"These HEALTHY Foods Will COMPLETELY HEAL YOUR BODY!" | Mark Hyman & Lewis Howes

uh i see panic attacks anxiety disorders often caused by the food we're eating what would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health oh that's not hard so i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome us how much does food play a part with mental health in your mind absolutely you know louis we are in a mental health crisis we are in a immune crisis we are in a food crisis we are in a social crisis that that is sort of likes of which we i don't think we've seen in our lifetime maybe back in the 60s it was a little bit ridiculous i was around then but i was like eight and and i think what's happened is that we've we've gotten so um confused about what to eat and and our diet has changed so much that it's driving so many chronic diseases and most people don't understand the connection between food and mood so your question how does food affect our brain well i wrote a book about 13 years ago called the ultramine solution about how the body affects the mind we often know about the mind body effect which is real but there's also the other direction going on and it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood behavior attention memory and and this is not just sort of hypothetical but there's a whole department for example at harvard of nutritional psychiatry there's a whole department at stanford of metabolic psychiatry i've had both of them on my podcast at doctor's pharmacy the doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain in the mood and we see depression anxiety irritability stress it turns out that when you eat the american diet or otherwise known as the sad diet this standard american diet that that people uh are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain and we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain you know when you cut yourself and you get infection it's red and hot and sore and inflamed if you sprain your ankle it's sore if you get a sore throat it's sore and red when your brain is inflamed it doesn't hurt the only way your nose brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences and so the food that we're eating pretending this sugar and starch and processed ingredients additives the lack of good fats the predominance of bad fats and refined oils the nutrient depletion of our diet i mean 95 of us are deficient probably in omega-3 fats you know 90 plus percent of americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency which all play a role in mood like folate magnesium is incredible for anxiety iron zinc all these vitamin d all these play a role in the brain function when you hear about winter blues you know that's because of lack of vitamin d so we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood and and the clinical trials have been really staggering showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression i see panic attacks anxiety disorders often caused by the food we're eating just an example when you eat sugar or starch your cortisol level goes up which is the stress hormone your adrenaline goes up so if you eat a bagel or a cookie your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber-toothed tiger wow and and that and that can create anxiety internally with the insulin internally yeah yeah i mean you could be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal but if you eat all that crap your brain is gonna feel it your your body's gonna feel it so what happens what happens to the brain when the when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it goes into your gut does it send signals to your brain and then it starts to uh you know what does that do is it inflame it in that moment does it take time to inflame something so so there's a whole cascade of things that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar that's 60 of our diet right it's ultra processed food it's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything and and what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar which then creates a spike and insulin at the same time you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline that's the first phase of the response of course it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol and all that but what happens next is even more concerning it it drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten sugar and starch and whatever bad fats it drives it into your fat cells and it's a one-way street into your fat cells called your adipocytes around your belly those belly fat cells those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals like hundreds of chemicals hormones inflammatory marker markers and messengers neurotransmitters it's it's quite striking when you look at they're not just like holding up your pants it's fat there it's like it's actually doing stuff and when you eat in that way it drives hunger it stores fat it shuts down your metabolism and it slows literally slows your metabolism and even worse it locks the fat cells so that that can't get out like a one-way turnstile and get in and then on top of that it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules we call them adipose cytokines they go to your brain and then create inflammation in the brain so it's a kind of a downstream effect over chronic eating this way if you have one cookie or one bagel it's not gonna kill you right right but if you're constantly eating this stuff and we're talking about the average american eats a pound almost a flour and sugar a day wow a pound like 152 pounds of sugar 133 pounds of flour you add that up and it's and i know i'm not that eating that much and you aren't so a lot of people are making up for the difference right right so food affects your mood for sure yeah and not even that it's not even just uh you know what it was striking i i don't know if you had david plummer on the show but he wrote a book called brainwash and it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this uh american diet that we're all eating it disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala now what does that mean in english the frontal lobe is a grown-up it's the adult in the room it's like it's like you think you're going to punch that guy but you go i better not punch that guy right right it's that it's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self and the amygdala is your reptile brain it's your lizard brain it's going to just run or fight or flee and it's and and what happens is literally physiologically these parts of the brain are connected but when you eat crap they get disconnected and so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grown-up in the room which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred and i mean just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now i think a large part of that has to do with uh our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian uh insult that is driving uh behavior change and when we look at and we look at the fact of other data to support it's not just a theory in prisons if you give prisoners healthy food swapping out all the crap they eat in prisons which is pretty darn bad there's a 56 reduction in violent crime in the presence if you add a multivitamin it's an 80 reduction come on if you look at kids and this is in juvenile detention centers they've done clinical trials because they've got these people locked up so you've got it's a really great kind of study now these kind of studies are hard to do because mostly we're free we call them free living humans who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they want they don't follow the protocol when you're locked up you get what you get right and so they took these vehicles the environment's the same for everyone yeah all that stuff that's right and they took these kids and they and they uh these were kids were disruptive violent aggressive oppositional suicidal it was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods it was a 91 reduction in all violent behavior you know oppositional behavior need for restraints