Everything in our society automatically creates disease, our process, diet, our century lifestyles, chronic stress. You know, I was with this guy, Silvio, on top of this mountain in Sardinia, who was two hundred sheeps and goat and his family lived there for one hundred of years, and so I said, I said, Silvio, so do you have any stress in your life? And he looked at me like it was the weirdest freaking question he'd ever even asked. And then he said, yeah, you know, sometimes at night a goat
gets loose and I have to go get it. I'm like, oh, they got Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that are tuning in who are here every week to become happier, healthier, and more healed. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book Eight Rules of Love is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book.
I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eight Rules of Love dot com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour Love Rules. Go to Jay Shettytour dot com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to
see you this year. Now, today's guest is one of your favorites. I am so excited because this is the first time we're in the same room, in the same space together. But I've been a follower and a fan and an admirer of his work for a very, very long time. I'm talking about doctor Mark Hyman, a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and
advocate in the field of functional medicine. Doctor Hyman is the founder and director of the Ultra Wellness Center, senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fourteen time New York Times best selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for the Institute for Functional Medicine. Doctor Hyman is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you haven't subscribed, make
sure you do. And Doctor Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS, This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, and CNN. He's also an advisor and co host of many shows. And today were tooms new book Young Forever, The Secrets to Living your longest, healthiest life. And I know this is what you want. So when you go and grab a copy of this book, it's available as we speak. Make sure you go and
order a copy of the book. This step by step program is to reverse disease, ease pain, and renew energy. Please welcome to On Purpose for the second time, Doctor Mark Hyman. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's okay to see you, man, No, thank you for being here. I mean, you know, your work is so practical, it's so accessible. I'm glad we get to finally be in person. And I remember last time you came on the show, everyone absolutely loved it. So I can't wait for this inhuman
person connection. But I want to start because when I was reading through this book, a lot of stuff came up. This this really stood out to me, really stood out to me. I want to dive straight in. Go let's go. You said, for every ten percent of your diet that is ultra processed food, your risk of dyeing goes up fourteen percent. So wait, I'll repeat that for everyone, For every ten percent of your diet that is ultra processed food, your risk of dying goes up to fourteen percent. You're
saying that's for every ten percent. Yeah, that's one percent of our diet and sixty seven percent of kids diets today in America. And what's ultra processed food? It's basically food like substances. It's not really food. I mean, processed food is not bad. Sour crouts processed food, miso processed food. You know, can sardines and canned tomatoes. That's processed food. That's okay. But it's the ultra processed food, which is where they take the raw materials from soy, wheat and
corn that are grown through industrial agriculture. They break them in part to the component parts. They reassemble them in foodlike substances, which are all color, size and shapes of chemically extruded foods. That have no resemblance to anything we're ever eaten for most of our evolutionary history and are extremely triggering for all the ancient pathways to cause disease. So if you want to get sick and die early,
eat processed food. Yeah. Well, with this conversation of how our diet and our gut health being linked to longevity and aging, it's something that's i mean, been around for for a long long time, but I feel like we're only really having this conversation now and more and more people are moving in that action. Would you agree with that?
I think it's true. I don't think And honestly, I've been in practicing medicine for over thirty years and I can't tell you how shocking it is to somebody my well educated patients that food has anything to do with how they feel. I mean, like, forget about disease. It's like and most doctors, if you ask, you know, just food have any to do that arthritis or rumors arthritis or you know, cancer or dementia, They're gonna don't know,
you know. But it's absolutely the biggest driver. It's the single biggest thing we do every day, which is interact with literally pounds of foreign material that we have to digest, breakdown and assimilate. And in the food is not just calories, it's information, it's instructions. It's code that regulates every aspect of your biology, for good or bad. And so we now understand how these ancient systems in our body that either can activate longevity and healing or can cause disease,
are influenced by the information and food. So food is medicine but can also be poison. So ultra process food is literally poison. It's addictive, it dries, inflammation, it accelerates every age related disease we know of, from cancer to hearts, thease to diabetes and dementia, depression, everything you can posibly imagine. Even violence and divisiveness and hatred in our society are driven by food. And I talked about this in my
last book, Food Fixed. Where in prisons, if they give prisoners healthy food, the violent crime goes down by fifty six percent. If they give it in juvenile detention centers, their violence goes down by our ninety percent. The restriction that these and news restraints goes down by seventy five percent. Suicide goes down by one hundred percent. That's a third leading cause of death in this population. So food is so important to so many aspects of our physical and
mental health. So we need to understand how our bodies interact with food and how we've co evolved with food and how to turn on the right signals in the body to activate well being and joy and pleasure and also all these ancient longevity switches. So that's really a lot about my book Young credits about it is about how do we activate these ancient longevity switches, these ancient
healing systems. So they quote from the book from the are you Vedic science was that when diet is wrong, medicine is of no use, and when diet is correct, medicine is of no need. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an ancient bit of wisdom from your culture. But it's yeah, it's as true as it ever was. Yeah, No, it's it's really interesting to me. So my my wife's an ioredic practitioner and so yeah, and so she's an iretic health counselor and that's kind of her field of study.
And what's really interesting about what you're saying and when you're talking about being young forever? I think the challenge is when you are young in age, you don't ever feel fallible, like you almost feel and I and I remember relating to that feeling of yeah, I'm probably gonna feel like this forever, right, Yeah. And then you start getting older and I'm not, you know, I mean, I'm thirty five now and ancient and yeah, and it's but you start to notice different things and you start thinking
about these things more often. Like I didn't have to think about my digestion until I was like thirty, and you start thinking about it or your energy levels or like what was possible and what wasn't. And I consider myself to be someone who wants to live an optimal life. Yeah, I don't just want to sit back and do nothing to live a long life. I want to live a life for I'm of service and I'm living my purpose
and I'm being able to have deep experiences. So when you talk about being young forever, what are the things that we're doing that are aging us faster? And this
so much? I mean, the first thing I say is that the purpose of being young forever is not to live a heatedness of life and seek pleasure and just being narcissistic It's about being able to show up in your life fully, being able to love and serve and do the things that you want to do, To engage in life in a meaningful, purposeful way, to be able to be president in relationships, to show up for your friends and family and community, to give be of service,
you know, like nim Caroli Baba said, love everybody, serve everybody, feed everybody. I think that's how it sums up the book. I think that there's so many things that we are doing unconsciously that are disrupting our ability to live well and age well and feel good. And there are many cultures around the world like the Blue Zones which I visited, like Sardinia and Korea, where the defaults are all automatically
making them healthy. If all you have to eat is your local wild foods and whole unprocessed foods, you're gonna eat that. If if you have to hike five miles a day up and down rocky terrain to shepherd your goats and sheep, you're gonna do that. You're not going to go to the gym, right. If you have to like lift big logs and build things, that's how you're gonna stay strong. Their community and their relationships are such an embedded part of their whole culture. So they had
these automatic defaults that create health. Everything in our society automatically creates disease. Our process, diet, which we just talked about, our century lifestyles, chronic stress. You know. I was with this guy, Silvio, on top of this mountain in Sardinia, who was two hundred sheeps and goat and his family
lived there for one hundred of years. And we had this beautiful dinner of all his food that he grew, and he made acknowledged sheep, cheese, everything, And so I said, I said, Silvio, do you have any stress in your life? And he looked at me like it was the weirdest freaking question he'd never even loved. And he's We took him a while. He saw it and he pondered, and then he said, yeah, you know, sometimes at night a goat gets loose and I have to go get it.
