115. Dr. Mark Hyman: The Truth About Why Americans Are Getting Sicker

The number one killer today is not smoking. It's not war, not infections. It's food. When you look at the global burden of disease study, which looked at 195 countries, they said that 11 million people die from ultra processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods. And I think a lot of people

don't even realize it. We make GLP1 in our bodies and it responds to satiation. And if you eat nutrient-dense foods, you actually release the GLP1 that stops you from overeating. Ultra-presence food is what makes people hungry. Our gut is the gateway to optimal health.

Now people get it and when I started and this people thought I was crazy. You were early on talking about the importance of gut health and its myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis. Basically our intestines, the size of the tennis court is laid out flat but it's only one cell thick is the lining. It's this one cell between you and a sewer. That's a very important dynamic and when that dynamic breaks down we get really sick. And when you get to the root you don't have to treat each thing separately.

You know, somebody that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do realize the importance of my gut health. Where do I start? Functional medicine is where we start. Start with nutrition and gut repair. And if you do that...

Today on The Ultimate Human, we have a true pioneer, a personal mentor of mine and an absolute icon in the wellness and functional medicine space. With decades of experience, Dr. Hyman has really redefined how everyone approaches health. He's shown millions of people that food can be your medicine. He's a 15 time New York Times best-selling author and a champion for health as preventative practice.

We'll dive into his groundbreaking work on reversing biological age, the true impact of our dietary choices and practical steps that you can take to live a longer, healthier, happier life. Let's welcome Dr. Hyman to the podcast.

Hey guys, welcome back to the ultimate human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Breca, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And as he just heard, today's guest is an extraordinarily special guest because he's very special to me. He doesn't know this.

He doesn't know this, but he is actually a mentor of mine, 15 time New York Times best-selling author. I think he's just an icon in the functional medicine space. And when I was looking for people early in my career, which is only 10 years ago, that agreed philosophically with what I was preaching. So I could latch my wagon to somebody that was saying the same thing I was that had some credentials. It was definitely Dr. Mark Hyman.

I'm very, very excited to have you on the podcast because you have liberated me from a lot of the chicanery and Charlin a tree that people accused me of. Yeah. Is that is that a word or did I just make? I think it's a word. Charlin a tree. Okay. Yeah. Let's put that in there. Good. Googling because, you know, I just believe so much in foundationally

what you preach, which is essentially that we can take charge of our cellular biology and we can cure reverse chronic disease and we can even extend our life. And that is a very exciting concept to me.

We just did a podcast where we talked about a lot of the simplicity and the complexity and, you know, about getting, getting back to the basics. So I'm really, really excited for today's podcast. I, I want to actually start with something, uh, you know, out there a little bit because we, I just did this, uh, gut reset challenge. And every, every month I, on the ultimate human, I run these free challenges, like three day water fast, uh, cold plunge challenge, 10,000 step challenge.

We've done lots of these sleep challenges. And the idea is to just introduce some of these concepts to people where they can use fasting or sunlight or grounding or breathwork or cleaning up their food, their water to really heal their bodies. And we just did a gut challenge. And when I was doing some research for the podcast,

I stumbled on a podcast you did with Andrew Huberman. Yeah. I think it was Huberman. Yeah. And you were talking about a gut bacteria that was present in high volumes in patients that were really responsive to immunotherapy. Yeah. Yeah. And its absence reduced the responsiveness of therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And since I just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I clemency. Yeah. That's it. I can think of it.

It's one of those keystone bacteria, like the keystone species, like the wolves in Yellowstone. It's like one of those important species of bacteria. If you don't have it, the cascading effects are quite significant. You increase leaky gut, you increase inflammation of the body, autoimmunity, metabolic diseases, diabetes. It's critical for gut health and maintenance. And we basically killed it off with all the inbox we've taken.

Yeah. So, you know, I think that people generally accept the notion that, you know, our gut is the gateway to optimal health, you know, our immune system sits right outside of our gut, you know, it's now and now people get in a restaurant and this people thought it was crazy. Yeah. Talking about gut and leaky gut. It was you and Dr. Pearlman were the

only ones like talking about this story. I read his gut brain connection and grain brain and some of these other books that he wrote. And in fact, that's what led me to you. And you were early on talking about the importance of gut health and gut function and its myriad of conditions that come from gut dysbiosis. And that's what I really want to touch on. I mean,

Yeah. Um, we, we only have what a single cell layer separating us. Yeah. Basically our intestines, the size of the tennis courts laid out flat in terms of surface area, but it's only one cell thick. It's the lining. It says one cell between you and a sewer. Yeah. You know, you have a great way to think about food. And it's like, that's a very important dynamic. Cause essentially your, your gastrointestinal system is outside your body. It's a tube that goes from your mouth to your butt, but it's sort of,

Got all this foreign stuff in it. Know where your body is or all this foreign stuff. And your body has to sort through like, what's friend or foe? What can I live in? We'll have to keep out. Right. And when that dynamic breaks down, we get really sick. When the whole ecosystem of bugs, of which there's, you know,

At least as many as our body's own cell is probably more 40-50 trillion. There's 100 times the DNA in the bacterial DNA in our body has their own DNA. We're outnumbered 101. Wow. And they're producing all these metabolites. Probably a third to a half of our blood metabolites are from the microbiome.

They all affect all of our body functions. And if you have a good bacteria, you're creating healthy metabolites. And if you're creating bad bacteria, you're getting bad metabolites. And that's what's leading to this cascade of disease. In fact, in terms of longevity, it's now understood as one of the hallmarks of aging, a dysfunctional microbiome.

Wow. And so if they're new to this subject, some of these new to this subject, I mean, where do they start? I know that functional health, you guys do a whole myriad of testing. I'm very impressed with function health or function health.

of the caliber and the breadth of testing that you do, quite honestly, for the price. And, you know, $15,000 worth of testing for like $49,000. It sounds too good to be true, but it's not. We talked about it on a previous podcast, but so, you know, it's so many that is going down this road of saying, you know, I really do. I realize the importance of my gut health. Where do I start?

Well, first is to understand what is going on there. Why is it important? Let's just sort of do a little primer on the gut, right? So you got this whole ecosystem and you, you're basically just a host for the bacteria out for you and do to there what they do. And there's probably a thousand species of bacteria in there. So maybe more, we're just figuring it out.

They have all kinds of jobs from helping you digest your food, to helping produce vitamins, to preventing leaky gut, to modulating inflammation, to affecting your brain, chemistry and mood, to regulating your appetite, to regulating your weight, to regulating your risk of autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, Parkinson's, I mean, you name it, it's connected to everything, autism, ADD, depression.

So you name a disease or a condition in our modern society. At some level, it's connected to the gut, even our mitochondrial health is connected to our gut. Wow. And so what's happened is that we've gone from an era where we're all hunter gatherers. We're all eating wild food. We're all eating. I mean, I visited the Huzza tribe in Africa last year and they're the one of the other tribes. Yeah, we live with them for a few days and we went hunting with them. Did you?

Really? Yeah, super fun. When you say we who went on. It was a whole crew of sort of friends and entrepreneurs and creative people who are just a part of this trip called Wow, it's now which is pretty fun. But the idea is that we camp with them and they have huge amounts of fiber. So they eat about 150 grams of fiber a day.

They went under this tree and they knew this yam was there, this wild yam, and they dug it out. And it's like, you know, you'd think it would like very tough to eat, but they cook it, they mash it down. And they eat all these foods that are extremely high in fiber. They don't eat processed sugar. They don't have artificial foods. They don't have emulsifiers and additives. Food dies. They don't have antibiotics. You know, so we've kind of changed our diet so radically in the last hundred years, even a hundred years ago. It wasn't so bad reading.

You know, a lot more food is just close to the earth. And so what's happened is we've taken, you know, our diet and turned into an ultra-processed diet, which contains compounds that cause a leaky gut, that feed the bad bacteria, that cause inflammatory bacteria to grow. Two, we've, you know, c-section rates have gone through the roof, probably third of all, both c-sections. The baby doesn't get inoculated with bacteria as it's going through the birth canal.

