The 7 KEY SIGNS You're NOT HEALTHY In Life! | Mark Hyman

doctors yeah a lot of the time i feel like could heal a lot of their patients with food oh my god well food is the cause of most chronic disease it's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food and they just medicate a lot of the time i mean listen it's so bad i mean i use food as medicine that's what i food is the most powerful drug on the planet what i realized is that you know i think many people who who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic so if you're for example carbohydrate intolerant and you're diabetic which affects a lot of people i'm going to talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book which is a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's carbohydrate intolerant like someone is gluten intolerant that means if they eat a lot of starch that they have like two cups of rice even if there's brown rice or two cups of beans it can adversely affect their sugar so i talk about like having less like having smaller portions of beans and grains and non-gluten grains in particular because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people um i think for some people who don't react to it it can be fine but not in large amounts and then i think you know meat is a big is the big issue right the meat is the big issue so should we be we just we just had dinner the other night right we both had meat right we had fish fish yeah black cod yes which was awesome i had a mahi-mahi you had a black cod is that what it was you had them yeah i had the black cotton yeah yeah i had the black the guy next to me had meatballs yeah but you know so so the issues around me also i think are everybody agrees and fish every agrees that if if anybody eats meat it should be humanely raised it should be sustainably raised it should be grass-fed it should be not harming the environment the ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are big and they're real yeah i mean i have many buddhist patients i have an a buddhist monk who's like a abbot who's a you know is a diabetic and he's never going to eat an animal you know so i need to help help him understand how he never need an egg how to eat a high higher fat protein diet which is low glycemic right so we can do that okay right so um more nuts and seeds you know less rice more beans you know just there's strategies for for doing that sure and he did great he lost 35 pounds reverses diabetes and now i have like tons of bun people you know praying for me yeah and uh and then the the uh the meat thing is tricky because uh you know it's also an environmental risk if you're eating factory farmed animals there's antibiotics in that and there's runoff from the pesticides and fertilizers it damages our water supply and rivers and lakes there's climate change that happens from the methane produced it's more more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide there's so and this high energy use one-fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption uh you know our water is is being used up at incredible rates for for feeding animals there's there's basically uh i think seventy percent of all water use and there's basically only five percent of the world's surface is is fresh water usable right it's fresh water right one percent is in russia wow and at least four percent for the rest of us and and 70 of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption so there's real environmental issues so i think you know a factory farming just should be not supported in any way we need to change that and that means we need to to change our patterns of consumption around me we need to downsize our meat consumption i call it having condom meat condom meat as opposed to like a condiment economy you know it should be a side dish or a dressing if you're gonna eat it sure and i think um not a full plate of steak you mean you know i think there's there's three issues with with me right there's environmental issues there's moral issues and there's health issues so we tend to talk about the moral i think that's people are entitled their beliefs and they should be able to follow whatever they want and be healthy the environmental issues are real and i think everybody would agree whether they're paleo vegan that we need to stop harming the environment and i think even if you're not paleo vegan everybody really releases believes that in fact the dietary advisory committee that was advising the government said we should limit meat consumption because of the environmental impact right now if you if you have grass-fed meat and if you have sustainable raisins you can't there's it's not as as abundant you can't produce as much and so we all have to eat less and it's more expensive so but that's okay and i think that that from a health point of view when i really looked at the literature and i did this in eat fat get then i looked at all the research that i could find on me because i was i'm like well i don't know i don't know for yourself too yeah like i'm i'm recommending to my patients i'm you know human too and i want to live a long time and i don't want to be doing something stupid yeah so i wanted to find out what does the science tell us about meat so you did all the research so i looked at all the research and i wrote 8 000 words in the book on meat wow there's a lot of research in there and i address all these issues you know environmental immoral and the health issues were quite interesting you know when we look at the studies on meat and anybody can quote anything saying anything right right so you want the paleo people like meat's healthy here's all the research and the vegan vlog you meat's going to kill you here's all the research so it's like and then you're at the average joe you're totally confused and your average doctor you're totally confused because we have no training in nutrition they haven't done the research themselves no they're going off of their opinion or their theory yeah they're they're like average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science they don't know because it's not what we learn right i mean i i just i'm at cleveland clinic and we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school there that's integrated in which is so great and that's awesome i i help team ryan who's a congressman from ohio introduced time he's great he's been on the show he's been out here yeah you know introduce a bill called the enrich act which was a bill that is funding 15 million dollars to fund nutrition in medical schools nutrition education for doctors that's what we need the most because doctors yeah a lot of the time i feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food oh my god well food is the cause of most chronic disease it's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food and they just medicate a lot of the time i mean listen it's so bad i mean i use food as medicine that's what i food is the most powerful drug on the planet i mean that's why last week i was in cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking class like that's what doctors should be doing because that's how i'm going to get that that's real medicine that's real medicine now just just a quick side note what is your involvement with what is functional medicine and what is your involvement at the cleveland clinic can i finish my meeting yes go ahead because i was still i was still rolling on the media don't worry about function medicine and then we'll talk about perfect perfect because people want to know like they're like well what about me they're like probably listening so so the science uh eight thousand words eight i'm not gonna give you a thousand so i'll give you i'll give you a few hundred percent so the science of meat uh was fascinating so when i looked at the studies that showed it was harmful here's here's what they were they were mostly population studies meaning they looked at groups of people followed them and then they asked questions of them what did you eat last year what did you last week what did you last you know month you know and they basically do these food frequency questionnaires and then they correlate that with the risk of disease and i try to control for all the confounding factors but it's very tough so the people who ate meat yeah they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death but what else was there smoking they're drinking exactly so sleep right exactly stressed out so if you look at the data they had they had 800 more calories a day they almost eat no fruits and vegetables tons of sugar get tons of sugar and processed food lots of fried foods drank more smoke more didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals well guess what you're good you weren't as healthy as the other people so most of the studies were like that now there was a few studies that were interesting i found one was a study of 11 000 people who shopped at health food stores and they found there were like a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters like so who are the people who are you know like healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat or who because mostly studies were not aggressive meat either they were on factory farmed meat right so then again how do you generalize that sure but then there were these 11 000 people and they filed them for many years and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians there was no difference in their health outcomes exactly the same so if you're a meat eater who basically it's a healthy diet and has grass-fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian no difference and you have a healthy lifestyle healthy lifestyle then there's no difference so there's other factors like how it affects your gut flora and so on and i think you know those are more complicated issues i address all them in the book but at the end of the day i think it's okay if you have no moral issues and you can eat sustainably raised meat and not in great quantities and as part of your diet i think it's okay yeah bottom line so what does your daily diet look like oh god doctor himself so today i had uh i was uh i had a i had a protein shake because i went to this friend of mine's uh company called essential foods living foods and he had this uh it was like a hemp uh coconut chia moringa like coconut cream like protein powder with lots of yeah and i had a couple that uh with a spoon of coconut butter for fat and almond butter for fat and uh and blended that up that was my breakfast and then lunch was um in a big salad with lots of avocado olive oil and some wild salmon which has fat so that was and dinner i haven't had yet so awesome and dinner i'll usually have you know a small piece of protein and like i'll i'll put 75 percent of my vegetable plate as vegetables really so if i go out to eat i'll order like three sides of vegetables right and if you look at your plate you know by by volume 70 or 80 percent of your diet should be plant foods and non-starchy veggies right potatoes right and right and by and by um calories it should be like 50 to 60 fat because the fat doesn't take up a lot of space so you can get a lot of calories and a little space and still eat like you put a lot of olive oil in your thing or even coconut butter so you don't have to worry about it you just have to eat and you know the trick is i don't worry about how much i eat i just worry about what i eat and i make sure i have stuff like i i know that i'm going to be like here and i know how long it's going to be so i always bring stuff in my pocket almond butter i know i'm never going to be in a food emergency so i'm not going to have to eat something crappy and i i i think you know i eat very little grains very little beans i do eat them i eat mostly vegetables and some low glycemic fruit and i eat lots of nuts and seeds and i eat you know good quality fish and and animal protein what's low glycemic fruit what does that include so i'm not eating like tons of pineapple and grapes and you know like those are sugary things and i eat like berries and and i eat you know um mostly berries and then like i'll eat like an apples or pears sometimes or kiwis or grapefruit or mangoes or papaya things like that nice okay uh so let's go back to functional medicine yeah what does that actually mean so functional medicine is compared to regular magnets yeah yeah well you know i don't know if people listening really have a great understanding of like what's happening right now in science but it's profound but the shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is it's like columbus going hey the earth isn't flat wow and right now the last few years it's just like the last decade or two with our understanding of the human genome of systems of biology of the body as a biological network as a system it's like an ecosystem where everything's connected working together and so the way we organize medicine is according to these organs you know you've got your cardiovascular system your neurologic system your gi system your you know and so you go to all these specialists right everybody and and everybody treats you they're part of your body if you have a migraine we're actually learning that might be related to gut flora but or if you have heart if i mean now we know that you might be getting cancer because your gut bacteria well no oncologist is asking you what's going on in your gut microbiome right and so now we know for example like the microbiome is a great example of this disruption that's happening in healthcare you know the microbiome which is your gut flora it's really it's like 10 times as many cells as your own cells it's a hundred times as much dna as your own dna so we're kind of lazy we have about as much dna as an earthworm okay but we borrow the dna of the bichromes the microbes in our gut to do things for us and we we we borrow things from plants to do things from us like like for example glucosinolates so the the microbiome is this huge thing it's got two to three million genes we only have 20 000 genes and it regulates your weight you can swap out poop from a thin person into someone with diabetes and reverse it right wow amazing we've seen we've seen people i've heard stories of fecal transplants not only curing things like that but like you know autoimmune diseases and really parkinson's and people with ms and like crazy stories that i'm starting to hear and there's research now going on aggressively in looking at fecal transplants for all sorts of diseases transferring poop from one person to another yes what does that how do you do that well how does that process well they collect the poop there's actually a uh yeah you've never heard of this never heard of this oh my god this is huge so so the uh what's it called fecal transplant okay fmt fecal microbial transplant the way it came about was some doctor had a bright idea that there was this condition called c diff which is a infection of the intestines happens after antibiotics is life-threatening uh and there's a huge amount of people are now resistant to antibiotics because of all the antibiotics in our feed and they're in the animal production so there's the drugs don't work people die wow and and somebody thought well if i put the poop from a healthy person in a sick person let's see what happens and the doctor did it and the person was cured like that shut up 98 effective 98 effective how do you do this so understand this process you want to get into it give me the visual version so basically they take like they take a fecal trans uh transplant specimen like a donor specimen from a healthy person and they screen them for also diseases and then they spin it up with some saline and then they inject it in with a catheter or a colonoscope and then they're actually also like [ __ ] it just heals inside or what's it do it when it's well that goes in it's like it's like massive probiotics right oh it's interesting yeah and so like an infusion of inflammation and probiotics and also there are actually pills now they actually are making special encapsulated new pills poop pills and it's i mean this is published in the new england journal medicine i'm not talking about like stuff that's wacky i'm talking about serious medicine that people are doing but it's not just for that now they're looking in for all sorts of things so people are cured right after one infusion yeah it's amazing so functional medicine is really understanding that the body as a system and network and understanding that that the focus should not be on treating disease but on creating health so it's the science of creating health it's the ultimate biohacking tool you know and it's interpreting all the data and the stories from your body that it tells through uh testing we do for example you don't have to do testing but you can look into the body look at your immune function and allergies and your gut flora and toxins and nutritional status it's like doing a soil sample so i'm like a soil farmer organic soil farmer rather than an industrial agriculturist i don't put all these chemicals on my plants to make them better like herbicides and pesticides i create a healthy soil yeah and then disease doesn't occur right you just disease can't land in a healthy soil right so that's exactly what functional medicine is we we help people get in balance we take away the things that cause imbalance we put in the things that help create balance so for example i had a woman come she had a whole list of problems i call myself a holistic doctor because i take care of people but they hold the problem so she had like psoriatic arthritis was on a drug that cost 30 grand oh my god called stalera and still was miserable she also was overweight had pre-diabetes migraine sinus problems irritable bowel reflux depression insomnia she had like this whole list of things of course she saw all these specialists the sinus doctor the migraine doctor the autoimmune doctor the skin doctor the depression doctor the gut doctor like and you know everybody's treating her with their best uh practices their best drug probably but i mean she's being seen at the top medical center yeah right they're not doing bad medicine they're doing standard of care in fact they're doing excellent standard of care but the standard of care is not the way we're going to fix these problems it's outdated or it's not it's not it's totally outdated so rather than uh thinking about how all these were separate i thought how are these all connected interesting right how are these all connected and so there were connections it was all inflammatory and they said well why don't we put you on an anti-inflammatory low glycemic diet a pagan diet basically right took away an anti egg allergens and i and i cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing huge sense of bloating and she had yeast reactions all she had like vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and itchy ears and yeast everywhere from the east on her mouth and thrush and so i gave her an anti-fungal i gave her stuff to clear out the bad bugs in her gut i put in good bugs i put in enzymes i put in things to heal and got the gut lining i gave her fish oil vitamin d just some basic stuff probiotics yeah but it's really eliminating eliminating the bad foods eliminating the bad bugs in her gut and putting putting in new bugs and putting in nutrients to upper body heal two months later comes back completely symptom-free no no more arthritis no more no more 230 000 drug no more skin psoriasis no migraines