The 6 Foods You Should NEVER EAT Again! | Mark Hyman

fructose is a very toxic compound when it's free and unattached to fruit and it's in everything it's in bread it's in salad dressing it's in tomato sauce for your pizza if you care about health these are the foods that i think it's okay to say you should never eat now we got to be careful with the word should because you never want to judge upon people but you're giving strong recommendations so let's jump right in and talk about which one of these well the things that i'm talking about you are not my opinion these are scientifically proven to cause disease and death so there's no doubt in my mind that these should never cross anyone's lips and they should be banned in fact one of them was recently by the fda was considered something not safe to eat anymore and yet it's been the food supply for 100 years actually maybe yeah a little 101 years since 1911 so when crisco was developed and that is trans fat or hydrogenated fat that should never pass your lips that's highly proven to cause heart attacks many other health issues diabetes inflammation and it's toxic and it's made from vegetable oil that's converted to a solid fat like margarine or shortening through a process called hydrogenation where they put in extra hydrogen atoms you should never eat that so if you look at the words on the ingredient list and you have to not look at the nutrition facts label only you have to look at the ingredient list the ingredient list will tell you everything that's in there and by the way the ingredient list in america sucks because in europe they put what percentage of things are and so you know exactly how much of which thing you're getting and i'll get into that in a minute so never eat anything that says hydrogenated partially hydrogenated soybean oil any kind of fat like that and just one little note we'll expand on it later on it was banned but through a little bit of a tricky loophole you can still find it in certain products well they gave the food companies a long runway to actually get get rid of it from the food but it's all over the supermarket even though in 2015 it was ruled not safe to eat that's something called grass or g-r-a-s or generally recognized as safe so it's even the fda finally and by the way it was only after 50 years of data proving that it wasn't safe that finally a guy who's been working on us for 50 years he was in his 90s a doctor a scientist sued the fda and that is that's why they finally had to succumb to getting out because the food companies didn't want it they have to swap out all kinds of ingredients in their products every single processed food had this in it for decades and decades the second is just about as bad and maybe maybe worse and that's high fructose corn syrup now why is that worse than just sugar well high fructose corn syrup has a number of qualities one it is not like regular sugar which is 50 50 glucose and fructose it's sometimes 55 fructose even up to 75 fructose and fructose and we've had podcasts about this you've had uh dr richard johnson on your podcast about this fructose is a very toxic compound when it's free and unattached to fruit right fructose comes in fruit but if it's just free in the product you're eating which is in sodas and all kinds of sugary drinks and and it's in everything it's in bread it's in salad dressing it's in tomato sauce for your pizza i mean it's it's terrible it actually has a very bad effect on your liver causes fatty liver high triglycerides inflammation insulin resistance and it's it's really driving so many diseases of aging heart disease cancer diabetes obesity dementia etc so you don't want to eat that the other reason it's bad is because it seems to take a lot of energy to absorb across the gut and so glucose gets in and sort of naturally gets in fructose requires energy and so if you're having a lot of fructose free fructose it basically depletes the energy in the gut which is required to keep you from having a leaky gut so your cells and your intestinal lining are stuck together like legos but if those lego junctions come apart those tight junctions come apart you get what we call a leaky gut and leaky gut leads to a whole host of downstream consequences that drive inflammation because basically protein and from food and particles that shouldn't be getting in and foreign proteins from that and also poop and bacterial toxins get absorbed and your body's like ah the immune system starts reacting and you start getting autoimmune disease and allergies and heart disease and cancer and everything it's bad so you really want to stay away from africa's corn syrup the other thing is interesting is when they process it they often use something called chlor alkali and i'll tell you a funny story because what this scientist i knew wanted to study high fructose corn syrup and so she asked the makers of high fructose corn syrup cargill and other big food companies to get a supply so she could test it they wouldn't give it to her but then she kind of changed her name and she pretended to be someone who was making a new soft drink or a new beverage so i'm using this i needed to to to make my new beverage so they're like okay fine they sent it to her and then she analyzed it and found almost all the samples had high levels of mercury because chloroalkali used to extract the ivor's corn syrup from the corn actually is a mercury dependent process so you might be getting toxic from mercury too so for a number of reasons leaky gut mercury you know fatty liver inflammation you should never have corn syrup and if you get rid of those two things high fructose corn syrup and trans fats you literally eliminate 90 of things in the grocery store i mean it's true the next thing you should think about are what are the toxins in the food that are inadvertently in there now in europe they have a legislation called reach which eliminates a lot of of toxins from the food supply but in america the fda is not very good at protecting us from harmful chemicals for example butylated hydroxytoluene is a known carcinogen and it's otherwise known as bht it's a common preservative and it's allowed in our food and in my book food fix i detail a lot of the science around which of these additives are in food which are not in foods in europe which are in here and and what the fda has done about it and often there's these huge efforts from the food companies to keep these things in the food supply like dyes and artificial colors and and flavorings because they are actually good for the food industry but they're not good for people and by the way 46 of the fda's budget comes directly from user fees and that accounts from food companies and pharmaceutical companies that are paying directly for the budget i think we're the only country where that's the case it's bad it's bad and the next category is ultra processed food and i'll get to that in a minute essentially it's highly pulverized ingredients from industrial food they usually come from three ingredients we eat corn and soy turned in all manner and size color shapes of extruded food like substances that shouldn't really be called food and and if you you can often tell it's ultra processed food but if you look at the label and you don't read the front of the package but you look at the ingredient list and if you can't tell what it is it has 45 ingredients and you actually can't tell if it's a corn dog or a dorito then you probably shouldn't eat it right and if it has ingredients you can't pronounce or in latin things you wouldn't have in your kitchen cupboard you probably don't want to be eating that now ultra processed food is about 60 of our diet 67 of kids diets for ten percent every ten percent