How to use FOOD as MEDICINE | Dr Mark Hyman | Feel Better Live More Podcast

so your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet so i wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues i would double down on eating what we've talked about today and it will have a profound effect on your immune system people don't understand that within a very short time a couple of weeks maybe you can really radically reverse your poor metabolic health as i say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body [Music] see that's the whole point of the pagan diet is that is that we we let our ideology trample over our biology in other words we let our ideas about what we should do get in the way of what our bodies need us to do and what they prefer so i you know as as a theorist you can say well everybody should be vegan or everybody should be paleo would be she a carnivore or eat raw or keto or whatever all those crazy diets and as a doctor you know this as a doctor sitting in the office seeing thousands and thousands of patients are running even more um teen blood tests lab work about what's going on with their biology you become very humbled when you realize that and we're not all the same you know a study can show x or y it might be applicable to that person in that study in that day but not necessarily to everybody and so really it's about finding what works for you a precision personalized nutrition and the vegan diet in my book i talk about how do you eat in a way that's personalized how do you figure out what is right for you and among many other things but it's really driven off of the two foundational principles of food as medicine and personalized nutrition and when you combine those two uh it's a recipe for a great life yeah you mentioned ideologies and that's really what food tribes have become haven't they you know they start off in a place of wanting to help people but nutrition has become very divisive now it's become actually quite toxic now and quite scary for people to enter that world and you know what's it always this way or is it a reflection of everything in culture and the world these days that we've become polarized and everything's black and white you know tell me how the landscape has changed well that's a very interesting question i i went to a talk once when i started cleveland clinic by peter orzaga worked for obama and he he showed these these graphs of voting records in senate and congress in the 60s and 70s 80s and 90s to show all what was happening with in the 60s there was this complete overlap republicans and democrats and as time went on they sort of these venn diagrams sort of split and they were two separate completely camps and i think you know and very much in the same way in nutrition and we've had this divisiveness that is really so unnecessary because we agree if we look at the science on a few basic principles but when i started out of this you know there was a vegetarian diet for a small planet whole foods kind of movement and then there was everything else there wasn't you know 14 different fad diets or approaches now they all have a role right keto is a therapeutic diet to use in my practice so people you know want to be vegan we can figure out how to do that but the the truth is that most of these dietary approaches are focused on how do we create a health how do we help the planet how do we do something good there's no bad intention and they have far more in common with each other than the traditional american diet which is 60 processed foods so i would say let's stop fighting each other let's agree on some certain basic ideas and principles and let's go up to the real problem which is our processed american diet that's killing so many of us and it's you know causing six out of 10 people to have chronic disease and around the world that kills 11 million people a year it's driving huge economic costs and makes us susceptible to covid because of our poor health and for immune function when we're overweight or poor metabolic health and it's you know the economic burden of it and it's just everything has to do with with um our current food system which is driving so much of our global crises even things like climate change which people don't connect with us but it is the food system is the number one driver of climate change around the world what drives you mark because you have written so many books now and we spoke about a year ago or so or just over a year about your last book food fits which is which is brilliant right and what is it that drives you to keep producing content to help people in all these different corners around the globe i'm trying to keep up with you i'm sorry every week this is a different book and a new podcast you see it's some cover of some newspaper it's awesome i'm kidding that what really drives me is is um is this is this desperate almost evangelical feeling like i have found the truth and no one's listening and i need to tell the world about it and what i mean by that is you know when i was sick and um you know 35 years ago i was really sick with chronic fatigue syndrome for mercury poisoning and i was desperate to get better i wasn't you know um getting any help from traditional doctors and i heard jeff bland speak who's the father of functional medicine and i think this guy's crazier is a genius and i better figure it out and so i started applying it to myself i started using these principles on myself i started healing myself i started using my practice and healing patients and i i was shocked like wow your rheumatoid arthritis went away when you did that or your migraines went away you've had you know three times a week for 20 years or your bowel or diabetes just went away or remember you got better if you had alzheimer's i'm like what is going on here and and so i began to sort of really deeply dive into this not because i was trying to you know write books or do anything i just because i i felt that there was this incredible secret of functional medicine that you know didn't didn't fix everything but it was such a better uh way of addressing health and disease and that so many people are suffering needlessly millions and millions needlessly but we're really missing a very straightforward and easy solution for most part so i feel like i just get so frustrated when i see people unnecessarily suffering i mean listen a lot of suffering you can't think about you you know my parents died last year or a couple years ago you know covet is causing great tragedy you know economic hardships there's certain things we can't do anything about and there are they're challenging but this is easy i mean i within a few days and you know this from your work wrong and in a few days people have health transformations you know like it like their diabetes can you know get better in a week if um if people are aggressive with their diet so we see we see radical transformations we just as traditional doctors we don't really know about it and that's really what's driven me for the last 35 years is this overwhelming drive to help tell the world about this incredible gift that we've learned about which is how the body actually works rather than how it was taught to us in medical school yeah i mean you mentioned food is medicine and it's something you've been talking about for many years it's it's written within the brand new book as well and i love let's hear your thoughts on that i don't know if it's the same in the states or not but there is a growing number of doctors in the uk who are sort of rebelling against that and saying and saying that food is not medicine and so what would you say to that we're doctors we do medicine we don't do food right so yes i get that i mean you know we were trained to not just to ignore food but to explicitly determine that it wasn't related to the conditions that our patients were suffering from we were taught that diet had nothing to do with autoimmune disease or cancer i mean maybe you feed too much fat you get heart disease or too much sugar you get diabetes but that was about it so i think i think we're we're really uh in this paradigm shift right now where where science has allowed us to dive into what are the components in food and how do they interact with their biology in ways that we've never really understood and it turns out you know we know that what's in food right it's protein fat fiber carbohydrates vitamins and minerals and that's true but that's not all that's in there it's uh it's all this other stuff that turns out it's really important it may not be causing an acute deficiency disease like scurvy but if you don't have enough of these powerful medicines in food over your lifetime your own biology doesn't work quite well and and for example you know when you get grass-fed animals there they can forage on 100 different plants and they eat this plant to get this phytochemical and this medicine they eat this plant to get this nutrient and over time they really are able to modulate their health through a robust array of a wide variety of different plant foods it turns out there's 25 000 25 000 plus molecules in food that are medicines these phytochemicals and the rockefeller foundation is spending i think 200 million dollars trying to map out the periodic table of food of phytochemicals and how they interact with their biology and and the and and the concepts of these chemicals in our biology is really quite interesting i call it symbiotic phytoadaptation which is a big mouthful but essentially it means that we've evolved symbiotically with these plants and have adapted our biology to use their compounds for our own benefit which is you know we do this all the time we you know we take a vitamin from vitamin c from an orange we don't make vitamin c so we use it for our benefit well it turns out that you know if you want your detoxification system to work well you need certain classes of compounds in broccoli family called glucosinolates and sulforaphanes it turns out if you want to clean up your mitochondria and recycle all the old parts so you have healthy aging you might need a compound that comes from pomegranate called urolithia maybe if