The mother's probably taking any body. So she's knocked out a lot of her healthy bacteria, which then the baby doesn't get it, even if it's vaginally born. Then we, we bottle feed and what's really fascinating is when you look at it and then look, some women need to form the feed their babies. So the formula needs to be improved. Somebody's got to figure that out. Oh my gosh. You know, it's, you know, it's, it requires seed oils. Yeah. It's seed oil. It's required. It's, you know, and, you know, what's really important is that 25% of breast milk, the calories and breast milk,

are not digestible by humans. These oligosaccharides that are complex sugars that can't be broken down, that are the fuel for bacteria. Formula doesn't have any of that. When you look at the bacterial strains and the short chain fatty acids, which are the fuel that the bacteria produce that are keeping your gut healthy, that are using to run everything in your gut,

There's higher levels of propionic acid, which has been linked to autism, and there's lower levels of butyrate, which is the really critical fuel for your gut lining, and also for regulating so many biological processes that's absorbed in the body that's used as an anti-cancer compound in the body. So you form a feed, you don't get the good bacteria, you get all these bad bacteria producing all these bad short chain pettiasces. So then by the time you add in,

All of the processed food in these kids are having these guts that are causing high levels of food allergy. We never had the food allergy rates. We have true food allergy, not just food sensitivities. We're seeing rates of allergy and asthma and eczema and then all these behavioral issues and ADD and autism rates have gone up a thousand percent. The use of ADD drugs has gone up like 400%. I mean, it's just, it's insane what's happening. Let me see kids with depression. Why is that happening? Because their microbiomes messed up.

And the microbiome needs to be taken care of, just like if you had a garden, you have to take care of your garden, you have to take care of the soil. And if you don't take care of your microbiome, you're going to end up with so many different chronic illnesses. And we see this story and it's functional medicine practitioners. We see this all the time. When you take a history and you watch the timeline, okay, you have an autoimmune disease when you're 40. Well, what was your story?

Well, I was, you know, my mother, you know, I had a C-section. I was bottle fed. I took lots of antibiotics because I had colic when I was a kid, you know, and then I started getting this and that allergies and asthma and irritable bowel and eventually it all ends up in something bad, you know, right. And so tending or undergarden is a huge, is a huge factor. And in functional medicine is where we start, start with nutrition and gut repair.

And if you do that, like 80% of things look better. Yeah. It's quite remarkable. Yeah. What's amazing is, um, I think unbeknownst to you, we've actually shared some clients who have, you know, since disclosed to me that, that they were also working with you. And some of them had serious gut dysbiosis and.

Um, when I was working with them and my clinical team was working with them, we had real difficulty, um, with absorption of nutrients, getting levels corrected in the blood. Um, and then they did a stint with you. And once the gut microbiome was, was corrected, you see the dramatic shifts in how they respond to the more, let's call it traditional therapies that, that, you know, that we were applying still not.

traditional therapies in terms of allopathic medicine. We don't use chemicals, synthetics, pharmaceuticals, but even the basics approach that we were taking that a lot of people respond to. These clients were having real difficulty and it just sort of further heightened my awareness to the work that you're doing. Yeah, it's so important.

So important. So when you're starting with the gut, I mean, do you say test, treat, and so how does somebody walk through this process? Because if you've got trillions of bacteria in the gut, hey, guys, Gary Breckett here. And I want to talk to you about something I consider a true game changer in my health regimen.

kettle and fire bone broth. When it comes to bone broth, kettle and fire is simply the cleanest on the market. They use only grass-fed and grass-finished beef bones, ensuring you get 19 grams of high-quality protein per serving. It's the ultimate fuel, especially for those of you diving into extended fasting protocols. In fact, these are the only bone broth I trust and I use for all of my fasting challenges, and now you can experience it for yourself.

just head over to kettle and fire.com and use the code ultimate human to save 20% off your entire order. Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

Well, there's some, you know, if you have real issues, you probably need to get some testing, right? Yeah. But empirically, you can actually get a lot of done without actually a lot of testing. So they used to call me Dr. C every poop because I get everybody. Everybody's floating too much fat. Yeah. And, and I know, but I would literally just full test on everybody. You came to see me. It was like getting your blood pressure. Right. Let me know what's going on in there.

And then in that, you know, we looked at your pancreatic enzyme function. We looked at absorption of fats. We looked at inflammatory markers, things like how protecting the acid of our protein X, which are markers of inflammation. We look at your antibody levels. It's because your gut is the lining line with antibodies that are your first line of defense. Right there. Yeah, you got 60% of your immune system right into the gut. And that's because it's where you're getting the most foreign material. We also look at short chain

fatty acids to get a sense. We look at the bacteria, including acromancy, which we can see based on PCR testing. We look at stool cultures, look at levels of healthy bacteria, yeast overgrowth parasites. We look at zion levels. We look at whole series of things, not just looking at the bacteria itself, but like what is the ecosystem like? Because you can check the bacteria and you can kind of sort of guess, but

You want to look at not just the bacteria, you want to look at all the functions that the bacteria are doing and see if they're working, right? Right. And so we do that. We also have people have bloating. It's really common to have what we call bacterial overgrowth work because of motility issues, because we're a crappy diet, because of various drugs we take like acid blockers,

We get overgrowth of bad bugs in our small intestine. Basically, you're most of the bacteria in your large intestine or the bottom of your small intestine. They're not in the upper part. Right. So when you, when you food go through your stomach and done your small intestine, it just gets adjusted. But if there's bacteria that have sort of migrated up there,

They ferment the foods and you get what we call food, baby. People know that is bloating, distension and feel full after a meal. That's because you have bacteria or yeast, we call it SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or CFO, small intestinal growth. Which they usually hit with high amounts of antibiotics. Yeah. So, you know, you can use antibiotics, herbs, you can do any funnels, depending on the person, but you can test for that with breath testing. You can look at

Also, not just breath testing, but you can look at urine, actually, to see metabolites of yeast and other things, for example, in the urine or bacteria in the urine, because your body's absorbing it, and then you're trying to get rid of these metabolites. And you can see non-human metabolites in the blood.

And you can also see him in the urine. So we use a whole variety of tests to see what's going on in that ecosystem. And in looking at looking things like lower echomancia, which is really important. And we, we then create a regimen to help people rebuild their gut. And in functional medicine, we call the five R program. And it's a methodology for helping reset the gut. It's remove the bad stuff. Like what is the bad stuff? Well, obviously all the crappy food reading process food. It could be removing the bad bugs that are in there.

like actual overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. And you just reverse that. Well, you can, you can use herbs. So there's a lot of herbal formulas to do it. Sometimes you need medication like refaxamine or fluconazole, which are any fungal, any fungal antibiotics that are, you know, used to actually treat SIBO, there may be cocktails for certain SIBO. For example, if you have methane SIBO, we can measure the gases. You know, we can see which gases are being produced. You have methane or hydrogen or sulfide, and they all require different treatments. So you can have bloating, but you don't know which

What's causing it? Sometimes there's diarrhea that's more prominent with your mobile and that may be more hydrogen-related SIBO, where you have constipation-related irritable bowel, or you're mostly constipated. Then you need maybe treatment for methane-producing bacteria that you can find that are causing constipation or fungus, which enough helps constipation. It's really looking at

All the different kind of biology down there and using whatever tools needed to kind of reset the gut. So you kind of have to reset it. Kind of like almost like white to say clean. So you get a profile of everything that's in there. These guys are bad. We get rid of them. These guys are non-existent. We need to populate them. Yeah, exactly. And then these guys levels are low. We need to enhance them.

So that's kind of removed. It's removing the bad foods, emulsifiers, food additives, emulsifiers are really common and things that make food creamy. It's all processed food has them in them. They're highly damaging to the gut lining that cause a leaky gut. And leaky gut basically is the idea that you have these cells, this one cell lining and it's stuck together like Legos. And it's an energy dependent process, requires energy from the mitochondria. And what happens is when you have various insults, whether it's changing the bacteria, whether it's, you know,

gluten, which is the biggest cause of leaky gut, whether it's emulsifiers, you get these cells separating and the food leaks between them and also bacterial toxins and products leak between the cells instead of going through the cells like a filter, right? It's like a coffee filter. You put the coffee in, you don't get any grounds in your coffee because you have the filter, but the same thing when the food goes through,

ourselves, you don't get into trouble. And the immune system has nothing to react to because everything's broken down into its fundamental amino acids, fatty acids, sugars. And then you just, they're just de-identified. So when you eat a piece of chicken, you don't become a chicken. Everybody breaks it down. Right. And so the, the, the, um, then you have these incredible, um,

damage to your, your gut from all these various insults and even toxins, heavy metals also cause leaky gut to happen to me. And then, then your immune system starts reacting and this creates inflammation. And you get this chronic sterile inflammation where your body's reacting.

to the toxins and antigens and bacteria there, and you're creating the systemic immune response. And that's how it's linked to all these diseases, right? Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is diabetes is obesity is dementia is autism is ADD is depression is our immune disease are all these are all you have to climb.

They're all inflammatory diseases and the source of most of the inflammation our body is coming from, aside from our diet, it's coming from dysfunction in our gut. And so healing your gut, taking care of your gut, tending your inner garden is so important. So that's the first step is remove. And then if we find a parasite, we might have to give in any parasite drug, right? And then I had a kid with Giardia, for example, and he had that autism. And we treated the idea as the autism dramatically improved. Let's not say every kid would

Autism has a majority because there's no such thing as autism. There are autism's. We can put these people in buckets of labels which have nothing to do with the cause. It just has to do with the amount of neural inflammation, right? Right. It misses the problem of medicine. We have a label like depression or autism or breast cancer or whatever it is. It's the same pathology.

