Dr. Mark Hyman: White Flour Can Be Worse For Your Health Than Sugar

mark has a new book out but he's written a number of books they're all excellent but one is called the diet we both have and that's because you were on a panel and you were moderate conversation between advocating a paleo diet and someone who was advocating a vegan diet and you basically said i'm teagan right it was they were just fighting and i just like these are these crazy diet wars and all these opposing camps and everybody's fighting with each other and i realize that they have far more approaches that are trying to improve our health have more in common with each other than with the traditional american diet or what we call the sad diet the standard american diet which is 60 ultra processed foods comes from three crops corn wheat and soy turned in all size shapes and colors of extruded food-like substances that actually are horrible for our health and are killing 11 million people a year around the world and are accelerating our deaths from covid dramatically in this country because we know that with covid it disproportionately affects those who are overweight not even obese but even just overweight and the obliques have more risk and those chronic disease caused by the food we're eating have the worst risk of death and dying so we're really in this in this moment where you know it's kind of a do or die situation around our diet and our health and and it's not a time to uh just indulge and put on the quarantine 15 or the covid19 mark because it's been very stressful so people who are stress eaters have more stress and are responding by eating more i think also we miss the things between and i hate to say it but you know eating can be really pleasurable and yeah i have a sweet tooth way too many sweets and i just want to reset and i wanted i want to feel better i want to have more energy and i want all the people who follow me or whoever's interested in kind of doing a reset and getting back on track to do it with us because yeah fun to do it as a community and i love the the subtitle of the book which is 21 practical principles for for reclaiming your health and a nutritionally confusing work i think onwards and we works great for some people i've done you know back in the day the scarsdale diet i and and i always kind of run into the same cycle of i don't eat enough i get really hungry i make bad choices i say i blew it i eat it down and i start the next day and it kind of like this endless cycle and i don't know if anybody who's watching i want to have some food and had had an eating disorder when i was younger thank goodness i don't anymore but i do have kind of a screwed up relationship with food like so many honestly people and of course so many women so i think that that what the reason why i was really excited to do this is because you're a scientist and what you say is backed by science and i think you're also going to help me and every anybody else who wants to do it kind of rethink their relationship with food absolutely and and so so let's talk about um let me give everyone kind of what we're doing here yeah so we're talking to mark today uh just for about an a half hour with kind of the basics of what this book is the book comes out tomorrow it's called the pagan diet everybody sorry it's backwards and the instagram and we gotta fix that yeah we're gonna have a pickup call if you guys don't get my morning newsletter please do because first of all it's excellent second of all it helps me employ a lot of people uh journalists who are excellent and smart and we want to keep them employed so we have to keep growing so go to katiecouric.com for all the information about where you can order mark's book or you can go to amazon obviously but of course i'd like you to read my newsletter yes it's a good one i get it every morning i get it every morning i love it we're kidding but anyway so um we're going to talk about this today and on march 1st everybody we're going to do mark's 21 day detox now mark please explain what a detox is because i think a lot of people think it means something that you don't want it to be so tell us well you know people think of detox i think of you know drug and rehab and alcohol about not eating anything or yeah or yeah or just having green juices and coffee enemas and i'm not talking about that i think i think what most people don't realize and don't connect is how they feel with what they eat so people may feel tired they might not sleep well they might have migraines they might have irritable bowel they might have joint pain they might have skin issues they might just be tired they might be gaining weight and they don't really connect the dots between what they eat how they feel so the whole purpose of a reset think about like a reset i mean detox is just sort of a commonly used word but essentially it's like a reset how do you reset your biology to its original factory settings because okay you were talking about how you know you get the visual cycle where you eat the sweets and you crave more sweets and you can't stop and it's like a whole thing and it's not because you have some moral failure or you're a weak person or you have some type of eating disorder it's because your biology has been hijacked by the wrong foods and has not been healed by the right foods and and the key principle of of the pagan diet and the functional medicine is that food is medicine it's not like medicine actually is medicine and it regulates all your biology so it regulates your hormones it regulates