do the surgical procedure, I take this medication, what is the potential downside? I mean, I like what you're saying in the food labeling because it's their choice about whether or not they proceed.
I mean, you can still go to the store and buy cigarettes. But if you buy cigarettes, you know what you're getting yourself into.
But if you're an adult and you're aware of the risk, you're aware of the risk. But I think the truth is that the majority of us have been so conditioned to believe that these are foods.

And, you know, what we've seen in our practice is that people's palates actually change.

They actually really don't like whole foods.

No, they don't actually like, you know, you make like a bone stock grass fed chili, which is what we're going to have after the podcast.

And they taste it and it doesn't taste good to them because, you know, it doesn't taste good to them because they're they're they're used to highly processed ingredients.

Thank you. And they taste it and it doesn't taste good to them because, you know, it doesn't taste good to them because they're used to highly processed ingredients and that palate changes.

And then, you know, when I started.

We should just hijack our taste buds for sure. Not only hijack our taste buds, but actually designed, like Casey Means talks about this a lot, but Cali Means talks about this a lot.

Designed to create an addictive response, you know, ding the dopamine receptor, the R1A2 receptor in the back of the tongue to really hammer that and give you a dopamine.

Thank you. a lot, but our Calumens talks about this a lot, designed to create an addictive response, you know, ding the dopamine receptor, the R1A2 receptor in the back of the tongue to really hammer that and give you a dopamine reward.
So now you're not just liking the food, you're addicted to the food. A hundred percent.
14% of adults and 12% of kids are biologically addicted to processed food, ultra processed food, according to the Yale food addiction scale. This is a, this is a global study.

Wow.

That, and 14% of adults are alcoholic.

So it's like the same.

Yeah.

It's frightening.

And, and, and Michael Moss wrote a book called salt. When you say biologically addicted, they don't like the food.

They're addicted to the food.

They're addicted to it.

Literally, they, by definition, all the behaviors that they have around food,

they have cravings, they have withdrawal symptoms. They, you know, they can't control themselves.
It's all the same behaviors as addiction. I've seen kids go, kids go DAF CON nine.
Yeah. I mean, Yale has done a lot of the work on this.
Kelly Brunell is very compelling research. And I mean, there's whole textbooks on this.
It's not just sort of like, oh, they're making food addictive. This is like a deep science.
And my book, 10 day detox was basically about that. And what, what they, what they found was like the, the, the, um, the Michael Moss and his investigation, he's a journalist from New York times investigated the food industry.
And we talked to 300 industry scientists, experts, executives, you know, whistleblowers, and found that, you know, this is deliberate that they have taste institutes where they hire craving experts. Craving experts.
This is their own internal language. Taste institutes, craving experts to create the bliss point of food, meaning the maximum dope mean response and the most mouthfeel taste response to create heavy users, which is their own terminology.
Heavy users, like an addict. Right, of course.
So it's easier to get someone who's drinking a 12 ounce soda or 10 ounce soda to drink a two liter soda than it is to get you or i gary to start drinking a 10 ounce coca-cola right right and so they focus their marketing on these communities of mostly of color underserved communities who are are targeted far more with ads black kids drink twice as much soda as white kids and it's because they're too much targeting of these communities by these these um food industry and also when they get their ebts or benefit their food stamp you know snap benefit cards and they they kind of up at the beginning of the month they go they know they they go to all the uh convenience stores the uh little bodegas and they have have all these giant ads, you know, use your EBT, two-liter bottle soda, soda, 99 cents. It's like it's really bad.
Wow. It's really bad.
It's very deliberate. You know, and what's interesting is the taxpayer is funding that.
Oh, yeah. And then the taxpayer is also funding the Medicaid-Medicare bill to actually treat the disease that's caused by that.
So it's like no wonder it's called the food and drug administration because the food leads to the drugs yeah and and now we're funding the foods and the drugs so it's really bad you're right 100 i mean the the rockefell foundation put out a report that for every dollar we spend on food we spend three dollars in collateral damage of costs and they didn't even include all the things that are happening so right yeah think about how much the tax pays are covering we privatizeize the profits and socialize the costs. The soil gets destroyed, the pesticides go on, the waterways get eutrophied, eutrophication, which kills all the wildlife and the seafood in the water.
We drain our aquifers, we damage the soil, we lose carbon to the atmosphere, and then we produce food from that that's commodity crops, it goes into ultra processed food that we pay for with SNAP benefits that go to the poor. we pay for that with medicare medicaid so we're literally paying so many times either directly or indirectly for the harms from our food system and the government is holding that bill wow i love how you said we privatize the profits and we socialize the cost the cost wow when you say socialize the cost i mean that's that's taxpayers so mean, like, who's paying for the fact that our aquifers are draining dry? Who's paying for the fact that our soils are damaged and there's no carbon in the soil anymore and we don't have organic matter to grow nutrient tensions? Who's paying for all the dead fish in 400 dead zones around the world, the size of New Jersey, that are feeding half a billion people? Who's paying for the loss of biodiversity and the killing of 75% of our pollinators and half of all the birds who's paying for all that? Well, nobody, it's all, it's all our collective commons.
We call it the, you know, the commons, which is, Oh, you know, and for the people that are so interested in green energy and, and global warming and, um, you know, uh, the, uh, green new deal. I mean, this is at the episode 100 that's regenerative farming and and in less expensive food you know it's interesting and it works for the farmers too everybody should see common ground and kiss the ground two films i was in that are talking about common ground and kiss the ground i'm gonna put links to those they're great films or they're going to be i think i'm on amazon coming up soon but they're they're they're really telling a story of how we can move to a more regenerative system.
Yeah. You know, I have a friend of mine.
His name is Alfie Oaks. He owns a huge grocery store in Naples called Seed to Table.
And we actually got on a helicopter one day with my film crew. And we parachuted into some of his organic fields.
And he was showing how um he's going organic produce um you literally