went down suicide went down 100 percent i mean it's the third leading cause of death in that age group it went down 100 no no suicides and so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry and you know wait a minute maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems with obesity and the problems with chronic disease and the fact that covet is is uh landed on a perfect you know laboratory for spreading in america because we're also unhealthy and immune systems are so sick because of our diet but it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our and our mood and our behavior which we're seeing it rampant in society today what would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health oh that's not hard so i mean you know i in my book the pagan diet it's called 21 practical principles first for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world and and it's really practical and there's a bunch of steps at the end but but i think you know the real dangers are one um high fructose corn syrup because anything with high fructose corn syrup almost by definition is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other bad crap so if you're reading labels like if you just can eliminate that that would be like number one number two would be trans fats hydrogenated fats which what is that what's really what's that in what foods is that is that processed packaged foods what hydrogenated fats what's that fried food is that french fries yeah well hydronium frats have literally been have been banned by the fda essentially ruled not safe to eat but they're still out there okay you can still find them it's less but it's and they used to be really it makes crisco shortening so anything that comes with a baked good or any any processed food uh and the third thing would be you know you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard can pronounce and recognize in other words would you have butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad you know which is also known as bht it's a preservative that's been linked to cancer it's banned in europe we have it in everything here you know so if you wouldn't have you know azo dicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries you probably shouldn't eat it and yet this is in so much of our foods in fact in america it's legal this is an ingredients used in breads to make them fluffier subway used it in their subway sandwiches if they have to take it out yeah yeah yeah so our friend our friend ashamed them into taking out but it's still legal here it's not illegal they just she just shamed them publicly by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the subway and got them but in in singapore for example if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food you get a 15-year jail sentence and a 450 thousand dollars no you do not yes you do i swear to god in europe a lot of these chemicals are made so so basically just eat real food so get rid of all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble and then you know there's another hierarchy of how do you even upgrade the quality but the whole principle of the pagan diet is that one food is medicine food is medicine and quality matters and it's not just calories it's it's information and it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite and so when you're putting something in your mouth you're literally speaking to your genes you're speaking to your hormones your brain chemistry your immune system your microbiome your mitochondria everything is controlled by what we're eating so the book is really focused on two key principles one is food is medicine and the other is personalized nutrition and medicine because you know i called the pagan diet as a joke between paleo and keto right sure you know and i had a i was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist and another one was a paleo doc and they were just fighting i was in the middle and i felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth and i was sort of i was like trying to break the break the tension a little bit and i said hey if you're a paleo and you're vegan i must be pagan and it was kind of a joke and everybody laughed i was like oh wow that was good and then i thought about on the way home and basically they're identical except for where you get your protein animals or grains and beans they both agree that we should eat whole foods they both agree with lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get our processed foods and low sugar and even agree that we should not be eating dairy which is a whole controversial subject but they're pretty identical sure and so the goal of this book is not to create a dogma but to create a big ten inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way so what are the principles of eat healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures different preferences different belief systems and i think you know i always encourage people to listen to their body not to dogma you know a lot of our nutrition advice is based on oh be keto or be paleo or be vegan or be this or be that be raw and the truth is it depends on you if you are if i do keto my body doesn't respond great i mean like i do higher fat but but right but another person is a diabetic they might do great on it right you know one person on a vegan diet like rich roll may be able to run triathlons i mean you know just incredible iron man stunts of heroic effort but he may be a unicorn or maybe he's figured out how to do it and other patients of mine see are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of their nutrition depleted or they don't have protein their body their body doesn't like it i just had a patient for example this week who was a young woman 26 years old who's been a vegetarian vegan she's basically a vegetable and sugar vegan and she didn't even like to she would eat sugar as well yeah oh yeah well a lot of people who are being eaten sugar because it's the body starts to crave the carbohydrates and sugar so it's it's not uncommon and and so she wasn't overweight at all but metabolically she was super unhealthy she had you know acne and she had her gut was a mess and she had very low protein like very very low amino acids she had very low vitamin d extremely low b12 very low iodine very low zinc i mean and you know she was extremely unwell and and her diet was just so uh not fit for her so we've had we had to sort of upregulate it and change it a little bit i had to get her on some different protein shakes which she needed i had to upgrade other vitamins i had to sort of get her off the sugar i mean it but i think you know it takes a lot of work so the key is how do you personalize the diet and get away from the uh basically religious nutrition that we which is either all vegan vegetarian keto all right carnivore there's all these extreme exactly yeah and and again i only encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room which is their own body their self right yeah like how do you feel uh do you feel great do you feel bad how's your stomach how's your head how you're clear you have energy i mean what what is happening to you so i think it's important to understand that that um you know we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine there's a whole section here on personalized nutrition and how do you identify your particular needs by various kinds of testing whether it's genetic testing whether it's metabolic testing food sensitivity testing and how do you actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way uh but it seems so extreme in my mind you know and yeah and i i empathize with vegans and i'm like yeah i don't want to hurt animals either and i you know but then i've tried it for a while and i'm also like gosh but i miss meats and it's like yeah yeah what is the way and what i'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all you have to really figure out what works for you yeah the one size that fits all is quality is is understanding food is information just meat for example so feedlot meat is an abomination it's it's