The average newborn baby today has two hundred and eighty seven toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath.

The ongoing debate over which foods are most healthy is a subject of co founder and chief medical officer of Function Health, doctor Mark Hyman.

What is inflammation doing to your body?

Inflammation is the root cause of almost all chronic illnesses and aging itself.

That visceral fat is like an incubator for inflammation.

Be a fire in your bellet cause heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes.

What are the highly inflammatory foods?

The sugar and starch In America average meet a pound of sugar and flour a day per person.

What do you think the US healthcass needs to be focused.

On all the ultra processed food which is sixty percent of our diet, and we have a whole food system that's turned into ultraprocessed food that we're consuming in massive amounts.

Is seventy three percent of what's on the grocery store shelves.

Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an ultraimmune disease?

You might be a little attired, you might be a little constipated, you might little dry, your nails might crack a little bit, you might feel a little depressed, you might have lower sex drive, getting a little bit of weight.

And people don't think of these as a disease.

But when you add them all together.

If someone's listening right now and they're thinking, I feel like craw, what do they do?

The Number one Health and Wellness Podcast.

Jay Shetty Jay Sheddy set.

Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become a happier, healthier and more healed, where we talk to the experts and the thought leaders who illuminate to us how we can truly transform our lives.

Today's guest is one of your favorites, one of our favorites here on Purpose, someone that I know personally and grateful to know off the screen as well as on the screen, talking about none other than doctor Mark Hyman.

Doctor Mark Hymen is a practicing family physician, founder of the Ultra Wellness Center and founder of the Functional Medicine Center at the Cleveland Clinic.

A leader in functional medicine, Doctor Mark Hyman authored fifteen New York Times bestsellers and hosts The Doctor Hyman Show, a podcast that you should definitely subscribe to if you haven't already, and he's known for his food as medicine, philosophy, and work in addressing the root causes of chronic disease through nutrition and lifestyle.

Please welcome back to On Purpose, doctor Mark Hyman.

Mark, It's always great to have you on the show.

I'm so happy to have you back.

Thanks, it's good to be here.

I love this place.

Mark.

I'm actually really grateful you here because we actually had a date scheduled for you to be on the show, and then I sadly learned from your team that it had to be canceled, but it was.

Four because I must die.

Yeah, it was really extreme.

Talk to us about this near death experience.

Because I've known you to be a longevity expert, a health expert.

You always looking great health, You're always feeling great health every time I've been around you.

Your energies radiant.

Yeah, you carry it with you.

I know you practice what you preach.

I know it's not made up.

Yeah, you're an authentic person in the work that you do.

It impacts millions of people worldwide.

And then you have a near death experience.

Yeah, walked me through what happened.

Yeah, you know, thanks Jake for asking.

I joked that my biological age is thirty nine, but my back age is one hundred and thirty nine.

And when I was thirty two, I lived in Idaho and a logging town.

I was chopping wood and carrying heavy wood and I ruptured a disk and it basically caused massive damage and a permanent process of my right calf.

So I've lived for thirty odd years and my back's just degenerated and I developed, you know, a lot of degeneral dist disease, and so I fell out of back pain and I ended up having an injection, which is pretty common treatment to help relief pain, and one of the rests of injections of any needle is infection.

And in a closed space of the spine, it just took off and very quick.

Within a couple of days, I couldn't walk.

Within a week, I had surgery.

They opened me up.

They closed me up because they couldn't reach the abscess it was on the front, and they said we can't do anything, and basically left me to die.

Give me anybody and said cross your fingers and here's some painkillers.

And they said there was no cure.

And then A friend of mine was a doctor, called me and said, what's happened?

I heard her sick and I told him.

He said, you need a second opinion.

So I got an opinion from the top of neuro said surgery center in the world in UCSF, and they said get out here right away.

So I took an ambulance jet and had another surgery a month later that would really relieved the abscess.

But in that intervening period, I got septic.

I was feverish.

I lost twenty five pounds from where I am now.