I'm like, oh, they got So we live in such a chronically stressed life. We're sleep deprived. We were exposed to unnatural light at the wrong times of day. We are exposed to an overload of environmental toxins. We have a horde of drugs were being given that are destroying our microbiome, antibiotics and all the things in our foods apply that are damaging our gods. So we have literally a disease producing culture. And we have a society that's
focused on individualism and success and achievement. And you know, in Sardinian agree on where I was, people weren't like on this big goal to achieve you know something. They were just living. They were just enjoying life. They were celebrating together, they were savoring the sweet things in life. They were just enjoying being as enough. And you know, I think so much of our culture is about doing
and making and creating, which is not bad. I do it, but I think I'm gonna cost if we are unbalanced in how we do it. Where are the starting points for people in creating longevity in their life, Because I find, like what you just said, you're so right, And sometimes what I find is that the world is overwhelming in the way that it's set up, but even trying to change your habits can be as overwhelming as well. Where people go, I don't know where to start, Like I
don't know where to start with my diet. I don't know where to start with my stress lifestyle. I don't know, you know, So where do you encourage people to start figuring out what the root cause of their challenges are and where they go from there? Well, you know, everybody is different, but I would say, you know, it sounds maybe obvious, but the fundamental things that keep us healthy
and keep us living long are really quite simple. And you know, there's a study many years ago by James Freeze, who we published in the newly Journal of Medicine, where he looked at what he called the compression of morbidity, the idea that we could have our health span equal our lifespan. Most of us spend the last twenty percent of our lives sick. Right, So you might live to eighty, but the percent of your life maybe twenty years or a little bit less, you're going to be unwell. That's
not fun. And he found if you just kept your ideal body weight, if you exercise and you didn't smoke, you live a long, healthy life and you would die quickly, painlessly and cheaply. But if you didn't, you would die long, expensive, painful deaths at early. Right. So I think where do people start. I think they start with the very foundational basics of self care, which is food and exercise and stress reduction tools like you have in calm where you
teach people seven minute meditations. You don't have to go to a monaster. You're like you did for years. Now you can learn how to increase your sleep quality. These are really foundational, basic things that everybody needs to know how to do. And there's a little differences for everybody. But the food stuff is really pretty straightforward. Eat real food. If it's basically grown in a plant, eat it. If
it's made in a plant, stay away from it. I don't have another I used to do a lot of work with churches and faith based healing and wellness, not faith healing, but faith based cultures and wellness. And although I'm not opposed to faith healing either, and I used to say, it's really simple to know what to eat. Leave the food that man made, Eat the food that God made. It's something a five year old can understand. Dude, God make an avocado, Yes, did he made a twinky? No?
It's not that hard. So stick with things that are as close to what their original form was. He foods that are rich in plants. Plant I call it plant rich diet, which is all the phytochemicals, and plants are medicines. Make sure you have adequate approaching as you get older, because that is important for building muscle, and muscle is the currency of aging. And we get frail and decrepit
as we get older because we lose muscle. Learn some simple practices of exercise that work for you, whether it's taking a walk. Resistance training is pretty important as you get older, which is either bands or body weight or weights or something. There's all kinds of techniques out there. But Bill and I was lazy out this. I didn't start till I was sixty, but I really transformed my body even starting at sixty years old compared to why I was at forty. I'll show you a picture later
before and after, but it's pretty impressive. And I think the other part is, you know, optimizing your sleep, and all all of the practices of how to do that are in the book. And then there's you know, extra layers of things you can do, which is the right supplements, and then there's all these emerging longevity therapies that are out there that are called hormesis which means the things that are stressful to your body, but they won't kill you.
So exercises a stress if you're lifting weights or tearing muscles, you're building muscle. Everybody's familiar with that, and you get stronger. Basically, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And there's phytohomesis, which are these plant compounds that are plants defenses that we consume, but that help our bodies activate healing responses.
So like all the colorful vegetables fyseten and strawberries, there's things in pomegranate, you're lithana, the catechins and green tea, and the list goes on, and there's listen list of them in the book and how to aize that, and then there's really simple ways to optimize your timing of eating to activate repair systems. So one of the key strategies around food is to use it to activate these ancient longevity switches. So we weren't meant to eat all
the time. We have hundreds of genes that help us adapt to starvation, but very few that help us adapt to abundance or excess, which we have now. So when you have periods of fasting, which has been done throughout the centuries for various religious or spiritual reasons and various practices. But it could be just an overnight fast for twelve hours or for twelve hours or fourteen hours or sixteen hours that gives your body a chance to clean up.
Imagine like being in your kitchen and cooking every night and never washing the dishes and never cleaning up and never analyzed it like you wouldn't do that. Your body needs that repair system to be activated, and it only be activated when you're not eating for a period of time.
So that is a very powerful way to activate these ancient switches that shut off inflammation, that increase antioxidant systems, that booster stem cell production, that cause autophagy, the cellular cleanup where you have little pac Man cells going around and cleaning up old damage cells and tissues and proteins. It's a very important strategy for improving your overall quantity
of life and health and metabolism. So there's a lot of hacks that you can use from a food perspective that I encourage, But there's also other treatments that are out there, like that are not just fastining for hormesis, but hot therapies and cold therapies. So you might have heard about like saunas or cold plunges and it's kind of all the rage now, but the science around this is really remarkable. Like in Finland, if you just take a sauna a few times a week, your risk of
death goes down by twenty four percent. If you do it four or five times a week, it goes down over forty percent. And that was compared to a control group in Finland which took a sauna once a week. Because everybody has a sauna in Finland. It basically I think there's enough saunas in Finland for the entire population to be once and then that increases your dat immune system. It activates something called heat chocked proteins that kill the clean up all the damage proteins and help refold them
and make them work better. And one of the hallmarks of aging these ten things to go wrong as we age is damage proteins, so there's all these benefits. Cold plunges also activate your monochondria and brown fat and help stimulate all these longevity pathways. So we can take a cold shower in the morning like I did a hot bath at night. If you have a sauna grade or
a cold plunge grade. And there's even you know, other therapies like hypoxiatherapies or hyperbaric oxygen or you know, even ozone which is being used now for all kinds of things. So we have a lot of very cool stuff on
the margins, but the foundations are so key. Yeah, these blue zones where like I'm at a couple that collectively was two hundred and ten years old, you know, I mean, you know, they didn't have you know, they didn't have saunas and hyperbaric oxygen and ozone and supplements, and they didn't have any of that. They they had these foundational things.
