Look at the Warning Signs. The Food Industry is Deliberately Making Us Sick but We Can Promote Health, with Dr. Mark Hyman
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Everything is set up for us to fail. It is a bit of a conspiracy. We have a food system that produces things that are technically not food. If you look at the Webster's dictionary definition of food, it's something that should support the health and the growth and the function of an organism. Ultra-processed food does not do that, and it's 60% of our diet. One in four teenage boys has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. This is a national emergency. For a foreign country, we're doing to our kids what we're doing. We literally go to war to protect our children. 93% of Americans are metabolic and healthy,

One in two have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Four in 10 have more than one chronic disease. 81% of Americans are on medication. Most people spend the last 20% of their life in poor health. You get to 60 okay and you live to 80 something. And the last 20 years are spent in doctor's offices, in hospitals, on piles of pills, feeling like crap.

That ain't fun. We weren't designed improperly. We're just living out of step with our biological needs. The problem is that there's this kind of slow, imperceptible shift from wellness to illness. We think, oh, I'm just getting older. This is normal to have aches and pains. This is normal to be tired. This is normal to have poor cognitive functions. It ain't normal. It's a sign of dysfunction. The food system has really hijacked our function.

and in ways that have driven all the chronic diseases. It's a concerted effort by the food industry through their lobbying agencies and groups to undermine the health of America. And they completely corrupted our understanding of nutrition. And it's a crime. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two. So now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.

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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. Today, we're not going to break down anything of significance. Do you want to live better longer? Do you want to figure out why the industrial food complex is designed to make you sick and how everything that we think is normal is actually programmed and potentially conspiratorially changing our food in order to wreck our health?

Just little things today. Also, we're going to talk about dispelling some common myths and misunderstandings about health, such as does it matter if you get 10,000 steps a day?

What kind of diet should you really be eating? We're going to have very specific tools, strategies, techniques in order to eat more healthy, reverse your biological age, feel better. The difference between healthspan and longevity. And we ask straight up.

Is it reasonable to think that we can all live to 120? Should we radically change our understanding of aging? And not only that, but how do we live really well, not only at the end of our life, but in the middle and wherever you are in life? Who's going to help us do all of this? None other than Mark Hyman. Dr. Hyman is the co-founder and chief medical officer of Function.com.

He's a practicing family physician and he's an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of functional medicine. So he's also founded the Ultra Wellness Center, serves on so many important boards. He's written 50

15 New York Times bestsellers. And he has one of the leading health podcasts, The Doctor's Pharmacy, spelled like a farm, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, with 150 plus million downloads. He's also a regular medical contributor to so many television shows and networks. He is the guy that you want to ask about how many pushups you should do to consider yourself healthy. He's the guy. And we're going to talk to him about that and so many other things. I'm

Also, he's giving our listeners a special code where they can bypass the wait list on function. And so we'll give that at the end. So please make sure to stay tuned for that. What a pleasure it is to welcome Dr. Mark Hyman to The Breakdown. ♪ Break it down ♪

It's really nice to have you here. And you've written, I think, 15 books. You have 15 New York Times bestsellers. And you've really kind of tackled so many different aspects of health. And I use that in a super general sense because Jonathan and I obviously talk about, what is it, Jonathan? Lifespan versus healthspan? Healthspan versus lifespan. Yeah. That's one of the key differentiators or people play different sides of that.

Jonathan, where would you like to start here? Because you've also gotten to be a patient of Dr. Hyman, actually. Most recently, you did a variety of tests. So where do you want to start, Jonathan? I mean, the most important question is, do they give you like a prize at 15 New York Times bestsellers? Like that's a pretty amazing accomplishment. Yeah.

- You know, no. But I did win an award called the Books for Better Life Award, which is for authors who are trying to just help people do better.

And so that was nice. But, you know, I did get the Christian Book of the Year Award, which I'm the only Jew to ever win that book, I think. Yeah, I won that award. Well, there was one other guy, but that was like 2,000 years ago. For a book I wrote with Rick Warren on faith-based wellness. But yeah, I got a Christian Book of the Year Award. Yeah.

Very good company. But about lifespan or healthspan, do you believe we can live to 120 like many of the longevity specialists are proposing? Or do you believe in just optimizing the last 10 decade of your life? It seems like those are the two different ends of the spectrum. Yeah, I would say given the science today,

It's not unreasonable that most of us alive today, if we do the right things, and that's a lot of ifs, can live a healthy 90 to 100 years. So our motto at Function or our mission statement is how to help you live 100 healthy years.

And the reality of getting to 120 is a little bit different. There have been a few who have. Madame Clement, whose path there was something I would not recommend for most people, which is cigarettes and wine and cheese. But for most other people, I think getting to 120 is going to be tough unless there's new advances, discoveries. But they're coming. I mean, I literally just talked to someone recently

who works at a lab that was funded by Sal Altman that's doing research on something called Yamanaka factors, which are basically, think of it as gene therapy that will turn on genes that reverse your biological age. So you'll be able to sort of switch them on and off

If you're aging and you lose muscle, your hair turns gray, you get wrinkles, you just turn it on and you reverse back. Now, not ready for prime time. Don't know if it's going to be five years, 10 years, 20 years before that happens. But there's things coming that could extend our life to 120. But I don't think that's where I'm focused. I'm focused on extending people's health span, which is how many years of your life you're healthy. Most people spend the last 20% of their life in poor health.

right so if you're you get to 60 okay and you live to 80 something

And the last 20 years are spent in doctor's offices, in hospitals, on piles of pills, feeling like crap. That ain't fun. You want to be like my hero on Instagram. I'm like an Instagram fanboy. I don't really follow many people on Instagram. This guy, Alain Gustave, who's this French dude who's 80 years old, who's ripped and who can kind of out shoulder press, out pull up and push up any 30-year-old. That's healthspan.

His health span and lifespan are going to be the same. He's going to live long, long, long, and then probably just go to sleep and die. That's what we want. I'm fascinated by this topic because most people do spend the last part of their years in very declining health, but they think it's natural. They're like, oh yeah, we have the saying, oh, I'm getting older, everything's supposed to hurt, or I don't have the energy anymore. And what I...

would hope to start to dispel and what I think is happening is that people are starting to change the perspective of what is just natural aging and what are the things that we're doing in our life that are causing us to age in a way that is preventable if we can make small incremental changes. - Well, that's a great question. And it's funny 'cause yesterday I literally had on my podcast the doctor's pharmacy, the head of the Buck Institute on Aging, Eric Burden, who's a brilliant scientist, and we actually had a conversation about this.

And what he said even surprised me, that there's been new data that's come out of the work at Calico, it's one of the longevity research enterprises that was through Google, that basically said that 93, I don't know if he came up with 93, that seems very specific, right? 93% of our health is determined not by our genetics, but by our environment, meaning everything that happens to us in our life. What we eat, how much we exercise, and what kind of exercise we do,

How we sleep, our stress levels, our exposure to environmental toxins, the health of our microbiome, our nutrient status. All these things impact our biological age and our health and our lifespan and our health span. And so we often think of aging as this process of decline, decrepitude, frailty, and degeneration.

Why? Because that's what we see everywhere, right? That's what you see when you take a look around at old people. They're not like this 80-year-old guy doing 30 pull-ups. Like, I can't do 30 pull-ups. I'm like, if I could do 10, you know? And he's like a lot older than me. So we have this distorted view of aging because of the quality or the poor quality of everybody's health in America and around the world increasingly.

