3 Things Causing INFLAMMATION In Your Body & How To PREVENT IT | Mark Hyman

if you have high cholesterol and no inflammation they're very low risk for heart disease but if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation those are the people who are at risk for heart disease what are the top three things that people are doing the root factors that are contributing to the chronic inflammation epidemic that we're facing today i'm gonna get to those things but first i don't know if people actually know what inflammation is let's go into it so people know that if you have a sore throat it's red painful swollen and and um that's inflammation and it hurts right the the ancient description of inflammation was rubor collar dolor and tumor so tumor is swelling rhubarb is redness dolores pain and color is heat right so we have to understand that those are the those are the cardinal features of inflammation but then you go well i don't really feel inflamed my throat doesn't hurt my joints aren't swollen i don't have a rash what do you mean by inflammation it's it's what we call hidden or silent inflammation and that is the problem it's the inflammation that we don't see that we can't feel that's causing all the chronic diseases that we see today heart disease cancer diabetes alzheimer's depression not to mention obviously autoimmune disease allergies and so forth those we know there's inflammation in those but i mean do people think of being overweight is an inflammatory state do people think of diabetes as an inflammatory state if you don't think of depression as an inflammatory state no but inflammation is causing all of those chronic diseases so back to your question what are the biggest drivers of inflammation well it's something that has been only recently a phenomenon in traditional medicine and has been ignored pretty much forever except by functional medicine which is your gut your microbiome turns out that 60 to 70 percent of your immune system is in your gut why is it there well it's the place where you're exposed to all the foreign materials every day more than anywhere else the purpose of your immune system is to identify friend from foe and to get rid of the bad stuff so when you're eating pounds of a foreign material namely food and you have three pounds of form material in there namely bacteria that's a lot to handle so the ability of the gut to sense what it should take in to keep out the things that shouldn't be in there is so important and so having a healthy microbiome allows us to properly regulate our immune systems and to let in the nutrients that we need proteins the amino acids the fatty acids the sugars and carbohydrates that we need the nutrients we need but it keeps out all the bad stuff it's the first line of defense first line of defense so when that barrier gets broken in the gut all of a sudden your immune system is exposed to a sea or actually more accurately exposed to a sewer and and so that starts to piss off your immune system and you start to create systemic inflammation so the microbiome is is really important and we're just beginning to understand how to identify what's out of balance in there and how to correct the system traditional medicine is still very much behind the eight ball in this functional medicine is way ahead by 30 40 years on understanding one how to identify dysfunction in the gut how to repair a leaky gut how to reduce inflammation how to restore a normal microbiome now before we go to the other two just to jump in the ancients knew a little bit about this yeah talk about that uh there's a famous ayurveda quote uh that really says if your gut's not healthy you're not healthy and if you want to fix disease focus on the gut so this has been known for a long time uh actually this idea wasn't new eli metchnikoff at the turn of the 1900s was a scientist who first came up with the notion of the gut as a source of chronic illness they had some wacky ideas about how to deal with it which was take out your colon which i would recommend but they were on the right track which is problems in the microbiome in the gut cause systemic disease and the solution is not cutting out your colon it's mixing the gut but but it was it's not something that knew and hippocrates says you know health doesn't health and disease starts in the gut absolutely that was the first one that you wanted to go into what are two other ones that you want to mention and there's a lot of them that are out there but we're talking about the top three what are two other ones you want to make the other big source of inflammation is our diet and not any um random thing from our diet but the amount of starch and sugar in our diet that drives a dysfunction in our metabolism called insulin resistance it's essentially like uh where we become resistant to the effects of insulin and our bodies need to make more and more insulin to regulate our blood sugar and that is because we're flooding our system with pharmacologic doses of starch and sugar about a pound a day per person which is just historically unprecedented and that insulin resistance causes the development of specific kinds of fat cells they're called adipocytes there are specific kind of fat cells in the gut around your belly your belly fat that produce a class of compounds called adipocytokines cytokines you might have heard about with covate or the cytokine storm these are the messenger molecules of your immune system and when you have a lot of these belly fat cells made from eating starch and sugar caused by too much insulin and insulin resistance it creates systemic inflammation so it literally puts your body on fire so if you're overweight if you have diabetes if you have high blood pressure if you have heart disease if you have dementia these are all related to this phenomena of too much starch and sugar and the systemic inflammation we now know that for example if you have high cholesterol and no inflammation there are very little risk for heart disease but if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation those are the people who are at risk for heart disease so when you start to look at inflammation in the body it's not what we can feel but there are ways of measuring through laboratory testing the amount of inflammation in our body and we're going to become more and more sophisticated about this david furman at stanford who's a scientist and doctor developed through technologies only recently available big data analytics giant throughput analyses where you can look at thousands and thousands of blood markers i mean we go to the doctor we get 10 20 lab tests right 30 40 maybe 50. there's thousands of molecules floating around your blood and most of them we completely ignore so he was like i don't care what we're actually measuring let's look at what actually matters and so he put thousands of these chemicals through analytic machines correlated with people's clinical history and was able to find four biomarkers of inflammation and immune dysregulation that are highly predictive of aging highly predictive of heart disease cancer diabetes alzheimer's all those diseases so we are going to become more and more sophisticated at our ability to look at inflammation people want to know more about it they can go to edifice i think it's edifice health is the company which is uh actually commercializing this test but but there's other tests we do like c-reactive protein to help to look at inflammation but insulin resistance is a big driver of inflammation because it makes your belly on fire literally and these fat cells are just pumping out tons of inflammation throughout your body the third thing that is really important to understand is that stress is inflammatory chronic stress causes inflammation in the body through a number of different mechanisms that one stress makes you insulin resistant so it'll contribute