Food As Medicine Preventing & Treating | Dr. Mark Hyman

has anything they'd ever heard of FLC syndrome you know what that is that's when you feel like crap does anybody have that who here has some sort of chronic ailment or something that isn't right or doesn't feel good in their body anybody a lot of you right you're a young healthy audience but all of us are often walking around with something and most of us when we go to the doctor they go well your tests are fine your exam is fine you know I don't know what's wrong with you and there's not a one of two answers to that problem either you're crazy or your doctor is missing something and what's really extraordinary in this moment in time is that medicine is going through a paradigm shift that is profound and it completely is forcing us to reimagine biology and disease for the first time in the history of our species we actually are having insight into the wonder of biology how things work what are the laws of nature when it comes to our human biology we never had a clue because most of our conditions that we have had are diagnosed in a way that doesn't make sense anymore given the information we have you know we used to go to the doctor when we had a headache we went to the head doctor we had an elbow pain we went to the joint doctor we had a stomachache we went to the stomach doctor but the truth is the body isn't organized that way just because medicine is organized that way it doesn't actually match reality it doesn't match reality we have a very different framework now that we need to use to understand disease it's based on systems thinking how everything connects together how our biology works as an integrated model so if you want to biohack your health or biohack disease or create optimal functioning you can't use our modern medical system of thinking because that system doesn't approximate reality we are focused on symptoms and not causes we're focused on the symptoms not the system we're focused on organs not the organism or focus on what disease you have instead of why do you have this so we need to reframe what we're doing and I unfortunately had to learn this the hard way about 20-some years ago I was quite ill I went from being very very healthy riding my bike a hundred miles a day being able to remember 30 patients at the end of the day without any notes and dictate all their charts to not being able to walk up the stairs not being able to remember where I was at the end of a sentence and I didn't know what happened to me I was 36 years old and my whole system collapsed I'd been a yoga teacher before I was a doctor I ran five miles a day I ate a healthy diet which I thought was a healthy diet and something just went terribly wrong and I had to literally reverse engineer my health because every single doctor told me that I was depressed or I had chronic fatigue right fibromyalgia whatever I had and no one actually helped me figure it out and it turned out that my entire system broke down from living in China having mercury poisoning I had mercury poisoning because I lived in China which has the worst pollution on the planet and I have poor genes that help me detoxify so I couldn't get rid of the toxins and in that discovery of my biology I literally cell by cell molecule by molecule system by system had to understand what was going on my immune system broke down I developed sores and rashes all over my body I developed terrible gut issues I had digestive bloating and diarrhea for years I had severe muscle pain and aches like had cogging dysfunction it's like I couldn't remember anything focus pay attention I was depressed was I got a depression a DD and dementia all at once and I was desperate to figure out what was going on and through my own unwinding of my biology I was able to figure out this model of functional medicine and I found pioneers in that field and I went and learned at their feet and I began to discover there was a whole field of thinking that was reorganizing our thoughts because we don't actually have a model to describe disease today it's really backward for example today we're learning that the microbiome has the capacity to connect to so many different diseases it can cause heart attacks right the bacteria in your gut our whole living organism that creates so many diseases heart attacks cancer obesity type 2 diabetes Alzheimer's autoimmune disease allergies asthma fibromyalgia all these things can be the result of changes in your gut flora and yet when you go to the doctor with arthritis they don't ask you about your poop right when you go to the heart doctor they're not asking you about what's going on with your gut flora you have three pounds of bacteria in there there's ten times as many bacterial cells as your own cells there's a hundred times as much bacterial DNA in you then your own DNA and that's dynamically interacting with you you have 20,000 genes you about two million bacterial genes and they're dynamically interacting with you all the time and when you when you don't understand that the definitions that we have of disease don't make sense we can't fix it so I was able to repair my biology to fix myself and to transform my biology by using the science of functional medicine which helps me map out the way the body actually functions and instead of looking at the signs and symptoms and the organs at the top of the tree I go down into the roots what are the fundamental drivers of disease what are the underlying causes of illness how do we actually get to what's making us sick and for one