So you know what I'm saying is, even given the basic things that we do know, we can easily get to one hundred and when these people moved to the West, they I at the same rate as everybody else, so it's not some special genetic thing. And then these other advances and things I talked about in the book can probably get us to one hundred and twenty, and then what's coming down the pike might get us two one hundred and fifty or even longer. So imagine a world
where we can take advantage of the wisdom. I mean, in this culture, elders. There's such a thing as elders. There's old people, the elder lee, which is Pejorda, but elders, I mean, how valuable are they to society? The wisdom keepers? You know, we lost all that and and imagine, like, now I'm going to be sixty three next week. You look incredible. Yeah, they're amazing, You're the best. Four facelifts
is good now? Actually, I think it's it's it's remarkable because I feel like I'm finally figuring life out, you know, I finally figuring out how to be happy and have good relationships and live my life in a balanced way and take care of myself. And I've just kind of figured so much out. Not everything, obviously, but I feel like now I'm just beginning. And now most people at sixty three are winding down. I remember as a kid, sixty three was like an old person, like dude, you know,
But I'm going helly skiing this year. I'm you know, I'm going I'm learning how to surf better than in December, riding horses on the beach in Mexico. Next week, I'm doing all these things that I, you know, are just very physical, active things that you wouldn't think a sixty three year old could do. Yeah, but the body is
capable of that. With your journey, though, when you said you started at sixty, like doing strength or resilience based training, et cetera, was help something that came very late in your life or was it like not at all? No, you might not know this tree, but I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I did not know that. So yeah, I studied Buddhism in college, and I medicine was an afterthought. So I was living with a PhD student nutrition at Cornell, and I studied nutrition.
I learned about nutrition against the dase. I was as you're tearing for many years, and I basically was very focused on health and well being. I ran five miles a day yoga all the time, but I didn't I didn't do weights. I didn't do resistance training. So I was like, I'm doing yoga, run I by. It gets fine, I play Dannis whatever, but I thought I didn't like it. Jim's your smelly And every time I like do push ups with my chest would hurt. I'm like, this is dumb.
But then I know, I couldn't do ten push ups when I was fifty, and now I can drop and do like seventy five eighty push ups without stopping. Wow, Okay, that's impressive. Yeah, it's just the body has the ability at any age to kind of recover. And I you know, my dad was eighty nine. He couldn't get up out of a chair because he just kind of had gotten a little frail. So I got him a trainer at eighty nine for the first time, and he was able to get so much fitter and stronger and more functional.
So it's never too late to start. Yeah, I feel like the biggest challenge that I'm noticing in all of this is that I was saying to someone recently that if I asked everyone, how many of you want to eat healthier? Everyone would raise their hands. If I ask people the question how many of you want to work out more? Most people would raise their hands. We don't have a challenge in desire. We have a challenge in habits where we don't know how to move away from
this compelling feeling. We have to go with what feels good in the moment, right like when you look at food It's like choosing a bowl of vegetables or a bowl of fries. You're going to choose the fries out of habit. And I find that sometimes we can put our willpower together and we can kind of push through and have that, but then as soon as we get access,
we cave again. So how have you thought about as you're helping guide people in this journey, like, how have you found even for yourself, you went from yoga to then being able to do a push ups today, what were the key tenets in helping you change your habits? Because I find that we're in a habits crisis right now. More than anything, I've been always pretty self discipline. I think that the thing that I've really learned, though, Jay,
is that it's it's your community that matters. That's your social not your social network online, but your actual social network in person that drives so much of your behavior. And I for decades studied the sort of molecular biology and physiology and biochemistry and genetics, and I was sort of in deep into like the inner workings of the human body. And you know, Einstein said, I'm not interested in the thoughts and the spectrum of this or that element.
I'm interested in the thoughts of God. The rest are details. So I feel like I was so interested to know the mind of God by understanding the natural laws of biology, which is what functional medicine is, what's described and young forever. But I had kind of missed something, which is how do we get people to change behavior? Because I can change biology, I can take someone with diabetes and heart failure and all these problems and I can reverse it.
And I went to Haiti after the earthquake in twenty ten, and I met Paul Farmer, who basically took care of people who were the most underserved people in the world. Haiti is the poorest civilization, the worst Western hemisphere. Half of the population lism less than a dollar a day, and these people were basically infected by the public health community and the TB and AIDS. And he said, look, I can cure these diseases with drugs. These are easy.
But people don't have the ability to take the drugs, and they don't have to walk clean water, and they don't have a watch. They'm gonna take it. And so he realized that the powerless community. So he created this model of accompaniment. We're going to accompany each other to health, and so he used community health workers essentially. And then I realize that, wow, you know, we call all these chronic illnesses of aging. We call them non communicable diseases.
They're not infectious, but there are contagious. We know that if you're overweight your family is overweight, it's not as strong a predictor of obesity as if your friends are overweight. If your friends are overweight, you're one hundred and seventy one percent more likely to be overweight than if your family is overweight. Wow, I didn't know that, which is crazy. This is Chris Stoker's work from Harvard, and so it's
our social fabric that determines our behavior. These social threads that connect us are more important than our genetic sets. So if you're all your friends are, you know, drinking beer and having fries and burgers and watching football, which it may not be a bad thing, but you might like that, you might not be as healthy as if all your friends are drinking green juices and going to yoga every day. Right, So it's a very different framework.
So I realized that the power of community is so important. So we did a program at this church Saddleback Church in California, where we used the small groups that they already had built, and we put a healthy curriculum, letting curriculum through those groups, and we thought a few one hundred people, which show up. Fifteen thousand people signed up the first week and they accompanied other health and they
lost a quarter million pounds in the first year. And through this process, I really learned that it was the power of each other to help each other get healthier, to lift each other up, to inspire each other, to hold each other accountable. It's like aa or it's like weight watchers. These things work because they have a community connected component. And that was one of the things I learned from the Blue Zones Jay that was so important.