to just making you overweight and belly fat even i mean i had a patient once where i this was so clear she had a daughter who was in israel it was during the time of sort of uh the infata the uprising a few maybe a few decades ago and she was terrified every day that her daughter was going to get killed in some kind of bomb or some kind of attack during this palestinian uprising and so she couldn't she couldn't sleep she was she wasn't even overeating but she just gained all this weight and as soon as her daughter came back from israel she lost 40 pounds just like that without changing anything so sometimes stress can be a very big factor in instant resistance it also um affects your your inflammatory response and creates an increased inflammatory response so if and this is interesting if you look at the data on what we call sociogenomics which is the ways in which our social interactions cause changes in gene expression you can be having a conversation with someone and if they're in conflict with you if you're oppositional if you're having an emotionally charged negative interaction it will turn on genes of inflammation if you have a loving connected conversation with someone it will turn on genes that shut off inflammation so your mind your meal your your brain is the most potent pharmacy ever and it will drive either inflammation or it will stop inflammation simply by your thoughts so you have to kind of look at that and and and that's something we haven't talked about a lot is how do we master our minds most of us are victims of our minds activity and we train our muscles we train our body we increase our metabolism nobody knows how to train their brain to actually function better from the perspective of being in control of your thoughts and that is that's not an easy one it's a whole other topic for a podcast how big of a challenge is the topic of inflammation like really like put it in a sense of a scale in terms of all the things the world is dealing with when it comes to problems with health how directly tied in is inflammation with those problems uh it's probably the number one driver of all the misery we see in the world uh there's a beautiful new book that was written by raj patel and rupa maria who i've had on the doctor's pharmacy podcast called inflamed and it's about the the biological the social economic and political consequences of an environment and a diet that's driven systemic inflammation throughout society and it's staggering when you start to look at it you know oppression is inflammatory and there's so many people oppressed and struggling in this society the diet's inflammatory the social structures we have inflammatory and so inflammation when you look at all the problems that are facing humans um in terms of health uh it's and even in terms of um some of the socio-economic issues that inflammation is such a big driver and understanding how we calm that down is so so important uh one of the things that it does which i think is something people don't understand when you look at our society we see so much conflict so much divisiveness so much hatred so much intolerance i don't remember it like this growing up i mean i just don't i mean the the diet wars are terrible the republicans democrats are no longer working together in any meaningful way um you know we've got religious conflict political conflict we've got the divisiveness in this country where we had sort of a takeover of the capital by a whole bunch of people who were you know hopefully making the world a better place but really that was not a very helpful act so why is it happening well it turns out that uh your brain when it's inflamed doesn't work and all the things that we see as behavioral disorders as violence as depression anxiety mood disorders the opioid crisis turns out that a lot of these things are driven by inflammation in the brain and and what's happening often is that the inflammatory processed diet that we have the changes in our microbiome because of our diet because of c-sections antibiotics and toxins and all the things that damage our gut microbiome because of glyphosate all that leads to inflammation and when you have inflammation like that in the body it disconnects the ancient limbic brain the reptile brain the fight-or-flight response from the frontal lobe which is basically the adult in the room your executive function your higher self so when your higher self and your lower self are not talking to each other when your survival brain and your sort of mature grown-up brain that makes sure you don't do or say or act in ways that are damaging or harmful to other people that connection gets weakened or it breaks and so when you look at for example diet studies in prisons or in juvenile detention centers it's so impressive because simply swapping out healthy food an anti-inflammatory diet for an inflammatory diet in prisons cuts a violent crime by 56 percent they had a multivitamin by 80 percent in juvenile detention centers these kids are violent 91 reduction in violent behavior 75 reduction administrates 100 reduction suicide rates in this group which is the third leading cause of death in in adolescent males and you reduce it by a hundred percent simply by changing the diet why does it work it works because it cools off the inflammation in the brain is causing a disconnect between people's ability to have executive function to have the grown-up in the room to have the higher self show up and say gee maybe i shouldn't punch this person or maybe i shouldn't cut them or maybe i shouldn't shoot them or you know maybe i shouldn't be in this violent oppositional life and i think i don't know how much has contributed to the divisiveness in our society from the food but i i think it's way more than we think and and we've had david promatter and his son austin on the podcast talking about their book it which describes this phenomena and the science and the neurology behind the way our diet affects our brain and disconnects our our limbic brain from our frontal lobe driving violent and disruptive and divisive behavior well one of the unique things that's happening in today's world that is built on top of all the different things you're talking about is that there are a lot of people getting rich off of creating this inflammation we have the food companies that are getting rich by marketing and selling high sugary foods to the public we have the news media that's literally making incredible millions of dollars hundreds of millions of dollars by driving inflammatory style news which drives inflammation in people creates more stress and the advertising is all about inflammatory products right all about inflammatory products food and many other factors that are out there too so a unique thing that's going on in the world today that's important to highlight that has really never been there at this level is that through really the hijacking of media and the use of media to grow these large companies we now are able to spread inflammation so rampant and there's a very few and small group of individuals that are getting dramatically wealthy off the process yes you know i think you know a lot of stuff started off with good intentions that had bad consequences right in the uh post-world war ii era we needed to scale up agriculture to feed a hungry world a growing population to produce a lot of cheap carbohydrate starchy calories and we did a great job we did a great job the average american has 500 more calories than they did in 1970 available to them to eat and they're eating it which is why we're all so unhealthy that was a good idea but the unintended consequences have been devastating not only to human health in terms of diabetes and obesity i mean when i was born there was a five percent obesity rate now it's 40. it's an eightfold increase in obesity in my lifetime uh but we've also created