Use These 7 FOOD FACTS To Heal Your BODY & MIND Today! | Mark Hyman

the leading cause of death worldwide can be traced to diet if you eat highly processed foods you have you know 50 to 100 increased risk of clinical depression patients with colon cancer those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually at a 50 percent lower risk of death [Music] what are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system and one of those things we can use to actually activate health within it great so um angiogenesis is a term that actually uh talks about how the body grows blood vessels blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body that's what keeps us healthy they started 60 000 60 000 miles so if you're going to pull out all the blood vessels in your body line them up and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice so that's one of this enormous organ system right so you know it's going to be important and we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes um and if you don't have enough blood vessels you can't heal your wounds and if you actually have too many blood vessels you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration um and you can grow cancer right so this is a system that is required to keep every cell and organ healthy help it's a health defense system and if it's out of balance you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels you wind up having in trouble so what are the things that can damage angiogenesis well it turns out high fat diets damage energy or just uh you know what actually mostly saturated fats but i think that it's you know really high fat overall like high fat diets are can be can be damaging and hypercholesterolemia for example if you have a lot of cholesterol floating on your blood like the damaging bad cholesterol ldl it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels if you have second cigarette smoke tobacco you know whether your people shouldn't smoke but even secondary smoke can actually damage your blood vessel response and you know then you think about heart disease you think about cancer things that are your blood vessels out of whack out of balance um you know the fat thing's interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils and and it's hard to separate out are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil or they're having you know trans fats and and toxic fats and inflammatory you know so the so the the science actually says is is not actually talking about what you actually eat it's about what the net net the effect that's in the body so if you wind up actually going from uh you know the researchers have studied for example in the lab animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic these are you know these are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat that's a genetic thing for sure right and those are the um subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis so i think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good we know that for example that the uh that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good um the poly unsaturated fats are are good for you um but i'm i'm talking about after what the body actually processes what actually results in your body um so um what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis well think about androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing right or a garden that's growing you want to you want to prune the garden you know make sure things don't overgrow pick out the weeds and if you're mowing a lawn you're kind of just getting everybody all the the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height yeah so you don't wind up having the scraggly lawn that's what the body does to keep androgenesis in balance not too much not too little and so the food we eat is actually like a lawn mower it kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body not too much not too little so the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea which is really good soy actually genestein is a bioactive found in soy is really good tomatoes are really good for helping to keep androgenesis in balance many fruits and vegetables also can do that so the brassinens are really good so many of the things we already know are good for us we know actually also help our blood vessels and now we know how and now we know how yeah now what about stem cells and regeneration this is a big topic that i think people are hearing about the news they they're confused about it there's controversy about it there's laws about it that prevent adequate research i mean it's really quite a a messy area and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in and and it's i don't think uh something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells that there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells and what are stem cells anyway what do they do and how do we how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them yeah well stem cells are really simple um we're made of stem cells so when our moms and dads got together and created you know uh us in the womb we started out as stem cells they actually made every single organization sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory and then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells and after we were born a few of those stem cells um stuck around um about 700 000 of them they stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining bar intestines they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate so when you and i are growing up right in grade school we learn from our teachers that starfish can regenerate salamanders can regenerate but people can't regenerate yeah right you can't grow a new arm yeah well it's true you can't grow a new arm but we do regenerate we train every day we know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back our gut lining grows back our livers can grow back if you actually remove part of your liver it'll grow back yeah our skin grows back you know so we our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells now what can injure stem cells you know um high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells so i'm okay with the one tequila i had last night you know having a tequila every now and then is not bad having glass wine but you know it's it's the the the thing is on balance what you want to do is people you know people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells diabetes is another state a metabolic state that you know it really impairs it cripples our stem cells sugar high blood sugar cripples our stem cells so the excess of anything can be harmful including to our stem cells so what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells this is where it's really become interesting before i talk about that though let me just affect your stem cells stress can definitely affect our stumps high stress will blunt the activity over our stem cells you know it's just like stunning them so they're like wait a minute what do i do now you know maybe i'm not going to be so enthusiastic and rebuilding our organs we've got to rebuild our blood vessels we've got to rebuild our hearts you know our hearts turn around like we actually have um stem cells in our hearts and our brains and we grow our nerves every single day something in our body is regenerating actually a lot of things are regenerating so what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies um that you inject into the body so you know taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them and someday that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine someday we're not there yet i've been involved with some of those efforts and what i've seen is very exciting but more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells and here's the research you can actually take uh it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable getting a stem cell injection like 20 grand or something right well you know uh i would say why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table yeah right so the mediterranean diet has been a study by spain looked at elderly people on the mediterranean diet and those who uh were on a mediterranean diet compared to not on an embedded training debt had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation in their bloodstream so again it's not one magic food it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating now when you you can actually do the research on specific things as well so for example tea green tea will increase your stem cells but guess what so can black tea right so here's what the surprise japanese live forever well you know all the green tea you know people in asia drink a lot of tea people in britain drink a lot of tea as well we used to say green tea is good black tea is fermented so it's not going to be that good for you we're changing our minds we have to keep our minds open black tea can also double the number of stem cells and then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study at uh by ucsf in san francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease so they had kind of crappy blood flow and they gave them hot chocolate yeah i was going to say the chocolate stem cell story i want to hear about it's amazing right so the darker the chocolate the higher the flavonols these are the bioactives are naturally present in cacao yeah and they there was a study the food is medicine this is the food there are literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties they are made by mother nature they're packed into food growing on the plant and you know every plant-based food will actually have some type of bio-active so in cacao which is a bean which then you process to you actually get you know kind of the cocoa powder if you take the really dark chocolate like 73 cacao that really dark chocolate and you make it into a high flavonol hot chocolate drink and you have it twice a day this was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate right and so okay so the question is is that important when they measured their blood flow what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which you know kind of like um lowers the circulation they let it go they found that the blood flow was much vastly improved wow so here's a functional uh uh result that actually means it makes a difference so who's going to complain about chocolate who's going to complain about tea who's going to complain about a mediterranean diet i mean you go out to eat these are the things we love yeah well it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block interfere inhibit some medical process some biological process whereas and there's toxicity to them there's side effects to them you know you can take too much which will harm you whereas foods don't work like that but you also talk about the dose and the quantity of foods so food is medicine what's the dose is it one cranberry is it a thousand cranberries you know right well so my book eats a beet disease i uh specifically have a chapter on food doses it's important nobody talks about well i know that because i you know when i read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries uh or kale you know i i'm always asking well how much should i actually eat and that always struck me as something that needed an answer right so here's how we've approached it you can actually get food doses that's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health the best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies these epidemiological studies there's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times right so in europe there's something called the epic study and haynes is the united states bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of patients in europe they're studying 500 000 patients over 20 years and they're tracking everything they eat and they're asking them how much are you eating and then on the tail end looking at what happens to their health what's their cancer rate what's their heart disease right what's their diabetes rate and when you actually combine those two the result that we want lower cancer less heart disease and you go back into the research and you figure out what foods they ate you can actually calculate how much they ate of it yeah right so and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this by the way this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well it's you know just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work you gotta correlate what works with what actually the amount is so smaller studies there was a study called the health professionals follow-up study done at harvard which looked at seventy thousand men and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week that's that's a half a cup of cooked tomatoes not that much you have pasta right lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39 yeah right so that's a dose that's an outcome and that's a particular food and you can do that systematically you got to hunt and pick for it but it's there and it doesn't give you the exact answer it's it's not like a medic like actually frankly even penicillin right you don't always get the right result right but you have a good approximation so that's the beginning of food doses i mean your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that i didn't even know about like fish row or razor clams or you know different kinds of chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that you know maybe have been studied in large randomized controlled trials but have clinical studies have epidemiologic studies and and we can start to include these and there's very little downside right right unless you don't like clamps but well look uh uh what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another and my approach is really a global approach um you know i my work uh spans around the world we're in asia europe asia i mean america uh and america's and uh and here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go right so what interests me is what are the common denominators so for example you mentioned razor clams well that's um that's actually a category of seafood we know from most epidemiological studies including studies in europe and asia that people who eat more seafood you know about three times a week actually have lower all cause mortality and they just survive longer so then you sort of say well what are what could be possibly responsible for that well we don't you know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat so if you uh what is the omega-3s in razor clams or something else well there's probably other things as well so uh i can tell you another example that that i was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually um not only have someone make it through fatty acids but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system yeah so again so it's like the mushrooms of the sea because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms exactly anti-cancer compounds and now they're in oysters wow and you know by the way these are long sugar chains that's right and and your body digests them uh they've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce so you know the kind of sauce the brown sauce you see in a chinese restaurant chinese food that they study that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system does that actually come from oysters it comes with oysters yeah they boil them down and they caramelize them so again this is where food is medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things really yeah you incorporate the culinary side the chefs get into it yeah i mean this is really i think us as a society coming together and saying what do we love and by the way in my book you to be disease it's really not about what to cut out of your life it's about what to add to your life yeah and what do we really enjoy it's all about our preferences and making the right decisions so this is incredible so stem cells are not some weird thing you have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat right you know maybe get it from some placenta somewhere you can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power yeah and you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate and that's so powerful and it's a very encouraging message now let's talk about the microbiome now this is a whole nother world that most doctors really are not schooled in that certainly wasn't part of my medical education that is something that i've been focused on for almost 30 years in functional medicine because we know that gut is where the seed of your health is it's what ancient traditions like ayurveda chinese medicine they all recognize this right we just for like oh well it's just poop you know he says brown stuff that comes out is waste who cares like whatever and now we're seeing it linked to so many different conditions from autism to depression to cancer to heart disease to obesity to parkinson's i mean the list goes on and on and we probably haven't even finished the list yet and and yet we know very little about it so could you tell us a little bit about the microbiome uh and why it's so important and and what we can do to protect it to feed it to help it and and also what are those things that we're doing that screw it up right so you know the microbiome is an entire new discipline that's going to change humanity you know i mean i think that we've always thought of humankind as just humans but in fact we're 50 50 with bacteria is really kind of like 90 10. well they've actually done some new calculations on this right so it's about 40 40 trillion cells about the same number of bacteria is the latest calculation on this is sort of the up to date numbers and it makes a lot of sense right so basically when we evolved as humans we were um hunters and gatherers picking stuff up you know nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that were had bacteria in it there's more bacteria in the planet than than living than animals and when we ate those the bacteria naturally colonize the body and by the way the gut of course but not just the gut our skin our mouth our nose every orifice has got bacteria in our tears of bacteria breast milk has bacteria even in the womb which we you know when you and i were medical school they said oh the word wrong in fact babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb amazing okay so we're beginning to rewrite the playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body the next thing about bacteria i'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome is in the middle ages bacteria was responsible for the plague and so we sort of developed this um fear fear and repulsion to