And we don't have examples of people who are 100 years old who are running marathons, although there's a few out there. But most of us see aging as a bad thing. The truth is that the World Health Organization is now kind of called aging a disease. It's not kind of been accepted in America yet, but it's definitely something that's in the ether. And the phenomenas that we see as we age, the decline, decrepitude, frailty, the diseases, the heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and worse, are

Those are things that are not inevitable. There are consequences of breakdowns in basic physiological processes over which we have massive control and we have huge influence, 93% influence to be exact. And so we can change the trajectory and increase our health span to match our lifespan and also increase our lifespan. So we can put more life into our years,

And we're years into our life. And that's really why I wrote Young Forever was to sort of map out what that looks like. But I think people need to understand that, you know, like I'm 65. Well, I'm not quite yet. I'll be 65 in a couple months. But, you know, like I'm great. I'm fit. I'm healthy. I just, you know, did a loop around on my bike, the normal loop I do, which is about an hour loop. I'm doing maybe two or three minutes off the time that I did when I was 35.

And so the body has a capacity at any age to maintain a high level of functioning. The problem is that there's this kind of slow, imperceptible shift from wellness to illness. It's like the frog who's put him in cold water and you turn the heat up slowly, he kind of boils to death. You show the fog in hot water, he jumps right out. We're like that slow boiling frog. And we just feel like this normal decline that we think is just, oh, I'm just getting older. This is normal to have aches and pains. This is normal to be tired. It's normal to have

poor cognitive function is normal. Whatever the thing is we're suffering from is normal. It ain't normal. It's a sign of dysfunction. And now with longevity science, we have the ability to track that. And what people don't do and what doctors don't do

is do a deep dive into all the biomarkers that are early warning signs. Your car, when your tire pressure goes low, it tells you. When your engine needs checking, it tells you. The cars are so smart now, if you kind of go out of your lane, it says, hey, take hold of the steering wheel, grab a cup of coffee. Your car is telling you to do that. We don't have those warning systems on our body

unless we look under the hood, right? You may feel not great, but we don't know what's going on.

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Jonathan, name some wonderful scents that we associate with fall. A pumpkin spice. Yeah. Apples, freshly picked. Of course, cinnamon. How about B.O.?

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The 93% of our health that is determined by our environment, which is, as you described, both environmental toxins, but also our lifestyle. Yeah. Relationships, connections, everything. Relationships, connections, the mind-body connection, our sense of purpose in life, which we talk a lot about on this podcast. A lot of people hear some of this and are totally overwhelmed.

right? You're like, I have to sleep now. I have to have, get my blue light glasses. I have to filter my water. I have to get all the supplements. I have to change all my food. So like a lot of people are like, oh my gosh, like, where do I begin? So I wonder if we can start to parse out some of these and do a little bit of an overview. And I know you have books on each one of these, which we can direct people to, but as a starting point,

I just feel bad. I make a living off of telling people to do the most obvious things, right? Eat real food. Don't eat crap. Move your body. Get seven, eight hours sleep. Learn how to navigate stress. Have relationships, connections, and meaning in your life. They're basic things. Take a multivitamin. Fish oil, vitamin D. It's so basic. It's so accessible for people.

Uh, it's just that people often don't have a roadmap and they don't know what to believe and they don't know what to do. They don't know how to do it. And, and we just need a little training wheels. Like, you know, here, here's the basic principles of healthy eating. And I know I can, I've written lots of books on it. My, my, my short and dirty one is called, uh, the pegan diet. It's a spoof basically on paleo vegan, but any of the diet wars and helping people understand that food is medicine and,

what are the 21 principles for eating in a nutritionally confusing world? It sort of gives you a basic breakdown of what does the science say? There's not a lot of controversy about what good nutrition is. Eat real food. Don't eat ultra-processed food. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. Have whole grains and beans. Have clean animal protein. Eat good fats. Everything around the margins is where the debate is, and it's just noise. And

And so that's pretty straightforward. Exercise, you know, take a walk. If you're not doing anything else, start with that. Learn how to do some simple body weight resistance exercises. You can do body squats. You can do pushups. You can do really simple exercises without a lot of equipment or money. Sleep, you know, some people have a struggle with sleep, but there are simple principles for sleep that you can follow, and it's not that hard. Matthew Walker is a great resource on this, but basically, you know,

Sleep and wake at the same time every day if you can. Keep your room really dark at night. Keep it cool, 65, 67 degrees. Make sure there's not a lot of noise. Use earplugs if there is.

Wind down at night, get off your screens. Just simple stuff. Take a hot bath. Stuff that is accessible to people. Stress, you always have your superpower of breath right there. Just take a deep breath, five deep breaths, recess your nervous system through your vagus nerve. Building relationships, community is harder. You have to work at that. I think it's incredibly important. But these are basic things that will have the most profound impact. I spent a lot of time in Sardinia and Ikaria during the research of my book, Young Forever.

And it was amazing. They don't have gyms. They don't have whole foods. They don't have a supplement store. They don't have fancy tracking devices for their sleep and special beds. They just live in an environment that automatically sets up the conditions for health. That's just why they live a long time. They have extraordinary longevity. And 100 plus years old, one couple I met was 210 years old together. I was like, that's right all the time.

And they're still vital and functioning. And we don't have those conditions set up automatically in our lives. And it takes a little bit of homework to set those things up, just like you set up your phone the way you like it. You set up your life the way you like it. Have the right food in the kitchen. Have the equipment. I have bands I travel with for exercise so I can do my resistance training wherever I am. I make sure I focus on sleep regularly.

I said, "I'm not always perfect with that, but I do my best. I do a meditation app or just do some deep breathing every day. I try to do a little wind down before bed. I definitely focus on my friendships and relationships." That's like 80/20 or maybe 90/10.

If you get those right, everything else falls into place. You make it sound really easy. And obviously... It's not that hard. Well, I don't know. Why do you think this country in particular is the way that it is? Do you think that people don't have ears to hear? I mean, like, obviously it's basic, but there are clearly impediments here. So what are those impediments?

And, you know, like how do we kind of break through those? Because I think, yeah, I think these are basic things, but they're also really challenging, especially for certain people.

you know, portions of the population. When you talked about, you know, being in your 60s and, you know, taking handfuls of pills and being constantly in doctor's appointments, that's been many of our lives since we're in our teens and 20s. And I think for women in particular who, you know, for many decades were told there's no such thing as what you're describing, it's all in your head. Many of us have been, you know, rotated through a system where we keep

being given pills and pills and pills and pills and doctors and doctors. And, you know, I don't want to live till 120. I'll be honest. Like I'm 48 and I feel like I'm done. So, you know, I think for many of us. Well, what if you felt great? You wouldn't want, you wouldn't, you wouldn't feel like that. Of course, if I, right. If I felt great, if I didn't, you know, get my first autoimmune diagnosis at 23, when I was at the height of my health,

Of course I wouldn't feel that way. But, you know, I was looking at, you know, for example, in Young Forever, you have these great, you know, there's this kind of like, I love a quiz, you know, there's these self-diagnostic, you know, kind of the seven core biological systems. And I went through them and I was like, I literally...

you know, it's not looking good for any of those systems for many people, you know, for many people before they get to 60. So what is the, you know, what is the impediment? And obviously this is fantastic, you know, information support. It's a great roadmap and all the work that you do is incredible. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about some of those impediments so that we can better understand how to get over them. I 100% agree. And I think, you know,

In my first book on metabolism I wrote in 2005, I said, "It's not your fault if you're overweight." There's a fundamental problem with our whole economy and food system. I ended up writing a book about it called Food Fix, basically talking about how everything is set up for us to fail. Everything is set up for us to fail. We have a food system

that produces things that are not food, technically not food. If you look at the Webster's Dictionary definition of food, it's something that should support the health and the growth and the function of an organism. Well, ultra-processed food does not do that, and it's 60% of our diet. It's everywhere. The food system has really hijacked our bodies in ways that have really driven all the chronic diseases. And you're right. 93% of Americans are metabolic and healthy,

One in two have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Four in 10 have more than one chronic disease. Six in 10 have one. And 81% of Americans are on medication. This is a bad situation. And it's not natural. It's not designed. Right. I was going to say, it doesn't have to be that way. Right. No, it's not like a normal consequence of being human or God made a design flaw. If you don't believe in God, nature, whatever you believe in, like...