unintended consequences for the environment and and climate and the changes in our in our biodiversity and loss of species and the damage the soil and our water systems because of how we're growing food so we've created all these unintended consequences in the same way you know these it's food companies we're not actually designing foods to drive all these problems but we're locked in a system where the status quo is trying to be preserved so they can maintain their market share their profitability and they're trying to navigate and figure out how to shift because culture's shifting demand is shifting but you know we we have a tremendous amount of money that goes into preserving the status quo how we grow food what we grow the processed food industry the marketing the food i mean we spend billions of dollars um from the food industry get spent billions of dollars marketing and advertising bad foods and the worst the food the more money they spend advertising uh and and what's worse is it's it's hidden advertising now that's really a problem and so these algorithms on the on these um social media drive you into more and more of the same so if you click on a conspiracy one conspiracy theory you're going to get fed 10 other conspiracy theories so i met these people that believe in all these weird seemingly disconnected conspiracy theories because that's that's the universe they live in so we live in these self-reinforcing information bubbles that are driven by algorithms and the algorithms where they're designed to give people stuff they like to show them if they want a nice pair of shorts or a bathing suit that they might like again well-intentioned well intentioned but the consequences now we sort of let the genie out and uh it's out of control and so even the people who develop these systems i mean i don't think mark zuckerberg is evil or had an evil intent to create more divisiveness and conflict and disruption in the world and violence no i don't think so but i also think that the incentives now are to keep doing it and not to stop so we have to start to look at what we're doing and create different forms of communications and media and social media that are not driven off of these algorithms that tend to cause more disruption more divisiveness and and and are incentivizing the wrong thing i mean one of the things that's just shocking to me is forget all the ads on tv that kids see and there's about 10 billion dollars spent on all that there's there's 500 billion ads 500 billion ads in one year directed at children for junk food on facebook that's terrifying to me because the parents don't even know it nobody it's like you can say oh don't watch your tv kids or don't watch those commercials about you know fruit loops but it's all the hidden stuff it's all it's all and it's all stealth it's embedded in games there's free games for these kids on social media and they they play these games but in the games they highlight mcdonald's or they highlight coca-cola they have these different kind of food companies that are paying for it and it's it's really co-opting these kids brains it's copying their their uh their their own free will in a way and i think that's what scares me more than anything is is the usurping if we will by this digital persuasion economy that's using algorithms to target us in ways that we that it seems to be things that we like but it actually keeps it spirals out of control and so we have to get we have to get a way to to solve that whether it's inventing uh parallel platforms that people can use where that's not happening in social media platforms or whether it's it's regulation or legislation this is this has gotten to be quite dangerous it's multi-faceted but most importantly we have to have a dialogue about it and even more important than that is that you the person that's watching the person that's listening today you have to be the ceo of your health you have to be the ceo of your family's health because ultimately you know regulation can do a lot but it can only do so much we at the end of the day have to drive education for ourselves and for our family and that's what this podcast and your work is all about so let's continue down the topic of inflammation patient comes to you today right what are the signs and what are the ways that the patient says ouch that are an indication to you that they have rampant chronic inflammation that is taken over and hijacked their body it's not that hard pretty much anybody with any chronic disease inflammation is a player um and and and so whether you have the typical things that we understand is inflammation like autoimmunity or allergy or eczema or skin disorders or whether it's the silent inflammation that's causing heart disease and cancer and diabetes and obesity and alzheimer's anybody with a chronic condition is typically inflamed at some level so my job is to then navigate and figure out what's causing it because when you get to the root of inflammation you don't actually have to treat the diseases directly they don't really treat diabetes i don't treat alzheimer's i don't treat heart disease i don't treat cancer i simply change the biology of the body to normalize function to reduce inflammation and as a side effect these things go away and i think that's a really important concept because if we don't understand that um root cause medicine is the way we need to go forward then we're going to just be constantly spinning out on all these new drug treatments and spending billions of dollars to address this i mean they found oh alzheimer's is an inflammatory disease of the brain so what do you have to do well they did a whole study taking advil it didn't work and it caused all these side effects why because they didn't get to the root of the inflammation uh recently a big study came out on aspirin doctors have been saying take aspirin to reduce inflammation to prevent heart attacks well i if you read my stuff over the years i've always said bad idea there are maybe some people who would benefit but aspirin is not a side effect-free drug and kills as many people as asthma or aids a year because of bleeding stomach bleeding gastrointestinal bleeding brain bleeding strokes hemorrhage so the recent studies show that oh sorry guys we were wrong you can't just take aspen to reduce inflammation and prevent heart attacks because it's going to kill you it's more likely to kill you than the heart attack so stop taking it which was a huge shocker because if you talk to any cardiologist or talk to any primary care doctor everybody was on board and i was kind of shocked because i looked at the actual science that was supporting this and i even look at the american college of cardiology risk calculator there's actually a calculator on the american college of cardiology website to put in whether or not you would either get harmed or have benefit from aspirin and most the people who are on aspirin actually don't even qualify or didn't qualify according to the previous guidelines now there's a whole bunch of people who who shouldn't even according to those guys let's be taking it so i think that it's backwards to say we're going to shut off inflammation with anti-inflammatories or immune suppressants i mean they're talking about using drugs like humera which is a 50 000 a year anti-inflammatory drug that's used for autoimmune disease for depression why because depression is inflammation in the brain the key isn't to shut up inflammation when the drug is to get rid of the source of inflammation how does traditional and conventional medicine again well-intentioned how does traditional and conventional medicine look at and treat chronic inflammation like how do they where do they think it comes from and then how do they decide how to tackle it you know it's just shocking to me that there really isn't a conversation about why oh we know