bacteria fast forward to the 1940s the discovery of antibiotics that really was a medical revolution and then everybody went willy willy-nilly with antibiotics which can be life-saving let's be clear about that but the overuse of antibiotics not just in humans not just in children but also in our animals yeah which is where which is where most of the antibiotics are we have 24 million pounds of antibiotics are used every year 19 million are used in animals for helping them grow and preventing infections and getting into our drinking water right so we're we've we've sort of invisibly uh impaired our environment so that we're exposed to antibiotics that changes the ecology the coral reef that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body so that's one thing is antibiotics the other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our our lifestyle you know physical activity yeah we know that if you're not active your microbiome kind of suffers and we exercise on the outside the bacteria get the benefit too they get that workout right um stress can change our microbiome how many times have you know um you've i'm sure you and i have done the same thing we stayed up all night we've had to pull some all-nighters next day you feel like crap you know your gut doesn't feel so good that's because of microbiomes having a riot yeah they pulled the all-nighter too so what we're realizing diet obviously and our diet plays a huge role so putting in pounds of stuff every day in that tube yeah well you know it's something really interesting right so when i look at the ingredients of any food that i actually get and i i try to do fresh food whole foods but every now and then you know you have to take something and you look at all the ingredients um the stuff you don't recognize you can't pronounce those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria yeah right you pick a mushroom and you eat it you know that the fiber in the mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria right the pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria right what we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm 3 000 food additives in the market that are fda approved and we don't know what most of them do very few have been tested and it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect their microbiome well and you know the what they uh we all know people that are super healthy right so they never get sick and then we know people that seem to get sick all the time the difference is probably in their microbiome in fact it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super agers you know these are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all and then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome they were remarkably similar they were almost identical amazing so health is clearly governed by our microbiome so what are things we can actually eat that can affect them well we talked about this a little bit earlier it turns out that um pomegranates actually can make a big difference cranberries can make a big difference nuts walnuts pecans cashews things that we actually know almonds yeah and so i had almonds for breakfast i want to make sure i got it well you know we should all we should all probably uh i mean unless you have a nut allergy i think the nuts are one of the one of nature's most healthful snacks i don't know if you saw this but um about two years ago uh the americans decided for clinical oncology the big cancer meeting they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer stage three colon cancer undergoing treatment whatever the treatment might be that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually at a 50 percent lower risk of death of from their disease now now you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20 reduction everybody's jumping up and down it's a billion dollar blockbuster drug and you're talking about a couple handfuls of almonds for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost a hundred thousand dollars is actually better well it's it's not an either or it's together and and again this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors you know people not just you and me but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment if you look at that data it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies i would actually strongly advise patients to use um to have nuts if they can if they can take it and what do they serve in the hospitals right so again we're in the middle of a revolution yeah it's slow but uh inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine why don't you tell us how did you come to this idea that we should be treating psychiatric issues with nutrition and through metabolic approaches yeah that's a great question uh so early on i went and i knew i wanted to do medicine and when i went into medicine i saw that there were a lot of conditions that weren't necessarily addressed uh with nutrition and there was a lack of training in the medical education system with obesity as well as nutrition and with psychiatric conditions i saw a lot of overlap with nutritional deficiencies and insulin resistance and even higher rates in that population versus the general population and we know in the general population it's even it's pretty pretty bad already in our country so the relationship between mental health and metabolic disease is is bidirectional which means if you have a mental illness you're more likely to have metabolic disease and vice versa and if you have a metabolic disease you're more likely to develop a mental illness you're more likely to have a heart attack for example if you have depression and you're more likely to develop depression after you have a heart attack so these observations that i made really put questions in my mind as to there must be something more to what we're doing that needs further investigation and i believe that there are metabolic issues that are not necessarily addressed within the field that i think needs to start occurring i mean we need to start including that in the world that we we diagnose and treat uh and evaluate disease yeah you know you're talking we're talking earlier about this idea of comorbidities which is a term we use in medicine to describe diseases that you know occur in the same patients so if you have high blood pressure diabetes depression you know reflux we call these comorbidities but we were talking earlier about how they may not really be unrelated that in fact they may be very connected and sounds like from your observations you made the conclusion that maybe the it wasn't a coincidence that the fact that people who were overweight or unhealthy also had mental health issues maybe there was a relationship nutritional deficiencies metabolic issues uh you talked a lot about insulin resistance so how did you come to sort of understand that that was really going on that that the the biology of that was was something that um was real so i originally started off with an interest in learning about nutrition and metabolic issues and obesity and i wanted to treat obesity and then i saw that in a lot of the patients there were psychiatric conditions in those patients so i started to veer into the realm of psychiatry and got very interested in that so what happened was that when i was treating metabolic dysfunction not necessarily obesity but metabolic dysfunction which is problems with blood sugar or insulin resistance or high blood you know cholesterol i saw improvements in quality of life in mood and anxiety symptoms in psychiatric symptoms essentially and that really got me interested in what is this relationship why is this occurring yeah and and got me interested in treating these patients in in a slightly different way than standard of care really integrating the the understanding of what metabolic dysfunction is and i then started a clinic and i started to do research and that's how my my path started and i started early on developing this clinic in in residency training which is incredible because when you when you look at the the level of mental illness in society it's one of the biggest causes of disability and one of the biggest costs is depression and anxiety and and i remember when i was seeing patients early on treating them for insulin resistance and pre-diabetes and other issues or gut issues or other factors that were going on related to autoimmune disease or inflammation and we would get them healthy they would sort of say wait you know my my depression went away my anxiety went in my panic attacks are gone my bipolar disease is better my add is better and i'm like well how did that happen and then you begin to go down the rabbit hole you begin to look at the biology of what's happening and one of the i think the greatest discoveries around mental health is that it's an inflammatory problem very often that the brain is inflamed but the brain can't say ouch like you have a sore throat or you know a swollen ankle it manifests all these psychiatric symptoms so i'd love to sort of take us down the road of how inflammation is connected to mental illness and what the approach is that you're using to help correct that uh sure so that's uh you know quite an important question and you know when we talk about how nutrition affects the brain and specifically focusing on reducing that sugar and processed foods and refined carbohydrates to improve mental and physical health we know that consuming excessive amounts of sugar processed foods and refined carbohydrates lead to obesity metabolic problems fatty liver heart disease even cancer there is evidence for this and the body is really one whole system and what happens in the body also affects the brain the brain has a delicate balance of neurotransmitters or chemical messengers with more sugar and processed foods these levels really become unbalanced and they're significantly off so i'm talking so wait wait so your brain chemistry gets screwed up when you eat processed food and sugar is what you're saying yeah yeah and i'm talking about ultra processed food also in in particular because i do think that there's a difference between processed food and ultra processed food ultra processed food is like the the real sugar the you know the cookies the cakes um the chips the potato chips is kind of highly processed things versus minimally processed foods maybe some oils um you know vegetables that are frozen that's a little bit different than ultra processed food and so the research is showing differences between those things in the brain yeah and you need the right raw ingredients for chemical reactions to occur in the brain and elsewhere like vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need proper functioning um you know of the brain you need proper speed of transmitting signals your brain is composed of electrical cells and it's a complicated web of signaling molecules those cells need fat to develop and to function properly so you need those omega-3s in your diet and if you eat sugar and ultra-processed foods the chances are that you're likely not getting those important nutrients those vitamins and minerals for those important reactions that you need nor are you absorbing them the most people with metabolic dysfunction actually have nutritional deficiencies and are malnourished so you're saying is people who are overweight and obese often are very malnourished and vitamin a nutrient deficient yes that's right that's sort of a paradox right right right they're eating all this food why are they nutritionally deficient but they're actually among the most malnourished they are because they're eating they're looking at all the wrong places for the nutrients they eat more and more food and i think a study from you know kevin hall and others showed that if you let people eat as much as they want and you give them ultra processed food versus whole foods they'll eat about 500 calories more a day of ultra processed food because they'll keep eating and they're hungry and they keep driving and you you talk a lot about that in your work about the the biology of what these do to your brain in terms of dopamine and the addiction reward pathways in the brain that make you literally become addicted to these compounds and how that affects you right so the rates of obesity and binge eating and addictive like eating are rising alongside the increasing dominance of ultra-processed foods in the modern food environment and there are several mechanisms as to how this works some which act directly on the brain and some that indirectly act through hormonal signaling so our body is very complicated and the brain is connected to the body and we used to learn in medical school that you have this blood brain barrier that you can get across it uh but that's not it's like the berlin wall but in reality it's it does leak right and there are things that do cross and it's more like a coffee filter you know it's a sip right yeah so so ultra processed food and sugar decrease our dopamine receptors and make us eat more compulsively much like addictive drugs the highly processed foods they they trigger dopamine reward pathways and they invoke addictive like behaviors which have been well documented and include intense cravings it includes feelings of withdrawal when cutting down on ultra-processed food continuing to eat these things despite knowing that the adverse consequences to it and repeated attempts to try to quit right i'm describing addiction here basically yeah and and the consumption of larger quantities over time than intended you know people always know it's like emotional eating it's not really biological true addiction what you're saying is really a true biological addiction just like heroin or cocaine or alcohol that you get withdrawal you get cravings you get increased need for more and more of the substance just receive the same pleasure you down regulate the receptors for pleasure so you have to take more of the stuff to actually stimulate that reward pathway and and it's really this vicious cycle that people get into and then they blame themselves and they feel guilty you know for doing it and they think they just have no willpower but you're saying it's much bigger than that yeah that's exactly right it's so sugar is an addictive substance it's not just something we say it has a straightforward neurochemical basis in the brain just like any other drug and i think of sugar as a it's a recreational food it's not a it's it's not a food that's essential for survival we make sugar um you know through the process of gluconeogenesis through through other foods um that we consume and so it's really about excess carbohydrates it's not i call it i call it sugar a recreational drug i've never heard anybody say it but oh he's right down in my book sugar is a recreational drug it's like if you like tequila it's fine but not breakfast lunch and dinner in the quantities we're having in america exactly yeah and we also actually i would like to share a story about about this um just during the era of covid since we're in it yeah you know just to give context as to you know why i wrote about this and why i'm working on this as well and continuing to feel you know motivated to continue to do my work is the shelter and place order had come you know a couple months back for my county and i'm in california i live in menlo park when it was announced my husband uh he's an infectious disease physician at stanford and i'm a psychiatrist and a state medicine physician as you uh mentioned we both felt doubly invested in this pandemic we went to our neighborhood safeway grocery store and we saw many people loading up their carts with pop tarts hawaiian punch popcorn anything ultra processed basically and they weren't loading up their carts with fresh vegetables or you know they were out of cookies at the grocery store yeah they were using toilet paper and toilet paper exactly and there were still uh you know produce left in the store uh you know it wasn't like they ran out of produce no so here i was gonna run on uh broccoli no and here i was at the checkout counter and i was thinking to myself you know staring at the person's car in front of me that is full of the recreational food as i mentioned food that's not necessary for survival and detrimental to our health i thought to myself this is certainly not preparing them for the pandemic or helping their immune system and if anything weakening it um and this is our local safeway this is the heart of silicon valley so in this context it wasn't about affordability or access that is what motivated me to to kind of get that public message out on this topic yeah you did write a great article on the hill and i i read it and you really talked about the way in which uh the pandemic we're facing is much more serious because of the underlying chronic disease pandemic we have in our society where it's driven by this ultra processed food that makes us overweight and sick and causes all these underlying chronic inflammatory issues like diabetes and heart disease and high blood pressure which are really the same mechanisms if you look at the mechanisms of high blood pressure heart disease and diabetes it's insulin resistance it's oxidative stress it's inflammation and it's the same thing that's affecting our psychiatric illnesses which is so fascinating and most people don't think about using the doorway of food to help treat the brain and you're doing that in your in your research and in your practice so tell us some of the kinds of things you're seeing in your patients using this approach because it's pretty radical you're going all the way sometimes to ketogenic diets with these patients with bipolar disease schizophrenia depression it's fascinating yes what i have noticed is that a lot of my patients that come for psychiatric treatment in evaluation a lot of them have pre-diabetes and diabetes and when i look up the statistics on this in our country 44 of adults today in our country are either pre-diabetic or they have diabetes and i wonder to myself what is that doing to our brain we know that affects all these different organ systems the liver the pancreas the heart but what is that doing to the brain right and so uh i'm happy to talk more about my research and and patient care um but one thing that i that i felt i didn't completely answer uh before was kind of how these hormones affect your brain with the effect of people how does it drive inflammation and all that yeah yeah yeah so kind of going back to that um you know so i was talking about the the definition of addiction and we know that hormones like insulin and leptin which is the hormone that tells us we're full it sends a signal to our brain and and ghrelin that tells us that we're hungry these hormones modify natural and drug reward pathways in the brain i mean they