horribly cruel to the animals it it it grows the animals in ways that are extremely destructive to the environment by these mono crop corn and soy fields we use to grow feed the feed lots that produce tremendous amounts of pollution all the hormones and antibiotics that we use and the quality of the meat is very different and the um you know so it's basically bad for you bad for the plant and bad for the animals so they should be banned 100 yeah but that doesn't necessarily mean that eating a wild buffalo is bad for your health right sure and or eating eggs grass-fed yeah or eating a fully grass-finished regeneratively raised cow or animal is bad for you in fact there's a chapter in the book uh one of the principles is you know he is is meat medicine right and and it's kind of a joke in a way like a little bit of provocative comment but what's really fascinating to me there's an article just published a couple of days ago another one about how if you look at you know feedlot meat it produces inflammation in the body it actually is is really not that great for us but if you look at these animals that have foraged on hundreds of different plants with all different phytonutrient compositions and all different vitamin and mineral contents they literally seek out and forage medicines in their diet and there's a guy i had on my podcast fred provenza who has studied rangeland animals his whole life and is working with researchers at duke and they've discovered in properly raised meat actually phytochemicals and this blew my mind meaning you have plant compounds like catechins that you find in green tea at the same levels in certain meat depending on what they eat wow so you have all these antioxidant anti-inflammatory detoxifying compounds found in meat that's raised properly and the other argument obviously is climate and yes you know i think the the the the factory farming of animals is an abomination and it is a huge contributor to climate change um and environmental degradation ecological collapse however that doesn't mean that you know we had 169 million ruminants roaming around the plains in america hundreds of years ago i mean we shot them we shot them all like we like basically buffalo bill said it for every every buffalo killed is an indian dead and they literally decimated like 60 million buffalo to down to a few hundred that's correct yeah and and so those those buffalo and those ruminants put in 50 to 8 to 50 feet of topsoil across america which is why we had such rich agricultural lands now we've lost over a third of that top soil because of our farming methods like monocropping and tilling it's degenerating the soil so that the soil can't hold the carbon because plants breathe carbon from the atmosphere they suck it into the plant that goes down in the ground into the roots and it feeds the microbiome of the soil and the microbiome of the soil then feeds the plants because you need it's this beautiful symbiotic relationship where the nutrients from the soil cannot be extracted unless the microbiome is healthy in the soil so you get we get all these nutrient-depleted plants and then we lose the carbon in the soil and we end up with you know climate change at accelerated level in fact the food system itself end-to-end is the number one cause of climate change by about 50 of it not not even fossil fuels wow yeah more than fossil fuels because when you look at end-to-end you know factory farming deforestation soil erosion food waste you know refrigeration transport all that stuff it's it's huge and so yes factory farming should be banned but it turns out that regenerative agriculture and i talked about how to be a regenetarian in the book which is a really interesting concept nobody can disagree with right you want to regenerate human health you want to regenerate planetary and ecological health yeah who's going to be against that right you're going to be vegan or paleo but like you can't be against that it's like being against motherhood or apple pie and so i i basically create um a framework of understanding the science around how if we use animals in in a ecosystem on a farm we can dramatically accelerate the production of soil and gabe brown is as a farmer north dakota who was a traditional farmer monocrop went through cycles of destruction of his farm through hail and storms and droughts and was going to go bankrupt and then discover the writings of thomas jefferson and discovered that the practices that they used a long time ago to preserve and conserve soil cover crops crop rotations you know putting in animals as part of the ecosystem and having roots in the ground all time all these very simple ideas that are regenerative agriculture and he was able to turn his farm around and has built 29 inches of topsoil makes makes 20 times what his neighbor does in terms of profit makes more food better food does not use any chemicals inputs or water it's unbelievable and it's something that is now scaling up across the country and the u.n says that if we took and by the way 40 of agricultural land around the world is not suitable for growing crops so even if you're a vegan you want to grow crop you can't do that on that land then it's just going to waste and what animals do is they have like all these stomachs and the ability to eat stuff that is inedible to us and turn into incredibly high quality nutrients grass and yeah yeah right like we're gonna be and we're not gonna be sitting like a gorilla you know eating 400 pounds of food every day just to get the nutrients we need so i think you know like oh gorillas are strong yeah but they eat all freaking day and they eat enormous amount of food in order just to get like a little bit from it so so we have to understand the the u.n says that if we took these two million of the five million degraded hectares of land around the world and we converted them regenerative agriculture we could stop climate change for 20 years so it's not like vegan and save the planet it's like not someone someone russ cons or is a farmer said it's not the cow it's the how right and and their studies are showing that for example if you eat kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat all your inflammatory markers go down whereas if eat the feedlot mean your inflammatory markers go up kangaroo well and it was done in australia kangaroos wow you can actually go in the grocery store and buy kangaroos yeah yeah i wonder what that tastes like that's interesting no but i've had i've had um i've had the llamas from um from south america what was that the gonacos was incredibly delicious it was uh this patagonia i had the ganaco that was the closest thing i've had to a kangaroo that's interesting but i've had ostrich i've had i've had buffalo i've had elk i've had venison what's the best tasting meat you've ever had i like elk good elk chop is like the best i just don't know why but it's so good interesting it tastes better than uh a steak yeah i really do think so and there's this company i have nothing to do with this company but friend of mine turned me on to it called wild idea buffalo which is basically grass finished wild buffalo and they harvest in really humane ways and it's super yummy and tasty and tender and delicious and you know you're eating basically like the native americans did so wow i mean honestly the the plains indians the native americans they lived very long they were at the turn of the last century they were the longest-lived people uh had the highest number of centurions yeah in 1900 and pretty much all they ate was buffalo with a few berries and seeds and stuff that they gathered did they have fruits or did they not have fruit a little bit yeah you know you've heard of pemmican right you know what pemmican is what's that pemmican is basically dried uh dried meat and fat from like usually with buffalo or other animals with a little bit of berries okay um and it and it was super nutrient dense and when lewis and clark uh went across america they carried pemmican because one pound a pemmic a day would feed would feed you um if you're a woman with half a pound and so they literally could bring 30 