in two Americans pre-diabetes and about 70% of us obese and by the way this is not just an American problem 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics are in the developing world China's number one India's number two the Middle East has the most per capita diabetics about one in four to one and three of the population is type two diabetic so we really need a new way of thinking about this and so I rather than going down to the branches and the leaves and the organs I go down into the roots and I look at the fundamental factors that are driving disease what's the underlying lifestyle factors the environmental factors what's your diet what's your stress level what are the ingredients for health so it's actually quite simple rather than just focusing on the symptoms I go to the cause and this is a timeline we use to help us map the story of your life I want to know what happened in the womb I want to happen with your mother whether she was sick whether she took antibiotics with her she had immunisations what she ate I want to know what happened at your birth was it a c-section was it something that had trauma what were you breastfed or bottle-fed did you have early antibiotics all these things set up the conditions for your life and what were the insults or traumas along your life that led to you having this problem in this moment and then we map this out in what we call the matrix now this is the model that we use to basically biohack any disease so people say dr. Hyman do you treat X or Y and I'm like well yes I treat the human body I don't actually treat disease the extraordinary thing about functional medicine is that you don't have to know the disease that you're treating in order to optimize health you follow this model and you can see tremendous transformations in biology for example that was a guy came in to see me I mentioned yesterday who had dementia he was seven years old he was pretty desperate his wife was very upset and basically went from being a CEO of his company there not being able to basically almost tie his shoes or function in any way had to quit work and was at home basically drooling and depressed and demented and he came in and turned out he had a whole series of problems that were causing his brain to not function properly he had heavy metal poisoning because he lived in Pittsburgh and there was coal burning there in Pittsburgh because of the steel plants he had insulin resistance or pre-diabetes because his diet was high in sugar and starch he had severe gut issues he had bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in his gut that was leading to his brain dysfunction because this gut bacteria weren't working and he had a bunch of genetic things that set him up for problems problems with methylation and sulfation which these basic biochemical reactions that have to function for you to be healthy and rather than say I'm going to treat your dementia I said why don't we optimize your gut flora why don't we optimize your biochemistry and methylation with the right foods and nutrients why don't we fix the insulin resistance with the right higher fat low glycemic diet why don't we help get rid of the heavy metals and get your feelings replace and chelate you and get you full of glutathione all the things you need to upregulate your detox system and I said let's see what happens like he had this extraordinary transformation where he went from being basically demented and depressed and being back to work functional and happy again and having his ability to be in life and his grandkids weren't scared to be around him anymore and it wasn't it wasn't because it wasn't because we are treating the mention I was simply optimizing his biological systems using this model so on the left hand side there's the predisposing factors all the triggers and on the bottom there's the underlying fundamental lifestyle factors which are all the things that help us to provide inputs into the body to create health so Dave talks about biohacking and all these little things that he's tweaking in the body it's all based on this model his next book is on mitochondria which is one of the system's energy system JG talks about eliminating the seven foods that's based on dealing with your gut and food sensitivities and allergies that create inflammation in the body we're all basically coming from the same paradigm and yet this is not something that's something I invented or that's not a new trick or technique or some little bio hacking thing this is the future of healthcare and medicine this is actually now being invited in the center of Cleveland Clinic where the CEO of one of the greatest health care centers in the world has invited me to come in and create a model that transforms healthcare because he knows that we can't solve our current problem of chronic disease using the same system and it's very powerful so uh I want to sort of go into a little bit of a story about a recent experience I had and then share with you why I think it's not the whole story I went to this place called health nucleus which is a part of the human longevity Institute which is started by craig Venter now craig Venter is the guy who decoded the human genome he basically took our genes and he analyzed every gene of his own sequenced it and he did it faster and better than the NIH the National Institute of Health and he did it for 300 million dollars and now it's health nucleus you can get your genes decoded for a thousand dollars soon it'll probably be a hundred dollars and I went through an