There was a little nursing homes. You know, their whole society was built around relationships and community and connection and celebration together. So people weren't isolated and lonely and disconnected like they are in the society, but they were deeply connected. The song out right, It's like the song is one of the three pillars of enlightenment, which is community that helps you build and work towards the right action and the right life and the right kind of loving and
the right behavior, all these things. So I think we really underestimate the power of that. So what I would say to people is find us someone, a friend, a buddy, a group. You know, my friend Rick Warren, a pastor
of Saddleback Church, said everybody needs a buddy. Yeah, And it sounds so simple when you say it like that, Like you know, it can feel like such a complex question sometimes and then when you put it like that, you're like, oh, yeah, that makes so much sense, and I start thinking about the people I spend time with. Then I think people struggle with points of transition in communities in their life. So it's like they built a community, they built a group of friends. Now they want new
visions with their life. They have new habits they want to adopt, and it's like letting go of an old set of habits which are linked to a group of people is the most difficult part. Right, If you're used to going and watching football with a group of people who you will drink together and eat unhealthily together. To you, you're not just giving up the food, you're almost giving up company. That's sort of if you're an alcoholic and
you're hanging out with other alcoholics. You got to find new friends, you know, Yeah, and that's the hard part, and that's the hard part. And I think that's what I found, having made many transitions in my life of groups of friends and habits. I found that the first thing was don't try leave your friends or break relationships, but try and build new ones first. And so a lot of people spend time going, Okay, well, I've got to somehow talk to this person about how we're not
going to spend time together. And it's almost the other way around. Find the new community first, find the new songer first, and the more you start associating with that group of people, it becomes natural for these things to have less energy and less time for. And the second thing was that I found that the people who wanted to be in my life continue to be in my life. Right, that's right. They'll come along, Yeah, they'll come and they'll aspire them. My god, Jay's doing so good, he looks
so good, he's he's feeling good. I want to know what he's doing, what's he's smoking exactly exactly. And the people that want to be in your life will come along with you. And I think that we sometimes just get so tired in in those groups that we just can't break out of them. But I love that answer.
I want to talk about some of the in the book, you talk about the ten hallmarks of Yes, and I want to dive into this because I think we're just again and I come at this as a patient of the book, like as as you know, when I'm reading the book, I don't count myself as someone who knows. I count myself as someone who is considers myself quite uneducated when it comes to physical biological health. And when I'm reading this, I'm going I don't even think most
of us know that. We're just not even aware. So I want to pick up you didn't get a handbook when you were born? This is yeah. I mean, most people can run their iPhone like nobody's business, but they don't know how to run their body at all. And so I want to pick a few that I already stood out to me. And we've talked about a couple of these, but hallmark one is disrupted hormone and nutrient signaling.
And I wanted to talk about the link between inflammation and aging because I find that that's something that people are learning about slowly or at least if you're not learning about it, you're experiencing inflamation for sure. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of the diseases of aging are inflammation diseases, right,
heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. I think, you know, before we kind of dive into those, I just want to sort of set the stage, which is, you know, what's really exciting for the first time, and I talked about the mind of God For the first time, we're understanding these fundamental laws of biology, Like we understand the laws of physics, and from a very few natural laws of physics,
we can see and create an enormous amount of phenomena. Right, Think about the things that we can create with physics. That's rocketship, going to the moon, you know, a bridge and build a building and talk on the podcast. It's all physics, right, And that's a amazing to me. And it's just from a few natural laws. What are those natural laws of biology? They haven't really been described. So scientists for the first time are understanding these fundamental laws.
They describe all the disease phenomena we see. The diseases are weighed down stream and menaces focused on whackam all treatment, you know, you just find the cure for heart disease and diabetes and cancer and dementia. What if they're all the same. What if it's all the same disease with just different manifestations like leaves on a tree where the trunk and the roots are the same. So that's what
we're finding. And the hallmarks of aging are these things that go wrong as we get older that cause all these diseases. And if we just cured heart disease and cancer from the face of the earth, like, how many years will we live longer? And these are the number one and two killers three to five years, which is kind of shocking, right, if we've dealt with these hallmarks, these causes, we might get another thirty or forty years.
And what's important to understand is that sciences are looking at how do we treat these and that's help full. But from my perspective, and I think what's unique about my book Young Forever is that I go to a deeper level what is the cause of the hallmarks? Because if the call marks are the cause of disease, what causes the hallmarks? Yeah, it's really quite simple. It's either too much of something that our body doesn't like or not enough of something in our body needs to thrive.
What are the impediments to health and the ingredients for health, and it's a short list. Impediments for health are bad food, too much stress, physical or psychological, environmental toxins, microbes can be gut microbiome being messed up, or infections and also allergens things that cause inflammation. So those are the fundamental things.
And what does our body need to thrive. We need the right food, the nutrients, right bounce of hormones, light, air and water connection meaning purpose, rest, restoration, sleep, exercise, movement. All these things are the ingredients for health. It's a very short list. So that's the framework of functional medicine. You either dying of too much or dying too little, right and so understand the information coming in from food
and what to do with it. So when we eat protein and sugar and fat, our bodies know how to handle this. We have all these pathways that digest to metabolize these things. When these sensing pathways are overloaded with too much of the wrong stuff, if you have you know we need glue, coast and sugar or fine. But if you are eating like a pound a day of sugar and flour almost which is what most Americans do today. That's like an avalanche of sugar and flour. That's a toxic,
poisonous pharmacologic dose. So that overloads, for example, the insulin signaling pathway, one of these four longevity switches that are part of our nutrient sensing system. That overloads it and causes you to have a cascade of downstream effects from inflammation to increasing belly fat, to oxidative stress, to mitochondral injury, to all these things that lend to a rapid aging process. So that's the biggest one, and that's kind of sugar
and start. So if you want to do one thing to extend your life, cut out or cut down dramatically on the amount of sugar and starts you're eating every day, and have more fat, and have more vegetables and have more in good quality proteins. Those will all help you thrive.
The other is the pathway around the nutrient sensing It's something called m tour and this is something people have heard about, maybe maybe not, but essentially it's kind of cool because there's this pathway that is so important in activating the cellular clean up mechanism called autophagy. And now we've heard about this, which is why we talk about intimate and fasting, or time restricted eating, or keytogenic diets or all these things that people are kind of tossing around.