alzheimer's is inflammatory oh we know depression is inflammatory we know heart disease inflammatory we know cancer is inflammatory okay so we need to give you anti-inflammatory drugs there's no questioning of gee why in the first place is your immune system so pissed off what's creating inflammation and we know so much about it it's not hard it's it's our diet our inflammatory diet it's stress it's our microbiome issues it's triggers that for example might be from latent infections or allergens or toxins all these drive inflammation so as a functional medicine doctor my expertise is in being an expert in understanding toxins allergens microbes stress and diet because those are the things that drive inflammation and so every individual has a different cocktail of things that are off but my job is to figure out what is their particulars triggers and get rid of them and then help their body on the other hand calm inflammation down so there's a whole bunch of things that cause inflammation but there's a lot you can do to reduce inflammation and it's not by taking advil or aspirin or steroids or some chemo drug or a biologic that costs 50 grand a year it's by the simple things that we know how to do food is medicine anti-inflammatory exercise is medicine anti-inflammatory sleep is anti-inflammatory meditation's anti-inflammatory yoga is anti-inflammatory and then there's a whole bunch of supplements you can take to help reduce inflammation like omega-3 fats and vitamin d and probiotics and zinc and and all the phytochemicals you can eat in your food that actually help reduce inflammation all the spices and all colorful fruits and vegetables so there's so much you can do to raise inflammation in the ways that we see now if you have uh some latent thing right if you have a lot of heavy metals or if you have a terrible bug in your gut or bacterial overgrowth or you have some particular gluten sensitivity you're going to have to deal with those things too but for most people the basics just work so well well let's talk about those basics you talked about food and you talked about some of the foods that help and we'll chat a little bit more about that but what are some of the examples of the foods that might hurt what are some of the foods that are out there that could be driving or at least supporting the process of chronic inflammation and why do they support that well it's both what we're eating what we're not eating right so we're eating too many inflammatory foods sixty percent of our diet in america is ultra processed food and what is that talk about the stuff that you see on the shelf what is an example because you know one thing i've realized and why i want to break this down is that if you go to times square you go here in santa monica where we're recording and you go up to most people and you say hey do you eat healthy most people are going to say yeah i eat healthy because everybody has a different definition of what it is or you ask somebody do you eat a lot of processed foods and most most people say no i don't need that much a little bit here and there so describe it what are we talking about here in ultra processors there are a few commodity crops that are supported by all our government supports from the farm bill that are the raw materials for processed food corn wheat and soy and they're turned into all sorts of weird products uh the corn is turned into all sorts of food additives and high fructose corn syrup the wheat is turned into highly pulverized flour which is highly inflammatory the oils that come from soybeans and corn are often highly processed and inflammatory so we're eating a lot of ingredients that are derived from these commodity products in ultra-processed food that we're not even aware of so when you read maltodextrin or something on a label you don't know where that came from that's a byproduct of corn from the from a science project in the factory uh when you eat high fructose corn syrup same thing so we're eating ingredients that are made from commodity crops they're basically the same three ingredients made into all sizes color shapes of of chemically extruded food-like substances so if you actually cover over the packaging and look at the ingredients you literally would see the same ingredients on almost every processed food we know with a few little tweaks here and there and you can actually even tell what it is by reading the ingredient list that's an ultra processed food if you buy a can of tomatoes and it says tomatoes water and salt you know what that is if the ingredient list is you know 14 15 35 items um and half of them you can't pronounce don't recognize they wouldn't have in your medicine cupboard or your kitchen cupboard then you should not eat them right i mean why should we be eating butylene hydroxytoluene or or orthodextrin or all kinds of weird compounds that are not our natural food supply so those are ultra processed foods and it's a huge component of our diet and it's highly inflammatory so that's 60 of calories on average and when you think of all the people who don't eat that much processed food and people are eating it might eat 70 80 right when you average a lot over all americans it's about 60 and kids it's even worse it's 70 percent 70 for kids i think 67 is something it's like terrifying to me so that is really what we should be focused on not eating and it's driving inflammation and sugar and starch is number one two and three all the food additives we eat about five pounds of food out of the year and they can be inflammatory for example all the thickeners emulsifiers things like carrageenan and gums that are used in processed food they often have something called microbial transflutaminase which is a gluten product that they use to hold the food together and all these emulsifiers they cause leaky gut so these damage your gut and when you have a damaged gut then guess what the floodgates open like we talked about earlier in the in the podcast you start getting food proteins and bacteria proteins leaking into your bloodstream your immune system gets all pissed off and it creates this vicious cycle of inflammation so eliminating all that weird stuff is so important if you read the label and you don't know actually everything that's on there and you can't pronounce it you wouldn't have it in your medicine cabinet don't eat it let's talk about next another category that is directly connected into inflammation and that is sleep and one of the biggest drivers of sleep that is affecting so many people is sleep apnea talk about sleep apnea and its direct connection to inflammation for most people and how can increase weight gain and a whole list of other things that are there it reminds me this guy actually uh sleep apnea is basically where you where you have multiple episodes of stopping breathing at night so you will snore you might stop breathing for seconds or minutes your sleep's interrupted and it's often not diagnosed because you're asleep and you don't know you're doing it uh your partner might yell at you or scream at you or move to another room or put in your plugs uh but you can actually use devices one of them is a great little app it's called sleep cycle and it just records your sleep on your phone and you don't need anything it's just you put your phone by your bed and you can have it on airplane mode even and it records your breathing and your sleep and your snoring and so you can see and hear your snoring from the app so i i know my stepfather was a big snorer he never believed it he had severe sleep apnea and i literally recorded him with my cassette recorder back in the 70s because he didn't believe me but you can hear him just snoring like a an elephant you know so it's really common it's often associated with being overweight with having a thick neck with um sometimes structural issues a narrow palate various things