your hunger your sleep your microbiome your immune system your your your detoxification systems everything is controlled by the food you eat so if you upgrade the quality of your diet for just a short period of time you know a couple of weeks you'll see profound changes if you take out the crap and put in the good stuff your body can literally go back to its original factory settings you know how would that be and a lot of us have you know bugs in our software that are causing us to behave in ways that we attribute to psychological or emotional issues or to body image issues and some of that may be true and there may be those things for people but i i often say you don't know what's true until you hit the reset button so that's why we're doing this with you is just to give people a chance to experience together with us how differently they can feel in a really short time and i i just want to use this example because people don't get how powerful food is you know we we talk about poor metabolic health being a risk factor for covet and 88 of us are in poor metabolic health that's 9 out of 10 of us which is crazy how could that be it's because 75 overweight and then about a a quarter of the skinny people also are what we call skinny fat so they look skinny but inside they're fat because they eat crap and their metabolism is the same as that of an overweight person so it's crazy and so we we have this poor metabolic health and it drives our behavior and when we when we hit the reset button we can literally change all the settings and allow our biology to work better and to actually self-regulate in a more authentic way that's based on what we do so like animals have an inherent nutritional wisdom you know they'll eat what they need to eat they'll eat the right plants and they'll forage for the right stuff and they well we've lost our nutritional wisdom because we just are addicted to a lot of biologically addictive foods that are sugar for as the number one flour is pretty right up there with sugar and then there's all the chemicals in food that make us addicted like msg and other things are in processed food so we get in this vicious cycle and the beauty of this reset is that we get to see you know what really is our baseline and how we feel and most people say dr hyman i didn't know i was feeling so bad until i started feeling so good and so that's really what i wish for people it's just connected us and then you can go back to eating your sheet kick if you want but at least you know if you do that you both you won't though people won't because they go i i feel great i don't have migraines my joints don't hurt my nose isn't running my irritable bowels gone i feel more energy i'm not depressed i mean it's pretty amazing how powerful food and mood and connection is is really is really true and you're right i mean and also diseases in general and the book is great because i i just want to read everyone afters because i'm like yes yes yes when i read the chapters uh use your food as your pharmacy and you spell pharmacy with an f in other words it's all about fresh produce everybody and getting healthy food eat the rainbow which we've heard follow the 75 rule eat the right beans whole grains nuts and seeds eat your meat as medicine now i am a meat eater and i think you can be a smart meat eater by not making it the star of the of the plate but so you say be picky about poultry eggs and fish have fats with every meal because as we now know that's satiate you in a way that really stave off hunger and i think your philosophy mark isn't it that you kind of you kind of keep your your blood sugar stable throughout the day yes okay you don't as i do make bad choices that's right and get kind of irrational about what put in your mouth right absolutely and there's some really cool new continuous glucose monitors where you can check your blood sugar 24 7 and it it's a shocking uh experience for people because they don't realize that oh i ate this and look at my sugars shot up and and you can get them from like freestyle libre which abbott makes there's a company called levels that does this but there's a really interesting trend that's going to be happening where where for the average person it's going to be relatively inexpensive and cheap to measure your sugar and you'll do forever like a diabetic but you can see how the impact of this has and and i think what i was going to say before about the changes in metabolic health that need to happen now because of covet is it happens quickly so if you take a diabetic who's over obese who's about who gets gastric bypass surgery you know they get their stomach stapled and their diabetes goes away in a week or two they're still overweight but they change the food they ate now it was the theory that that was because you changed the hormones you stapled the stomach the surgery did something so but no one had looked at actually what happens when you compare people who've got a gastric bypass who are obese with those who didn't get a bypass but ate the same diet that they would prescribe to someone who had a bypass and what they found there was no difference it was the food it wasn't the surgery and and it happens like that and you know we've had patients get off insulin in three days for her type 2 diabetes because they change their diet and that's really what what i want people to experience because we could talk all day long they could listen to you that goes to me they can read my book i don't care about that i just want people to have the experience of what it