I was in bed.

I couldn't eat sitting up.

I literally had to lay down with four pills outo my leg.

And after the surgery, thank god, it worked, but it was a hail Mary surgery, and they said I was maybe a couple of days away from dying.

And I remember going on anesthesia on the day of the second surgery, and I was like, this could be my last moment of consciousness.

In the aftermath of that, you know, I I was on a walker.

I couldn't stand up, I couldn't brush my own teeth, I couldn't wipe my own ass.

I was like it was bad and I had to depend on other people, but slowly, you know, just determined.

I clawed my way back to health and using every principle that I know of how to create health.

And I'm sixty five.

I'm not a spring chicken, and I know what to do, and I did it.

And I wasn't sure if it was going to work.

At sixty five, you know, how much can you get back?

But I put on more muscle and I'm stronger than I was even before the surgery.

And I just did it.

Every day.

It was like compounding interest.

Every day, I ate the best I could.

I got in the gym with my physical therapists, a trainer every day, sometimes twice a day.

I got treatments and acupuncture, and I just clawed my way back, took my supplements, took my creatine, took all the things I needed to do.

And it took about five months and then I really started to kind of come back.

And it's only been seven months from the recording of this podcast, and so I'm back and I feel good, and I feel actually better than I ever had because I've doubled down on my health practices.

But it sort of shows you if you know the laws of nature, the laws of biology, how the body works, how it's designed, how to create health.

Right, because doctors don't learn about that.

They don't learn about how to create health.

They learn about how to diagnose the treat disease, which is important.

But if you say to your doctor, how do I create health?

Doctor, and they're like, well, I don't know, just eat better, exercise.

But it's a very specific methodology.

It's really what functional medicine's about.

It's about how do you create optimal function and how do you create optimal health and what is the science of that?

And so doing that, I was able to actually build myself back up and create health and actually feel better now than I did before the surgery.

Oh my gosh, what did it take for you to rebuild?

Because we always talk about being proactive, talk about being well first, which you focused on and you have.

Yeah, and when you end up in a position like that, it's hard mentally, and then of course it's harder physically.

As you said, your body sixty five, even if your biological age is thirty nine.

There's a reality to that.

Yeah, what were the key things you had to work on?

You talked about building muscle again, what were the things you had to do in order to get back to standing in front of me right now and looking great.

The biggest component I think of your health is the thing that's between your ears.

It's your mindset, something you talk about a lot.

It's your determination.

It's the belief that you can actually get better.

And I was physiologically depressed.

I lost half my blood volume, so my blood count was half of what it should have been, super anemic.

My hormones all were in the toilet, my testosterone, my thyroid, nothing was working.

I was very nutritionally depleted.

I hadn't really eat, and so for me, it was it was just the will to get up every day and do the little things, even when my mind was like, just stay in bed, just give up.

It's not worth it, you know.

And I think for a lot of people it's hard to divorce your thoughts from reality.

I think, you know, you've lived in a monastery, and that's basically what you learn is how you're not your thoughts, you're not your beliefs, you're not your body, You're not right and and so you know, but when you're in it, like it's you're in a body.

You're in a physical body that feels bad.

How do you fix that?

And so that's what I've done for thirty plus years with my patients with folcial medicine, is when they feel bad.

And a lot of Americans out there feel bad.

You know, six out of ten of us have a chronic illness, and ninety three percent of us are metabolically and healthy.

Most of the population has what I call FLC syndrome.

That's when you feel like crap.

You know, whether it's just little things like painful periods or headaches, or constipation or joint aches or skin rashes or whatever it is.

You know, people suffer and there is a way through that.

And so for me, it was a mindset of not believing my thoughts and no matter how physiologically depleted, I was to just do the baby steps every day.

That got me to where I'm now, which is feeling awesome.

And I was in the gym at Equinox working out for an hour this morning.

I was like, right, that's amazing, and I'm so I'm so glad that you've I mean, you've helped so many people over the years, but it's a special feeling when you reuse your own work to rebuild.