you want to you know regulate your gut and have a no no damage to the barrier and it can lead to autoimmune disease heart disease cancer you want to grow bacteria call acromancy that bug likes certain things like cranberry pomegranate and green tea or or maybe you know you have um these zombie cells running around from your white blood cells that have been damaged from uh various kinds of insults over years and and they're causing aging and maybe if you eat this these phytochemicals there's over 132 phytochemicals from this buckwheat that jeffrey bland has just got rediscovered that are some are 100 times more potent than any other food source and you eat these it kills the zombie cells these phytochemicals so the question is how do we begin to incorporate all these principles into upgrading our biology and healing disease yeah i mean just hearing all those powerful compounds that exist within foods you know it's mind-blowing really i'm sure we're going to discover more there's probably probably plenty out there we don't even know yet we don't even know the names what they do but that time is coming but you know i think about this concept food as medicine and philosophically i think in a culture where 80 of what we see is driven by our collective modern lifestyles i kind of feel philosophically as doctors as i feel unless we give it the same priority and call it medicine it's not going to have that same impact right with our patients so we prioritize the drugs and say oh we've got to give it that weight but then culturally i feel well hold on a minute well i grew up in an asian family in an indian family where we grow up with the concept of food as medicine you know if we're if we're not doing so well or we've got a cold or something our mum might give us more food with turmeric in and um you know with the south american cultures where they talk about the concept of food as medicine so i kind of find i find there's a slight arrogance when we try and say food is not medicine and it almost there's almost this kind of um attitude of oh you know we we now in western medicine we figured this out in 2021 we figured out actually that food is not medicine okay great i'll go and tell my grandparents that and everyone else who's done all that research for years do you know what i mean i kind of feel i feel that's a no-brainer yeah yeah it's pretty striking um but you know the um there's a quote from r d language a psychiatrist back in the 60s that scientists can't see the way they see with their way of seeing in other in other words paradigms are really hard to break when you're a doctor and you're saying well eat better and exercise more or eat less and exercise more and it doesn't work you go well nutrition doesn't really work but that's not really helpful that's the side as i say why don't you just fly to fly to london well how do i fly there do i need a plane like how do i get there do i swim you know like and and what's really striking is that is that most doctors don't know how to apply food as medicine so if if you have a headache and i would say well i'm going to give you like one milligram of aspirin you think it's going to work right it's like you need 600 milligrams of aspirin to get your headache to go away so we said well you know food didn't work uh well it didn't work because you didn't know the right medicine which foods to use you didn't know the dose you didn't know the frequency you know it's really sophisticated that's why the pekin diet isn't really like a fixed diet it's really a set of principles that allows you to sort of eat in a way that meets your dietary preferences and cultural preferences but also helps you to figure out which are the foods in each category that you should be eating that have the most medicine and what are the principles that we might want to learn about personalized nutrition or how to eat like a vegetarian which we can talk about or how to eat for your mood or longevity or how to feed your kids or how to eat in a way that's affordable so it's a really practical guide uh sort of one of those things you can kind of refer back to over and over again to see exactly you know what's the the uh digestible bit it's sort of like little snacks of information that allow you to really get the point and and follow through on it there's a ton of theory i've written about before in the science but this this is there's a lot of science in it but it's really a very very practical book yeah uh and on the book i i agree it's it's really good uh digestible read for people who want to learn more about foods the various properties and different foods and the various principles as you say it's kind of it's called a pagan diet but it's kind of not really a diet in the conventional term right it's the way we think about diets it's really not that as you say it's 21 foundational principles which frankly are going to be helpful for so many of us yeah i mean that's sort of the joke of it all that's like when we're in these different diet wars and diet camps we're all fighting with each other and that's how the this whole name came i was sitting on a panel with a vegan cardiologist and a sort of a militant paleo doctor and they were fighting and i'm like hey if you're a paleo and you're vegan i must be pig and i'm really cracked up and i thought okay well there's something here and i went home and thought about it as i was flying home and i was like wait a minute they're identical exactly the same principles except for one which is where you get your protein which is animals or grains and beans otherwise no dairy no sugar no processed food whole foods vegetables good fats you know all the same principles except except that one and and the truth is they have far more common with each other than the traditional american diet and so i began to sort of realize maybe we can all come together with a movement that actually helps to you know crystallize what we do know and and then personalize it and that's really the whole point of the pecan diet instead of an undiet it says wait a minute if you're focusing on i mean the traditional american diet yes that's that's an easy sort of win uh but if you're you know keto or vegan i mean how do you be a healthy vegan i see i see people running into trouble with that all the time and so you know i talk about how to do that in the book so i think it's really kind of a fun little sort of kaleidoscope and it's actually someone someone someone has said to me after say dr eiman there's no chapter on weight loss and i said that's right i said there's no chapter on weight loss because i never tell patients to lose weight i just don't i i don't actually think it works and i don't think it's helpful advice and i think what i teach them is how their body works how to work with it and their weight loss is automatic i don't i don't say start starve yourself restrict calories and eat these foods only these foods this is really what is going to help you thrive and people just have the most amazing results i mean literally 100 pounds 50 pounds 75 pounds it's really pretty amazing but it's never it was never a goal and i i think uh you know it was sort of shocking to people there's a book on diet with no no no mention of weight loss but that's how it goes yeah no absolutely so there are all these principles in the book i want to sort of dive into some of them uh and you mentioned eat like a regenitarian and i think that would be i think it'll be a good place to go into um before we do that they mark can we just sort of set out the the foundations off the pagan diets you know uh you sort of touched on a few of those principles so for people who are coming to your work for the first time and are trying to understand well you know what is the component you know is it paleo is it vegan you know what is it what are these sort of foods that you're recommending how would you sort of simplify the concept for them yeah it's it's really pretty easy i mean it i it's embarrassingly easy actually because it's like people aren't gonna really be able to sort of disagree with anything because it's all pretty common sense and straightforward so the first thing is you know really use your food as your pharmacy so when you are eating think of what you're eating as medicine are you eating a french fry that's fried in rancid oils that's you know got 14 different ingredients in it uh that is going to kind of fry your arteries and you know cause all kinds of problems or are you going to eat let's say a wild blueberry and it has all sorts of phytochemicals and so forth so how do you how do you begin to sort of think of food as your medicine the second is you want to eat a lot of medicine so eat the rainbow which is essentially all the colors and plant foods are where all the benefits are so the more deeper darker colors and pigments that's where all the phytochemicals are and also think about your diet is mostly vegetables like it should be 75 non-starchy veggies which is like really what the majority of your plate should be a little side of protein um when you're picking any kind of category food whether it's beans or grains or nuts and seeds um it's important understand which ones in each category are the best for example peanuts might have aflatoxin which you want to stay away from or be careful when you source it or you know you probably don't want to eat a lot of the gluten and grains here but if you're having heirloom grains like rye or maybe heirloom wheats that might be okay because they're less inflammatory and so forth or maybe you have gluten issues and you shouldn't eat at all or which beans are the best beans or which which seeds are the best seeds and so forth and then i have a whole section there on you know meat which is i think a little shocking for people but it's talking about how to eat your meat as medicine and some of the research on this is just stunning that that these grass-fed animals have high phytochemical contents just like plants and have all these health benefits so we're learning more about it this is out of duke um so whether you're eating any kind of protein how do you pick the best eggs or chicken how do you