parachuted or you just landed well not parachuted we landed in a helicopter you're a hardcore

Gary that's really good I'm doing it like deep investigative background Mark you know I'm

committed you know at night with my AR-15 you got your your night vision glass on your paragliding

in there's a tomato dropping in from 30,000 feet with oxygen mission impossible yeah um so so we

Thank you. You're night vision glass on.
Night vision goggles. You're paragliding in.
There's a tomato. Dropping in from 30,000 feet with oxygen.
Mission impossible. Yeah.
So we took a hillock out there and we dropped it on a bunch of his fields. And he was showing me how he's actually growing organic produce at less than the cost that it would be to spray it with herbicides and pesticides and insecticides and all this.
And some of it was really ingenious.

Like they ran these reflective foils. So they have, you know, imagine just these long rows and they would wrap the roots in these reflective foils because they realized that these white flies were photosensitive.
You know, they were, they don't have real eyesight. They're photodynamic.
dynamic. And what would happen is the, this reflective foil would just bend and scatter

the light and it would confuse the insect and they all went into the woods. I mean, and the fields look so pristine.
Yeah. They were beautiful.
And then that's the irony. It makes more farmers will make more money.
Yeah. Produce better food, restore the ecosystem.
It's a win, win, win. It's like a triple bottom line.
Yeah. And I watched the produce get picked at nine o'clock in the morning.
I watched it myself picked, washed, processed, and it was on the shelf by two o'clock that afternoon. So there's a strawberry that was in a field at nine o'clock in the morning that's on the grocery store shelf at two o'clock in the afternoon.
And it's a profitable grocery store. So, I mean, this can be done in a way that creates jobs, creates profit, creates nutrition that actually fixes the dynamic in the food supply and he was saying that some of these fields are so they have been sprayed for so many years with these herbicides and pesticides yeah that there aren't pesticides for three states away yeah like you know there's true we're not even we're not even protecting them against the pesticides that exist the pests that exist anymore because the over spraying has just and We're all poisoned.
One of the things I love about Function Health, this company I co-founded, which is lab testing, we're including testing for pesticides, PFAS chemicals, BPA, and we're finding glyphosate. It's an incredible toxic load do you do? What do they do for? Because I've read that there's now testing for microplastics.
And the only thing that I'm aware of that gets those out is this new Serif filter, this Xterra filter by Lumati that actually filters the blood in a dialysis type format, which I'm a big fan of. They use these heparin binding sites

and they pull the toxins out of the blood.

But what do you do for people that have heavy toxic loads?

I mean, first you got to remove the toxic load, right?

But what do you do for all these things

that are embedded in the body,

the heavy metals, the microtoxins?

Yeah, it's tough.

I mean, you know, detoxification is another core modality

that functional medicine uses to treat patients.

So metal detox, cellular detox,

and there's many methods to do it.

But one is, you know, reducing the exposures, right?