feels like in a very short time to reset their biology and feel what it feels like to be themselves so let's talk about the basics because as i said everybody we're going to do this on march 1st and by the way i totally appreciate someone said don't drink out of single-use plastic bottles this is very unusual for me i was playing tennis this morning i didn't bring my water bottle they had some of these in a cooler and i actually took it but i don't usually drink single used blood you were for calling me out and it's an anomaly but thank you for mentioning it so let's talk about the basics because as i said i'm gonna maybe what also uh put in wake up called the grocery list yeah that people need to buy they don't have to be fancy or expensive we we need to make that very clear in fact pepper and fed up we talked about the price of a fast food meal versus like a cook at home healthy meal and the healthy meal was what was much less expensive but anyway do a grocery list but why not for these purposes today and for everybody who's going to be joining me um why don't we talk about sort of the very basic principles of what this 21 day program is going to be like and a program that i hope i can adhere to for life because i want to i want to be healthy and i want to live long and by the way i'm getting such a gut mark what i know because of my age but no it's not i'm 61 and i have like don't want to embarrass you but i have like six percent body fat it's possible even for women i've seen it i have a i have serious belly fat that i yeah i throw myself back and i sit in a chair sometimes i look down and i look like i'm six months pregnant but we can fix that it'll be fixed in three weeks out there are feeling me when i say that um so let's talk about kind of the basic principles of this i'm going to call it a reset because i don't idea of calling it a detox right i agree i agree that's what we call the 10-day reset but we can do it for 10 days two weeks and here's the deal with the vegan diet it's not it's not exclusive it's not restrictive it's inclusive of all aspects of food that meet many dietary cultural religious preferences on philosophical approaches but the principle that's really important is quality is that food is information it's medicine so whatever you're eating make sure it's the best quality that you can get that will regulate your biology in the right way as opposed to for example uh let's say you're eating just one example it's like dairy we talk about the book so i'm i think some people are against dairy or not i think the question is what dairy and not all food's the same so if you have a a cow that's one of these hybridized holstein cows that's spread for high milk production this pump growth hormone and antibiotics that's fed all kinds of unnatural diets that change the quality of the milk and and and the properties of it is that the same as eating a an in a sheep or a goat that's foraging on wild plants that's changing the quality of their milk and has a different form of casein which doesn't cause inflammation very different for example goats feeding on certain shrubs can have high levels of phytochemicals in their milk just like green tea so it's like the powerful benefits of green tea you can get from eating goat milk that's fed certain shrubs and it's a different form of casein which doesn't cause gut issues and inflammation all these other issues that regular milk does so it's still milk but like what milk what meat what nuts what seeds what grains what greens right for eating white flour you know that is pretty harmful right because that is basically like sugar and especially in america because i got to europe and i eat pasta i'm fine well it's true because they use a different form of wheat different genetic strain doesn't have the same gluten proteins doesn't have the same starch level it has potentially other phytochemicals in it so it's a more more well tolerated but if you're eating white flour here you're eating dwarf wheat is super starchy it's worse than sugar it has more gluten proteins that cause all kinds of inflammation it's preserved with calcium proprionate that causes autistic behavior in animals and behavioral issues in kids and it has glyphosate because they spray it at the end of harvest to dry it out and that glyphosate can harm our microbiome and cause all stuff so that's that's the one kind of flower hard everyone mark knows but then but then but then you have like then you have this other flower that i write about the book it's called himalayan tartary buckwheat which is this incredible grain it comes from the himalayas it's grown in rough conditions and that makes the plant really robust and has 132 phytochemicals that rejuvenate your immune system that don't raise your blood sugar that have higher levels of protein and more nutrient density and you can make pancakes out of it so you make pancakes out of white flour you make pancakes out of this buckwheat flour totally different for your body so that's the fundamental principle is quality and food is medicine but i think you might be scaring some people off with like flowers and i want everyone to know that this program is accessible and that yes there are some really cool products that we can talk about and look into but you know you can really do this right i'm going to your neighborhood so i don't want it to feel too no no no no i was just giving an example of like what would right so so the focus is is you cut out the bad stuff you put in the good stuff right so the the the pig and that in general