I mean, you must have so much conviction and confidence and everything you're about to share, Yeah, the episode now to help everyone else.

You must have a double sense of affirmation that this stuff works because you've had to do it in the most dire of circumstances.

Absolutely, and I had to track all my blood work and I had to track my nutrient status and adjust it and customize it.

But it was, you know, having the knowledge that I have in the data I have, which really now is through the magic of technology and the explosion of the changes in our scientific framework of how we understand the body.

Like we're in this paradigm shifting moment in medicine and healthcare, and the promise of actually reversing chronic disease, of creating health, of people getting free from a lot of the suffering, the needless suffering that they have is now really possible.

And that's really what I'm so excited about.

I mean, I'm just like sixty five, and I'm working hard that I've ever worked, because I believe that there's this moment where all the things that I've done one on one with people or through my books, you know, people come up with say, oh, doctor him, and you saved my life or whatever.

I'm like, it's one by one by one.

But what if this can scale through through the ability of technology to make sense of all your personal health data, customize an exact plan for you and I do exactly on what to do, when to do it, and how to adjust it over time.

It's that's where we are.

It's pretty it's pretty cool.

Absolutely, yeah.

Do If someone's listening right now and they're saying, doctor Mark common, I feel like crap.

Yeah.

Like, if someone's listening right now and they're thinking I feel like crap, where should they start?

What do they do?

That's a great, great question.

You know, there's a more serious version, Jay, It's called fls.

You feel like shit?

Yeah, right?

But you know I I you know.

I have found that food is the most powerful tool to change your biology.

It's basically code or instructions that changes your physiology with every single bite.

It changes your gene expression, it changes your hormones, your brain, chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome are transmitters.

Everything has changed, not in like years or decades, but literally in minutes, and and so food is the most powerful way to quickly shift your biology.

And those people, Jay have no clue that what they're eating is making them feel bad, or that their sense of how they are and their conditions that they're suffering from are caused by food.

And so what I've done through functional medicine is it's often called an elimination diet, but I like to call it an addition diet, because you're adding in all the healing medicinal foods and you're dying, you're taking out the inflammatory foods.

And so I created a program that I've used my patients called the ten Day Detox Diet, and sometimes I would have people on for a year.

You know, if I call it the ten year detox diet, nobody would do it.

But I call it because in ten days it's it's kind of raculous.

And I run programs around the world where I have people come together, we spend a week, and the average reduction in symptoms from the FLC syndrome, you know, whether it's you know, sinus issues or allergies or irrebo bow or headaches or joint pains or acne or insomnia or a depression or all the little stuff that isn't like you know, cancer or dementia or you know, a heart attack that's more serious.

All that stuff literally you don't.

Have to suffer from in ten days.

Yeah, and there's a seventy percent reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in ten days.

I mean, I was like, when I first got to Cleveland clinic, I gave a talk and this gentleman comes up to me.

It says, doctor Hyman, I have a rheumat arthritis.

But I did your ten day detox and it went away in ten days.

Is that possible?

I'm like, yes, possible, it happened to you.

You know, walk me through the two types.

What are the medicinal foods and what are the highly inflammatory?

So the highly inflammatory foods are obviously all the ultra process food, which is sixty percent of our diet.

You know, we have a whole food system that's designed to produce commodity crops that's turned into ultra processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts.

It's seventy three percent of what's on the grocery store shelves.

It's hard to get away from it.

And it's it's, you know, stuff that you know you wouldn't have in your kitchen, you wouldn't have beutilated hydroxy taluinge to sprinkle on your vegetables, or mono and diglycerize and bottle it to put on your salad dressing.

Right, it's maltodexter.

Like all the crab is in there is super inflammatory, the mulcifiers, additives, colors, dyes, and then there's just a sugar and starch.

I mean, we each in America average eat a pound of sugar and flour a day per person.

That's an insane amount of sugar and flour, and that's incredibly inflammatory.