Thank you. modality that functional medicine uses to treat patients.
So metal detox, cellular detox, and there's many methods to do it, but one is, you know, reducing the exposures, right? Filtering the water, filtering the air, inorganic, common sense stuff, changing your household care products, your skincare products, and the Environmental Working Group has a whole set of guides on how to do that. So I would go to ewg.org, and that's great just for reducing your load.
It's free information too, by the way. Yeah.
Second thing is you've got to upregulate all your detox systems. So pee, poop, sweat, you know, like saunas, lots of fiber, you know, lots of water, just flushing stuff out.
And then there's a lot of molecules that help to increase your body's own endogenous or built-in detox systems, glutathione boosting compounds, whether it's the broccoli family of foods, whether it's taking N-acetylcysteine or lipoic acid, uh, other, or even glutathione, glutathione, you can take glutathione, a selenium, all the nutrients that help boost glutathione. And then, you know, there, there's other cofactors like zinc for metal, metal binding proteins that mine metals.
So there's, there's a lot of things you can do nutritionally to upgrade your biology. And then sometimes you need chelation and then saunas are another big thing.
And then there's another protocol, which I've been using with my patients. It's a little harder to access called the PK protocol.
It essentially uses phosphorylcholine to flush out cellular toxins and rebuild mitochondria. And how are you taking that orally? It's an IV treatment.
You also can take oral phosphorylcholine, but it's the structure of your cell membranes. And all these toxins are embedded in our fat tissue and their cells are all made up of fat.
So that's where the cell membrane. Yeah.
So that's where it is. So basically, you know, there's this incredible protocol.
I can show you after it's like really quite profound. It helps with mold toxins and pesticides.
Yeah. And we live in the mold capital of the world here in Miami.
Yeah, pretty bad. Physicians just told me that.
So I'm excited about, you know, this company that I co-founded because it really gives people agency over their health. It helps them undetify what's out of balance.
We talked about nutritional health and metabolic health and a lot of things that people are just not catching and they wait until they get really sick and then they find out. And so our goal at Function Health is to help people live a hundred healthy years.
And we provide a really deep analysis of what's going on with your biology. And we're going to be able to track more and more data from your wearables, from your medical records, from imaging, from your omics, from stool testing, toxin testing, and use that information to create a personalized set of recommendations that tells you where you are, where you're headed, and what to do about it.
And so it's very empowering. And I think, you know, we just started, and we had like 100,000 people sign up.
We we had three hundred thousand people on the wait list although your podcast listeners can jump the wait list and use ultimate health 100 as the code ultimate health 100 i'm going to be the first one you're going to see 100 for the first 100 listeners just set sign and you can jump the wait list yeah and uh and use that code as the early access code and it just you get incredible data on your biology and you know people are using wearables and glucose monitors and all that's great but this is like this is next level this is amazing and i'm going to put links to um uh function health and everything that you're doing in in in the uh show notes on the podcast i'm also going to put links to your um books i'm really excited to be also you you know, part of trying to make America healthy again. This movement to really be apolitical about how we try to influence public policy in the country.
Disease doesn't know if you're red, blue, or purple. It doesn't.
You know, I mean, I don't know how people could be on the other side of, you know, making our children more sick. But so, you know, I wind down every podcast by asking all my, the same question.
I definitely have to have you back. Cause it literally, my, you're just getting started.
This happened last time, you know, I was like, God, I got so many more questions I have for you. Um, but we'll definitely, we'll definitely do a follow-up podcast, but I ask all my guests, um, yeah, come to Austin.
We'll do a double back-to-back again. Let's do it.
No, for sure. I want to go back for Rogan, so we'll do another double back-to-back.
I ask my guests, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? To me? What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I think it's being able to show up fully in your life, feeling good and able to do what matters to you. To love the people you want to love.
to do the work you want to do in the world have the energy to show up for your friends and family and your kids to be able to actually be fully here because if you feel like crap yeah you want to just sit and scroll instagram or watch netflix and not be engaged in life and the end of the day it's about the quality of our life and the quality of our experience. And I don't care what age I am.
I want to be able to do what I want to do. I want to go play tennis.
I want to ride a bike. I want to make love.
I want to go for a hike. I want to jump in a lake.
I want to do all those things, you know? And I count on doing those until my last day, you know? Yeah. And you're crazy.
You're 65. Why are you riding horses across Mongolia without a helmet? I'm like, you know, because I can.
Because I can. You know, it was crazy.
We went on this Mongolian horse trip. And that's like, for me, you know, like a dream to be able to go into the tundra in Mongolia and be in the middle of nowhere and ride these little Mongolian horses, you know, at full gallop across crazy terrain.
And I've been riding since I'm a little kid, so I'm experienced. But, you know, it was just like, i don't want to not be able to do that because i'm 65 years old i mean i was 65 years old and you're so much pain and you can't get out of bed and you can't you don't like the long flights and yeah that's right well um i i have thoroughly enjoyed this podcast i mean this is going to be probably one of my most popular episodes um and you know my audience is going to absolutely love this and i i really just can't thank you enough for coming on thanks gary um huge fan and uh big follower of your work and i wish you all all the success and i hope that i

can be a small porter giving you a bigger voice thanks gary appreciate that you got it and as

always guys that's just science