no sinus problems no irritable bowel no reflux no depression no insomnia and she lost 20 pounds all from food totally and what was food and her gut flora right i focused on her gut flora why because 60 or 50 of the immune system is in the gut interesting yeah why why is it in the gum like why is it there because that you're sticking pounds of food a foreign material every day in your body gotta fight it off in your gut yeah and you've got you know you've got like big bugs in there and poop it's like it's like a danger zone right it's like you're like and it's one cell away like you're one cell away from a sewer every minute really yeah it's one cell between you and that mass of food and poop right so your immune system is like anything happens like right there so when people have autoimmune disease it's often a gut issue people didn't know this before did they no no so now like now all this is really coming to light and functional medicine is the operating system to interpret the data it's a new set of lenses to think about how to solve it and it's a system of treatment that helps people get back in balance yeah that's what's powerful and then at cleveland clinic you know the ceo of cleveland clinic toby cosgrove i call the wayne gretzky of health care he goes where the puck's gonna be not where it is smart right and he's basically came after me to go set up a center there and i'm a functional medicine center yeah i'm like i'm not going to cleveland clinic it's like a you know it's like i'm not going to go to a place where i'm going to have to bang my head against the wall where it's traditional medicine where they don't get this where they're in the dark age i just it's also known as one of the top hospitals of course but it's the top hospital in the old model yes right so i'm like but he know he knows what's happening he knows what's happening he's like we need this here wow and so he's investing tons of money millions and millions dollars building this we're building an 18 000 square foot facility we started with a little space and we just outgrew it we're hiring doctors i have an interview with the doctor right after this and we're we're basically growing we're doing research in all sorts of conditions we're changing medical school education we're changing policy we're doing community work amazing so we're really he's really putting us on the map in the traditional world and and he's gonna go out of business if he doesn't start doing this but what's amazing to me you know uh louis i thought when i got there people would be you know skeptical um negative uh make it difficult for me and my team there but it's the opposite and i at last they want to learn last week when i was there i had two deans in medical schools two chairs of depart two chairs of institutes which are like big deals right and another doctor as patients no way yeah they're coming as patients because they're not being cured with the medicine the executive team the c-suite team is sending all their family members to come see us about 20 some years ago i was quite ill i went from being very very healthy riding my bike 100 miles a day being able to remember 30 patients at the end of the day without any notes and dictate all their charts to not being able to walk up the stairs not being able to remember where i was at the end of a sentence and i didn't know what happened to me i was 36 years old and my whole system collapsed i'd been a yoga teacher before i was a doctor i ran five miles a day i ate a healthy diet which i thought was a healthy diet and something just went terribly wrong and i had to literally reverse engineer my health because every single doctor told me that i was depressed or i had chronic fatigue right fibromyalgia or whatever i had and no one actually helped me figure it out and it turned out that my entire system broke down from living in china having mercury poisoning i had mercury poisoning because i lived in china which has the worst pollution on the planet and i have poor genes that help me detoxify so i couldn't get rid of the toxins and in that discovery of my biology i literally cell by cell molecule by molecule system by system had to understand what was going on my immune system broke down i developed sores and rashes all over my body i developed terrible gut issues i had digestive bloating and diarrhea for years i had severe muscle pain and aches like had cognitive dysfunction it's like i couldn't remember anything focus pay attention i was depressed was like i got depression atd and dementia all at once and i was desperate to figure out what was going on and through my own unwinding of my biology i was able to figure out this model of functional medicine and i found pioneers in that field and i went and learned at their feet and i began to discover there was a whole field of thinking that was reorganizing our thoughts because we don't actually have a model to describe disease today it's really backward for example today we're learning that the microbiome has the capacity to connect to so many different diseases it can cause heart attacks right the bacteria in your gut are a whole living organism that can create so many diseases heart attacks cancer obesity type 2 diabetes alzheimer's autoimmune disease allergies asthma fibromyalgia all these things can be the result of changes in your gut floor and yet when you go to the doctor with arthritis they don't ask you about your poop right when you go to the heart doctor they're not asking you about what's going on with your gut flora you have three pounds of bacteria in there there's 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells there's a hundred times as much bacterial dna in you than your own dna and that's dynamically interacting with you you have 20 000 genes you have about 2 million bacterial genes and they're dynamically interacting with you all the time and when you when you don't understand that the definitions that we have disease don't make sense we can't fix it so i was able to repair my biology to fix myself and to transform my biology by using the science of functional medicine which helps me map out the way the body actually functions and instead of looking at the signs and symptoms and the organs at the top of the tree i go down into the roots what are the fundamental drivers of disease what are the underlying causes of illness how do we actually get to what's making us sick and for one in two americans pre-diabetes and about 70 percent of us obese and by the way this is not just an american problem 80 of the world's type 2 diabetics are in the developing world china's number one india is number two the middle east has the most per capita diabetics about one in four to one in three of the population is type 2 diabetic so we really need a new way of thinking about this and so i rather than going down uh to the branches and the leaves and the organs i go down into the roots and i look at the fundamental factors that are driving disease what's the underlying lifestyle factors the environmental factors what's your diet what's your stress level what are the ingredients for health so it's actually quite simple rather than just focusing on the symptoms i go to the cause and this is a timeline we use to help us map the story of your life i want to know what happened in the womb i wonder what happened with your mother whether she was sick whether she took antibiotics whether she had immunizations what she ate i want to know what happened at your birth was it a c-section was it something that had trauma what were you breastfed or bottle fed did you have early antibiotics all these things set up the conditions for your life and what were the insults or traumas along your life that led to you having this problem in this moment and then we mapped this out in what we call the matrix now this is the model that we use to basically biohack any disease so people say dr hyman do you treat x or y and i'm like well yes i treat the human body i don't actually treat disease the extreme thing about functional medicine is that you don't have to know the disease that you're treating in order to optimize health you follow this model and you can see tremendous transformations in biology for example there was a guy came in to see me i mentioned yesterday who had dementia he was seven years old he was pretty desperate his wife was very upset and basically went from being a ceo of his company to not being able to basically basically almost tie his shoes or function in any way had to quit work and was at home basically drooling and depressed and demented and he came in and turned out he had a whole series of problems that were causing his brain to not function properly he had heavy metal poisoning because he lived in pittsburgh and there was coal burning there in pittsburgh because of the steel plants he had insulin resistance or pre-diabetes because his diet was high in sugar and starch he had severe gut issues he had bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in his gut that was leading to his brain dysfunction because his gut bacteria weren't working and he had a bunch of genetic things that set him up for problems problems with methylation and sulfation which are these basic biochemical reactions that have to function for you to be healthy and rather than say i'm going to treat your dementia i said why don't we optimize your gut flora why don't we optimize your biochemistry and methylation with the right foods and nutrients why don't we fix the insulin resistance with the right higher fat low glycemic diet why don't we help get rid of the heavy metals and get your feelings replaced and chelate you and get you full of glutathione all the things you need to up regulate your detox system and i said let's see what happens well he had this extraordinary transformation where he went from being basically demented and depressed to being back to work functional and happy again and having his ability to be in life and his grandkids weren't scared to be around him anymore and it wasn't it wasn't because it wasn't because we were treating the dementia i was simply optimizing his biological systems using this model so on the left hand side there's the predisposing factors all the triggers and on the bottom there's the underlying fundamental lifestyle factors which are all the things that help us to provide inputs into the body to create health so dave talks about biohacking and all these little things that he's tweaking in the body it's all based on this model his next book is on mitochondria which is one of the systems energy system jg talks about eliminating the seven foods that's based on dealing with your gut and food sensitivities and allergies that create inflammation in the body we're all basically coming from the same paradigm and yet this is not something that's something i invented or that's a new trick or technique or some little biohacking thing this is the future of healthcare and medicine this is actually now being invited into the center of cleveland clinic where the ceo of one of the greatest healthcare centers in the world has invited me to come in and create a model that transforms healthcare because he knows that we can't solve our current problem of chronic disease using the same system and it's very powerful so uh i want to sort of go into a little bit of a story about a recent experience i had and then share with you why i think it's not the whole story i went to this place called health nucleus which is a part of the human longevity institute which is started by craig venter now craig venter is the guy who decoded the human genome he basically took our genes and he analyzed every gene of his own sequenced it and he did it faster and better than the nih the national institute of health and he did it for 300 million dollars and now at health nucleus you can get your genes decoded for a thousand dollars soon it'll probably be a hundred dollars and i went through an entire workup where i had my genome mapped i had my metabolome map my microbiome mapped i had all sorts of blood tests 20 miles of blood i had a full body mri scan a total measurement of my echocardiogram my body composition everything was measured it was a lot of data and the problem with a lot of data is that you have to make sense out of it right how does it connect where are the dots that connect everything together well functional medicine is the filter and someone said to me you know how how do you actually think about this differently well if you think about physics you know we have laws of physics that can explain the workings of the universe gravity the the rotation of the planets all these phenomena that are quite extraordinary we can interpret through the filter of math and physics but human biology we don't have any natural laws that we've discovered about how the human body works it's very descriptive it's like you have these symptoms you have this disease it doesn't talk about why or what the mechanisms are what the causes are so functional medicine is like the natural laws of biology and you can explain a whole host of different phenomena by means of a very few number of general laws so when i went to to craig venter's institute i had this whole thing mapped out and yet i got all this data and unless you have a filter to understand how it all connects and what to do with it you can't actually can't create health and so i i kind of had my whole genome map this is my genome here this is all me you can see everything right into me here uh and uh well it's more interesting to me than this this is actually what i call the super gene now this super gene is much more important which is not what is your genome but how is your genome working what is causing genes to get turned on or off you can't change your genes but you can change the expression of your genes you can change how those genes work which ones are turned on or off and there are a whole host of things that influence that and it's not just your genes it's the that's the food that you eat that changes your gene expression it's your social interactions and connections that change your gene expression we now know that if you have somebody who you're with and you have a deeper connection with them and a positive interaction you literally can change each other's gene expression in the moment and if you have a negative interaction you can change your gene expression in the moment the same thing with food with every bite of food you're changing your gene expression so we talk about the exposome which is what are your genes exposed to right it's the environment toxins and light and air and water and community and connection and food all the inputs that we're constantly feeling emf everything around us is always giving us input into our gene expression that's called the exposure and that accounts for over 90 percent of the result that we see as our phenotype which is who we are in this moment whether we're sick or healthy is related to these inputs to our genes so you have control over those inputs most of the time and you can change your gene expression very quickly someone said you know how can you reverse disease even at late stages is it possible i said well yeah a guy named george who came to see me was 300 pounds he was 63 years old he had heart failure diabetes he had angina he had reflux he had prostate problems erectile dysfunction and sinus issues and you know all kinds of problems i always say i'm a holistic doctor because i take care of people with a whole list of problems so uh he he said to me can you help me i said yeah i can help you but you have to do everything i say so he did everything i said a year later he was 300 pounds he came back he lost 150 pounds every single one of his diseases was gone now he's 70 something years old and he's starting a bath house in new mexico so the power of biology to change at any age is is really remarkable you can reverse aging and i i see this over and over so the super gene is your genome it's your exposome it's your microbiome as i said because your microbiome those two million genes are constantly interacting with you and your own genes and it's called the hollow gene but it's also your neutral genome what are the foods doing that are affecting you and how are those affecting your gene expression it's your proteome which are the proteins that are produced from your genes your metabolism which is all the metabolites that are produced from your genes i had my metabolism measured there instead of like 20 blood tests there was 2500 blood tests i had measured so that's really more important is how are your genes being influenced and how do we map all those influences in a system that makes sense that's what functional medicine is it's sort of an operating system it's a way of thinking it's not a new test or modality or specialty it's a way of thinking about solving the puzzle of disease so this is some of my genes here uh you know i was happy that i had uh more genes than mostly anybody else i had over uh seven million or six million variants so we all have variations in our genetic code i had more than average i was happy about that and i and i had uh i had a telomere length of 43 years and i'm 56 years old so that made me happy so what i'm doing clearly is working and i found out that i actually uh genetically am more diverse than i thought i thought i was a jew from you know the middle east and that's where i came from but turns out i am from the middle east i'm also from asia i'm part asian um from west africa and i'm even half a percent native american uh and and uh one and i'm one i think and a half percent neanderthal so that explains you know why i have a big bot like chinese food like sweat lodges get filth deficiency nice pull women's hair out and and you can see this is interesting they can map your dad's you know ancestry so my dad's from west africa my mom is from the middle east and all over asia uh and here's my neanderthal genes you can see right there um it's kind of exciting and then this is my metabolome now my metabolome is this map of 2500 metabolites but it's just data how do you make sense out of all this data how do you make big data small how do you create big insights out of big data well that's the beauty of functional medicine so one of the things that i learned was that i have areas of my mitochondria that are not working as well and i know that's probably true as a sort of consequence of the mercury poisoning and the illness that i had and so i know how to tweak this by basically biohacking my biochemistry and using a few nutrients to upregulate various pathways now that's kind of cool but at the end of the day what really we need to know is how do we undo the things that often are happening to our biology now this is clayton now clayton was a little boy who had severe add he also had asthma he had anxiety had abdominal pain he had anal itching and that was just the a's he had a whole list of other problems he had eczema and hives and insomnia and muscle cramps and he had severe add and dysgraphia he couldn't write his penmanship was so bad so rather than give him ritalin and rather than give him asthma medications and medications for his stomach pain he was on seven medications you know he was on a pill for every ill instead of asking the question why these doctors are like what disease you have what drug do i give you and with clayton instead i said what's going on why is he having all these different diseases why does he have so many different problems at 10 or 12 years old why is this going on so