of your diet that's ultra processed food your risk of death goes up by fourteen percent now i'm not good at math whatever 66 times 14 uh that's a lot it's going to raise your risk by i don't know what 75 percent of of death from eating this food so in the world globally it's been connected to 11 million deaths conservatively by the global burden of disease study that's been an ongoing study looking at people's food habits and their and their and their risks of a disease so we really don't want to be eating an ultra processed food the next thing you should avoid are artificial sweeteners why because for a whole host of reasons they they harm your body one they create damage to your microbiome and lead to increase in obesity and diabetes two they seem to trigger your brain in a way that creates a we'll call a cephalic insulin response they're a thousand times sweeter than regular sugar and they'll trigger your brain to think sugar's on their way it's like pavlov's bell you know it rings the bell the dog salivates even if there's no food because it gets conditioned so the body's conditioned to respond and when you when you ring the bell of sugar on the tongue at that level it sends a message to the brain and it starts producing secondary metabolic effects like increasing insulin for example we call it the cephalic phase insulin response and that drives you to be hungrier to eat more so that's when you'll go to studies people who drink artificial sweeteners are most are more likely to be overweight more likely to have diabetes it seems to be you know counterintuitive but actually what the data show and lastly if you can you really should avoid any of the foods and that are in the dirty dozen foods from the environmental working group or ewg.org these are the foods and basically fruits and vegetables with the highest amount of pesticides so like strawberries for example grapes you don't want to eat those if they're not organic now i love strawberries but i won't eat them if they're not organic now you can't always be perfect with that but you want to really minimize your intake of pesticides and that's the best way they also have a clean 15 list which is if your budget isn't really high okay well these clean 15 it doesn't really matter if they're you know like avocados avocado or a banana or whatever it doesn't matter but if you're eating a strawberry or nectarine or certain you know celery for example and people eating celery juice like crazy if it's not organic it's just a reservoir of toxins so i wouldn't be doing that so those are the foods you really want to avoid at all costs then there's the ones you want to kind of limit flour any kind of flour think of it as a drug it's it's like sugar it's tequila it's wine it's a drug and you you can have it but you want to make sure one you don't overdo it and the americans are eating about 133 pounds of flour every year it's a lot of flour it's almost a little bit maybe a third of a pound a day per person we have muffins bagels you know bread pastas right i mean it's just we have so much flour and that drives your body to think that there's high levels of sugar because this flour is actually worse than sugar for your blood sugar so it spikes your blood sugar more than table sugar so you really want to eliminate that the next thing you want to limit is really sugar we eat about 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and a lot of it's high fructose corn syrup as i mentioned we don't want to be drinking liquid sugar calories again think about sugar as a recreational drug delayed sugar of course i do but i do it in limited amounts i do it in the context usually a meal i don't have it on empty stomach it prevents the spikes in blood sugar you also want to avoid refined oils all the highly processed refined oils yes we can use oils like avocado oil olive oil those are fine fat is good but all these highly refined oils that are from cold vegetable oils i mean they're made through solvents and hexane and high temperatures and they oxidize easily they're very unstable and they can be linked to increase inflammation and gut issues and and so forth so i try to really get rid of those and those are all in the processed food when you go out to eat they usually use these crappy oils so you really want to be careful and the last category is gmo foods why is gmo bad we can argue that all day long but here's what we know about gmo foods one there's a lot of glyphosate 70 of the agricultural chemicals used today in the world is glyphosate what's glyphosate it's an herbicide herbicide that causes damage to the soil so it kills the microbiome of the soil which is needed to actually grow healthy plants that are nutrient dense it also destroys our microbiome and it's been linked to cancer there's been i think 14 000 lawsuits and billions of dollars in settlements from monsanto's glyphosate around them and and so you want to really avoid that whenever possible and that that's by avoiding gmo foods now we we may also potentially have other factors that gmo may cause adverse effects in humans but you know i think there's still a lot of debate about that but we know there's a lot of reasons and if you're eating gmo foods you're contributing to the destruction of the planet and the degradation of the environment and the destruction of soil and climate change so you might as well be driving a hummer if you're gonna eat gmo foods you heard it here first mark let's dive back into a couple of these top ones that you had trans fats and high fructose corn syrup um you know you said 90 of the grocery stores so what are some common products or types of products just to make it real for people that would have trans fats in them still to this day i mean anything i mean you know it's shocking to me drew i i got i go in the grocery store i'm like wait a minute isn't this seven years ago that the government said this is going to kill you and it's still on the shelves i i don't get it like cool whip or and they might be swapping it out so i i can't be 100 sure that i've been like on every product but it's basically in any kind of processed food so any kind of baked goods any i mean it was been in bread it's been in in all kinds of uh baked and and cooked goods that people are are buying whether it's frozen meals or anything pizza i mean i once i once took my son to the grocery store because he said dad there's nothing to eat when he was a teenager there's nothing to eat in the house you know there's nothing to eat in hell there's plenty of food to eat out but it was nothing junky and i said okay well go to the grocery i want to have friends over i want to watch a game but there's nothing to eat i'm like okay let's go to the store and you can buy anything you want one rule no trans fat pizza cookies whatever you want buy whatever you want no trans fat you couldn't find anything like there was almost nothing in the grocery store you could find it was like 10 years ago but it was like terrible so i think i think we really we need to really be careful about looking at the labels on that and just for reference because we have everybody here you know you were in a documentary fed up yeah and a big part of that was how sugar is driving all sorts of downstream effects that are impacting people's health we say sugar but that sugar could show up in high fructose corn syrup you know you talked about it here but it could show up under a lot of other names that are there what are some other names that high fructose corn syrup could be disguised as um we usually have it was crunchy but the thing is with sugar it's fascinating in europe uh it said you have to say the percent of everything on the label in america you just have to put what's