have so many effects on their brain uh our hunger hormones go awry and it can actually increase the reactivity itself of the dopamine system and so this happens when we consume that excess sugar and the excess carbohydrates in our diet and they cause these rapid shifts in blood glucose and insulin levels similar to other addictive substances so my approach in patient care has been to work on this system to decrease these shifts that occur in our our blood sugar in our hormone levels to kind of go back to the homeostatic state that our body and our brains were meant to be in and so i treat the metabolic dysfunction and i look at how that improves both metabolic issues as well as psychiatric outcomes yeah so it's fascinating so basically you're treating the body to fix the brain right you're dealing with these physiologic changes that have to do with our diet and nutritional psychiatry that most psychiatrists aren't thinking about i mean most psychiatrists are thinking about you know psycho-emotional issues they're thinking about medication and then prescribing antidepressants but they don't really work as well and i you know i just found that the amount of benefit you get by addressing these underlying factors is so much greater than you get with medication which are marginally effective for most people i think you know unless you have really severe depression but i think the data is just not that exciting about these drugs right i mean they can be helpful for people they can be life-saving but but there are also other doorways that you're exploring which are seem to be way more fruitful is that your experience so you know the field has come you know a long way they've there's a lot of research that's been done on the biological piece and neuroscience and looking at you know obviously the serotonin hypothesis but that's a hypothesis and an observation from like 30 years ago and all these research and money has been thrown on developing drugs but we're not necessarily addressing some of the root causes of of why are these chemicals imbalanced and so that's an important question that i and others are trying to study through research studies and clinical trials and like you said we know that although our medications are necessary and life-saving for many they have undesirable side effects that can worsen metabolic health and while it's helping in one domain it may in some people also be hindering improvement in psychiatric symptoms especially if the metabolic health is poor so psychiatric treatment is never going to be a one-size-fits-all approach mental health conditions are are very they're heterogeneous and they have different phenotypes or presentations we don't have a single mutation or a gene that we can point to or a lesion there's no smoking gun it's a complex relationship of multiple genes and environment and unfortunately a metabolic assessment's not part of that routine care and stigma certainly plays a role in this obesity stigmatized and so is mental health education about nutrition metabolism is lacking in medical education um most psychiatrists recognize this relationship they do they understand the connection between food and mood they're starting to they understand the that that there are side effects with psychotropic medications i think they don't necessarily have expertise to treat it or address it they don't know necessarily what to do about it but most most psychiatrists that i speak with and my department certainly has been very supportive of this idea and if someone has to do the research and sometimes to do the work to kind of move the field forward and yeah there's a a growing body uh you know of other researchers working on this and we hope you know that evidence-based research has to be done to to kind of change the mainstream's generative care yeah i know i mean you were talking about metabolic psychiatry i was also uh noticing that harvard had a whole department of nutritional psychiatry which is you know seems like bookends on the country you know the rest of the psych psychiatric world is thinking about this but you know you you mentioned earlier that you you work with bruce ames who's an incredible biochemist and nutritional scientist from uh california one of the most published uh sort of scientists in the world and and i spent a lot of time with him and he talks about this whole idea of a metabolic tune-up and that so many of our biochemical reactions are regulated by vitamins and minerals and that each of us have different needs for different components of those uh vitamins minerals i remember when when one guy was i was sitting in my office one day working on something i was thinking i might have been working on that book and i was talking to somebody about foley to b12 and b6 he said oh yeah i had really bad depression and i took some of these b vitamins and i just went away and i think you know there are some people who have a higher need for for example folate or b6 or b12 based on these genetic variations that bruce ames talks about that really are are so prevalent in fact one-third of our entire genome codes for enzymes and those enzymes all need helpers which are vitamins and minerals and and we don't really pay much attention to that so when i look at depression or psychiatric illness you know i see so many different things that are going on there whether it's it's insulin resistance pre-diabetes or vitamin d deficiency or folate insufficiency or zinc or magnesium all these various nutrients play a role in brain function and they're not something we really learn about when we learn about psychiatry right is that is that changing i think that is changing there's a complex relationship between metabolic dysfunction and nutrition food mental health and you know i want to start off by saying that the idea of food is medicine is not a new concept in the field of nutritional psychiatry has really grown over the past few decades by several prominent psychiatrists and researchers however the focus has largely been looking at specific foods or supplements eliminating certain things from the diet the microbiome you know are looking at the mediterranean diet for example affecting depression symptoms and these are all very important questions but what i thought was missing and why i named our clinic in our groups work metabolic psychiatry is to distinguish that this is a study of how treatment of metabolic dysfunction can affect psychiatric symptoms yeah if a majority of us are suffering from obesity type 2 diabetes insulin resistance metabolic syndrome what is that doing to our brain we know that these diseases affect multiple things mental illness uh rates have increased over the past 20 years in fact doubled we know that uh mental illness like depression bipolar disorder psychosis they're strongly associated with inflammation that's that research is really indisputable and research is also showing that there's an energy deficit in these brain illnesses and the mitochondria the energy powerhouses of our cells are not functioning optimally causing changes in brain signaling itself and the thought is if we can target inflammation insulin resistance the abnormal blood sugar etc as a method to improve mental health symptoms and we can really improve our patients lives further and again mental illness has many different causes but even if we you know can five to ten percent of people have an improvement in these symptoms with this method then i think that would have that would be a pretty significant improvement of the overall mental and physical health of our country i think it's a lot more than five to ten percent i mean when you think about that the most amazing thing you just said to me is such a paradigm shift which is that depression is inflammation in the brain and that when you look at autopsy studies and when you look at the biology of this disease the brain's on fire and it's also on fire in autism in alzheimer's in schizophrenia and a lot of these disorders that are we think of as mental disorders but are actually brain disorders that are manifestations of inflammation that show up differently in different people and the question is you know what's driving that inflammation and i think diet clearly is probably the biggest factor which makes it an incredible thing to use to actually alter the course of these diseases because it's an easy tool to change and actually get a result and that's what you're talking about your therapeutic use of you know metabolic medicine to actually fix psychiatric problems which is pretty amazing let's talk about the gut and connection to some of these diseases we we treat something a lot that's called sibo now when i went to medical school this wasn't even a thing but essentially it means small intestinal bacterial overgrowth which means bad bugs growing in the small intestine where there should be sterol that have an impact on our health so what what are the symptoms how would people know they have it and what kinds of problems are they connected to and let's kind of get deep into what our approach to diagnosing and treating it's going to be sure so you know i just want to be a little cautious here because we're jumping right into talking about a disease yeah right right well it's not it's a it's a phenomenon it's a phenomenon that actually causes also right other problems we we do have to give things labels but it is a phenomena that's connected to many different parts of our body and getting somebody better involves the whole lifestyle spectrum and involves us using something in the functional medicine realm that we call the matrix and the matrix is looking at not diagnoses but conditions yeah let's talk about the matrix yeah tell us more about the yeah what is the matrix yeah how does it differ from traditional diagnosis and so for me to tell you about the matrix you have to swallow the red blue with the blue which one you want to swallow okay take the red pill that's the right fill okay so anyhow now i can tell you about the matrix so so the matrix is basically a construct that we have in our minds where when you start telling me i have headaches i have fatigue i have belching i have bloating um i have uh i have a diagnosis of hashimoto's thyroiditis migraines migraines they don't become the endpoint they become part of the narrative of your of your disease and we we put together into a story we call the matrix and so we look at assimilation which is the gut we look at energy that takes us from you know an idea of fatigue we rattle it down on our brain to what are the things in the body that control energy right and so we think about mitochondria when we think about energy we think about toxins how do toxins influence the rest of your your well-being we think about our our transport system our blood vessels our lymph drainage and the connection between lymph drainage in the brain and your gut leaky gut leaky brain things that we'll talk about and we think about the hormonal system neurotransmitters to adrenals to thyroids and we we place this all in our mind in this in this matrix this paradigm of thinking and then we make the connections yeah we say okay what's sibo okay well it's going to be symptoms bloating distension i feel like i've used the term food baby there's something always in my gut yeah you have a food baby you something and you feel your belly blowed up that's called sibo right that is sibo you don't feel like you fully evacuate when you have a bowel movement you're fatigued you get depressed and and you and you can actually feel your depression and it's related to how your gut feels i have that food baby i'm anxious i feel depressed it impacts me it can link to all sorts of other diseases right fatigue and then when we think about fibromyalgia you know we need to think about the gut and what's been impacted there we think about parkinson's 50 of people with parkinson's actually have sibo yeah now asthma right and we don't we don't know we know there's an obs observational connection there we don't know anything about causality but it's something you have to consider when you're thinking about other diseases so the fatigue the brain fog the potential inflammation and joint pain the all of the gut issues that's sibo yeah and a lot of sibo we don't know all the causes there used to be some standard ideas what the causes were but now we know that it's it's hard to determine so the use of proton pump inhibitors and other acid blockers previously all that stuff all that stuff and then we have stress plays a major role um and so that's some of the cause that's a sibo can look like and now how do we how do we address it how do we get it back up you mentioned these acid blockers because you know they're given out like candy you can buy them in the drugstore they're over the counter now and people think they're safe and fine i remember when i went to medical school they just came out and we were told by the drug reps these are very strong drugs they completely shut down ass in the stomach you never want to give them more than six weeks and now people are on them for six decades you know and and what they do is pretty frightening literally they will help your heartburn but the side effects which are not really side effects they're effects we just don't like them so we call them side effects our bloating and diarrhea and distension all the sibo symptoms and by the way they cause osteoporosis and pneumonia and prevent b12 absorption and zinc absorption and mineral magnesium absorption so they're not exactly the same i just have to say this mark and i you know is that this is my this is the concern we all have for medicine when we we we've been unplugged and this is the issue is that we have pharmaceutical companies that provide medications to our patients to support sick lifestyle that perpetuates disease yeah i love those uh advertisements on tv where they're like don't worry eat your like sausage and peppers and don't worry just take this crevices take the purple pill it's ridiculous it is and so that but on the functional medicine side here's where the hard work is changing the lifestyle to make it a healthy lifestyle so people can you know be healthy prevent disease if they do get sick then we help them change lifestyle because that can impact disease more than anything else and then for people who are well or have gotten better we can use lifestyle to optimize their their their aging and again using a term i've heard you use age young you know and that's that's part of what we do here to ultra wellness is the whole spectrum prevent treat and then help people optimize and age young yeah my goal is to die young as late as possible so back to the sibo thing yeah right it's a you know so once we we make that now how do we make the diagnosis so i always tell people tests are good but there's no perfect test and you know your cognition your doctor's ability to think through problems is the most important thing that they think that's what we do in functional medicine we are thinking differently you know my uh mentor sid baker was one of the leading i think medical minds of the last century was uh really pioneered a lot of the visionary concepts of functional medicine he says we're in the name it blame entertainment game you know um we name and blame we name the disease then we blame the name for the problem and then we tame with the drugs so we say oh you're sad and hopeless and helpless you have depression that's what's wrong with you no it's just the name of what's wrong with you it's not the cause right let me go i know what you need you need an antidepressant and that's like it just doesn't make sense instead of what we do in functional medicine it's called thinking and linking right we actually thinking everybody you know thinks you treat the same disease with the same treatment and in functional medicine you can have 10 people with migraines or treat everyone differently everybody's different right people with lupus and everybody's treated differently because you're looking at what the root cause for them is and right i think that's really profound yeah and i want to get back to the sibo thing but i just want to come back to the matrix because that's such a key concept and you know you described all these biological networks you know assimilation which is the gut defense and repair the immune system energy how we make energy detoxification our transport system our circulation our communication systems hormones and our transmitters our structural system and all those are influenced by our lifestyle right by our thoughts our feelings our relationships our diet our exercise our sleep all those things intrinsic relationships yeah and then and then they're also influenced by external factors like toxins allergens bad bugs stress poor diet right and those impact our genes to change the expression and so we have basically our inputs that are a problem and then our lifestyle and that causes disturbances in these systems and no matter what disease you have we use this model and every single chronic disease and even acute many acute diseases are caused by disturbances in our biological system absolutely and that is what functional medicine's so unique at diagnosing and treating in a totally new way absolutely and so it's it's that constant work around the matrix and one of the things that i said earlier is functional medicine is is hard medicine it's hard for the doctor it's hard for the patient yeah because you think you have to think right and you're constantly thinking and as you treat the environment of the patient changes so you treat you you begin the treatment plan and the patient comes back with a particular response and that response will be based on what is their lifestyle what part of the lifestyle have they been able to change because it's a real struggle for people to change lifestyle that's hard work um and then you know what are their genetics you know and and how are their genetics because we you know use a lot of genetic testing here that help us identify that and so once they come back and they've responded to our first step of treatment then we go around the matrix again yeah and we rebalance and we look okay okay it's like pit tailoring you adjust every time they come out every it's like it's like a fine watch and you're just constantly working the gears asking questions having them tell their story again retell their story i can't tell you how many times i have sat an hour and a half initial visit only to have the patient come back over over a zoom or a physical visit to the office and i ask them the same questions and all of a sudden they're in a different place and i get a different answer that opens up a whole new realm of thinking about their disease their health and even their goals for their life so every time i go around the matrix i get that person better and better and