Top Foods & Lifestyle Habits To Heal The Body, Prevent Disease & Stay Young | Dr. Mark Hyman

something I've been thinking about for a while Mark is that all we can ever do is find the right diet that works for us at that point in our life right absolutely and what you're speaking to and you detail the pro-stage study in the book what it showed um which is very very powerful but we're almost making a case I think that as we get older potentially we need to increase our protein intake is that something you would agree with absolutely even the study that most vegans quote that show that protein is bad for you show that as you get older it's actually important that you increase your protein intake so you know what people don't understand is that the the recommended amounts of protein are the minimum amount to not get a deficiency disease so how do you not get protein deficiency which is a very serious disease you have to eat 0.8 grams per kilo but that's like how much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets probably 30 units how much vitamin D you need to optimize your immune system in to prevent cancer and heart disease and all these other benefits probably two to four thousand maybe you know 10 to 100 times the minimum amount so I'm not saying you should have 100 times the recommended dietary allowance of protein but you need more than the minimum amount and for people getting older it shouldn't be probably 0.8 it should be more like 1.6 and if you're doing a lot of vigorous activity and strength pinning you can even have more so I think both because there's resistance to the effects of eating protein meaning it's you need to more protein to get the muscle building effect and the fact that you know as we get older we need to to make sure our proteins are met we do need more protein as we get older is this thing Mark and goes okay I understand that okay I'm going to increase my protein a little bit um but I'm not sure about strength training you know I like going for walks um you know I hear you but I'm not interested in that I'm not worried about me that was me yeah what what why is it so important that people don't neglect resistance training particularly as they get older yeah that that was really uh that was me I I hated the gym it was smelly I didn't want to go in with all the you know big guys who were intimidating and lifting all these heavy weights and I was a skinny guy so I just I just kind of didn't go and I and I knew I recommended it because I the science was clear but I just myself I was kind of resistant to resistance training and I decided I was gonna do it and I hit 60 it was like in my 59th year I was like okay I'm gonna it's 59 probably should get on it now and I started to do it and it was really life-changing and I think that that most people don't realize the impact of strength training on your balance on your Mobility on your function on your metabolism on your overall well-being on your hormones sex hormones decline as we age so strength training boosts those so it has so many benefits that that if if you want to live a long healthy life aside from cutting out sugar and starch probably the other most important thing is resistance training if you just get two things from this podcast is to understand that you need to dramatically reduce or eliminate starch and sugar from your diet and to start resistance training in some form it could be body weight it could be bands which I do it could be weights but make sure make sure you work with someone to do proper form and so forth so you don't hurt yourself when you're starting out but it's so important to do and there's all these apps there's YouTube videos there's no lack of instruction out there but it is something you should consider essential part of Health as you get older and it doesn't have to be a lot it can be 30 minutes three times a week I like to do more but the reality is I probably only do three or four times a week because I just don't have the time at this moment but I when I do I try to do it more and more often yeah but but I think it the minimum is very is very adequate an hour and a half a week if you don't have an hour and a half a week to invest in your health and what's going on with your life in fact I often use this cartoon and my talks where it shows a doctor telling this patient do you have time to exercise an hour a day or be dead 24 hours a day you know so I think that's a funny cartoon yeah yeah thank you for the clarity there I mean a couple of things that on Saturday I tend to go to my local park run um sometimes with my son's son is with my family and at the end of park run this Saturday I bumped into a friend of mine who said actually wrong and I heard your conversation with Gabrielle line I know Gabrielle's been on your podcast and she said I heard it and for the first time in my life I've actually went and started strength training she's been doing that for about two months and she said yeah she's in her mid-40s right yeah yeah and she says she feels absolutely fantastic she was already worthy active she would run yeah right she would so so that's in her 40s but a wider Point here Marcus and why I'd be thinking a lot about strength over the past two or three months and again we can knows the science we can write about it we can try and practice things but then sometimes things happen in our lives where the same information lands in a slightly different way so I've had some real challenges in my personal life over the past two or three months to do with the health of my mother and Mum is now I think sort of 82 83 and she's been Mega unwell since uh Christmas she was admitted to hospital she's come out she's definitely not the same as she was now and what's really striking is that you know my brother and I try our best to look after her and care for her but because of her muscle strength or I should say her lack yeah and muscle strength yeah basic things now like you know getting out of a chair being able to get out of bed yourself when you can't do them yeah the quality of your life can rapidly rapidly Decline and I know this I've seen it with patients before but when I'm now witnessing it on a daily basis with my own mother I'm like wrong and you need to keep moving you need to work on your muscle mass and I think there's a wider point mark which I I hope you can speak to which is this idea that as we get older our muscle mass is declining right so if we don't do anything about it we're on that road to what I just described so could you maybe sort of speak to that inspire people about why they need to get going with this totally I mean it starts you know when you're when you're younger you can kind of manage but when you get into your 30s 40s we're not talking 60s 70s here we're talking 30s 40s you start to decline muscle mass and unless you are fighting that entropy by the time you're 60 or 70 you're going to be twice as fat as you were even though you're the same weight you will become what we call skinny fat and your muscle will be replaced by fat so think of a wagoon buy versus a filet mignon you want the filet mignon because it's much more functional muscle and what happens is is we lose that muscle and we get a disease called sarcopenia which is something most doctors don't know how to diagnose don't test for and don't treat but it is among the most important and most uh deadly things that happen to us as we age what is a big cause of death in the elderly Falls false falling and then breaking your hip and if you're you break your hip it's worse than getting a diagnosed with terminal cancer in terms of your mortality rate so it's it's a really big deal and I think that that can be almost entirely prevented by resistance training and giving people the strength to be able to hold themselves up to ball properly if they end up falling to have stronger bone density and all the things we need to to do as we get older so the reason people end up in nursing homes in long-term care studies is not because they're sick with a chronic disease it's because they can't get out of bed or get out of a chair or tie their shoes or cut at their toenails and so that's the reason and that is totally fixable by building muscle as we age and staying strong and Fit I mean I see I see you know 100 year old guys riding horses in these blue zones it's really impressive people most people wouldn't even go out without a walker at 100 years old or if they can get up at all or if they live that long so we're seeing you know the ability to do functional things as the most important thing Peter attia is a friend he talks about the the the centenarian decathlon what are the like 10 things you have to do like get up off the floor I mean I I went skiing with my dad when he was in his 70s and he found this key so he couldn't get up he could not get his body off the ground and and then I you know I I help them by getting them strength training and I paid for a trainer for him and he was able to actually start to regain strength even at in his 80s uh and even even up to almost 90 years old it was very impressive to see yeah a couple of key messages there let's not wait until we're in our 70s and 80s to to face those difficulties right the decline is starting already for many of us so let's do something about it that was one key message there the other one was what you said about your father that even in your 80s it's not too late you can make a difference right and so no I think those are those are really key points which again you make very clear in the book well talk to me about hormesis there's a chance to unhormesis in the book yeah what is it and how can we utilize it I guess to help us age better well you know uh I mean we we've all evolved in a much more stressful environment you know we didn't have perfectly controlled temperatures and humidity and air conditioning and heating and we just sort of lived out there in nature and we had periods where we had access to food we didn't have grocery stores repairs but we didn't have access to food and and we had to move our bodies alive just to function and and all these are stresses so hormesis is essentially a stress that doesn't kill you and it activates these ancient healing Pathways these ancient longevity switches in your body in ways that we now are fully understanding and I'll just go through some of them what's the stress well not eating is a stress so starvation would be considered stress so not eating from six o'clock at night to eight in the morning your body's like Oh I'm a little short on food here lots of stress let me kick into gear all these healing systems like autophagy which we mentioned before exercise is another kind of stress you know when you lift weights you're tearing your muscles when you sprint you're stressing your mitochondria and that causes them to rebound round and become stronger those are two examples of hormesis but there's a lot of other cool ones that are now being used hot and cold therapy saunas for example show reduction in depth by like 40 something percent in in Finland in these large studies uh and and and and does so by for example activating your immune system by fixing your proteins that are damaged as we age with this these products that they're produced in a sauna called heat shock proteins or cold therapy uh cold plunges doesn't have to be a sauna it can be a hot bath it can be a cold shower most people have a bath and a shower you know so I take a cold shower in the morning for two minutes it's a it's a really inexpensive way to activate hormesis if you want to cold plunge and splurge on that great and those are powerful but I just you know filled my bathtub full of cold water and if you live in a warm climate you can throw a couple of bags of ice in you know and then sit in there for three four minutes that activates these healing things in your body and there there are also other forms of hormesis that are phytohormesis plant foods that have little stress molecules that they make to defend themselves when we consume those in small amounts they kind of trigger these helium responses and many of them through these Hallmarks of Aging for example Phi Seton which is from strawberries helps you kill zombie cells and quercetin also helps to reverse your biological age working on your epigenetics and it reduces inflammation so there's all these compounds that we can consume from plants that do this and then there's some other kind of more advanced therapies like hyperbaric oxygen therapy or or hypoxia therapy where you reduce oxygen levels these are stresses on the body and it can actually help to activate longevity Pathways like in Israel they did a study in hyperbaric oxygen and they found that it increased telomeres and killed zombie cells more than any other treatment and these are things that we see as two of the Hallmarks of Aging that get worse and it made them better simply by lying in 100 oxygen at a higher pressure than atmospheric pressure for 60 minutes for you know 60 sessions over a period of time so we have we have real insights into how these stresses can activate these ancient longevity pathways well you mentioned a couple of terms there that some people may not recognize zombie cells and telomeres right so yeah you mentioned that some of these therapies can help with those two things two hormones of Aging but perhaps you could just expand a little bit on what telomeres are and what zombie cells are yeah so so we mentioned these 10 Hallmarks of aging and then these things that kind of happen as we get older one of them is you know we replicate our DNA I don't know some quadrillion times in In Our Lifetime and so our DNA has to kind of open up it has to be red and it has to close back up and and that's regulated by these things at the end of your chromosomes called telomeres as as they keep replicating there's a little bit that gets cut off each time and they get shorter they're like the little caps on the end of your shoelaces that prevent it from unraveling and when they get too short you end up having real problems and that shortens your life uh so telomeres are important metric to look at as as about how we're doing with longevity the other is zombie cells zombie cells are also known as senescent cells and normally you know when cells have gone through their normal process of doing what they do they they die off and we have a process to do that in our body called apoptosis which just means you kind of explode the cell and you die and you eat all the parts and it's sort of a recycling system but sometimes those cells don't die and they become zombie cells and those zombie cells produce all these inflammatory chemicals that that go all over your body and then they kind of make other cell zombie cells and it creates this whole zombie apocalypse inside and end up with a state of accelerated inflammation and that's why we call it aging inflammaging so senescent cells are things that can be changed or got rid of through some things like hyperbaric oxygen or certain analytic therapies that can be from plant compounds that we can use so maybe even drugs will be synolytic drugs where we're learning more about this as we go on but these zombie cells are not good for you and and hyperbaric oxygen can help to get rid of them which is great yeah you also as you've just explained and I really did enjoy reading this section where all these kind of plants compounds can also help us get rid of zombie cells and you mention of Youth and bear in that section Mark you you wrote quite a provocative sentence um what's new yeah what's new but it was it really got me thinking it's quite a beautiful statement actually you believe we co-evolved with plants to borrow their medicines to keep us healthy talk to me about that yeah well you know like guinea pigs make uh don't make vitamin C humans don't make vitamin C uh many other species of animals do we don't make it because we're lazy our biology we want to don't want to do anything that we don't have to do with our biology to conserve energy so we've co-evolved with plants to use their compounds as medicines to help regulate our biology and animals do this you know if you see a wild animal or a cow that's pasture raised they will graze on a few major food crops but then they'll sample maybe 100 other crops uh plants to actually activate medicinal properties in those plants for themselves they're not they don't know that but they they kind of intuitively figure this out and keep themselves healthy which is quite interesting and so the same thing with humans we've co-evolved with these plants and eat over 800 species of plants as hunter-gatherers that contain these rich phytochemical compounds that we now are understanding that maybe we thought they were 25 000 there may be a million of these things in plants and we're starting to catalog them and understand their mechanisms of action how they were work when we say food is medicine that's what we mean we mean inside the food we're eating there are medicinal compounds that our body uses to activate various Pathways for example one of the key findings for example around longevity was the activation of sirtuins sirtuins is one of the four longevity switches that are in the Hallmark of Aging called deregulated nutrient sensing meaning how do we sense our nutrition environment and how do we regulate different processes based on whether we're eating the wrong stuff for the right stuff and so Resveratrol which comes from grapes actually works on sirtuins to activate sirtuins which kicks in this whole system of DNA repair and improving insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial function and helping to reduce inflammation and some really amazing thing that happens when you properly regulate sirtuins well Resveratrol is a plant compound that is acting on that pathway for example doesn't mean you should be drinking red wine I want to be careful with that because we now know the alcohol in is actually even in lower amounts than we thought can be harmful increased risk of cancer and it's definitely not a health promoting activity it's fine to do once in a while as a recreational fun thing to do but it's not something you want to do every day and I think the uh the but the compounds in the red grapes actually do act on this pathway so that's one example yeah but then also I think we have to acknowledge that I'm guessing in these blue zones where you went to that people are drinking as well right yeah they are yeah they are they're having dust of wine here and there but you know we have to understand that that there is a phenomena in science called healthy the healthy user effect and and this means that we can get kind of confused in studies where we say oh these are people drinking alcohol live longer or they do this for that and maybe the other things they're doing right if we're told that you know having a glass of wine is good for you then maybe the people who are drinking the wine are engaging other healthy behaviors right they're exercising they're eating more fruits and vegetables they're not smoking so we we have to be careful these biases that are inherent in studying people where we thought for example that hormones were protected for women against heart disease and cancer and stroke and dementia because of a population of study where they found you know women who seem to take hormones had less of these problems well it was because these women were healthier as a group because they went to the doctor more they paid more attention their health they exercise more they didn't smoke they ate more fruits and vegetables that's why they had less heart disease cancer stroke and dementia and when they did a randomized controlled trial called The Women's Health Initiative was a billion dollar study 160 000 women they literally had to stop the trial part