pounds of food for a month and and they had this it was dried it lasted forever so it was the food that the native americans used uh which is dried pemmican so it was like some buffalo meat dried with was kind of like a beef jerky type of thing with some nuts yes but it's high in fat very high in fat so very high in fat and meat and and berries interesting so native americans lived on that they probably had much smaller fruits back then as well like little baby apples wild right and wild like two bites yeah well all those foods were so more nutrient dense i mean another example of food is medicine you know we talked about the the meat is medicine but you know one of the most exciting things i've heard about recently is you know well here here's a concept when you look at plants the harder or animals the harder they have to work to survive the more nutritious they are so so what are those plants what are those plants so if you're eating a mono crop vegetable or plant or grain it's the worst it's almost deployed of nutrients it's bred for starch and sugar monochrome means meaning like you have a giant cornfield or a giant soybean field or one one crop you have like acres you know right you have like you know 2 000 acres of broccoli or whatever that's the least nutrient dense yes yes and then if you get a and then if you get and if you get organic a little better if you get regenerative it's even better because the soil is so nutrient dense because the soil think about like these traditional crops are growing now they're grown basically in dead soil yeah and all the nutrients have to go in so it's like it's it's like they're getting the npk which is essentially the the basic nutrients for plants nitrogen phosphorus and potassium but they don't get all the other stuff right and so they look at all the rich things that come from the microbiome of the soil extracting all these incredible minerals nutrients i mean your broccoli today is 50 less nutritious than it was 50 years ago so they don't they don't get all this incredible nutrients from the from the soil and and and so when you're looking at these incredible uh stresses on plants that happen for example in a regenerative system which is a little harder for them to grow or a wild system the nutrient content is so much higher because there's this phenomena in science and medicine called hormesis hormesis means a stress but then that stress makes you stronger so it's essentially what doesn't kill you makes you stronger right so if you lift weights you know you're going to tear your muscles but then they'll get stronger if you do interval training you're going to like feel like crap and it's hard and stress but it'll make you stronger or if you you know do any kind of stress to your system it actually can create a rebound effect like ozone does that and many other therapies will literally create a stress and then the body will come back and bite it wild plants are are the most nutritious so wild blueberry is better than a regenerative blueberry better than organic blueberry better than a feedlot i mean a mono crop blueberry farm right that's full of pesticides and chemicals not all broccoli is created equal no not all plants are crazy i like to eat weird food i like to eat strange food i'm here in hawaii and and i'm going to the farmer's market and i'm eating stuff i never ate before i don't even know what half of these fruits are i said a syrian cherry which was like an explosion of flavor and color i'd never even eaten or heard of it in my life so i'm like big on eating weird food uh we eat about three crops sixty percent of our diet is three crops basically corn wheat and soy and in the rest of the world it's often rice and then about 12 plants comprise the other part of our diet and there's like 800 species of of plants we used to eat there's many livestock species we lost 90 of our edible plant species 50 of our livestock species so we're eating all this mono junk when you go to europe you get a lot more you know artisanal stuff and so anyway what's amazing about um food is that when you eat the right foods and you're eating quality foods you literally can can activate all these healing mechanisms in your body by using the plants defense mechanisms to help you so here's a really cool story it explains how food is medicine and last night you know what i had for dinner what's that i had pancakes oh that sounds good but i didn't have just any pancakes and like dr hyman's having pancakes for dinner what is up with him no i had special pancakes made from himalayan tartary buckwheat himalayan tartary buckwheat is is a plant that has been almost forgotten that was grown in the himalayas under extremely rough conditions right no water out high altitude you know basically crappy soil you know cold weather i mean you name it it was the worst place i mean you don't want to grow uh something you don't want to grow it in tibet you want to grow in like you know iowa right yeah yeah so but this plant as a result of all these stresses this special type of buckwheat developed all these defense mechanisms and it is one of the most powerful superfoods on the planet it's developed over 130 or 40 phytochemicals some which are not found anywhere else in the world that regulate your immune system and literally can rejuvenate your immune system so it's called himalayan buckwheat himalayan tartary buckwheat like the tartars i gotta get this where can we get it you can't yet but you will how'd you get it oh i have inside track my mentor and and my friend dr jeffrey bland is a nutritional biochemist student of linus pauling who has you know taught all of us about food as medicine and food is information and functional medicine and and discovered this almost by accident there was he read about in a journal there was some obscure reference he tracked it down long story short he found this farmer who'd gotten some of these seeds by accident from the usda grew a little bit of it and he started working with him and this summer they produced the first hundred thousand pounds of himalayan tartar buckwheat so he sent me a couple of pound bag of this flour and so i made pancakes from that flour and it's it's basically higher in protein higher in vitamins minerals and higher and it's the highest protein of any grain and it's not really great it's a fruit and it's got all these phytochemicals that rejuvenate your immune system so here's just to take you down the rabbit hole for a minute and how explain that how does food act as medicine i mean it sounds good dr hyman but how does it actually work okay so here's what happens as we age this is a little complicated story but it's worth telling as we age our immune systems age as well it's called immunosenescence the aging of our immune system and part of that happens because in our bone marrow we have stem cells and and we have stem cells for white blood cells now if you are eating the typical american diet you're exposed to all the crap in our food and the toxins in our environment and all that these stem cells get injured literally get mutated and they produce their progeny which are their white blood cells we produce a million white blood cells in our bone marrow every minute one million and then they go out in the periphery and the rest of your body and they do their job right when you have these mutated funky white blood cells they're called chips they get in the circulation and they become zombie cells you might have heard of zombie cells which create aging and these zombie cells create cancer and heart disease and inflammation and and autoimmune diseases and all kinds of stuff and they're very hard to get rid of because they just live forever they're like zombies how do you get rid of them well it turns out by some magical twist of uh nature that the himalayan tartary buckwheat phytochemicals target and kill come on the cells that are zombie cells so literally i had an immunorejuvenating pancake dinner last night i'm so proud of myself it was the first it was the first time i ever had breakfast for dinner it was so good i mean with berries put a little cinnamon in there which