The reason those are important is they give your body a chance to do clean up at night, right, and we need to clean up like the kitchen instead of leaving it the dishes in there for a week or a month. So that process is so important. So we need times of not eating to activate this autophagy process, and that happens by the inhibition of M tour. Now M tour when it's overstimulated by too much protein all the time or too much sugar all the time, we'll
just keep making stuff in the body. And it's like, you know, if you just keep making food in your kitchen, it's gonna overflow and it's gonna be a mess. And that's what happens inside your body. So what they found was it was this compound that they that they discovered in Rapa Nui, which is Easter Island. Now, who knows the aliens came down and put those things there, I
don't know. It's those statues that are on this island off the coast of the Chile, right, and they scraped off some stuff off the back of the statue and they took it back to the lab and they oh, maybe this is an antifungal, and now it doesn't work so well, maybe it has some immune properties and it's used in transplant medicine. But then it discovered it inhibits
m tour. In fact, the name m tour stands for mammalian target of Rappa mic and Rappa myycin is named after Rapa Nui or Easter Island, So the drug that they've developed is named after this, and this inhibits emptor. It is now being studied for longevity, and so we need periods of time to inhibit emptor fasting and aud even anything. And we need time to stimulate em tour to build muscle so we don't get frail and decrepit
as we age. And then there's other pathways like SIR two ends and MPK that are part of our nutrients sensing system that detects scarcity and will activate DNA repair. And people have heard about an example risk fair trawl and longevity, and this work of doctor David Sinclair and this, you know, they worked, but they gave them, you know, from red wine, the equivalent of fifteen hundred bottles of red wine. So they don't want to practice this at home,
but but it was amazing what they saw. These animals live longer and they got healthier even eating a bad diet. If you activate these longevity switches, it's so powerful. And the beautiful thing is that a lot of the plant foods that we can eat, the phytochemicals that are rich in this plant foods all activate these ancient longevity pathways like green tea or pomegranitor, or there's fairy tral from red grapes, and the list goes on. And so we
have these ancient systems that we can play with. And so the book is really about how do we turn on the longevity switches, How do we activate those in the right way, How do we eat in a way to optimize each of those in the right time, It the right way. When I hear that in my head, I've I've become more close and clear about this because of my wife. So it comes back to me where it comes back to your point of view. Want the
burgers And She's like, yeah, any day of the week. Yeah, you know, it's so I've been through this journey with her. We've been married for six years and together for ten, but for the six years that we've been married, she's been on this journey with me of helping me transform my diet and my habits. And I've felt all the benefits you're speaking about having gone on that journey, and I've also felt some of the shocks that my body's had in missing out on some of those things that
it's used to. Like, my body loved bread like it still loves bread, like. It feels great when I eat bread. And I'm talking I'm not talking my gluten free bread. I'm talking my bread that has gluten in it. And but I know that gluten's yeah, can be massively inflammatory, especially for me as well from the test that I've done. But I find it really interesting that sometimes I can feel great eating things that are bad for me, but there's something happening inside that I'm not aware. Yeah, I mean,
sugar is a drug. Bread's a drug. I mean, in fact, you might not know this, but one of the things that happens when you eat bread in you're consuming gluten is that the gluten gets partially broken down into these things called ludomorphins, which actually are like morphine, and they bind the receptors in your brain that make you feel good. So, yeah, heroin makes you feel great, that doesn't mean it's good
for you, right, And so it's very addictive. And it also, you know, gives you a jolt of sugar and adrenaline. So when you eat sugar, you get a jolt of adrenaline. Literally, your your cortisol goes up, your adrenaline goes up, so it's like it's like being jacked up on steroids and adrenaline, which feels good for the moment, and then you crash. Yeah, exactly. Number four I wanted to talk about you talk about
damage proteins, Yeah, and dysfunctional molecules. I think that was I think damage proteins is something we're not very well educated on. No, I think you know what happens is you know your your body has It's just it's just a miracle to me Ja that the body has this systems to handle things that go wrong and to repair things and clean up things. So we are constantly making proteins. People don't really realize this, But what did your DNA do right, your DNA, All it does is code for proteins.
Proteins do all sorts of things, from build tissues your bustles and joints, to building your immune cells, to being communication systems. And small proteins like peptides, are messengers with eighty thousand that tell your body what to do and regulate all kinds of things from brain chemistry to hormones of sexual function, to metabolism to mitochondrial function. I mean,
the list goes on. So proteins are so important, but as we age, those proteins can get damaged or they are injured, and they're misfolded and they're broken, and so the body has to one address this and too hopefully
prevent you from making these. So one of the things that happens, for example, it's really dangerous, is when you eat sugar, it kind of binds with proteins in your body and it damages them and causes glycation, which is basically just the phenomena that that happens when you get a crispy chicken skin or crust on our bread or
crambrulet and you get that like little crack. That's so good, right, We all have that stuff, but that that that reaction happens in your body and that and that creates what we call ages, advanced likeation end product which ages us and that binds two rages receptors for advanced likeation end products. So that rage literally aging and raging is what happens. So when you when you eat a lot of sugar
and start, you're causing these damage proteins. So the measurement, for example, of your diabetes control we call hemoglomin a one C. That's a measure of damage proteins. That's sugar binding to hemoglobin and damaging it. And we can see that on a blood test. But this is happening throughout your body. And what's amazing is things like we talked about hormesis and these stresses like saunas. Saunas create heat shocked proteins which are actually repairing proteins or cleaning up proteins.
When you have autophogy, which is we talked about, which is a self clean mechanism, you actually clean up these old proteins and you recycle them. So the body has a recycling system basically like takes up all these old damaged things glombs onto him like a pac man, digests them, breaks them down its component parts and says, okay, I got new parts. Let's make new proteins, and you start over.
It's pretty amazing. Actually, yeah, it's unbelievable. I've never I've never heard anyone say that before about how the body is a recycling mechanism. It does. It's amazing. I mean, like, that's what's so exciting to me is you know when I went to school, I in medical school. In their second year, we get a book called The Pathologic Basis of Disease, which is really great. It's like the foundational textbook. But I didn't get the Scientific Basis of Wellness textbook.
I didn't learn anything about that. Like, so, how do you create health? You say to your doctor, I want you to treat decisions, Okay take this drug. If you say doctor, I want you to make me optimally healthy, and like, okay, well, eat better, exercise, take vitamins. I don't know, but like they don't have an answer, right, But it's scientific wellness. What is scientific wellness? Why? What
is the science of creating health? That's what functional medicine is, and that's really what I've given people as an owner's manual for their body, how to detect what's wrong, what tests to do, how to find out what's how to balance and how to correct it, and how to optimize each of the systems in your body so you can create health. And what's really exciting is now we have a metric called a biological age clock that we can measure. So before we'd kind of say, oh, is this working
or not? Maybe your blood works better, maybe your weight weights a better blood pressure is better, and that's are all in sort of indirect markers. But there is something that we now have discovered which is a biological clock, and it's measured by looking at little marks on your DNA that are called your epigenome. Now we all know what your genome is, which is your genes, and you got about twenty thousand genes. That's your DNA. That's not
really changeable except through gene editating or whatever. But your epigenome and the genes are like the keyboard at a piano eighty eight keys. You can't change that, but you can play jazz, reacttime, Mozart, classical, whatever you want, blues. It's amazing right on the same keyboard. The same thing with the epigenome. The epigenome is the piano player, and that controls which genes are turned on or offer expressed.