way through because so many women were dying who were taking the hormones it's because of of the bias in the first study that was called the healthy user effect and that's what's going on when you look at some of the data well yes the people in the blue zones drink a little wine but what else did they do they weren't exposed to environmental toxins they had really no chronic stress they had deep says a meeting purpose in community they ate foods that were original like almost heirloom Foods a lot of wild Foods they ate nakaria they had animal foods but they had animals they were eating all these wild plants and had phytochemicals in them you know they they had uh natural exercise that they did as part of their life so what was it was it the alcohol or was it all this other stuff yeah thanks for explaining that I was just bringing that up to stimulate conversation because um I think one of the problems when we look at these blue zones is that we as I've already mentioned we take these things in isolation and yeah it's the totality of their experience that leads to it and we're trying to learn principles and also the truth is like in the west most people certainly if I speak about my the patient population I have seen most people are consuming alcohol to de-stress right so it's a way of mitigating chronic levels of high stress so yeah I I imagine in the blue zones it's a very different relationship with that alcohol it's not to de-stress maybe it's a small amount to connect right maybe it's also true and maybe it's also different like in icaria they made wine according to their ancient methods they they kind of smushed it with their feet The Grapes were grown in tough soils so they were much higher in phytochemicals they they didn't have any sulfides they kind of yeah kind of fermented them in these clay pots underneath the soil and and you know sometimes it didn't work out and they were all organic there were no pesticides so who knows quite different I actually I actually drank the wine and Curry and I was like normally wine makes me feel like crap I just get brain fog and feel kind of off and and I I drank this wine I felt great I was like wow this is really different but it's not wine that you can actually even take home with you because you know they they can't ship it they can't really bottle it it's really serve fresh it's very it's very different yeah yeah and just to be clear none of us are as medical doctors are promoting alcohol because actually we're just having a conversation about how these things may influence Health and Longevity um if you want if you want to climb five miles on a Rocky Mountain every day if you want to sleep eight nine hours if you want to have no chronic stress be exposed to no toxins have a deep sense of community meaning a purpose and eat like only heirloom traditional foods that are completely unprocessed you probably could have a glass of wine it's not going to hurt you so yeah just think of all the other things yeah Mark coming back to nutrition it's it's a very confusing topic for many people right and I'm always conscious that I never want to leave people at the end of these podcasts more confused and I think sometimes that does happen because you speak to someone who may have a certain food philosophy and he speaks to someone else with another food philosophy and yeah they sound very knowledgeable and they quote research to support their point of view and so in the interests of moving this forward for people right let's just go go through what everyone can agree on we started off this conversation talking about reducing Ultra processed foods I don't think there's many people in this space who would disagree with that right I know I think that's a universally acceptable University yeah and then that sugar and starch in general are are really not great for you I think most people also agree about that excess sugar uh for sure you know I think most people can agree with you know we're eating way more than we used to and reducing it stroke eliminating I think is pretty hard for most people yeah environment reduces your type 2 diabetic and you're really overweight you know and your metabolism is so screwed up you know those people I think you probably need to be on an extremely restricted carbohydrate diet but once you're metabolically healthy you can eat more and be more resilient and that's the goal so then with the third thing I think we we discuss protein now yes it's controversial um and it is you know as you even admit in your book it is confusing for people there's a line where you actually say that so you understand the confusion but the protease study which was very thorough does seem to support um increased protein intake to help us prevent sarcopenia particularly as we get older and I think you've very eloquently explained your your view is that actually it's easy with animal protein but if you want to do it with plant protein you can do it you're going to need to supplement you may need to make sure you're hitting that 2.5 grams of leucine so I think again broad agreement there I I would say would you agree with that I agree and I agree in terms of plant proteins you have to make sure that you add extra amino acids or that they're added already to the plant protein and you have to probably take a plant protein powder which is pea protein or other forms of protein that may be you know pumpkin seed there's there's good protein powders out there but they're not going to be sufficient on their own unless they're they have a added amino acids to bring leucine content up to two and a half grams per serving which is you know about 30 30 plus grams okay great and then let's move on to a term that you have said on numerous occasions in this conversation previous podcast conversations which is phytochemicals or phytonutrients right and these are compounds that are found within plants now I think I think it's there's broad consensus that phytonutrients are probably helpful for us right there are a couple of people I follow online or carnivore Community thinks those are toxins in Plants but I don't quite agree they they technically they kind of are right the phytochemicals in plants are the plant's defense systems but as I said you know a little bit of stress a little bit of phytochemical hermesis actually helps our own biology work better yeah so and I think another um somewhere that I think people get confused with phytochemicals is that they don't understand the way in which it works in the body they sort of break it down into the constituents like they'll look at the foods and go well how many how much fiber how much protein how much fat how many carbs phyton you you know if you go to the supermarket you don't see the phytonutrients uh numbers on the back right but it's it's it should well yeah but maybe that's the way we'll move at some point in the future but I I wonder if you could just really expand on that you know why are phytonutrients so important in your view and it's it we need to move Beyond this kind of fat protein carb model to really understand that because it's to do with signaling our genes isn't it totally I mean I think I think the thing that we've missed is that you know nutrition we we look at a reductionist view uh what is needed amino acids fatty acids carbohydrates some vitamins and minerals and it turns out that you know you can give people nutrition through an intravenous tube which contains all these elements but what is missing is a lot of the stuff that actually really is necessary for health which are these these things that were not considered essential nutrients but that I consider essential they're not necessarily going to give you a deficiency disease if you don't eat them but if you don't eat them over a long period of time chronic disease will accelerate and you won't protect yourself against all these ravages of aging and I think this is such an important concept for people to understand that these are medicines in food and I and I have a whole chart in the book about how different compounds in food whether it's certain classes of foods like onions and garlic which have quercetin or other foods like the broccoli family that has glucophonin which is important for longevity or whether there are certain you know phytochemicals in green tea like catechins that activate different Pathways or the mushrooms that have polysaccharides that regulate immunity I go through all the different foods that we can choose from the grocery store what I call the pharmacy f-a-r-m-e-c-y and we can use those Foods as a part of our daily consumption to activate some of these longevity Pathways and switches so it's not it's not hard to do but it's important that we consider that these these compounds are really essential for us if we want to have vibrant health you mentioned the carnival Community which is is growing and I think it's something that you know doctors like ourselves should be talking about because a lot of people are saying I've tried everything and since I went carnivore so for people who are not familiar basically pretty much an all meat diet is is the way I think many people practice it and they are reporting all kinds of improvements you know in joint pains skin weight loss you know Vitality vibrancy right so I I wanna with sensitivity and compassion sort of tease us out a little bit because on one hand and I and this is my view with any patient you cannot blame anyone for doing something where they've made a change and they feel better especially when what they tried before did not make them feel good I agree 100 so what do you think is going on uh for people in that Community obviously you don't know every single patient there and where does the phytochemical story come in for those people would you say yeah so you know the truth is that that you know there are therapeutic diets that can be applied in different patients that need different things so do I think everybody should be on a keto diet no do I think it's therapeutic now I think be very effective for some people absolutely do I think carnivore diet is the diet we shall be on no do I think it could be effective for certain people yes and part of it is not the meat that they're eating it's what they're not eating right they're not eating sugar they're not eating processed food they're not having gluten they're typically not having Dairy they're not having uh any of the typical processed inflammatory foods that are causing so many of the symptoms so for example if you get off Greens and Beans you're removing a lot of things that potentially are bothering people's gut and not that grains and means are bad but but for certain people they are right so if you have an autoimmune disease if you have leaky gut if you have um you know various inflammatory problems it may be a real Factor so I often will put people on a more restricted diet in order to reset their biology and see what's working and what's not and we call that an in functional medicine and an Elimination Diet so a carnivore diet in a sense is a very Extreme Elimination Diet with one basic food group now the truth is that you know you can get phytochemicals from animal Foods if you eat regenerally raised animals or wild animals in in Hikari and Sardinia they were taking their goats and sheep and they were taking them to eat all these different wild plants at different times of the year because they knew not because they had phytochemical they knew it would taste better if it had this plant or that plant at this time of the year that the milk and the meat would taste better the cheese would taste better favor always follows phytochemical richness in our food so where our flavor comes from other than the additives is from the colorful compounds in the food like a ripe tomato or you know a nice juicy Peach in the summer or something that is from uh you know asparagus just pick from the garden tastes way different than asparagus you buy in the store these are because of the phytochemicals in them but when you are eating a carnivore diet you're eliminating um most of things but you are maybe getting some phytochemicals in the food you're also getting you know fatty acids and if you're eating the right kinds of meat you're getting some Omega-3s you're getting lots of nutrients Inc you have to probably eat organ Meats to get all the vitamins that you need so there's some tricks to it but I I think that that it is a pretty interesting way of thinking about treating lots of different conditions that are inflammatory and I'm not opposed to it but I but I don't think it's a long-term strategy and and you know when you look at our biological needs we we need small amounts of essential fatty acids you know in the gram level there there is no biological requirement for carbohydrate but there is a large requirement for the macronutrient protein it's the only one for which there's a large requirement it's part of our diet so I think people can do fine on that I worry long term but it's about looking at the numbers so what does your numbers look like how does I mean I just saw a patient the other day who was on it and their cholesterol went crazy so there may be individual responses that are quite different even to the same diet and I think that's what people need to understand there's no one-size-fits all there's not you know vegan diet is great for everybody our carnivore diet is great for everybody it's really about what's great for you what works for you and that's as a physician what my interest is is not in you know research studies with thousands of people it's like what is happening to that person in front of me and let's do a what we call end of one experiment let's try whatever you want to try or let's try what I think might be best based on the research and let's measure again how you do yeah if you get better grade if you get worse let's change our strategy yeah I think that was a peaceful breakdown and and sort of very similar to my view on it which is it's a it's it's a phenomenal Elimination Diet you know the case study of psoriatic arthritis which you mentioned earlier on in this conversation again the principle was you put that patient on a very strict Elimination Diet to help them because they were sick and you know maybe a year down the line six months down the line as they rebuild their body they rebuild that gut lining potentially bakasota reintroduce things right you know we see that all the time and I guess you know phytochemicals aren't just in your broccoli and your asparagus green tea black tea right the herbs that you might put on the cooking right they they all contain these you know turmeric curcumin all this sort of stuff do you know what I mean there's there's other ways people can get that even if they are on quite a restrictive diets absolutely absolutely yeah yeah no totally yeah um Martha said there's a point there as you mentioned the elimination diets and I'd really welcome your thoughts on this these days for most people is it more important to focus on what to bring into your diet or is it more important to focus on what to take out of it that's a great question I think you know um I think it's both I mean you you have to add in all the good stuff and you have to take out the bad stuff I mean if you're if you're eating you know three cups of broccoli a day but having three coca-colas um I don't think it's going to do the same thing as if you get rid of the Coca-Cola's any you know more Whole Foods so I think I think we do need to get rid of stuff and we also need to add stuff so they're both really important uh I think I think the key is is trying to include more and more the things that are good for you and slowly eliminate things that are bad for you and I think people can get there now what I often recommend because if you do the incremental approach you might not see the benefits as as fast um is is a short-term 10-day reset and uh I call the 10-day detox diet I've written a book about it it's it's sort of highlighted in a little bit in the book about how to do that but the key is when you when you kind of remove all the bad stuff potentially bad stuff because it may not be bad right gluten may not be bad for everybody but but if you remove all the stuff that potentially is bad for 10 days your body will get the chance to reset and what I've seen by doing that that there's a 70 reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days that's migraines irritable bowel depression arthritis whatever it is gets better in 10 days now if it doesn't get better maybe something else is going on maybe you have Lyme disease or mercury poisoning or something else causing it but most of the time a lot of the ailments that we're suffering from are because of what we're eating and a short-term reset can be extremely powerful so you can do an incremental approach if you want but I encourage people to do a reset because then you go shoot you know I didn't realize how much food was affecting how I feel and how much better I could feel in so few days it's not like months or years of doing this to see a result it's literally days yeah and that's one of the things I really like in in the new book Young Forever Mark is that there are some complex things in there if you have the resources and you're able to access them but the majority majority are simple things that we can all do you explain the science you know the science can be complex it's really interesting to read about it but actually the Practical takeaways are actually not that difficult and no you know one thing that people will often say and will probably get comments on on this video on YouTube that yes but it's hard for us to find a doctor like you Mark or dots like me who looks at these root cause solutions for people and I the one thing I try and emphasize is that eighty percent of what I'd end up doing anyway is the stuff that we're talking about right so yeah get stuck in and do this basic stuff first your diet your movement your sleep your stress do you know what I mean and that and then absolutely if that doesn't work then we can go in deeper yeah and in the book I go through okay well there's quizzes so you can identify where your imbalances are what's going on with you you can be someone who can self-diagnose what's happening and then there's guidelines about you know what are the specific extra dietary changes or extra supplements that might help or other things that could be necessary or even further testing or medical care so there's a road map for you to be the CEO of your own health to dive deep into the things that are out of balance and to correct those things not just live longer but to actually feel better now couple of things I wanted to cover before we ended mark one was you just mentioned the 10-day detoxification diet that you sometimes you know you've written a book about it you've spoken about before now the term detoxification is something that seems to um people get triggered by that term let's put it like that right so oh it means you like to go to rehab right yeah but but if we think about it um people understand the term hangover they understand right if they uh toxify themselves with too much alcohol they're going to get symptoms and they also understand that oh if I have a hangover and I drink more water or instead of having fatty uh fried foods and let's say but have more Whole Foods and fruits and vegetables for example that I'm going to feel better more quickly right so I think that's a really simple way for them to understand yes detox organs exist but you can enhance the way that they work by what you're putting in so for people who are pushing back when they hear you say detoxification I wonder if you could explain what you mean by it and why it's so important well if people don't believe in detoxification then you should basically not pee