is good for your blood sugar you know it's so high in protein i put an egg in there macadamia milk really simple no it wasn't super starchy and it just it was delicious and it's rich almost yellow color to the flower with all the phytochemicals so that's an example of how food is medicine so i think we are just beginning to understand this in fact the the rockefeller foundation has funded hundreds of millions of dollars into studying what they call the periodic table of phytonutrients which means they're classifying the 25 000 plus phytochemicals found in plant foods and everybody's heard about this oh wine has resveratrol and green tea has catechins and broccoli has sulforaphane and you know himalayan tarter buckwheat has you know a whole list of stuff right so we're kind of familiar with the idea of phytochemicals why do you eat blueberries because they have promenado cyanogens right but they're they're cataloging all of these and there's many unknown ones like in himalayan tarty buckwheat we're discovering ones we've never even knew about before and we want to be eating these these are the these are the medicines that are in food this is when the the animals are foraging around eating this they literally can get these in their meat and the thing about the the climate change thing when you actually look at at the regenerative agriculture model for raising animals now you have to eat them or not right you don't have to eat them but you have to include them in the in the cycle because without them you cannot build soil at a rapid rate right we've lost a third of our topsoil we are projected to lose all of it within 60 to 80 harvests this is according to the u.n and also an obama report from from soil so the only way to really build soil is to include animals in the process of agriculture by having the manure by having yeah yeah so you poo and pee and move around they move around like in this uh we call it adaptive grazing uh or there's different different terms for it but essentially it's a way of raising animals in herds and moving them around quickly in different fields not letting them over graze and they chomp down like the buffalo did or the elk they'd move they'd eat they they moved to the next spot and they wouldn't ruin the land they would and that peeing and pooing and their hoofs digging in the saliva from their mouth that saliva would literally fertilize like makes the plants grow more it's like it's like fertilizer for the plants so they get all slab and then the plants come back stronger and they put more roots down and it pulls more carbon in the atmosphere and it creates this virtuous cycle so if you're looking at for example eating a vegan burger plant a plant based burger like in a possible burger yeah it's better than a feedlot burger but they're growing the soy with glyphosate rich mono crop culture soy cultures and it's destroying the soil it's showing the microbiome the soil the glyphosate destroys your microbiome but in terms of climate change it it adds three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment whereas a regeneratively raised beef burger removes three and a half kilos of carbon so it's seven kilos of carbon kilograms of carbon less than a uh impossible burger so we have to sort of get into the nuances a little bit and and that's why i like to just people to eat real food and follow the principles of nature and uh and and it's amazing not only will it be good for the animals and good for the planet but it will regenerate your health and that's really what i see with my patients that the food is the most powerful drug on the planet what are you doing personally to help with uh staying young anti-aging beyond food are you doing stem cells yeah so i actually actually bone marrow everything in the book i have a whole section on how to eat for longevity so that's you know that's a lot of the principles there uh but in addition to the food and i think if you were to pick the number one two and three thing around longevity it would be your diet yeah really and then you know yeah for sure i mean you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet i hope i look as good as you when i'm your age i'm 61. all right it's unbelievable man great you should i've been working out yeah so i think exercise obviously is really important sleep meditation all those things those are the foundational things and then there's all the the hacks right and i think there's a whole class of things that people are using from things like nad to peptides to exosomes to hyperbaric chambers to ozone i think these are all where these are all around the corner and and i i use a lot of them personally i use ozone i use peptides i'll use exosomes i'd like to get a hyperbaric chamber but i can't get that you know but there are there's a lot of there's a lot of really cool things out there longevity and i think we just launched our like jeopardy road map docu series which discusses all this sort of emerging technology around stitching and people i think it's called longevity roadmap i think they just google it okay yeah that's interesting what would you say are the the the three things you you would keep doing for as long as you could to help you with anti-aging and and living longer and staying would it be the peptides would be something else i i listen i think it's like those are those are like there's the 80 and that's the 20. so that's the 20s all that fancy stuff and the 80 is food your food and fit exercise and i've been doing more strength training and i've been doing more cardio and um and i think you know sleep and meditation and then the other thing that people often don't think about for longevity is community love because love is medicine just like food is medicine absolutely and i stress in your heart you're gonna die yeah i mean it's going to make you it's really true and what's really striking is when you look at the data some of the most potent predictors of longevity is not your diet actually it's whether you are socially connected so if you're part of a knitting club or a bridge club or a bowling club like the longevity numbers just go crazy even and there's a great study that was done years ago in a little town called i think it's called rosario uh uh what was it rose rose something uh pennsylvania and it was basically in a community of italians from this one little village in italy that all kind of moved over to this one town years and years ago and they kind of left their old italian diet behind and adopted the american diet but this community was so tightly knit and there are all different economic spectrums in the community but they were always there for each other there were birthdays and parties and holidays there was a sense of connective connection and and love in the community it was really unique and and what was striking is even though they adopted all the american lifestyle habits they didn't get the same mortality as the rest of americans because they had this incredible social fabric that was providing them a foundation of love and connection and meaning and purpose and and and what's striking is uh i just saw an article even one of the major medical journals the journal of the american medical association that was striking to me because it was so clear that meaning and purpose are also predictive of longevity so if you have no meaning and purpose in your life what's the point of being here i'm miles away right you kind of have nothing to live for right so i think i think it's really quite interesting and i i think we're in this moment where we're learning so much about medicine and well-being and health and and we are in a massive paradigm shift that's what functional medicine is that's what this book is about the pagan diet it's really a functional medicine view on food and nutrition and health and longevity you talked about insulin resistance as one of the leading causes of chronic disease today what is insulin resistance how do we prevent it and then how do we treat it yes well uh great question and and i think uh we hinted about it a little bit before but you know 88 of americans are in poor