with your teeth so you can be thin in habit but there may be airway issues uh there can be central sleep apnea obstructive sleep apnea so it can come from your brain or from your your obstructive airway and what that does have those repeated awakenings to the night and the decreased quality of sleep it it actually causes insulin resistance it actually causes diabetes it actually makes you crave more sugar and eat more sugar and carbs and and you can often fix weight issues or diabetes or obesity unless you fix sleep apnea and it reminds reminds me of a patient i had when i was at canyon ranch who was a lawyer and he's like look i can't lose this weight i'm 50 pounds overweight can you help me i'm like okay well talking about your life well i'm a lawyer i'm like okay start getting to me how do you sleep well okay and i said well i'm tired all the time i said well it means oh yeah well i i have to have a stand-up desk this is before stamp desks are possible or i mean we're popular like you know 25 years ago because if i don't if i don't stand up i fall asleep at my desk i'm like okay well how about we check for sleep apnea and he had terrible sleep apnea we gave him a treatment for it a cpap machine and he lost 50 pounds like that and his insulin resistance went away simply by sleeping so sleep is so important in regulating your metabolism and inflammation and you know we think of snoring as kind of like a funny thing and we might hit our partner or laugh at our parents or grandparent but really as a dear friend of both of ours uh dr steven lynn a dentist down in australia and he says snoring is choking so you have to think of snoring as choking at night so if you know if you're snoring or anybody else is snoring you're choking and you're choking and that prevents you from getting the right amount of air and another version of that that's milder is breathing through your mouth you've done some episodes on this i've done some episodes on this if you're breathing through your mouth at night and not through your nose which is how we're designed to that's also a sign that you might have a mild form of sleep apnea that needs to be addressed because it's directly tied into promoting inflammation in the body let's talk about another category of things that is a driver of inflammation and that's our sedentary lifestyle talk to us more about that yeah i mean sitting is inflammatory as we sit here and do our podcast and that's why um so much of us are are struggling is because when we don't move uh we we are actually increasing the the poor metabolic function that we have increasing the risk for muscle loss increasing the risk for insulin resistance increasing risk for just chronic inflammation in our body so being sedentary is a huge risk for inflammation on the other hand exercising enough but not too much right if you over exercise if you're ultra marathoner or marathon runner it creates more oxidative stress and inflammation in the body but if you do regular exercise you literally can reduce the inflammation in your body and and and that's one of the most important things besides your diet for regulating inflammation you talked about stress when you sit down with your patients and you talk to them about their lifestyle what are the biggest contributors that you see over and over again top level that are the big factors that drive chronic stress individually from patients you know what is it is the relationship is the lack of meaning and purpose like what are the things that are out there that you see time and time again that are really the drivers of the stress that everybody's dealing with it's a great question you know why are some people more resilient than others why does people roll with the punches and others just get completely knocked off center and one of the things we use in our practice at cleveland clinic and lennox and the ultra wellness center is called the ace questionnaire or adverse childhood events and it's essentially a set of 10 questions or so that you get a score for that tracks trauma were you abused as a child where you unsafe just a whole series of questions that help understand if as a child you experience lack of safety or worse abuse trauma incest so forth the higher score the more chronic disease risk you have the more inflammation risk you have the more likely you are to have autoimmune disease to have allergies to have chronic illness so looking at someone's childhood is so important and those impacts of trauma and i think we're just beginning to understand how widespread that is and you know for example one in four americans is a victim of sexual abuse as a child think about that one in four americans it's like 80 million people that's a lot of people okay um i wonder if that's the 80 million that has autoimmune disease i don't know but it might be and so as you begin to look at how do we manage the inflammation response that's the first place i start and then and then i look at how do people navigate their minds because your mindset plays a huge role in chronic disease and so if you're able to regulate your thoughts if you're able to not be constantly triggered and activated by your environment if you're able to have a level of equanimity which can be cultivated and developed through practice right that's what meditation does and yoga does and prayer does and there's a whole series of practices of whatever calls to you that you can do that really helps to reduce the level of stress in your system if you don't learn how to do those things then you just you just kind of have this unregulated unmitigated stress response that drives so much chronic disease that keeps you inflamed so yes i mean we have to one look at the original sources and we have to look at you know how we navigate our lives and how our our thoughts are and how our relationships are and how our community is and so there are a lot of ways to work through that and i think it's so important for people to understand that they need to build the structures in their life that are constantly battling inflammation so what is that for me it's it's basic practices that i do i meditate every day i exercise i eat an inflammatory diet i take the supplements that help my gut microbiome stay healthy i make sure i have low levels of toxins that i'm exposed to i make sure i connect with people i love build community have deep relationships that's to me what i do to mitigate and to discharge the stress and inflammation because if you if you don't intentionally do it uh it just accumulates and uh and it's tough because we we are live in a bubble so it's sort of like being in the truman show we don't even know we're in it we're just victims of or in the matrix and we don't know we're in it so how do you get out of that and go okay i'm just going to pause for a minute and kind of reset and i think that's a really important set of practices that we can all be doing and it can be fun it doesn't have to be difficult or stressful one of my favorite is is hot and cold therapies so sauna steam ice plunge it's amazing for discharging stress literally your whole system will will sort of reset i remember working in uh residency and you know we had an enlightened residency where we only had to work 30 hours in a row not 36 hours i would get off noon the day after call and i'd drive up to this hot springs in california and i would soak in the hot springs and then i would go in the ice pool and the hospital was super hot and icing was super cold and it'll go back and forth back and forth and i just know all my fatigue all my stress from working on the hospital and the call and the trauma just would go away and i would like reset and you know now it's a thing but back then we just kind of was weird but it's so powerful so you have to learn for yourself one of those things that you can incorporate that you like into your life on