not poop not sweat and not breathe because those are all the ways our bodies are naturally designed to eliminate but more combat people will say they will say Mark yes but um they're all working for me so why do I need to focus on detoxification my body will do that naturally so what what did you say to that it is true your body does have these natural systems but we do everything to impede them right we are overloading our our metabolisms with bad food we're not even a fiber in our guts are often messed up we're often not drinking enough water and eliminating our liver Pathways aren't optimized to detoxify all the chemicals that we're consuming from from our foods and our environment and so we need to help boost them a little bit and I think most most of the science around detoxification is very clear we have these detoxification systems they're often not working well and we need to increase their function or to be healthy uh and the the other kind of connotation of detox means get rid of the bad stuff right so yes it does mean detox from sugar and processed food and so forth so there's both sort of uh you know the the sort of hard science of our detoxification organs and systems and how to optimize those but there's also the the reality that we're eating a lot of crap and we need to get rid of it and that's another sort of way of thinking about it you mentioned Mark biological age and chronological age yes please explain to people who don't know the difference sure so you know I'm 63 I can't change that I was born in 1959 and that's going to progress inevitably toward you know however many years I'm alive however my biological age is my age on the inside it's not my chronological clock it's my biological clock and we now know that we can measure our biological clock and our rate of Aging through a specific test called DNA methylations something relatively new and it it tests what's called our epigenome our genes are fixed we have 20 000 genes we can change that or 25 whatever but we have on top of those genes a regulating system Epi means above and the epigenome basically is like the piano player that plays all the different Keys which are our genes we've got 88 keys but they can play thousands of tunes you kind of rock Ragtime jazz blues whatever classical all in the same 88 keys same thing with the RPG genome and it can control your biology in real time in ways that either accelerate or reverse the aging process and now we know that a lot of the interventions that we discussed whether it's diet and exactly what to eat how to eat and so forth exercise and types of exercise stress reduction sleep environmental toxins nutritional level our microbiome all these things influence our epigenome and can change it either into something that's causing us to age fast or slow or reverse our biologically so if you're eating Ultra processed food you're not exercising under tons of stress or not sleeping your nutrition will need efficient you're exposed to toxins guess what your epigenome is going to be bad you will be older than your chronological age as opposed to younger so we know through interventions even shorter interventions of for example eight weeks we can of aggressive lifestyle and dietary change with functional medicine you can reverse your biological age by three years so in eight weeks you turn back the biological clock by three years that's profound in eight weeks in eight weeks yeah and so I mean I'm 43 I'm trying to get to 25. let's see how it goes but but you know I think that's a key Point here mark when a lot of people think about longevity right I think there is a slight mismatch in their brain where it's like well why should I be bothered about what happens in 20 30 years I want to live my life now right so there's there's always in this like disconnect whereas what I love about the things that you recommended Young Forever is that yes it's going to slow down the aging process if that's your goal but it's also going to help you feel great like straight away right so it's it's not something that we can kick down as the future it's going to have immediate it's gonna have an immediate impact on the quality in your life immediate yeah absolutely adding more life to your ears not just here's to your life right so how do you actually feel good to do what you want in life that's what it's all about how do we be a more engaged Society how do we become more connected to each other in support of how do we actually change this sort of this inexorable sickness both biologically and psychologically that we see in our society and a lot of it has to do with our biological Health we know that our mental health is connected to our physical health and a lot of the sort of raging depression and anxiety and mental health issues that are exploding across the globe are really related to you know our overall stress as Society but also to the food we're eating that literally the the dietary things that we do Drive our poor mental health and that particularly starts with sugar and processed food and that can be changed and that'll give us a sense of purpose and meaning and ability to do whatever we want you posted a photo on I think it was on Instagram a few months ago of you in your 40s and you now yeah in your 60s right and there was uh it was quite a noticeable difference it was yeah um I think if people didn't know they may not be sure which one was which I think you could tell which ones which I'm looking at your face oh my gray hair a little more gray hair but but why did you post that what was so important for you to show people well I think I think two things one you know when I was in my 40s I was athletic I was running I was biking 100 miles I was very active um and I was eating what I thought was healthy uh which was which was Whole Foods but I tend to eat a lot more carbohydrates a lot less fat and less protein and I didn't do resistance training I thought I'd bring yoga I'm you know that's good enough or I'm doing you know biking or running and I didn't and so when I was 60 I decided to start doing resistance bands and strength training and I also have changed my diet over the years to be much more low glycemic to be higher in protein and fat and and low in starch and sugar with lots of phytochemically Rich fruits and vegetables and I noticed my body composition changed I went from like you know 12 body fat to six percent body fat I had you know increasing health and and strength as they got older which I think most people don't see they see you know as you get older you lose muscle you become more flabby you know and that is truly usually what happens and that is the death metal if you want to age fast then don't exercise and keep your diet high in stretching sugar alone protein and fat and that that's the recipe for disaster it's really the recipe that most of us are following but the body has the ability to uh as I as I as I showed in that picture to change radically at any age so I've seen people you know even at 80 90 start to do things and and you see there their their strength and their function come back yeah well we'll definitely if you if you're willing to send me that photo or definitely pop it up on the video I think it's very inspiring for people and I think that's a wider point there mark which is again if you go down the street and you picked 10 people at random and asked them would you like to live longer I suspect that many of them will say no because they perceive old age with Frailty and morbidity yeah and I think your book's really challenged that but can you speak to that a little bit I think you've you've written in the book that actually what we see around us is actually what you call abnormal aging yeah or you've come to expect the typical person who's older as representative of what's supposed to happen right we become hunched over or weaker more frail less people do things we want to do we become fraught with diseases you know and over uh probably 80 percent of people over 65 have one or more chronic illnesses and and we so we come to expect this is just how life goes and we can't do anything about it but what we're actually witnessing is an accelerated process of Aging that has to do with these underlying Hallmarks of Aging that go awry and things like damage your mitochondria inflammation change under microbiome changes in our nutritional sense apparatus that regulates our food and Metabolism our our DNA damage that happens epigenetic changes shortening telomere zombie cells that developed so all these things happen as a result of damage to our proteins happen as a result of this abnormal process that now we can intervene in and a lot of longevity scientists are looking for drugs or interventions to interrupt these Hallmarks of Aging which may be helpful like rapamycin for example or or metformin but the reality is that that we have a greater far greater influence through dealing with the root cause of those Hallmarks what I call dying of too much or dying of too little which is not enough of the good stuff and none of too much the bad stuff that we're exposed to that all these Hallmarks and then we don't we don't actually um have to actually treat them individually we can optimize our health and our medicines will be better our blood sugar regulation will be better our inflammation would be less and everything tends to work better when we deal with those those root causes of the Hallmarks so we we don't have to accept this decline in decrepitude or Frailty as normal we can reverse that we can reverse that biological process and actually get younger as we get older I know it's part of the research for this book you went on your travel so I really enjoyed watching you sharing a lot of these stories on your social media this is probably I don't know six nine months ago I can't remember yeah when exactly um I know two countries you visited or two places you visited were Sardinia and icaria I think yeah and I wonder could you paint us a picture of maybe some of the older residents who you met who really challenge that modern assumption that as we get older we're going to be frail we're going to be sick we're going to be sat down all day we're not We're not gonna be doing much because you know you shared yourself in your early 60s how much vibrancy you have okay that's fantastic but paint us a picture from your travels as to you know a couple of people who you met who also showcase to us what may be possible as we age yeah I think that's very very important point that uh you know we need to sort of look at cultures where they live a long time and what are their habits and behaviors and how are they different and I think you know they they age very well and live a long time and now the blue zones are these places around the planet where people are the longest lived humans the thing is when they move to the Western societies that that we come from they age at the same rate as we get old and sick and die sooner and so really by default their habits are those that promote longevity they're not you know doing saunas and cold plunges and taking a lot of supplements and doing IV NAD and doing exosomes and plasmapheresis and all these kind of cool things that are emerging around longevity their whole default culture is is actually automatically providing them with the inputs that enhance health and promote longevity for example their diet is is incredibly rich in phytochemicals in in Whole Foods and things that are are wild and and really simple foods that they've eaten for thousands of years we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focused digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation they exercised as a normal part of their life whether it's gardening or whether it's you know shepherding climbing up and down the mountains all the day long and it says the social connections and the tight-knit family groups and the social Fabric and the idea that we should just be there to help and support each other this is really quite important and and so when you have these defaults longevity happens as a natural consequence uh they actually were quite incredible I met this guy Pietro who was 95 years old they just retired quote retired from being a Shepherd where he was shepherding his sheep five miles up and down the Rocky Mountains every single day for probably when he was like 12. and it was straight up as an arrow booming voice Clear Eyes you know just looked like the average sort of probably a 67 year old in America and I'm like wow this guy's 95 years old it was a a Leica who was a almost 90 years old this woman cooked us a meal from her garden she took care of this entire I wouldn't call it a garden like a farm she had on a hillside all these Orchards and fruit trees many many garden beds animals she took care of him she's all by herself her husband was in like a hundred so he was he was sort of chilling I mean he she just was was so fit and I was literally chasing after her going up this hill huffing and puffing and she just was like a little mountain goat I was like holy cow this is impressive and she cooks all her own food they graze all their own food she cans all her food she preserves all her food and she's like 90 something years old I'm like this is not what we see in America 90 years old we see people in nursing homes or sitting in a wheelchair a rocking chair and not doing a whole lot yeah it's so interesting to hear that Mark and I'm just wonder for you you're someone who's known the science that's come out of the blue zones you've spoken about it before you you've you've known about this for many many years was it different you can know it with your rational mind but then you show up and you spend time with these people these family is these elderly individuals who are maybe more active than you are potentially and you know right you know what did that do to how did that influence your writing of this book because I I always think about this as you know you like me as someone we try to communicate these ideas in a simple way to the public yeah and we can know stuff with our rational brain but I think there's something quite powerful about stories and actually seeing people who embody what we actually want right totally I mean it just was so inspiring about what really matters in life it's not being on your cell phone or being on social media or achieving something or having some great goals it's about just the process of living and they did that so well they really lived close to the Earth they lived close to each other they celebrated together it was just it was just quite amazing you didn't see any nursing homes or somebody's spouse died they would move in with their kids or their you know niece and nephew it was just it was one of them when Julia she was 100 years old and three months she said I'm 103 months I'm like okay like I'm five and three quarters you know when you little kids and you're like I'm 103 months and uh you know she she didn't have kids around she wasn't ever married uh all the men she was dating when she was younger all died out and she lived with her niece and and nephew and and they were taking care of her there was no sense that they would be putting someone in a nursing home and she was still working at 100 years old she was sewing all these doilies and embroideries for weddings and different celebrations and so she was very active she'd go and walks away every day and you know she really didn't have any health issues I think she was her third is a little slow so she she maybe took some tired medication but she was quite amazing and clear-eyed and sharp and funny as heck would you say since coming back from your travels seeing people like that has it inspired you to change anything have you are you more active than you were before you've always been very conscious about your health so yeah I'm just so fascinated by what that experience did to you on a personal level well it was it was just profoundly moving and uh inspiring and it made me realize that you know a lot of the things that we value in our Western culture are not the things that really matter and uh you know the the the what matters is our friendships our community our connections is is taking care of each other is taking care of the earth is actually living in a way that's not harmful to ourselves or everybody else and that's how they lived and they lived that way for thousands of years and they they sort of naturally developed these environments and habits that fostered Health and Longevity and so as much as I can I try to learn from them and incorporate some of the habits they have and it you know it's beautiful for me I've read every page of the new book Mark and as I say I really I really really like it I think it's going to help a lot of people and we're going to talk about a bit more on food and exercise and protein and stress to see we're gonna get to all of that but I wanted this will surprise you I think for me through the lens at which I look at life now I think the most powerful sentence in the book is this one oh in places like the blue zones people seem to understand their place and purpose in the community in which they live now what I when I read that I paused because it really speaks to so much of what I've tried to write about in my book unhappiness how I think about the world now you know you've touched on this a little bit in a couple of ways Mark you said that these guys aren't doing cold plunges they're not like thinking about their diet they're not trying to practice anti-aging their environment just kind of supports them so that they they live well right and and I remember I haven't been to these so-called blue zones right but last summer I was in ethaki small island in Greece with my family and we were there for about five days it was this peaceful small island and there's so many things I remember there was one Family Restaurant which we would go to most days very small it was all Local Foods yeah the the families helped out it was three or four generations all around the entire time and I remember once Mark I remember I think my kids were getting a bit tired of the same vegetables every night so they say Daddy they've got broccoli so I said hey and I think I shared this once on the podcast before I asked the lady who was serving us um too many other vegetables for example like broccoli and she looked to me she was super nice she was sad she was almost with a look of confusion she said well that's not in season like it was and it really it was such a powerful lesson I thought actually what they're feeding us is literally what is in season and being grown on that small island so that was a very powerful lesson but but the overwhelming sense I got was that these guys aren't searching for status they're not trying to necessarily compete or certainly from what I could see in a way that I think we are in the west they're not striving and as as I say why that phrase in the book it's so powerful people seem to understand their place and purpose in the community in which they live yeah I think that's a big problem for many of us in the west and I think that is getting in the way any any thoughts on that Mark oh my God yeah I mean think about you know when you look at some of the data it's a little startling if you if you were to erase heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet we would maybe extend life globally by five to seven years which is these are the number one and two killers if you have meaning and purpose your life extension is seven years so having meaning and purpose in your life meaning that you you know who you are why you're here what you're doing what your place is in the community in connection to others that actually is is a benefit as great as eliminating heart disease and cancer from the face of the earth I mean think about that