metabolic health right that's staggering that's almost 9 out of ten of us and that is poor metabolic health means insulin resistance and i'm gonna unpack that in a minute 75 overweight 42 are obese 40 of kids are overweight i mean it's it's it's terrible one in two americans has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes all this is caused by the amount of of starch and sugar in our diet right broccoli is a carbohydrate that's fine to eat but white flour is also carbohydrate it's worse than sugar in your body so the the volume of starch and sugar that's predominantly our calories is driving this poor metabolic health and what happens when you eat sergeant sugar which by the way we really didn't have right for most of our human history we basically were hunters and gatherers until 10 000 years ago and then you know if we had grains we had whole grains the the milling of flour didn't happen until about 150 years ago and when that started and they started to actually refine the flour is when we saw these nutritional deficiencies like skirt like berry berry and pelleagra and in these horrible vitamin deficiencies it was really terrible and they actually you know they actually discovered vitamins because they started depleting the food so when we when we eat in a way that has all the starch and sugar it causes our blood sugar to go up that causes our insulin to respond to try to keep the blood sugar down so you can have normal blood sugar if you go to your doctor you can have a normal a1c which is your average blood sugar but if your insulin's high you're in big trouble i saw a guy with 400 pounds his blood sugar was perfect his average blood sugar was perfect his insulin was like 20 times normal because it was keeping everything down oh man now insulin gets that high because the body becomes resistant to the effects of the insulin it's like the boy who cried wolf so you need more and more and more insulin to get the blood sugar down more and more insulin what does that do well insulin has a number of roles uh in in a small amount it's good keeps your blood sugar good if you're healthy fine if you have no insulin you get type 1 diabetes you need insulin shots but most people have what we call type 2 or pre-diabetes or insulin resistance and it turns out that this is the driver of cancer like the most common cancers prostate breast colon cancer pancreatic cancer heart disease most heart attacks are caused by this diabetes obviously dementia they're calling type 3 diabetes depression so so many issues are driven by this insulin resistance that are burdening our society with chronic disease which affects 6 out of 10 people and so when you have this phenomenon in your body it drives inflammation it drives fat storage in your belly it causes more hunger it slows down your ability to lose weight and it creates this vicious cycle of muscle loss and fat gain it just it's like super fuel on on the aging process that's why you see diabetics you know have you know far more heart attacks they're four times the risk of dementia they're more likely to get cancer they're it's just all related to this phenomena and then if you're talking about the game of longevity you know i remember this lecture i heard like 20 plus years ago from a harvard professor who was talking about you know preventive cardiology said mark if you could take a group of 100 year old people who have perfectly clean arteries they'd have one thing in common i said what's that he says they're insulin sensitive meaning they are able to easily regulate their blood sugar with very minimal amounts of insulin but most of us well most because they're basically healthy or they have genetics that help them or they eat you know well but the key is to keep your in the game of aging is to keep your insulin low um right and if you keep your insulin low you're going to be activating all these anti-aging mechanisms in your body if your insulin is high you're going to accelerate all the aging so that's why are poison when insulin is high it's weakening your immune system it's increasing inflammation which is making you age faster essentially and gets sick right yes and not only that lewis what right is happening now with covet in america why are we the worst country in the world with covet it's not just political mismanagement the fact isn't is that we were the sitting duck perfect place for kova to land and cause havoc because we're obese we're overweight we have chronic diseases and these are all diseases of inflammation so we are pre-inflamed and when covet hits it just it's like gas on the fire right it just blows up your immune system which is why you see these cytokine storms and this overwhelming inflammation in the body it's not the virus that kills people it's pot it's people's own bodies overactive inflammation because it's primed because of our inflammatory diet and so nobody's talking about this i think bill maher is the only one i've seen talking about in the media who says hey guys the thing we can do yes maybe we need to be protecting ourselves and practicing social distancing maybe getting vaccines that's a whole rabbit hole it shouldn't go down but but nobody's talking about getting healthy our diet or losing weight or immunorejuvenation or even things like vitamin d which are so cheap and simple i mean if i were president i would literally give free dose of vitamin d to every mammalian child in america just boom give it to me there's a lot of research showing that vitamin d is defending uh the body against uh covet right yeah if your vitamin d is low you're 80 more likely to end up in the hospital and die if your vitamin d is high you're 94 percent less likely to end up in the hospital or in the icu 94 right that's better than vaccines right with a lot less hassle and risk and side effects yeah wow okay so how do we how do we treat it then what are the things that we need to do when our insulin is high well it's guess what i wrote a book it's a really good book it's called the pagan diet and it helps it helps you do that and essentially the principles are you know things that i i'm almost embarrassed louis that i i have my career telling people to do stuff that's so self-evident right like we all know yeah eat real food don't eat crap you know eat lots of vegetables eat lots of good fats get good quality protein it's it's not that hard and the key to insulin control is fat and here's why if you if you look at protein if you eat a lot of protein that can spike insulin because there's a process called gluconeogenesis where the protein gets turned to sugar when you meet your protein needs if you eat sugar starch yes you'll jack up your insulin if you eat fat there's zero insulin response really so what's interesting if you look at the fat thing they'll go fat's fattening it's going to make you fat it only makes you fat in the context of insulin so if you look at type 1 diabetics their their pancreases are gone they can't make insulin these people are starving all the time because insulin gets the fuel in the cell so they literally are metabolically starving and they're losing weight so they can eat 10 000 calories a day and would lose weight it's not the calories it's the insulin so the the foods to to help you in terms of insulin and the fats are avocados olive oil nuts and seeds those are all sources of great fats macadamia nuts you know pumpkin seeds walnuts all the great nuts and and then you know depending on on your metabolism your genetics you might tolerate saturated fats like coconut oil or grass-fed ghee or grass-fed butter um those are all fine i would stay away from all the refined oils which are called plant-based oils right they're problematic for a number of reasons because they're extracted with hexane solvents they're oxidized easily they're unstable and we eat them in huge quantities that we never ate before right so i'm sort of a little bit of an evolutionary eater in the sense that you know like we never we had 22 teaspoons of sugar a year when we were hundreds gatherers we found a honey thing somewhere now we have how many a day 22 a day and some kids have 34 teaspoons