better so we don't treat 155 000 diseases we just work with optimizing our biological systems in the matrix that is the key to functional medicine so that in a sim in a way it's very simple but it's also very unique because each patient's different and for the patient some of the changes are hard because we're asking people to change their diet or take different supplements but the truth is that it's actually you know and so much suffering and helps them so much that people are so excited about it oh they can they do it and so yeah it's it's actually many times very easy for patients to change because they see the results so quickly yeah so let's talk about the sibo let's get back to sibo and talk about this cases yeah i think we should share some cases we should yeah give an example of what we're talking about because it's kind of abstract i would say that very rarely do i see siba by itself and and why is that because mark you've already talked about it's the microbiome okay when the microbiome is disordered as it is in sibo and you have these bacteria growing or they shouldn't grow and so um you you're you're now changing how food is processed you're changing where it's processed and you're changing the body's ability to absorb it and what we know about the microbiome is those bacteria actually train our immune system they're very closely related to our immune system and they they will they our immune system identifies antigenic material from the bacteria and it the bacteria is able to tell the immune system here's what you need to be worried about here's what you don't need to be worried about yeah right and so when we alter that gut immunity we can create inflammation and we create inflammation we begin to break down that that that membrane that's responsible for opening and closing and letting good compounds and and good nutrients in and keeping the bad guys out yeah when that breaks down we have leaky gut and now all of a sudden our immune system starts to see proteins and that have not been completely processed down to the peptide level that they're accustomed to and they start making antibodies against commonly eaten foods yeah so now this person with sibo is sensitive to a plethora of foods that they eat every day which might not they might not be allergic to those foods but they're sensitive to them so now they're not eating so they're coming with all these symptoms it gets exacerbated by almost everything they eat in their diet and it because now the and they don't know what to do not eat because they're just everything bothers them right right and so um now they they can come in that sick now that their immune system is triggered they have muscle aches they have they have joint pains they have brain fog because now they're having they have fatigue their mitochondria are being affected their brains are inflamed they're being affected so now this person comes in and they may say to me i i have brain fog i have this i have that i get the whole story and i hear the gut always start in the gut right so now what do we do when they tell me there's symptoms we order a test it's called a small intestine before the testosterone okay i just want to recap because what you said was so profound yeah which is that i like being profound thank you no i mean it's a total frame shift so most doctors don't think much about the gut unless you have direct digestive symptoms and even when you do they treat it kind of in a very linear way but what you're saying is when those bugs that should be in our large intestine migrate up to the small intestine for various reasons it causes an imbalance in there and that leads to a breakdown in the barrier which causes this leaky gut and then all these foreign proteins and bacterium components leak into the system your immune system goes ah that's not me and it starts creating a response and then you get systemic inflammation which is why you get brain fog and muscle aches and fatigue and joint pain all these things skin rashes acne whatever and and and people think these are all not connected but they're all they are connected that's why siba is such a great topic to start with yeah because it connects the entire matrix so tell us how we test for it now let's get into a case okay so um testing will be with um a breath test it's a um it's called the sibo breath test and you we starve you for a day basically you want to starve out those bacteria that are living in the small intestine so they become metabolically inactive and then you wake up in the morning and you take some laculos which is like not absorb sugar no not absorb sugar but before you do that you breathe into a little balloon and then we put that aside as your baseline um test then you drink the sugar drink and now the bacteria are like we got some food we're excited we're starving out thought we're doomed and then they get very metabolically active and then within 30 minutes or 60 minutes when they're metabolically active they start producing the exhaust of their metabolism hydrogen and sometimes methane and even sometimes sulfur gases so it's not just the cows that are burping methane humans nope yep uncle uncle art's been built if you have sibo you're contributing to climate change is that it yep that was going to be when you when we get to the magic wand question i'll talk about my wife anyhow so there's also other tests like urine tests you can look at metabolites right yep you can look at yes so yeah we can look at where it metabolites that will show us markers for dysbiosis in the gut i'm using an organics test so an organics test is when we look at all the organic acids that are products of your metabolism and so we're able to tell we know what should be you know in the metabolism appropriately and we can look at organic acids and we do that as a part of our gi work which is a test that traditional doctors don't do they'll do the traditional breath test but they're not going to do an organic acid organic acid test for something even more advanced called an ion profile that looks at all of your amino acids and that's important when i do a sibo workup because if i look at your amino acids and you're depleted then i know you're really in trouble with your sibo because you're not getting good nutrition you're not absorbing yeah and then i can see markers of inflammation on the ion test i can also see um the the organic acids are really critical because there are things that the bacteria produce that will end up in our urine that indicate to us that wow those things are in the urine because you have bacteria overgrowing or don't belong in your gut yeah and now we find out i think you're right i'm going to jump in with a case i just remind me of a little girl i saw years ago who was nine years old and she was pretty little sweet looking girl right who was a monster like a terror she would constantly get kicked out of class she literally couldn't make it home on the bus without the bus driver having to stop ten times to settle her down she was violent she would rip you know pictures of like part of her family at home she would terrorize her sister and i'm like what's going on with this girl right and we did a whole workup and we found her organic acid test and we found she had massive levels of overgrowth of bacteria yep and she had overgrowth of yeast which is not called sibo but seafoars small intestinal fungal overgrowth and what i did was i gave her an antibiotic and an antifungal and literally the girl completely transformed so you think you're treating a psychiatric disorder absolutely with antibiotics in any fungals how does that make sense well it makes sense when you understand the connections between the gut and the brain i mean this was over 10 years ago i remember writing about it in the ultramine solution girl like wow you know the gut is so connected another one with ocd the same thing she had high levels of ammonia and she had severe ocd she wouldn't pick up anything off the floor i gave her an antibiotic and literally she became like neat freak it was the weirdest thing oh you know i so i would so in in those cases um in the cases i've seen siba is very commonly related to neuropsychiatric disorders so when i have people with memory loss brain fog adhd just as you've said i've had i've had multiple patients right autism the first thing we do is treat their sibo change their diet and within the first six weeks we're starting to see significant change in their behaviors with adhd and in their verbal abilities with autism kids so um the i was going to talk about a fibromyalgia case but i will talk about a adhd i had a uh actually an anxiety depression case talk about both of them yeah i'll talk about there's so many cases i could choose from um uh there is um a recent case from a patient from a different part of the world actually came in and they were having lots of difficulties with their child very bright siblings but this particular child was having lots of issues with impulsive behavior attention in the classroom um moodiness um to the point where there was the child would speak of not wanting to live anymore and so i went through all their symptoms and i th the biggest thing that this child had difficulty with was the bloating and distension that was constant mom noticed it from almost day one of life so we did not only the sibo breath test but we did something called a gi map test which we'll look at it will it will using dna and pcr technology look at all of the bacteria in your gut the major colonies major species look for candida and also look for markers of inflammation those two tests on this patient indicated severe disruption of the balance of the microbiome the patient with the patient was put on a brief elemental diet which is a diet that takes out you know most most foods all the foreign protein all the form proteins and then was put on a autoimmune paleo diet um and very difficult to to put a kid on a diet which basically starves a lot of the bad bacteria absolutely feeding them with all the starch and sugar and carbs which they love you're giving them right and we and we combined it with a low fodmap diet to make sure that the child got all the nutrition they need map is like what that's like so those are those are long chain sugars that get fermented very quickly by bacteria and when you eat them and you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth you get a very big food basically nine months pregnant right you know and the food baby is this basically you're fermenting food where you shouldn't be food's meant to be fermented in the large intestine and that's like florida right but you know what's happening with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth bacteria up in maine and the food's coming in the main mains not ready for gas so now all of a sudden you've got this gas where it doesn't belong geographically you feel very uncomfortable and it starts to impact everything we talked about your nutrition your inflammation and that translates to that gut brain connection the brain gets affected that's why we see so much benefit when we treat diseases like sibo and dysbiosis in our patients with neuropsychiatric disorders from adhd to ocd to anxiety and depression and you've noticed it i know we've talked about even like parkinson's and and other disease processes that will stabilize once we start addressing gut issues so what happened to this this kid then so within the when we had the six-week follow-up and we had started treating now it was actually not the six-week follow-up but the six-week follow-up we went over all the testing and we started the the the second part of the nutrition plan once we started the nutrition plan and i used some natural um herbs to get rid of some of that overgrowth so sort of sort of antibacterial antibacterial herbs um that come in different compounds that we use at the eight week eight weeks later that child's behavior the mood swings were completely gone yeah completely gone the impulsivity was drastically reduced and the teachers were saying he was now paying attention in class and that was just with food no stimulus remarkable no stimulants i just herbs like oregano and oregano and thyme and things like that absolutely yeah powerful stuff yeah and so that's that's the siba story if if someone's listening their depression anxiety mental health issues what are the ways of eating that actually cause a problem and then when we'll get into one of the ways of eating that actually can fix the problem yeah that's then we'll get into this such a great question let's start with the problem at the end of your fork before we tell you the solution and the problem that you're under your fork a lot of people know those words that you know everybody knows i'm about to say sugar everybody knows i'm about to say trans fats everybody knows i'm about to say processed foods and so the surprise it causes everything after diabetes alzheimer's yeah and depression and i think what's really been striking to me as a psychiatrist interested in behavioral change and as an eater and as a parent how do you change uh those from being concepts to being behavioral and action-oriented items in your own life and so what's causing the problem very simply is is not getting enough of the right nutrients and i would argue for a lot of americans missing a set of nutrients americans are not americans are not getting phytonutrients because not eating plants americans are not getting uh seafood because they eat 14 pounds per year period and it's fish sticks it's not the seafood that we would want them to eat they're not you know this is not shrimp ceviche and wild salmon on uh yeah and they also there's i think a problem that isn't just around the food choice but it's around uh i would say the missing spirituality of food and that that people have we've lost our soul about food and when you tell people to eat well there's a notion that well that costs too much or it takes too much time or i don't know how to do it and i think those are our missing lies yes and and i think it's just i mean my mama taught me how to cook and she's taught me that recipes start with olive oil or butter garlic and onions and then you add in what you put in some vegetables in that and and you're good right you put in some meat in that you're good you um and so pretty much how i cook yeah i mean i think it and what i'm i'm shocked by things like when we make our lentil soup at home we make a lentils carrots celery and that's it we put it in a crock pot and i love serving that dish for people like wow what's in here right it's like it's lentil food yeah carrots celery a little bit of pinch of sea salt so anyway those are what's on the end of the fork that's causing the problem is first of all people aren't eating with the fork right people aren't taking a deep breath and engaging their digestive system and people aren't in any way offering up gratitude or thanks for the most people some of you all are out there doing that but the number of times as we did when we were we had that wonderful dinner with well and good and we sat there and i'm sitting there next to gabby bernstein and i'm thinking like i've been out in the midwest like you don't eat until you say grace right and i said let's let's have a moment and everybody's ready to give thanks brother heads for a moment she said such a wonderful uh graystar food for us so those kind of things it's not just that that garbage is on the you know it's not even your fork it's in the package that you're eating or that it's on the go it's that we've lost that notion of where it comes from and and valuing that and honoring that and we're doing a better job as you know honoring the farmers who grow it you know who are you know these silent heroes you know talking about a health care crisis i mean talk about physician suicide i mean the biggest threat to farmers right now is farmer suicide i mean we're just losing dozens of farmers a day it's the number actually came out a bit there was like a little confusion like what's the top uh risk group for suicide was it farmers or doctors and i was like you know either way it's just awful so is there data of science proving that sugar and processed foods cause mental illness well let's talk about the data set that there is the the big data set and there's controversy about this data set is correlational data and the controversy is that's really misguided us with a lot of nutritional policy per you know smart folks looking at that i really like the writing of gary tabbs and peter attia who kind of look at the science behind correlational studies and have some serious questions but but if we're going to think about that data as being useful that data is very clear when you eat more processed foods which means simple sugars trans fats and a lot of simple carbs and all those ways that you know it's not just sugar folks it's like you know you know fructose syrup and i love corn corn syrup solids right now they changed the name of high fructose corn right it was like it's like sounds like a corn kind of like corn syrup or it's like maple syrup and so uh those are you know the things that certainly we want folks to to avoid and um what does the data say if you eat highly processed foods you have you know 50 to 100 increased risk of clinical depression oh if you eat high glycemic index foods there's a great uh study that came out a colleague at columbia looking at high glycemic index foods so those are foods that just spike your blood sugar more those have a significant increased risk individuals have an increased risk of depression the women's health initiative so big big study of of women ages 45 plus and so there's that correlational data and it's just consistent when you look at the meta-analyses of it it's consistent that the food that we've created in the last hundred years leads to an increased risk or increase risk in that population of depression same data for adhd yeah not as much data for anxiety disorders which is interesting but but certainly feels true to me clinically then we move on to randomized controlled trials and the reason this of interest is is on the molecular side like in the mouse models you know this in the s i mean you know not having enough nutrients and putting lots and lots of fuel in any sort of mars look like yeah i mean what the responsibility i mean there's a very it's very clear what depressed mice look like is you stick them in little cages and they just don't try and uh and you put them in to swim it's a forced swim test and when mice are depressed they don't fight to get out they just stop swimming they drown we don't let them drown but but they would drown if you didn't fish them out whereas non-depressed mice they're fighting to get out yeah that's what a depressed mouse looks like so the randomized controlled trials that came out recently are