for a minute yeah and I guess these would be seen as the sort of soft things right real health is about food protein movement right but you know a bit of meaning and purpose on the side but that that kind of deity just shed shows that actually it's not the soft sub on the side it's at least equally as important if if not potentially more importance totally actually I think people think of it as soft but it's not really soft it's actually hard science we know the ways in which stress and being isolated being disconnected not having meaning and purpose being lonely these are extreme risk factors as great as smoking for example and if you if you understand the way in which this process of of stress affects our biology you will understand that it works through these Hallmarks of Aging it works through for example our epigenome who are environment through our thoughts our feelings our relationships all things we just talked about that influences the epigenome to age faster to cause more heart disease more cancer more diabetes more dementia because it's affecting so many of these processes stress causes inflammation stress causes your nutritional regulation to be affected and you'd be more likely to be pre-diabetic it affects your mitochondria it affects your microbiome your microbiome is literally listening to your thoughts and if you don't say nice thoughts your bacteria don't like it literally so we now understand that this is not some abstract idea that stresses in some nebulous thing that it actually is a real phenomena that's translated into biological signals that either can create Health if you are connected and have purpose and meaning and learn how to regulate your stress response which is a big part of of longevity as as important as anything else that we do I read in the book that um over the past couple of years since covert here and they've been there were restrictions in place you shared that you actually reached out to your close male friends to have regular Zoom meetings yeah um I was it was quite powerful reading that because you've obviously known this science for many years yeah yeah but that was you really on a practical way going well I need my male buddies I need to stay connected to them you know what's that done for you would you say oh it's been profound you know I think uh you know in Okinawa when people are born they put in a moai which is like a little group of friends and you basically go through your whole life with this small group of friends that are there that your childhood through your adolescence and your early adulthood all the way through to very old age and and they know you they love you they they're there for you they're not there because you're this one or that one or if this success or that success but they're your you're you're basically Soul family in a sense and and for me I I think uh I realize that this is such an important piece of my happiness and my well-being is being connected to those I care about and I love and so I reached out to friends I've had for 40 plus years uh in some 25 some 35 but long-term friendships who know me well and I said to them you know hey it's covid um I'm going through a bit of a rough time uh left it sort of maybe get together every maybe other week for me be an hour you guys up for it and they're like no no we want to do an ah two hours every week and we've been doing that for over two years now and it's been the profound change in my life where you have an opportunity with people who know and love you to be seen to celebrate the things you want to celebrate to hear the challenges in your life to be there for each other to call each other out to support each other you know really hold each other accountable and it's such a it's such a beautiful magical thing and I wish it on everybody and if you don't have that you know it takes time and it takes effort but it's worth building because it really forms the foundation of a good life even if it's just one or two other people yeah I appreciate you sharing that and I really did enjoy that chat from the book where you spoke about the importance of purpose and meaning and I think he was sharing the optimistic people live longer even if they're wrong I'm pretty sure I read that this morning is that right right that's right that's right yeah uh yes Agnes live longer if they're wrong so it's really your mindset that I talk about in the book and how important your mindset is and your beliefs you know Ella Langer did an incredible study years ago where she put people who were older in a in a house for a week or maybe I forget exactly how long it was not that long and and everything in the house was was sort of uh basically historical it was it was taking them back to a time when they were young adults so let's say in the 50s so they had magazines from the 50s and the TV was from the 50s and all the furniture was from the 50s and their whole environment like was basically as it was when they were younger and when they then measured objective metrics of a longevity aging their grip strength and their Fitness level and all these weird things they they found that they actually got younger just by believing they were younger by acting as if they were younger so you know I I think it's important to realize that we we actually have an important role to play in our in our health and our longevity through the power of our minds and our beliefs and our mindset and so there's a bunch of suggestions and ideas in the book about how do we how do we get our right how do we reset our our mindset to a positive mindset that can help us to to achieve Health and Longevity I I think that speaks to this um why the point which we'd be making which is if if we think that getting older means more Frailty and more morbidity yeah well it's sort of gonna be our reality because that's what we're expecting to happen we know there's a lot of research on that your mindset your thoughts as you're saying and and I think that's why your book and this this movement is important it's very very important because it challenges those kind of preconceptions which as you you're sharing from your Journeys need not necessarily be the case right so no I think that's a really really key point I want to talk about protein Mark protein is something you've written a lot about and I know it's a divisive topic right so I wonder if you can help walk us through it and you know you shared before in this conversation that it's one of the things you've changed as you have got older is you brought in resistance training into your life which has made a big difference so maybe just talk to us about this sort of area and why it's so important for aging well I think I think you know the protein conversation is super important I think it's polarized and it's ideological unfortunately but it should be scientific you know people think being a vegan is the way to go for longevity others think that you should be eating more protein and I think there's a lot of confusion out there and part of it has to do with um beliefs and ideology and I'm not going to get into all that I do think that you can be a healthy vegan but it is a lot of work and you need to know what you're doing and you need to supplement with certain things that can protect you from the challenges of being a vegan which is getting adequate levels of certain amino acids for protein synthesis and muscle buildings or nutrients that are deficient it's not easy but it's doable so I'm not saying I'm opposed to it I'm just saying it's it's a it's a harder road to hoe in terms of longevity and well-being so when you look at protein the the feeling is that in the longevity community that we should potentially be vegan because we don't want to over stimulate a particular pathway uh one of the Hallmarks of Aging which we call mtor now this is one of the four nutrient sensing Pathways in our body that samples the environment and the food we're eating and regulates all sorts of biological processes and this is really the meta Hallmark this is the one that's I think the most important which is how food interacts with our biology to create healthy disease or longevity or early death and so mtor is stimulated by protein and particularly by animal protein because it has higher levels of an amino acid called leucine leucine is so important for tripping the switch that builds muscle so I'm just going to stop for them for a minute because I want to emphasize how important muscle is to longevity without muscle your metabolism goes down your stress hormones go up your become more insulin resistant and pre-diabetic you become more inflamed and this whole Cascade of phenomena that occur because your muscle gets replaced with fat so the key is to build and keep and increase muscle if you can as you get older enhance longevity and that you do you have to do that by tripping the switch of mtor to build muscle the problem is if you do that all the time if the mtor is always stimulated you actually don't give your body a chance to engage in one of the most important processes that are important for longevity which is what we call autophagy autophagy means self-cleaning or self-cannibalism or self-eating literally like Pac-Man and and this is a good thing because our body has the ability to go and recycle parts to get rid of all proteins and old cells and clean them up and actually you know build new stuff which is great it's like recycling plastic bottles and making clothes out of it right so we we have that internal system in our bodies that we have to turn on on a regular basis in order to clean up and and prevent rapid aging so that's a good thing and the way you activate autophagy is by inhibiting mtor which means don't give it food or protein which is a good thing so what do you do do you not eat protein to turn on autophagy or do you eat lots of protein to build muscle well the key is both you need like any system you need sometimes an on and sometimes off you need to sleep and you need to be awake I mean it's basically how the body works so we need overnight to stimulate autophagy by giving ourselves a break from eating meaning getting no food from dinner until breakfast so no late night snacking and you should give at least 12 hours so if you eat dinner at six you can eat six in the morning if you want to extend to 14 that's eating at eight in the morning that's doable for most people 16 hours is a little bit longer that can also have benefits and that gives your body a chance to sort of pretend that it's starving because you're not really starving but your body thinks this kind of means maybe starving so it starts to turn all these protective mechanisms that is related to the stress of not eating called hermesis and so basically we can talk about that more but basically the idea is when you when you activate autophagy at night it's a good thing and it's against life however you need to give a good protein load in the morning on a fasted State probably 30 or 40 grams of high quality protein when I say high quality I mean it has to have at least two and a half grams of leucine which is almost impossible to get from plant protein unless you eat a huge amount or which people can't do like having you know six cups of brown rice or two three cups of beans it's hard for people to eat that much of that stuff and and then you can add the leucine to a plant protein but you you actually have to get the leucine to turn on this so you can have plant protein powders that are supplemented with amino acids or you can just have a whey protein shake or you know some animal protein eggs or chicken or fish whatever you want to eat and that will turn on mtor and build muscle and then if you if you fast and then load up with protein in the morning and do the resistance training maybe before you you do your protein load that's the best strategy and that's how I build muscle which I basically would would be in this fastest State I would work out and do my half hour band routine and then I would have a good protein shake with 40 grams of protein and a bunch of other goodies in it to help me build muscle and it really works and it works even despite the fact that as you get older you get something called anabolic resistance meaning your body is more resistant to building muscle so you have to work harder and take more protein so as we get older we need more protein and we need more high quality protein and I think that's really the the clear evidence from the scientific literature about what we need to do but people get into hydrological battles about you know whether you should or shouldn't meet I think I think it's really beside the point the point is how does our biology work how do we work with it how do we activate these Pathways in the right way and how do we give them a rest when we need to give them a rest the root cause of our patients problems but actually the root cause of many is society's problems from what you're saying also food is Foods yeah let's go into it so we've got the chronic disease epidemic we've got the economic burden let's talk about some of the social justice issues around this yeah well I think what we'll sign really nice there is is something you said which is I realize that for many of my patients it's not their fault now I think that was really poignant because when people talk about healthy foods choices a lot of people on social media a lot of people in the media will still think it is the person's fault they know what they should be doing they're simply not following the advice they need more willpower they need to get a grip of their life it's not good enough but I guess what you're saying is it's not their faults why do so many people think it is their fault and why do you think it's not their fault well that's a great question so the reason people think it's their fault is because we've been told by doctors nutritionists our governments and of course the food industry that all calories are the same that calories and calories out exercise more eat less you lose weight and if you don't do it it's your fault then all calories are the same it's just about moderation and that you know 20 ounce soda with 250 calories is exactly the same as eight and a half cups of broccoli with 250 calories that and I mean even a five-year-old can get that's ridiculous but that's exactly the message out there and when all calories the same then you know there's a sense of well just you know control yourself right control yourself it's your fault but the truth is we know from the science that not all calories are the same and Ultra processed food calories affect the body the brain and Metabolism very differently so what are Ultra processed foods to people who are listening to this it's pretty much everything in the supermarket in the middle aisles it's packaged food uh it's it's refined Foods it's white flour it's white sugar it's high fructose corns trans fats all the food additives and chemicals that are in food when you buy a package of processed food it's basically what's made by the food industry it's the opposite of Whole Foods right yes I mean I make it really simple when I teach in churches I say you know it's really simple to know what to eat leave the food that man made eat the food that God made did God make a Twinkie no did God make an avocado yeah does it have an ingredient list it's probably not good to eat now of course there are some foods that are simple ingredient list of sardines olive oil and salt or tomatoes water and salt or you know there's stuff that you can buy that's canned or packaged that it's real food but most of them are not and what's true and this is this is this is validated with over in 300 interviews with food industry insiders whistleblowers food scientists it was done by Michael Moss these foods are designed to be biologically addictive they have craving and experts that work in taste institutes to create the Bliss point of food the quote Bliss point of food designed to create what they call heavy users these are their internal terms that they use within the food industry they know actually how to create that perfect mouth feel that perfect brain hook where your brain is literally addicted so it's like if I said to a patient let's and I want you to hold your breath underwater for 10 minutes I'm going to give you 5 million dollars darn right they're going to want to do that but they won't be able to do that right and it's the same thing when we're eating these Foods they alter our brain chemistry and our hormones in a way that affects our ability to control our behavior and if you if you shut that off it changes everything so let's tell you a quick story about this woman Janice who came to our Center at the center for functional medicine at Cleveland and joined one of our groups and she was 66 she had type 2 diabetes she demanded insulin for 10 years she had a body mass index of 43 which is very overweight 25 or less is normal 30 is obese she was 43. she had high blood pressure heart failure kidneys were starting to fail her liver was starting to fail and she was on a boatload of medications blood thinners blood pressure medications cholesterol meds diuretics you name it she was on it and her whole life I mean she was a very educated woman but her whole life she had never learned about food she grew up in a home that all they ate was packaged and processed food she grew up in a home where they didn't cook and she was just focused on her career in her life and was doing really great things but it was really on her way out uh and we just literally put her on a Whole Foods anti-inflammatory detoxifying diet mostly similar to the 10-day detox diet the book that I wrote which is very low in starch and sugar within three days she was off for insulin in three months she was off all her medications her blood sugar was normal her A1C went from 11 to 5 and a half which as a doctor you know is extremely dramatic to putting Concepts to people listening that's from being a very very poorly control type to diabetic to not actually going into the pre-diabetic range actually into the normal range yeah and then her heart failure which by the way heart failure never reverses in conventional medicine you can manage it with medications rejection fraction was 35 if it's under 30 you're headed towards a heart transplant and it went up to 50 after her three months and her kidney failure she was on her way to dialysis reversed just using the power of food and putting her in a group setting where she was given support and education and knowledge wow that is so inspiring I think she lost she lost over the course of a year 116 pounds and now has her life back and is off all medication and saved about twenty thousand dollars in co-pays for her medication and I don't know what her insurance company was paying yeah I mean Mark you have got countless stories like that because you have been talking about using food as medicine for years now you know I remember before I even got into this uh way of thinking you know I was reading blogs that you'd been writing and and thinking wow this is incredible I wonder if that will work if I try that yeah but you can see how impassioned you are talking about this but you know you mentioned the addictive qualities of foods and I think it reminds me of a conversation I had recently on the podcast with Professor Felice Jacka uh you probably you may not know her but you'll be familiar with her work she was in charge of the first randomized controlled trial the smiles trial that was done in Australia to look at um whether diet can uh you know can improve depression depression the first exactly 67 patients so she she showed that the group who changed their diet to a modified Mediterranean diet after 12 weeks had above a 30 remission rate compared to only eight percent in the control group which is social