the most abundant ingredient first in order of so you could have you know five ingredients but you know you could have like one per the last thing when you pay one percent and the first ingredient could be 95 so you don't really know the amount so what they've done is food companies have come up with five or six different kinds of sugars that they'll put in a particular food like a cereal or a cookie so they don't have to have the first ingredient be sugar because it's like it's barley malt and it's you know maltodextrin and it's you know it's uh you know all kinds of weird names that people use for sugar that that are actually just the same thing that are made a little bit different but then the food companies put them all in this food that makes it look like sugar is not the main ingredient but like cereal is a great example there might be four or five different kinds of sugar corn syrup and cane sugar and you know whatever high fructose corn syrup and and you and you get the cereal it's 75 sugar so you really have to be careful to look at all the different names of sugar and there's like 50 different names i can't remember them all now but if you google 15 different names for sugar you'll see all the different names for sugar one of the things you've talked about is in europe also again you know just looking at what other countries have done ways that they're trying it's not perfect but to better protect their population and encourage literacy for nutritional facts is they have a red light green light yellow light system kind of like the traffic lights right and another thing that they do is for sugar they also say what percentage of the daily value it is we're the only country that doesn't have a daily recommended value when it comes to sugar so people often don't even know how much sugar whether it's high fructose corn syrup or something else how much sugar they're actually consuming in their day yeah i mean the the u.s dietary guidelines say we should have less than you know five percent of our diet is sugar and yet it's not on the label in fact it was a huge fight under obama because michelle obama wanted to change the food labels and put the amount of added sugar on the label but the food companies didn't want that because they didn't want people to know how much sugar they were adding because they could say carbohydrates 30 grams and it could be you know a lot of fiber or could be good stuff but but when they actually have to put in added sugars it actually shows how much they add to the food so the problem is all these foods in order to taste good because they're just made from garbage they have to either a ton of sugar or ton of salt or a ton of fat and that's basically what makes people sick and overweight so mark one of the things that the food industry will often say and i'd love your take on it because it's part of the problem and the mess that we're in is they'll say well if we didn't make this hyper salty hyper sugary item somebody else would go make it instead so we just have to give the people what they want yeah i i love when they say that you know the food industry is very good at controlling the memes and the mantras that are culturally pretty much out there for people one is in order to lose weight you have to eat lex and exercise more eat less exercise more it's all about calories in calories out and the implication that is it's your fault you're fat like you're just a lazy glutton and if you stop eating so much and start exercising off the couch and move your butt you lose weight that's just a big fat lie and the science doesn't support that in any way the food is information calories information and and eating a thousand calories of broccoli or a thousand calories of high fructose corn syrup profoundly different in the way they affect your biology everybody can understand that the second is that they they say well just giving people what they want well guess what if i stood on the corner and handed out cocaine everybody'd want that if i was selling 2.99 bags of cocaine and mcdonald's do you think that would sell out like that of course they would well we're just giving our customers what they want they want a little heroin cocaine but that's ridiculous these are highly addictive foods and the food industry is so smart about designing foods to hook us now there's a book by michael moss new york times reporter called salt sugar and fat it was actually my first podcast and he describes the ways in which the food industry has created taste institutes where they hire quote craving experts to create what they call the bliss point of food in order to create heavy users they literally use these terminology heavy users like a heavy drug user right and and so they they design foods for the right mouth feel the right crunch the right flavor the right the right stimulation of the dopamine in the brain which is the addiction center and so these foods are highly addictive and you crave them you want more of them the more you eat i mean nobody nobody is going to eat 25 avocados but very often people can eat 25 chips and white cookies right so that's because of how it affects our brain and i think i think if we we really look at the science of this we have to sort of start holding these companies accountable to the foods they're producing we we limited smoking we had taxes we had i mean we have alcohol we have alcohol taxes we have restrictions and so forth and what people can and can't do these are biologically deadly substances that are rampant in our culture that that the majority of people are addicted to it's some way or another some very very much so and some less so and i think the important part of that and that goes back to the title of this episode which can seem a little bit clickbaity again but we did it to get people's attention to listen this conversation it's actually harder in my opinion and i've seen you treat a bunch of patients and know many of them even my mom has actually is a patient of the ultra wellness center had a great experience there it's so because these foods are so highly addictive if you try to practice moderation around them i'm talking about the ones in the first category high fructose corn syrup trans fats and especially the artificial sweeteners and the ultra processed fruits if you try to do and practice what's called the moderation approach of okay i'm gonna just have a little bit first of all a little bit means different to every person but secondly you're gambling a little you're gambling because you don't know how these foods are going to play with your own level of addiction and it's actually kind of hard to stop eating them that whole uh chips ahoy or pringles uh commercial once you start you can't stop it's kind of true they may believe this the whole thing that was the lay's potato chips i can't believe i ate the whole bag you eat a little bit these foods are addictive and they just keep on pulling you back back in yeah it's so true and i think you know the science of this is really compelling i'll just sort of break it down a little bit but you know my friend david literally was at harvard is one of the most brilliant scientists clinical trials in the world has done a number of really elegant studies looking at this one was he took a group of overweight guys and he fed them what seemed to be identical milkshakes on different days so they were the same in protein fat and carbohydrate same percentages same amount of fiber exactly the same except for one difference one of them and they tasted the same one of them had a very quickly absorbed carbohydrate that spiked blood sugar and the other one didn't was much more a slow carb let's call it a slowly absorb carbohydrate and they then