We weren't designed properly. We were just living out of step with our biological needs. And so I mapped out very carefully how the food industry influences scientific research, as well as the pharma industry, how they co-opted scientific establishments like medical schools and academic institutions that do research. They fund most of that.

They've come up to professional societies like the American Heart Association, Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, where they're primarily funded by the food and pharma industries.

They created front groups like the American Council on Science and Health that says trans fats and pesticides are good for you. And so is smoking, by the way. They've actually attacked me. They've targeted me. And if you go and look at them up, Google American Council on Science and Health and Hyman, you'll find out that they're funded by the pesticide makers, the herbicide makers, the pharma companies, the big food companies. And it's just kind of so transparent when you take an inch-deep look.

Can you expand on this part a little bit? Because I do think this is one of kind of the major impediments is that we're kind of being supported by a system that is trying to tell us something that's simply not true about food, about health, about sort of how to live our lives. Like I was looking at a commercial or I was watching something and there was a commercial saying,

for a medical company. And it was showing, you know, a guy taking his kids to the pharmacy and, you know, they're buying candy as they check out while he's picking up his prescription medication for whatever's ailing him. And I was like, is this a joke? I mean, it's McDonald's in hospitals, right? It's the most convenient, easy, fast food. It really shouldn't be in hospitals though. Like if we really want to be honest with ourselves. So can you kind of

Can you expand on this aspect a little bit, you know, to make it not feel like a conspiracy theory, right? Well, I hate to tell you, but it is a bit of a conspiracy. It's a concerted effort by the food industry through their lobbying agencies and groups to undermine the health of America and keep the right information out of people's hands. They fund 12 times the amount of research on nutrition as the NIH does.

They have literally completely corrupted our understanding of nutrition. And it's a crime in my view. I mean, they target Hispanic and black kids and they drink far more soda, for example, than white kids. This is not my opinion. This is data from the Euro Food Policy Institute. There's also evidence that, for example, the

The top people at Coca-Cola were funding scientists to basically say that all calories are the same and that it doesn't matter if you eat sugar. And they got called out by this. And then, you know, it was pretty ugly and they had to fire this person. So there's a lot of trails of evidence about how there's a deliberate effort among the food industry, either...

individually or collectively through their trade organizations to undermine the health of Americans, uh, through their targeting. Like I said, of, of, uh, social groups like NAACP, uh, which makes them oppose, uh, soda taxes. They, they, uh,

As I mentioned, you know, fund $12 billion a year on nutrition research that says their crappy products are healthy. Uh, they, they done so much to undermine a health in a deliberate way. So I don't think it's a conspiracy, you know, and they're all sitting in some room colluding, but the trade organizations for sure. I've worked on this. In fact, sometimes it is a bit of a conspiracy, for example, and in, uh, in Washington state, I outlined this in the book, there was a bill on the ballot to ban GMO and, uh,

The groups got together, food industry groups got together illegally, which they're not allowed to do this, and they decided to create a campaign to fight this. And they won. They defeated the ballot initiative.

However, the Attorney General of Washington kind of got wind of what they were doing and investigated them, convicted them, and they had a $18 million fine. It's trivial for them. We're talking about a $1 trillion industry. This is like nothing. So it was like a slap on the wrist or not even. And it was like sit in the corner for five minutes. And basically, they were found to completely be acting out of integrity illegally and were fined for it. So

Their evidence is there. And it's sad because the average American doesn't know what's going on. They don't know who to believe. They don't know who to trust. Well, I was going to say, like, that feels right. Like, the fact that, I mean...

Even my well-meaning teenagers, you know, who I believe have gone to the dark side are like, does it really matter? Does it really matter? Genetically modified? It'll get better. No, but I think that that's I think that's how a lot of people feel. And I wonder, I mean, obviously, this is part of the incredible work that you do. You know, this is sort of part of the education that I think is missing for many people.

This is something that's happening. You're being told to ingest things that actually are not good for you, right? Even like preservatives and dyes, which have been banned in Europe, right? That we're still sort of being spoon-fed here. This is sort of like the education that I think a lot of people don't have. And when it's normalized, when it's normalized and everyone around you is eating the bread that's soaked with pesticides or is drinking the...

sports drink with the dye in it. It's easy to say like, well, mom, dad, like you're being ridiculous, you know? Yeah. It's on all the store shelves. You walk in and it's just feels normal. And then the people who are sounding the alarm become the extremists. It's crazy. I mean, is it ridiculous that 20% of our kids are obese, that 40% are overweight?

that our kids are medicated like never before in history with things like Ozembic, with diabetes drugs. I mean, one in four teenage boys has prediabetes or type two diabetes. I mean, this is a national emergency. I mean, if a foreign country were doing to our kids what we're doing, we'd go to war. We'd literally go to war to protect our children. But we're killing them. And their lives are gonna be poorer and sicker than their parents.

They're going to have significant health consequences. An obese kid has a life expectancy that's 13 years younger than a kid who's not obese. Their ability to earn equivalent incomes in the working place are diminished. There are

likelihood of going to college is lower. I mean, there's the data on this is so much, uh, worse than we think. Um, and I, and I, I think, I think it's a national emergency and I'm packed. I'm going to be testifying in Congress, uh, uh, September 18th to, to really address some of these issues. Uh, because we, you know, uh,

Yes, I'm a doctor. And yes, I sort of see patients and write books. But I realized that I can't cure these problems in my office. They have to be cured at the end through the food policies that have to be changed. And that's really why I started a nonprofit called the Food Fix Campaign to drive policy change in Washington around these issues. And it's amazing that the only people they're hearing from are the lobbyists. They don't hear from people like me. And I've had to raise money and thankfully have

been able to raise a bunch of money to fund this nonprofit. So I have a team and I can go in there and they're like shocked about this. They have no clue that this is going on. They're not ill-meaning. They want to do good things in Congress, but they're just only hearing from big pharma, big food, and big ag.

I think a lot of us can relate to being in environments where you felt like you couldn't be your full authentic self for whatever reason. Kind of like I feel when I podcast with Jonathan. But maybe it's a work environment where you feel like you're holding back. Maybe you're in a group where there's like strangers and you don't feel like you can be yourself. I think we all can relate to hiding behind a mask.

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This is one part of the question that comes up for me specifically is, are people incompetent? Lack information? Totally ill-intended?

You mean consumers or you mean the corporations? I mean corporations and policymakers. Is it simply that they don't understand that these dyes are toxic? Or is it like the smoking companies where there's so much profit to be made by making people sick that they just don't care and they will do anything to get the soda into the hand of the kid to drive them to consume as much sugar as possible? It feels maddening. Can I tell you something? The cigarette companies bought up a lot of the food companies back in the 70s.

RJR Nabisco, Philip Morris Kraft. They've divested some of this, but they basically then went in and designed these products to be hyper addictive. The truth is in Congress, the average member of Congress, and that's not obviously all, many, many do understand this, especially now we've met with over 150 members.

just don't understand this. They're not hearing this information. So in Congress, it's not malintent, although I think there are some that are colluding with the food industry in a conscious way and with ag and pharma, and you can read about that in my book, Food Fix. But for the most part, people in Congress are just wanting to do the right thing.

the corporations themselves are amoral. I mean, they're focused on creating profit for shareholders. Now, there are good actors in there, and there are people who have tried to do good things, like Andrew Newy at Pepsi, tried to improve their food, but got fired because it was hitting their bottom line too hard. You know,

Mark Schneider at Nestle is doing quite a lot to actually change things to move a lot of their supply chain to regenerative agriculture and take a lot of bad ingredients out of food. Walmart, Doug McMillan is doing good things to actually help improve food access to healthier food. They're the biggest organic grocer in the world now.