But the causes are different. Right. For any functional medicine, you say, you know, one disease can have many causes and one causing pretty many diseases like gluten can create a whole hundreds of diseases. Right. Right. So first, you kind of got to do the remove step. And, uh, and then you got to do the replace step, which is replacing digestive enzymes.

Prebiotics, and I'd also probably say polyphenols, which are important, and I think this is fairly new discovery of how important the colorful compounds in plants fertilize the bugs. They're also kind of a prebotic. So, for example, acromancia, if you people green tea and pomegranate and cranberry,

It loves that stuff and it grows the acromancy. Wow. So you can see even, you know, this is my friend, William Lee, his mother had stage four uterine cancer was failing immunotherapy and then the other kind of treatment. And he did, he knew about this literature about acromancy and he tested her and she was very low. He gave her all these foods and had high polyphenol content to increase the acromancy levels. And then she responded and was cured of cancer. Wow.

So that's how I've heard you talk about that. And this was, and what is it about the acromancia? That is, is it is what's calming the immune system? Well, it's it's called acromancia mucinophilia, mucin loving mucus loving. What is on the lining of your intestine is a thick mucus layer. It's kind of like a filter, like a void. Yeah. Yeah. That protects your lining from getting damaged. When you have low levels of mucin, then your gut is more susceptible to be leaky.

So, so then we do the second stage and the third step is to re inoculate. That's probiotics. And there's a million of them. They're all have different properties. They all have different effects on the body. They're used in different ways for different things. So there's a whole science of nuts. Like it's not just that there's a probiotic, right? Many species and they all have different impact. You can take Acromancy now.

You can take bifidobacter, you can electobacillus, but there's different strains like plantarum or remnosis or other ones that have different modulating effects. So you kind of have to understand how to use them. You have a whole universe of probiotics that you can select from. Depending on what you're trying to do. Yeah. So someone has, for example, a fungal overgrowth. I'll give them something called saccharomyces, which is actually a yeast that fights other yeast.

Um, and so there's, uh, there's, for example, bifidobacterium infantus, which is used for babies to help inoculate the gut and colonize the gut, which prevents all these autoimmune analogy diseases, which I think every, every woman who's having a baby should use this product. I have no dissociation, whether affiliation with it. And what is it? It's basically bifidobacterium infantus, uh, the company that makes this called the vivo.

I have seen them and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research. It's very impressive data. And I think I recommend that every woman, if she's breastfeeding, she puts on her breast, if they're obviously bottle taking and putting in the formula, but really important. And so you've got to kind of re-inoculate with the right bacteria. And then you've got to repair the lining of the gut. The gut requires glutamine and zinc and vitamin A and omega-3 fatty acids.

and phytochemicals and things to help repair the gut and less of restore which is to kind of reset the kind of gut brain connection because a lot of us stress will affect the gut, right? You can literally create a little nail nerve is just enveloping that. Yeah, your whole your whole nose. Yeah, your gut your gut brain is has more neurotransmitters than your brain brain. Yeah.

And so, yeah, the majority of them are in here. Yeah. It's hard to have upstairs. People take, you know, psilocybin, which increases serotonin. They often get gut symptoms, right? Cause it's often related to the kind of serotonin in the gut. And, and the, um, and the beautiful thing is, you know, by using, you know, whether it's breath work or meditation or any kind of practice of resets and nervous system, we'll reset the gut.

It's a very systematic process. It's got to be personalized though. It's not like one size fits all. Although there is a way to just sort of do a basic, got reset like I'm sure what you did. It works for most people. But if it doesn't work, then you got to go back. Oh, maybe I have SIBO and the results are amazing. I'll just say a quick story of a patient. She was a 50 year old business coach.

She was depressed, she was overweight, she was prediabetic, she had severe psoriatic arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease, she had severe reflux, she had severe double bowel syndrome, bloating, she was seeing the gastroenterologist, the rheumatologist, the psychiatrist, the endocrinologist, she was on a formage, she was on drugs for $50,000 a year for her autoimmune disease, she was on acid blockers for reflux, he had an old bowel drug, she was on antidepressants, she was on the pile of meds, right?

And I said, gee, what are all these things in having a common? You know, what is her depression and psoriasis and her overweight issue or insulin resistance and gut issues have in common? Well, they're all inflammatory diseases, right? So where's it likely coming from? Well, she had all these gut issues. I said, let's start there. Yeah, put our elimination diet. So we get rid of the most common foods that cause a problem.

And what is elimination diet? So elimination diet is basically eliminating foods that are more likely to cause a problem. It can be based on testing or just empirically. And then you add foods back slowly to see what's happening. And the most common foods that are problem people are gluten and dairy. Gluten and dairy. And then there's a whole sort of cascade after that, whether it's grains or beans or some of them be direct to eggs. And there, you know, there's extreme versions, for example, autoimmune paleo would be like an extreme elimination diet where you get rid of

You know, grains, beans, dairy, obviously sugar, processed food, obviously. But you also get rid of nuts and seeds, also get rid of nightshades. My 10-day detox side is essentially an elimination diet. You know, you add nuts and seeds. There's also...

You know, eggs you can have and so forth in the nightchase. It's a little bit more liberal, but you know, the results are pretty profound. People are really, really sick. I might put them on an autoimmune paleo diet, but for most people, a 10-day detox, which is a reset. It's where you get like, we see 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. Wow. And then we actually have an online program called the 10-day detox where people are seeing a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days.

And I've done this program with thousands of people. That is incredible. And retreats around the world. It's quite amazing whether you have a food based. It's just just entirely. It just can't rid of the shit. And I did the good stuff. It's not that hard. Yeah. You know, you're going to get paid a lot of money for just telling people to do civil stuff. Yeah, I do too. But it's basically just, you know, eating whole real food, nutrient dense food, a lot of phytochemicals, a lot of fiber, low glycemic, lots of good fats.

And so they're not starving on. No, you're eating a ton of food, raw food vegan overnight, you know, protein, vegetables, nuts, seeds, you know, we get rid of them. And you can add things back to see you. Maybe there is a bothersome, you know, I know that dairy bothers me. But if I go to sheep, I'm fine.

Oh, right. So I can tell. And when you reintroduce it, you have to get a worse reaction than you had when you were eating it all the time because your body actually has these stored antibodies that it just goes out and attacks it. Right. So basically we do it on a nation diet. And on her, we basically treated her SIBO and CFO. So she'd taken lots of steroids, lots of antibiotics in the past. So I knew she had bacterial liver. So I gave her a drug called refaxamine, which is a non absorbed antibiotic.

I gave her a deep flu can or fluconazole, which basically kills all the fungus. And then I re-enochulated her with healthy bacteria. I gave her some prebiotics, just gave her vitamin D, some fish oil. Very simple, some probiotics. It comes back six weeks later, and I'm like, I never tell people to stop their medication. I said, let's just try this and see how you do. KMX6, I stopped everything. I have no more sorority arthritis. Skin's clear. I have no more heartburn, no more, you know, reflux, no more irritable valve, no more depression.

I lost 20 pounds. I don't pre-diabetes. Wow. And I got off all my medication. Yeah. And all we did. Amazing. Six weeks. Six weeks. All we did was reset her gut. Wow. My joke is I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. Yeah. And when you get to the root, you don't have to treat each thing separately. Right. And I think unfortunately, modern medicine has so many silos. I forget how many specialties and subspecialties are now, but it's mind-numbing. They're basically a doctor for every interview these days.

Yeah. And, you know, we used to see this in the mortality science space, you know, patients go into the primary care doctor and they get referred to cardiology or for some psychology or for some to gastroenterology or, you know, for some autoimmune, they got a hematologist and then nephrologist and the next thing you know, it's so, and everything so segmented and even in this, in this client that we talked about earlier that had this, this stage four colon cancer that, that was, you know, cured in five months on the immunotherapy.

Um, she had, I think she was seeing 13 different specialists at any given time. Um, and you know, for most people, they didn't really realize there were 13 subspecialties in medicine. And interestingly, um, you know, the cardiologist would have her on, uh, non potassium sparing diuretic. And then the kidney, the nephrologist also had her on a diuretic that was potassium sparing diuretic. They didn't know that they both had her own diuretic.

And there was all this duplicity and compounding effect because there wasn't this systemically holistic approach. I liken it to the hub of the wheel, right? I mean, you got all these spokes. And if you start chasing the spokes, you'll just spend the rest of your life just running around that wheel. But if you find the hub.