they fed the same guys different milkshakes on different days and then they tracked their blood and they looked at functional mri imaging and when they look at their blood the guys who had the high sugar spiky carb their insulin went up their sugar went up their cholesterol went off their triglycerides went up their cortisol went up their adrenaline went up it was like a stress response when you eat sugar it literally creates a stress response so when you eat a lot of sugar it's like being chased by a tiger your body doesn't know the difference and so cortisol causes all sorts of problems causes diabetes causes you to have dementia it causes you to gain weight it causes you to lose muscle it's really bad causes your bones to dissolve and this is what happens when we eat sugar so then he took these guys and put him in these mri machine and looked at their brains before and after the high sugar milkshake and they found that the ones who had the high spiky sugar milkshake the area of their brain that's the addiction center called the nucleus accumbens lit up like a christmas tree essentially it's the addiction center that gets stimulated by cocaine or heroin or anything else that is addictive and so it proved that from a biological perspective it's addictive and this study's an animal i wrote the 10-day detox diet which i catalog a lot of the research but that was like 10 years ago almost eight years ago i wrote that book and they found that for example with animals if a rat was connected to an iv cocaine and they could hit the lever and give themselves iv cocaine they would literally always switch over to sugar if given the chance and they would work eight times harder to get the sugar than the cocaine and they would another experiment was kind of a terrible experiment but they put them in this uh cage with an electric chalk floor and whenever they ate the sugar they gave them electric shock and they kept eating the sugar despite the fact they were getting shocked over and over it's like getting electric shock therapy while you're eating sugar and it's think about it i mean how does someone get to 500 pounds not in one day it's slow and they keep eating the stuff even though it's making them sick even though it's making them incapacity they can't stop themselves their whole system including their brain has been hijacked yeah and they're more likely to be depressed which also makes them feel like there's no hope and one thing leads to to the next all right mark let's pivot a little bit to this category which is the highly minimized if we can avoid it amazing it's tough sometimes and it takes a little bit of education um but it's really worth it and one of those things that you mentioned previously one of those topics is these gums and emulsifiers so first of all what are they and what are they used for when it comes to processed foods so the bees are basically thickeners right they they thicken stuff they're used in milks all the nut milks have them often there's ones that don't so you have to really be conscious like carrageenan and xanthan garment and what turns out that these thickeners seem to have a really bad effect on the gut and they damage the gut and cause what we call leaky gut and they've been linked to allergy and autoimmunity and all kinds of other issues digestive problems so i'm very cautious about these various emulsifiers and thickeners and i read an article in a medical journal not that long ago it's like holy cow these are these are really a problem uh there's one and this is not on the label which is almost in most processed food which is kind of weird that they don't put on the label but it's called it's called microbial transglutaminase wow and and this is a compound that sounds like a big fancy name but transglutaminase is from gluten transglute tamini so it comes from gluten and it literally manufacturing gluten which makes things stick together maybe make bread and use the flour and it gets sticky that stickiness is gluten that's what they call it gluten because it's glue it's like glue right they used to use on envelopes to actually when you lick envelopes to seal the envelope they would use gluten to actually make the envelope stick right so it's sticky and and so they take bacteria and they kind of genetically modify them to produce this microbial trans-glutaminase but it's not on the labels so it's in a lot of processed food and it's basically like concentrated gluten you're eating if you're gluten sensitive it's a problem even if you're not if you eat a lot of this stuff it damages your gut even healthy people a little bit gluten they can handle you get a little leaky gut whatever your body handles it but for the most part like gluten is just not good for your gut you know the thing about these and why education is so key is i can remember let's say like 15 years ago 12 years ago they started to become commercially available almond milk and nut milks that were out on the market yeah you can go to most grocery stores and pick them up at that time anyone that you looked at they all had carrageenan i can't i can't think of anyone except if somebody made it themselves at like a store or like a small batch or raw almond milk or the ones you make at home but all of them had it now through all this education and the fact that companies are listening right where you say like we're voting with our dollars companies are listening i counted in my uh los angeles whole food store there's now three or four commercially available uh almond milks and nut milks that are available in like the refrigerated section that have no emulsifiers and no filters and so this is why it's so important because we as the population that's eating all these foods we learn about these things and we speak up and we share the knowledge the companies will change and they'll start making products that we actually care about and want to consume absolutely i mean we have to be conscious of what we're eating we have to be discerning and and when you start to take the meta framework which is the framework i take of functional medicine which basically has reframed food not just as calories but as information as code as instructions that upgrades or downgrades your biology with every bite so if you're eating information in processed food or other bad ingredients that's doing harm to your body why would you do that and it doesn't necessarily cause harm over decades it causes harm immediately like food is the most important chemical signal that's instructing our body what to do every minute constructing every cell so you're eating food that's causing inflammation damaging your microbiome impairing your detox system causing problems with circulation causing hormonal dysregulation causing problems making energy in your cells why would you do that so once you begin once you begin to understand what food is you only want to up eat the right information i mean you wouldn't go to go to take your nice car and put in crappy gasoline it's watered down or got junk in it your car's not gonna run why would we put junk in our bodies people often underestimate how much processed foods that are eat they're eating so are there any tips or tricks or hacks that you have and one of the main reasons why i bring this up is that you talk to most people most people think that they a lot of studies and surveys have shown this is that most people tend to not think that they're the average right so if you say the average american is eating 128 pounds of sugar every year most people think that they're better than the average right but most people can't be better than the average because that would make the average true so what are some questions that people can be asking themselves to