supports and when I spoke to online podcast I also mentioned to her that my cousin uh who's in his late 20s he's now working he drives to work every day in his car and he says when he's driving home after a day after a busy day's work there is one roundabout in particular where there is a KFC yeah and he says I can smell the food every time I go through that roundabout and I can't always resist I will often succumb to that smell so he put his windows up in the recirculation button on his car so he doesn't yeah but what's interesting is that you mentioned the taste of these Foods yeah it's formulated in such a way that that they they almost have that sort of addictive quality to them and that almost actually measurable on brain scans looking at the part of the brain that's affected just like heroin or cocaine it's not it's not an emotional addiction it's a biological addiction wow do you know much about the smell of these Foods whether it can do similar things I bet it can I mean I I've been succumbing it sometimes like ones that are very stressful trip and I was coming back from somewhere and it was I was my flame was delayed I was gonna get a two in the morning and I'd see patients the next day and I felt sorry for myself and there was a Cinnabon stand and they blow the like I think they have a family they blow the the smell towards you and I just went and had a Cinnabon but yeah it was terrible I felt horrible after yeah but but you're just showing that we're all human we can know as much as we want about the right food choices yeah you clearly know about the white food choices but even you are susceptible when life gets tough when you're stressed when you're tired if the food environment around you is blow throwing out that smell is um you know tempting you with their offerings ultimately it's going to be very hard to make those good choices that's why we have to change the food system that's why this book food fixes for me such an important part of how I think about the world now and I think about yes you know it's it's about obesity and diabetes and chronic disease but also it's about mental health as you said and even in our kids you know we see our kids not functioning well one in ten kids have attention deficit 40 percent of our kids in America overweight in school we have uh increasing amounts of performance issues we have what we call an achievement Gap you know we're 31st in the world and in education math and reading and so forth were worse than Vietnam and and the reason is because it's affecting our kids brains and their cognitive function this is well documented these kids are nutritionally deficient and the kids who grew up in poor environments or don't have adequate high quality nutrition their brains are 10 smaller they're IQ points seven points lower they're we've literally lost millions of cue points in our children you mentioned kids who are growing up in poor environments so these deprived communities and we know full well what the research says about people living in in areas of lower socioeconomic status is the way the food industry is set up does it unfairly penalize those with the least in society so when we look at the social injustice around food it's massive you know when you look at how the furnace retargets poor minorities it's disproportionate so they're targeting them with more ads and more marketing and they're providing their communities with more of these foods such as soda and processed food and it has a big impact on them African-Americans or 80 more likely to get diabetes they're you know four times more likely to get kidney failure they're three and a half more times more likely to get amputations and and these communities are being targeted by the food industry in direct ways and and then there's accessibility the important environments where there's no grocery stores or the you know convenience stores and and no produce stores yeah so so for seven years Mark I worked in a place called Oldham in North Munster in the UK and it was in right at the center of Odin and the practice was in quite a deprived area what most people consider a deprived area most of my patients were uh you know we're certainly on very low incomes many were working two jobs but what was interesting is these cars really cared about themselves and their families they were trying to make the best decisions and I think it's really important to highlight this because I think a lot of blame gets put on people who totally trained who are struggling with their health and and they're making certain food choices but I saw firsthand how well for example for example I would usually bring my lunch into work with me on the rare occasion where I forgot to bring it sometimes I think okay I'm just going to go and walk and buy something it certainly it's not like Santa Monica we're calling this podcast which is probably the wellness capital in the world where it's super easy to buy something healthy yes right I would walk for about a mile in diameter around that practice and I struggle to find anything because there were there was at least seven or eight fried chicken and Kebab shops with big signs on there saying something like you know one pound 99 eats as much as you can you know that's what two pounds that's what maybe about three dollars you it's very hard to compete with that and I thought I thought I can give them the best advice I possibly can but they're moving into an environment where it's simply too difficult day in day out to make those healthy choices in addition they they I found were very trusting of the government and the supermarkets so what I explained to them about certain breakfast cereals that they were having in the morning it's all sugar yeah they were shocked yeah and they said what what's chassis yeah but why they've been sold in the supermarkets there's a picture of you know Hearts it says Hearts healthy on it because there's no fat no but what's interesting for me Mark is that these guys were trying their best yeah they literally were shocked when I was telling this information so when we think that everyone knows this stuff now they don't and it is these deprived areas which are getting hit the hardest absolutely I remember when I was uh and helping with this movie Fed Up which was released a few years ago about the effects food industry and sugar on the health of our nation there was a family that I worked with and they lived in one of the worst Food deserts in America they were very overweight the father was 42 already had kidney failure on dialysis for from diabetes at 42. the mother was severely overweight the sun was severely overweight at 16 had almost diabetes and struggled and they lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability they were you know trying to lose weight because the father couldn't get a new kidney until he lost 40 pounds but they didn't know what to do and they were eating all this stuff that they thought was healthy like Cool Whip because it had zero trans fats which is basically all trans fats and sugar it just basically threw a loophole in the government that allowed them to actually say zero trans fat they had processed salad dressings they use iceberg lettuce they didn't never knew how to cook they didn't have any utensils they didn't have knives cutting knives they didn't have cutting boards uh so I said well rather than me give you a lecture on you know how to eat healthy let's just go in your kitchen let's get some groceries and make simple food we made turkey chili we made a salad from like real lettuce and real vegetables and olive oil and vinegar dressing we roasted some sweet potatoes with some herbs we stir-fried some asparagus they didn't know how to do any of that they know how to roast they know how to saute they're not nothing and they what vegetables they had were canned green beans and iceberg lettuce and that was pretty much it everything else was from a box or a package and they really didn't know and I said here's what it's going on and I took everything out of their cupboard I showed them everything I covered like the front of the boxes and said what is this they couldn't tell by looking at the ingredient list I said it's all the same stuff just in different size shapes and some colors and and they were so eager and they I said let's cook a meal together so we sat together we cooked we talked we had fun they loved the food it was delicious and I said look I you guys can do this here's a cookbook here's a guide on media eat well for Less you know good food on a tight budget and I didn't know what's going to happen in the first week she texted me back we lost 18 pounds as a family within a year the mother lost about 100 pounds the son lost 50 gained it back by working at a fast food restaurant which is only place to work down there but eventually got his act together he lost 138 pounds he asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school and now he's in medical school wow you know which is just staggering and amazing and we have you know the ability to to actually do this if people understand what's going on but most people don't understand that they're being taken advantage of that they're being targeted the system is set up for them to fail and and it's not an accident you know we have sort of alluding to the reason we have these policies is because the food industry controls the government they spend half a billion dollars just on our farm bill in the U.S which is controls our food and AG policy there's a hundred percent of the Senate and House AG committee members are on the take from big food and big AG in terms of campaign donations um who do you think they're going to support corporate interests or citizens and it's really unfortunate the the uh the policies we have are so destructive I'll just go through them one you know we we support the growing of commodity Foods corn soy and wheat which gets turned into processed foods so we make it cheap to have processed food and it's high fructose corn syrup I mean the vice chairman of Pepsi said when I asked him why do you use high fructose corn soup he said because the government makes this too cheap for us not to use it and I said you know we we have policies that allow unlimited marketing of junk food to our children and the rest of us were it's proven to cause harm we'll uh the FDA makes food labels the federal drug food Drug Administration they're so confusing that the average person can't understand them and doesn't prohibit the use of toxic chemicals that are used in our food supply which are mostly banned in Europe things like BHT and other things we have policies that support food stamps in other words not only helping grow the food that's the bad food but then we provide it to our poor with 75 billion dollars a year in food stamps seven billion of which is soda and Coca-Cola's major source of American Revenue 20 of it comes from food stamps that is so they're the biggest welfare and queen could it for for a lot of my UK listeners could you explain what food stamps are yeah food stamps basically food assistance if you're poor and there are 46 million Americans who need food support because they're basically you know it's like a card credit card that you can go buy food with uh and they can't afford to buy food so the government gives them money to do it but it's all processed food and one in four children in this country depend on food stamps so it seems Seems modern invest because on one hand you've got potentially the government doing a good thing which is okay you can't afford food we're going to help you yeah but with the other hand they're supporting if I understand this right they're supporting completely the wrong food choices or the unhelpful food choices so they could keep the food stamp system but encourage Whole Foods instead of processed foods and then suddenly you're helping these communities out and supporting their health absolutely and it's been shown you can save billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths by incentivizing good food and and the incentivizing bad food but they won't happen because the government is so locked up with the food industry Mark I want to ask you a question um in all the years I've known you and and seen you speak you've always been very passionate about getting to the root cause of problems you've already you've always been extremely passionate about how powerful food is yeah but I don't think I've ever seen you this impassioned about a particular topic and it's really and I'm just getting started yeah but but it's really interesting for me is that you you've dived deep into the research on this over the last few years I know that when writing this book you sort of lock yourself away you've actually really tried to understand systemically what is going on here has what you have found is that what's driving this this new sort of supercharged passion has that made you angry it has made me angry because well it made me angry it's also made me optimistic because if we can identify and name the problem we can do something about it you know we talk about climate change people go I get climate change but nobody's talking about the impact of the food system not just on chronic disease and the economy and our kids brains and mental health even violence you know we know is linked to yeah bad food and prisons violent prisoners can reduce violent crime in prisons by 56 percent just by eating a healthy diet but we also know that it's destroying our environment our climate that food the food system is the number one cause of climate change people don't get that people don't understand that that when you put it all together whether it's deforestation soil erosion factory farming whether it's food waste processing distribution Refrigeration of food all that together makes the food system the number one cause of climate change it's not about driving electric car we've got to fix the food system well let's get into climate change because it's clearly a topic that is um at the tip of many people's tongues these days it's a very hot political agenda there have been many documentaries made on uh what is driving climate change but it's also a bit like the diet was in terms of what foods we should be eating um the climate change was potentially it can be quite polarizing in terms of you know what foods are driving this and I know you know I don't know how much you've gone into that you know what are those foods that are driving and I wonder whether we could have broaden out that discussion in terms of soil Health regenerative aquaculture you know climate change what are the foods that are driving this and how do we change that great question so you know I think I think uh We've pretty much gotten into this conversation that meat is the cause of climate change that that we should not eat meat and I'll be vegans and that would solve climate change would it depends and it's a more nuanced answer so factory farming of animals absolutely is a significant contributor to climate change whether it's ten percent fourteen percent it's a significant contributor why because Factory firm animals it's not just about the methane burps from the cows it's about the way we grow the food that feeds the cows so we grow a lot of corn through industrial processes that destroy the soil which use up enormous water resources that depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel dependent things like fertilizer which takes a lot of energy to make herbicides and pesticides which are fossil fuel derived and so we we have a real problem and then all the the factory farming of animals also drives huge amounts of methane in the environment so you've got this whole problem of factory farming of animals but as a friend of mine said it's not the cow it's the how so when you look at one of the biggest drivers of climate change it's the loss of soil we think of the rainforest but the soil on the earth is a far bigger carbon sink than all the rainforests well let's let's dive into that because I think a lot of people listen to this will not be familiar with this what does the soil do why is soil health so important for the environment but also for human health so that we have lost huge amounts of soil so we lose about 2 billion tons of soil every year 200 000 tons an hour we lose Farmland the size of North Korea or Nicaragua to Desert every year soil if it's healthy not the soil that we now have in America because we've lost so much soil we've lost a third of all the soil on the planet for farming because of the way we grow food we basically till it and then we pour these chemicals into it that destroy the organic matter of the soil now organic matter is basically carbon it's carbon in the soil how does it get there through a very powerful the most powerful technology in the planet to reduce carbon it's called photosynthesis it's just ancient technology nature that sucks carbon out of the environment what do plants and grasses breathe they breathe carbon dioxide and they suck it in and then they build plant material right they build carbon it goes into the soil every one percent of carbon in the soil organic matter in the soil will help to draw down carbon and it'll also help to restore water in the soil one percent organic matter in the soil leads to an extra 27 000 gallons of water that can be stored in there why are we having droughts and floods and wildfires because the soil can't hold the water anymore so it either runs through it or or it just kind of runs off it and that leads to this huge amounts of droughts and floods so organic matter in the soil is the thing we have to build and we've lost most of it in fact we had so many in America we had places with 50 feet of topsoil that's now almost gone because it was built by the bison and the elk 60 million bison we had more ruminants running around America then we have cows and there was no climate change from it it wasn't that because it they basically grazed the grass in a certain way moving around frequently they dug with their hoofs they pooped and peed and that's what built soil it uses natural fertilizer right the cows become part of the cycle and I think you know regenerative agriculture is the science of how do we build new soil as a solution to creating a healthy ecosystem to dealing with our scarce Water Resources to increasing biodiversity which we all depend on to I mean we've lost 75 percent of our pollinator species because of all the chemical Agriculture and Einstein said that if we lose bees off the face of the Earth humans have four years to live so you should say it's not the cow it's the house so therefore has your research basically shown that if we go I guess to more traditional ways uh or I don't know if we have to find newer ways well it's almost mimicking nature right mimicking how natural herds moved around these big herds moved around in concentrated groups they would not graze the grass to the nub they would kind of graze it down halfway they'd Move Along they'd poop and pee and they kept doing this and this is what built the soil so when we look for example at life cycle analysis that was done by Qantas of both a GMO soy Burger was actually the impossible Burger compared to a regenerative Farms grass-fed regenerally raised beef burger they found that while the impossible Burger was far better than a feedlot Burger in terms of its carbon emission carbon footprint it added three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment those net it was a net add of carbon and greenhouse gases to the environment by eating an impossible Burger GMO soy Burger the grass-fed Burger pulled out three and a half kilos of carbon from the atmosphere okay okay wait so you'd basically have to eat one regeneratively raised grass-fed Burger to offset the carbon emissions of a soy Burger that is