i began to dig into the story and we found all sorts of imbalances in his biology we found that he had severe gut issues he had overgrowth of yeast in his gut from eating a diet that was full of sugar and processed food and taking antibiotics for years he had lead poisoning from having led in his environment he has severe nutritional deficiencies which which were from his diet he ate a processed food diet processed meats lots of sugar trans fats we had trans fats he had no omega-3 fats he had low levels of zinc magnesium antioxidants he had low levels of b vitamins and we were able to map all this stuff out he had food sensitivities he had reactions to gluten he had all this total system breakdown so rather than treat his add and rather than treat his asthma or his irritable bowel or his hives or his eczema his anxiety with all these different drugs which is what we learned to do in medicine i simply got his system in balance and what was really shocking to me this is sort of when the light bulb went off in my head this was his handwriting when he came in to see me he was 12 years old you couldn't read anything right and after two months his mother brought his homework back and it looked like this now i didn't try to biohack his handwriting or treat his brain all i did was basically take out the things that we're creating in balance and putting the things that we're creating balance so it's really a very simple equation when you want to create health if you want to bio hack your health it's actually quite simple i only asked two questions when someone comes to the office to see me one is what do i need to take away that's bothering this person is there something that's pissing their system off it's irritating them that doesn't work for them that isn't right that i need to remove and it's a short list these are the causes of disease it's toxins allergens microbes poor diet stress there's five causes of all disease and those interact with your genes to create imbalance and then there's ingredients for health what are the ingredients for creating a healthy human i mean whoever here is in healthcare you probably didn't have a class in school that says creating a healthy human 101. did you probably not right so we we have to actually go back and say what is it that creates a healthy human what are the inputs that create health i mean if you have a racehorse you know how to get that horse to hot to a high performance level you have to feed it the right food you have to exercise it the right way get us the right amount of rest all those things are scientifically designed to create phenomenal performance in racehorses but we we don't treat ourselves that way i mean you know i mean most of the stuff that we eat we shouldn't even be considered food it's like a food like substance so with with with ingredients we have to think of what are they it's the right food you know when you heard a little bit about it just before about what our indigenous foods were it's just low processed real whole fresh food that's low in sugar high in the right fats i've written a dozen books about it it's pretty straightforward everybody has the basic same concept of what is a healthy diet the second is the right nutrients it's also light and air and water you're gonna get a lot out this afternoon and love and connection and community all those are ingredients for creating a health human sleep restoration and when we when we don't have that input we actually get sick now with this kid i used a powerful new drug that i didn't tell you about fully this drug has the power to optimize dozens of hormones to improve the expressions of tens of thousands of genes to optimize hundreds of thousands of protein networks to balance your immune system and cytokines to optimize your gut flora and it works faster better and cheaper than any drug ever discovered has no side effects since it's available to almost anybody on the planet you know what drug it is love well it could be loved it's actually food food is the most powerful drug it's not like a drug it actually is a drug and if i had to go you know to a deserted island i only had one drug to use it would be this drug to reverse disease it's the most powerful drug i i wrote something called the 10-day detox diet and in that program i basically synthesized functional medicine i eliminated the foods that create disease put in the foods that create health and gave people a few simple practices to do in 10 days their scores on the flc quiz which is when you feel like crap went down by 62 that means all diseases improve migraines asthma irritable bowel depression joint pain insomnia anxiety whatever it was autoimmune disease one guy came up because i have rheumatoid arthritis in 10 days i feel better is that possible i'm like yeah it's possible because food is the most powerful drug i had one said dr hyman i had type 2 diabetes i got off 56 units of insulin in three days how is that possible another one said i had lifelong depression on off medication and out of psychiatric hospitals in three days i don't feel depressed for the first time my life is that possible i said yes it's possible because food is the most powerful drug on the planet and it's not just calories food is actually information it's literally instructions like code so you can upgrade or downgrade your biological software by what you put in your mouth every day so next time you take a bite of food just remember that it's not energy it's not just fuel it's actually instructions it's information and what you want to be telling your body to upgrade or downgrade your biological software now there's one more thing i want to share with you which is yes food is medicine and yes we can understand functional medicine and go into the details of biological networks and understand how everything connects together and i've spent my life studying biochemistry and physiology and genetics and the connections to the patterns and everything and i've seen more data than most physicians because for 20 years i've had a unique practice where i've been able to do 5 000 worth of testing on almost everybody and see millions of data points on tens of thousands of people and look at the patterns and connections and i was just so focused on this and then one day the earthquake in haiti happened and it changed everything for me to make a long story short i basically ended up in haiti after the earthquake and um it was pretty intense we arrived in this massive destruction in the main hospital and i met a guy named paul farmer paul farmer is an extraordinary man who went to haiti when he was in medical school in one of the poorest countries in the world it's the poorest country in the western hemisphere where most people live on less than a dollar a day and don't have clean water or sanitation and most people have given up on these people because they had tb and aids and there was no way to treat these people because you need complicated drug regimens and he said no no we can help these people we can solve this problem what seemed insoluble we can solve and it wasn't by better drugs or surgery that paul fixed these people it was by the power of each other he called it accompaniment we accompany each other to health he used friends neighbors community health workers that he trained who were just their neighbors to help each other to grow each other's houses and make sure they had enough food to eat and water to drink and took their pills on time and had a place to sleep and just basically took care of each other and it was the power of that social connection that was able to drive this transformation it's been used for the gates foundation the clinton foundation it wasn't through better improvements in medicine it was just through the power of our social connections and i realized that it wasn't our genetic threads that were making us sick it was our social threads that were making us sick that just as our social connections can make us sick they can also make us well i realized that this was also true of chronic disease that actually not just infectious disease was contagious but actually so was chronic illness diabetes is contagious heart disease is contagious obesity is contagious and this work has been shown over and over to be true this is the guy uh from harvard named christakis who's looked at the social networks and our patterns in life and he's found that when you looked at huge amounts of data that there are clusters of people who kind of grouped together in social networks that drive disease so he found that if you're overweight um and your friends are overweight sorry if you're overweight you uh if you have a friend who's overweight you're more likely to be overweight than if your family's overweight if you're if you have a friend who's overweight as a close friend you're about 170 times 70 more likely to be overweight than if your sister or brother's overweight you're only 40 more likely to be overweight so it's those social threads that connects us that are more important than our genetic drinks but there's also there's also the happiness clusters so people who actually cluster together and are happy together do better so what really became evident to me was that we have to reframe our idea of how we change biology using the understanding of functional medicine in biological networks but we have to change behavior by dealing with the social drivers of disease because i know when i go out to eat with somebody they're worried about what they're having for dinner whether they're going to order dessert or not and i don't have to say anything right because it's that power of peer pressure when i'm around dave asprey i'm not gonna be eating bread right so so i think we all we all feel that experience in that so if your friends are having all these bad habits you're gonna have those habits if your friends have good habits you're gonna have good habits so i'm pondering all this and then one day this guy comes in my office who um was very overweight and this guy named rick warren who you might have heard of he wrote a book called the purpose driven life which sold 32 million copies he put 10 million people in small groups around the world to live better lives purpose-driven lives and he was very overweight he said like i want to get healthy can you help me i'm sure so i said let's have dinner afterwards we had dinner i said tell me about your church because i'm a jewish doctor from new york i don't know much about churches in southern california i said i said um what's going on with your church well we have 30 000 people i said wow he said we have 5 000 small groups that meet every week to live better lives i'm like oh my god and the light bulb went off and i said why don't we create a healthy living program delivered to these small groups and see what happens and we thought a few hundred people would show up fifteen thousand people came to church we had to turn two thousand people away they signed up for this program we created a 40-day program then a year-long program and the first year they lost a quarter of a million pounds and all sorts of diseases went away right people's diabetes went away their autoimmune disease went away their reflux went away their migraines went away their autoimmune disease went away it wasn't because we treated disease it wasn't one doctor treating one patient it was one doctor there was a couple of us it was actually dr oz another doctor dr amen and me it was a jewish doctor christian doctor and a muslim doctor sounds like the beginning of a bad joke but it was quite extraordinary so we wrote this we wrote this book called the daniel plan i wanted to call it the jewish doctor's guide for christian wellness and it won the christian book of the year award last year which was really cool i think i'm the only jewish guy to ever win the christian book of the year award uh well there was this one other guy there was one other guy and i and i i found this profound change because when people started to do this together when they connected together when they worked together and played together and ate together everything changed they changed what was acceptable in the culture they no longer had ice cream socials and pancake breakfasts and donuts and soda everywhere it was like they were trying to get their people to heaven early eating all that stuff i i went on stage in the church i said listen if you had jesus come to dinner what would you feed him a big mac fries and a coke i said listen if you believe god lives in you why are you feeding him crap i said what you have to eat is very simple you just leave the food that man made and eat the food that god made right did did god make a twinkie no i actually have a slide one of my lectures i put up which is showing that uh label of a twinkie and i said if anybody can guess what this food is i'll give you a thousand dollars and nobody's been able to guess because you can't tell what it is if you cover up the front of the package because all the ingredients are the same processed stuff today more than ever there is there's a epidemic for sure with sleep deprivation and we're seeing this show its face in so many different areas i think the first step is actually understanding the value of sleep and so for example you know real talk nobody's waking up in the morning like you know what i want to look terrible today you know everybody wants to look good and if we understood just how much our seat quality and affected our body composition i think it would start to push that conversation forward so there was a really cool study that was done so sleep and weight are connected oh my goodness university of chicago did a really fascinating study so they took folks and they put them on a calorie restricted diet which is what i was taught to do in a university setting which doesn't necessarily work by the way exactly but they put them on this calorie restricted diet and during one phase of the study they allow them to get eight and a half hours of sleep so sufficient sleep another study another phase of the study same people same exact diet they're not cutting any more calories they're not exercising more or less and now they sleep deprive them so now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep they take three hours away at the end of the study they compiled all the data and they found that when folks were getting a sufficient amount of sleep they lost 55 percent more body fat just from sleeping yeah right and i didn't say weight they lost actual fat mass not muscle which is crazy like how it i'm not saying you're doing like eight days a week crossfit right you're just sleeping better and the question for me is immediately like oh my goodness how how is that happening and so it's during sleep that we're releasing this is crazy melatonin this super glorified sleep hormone which it really isn't that it's kind of a regulator of your circadian rhythms rhythm's period but it actually is a really profound fat burning hormone as well so the journal of pineal research found that melatonin is that gland in your head that releases melatonin it's like pineal gland correct which that's not the only place so we'll get back to that in a moment that's like your third eye gland basically so the pineal gland and it responds to light and you know all the artificial light and the effect it suppresses it it's abhorrent it has to have darkness right so journal pineal research found that melatonin increases your mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue or brown fat and this is a type of fat that actually burns fat that increases your metabolism yes and the reason it's brown versus the white adipose tissue is kind of the stuff we think about when we're trying to get rid of fat brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria right these kind of energy power plants i know you've talked about many times on the show but it's such a metabolically active tissue and so if you're not getting adequate sleep you're not producing that hormone nor you get your greatest secretion of human growth hormone during sleep yeah this is the most it's also known as the youth hormone in a way it's a repair hormone kids have so much hgh this is why they have so much energy it's muscle sparing and also it's a big component of you healing and recovering and so you're missing out on that and cortisol that's another one so if you're sleep deprived one of the very first things we see is an increase in your cortisol levels that's the stress hormone exactly exactly and cortisol has this interesting ability to literally break down the muscle that you're working so hard to build it's terrible gluconeogenesis is a prostate process called gluconeogenesis break down your valuable muscle tissue and turn it into fuel because it's this stressed hyper alert cautious dangerous state your body thinks you're in because you're sleep deprived and i can go on and on i'll show them share one more stuff i always say stress is is is bad because when you have high cortisol it does everything you don't want right it shrinks your memory center your brain causes alzheimer's it causes you to lose muscle and gain fat it causes your sex hormones to get screwy uh it has so many horrible effects and it's not worth getting stressed about stuff yeah it doesn't matter you know like stuff there's stuff that does matter that you have to worry about but the truth is most of the things we react to and stress about are just our beliefs or thoughts and not really real right yeah that's a and i even focused on that as well because a lot of folks have what we call clinically just a lot of inner chatter you know the brain is a very vocal and kind of noisy organ yeah you know and so the great thing is a lot of our needs are met especially if people are listening to this right now it's like the crazy ant that lives in your head you know right right but we have so many things covered in our lives that our ancestors didn't have to worry about but the human mind is so expansive so we can manufacture things to worry about and that worry can push us and i often tell people you know people coming into my clinic that you can overeat your weight fat you can under exercise your weight fat or under move your weight fat you can undersleep your weight fat and you can also over stretch your weight fat for sure it has a huge component for our overall health and our body composition too so but i was going to share stanford university yeah they found that just one night of sleep deprivation has a dramatic uh effect on suppressing leptin yeah right and that's that kind of glorifies hunger fall i mean i'm sorry satiation hormone and gorilla on the other side has this uptick and that's that hunger hormone yeah right so just one night and it makes you crave a ton of cards i want to ask you this i was going to say i know you've been up late before oh yeah but i don't know if it's me or if anybody else listening have you ever been up at like two o'clock in the evening maybe at a party maybe just kicking back watching tv and you're like you know what i really want a salad right now nope no no if that's ever happened please inform me i don't get a craving for broccoli i want salty sweet crunchy chew like i once yes yes because your brain is literally starving for glucose just one night of sleep deprivation we're seeing about a 14 reduction in glucose reaching your brain yeah i know it's true i remember working many nights in the emergency room delivering babies being up all night and then next all you want to do is eat carbs and sugar you