So, you know, there are good people, but the bottom line is that the incentives are wrong, right? So if your incentive is to sell more pesticides, herbicides, nitrogen fertilizer, to sell more soda and junk food, like that's what you're going to do. And unfortunately, you know, the weight is so heavy. Just one other quick example. In Washington, there was a bill that was a GMO labeling bill, just to label foods with GMO.

And that bill was fought really aggressively by the food industry. They spent $192 million collectively to defeat this bill. The only other country that doesn't label GMO, I think, is Syria or something like that. And Russia does. China does. We're working on front-of-package food labeling as part of our Food Fix Initiative with the FDA.

And in South America, for example, if you go to South America, they have like a stop sign in black and it says, this will kill you basically. Don't eat this. Like a cigarette warning label.

And they have it in Europe. They have stop signs. Red is bad for you. Yellow, eat with caution. Green is good. Stuff that's easy to understand. So in America, you don't know what's going on under the surface. You don't know how bad your food is, how ultra-processed it is, what the ingredients are in it. You've got this nutrition facts label, which is super confusing. You've got an ingredient list that most people can't even understand what it means because it's got so many ingredients that aren't even in English.

that are chemicals that are basically deconstructed science projects that are assembled into things that look like food and are harmful. And they're killing us. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. And our diet is 60% ultra-processed food in kids, 67%.

That's like you're more than 100% going to die. Like, literally, that math doesn't add up. I know. 10%. If you go 60%. For every 10%, sorry. 14 times 6. What is that? No, it's increase your risk of death by 14 times 6, whatever that is. You're literally 16% alive. That's kind of what it feels like many days. Basically. This is also why people can't stick to any sort of

change routine, why change becomes so difficult is because we're addicted to biologically engineered food that is triggering the very primal systems of our brain to crave it. So it feels like you're trying to get off drugs. Yeah. I mean, it's all another conversation. Yes. This food is hurting us and harmful and bad for us and is so many issues. And, uh,

It's been specifically designed this way by the food industry. Michael Moss and Salt, Sugar, and Fat detailed interviews over 300 food industry scientists, experts, executives, kind of whistleblowers, and kind of reveal what they did, which was they create taste institutes where they hire craving experts. These are their official titles, craving expert, to create what they call the bliss point of food. Again, food, again, their term, bliss point, and to create what they call heavy users, literally their term.

So they know they're designing food to be biologically addictive. What is that perfect mouthfeel, flavor, taste? Like what's going to like light your brain up the most? And again, this is not just theory. They're even putting two-year-olds in MRI machines to see which images of food are going to light up their brain and make them more likely to kind of

from their parents. There's two-year-olds who barely can talk when they go to the grocery store watching media who are screaming to get this or that crappy cereal, right? And it's not an accident. This is deliberate. This work has been exposed in journals like the New England Journal of Medicine. Again, I write a lot about this in my book.

But the data is there on how they're doing this. And people don't realize that these foods have hijacked our brain chemistry, our metabolism, our hormones, our immune system, our microbiome in ways that are degrading our health and are causing us to want to eat more and more of these foods. And so the NIH did a perfect study on this. They looked basically at

same group of people, but different diets, different weeks. And one week they gave them like regular food, whole foods matched for calories, carbs, protein, fat. And another group they gave them the following kind of couple of weeks, they gave them another diet, which was ultra processed food, but matched for calories, carbs, protein, and fat. The group that had the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day. In other words, the governor on their appetite was, was

So they didn't know they were full. Like how many avocados can you eat? You know, I can probably eat a quart of ice cream, but I definitely can't eat 20 avocados.

Or you can't eat like 20 carrots or whatever. You pick the vegetable. You can't even eat like two pounds of meat. I think in Texas they serve you like a 72 ounce steak and you can eat it all, it's free. You just can't. It's kind of funny because I hadn't really thought of that. If you give me a bag of chips, I will

like a big bag. I'll eat all of them. Back in the day, if you give me a whole thing of Oreos, I'll go through most of them. If you give me a can of Pringles, I feel like my obsessive compulsive disorder won't allow me to leave a chip in the thing. It's like if you give me a tube of something, I got to eat the whole tube. That's how my brain wants to organize it. But I never thought about that, that

There's a limit that you hit with other foods that you simply don't hit. I want more. Those golden round crackers. What is up with Ritz? Don't you remember that commercial back? I don't know. Maybe you're not old enough, but there was a commercial about Lay's potato chips. You can't eat just one. I bet you can't eat just one. Lay's was right. Lay's had my number. They had my number. But I hadn't

thought about that. Also, I mean, look, if you have a propensity towards certain kinds of eating behaviors, I mean, I've seen people eat an entire bag of caras, but they usually get sick or their skin will turn orange. I met this guy from the Calorie Restriction Society, which is basically based on the science that if you eat less calories, you live longer. Don't we just call that anorexia?

Or am I just an 80s kid? No, no, no, no, no. This is a thing. It's a thing. Because there's a lot of data on this animal. It's like the only proven thing that will extend your life by a third. Oh, I know. So you only live to 120. The skinny mice. And he's like, yeah, what do you eat for breakfast? I'm like, well, I have five pounds of celery. I'm like, God, that sounds terrible.

And no ranch dressing with it. Yeah, if I can't dip it in something that also needs to be finished in one sitting, we're not eating. I want to button this notion of food scientists in a way that can feel liberating to hear this information. Because it can easily feel like there's a government conspiracy

or there's a corporate conspiracy to make us all sick. But I think it's important to see that there are and acknowledge that there are evil actors out there because then choosing something else that is healthier is actually an act of freedom.

It's actually an act of fighting the system that is out there to try and addict me, to try to make me sick. And being a Canadian, I'm very much into the belief of the American system of freedom. And instead of thinking, oh, the processed food and the chips are natural, if you see it as there is a system of bad actors out there that are trying to

make me a certain way, then fighting against that and choosing the healthy food is not a hippie choice. It's actually a very radical choice. Yeah, that's true. I mean, you know, there's a great book called Join the Club by Tina Rosenberg about how social change happens. And they describe this phenomenon called rage against the haze. So Camel was promoting Joe Camel and, you know, the targeting kids with cigarette ads and

And you didn't convince the kids by saying it was bad for them. These kids started to recognize that these things

tobacco companies were targeting them maliciously. And so they created this movement called Rage Against the Haze, the haze meaning the haze fog of smoke, which nobody likes. And it was very successful and it got them to kind of rise up and be rebellious against these bad actors out there. But I think as long as we kind of realize we're in the matrix, you can kind of get out of the matrix and you can kind of understand that there are simple things you can do in your life that are not that

that hard. It just takes a little bit of reorientation, building new habits, but you can do them. You just got to set up yourself for success and it's really not that hard. Carrots are now my new freedom flag.

Yeah, I always say you can have unlimited refills on non-starchy fruits and veggies. So like literally you could eat like, you know, a giant bowl of salad or you could have like 10 pounds of broccoli or whatever you want. Like you will hit a limit. You can't eat anymore, right? But there's unlimited refills. And that's how I eat. I eat like, last night at dinner, I had like mushrooms and I had a Japanese sweet potato and I had a tomato and basil salad and I had...

sweet peas, snap peas, and spinach. So I'd like, I don't know, I can't count, but it's like four or five different vegetables. And I had a piece of grass-fed steak as protein. So I literally make my plate like mostly veggies and then a little bit of protein. I want to ask a couple of quick questions that maybe you can just

semi-rapid fire some answers. You have an amazing quote from your mother about exercise, and I think people underestimate the small incremental benefits that exercise can do, even if it's not running a marathon. You did your homework. Well, my mother always used to say, whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away. And she was like,

I don't like to perspire. She says, which they pig sweat, men perspire and women glow. But she basically just didn't like exercise. And I couldn't get her to work out. I mean, she ended up getting osteoporosis and being very frail at the end. And she really didn't have to be that way. And it was sad. But, you know...