get a real good sense of how much of this process in ultra-processed food is in their diet i mean i i kind of joke because i speak a lot of churches and i say it's really simple to figure out what to eat ask yourself did god make this or did a man make this did god make a twinkie no did god make an avocado yes it's pretty simple so what you're eating should be food that you can recognize on the label now it can be packaged or processed but you should actually recognize all the ingredients if it says tomatoes water and salt then a can of tomatoes fine if it says sardines and olive oil and salt you know what all those things are but if it's got 45 ingredients i mean i i tell this job when i was in haiti during the earthquake in 2010 and for the first few days we had no food and we were just i bought a few cliff bars and racing clip bars and starving and working you know 20 hours a day and finally the military showed up the 82nd airborne and i'm like hey guys you know you got any food because we're starving all the doctors can barely work because we haven't eaten and like yeah we'll get to the mres and so i went with one of the soldiers to the back of their truck and i looking through the different ones and was like oh i i needed something kind of comforting because it was very stressful you can imagine it was like 300 000 people dead 3000 people wounded and it was we were in the epicenter of all that and i saw this meal it said chicken and dumplings and i'm like oh that sounds good dumplings something comforting i'm going to eat that so i brought it back to the back of the or where we fixed you know how to sort of makeshift or and it's kind of cool because they have these thermogenic systems in there which it kind of heats by itself just like with the chemical reaction and so as i'm waiting for it to heat up i'm like looking at the package and i'm reading the label and i'm being like there's like literally like 100 ingredients it's like i'm not even exaggerating and i couldn't find chicken it was a chicken-like substance you don't want to be eating that this is the part of the podcast where we answer some of the questions from the community the folks who listen and follow you on social media and you can go to drhyman.com and send in your question that we potentially could answer in a future episode so the first question is how quickly do unhealthy foods start to have a negative impact on our bodies and how long does that impact remain well it depends on the food it depends what you're eating but most people don't realize that i think well if i eat junk over many years it's going to cause problems i'll gain weight i'll get diabetes but you know it's not an immediate issue really the truth is it is literally with every single bite of food you eat it's code it's messages and what does it do it changes your gene expression literally in real time in seconds to second time it changes which genes are turned on or off you can turn on the disease genes or the health genes it controls inflammation so you literally can see inflammation go up or down literally depending on what you're eating with every bite your microbiome changes in real time the bacteria multiply like this millions of times a second and they're changing what you're feeding them affects which ones grow and which ones don't grow you can be growing a whole crop of bad bugs in your gut that causes disease or you could be growing a crop of good bugs it helps you stay healthy it regulates your hormones in real time your brain chemistry in real time your um all of your mitochondrial function your energy production all that is regulated by what you're eating not over decades but literally over seconds so you have the power to change how you feel by changing what you eat and as a doctor drew and i've had a very you know blessed career and i'm very lucky to have seen a lot of people who are very self-aware and who are very you know um well to do and they they really do want to take care of themselves and eat well and and it's shocking to me how few of those people have ever connected the tots between what they eat and how they feel so they might have runny nose they might have bloating they might have a headache they might have skin issues they might have this amount of that and they have no idea that it's connected to what they're eating even though if they paid attention they would notice oh when i eat this i feel this when i eat that i feel this some people just disconnect it from their food and health connection and and i think that's one of the most important things to recognize i mean i literally literally got a text from a friend of mine who was like 65 years old and she's like you know i'm basically healthy but i've got a lot of this i got all of that i got a little achy a little tired a little bit of energy a little extra weight on me and i said look so i want to come see you got to work up i'm like save your money i said here's the 10-day detox just do this for 10 days just get rid of all the bad stuff put in all the good stuff just eat real whole food get rid of the drunken process but all the things we're talking about she texts me back you're right you're right you're right you're right right you're right you're right i was like she's like i think i might do this for my rest of my life because she had such a quantum jump in her well-being by simply changing what she ate and it does sometimes take that dedicated plan that somebody does because we don't know often how good we can feel until we have a contrast exactly so having that contrast and doing something like following the book you know picking diet i think there's a plan inside of there a 10 day detox your book there's a plan inside of there you do a plan like that you increase your body's interception right seeing the difference between living one way and being another way it's kind of like sometimes i'll hop in an uber and they'll be like 15 air fresheners inside and you get hit with this sort of wave of artificial smells and fragrances and you're like oh my gosh like i get a headache i don't feel good my nose starts getting a little stuffy maybe runny and i get out and i breathe fresh air and i'm like i feel so much better yeah you need that contrast sometimes and doing something like a 10-day reset 10-day detox is a good way to do that well you know the the comment i often get from my patients is dr hyman i didn't know i was feeling so bad until i started feeling so good that's key and i think i think it's like the frog and the boiling water if you drop a frog in boiling water it'll jump right out but if you put them in cold water and you slowly turn up the heat it'll boil to death right that's what we are like we literally slowly boil to death by doing the things we do without paying attention to actually how it's affecting us all right mark the next one comes from our dr hyman plus community which is your members access community and actually we have a few members here alan paul and judy that are watching and on facetime on the computer that's right next to us and paul one of the members asks what is the relationship between ultra-processed foods and farm bill subsidies oh boy well good news i wrote a book on it it's called food fix how to save our health our economy our communities and our planet one bite at a time and the truth is our agricultural policies foster all the wrong foods they support the production of commodities corn wheat and soy in industrial ways that destroy the soil then destroy the ecosystem cause biodiversity loss climate change and and obviously the use of pesticides herbicides which you know cause all kinds of downstream consequences to the environment lots of fertilizer which runs off into rivers