know i'd go to mcdonald's and get the apple turnovers and the french fries like the middle of the night that was the only thing was open in the hospital so between it was only closed between two in the morning and six in the morning otherwise it was open 20 hours a day it was the only thing open in the hospital can you leave it and i would go you know be sleep deprived and stay up all night and i i totally craved carbs wow and you did that work on that food and now what you're made of now and the work that you're doing is just like exponentially you see that i thought about this the other day we're putting folks in space on vending machine consciousness right astronaut just imagine if we can get people on really healthy real food yeah and what we can create as humanity it's exciting so what's exciting about your book about sleep is that you you break it down you talk about 21 strategies that are very specific to actually fix your sleep yeah because i'm sure many people listening maybe even half or more have sleep issues whether it's not enough sleep whether it's disruptive sleep whether it's for quality sleep other more serious things like sleep apnea people often don't know they have it so so can you walk us through some of the key strategies and and what really matters sure so i've been really working to press this into public awareness for about five years now and this was because seeing people in my office coming in and you know they're struggling with their blood sugar for example and we had about right around 75 percent uh success rate with you know getting folks off you know lisinoprils and metformins and all this and working along with their doctors those are blood sugar and blood pressure pills right and here's the thing that 25 of folks who weren't getting those results ironically that would really bother me and i know you've probably felt this right yeah yeah ironically kind of 20 what are you missing right and so it took about five years in practice maybe a little longer before i had the audacity to ask how was your sleep yeah and what people would tell me blew my mind i couldn't believe they're even sitting there yeah and so and this is another thing that we know is that folks don't really want to change too much to get the result they want and i knew that and so i just dug into the research and i went to find clinically proven strategies that people don't have to turn their world upside down and once i implemented those with the patients i was working with it's like the floodgates would come off the weight would finally come off their blood pressure would finally come down their symptoms of depression would start to dissolve and i was just like this is really something special i need to tell more people about this and so eventually it's compiled into these 21 strategies and for me again some of these things are going to be a reminder for folks today but i want to talk about something that a lot of folks still don't have a big awareness of and this is the fact that your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact whoa on your sleep quality so your poop and sleep are connected what a concept in a way okay let's go to that one don't do the two together no that's not you know that's cool that's gonna blow people's mind and even my mind tell us how the microbiome and your gut affects your sleep and what you can do about it absolutely so let's start with the basic component and i know again these are going to be things people have heard about before probably on your show yeah but let's start with serotonin okay so it's pretty well known by the way there's more serotonin in your gut than there is in your brain exactly upwards of 80 to 90 percent of your body serotonin is actually located in your gut produced by your enterochromafin cells by the way all right so those are those are special cells in your intestinal lining yes i'm just translating all the big words see i like that we're like flipping places because i would do this for you so here's what's so interesting is that serotonin we talked about melatonin being important for our sleep in our circadian rhythm serotonin is a precursor or a seed to make melatonin so already right off the bat your gut environment these cells in your gut are helping to make this compound that's related to your sleep quality and with melatonin that's what i want to liken it to it's like that manual gear shifter for you to go through your sleep cycles properly and to actually get recovered you need melatonin to be produced and we'll come back to that so that's number one serotonin you can't just take melatonin i'll answer that okay okay that's tricky okay so well i'll just i'll just tell you so i looked around because some of our colleagues would feel that and this was just a theory that if you take supplemental melatonin it's going to reduce your body's ability to produce it itself and that's actually i couldn't find that anywhere there was no evidence of that what i did find was taking supplemental melatonin taking too much or too frequently can down regulate receptor sites for melatonin so your body can still produce it but the receptor sites that actually do something with the melatonin can get down regularly he is there but the lock isn't yeah so you we do need to be mindful of that and we can come back and talk about that but here's the biggest probably aha moment hopefully of this episode is that it's not just serotonin it's producing the gut and so check this out and i just came across this i'll share this with you today this was in the world journal of gastroenterology listen to this they found that there's upwards of 400 times more melatonin in your gut right than in your brain because you talked earlier about the pineal gland that's what i was taught in school it's produced by pineal gland in the story this study found that you can actually have a pinealectomy which is a removal of your pineal gland which i don't recommend by the way don't do that but it's like a frontal lobotomy you know go go there and you don't and you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut right you're a gut brain and a brain brain exactly and that that's that's something really important to understand too your gut is really it's often referred to as a second brain you know it's we can call it the enteric nervous system there's like 30 neurotransmitters just like your brain it's like a mass of nerve tissue 60 of your immune system and yeah most of the genes as well yeah that vagus nerve so ucla researchers found that the vagus nerve which we thought was just kind of like the brain communicating more telling the gut what to do 90 of those the the communication from those nerve fibers from the vagus nerve to the brain is your belly your gut telling your brain what to do in many ways totally nuts and the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed not only is your cortisol high and you lead to more fat accumulation stores belly fat but it actually blocks your cells ability to burn calories because the nerves or the vagus nerve help you metabolize your food which is a relaxation nerve it also has the effect of of decreasing absorption of nutrients so not only are you not absorbing but your your metabolism just slows down which is amazing it's just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function so profound but this is just getting out of that isolation thinking you know that's what i was taught in school as well it's like that's functional medicine the body's a system yes everything is interconnected and it's just beautiful symphony if everything's working well so uh caltech researchers to kind of get to how does this all connect they discovered that and this was just i mean it's been around for years but this is more of a reason like okay meta-analysis now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters so your gut cascade your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality and so now the question is what do we do about it how do we protect or support our microbiome yeah and that's one of the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality so let's just go through a couple the biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up all right so one of those would be eating processed foods so that crazy amount of sugar has a tendency to feed pathogenic opportunity bacteria right so that's one thing avoiding haphazard use of antibiotics they have a place but we shouldn't be using antibiotics every time you get the sniffles right and that's literally what when i was a kid just give them some antibiotics right we would even like if my mom had some antibiotics you know just totally negligent yeah give them whatever's in the cupboard also um pesticides herbicides uh rodenticides metals yeah these things side literally means to kill by the way yeah but these have uh pretty because they're meant to kill small things guess what your microbiome is made of you know and so and how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers which also terribly disrupts your gut microbiome yeah looking at that the wrong way as well and so just avoiding those things but also what i want people to do is support their microbiome by you know and this should be just captain obvious at this point and me working at a university for so long as a strength conditioning coach before i did my clinical work i work with people from all over the world and i would ask them about their fermented foods and every culture had something yeah right so whether it was like some kind of kefir or like pickled whatever right and so making sure that we're getting us at least you know every couple of days get a serving in of some fermented food or beverage i'll eat the kimchi yeah i got a jar in my fridge i love kimchi and my my mother-in-law makes it for me and she's from kenya so they had like uh fermented um a fermented like kind of similar to kombucha like she knew about this like 20 years ago and i'm like what is this weird stuff she's growing yeah yeah the kitchen is freaking me out she had grass like first time i came to visit and they were growing grass you know like it was wheatgrass but i was like hey watch your mom caught grass in here she's like did she get it i didn't know so anyways um i didn't know but that is a big component here is like shifting gears and having a more targeted perspective about supporting that gut microbiome but also and this is a really cool takeaway for everybody today is making sure we're getting in servings of what i call good sleep nutrients every day yeah what is that because eating for sleep nobody really talks about that so what does it so look like the first one i'd share and this one is from the public library of science and so they found that vitamin c which we know about vitamin c we tend to associate it with the immune system right it's powerful antioxidant but they found that folks in their in this particular study that were deficient in vitamin c had a tendency towards waking up more frequently and getting vitamin c levels elevated reverse their symptoms all right so that's just one example so iron's the other one if you have a little ferret and there's another one yeah that's oh my goodness that's huge and especially more so for women yeah it tends to be and another one this was published in the journal sleep all right this is the big journal and what they found was um calcium right so this goes back to that story that i was told about calcium it is important for sure but folks who are deficient in calcium had uh more interrupted sleep patterns as well and so by getting those calcium levels up but how do we go about that i'll just pass it over to you yeah rather than drinking like homogenized glow in the dark you know like from a mutant cow what other sources of calcium calcium do we have oh my god you know it's it's when you look at the data on calcium it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones but the best absorbability in use is actually from greens like arugula and greens that we can have dark green leafy vegetables also there's some great sources like tahini which is basically ground sesame seeds also different things people might like i like which is sardines with the bones in them and and salmon with the bones in them like canned salmon those are really great to eat because they have a lot of great absorbable calcium exactly calcium is kind of like an end product from this like biological transmutation so bones have a great source of it but you know people say oh you don't you need you need milk i'm like well where do you think a cow gets their calcium from it has strong bones they've seen a cow bone they eat grass it's so shitty grass anyway this is really fascinating process it's kind of like like a biological transmutation of sorts where certain things come together to create bone right so like you need silica you need boron boron k2 yeah all of these things come together to make this magic happen so by the way i want to give some sources with vitamin c obviously we know about citrus um fruits like strawberries uh sweet peppers but there are these quote superfoods as well like camu camuberry this might be the highest botanical source of vitamin c super tart tangy fruit it's like a amazonian thing uh amla berry acerola cherry those are super super high sources of vitamin c uh another one and this was this the last one i'll share there's a whole list in sleep smarter so this was a study conducted by university of oxford found that omega-3s can help folks to get deeper more restful sleep all right so it helps with those modulating those rhythms which it makes sense because it has to do with your brain yeah right your brain has these gates you know you have the blood-brain barrier but the gate allows in certain vips yeah and it's only like 30 things right and one of those is a mega well you can have a leaky brain and then you get more trouble oh my goodness you know about the leaky brain this is like you're already you're getting into some territory here this is super fascinating stuff right leaky gut leaky brain who knew yeah right who knew so exciting and also there's some uh researchers just came across that the brain kind of has its own nerve um immune system in a way yeah it does in its own lymphatic system which is like to clean the brain every night and guess how you do that sleeping yep that's ten times more active yes i mean we know if you if you don't sleep you're much higher risk of alzheimer's because you can't clear out the garbage and your brain gets toxic yeah it's fascinating that's run by the glymphatic system yeah so that's like a little shout out to the glial cells that help to run it the body is just incredible so eat plenty good good sleep nutrients every day magnesium though oh that was the last one actually okay i was like that's the one the first one i go through about patience this is the big one i was saving the best for last i first learned about the benefits of magnesium probably from you okay this was again like you've been talking about this for like 15 years i'm getting old and um i was like holy crap because it's responsible for so many biochemicals i got 300 enzymes and yeah and so what that means for people is just like so magnesium responsible for these well now we know like over 325 processes what that means is there are 325 things your body can't do or can't do properly when you're deficient on it yeah and and it by the way magnesium deficiency affects 48 of americans and it's caused by stress yeah chronic magnesium deficiency it's caused by stress it's caused by coffee alcohol and you know not having enough in our diet which comes from mostly plant foods beans and greens nuts and seeds yeah absolutely and this is one of the things that we can do something about but like you said it's a it's kind of like an anti-stress mineral yeah and so just the amount of stress that we're exposed even even to even our environment is stressful it's different you know we're indoors a lot more processed air and we're not getting access to sunlight like just our reality is more stressful but then put on top of that our work demands relationship demands how would you know if you're magnesium deficient you can get a test done you know but i really always most the tests are very inaccurate red cell magnesium is better yeah but it's mostly symptomatic and actually the way we really have to diagnose it is called a magnesium magnesium load test where you give people a high dose of iv magnesium and then you collect the urine for 24 hours and if nothing comes out it means their body's sucked it all up and if it all comes out it means they have enough right so i think you know magnesium testing is tricky so you got to go by the symptoms exactly exactly that's the thing and what i was going to say is i always err on the side of how do you look feel and perform you know and in my practice there were only a couple supplements i would recommend magnesium was generally and maybe for 80 of the people that came in because it there's such a tendency for people to be deficient in it and so but here's the issue so food first obviously anything green is going to be a good source of magnesium so just keep that in mind kale collard mustard greens but outside of that supplementation can be tricky because we have this bowel tolerance yeah right so even if you take a little bit more than your gut can handle at that moment and you might need to really get your magnesium levels up you're gonna activate what we call clinically disaster pants which means the poop potentially pooping in your sleep yeah like the whole thing this goes forward it's a laxative milk of magnesia right magnesium citrate is what they give people before there you go they have colonoscopies to clean out their bowels right it works so and there's different forms and some are going to be better for different people but what i i don't know if you've done this or looked into this but like topical magnesium yeah you can use topical magnesium yeah that's what i do even brought something with me when i travel you know keep it in my um in my bag and i love it i think it's fantastic it's important and people can you know overlook symptoms that are all caused by magnesium deficiency right sleeplessness insomnia anxiety palpitations muscle cramps menstrual cramps seizures you know arrhythmias palpitations all those things are caused by magnesium deficiency and it's interesting in medicine we don't really think about it but it's used as a quote drug in the worst cases because drugs don't work for example preterm labor someone comes in having a baby too early you give them intravenous magnesium someone comes in and they're having high blood pressure and seizures in pregnancy they give them intravenous magnesium people have cardiac arrhythmias where their heart is beating crazy beats in the emergency room and none of the drugs work you give magnesium it's pretty interesting and it's something we use all the time in medicine but we don't think about it in this way but it is probably one of the most powerful things for sleep for people death absolutely you're saying there's one cause which is c diff for all neurodegenerative diseases in order to prove that hypothesis two things have to happen going forward two things the first is we have to establish that there is c diff uh in the brains of patients with alzheimer's disease guess what that study's been done yeah uh it also showed that there was some poop for brains hoop for brains is that is that like is there a true website or something