how do you understand what are the right fats to eat how do you think about dairy which is you know really often a big problem and it's and the modern cows we have are pretty harmful and then there's some you know just guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you but not only good for you but good for the planet and good for society like eat like a vegetarian or you know think about sugar is fine but it's like recreational drug you know how do you personalize your nutrition or detox or eat for your gut or eat for longevity or mood or or how do you afford what you're or you're doing in a way that actually is makes it doable because it doesn't have to be expensive so it really guides people through a way of thinking about food that it will last them as a roadmap for their life you mentioned meats there you mentioned phytonutrients so let's just let's just start off explaining what phytonutrients are and then i agree that that selection on meat is really fascinating and you know meat has become one of these controversial items as well and one thing i do know mark like myself you're very respectful of people's individual choices their ethics and how they choose to live and their cultural beliefs so yeah just walk me through phytochemicals but then also let's then go from that into meat and how meat potentially might be medicine for some people yeah for sure i mean before we get down in the weeds i just i just want to say that you know i my personal goal is to live healthy and vibrant to be 120 at least so i i don't want to eat a meat or anything else if it's going to hurt me so i i took the time to really dive into all the research i locked myself away for a week with you know stack of scientific papers you know four feet high i went through it all and these are the i mean there's a hundred thousand papers online on me on the national library medicine but if you define the major ones you can find you know what is it saying was it not saying really there were three issues one was um moral and ethical um and and the other is in climate environment and the last is health and so they're all kind of smooshed together right so if you want to be saving the planet if you want to be healthy and you want to do the right thing morally ethically you should be a vegan and that and everybody should be vegan because that kind of deals with all that but unfortunately it's not so simple um and and you know kind of getting back to like what is meat uh and and phytochemicals it it also sort of speaks to the theme of the book which is meat is not meat is not meat right if you're eating a feedlot cow is different than eating wild elk in terms of your health the well-being of the animal you know the the effect on the environment climate so people need to understand that quality matters in every aspect of what you're eating and that's the whole premise of the pecan diet is how do you pick quality in each area so in terms of meat you know most of the meat that's eaten and consumed and even that we have done research on is feedlot industrial meat which is fed all kinds of weird garbage and is is really full of hormones antibiotics and it's mostly corn but wild wild or grass-finished animals can forage on hundreds of different plants each with diminishing properties and those chemicals from the plants these phytochemicals we call them phytonutrients or phytochemicals means plant they get absorbed and they start to become part of these animals tissue and you eat them you actually can get for example for example goat milk if the goats are foraging on different shrubs you can have the same love of catechins which is the powerful anti-cancer antioxidant detoxifying compound in green tea as green tea so so it's like drinking green tea when you're drinking goat's milk that's bad on certain bushes that's just an example but we're learning more and more about about these powerful medicinal properties and then how it affects your biology and if you look at kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat in a study in australia they found that when they eat the feedlot meat same portion they got inflammation when they eat the kangaroo meat their biology was totally different they actually reduced the inflammation so that's kind of striking to me when you see you know eating identical amounts of food kangaroo feed lot profoundly different effects on biology on that mark in the in the spirit of the book which is um you know pagan bringing in you know paleo and vegan and where this where the sort of similarities are yeah and where do we all agree i think one thing we can all agree on no matter what side you sit on on and the dietary wars potentially is that factory farming is a bad thing would you agree with that i mean listen you know the the moral ethical issues really have to do a lot around that but you know factory farming is an abomination it's bad for the cows and the animals that are raised in these confined animal feeding operations it's bad for the environment i mean just tyson chicken alone is the second biggest polluter in the united states after u.s steel i think it's like and the health of the animals is the moral ethical issues and the health of the meat that it produces or lack thereof so i think you know it's sort of a triple whammy for for the planet for the animals and for humans and it should be banned and there's no question about that and i do think that there's evidence that uh it's moving in this right direction that there's a bill produced by i think a couple of senators who who put forth the idea that we should get for gender we get rid of factory farming by 2040 which is you know 20 years from now so i think we're we're heading there but i think yeah it's an abomination and we should never eat factory farming so i think the other consideration around me eating animals is what is the effect on ecology and climate and i think we know that factor farming is a huge contributor that traditional farming and is is probably the number one contributor to climate change when you add in deforestation soil erosion factory farming animals food waste transportation refrigeration all of it end to end probably half of all climate change and and so the question is you know um is it is it all animals that will do that and i think that there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture which sort of focused on a really simple idea which is not the cow it's the how right so it's not it's not the fact that you're actually raising animals it's how you're doing it and the truth is that most of the land we we now farm is used to grow food for animals about 70 percent and and it is soy and corn all the sort of stuff that we feed them that's highly uh different than their normal diet which is grass and it creates all sorts of secondary problems changes the quality of the meat and so forth but the but the way we grow these foods actually destroys the soil uses tons of water from irrigation it causes collapse of ecosystems in biodiversity because of use of pesticides and herbicides the nitrogen fertilizer runs off into the rivers and streams and oceans and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish every year so we really have this sort of destructive agricultural system that that is often used to produce food for animals and then that's just a bad idea because the way we grow it is the number one cause of climate change and how we do that so i think we need to sort of change what's happening with the animals and put them back where they belong which is on rangeland and forty percent of our land of agriculture goes oh we should just grow vegetables well you can't 40 is is not suitable for growing crops it's only suitable for grazing so what do you do with that well you have to put animals on it turns out that they will build soil they'll conserve water they'll reduce it or eliminate the need for pesticides herbicides and they will draw down carbon out of the atmosphere because the soil gets built uh and produced better quality and and even more scalable than traditional agriculture right now for for animals so we have this potential and everybody's talking about it there's movies like kiss to ground there's books on it there's conversations that are happening in washington dc now about it so i think we're we're on the precipice of a real sea change around thinking about how we grow food in a way that's regenerative and and and meat has got to be a key part of that you can't have an ecosystem on a farm that actually builds soil without actually having animals poop and pee and you know put their saliva on the grass which makes it grow it's like actually a growth factor for the grass so we want to keep building roots and building soil and that's really through the the kind of reuse of animals rotating through a farm ecosystem so i think we have to sort of think about all these pieces now the last piece is health so if people are thinking oh well meat's going to kill me i don't want to eat it it causes heart disease and cancer pretty much you can go and find any study that you know supports any belief that you have and you can ignore all the rest but when you look at the totality of the evidence and you look at the kind of ways of what studies were done you know i i'm not convinced that meat is bad for you in fact you know there are many large reviews recently that sort of refuted that idea and and looked at all the data and when it turns out when a lot of studies were done on meat they were population studies they looked at groups of people over time they really can't prove cause and effect they say well what did you eat for the last 30 years oh you ate more meat than this guy okay you had more heart attacks it's probably the meat but you can't prove that it doesn't create proof and and it may be something else right when you look at the habits of the meat eaters in those studies because this was done when we were told meat was bad so if you ate meat you you were basically somebody probably didn't care about their health right so yes it was true you smoked more drank more ate less fruits and veggies more processed food more sugar you know didn't