is very inclusive you can have all kinds of things rains beans dairy everything but when you're doing the 10-day reset you really want to get rid of all the potential inflammatory things you want to get all the crap so it's more of a shorter shorter term reset but i thought the reset was 21 days yeah 21 days you can do 21 days 10 days whatever whatever you once and i will 21 it's good 21 is good because how long it takes to break habits to do 21 too yeah absolutely yes um so so you can eat uh really almost any vegetable that's not a starchy vegetable that's right potatoes butternut squash like all these different vegetables and you can eat a lot i think you say something like 9 to 12 cups a day yeah you can eat as much as you want it's unlimited refills and i typically have like three or four side dishes and vegetables i'm going to be roasting mushrooms have a uh you know stir-fried broccolini or i might have uh you know a salad on top of that with avocados and tomatoes and cucumbers i have a lot of different and you want variety so that's really key your plate should be 75 non-starchy veggies and then protein is really great if you want plant proteins you can use things like tofu and tempeh if you tolerate those which are higher in protein less than starch or you can use grass-fed meats or small like small fish if you if you don't have a lot of money you can use small canned fish like sardines or herring or mackerel they're very cheap and extremely nutritious they're super foods uh and then of course you know you can have some berries and fruit and low sugar fruit but not a ton of fruit just a modern amount of fruit lots of nuts and seeds like okay so so i i'm gonna have you go through a day of uh what what you might recommend we start eating and again maybe we can even do some menus and stuff you have some of those in your yeah absolutely but um so everybody because i've been reading the book so you should really for this reset stay away from fruits like bananas apples these very high sugar fruits directly or stick with primarily blueberries strawberries berries of all kinds any kind of blackberries yeah and kiwis are fine some some fruits are fine and i would say that the key point here is that um if you if you're focusing on your diet it's really simple it doesn't be complicated or difficult so for breakfast for example you can make pasta raised eggs you can cut up an avocado slice up some tomatoes throw some olive oil salt and pepper on there super easy and you can make the hard-boiled eggs the night before and it literally takes five minutes for lunch you can and you want to eat fat because the key to keeping your cravings down and hunger down is fat so i make up what i call a fat salad so i put like arugula and i have the pre-washed stuff because i'm lazy i'll throw on some cherry tomatoes not to cut anything i'll take an avocado scoop it out i'll throw in some pumpkin seeds which are full of zinc which is great for covet also lots of good fats in there i'll maybe throw some olives in there and then i'll i'll put olive oil olive oil in there and if i want i'm hungry i might put a i open a can of uh a mackerel or sardines or herring or a can of wild salmon and have it along with that and that's and and that's got omega-3 fat so you're having all these different fats with lots of vegetables and it's all so yummy and it's delicious and it's easy to make it probably could whip it together in 10 minutes and then dinner is like you know i just make it really simple you can have put a little fish and and pan fried roast in the oven or chicken breast or you have grass-fed steak if you want you can make some stir-fried veggies that take really just a few minutes chop up some veggies a little garlic ginger i don't make complicated recipes most of the time and i like to roast mushrooms that's my new favorite thing is roasting mushrooms just in the oven or a toaster oven and they're done so very simple cooking very delicious using olive oil salt pepper spices uh and if you want a snack you have nuts and seeds or and so what about grains are are we supposed to stay away from grains grade and of course my coffee what but tell me about grains dairy caffeine and i know sugar this is hard for me because i think i have a sugar problem mark yeah yeah you won't in a few days you'll notice in three days and we can talk about this next time but i had a woman come to a workshop i did and she's like drama there's no way i can get sugar i'm doing this program which is clean diet but i'm not gonna do it i've been addicted to sugar for decades and there's no way by day two she's like i have no cravings i feel good so if you eat this way what happens very quickly you change your hormones you quickly you change your brain chemistry and so all of a sudden you're not in the same vicious cycle that you were and you it's like surprising like why aren't why do i feel full why am i why am i you know not hungry right why why is everything easy and and what about so let me ask you about okay so sugar let's just get off sugar everybody we'll do it together what about what about grains mark grains are okay but i what i would say for initial for initial detox what i have people do is just get off of all the potentially problematic foods because some people have digestive issues and they can't really tolerate a lot of grains and beans some people have digestive issues or allergies they can't tolerate dairy so essentially what i do is try to give people a diet that eliminates all the potential problematic foods and it's