entire workup where I had my genome mapped I had my metabolomic my microbiome mapped I had all sorts of blood tests twenty miles of blood I had a full body MRI scan a total measurement of my echocardiogram my body composition everything was measured it was a lot of data and the problem with a lot of data is that you have to make sense out of it how does it connect where are the dots that connect everything together a functional medicine is the filter and someone said to me you know how do you actually think about this differently well if you think about physics you know we have laws of physics that explain the workings the universe gravity the the rotation of the planets all these phenomena that are quite extraordinary we can interpret to the filter of mass and physics but human biology we don't have any natural laws that we've discovered about how the human body works it's very descriptive it's like you have these symptoms you have this disease it doesn't talk about why or what the mechanisms are what the causes are so functional medicine is like the natural laws of biology and you can explain a whole host of different phenomena by means of a very few number of general laws so when I went to to Craig Venters Institute I had this whole thing mapped out and yet I got all this data and unless you have a filter to understand how it all connects and what to do with it you can't actually can't create health and so I kind of had my whole genome map this is my genome here this is all me you can see everything right into Mayer and well it's more interesting to me than this this is actually what I call the super gene now the super gene is much more important which is not what is your genome but how is your genome working what is causing genes to get turned on or off you can't change your genes but you can change the expression of your genes you can change how those genes work which ones are turned on or off and there are a whole host of things that influence that it's not just your genes it's the it's the food that you eat the change is your gene expression it's your social interactions and connections that change your gene expression we now know that if you have somebody who you're with and you have a deep heart connection with them and a positive interaction you literally can change each other's gene expression in the moment and if you have a negative interaction you can change your gene expression in the moment the same thing with food with every bite of food you're changing your gene expression so we talked about the expose ohm which is what are your genes exposed to right it's the environment toxins and light and air and water and community and connection and food all the inputs that we're constantly feeling EMF everything around us is always giving us input into our gene expression that's called the exposure when that accounts for over 90% of the result that we see as our phenotype which is who we are in this moment whether we're sick or healthy is related to these inputs to our genes so you have control over those inputs most of the and you can change your gene expression very quickly someone said you know how can you reverse disease even at late stages is it possible I said well yeah a guy named George who came to see me was 300 pounds he was 63 years old he had heart failure diabetes he had angina and reflux he had prostate problems erectile dysfunction and sinus issues and you know all kinds of processes I always say I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems so he he said to me can you help me I said yeah I can help you but you have to do everything I say so he did everything I said a year later he was 300 pounds he came back he lost 150 pounds every single one of his diseases was gone now he's 70 something years old and he's starting a bath house in New Mexico so the power of biology to change at any age is really remarkable you can reverse aging and I've seen this over and over so the super gene is your genome it's your expose ohm it's your microbiome as I said because your microbiome is 2 million genes are constantly interacting with you and your own genes and it's called the hollow gene but it's also your neutral genome what are the foods doing that are affecting you and how are those affecting your gene expression it's your proteome which are the proteins that are produced from your genes your metabolomic metabolites that are produced from your genes I had my metabolomic set up like 20 blood test there was 2,500 blood tests I had measured so that's really more important is how are your genes being influenced and how did we map all those influences in a system that makes sense that's what functional medicine is it's sort of an operating system it's a way of thinking it's not a new test or modality or specialty it's a way of thinking about solving the puzzle of disease so this is some of my genes here you know I was happy that I had more genes than mostly anybody else I had over 7 million or 6 million variants so we all have variations in our genetic code I had more than average I was having about that and I and I had I had a tell him your length of 43 years and I'm 56 years old so that made me happy so what I'm doing clearly is working and I found out that I actually uh genetically am more diverse than I thought I thought I was a Jew from you know the Middle East and that's where I came from but turns out I am from the Middle East I'm also from Asia and part agen I'm from West Africa and I'm even half a percent Native American and one and I'm one I think and