exercise so it didn't take your vitamins of course you had more more disease was it the meat or was it all the other stuff so and then when they looked like as i mentioned when they looked at people who shopped at health food stores um who both were were eating healthy food some may meet in the context of a whole foods diet others just didn't and there was the same reduction in death in both groups by half when you look at cultures like the maasai you know we live on milk and meat they live very long they're very healthy but they also do something really interesting was they actually it's not even necessarily how you how you raise the animals it's maybe how you prepare the meat for example if you're cooking it on high char grilling that's probably not good it's slow cooking with tons of spices those spices have phytochemicals that alter any kind of harmful reactions that can happen from cooking meat so there's there's a lot of incredible science around how we actually can include meat as a healthful part of our diet in fact probably for most of us we probably need to especially as we age because it's very difficult to build muscle without adequate protein yeah i mean super fascinating and this is one of those very emotive and divisive topics uh meat plant-based eating you know veganism these are things which are becoming people are becoming very you know very solid in what they believe very sort of entrenched in their views to the point we're even saying something like that mark is potentially going to really inflame some people who believe that actually everyone on the planet should only be eating plants and you know something you said right at the start of this conversation mark and it's something that's been very clear to me from observing you for for many years is that you are a clinician you have seen tens of thousands of patients and you know i'm i'm certainly i'm only 20 years into my clinical career you are you've got a lot more clinical experience than i do but within that time if you are a practicing clinician and you have seen thousands and thousands of patients they teach you you soon very quickly learned that i cannot subscribe to one ideology because the patients are proving that ideology wrong all the time different people are coming back saying oh really that's working for you well i didn't think that would work but this is working and so right you know you know um if somebody is 100 plant-based and they're listening to this conversation or watching on youtube and they're thinking well you know what i i people shouldn't be eating animals because actually you know it's compassion to animals we shouldn't be killing animals what would you say to them listen like i said i have monks and habits that are my patients and i don't force them to eat meat if it's against the religious or spiritual or moral beliefs and i think that's a perfectly fine choice that anybody can make um however i would make sure that people fully understand that if you're a human being or living on this ecosystem called planet earth that there are consequences to everything including any type of agriculture so unless you're gathering all your wild foods you're basically in a destructive act right so the most traditional agriculture was they they destroy natural habitats they till the fields they use machinery to harvest your cabbages or your grains or your beans or whatever you're eating and guess what there's a lot of animals that live on in those ecosystem rabbits moles mice you know birds i mean 50 of the bird species have been killed through agriculture in this country 90 75 of our pollinator species are gone and and there's been estimates that you know just just growing vegetables in this country for people to eat healthy food you know in plants uh has kills over seven billion animals a year um and is the life of a rabbit any any less valuable than the life of a feedlot chicken or a pig or a cow i don't know i think so we're just gonna have to be real about you know what we are doing in terms of our our behavior as humans we can't avoid the cycle of death in life and birth and renewal i mean it's just sort of what we're doing you know and i think that that uh fooling yourself to think that you're not part of that even if you're a distance from it it's like well people say well i'm not gonna go shoot an elk but i'll eat a cow like you know i think we were so divorced from the sources of our food and what we're eating but i think we kind of drew the chain back we'd see that you know we're all involved in this essentially destructive agricultural system while they were eating a vegan or not and that that may be a problem and you know there may be sort of other levels of destruction for example if you're looking at these brand new fake meat companies and some of them are okay but it's something like using gmo soy which is highly destructive the soil uses tons of glyphosate that's creates you know harmful effects on humans destroys the microbiome in the soil you know uses lots of irrigation and causes all sorts of issues as a consequence of growing these gmo soybeans that we're using for plant-based meats so i think i think we just have to kind of get the whole picture instead of just kind of looking at a sliver of the truth from here and there isn't what you just said that we're divorced from where our food comes from isn't that it strikes me that that's at the heart of this problem that you know i grew up completely divorced from where my food was coming from you know it arrived in packets you know if you go out let's say to it to an extreme so hunter-gatherer tribe you know they know where their food is coming from they know that's their their raison d'etre every day is to acquire food to live you know their their diet is dictated by by geography by the climate you know they don't have the choices that we've got whereas we're just disconnected we're disconnected from so much in the world but we're disconnected from our food supply which leads to these ideologies and these kind of the these sort of theoretical concepts that actually when you go out into nature maybe they're not quite as clear-cut as we might have thought yeah absolutely so i mean just the divisiveness and the i don't understand it i just you know i'm like hey we're all here just trying to do our best and let's work together to find out a way to live better for ourselves look better for the planet and and the world so i think i think everybody has a good intention for sure when they're trying this or that or different approach but the advice i'd give to people is is don't let your you know ideology trample your biology and end up in trouble and i've seen many people who do this i think i should be keto and that's what i need to do and then it doesn't work for them or something i should be vegan and it's like well it doesn't really work for them so i think we need to be honest about about it and actually um listen to our bodies as i say the the the smartest doctor in the room is your own body yeah and that's the theme i get from the pagan diet mark is that you know you you are you're trying to give the reader the ownership those those those foundational principles say hey look this is the science these are the principles play around with it a little bit find out what's working for you right that's kind of you know because you know we can talk about therapeutic diets for example so um let's say somebody comes to see you in your clinic and they've got type 2 diabetes right you may i guess approach that differently from someone who just generally wants to eat better for their overall health and their longevity or is it the same no it's totally different i mean if someone comes in with diabetes they're they're it's like they need a rescue mission as opposed to someone who's just generally fit and healthy can have a more robust resilient metabolism will be able to tolerate a wide variety of foods for example if i'm riding my bike you know three hours a day i might tolerate a lot more starch right i might tolerate more sweet potatoes or rice or even a little sugar but if i if my metabolism is screwed up for 30 years of eating sugar and soda and starch and i can't even regulate my blood sugar and my insulin goes sky high then i i'm really carbohydrate intolerant i should really avoid those so it's really about looking at what is each person's biology doing uh what's their gut doing do they only keep god do they have food sensitivities what is their metabolism like are they tend to be more carbohydrate intolerant kind of pre-diabetic spectrum are they more sort of a lean kind of guy who sort of maybe doesn't do that well on saturated fat so i think we have to really understand that we're all so different and the the the dietary approaches can be customized based on what really is needed and and i talk about that in the book and there's many other resources in functional medicine that that are available to help people understand how to personalize diets if you have an autoimmune diet for example there is an autoimmune diet that actually works really great for colitis but that's a very specific diet it might be very different than i'd given a diabetic for example or someone with alzheimer's right so it's very it's very important to understand that it's personalized yeah there's a theme in the work over the last year's mark that there's a real big um there's a real big mission i i sense from you about talking about food not just for individual health but for wider population and planetary health and the environments and the climates clearly you went in a deep dive in your last book food fakes but that theme still is is very present in the pagan diet it's something that is clearly very important to you you've mentioned regenerative agriculture um in the book you also talk about food waste and just how problematic that is um i wonder if you could expand a little bit on food waste and what that's doing for the climates sure you know i mentioned that you know when you look at the food system end to end it's probably the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions estimated 30 to 50 or more and and one of