Um, which very often is the God. Um, then, um, you know, you found the fantasy. One of my favorite things about these bars is that I formulated it in conjunction with body health because they formulated the perfect blend of amino acids. That's why they're called perfect amino's. So to get 30 grams of protein, if you look at one of these bars and it says 30 grams of protein on the back,

The chances of you getting even 10 grams of protein are very, very slim. About two thirds of the caloric intake that you're putting in as protein is actually turning to sugar or turning to fat. With these bars, 99% of it is absorbable. It has a blend of the exact

necessary essential amino acids that you need to fuel your body. Yes, we use amino acids to build muscle, but we also use them to build collagen, elastin, fibering in the skin. We use it to make cellular structures in the body, things like natural killer cells. So we want to be eating whole food ingredients that taste great.

that actually fuel our body at a cellular level. There is no other protein bar like this on the planet. This was years in the making, just trying to find a manufacturer that would take whole real foods and press them, put a little CO2 into the container so it doesn't spoil, and then seal it and package them for the shelves was a difficult task. You know, most of the manufacturers we talked to wanted to add seed oils. They wanted to add preservatives. They wanted to add food dyes. All the cheap ingredients that make these salable and palpable, but don't feed our cellular biology.

I can't wait for you guys to try these. You're going to love them as much as I do. So click the link below and be one of the first ones to get this delicious new way to fuel your body. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. And the key to this is what we're doing is restoring a healthy gut ecosystem. Right. And you and I both do this. What the work we do is basically helping people create health. We don't treat disease directly. When you, when you remove the conditions that cause disease, add in the things that help

you know, prevent or reverse disease, the body is very smart and knows what to do. So true. You don't need to like, even though we may not understand everything that's happening when we do these things, because it's impossible to know there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second of the body. Yeah. You and I, no matter how much we studied, could never learn. The reality is that just doing some simple practices can make profound impact. And so really, you know, functional medicine, I think is one of its greatest contributions to humanity.

is the understanding of the microbiome is understanding how to reset it and treat many chronic illnesses through improving the health of the microbiome. And we've been doing this for decades. And before it was even called the microbiome. And I think it's really the center of the practice we do. And I think what's really interesting is that if you look at the bluestone research, there's really not continuity in any of the diets, the centenarians. There's high carbohydrate consumption.

Sardinia, for example, there's high meat consumption in Singapore, there's high, you know, there's fatty fish and oils in the Mediterranean diet. But the commonality is that they are all whole foods. None of them were eating a highly processed diet. I mean, maybe they were making bread, but they're eating bread or pasta, but they were eating bread and pasta. Yeah, but I was, I mean, they made bread, but it was from Zia wheat, which is ancient wheat that allude into the great used to consume it is to fuel his, you know, campaign.

to conquer the world. But it was very long gluten, super nutrient dense, lots of phytochemicals, lots of fiber. And maybe it wasn't a problem for them. Yeah. You know what's funny? Well, maybe it's not so funny, but I was actually

I'm watching one of those history channels the other night, and it talked about in the 1800s how they had this thing called fencing. They would feed prisoners that they were transporting certain diets. You ever heard that when you go to jail, it doesn't happen anymore, but they just feed you bread and water. It was a bread and water diet.

There's actually some history to that in that they because they would transport these convicts on horseback over long distances. What they didn't want them to do was on foot was to run and get away from them. So they fed them.

bread and water to weaken them and weaken them is actually just gummed up there. They didn't know why. I mean, they didn't know the bifida bacteria cycle and those, you know, the single cell layer of the gut, but they, but, but these Mounties knew enough to know that if I only fed them bread and water, they wouldn't die, but they couldn't

go more than a couple hundred yards. Yeah. And that was it. So they didn't ever have to hunt them down. And so I just, it just struck me when I was watching this thing that they would, you know, they put them on, on horseback. And now those guys are eating beef jerky and, you know, shooting animals and cooking them on a fire and things like that. But then the prisoners, they just gave bread and water too. And after a few days of just on a bread and water diet, they were just so

sick, they weren't dead, but they certainly were not in any kind of condition. And you think about what we're doing in modern societies, where it's essentially our self, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, and it's even worse, because the foods we're eating are, are so one depleted nutrients and two, they're full of compounds that actually

they actively damaged the gut, right? And I think this is sort of the, you know, we're switching topics here. I mean, you and I are both big believers that if we're going to fix chronic disease in this country, that we have to fix the food supply. And, you know, our soil has become so nutrient deficient. People say, no, you can get all everything that you need from, from foods. And I go, well, theoretically, I guess that's true. Right. But the truth is the modern society today is really, really hard.

I mean, if you had a farm and you're growing your own chickens and your own eggs and you had your own hydroponic facility and you had grass-fed cows, you probably could get there. But I think the chances, even of people that are as conscious as you and I are with our travel schedules and everything else, there has to be certain supplementation.

And I was actually looking at a research article on soil depletion, the difference between the soil and the soil. And this was 2016. I haven't seen another one in the last eight or so years, but I'm sure it's gotten worse.

Yeah. But so to talk a little bit about the food supply and depletion in the food supply and, you know, it's linked to this pandemic of chronic disease, because we are the sickest, the most diseased nation in the world. And we spend the highest amount on healthcare. That's right. Which is the ultimate dichotomy because we know that spending doesn't equate to outcomes. Or else the four and a half trillion we spent, we would be the leanest, healthiest, you know, highly functioning humans on the planet. Totally.

for four and a half trillion dollars we should be. Yeah. And we're spending more and more and getting less and less. Absolutely true. We're like, I think more than twice per capita in the other nation and we're 48th and life expectancy. We're 30th. It's off the 60th. Now 20. Yeah. Who knows? Like it's going up and down. We're we're we're. I think South of Angola or something. And I think, you know, we also are 30th among all development nations last among all development nations in all the major healthcare metrics like informatality. So

We're doing something wrong. In terms of the food supply, yes, it's depleted of nutrients. The soil has been damaged by our industrial farming practices. And my joke is nobody really needs to take any vitamins, but only under certain conditions. You have to hunt and gather your own wild food. You have to be exposed to the environmental toxins. You have to drink only pure clean water, breathe pure clean air, sleep nine hours a day, wake with the sun, go to bed with the sun, and have no chronic stress.

No, then you probably don't need vitamins. Like, because it's true. We have for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe you're Amish, right? Yeah, hundreds of thousands of years. Humans never took vitamins, never needed vitamins. But if you look at, um, um, Cordane's work, uh, around Paleolithic diets, you know, the nutrient density was so much higher. They had 150 grams of fiber. We have maybe eight to 15 for a month per day.

They're vitamin levels and mineral levels and consumption that make three fatty acid levels so much higher. All the foods are- And the ratios were different too. It's omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios. Yeah, and the salt and the potassium. And then we have like 12 times as much or 10 times as much salt as potassium. So it's salt is good, but it's not, it's like you need the potassium which comes from plants and foods.

So, I think we're in this really crisis moment, and we're six out of 10 Americans have a chronic illness, four out of 10 F2, when you define chronic illness a little more broadly, not just one out of two prediabetes or type two diabetes, but 93% of us probably have some form of prediabetes or type two diabetes.

when you, because that's based on the genesis of metabolic dysfunction. Right. I mean, we talked about the criteria prediabetes. It's like, if your triglycerides are over 150, if your HL's under 40, if you're over 40, if you're man, or whatever for woman, your blood pressure is 140 or 90. So the numbers that are used to define prediabetes are, I think, are a low bar.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your blood sugars over 100 is your low bar. Yeah. The time you get there, you're ready. Anyone sees like 5.7. Yeah, you're already in trouble. So when you look at metabolic dysfunction through to a broader definition.

Only 6.8% of Americans are healthy. That means... Metabolically healthy. Yeah. And that means they don't have some degree of prediabetes or insulin resistance. And now with function health, we're seeing just extraordinary dysfunction. That's what we call function health. It's going to be well functional.

Uh, and we have, you know, it's basically a lab lab, um, a platform health platform where a lot of people access drone data through lab testing and, and we're testing over 110 biomarkers on first flush and we see all the metabolic things insulin, which never gets measured. The first thing to go up your blood sugar is the last thing you want to see. We can see.