exciting because we can say it makes common sense we can say on a molecular level it makes lots and lots of sense we can say it makes sense in the correlational data but you and i know mark medicine's not going to change until we have randomized clinical trials and that's where folks like felice jacka and michael burke and the food and mood center in australia they're really i would say the leaders in this where they've completed a number of trials natalie parletta uh is also not part of that group but it's a part of the leaders in this and now they're putting down numerous randomized trials and creating resources for patients with mental health concerns like depression yeah to make sure food's part of the equation and their data looks quite strong and and what i love about this is when the data comes out i was funny one of the big leaders in psychiatry um won't mention it by name but been very critical it gets really critic it's a big big post about how and some you know one of these health medicine review websites about you know how how bad the trial was or how small it was it's like fighting everybody's always criticizing each other about the study and i was like so when we don't have data you say there's no data and then when people do a really good trial you want to pick it apart yeah and there's some feeling that that it it's it's it's almost like you know folks have really people don't like paradigm shifts well i mean is this how bad it's gotten mark that we're at a paradigm shift we're suggesting that our our patients our neighbors our families eat well for things like uh when they're thinking about their brain and their mood and their dementia risk and their depression like we've gotten so far down the rabbit hole of medicine that that's a paradigm shift yeah like that that's crazy it is absolutely nice and there's you're right there's so much data like you might be aware of hiblin's work which was from the united states captain joe kevin joey of luna is like he's a pretty cool guy he's the uh he's the leader of the what he calls himself the uh he is the uh servant he's the surgeon generals he's a soldier in the surgeon general's army there you go and he did these amazing studies looking at the rise of omega-3 omega i mean the rise of omega-6 fats refined oils and the decrease in omega-3 fats lead to violence homicide suicide uh and that changed behavior and i remember once coming back from you know somewhere and i had a letter on my desk in my office and it was from a prisoner who wrote me a letter wrote read my book culture metabolism way back when and said you know i was a violent criminal in my life and i realized you know i i that when i changed my diet after reading this book in prison i don't know how he did that that he realized he was a very different person and they've done prison studies where they peop prisoners healthy diets and they reduce violent crime by 56 percent if you have a multivitamin it reduces crime by eighty percent well you can in prisons yeah you can just see that the notion that we you know we don't approach that right what is criminal activity violence so some of it's stuff we don't understand some of it certainly horrible character pathology but some of it when we think that this is a population that in general does not have good nourishment in general um you know does not learn a lot of mental health skills uh you know there's there's a way that that some of what's going on there is certainly just a result of a broken system of mental health care and and i would say a broken system of our culture i've been really uh i've been inspired this month by benjamin uh the benjamin rush biography and the reason is that i didn't know anything about benjamin rush and benjamin rush is one of our youngest founding fathers he is the second youngest sign of the declaration of independence and the only i think one i think the only physician signer yeah and he is our original american physician they called him the american hippocrates back in the day and he's also our original psychiatrist and he founded the first mental hospital and he helped us found this country on a very very simple principle which is that when we think about mental illness we can't put people in asylums and say that they don't have spirituality or they're sinners or they're bad people that we as physicians are going to treat them as patients and we are going to care for them and that is just inspired me to really think about what's happening in our country and how bad our mental health has got and how we all know about it and we're just finally starting to talk about it but we were we were founded as a place where we should have freedom to talk about this i'll get you a cup of the betterment right yeah that sounds fantastic every doctor should read it so so so drew uh you wrote this paper was published september 2018 in the psychiatric journal and and it was really quite detailed in terms of its analysis of the types of foods and nutrients so help us take this home what are the things that you learn from there that are the most important nutrients we need and what are the most important foods to help us get those nutrients and just in general to help us for sure mental illness and so the simple the paper is called antidepressants foods and and folks can and check it out and it's an open source article and and i did this with my colleague dr laura lachance and quite simply it's it's arithmetic it's bean counting and we went through all of the literature looking at all of the the essential nutrients uh vitamins and minerals and did a literature research to say well which of these have significant evidence that they can help prevent depression and that they can be used to treat depression and there are 12 that we've found and i bet you could name all 12 mark i mean they're the 12 we would expect omega-3 fats and zinc and b12 vitamin e magnesium all right and then iron and so then we looked at just a simple what a nutrient profiling system is is it just tries it's just a system for looking at what foods have the most of those nutrients per calorie and then what a good nutrient profiling system does and dr lachance and i really wanted to create a good one because oddly there are i think 27 nutrient profiling systems in the world that have been created some people have seen ones like the andy or new valve you know how many have been about mental health none none and so what we a good nutrient uh trifling system does looks at food categories so we're not saying koko kale kale and people say well i don't like kale you can't eat too much of it yeah yeah exactly oh no it's toxic now now it's toxic work uh but what we say is leafy greens and so what we did is we scored um we looked at all of the all of the the top foods for these nutrients scored them and then created a list of the top plant animal foods and so they're they're you know first of all they're the foods that top the list which i just think are are interesting like oysters clams and mussels are in the top five on the animal side and the reason we did animal foods is that no nutrient profiling system usually has any meat or any animals in it because it's all based on calories usually and plants always have fewer calories but most people eat meat or seafood so we wanted to give folks a list of which which had the most nutrients and why why would this shellfish the top ones top ones because they think about oysters why do they top the list you got 10 to 15 calories per oyster so let's just say you know six oysters 60 calories and for those 60 calories you're getting 768 milligrams of launching omega-3 fats you're getting 340 of your vitamin b12 you're getting uh gosh at least a third of your iron you're getting 500 of your daily need of zinc you're i mean on and on and on you're getting some vitamin c and oysters okay let's go get some oysters yeah exactly all that for 60 calories and that's just and on the other side looking at plants like things like watercress top the list and why just watercress lots of nutrients no calories or very few calories and so that's a great example of nutrient density those foods and so the food categories that people should be looking for things like leafy greens the rainbow vegetables more seafood and if you're eating meat and red meat to look more towards wild red meats or grass-fed red meats so this is fascinating so the diet that prevents cancer heart disease dementia depression and fixes most chronic illness is the same diet it's really it's well it's where we got off in medicine we kind of separated out mental health and brain health from the red like like you're saying kind of like somehow the blood blame brain barrier was like thou shall not pass like we we didn't think that sure those same all the same activities that we we think about in terms of our general health and the foods we want people to eat and the things we want people to do move their bodies uh connect be part of their community yeah that that's key to your brain health in your mental health yeah and and the trouble with you know our food supply is that it's often depleted even if you're eating the best foods you know you have an organic farm the soil matters it really is in the food yeah and if you're going on a depleted soils which most of our soils are more like dust and dirt well they're just like chemicals and chemicals out i mean it's really you know if you if you if you live you know if you if you live by the food you grow you don't you know you don't do it the way that a lot of food is grown and even you know even organic food it's funny as you as you drive through the produce spell and i encourage people to do this and you look out you know you'll see organic stuff out there yeah but it doesn't look like a it doesn't look like a healthy farm somehow it's got a lot of food on it but it doesn't smell right the people working it they they i don't know they don't seem happy in a certain way the the it's it's because of their big mono crop organic yeah there's a big monoculture you know you look at a big kill the soil we should produce great soil they they there's a ton of tillage there's a ton of diesel spent there's a ton of compaction and and it's a real i think it's a challenge right now industrial organic is what michael pond calls it it is and and in a lot of ways you know that's been a huge victory because we have a conversation about organic right it's better that and the organic was just found to reduce cancer by 25 people who had it this french study right i mean so there's you know there there's something there so it's a step in the right direction but when you think about where i'm from and you drive around we our soil is pretty rough in crawford county but boy you wanna i would say that a lot of places mark where we live if you'd take a lot of americans they wouldn't know they were in america because it's just that whole central notion the central america or middle america notion of a small farm and what that looks like and how that functions some cows couple pigs not a monoculture uh a nice garden for all your food and for sharing with your neighbors that has died in a way and and i i i think wayne o'barry calls it the unsettling of america yeah and i think that what you know maybe dead is not that's on life support and and maybe we're seeing a shift now it seems like it's coming back there's more small older farms i hope so i mean it's definitely coming back you see it you see it on the coasts and you see it around urban centers but there's still a lot of places that don't um you know where it's not uh it's not happening and that kind of combo of um you know i would say agri-tourism and interest in food but also just interest in farms but i'm i'm hopeful so so so my question was going down the path of okay if our even organic isn't the best that it could be if the foods have been bred in a way to create more starch or a lot of the phytochemicals have been bred out of it the nutrients aren't there because the soil even if it's the best organic farm and by the way dan barber and and walter rob a former ceo of whole foods or create a seed company to actually reinvent new seeds to breed them so they have flavor and they have nutrient density and they're phytochemical rich it's a very different idea than breeding them for yield or for pest resistance or water or drought but they're doing all that too but they're doing both so the question is if that's true then do we need supplements and do you use supplement nutritional supplements in your practice to treat mood disorders so i think even with the food we have today you can still get all the nutrients you need it's actually challenging if you look at all the recommended daily allowance and you think what you would need to eat to meet that yeah it's a little challenging it requires some thinking about it i almost got it yeah tell people no just eat nutrient dense food you'll be fine but if you start scratching your head and adding enough it can be tough yeah i just stopped i had a patient once who was like i don't take supplements so i literally looked every food up and i'm like okay selenium it's in brazil so i have two brazil nuts a day like this i have 17 pumpkin seeds i have you know two cups of you know broccoli or whatever it is it was like okay fine if you want to do that go ahead let's check your nutrient levels well i have that problem where i i don't like the idea of turning a meal into a math equation and so yeah i have myself i mean i'm i'm 44 and i stopped taking all supplements probably about maybe 10 or 15 years ago i guess that's not entirely true i'll take i'll take a little omega-3 sometimes and certainly in my practice for non-seafood eaters or for individuals who are just kind of eating seafood every now and then especially for individuals who don't want to try a you know a medicine and they've never even for individuals who do i'll put them on a one to two gram milligram grams of fish oil i mean the trials that that you know fish oils is very in the science in the sort of studies of depression is one of these things that has statistical significance but it's not able to show clinical significance in the meta-analyses that you get about a point reduction on a you know hamilton d uh depression rating scale that said uh well you can't take fish oil and be eating like processed oils exactly the place this place is you can't be eating piles of sugar yeah yeah it that you know and you wonder this is the way the studies are designed well you wonder what do they control for that and two you know we have all these snips now in the elongated genes in terms of how we process omega-3 fats are genetic variations yeah i mean there's that there's also that you know if you have somebody who's a seafood eater versus not but the the um the bottom line is i think that there are certain supplements uh that should be tried especially when people are struggling with traditional like antidepressant response like a lot of people see they'll have been on a medicine it works some like with tearfulness or sleep but they're not eating well and for whatever reason they're not gonna start eating well so that's a really good example of somebody who a multivitamin or something with zinc or magnesium um certainly anybody who's low i mean i always have that feeling like if you're low i i definitely do test your patients yeah yeah i test i i don't do as extreme or not negative extreme maybe it's thorough but i certainly test everybody i mean i think what you were saying earlier i think any mental health clinician who misses i mean this is malpractice if you miss a thyroid problem a b12 deficiency syphilis i mean there's a bunch of biological causes of depression yeah and i think you and i see that get missed sometimes where it's like this is not this is not even functional medicine this is just basic medicine yeah it's all good yeah it's good medicine i mean i i you know in my practice i see the common deficiencies you're testing are vitamin d magnesium omega-3 fats sometimes iron yep and the b vitamins particularly around homocysteine and methylation issues which is this cycle of folate b12 and b6 and so i find that giving people a multi and fish oil and vitamin d and maybe a little magnesium usually has enormous impact and what you think is that even if you're going to get them to change their food right away there's some you know that takes a little bit in in a way changing the food i i feel something i feel like we're so depleted it's just yeah well it's hard and it's also it's really hard when you're depressed yeah you know so i think what uh it also gives people something to do yeah because you do i mean depression causes a lot of carbohydrate craving and a lot of you know we eat we call it comfort food for a reason because we eat it when we want to be comforted right i mean i know when i'm in that bad spot man i'm i'm a mac and cheese guy yeah gives you a little serotonin yeah don't give me don't give me any talk about carbs i need like my comfort food but it's um i think it's something also the other one that's i think exciting is the almethofolate it's just exciting in the idea that it's actually a prescription drug for depression well it's a deployment but yeah it's a b it's a b vitamin right you surf by am i allowed to say it's a b vitamin that got you cert by big pharma is the way i think about it which is you have l-methylfolate which is folate that has a methyl group added onto it and instead of that being five bucks it's 200 bucks yeah but you can get it for five bucks you can you can get but the idea that we're just now because this is gonna be the next frontier mark as you know which is we're gonna start really getting into precision psychiatry that's my most my favorite new center at columbia is the center for precision psychiatry there is that there's a center for precision psychiatry there's a center for practice innovation there's a center for women's mental health i mean we there's there's going to be there's a new center for media and mental health that's coming online and precision psychiatry is just that which is there's no i mean one of the things i think it's interesting is there's nobody that's more critical of psychiatry than us like than ourselves yeah because nobody sits with the like and sees the failure well nobody sits with it like you know and until you sit with getting an antidepressant prescription wrong [Music] and then getting it right and knowing that somebody suffered because you didn't make the right choice when you sit with that you want to get it right more than anybody else because that's that's your job and so it's an exciting time between the new knowledge of the microbiome the psychiatric genetics which it's not there yet but man it's getting close we're we're i hope going to see the tide turn on our methyl mental health epidemic