or is that rudy made that up for brains well there's another way to say it but but but more importantly clinically clinically i mean look people can say oh it's an epiphenomena right like the brain is you know already decom composing of course you can have the bacteria emerging when the person's dead their argument right maybe it's not that clustering is causing the disease but it's just it's there for the ride as it eats your brain up after you're dead right that's that's sort of maybe not meaning they find an autopsy but maybe it's it's like it doesn't mean that it was there when they were living yeah right so fair enough that what that means is that we have to demonstrate so they ran for the hills as soon as a person died is that it i guess i don't know probably unlikely right yeah exactly but but in fairness to that sort of uh count or punch what what the medical community would ask for going forward is especially clinically if like we make a decision that that we think that this is definitely c difficile in you know a patient with a disease like alzheimer's right to make that conclusion clinically you have to have absolute 100 evidence that that bacteria is actually causing that disease with some with some you know yeah obviously not every disease is gonna you know test positive and not only are is the challenge here that the majority of patients who test for c difficile who have dementia uh parkinson's alzheimer's and what have you have negative tests for c diff in their stool in their stools right and so people that are sort of looking at this picture with me if you will are saying exactly that well it can't be c diff because we're testing c diff in the stool and it's not there i say well guess what it went uptown okay it used to live downtown but it likes uptown more why because a we give them ppis which they love that that alkalinic environment acid blockers acid blockers like capsules and and what previously and what do we give them that they love most of all antibiotics c-diff loves antibodies it's actually an antibiotic associated infection exactly that's how i got it i took an antibiotic from my bad tooth and i ended up getting yep c diff yep that's i mean that if that's not a word of warning to all the listeners i don't know what it is yes exactly right see basically it's called antibiotic associate cdf so i started asking patients with neurodegenerative diseases if they had a pro drum when they first started getting sick and all across the board i mean like symptoms that happened before they got of course well you asked yes questions like that right i want to know like what they did as a as a baby basically you know even though they're seven years old why ask i don't know i've asked my mom that question but you know younger patients you could ask them that question because they're with their parents uh and i say to them you know i asked them three questions i go did you have a lot of antibiotic exposure before you got sick sick 100 it's like not it's it's like it's like i could i know the answer before i even asked the question it's just a question of how many antibiotics they had yeah and what course antibiotics they had and the second question that's worthwhile to ask clinically is do you have trouble actually mounting a fever so that's that's a that's a question that i was surprised by the answer that most i mean not most but most my patients basically have said no you know what i've i have no sign you really never get a fever i'm like oh okay so which is not necessarily a good thing that's right it's not a good thing at all because the only thing that actually will treat spores right is is heat heat if you look at if you look at that that's why we get a fever right you get a fever because it's your body's mechanism for killing infections it's it's you know i make a joke with people i say them all the time i said name one disease that that humans have cured cured like oh you know they always mention infectious diseases because that's that's that is the truth we've cured infectious disease but the only thing that actually cures disease is our endogenous mechanisms you know fever actually fever and sleep basically are the two endogenous mechanisms of holistic medicine and diet just means stuff that you do yourself your body does your body's doing it for you yeah but you have to help the body do that you can't be staying up late and taking ppis to watch you know seinfeld episodes you can't you can't have your like pizza followed by your prilosec and stay up all night watching game of thrones correct now in in perfect disclosure yeah normal i've done all of those except i i actually do eat the pizza when i'm watching those shows and i i just i got to work on myself basically okay doctor treat yourself yeah right but anyway yes so so this this whole conversation is fascinating to me because from a functional medicine perspective you know many roads lead to rome in other words just because you know the name of the diagnosis of the disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you exactly and the truth is there can be a 10 or 20 causes for the same disease right and i you know i i think that's probably true even a neurodegenerative disease like alzheimer's so yeah i just want to make sure that we're not we're not saying that every single person with alzheimer's has c diff right or that that's the cause because it could be something else exactly lyme disease 100 it could be yeah heavy metals but the point is no resistance right now but i think the sort of like the the the devils in the details if you will right meaning that that yes i think there's very strong compelling evidence at this point that back bacteria are the cause of neurodegenerative diseases not not my yeah we talked about rudy tanzi who's a harvard scientist one of the discoveries of some of the pre-cinilian genes which are the genes that show that uh people are risk for early alzheimer's he actually said they were discovering all these microbes in the brain which we thought was sterile right and that we had this blood-brain barrier that protects us right and you're saying and he's saying that that barrier is not always a hundred percent and that stuff can leak through not only you have a leaky gut but you can have a leaky brain look bacteria not to scare people bacteria love the brain why 25 of the body's glucose is used by the brain they're they're they're they know where to eat they're going to you know le pen or that fancy restaurant is downtown like everyone else is eating downtown they're getting you know our brains live on ketones 100 percent but not but not wait that's very important they prefer simple sugars why because they're lazy right they they want you know they want instant gratification so they they like sugar better than ketones but ketones and ketonic diets work for some of these neurodegenerative diseases like alzheimer's and even ls and cancer and that's right that's right and i think one of the mechanisms to be honest with you is that ketones actually uh improve first of all they improve mitochondrial function but they're not a good substrate for bacteria they're they're a great substrate for us bacteria don't like them because they like they like eating fast food basically yeah so eat them sugar we eat fat that's right okay so so this is just a breakthrough idea and and this isn't just an idea you've actually treated patients using this approach and seen some really extraordinary things yes so can you share with us you know a little bit about this case you were sharing with me earlier about als which is a horrible condition stephen hawking had it it was called lou gehrig's disease after the baseball player essentially it's where your nervous system is affected by the killing of the neurons in your spinal cord which makes you basically paralyzed you've got fasciculation which is twitching you eventually can't move your arms and legs you're in a wheelchair you shouldn't breathe you need a respirator you wouldn't wash it off on you on your worst enemy would not work you know like it's like a slowly getting paralyzed right that's right and and never has there been a treatment that has stopped or reversed it right and you're saying that you've seen patients where this actually happened so well we are in the process of validating that sort of that data yes so yes we need more studies yes we need to do research on multiple patients but even if there's one patient right where you've seen a change it raises the question oh it's by the way it's made me go crazy by the way because you know i am so i'm finally glad to be a neurologist you know being a neurologist is like being a nihilist or a masochist diagnosing adios right well it's worse than that it's like diagnose and let me you know let me not tell the patient that they have als let me let me treat them for you know uh like a you know a cidp picture because they don't want to actually make that diagnosis for people it's the hardest diagnosis you could make for for a patient because everyone knows als is incurable disease right i mean it's a hundred percent it's like not even pancreatic cancer is better well you have a five percent chance of living a pancreatic cancer you have zero chance of living through this disease zero so based on your hypothesis that it's infectious yes that plays a big role if not is the main role right um you know i personally shared on on this podcast that i went to a place in mexico called san aviv where i and my wife both went through this treatment called hyperthermia which essentially is where they heat you up to 107 degrees which sounds crazy and it's scary right but actually we did both fine and it killed a lot of infections that we have he matches my wife her viral loads of uh very tough to treat infection yep called cmv came plummeting down yep she felt much better i felt much better and it and and so this is a therapy that is not much used in the in the united states but is used widely in europe as us in mexico and other countries is the therapy for some of these types of infectious diseases and even cancer right so how does how does the theory work behind this with something like als well the idea is that you know uh fever is the the way of actually denaturing spores so okay that's a big sentence can you unpack that sure so human cells have their proteins that that you know either fold properly or not filled properly at a certain temperature right bacteria have their own temperature zone like their ideal climate and spores have another ideal climate right meaning that to kill a spore a spore is like a baby because of baby bacteria and that's what i believe personally is the reason that patients have amyloid accumulation that the spores are are creating this protective cover against antibiotics that actually is in fact the amyloid being produced they analyze like the armor for the bacteria yes they're like the you know the the uh bomb shelter yes the the biofilm is the bomb shelter for these little baby bacteria yep and so how does hyperthermia work to disrupt that and oh so what is what is that because procedure well so it works hypothermia works by it's a it's a very narrow window of temperature meaning if you give too much temperature you can actually hurt normal cells as much as you know bacterial cells if you don't give enough temperature you've done nothing so it's like goldilocks it's like goldilocks you got it just right you have to get it exactly right okay and that's part of uh the way that the hyperthermia technology has been developed is by really understanding that the brain itself can provide feedback on the the tolerability for human cells because brain cells are going to tell the brain hey this is pretty hot in here you want to fry your breakfast can you turn the thermostat off now so the part of the part of the device actually is to to get the brain temperature uh back into the feedback system where it's self-regulating so you never reach a point where the temperature is harmful to your own cells and and so you know they often in places where they do this they they'll give at the peak of the temperature they'll give antibiotics or antivirals right does that make sense to give antivirals or yeah to give antimicrobial treatment to patients when they're at the peak of the fever because the idea is that it sort of flows for yes for acute infection yes i would i would argue this time or well if the lime is acute certainly i mean i don't think that that uh i mean i think i'd be weary of the of the issue that by you know robbing peter to pay paul for instance let's say that c diff is let's say let's progress like say this is a poly microbial disease okay as opposed to a like lots of different books lots of different bugs as opposed to just one ring leader everyone else is following okay so lombard believes it's it's that that c diff is the ringleader okay and all these other guys lime hsv they're just they're tagging a ride because it's such a great killer that's like okay great we'll we'll take the leftovers no problem here we'll take the leftovers so my concern is clinically that if we start treating patients you know with you know bacterial uh drugs like rocephin whatever it is for chronic lyme yes you're dressing chronic lyme i mean the significance for us yes exactly yeah exactly so so the heat alone is enough to disrupt the c diff it's well we haven't demonstrated that yet to be quite frank but what what's been demonstrated uh is that uh by applying uh hyperthermia that we're able to actually see improvement in clinical symptoms of patients with als people's muscle strength this is a progressive disease so it gets worse and worse and worse every visit they're worse right you're seeing patients it stops or gets better which never happened correct right so this is a major breakthrough i think so major breakthrough and and this is not something new it's been around for a long time so where in the world is most of the research being done on hyperthermia for als period i mean it's mostly so there mostly research on hypothermia actually is cancer research so they call it chemothermia chemo hypothermia so people can look up a lot of data on on how hypothermia affects cancer but as far as i know there's zero data until now applying hypothermia for als we will be the first people to actually talk about applying hypothermia treatment of als what about things like alzheimer's or parkinson's or ms well the difference in those diseases are that um in alzheimer's right it's very difficult to induce hypothermia in a patient with alzheimer's disease why because you need to be compliant the treatment itself is you know it's fairly rigorous as as you you know from your eyes they put me asleep asleep right we don't want to put them to sleep though right because we're concerned about protecting their brain so you know if you have a patient who's got you know end-stage alzheimer's disease for instance i don't see how this is going to be held early but early 100 early early in fact i will talk later not about the case now because i we're really just in the beginnings of of this case uh but yeah i think it would be applicable for alzheimer's disease as well have you seen any patients no reported or not literally not anywhere no but you serve as a theory yes it's still a theory an ams what about ms uh ms there's data on actually uh the opposite right which is how do you induce hypothermia right because in ms it's a you know it's an inflammatory disease obviously right uh which by the way i also believe is is caused by clostridium but not not c diff where it's especially important to actually identify at that stage that this is bacterial so they're i don't know what yeah so what what what is the idea with ms that you you wouldn't want to use hyperthermia that you wouldn't want to use heat because it makes it worse well because remember when you heat up a patient with ms what happens they usually get worse so the the trick is but maybe not enough right maybe it's not enough that's right maybe you haven't reached the threshold to actually you know use the body's fever mechanisms against because there's links to ms and epsilon virus and other infections there's links to alzheimer's and right herpes virus infections right so yes the whole principle is applicable for all those diseases but we don't know yet if it is applicable yet until we clinically demonstrate that right um but uh yeah i think that this is going to be a treatment that's going to be very important for a lot of different diseases mark so so there's this whole theory that the body has a mechanism for dealing with this and it has these own proteins correct that are produced in response to heat and there are things we learned about in medical school they're called heat shock proteins i learned something very important about heat shock proteins from dr lesler uh because remember that you know people looking at how to induce hypothermia right so there's all sorts of research there's actually even a drug in clinic for als uh that is the the the mechanism of action is based upon increasing heat shock protein through a pharmaceutical agent so i was at this lecture and i you know i thought i thought i knew everything basically and i learned that actually you could induce it you thought md stood for medical deity is that it medical dating yes yes exactly we all got that draining yeah the truth is we know close to nothing that's that's why i said the beginning of this talk i you know like thanks for inviting me but i really know nothing just disclaimer but anyway so yes actually in ms the the goal is to induce heat shock protein through hypothermia hypothermia so you get people cold not people the brain the brain right how do we do that chill the brain kill the brain how do you do that yeah ice blocks around the head no no um well i'll invite you up and you could you could see for yourself what that looks like all right dunk your head in ice water nope nope nope none of the above okay so we have to be in mystery here a mystery about what the device looks like it's it's it's basically the same concept as building a hyperthermia device except remember now the technology itself is was developed basically for anesthesiologists this was developed at yale by dr abreu who's the the person who actually discovered a way of measuring brain temperature objectively externally okay so that that's kind of where this whole thing started from to be honest yeah and we don't just take electrode in your brain you can literally map it out from the outside you can map it out from the outside so the the ability to do that now allows a clinician to not only you know heat the the body to create hyperthermic states but through other types of modalities to actually cool the brain safely externally with the same in the same way meaning that you can actually apply a small device to a region of the of the skin periorbital location and you can actually change the temperature of the brain through this what's called the brain thermal tunnel and that also creates heat shock protein 70. and i did track protein i didn't know that until i was in australia that's amazing so you're hopeful about the future of neurology it sounds like it's the first time i've been hopeful about anything in my life to be honest to you that's a big statement yes it's true if you're exposed to glyphosate it harmfully affects the bacteria in your gut that produce really important amino acids that regulate your gene expression and the pathway it disrupts is a chickamay pathway and that leads