the biggest contributors is not just soil erosion and factory farmed animals and deforestation is food waste we throw out about 40 of our food around the world if we actually would have to grow that food again we'd need a landmass the entire size of china we throw out two trillion dollars over more of food every year it's different reasons in the developing world versus develop world the developer that's mostly what we throw in our trash in the house and the developing world is often lost in the food chain because there's no refrigeration and it's definitely difficult to transport food um but we you know when you think about it you know we look at uh food waste just just for example as if it were a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the us and china that's how bad it is um if you think well those factory farm animals and the methane and that's causing greenhouse gases from the cow farts well guess what the greenhouse gas emissions from food waste from the off-gassing of the rotting vegetables which produce methane it's three times as much methane three times as much methane as cows so uh if you're vegan and throwing out all your vegetables that you've got let rot in the fridge or you or you maybe are just drunk over food scraps you know that actually adds up and it is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases i encourage everybody to compost uh we should not be i mean in certain countries you cannot you cannot throw out your garbage in san francisco you can't throw out food waste you have to put in compost and the airport says compost bucket it's not that hard to do it's just another track we have recycling we have garbage and we have like compost uh and it can be a huge benefit and it's something that the government's working on across america and across the world there's governments that are really focusing on food waste and france you know i think you can't throw out your your garbage you have to you have to recycle it or if you're a company you can't just get your fulfill your food waste out and you do you get a fine i think you get a five year five year jail sentence or something a big fine so it's really important and in europe they have way maybe anaerobic digesters which they don't have so much here but um there's ways to handle it not just you know for example you making compost but there are large companies that can be mandated to actually deal with food waste differently so in massachusetts they're like hey you if you make a ton of food waste a week from your you know grocery store or restaurant or whatever you can't throw it out you have to do something with it you have to give it to the farmer you have to compost to get to something and and so they they this company was developed called vanguard nobles that built these anaerobic digesters basically like a big kind of furnace they throw in the food scraps they throw in manure and it kind of cooks uh and it provides electricity for 1500 homes the dairy farmers who are losing money are now making 100 grand a year the vanguard renewable sells the excess electricity up the food up the uh up to the grid and so basically it's a win-win-win for everybody and there's only five of them here there's like 17 000 of them in europe so there's a lot of ways to solve the food waste problem but it is it is a huge problem and and i think also you know we we're so strange in this country we only want you perfectly shaped vegetables or perfectly shaped vegetable fruit i mean i don't know what it's like in the uk but you know if there's funny shaped things they just go they go in the garbage like if it's a funny shaped apple or funny shaped carrot or if it's got two legs or you know it's like it's like a potato that's not perfectly round or but it's it's like what we were saying before isn't it that we we're divorced from where the food comes from because if you had grown it yourself you would know that they're not all perfectly round beautiful um that's half the problem isn't it we're presented shiny pesticide laden fruits and vegetables in stores and we from a young age think that well an apple should always be perfectly round and ripe and red you know it's interesting um that that when i was a kid my mom had a garden and we had fruit trees in the backyard we lived in the middle of suburbs [Laughter] and in america during world war ii and i know it was like in in the uk but but we were implored to grow our own food and so the forty forty percent of food in america was grown in victory gardens literally in people's backyards uh so i think i think you know we we need to get back to figuring out how to have a better close relationship to our food if someone's listening to this mark and they've never thought about their food waste before because because it's just not the cultural norm i think in many countries still certainly i think in the uk it's yes we're talking about it some of us but we've not been grown up we've not grown up with that as a concept as a as something that we do right so people might be listening go yeah okay so if something's rotten in the fridge i might just throw it into my regular dustbin can you explain to them why that's problematic and what they should be doing instead of that because yes there's societal there's things that companies can do but individuals can play a role here as well absolutely yeah and then there are and there are you know there's legislation helping with compost and there's there's companies that are sort of you know made to to sort of change their ways because of these regulations which is all a good thing and there are cities that have you know ordinances for compost so that that's all happening but an individual level you know it's one of the most powerful things you can do to help address climate change is just don't throw your food scraps in the garbage start a compost pile now if you live in the country it's easy just you just can build like a little two by four little box and just throw this stuff in there and you can throw in leaves or garden waste or whatever in there and over time it just like i'm really lazy about it but over time it just turns into this incredible soil um there's there's ways to do it in a more sophisticated way but it's pretty simple and if you live in the city or an urban environment there are amazon or other places you can buy these these home composters where you just put the food scrubs in and it's a little thing it doesn't smell in your house and then it turns into soil you can drop it off at the local farms even in new york city there's a you can drop off your compost uh scraps in the local farmers market so there's there's definitely a way to to sort of help encourage people to start to think about doing this because you know this is one of those things particularly in the developed world where we have control over it's really and the food is is who often most of it 30 plus percent is wasted in the home it it just strikes me that there will be some people who are fighting on social media about the climate and what we should be eating what we shouldn't be saying but at the same time be throwing out their food waste into their dustband and it's you know and i don't say that with i'm not judging anyone for that or criticizing i'm just saying sometimes we just can't see the perspective can we either actually you know what this will make a huge difference if i could just start doing it yeah yeah exactly and you know and so there's also other ways to join in for example there's a company i i a couple of companies one's called imperfect foods which is basically takes all the ugly food from farms that are going to be thrown out and and and sells them you know direct to delivery so you can get funny shaped carrots and potatoes and veggies that are kind of weird looking but they're the same veggies they just taste they just taste the same they're just different shape uh and there's other companies as well that do the same so they there's a lot of ways for us to get involved whether it's you know buying ugly food or whether it's uh composting or whether it's just being more careful or using various strategies because a company called the peel that creates a second coating on the plant's vegetables so they last longer or fresh paper which is actually like this is a an indian woman who developed this concept because she would go she went home to india and she got very sick from i think traveler's diary or something she ended up um getting her grandmother to give her all these like spices and herbs and fixed her whole system and then she thought about you know all these rotting rotting vegetables and she put this uh herb infused with cloves and all these you know and medicinal herbs into this paper and put you put in the drawer of your of your fridge and the vegetables last two or three times longer so there's all kinds of innovation happening but you can all be part of the solution one of the sections in the book is about children feed your kids what you eat and you know as you talk about the environment you talk about compost of course these are great things that we can start to instill in our kids which means that they're much more likely to be engaging with that as they get older but it's also about what we feed our kids and you were like myself very passionate about this and i love that feed your kids what you eat when did that start to become so like controversial when when when did we start having kids meals and happy meals i mean what what happened then we actually give our children different foods to what we give ourselves it's true you think i'm like what do kids eat in japan they eat raw fish and seaweed you know you know when kids eat in you know india they eat spicy curries right and i think we we've kind of gotten away from from what our traditional knowledge and wisdom is and we feel like we have to feed our kid go-gurts and lunchables and snack packs and goldfish and i don't even know what else like i'm so out of that world now and it's it's a giant marketing scam and it's a frightening to think you know you wouldn't feed your kid you wouldn't feed your dog a big mac fries and a coke but you'd