mind-blowing actually that's exactly what the words this is in my opinion this is a independent scientific group that analyze both of those so so just to clarify that what we're saying or what what what the research you've done is saying I haven't done the research I've just reported reporting okay so so essentially what this research is saying is that an impossible Burger is better than a feedlocker I guess so A convention uh absolutely you know these sort of factory farms absolutely burgers so on that if you make an argument between those two yes an impossible Burger is better for sure but if you compare an impossible Burger to a uh generally raised grass-fed burger then that is better for the environment than the impossible Burger now that is not the narrative that's being played out in the media at the moment and I guess and the question is what is that also on purpose is that also part of this big uh structural problem with the food industry it's huge yeah it's huge I mean I think yes we should be finding you know other Alternatives and protein sources that's great but it's also a highly processed industrial food and when we talk about growing the soy what does that mean well we're growing soy in jar and large monocrop Fields often these are rainforests that have been destroyed and taken down although I don't know if they use the amazing American sources the amount of fertilizer destroys the soil and the organic matter of the soil it off gases greenhouse gases it takes a lot of energy fossil fuels to produce and it runs off into the rivers and lakes and oceans in fact in the Gulf of Mexico there's a dead zone the size of New Jersey that his kills 212 000 metric tons of fish every year there are 400 dead zones like that across the world in areas of coastal areas that feed half a billion people on the planet and if you put them all together it will be the size of Europe that's just a nitrogen fertilizer and then let's talk about the herbicides and the pesticides they also kill pollinator species and the biodiversity in the soil and they don't promote organic matter so they kill the organic matter in the soil so you end up with then you then the soil needs massive amounts of irrigation because it can't hold water we have 70 percent of human use of fresh water is for irrigation of crops mostly for animal production so we have water depletion which we're losing our Water Resource we have the the killing of the soil we have the polluting of our our lakes and rivers we have the loss of biodiversity when you're eating your impossible Burger now that is a shock right for most people to hear because it sounds like it's a soy Burger grass-fed and all that or I mean the GM it's a you know plant-based Burger but it you know it's not as simple as that and when you look at the the ecosystem services that are provided by a regenerative Farm it's massive so there's there's been huge Investments now in buying up all regular farms and converting them to uh grass-fed or regenerative Farms because they provide so much benefit so we are they provide an economic benefit yes so we provide so that's that's important if this is going to be part of the solution yes and it has to also be an economic benefit that's the that's the harsh reality of life we use about I don't know it's 120 trillion dollars a year of ecosystem services from the planet we're basically extracting these and using them whereas regenerative agriculture can actually provide value it increases the biodiversity of the soil it increases the water retention increase the organic matter it sucks carbonated environment and it's been estimated I mean that the soil can hold three times the amount of carbon it's in the atmosphere today and it and if you actually were to scale this up and it needs to be scaled up then it could literally draw down all the carbon from the Industrial Revolution I mean are we essentially saying if we fix the soil the solution's under our feet we fix our health we fix the food industry we fix climate change yes because not only are you growing different kinds of food the food you're growing is so much more nutrient dense why do plants get nutrients they get it from the soil if you don't have the right microbes in the soil you can't extract the minerals and vitamins from the soil we know that our plants even if they're healthy organic plants have 50 percent less nutrient levels then they did 50 years ago and that's that's something really important for many of us to remember and I've seen plenty of days supporting this that you know the broccoli from 2019 is not the same broccoli as the one in 1970 say in terms of the nutrients available so we could be trying our best and trying to eat as many vegetables as we can trying our best if we can afford it to go for this organic these organic vegetables but we still are not getting the nutrients that pretty much everyone was getting 40 50 years ago and the problem is you know that there are basically a couple of dozen companies that control the food system the big food companies the big Ag and processing companies the angular chemical companies the seed companies the fertilizer companies there's just a few companies that have massively Consolidated used to be over 100 seed companies 30 years ago now there's like four you know big ones that produce that can that control 60 of our food well you mentioned all these pesticides and herbicides that are getting used and the Damage that's causing to the soil but I was reading um bits of your book where I think he was suggesting that being a farmer in the United States is quite a dangerous job yes so as well as the systemic implications of this what are the implications for that individual farmer well this is another part of the social injustice issue you know there's many aspects of that but you know food and Farm Workers were excluded from Fair Labor Act that was developed in the 30s to create Fair labor standards in the United States minimum wage and working conditions and so forth why because most of the food and Farm Workers were former slaves so they weren't protected and that is carried over even now you know 80 or 90 years later we're seeing lack of protection so the average you know food worker may make two dollars an hour and depend on tips uh they make you know minimum wage or less and they're unable to take care of their own health care they're unable to provide Their Food Services many of the the these workers have to be on food stamps or food assistance and the farming itself is highly dangerous uh they are are I mean the pesticides the chemicals they use the working conditions I mean you see pictures I think our strawberry Farmers wearing face masks on gas masks yeah the whole the whole thing is covered whilst they're spraying pests and the food workers I mean it's you know working in a in a big chicken factory for example Crossing chickens it's like a one step after the other repetitive motion injuries they even don't let them go to the bathroom and they come to work in diapers so next time you're having your factory farm chicken think of that food worker who's can't even go to the bathroom and has to pee in a diaper because she can't leave the food line think about that if I were to prescribe one intervention to extend life to prevent and reverse chronic disease it would be to drastically reduce or eliminate sugar and refined starch from your diet yeah why is that so important the idea that sugar and starch are driving the dysfunctions that we see as normal aging but a really abnormal aging is is not really new we know that underlying all the chronic diseases of Aging heart disease cancer diabetes obviously dementia these are all related to disturbances and our ability to regulate our blood sugar to what we call insulin resistance where our body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin and this creates this whole Downstream Cascade that is like a wildfire on the aging process it causes you to gain belly fat it drives up inflammation it lowers your hormones it increases cortisol increases your stress hormones it actually also causes abnormal cholesterol fatty liver all sorts of problems shrinks your hippocampus in your brain fuels cancer cells I mean it is the nightmare if you want to be someone who's healthy and healthy for a long time I mean the idea basically is to have your lifespan which is how long you're alive be equal to your health span which is how many years of your life you're healthy and for most people they're about 20 years short on the health Span in their lifespan yeah it is incredible you have been talking about this for Years yet the consumption of these Foods the consumption of ultra processed foods all over the globe appear to be on the rise so can you talk to us a little bit about Ultra processed foods what are they exactly and why are they so problematic for our health well historically you know we've evolved eating Foods in their original states and the complex Matrix of fiber vitamins minerals protein fat and carbohydrates and they're in a rich array of phytochemicals and other matrices that make our bodies able to manage and handle these things Ultra processed foods are essentially food-like substances that are made from highly processed ingredients from some commodity crops soy wheat and corn mostly that are then turned into all size shapes colors of chemical extruded substances you know bear no resemblance to the original form and cause all sorts of havoc in our biology aside from all the preservatives you know additives thickeners artificial sweeteners things that are also problematic for health but just just the processing of the food itself in a way that pulverizes it into some thing that isn't resembling food at all and then reassembles it in a way that actually is harmful to my biology It's Quickly absorbed it sends signals to our biology that we're not getting any real food in fact people who eat Ultra processed food if given you know compared to uh and this is a controlled trial where they gave people either Ultras processed food or they give them whole food and the same amount of food they could sort of eat as much as they wanted the people who had the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day that's a base basically the equivalent to gaining a pound a week or 52 pounds a year so it's no wonder we're such an obese Society increasingly in the UK I think the United States has you beat a little bit but not by much I think uh the the reality is that this Ultra processed food is driving so much of of the challenges we see in our society for every 10 of your diet that's Ultra processed food your risk of death goes up by 14 and in America 60 of our diet is ultra processed food and kids it's almost 70 percent of their diet this is just a deadly combination that not only causes long-term problems of you know shorter lifespan and we're seeing our life expectancy go down but also immediate problems of of all sorts of conditions that we now know are related to the starch and sugar whether it's fatty liver and kids that need liver transplants or kids who are you know having heart attacks and 20 years old because of this I mean it's it's really pretty frightening you said that for every 10 increase in Ultra processed foods your risk of death goes up by 14 14 yeah that's from the global burden of disease study huge study of 995 countries uh you know 11 million people die every year from eating the wrong food that's more than smoking or Wars or anything else it is the number one killer in the world today smoke despite all this knowledge why is consumption still going up what's going on is it an individual problem yeah is it the food industry right yeah yeah yeah well this is this is my last book which was a food picks where I mapped out the problems with our food policies and our food industry and how everything that we're doing is fostering the the production the growing the production the marketing and the sale of these Ultra processed foods in ways we've never seen in human history and and that's really what's what's driving it and I'm working hard on my nonprofit the food fix campaign to change those food policies to address you know food marketing to kids for example Boris Johnson thankfully he he got uh wise once he got covered that food was related to his poor health and that he understood that the reason he ended up in the ICU from covid was because he was in poor metabolic health and that was because of the starch and sugar and processed foods and he then started to restrict marketing and other kinds of initiatives that actually were trying to lower the consumption sugar and Ultra processed food which I think is great but that needs to happen you know globally in America you can you know the effect of this is not just on on Aging but is on everything if you look at America it's four percent the world's population but it was sixteen percent of the coveted cases in deaths which means we have a 400 percent increase compared to what we should have in terms of our population why is that because covet hit a population that was pre-inflamed that was metabolic and healthy and that was at high risk for having complications in Death from from coven and that's why we're we're not because we have a crappy Health Care System we spend more than any other country by double and yet we we did the worst yeah in your experience Mark and you have been you know you've seen tens of thousands of patients over maybe what three decades now a long long time I'm scared to say that I started Medical School 40 years ago this is fine well one of the reasons I I actually love talking to you Mark is because you have been a practicing clinician for so long you know you have real world experience with patients and as much as we both enjoy talking to researchers yeah it can be very you know very interesting to learn about new research but I think there is something special certainly for me about talking to clinicians because the research doesn't always apply to that person in front of you but what some of the common traps that people fall into would you say when they're trying to choose their their food for example you know what are some foods that maybe people think are healthy from the way that the that their Market said but actually are causing them them short-term and the long-term problems that's a great question I think you know just it's more directly answer your question uh which I indirectly answered about whose responsibility is it is it a personal responsibility that we need to just all eat less and exercise more is there something else going on and there's something else going on which is that we are highly addicted to these Foods they're designed to hijack our brain chemistry our hormones our metabolism and they do very good job at that and so we have to realize that there's there is some level of responsibility but there's also the food environment and the food that's available and the the compounds that are in the food that hijack our biology so that that I think is important to understand to not blame the person who's overweight that is one of the most um I think damaging things that we do as a medical profession and as nutritionists in our health policy it's certainly the Mantra of food companies which is there's no good and bad calories it's all about moderation and if you want to sort of have Coca-Cola or Pepsi and and it's part of your caloric intake that that's okay and that's just that's just a bunch of nonsense uh as far as far as the foods that we think are okay that aren't okay well I think maybe we sort of don't understand when we see things like whole grains that actually a lot of the whole grain foods out there are highly processed whole grains that are you know put in Cheerios or Frosted Flakes so we have you know like new Frosted Flakes with extra extra you know whole grains in them it just is insane I think we need to be very careful of food marketing and food labeling if you want to have food try to have in its original form whole grains are actually that whole grains and you can cook them yourself at home uh and and that's really important to not fall for these sort of marketing claims I think also low fat is a terrible thing that we should be avoiding a lot of low-fat foods are high in sugar and that was really the the damaging message of the 90s with the food pyramid in America where we're told to eat six to eleven servings of bread rice cereal and pasta day and cut our fat consumption and we did that and and subsequently became the you know increasingly obese around the globe because of that advice that was really shared globally so there's some really simple things like avoid low-fat foods eat good fats and don't don't fall for for false marketing labels where it says it's healthy for you if it's a processed food yeah I definitely agree breakfast cereals are a huge culprit I think you know the majority of breakfast cereals not all of them but the majority probably not helping people they're certainly not helping them start the day they're probably putting them on a blood sugar roller coaster right from the start of the day yeah but can I just clarify what you said on uh low fat there because there's obviously foods that are natural you know whole foods that are naturally low fat and there's yeah um low-fat products that the food industry have made are used broccoli is low fat I mean that's fine asparagus are low fat that's okay but it's it's all the low-fat processed food I'm talking about yeah as a marketing claim or if it says high fiber or if it has whole grain on it these are these are ways in which are the the food industry uh uses sort of marketing on the front of package labeling to confuse people and for example Cheerios is a great example that everything's cheers of the health food it's oat bran it's old fiber it's healthy lower your cholesterol it sounds good but in fact the glycemic index of Cheerios is worse than table sugar so that is a problem you know the glycemic index 74 out of 100 table sugar 65. so I think we have to be very careful when we kind of eat these foods and how they impact our blood sugar and it's really important for us to understand that you know how how food affects our blood sugar as we discussed at the outside of the podcast is the most determined important determinant of our long-term health and well-being including things like depression fertility acne uh all sorts of problems that aren't just about heart attack Strokes cancer dementia and diabetes yeah well thank you for that um sort of thorough overview in summary these are of course things that you've um discussed and written about many times particularly in your last but food fits which was you know a fantastic Deep dive into that area the new book young forever now I really like it because there's a real practicality throughout it I just want to ask you though why this topic right you know why why the topic of aging and and perhaps you could also share where you are in your life you know if you're happy to share your age you know why why why is this so important for you well you know as a joke everybody's favorite radio station is wi FM what's in it for me and I'm I'm 63. so I'm interested in what's in it for me because I don't want to age poorly I want to be vibrant and do all the things I love to do whether it's go skiing or Gallop down the beach on a horse or go for a long bike ride or do whatever I want to do I don't want to be limited and I want to be able to enjoy life fully and travel and do all the things that that really give me joy and make life meaningful and to be able to show up and do the work I want to do in the world and to be engaged and focused and healthy to be able to actually show for the people that matter in my relationships to to be in contribution and so in order to do that I have to be