we are going to see the tide turn on and it'll help epidemic mark so tell us about square roots how how do you see a change in the food system and how do you see it shifting the way we think about farming why i mean you've you've you know covered my entire pitch right how scary the food system is and that you know that really led me to jumping in okay we've got to do something about it um you know what square roots is in essence is a urban farming company as you've said we built farms right in the middle of the city and so what that means is we're growing food essentially in the same zip code as the end consumer we're also able to do that all year round thanks to the technology platform that we've built where we're building these farms indoors and what that means is that we can control the climates inside these farms and do that all year round right so let's say for example um basil was your favorite herb yeah this is some basil right here perfect okay so the way that we know it's really could the way the way that we would do that is we would say okay where in the world do they grow the best basil yeah right and the answer would be north of italy right okay and so we would literally look at the historical environmental patterns in the north of italy and understand okay in the best basil growing season when does the sun come up when does the sun go down right what is the temperature what is the humidity what is the co2 level and then recreate that environment inside a box and basically drop it in the middle of brooklyn and grow you know literally the world's best basil but do that right in your backyard right which means when you as the consumer get to eat that food it was harvested like 10 hours ago right this morning you know as opposed to the industrial food system that you're talking about where this food is being shipped across the planet and it's taking days weeks you know sometimes even months yeah to get to us which is crazy i mean if anybody's gone to their garden and picked an asparagus or had broccoli or a tomato they know how different it tastes than when you get something that's been shipped across the country or across the world and the nutrient density of the food declines in direct proportion to how far it's gone how long it's sitting on a truck a plane or in the store and you're talking about getting not only local food but immediate food oh and i know there's a term for that no it it it's crazy right when we first started studying uh food systems and we were putting square roots together three or four years ago i was horrified to find out that the average apple in a u.s supermarket has been traveling for nine months before it gets there yeah not nine days not nine weeks nine months yeah and to you know stop that apple decomposing into a gray ball of mush right it's covered in wax right i'm sure you've gone to the supermarket and you buy an apple and the first thing you do is come home and wash it right you got to get rid of that wax and the reason for that is to stop the thing decomposing yeah in the three quarters of a year that it's traveling right but to your point during that time all the nutrients inside are breaking down into sugars you know so you think you're making a healthy choice right maybe you're buying that apple for your kid for lunch tomorrow morning i mean it's better than a pop-tart but still well it's not as good as it could be right it's a waxy ball of sugar yeah right and when you say it like that i mean like right and so then now join the dots between you know a country where we've got 30 35 childhood obesity rates in most of our cities right who are all at the mercy of this industrial food system it is crazy yeah it's pretty it's pretty big so what you're seeing is you've created a essentially a very smart system of agriculture that incorporates a lot of data and knowledge and technology to grow just plants in a way that makes it optimal for them in those conditions and i i think it solves a lot of problems right so let's talk about the kind of problems it solves one talk about the impact for example on the the nutritional quality of the flu mm-hmm right yeah so can you tell us more about what what really do you know about how good or different food that's that fresh and that local and grown in these conditions is absolutely well i mean i think that the first thing to say is that again as food travels those nutrients break down over time right and so a system like square roots where we're growing food in the same zip code as that retailer as that end consumer right it means our food is traveling for less than 24 hours right and so all of the nutrients that are there when the food is is picked right they're still there when you eat it right it's like you know one day right there's hardly any any kind of degradation there and then what we'll do uh to make sure that we understand how good that food is is lab test it against you know the best organic farmers market food that you can buy in new york city and we're you know very very happy at that nutrient quality so you're testing what in that in those tests you're testing like vitamin levels yeah levels and all sorts of stuff right so we want to make sure that we're at the levels exactly at the very least as good as at the best food that you can buy at the organic farmers market in new york right however what we're then able to do is provide you as the consumer with that food all year round right 52 weeks a year because inside these farms in those controlled climates it doesn't matter what the weather is outdoors right you can have two for the snow outdoors it can be the middle of february in new york city but indoors it's still the perfect conditions to grow that food right with those nutrient levels you know with all that goodness that's there and then still get that food to the consumer within a day of harvest okay the other benefits are sort of disrupting some of the social challenges that face people when they try to eat good food if you live in a food desert or something we call food apartheid and you don't have access you can literally put these shipping containers where you grow your food in any neighborhood and provide fresh local produce to that neighborhood in ways that were never accessible to them before yeah i mean if i think about what we've got in new york city for example um you know our farms are built inside refurbished shipping containers right and that means that we can be very creative with existing city infrastructure in terms of thinking where should we put a farm right if you have an empty warehouse boom i can back in you know 20 shipping containers and turn that into a farm right in brooklyn for example where our first pilot farm is we literally have dropped these shipping containers on an under utilized parking lot outside an old pfizer pharmaceutical factory and turned it into a farm right and what that means then is we're now distributing food i think to over 75 retailers across new york city um all of our retailers are within four miles of the farm and that's mind-blowing right to think that the seven or eight million people that live in new york city can now have this hyper locally grown food and have that all year round like it's a game changer you're not local but hyper local right exactly i mean literally you can jump on the j or the am right the subway line and come visit the farm right you're here in a beautiful part of town our farm is like two miles away from your apartment amazing yeah so the the other benefit is is um you're you're raising up a new generation of farmers that is absolutely essential because in this country the average age of farmer is 58 to 60 people are aging out of farming there are really very few supports for er young farmers to enter the marketplace the land acquisition costs are so high the land has become financialized because corporations have bottled up because it's it's actually got more land value than agricultural value so we're really in a situation where young farmers have a real barrier to entering the market but you've created a whole program that's called next gen farmer training program that allows you to bring in people who want to be part of the solution and create a career out of it can you talk about yeah why you're doing that because you could just be selling herbs and vegetables and why would you want to know i mean you're right you know at the beginning of the pod you were articulating the issues with the industrial food system right chronic waste terrible for the planet um you know all of these things pollution diabetes you know 70 of our food has got pesticides and this is all horrific and then this extra topic that doesn't get as much air time as it should is this demographic time bomb that's about to go off right if the average age of a farmer today is 58 like who's going to grow the food in five or six years time when they retire it's like frightening and but you know to your point very very hard then for young people to start a career in farming you know and quite frankly if you're 22 23 like do you want to live in the middle of the country you know in a big you know farm or in brooklyn but you want to look like farmers right exactly you know be surrounded by technology and you know like a you know have have an opportunity to to you know really change the world right and so again when we were putting the business together you know we we realized first and foremost that if we're going to build an urban farming company we need farmers at the center of the system now that might sound obvious right but there are a lot of entrepreneurs in this indoor farming space who are raising a ton of venture capital money to build robots and automation and you know ai and all these kind of buzzwords there's literally hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through this vertical farming basically to take the labor out of the system right because that's one of the most expensive inputs right and yeah there's a lot of amazing technology on that our fundamental thought though belief really was that it's the farmer that's at the center of the system right the person that's willing this plant to come to life that just makes it taste better right it's like when you when you're cooking right you bite it right now exactly exactly and you know i have a phd in ai right i've spent my whole life in data science and you know i found it very very difficult to kind of rationalize that that that that answer initially but i just know that it's true right it's the love that the farmer puts in that that makes the food taste great so we had to figure out how do we provide a pathway for you know young people to come in and learn how to be farmers right provide that love in the system but we also wanted to do that in a way that was creating a positive social impact on the world is right how can we empower and educate and inspire and get more young people into this local food movement they can spend you know 12 months with us 24 months with us and then when they graduate and they leave square roots you know are they now inspired and did they have the tools and are they ready to set up their own local food companies right because the more of us working on this local food revolution the better right so that was kind of the genesis of okay what you know what what can we do here to bring more young people into the industry so great it's so it's so important because we we do have a crisis in farming and agriculture and we're trying to shift and there's so many movements there's regenerative agriculture that's really defining a whole new way of thinking about growing food that restores the soil that reduces carbon in the environment that preserves water they reduce chemical inputs and fertilizers these are all really essential activities and vertical farming is not going to solve our entire food problem but it does fill a niche that is really important which is how do we how do we bring food into urban environments where more and more people are moving to across the globe where where there's less access in many areas for healthy food well and who's going to do that right so that that was the reason why we put this next jam farmer training program together right which is there aren't the millions of farmers you know who understand these systems right who can make this happen and so what what the next gen pharma program is it's a it's a 12-month program young people come and they work with us for a year we basically surround them with technology and training and a team so that they go from you know perhaps zero experience growing plants to become a really competent farmer within about four weeks the technology platform helps them do that right it kind of guides them through their day-to-day okay buddy you're in you know this farm today you've got to harvest the basil you know here's how to do it run your phone your smartphone yeah that's exactly right they literally like open an app on the phone and the and the system is kind of you know giving them instructions of what to do today right yeah at the end of that harvest day then that food gets aggregated and packed and distributed all across new york and it's done through bicycles that's right yeah you know the carbon footprint is basically whatever the guy who's driving the bike or the woman who's driving the bike eight right yeah it's so fun we have these like little electronic tricycles with climate-controlled uh modules on the front of them right so the food literally goes from the farm straight into the climate control bike and then boom we cycle all around town and distribute the food that way like a different different meaning of the word recycle right okay so are you riding the bikes as part of your training to get around of course yeah i mean to be fair actually we do do that every new employee that comes into square roots they spend a month in the farm right you got to learn how to do this thing and then for sure they're on the bikes they're in the stores doing demos like you know you've got to be able to kind of walk the walk right as well so let's talk about something that is is also an important piece of the food story which uh i think there's debate about how this approach impacts that um and and that's climate change uh it's really clear from emerging research that our food system is the number one source of climate change yeah 30 of greenhouse gases right yeah 30 but if you add in food waste you had all the transportation you add in the whole not just you know animal factory farms you add the whole value chain some estimate that it's between 40 to 60 percent yeah it's fine so it's it's frightening it's bigger than the energy sector's contribution so if we just completely stopped fossil fuel use today everybody switched to electric cars and had zero emissions we'd still have catastrophic temperatures within two decades so the only solution is to reimagine agriculture and farming at scale and the idea of a carbon farm essentially is that soil is a big sink for carbon it's basically the plants draw carbon out of the environment and store it in the soil the microbes feed on it and it becomes this wonderful virtuous cycle and the hypothesis that some have is that if we do this at scale we can actually draw down carbon and it's the biggest carbon sink on the planet bigger than the rain forest right now soil on the planet contains three times as much carbon as the entire environment in the atmosphere so with with industrial farming it's clearly a problem regenerative farming is a promising solution how does vertical farming hydroponics aeroponics how does it all fit into that because there are energy inputs to the system right so yes you have a container and it's sitting in brooklyn somewhere in a warehouse but you have to have lights that's driven by electricity you have to have cooling and temperature control and there's water use but it's i think far less than traditional agriculture but so there's how do you how do you kind of reconcile that what does the data show i know that cornell are doing some research to look at all these variables i don't know if anybody's really sort of figured it out but i wonder is it got a positive benefit or is it a negative benefit to the environment yeah and i think right no one don't known us figure today right and you're going to take maybe years right to figure out the exact impact of industrial farming right and then to do the comparison with indoor farming with indoor farming there's so because it's a technology driven industry right there are so many efficiencies that happen every every day literally right but by the time that five year study you know that's commissioned and is finished like it's kind of out of date right because the industry has moved and that that's a fantastic thing about indoor farming i often you could run off solar power wind power or wind power right so we're opening a farm in michigan right now that is that is that is wind power right which is absolutely incredible and you have to think intuitively right that if you have an industrial farm where there's you know chemicals pesticides herbicides um you know that the the you know farmers are kind of over planting to hedge against nature right think of all the resources that that takes and then you've got to distribute food maybe across the world um you know the refrigeration costs along the way et cetera et cetera intuitively it's got to make sense to grow not not all i would never say this is you know a complete disruption and you can't grow everything in there exactly right but i would say you know perishable produce right your herbs your leafy greens some fruits like let's start thinking about how to do this at scale indoor in the same zip code as the end consumer as soon as possible now i'll tell you this right in the uk where i grew up the intensive farming techniques that we're using we're eroding the topsoil at such a rate that there is only about 50 years worth of harvests left in outdoor soil right if we continue the current products if we continue the current practices right so you can sit here and pontificate you know for the next 10 years right to figure out okay which is you know you know is the carbon footprint of this better than this now we're 10 years closer to that 50-year kind of apocalyptic cliff right where we can't grow food outdoors so you have to and it's not just there i mean before obama left he had people working on the soil issue and they estimated in the united states uh by the end of the century we're running out of soil right done so you've got to do something right so the way that we think about soil no food no humans i get climate change exactly exactly so so you know when we think about resources right we think about space we think about water and we think about energy right so from a space perspective we're growing using