feed your kids that you wouldn't feed your dog chicken nuggets and fries or pizza but you would feed your kids that and i think we really have to take a look at you know what we're doing for future generations because the level of malnutrition in the youth is so high not just vitamins and minerals but just their overall poor quality diet leads to poor intellectual development violent behavior inability to actually have good academic performance to to to even security as they get older because if you know they're overweight or unhealthy i mean they're less likely to get a good job or get married or be happy and if you're overweight as a kid your life expectancy is 13 years less so i i think you know my joke in my house was you know there was there was no menu there was only two things on the menu actually take it or leave it you know they're going to eat it or you're not and my mother taught me that she's like well you know when your sister didn't want to eat her eggs for breakfast she didn't make her eat them but she gave the same eggs to her at lunch and at dinner and figure figured out she was pretty hungry she ate them and never refused food again so i think we we coddle our kids in that way and you know i had a friend who fed his kids macaroni and cheese and pizza until he was 16 years old i'm like what are you thinking like this is not good and you know the kid has all kinds of health issues and consequences for that so i think we we have to understand that that we need to cultivate our kids very early to real food uh you know we should be we could be making our own baby food in a blender or vitamix we can you know give kids uh the food that we're eating from the table we can eat you know we can maybe mush it up a little bit but it's really pretty important to feed them real food uh and when you think about the these baby foods which are full of sugar and the formula which is you know given these kids and sometimes you know mothers can't breastfeed but you know there there's lack of key things that we don't even know we were missing for example like dha for brain development or oligosaccharides which are these powerful um starches that feed good bugs that aren't in in formula they're only in in breast milk so we really kind of have to get back to getting our kids um sort of out of the lure of the food industry which is tough because you know they spend billions of dollars of ads trying to of dollars in ads trying to hook these kids i think in facebook there's over 5 billion with a b as you know on on social media for various junk food things which are often invisible they're called stealth advertising it's not like it's a commercial on tv so when you're my kids not watching tv but i get guaranteed they're probably on their phone on their computer and they're getting all this stuff served up to them so i you know getting your kids eating right from the beginning is so important getting them in the kitchen you know we had a book called pretend soup a cookbook which has yummy delicious healthy vegetarian recipes we used to make together uh you know i have a picture of my son literally sitting in a salad bowl look at the kitchen or you know a video of making you know like he's like maybe a year old and he's like just making a huge mess with all the flour and my daughter's you know cooking but i got them cooking i got them planting gardens i got them harvesting you know no they're both very much even though they straight a little bit very much focused on unhealthy eating yeah i think it's hard for parents these days in so many ways you know you mentioned the stealth advertising but i think also you know parents feel so busy they're they're rushing around trying to do so much obviously we're talking in a time of this uh you know these sort of lockdowns and these restrictions so certainly here in the uk at the moment there's a full-on lockdown across the entire uk most people are at home parents are really struggling with trying to homeschool their children and do their jobs and i think it just highlights the pressures that many parents feel and then when you add in some stealth advertising it it seems just too hard for people to actually change things or you know a lot of people say well my kids won't eat that stuff you know because i mean you know they've been eating other foods and it's really hard isn't it when they be conditioned into eating more processed foods it can be quite hard that initial uh transitional phase to try and change that and get them back onto real unprocessed whole foods oh it can be worse than that i mean some of these foods are highly addictive so these kids will literally go bonkers uh fits tantrums banging raiding the kitchen i mean these stories it's like well it's like a crack addict trying to find the crack in the kitchen uh and so you know if you make your home a safe zone you can't control what your kids do once they get the car keys or go out but but you can definitely control what's at home and so i think it's important to make your home a safe zone there shouldn't be anything in there that the kid can eat that's going to harm him i mean you wouldn't leave medicines out you can leave poisons out you wouldn't leave all these things that we we worry about but the truth is that what we feed our kids every day is far more harmful and deadly than any of these other things in terms of the the the impact on the population so i think i think we have to really um sort of as a families come together and go like what do we want how do we how do we live the life we want and how do we meet the values that we have the family and a lot of it has to do with health and well-being and be able to do the things you love and that has a lot to do with food and so when people sort of connect the dots they can begin to really start to just sort of bring in a different way of of thinking and being around food what you said before just reminded me if when i was a kid mark um you know my parents both came over from india to the uk i was born and brought up in the uk and my brother and i and my family every other summer we'd go to kolkata in india and spend six weeks there with our with our cousins and our family and i remember i remember two of my cousins i've got this vivid memory i i must have been around i don't know eight years old something like that and they were all in their school uniform dressed ready to go out to school for the day and then we sat down at 7 30 in the kitchen with a full plate of rice dal vegetable curry um two or three different vegetable curries like a proper real food meal that they would have yeah in the evening that that the parents were giving that to them because it's like okay here you go here's your breakfast then you're off to school for the day and then when i started to go in my early 20s not with the same cousins but i noticed how things had changed that a lot of my family were that there was marketing from various uh a lot of western companies actually were marketing you know uh you know bread that's easy to toast in like 30 seconds and cereals and i saw you know over 10 12 years i saw that change yeah but but literally you would change because that was an aspiration it was like oh that's what they're doing in the west the aspirational wester that's what people eat when they're busy and they get out and it it's amazing how quickly through advertising and through perception that these age-old habits that we've had for donkeys years can just change so we're starting to have these high sugar highly processed breakfasts and that's considered normal yeah yeah i mean i honestly the uh the whole invention of cereal was one of the biggest scams propagated on humanity i mean when you think about it was kellogg and others we wanted to take you know grains and turn them into cereals but the you know the cereals we're eating now are mostly sugar uh you know like 75 sugar some of them in terms when you look at the carbohydrate they might have six forms of sugar in them and they are what we think of food is a healthy breakfast when we feed our kids you know cereal and milk is a good breakfast but it's really toxic and it leaves them nutritionally depleted it makes them gain weight it causes them to sort of probably not be able to focus and you know often be hungry before lunch so i i often joke i say i'm a serial killer i don't think we should eat we need protein and fat for breakfast not not sugar for a family or a parent listing mark who thinks okay i get this i need to i want to change how i feed my children and feed myself but they feel it's too hard right they feel i don't know where to start because this is how we've been doing things for the last four or five years dr hyman tell me where to start what would you say to them well it's like anything else you know if you don't know how to do it it's hard right but last night i had some friends over and um you know i was busy up until they showed up and um you know i threw some sweet potatoes in the oven an hour and a half before they came let them cook and then we made really simple salad i made some stir-fried mushrooms and some grass-fed steak and literally the whole thing took 15 minutes and it was super easy so i think it's really about skill and it's about knowledge it's about understanding how to navigate the grocery store navigate your kitchen to have the right tools in place to have things ready and easy for you so i think i think it's often you know we don't we don't know the skills of how to cut vegetables or how to shop or how to prepare food or how to cook and so we really have lost these arts and it's important people to start to learn them back but once you do it's really pretty simple and i you know i have no problem feeding myself really well and have for years even in a very very busy life so i think in the book i do talk about how do you how do you make it easy how do you make the habit stick how do you make it affordable and i think the messaging that we've gotten is that it's it's complicated it's difficult it's time consuming it's expensive to eat well and that's just not true i mean you look at the data on affordability and whole foods you