That's going your blood sugar. So you see the in the slow resistance, but for the heman see, he's trying to react. And we can see also look at cholesterol differently. We look at the particle number, particle size, things that are not looked at less than 1% about cholesterol tests actually measure what should be the gold standard of cholesterol testing, which is looking at particle number and particle size, quality, not just the weight of the cholesterol. Right. Because you get a cholesterol 150 and it can be terrible. You could have, you know, 2,000 particles and small particles, or you get a cholesterol 300 and it'd be completely fine because you're all large, fluffy particles in your

triglycerides and HDL are fine. There's no heart disease. So we're doing diagnostic tests that are so antiquated at your regular checkup where you may be 19 biomarkers. Yeah, even the lipid panel now is just that I see on the majority of all testing is very basic. It's triglyceride, HDL, LDL, LDL. Yeah, no, it's not. Yeah, it's not what we should be doing. And

And we're also not looking at the other biomarkers that are important for metabolic health, like uric acid and inflammation, CRP, Apo B, which is super important. The most predicted biomarker for a, yeah, like the most predicted marker for bar disease, doctors own check it. So we measure all that and we're seeing like 96% of the people who we test in the health forward population,

have some degree of metabolic dysfunction based on these biomarkers. Holy cow. You know, so we're, we're in deep due to, and it's why we have this crisis of chronic disease caused primarily by insulin resistance, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all on the rise. Diabetes got a 400 percent heart disease, 50 percent cancer, 30 percent, but over 60 percent, those under 50 primarily caused by our diet. And this mess in our microbiome and colon cancer.

We're seeing 150% increase in Alzheimer's. We're seeing increasing cancer rates. We're seeing over 100% increase in depression and mental illness, a thousand percent increase in autism, a hundred percent increase in autoimmune disease. And at the same time, we're seeing two to three to 400% increases in all the drugs that treat all those diseases. So we're spending more and more. We're doing more and more. We're getting sicker and sicker. What's wrong with this picture?

Yeah. It's like, it's really the root cause is our food system. So as a doctor, treating people for decades, I'm sitting in my office going, geez, and I just have all these patients with chronic disease. And as a functional medicine doctor, I'm trained to ask why functional medicine is the medicine. Why not? What disease you have? What drug do I get? But why is it? How did you get here?

And I started thinking, okay, why is my patient of diabetes? Why do they have heart disease? Why do they have all the music? Like, it's the food stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Like, okay, well, if it's the food, well, why do we have the food we have? Well, it's our food system. It's our industrial food system. Well, why do we have that food system? It's our food policies. Well, why do we have those food policies? It's the food industry.

It's driving most of those policies globally. And most of the research, most of the research and I'll unpack it for you in a minute. But it's really, it's really stunning. And I wrote a book in 2000, came out in March, 2000, sorry, in March 2020, which is terrible to publish a book right now.

Right when nobody could go to the shelf and get it. We could like try to put you behind other things than the fate of our food system. But I started an on-profit at Food Fix campaign where we were working on policy change in Washington. But in that book, I answered the question for myself, is why am I patient sick and how is the food system responsible for all this and why is this happening in one of the policies?

And it was really clear to me that it was the food industry driving a lot of this and obfuscating the truth, corrupting the science, corrupting public health agencies, confusing lawmakers with nonsense data. And I'll tell you anything in a minute, but there's a new report that's coming out next year. And I recently talked to one of the scientists from the World Health Organization who's

Leadingness of 20 scientists, leading researchers decides around the world who've come together to write a report on the commercial determinants of health. We've heard of the social determinants, which is poverty, lack of access to foods, but the commercial determinants of health are the ways in which multinational corporations, food, ag, tobacco, alcohol, corporations, privatized profits, and subvert public health deliberately.

Yeah. And as I began to unpack the story in my book, I began to see, you know, when I did the research, I was like, I knew there was this shit going on, but I didn't know how bad it was, you know, like, like I, as part of my work in Washington, we got the government accountability office, which is the government watchdog to do a report through friends who are congressmen that can ask for these things. Nobody looked at this.

What are the impact of our food policies on disease in America and the cost and our house? No one looked at it. Right. So they looked at it and they did a couple of years study. They analyze it and they found that there were 200 policies plus in 21 different departments and agencies in our government, all working in cross purposes, telling people to do different things. So on one hand, we say in dietary guidelines, eat healthier whole foods. And on the other hand, with SNAP, their biggest food program, we spent $125 billion.

75% of that is for junk food, culture process food, 10% for soda. Wow. So we're spending $12 billion for soda for the poor, which is probably 15 billion servings of soda that the government's paying for. 20% of Coke's profits in the US come from food stamps.

No. Yes. From food stamps. Yes. And this is the population that's the most underserved that has the least awareness of what's going on. And they are the most susceptible to government and regulatory bodies dictating what they're going to eat. That's right. What they're going to eat. And what's exciting to me, Gary, is the first time in a presidential campaign

and probably in this podcast series, we're going to figure out who's president. I don't know if he's going to be president right now. Well, we're 24 hours away, right? Yeah. The first time in any candidate talking about chronic disease. Yeah. You know, President Trump in 2023, even before Bobby Kennedy kind of joined him.

with this make America healthy again movement was put out a five minute video about the chronic disease epidemic, particularly in children that we have to do something about it. And I was like, whoa, this is amazing. Yeah. And I think there's so many forces that are pushing against doing it right. And what the food issues done, and I include the ag industry, the pharma industry,

and the process food industry, the fast food industry, it's basically probably 20 CEOs around the world that control the biggest industry on the planet, which is the food industry. It serves as food, which is we all eat on the planet. So I think last time I looked at it was $16, $17 trillion a year industry. And so what they've done is both, I think, deliberately and just to historical, you know, kind of, you know, the kind of

Kind of practice that they had, they weren't as a malicious, they literally created a food system that makes us sick and they profit from and we get sick and the government pays for. So number one, they fund 12 times the number of studies on nutrition as independent scientists. Even though they're directly conflicted. So like the American Bever Association funds a study on dietary,

a sweeteners and artificial sweeteners, they're fine. Well, should we believe that study? Probably not. Yeah. They fund academic institutions to do research. And so a lot of the medical school curriculums are pretty much pharmaceutical school curriculums. Yeah. You know, my daughter's in medical school. I see that really clearly. We see also how they fund the professional associations. So for example, the American Heart Association receives $192 million in funding from food and pharma. You're kidding.

a year. 192 million a year. Yeah. Yeah. The diabetes association, American diabetes association, Academy nutrition, dietetics, the American Academy of Pediatrics. I mean, I mean, there are a whole bunch of family doctors that quit when the American Academy family practice took $3 million from Coca-Cola. Right. So they're funding all these groups. They're also funding

fake

I knew it was coming. I mean, I take it as a badge of honor to get these pieces written about me because it means I'm touching a nerve. And they're the organization that says that pesticides are safe, that trans fats are good, that smoking, tobacco doesn't cause cancer. I mean, I'm not joking here.

And the guys who were the doctors and people that's all funded by these big corporations and many of these guys are corrupt. Some of these guys have been in jail and they came out after Dr. Oz and once in the New York Times and said they wrote a letter to Columbia saying he should be taken off the Columbia faculty because of his crazy views. And it was all this group and there's many, many of these front groups.

like crop life, which sounds great, but it's a basic industrial agriculture front group. And so they do a fund research, they fund our academic issues, they fund our professional associations, they fund front groups that are confusing people with misinformation and propaganda. And then they also fund social groups like the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.

Wow. And for example, there was, I was in a movie called Fed Up, which was about childhood obesity with Katie Kirk and Laurie David, we did about 10 years ago. And I met Bernie's King, who was Martin's daughter. And I said, why don't we show this film at the King Center?

And she's like, great idea. Let's do it because, you know, violence, nonviolence also means nonviolence to the self. I'm like, great. Yes. And so a few days later, she called me and said, Mark, we can't show the film. I'm like, why is Coca Cola funds the king center in Atlanta? I walk out of the, I walk out of the campus with Spelman college, which is a black woman's college in Atlanta. And there's more house, such as the men's and Spelman. Dean of the university said to me, Mark,

50% of the entering class of 18 year old African American woman have a chronic disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, 50% of 18 year olds. And I look at the campus, it's just blanketing with Coca-Cola. I'm like, what's going on here? Yeah. She's like, well, Coca-Cola is our biggest donor. You know, you look at the board of directors of Spelman College.

On the Trustees, it's someone's vice chair of some big position at Coca-Cola. It's just so corrupt. And I was talking to a friend of mine.

who was involved with the recent dietary guidelines that you might have heard about were mandated to look at ultra processed foods. I heard about this. Right. Lucky Charms came out. That was different. That was my favorite. But this is a dietary guidelines committee, which is supposed to be an independent group of scientists that have to review the literature that the USDA then can kind of authorizes them to look at. And you got a bunch of people in the USDA who

You know, may or may not be paid off of something that's going on, but they're basically the way they designed it, the whole process was so set up to fail. Cause they was like, you know, they didn't define processing properly. Like a can of tomatoes is processed food. A can of sardines is processed food, right? So it's like.