- Exercise is just one of those essential things you can't avoid. I mean, your bodies are designed to move. You need to build muscle as you get older. If you want to be functional, you've got to actually be able to walk up the stairs, pick up something off the ground, carry your groceries. I mean, just basic life stuff. And the reason people end up in nursing homes is not because they're sick usually, it's because they can't do their daily activities. They can't go to the grocery store and carry their groceries. They can't tie their shoes. They can't cut their toenails. They can't get out of bed 'cause they're too weak or get up out of a chair 'cause they're too weak. That's the problem.

And so that's all avoidable. And as you get older, you just need to do more strength training and still do your cardio, but it's just non-negotiable.

Help us sort through a few myths because there's so much information online. Instagram is filled with, you should be doing this exercise and you should be doing this yoga, but no, actually don't do that yoga. Do functional pattern training. What Jonathan's Instagram feed mostly shows is like very, very attractive tattooed people lifting objects that are found on farms. That's...

It's a generalization. That's a little bit what I think he wants our way. He's like, let's do this workout. And it's like hot tattooed women with silicone breasts, like running in a pool. I'm like, that's not going to be me. I did show her a pool workout yesterday with some like barbells in a pool and it looked fantastic. But Dr.

Rebounding, jumping on a trampoline, does it help our lymphatic system? Any benefit there?

For sure. I mean, anything helps, right? Like doing nothing is bad. Doing something is good. So getting a little bouncy trampolines, easy on the body, jump up and down, it increases circulation, lymphatic flow, cardiovascular health. I mean, it's great. If you do that for half an hour while you listen to some great music, you're good. What if you urinate constantly while jumping on a trampoline? Is that a separate problem? Well, you can always put a catheter in. That would help. Okay. Got it. On it.

Other things we hear a lot about VO2 max versus grip strength versus being able to deadlift my body weight or farmer carry mime. Any of those more important than the other in terms of what someone should be focused on? Oh, there's data, right? So what is, what does the data show? And what is, what is the sort of, uh, sort of,

internet's to say, right? Everyone should farmer lift Maya. That would be good. Yeah, that'd be good. That probably would work. Do squats with Maya on your back. All right. So I would say that VO2 max, for those of you who don't know what it is, essentially is a measure of your cardiovascular fitness. It's the amount of oxygen you consume per minute, the maximum amount. And that really is how much oxygen you consume per minute

it's direct correlation with how fast you can burn calories. For example, Lance Armstrong has a very high VO2 max, which makes him be able to go crazy speeds and long distances. He is like a Ferrari engine. Whereas a lot of us might have a VW bug engine and barely get to 50 miles an hour.

And that VO2 max measurement, which you can measure in a gym or metabolic cart, is directly correlated to longevity. So the higher your VO2 max, the longer you're going to live. Basically, the way you increase it is by doing sprints. A minute as fast as you can, like you're running from a tiger, and then three minutes walk slow. Pretty easy. You can do it on a bike, you can do it on a treadmill, you can do it on an elliptical. But it's just going sort of full out and then kind of poop

pooping out and then resting, slow walk. And that you do that for half an hour in a cycle after cycle, you're going to increase your VO2 max. You do it once or twice a week. Not that big a deal. Grip strength, for sure important. You know, being able to deadlift your body weight, sure, that's great. These are all measures of strength. There's an interesting study on push-ups. If you can do 40 push-ups as a guy, your risk of having a heart attack is extremely low. So 40 push-ups at once, like all in a row. So

And like real pushups, not the kind where like your, your tushies in the air and it's really just, yeah. Like real pushups. Real pushups. I mean, I, listen, I was 50. I couldn't do 10 pushups. I couldn't do 10 pushups. And, um, and, and, and now I can, I, I got, I got up to 75.

So, you know, at 65. So, you know, you can do it. Your body can do it. And this guy in France, who's my hero, I bet he can do way more. Why is it that that...

is an indicator of, or prevents heart attacks? Well, I mean, in order to do 40 push-ups, you've got to be in shape. Like, you've got to have upper body strength, you've got to have cardiovascular strength and fitness, you've got to have core strength. I mean, it's not easy to do that, many push-ups. So I think it's sort of a surrogate

Yeah, I was going to say, Jonathan, just like be careful with the metric. It's not can you do push-ups? It's is your health in such a place that it is evidenced by the number of push-ups you can do. It's not like keep working on your push-up form. Right, right. When I'm actively working out, I'm a taekwondo person. So when I'm, you know, actively going to class two, three times a week, like,

everything gets easier and better. You know, when we do pushups or squats at the end, like I feel like this, like I feel like a super person because I've been, you know, actively conditioning and training. Anyway. How many steps should we take? Is it 10,000? Should we be having more than that? I think somebody made that up. Is the truth. It feels like a lot. Some,

Some days it really feels too hard. It's not that much. I literally, we were moving to Texas and we had to pack our house and I had to walk up and down the stairs and this and that. And I did like 16,000 steps just to my house in a day. But that's like being a moving company. I'm not a mover. I'm like a mom of two. I was just packing. I was just packing. But yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. It's not that hard. I mean, if we sit on a desk all day, it's going to be hard. But if you go out for a walk, it's two miles. It's not that much, right? If you live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, it's also going to be hard, just saying. It's true. It's true. I mean, yeah, you can just, you know, you can skip rope. Like you can, there's a million things you can do at home. You know, you can do running in place. You can, there's just a thousand things you can do.

Why does walking after a meal stabilize our blood sugar? Well, your muscles are the biggest sink for fuel.

And so after we eat, the fuel's rushing through your bloodstream. Where is it going to go? Well, it's either going to go to your fat cells in your belly or it's going to go to your muscles. So if your muscles are activated for eating, it's going to be a sink for the sugar and the fats and stuff you're eating. And the other thing that happens is muscles have an insulin-independent mechanism for getting sugar in the cells. So when you exercise, you're activating that secondary mechanism for getting insulin in

to be not necessary and actually be able to get sugar in your cells. So if you're insulin resistant, for example,

which many people are, probably 93% of Americans are to some degree or another, it's harder to get your metabolism to work. So exercise is really a way to sort of fix that. If you have gestational diabetes, that's one of the things, if you're trying to avoid taking insulin, which I was able to with my first pregnancy and didn't have it with my second, but that's one of the things they tell you is like right after you eat, especially if you're going to have a fruit, like take a walk. And it actually, it's a thing. Like I didn't realize it's a very good habit also.

Switching topics back to food for a moment.

Do you think the food we're eating now is less nutritious than it was 50 years ago in terms of the topsoil and how it's being grown? Well, think means it's an opinion. I wouldn't say think. I would say it's a fact. The data is so clear on this. This is not my opinion. This is based on public scientific research that our vegetables and fruits are far less nutritious than they were 50 years ago for many reasons. One, because of the depletion of the soil microbiome, which is necessary for the plants to extract the nutrients.

because of the effect of glyphosate, which is a microbiome destroyer for the soil, because of how they breed plants. They breed plants not for flavor and nutrient density and biochemical richness,

They breed them for shelf stability, for starch content, for drought resistance, for being able to sort of stay in a package and be shipped across the country without squishing. I mean, there's a million things they breed for, but not for nutrition. And so what's happened is, one, the starch content's gone up, the protein's gone down, and two, the vitamins and minerals have gone down, and three, the phytochemicals have gone down. And all that is having a serious impact on our health.