and streams and creates dead zones killing hundreds of thousands of metrics tons of fish in the gulf of mexico and there's 400 of those around the world it's just it's a disaster so our policies basically promote growing all the wrong stuff and not the right stuff thank god you know i've started a nonprofit called food fix and it's the food fix campaign to change policymakers i ideas about what's good and what's bad because they're only hearing from the food industry they're only hearing from big ag they're not hearing from scientists and doctors and people really understand these issues and we literally just got a billion dollars which sounds like a lot but we need like probably 300 times that a billion dollars allocated to climate smart agriculture so now we're going to be paying farmers to do the right thing so the farm bill as it is right now is a disaster but it's starting to actually be slowly massaged and changed to actually incorporate strategies to help farmers do the right thing in other words cover crops if a farmer was getting subsidies from the government or crop insurance whatever they get if they want to cover their land with crops during the off season so their soil wouldn't blow away and cause soil loss and by the way we've lost a third of our topsoil since the industrial revolution and a third of all carbon in the atmosphere right of the trillion tons of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere 300 billion of that is from loss of soil and the organic matter in soil so it's a big deal they so the the farmer can't even plant cover crops just to protect the soil because he'd be penalized by our current agricultural farm bill so the good news is that's starting to change we're working hard to change it if anybody hears this and they want to get behind this they want to help us please help us we need we need donations we need support you can go to foodfix.org and and learn more about what we're doing all right the next question also from a member of our dr hamer plus community uh is from judy and she asks how do we drive consumer change when organic is expensive and the food manufacturers are so powerful yeah well it's really the rockefeller foundation did a wonderful report called the true cost of food and they basically estimated that for everything you buy in the grocery store it costs three times that in terms of its impact on our society in terms of chronic disease in terms of this fact impact on education learning on on national security because of military being unfit to fight because they're so unhealthy from the food they're eating it affects climate um the environment and obviously the economy and also social justice issues there's all these layers of issues that are are downstream secondary consequences of the artificially low prices of our food so if you go buy a soda it shouldn't be a dollar it should be 100 how do we let's take take corn for example corn is in everything it's the most ubiquitous product in america and it's in every processed food we pay for it i think four times first we pay in terms of crop insurance and we sort of pay for the farmers to to grow the food second we pay for the environmental damage in society loss of biodiversity climate change the destruction of fish populations nitrogen fertilizer all that then we then we we turn all that junk into processed food the food companies do that but then the government buys the processed food for the poor there's 46 million people on snap or food stamps and 75 percent of that is processed food and most that's from corn so we're literally doling out money to buy this junk and then we pay for it on the back end through medicare medicaid when people get diabetes and obesity and food food-related illnesses so you know yes organic is more expensive now but if we actually had an accounting and a reckoning of the true cost of food it would be much cheaper and so what we're working to do is trying to align the cost with the real cost of the food and so we'll i think we'll see over time regenerative uh food come down organic food come down and and start to sort of see a little bit of a balance in what's happening and you know there's a hierarchy right if you can't eat organic i understand it's a budget issue and you have to realize that if you just switch to real food and get off of processed food that's a huge step that's like 90 of the way there and then if you really you know don't want to be poisoned by pesticides stay away from the dirty dozen foods or if you're going to buy them just by those organic that we talked about earlier so really you know we we can do it people can do it and the data is very clear on this if you look at studies have been done on whether it costs more to eat healthy the answer is not really some studies show it's the same some studies show it's you know maybe 50 cents more a day and i work with a family i've told the story many times in south carolina as part of the movie fed up they lived on food stamps and disability a thousand dollars a month family of five lived in a trailer never ate a real food in their life literally i mean everything was processed packaged boxed frozen canned i showed them how to cook a meal simple meal that would be one of the worst foods that's in america within a year they lost 200 pounds as a family because they were able to figure out how to eat real food and i gave them a guide called good food on a tight budget which is food that's good for you good for your wallet and good for the planet from the environmental working group it's available so what cuts of meat are the cheapest what vegetables are the cheapest what nuts and seeds are the cheapest what beans are the cheapest eat real food it's not that expensive uh mark mark bittman who wrote for the new york times and has written a lot about food and his great chef he did a great article in new york times years ago where he talked about how if you want to take your family and feed him a home-cooked meal live a roast chicken and vegetables and a salad and potato baked potato it's cheaper than taking your family to go to mcdonald's when you have education to know how to cook and that's a big part of what you've also been advocating for and you guys have done a little bit at cleveland clinic is doing pilots of actually having our medical system be a little bit more involved in the education of especially disenfranchised communities who maybe haven't had a few generations of individuals who showed them how to cook in the first place they've been they've been completely completely culturally appropriated um and their food sovereignty has been usurped by the food industry and even by the government in the government food programs which are often well-meaning but ill-doing so like food stamps it's a well-meaning program we don't want people to be hungry and starving but meanwhile we're feeding all this food that's killing them right i've said it before like the number one purchase food on food stamps is soda sodas ten percent seven i think it's what is it i think it's seven uh billion servings a year no no i think it's 30 billion servings a year of soda for the poor the government pays for the number one revenue in america for coca-cola for soda is from the government from food stamps it's mind-blowing and really it brings up that this is kind of like when you shift and make this sort of a political conversation it's a bipartisan issue right because you have two elements of this you have the personal accountability which is often what traditionally like conservatives are really interested in and personal accountability is a huge part of it we have to realize that we're a part of the problem so that means that we're part of the solution and