And your biological age is a sum total of every influence, every food you've eaten, every type of exercise you've done, every thought you have, every relationship have been in, all the talks you've been exposed to, washing over your DNA, creating these marks to determine your biological age. So I've done my biological agent. I'm sixty three, but biologically i'm forty three. That's unbelievable. Yeah, well it's really cool. I'm going for twenty five. I'm trying to get younger than
you ja exactly. And I think, you know, we have so many technologies that allowing us to now do this that are even beyond the diet, exercise, and lifestyle stuff. So we now can measure the effective interventions on these things and check how we're doing through these epigenetic clocks. And our biological age doesn't have to match with and track with our chronological age. And now I was born
in nineteen fifty nine, I can't change that. I can't be chronologically younger, but I can't be biologically younger even as I get chronologically older. And what's amazing is it doesn't take that much like I've seen studies. We're using a dietary intervention, which is an anti inflammatory whole foods diet, you know, some phytochemical support, and a little bit of exercise and lifestyle support. Within eight weeks, they were able to reverse biological age and this cohort of patience by
three years. And what if they did it for a year you know, you know, so we have the ability to do this to measure it now. It's very exciting science. Yeah, and let's let's talk about some of the things that people are feeling today, because I think that's how we get in touch with our health, or we start. I think people who read this book are going to get that manual that you're talking about. I want to guide
people to this book through things that we feel. So what's really interesting to me is how commonly people are experiencing brain fog today. Yeah, and I think as we experience brain fog, I don't think we often know what to do about it. We often also start going internal. This is also the same thing as connecting what you talk about in the book to our mental health. I think a lot of the time when we're experiencing mental health challenges, we're trying to solve it through the mind,
correct and I think that that's not working right. It's it's actually very difficult. And I recently had and I know, you know Mona Sharmawell who I work with NA works with me on my diet, on my plan and everything,
and uh yeah, she's a functional medicin nutritionist. Yes, and so we I did a vitamin detest and my vitamin D was ten yeah, yeah, right, yeah, that's like very and I'm still functioning doing everything I do on vitamin D. And she was just like most people who have that level that like have forms of depression, depression muscle eggs and I'm yeah, and I'm and I'm not having you know, the depressive aspect of that and so, which which was
great for me. But my point being that there is this big connection between physical and mental health or like physical diet, sleep, energy levels and then impact. So talk to us a bit about that. So huge, Jay, you know, I think, you know, there's so much to work on on your biology. But I wrote a book probably a fifteen years ago now called The Ultramond Solution about how
to fix your brain by fixing your body first. So you can meditate all you want, but if you're mercury poisoned, or your thow is not working, or your vitamin B twelve or vitamin D deficient, or your microbiomb's a mess, it's going to be hard to achieve the goals you want to achieve. So set yourself up for dealing with your soul's evolution, with your spiritual growth, with healing your emotional life and trauma, by setting your body up to
function better to help you, to help you right. And so you know it's you know, this book isn't about getting to one hundred and twenty. It's about how to activate these health switches, longevity switches to make you feel good now, because most people have what I call FLC syndrome, which is when you feel like crap right, And so people walk around with all sorts of symptoms and not realizing how good they can feel and how quickly they
can feel good. And so by doing some of these practices, simply changing your diet and lifestyle changes people can experiment. Even ten days of it can have a profound effect. Now I do workshops around the world where I take people through a ten day or even a five or six day program and universally, within a week people have a seventy percent reduction and all symptoms from all diseases by simply cleaning up their diet and how many days five to seven days? Way do you do this? Well over,
We're doing next one in Sardinia and April. You should come. You should come. It's a little boutique tour in April. When someone after that, I might do one in June in Abisa. Okay, cope, be great. Yeah, but you can teach them too, gonna, I'm gonna come with a face. You can read these some meditations. Yeah, yeah, I'm being serious. No, No, for sure, Oh that'd be so five. It's great and
it's so beautiful there. So, so we have this ability to activate these these healing mechanisms through changing your diet and heal our mind. So there's an amazing psyche chiatrist who is at Harvard who wrote a book called Brain Energy, Christopher Palmer, who's just brilliant, and he basically was a traditional Harvard psychiatrist who had a patient with schizophrenic and
I was schizophrenia is one of those conditions. It's not like you know, people's anxiety or depressed or it's like emotional. This is like a pretty serious mental disorder, right, and we think it's not changeable. And he on the medications gained a huge amount of weight, which a lot of the psychotic medic anti psychotic medications caused weight ging. And he a guy would just hide in his room all day and I'll come out and only see the psychiatrist.
And he said, I want to lose weight. And the psychiatrist knew he wouldn't go to anybody else, so he said, why don't you try a ketogenic diet because I heard it it really works and maybe it'll help you know, And he did it and it schizophrenia went away. Wow. And the psychiatrist like, what's going on in the metabolic function of the brain that's affecting the mind? Right, The brain in the mind are not the same thing, but
the brain function influenced the function of your mind. And so by healing the brain, you can then start to really deal with your stuff with your mind. It's not going to fix your thinking overnight or your mindset and all the things you need to work on, but it'll allow you the ability to do it so much better, and it might even change your thinking, It might even change depressive thoughts, anxiety. You know a lot of even panic attacks can be caused by fluctuations in blood sugar,
you know, which I've seen patients. So I'm so excited you ask that question because we have such a mental health crisis in this country, and we know from dietary studies where they've looked at traditional diets like the set we call it the Sad diet, the standard American diet, which makes us sad actually, and they swapped out that for whole foods, you know, basically a Mediterranean kind of diet. And it was a very large study. It was a clinical trial, a randomized control trial, and it was a
better at treating depression than almost anything else. I want to call it the Glad diet. And we've seen in these studies like I mentioned, in prisons and other places where people giving a whole foods diet will dramatically reduce their violent behavior or their mood will improve. And so these foods that we're eating are inflaming our brain, They're inflaming our emotions, are inflaming our minds, and depression is an inflammatory disease of the brain. Autism is an inflammatory
disease the brain. Adds an inflammatory disease the brain, Alzheimer's. All these things are brain inflammation, and how is this inflammation being caused primarily through our diet and lifestyle in toxins. So it's a totally fixable problem. Yeah, I mean, listening to you, it gives me a lot of hope in that, you know, anyone who's listening to us today and goes and grabs a copy of the book Younger Forever The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, which I highly
rarely recommend. Will put the link to the book in the notes and the caption. As we're having this discussion, I'm feeling a great sense of confidence. And the reason why I have these conversations as well is because they remind me of why I'm trying to have a clean diet and why I'm trying to do the right thing. And I think it's so important to strengthen that. Why totally because it just becomes so easy to go back
to our you know, obvious habits so quickly. But I think the challenge is that for so long we've been trying to deal with our health in silos. So if we have a mental health challenge, we try and deal just with our mind. Yeah, And if we have a physical health challenge, we try and just deal with our body. And we don't realize that they're so interconnected. They're not separate. There's no mind, body, body minds. It's one thing. It's all one thing, and try to separate out doesn't make
any sense. And so medicine is really bifurcated psychiatry and the rest of medicine, And it just doesn't make any sense to me. And when I call myself the accidental psychiatrist, because I basically wasn't treating people's mental disorders, but I was treating their physical health. And I saw their brains get better and their mind get better, and their mood get better, and bi polar disease go always because sophrenia get better, autism get better, add get better, depression get better.