a half percent neanderthal so that explains you know why I have a big butt like Chinese food like sweat lodges good filter fish and I pull women's hair out so and and you can see this is interesting that can map your dad's you know ancestry so my dad's from West Africa my mom is from Middle East and all over Asia and here's my new fall jeans you can see right there it's kind of exciting that this is my metabolomic tabal ohm is this map of 2500 metabolites but it's just data how do you make sense out of all this data how do you make big data small how do you create big insights out of big data well that's the beauty of functional medicine so one of the things that I learned was that I have areas of my mitochondria that are not working as well and I know that's probably true as a sort of consequence of the mercury poisoning and the illness that I had and so I know how now how to tweak this by basically biohacking my biochemistry and using a few nutrients to upregulate various pathways now that's kind of cool but at the end of the day what really we need to know is how do we undo the things that often are happening to our biology now this is Clayton now Clayton was a little boy who had severe ATD he also had asthma he had anxiety had abdominal pain he had anal itching and that was just the A's he had a whole list of other problems he had eczema on hives and insomnia and muscle cramps and he had severe ATD and dysgraphia couldn't write a penmanship was so bad so rather than give him ritalin and rather than give him asthma medications and medications for stomach pain he was on seven medications you know he was on a pill for every ill instead of asking the question why these doctors were like what disease you have what drug do I give you and with Clayton said I said what's going on why is he having all these different diseases why does he have so many different problems at ten or twelve years old why is this going on so I began to dig in his story and we found all sorts of imbalances in his biology we found that he had severe gut issues he had overgrowth of yeast in his gut from eating a diet that was Oh sugar and processed food and taking antibiotics for years he had lead poisoning from having led in his environment he had severe nutritional deficiencies which which were from his diet he ate a processed food diet processed meats lots of sugar trans fats he had trans fats he had no mega 3 fats he had low levels of zinc magnesium antioxidants he had low levels of B vitamins and we were able to map all this stuff out he had food sensitivities he had reactions to gluten he had all this total system breakdown so rather than treated as a DD and rather than treat his asthma or his irritable bowel or his hives or his eczema I was anxiety with all these different drugs which is what we learned to do in medicine I simply got his system in balance and what was really shocking to me this is her one of the lightbulb went off in my head this was his handwriting when he came in to see me was 12 years old you couldn't read anything right and after two months his mother brought his homework back and it looked like this now I didn't try to biohack his handwriting or treat his brain all I did was basically take out the things that were creating imbalance and putting the things that were creating balance so it's really a very simple equation when you want to create health if you want to biohack your health it's actually quite simple I only asked two questions when someone comes to the office to see me one is what do I need to take away that's bothering this person is there something that's pissing their system off it's irritating them that doesn't work for them that isn't right that I need to remove and it's a short list these are the causes of disease it's toxins allergens microbes poor diet stresses five causes of all disease and those interact with your genes to create imbalance and then there's ingredients for health what are the ingredients for creating a healthy human I mean whoever here is in health care you probably didn't have a class in school that says creating a healthy human 101 did you that's probably not right so we we have to actually go back and say well what is it that creates a healthy human what are the inputs that create health I mean if you have a racehorse you know how to get that horse to hot to a high performance level you have to feed it the right food you have to exercise it the right way get it the right amount of rest all those things are scientifically designed to create phenomenal performance and racehorses but we don't treat ourselves that way I mean you know I mean most of the stuff that we eat we shouldn't even be considered food it's like a food like substance so with with with ingredients we have to think of what are they if it's the right food you know when you heard a little bit about it just before about what our indigenous foods wore it's just low process real whole fresh food it's low in sugar high in the right fats I've written a dozen books about it it's pretty straightforward everybody has the basic same concept of what is a healthy diet the second is the right nutrients it's also light and air and water you can get a lot of this afternoon and love and connection and community all those are ingredients for creating a health human sleep restoration and when we when we don't have that input we actually get sick now with this kid I used a powerful new drug that I didn't tell you about fully this drug has the power to optimize dozens of hormones to improve the