a daily basis that help regulate you let's go back to the gut microbiome you listed it as one of the top things that a disrupted gut microbiome or a dysregulated gut microbiome is one of the key drivers of inflammation you have in your lifetime on multiple occasions had a gut that's been messed up right we won't get into the whole journey we made a couple documentaries about it if people want to watch them they're at drhymon.complus sign up for a free trial you could watch them broken brain longevity docu series we've talked about them all yeah but high level what was missing for you when your gut was dysregulated and how did you begin to take the steps to bring it back into repair i mean i you know i didn't have the usual things i was always a weirdo so for me um the first time was mercury poisoning and mercury is powerfully damaging to the gut it will bind to all the enzymes it'll cause leaky gut and it creates bad bugs growing and yeast overgrowth so for me i developed you know chronic diarrhea bloating irritable bowel bacterial overgrowth fungal overgrowth and and that was really really really hard to treat until i got the mercury down that was my first foray into bad gut then i kind of corrected it after i got the mercury out and rebuilt my gut and then about five years ago i had a bad tooth and ended up having a root canal the root canal went bad got the tooth pulled and the dentist who was a holistic dentist said you better take this antibiotic and i'm like okay and i just was a little nervous about it and it's a particular antibiotic that's great for dental infections called clindamycin but it's also the biggest cause of what we call c difficile which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills 30 000 people a year very difficult to treat and they're using fecal transplants to treat it almost 100 cure and the typical antibiotics that are used don't work that well so i basically developed c difficile which was a terrible intestinal infection colitis and that caused colitis and then that developed into inflammatory bowel disease i was having 20 bloody bowel movements a day severe pain i mean it was just i lost 30 pounds it was it was bad and all my normal tricks didn't work why because my whole system was so screwed up by the mold in my house and by this infection that took over that even even taking prednisone didn't work and i was you know next step was taking a biologic and i didn't want to do that and so i began to sort of figure out how do i really reset my system and sometimes you just need a powerful set of tools to drive the body out of a stuck inflammatory cycle and i based on my experience in the science and what i understood i use a combination of things that just const just almost immediately flipped my system one was ozone therapy that was hyperbaric oxygen therapy i use high dose intravenous vitamins and vitamin c and also stem cells and those four things and exosomes those four things really flip my system out of this stuck inflammatory cycle but that was weird and that's rare and most people i don't need to do that with but i'm a weirdo so i i get all the worst of everything and i have to figure it out and then i you know kind of learn how to sort of make my body work better well one of the unique things that came out of that is that once you got your system back to baseline and it was really bad right it was really bad we've talked about that before but once you got it back to baseline you went down this whole rabbit hole of how the power of phytochemicals as you talked about earlier phytonutrients phytochemicals these plant compounds uh on a regular basis can help you maintain this level of where you're at so talk to us about it yeah so how is this that food is really information in this category of phytochemicals yeah so so for decades we've known that prebiotic fibers are healthy and prebiotic foods are healthy what is a prebiotic it's something that feeds the good bacteria so it could be various kinds of fibers that are in plant foods special foods like artichokes asparagus plantains jerusalem artichokes all have these special fibers that are really good food for the microbiome also the probiotics are important to probiotics and there's all kinds of strains we also knew that that that that we need to make sure we have the the right amount of of of just general fiber as well so those are those are things we understood but what i didn't understand was the importance of the phytochemicals in food to feed the good bugs because not only do they eat the fiber but they also are stimulated and love certain phytochemicals for example there's a really important bacteria that i had almost none of which is called acromancia muciniphilia mucinophilia means mucin loving right mucin is mucus why do you have that well you want to protect your intestinal lining and not get a leaky gut so your back this bacteria creates this incredible thick mucous layer that prevents bad stuff from getting in but if you don't have this bacteria you can't get that well when i had this problem you couldn't actually take a necromancy or probiotic now they have them but acromancial love polyphenols which are these colorful compounds in fruits and vegetables they love cranberry they love pomegranate they love green tea they love curcumin they have all these incredible plant compounds and so that was a huge insight so we need prebiotics probiotics and polyphenols to create a healthy gut which is why eating a colorful diet is so important beautiful and you've written about acromancia we'll link to the blog post that you have there you even talk a little bit about this kind of shake which includes uh pomegranate concentrate and a bunch of other things yeah cranberry and green tea so we'll link to that as well that really helped me by the way that really helped me reset my gut i created this cocktail of stuff that was designed to incorporate all the knowledge that i had over 30 years of functional medicine it was a lot of different things in little containers and things we've now created something called gut food which will soon be available on getpharmacy.com which combines all these things into one simple powder that you can mix in water or in something else and actually consume it and it will help to provide the food for your gut we're calling it gut food let's talk about testing when it comes to inflammation are there tests that you use and recommend both with patients that you work with but also if people don't have access to a functional medicine doctor are there tests that you recommend they ask their doctor for to help them understand how inflamed they are yeah i mean there's two aspects to this one is checking for inflammation to see if you're inflamed and then checking for why you have inflammation it's two different things so while inflammation may be imbalances in your gut flora it may be toxins it may be allergens it may be your diet it may be stress right so we have to go down those rabbit holes in terms of the actual measure of inflammation we're getting much more sophisticated about it so there's a common test that your doctor can do called c-reactive protein and that's really important has to be a high sensitivity c-reactive protein that can help you determine if there's a generalized level of inflammation it's good but it's not perfect then there's a sedimentation rate which is an age-old test it looks at how long it takes your blood to settle if it's got a lot of inflammatory proteins it's done and settled in the test tube very fast that can be a sign so there's there's common things we use we can also look at cytokines you can look at interleukins and and we can look at two necrosis factor alpha and other biomarkers of inflammation but that's just scratching the surface there's a whole as i mentioned earlier there's this scientist at stanford who's measured these