When you kind of look at the data on it, it's very clear. And this is the British Medical Journal came out with a paper a few years ago show that 32 different diseases were caused by or worsened by ultra processed food and all the major illnesses we have from our community to cancer, the heart disease, diabetes, I mean, the list goes on depression, clearly depression and mental health is caused by ultra processed food.

And he said he was one of the reviewers on this sort of guidelines. And he pointed out all the flaws and they just completely ignored it. Wow. They completely ignored it. And they came out with a ruling saying there's no data to support the fact that ultra processed food is causing obesity. And so we're not going to make an determination with the dietary guidelines. This is the guidelines that set the standards for all nutrition programs in the country.

Yeah. And when you look at the global burden of disease study, which looked at 195 countries, the number one killer today is not smoking. It's not war, not infections. It's food. Yeah. It's 11 million people. And it's, I think that's conservative because about 75 million people die a year in the world.

And I would say probably 60% of those are from chronic lifestyle preventable illnesses globally, not even in the developed world, but even the developing world. There's twice as many deaths from chronic lifestyle preventable diseases like diabetes and heart disease. And there is from infectious disease or malnutrition. Wow. This is double these burden in the developing world. And so they said that 11 million people die from ultra processed food and from not getting enough of the good foods.

And I think it's probably more like two Holocaust a year. Yeah. And this is a hundred percent preventable. It's unbelievable. So, so we have a system that's set up for everybody to fail. So for people to do what you want to ask them to do to eat better, to live a healthier life. It's very tough because there's so many forces pushing against them. Totally. And when you look at television, what are the ads? I mean, look at the media. It's junk food ads and it's pharma ads. So it's like eat this and then take this. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually, on my gut challenge, I actually played one of the, one of the farmer's ads, farm ads and, and just listened to the, the side effects and, um, well, they seem really fast at the end. They seem really fast. And it's always like, you know, it's like grandpa's like pushing his daughter on the swing, you know, granddaughter on the swing. And it's like liver failure, blindness, you know, um, mental, mental decline and occasionally death.

Um, contact your physician immediately if you experience a sudden loss of consciousness. I'm like, what? Yeah. But they say they say they, they show this beautiful, you know, life, you know, giving thing. And then they show like the end is like super fast. Like I just read through it. Um, you know, and I've even heard that the reason why, um, they spend so much money advertising directly to the consumer that it's actually the worst ROI. There was a worst return on investment. Um, um, marketing expense, like,

In marketing history, it's like they actually lose money advertising directly to the consumer. So then it begs the question, well, why did they spend so much money advertising the consumer? And then, you know, I've heard people talk about it and it's to control the media. Now, I'm just like you were saying, like you could show your movie at what was at the college. No, because they actually wouldn't have benefited from the movie, but the purse strings were controlled by one of the top journalists at CBS.

who kind of agrees with us. And I said, you know, why can't we get more content around these issues on the media and as well. Mark, you know, we, we are pretty tightly controlled by our advertisers. Yeah. I'm like, we're freaking honest. Yeah. Yeah. At least you're honest about it. And they're stuck too, because I mean, if 75% of my budget to pay for my family's well-being came from one source, be hard for me to

bite that hand. Yeah. And we, and we pay so much for drugs in this country. And they always, because R&D is so expensive and takes so much money to develop a drug and do this, they spend twice as much money on marketing as they do on R&D. Wow. And, and while they may, may, may not see the return investment, I think they probably do 40% of the time. This is based on published research, 40% of the time that people see an ad on television and go to the doctor and say, I want that drug, they get that drug.

really. Yeah. That's why they do it. Wow. Hey, I think they control the media with the amount of ads. I mean, if you're 75% of anybody's budget, you go listen, that's not so. So we got to address the food system, you know, from field of fork. And, you know, if I were king, which I'm not going to be or a dictator run for president. No, I'm not old enough. I'm not old enough. I'm only 65. I have to wait a little bit. So.

If I were king, there would be a whole set of sweeping things that could transform the food system in America. Yeah, I'd love to hear this. Develop a national and student nutrition and fund it adequately to really deeply research the root cause of our chronicities epidemic, which is primarily food. And make it independent. Make it independent. Truly independent. If it has any effect on public policy, it has to be independent in nature. Because I think the challenges that our public policy makers are not, yeah, that remove conflicts of interest across a whole segment of government that's dealing with these issues. Because right now, there's so much conflict of interest.

So the NIH has a big role. The NIH also could say, and this, I think this would make a big difference, say to all academic institutions, you're getting zero money from NIH grants, unless you change your medical school curriculum to incorporate nutrition. And we're not also at the federal level, because we fund graduate medical education, $17 billion. We're not giving that $17 billion unless you have a nutrition lifestyle curriculum in your graduate medical education programs. Wow.

You know, big thing. Second, I would, I would reform our HHS policies and Medicare policies to reimburse for lifestyle change programs and for nutrition and medical healed meals and nutrition services. Really important. You change what's paid for because doctors do what they get paid to do. Not what the sciences are supposed to do. Right. We know, for example, there's not a doctor in the planet that's going to say to you that lifestyle is in a better treatment for diabetes. Right. Right. Everybody knows that.

We know that food causes it. It's not a secret. And we know that they can fix it. And we know that food can fix it. Although there's still some controversy because people haven't seen it that much. But I mean, Verda has shown this very clearly that you can reverse 60% of diabetes with a ketogenic diet. We've seen it. We've seen it. I've seen it in my practice every day, but you know.

One of my favorite biohacks outside of breath work by far is mineral salts, baja gold sea salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid division or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this and water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a date today.

I actually made a grass-fed steak with grass-fed butter, and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary, and I sprinkled baja gold sea salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking, too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know. A $15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. This is literally the world's best biohacking secret. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

Doctors do what they get paid to do, not what works. Right. And so they, they get paid to give all these diabetes drugs. So we can give those epic for $1,600 a month, but we can't put people in a nutrition lifestyle change program, which is pennies. Yeah. When a group model program that works effectively, which would actually take the pressure off of the healthcare system. Because, you know, I heard Casey means talking about it. Um, and she was saying, you know, the, we're, we're about to approve.

uh, ozempic as a frontline defense for, um, uh, not just diabetes, but yeah, diabetes, um, which is like when you start to become, um, you know, it's not morbid obesity. It's just obesity. So, you know, you get a little, a little fat and we don't, hey, don't stop bathing your cellular biology in the toxic soup. Um, we're just going to press down on, on that with a GLP one and

You know, and I think a lot of people don't even realize it. GOP, we make GOP one in our bodies. Yeah. Don't worry when we make in our gut. And it responds to satiation. And I'm amongst other things. But if, you know, what makes you satiate? Nutrients. And if you nutrient dense foods, you actually release the GOP one that stops you from overheating. Yeah, all your processed food is what makes people hungry.

Yeah. Right. And it's like, you know, no one's going to eat 12 avocados or, uh, you know, four 10 ounce steaks. You can't, you can't overeat a rib. You can't, but you can, you can easily eat a bag of cookies, right? Yeah. And drink and drink a, you know, a liter bottle of soda. And what's interesting is, you know, when, when you look at the dichotomy about how people present it, they're like, no, it's just calories in calories out. It's calories and calories and calorie. Well,

That's maybe true from the lab. It's true in a lab. When you burn the calories, they release the same amount of energy. When you eat them, they're different. Yes. A calorie burn is a calorie burn. A calorie eaten is not a calorie. Yeah. It's whatever the kilojoules is that raises a cubic centimeter of water, one degree centigrade. So you compare an ultra process food to another calorie source.

But I totally agree with you. That's not where the example can stop because if I get hungry from the other calories, if I have an insulin spike in an insulin crash and if I actually overeat, so now I'm on two identical 1500 calorie a day diets, one's ultra process, one's nutrient dense. The nutrient dense diet is going to release more GLP one. It's going to actually cause a greater sensation of satiation. It's going to reduce cravings. The other one is going to actually trigger the craving.

Yeah. That's right. I mean, it's this. Well, this person wants to eat 3000 calories. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of outdated. And then actually by Kevin Hall, where we basically gave people whole food or ultra processed food, the same group. And two weeks they had ultra processed food, two weeks they had whole foods, the ultra processed group, eight, 500 calories more a day. Cause they said, eat whatever you want to your bowl. And so the eight, 500 calories more a day. That's in a week that's 3,500 calories in a year. That's, you know, 52 pounds of weight gain. Wow. Right. Just from that one little.

effective. That's why America's so obese. It's like insane. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like that. We want to treat obesity as a disease as if it happened to us not happen within us. And then we want to bring in more pharmacy intervention on the back of the taxpayer paid by paid for by Medicaid and Medicare. It is the bill is 1948 18. That's really dangerous one. The end all obesity. Yeah.