expressions of tens of thousands of genes to optimize hundreds of thousands of protein networks to balance your immune system and cytokines to optimize your gut flora and it works faster better and cheaper than any drug ever discovered has no side effects since available to almost anybody on the planet you know what drug it is love well it could be loved it's actually food food is the most powerful drug it's not like a drug it actually is a drug and if I had to go you know to a deserted island I only had one drug to use it would be this drug to reverse disease it's the most powerful drug I wrote something called the ten day detox diet and in that program I basically synthesized functional medicine a eliminated the foods that create disease putting the foods that create health and give people a few simple practices to do in ten days their scores on the FLC quiz which is when you feel like crap went down by 62% that means all diseases improve migraines as my arrow about depression joint pain insomnia anxiety whatever it was autoimmune disease one guy came up as I have rheumatoid arthritis in ten days I feel better is that possible I'm like yeah that's possible because food is the most powerful drug I had one one said dr. Hyman I had type 2 diabetes I got off 56 units of insulin in three days how is that possible another ones that I had lifelong depression on off medication and out of psychiatric hospitals in three days don't feel depressed for the first time my life is that possible I said yes it's possible because food is the most powerful drug on the planet and it's not just calories food is actually information it's literally instructions like code so you can upgrade or downgrade your biological software by what you put in your mouth every day so next time you take a bite of food just remember that it's not energy it's not just fuel it's actually instructions it's information and what it what you want to be telling your body to upgrade or downgrade your biological software now there's one more thing I want to share with you which is yes food is medicine and yes we can understand functional medicine and go into the details of biological networks and understand how everything connects together and I've spent my life studying biochemistry and physiology and genetics and the connections and the patterns and everything and I've seen more data than most physicians because for 20 years I've had a unique practice where I've been able to do five thousand dollars worth of testing and almost everybody and see millions of data points on tens of thousands of people look at the patterns and connections and I was just so focused on this and then one day the earthquake in Haiti happened and it changed everything for me to make a long story short I basically ended up in Haiti after the earthquake and it was pretty intense we arrived in this massive destruction in the main hospital and I met a guy named Paul Farmer Paul Farmer is an extraordinary man who went to Haiti when he was in medical school in one of the poorest countries in the world it's the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere or most people live on less than a dollar a day don't have clean water or sanitation and most people had given up on these people because they had TB and AIDS and there was no way to treat these people because you need complicated drug regimens and he said no no we can help these people we can solve this problem what seemed insoluble we can solve and he wasn't by better drugs or surgery that Paul fixed these people it was by the power of each other he called it accompaniment we accompany each other to health use friends neighbors community health workers that he trained who are just their neighbors to help each other to call each other's houses and make sure they had enough food to eat and water to drink and took their pills on time and had a place to sleep and just basically took care of each other and it was you have power of that social connection that was able to drive this transformation that's been used for the Gates Foundation the Clinton Foundation it wasn't through better improvements in medicine it was just through the power of our social connections and I realized that it wasn't our genetic threads that were making us sick it was our social threads that were making us sick that just as our social connections can make us sick they can also make us well I realized that this was also true of chronic disease that that actually not just infectious disease was contagious but actually so was chronic illness diabetes is contagious heart disease is contagious obesity is contagious and this work has been shown over and over to be true this is the guy from Harvard named Christakis who's looked at the social networks and our patterns in life and he's found that when you looked at huge amounts of data that there are clusters of people who kind of group together in social networks that drive disease so you found that if you're overweight and your friends are overweight sorry if you're overweight your friend is overweight you're more likely to be overweight than if your family is overweight if you're if you have a friend who's overweight is a close friend you're about 170 times 70% more likely to be overweight than if your sister or brothers overweight you're only 40% more likely to be overweight so it's those social thread that's connects us that are more important than our genetic things but there's also there's also the happiness clusters so people who actually cluster together and are happy together