healthy and if I'm very interested in the topic of how you stay healthy as we get older but I also find and by the way biologically according to new metrics that we can use to measure our biological age I'm only 43 so I still I'm still pretty young and the truth is uh I I wanted to focus on this topic of longevity and Longevity science because unlike other disciplines in medicine this is a relatively new field of research and because in the past we thought there was nothing we can do about aging that we actually just need to to actually stop worrying about it and deal with the disease of Aging instead of actually having the the things that we know need we can actually do something about and from a functional medicine perspective I found the the longevity science kind of being almost a representation of the truth that we've known a long time in functional medicine that their body is a system that their underlying root causes of disease that if we want to really deal with all these diseases that we see the 155 000 diseases that are in our International classification system that we need to sort of go back to understand root causes and in longevity science there are 10 Hallmarks of Aging that have been discussed that are underlying all the disease of Aging so heart disease cancer diabetes dementia the aging process self Frailty all those things we Now understand are not normal processes they're abnormal processes that are resulting from disturbances in these fundamental systems or functions and and when they go wrong we call these the Hallmarks of Aging but we can intervene with these things and they're very much in the functional medicine kind of framework of the body as a system of dealing with causes and so I thought by focusing on longevity science I could help to elucidate what I thought were the flaws in it which is that it didn't go far enough to look at the causes of the Hallmark so the Hallmarks of Aging are the causes of all the diseases in aging what causes the Hallmarks in the first place and that's where functional medicine comes in to be able to be a detective and find out where the imbalances are and how we can correct them so we can possibly influence these Hallmarks of Aging yeah mark since we last spoke there's there's a lot of new listeners to this podcast and some people may not be familiar with the functional medicine approach so you sort of outline some key tenets there which are really interesting but I wonder if you could just give an overview for people who think medicine is medicine yeah maybe for someone who's never heard about the difference before how do you sort of Briefly summarize the the key differences between conventional Western allopathic medicine and the functional medicine approach well you know functional medicine is really what will be medicine it's our whole view of biology that's shifting from a reductionist disease-based model to a systems model of understanding the body as an interconnected network of biological systems that we have to treat as a whole and functional medicine from from the perspective of the patient is about not treating all the individual symptoms and diseases separately but really treating your whole system I'll just give you an example that illustrates the clear difference this is a patient that I talk about the book Young Forever she was around a 50 year old woman business executive coach who had all sorts of problems psoriatic arthritis which is a terrible condition of the skin and Joints it's quite uh kind of debilitating and she was on a drug that cost fifty thousand dollars a year for that's an immune suppressant she also had terrible irritable bowel syndrome and bloating she had been on lots of antibiotics and steroids she also had reflux she had depression she had insomnia she had migraines she also had pre-diabetes was overweight and so rather than you know treating her all her diseases separately which were being done right she saw the psychiatrist for her depression the endocrinologist for her pre-diabetes the neurologist for her migraines the gastrologist for her GI symptoms the rheumatologist for psoriatic arthritis and she was given the best possible treatment by all these Physicians they were excellent Physicians doing exactly what we were taught in medical school and what is exactly the current state of treatment for each of these diseases however she was not better she was marginally improved and her symptoms were most or partly managed but she wasn't better and so rather than saying well I'm just going to up your dose of these drugs or that drugs I'm going to get to the root cause and all the diseases that she had were all inflammatory diseases her diabetes or pre-diabetes her weight issues her migraines her depression her certain arthritis obviously her gut issues these are all inflammatory so from a function I'm going to perspective we go what's causing the inflammation and I joke and I say I'm an inflamologist is actually what we need to be if we're studying longevity because the whole process of Aging is called inflammaging and so rather than treat all these things separately I said well her gut is where 70 of her immune system lives she's having terrible gut symptoms I guarantee you she's got a leaky gut she's got probably bacterial overgrowth yeast overgrowth and a leaky gut and lots of food sensitivities and reactions so what I did was simply put her on an Elimination Diet I got rid of all the sugar processed food gluten dairy obviously alcohol and get her on a Whole Foods diet with good proteins lots of good fats lots of fruits and vegetables and I said to her you know take a fish oil a vitamin D probiotic super simple regimen of supplements that I thought she needed based on her history I I said don't stop your medication but just continue to do this and we'll check back in and go over everything in about six weeks so she came back six weeks later she had stopped all her medication including that fifty thousand dollar drug for her psoriac arthritis and I didn't tell her to do it but she stopped everything her symptoms were completely gone from everything her skin was cleared up her joints were cleared up her migraines were gone and depression was gone her insomnia was gone or she lost 20 pounds her irritable bowel her reflux was gone I also gave her stuff to reset her gut and it not not absorbed antibiotic and any fungal that got rid of all the bad guys in her God they were causing all this inflammation so this is a case that I really focused on the root cause which was her gut to treat all these other problems and we got her gut healthy everything else went away so when you create Health when you create a healthy system take out the bad stuff put in the good stuff the body has a chance to repair and renew and that's what's really the exciting part around about the longevity research is that now we understand that the body has this extraordinary ability to to renew repair rejuvenate and reverse our biological age just as our skin has the ability to heal when we cut it our body has that innate healing system we've just done everything possible to interfere with it to impede it and the book and forever is really a roadmap and how do you how do you actually activate these ancient embedded healing systems in our body that can reverse our biological age and make us younger as we get older I saw this on Twitter recently someone I can't remember who it was who wasn't a huge believer in organic food actually tweets is something I wish I could remember who it was instead actually you know what I was wrong because I didn't realize the implications it had on those individual Farmers oh yeah and I was just thinking about my own health and that's a separate story which if we had time we can go into but he said I should realize how selfish I was being because actually the implications for that individual farmer is huge and I think and there are kids you know the data has been looked at but the pesticide exposure in these in these groups has led to a loss of 41 million IQ points in these kids we're literally sacrificing the minds of our future generation we're destroying the intellectual capital of our society I think that this appears to be I think it's a global problem but from what I see and are interested as to where the bulk of your research has been on this is this more of a problem in the United States than anywhere else in the world well like the United States it leads in many things but it's not just in ic it's everywhere it's Global 80 of the world's type 2 diabetics in the developing World China and India are number one and two in diabetes we're seeing you know Africa being inundated with the fast food companies taking over it's aspirational it's a sign of affluence to eat at KFC in Ghana you know it's and they they are controlling the The Narrative and manipulating the science all around the world of Malaysia you know they're partnering with quote nutrition scientists to produce research that shows that their products are healthy and it's it's interesting I just had a thought as you were talking about that these um so-called developing countries which I guess is a in many ways a misnomer now and because very soon I think China and India are gonna probably gonna be more developed than we are here yeah um but I remember as a kid when I used to go to Calcutta in India every every other summer we'd go for six weeks because my family you know all my aunts that's a rough Place yeah so well it's a beautiful place actually and we you know but yes there's a lot of um it's a lot of poverty a lot of problems there but I remember as a kid going there and in the summer in our British summer you know in July and August um the schools were still running so I'd go and see my cousins but they'd be going to school I remember in the morning breakfast would be served and they had proper meals yeah so you know meal would be prepared so it'd be like two or three vegetable curries maybe a bit of fish maybe some chapati breads maybe a bit of rice but they had a proper meal before they went to school yeah and I used to think this is this is so different because you know I have a quick bowl of cereal that takes two minutes to prepare if that probably takes 30 seconds to pour the milk over and eat that and I didn't really realize the significance of it at the time but now as I reflector now when I go back I've not been for a few years but oh yeah culture has changed what you said about the middle classes aspiring to this Western way of living now they're too busy now they don't want a proper meal they want the quick cereal and you see the big adverts everywhere that you know the food companies have come in they're advertising how healthy these foods are um they want the quick highly processed bread that you can put in the toaster for 20 seconds it's toasted and you can slap on some jam and then get out to work quickly and it's amazing that actually you know this was only like 20 years ago 25 years ago where they were having the middle classes in India were having these proper meals before they went out for the day whereas now they've aspired for this what they consider this Western ideal and it's yeah it's quite striking how quickly that's changed it's true and you know the good news though you know in researching the book is there's a lot of bad news but the good news is that there is a lot that can be done to fix this problem that's why I call the book food fix because there are solutions that citizens can do in terms of choosing what they eat in terms of composting for example food waste is a huge issue this third largest emitter of greenhouse gases if it were a country after U.S and China we we have ways we can influence um our choices with our wallets and our votes so people often are cynical about the political process and voting but it matters and we do have control we can their Grassroots movements and efforts happening all around and I think there are a lot of things that people do to get involved and to actually change their personal life their personal health and their communities and that's really what food fix is about it's about outlining what those Solutions are and how to do them so you sound as well as sounding impassioned and almost you know I wouldn't say angry angry is the wrong word but a little frustrated there's a wheel wake up everybody this is happening there's a real notes of optimism here and I think let's go into that optimism because I think if people are listening to this and they're affected by this and they think yeah well actually okay fine I I can't maybe influence the political system although maybe there was a way that they can absolutely you can but on an individual level let's talk about some of the things they can do and I tell you on a personal level as I've been reading more about factory farming as I've understood it more yeah sure the financial case the the political case but just the the moral and ethical case around it in terms of how animals are treated um there's a Thai restaurant near to where we live where you know sometimes my wife and my kids will go out and eat that we like the food there and I in the past maybe a few years ago would have had let's say Pad Thai chicken noodles okay but recently the last couple of years I will now no longer have that because I know that the chicken being served there I I don't think is a high quality I don't think uh I think it's factory farms I'm I'm they're very unclear on where this chicken comes from and so you know you could say we should um boycott the restaurant okay you you can make that case but we we don't we go but I will have a you know I'll have the vegetarian pantai noodles now so I won't support and pay for something on the menu as much as I possibly can that actually is going to support that industry and I feel I'm doing a little bit you know I had this conversation a few weeks ago my kids they wanted the chicken and I said look guys you know do you know where that chicken comes from do you know what is happening do you still want that chicken and look I'm not saying I'm doing this the right way with my kids but I think kids are the future and I think if we can teach and have these conversations with our kids then they're gonna see this from a young age and they were like yeah actually Daddy will have the the vegetarian one as well much of a difference does a simple choice for a family of four like that actually make it can make a difference I mean imagine if everybody in the world decided for one day they were going to not eat any processed food or any fast food don't you think that would have a big impact on the global markets I think I think we have more influence than we believe and I think it all starts with Grassroots efforts and movements so if people start demanding things it changes I mean I got a text today because I did a podcast with Tom Newmark about the carbon underground which is essentially about carbon underground meaning getting the soil full of carbon again and I talked about regenerative agriculture and how important it is I talked about the fact that General Mills was sort of guilted and forced into committing a million acres to be converted to regenerative AG and the person who texted me works at Nestle and she says I'm going to bring this to the CEO of nestle would you be willing to meet with the Sea of nestle to talk about these issues and get them to start changing their supply change because because if these companies start it can make a big difference and and not everybody has that ability to make those levers that I maybe can but it's possible there's a guy named Jeremy Kohler who was a as a business guy from the UK who who aggregated 12 trillion dollars in assets from institutional investors and Pension funds and said look guys we're going to try to end factory farming of animals first we're going to start with antibiotics we're going to go to the top 20 fast food companies who we are all invested in and we're going to tell them we're going to divest if you don't stop antibiotics by this date from all your food like McDonald's and Burger King and all that stuff and they did and it worked so there are levers that can be pulled in the system whether it's through business whether it's through the market from the bottom up you know the the Groundswell is pushing companies to do the right thing into sustainability into thinking about their communities and they want I mean I think there is more Consciousness now happening in those companies because they're hearing it from you know the consumers who want this and so the consumer demand is driving the marketplace yeah so the more the more we all can make these choices the more people listening to this can go okay you know what I'm going to see what small difference I can make in my life that's going to have a significant knock-on effect you know there's I mean we're all like see the growth in electric cars I mean that is going to replace the combustion engine very soon why because consumers and people are demanding it yeah the same thing can happen with food you mentioned um prisons before yeah and I found that really interesting both you and I have spoken to Dan buettner on our podcasts um the chap who has studied extensively these so-called blue zones around the world these areas of um High long jealousies these longevity hot spots and what's what's striking about that is that a lot of people are you know you know debating what are the various components of that one thing that seems to be really consistent is that the environment is set up in such a way that it makes the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice yeah right and right you mentioned a statistic something like if you if you serve healthy food in a prison yeah it what it was 50 something percent it was really basically we're looking at you know you talked about the smile study about the effect of food under pressure and we know mental illness is really driven by a lot of nutritional deficiencies in in violence and behavior change we don't really think about it that way but in prisons they've done randomized trials where they put half the group on a healthy diet half the group on the same prison diet who are violent criminals violent in prison and they reduce violent crime by 56 percent and if they added a multivitamin they reduced it by 80 and I remember once coming home from I mean coming into my office at work and there was a letter handwritten letter that was from a prisoner in prison who said Dr Hyman I read your book in prison I changed my diet and I don't know how we did it in prison he said I realized my whole life as a violent criminal was because of what I was eating I feel like a completely different person so I thought it's powerful isn't it that is so incredibly powerful to see the power of foods yeah there is something going on in the UK at the moment actually which I'm just going to bring up here and a lot of people are getting quite annoyed and very frustrated with the term food as medicine or food as medicine it's really interesting yeah and I I know they have a quarrel with Hippocrates huh yeah I know my thoughts on it and I think they're probably very similar to yours but maybe it's just been a nice little offshoot here to to touch on you know these stories are mentioning the smiles trial this prisoner who wrote to you all the countless case studies you've got and I've got um you know is food medicine absolutely I mean there is no doubt about it I'm William Lee just wrote a book called eat to beat disease was a Harvard uh uh physician yeah I'm not ready I've seen everyone I've not actually read this one really brilliant but he he showed a slide and it is very sophisticated analyzes testing food components compared to drug components so a blood pressure drug a cholesterol drug you know heart failure