know maybe maybe it costs 50 cents more a day other studies show it may not cost any more at all so i think we have to sort of understand that the propaganda of you deserve a break today you know you know leave the cooking to us you know outsourcing our cooking to corporations is killing us and we need to we need to take back our kitchens they've been hijacked by the food industry and we need to start enjoying enjoying at home and i think you know covet has had that silver lining a lot of people are starting to cook at home and you know people are getting a little trouble because they're they're not necessarily thinking they want to eat healthy stuff they want to bake but you don't want to have that covered 19 or the quarantine 15 pounds you want to you want to make sure you stay metabolically healthy because if you don't you're more risk for getting sick from covet and more risk for dying so i think you know we we have to sort of get over this myth that it's difficult time consuming hard and and just understand that there are some basic skills you need to learn and it's not hard i mean i had a family of five who lived in a trailer uh disability food stamps uh never cooked a meal in their life all seriously overweight father was 42 on dialysis from kidney failure because of diabetes i mean type 2 diabetes at 42 and the sun was you know 100 pounds overweight it was pretty pretty bad scene desperate to do the right thing desperate to lose weight he couldn't get a new kidney if he didn't lose the weight so they were all struggling and um they never cooked a meal so i said let's let me not give you a lecture but let's let's go to your house and let's go to um shopping let's get some simple food and i gave them a guide called good food on a tight budget we made you know food from from inexpensive ingredients that are whole foods right you have to have a 70 grass-fed ribeye steak but you can have you know ground turkey that's organic so we had ground turkey chili uh we had stir-fried asparagus we made a salad roasted some sweet potatoes they didn't have knives or cutting boards and within within a few minutes they realized this is fun and two when they ate it they were like this is delicious and someone's like do you cook like this with your family every night and i'm like yeah and then and then i was like i know what's gonna happen so i gave them a guide on how to eat well for less and then i gave them my cookbook with some recipes and i said you guys can do this and on the way home i bought them with cutting boards and knives and i sent them to their house online and they first week she texted me back we lost 18 pounds the mother lost 100 pounds in the first year the son lost 50. gained it back he went to work at the bojangles which is a bad fast food store but then ultimately end up lost 138 pounds going to college in medical school i wrote him a lot of recommendations because of a simple meal that we cooked together that changed their lives right just think about that it's not like you need you know 10 years of culinary education just here's how you chop things here's here's the principles of stir-frying baking roasting like it's just really simple and and it was just uh it was just so so powerful for me to have that insight that people don't really know it's not a lack of desire it's a lack of knowledge and skill and again it's not that hard to to get those skills so i i think you know we're really only one meal away from a real food revolution jamie oliver really has talked a lot about this you know if we can just get a couple people to cook everything's gonna change and i agree yeah it really is something isn't it this skill of cooking that you know until i don't know when it was when we probably couldn't have lived without the skill of cooking until i don't know 30 40 years ago if you couldn't cook you probably you didn't have access to takeaways and um all these these cafes to give you that food you you had to figure it out and i i do want to i touched on this in in my last bookmark i touched on this that the rise of the influencer and the instagram influencer and again nothing wrong with that at all but sometimes i feel that people who don't know how to cook and they're a bit scared and bit intimidated and then they follow food influences and they see this gorgeous meal that that is picture perfect so we think they just whip that up in their kitchen we don't realize that you know a lot of uh food photography you know is set up over two three hours to actually get all the lights right so it actually you know looks the right way and then they think that their standard um leg of lamb broccoli and potatoes is like somehow a failure compared to what they see around them so there's there's that myth to sort of bust as well i think absolutely you know it's so funny that it is it is uh you know listen if you want to be a five-star chef fine a michelin chef i'm not looking for that i'm looking to make simple ingredients into delicious food and it just doesn't have to be hard it just doesn't have to be hard it's if you get real food and good ingredients the food itself just tastes good you know i just made a beet salad i just took the and beets aren't that expensive i just cut the beets boiled them i chopped them up and then put in like olive oil lemon dill parsley cilantro salt and pepper it was just delicious beet salad super simple and the beet greens i chopped them up stir fry them with little onions and ginger and have this beautiful you know beet green side dish of cooked greens um and it's easy like it's just you don't need fancy recipes i mean i've written five cookbooks but like honestly it's like i don't really use a recipe book it's just once you learn the it's like learning the scales you know once you're a musician you've gotten really good at the scales you can play anything right so i think that's sort of how it works with cooking as well man we're having this conversation at my dinner time mark and you talking about those foods i can i can feel my stomach juices just uh uh-huh you know i know you're just woken up it's morning time but i'm i'm getting super hungry as you say that so me too i'm like i'm like it's breakfast time it is breakfast time but um you mentioned kovitz and um you know looking after your diets and the way you live was important 18 months ago was very very important already it's almost been heightened in the last 12 months in terms of what we're seeing around the world and it in in some ways this could be the biggest wake-up call to say hey look you know what it is time to really start putting our well-being our health our lifestyles first i mean what's your experience being of that and you know can you talk about some of those real risks with covid and how your food choices how um you know how it can impact that potentially yeah i mean i i i would hope that we're gonna have a wake-up call around this range but i'm not hopeful i don't know what it's like in the uk but in america it's like crickets here except for bill maher who screams on television about how we need to face the fact that the reason in america were overwhelmed by copa is because we're metabolically so unhealthy 88 of americans have poor metabolic health which means that they're like in the spectrum of pre-diabetes which means they have belly fat which means they have inflammation and so when the covet lands on them it's almost 9 out of 10 americans they're like a sitting duck and so it's like putting gasoline on a fire and all of a sudden you could cite a kind storm that ends up killing people and and wherever you are in that spectrum we know that the poor metabolic health is a driver uh for for for really bad outcomes with that said people don't understand that within a very short time a couple of weeks maybe you can really radically reverse your poor metabolic health and i'll just give you a quick example you know we had a type type 2 diabetic on insulin for 10 years heart failure angina liver kidneys failing i mean just she was a mess she was had a body mass index of 43 which you know normal is under 25 over 30 is obese she was in the severely obese category uh 65 years old and taking insulin every day and tons of medications within three days of changing her diet like three days she was off her insulin completely within three months she was off all her medications and her metabolic parameters were all normal in blood sugar cholesterol blood pressure everything kidneys liver and so it doesn't it might take 30 years to get there it can be very quick to get back and even if you don't lose all the weight i mean if you're for example a gastric bypass patient and you have diabetes you get your gastric bypass within a week or so your diabetes is gone you're still very overweight because it takes a little longer to lose weight but your diabetes is gone so your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet so i wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues i would double down on eating what we've talked about today on the show the pagan diet or just the similar whole foods philosophy approach and and and it will have a profound effect on your immune system i just wanted to touch on you one of the principles is around habit change one of the chapters which is uh super interesting and there's a few things in there i really liked but one of the things that you wrote was friend power is more important than willpower and you shared how at the cleveland clinic how you guys use groups and how powerful that can be and so you know for people listening who have tried to change before struggle to do it by themselves i think this could be quite a helpful tip for them right absolutely i mean i think you know um for years i i studied the minutia of functional medicine i was sort of a nerd about the biochemistry the genomics the physiology the microbiome i just wanted to know every little aspect of our cellular functioning and bio all this sort of nerdy stuff and i was really good at getting people healthy if they did what i tell them to do but often you know we know in medicine and half of people don't fill the prescriptions they get and half that do