to abnormal gene expression and not be able to actually do the things your body's supposed to do and it also seems it also seems to deplete glutathione which you mentioned which is a critical molecule for regulating inflammation detoxifying antioxidant it's really the center of our biology and if it disrupts that we're kind of screwed right glutathione is so important and we're seeing so many people talking about you know taking glutathione as a supplement taking an acetyl cysteine to as a precursor to glutathione methionine is the is the core essential sulfur-containing amino acid and it is a precursor to cysteine which goes to the divine methionine synthesis is disrupted uh by any coli by glyphosate there was a study that showed that so it prevents the microbes and also prevents the plants from producing methionine from inorganic sulfur so this gives you again a deficiency in the in the sulfur-containing amino acid so we have a deficiency both in the aromatics and in the sulfur-containing amino acids and they're so important for so many things it's just uncountable practically the waste that that would impact particularly your metabolism of course also protein synthesis and of course the all the um hormones you know that that are affected and the b vitamins all of those things are going to be affected by these disruptions by glyphosate and i mean you're a mit scientist this is not some crazy fringe idea uh this is you're you're you're an evidence-based scientist it's looking hard at heart of the data and coming to these conclusions why why well before we get into why why the government hasn't figured this out yet um let's let's talk about you know other diseases and how good the evidence is how good is the evidence around cancer for example or diabetes or autism or any of these autoimmune issues that you're talking about yeah cancer is actually the hardest one to um to explain and maybe the weakest one in fact i would say a cancer request evolves out of mitochondrial dysfunction so eventually it causes it studies have shown that it enhances other chemicals effects that would lead to cancer in other words a secondary effect this there are studies that have shown that and there are also studies that have shown that it causes um cancer cells uh breast cancer cells in vitro to proliferate at when it's exposed when they're exposed to extremely tiny levels and parts per billion per trillion parts per trillion levels of glyphosate induced proliferation in cancer cells i think it does cause several different cancers but the um it's a much more difficult thing to explain than some of the other diseases liver disease is quite easy to explain if you accept my theory which we maybe should get into at this point because that's crucial my theory for it's extremely unusual mechanism of toxicity so just to back up for people a liver is your detoxifying organ and and you hinted at how glyphosate interrupts sulfur metabolism which is a critical part of our biology and in functional medicine you know there's there's a real focus on our sulfur biology because it's critical for detoxifying all the environmental compounds are exposed to for in metabolizing our own internal toxins and and people who have low glutathione which is the sulfur-based compound are sicker i remember reading one study that if you looked at people who are hospitalized versus not hospitalized you know if you if you have this general lower levels of glutathione based on a gene that is important in regulating it you're you know 50 of the time you're going to be more likely not for the hospital so it's kind of a marker for overall health and well-being and i i personally have a lot of experience with glutathione mercury poisoning and it gets very depleted and i had to learn how to restore my sulfur metabolism and also something called methylation which is the b vitamins because they're very interlocked and you think of your biochemistry for those listening it's it's like this big network of biochemical reactions but right at the center of it is this two core systems that run all the time literally every second millions and millions of times a second billions of times probably called methylation and sulfation and these pathways i've written a lot about them in books and articles but this is this is the key to health it's a key to gene expression to immune function to detoxification to cognitive function i mean it just goes on and on and on so when this is screwed up it's not just like some you know sort of minor pathway that gets disrupted in human biology it's a major pathway so with that background can you explain how glyphosate disrupts sulfur metabolism a little more clearly and and and explain um you know what really uh the role of of the sulfurs in maintaining health and why we should be terrified about glyphosate and sulfate right i mean i think glyphosate disrupts uh sulfate synthesis sulfate activation sulfate transport and sulfate delivery it disrupts every step of the way for sulfate and as you mentioned mercury i actually get sulfated to detox it if you can't sulfate the mercury you're in trouble i think that we have a systemic deficiency in sulfate in the glycocalyx which is this in the lining of all the cells like in the blood vessels there's all this sulfate that populates the sugar molecules complex sugar molecules in the um lining the blood vessels those need to be heavily sulfated to have the blood circulation work correctly and also for the cells to be able to receive signals and to bring in uh different things they're going to take in to digest it's just really central having enough sulfate in them around the exterior of the cell it also gives the red blood cells negative charge which is important for the zeta potential in the blood they're just all these things that are connected to sulfate and i talk a lot about sulfate in my book it's actually been central to my understanding of where biology has gone wrong and i felt sulfate was in trouble with autism and with heart disease many years ago long before i knew about glyphosate so the sulfate and the glyphosate really came together very nicely for me for me to recognize how glyphosate is causing autism and probably heart disease through sulfate issues and as you mentioned the sulfation sulfates is very important for detoxing many of these fat soluble chemicals that um they go to the liver it takes the slivers job to detox them and it takes them up it adds sulfate oxidizes them it adds sulfate the enzymes that the type enzymes that take that do that first step of detox are also suppressed by glyphosate that's been shown in multiple studies it suppresses the enzymes in the liver that modify these fat soluble molecules to make them to detox them and to make them water soluble so they can be removed through the urine they also wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait so so what you're saying basically is when toxins come in the liver they have to be detoxified by the liver and there are enzymes that do that that are like the helpers what you're saying is that glyphosate screws up those enzymes so those chemicals can't get processed down the assembly line of detoxification yes and of course then those chemicals become much more toxic so glyphosate makes many many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them and of course glutathione is part of that problem because a lot of things get glutathione glutathione elated to get removed as well there's methylation glutathione elation sulfation these are all steps that are taking the liver to uh to make these uh to to make these to change these molecules into something that's less toxic and that process gets broken down by glyphosate um so it's it's really quite um remarkable all the things that it can do to disrupt your your health the sulfate the whole sulfate story has in part it's because these um chicken mate pathway because the chicken mate pathway produces those aromatics for example serotonin gets produced in large amounts in the gut actually and also melatonin they both are producing large amounts in the gut they are sulfated before they're shipped out and then they arrive in the brain in a sulfated form so this i think the serotonin is actually transporting sulfate to the brain this is something i talk a lot about there's all these molecules that get sulfated and transit not just the toxic chemicals vitamin d cholesterol um various sex hormones they're all sulfated when they're shipped out and then all these aromatics that come out of the uh sugary pathway so those molecules become deficient which means that the sulfate transporters become deficient which means that the brain doesn't get enough sulfate and autism is very strongly linked to heparin sulfate deficiency in the in the brain ventricles that's really been a core feature of autism that's been shown in both mice and humans and i think it's just because there's not enough sulfate being delivered to the brain and the body does something very interesting to get around that which is quite fascinating and also quite disturbing which is that it produces hydrogen sulfide gas in the liver in the gut the autistic children produce hydrogen sulfide gas which then floats up to the brain and then gets oxidized in the brain to to make sulfate so it's a way to transport sulfate a very sneaky way to transport sulfate by turning it into a gas turning the sulfur molecule into a gas hydrogen sulfide it also makes the kids poops really smelly and stinky yes and it also gives them brain fog because the hibernation is is all involved with hydrogen sulfide gas and basically people go into hibernation because they've got hydrogen sulfide floating in their brain their brain is and then of course you have to have oxidizing agents to oxidize the disulfate which gives you the inflammations the anti-inflammatory process in the brain that's characteristic of autism this kind of you know chronic low-grade encephalopathy that's a feature of autism is because the autistic brain is constantly trying to make sulfate from hydrogen sulfide gas okay wow this is just so much information i i'm just loving this i think just to unpack a little bit for people you know when you eat foods with glyphosate which is 75 of all or 70 of all crops uh and often it's used on gmo foods like soy but even non-gmo foods is used unlike wheat it it it's a whole host of different ways in the body that it screws things up right so what you're saying it screws up this pathway that makes the neurotransmitters that help bring gene expression important for cognitive function it disrupts glutathione which is critical for detoxification it regulates immunity and oxidative stress it also affects protein synthesis and immune function and can create a leaky gut destroy the microbiome so you've got all these mechanisms not just one but many mechanisms by which glyphosate destroys human health right yeah and people say how can one chemical cause so many diseases i mean i showed all those charts nancy swanson was the first one who started doing those charts i don't know if you saw those of um rise into various diseases strongly absolutely practically perfectly correlated with the rise in glyphosate usage on court crops over time and it was just stunning and um p-values are 0.0000 i mean several zeros before the first significant digit of the correlations between these two trends in disease versus the rise in glyphosate usage and you know people would say well they would say correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation and then they would say how could one chemical cause so many diseases and i was wondering that myself but now i understand how and it is this metal it disrupts the whole minerals are completely messed up iron manganese zinc they become both toxic and deficient at the same time because of its ability to to bind to them and hold on to them prevent the natural system from transporting them properly and then it's the sugarmate pathway getting wrecked and that's all these aromatic amino acids and all the derivatives that are so important for our health are getting reduced and then um and then it's actually the site enzymes in the liver these are all have all been shown you know in multiple studies and it's doing this it's hype enzymes in the liver getting suppressed which is cytochrome people 50 enzymes which is stage one detoxification depressed and then this inability to uh for the might gut microbes to convert inorganic sulfur into organic sulfur which is going to give you methionine and methionine of course is the methylation pathways it's the sulfation pathways those are all going to be disturbed because of deficiency in methionine and instead the sulfur gets reduced to hydrogen sulfide gas which then causes all these other problems so it just jams up your biochemistry has been bottom line it's like throwing a sand and an engine basically right right right yes amazing and there's a few other things i want to touch on which is uh glycine glycine is it does affect our protein synthesis and and tell us how our body uh has swapped out glyphosate for glycine and what that what that does yes and that's a central topic of my book that's almost the point of my book is to try to convince the audience that that's true because i've gotten i've been saying this anthony samson was the first one who suggested to me that might be happening that is substituting for glycine during protein synthesis and at first i was skeptical because it has an extra piece attached to its nitrogen it is a complete glycine molecule and it does disrupt glycine in various ways that's known but it also potentially could be substituted for glycine during protein synthesis and there's no reason to stop it it turns out because proline is a coding amino acid that also has an attachment to its nitrogen and it's still able to find there's another linkage that the nitrogen can hook up with the other because the the amino acids have to hook up in a chain and the nitrogen is involved in the hook they're like paper dolls holding hands and hands and the nitrogen needs to hold hands it has something in the way another molecule in the way but if there's enough room around it can fit so it turns out there's specific circumstances under which it will substitute and this gets a little complicated in terms of the science but it's quite quite interesting because the enzyme in the sigma pathway that gets disrupted by glyphosate has a glycine residue at the site where it binds the phosphate piece of phosphoenolpyruvate so that enzyme binds that that molecule at a place where glycine is highly conserved and if you take take that glycine out and replace it with alanine which is just an extra methyl a very small change glyphosate can't affect it at all all of a sudden it's completely immune to glyphosate once you remove that glycine and they've shown that it is at that place where that glycine is that it disrupts the protein they've shown that that's that that's the spot and they know that if they can either remove that glycine or they can crowd it they can put in other amino acids close by that'll that'll crowd the glycine and then the glyphosate won't fit anymore so the argument they say is that glyphosate is replacing the substrate pep what i say is that it's replacing the glycine so we have a very different view of how that enzyme is getting disrupted if you say it's displacing the glycine and if you say it can displace the glycine and other enzymes that have the same property and there are many many enzymes with very important functions that have glycine at a place that's highly conserved that binds phosphate even that binds pep the same substrate and i suspect it's affecting many of those enzymes it's that particular group of enzymes that are getting extremely disturbed by glyphosate and that have enormous roles in metabolism and that's how you're going to get mitochondrial dysfunction all kinds of things so it screws up your immune system it screws up your mitochondria energy it screws up your gut creates oxidative stress it screws up your detox system what doesn't it do you know that's the big question cancer is an interesting one and there are cancers that are going up dramatically pancreatic cancer thyroid cancer um liver cancer and and and kidney cancer it definitely affects it affects a lot of the um endocrine system basically uh the glands that's what i want yeah it's huge so so there's 9 million kilograms of this stuff sprayed around the world 300 million pounds or kilograms down in the united states is a lot um we're exposed to this in significant quantities right and and so what is the amount uh that is going to cause harm um is it oh i know that's the real question right i think need zero i think we need to ban it worldwide and we need to work hard on figuring out how to get it out of the soil and out of the air and out of the water you know we have a huge problem right now we've got all kinds of glyphosate gathering up because it takes it a long time to well it can get broken down quickly in under optimal conditions and of course monsanto says that that's what's always there two weeks later it's gone that's what they say it is definitely not true experimental in many different kinds of soils it'll last for for years there was a study that showed that after two years sixty percent of it was still there so it you know and it stays in the ocean if it gets deep then there's no sunlight sunlight helps to break it down uh there are certain microbes that can metabolize it but most microbes can't so it has to be specialized microbes i think we need to do research to actually figure out which microbes can we safely put in the soil to help break it down because actually many of the pathogens can break it down like the fungus we have all kinds of problems with fungus infections in both animals and plants and fungus can break it down so i think that's a reason why it's thriving incredible so the amount we need is not very much right is if you were going to look at the data is there any data on how much glyphosate is in people and and if you look at the population has have they studied like what is the body burden of glyphosate and is it in amounts that are really relevant or or not yeah that's a big question of course it's a question of what you think is relevant and one thing it has been found in people it's been found in in large amounts in uh and in fact it's been found correlated with disease there was a study that showed um people who had um liver fatty liver disease which is an epidemic and the people who had fatty liver disease they were tested for glyphosate in the urine and they had statistically more than the ones who didn't have the disease and among the ones who had it the ones that had worse disease had statistically significantly more than the ones who had less forest disease that's his father and there was a 90 million and by the way 90 million people in america are affected by that yeah it's it's huge and i think life states they really dead on and and the study on on rats exposed them to levels of glyphosate that were below regulatory limits and caused fatty liver disease in those rats at those levels the other thing that's coming out at least lately which is really shocking is extremely low levels of glyphosate causing endocrine effects that are long-lasting they are there are these amazing experiments coming out recently where people expose pregnant rats to glyphosate at levels that are so low the rat doesn't look like it has any problems the rat is perfectly fine the babies are born