do better so what really became evident to me was that we have to reframe our idea of how we change biology using the understanding of functional medicine in biological networks but we have to change behavior by dealing with the social drivers of disease because I know when I go out to eat with somebody they're worried about what they're having for dinner or whether they're gonna order dessert or not and I don't have to say anything right because it's that powered peer pressure when I'm around Dave Asprey I'm not gonna be eating bread right so I think we all we all feel that experience net so if your friends are having all these bad habits you're going to have those habits if your friends have good habits you're going to have it so I'm pondering all this and then one day this guy comes in my office who was very overweight and this guy named rick warren who you might have heard of he wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life which sold 32 million copies he put 10 million people in small groups around the world who live better lives Purpose Driven lives and he was very overweight he's like I want to get healthy can you help me I'm sure so I said let's have dinner afterwards we had dinner I said tell me about your church because I'm a Jewish doctor from New York I don't know much about churches in Southern California I said I said what's going on with your church so well we have 30,000 people I said Wow he said we have 5000 small groups that meet every week to live better lives I'm like oh my god and a light bulb went off I said why don't we create a healthy living program delivered to these small groups and see what happens we thought a few hundred people would show up fifteen thousand people came to church we had to turn two thousand people away they signed up for this program we created a forty day program than a year-long program in the first year they lost a quarter of a million pounds and all sorts of diseases went away right people's diabetes went away their autoimmune disease went away their reflux went away their migraines went away their auto mean disease went away it wasn't because we treated disease it wasn't one doctor treating one patient it was one doctor was a couple of us it was actually dr. oz another doctor dr. Amon and me it was a Jewish doctor Christian doctor and a Muslim doctor sounds like the beginning of a bad joke but it was quite extraordinary so we wrote this we wrote this book called the Daniel plan I wanted to call it the Jewish doctors guide for Christian wellness and it won the Christian Book of the Year award last year which is really cool I think I'm the only Jewish guy to ever win the Christian Book of the Year award well there was this one other guy that was one of the guy and I and I I found this profound change because when people started to do this together when they connected together when they work together and played together and ate together everything changed they changed what was acceptable in the culture they no longer had ice cream socials and pancake breakfasts and doughnuts and soda everywhere it was like they were trying to get their people to have an early eating all that stuff I go on a stage in the church I said listen if you had Jesus come to dinner what would you feed him a Big Mac fries and a coke I said listen if you believe God lives in you why are you feeding him crap I said what you have to eat is very simple you just leave the food that man made and eat the food that God made right did did God make a Twinkie no I actually have a slide one of my lectures I put up which is showing that label of a Twinkie and I said if anybody can guess what this food is I'll give you a thousand dollars and nobody's been able to guess because you can't tell what it is if you cover up the front of the package because all the ingredients are the same process stuff so we we created this program that we've now expanded to hundreds of churches around the world and I realize that it's really the power of each other that's going to solve our global health problem that we have to connect with the power of love and that's why we're all here right we're all here because we want to be part of a community we want to be part of a tribe we have a longing to belong as part of our ancient DNA Ian Wilson called it a social conquest of the earth it's this powerful drive for us to connect with each other and that drives our behavior so we have to basically love our way out of our chronic disease epidemic we have to use the power of functional medicine to change biological networks and the power of love and community to change our biology and that's really at the end of the day what all matters so I'm going to leave you with a quote from an African proverb which says if you want to travel swiftly travel alone but if you want to travel far travel together so let's all do this together thank you you

Channel: Mindvalley

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Keywords: Food As Medicine Preventing and Treating, Mark Hyman, Fundamental factors of driving disease, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr Mark Hyman, a-fest talk, Functional medicine, food insider, purpose of life, How to connect with people, money management, self development, motivational speech, motivational speech for success in life Inspiration, meaning of life, Spiritual formation, self worth, success stories, how to manage money, understanding stock market, time management tips

Id: GYlKqiH1N_s

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2016