mostly grains beans and dairy for for most people and then add them back after 21 days see how you feel you know i had a little boy who was just really struggling with all these recurrent infections and cough and fatigue and headaches and struggling and we cleaned up his diet we got him off of corn dairy i think gluten which were his big trigger foods and all this things went away and then over the holidays he cheated and he got sick right again so when you go back to eating you go oh i know what's going on but like the thing is katie if you have a horse standing on your foot all the time then you don't know what it feels like to have the horse off your foot until he gets off like all of a sudden geez i didn't know that my dog was caused by what i was eating then you eat it and you get a migraine or you eat it your joints start to hurt or you eat it your nose starts to run or eating you get irritable bowel syndrome have diarrhea well then you know it probably your body doesn't like it and then you can stay off at longer term let me ask you about and then if you have a little more time mark i know you have to go but we have a lot of people asking questions or we can do another one we can do another one anytime i got deepak chopra right after you okay so so coffee and dairy and can i cup a coffee in the morning please open this yes yes yes coffee is not the worst enemy yeah so coffee is the biggest source of antioxidants in the american diet but that's not a good thing it's because the american diet is just so crappy this has so many options but it but some people tolerate it fine it can affect people's sleep it can make people anxious it can make them irritable it raises cortisol so there are there are challenges with it for some people but most people do okay with it uh and that's why i say if you want to really clean the slate no alcohol no coffee but if you really want a cup of coffee that's okay yeah dairy gary you could have a non-dairy milk in it if you want as a creamer i would not do dairy for most people because again it's one of those common problems that causes proteins like drip allergies digestive skin issues eczema acne i wonder mark if the dairy is is exacerbating my eczema i know this is like 100 percent i think i'm on my eyelids and it's so weird and i did one of those allergies blur some of the chemicals in in some of these like shampoos and stuff but i also wonder if some of the food i'm eating is is inflammation yeah for sure katie the most common in my practice in functional medicine reason for people with eczema arthritis is gluten and dairy and sugar and that often affects the the microbiome which creates bad bugs in your gut and it causes inflammation and leaky gut so you're going to feel so good katie your eggs are going to go away your belly fat's going to go away you're going to turn the energy you're going to make a new movie listen uh you have me at leaky gut mark [Laughter] so listen here's the drill this is if you're just tuning in this is my good friend mark hyman we're going to do a 21 day reset it's called spring into health because it's really about feeling good you are probably going to lose weight but this is not the ultimate goal is really to feel better and i'm going to lose my belly fat if you have belly fat then you might want to lose yours too and then we're going to be checking in with mark periodically his book is called the pegan diet um where did i put oh here it is the pig diet um it comes out tomorrow uh subscribe to our newsletter i want to hear how you all are doing and um we do this again mark because i got so many good questions yeah yeah we can do it later this week you know one of the things that i know you believe in is you've got to eat a good breakfast and you know and i want to talk to you about intermittent fasting and all this stuff to get the best scientific and medically validated information to people so they can feel better and you know just be healthier yeah and that's the whole point of the book is take take the science make it really simple get the noise out of all the conversations get the confusion out of it and let people try in a way that's going to support their health to regenerate their own health and by the way the way i'm talking about it will help regenerate the planet too because it helps climate change and everything else that's wrong with the world well listen there's so i'm excited to to do this as a community with with the people who follow me and we'll be in touch you guys sign up for the newsletter we'll do another instagram live maybe uh we'll do it the day before march 1st so we can get everybody ready to go i'll put out a grocery list of things that you should buy buy my mark's book and um in the meantime tell oh what sign up for wake up call i said that we're going to get to your questions you guys i'm sorry we couldn't get them to to them today but let's do it maybe on uh february how many days in february this year it's 28 28. we'll do it on february 28th and um to get us all psyched to do the reset on march 1st and mark thank you for doing this with everybody mark's very expensive you guys so this is that we get them free but you know for for 17 you can you know get the whole thing you don't need me it's cheap if you guys like what you see subscribe right here

Channel: Katie Couric

Views: 150,258

Keywords: Katie Couric, Katie, Celebrity, Entertainment, health, healthy eating, diets, mark hyman, doctor, dieting, vegan, Paleo

Id: rpjGNhRWySw

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021