Yeah, which they all sound so it's a pay for rose and pig. Yeah, it's not the best solution. I mean, listen, if we covered these drugs for everybody who's overweight or obese in America, it would be $5.1 trillion, which is more than we spend on health care. It'll be like literally more than double our health care, which is already twice. Does everybody else in the form? Yeah. So if I were king back to where I was king. Yeah, I like this. With NIH, HHS, then we attacked the dietary guidelines. USDA does have to be able

updated to include all the relevant science, which means we have to fund the process and I'm working with people in the agencies, saying we don't have any money to do this. We're mandated by the Congress to develop this. We don't have the money to review the data to put science panel together. There's no money for the National Academy of Sciences, but I said, why aren't you publishing the evidence around effective, hard carbohydrate diets and the adverse effects on our health? This is what we

National Academy of Sciences hasn't reviewed the literature yet. It costs a million dollars and we, they don't have a million dollars and there's no funding for that process. And we can't actually review and revise our dietary guidelines. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like we're ducking. I mean, a rounding error, all right, which is has ability to make huge impact on how we understand nutrition and health. So,

Reformed out your godliness to match the science. We need to change our school lunch programs in schools. We need to upgrade the quality of the food and put more money in that. We need to change our SNAP program. It's called supplemental nutrition assistance. It is not nutrition. It's food.

Not really if you actually look at the definition of food in the Webster dictionary, it's not even food. Because that's something that supports the growth and health of an organism after processed food by definition does not do that. It was actually not food. It's food security, it's calorie security, but it's not nutrition security, which is giving enough nutrients. It keeps you from dying. It keeps you from dying from starvation, but you die from diabetes. And it's interesting that people who are most obese are the most nutrient deficient. If you're the most food insecure, you're more likely to be diabetic.

So we need to provide real nutrition and security and get rid of all the junk in SNAP and make it like WIC, which is women's infants and children program. You can buy fruits and vegetables, you can buy meat, you can buy whole grains, you can buy beans, you can buy a lot of good stuff. We already have those restrictions for women infants and children programs. Just apply that to SNAP.

Yeah. Okay. Listen, if you're not so much resistance, right? Yeah, so much resistance from both, you know, both sides, even Democrats, Republicans, because of the food industry, then we need to

also in change the marketing. So we need to end marketing of junk food to kids, at least, right? We can say First Amendment, whatever. In Chile, they don't allow any marketing, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. UK, just ban junk food marketing. You shouldn't be able to see ads if you're a kid for this crap that's gonna cause you to be addicted. It's just like advertising cigarettes like Joe Camel. It should just be banned. It kills more people in cigarettes every year. It should just be banned. So that's a huge one, marketing.

And then we need to look at the FDA around what they're doing in terms of food additives. Let's just meet what other countries have come to the inclusion based on the science are not safe additives. Yeah. BHT and all these red diet, all these, they just have no place in our food supply. And then we need to actually have clear labeling of food. The FDA, these are not hard policies. They're hard to implement because of resistance, but they're simple ideas.

Yeah. Put front of package labeling on so you know if the stuff is good for you. Put the amount of servings of fruits, vegetables, beans, holes, grains on the label and put warning labels like they have in other countries. If it's bad for you. It's like red light is bad, green, good yellow with caution or there's stuff. I mean, giant stop signs are like cigarette labels. They have the ability to do this and they've done this in other countries and it works. Right. So you don't interrupt free choice, right? We don't get any choice regularly with people, but you have to keep people and educate them. Don't take it. You want to eat crap. That's fine. But like,

tell them what they're doing. Like in, you go to Europe, the cigarette package, the entire cigarette package is basically a warning. It's so funny. And then we have a few other things that I think would make a big difference. So we have the FDA, we have the NIH, we have the HHS USDA, then we need to reform agriculture. Yeah.

So that's USDA, but mostly USDA is mostly food programs. There's 20 billion spent on supporting agriculture. There's 125 billion spent on food stamps alone. Really? Yeah. 125 billion on food stamps. It's the biggest program in food program in the country. And so the regenerative agriculture movement is gaining steam, and that's going to create more money for farmers, more productive farms.

restore ecosystems, which were biodiversity, restore the soil, restore our water tables, produce more nutritious food. The farmers make more money. We eat healthier food. It's a win-win-win. The people that lose are the fertilizers and the seed and the chem companies. So nobody's going to like that. So what I'm saying is very heretical. It's not going to happen like Leelis. Maybe President Trump and Bobby Kenny could do it. I don't know. But we need to put in these policies that have been studied, that are validated,

work that will actually change the health of America from the ground up. Yeah. First of all, I could not agree with you more. In medicine, there's something called informed consent, which isn't like a physician doesn't have to educate a patient to the point where they thoroughly understand the procedure, certainly not how to conduct the procedure, but they understand the risks and the benefits. What's the upside? What's the downside?

If I do this surgical procedure or I take this medication, what is the potential downside? I mean, I like what you're saying in the food labeling because it's their choice about whether or not they proceed. You can still go to the store and buy cigarettes. But if you buy cigarettes, you know what you're getting yourself into. But if you're an adult,

And you're aware of the risk, you're aware of the risk. But I think the truth is that the majority of us have been so conditioned to believe that these are foods. And you know what we've seen in our practice is that people's palates actually change. They actually really don't like

Whole foods. No, they don't actually like, you know, you make a like a bone stock grass fed chili, which is what we're gonna have after the podcast. And they taste it and it doesn't taste good to them because, you know, it doesn't taste good to them because they're, they're used to. Yeah. Highly processed ingredients in that palette changes. And then, you know, when I started.

or taste buds for you. Not only hijacked our taste buds, but actually designed like in case he means talks about this a lot, but our Cali means talks about this a lot designed to create and get the response, you know, ding the dopamine receptor. There are one, a two receptor in the back of the tongue to really hammer that and give you a dopamine reward. So now you're not just liking the food. You're addicted to 14% of adults and 12% of kids are biologically addicted.

to process food, ultra-processed food according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale. This is a global study. And 14% of adults are alcoholic. So it's like the same. It's frightening. And Michael Moss wrote a book called Salt. When you say biologically addicted, they don't like the food. They're addicted to it. Literally, by definition,

All the behaviors that they have around food, they have cravings, they have withdrawal symptoms, you know, they can't control themselves. It's all the same behaviors as addiction. I think you go get a DEF CON 9. Yeah. I mean, Yale has done a lot of the work on this. Kelly Brunnell is very compelling research.

I mean, there's whole textbooks on this. It's not just like, oh, they're making food addictive. This is like a deep science. And my book, Tendi Detox, was basically about that. And what they found was like the Michael Moss and his investigation, he's a journalist from New York Times, investing into the food industry and we talked to 300 industry scientists, experts, executives, whistleblowers, and found that this is deliberate, that they have taste institutes where they hire craving experts.

craving it. This is their own internal language. Taste institutes craving experts to create the bliss point of food, meaning the maximum dopamine response and most mouthfeel of taste response to create heavy users, which is their own terminology, heavy users like an addict. So it's easier to get someone who's drinking

12-ounce soda or 10-ounce soda to drink a two-liter soda that is to get you or I Gary to start drinking a 10-ounce Coca-Cola, right? Right. And so they focus their marketing on these communities, mostly of color underserved communities who are targeted far more with ads. Black kids drink twice as much soda as white kids.

And it's because there's so much targeting of these communities by these food industry. And also when they get their EBTs, they've been at their food stamp, you know, snap, benefit cards. And they, they kind of up at the beginning of the month, they go, they know, they, they go to all the convenience stores, the little bodegas. And they have all these giant ads, you know, to use your EBT to later battle, Soto side on soda 99 cents. It's like, it's really bad.

Wow. So that's, you know, and what's interesting is the taxpayer is funding that. Oh, yeah. And then the taxpayer is also funding the Medicaid Medicare bill to actually treat the disease that's caused by that. So it's like, no wonder it's called the food and drug administration because the food leads to the drugs. And now we're funding the foods and the drugs.

It's really bad. You're right. 100%. I mean, the Rockefeller Foundation put out a report that for every dollar we spend on food, we spend $3 in collateral damage of costs. And they didn't even include all the things that are happening. So yeah, think about how much the taxpayers are covering. We privatize the profits and socialize the costs. Then soil gets destroyed, the pesticides go on, the waterways get used for fire, use vacation, which kills all the wildlife and the seafood in the water. We drain our aquifers.

We damage the soil, we lose carbon to the atmosphere, and then we produce food from that. That's commodity crops that goes in ultra process food that we pay for with the SNAP benefits that go to the poor. Then we pay for that with Medicare Medicaid. So we're very paying so many times either directly or indirectly for the harms from our food system.