the other side let's say it's the progressive side liberal side is often talking about well if we don't do something to help people who are in these disenfranchised places to actually learn more or get better access or more education it's hard for them to quote unquote lift themselves up from their bootstraps and it's the combination of both of those it's the combination of both of those that actually truly makes a difference and that's where compassion and empathy and also the understanding of of a functional medicine approach to changing our food system you know i had a really interesting dinner once in brooklyn with the medical director of bedford stuyvesant health center which is a very underserved area disenfranchised as you mentioned mostly african-american and there's an african-american doctor woman who'd been working there her whole life and she said mark what is the biggest predictor of you know disease and obesity um and i was like well you know i don't know maybe it's just it's just access or air and she said it's education it's education that if you take people who are who have come from nothing and had no education about food and made a lot of wealth they're still health their health really is still very bad because they haven't figured out what to eat they're still eating based on what they were programmed to eat as kids and so the food industry knows this they hook these kids early why why are they in all the schools why is you know why is probably 70 percent of schools have you know processed food from big food companies in the in the cafeteria for these kids should be allowed there's like mcdonald's monday and taco bell tuesday and wendy's wednesday and it's like it's pizza hut thursday i don't know it's like crazy but that's what's in their schools today that's what kids are eating i had robert dr robert lustig who's a contemporary viewers and also in the movie fed up on my podcast yesterday and one of the things that he was saying is that because the history of school lunches was that the government basically said to schools like this cannot be something that you just lose money on you actually have to use it as a way to cover your own budget so these schools all started going these school districts started going to the big food companies like cisco and you know the different ones that are out there and said well you know do you think that you can help us and they came in and they said absolutely we can totally help you we'll lower the budget you'll actually make money from it and by the way you'll get all this extra cafeteria space to then use that for classroom space okay maybe good intention maybe nefarious but let's say that's what happened then a lot of these schools are now trying to make their own food and trying to take control back of their cafeteria but they actually don't even have the space anymore because they've reconverted all that kitchen space and food prep space so they're beholden to the food industry it's completely true drew i mean most schools have deep fryers and microwaves that's it and that's they get highly processed food they just can be deep fried or microwaved and there's no kitchens they don't cook and the food industry has really designed that so that basically the kids we have today are growing up on food that's destroying their brains destroying their health why we see i i think 40 percent of kids overweight 40 410 kids are overweight i mean there was that one overweight kid in my class that was it everybody else was skinny now it's not like that and now we're seeing diabetes in little kids because of this and the truth is that there are people working to change these school systems and one of them is a good friend of mine jill shaw who started something called my way cafe in boston where she saw how these underserved communities in boston and the inner city were eating horrible food these kids were just not doing well they had add behavioral issues health issues and she said you know what we can fix this and so she said i'm going to do a pilot i'm going to pay for a kitchen and i'm going to train the staff in the kitchen and i'm going to hire top chefs to make the yummiest meals and foods and recipes for these kids and we're gonna see if this works and so she she did it and the the amazing thing is she did it within the school lunch budget which is not very much and she did it within the government's dietary guidelines for what school lunch has to be and it was so successful that the kids ate all the food there was no waste they loved it and then she formed a partnership with the mayor of boston and has scaled this through dozens of schools within boston and this is really something that can be scaled across the country and they performed a private you know public partnership where they're able to get these kitchens converted and the staff trained and the staff was so much happier they were feel like they were doing something meaningful and useful rather than just deep frying and microwaving stuff so it's really amazing when people look at these problems and think about solutions that there really are solutions out there absolutely there's another team that you're part of called the eat real uh is the name of the group the nonprofit eatreal.org and they're doing a similar thing in the bay area so that's another thing that we'll link in the show notes if you want to support any of these programs those are two great organizations to do exactly that all right mark we got a couple more questions and then we'll don't go into our recap so one of the questions that we have here is that are vegetable oils really that bad what is the primary impact that they have on the body well you know one of my good friends and someone i deeply respect who is one of the leading nutrition scientists in the world dr dairy schwab zafar he's the dean of tufts school of nutrition science and policy and we agree on like 99 of everything except for this and he he basically says that the science shows that people who consume more of these vegetable oils do better they have less heart disease they live longer less chronic illness the problem with these studies is that there are large population studies which show correlation but not causation so we can't prove that they work now there are mechanistic studies there are interventional studies and they're kind of all over the board some of them show they cause a lot of oxidation and inflammation in the body some show they cause a lot of microbiome and gut issues some show they cause you know other harmful effects but i think i take a more of an evolutionary approach to this you know how how is our biology designed what works for us why are we now facing this pandemic of diabetes and obesity i mean when i when i graduated from medical school there was not a single state that had an obesity rate over 20 percent now there isn't one that has one under and most are 40 40 is the average now almost and when i was born there was 5 obesity now there's 42 percent obesity soon it's going to be 50 obesity not just overweight 75 of our weight it's just a disaster so the question is from an evolutionary perspective you know what should we be eating we should be eating food as close to what our body's involved to eat which is whole real unprocessed food now we did need olive oil we had butter for centuries we've had olive oil for thousands of years i mean these are these are ancient foods that are minimally processed olive oil you know they crush the olives in the olive oil the olive oil comes out and you want to get an extra virgin olive oil which really is a kind of first pressing of the olive oil the problem is most of these oils are made from grain like corn oil soybean oil sapler