So your broccoli today is probably 50% less nutritious than it was 50 years ago, bottom line. And does organic counterbalance that or it's all less nutritious? Organic's helpful, for sure. Yes. The more stressed a plant is, the better nutritional performance

profile it has. So organic is better. However, you can still do till organic, meaning you can still till up the soil and kill a microbiome, and that can create a problem. Regenerative agriculture is no-till. Your nutritional density of your food is derived from the health of the soil. We've effed up our soil, and we've done it through industrial agricultural practices that kill the living matter in the soil, which is needed to make your plants

not only taste good, but be nutritious. And so we have messed up agricultural industrial practices that we need to fix and move to regenerative agriculture, which creates more nutrient-dense food, prevents the soil loss, reduces the need for chemicals and pesticides, stores carbon, reduces climate change, makes more money for farmers. Like it's just a win-win-win-win-win.

Okay. And, but I, I do want to ask here, since we've been also sort of talking about conspiracy theories, um, you know, the, the, well, and also outright conspiracies, like it's not, you know, it's not just theories like, you know, ways that, that government organizations are often, you know, colluding and, you know, doing the best for them, but not what's good for us.

But with something like this, like when I think about, you know, I had to study like the agricultural revolution, right? And it was like, oh, these are the things that were done because more people needed more food. And so we came up with all these things. And then like, also like, you know, people have been genetically modifying naturally, you know, fruits, vegetables, and animals. Hybridizing. Not hybridizing, but right. But it's exactly with his peas, adorable. But, you know, people have been doing these things because

Because when you have more people than you had before, oh, we've got to find better ways to industrialize the system so that we can get more food to more people, right? So at which point, though, do we get to say, gosh, there are certain ways that things need to happen? We're not all going to go back to living on farms, I promise. So you're right. You're right, Miami. The agricultural revolution was designed to feed a growing and hungry world after World War I. I mean, sorry, after World War II.

and that led to the industrialization of agriculture and the use of actually neurotoxins and chemical weapons which are pesticides and bomb making material which is nitrogen so they turn all the bomb factories and and the chemical warfare factories into pesticide and fertilizer companies so that's a little dark secret people don't know but the it did help um but what we did was

something terrible, which was we did not understand the consequences of what we were doing. We did not understand the danger of pesticides. We didn't understand the danger of the growing food that had more starch in it. We didn't understand the destruction of the soil through our farming practices. But now we know. Now we know. Now we know. Now we know. So we really try to do that. And I'm working with my nonprofit to change our agricultural products. But you're 100% right. And the truth is we have 500 calories more per person in America than we need

to feed. I mean, the average person in the world now has, if we sort of equitably distributed all the food, we'd have more than enough food to feed everybody. In fact, we waste 40% of food in the developed world, essentially it's thrown in the garbage. In the developing world, there's refrigeration, food supply chain issues, but basically 40% of the food or $2 trillion worth of food or food that would have to be grown on a landmass the size of China

is literally thrown away every year. So we have more than enough food if we figure out the food-based issue, if we understand agriculture packs that work better to feed everybody. So it's really not a scientific problem. It's more of a political issue. It costs more to store the food than it do to give it.

That's from Slow Train. Can you give your sort of very official doctorly perspective on what is going on with all of these drugs that make all my favorite celebrities not look like themselves anymore? And I don't mean because they're losing weight. Their faces are changing. I can't recognize anybody. What's happening?

Are we supposed to be on these drugs? Is it better to take them than to run the risks of all the things that happen if you're overweight and then diabetic? Like, what is this? I mean, also, it's fascinating. You know, some people are reporting other kind of like dopaminergic systems seem to be getting downregulated. Like, what's going on with these drugs? For some people, they can be a lifesaver.

But to scale it up at the level where somebody wants to lose 10 pounds because they need to get their bikini or that everybody who's overweight, not obese should be using them or everybody who's not diabetic should be using them is just a disaster. And here's the reason. One, these drugs are not without side effects. And the longer you're taking, the more side effects there are. And one of the most serious side effects is muscle loss. And muscle is the single most important thing you need to maintain, right?

to keep a healthy metabolism because it burns calories. It burns seven times more calories than fat. And when you lose muscle, you lose function, you age faster.

And what you're seeing with your friends is what we call a zempic face. They have losing muscle and they're losing fat out of their face and they look terrible. I just saw someone like that the other day. I was like, oh my God, like she lost 20 pounds, but she looks terrible. But they're skinny, right? But people are like, I don't want to live forever. I just want to be skinny and beautiful, right? But as Jonathan says, people are getting like smaller, but fatter, meaning you're getting like smaller, but not necessarily less unhealthy. Yeah, so if you look at body composition and I think,

Anybody taking Ozempic or any of these drugs, Mojarra, Ozempic, or whatever, the new ones coming down the pike, anybody who's doing that needs a body composition scan called a DEXA scan and regularly measure their body composition so they're not losing muscle and doing the right thing. Two, they need to have a gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So if you're 150 pounds, that's 150 grams of protein a day. - That's a lot of protein. - It is. And three, because you need protein to build muscle. You need muscle to build muscle, essentially.

And three, you need to be on a progressive resistance training program. So your strength training three to four times a week. If you're not doing that, you should not be on these drugs and they should not be prescribed without that.

And that can mitigate the effects. But again, I don't think this is the solution to the problem. The reason we're overweight is not because of an ozempic deficiency. It's not like everybody walking around with an ozempic deficiency. Where were all those people when I was born? I mean, there was, I think, 5% of the country was obese then. Now it's 42, 43% of the population's obese. And that's ridiculous. But they can't eat all that protein because they can't eat.

They're busy being fabulous and skinny. They don't have time to eat protein because they're walking the carpet. But their stomach is not allowing them to eat that much protein. So fundamentally, they're not ever able to get. It's a challenge. It's a challenge. I mean, it is a challenge. And and

And, you know, you can do protein shakes, you can do other things, but there's ways around it. But you have to realize it's not only just the muscle loss, you also have small bowel obstruction, you have pancreatitis. I mean, I just saw someone who was on it the other day. I didn't prescribe it, but they had pancreatitis. I was like, wow, that's terrible. We found it from one of our function panel tests. And I was like, holy cow, you got pancreatitis. And that's one of the things we screen for with Function Health is your pancreatic function.

which is something that can go wrong. It can cause thyroid cancer, it can cause bowel obstruction. And it's not trivial, like 900% increase in pancreatic problems, 450% increase in bowel obstruction, which means you need surgery. It's not a trivial thing.

What are the benefits of the kind of screening that you do and that you talk about? Because I think a lot of people kind of don't deal with anything until they're sent to the doctor because something's really wrong. Can you talk about the perspective of sort of preventative medicine, meaning being proactive and not just reactive about our health? Yeah.

Well, I had a patient who came to see me once and he, blood sugar was like 115. And I said, gee, this is high. I've seen your doctor about this because he brought in the results from his doctor. He said, yeah, yeah. I said, what did the doctor say? He said, oh, wait until it's like 126 when you have diabetes, then we'll give you a medication. And I'm like, I'm like, you know what? And this is exactly how doctors are trained to think. You don't treat something until you reach that threshold of a disease. And once it's a diagnosable disease and then you do something. So like,

Like what's the optimal blood sugar? It's probably 70 to 85. When you start going over 85 to 100,

you start seeing a linear increase in cardiovascular risk. Even as patients, that's how we're taught to think about medicine, right? The notion of being proactive or preventative, I never even knew those words until I was a grown-ass adult. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we learn about mammogram or pap test or get your annual checkup or whatever, but those are so anemic. I mean, your annual checkup, you'd get maybe 30 or 40 tests. You get your

blood count, your cholesterol. Please, you get 10 minutes. You get 10 minutes with your HMO doctor. Exactly. I mean, you know, your labs are finalized for you next year. And they're not checking for all the smoking guns, that this is smoldering fires in your system that are not necessarily symptomatic right now, but show you're heading in a bad direction.