everything's good the pups grow up they they have their own offspring they grow up and you see all kinds of problems so in other words it's showing up in the second and third generation so in the grandchildren of the rats that got exposed there's the epigenetic changes that are passed through the lineage to another generations so you're not only dealing with what you're exposed to you're doing what your grandmother was exposed to yes and of course we've now we're now getting second third generation showing up because it's been since 1975. yeah it's pretty terrifying so it really is i mean i feel we have to i feel we have to ban this chemical worldwide right now i mean if we have any hope for the future i feel like we really need to wake up and realize this is the thing that's causing all the problems that we're seeing and it shocks me that we see all this obesity like this country is just you know so many problems with obesity and and we just think oh we're just watching too much tv and eating too much popcorn i mean that's just like really ridiculous to think that could be the reason why we have such a tremendous uh inability to keep the weight off yeah well there's a whole science field called the study of obesogens and obesogens are environmental chemicals that cause obesity i've written a lot about this over the years even you know 15 16 years ago i wrote about it because i used to see it in my patients and when you start to improve their detoxification and get rid of these chemicals from their body they actually do better their metabolism improves their weight loss comes off but what we're really saying is that most of us have levels of glyphosate in our bodies including you and i that do impair human health and i'm sure people listening are wondering what the heck can i do about it other than you know like if dr hyman and stephanie who's an mit professor who's made her life work to study this have high levels what the heck am i going to do i know it seems really hopeless i was so depressed when i found that i was really shocked actually that i was content it wasn't high but it was there it was measurable and um and it's just really depressing that you can't avoid it which i think is the case if you live in america i mean there are places in the world where you probably can but it's very difficult to find a place here that without it it it's in the rain um it's in the rain it's in the water it's in the atmosphere it's in their food so study in brazil found it in the in the atmosphere founded in the nanoparticles in the air in you know in brazil is is the majority though from our food that we get it i think so but i'm not sure that's been my big question i think people who live next to uh fields where it's being sprayed are in serious trouble and they're going to get things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because they're breathing breathing glyphosate but i think most of us are getting it through our food and possibly through our water i mean there's a question of a water supply and it could also be from the air and i'm concerned about that with respect to uh biofuels because i'm really quite wondering if biofuels are introducing glyphosate into the air in cities where they're being burned because they're coming from like for example ethanol bioethanol is coming from gmo roundup ready corn or sugar cane sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest so it could be in the atmosphere i mean it is in the atmosphere and it could be from the air that you're getting exposure into to the lungs and that's another word that i have so um is there a way for us is there anything we can do eat take supplements anything that can help us reduce our glyphosate levels take a sauna uh wheatgrass enema what are we gonna do yeah i mean i'm a big fan of sunlight and of course vitamin d is so important but i i believe sunlight also helps you to make sulfate in the skin i talk about that in my book uh quite fascinating um science and so sunlight exposure i think is extremely useful for improving your immune function your immune function is really central to your health people many people in america have a weak innate immune system and that's causing a lot of their diseases their diseases are actually there to help boost the immune function they they serve the immune cells to help improve their health i believe you know all these diseases like arthritis and things gut dysbiosis and etc but um so we'd be taking for example sulfur producing some compounds that help boost glutathione like lipoic acid and then acetyl cysteine and yes we'll be taking the methylating vitamin b vitamins to help with that sulfur and right make sure you have an inflammation question i like to just eat really really healthy foods you know certified organic whole foods lots of green vegetables um lots of food is that is that enough though i mean is that enough because i don't you've been doing that already so so i'm thinking okay from my functional medicine perspective how can i fix these problems right glycine is another one you know taking glycine that's one that i've i've talked to functional medicine specialists who like glycine as a supplement yeah i love it yeah because that's going to help to counteract the glyphosate substitution for the glycine which is so important to try to take you can take amino acids of glycine you can take sulfur boosting compounds like nac and lipoic acid selenium milk the soil um epsom salt baths absolutely salt fats vitamin d these are all things people can do and plus just cut out your exposures as much as possible and then probiotics yeah yeah cut out exposure is crucial try everything you can to cut out exposure and then probiotics especially it's curious that there was a study on cows that found that sauerkraut juice was beneficial for cows that were um i can't imagine these cows eating sauerkraut but um they were sick and they had glyphosate in their urine and they gave them several things but sauerkraut juice was one of the things they gave them i don't know how they thought to do that but i found that quite interesting because i was wondering whether and i haven't hasn't been proven whether the microbes in the sauerkraut juice were able to metabolize the glyphosate i feel like if you could get micro microbes growing in your gut that can metabolize glyphosate you would be a lot better off and so acetobacter there are species of acetobacter that can metabolize glyphosate so one could hope they might be in apple cider vinegar you know fermented foods it's a possibility it hasn't been proven but it's something that i find appealing so so i need a multi-pronged approach when somebody comes in and they complain of abdominal pain maybe they get fullness or bloating after they eat maybe they have a diarrhea after they consume or just diarrhea during the day um and they may feel nauseous or have excess gas and so then you get a good detailed history of what they're eating um sometimes people it throws somebody off because they may not have had problems with dairy prior to when they you know at a younger age and then they developed and so they they they're confused as to why they have started to have problems now but as i mentioned you can develop problems with lactose issues with lactose and digesting dairy at any point in your life it increases as we get older and it often can increase after we've had you know some sort of infection or inflammation or antibiotics in our system and so you know you want to just figure out what are they what is somebody dealing with the abdominal pain the bloating and gas and and then you want to say okay when do your symptoms occur because typically when there's problems with lactose it's it's half an hour to two hours after you consume the lactose containing food so the the dairy and the symptoms usually resolve five to seven days after you've removed the dairy from the diet and what's happening is there if there's low levels of this lactase enzyme in the small intestine then the the carbohydrate component of dairy the lactose does not get broken down and when it's not absorbed as it should be it goes into the colon and in the colon it gets it gets consumed the bacteria in the colon eat it and produce a lot of gas and a lot of water goes into the colon to deal with these uh food particles that are too large and as a result you get a lot of gas and bloating and diarrhea so it is a very hard food to digest and absorb we see it all the time and so it's it's the reason we wanted to talk about it and do this podcast is because it's so common and patients are really struggling with it all the time and and even though you know to you and i it's like okay we you know of course go off dairy people often come in in in denial they're like oh no it's not the dairy you know and i'm like yeah you got to give it a try you know one of the things is often people wonder about is well what about uh black taste free milk or what about yogurt or what about cow or sheep or what about a2 versus a1 casein how do we figure all that out and and and how do we determine you know what people should be doing if they want to include dairy because i know for example if i eat regular milk i'll be in trouble but if i have goat or sheep yogurt i seem to do okay so i wonder you know how does that work and can you explain a little bit about that it's such a great question i mean what we often start with is pulling away all dairy for somebody because that's how we can see okay how much is this going to improve your symptoms but you're correct there are some better quality dairies like the a2 milk that people tolerate better um if if the dairy is fermented like yogurt it's broken down and so many times people can tolerate some plain whole fat yogurt and without problem but they couldn't drink a glass of milk for example um and because that fermenting process breaks it down for other people they can't tolerate anything so they can't they they some people even have to be a little they have to watch even butter intake and they have to go with something like a ghee instead um so there's many ways you can react to dairy so we're talking about reacting to the lactose in dairy which is the carbohydrate component of dairy that's what we're talking about here but people also react to the proteins in dairy and they can have food sensitivities or food allergies to that dairy as well so there's multiple ways people can react to dairy but so we always start with pulling it all out and then maybe adding back in some easier to digest dairy if somebody really wants it and they and they don't have a problem with it such as a full fat you know non-sweetened yogurt hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctors pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that i know and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is called mark's picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it i share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that i use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and i'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter i'll only send it to you once a week on fridays nothing else i promise and all you do is go to doctorhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash picks p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode and so what about people taking enzymes like lactase or is that a good idea should people just avoid dairy you know are there other issues that happen and you know what are the consequences of sort of consuming dairy if you are lactose intolerant you know that's a great question so the enzymes that are in that uh like the lactase enzyme is the enzyme in lactate is a beta-galactosidase and that um can help people break down their dairy and tolerate it better um but that's a good question like i typically recommend that people don't consume a lot of these enzymes if they're having problems and just avoid the food but some people choose to have some of these uh digestive aids and then have a little bit of of the the dairy from time to time yeah as sometimes cheat and you know eat ice cream and then of course i pay for it later yeah right yeah yeah so you know it's it's you know i think that these enzymes may be helpful for some people but um but i think the reason that we're so focused on dairy is is you know everybody was like you got to get your calcium you got to get your calcium it was a huge marketing campaign to to promote the amount of dairy that we needed to consume and and so it's really important to remind people that there's so many other ways to get their calcium you know almonds almond butter great sources of calcium sardines great source of calcium salmon in a can has bones in its great source of calcium broccoli and your greens are a good source of calcium and so there's lots of ways you can get good calcium in your diet and you don't have to feel like you need to be getting it from from dairy products yeah and i would just underscore that anybody listening who wants to hear about dairy should listen to the podcast i did with david ludwig where he dug into the article that he wrote with walter willett who was one of the leading scientists at harvard called milk and health and if you want to google it it's new england journal medicine milk and health will put in the show notes but there's also a great medium article he wrote about it as well and bottom line is that you know all the propaganda about milk needing for your bones it actually increases fractures it's you know it it doesn't um do a lot of things that it was promoted to do by the gary council and the got milk ads uh it's not a great sports drink it's not a great way for weight loss it's not great for for osteoporosis and vagina may cause osteoporosis it may cause allergies digestive issues as we mentioned even autoimmune diseases cancer so i i think there's a lot of reasons to be cautious about dairy and i and again i i think just underscore the fact that when we're talking about dairy we're talking about sort of modern cow dairy sometimes heirloom cows have different you know or grass finished cows have different properties and better tolerance some of sheep and goat is better tolerated so it really depends on on sort of you and a personal decision but it's not nature's perfect food unless you're a calf and it's also you know problematic in many many ways absolutely as we see here with some of these cases like this first one here was a 25 year old gentleman who came to see me and you know he he was he was relatively he was really healthy actually and he was doing well until about a year ago and he had like a stomach bug he he was traveling and he got some stomach bug he didn't really think much of it he recovered from it he had but at the time he had like a fever and some diarrhea he recovered from the bug but but then since that point in time he still had episodes where he was rushing to the bathroom and had diarrhea and bloating and gas production and and he really couldn't figure out what foods were involved at all and he didn't think any food was involved and he was he was you know so he wanted to figure it out so based on his timeline of symptoms and you know that we gathered from him we said you know even without any testing we said let's just do a trial off a dairy and see what happens and within a week his symptoms got all better and he thought i you know was just you know did a wonderful job i know right i fixed his diarrhea and and gas and bloating and and you know he's he just avoids really most dairy because he feels better at this point in his life so it's you know it's it's sometimes um can make a huge difference and something that we really encourage a lot of people to give a trial for yeah i think you know we've all been sort of brainwashed that we can't live without milk and dairy and then it's it's uh important for all these reasons which turns out not to be i would say that um you know clinically practicing functional medicine for plus 30 years and you also you know is one of those foods that is really problematic for a lot of people not just lactose intolerance but eczema asthma just general digestive discomfort acne autoimmune diseases all kinds of problems clear up when you stop dairy so if you've never done it i would encourage people to think about just taking a holiday for three or four weeks and just then adding it back and seeing what happens you'll know your body will tell you very quickly whether or not you are intolerant of dairy well i mean because it may not cause lactose intolerance but you can get other reactions like congestion sinus infections you know all kinds of skin issues eczema and so forth and we did a we did a peek and diet challenge with katie couric and and she has eczema she's like an arthritis and she got off all that junk and and it got better oh good for her good for her you know it is amazing like you were mentioning you can you can have a hard time digesting the carbohydrate in the dairy and have the lactose intolerance and you can also have a sensitivity to the proteins in the dairy and and with a sensitivity with the proteins a lot of times that will cause acne or it'll cause the eczema or asthma or inflammation in the skin um and and of course you can have an immediate reaction to dairy too you can have an ige allergy so you can have an allergy a sensitivity or a lactose intolerance there's so many ways that people react to to uh dairy and in my second case here was a 20 year old woman who came in and she got bloated every time she ate she felt full and she sometimes had diarrhea and stomach pains so she was just really struggling with her digestion it would sometimes be constipated but then sometimes diarrhea sometimes rushing to the bathroom really feeling bloated a lot and when we got our history we realized that she had this long history of acne well not she's only 20. so it wasn't that long but a few you know a history of acne and so she was placed on antibiotics for the acne at age 18 and she had been on antibiotics for a couple years and what we know is that even though those antibiotics may clear up the acne for you know immediately at that time long term that's a huge concern because it's getting rid of all the good bacteria on our skin that prevents acne in the future and it's also getting rid of all the good bacteria in our digestive system that's that is keeping our digestive system working well and so that can really mess up the the uh the microbiome and result in in lots of issues and for her you know over time she started to have a lot more issues being on those antibiotics with her digestion so you know for her we did it we did a dairy free trial it just for both her skin and her digestion and you know we saw a good improvement in her digestion and her skin like her digestion got about 50 percent better her skin got 60 to seventy percent better but she was not a hundred percent better so then we need to do more testing we did testing for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth we did stool testing and we found that she had this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that we needed to treat and so you know i think a lot of times those long-term antibiotics like that can result in this overgrowth of bacteria that then you know that then then just snowballs into more and more problems and so we needed to treat that with an herbal approach and it was at that point when we kept her off of the dairy treated her bacterial overgrowth that she you know started to get much better in terms of