don't take them so the doctor writes prescription for statin 25 of people take it and 75 don't so that's not a good odds and i think in in medicine and nutrition and what we're doing is maybe even harder so uh you know i had this epiphany a number of years ago well over 10 years ago when i went to haiti and met paul farmer who was able to deal with tb and aids in one of the worst places in terms of health care and poverty in the world haiti not by better drugs or surgery or technology but just by the power of community he called it accompaniment and he trained thousands of community health workers to help each other accompany each other their health and make sure they took their medications because we know how to cure tbns to potentially treat them using the right cocktails and medications but these people didn't have a watch they didn't have running water they didn't have they often a place to be i mean so it was dealing with a lot of these this fundamental we call structural violence issues the social economic and political conditions that drive disease we see that in this country you know with food swamps and food deserts i'm sure it's like that in the uk too and i think we we have a tremendous um sort of deficit of understanding how how we really get environment that supports people to health and so the big epiphany for me was okay i know how to change biology but i'm going to fail until i understand how to change behavior and so so i realized at the same time when paul was treating infectious disease using this this model i was like wait a minute um i said wait a minute you know chronic disease is also contagious right obesity is also contagious you're far more likely to be overweight if your friend friend's overweight then if your family is overweight we know that that you're social for you or maybe more important your genetic threads in determining your health outcomes we just know this from the science so if that's true you know if you're bad behavior uh it goes along with with uh you know bad habits in other words if all your friends are you know eating mcdonald's and smoking and drinking beer and having coca-cola you're probably going to be doing the same thing but if all your friends are you know drinking green juices and going to yoga well you might be doing that so so there's a tremendous amount of peer pressure that that we all are subjected to because we're social animals uh it's how we as how we live we have to be social or else we would die as humans we just we're not we're not like a wild you know lion that can roam around by himself or whatever and just eat whatever we want like we're we're dependent on each other and so what we know is that it's much more effective to use friend power uh than than to use willpower when you want to change behavior and particularly for chronic disease so so i kind of had this experiment that we did with this church in southern california where we got 15 000 people to sign up for a six-week healthy living program sort of faith-based wellness program and it was striking what happened people just did so well they lost over the course of a year they lost a quarter of a million pounds probably like i don't know how many stone that is but it's a lot of weight and i think we we saw that the power of these community-based solutions was so massive uh and it wasn't even an expert they had these groups that they had in the church that were met every week to support each other so that would mean six to eight uh people and it would have these these little learning sessions and we just sort of substitute in the curriculum for the healthy living and they support each other they encourage each other they help each other accountable they had jogging for jesus you know and like all kinds of stuff that they did uh to actually do stuff together and that was really was an insight for me that was like wait a minute this is how we have to change medicine and so at cleveland clinic we're doing the same thing we're about to publish our data in the british medical journal actually uh soon uh where we show that that the the group visits the community support uh was more effective than one-on-one visits with a functional message doctor which were more effective than with a traditional doctor so we've got some interesting data about the power of this model to really accelerate change it is the speed of recovery and getting better but also the adherence and the the level of change so i i'm excited about using this model and we're trying to scale this up around the country and and use this power of community i call it love is medicine so food is medicine love is also medicine yeah i love it mark mark you you've just you know you're someone who has been dedicated to the cause of empowering and inspiring people both patients and physicians all over the world for so many years i i can't imagine what it's been like for you you know i'm sure you've faced all kinds of opposition at various times but you know you're driven in that mission and you know it's it's fantastic to see it's very inspiring i know for many um you know for many of my colleagues or myself we see what you have been doing and how you have paved the way for many of us to start spreading our messages i want to publicly acknowledge you for that and say thank you and just to finish off mark you know it's as i say it's the pinky night is a brilliant book i think it really helps to simplify nutrition for people uh some really some core principles there um i always love to leave my listeners with some actionable tips so we we covered a lot of ground today um phytonutrients we covered the climate regenerative farming kids all kinds of things but just to bring it all down for people at the ends this is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life what are some of your top tips for people listening to the show right now well i try to synthesize this at the end of the book and you know sort of getting started and it's just some simple things that are easy to remember first when you're going to eat something ask yourself a simple question did god make this or did man make it if you don't believe in god is it a nature mate so did god make an avocado yeah did he make a twinkie no if if if god made it you can eat it if nature made it you could eat it but if man made it you probably don't want to eat it right the second is a similar idea is you know try not to eat food with labels or if it has a label make sure you read very carefully what the ingredients are if it's broccoli it just says broccoli if it's a piece of chicken it's chicken if it's an egg it's an egg if it's an almond it's an almond it doesn't have a label or nutrition facts and so most of the food i like to use without labels now sometimes you know if you want to buy a package of nuts it might say a label on it and then it has your little nutrition facts on it might say salt or something or if you buy a can of sardines it might say olive oil and sardines and salt that's okay but just try to avoid foods with labels the next the next kind of principle is if you don't have it in your kitchen cupboard or you can't pronounce it you probably won't want to eat it right so if you have a jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your stir fries probably not but it's otherwise known as bht banned in most of europe but available here in the united states and it's uh it's a carcinogenic preservative so you don't want to eat that stuff also when you go shopping don't go down the middle of the aisles stick around the outside where there's just real food vegetables and the produce and the dairy in the meat section if you're eating just focus on plants like i i always focus on two or three servings of plant dishes at each meal whether it's just serb asparagus or mushrooms or salad so last night i had beets we had mushrooms that had salad and we had sweet potato so we like four four vegetable dishes and you know a small piece of meat on the side so that's where meat is a condiment or a condom meat and fat is so important so remember to eat good fats olive oil avocados are my favorite um but there's other good fats too make sure you eat a lot of phytonutrients you want to pick your medicines and your foods so like learn about some of the colors and what they have and try to eat like the rainbow as a way of getting phytochemicals it's an easy thing to do uh and you know enjoy nuts and seeds and and and certain beans are fine so i just and enjoy your food i mean it's just got to be fun and delicious and pleasurable so i wouldn't really um get crazy about finding a particular thing i don't i don't count calories i don't count carb grams fat grams protein grams i don't i don't think any of that i just think about what i eat if you focus on what you eat and quality you don't have to worry about how much you eat literally i mean i could eat you know a giant bowl of salad until i couldn't move and nothing would happen right so i think i think you can you can find out what your natural rhythm is in your biology by just getting unreal food and then and then actually just focusing on quality and if you focus on quality all the rest takes care of itself diseases weight metabolism all that yeah love it mark mark thanks for coming on the show thank you for all the great work you continue to do and uh yeah i look forward to the next time we get to have a conversation thank you my friend it's great to be here really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action if you did enjoy that please do press subscribe hit that notification bell and why not check out this conversation that i picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 104,388

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, dr mark hyman, mark hyman md, clinician, policy change, climate change, nutrition, good health, diet, pegan diet, food is medicine, personalised nutrition, phytonutrients, plant foods, ultra-processed, processed diet, chronic disease, reduce food waste, regenerative agriculture, factory farming, food industry, mark hyman

Id: r6l_Igx6XC4

Length: 76min 5sec (4565 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021