unique analytes in your blood that doctors normally don't test that are the most predictive of aging and chronic disease so we should probably be testing things like that so those are the ways we kind of measure inflammation we can also look at auto antibodies we can look at allergens we can look at immunoglobulin levels there's a lot of ways we can look at what's going on with the immune system we look at t cell function and lots of things so the basic tests are available through conventional medicine but the key is not just seeing if you're inflamed the key is to ask why you're inflamed and then go down the rabbit holes of looking for the causes can you share a case study from your practice of anybody because we have so many different names for modern diseases that are driven by inflammation but if you can think of one person who had the right mixture of a lot of different root factors that you helped and worked with to get their inflammation under control and then get back to health absolutely i'm just thinking of so many patients that are flooding my brain right now but i'll just share one story of a woman with rheumatoid arthritis terrible migraines and a lot of gut issues and you know typically she was seeing her rheumatologist and getting all the rheumatology drugs and really struggling and so i said well okay these are all inflammatory problems migraines gut issues rheumatoid arthritis let's look and see what's causing it so it turned out she had very high antibodies to gluten so she was gluten sensitive and quite significantly she had bacterial overgrowth in her gut and she had super heavy metals so systematically i got gluten out of her diet i healed her gut i got rid of the heavy metals and she had complete recovery and all the things that were abnormal her c-reactive protein her rheumatoid arthritis antibodies her my her migraines her her leaky gut all normalized and now it's 20 years later and she's still amazing and got rid of all those diagnoses because they were all caused by inflammation you talked about diet you talked about additional therapies like sauna hot and cold other things like that we talked about exercise talk about supplementation how does it play a role and how could it be helpful on the topic of inflammation well you know just the most basic things can be helpful right so there was a study published that showed that if you take a multivitamin your c-reactive protein level goes down which is awesome but that's just one thing and and what is the mechanism of that that you think yeah so we we have a similar body to control inflammation and that system requires nutrients and many of us are nutrient depleted so for example a multivitamin will reduce c-reactive protein and it does so by activating all sorts of enzymes cool so vitamin what are vitamins minerals they're basically helpers one-third of your entire dna codes for enzymes what enzymes do they turn one molecule to another molecule one chemical to another chemical in your body and all the enzymes we nee we have required coenzymes or cofactors helpers and what are those those are vitamins and minerals and so some of us need a lot more of this one or that one and if we're low which a lot of us are this is not my opinion this has been the government's own surveys and diagnostic testing and giant studies of tens and tens of thousands of people that over ninety percent of americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level you need to prevent deficiency disease so not how much you need for optimal health or immune function but how much vitamin d you need to not get scurvy i mean to not get rickets not very much how much vitamin c do you need to not get scurvy not very much but how much vitamin c or vitamin d you need to regulate your immune system and reduce inflammation a lot more so many of us are deficient in nutrients so that's the mechanism and then there's specific nutrients that are really important inflammation omega-3 fats number one we need the omega-3 fats like ep and dj that typically come from fish oil we need the uh vitamin d levels to be adequate uh and and not low because vitamin d regulates hundreds of genes that regulate inflammation we need to make sure we have adequate amounts of things that help to boost detoxifying compounds in your body like glutathione which comes from the for example broccoli family when you eat these compounds they help to increase glutathione but also you can take for supplements to do that like n-acetyl cysteine which i think the government is is now restricting in some ways which makes me very nervous but this is a substance we've used for you know a long time decades and decades since i've been in medical school in medicine as a therapy to help recover people from tolerant overdose and liver failure from kidney failure from dye contrasts and many other things so for asthma and lung inflammation so it's one of the most powerful anti-inflammatories in our body so i take supplements to increase glutathione which really helps so there's a there's a few things we can do strategically and then of course there's things like curcumin and there's polyphenol supplements and and various other things you can take but but those are the most important you wanna know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all i have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below talk to us about the role that fasting plays fasting in all its different forms when it comes to chronic inflammation that plagues so many people yeah so our bodies were designed to deal with scarcity and we have hundreds of genes that help control starvation and put our bodies in a healing and repair state when we are lacking food we have almost no genes that help us deal with abundance in excess like the 500 extra calories of corn syrup that every american is exposed to since 1970. so when we are in a state of scarcity our bodies kick into action a whole set of mechanisms that reduce inflammation that increase antioxidant systems that build muscle that get rid of fat burn fat which is good in the case of starvation and that help to increase stem cell function and and many many other beneficial factors improve mitochondrial health clean up your cells get rid of waste i mean it's just it's quite amazing what happens when you have scarcity when you starve which is a good thing because you you want to keep alive as long as possible so everything is in your body is like i'm just going to fix everything so i don't die so how do you get to that state well there's a lot of techniques that are now being talked about and they all have the same mechanisms whether it's time restricted eating which is eating within an eight hour or ten hour 12 hour window whether it's intermittent fasting which is having a 24 32 hour fast once a week or more prolonged fast whether it's fasting making diets which are calorie restricted diets for five days of 800 calories whether it's a ketogenic diet which restricts carbs and increases fat that's actually what we get in when we're not eating we get in a ketogenic diet when we don't have food our bodies go in ketosis but you can do that by eating more fat so all those ways of eating actually activate the body's own healing mechanism what happens well you reduce inflammation you increase antioxidant systems you increase stem cell production you increase muscle you increase bone density you increase cognitive function and brain chemistry and neuroplasticity you do all these things simply by activating these ancient healing systems that are designed to protect us from starvation so it's kind of like controlled starvation in a way and that's a good thing and i think it's really it's really important for us to think about how we do those things on a regular basis and i try to incorporate those strategies regularly in my life so now we're gonna go to our community our