oil canola oil and they're made in a highly processed way using heat and solvents to extract the oils which causes them to oxidize and and can potentially cause a lot of harmful effects so i don't think we should be consuming the volume we are we are consuming literally a thousand times more soybean oil than we did a hundred years ago which we've had in when we eat soybeans you'd get soybean oil if you're going to eat plant-based oils eat the plant eat the nuts eat the seeds eat the corn eat the soybeans stay away from all this other stuff and i think it's also it's it's a fun thing to do that if you were somebody who's consuming a lot of these uh vegetable oils that are there try doing 30 days without them clean up your diet do something like a whole 30 program or 10 day detox and see how you feel when i eat at a restaurant or a place and i start getting a little bit of a headache or i don't feel that good and i go and talk to i'm like what do you guys use in the kitchen just curious like oh we cook with canola oil yeah right i'm like that's why i feel like i have a headache i don't that's why i feel like my nose is stuffy that's why i feel like you know things are yeah and then a lot of them are gmo and then you know a lot of the toxins are fat soluble and so so often these they're they're highly concentrated sources of environmental chemicals too right and it tends to be that the people that advocate that the vegetable oils are not that bad tend to be individuals who come from more of a traditional plant-based world or vegan world because they don't want people eating as much of the butter and the saturated fats that are there now there could be an argument that's you know having some less of those foods but it's one of those things that until we have the the bigger studies that show causation try doing a little bit of n of one um research on yourself and try going out without them and see if you feel better all right mark so the last question that we have here is would you recommend conventional meat and poultry when you can't access organic grass-fed or regenerative meats thoughts on conventional meats it's tricky i mean i think do i ever eat out and eat some meat that i don't know where it came from yeah i do do i want to no and i don't want to contribute to the problem so most of the time i try to source from places that i know how they grow the food and and that usually is from regenerative farms from grass-fed meats organic chicken you know certain types of fish farms are okay certain wild fish is okay but i'm very cautious about it because one in terms of your health how much worse is it than regenerates meat we're still figuring that out right we we know for from some studies for example if you eat kangaroo meat like in australia they study versus feedlot meat inflammation levels go up with the feedlot meat and they go down with the kangaroo meat gram per gram of protein so because food is information what is the information that food if you're eating regenerative meat you're getting better profile of fatty acids and omega-3s you're getting more antioxidants you're getting more minerals and what's really surprising is we're now finding plant medicinal compounds called phytonutrients in the meat of regenerated meat because they're eating all these plants these wild plants that have all these medicinal properties so you know when you're eating any feedlot meat you're maybe not getting all these beneficial things you're getting protein you're getting a lot of nutrition you're getting nutrients but you're also contributing to a system that is really destroying the planet so michael mark bittman talks about the cow being and factory farms being the new atom bomb and i think it was an exaggeration but the truth is that if we look at how most animals are raised in this country it's a disaster it's a disaster for them from you know a humane point of view it's a disaster from the environment in terms of the environmental degradation climate change pollution pesticides chemicals all the hormones used in it pesticides you know it's a disaster so i i feel like is in in terms of your health is eating you know a steak from a feedlot steak or regenerative steak is it it's marginally better is it ten percent better fifty percent better i don't know i don't think we know but i do think we know the damage to the earth and the other downstream consequences so if you're if you can't afford grass-fed meat or whatever okay you know you want to get some protein fine but i think i think you need to be as as kind of adherent to the philosophy of eating food that's not going to hurt you or the planet and whenever you get it basically yeah and you do your best and the good thing is just like i was talking about in the almond milk example or other examples that we've seen the more people that start purchasing and seeking these out the more that the price comes down for these items and you know big companies and corporations they get so much shade thrown at them but honestly costco and walmart not that i'm the biggest fans of any big corporation out there we have to give them credit where credit is due because costco in particular they have lowered the price of so many of the traditional health foods yeah and that are out there and they made it a lot more affordable like wild frozen blueberries you know organic this organic that they're trying to do their part because the consumers are asking for it so i think that's one other hack is you know buying some of these things in bulk and seeking out some of these stores or letting your big box store know about some of the you know foods that you'd like to start purchasing there you know it's true drew walmart is the number one organic grocery store in the world they're the biggest purchaser of organic cotton right that doesn't mean that there aren't problems that are there i don't know too much about walmart and things that are going on but we need to work in partnership with these companies because that's the only way that we're going to make it accessible to everyone all right mark this is a good opportunity to do a recap of some of the top foods we went all sorts of different directions in this podcast but give us a little bit of a recap of some of the top foods we should quote unquote be avoiding and minimizing the top foods we should avoid as we discussed are high fructose corn syrup trans fat artificial sweeteners and gmo foods those are the top they should just never cross your lips and as far as the limit foods go we should get rid of as much sugar and flour from our diet as possible liquid sugar calories and refined oils as much as possible great and as always we're trying to do our best because nothing is worse for your health than stress if you stress out about what you're eating 24 7 that's not a good thing so this is information that's steering you in the right direction and then you have to personalize it for where you and your family are at but we can leave the stress and we can leave the shame behind just continue to make do your best positive do your best changes in the right perfect no do i try to do my best every day yes if you loved that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here we have to sort of expand our idea of food from just being fuel and energy to being information that regulates everything in our biology that determines healthy disease whether they're going to live a long time or die quickly and that's really the power of food mark let's talk about the 7

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 1,941,604

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

Id: kl0tncoKuFY

Length: 57min 5sec (3425 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022