drug whatever the drug is and looked at various food components and how it compared in terms of the effectiveness using very sophisticated models for testing these in in biology and they found that almost every single time food beat out the drug in terms of Effectiveness wow and what food is is far more than calories as I was talking about not all calories are the same that's the biggest myth that's perpetuating everything because in in the fast food world if all calories the same it doesn't matter if it's KFC or soda or french fries as long as you balance your calories doesn't matter what you eat that's not true because food is information so we know that food influences the body in multiple ways one it changes gene expression you literally can turn on or off jeans by which if you had broccoli you can turn on genes that help you detoxify and produce glutathione right if you eat green tea drink green tea you increase the level of catechins which have the ability to detoxify heavy metals and activate various enzymes if you if you eat the right foods you can balance your hormones if you eat the wrong foods you eat too much insulin your testosterone goes down if you have too much sugar if you eat the right fats it's the opposite if you look at what it does to your brain chemistry you can either hijack your brain chemistry it can make you calm and peaceful in your mood it can change your microbiome you literally have trillions of bacteria in your gut that control almost every function of your body and when you eat the wrong Foods you grow the bad ones that make you sick and when you eat the right Foods you grow the good ones that make you healthy so literally with every bite in real time you're changing your biochemistry your physiology your genetics every single minute of the day yeah you're absolutely right I mean it is that powerful yeah I mean this is not in my opinion by the way this is just hard science yeah and I would extend that out of course we're talking about food but but even sleep there's a there's really good studies showing that a single night sleep deprivation changes the expression I think of over 700 genes you know that if you haven't slept well uh you you the genes are actually pretty just post inflammation the pro-inflammatory genes get turned on and the enantiinflammatory ones started getting switched off so our lifestyle literally is medicine it's not just prevention of health problems it can often be used as the treatment as well and that's something that I think isn't still not recognized enough it still it always comes down to prevention and of course prevention is better than cure but you can use lifestyle a lot of the time as treatment as well as like the story with Janice I mean we weren't preventing your heart failure preventing her diabetes preventing her high blood pressure we were treating it with food and with lifestyle so yes food is medicine exercise is medicine sleep is medicine stress reductions medicine you know connection love is medicine yeah these are all medicines and that and they work well most importantly this is the medicine we need primarily for the health problems of the 21st century yeah that's the key maybe 30 40 years ago you know what maybe we didn't need these things as medicine in the same way maybe our conventional opinion of medicine like a drug that we prescribe you know if you've got an acute problem and you come in with that you know I can understand where that rationale has come from but the health landscape of the US of the UK has changed dramatically so we now need these lifestyle tools as our medicine by the way twice as many people die from chronic lifestyle diseases as infectious disease not just here but globally yeah so in South Africa they're suffering the double burden of malnutrition and obesity I mean exactly it's slightly ironic in many ways and it's I think not calling food medicine I think is doing our patients a disservice because then it's not put on the same level or a higher level than let's say the pharmaceutical drug that we might have to offer and I think that's the danger when we don't talk about it in these terms I mean listen what happened to Jess there's no drug on the planet that can do that there's no drug on the planet that can reverse your need for insulin in three days or can reverse your heart failure or can reverse your kidney failure they just don't exist yeah and food can do it and I've seen it over and over again I may sound like a crazy man but the truth is this is actually what this sign shows is actually what people who are using food in this way see all the time well you know you don't sound crazy you know what you sound like you sound like someone a little crazy who's been practicing medicine for many years how many years now 32 years of seeing tens of thousands of patients you have seen first-hand the impacts and literally you just sound someone to me who's just very passionate you've seen it you've seen the structural problems and you want to take on something that not many people are taking on you're not writing another book um you've written many great books but this feels very different to me this has taken on the political structure the economic structure you're looking at food in a different way and I think that's very very important and I want to thank you for that because I think it's very important that this sort of message gets out there coming back to systemic change and we talked about making the food environment easier and we talk about prisons we want to talk about schools so I'm a father as you are I've got two young children they're both at primary school at the moment and what's interesting for me is that while my kids are a bit younger you know they're currently nine and six I was okay at sort of I won't say controlling but I could I could sort of control what they're eating yeah and as my children are getting older particularly my son now who's nine and he's been exposed to more and more things it's getting harder and harder so this may be controversial to some but I'm going to share my view on this so on the final day of school last year before the summer break a lot of the teachers brought in haribo's for the kids what's that so Harry Bowes are a very popular food mate certainly in the UK of sweets candy basically I don't know if they're here or you must have an equivalent here yeah probably these are bags of sweets that are very very common now the reality is my kids don't eat that stuff because I've never given it to them um now you know a lot of people will probably say well I've you know that's too brutal you need to expose them to this sort of stuff and you know I like all parents I'm trying to do the best that I can this is what I consider to be the best decision maybe Tom will tell that I was wrong but I'm certainly trying to do the best that I can they've given them more junk food no but it's about trying to teach them a balance and I just think the norm in society is so skewed away from Health at the moment that fitting in with what is quite a sick Society I don't think necessarily it's biologically normal I don't think it's the right thing and so I'm trying to protect my kids as much as possible now Jamie Oliver has been involved with trying to change various things in the UK I helped someone this last campaign about junk food advertising and I think that's something that is different in Europe compared to America we do have some regulation around it maybe it's not perfect but there is something still there now at the last meeting I was down at in Jamie's office where a lot of opinion makers were there we were we were discussing the enzymes this whole idea of schools being a safe Zone yeah came up yeah and for me I really like that something I've been talking about for years that that essentially a school or a hospital or even a prison right but but let's get back to schools particularly schools I know schools should be the model educationally but also health-wise I genuinely don't see why there was a case in 2019 and 2020 why when we're facing this chronic disease epidemic when in the UK one in three kids leave primary school to go to secondary school at the age of 10 or 11 are either overweight or obese I find it very hard to justify the case now where any school should be serving these sort of uh these sweets sugar sweetened beverages packets of sweets because what that also does is it normalizes the food it allows us to start associating reward and doing well with sweet food and you know I had difficult conversations with my son my son said to me but he wants everyone having a harrowboat at school I mean you've been telling me this is very good for my health but why is why is everyone giving it out and so what does that do this is another problem which is not getting spoken about enough Mark is that if you are a parent who is trying to do the right thing with your children you are then you're then making your children social outcasts because they're not engaging in a society that is actually engaging a lot of unhealthy behaviors I'm confused help me out well you know I don't know what it's like in the UK but in the United States schools have been infiltrated by the food industry eighty percent of schools have contract with soda companies fifty percent of schools sell brand name fast food at lunch McDonald's Burger King Domino's Pizza in school in schools I mean I I don't know most times in the UK if anyone knows please tweet me and Mark and let us know or let us know on Instagram they'll be super interested I went to a school I'm not aware of that I went to an underserved School in Cleveland and um it was a poor African-American Hispanic School the 43 of kids are absent one percent one percent by the time they graduate are qualified to go to college I walked down the hall there was a young girl very overweight one hand she had a 32 ounce like a liter slushie and another 32 ounce or a liter soda in the other hand and you know these schools have fast um you know food in them and they have deep fryers and microwaves in the kitchen I walk through the kitchen there was not a stove you couldn't cook food it all came out of boxes packages processed food it's like burgers fries clearly this is a problem it's probably for that Health but but there's advertising in school so the in the bathroom stalls there's like Coca-Cola ads I mean it's everywhere in this where I see the problem Mark is that yes that's bad for their health but I think the problem is deeper than that because what that does is that it almost ingrains the kids of course in a certain way of thinking while they're young absolutely that's the science of what they're doing and they're deliberate and intentional about it and there are schools that are fighting back there's for example a friend of mine who's created a program with the schools to rehab the kitchens to get local chefs to create great recipes that are within the school lunch budget and the school lunch guidelines and has revolutionized the Boston city school district and the mayor is now involved and they literally have transformed schools and getting these kids eating real whole healthy food that they love what about the parents who say that actually our kids should be allowed to be sweet treats at school it's too Draconian not allowing them to have this at school what what is your view there maybe they should just give him a few lines of cocaine in school along with their lunch or a little heroin booth there where they can get a shot of heroin I mean listen the science is so clear that these foods are harmful they're deadly they're addictive why would you give them to your kids yes you can have a sweet treat yes you can have sugar of course but make it from Real Food not Ultra processed food that's going to hijack your brain and your metabolism make a real cookie from butter and flour and sugar that's fine did Marco Polo say eat whatever you want as long as you make it right so you want french fries make your French fries at home yeah because it's different when you're making it yourself and I think the problem also for me is if schools do this is that you take away a lot of the choice from parents so parents want to engage in a sweet treat with their children actually if they're getting loads of it at school then they're already going past their daily quota if you even agree with daily quizzes but you're then taking away that choice and I feel schools should be safe zones and then it's up to parents what they choose to do with their children outside school that's the way I would like to see it exactly schools should be safe Zone your home should be a safe Zone I mean there's you know I once said to my my son once said you know I want to invite some friends over he says but there's nothing to eat in the house right what he meant was there's no junk food yeah so I'm like all right let's go to the grocery store and there's only one rule you can't buy anything with trans fat in it he went around and around and around couldn't find one thing to buy I mean that's the problem so we can make a pizza at home and we did you know and that could be fun right we've done that without kids you make a healthy pizza right you get the kids involved right you know put it in the oven they're engaged with that and I guess that's something we've not covered yet is you mentioned the political structure the the farming structure the economic structure but how important is teaching our children teaching the population at large one of the most basic human skills of all which is how to cook yeah we I mean I just wrote a cookbook called food what the heck should I cook and a lot of the cookbook is about yeah there's a lot of great recipes but here's how you can just learn how to cook with the basic skills that you can put ingredients together you don't have a fancy recipe and I think it is it's a crime that we have lost that and it's not an accident this is where I I talk about the food industry in the 50s in America there was a woman named Betty who was an advocate for she was a home economics teacher and she was an advocate for teaching Families how to cook food and how to prepare food and how to grow gardens and she was really creating this great movement the food industry freaked out and they said look they gathered all In Minnesota where they the General Mills headquarters was they bring in all the food companies and they basically colluded to decide that we're going to make convenience of value right you deserve a break today let us do the cooking for you right and so they created a cookbook called The Betty Crocker cookbook now you're probably not familiar with this cookbook but there was there was a cookbook my mother had at pretty much every family in America had this cookbook and the cookbook was basically recipes that included processed food so it was like take one bag of Ritz crackers and sprinkle it on your broccoli casserole or add one can of camels cream of mushroom soup to this or that and so they were insinuating processed food and then they came up with TV dinners and then you know we moved into fast food and now you know we had basically two percent of meals eaten outside the home in the turn of the last century and now we have 50 of the meals eaten outside the home and we have Generations who don't know how to cook uh really don't know how to cook anything and it's it's pretty frightening so bringing that skill back is critical I mean how do we teach our kids things that often are Irrelevant in school but don't teach them the three things that matter most how to take care of your body and nutrition and cooking is part of that how to have healthy relationships and how to manage your money we don't want any of that in school yeah I mean this is a great place to sort of close down this podcast look those are three great tips on what we should be teaching kids in school so there's many teachers who listen to this podcast if you can actually go back to school if you agree with those um let us know for for one on social media if you've got some new additions to that that you think we haven't mentioned please let us know on social media we'd love to hear from you um but in terms of we all can make a difference if you're a teacher and you go into your school if you're a parent you go into your school and you have these conversations with the Headmaster with the parents committees you know I find the parents committee sometimes actually quite problematic because uh the whole fundraising system around everything is revolves around sugar revolves around treats uh my wife and I literally we were chatting about it just this past weekend but this podcast as we mentioned at the start is called feel better live more I genuinely believe that when we feel better in our sales Mark we get more out of our lives I always like to leave my listeners with actionable tips things that they can put into practice into their own life immediately to improve how they feel yeah now because at the top that we've covered today which is basically what you've written about in your book food fix I wonder if we could do this in two parts the first one is if people feel inspired by what you said I'd recommend for a start people go out and buy this book because I think it will really really forced you to re-examine what you thought about Foods I think it it is so well researched you've clearly spent a lot of time delving into this so thank you for that but if people at home want to start making a difference to this structural food problem that exists what are some toxics they can do well I think the first thing is you know change your diet so that you're eating real food you know don't participate in this junk food culture two make your home a safe Zone three we didn't talk about it but food waste is a big problem so make a compost bucket in your kitchen you can have a home composter you can have in your backyard you can have a garden for if you're a parent be a school activist get your schools to shift to what's going on in there around healthy food and there's a lot of examples of how to do that five if you work somewhere get your workplace to be a safe Zone too at Cleveland Clinic the CEO eliminated any sugar sweetened beverages from the campus it's possible and also think about you know getting engaged with organizations that are making a difference in the food system and that are part of Grassroots efforts and there's a lot of them out there and I detail them in the book and then lastly vote with your vote you know being an activist politically where you actually can make a difference you look at the voices that are heard out there that make a difference Margaret Mead said never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world in fact it's the only thing that ever has and I think we should remember that because our actions matter our work matters I mean Greta Sternberg I'm the young young girl yeah it was like you know raising Consciousness about climate change she's 16 years old she's raising her voice she's going up against the powers that be she's getting attention each one of us can be part of that whether it's in our homes and our families and our schools and our workplaces our communities our faith-based communities that's a place to start if you enjoyed that conversation I think you are really going to enjoy this one about the impacts of sugar on your body and brain when you consume sugar you are poisoning your mitochondria sugar and cyanide do the same thing this is the toxin

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 527,481

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview, Mark hyman, mark hyman inflammation, mark hyman nutrition, mark hyman stay young, mark hyman reverse aging

Id: 9lXG8x0yR3o

Length: 155min 37sec (9337 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023