And we co-founded Function Health to help people get access to their own lab data. I mean, you can wear an Oura Ring or an Apple Watch and get all your biosensors, but where can you actually find out what's going on under the hood? You have to go to your doctor. You have to beg for them to do the right test. You have to go to your doctor.

hope he or she will order them, or she will know how to interpret them. You hope your insurance will pay for them. It's like, it's terrible. And then you don't actually even have them. So in a coherent, linear way to track them over time. So we created a health platform called Function Health. Easy to access. It's basically...

$499 for a year's worth of testing, twice a year testing, 110 biomarkers initially, and then about 60 the second time. Tracking the dashboard, you can see what's happening. It gives you insights about what to do, and it empowers you to be the CEO of your own health so you can live 100 healthy years. And what we're finding is staggering, Jonathan and mine, because this stuff has never been looked at at a population level. We now have 60,000 members. There's 300,000 people on the wait list. It's remarkable what we're discovering that, you know,

89% have severe metabolic issues.

51% have high ApoB, which is something that's never tested, which is the most important cardiovascular risk marker. 46% have high C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation. 30% have a positive ANA, which is a marker of autoimmune disease. 13% have thyroid dysfunction, autoimmune thyroid disease they didn't know about. 67% have a nutritional deficiency in a level of a nutrient that's not at the optimal level, but the minimum amount that you don't get like scurvy, kind of. This is a health-forward population.

So the point of function is to give you the

window into your own biology to empower with your own health data to track your data over time and make actions based on that data. Okay. So let's talk about, I want to talk about Jonathan's data because the action I'm concerned about is should I kick him to the curb and pretend I never met him? No, he's going to be fine. He's not my problem anymore. He's someone who's, you know, Jonathan looks obviously is 45 or so. He takes good care of himself. He's not overweight. He's

very conscious about his health. And that's reflected in most of his biomarkers. His belly's a little soft right in the middle. Is that true? I can't really tell from this angle. Maybe you can stand up and take your shirt off there. I find it endearing. Okay. I don't know about that. You can do like a mirror test. I'm working on my crunches. A mirror test is, well, you know what? You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. It's the carbs and sugar that give you belly fat.

But the beautiful thing is for you, your insulin levels are great, your lipid levels are great. We look at a lot of really important things that are often abnormal for people. ApoB is 79, that's good. That's a cardiac risk factor. So your blood sugar is 87, that's great. Your insulin's low. This is not what we're seeing with the majority of the population, right? Your thyroid's great, your blood count's great, urine's great. If you saw the way he lived in eight, you would know why you're not seeing what you see in the general population.

Your vitamin D level is good. But we did find some things that are quite concerning. And one in particular is really common. It's something you don't get checked on your regular blood work, but it's a whole iron panel that we do. And our iron panel is important because it helps us to detect a common condition,

that is in about 10% of the population where you have too much iron. And that's called hemochromatosis or iron storage disease. We also can pick up anemia this way. And we see a good portion of the population is anemic based on this test. But you had a test called iron saturation. So think about iron, iron rusts. So Jonathan, you have a condition that I think is likely- He's rusty.

He's rusty. Not too bad yet. I'm pretty rusty. You're pretty rusty. So what happens is typically as you get older, you accumulate more and more iron because you keep storing more iron. And when you do that, you rust. So you get heart failure because your heart rusts. You get liver failure because your liver rusts. You get joint problems and arthritis because your joints rust. You get brain damage and dementia because your brain rusts. You get diabetes because your pancreas rusts. So you can say you got iron everywhere in your body. That's a bad problem.

But the good news is that this is 100% preventable and we need to do a follow-up test based on this. And this is what you'd get in your function insights that you'd get on your test report, which says, gee, you probably need to go see a doctor and check the hemochromatosis gene, or we can eventually do that for you as part of the screening.

And then if you had this gene, you're going to need to watch this number and you're going to need to get blood draws, basically donate blood regularly, like every few months until your numbers are normal. And this is going to be a lifelong thing, but it will save your life. And this is something you just didn't know. The other thing that we, and again, it's about 10% of the population. The other thing we found was that you have an elevated level of something called rheumatoid factor. Now it's just slightly elevated, but this is an autoimmune marker.

Now, I mentioned earlier that about 30% of our cohort at Function Health have a positive autoimmune marker called ANA. A lower percentage have the positive rheumatoid factor. But it means you kind of have a pre-autoimmune disease. We've heard of prediabetes, but there's also now recognition of prehypertension and even pre-autoimmune disease.

So something's cooking. And this would make me as a functional medicine doctor go, okay, Jonathan, let's talk about what's going on. How's your microbiome and your gut health? Do you have a leaky gut?

Are you exposed to environmental toxins, which can be auto-autogens and cause autoimmune disease? Have you had Lyme disease in the past? Maybe you've got some smoldering thing. We found out from your talking earlier that you had COVID. COVID, we know, dramatically increases the number of autoimmune antibodies. So I would say, gee, you just had COVID. Let's recheck this in six months and see if it goes away. And then you'll probably be fine. So it might be nothing. It might just be a post-COVID phenomena, but it could be something that's smoldering that we need to figure out why. And so function help gives you that insight. Now,

You're pretty darn healthy. But, you know, a lot of people, we find a lot of stuff and things that people don't realize, even very young people. And we picked up cancers early. We picked up people with all kinds of metabolic issues, nutritional issues, autoimmune issues. And it allowed them to actually be proactive about their health and address things that are problematic for now, but also prevent things that are coming down the road that are entirely preventable.

I mean, it was wildly helpful to find out these things that, again, I feel great, don't feel like I have any particular thing that I'm concerned about. But to know, for example, the iron storage condition specifically, that's a huge piece of insight.

Yeah. So you, Jonathan, yeah. Yeah. So you would get an insight from Function Health when your dashboard or would say, you know, Jonathan, you have this elevated level of iron saturation. Your ferritin level is normal. So you haven't accumulated that much iron yet, but it's something you want to go further evaluate and get a gene test to see whether or not you in fact have this problem. And then let's track it over time and maybe give blood regularly.

He eats a lot of iron. Does that matter? Or I would say, you know, gee, maybe are you like, you know, eating, maybe you shouldn't be cooking out of iron pots, for example, if you love cast iron pots. You know, like there's actually a condition that's similar to this from the Bantu tribe in Africa called Bantu siderosis, where they get iron storage too much because they just cook out of iron pots. So they just eat too much iron. We thought,

I thought that cast iron was the way to go. It is. I cook and cast iron all the time, but it's fine because most of us have a governor so that if we don't absorb too much iron, we just get what we need. But some people can't, like Jonathan. So, Dr. Hyman, can you explain how you get a biological age number that you spit out at people? So basically, your biological age is something that can be determined now. It's a way we can actually measure your rate of aging.

And so I'm 64, my biological age is 39.

And it's 'cause I do all this cool stuff that I do to make myself healthy. Listen, facial recognition software is gonna tell you whether someone's got a young or old biological age. You as a human being already have that facial recognition software. You see a 45-year-old who's been smoking and living homeless for their whole life, they look like they're 80. You see an 80-year-old who's been exercising, eating wheatgrass his whole life, and he looks like he's 45.

We know kind of intuitively what that is, but now we have a biomarker. And so it's a biomarker based on something called DNA methylation, which essentially is

complicated to explain, but essentially we have our genes and then we have the control mechanism of our genes called the epigenome. And we measure how that's working. And that's what degrades as we get older. And we can measure that now. And then based on that, we can calculate your biological age. And it changes based on what you do. For example, two years ago, I did my biological age. I was 43. Over the last two years, I've been really aggressive about doing a lot of things to reverse my biological age based on all the things I learned in writing Young Forever. And it worked.

I got two years older chronologically, but I got four years younger biologically. That's the goal. Big reveal. I was 30. And now knowing that you're 39 and almost 65, I have to compete with you. So I have a few years to maybe push my age down. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I see some 30-year-olds that are like 14. I'm like, wow, that's really good. Also...