of sugar a day or more and and so you know the fats we're eating are are totally different than we used to 10 of our diet is soybean oil which is uh something that's increased a thousand fold in the last hundred years and it's not something our bodies really handle so i i think my fats i have in my kitchen are olive oil avocado oil coconut oil ghee and a little grass-fed butter and then you know i have a little toasted sesame oil for flavoring for asian dishes and you can get you know various kinds of nut or seed oils that are low you know processed with expeller pressed or cold pressed so they they're not highly refined and you can use those as flavorings like walnut oil or macadamia oil and so forth but i think the majority of oil should be that and can you share uh there are seven systems of functional medicine is that right um yes what is it so people are yeah so okay well at high level what is functional medicine i always joke it's the opposite of dysfunctional and the the body is not organized the way that we all learn in medical school medical school you know you have your head doctor and your joint doctor and your stomach doctor and your heart doctor your lung doctor you're this doctor that doctor one patient said i have a doctor for every inch of me none of them talk to each other and the truth is that these are all connected these body systems are all connected your body is a network it's an ecosystem and so the siloed approach to medicine based on diagnosis and symptoms really has nothing to do with the natural laws of biology they're just things we've observed and we're in a very primitive state of medicine right now we're going to look forward and maybe 5 10 20 years ago what were we thinking so functional medicine goes right to the root cause so we're treating we're treating the symptoms functional medicine treats the causes you know we're suppressing symptoms functional medicine is addressing the mechanisms of these diseases so if you know for example you can take all the diabetes drugs you want you can take all the blood pressure drugs you want but if your if your lifestyle in your diet is causing the diabetes it's not going to work right and you can the joke is if you're standing on attack it takes a lot of astra to make it feel better the treatment is take out the tack right sure so so you know that's the western medicine so functional medicine has these uh this framework which is you're predisposing factors genetics triggers stresses exposures toxins whatever allergens infections interact with your lifestyle to drive imbalances or to create balance in seven key systems in your body and this is the key to health so we treat these systems by getting rid of the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff whether it's food or whether it's meditation or sleep whatever nutrients and it's really what this book is found on us how do you activate and optimize these seven functional systems that are all interconnected that are web-like they're they're biological networks there's one big network how do you activate them through food and i talked about how food influences each of these systems like for example your microbiome is one of them your immune system is another your energy system is another your detoxification system is another your communication systems hormones neurotransmitters another your structural system is another which is your biomechanical structure all the way to your cell structures and so forth so these are the systems you focus on but let's just take for example one the microbiome well we know that and this is striking to me i used to talk to gastroenterologists all the time like well don't you think food has something to do with maybe what's going on with the irritable bowel or reflux or you know like oh yeah well eat more fiber or yeah don't don't eat drink coffee or alcohol or eat spicy foods or whatever don't eat fried foods like that was the extent of their advice i said didn't ever occur to you that you know you've got this entire tube there with all this stuff in it you're putting pounds of foreign material every day don't you think that would have something to do with what's going on in there and your digestive diseases and they're like wow what a novel idea i just never thought of that i'm like wow so it's really striking actually and and you know the microbiome turns out is the big regulator of most of your bodily functions your immune system your mitochondria your brain function your levels of inflammation it vitamins and mineral production it really controls so much of what's going on in your body detoxification and we just are it's like this the new frontier because we thought it was just poop oh who cares this is poop it says waste it doesn't matter it turns out it is the most important organ in your body that controls everything in fact probably a third to a half of all the metabolites in your blood come from the microbes in your gut you've got 10 times as many bugs in your gut as your own cells 100 times much dna so you might have 20 000 genes there might be two or three or four or five million genes of bacteria in your gut and those genes are producing proteins those proteins are are being absorbed in the body and they're interacting with your biology and they're regulating all these chemical pathways for good or for bad so if you have bad bugs growing like weeds it's going to kill you makes you sick if you have good bugs it's going to make you healthy so here's an example again how food is medicine so it's not just eat more fiber have probiotics or whatever turns out that there's a bacteria in your gut that's super critical it's called acuramancia mucinophilia this bug creates a mucous coating lining on the gut so you don't get a leaky gut and you don't have damage to the barrier think about like a second skin like if your skin is damaged and you put it in the dirt you'll get an infection right but if your skin's intact you can stick it anywhere it's fine like that with your gut so this bacteria helps produce this sort of barrier layer in the gut how do we create that bacteria good question so you sent me right out lewis so so the this bacteria uh likes certain foods it turns out you can't take it as a probiotic and taking probiotics or prebiotics doesn't help that much but it loves we call polyphenols so what are polyphenols these are these thousands of phytochemicals and there's certain ones it really loves like pomegranate and cranberry and green tea now what's really fascinating is is that there's a new drug class called checkpoint inhibitors that are used for immunotherapy which is to help your own immune system fight cancer and they can be very effective so you've got a stage for cancer you get this drug and boom you're cured like in a month with no side effects it's like it's pretty miraculous advancing cancer therapy however it turns out that most checkpoint inhibitors is immunotherapy drugs require ackermancy in your gut in order to be effective because acromancy regulates so much of what's going on in your immune system so many people have very low levels of akromancia and what what is amazing is i've heard stories from one of my colleagues for example william lee who said his mother had stage four uterine cancer not responding to checkpoint inhibitors on her way to dying quickly he did her stool test because he knows about this because he was in the food as medicine wrote a book called etb disease he found noechromancia gave her all these polyphenols and then got her retreated got her acromancia up and she's completely cured of cancer come on yes i'm not kidding so this is the power of food as medicine it's it's that specific so these seven functional systems like your detoxification system how do you get rid of internal waste and environmental toxins well certain foods are powerful up regulators of your own body's detox systems so for example glutathione is one of the most important detoxifying compounds in the body when you eat broccoli or the cruciferous vegetables collards kale cabbage brussels sprouts kohlrabi all that garlic onions certain other foods you know all