I'm like, what is going on here? And blew my mind? Did you give us a few examples of those were people that you worked with in those spaces, Because I think that's something we don't hear about as much like I think we hear a lot today about when people are struggling with those things, they're going to therapy. Yeah,
but we're not doing. One patient who you know, was just severely depressed and was struggling for years and years and and you know, I found out she had mercury poisoning, and we got the mercury out of her system and she got better. There was a patient who in a patient of mine. It was someone who was part of the Daniel Plan, this faith basedball in this program I mentioned, who came up to me after the six week part of the program we started. In six weeks later, we
had another rally and gathering in Doctor Hyman. I don't get it, like I've been in and out a psychiatric hospital in my whole life. I've been in every psychiatric medication. I'm about to get divorced, am about to lose my job. I'm just struggling so much. And I changed my diet and in three days it all went away, and I feel so good. Now. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible. It happened to you, so it's clearly possible. So people don't realize how quickly we can see these
change and so that was really remarkable. I had a kid with add who was just so out of control and his behavior. You couldnt pay attention, he couldn't focus. He was kicked out of kindergarten. If you can imagine being that bad, being kicked out a kundergarten, you know. But he had all these other health issues. He had asthma, and he had rollaboll and he had all these headaches
and cramps, and so I basically treated his biology. Turned out he had a leaky gut and food sensitivities and lead toxas city and he ated total junk food diets. We have so nutrition to fishing and omega threes and zinc and magnesium, be vitamins, and so we just fixed all that. We just cleaned up his gut. We gave him good food, we gave him good nutrients. Two months later, it came back and all of the sims were gone physically,
and all of his mental sims were gone. And his handwriting, which we can show in the in the in the show notes and on the video, that his handwriting went from being illegible at twelve years old to being perfect penmanship. And it wasn't because I gave him handwriting lessons. It was because his brain went from completely chaotic and disorganized to completely coherent and functional. Yeah, I hope everyone was
listening to this. If you're struggling with anything based on your mental health, your brain health, I hope that you're also going to take some time out to research on your diet to of course read this book, because I
just want people to make that connection quicker. And I spend years doing the opposite, Mark Lake, And that's why I'm so fascinated about all the work you do, because I spent years and I got to a place where I had mastered my mind, but my body was just not catching up right, And so I could take care of my thoughts and my emotions and my feelings, but my body couldn't match that pace. And so I've kind of come the other way. It's great And hey, yeah, yeah, exactly.
You talk to us about and again we're only doing a very high level of the book because I want people to get a sense of some of the depth of what you talk about in this book. Could you explain to us again at that top level, what the seven core biological systems are? Yeah, so this is a really important Jay. So like I said, you know, one of the laws of biology, what's the mind of God?
And right now we're going to going to revolution in medicine that's as big as anything has ever happened in history. You know, from the discovery of the germ. It's remarkable how we're now understanding the body as an ecosystem. This is called systems biology or functional medicine is the clinical
model that applies us. And so the hallmarks of aging are what these emerging scientists and Lungevi you're talking about that go wrong with aging, But what is causing them is what functional medicine is really good at figuring out. And what happens is that these seven core systems in the body that go wrong, they get out of balance, just like in Arubata they have the docious you know, or in Chinese medicine they have the five elements, or we have the en yang, and we have the imbalances
and deficiencies or excesses. And this is exactly how the body works. These ancient technologies from thousands of years ago figured it out. We just now we're putting scientific language on it and understanding and so there's instead of one hundred and fifty five thousand diseases. There's these disturbances in these core systems, many of which are also the hallmarks of aging, like your microbiome, your immune system, how you make energy, your mitochondria, your detox system, how you get
rid of toxins, your transport system. I move things around in your body, and your circulation and limps or some communication systems, which is your hormones, your transmitters, your peptides, all the millions of chemical reactions that happen all the time and have to be coordinated. And your structural system from your biomechanical structure and your skeleton to your sub cellular structures. All of those systems have to be in
balance for you to be healthy. So, as a functional medicine doctor, as a systems thinker, I look at how do we find out why they're out of balance? How do we take out this stuff that's causing in balance and put back the stuff that's creating balance. So let's say they gut for example, Well, you might have food sensitivities, you might have bad bugs growing in your guts, so
you got to remove those things. You got to remove those foods like luten or dairy and you got to get rid of you know, the bad bugs that are growing in the gut. Maybe you need some herbs or even an anty fungal or in antibiotic. And then how do you repair that? How do you give the gut
what it needs? You need probotics and probotics and polyphenols, and you need the right nutrients like zinc and vitamin A and and I'll make it three fasts to help the gut heal and glue to mean, so we know what the ingredients are for each take out and put in, and so we apply that to each thing, including the
immune system. I mean. One of the most shocking things to me we're in COVID was that we are about four percent of the world's population in America, and we have an extraordinary healthcare system and spend twice as much as any other developed nation, and we were sixteen percent of the cases of COVID and deaths, So four percent of population in the world, four times as many death as we probably should have had, and we probably should be even less than the rest of the world because
of our healthcare system. Why was that? It's because our diet is so bad that we're pre inflamed so when COVID came, it was like throwing gas on the fire. And we were pre inflamed because we were obese, which were chronically ill because we have all these diseases of inflammation, and so that's really why it was. It was sort of shocking to me that that, you know, nobody has talked about this, and yeah, we have the power to
regulate our immune systems by what we're eating. Sugar suppresses your immune system, you know, helping overweight suppresses your immune system even in the response to vaccines. If you're overweight or you're elderly, because you're inflamed, your immune system doesn't respond to vaccines. I think everyone's experiencing a low immunity, you know, in general as well, because of all these factors that you've talked about today as well. And I just want everyone to see. I want to point this
out for everyone who's watching the show. If you're listening, then I'm explaining what I'm doing. I just want to show this to everyone who's watching, because you can actually see how the book breaks down. The Young Forever program, which is the program that Mark recommends in the book Young Forever, and what I love about it is that as you're flicking through this book, you're just going to see a very systematic and formulaic breakdown of the system. It's not just it's a how to manual for how
your body works. So yes, yes, you didn't get born with that instruction manual. This is a good one. Yeah. I want to point that out to everyone who's sitting there going like me. Often I can get you know, I can often start thinking, well, this is a lot of information. I don't know enough where do I start, what do I do? But the book, to me, it does a great job. I'd simplifying it. Yeah, I mean the book is really three parts. The first is the why, like why are we aging? What's going on? A little
bit of science geeky. If you don't like any of that, you can skip it. But I like to know why. And then there's the what, like there's the what to do, and then there's the how to do it. Yeah, so it really is is really you know, I'm a doctor. I take care of patience and so I get results
by giving people a programmatic plan to follow. So this is what I've been doing for thirty years, you know, and there's a lot of great longevity books out there, but they're often by academics and I've learned so much from them, but they but they're like, well what do I do? How do how do I what do I have to do? Exactly? But this breaks it down exactly,
even day by day and what you can do? Yeah, Mark, is this someone that you've worked with that was so negative and felt that they were too late to solve their challenges, but you were able to find some change in them? Could you tell us about Yes, I mean, you know one of the most remarkable patients that had and she was part of a group program. We had a Cleveland clinic called Functioning for Life, which used the
powerful community to help people change behavior. And she was a woman who was allowed to go on her way out. She was sixty six years old. She had typed to diabetes for ten years. She had heart failure, she had kidneys who were failing, liver was failing and fatty. She had high blood pressure if she's in a pile of hills that her copay was twenty thousand, who knows what she was costing the healthcare system and not out of the hospital. Her body mass index was forty three, which
is severely obese, you know, twenty five or less. It's normal thirties, obese forties, just like next level, right, And she came to the program which she changed her diet. She was a fairly educated woman, but she and it was a minister in her congregation, but she really grew up in a family that never ate real food. So everything came from a box, a package you can highly process. And that's just what she did for her whole life. At sixty six years old, and she was on her
way to a hard transplant and a kidney transplant. And you think, go from a traditional doctor point of view, well, you know, you can't really do anything about that. Maybe you can manage these diseases and make make her live a little longer and make her quality vife a little better. But I'm like, no way, I don't want to manage disease. I want to get rid of it. So we put her on a diet. It's a very anti inflammatory diet.