vertical walls right so we kind of take that two-dimensional field and we turn it on its end and kind of rack that field inside these boxes right so now we're growing food in three dimensions instead of two dimensions and that means you get a lot more food from the same size footprint right so you know theoretically now we could think about saving you know like an apartment building which is a single level that's exactly right right and so now let's think about okay well if we're sort of you know saving you know acres and acres and acres of farmland because we're growing indoors using this kind of very smart space system you know can we what what else now can we do with that outdoor land to do things like you know take carbon out of the air right so you can work in in in collaboration right with the outdoor farmer right this isn't just you know the only part of course on the water side these are hydroponic farms so there's no soil what that means is there's no water runoff right like you would have in an outdoor farm so these are very very efficient in terms of water use right some estimates um claim that hydroponic indoor farming uses about 90 percent less water than the equivalent outdoor farm right so that's a good thing which is important because we're running out of water too and not just soil so completely and then the third thing is energy right so yes we do have artificial lights inside these farms right it's the light that gives the plant the energy right that it then turns into biomass to grow right called photosynthesis exactly right you need that what we are able to do though is through studying photosynthesis you begin to understand what spectrum of light the plant uses at certain points during its growth period and then the artificial light we're only pushing into the farm the exact spectrum that the plant needs right so often when you look at pictures of indoor farms there's pink lights everywhere right it's kind of red and blue lights because that's the spectrum it looks like a disco right it's like a studio 54 farming we've been called many times but the reason for that is one about energy efficiency right which is if we're flooding this farm with white light you then have all that spectrum either side of the red and blue that would just be wasted like right the plant doesn't use it wasted light wasted energy let's not do that let's hyper focus the spectrum of light to give the plant just what it needs right and then finally as technologists we're obviously making all of that more and more efficient every single day right if i'm an outdoor farmer i can't suddenly look at the sun and make it twice as efficient tomorrow to half my costs right or double my yield as an indoor farmer i can look at those lights and make them twice as efficient over time and bring that positive impact uh you know to the whole model through technology over time it seems like if you can add in the renewables to it you know like solar wind that you can actually you know make a real argument that it's 100 actually much better we live in a toxic world right it's not a matter of you know do you have toxins just how many do you have right you know you know persistent pollutant toxins that will just migrate will just camp out in your fat and just leech into your system on alter how your mitochondria work alter how your immune system works yeah great case that i had uh it's a gentleman who has alzheimer's he was seen at a very large institution in boston and he was diagnosed at the age of 56 with you know moderately advanced alzheimer's he was um he had a basic evaluation with a spec scan and he was told he had alzheimer's he was given a pill that we know doesn't work for more than 18 months to stabilize it right yeah we he was given a it doesn't work even phrases yeah he doesn't even i was just trying to be generous um and then that's not our opinion this is basically in the major medical journals the pills for alzheimer's don't work so then then he was given you know start behavioral therapy and cognitive therapy again hasn't been proven to do anything to slow the progression or improve cognition at all so he's you know at a major institution given those two things to do he is he is a very very active gentleman um with uh a great deal of huge responsibilities in his life um very dear man and he comes here for the first visit and he's you know he's you know you see these these issues and so we start talking and i start testing so we do the tests let's look at the gut let's see if there's toxins let's find out about your hormones right let's see if you have any autoimmunity let's do some we do some you know we do specific autoimmune testing to see if your your body is making auto antibodies against brain tissue so why would you do that because alzheimer's is what it's alzheimer's is a multi-faceted multi-causality disease it's inflammation of the brain it's inflammation of the brain that's what's driving it right and there's and there's lots of things that can cause an inflammation right so we're going to look for everything that can cause inflammation and there's also disruption of normal function right that that might be distant so what effect does having a low testosterone have on the brain testosterone has a you know has a big impact on the brain it can have an impact on on inflammation it can have an impact on how the pituitaries and the hypothalamus are secreting other hormones how those hormones will work and how your neurotransmitters may work so here are some of the things we found with this gentleman you had a mercury of 120. oh wow now put it in perspective like zero is normal zero to four and anything over 10 i worry about 20 is bad and like 120 is you know a handful of people yeah that you see over the course of decades have 120 yeah yeah very very few people mercury level testosterone level from where fish water air but lots you know he was a fish eater in his lifetime and again you know he wasn't like an extraordinary fish eater but if you look at his detox genes yeah he had a lot of on his genes he had a lot of variants that put him made him susceptible to not being able to detoxify as well as he should so you know you and i can go eat you know sushi the whole week not me i got those same genes okay you got this that's why i got mercury poisoning all right so i could eat it i don't have an issue with mercury right my mercury wasn't high at all and i love fish i eat a lot of fish so jealous okay well so so mercury his testosterone level was 150. so at his age his testosterone levels should be you know 600 on average 800 800 600 yeah right um so 150 is like nothing about what a woman has almost exactly so so he had his testosterone as though his mercury was bad and of course there was sibo and he had dysbiosis so not only did he have his gut was all messed up his gut was all messed up and then finally on top of it he tested positive for lyme disease so that's another thing that we do here at the ultra wellness center is you know you can't practice functional medicine without coming across lyme disease almost every day you know it's it's stealth infections lyme disease and the co-infections that can be found with it along with other viruses are a big part of what impacts people he had lyme disease so we had four strikes against them and so so here's what's really interesting we arranged for him to get some really intensive um lyme disease treatment um at a another clinic um uh in in germany and where they do hypothermia hyperthermia uh and they uh they give iv antibiotics when you're you're by making somebody really warm um you are able to uh that's when the bacteria can most susceptible to antibiotics and so at that really high temperature about 107 degrees they're going to put an iv infusion of an antibiotic in and fight the infection i did that i i went to santa baby but i had hyperthermia and i liked lyme disease and babisia and i had night fits all the time and i did the treatment and it kind of went away and i've seen this case after case now it's not something that's available in the united states but it can be very powerful yeah so in his particular case we chose that direction because of the degree of the severity of what he was facing yeah so we wanted to let's just let's just hit this hard hit it fast it was something we really believed in so we arranged for him and i worked with those doctors at the st george clinic and um then we treated his mercury uh we we started treating his testosterone um using um first getting him to sleep better working on his nutrition i always like to work on lifestyle before i start treating directly with hormones then we added in some hormones that would benefit his testosterone levels and at six months he had stabilized so he had he had not worsened at least six months actually about the eighth month mark um uh when we we saw he was at he was still working and he he noticed that his memory had not gotten any worse than it had been and so we're continuing to work it's a story that's ongoing but really really exciting because that's important to say that this is a progressive disease because usually a year later people are a lot worse right i was thrilled that at eight months he wasn't worse and were his numbers better but although oh absolutely testosterone levels were up to like 500 at that point um mercury level was coming down mercury can be hard to come you know bring down it can take a period of time but i do like to remind people he was very excited to know there are things i can work on see he left a large institution with things to do that weren't going to work it's sort of hopeless so this is a really important point with functional medicine alzheimer's is a diagnosis it's not the cause no and functional medicine helps you figure out what that is not doesn't mean everybody with alzheimer's has those things although they're common but you know tick infections heavy metals hormonal issues gut issues things you can actually treat and i think this is such a big difference between functional medicine what we do here at the ultra wellness center in lenox massachusetts and what people get when they go to a traditional physician they're not having somebody pull back the hood and look underneath and see what's going on they go oh i know what's wrong with you of alzheimer's no that's just the name of the problem right now let's start to figure out what's going on and that's beautiful you know you know we see everything here we see autoimmune diseases from hashimoto's thyroiditis to ulcerative colitis uh to um rheumatoid arthritis we see alzheimer's disease adhd autism we see people with it doesn't matter what diagnosis you have because we treat the system not the symptoms or diseases and when you do that whatever they have has a chance that's the point i want to make you know we see everybody with everything from every age and we end up being able to help them more than the specialists did because we're looking at everything and we're getting to the root cause and so in the course of a week i can see a two-year-old or a three-year-old with autism yeah and i can see i can see a a year old with als right i can see a woman with depression no libido uh fibromyalgia and it all it it's all in my purview yeah and it's all really this is a really important point you know people say well do you treat this you treat that i'm like i treat things i've never seen i never had a patient with vestibular migraines before i mean i don't know that much about it other than you know the basics what i learned medical school but i know how to treat the body i know how to treat the system i know how to treat a human being and look for the root causes and when you do that even if you don't exactly understand the disease it'll often dramatically improve or reverse completely absolutely you know but you know i i like to let people know it's it's it's hard work it's good work it's really good hard work you're never not like take this policy in six months right change your diet you have to take care of your lifestyle issues you have to take things to help reset your system get your gut do the hormones treat the lyme right like example i think is a good one is my own daughter she went you know she started having i have permission from my daughter actually she said are you gonna say my name i said do you want me to she said yeah so my daughter isabelle so my daughter isabelle um so she started having her period and about you know in the first year of her cycle she was very irregular and she was really getting more and more fatigued so it was around school time it was august you guys were a pediatrician yeah so no no because you know my wife goes with her and at the you know my wife is she she's um very attentive to these these health issues and nutrition and so she sat in the visit and she came back and she shook her head george she said i am done i am so done i told him that isabelle had fatigue never once asked her what she eats then talked about nutrition whatsoever basically said you know barely asked for about her period other than to know that it was irregular um and um really basically said you know you just started your period give it some time you're an adolescent you know you're you sleep more you're going to be fatigued it's sort of the natural process so i'm like thinking nope so i wanted to know i know my daughter's diet is hard as we try in our home my wife and i eat whole foods she will tend towards carbs and sugars outside the home and even inside the home so i had a lot of suspicion from watching her in our house that she was having issues around her diet and nutrition so the first thing i wanted to do was find out if she was having any food sensitivities so we did some igg antibody testing which looks at food sensitivities not necessarily food allergies so ige looks at food allergies i think about peanut allergies peanut butter that's anaphylaxis you'll know you eat it you turn blue but i stopped like you might not know you might eat right you know you eat a strawberry and on wednesday get a headache right strawberry uh on friday night and sunday you have you know red cheeks that's sensitivity now you can have sensitivities and you never make the connection to food my daughter had huge sensitivities to gluten gluten it's a really bad thing we're going to talk about in a second milk egg and then multiple other foods which goes that whole leaky gut feels a leaky gut leaky gut check the thyroid your tsh should be you know in general you know if you look at numbers 4.5 or less hers was 5.8 yeah because that's like low thyroid i checked her thyroid antibodies when the body begins to make antibodies against self tissue my daughter had antibodies against her thyroid wow again 14 years old right and she was told most doctors don't check anybody they'll just check the tsh and if it's around normal they'll just say it's fine right and and her cbc her blood count we have hemoglobin and mata critter two numbers you look at to see if you have enough blood blood carries oxygen oxygen is required to make energy energy gives you energy and if you don't have it you're fatigued and she was fatigued these tests were not done she was anemic her her hemoglobin her her hemoglobin was 9.9 oh that's really 13 to 14. yeah right that's like that's like down like three pints now these these are lab tests were available at the conventional doctor so now here's my daughter with all this going on so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to change your diet but here's the key thing the gluten piece see that gluten sensitivity triggers everything as we know you know gluten is what triggers the the you know can be a trigger for your gut to make something called zonulin and zonulin is the molecule that opens and closes those gates in that membrane that protect the lumen you know your body from what's in the lumen of your gut in the intestine right in the intestines so when you're sensitive to gluten and you start to trigger that you create this leaky gut that's when you really open up that door as we talked about for autoimmunity and malnutrition and then on top of that she was having these bleeds the last thing i checked mark was her hormones well before you just want to recap that because that's important so gluten basically damages your gut lining which then causes leaky gut but it also prevents iron absorption yep which is why she was anemic it also triggers autoimmunity particularly thyroid autoimmunity so a lot of people hashimoto's caused by gluten so when you sort of dial back you can get to the right cause okay let's see what happens so so okay so and then on top of that is a quick aside i checked the hormones and you can do this ratio between your progesterone or your estrogen when a woman's irregular like that you should really check that because if you have a relative elevated estrogen compared to progesterone that's called estrogen dominance and estrogen dominance can impact your cycle it can make it irregular and it can make it very heavy it can lead to a lot of pms and depression yeah and it can last for half the month yeah okay so all this was going on by the way 75 of women have pms that is not a normal condition no it's not it's because of our diet our stress our lifestyle our gut our food foods that has has hormones in it you know we just you know the whole you know issue with hormones in our food and guess what's the biggest driver of high estrogen levels sugar sugar and hormones in our starch exactly so my my daughter is a perfect example of the modern diet despite believing i got to say this parents who eat really well have a garden in the backyard and do something and teenagers are temporarily psychotic it's part of the point i want to make and this is this is the point is that she is fortunate to have me as her dad because if she didn't have me she could have gone a decade or two decades thinking hmm that's just me only in her 30s after a baby or before a baby or in a stressful time to just completely break down and all of a sudden have hashimoto's or rheumatoid or some other immunology disorder that could have been prevented and this is what happens i've seen this over and over in patients so start out and you can track their history we'll call it the timeline and functional medicine we track okay this person was born by c-section their gut doesn't get developed in the microbiome they had antibiotics early on because of ear infections disrupts their gut microbiome maybe they develop some acne or maybe they got some allergies and you then they get maybe thyroid issues when they're 20. then they get when they're 30s they start getting autoimmunity like rheumatoid arthritis and it's the same freaking story almost every time all the time and you can track it back so the fact that you got your daughter early is a huge thing and that allows her to