youtube comments our facebook comments instagram and podcast community that emailed in we're gonna take a few questions here and we're gonna start off with the first one and the first one we have here is what role do grains play when it comes to inflammation chronic inflammation in the body can grains help or hurt chronic inflammations in the body great question depends on the grain white flour surely is one of the most inflammatory foods on the planet whereas ancient grains like himalayan tartary buckwheat may be one of the most anti-inflammatory foods on the planet so it's not grains as a whole it's which grains in what form how are they grown where were they grown what were they grown with are they full of pesticides are they full of glyphosate i mean there's there's so many layers of things that will actually determine the answer to that question in general though the way we eat grains in this country is as white flour 90 of the grains we eat in this country is white flour very few people eat whole grain foods um maybe there's a whole wheat bread but if you look at the label it's mostly white flour with high fructose corn syrup with a few flakes of whole wheat thrown in there right it's not it's not like the dense breads you get in europe or germany so i i'm not against grains but i do think that there are are challenges for people who are a lot eating a lot of flowers probably one of the most inflammatory foods and if you have a leaky gut if you have an imbalance in your microbiome if you're not having an intact system in your gut it grains can be a problem so i tend to eliminate grains if i'm really aggressively trying to reduce inflammation not forever but for a short period of time to try to reset the system to heal the leaky gut and get people functional again and if you if you if you do that you you also do a number of other things because grains are starch and depend on how much you eat right having a half a cup of black rice or a half a cup of buckwheat may not be a problem but typically we eat huge amounts of grains and that drives another pathway for inflammation which is insulin resistance or pre-diabetes or blood sugar problems and so we we have to understand that we have to reduce the starch and sugar in our diet and one way that is is actually reducing grains but whole grains can be a part of a healthy diet it's just when you get to eat them who gets to eat them in what context with what other foods and where those grains come from and are they you know modern hybridized grains that are full of starch and sugar or are they ancient grains that have all these phytochemicals and other beneficial properties next question how does hormonal balance or imbalance related to inflammation so the biggest driver of chronic inflammation is stress which drives all kinds of hormonal dysregulation it screws up your hormones the sex hormones your insulin blood sugar uh cortisol adrenaline and and it really drives huge amounts of inflammation so if if you are actually are are highly stressed that will drive a lot of the pathology i mean insulin is another hormone that is a big one that drives inflammation that's one of the biggest ones we talked a lot about that you'll see people who are taking hormones for example estrogen or the birth control pill and and depends on what you're taking if you're taking for example premarin it raises inflammation in the body it causes a high crp so does the birth control pill so a lot of people are taking the birth control pill i'm not saying people should stop birth control pill but you want to make sure you mitigate the effects of that and i recently did an instagram live with the founder of even sarah morgan talking about the ways in which for example medications deplete nutrients and affect the body adversely so for example if you're on the pill the birth control pill you may need to take certain nutrients to mitigate the effects of that and help reduce inflammation so certain things i would never take like premarin which is a hormone that drives inflammation but i i certainly wouldn't tell everybody to stop the birth control pill but i think you have to know what you're doing and actually offset the harm by taking the right nutrients to to actually mitigate the damage and the inflammation that comes from that last question here before we go into final thoughts and conclusions can inflammation be tied to our genetics are some people more prone to developing markers of inflammation especially chronic inflammation absolutely i mean we're all heterogeneous you know we have 20 000 genes we have about 5 million variations in those genes and some of those variations predispose you to inflammation and we test those i do that in my actual practice looking at saliva swabs that measure dna and we can look for variations in certain genes that affect the cytokines like interleukins and cnf alphonse other genes and we can see oh you're someone who if you get some trigger is way more likely to be inflamed so there are people who are predisposed inflammation but that doesn't mean they're predestined to inflammation so they need to identify one the sources of inflammation in their life and get rid of them we've talked about those and they need to include anti-inflammatory strategies in their life an anti-inflammatory diet more polyphenols probiotics antioxidants and obviously other anti-inflammatory strategies like adequate sleep and exercise and stress reduction so forth so hot and cold therapies we just need to upregulate the anti-inflammatory system and calm down the inflammatory system so yes there are people who are genetically predisposed but it doesn't mean they're predestined so not everybody will have access to a functional medicine doctor obviously if they do that's fantastic and amazing you can go to ifm.org and find somebody in your area it is often expensive insurance doesn't cover it but it's and it's not available to everybody but if you can it's a great thing if you can't and for example they wanted to explore the topic of genetics a lot of people have 23andme data are there any of those websites that you like or would recommend to people that they can plug in their raw data and get back some of these unique markers that they have to pay attention for their own genetics i mean there are uh is a genetic genie which is sort of a interpretive guide where you can plug in your 23andme data which can be helpful for looking for problems with methylation and glutathione and detoxification and some of the inflammation genes uh 23andme only does a small slice of your genome it doesn't look at everything so uh we do more clinical testing uh and i tend to do that and focus on that so there may be there's so much going on right now in the space i may not be familiar with it but there probably are companies that are looking at inflammatory genes that are available to consumers the question is when you do that information and i think that's the challenge for people so how do you change your diet what supplements you take what do you avoid i mean it gets a little granular so it's usually better to work with someone who's experienced to understand these tests how to mitigate your risk and to to create a lifestyle that actually helps to reduce inflammation if you loved that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out here healthspan is how many years you're alive that you're healthy and lifespan is how many years you're alive so if you spend you know the first 50 years healthy and then you start having heart attacks and diabetes and obesity and chronic disease which by the way affects 6 out of 10 americans 88 percent of metabolic and healthy

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 258,364

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: CSkbXhjwStE

Length: 62min 23sec (3743 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021