And the government is holding that bill. Wow. I love how you say we privatize the profits and we socialize the cost. The cost. Wow. When you say socialize the cost, I mean, that's that's tax payers. Yeah. I mean, like who's paying for the the fact that our aquifers are draining dry? Who's paying for the fact that our soils are damaged and there's there's no carbon in the soil anymore. And we don't have organic matter to grow nutrient tenses. Who's paying for all the dead fish and

400 dead zones around the world, the size of New Jersey that are killing, that are feeding half a billion people who's paying for the loss of biodiversity and the killing of 75% of our pollinators and half of all the birds. Who's paying for all that? Well, nobody, it's all, it's all our collective comments. We call it, you know, the comments, which is, oh, you know, and for the people that are so interested in green energy and global warming and, you know, the,

Green New Deal. I mean, this is at the episode. That's regenerative farming and less expensive food. You know, it's interesting. Then it works for the farmers too. Everybody should see common ground and kiss the ground to films. I was in there talking about common ground and kiss the ground. Yeah, they're great. They're going to be, I think I'm on an Amazon coming up soon, but they're, they're, they're really telling a story of how we can move to a more regenerative system.

Yeah, you know, I have a friend of mine. His name is Alfie Oakes. He owns a huge grocery store in Naples called C2Table. And we actually got on a helicopter one day with my film crew. And we we parachuted into to some of his organic fields. And he was showing me how he's going organic produce. You literally parachute or? Well, not parachute. We landed in a helicopter.

You're hardcore. Yeah. That's really good. I'm doing it like deep, um, investigative background. You know, I'm committed, you know, like, my AR 15. You got your, your night vision glass on paragliding in there's a tomato dropping in from 30,000 people. Oxygen, the mission possible. So, so we, we took a hillock out there and we, we, we dropped in on a bunch of his fields and, um, and he was showing me how he's actually growing.

organic produce at less than the cost that it would be to spray it with herbicides and pesticides and all this. And some of it was really ingenious, like they ran these reflective foils. So they have, you know, imagine just these long rows and they would wrap the roots in these reflective foils because they realized that these white flies were photosensitive.

They, you know, they were, um, they don't have real eyesight. They're photodynamic. And what would happen is the, this reflective foil would just bend and scatter the light and it would confuse the insect and they all went to the woods. I mean, and the fields look so pristine. Yeah.

They were beautiful. And then it was more farmers will make more money. Yeah. Better food. Restore the ecosystem. It's a win-win-win. It's like a triple bottom line. Yeah. And I watched the produce get picked at nine o'clock in the morning. I watched it myself picked, washed, processed, and it was on the shelf by two o'clock that afternoon. So there's a strawberry that was in a field at nine o'clock in the morning that's on the grocery store shelf at two o'clock in the afternoon.

And it's a profitable grocery store. So I mean, this can be done in a way that creates jobs, creates profit, creates nutrition that actually fixes the dynamic and the food supply. And he was saying that some of these fields are so, they have been sprayed for so many years with these herbicides and pesticides.

that there aren't pesticides for three states away. Like, you know, we're not even, we're not even protecting them against the pesticides that exist anymore because the over spring has just, and we know we're all, we're all poisoned. Like, you know, one of the things I love about function health is company I co-founded, which is not testing. I want to say, we're, we're including.

Testing for pesticides, PFAS chemicals, BPA, and we're finding glyphosate site, incredible toxic load in the population. What do they do for, because I've read that there's now testing for microplastics, and the only thing that I'm aware of that gets those out is this new serif.

filter, this exteria filter by Lumatti that actually filters the blood in the dialysis type format, which I'm a big fan of. They use these heparin binding sites and they pull the toxins out of the blood. But what do you do for people that have heavy toxic loads? I mean, first you've got to remove the toxic acid, right? But what do you do for all these things that are embedded in the body, the heavy metals, the micro toxins? Yeah, it's tough. I mean, detoxification is another core.

Modality that functional medicine uses to treat patients. So, metal detox, cellular detox, and there's many methods to do it, but one is, you know, reducing the exposures, right? Fill the water, fill through the air, you know, organic comments and stuff, changing your household care products, your skincare products, and environmental working group has a whole set of guides on how to do that. So I would go to EWG.org and that's great. Just for free information, too. Yeah.

Second thing is you've got to out-pregulate all your detox systems. So pea, poop, sweat, like saunas, lots of fiber, lots of water, just flushing stuff out. And then there's a lot of molecules that help to increase your body's own endogenous or built-in detox systems, glutathione, boosting compounds, whether it's the broccoli family of foods, whether it's taking in acetylcysteine or lipocarcid. Or even glutathione. Glutathione. You can get glutathione, a selenium of nutrients and how boost glutathione.

And then, you know, there, there's other co factors like zinc for metal, metal binding proteins and mine metals. So there's, there's a lot of things you can do nutritionally to upgrade your biology. And then sometimes you need chelation and then saunas or another big thing. And then there's another protocol, which I've been using with my patients. It's a little harder to access called the PK protocol. It essentially uses.

Fostral choline to flush out cellular toxins and rebuild mitochondria. And how are you taking that orally? It's an IV treatment. You also can take oral fostral choline, but it's the structure of your cell membranes. And all these toxins are embedded in our fat tissue and their cells are all made up of fat. So that's where the cell membrane is. That's where it is.

So basically, you know, there's this incredible protocol. I can show you after it's like really quite profound. It helps with mold toxins and pesticides. Yeah. And we live in the mold capital of the world here in Miami. Pretty bad physician. So I'm excited about, you know, this company that co-founded because it really gives people agency over their health. It helps them on data fight. What's out of balance? We talked about nutritional health and metabolic health and a lot of things that people are just not catching and they wait until they get really sick and then they find out. And so.

Our goal at Function Health is to help people live a hundred healthy years, and we provide a really deep analysis of what's going on in your biology, and we're going to be able to track more and more data from your wearables, from your medical records, from imaging, your own legs, from stool testing, toxin testing, and use that information to create a personalized set of recommendations that tells you where you are, where you're headed, and what to do about it.

Yeah. And so it's very empowering. And I think, you know, we just started and we had like 100,000 people sign up. 100,000. We had 300,000 people on the waitlist. Although your podcast listeners can jump the waitlist and use ultimate health 100 as the code. Ultimate health 100. I'm like.

I'm going to be the first one. You're going to see Gary Ranker for the first 100 listeners to set. You can jump the wait list and use that code as the early access code. And it just, you get incredible data on your biology. And you know, people are using wearables and glucose monitors and all this. Great. But this is like, this is next level. This is amazing. And I'm going to put links to function health and everything that you're doing in the show notes on the podcast. I'm also going to put links to your books. I'm really excited to be.

Also, part of trying to make America healthy again, this movement to really be apolitical about how we try to influence public policy in the country. Disease doesn't know if you're red, blue, or purple. It doesn't. I mean, I don't know how people could be on the other side of making our children more sick. So, you know, I wind down every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. I definitely have to have you back, because it literally might be for you. You can't start it. It's like, this happened last time.

And I was like, God, I got so many more questions I have for you. But we'll definitely, we'll definitely do a follow-up podcast. But I ask all my guests. Yeah, come to Austin, we'll do a double back to back again. Let's do it. No, for sure. I want to go back for Rogan. So yeah, we will do another double back to back. I ask my guests, you know, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

To me what does it mean to you? You know, you know, I think it's it's being able to show up fully in your life Feeling good and able to do what matters to you to love the people you want to love To do the work you want to do in the world have the energy to show up for your friends and family and your kids

to be able to actually be fully here. Because if you feel like crap, you want to just sit and scroll Instagram or watch Netflix and not be engaged in life. And the end of the day is about the quality of our life and the quality of our experience and

I don't care what age I am. I want to be able to do what I want to do. I want to go play tennis. I want to ride a bike. I want to make love. I want to go for a hike. I want to jump in the lake. I want to do all those things, you know, and I counted doing those until my last day, you know, and you're crazy. You're 65. Why are you riding horses across Mongolia without a helmet like that?

You know, cause I can't, you know, it was crazy. We went on this Mongolian horse trip. And that's like for me, you know, like a dream to be able to go into the tundra in Mongolia and be in the middle of nowhere and ride these little Mongolian horses, you know, a full gala across crazy terrain. And I've been writing since I'm a little kid, some experience, but, you know, it was just like,

I don't want to not be able to do that because I'm 65 years old. I mean, I was 65 years old and you're so much pain and you can't get out of bed and you don't like the long flights. Yeah. Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this podcast. I mean, this is going to be probably one of my most popular episodes. And, you know, in my audience is going to absolutely love this. And I really just can't thank you enough for coming on. Thanks, Gary. Huge fan and big follower of your work.

And I wish you all all the success and I hope that I can be a small part of giving you a bigger voice. Thanks Gary. Appreciate that. You got it. And as always guys, that's just science.