these foods will help to boost the glutathione levels in your body to help you detoxify for example if you if you look at in asia if you have like a green tea they eat a lot of sushi and stuff in japan but they also have green tea green tea is a chelator for heavy metals so the body has has this innate intelligence that can be activated by these phytochemicals so we think what do we need to eat we need protein fat fiber carbohydrates vitamins and minerals and we stop there but maybe it turns out these 25 000 phytochemicals like all these things we've been talking about from the aggromancia or the himalayan tartary buckwheat or the you know the all these things that glucosinolates and broccoli these compounds turn out they may be the key to to really good health so you might not get a acute disease but you'll get what we call a long latency deficiency disease meaning you know if you don't get up vitamin c short term you might uh you know you won't get skirt you'll get scurvy if you know but if or let's say let's say vitamin d is a better one if you don't have enough vitamin d in the short term really aggressively you'll get rickets and in the long term it might cause cancer if you're low in vitamin d it might cause osteoporosis it might cause other problems and so these phytochemicals i think are are we're going to find out pretty essential if we want to optimize our health and performance and become great yeah man you're giving it to me today i love this i'm trying i'm trying i've got one or two final questions and i'm gonna let you go i want to make sure people get this though the pagan diet the 21 practical principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confused world it's very confusing right now for a lot of people so make sure you guys get this book you can get it online amazon you can go to uh your site as well is there any bonuses for people if they pick up the book or anything yes if they go to pegandite.com they can get a whole list of amazing foods we've partnered with lots of like regenerative farmers and our great food suppliers and other wonderful bonuses you can go on peekingdiet.com and check it out and there's a nice video there explaining a little bit what it is and some bonus bonus material as well i love it if you guys have enjoyed this and this is just the beginning of what you'll get inside of this book uh treat sugar like a recreational drug i need to always remind myself that that's one of your chapters lots of good stuff about eating brain boosting foods balancing blood sugar all the things you need to know to heal yourself with food so make sure you guys get this book i'm curious final question for you uh and we've had a mark on a few other times so if you guys want to hear his three truths and his definition of greatness we'll link up the previous episodes so you can check those out i'm curious you're 61 you said mark is that right yes yes you're 61 you're you're about to be a 14-time new york time best-selling author thank you i hope you're you're you're extreme you're extremely educated on so many things about the body the minds about food nutrition uh you're you're well connected to some of the brightest minds in the world in medicine religion spirituality business what's your biggest personal challenge right now at this stage of your life that you have yet to figure out how to overcome or something you're dealing with that you're still struggling with whether it's personally professionally health whatever it may be yeah it's a great question well an interesting moment right for all of us because covet has really forced us all into introspective time to think about the meaning of our lives what we're doing what's important what's not important how we spend our time who we spend our time with and and for me um i've gone through some personal challenges uh recent you know separation from my wife which is fine i mean it was really loving and great and but it's still hard and i had a recent back surgery last summer and i fully recovered from and working out you know two three hours a day sometimes uh but what was more important is sort of at the stage of my life where you know i've accomplished a lot and you know 13 new york times best sellers i have a clinic in cleveland a clinic on lettuce you know online online presence doing all sorts of wonderful things and i sort of decided to take a minute to stop and and sort of reassess what i want for the next 30 years so my first 30 years were essentially becoming who i was the next 30 were doing what i was right really full-on 30-plus years of grinding it out but in a way that actually was great for me because it led to so much goodness but i was working really hard to a question of what's the next 30 years look like for me so i took a moment to instead of becoming somebody to become nobody for a minute so i've gone to hawaii and i'm still doing a little bit of work but i've taken more time off and i'm looking forward and saying how do i how do i design my life in a way to create the most impact which will bring the most healing and love to the world but also do it in a way that helps me to be fully fulfilled and happy and regenerate my own well-being you know because i i sacrificed myself and my body at the altar of service for way too long i mean i was on the road 50 of the time you know i just i was a master of hotels car services airports like i was just you know i i was an expert at things i didn't want to be an expert at and i just realized how much of a toll that took on my social connections on my own health and well-being on you know my ability to really savor life and so my challenge is how do i sort of change gears a little bit and start to design a life that allows me to have the most leverage and impact to change the things i want to see changed in the world but at the same time help me thrive and live in a way that i can savor life that i can that i can inhabit the moment and i can have more spaciousness to do the things that are the most important that i think you know i can do for the next phase of my life so it's going from being like a warrior on the battlefield to being more of like a a merlin king position where i can you know but i'm sort of working through it all sure and i feel like i'm getting close i'm getting close and it's just a it's just an interesting moment for me uh in this in this time to think about how do i you know how do i struggle with with uh letting go of the things that define me and actually reimagine things that will redefine me to be uh who i want in the next phase of my life oh man yeah i'm gonna have to learn that someday i'm sure i'm i'm in that stage too where you're at where you were yeah yeah i'm gonna let's build and grow and create and make it happen mode so uh well i acknowledge you uh dr mark for for constantly showing up in a way to serve the world and now reimagining your life to serve yourself and the world in a different unique way so uh thanks for for sharing that and thanks for giving us so much wisdom and practical principles in this interview i appreciate you very much i'm always grateful for your wisdom and our friendship and and all of that you do for me so i'm sorry for the challenges and the changes that are happening but i also know that they're happening in your favor and uh it all benefits you for the future so appreciate you very much make sure everyone get the book get it for a couple friends you think could use this for their health as well as we could all use more uh and thank you so much my man i appreciate you of course lewis thank you hope i get to see in person give you a big hug soon when this nonsense is over let's do it man if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here we can change what we eat because we do it all the time and the choices we make matters

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, mark hyman interview, mark hyman motivation, mark hyman speech, how to live longer, health theory, foods you need to eat, mental health, nutrition tips, health

Id: McjeOAqkkJk

Length: 61min 48sec (3708 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021