It's whole foods, plant rich, lots of good fats. We didn't even get her moving or exercising in the beating because it's hard when you're that big to move. But just change your food, maybe a few supplements, not a lot, vitamin D fistrel multi vitamin. In three days, she was off for insulin. In three months, she reversed. Everyone in her disease is objectively by you know, traditional conventional medicine, bio markers, or heart failure reversed, her kidney's normalized, or
liver normalized, or high blood pressure normalized. Her diabetes or blood sugar went from a once went from eleven, which is like probably should be in the hospital level of blood sugar three four hundred to like five point five, which is actually perfectly normal. She lost forty three pounds in the year, she lost one hundred and sixteen pounds. And I've got the pictures that before and after I'll share with you. It's really remarkable. I had, Holy cow.
You know, there is no drug on the planet that works as well as food. I mean, if I could give her a pill to verse all diseases. As a doctor, I'd write that prescription all day long. I'm agnostic when it comes to the therapy. I don't care if it's exercise or exorcism, whatever a patient needs, you know, I'm gonna give it. And so I'm like, Wow, this is such, this is such an eye opener for so many people
to see it's possible. You know, another patient with kidneys, we're failing and we did this whole program and he went to see his neprologist and think I was like, what are you doing? I've never seen a kidney fail you reverse? What are you doing? And he couldn't believe it, because doctors don't get trained to do this, so they
don't see it, so they don't believe it. They goes, well, there's no evidence for this, Well, maybe you haven't looked, because there is plenty of evidence even though there's so much evidence on lifestyle and diet. Do we pay for food is medicine? No? Yeah? And it is the most
powerful drug. Yeah. Well, I hope that gives anyone who's listening and watching a sense of confidence as well, that you know, no matter how far you think you are, I'm any challenges you're going through right now now that hopefully this can at least be another alternative option to try completely if you haven't tried it already. It's so needed. Mark. We end every episode with a final five, which are a fast five, so every ancet to be given in one word to one sentence maximum. Okay, got it, and
so Mark, these are your final five. Question one, what's the best health advice or diet advice you've ever received? It's probably Michael Pollan's eat food, not too much, mostly plants. It's just so simple, so clear, and it needs to be defined like eat food, what food, real food, whole food, you know, But yeah, yeah, I love it. A second question, what's the worst advice you've ever heard? Health advice you've
ever heard received? Or give? God? Eat a high carb diet six to eleven servings of bread, rice, serumpasta day to save your life, which has caused more deaths and more disease than almost anything in history. Which is a government's food pyramid in nineteen ninety two. And that's so common in all meals today. Oh it's terrible. Yeah, we're still we're still yeah, we're still promoting that stuff. It's
not great. Question number three, what's something that you used to think was true about health but now you've changed your mind about it? I think I used to believe this is a very controversial topic, which was must healthier to be a vegan or vegetarian. And I think as I've sort of gotten understand the science and the biology of longevity that we need adequate protein as we get older, and if we don't eat enough, we can't make muscle and muscle as the currency of aging. So I think
it's eating the right stuff. And you know, I think if people have a moral issue with animals, we can work around it. But I think from a health perspective, eating regenerally raised animals that are well cared for, that are humanely raised, that regenerate ecosystems, increased biodiversity, reverse climate change, and create nutrient dense food is really a big shift for me from being a vegan vegetarian to kind of
see what happened when I did that. Amazing. Thank you for that answer, and I'll pick your brain about that health please. Question number four, what's the small less change someone can make today to experience some positive impact in their way they feel. I think it's do one small thing. You know, when they say floss one tooth, ye, do one push up tomorrow, dude too. So start with small things. You know, uh, you know, maybe you're drinking twelve cokes
ad egg, go to eleven and go to ten. You do one small thing to improve your health and then that will build over time absolutely. And fifth and final question, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be. Oh, that's easy.
I would I would make a law they would make food quality, and that I can define what that is the most important determinant of all of our food policies and all of our agriculture, the most nutrient dense, whole, real food we should be promoting and subsidizing and growing. I love that. That would be powerful. I mean, that'd be so useful. Yeah, solve so many problems. I mean, that's you've talked about that in your previous book. I remember we discussed it, like just how much could change
at a systemic level to transform the healthcare of the world. Well, thinking about all the things we talked about, from the mental health issues to the physical health issues, to the cost of society to damage the environment, it's all driven by the production of ultra process food and the dissemination of it and the eating of it, which is sixty to seventy percent of our calories. That has got to stop. It's just it's crushing us with the weight of that,
the figurative and literal weight of that. Absolutely everyone the book is called Young Forever by Mark Kyman, The Secrets to living your longest, healthiest life with a step by step program to reverse disease, ease pain, and renew energy. Make sure you go and grab a copy of this book, order it right now. I highly recommend deeply reading this
with a group. If you can get together with a bunch of friends as Mark was talking about, and to read this together and to support each other, maybe you're going to take a chap to reach and help teach each other. I just feel that when health becomes this collective responsibility in a community, it becomes a lot easier when we feel we're learning with each other, from each other and growing together as opposed to when we're trying to do it ourselves. So my recommendation is go and
make this your book club pick. Go and follow doctor Mark Hyman on Instagram and across social media if you don't already, and tag me and Mark with what you're testing, what you're experimenting with, what in the book is resonating with you, makes you take pictures, tag us both, share it with us because I love seeing the changes you're making based on these conversations. Mark, any final words, any last thoughts you want to share with us. Yeah, I
think that you just said it all day. I think that the beauty is that people are just a few short days away from feeling better. It's not about living to one hundred and twenty. It's about feeling good now. This is not about a hedonistic, narcissistic pursuit of longevity.
It's about optimizing your health and well being so you can show up in the world and love better, and serve better, and be better and add value to the world and add your contribution to the world and not be caught in a spiral of dysfunction and disease that makes us kind of retreat from being part of the larger community of humanity. That's beautiful, Mark, Thank you so much for doing the work you do. Thank you for showing up as you do. And I'm so excited to
join you hopefully next year. We need to plan that out. Okay, I'll give you the day being very serious, but I'm very excited. And during twelve to nineteenth and a Bisa at six senses and you can all come if you want. We'll not all of you. I think it's only room for forty five. But you know, I love it. Mark, thank you so much for this and I can't wait to have you back on the show again. Thank you so much.