her digestion her skin improved her digestion improved and her pain and her belly improved significantly as well um and and you know what she she sometimes at this point cheats with a little bit of you know healthy yogurt but um but she mostly stays off the voluntary and is doing much better well i mean you know basically the messenger thing is when in doubt cut it out there's a lot of the chemical sunscreens like ava benzone i don't even know all of the names of them the chemical sunscreens and many of those are potential endocrine disrupting chemicals as well the flip side is mark i'm one of those people who grew up in the south had more than my share of sunburns had my first skin cancer when i was 37 so i also want to slow down skin aging and wrinkles and skin cancer so we kind of have to say well how do you get the protection you want without putting yourself at risk i personally am a real fan of the zinc and titanium the mineral based sunscreens or even just a hat covering your skin staying out of the sun in the middle of the day i mean i think there's a lot of other things we can do that are going to be safer for us and safer for the planet one of my favorite one-stop shopping places to learn more about safety levels and which either skincare or sunscreens contain things we do or don't want is the environmental environmental working group and i know you you've been a big supporter of their work for years i think they were some of the pioneers at really raising awareness and what i love about them is they have a safe cosmetics database that you can search by type so you could search sunscreens or you could search by brand plug in your favorite brand and see how it rates to others on their list what about the sort of things like the tick stuff because people are worried about ticks and deet is really uh common which is a terrible toxin that's used to kill insects but also it's a neurotoxin that can affect humans so and then you know they say not to touch yourself don't put your mouth but like putting your skin it goes through everything so tell us a little bit about deet and and what to do about that yeah so that that's another one i mean you know mark in the berkshires ticks are everywhere so for those of us who love to be in the woods you always have to be mindful of enjoying your time in the beautiful woods and hiking without putting yourself at risk for getting a tick-borne illness so how do we navigate that balance as well um you know for people who are super concerned i don't know how you feel about this but you know if you tuck your pants into your socks and put a little deed around where they join maybe that's enough i don't know um i i don't do it i mean i hike all the time and you know the other nice thing about being in the berkshires i can come home strip on my front porch leave my clothes on the outside go in and do my tick check because i think that's probably the most important thing um the other interesting piece though is there's there's emerging science-based evidence that some essential oils may be almost effective at sd at repelling ticks there's been some research on lemon eucalyptus oil on thyme oil on citronella so i think that is another reasonable option to try to get some of the tick repellent benefits without causing harm so those essential oils are basically plant chemicals that are repaired and this sort of loops back to you know the sort of view of functional medicine which is that plants are highly intelligent they they're in fact sentient beings believe it or not they have 20 different senses and they do all kinds of smart stuff that we you know we don't really attribute to plants but they produce these molecules to deter insects from the cells so and they communicate with other plants so if there's a caterpillar eating a plant that plant goes ooh i'm getting eaten by caterpillar i'm going to produce this molecule and by the way i'm going to send a message to my neighboring plant friends over there through the mycelium rhizome network that you should secrete this chemical too and so these plants produce all these wonderful chemicals that we use you know for our own benefit but they're really for their benefit uh and and i think the essential oils are great and there's a lot of natural alternative uh products out there that that are for insects repellent for skin care for makeup the only thing you don't realize the makeup there's like lead you know and and a lot of makeup and a lot of lipstick it's leather lipsticks yes oh my gosh oh my gosh and those things are you know really avoidable um it's just a matter of education and i think the beautiful thing about as we move in the right direction is people start to become conscious as we push those companies by our financial choices we actually can drive the marketplace into a better a better set of products and that that is really what we need to be doing okay so it's you know it's a big deal to think about what you put on your skin i remember you know learning that basically if you wouldn't eat it you shouldn't put it on your skin and and you and i both know that when we were in medical school that we delivered all kinds of drugs to the skin i mean one of the quickest ways to get someone relief from chest pain if they came into the emergency room with engine or you know heart disease was to slap a toothpaste tube full of like nitroglycerin cream and put a put a bandage over it and that kind of went right through the skin you know there's hormone patches for women there's pain patches there's all sorts of patches that people use because the skin is a vehicle for delivering medicine so it makes a logical sense to think that we should be aware of what we're putting on our skin in terms of sunblock insect repellent makeup you know body care products and yet most of us never give a thought about it so tell us cindy why why should we really care and i think it's it is you know because this is it seems to be like maybe a trivial issue but how big of an issue is this and why should we worry or should we well i'm glad you pointed out that we absorb things through the skin so we think we put it on our skin and it's just going to stay on the outside but it can potentially get inside our bodies and one of the challenges mark is trying to do good research to actually prove cause and effect when you're looking at some of the carriers or um preservatives that are added to the things like the the cosmetics that we put on our skin um you know our old model of what happens with toxicity is the dose makes the poison you know you have to have massive amounts for it to have a negative impact but there's so many things that are in our skin care products like phthalates or parabens that have been dubbed endocrine disrupting chemicals and what that means is even tiny amounts especially at critical windows may actually muck up hormonal signaling and have long lasting impacts that's less related to the dose but the cumulative exposure over time um yeah and so so it's hard to tease out i mean you might be having exposures every day in teeny tiny amounts that don't seem immediately problematic but down the road when you're struggling with insulin resistance or breast cancer or uterine fibroids or thyroid issues it could be related to these endocrine disrupting chemicals that have wreaked havoc on our hormone balance i mean so yeah so why why are all these compounds used in these products i mean why do we need all these petrochemical endocrine disrupting hormone-busting disrupting compounds why are they there it's a great question so parabens typically are added as a preservative to extend the shelf life of your skin creams or your your topical creams failing yeah so we'll go rinse it so you can keep it on yourself for a year or two and it won't smell funny or won't go bad um and so you don't get bacteria i mean some of them are trying to keep contaminants out um phthalates tend to be embedded with fragrances to make things smell pleasing to us when we put them on our bodies and those are also endocrine disrupting chemicals and and um and is there a way to measure in the body whether there are these chemicals that are there from these products that people are using that's a great question mark um in studies that are trying to tease out how they influence our health they often look at urinary levels to see how much people are exposed to it's a little bit challenging however because it turns out that all of us show evidence of exposure to these chemicals so it's a little bit hard to know what to do with measurements um other than trying to do it from a scientific standpoint say do the levels track with health outcomes in clinical practice i have not done that i don't know if you found it helpful or not and when i was first looking at it we ended up coming back to the same recommendations anyway we need to reduce exposure and find ways to support your bodies getting rid of them right i mean everybody should cut out toxins from their life and everybody should do all the things they can to upregulate their biology to detoxify these compounds for sure but sometimes it's really helpful like you know people just don't know about their exposures i had one woman who was using sunblock for years and her makeup we checked you and super high levels of parabens i'm like oh this isn't good and other people you have high levels of phthalates because they're drinking plastic water bottles or people have bpa because they're not aware of where it's coming from which is best finale that comes from credit card receipts or restaurant receipts or you know just all kinds of you know gas station all that stuff it's just it's a lot it's in plastics and bottles so i think i think we really can raise awareness by seeing that it's in your system you know i think i think i find that often helpful for people to change their behavior too like and and then then you can actually track it and see that it's coming down and see what's happening and i think you know it is a little amorphous because you know when you look at you know on an individual level it's hard to draw the connections in a one-to-one level of whether this caused the problem or not but if you but if you look at a population-wide level these toxins clearly are linked to all sorts of harmful effects in terms of endocrine disorders heart disease cancers and more and and i think it really is important people understand what they're doing what they're putting on their body right so the the um the other thing you know i'd love you to talk about is some of the the epigenetic effects of the um toxins on the fetus when the mother is exposed to the products that could cause this hormone destructive chemicals to get in the blood of the baby yeah i think that's really important to understand that there are critical windows or critical time frames that it's even more important to reduce exposure and one of those classic time frames is when a woman is pregnant even little bits of exposures in utero may affect the fetus and then those impacts persist into adolescence a study a few years ago what they what they did a lot of the data has to be correlative but they measured urinary levels of phthalates and parabens in women at two different points in their pregnancy and then when their babies were born they tracked them for nine ten eleven years and they found that higher levels of phthalates and parabens in the urine the daughters of women with those higher levels ended up going into puberty earlier which now that doesn't prove cause and effect but you know sometimes you can't ethically design a study and when we see research like that that it does correlate with endocrine challenges down the road we have to take that seriously we have to take that seriously there's been some other research linking exposure in utero in particular or early childhood to phthalates and parabens to higher incidence of adhd like symptoms in adolescence so even neurodevelopment again a lot of the data is correlative and epidemiologic but we can't really design a placebo-controlled double-blinded trial to willingly expose one group of women and not expose another and track their children for 20 years yeah i mean it's linked to add to neurodevelopmental issues behavioral issues later stage symptoms of um you know obesity even diabetes heart disease cancer when they're exposed to these compounds in utero which is kind of striking because i think people don't seriously think about what they're putting on their skin but it is one of the most important things that you do every single day literally you're doing besides eating most of us put stuff on our skin every day whether it's shampoo whether it's face cream whether it's makeup whether it's sunblock whether it's insect repellent like these are things that we use a lot of in america and and unfortunately they're really problematic so um let's say you say you you go oh geez i've been using this stuff for a while i'm going to switch to all these other products uh but what do i do to get rid of these embedded toxins because if we did a fat biopsy of every american you know we wouldn't be too pretty there'd be a lot of these compounds in there that are all stored in there to help get them down and we've done we've done uh podcasts on detoxification but we're not talking about like a water fast or some crazy thing we're talking about you're supporting the body's natural built-in detox pathways how do we do that you know mark before we jump into that i want to come back to something that you just said about the fat biopsy um and i know that urine levels can sometimes be really helpful at motivating people to say oh my gosh i need to look at this but we have to be aware that even if they're not showing up in the urine if we've had old exposures they do tend to get deposited in fat and we're not doing fat biopsies on people i just want to point that out so don't use a an okay looking urine to say okay not a problem for me right right for sure and it's been a it's been a concern as well if those are all residing as deposits in fat tissue if somebody really rapidly loses weight and starts to mobilize all that all those stored toxins it could potentially put extra burden on a lot of different processes in the body so it's just food for thought um and you have and you have done a lot of podcasts on detoxification it really is coming back to the basics i mean how do we get rid of things we sweat by we break a sweat by going out in the woods or exercising or sitting in a sauna we really have to focus on optimal gut function um hot fiber dense diet a healthy microbiome and specific foods that support all of our detoxification pathways we can talk about a few of those um drinking enough water i mean it's really i don't know that there is a super magic for these endocrine disrupting chemicals except it's really important to make sure our detoxifying enzymes have the nutrients they need to do their job and what are those things that our body needs most of to actually get rid of these toxins yeah we need b vitamins we need magnesium we need these sulfur-containing amino acids that are rich in foods like broccoli kale brussels sprouts garlic onions the allium family antioxidant rich foods can kind of fill the gap with some of the deeply pigmented fruits and vegetables you know similar theme i think that's come up in other areas but those are some of the foods that are most important prebiotic prebiotic-rich foods that can select out a healthy robust diverse microbiome that can also kind of if we have detoxified and mobilized things can help us get rid of it and clear it out of our system those are the other other practices that we can do to help our detox system like saunas exercise lymphatic drainage and um infrared saunas hot and cold therapy all those things help mobilize toxins from our system right right do you have any favorites yourself uh do i have any favorites i i do have um a lot of things that i do to actually mobilize my toxins every day i make sure that i eat brassicas every day so last time we had a big bunch of broccoli rabe for that night brussels sprouts uh lots of garlic and onions i use a lot of spices in my cooking and i also make sure i do saunas i do ice baths i sweat i actually like to sweat a lot so my exercise is great yoga is great for lymphatic drainage getting massages it's great to mobilize tissue lip stores so there's a lot of techniques you can use to actually help and then i take the right supplements i make sure i take a cocktail because i've had mercury poisoning i have weak detox enzymes i take n-acetyl cysteine i take all the methylation vitamins i take a lot of the things that actually help to mobilize these toxins given the sulforaphane boosting compounds um i even use indole to endomethane as a way of sort of helping with you know some of the effects on hormone metabolism so i i'm sort of pretty fanatic about because i've been so it from being toxic and i don't want to be toxic anymore but you know the truth is it's hard like i you know i didn't stop eating fish and i um you know i got my mercury levels down years and years ago from like almost 200 to like you know eight or five wow and i was like oh you know it's been a bunch of years and i've been sort of a little bit lazy about fish i don't eat tuna i don't eat swordfish but occasionally occasionally i have a piece of tuna when i go out occasionally i don't eat halibut i never eat swordfish occasionally i'll have you know more fish than i would think and i thought i'm good but i just checked my levels and i again my level was super high and like 37 on a challenge test wow you know like i think we're just we're just in such a toxic world and it's hard it's hard i mean last night i made a delicious you know spanish kind of greek baked cod with tomato sauce but like cod is not terrible it's not the worst but it's definitely got mercury and i'm just like what am i doing well it's like what are you going to eat you know so comfortable i've come to believe that you know grass fed regenerative meat or wild meat is probably the safest protein on the planet i know it's maybe controversial to say that but you know even you know even um you've got unless you've got really well grown whole grains and beans uh that are generally raised and have no glyphosate sprayed on them and are not you know genetically altered and there's like a lot of messy stuff in the plant world so i don't know but i i definitely make sure i up regulate my system all the time you know mark you you raise an interesting point as well i think everybody is different in terms of their genetic predisposition to handle a given amount of exposure or not it's not that we're just going to let okay you're a good detoxifier you can let yourself do whatever but i think that's also an important point that some people need more support than others we all want to reduce burden we want to reduce what's coming in but some of us have to go the extra step and really do more aggressive programs like you're doing if you love that last video you should check out the next one for sure on getting the root cause of all disease there's so many things that drive inflammation and if you're overweight you're inflamed most of our chronic illnesses start in the gut you need to address the inflammation in your brain in order for you to lose weight right

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 273,170

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: MYjvbNPJVmo

Length: 149min 34sec (8974 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021