then maybe develop normally and not develop these autoimmune diseases and so forth that we see in so many yeah here's here's one of the things i want to say about functional medicine applying everything that we discover as we ask those questions why we do this advanced testing that you're not going to get at another center it's not easy right and i know i know firsthand what it's like to have to change your lifestyle not only my daughters but in my own when i dealt with my brain injury but with my daughter having to help her sleep better create a sleep ritual help her to learn how to meditate help her to make good food choices that is not easy work and so you know at the ultra wellness center we also have coaches so we have coaches that will come alongside you and will hold you accountable work with you to help you devise strategies over a long period of time to change these lifestyles we know habits don't change for at least three months how can we anticipate that some of the most critical things that are gonna make you healthy are gonna happen in two weeks six weeks or eight weeks it could take three years yeah i like to remind people that what's fascinating too is that what i see here is that it's not as hard as you might think because when we put people on a regimen and i do this pretty aggressively to get them feeling better fast yeah because i figure if they can have the experience of feeling good even if there's more work to do they're going to do it right in other words in 10 days or two weeks by changing your diet and doing a few simple things you often see profound differences you know in the 70s we're talking we're talking 40 years ago in the late 60s early 70s actually talking close to 50 years ago people were saying we have to stop marketing junk food to children this is really bad we are teaching young children that soda is a cool thing to drink even before they can talk even before they're even marginally able to understand what's coming at them we're teaching them soda sweetened juice bread sweetened breakfast cereal cookies these are the things that make life worth living right 50 years ago there was noise being made about that the federal trade commission which was on the verge of doing something about it was effectively silenced congress was effectively bought off no one even raises the issue anymore you can't even get the national government to talk about this stuff so now you're relying on things like soda taxes which are better than nothing but not much yeah well it's interesting barry popkin who i know you know very well he said to me that in chile where they implemented a sweeping policy change around food including a soda tax of eighteen percent right and in great labor including eliminating marketing to kids right uh through any media uh and also on the cereal boxes so tony the tiger is dead right he said shockingly when they analyzed the impact of these policies that the marketing restrictions were four times as effective as the soda tax yes i would imagine that and in this country i i read i think mayor nessl wrote an article i think in new england journal years ago about food marketing kids that said i think we're one of the only countries other than syria that doesn't restrict food marketing to kids in some way i don't know well maybe in some way and we do restrict it in some way but again these are to a large part it's voluntary like the industry had said well don't worry about it we'll we won't market junk to kids which was a total lie they took one sliver of their marketing budget and moved it somewhere else so they can say oh here's this you know saturday mornings we don't sell junk on children's programming that's kind of it the the real tragedy here is that i mean suppose we have this conversation a great conversation filled with interesting things too intelligent guys maybe we change a couple people's minds or a few people have insights fabulous meanwhile the budget for the fast food junk food industries is in the billions of dollars and they're targeting young kids who can't really say oh what a bunch of garbage that is but say oh wow i can paddle my canoe down a river made of milk and capture fruit loops in this kind of game that and aren't fruit loops fun or isn't coke enjoyable every year that passes that we are not teaching four-year-olds how to eat well means that 20 years from now we're going to have 24 year olds and 40 years from now we're gonna have 44 year olds who are struggling with their diets who are coming to see you and other doctors and saying gee i'm overweight i can't control them why is that well the reason is not that you're a bad person um the reason is that you were trained as a young person to eat badly and that you're surrounded by not the most ideal food that you should be eating in fact you're surrounded by the opposite of the ideal and your every place you go every david kessler has always talked about this this sort of i mean the silly scientific term is obesitogenic environment but basically what it means is that we are in a permanent carnival of junk food food swamp right and food swamp is much better than food desert everywhere you go there's cotton candy and marshmallows and cinnabon and double cheeseburgers and and it's all screaming eat me and when you're a little kid you were being told this is the cool stuff yeah not like stir fry with broccoli and tofu but this stuff it's tough and you know the average kid sees between six and ten thousand as for junk food in a year a year a year and if you spoke to your kid three times a day at every meal about healthy eating you could not compete right that would be one thing and then i think even today it's worse because that was based on traditional media now we have social media which is all subversive invisible and embedded and much harder it's true if you spoke to your kid three times a day you'd talk to them a thousand times right and they might hate you by the way the kid would hate you so that's true and my daughter is fascinating she reminds me the story when i was you know reading about this you know if kids who are two years old can recognize labeled brand name products before they basically can even walk or talk you have to be eight before you can distinguish fact from fiction i remember my daughter was like eight or nine she says daddy how come all those commercials on television in real life it doesn't actually kind of match up with what you see and i'm like wow that's very insightful she kind of has this awake that like all that crap she sees in the media isn't actually what it really is and and uh you know our friend kelly brownell was also uh sort of pioneering some of this research around food marketing and said the worst foods have the most marketing so the ones that have the most uh harm and the least nutritional value are the ones that are most promoted right well unadulterated foods are not very profitable yeah like broccoli is not that bright yeah who's where do you see those super bowl ads for broccoli or cashews you know you don't um all right so let's talk about the the the way we can help shift this and if you were advisor to the president and you were sitting in the white house and maybe uh this next election cycle and you could help shape that national food policy where would you focus i mean i would the two things we've talked about i would do the antibiotic thing like that i wouldn't even you know just yeah it has to be an edict and by the way that would transform animal agriculture overnight i think it it might although they've taken antibiotics out of industrial agriculture in denmark and the netherlands and they're still producing a lot of factory farms okay so you can do it without antibiotics it's not a panacea yeah but it sure it sure starts to solve one public health problem which is the our antibiotics are not as effective as they were and so that's an easy thing there's great public relations victories a lot you could talk about you could use it in tandem with making in factory farm to meet better you're not going to make it go away by this but you could there are degrees of so i would just that would be like okay you want to know what i want to do it's not it's not the biggest problem it's not the biggest solution but it's the easiest thing it's like such low hanging fruit and really we all those of us who wrote this call for a national food policy honestly thought that it would be one of the first things the obama administration would do that's ten years that it hasn't happened that it could have happened so that's unfortunate the second thing i do is start working on marketing the marketing of junk to kids i mean we just talked about that also but i would just say what's feasible what can we do here can we make it so that miners can't buy soda without their parents permission it's a radical notion but they can't buy cigarettes and it's soda is arguably as harmful as cigarettes we had no problem with that it's certainly as harmful as beer so yeah well i mean it's it's now clear that diet and particularly sugar sweetened beverages you know kill more people than smoking war and terrorism and uh combined right and transportation so well you know experts are now saying that the leading cause of death worldwide can be traced to diet so we know that a billion people don't have enough to eat that's an income issue and that's a justice issue and that's an issue that needs to be dealt with in one way on the other hand we know that another billion or more people are getting the wrong calories 2 billion or overweight okay are getting the wrong calories and are and are getting chronic diseases from their diet you know it could happen i mean it could happen to non-overweight people too so how do we address that yeah and you know until we until we change our economic system we're not going to be directly regulating what food manufacturers can produce but maybe we can directly regulate what they can sell yeah that's not that would be uh so what about the this sort of dichotomy between the message that meat is bad in the sense of harming the planet harming people causing climate change and feedlot factories and the emphasis you also play some regenerative agriculture which necessitates animals being part of the cycle of regenerating soil holding water drawing down carbon reducing climate change because it's i think it's a debate that is is dichotomized but falsely so it's if meat is bad it doesn't mean all meat is bad right and how how do you explain that to people you know i think you start with the fact that the way we produce meat is mostly bad and you start i'm bad is obviously a simple term but it works i guess and you start with the fact that we mostly eat too much of this meat that's produced badly so if we ate less meat and produced it better and saw our animal friends as a way of keeping soil healthy as a way of promoting regenerative agriculture and so on it becomes more of that kind of closed system where everybody has a role and it's not just we're raising animals as if they were little machines and we're killing them as if they had no life worth thinking about and we're just eating them as fast as we can and by the way we're doing it at a rate that the rest of the world can't but tough luck because we're americans or whatever you're whatever you're saying um you know the the latest thing five years ago or so lancet said um lancet said that people in the west should be reducing their meat consumption by 90 percent i don't think they're actually the latest stuff i think is a little less onerous but even if it's 50 that's a lot for a lot of people i think it's just clear to say we need fewer animals in industrial production we need more animals on pasture um and we as humans need to be eating fewer for them and paying more attention to which ones we're eating when and how i mean that's a broad overall statement to come out and say look we all have to be vegan or we have to reduce our meat consumption by 90 percent like this people just going to shut their ears i think what's fascinating though is if you look at the the problem the price of feedlot meat is pretty low it's unbelievably cheap until you get to that true cost stuff the true costing so you add in the cost of the fossil fuels to grow you add in the cost of soil destruction from the corn and soil i mean one pound of soil that's lost for every pound of corn grown we have the greenhouse gases water per pound of meat right that kind of thing has gas stuff on and on and on public health costs i don't think you mentioned exactly trillions of dollars a year absolutely so there's a huge cost so maybe a pound of meat should be a thousand dollars if it's a feedlot meat or right whatever whatever it is whatever it is on the other hand your grass-fed ribeye is 70 for a steak you know that's ridiculous but what if the true cost of that was incorporated in terms of the benefits to the soil and the water retention of the soil and the reduction climate change and the health benefits of more omega-3 fats in the diet from the food i mean so we have to equalize that and we put all these price supports for feedlot meat through subsidies that gross corn and soy we destroy rainforests and destroy soil none of that's incorporating the cost and on the regenerative side it's very hard for people to start that because it's cost a lot of money up front it's hard to transition uh you know and a lot of rangelands are not being used in this way but could be restored i mean you know i always sort of sort of talk about how we had 60 million bison in this country before we kill them all off to starve off the native americans and now we have about 80 million cows we didn't have climate change back then we didn't have soil destruction they were actually building tens of feet of topsoil so how do we sort of rethink that and include that in the equation so i think to me policies that that actually help account for the true cost of food and reduce the supports for that in feedlot meat and then having subsidies and support for regenerative ag seems to be like a great solution right and you put that in conjunction with putting farmers back on the land who want to do the kind of farming that will support the environment that will uh produce meat that's raised without torture and and so on and you have a you're beginning to have a kind of comprehensive plan for how to address food i think a big thing is i mean you asked what i would do if i were food czar or whatever yeah um another big thing that addre that addresses those that package that you just raised is how do we get how do we make land affordable for people who are going to farm it in a way that will sustain that land as opposed to scraping off the top layer of topsoil having the wind blow it away and that's what happened to the prairie yeah you know a lot of it is just gone that was the dust bowl we killed the bison and we got the dust bowl well we killed the bison we killed the bison and killed the original people or moved them in order to be able to scrape the the the prairie down to the topsoil in order to plant the topsoil in wheat and then much of that topsoil blew away during the dust bowl right and then there was an attempt to kind of reestablish that environment which you know hasn't worked that well and it's certainly not a sustainable system now either i mean it's only what 75 well i guess uh 90 years after the dust bowl that land isn't repaired and that land is not being used in a sustainable way yeah it's it's really all interconnected and that was what was so great about that article to create a 21st century national food policy because it connected all these disparate dots and it pointed out a lot of points of light of people actually doing the right things that need more support and help right and and and the truth is we have the potential to change what's going on with simple government policies like the good food purchasing program for example in la is where the local government says we're only going to buy food for our institutional things that we serve as a government that's sustainable that's high nutrition that meets all these metrics and it's measured and it's reproducible so those kinds of initiatives could be huge if we sort of put a little compost on them um not gasoline that is spreading they're good for food purchasing policy and you know the the great thing about it and this is because of the terrific people behind it but the great thing about is that it even talks about the parts of the food system that aren't again would get talking about hidden costs for a bit or we're talking about um factors that aren't normally associated with it but good food purchasing policy says well we want this food to be grown by people who are treated well by people who have fair labor practices yeah um so that we want to make sure that workers who are bringing us our food are treated well that's a novel concept yes to say um i mean you probably know that something like eight of the ten worst paying jobs in the united states are in the food system yeah people who are bringing us our food farm workers food workers retail workers people who bring us food often are on food stamps they can't afford to buy food in the same way that many of us do so they're being underpaid they're being paid minimum wage there's wage theft and a lot of those kinds of jobs they're being paid less than minimum wage they're tipped workers which is a problem and good food purchasing policy is a way that cities can say well we don't want workers who are in the food chain who are supplying us our food our city's food to be mistreated we want them to be making at least a fair living wage and that's you know that's a food issue and that's you know you can't say that's not a food issue it's a food issue and it's a big issue and the other part of it that people don't think about is that farming is the most dangerous occupation in america and people who are farm workers die at seven times a rate as non-farm workers and it's because of the pesticides and the chemicals and the farm injuries and and these are often poor underserved workers who have no health care and guess what we pay for that i mean so all these costs are sort of embedded in the system that aren't reflected in the price of food and we we actually don't even talk about them hey it's dr hyman if you enjoyed this video you're going to want to check out this next video coming up inflammation which is what i had right widespread inflammation in my nerves inflammation in my gut inflammation in your brain in my thyroid exactly it doesn't qualify as a treatable disease right that's what i was joking

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 1,440,510

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Id: 3dppG0JwPag

Length: 151min 4sec (9064 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021