Should everyone be on Himalayan tart buckwheat sprout powder? I think that's the most important question. Oh, yes. Himalayan tart buckwheat sprout powder is so cool because Himalayan tart buckwheat is a form of buckwheat, which is neither wheat nor grain. It's a flower grown from the Himalayas in harsh conditions, which makes it very stressed. And the more stressed a plant is, the more protections it creates. The protections that the plants make are called phytochemicals.

These are things that our body uses to self-regulate and are like, you know, like you've heard about like maybe red wine, azrosperitrol, that's a phytochemical or green tea has good effects or broccoli is good for you because it has these phytochemicals. Well, the same thing, but Himalayan tartar buckwheat has among the most phytochemicals of any known plant. And, uh,

When you get sprouted powder, you can throw in your smoothie. I had it this morning. It's delicious and it's nutty and flavorful. It's a great way to get your phytochemicals in. That's how I'm going to be 14 again.

Dr. Hyman, thank you so much for talking to us. And you are offering our listeners a code to give the first 100 signups access to bypass the current wait list, which is amazing. It's 300,000 people, by the way. Yes. The code is BialikBreakdown100 and we'll give all that information so that everybody knows where to find it. We'll put it below. But thank you so much for talking to us. And we just really appreciate you coming on. We're big fans of yours. My pleasure. It was fun. It was fun. Let's do this again.

Dr. Hyman mentioned food fix, which I'm holding. And, um, you know, that has a lot of kind of guidelines like nutritional and sort of dietary guidelines, but, you know, I think, um, a lot of what Dr. Hyman is, is saying is stuff that we do absolutely talk about here. You know, we've had many guests on, um, who, who do talk, you know, in, in similar ways, but I did really, I appreciated his perspective in particular on, you know, kind of some of the aspects of what

we shouldn't feel bad about that really is out of our control. Meaning when you have, you know, all this stuff behind the scenes going on, which I don't even understand the full details of, but just the notion, you know, that, that it's not, it's not just us, like literally food is made in a way so that

you do eat more of it. It's the way that they make profits. It's the way that our bodies then start reacting is what I think a lot of these companies didn't know in the first place, just like the agricultural revolution, right? When, when he said, well, we didn't know, but now we do. I think that's kind of how I feel about a lot of these companies. Like they, they may not have realized, right? Like when they started making TV dinners,

It was like, let's make moms' lives easier. That was like a lot of what the sort of ingenuity of the 1950s was, right? Post-World War II and like women were exhausted and taking lots of painkillers because their lives were difficult. They were like, here's all these products that'll make your life easier. Here's a microwave. Here's, you know, TV dinners that come in a piece of plastic and all you do is put them in the microwave, right? Like all these things weren't originally devised, right?

to hurt us. But what we now know is that decades and decades of ingesting food that has been grown in hot plastic

is actually not good for us. And what's happening is we're kind of deep into this cycle of our bodies showing us that they're not happy, they're rebelling, they're angry. And the accumulation of these chemicals in our bodies is leading to things that then lead to us needing pills for other things that cause more problems in the first place. And it's like we're literally caught in this spiral, but it's not our fault.

It isn't our fault. And I think you have a very charitable interpretation of the early days of fast food or convenient food. What, you think someone was like, let's hurt everybody's microbiome? No, I think for the microwave dinners, it was about convenience. It was about helping people. It was like, imagine we didn't have to cook and spend all these hours in the kitchen. How amazing would it be to free people up to have easy...

access food. I dream about it sometimes. But it quickly transitioned to a scientific effort with hiring craving experts to make food as addictive as humanly possible. And the idea of the bliss point

Finding that perfect combination of sugar and salt and sweet that literally hijack our brains so that we cannot tell when we are full and that we just want to have more and more and more of something has become a totally standard practice. And it is chemical warfare to attack people's

brains like that because you're literally bypassing all sense of control and regulation and we can no longer tell what we're eating, if we should eat more of it.

Then over and above that to target kids with very sophisticated marketing, color science, character design, so that the packaging of the food and it's like actually easier to be like, all right, kid, you can have whatever you're crying on the grocery store. There's a toy in the bottom of the cereal box. You have to eat the box to get it. It was my favorite game. And it's actually, it becomes...

like a war with your child in the grocery store where they're lying on the floor, throwing a tantrum. And you're like, am I going to do what I know is better for their health and nutrition and have to deal with this kid who's making this massive scene? Or do I drag the kid out or try to cajole the kid or pick the kid up or manage the kids? Like at a certain point, people just give up. And that's where I think

the forces are against us. Yeah. And, you know, imagine, you know, our pediatrician used to talk about this

There are, there are food establishments that give your child a toy if you buy their food and the commercials that we are raised on, right? The television that we watch is full of the latest toy that you can get if you buy this food. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I didn't even want the happy meal. I wanted the toy.

But they didn't buy, my parents wouldn't just like buy a toy because I asked for it. I'm sorry. What is this fantasy land? I'm going to tell you some of the questions I had. I think if anyone's listening and wants to vote on which question they really want an answer to, we will search out that answer. Tag us on Instagram at Bialik Breakdown. Here are some of the things that I didn't get to ask.

Why is gluten in America worse than in other places? I actually have the answer to that. Is oatmeal stripping our body of nutrients? You're obsessed with oatmeal stripping our body of nutrients. Like the one thing I eat. Is Jonathan stripping Mayim's life of joy?

Are nut milks bad for us? I'm sure they are, but cow milk is bad too. No one should drink milk. Oh, we didn't even get to ask him about the dangers of dairy. He does not like the milk of cow. No, he does not like cow milk. Do vegetable smoothies spike our blood sugar, even if there are no fruits in them? And is a blended banana that much more of a spike than eating a whole banana? Don't eat any smoothies that taste good.

Strategies to Reduce Autoimmune Disease. That's going to be actually probably a separate podcast. Also related to that, why do women experience more autoimmune diseases? We've touched on that a little bit. We actually floated a theory with Dr. Andrew Weil. So if you haven't seen that episode, you should check it out. Truth About Sunscreen. We could also probably do a whole topic, a whole episode just on that. Hormones, Causes and Solutions for Low Sex Drive and How to Fix Them.

Health benefits of lucid dreaming. What I'm realizing as I'm reading this list is each one of these is probably its own episode. And I need a doctor to just become a resident of this podcast.

What I'm realizing is that we've never done an outro where Jonathan has listed the questions he didn't get to ask with no hope of them being answered by any medical authority. First time we've had an outro like this. But thank you, Jonathan, for that window into your brain and the things that you wish you could curl up at Dr. Hyman's feet and ask him. Top reasons why most diets fail.

I have more. Is alcohol poison? Yes, it's poison. And why is it the only drug that we need an excuse not to consume socially? Because it's delicious and it makes everyone more pleasant. How to rewire your brain to end food cravings? I have done a little bit of work on that myself. We have admitted. Jonathan, I think you need to go to functional medicine doctor school. I think you would love that. Should I start

a GoFundMe to go back to medical school. I don't know. You're from Canada. Don't they have like socialized like here? You want an education? Go have it. I've been in the arts a long time. Is there a way to like have a science assistant? And like I go to school with a new show idea. You and I go to medical school together. You do the science part. I do the asking the questions part.

Please make sure to include your answers below or which of those questions you'd like us to get you the answers to and we can work on that. Also, Mayim, I think you're the craving expert of this podcast. You find the audio bliss point. I think that's a compliment.

We also want to remind people, Function is the first of its kind platform that revolutionizes how people manage their lifelong health, starting by providing access to over 100 plus lab tests at a single cost. Jonathan got such interesting information, and we're really, really glad that our listeners can use the code BialikBreakdown100. The first 100 signups will access and bypass the current enormous wait list of

hundreds of thousands of people, I believe, as Mark Hyman just said. So please check that out. We'll put the information below and from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or fiction. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.

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