Some people react to dairy, some people react to gluten or grains, and so I take away all the things that are potentially reacted, not that they're necessarly bad foods, but a lot of people have gut issues, and that that people have gut issues have trouble with grains and gluten in this country is very different than other places, like in Europe where we were talking about what we both were this summer, and they're it's a different genetic strain.

They don't use the same chemicals on it.

They don't spray with life essay, which is a microbiome destroyer, and so that that often is a factor in causing leaky gut and inflammation.

So I remove all that sugar, processed food, flour, grains, and add in all the foods that are healing, alcohol, caffeine sometimes, and then add in lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, you know, good quality protein, lots of good fats, avocados, coconut all that stuff.

It's just pretty simple.

It's like it's not that hard and it doesn't have to be that expensive, and in a very short amount of time people for better.

The first few days people feel bad because what happens is when you stop eating the foods that you're reacting to, you get what's called a die off reaction.

So basically all the immune cells that are busy dealing with all the crap you're eating all the time have nothing to do, so they form these things called immune complexes, like they glomp together.

And then it's like you feel like you have the flu.

And that lasts maybe a couple of days, and then after by day three, four or five, you're like sleeping better, you have more energy, your head's clear, your symptoms are getting better, and even in five six days, seventy percent reduction.

And you know, we have an online programs called the Candidtox.

You can go to tend adtox dot com.

We've done it with thousands of people and it's like I'm always a sound and what I see, like does this really work out?

Well?

You know, because it's like it's almost sounds going to be true.

That's incredible, But it's just it just shows you that food is medicine.

And it's not metaphorically medicine.

It literally is medicine.

Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors and back to our episode.

I want to dive into each of those three areas of the inflammatory foods.

First of all, for anyone who's not aware or doesn't totally understand, what is inflammation?

What is that doing to your body?

Why is it important to have medicinal foods and avoid inflammatory foods?

Yeah?

Well, you know, the inflammation is something that now is being understood to be at the root cause of almost all chronic illnesses and aging itself.

You know, and you'll know if you have inflammation, right, you have a sore throat, you get an infected finger from a splinter, you sprain your ankle, you know, those are signs of inflammation.

Yeah, those are signs of inflammation, but there's another kind of inflammation that's a little more silent, and we can measure that through blood tests like see racket protein, which we do through function health.

And the amount of people who are inflamed is just so massive because of our diet, and so that creates this elevation in these molecules in our body called cytokines.

And you from COVID.

Everybody heard about the cytokine storm.

What killed people was this overwhelming inflammation And why did Americans die at a far greater rates.

We are four percent of the population but sixteen percent of the deaths in cases of COVID in the world, so four times what we should have been.

It wasn't because we didn't have access to medical care or we didn't have good doctors.

It's because we're all pre inflamed.

We're all metabolic and healthy, and the worst kind of inflammation is that that comes from your belly fat.

So I just saw a couple of days ago who was fifty two years old and you know, looked pretty healthy, but he had like a little gut on him, like not big, and he had thirty two percent body fat in his belly, and that visceral fat is like a incubator for inflammation.

It's basically a fire in your belly.

And that vistral fact cause heart attacks, strokes, cancer, obviously diabetes, and that he had a blockage and ninety percent blockage in his heart and it was because he had this inflamed silent killer inside of him.

And so so it's not just the inflammation that you know by getting a sore throat.

It's it's the quiet inflammation that you don't know you have and that leads to all these things can like not just the obvious things like autommune diseases, which we can talk about allergies, but you know things that are more subtle, whether it's you know, hormonal issues like menstrual crams, or issues like migraines or headaches or fatigue or all these things are signs of this fire raging through your body that you don't know about that's killing you.

And so by eating an inflammatory diet and removing the inflammatory foods, like your body will quickly reset.

I mean your body has innate intelligence is which is a miracle for me when you think about it.

Your body is a healing machine, Like, look what happened to me?

I mean I was in bed, I couldn't walk, I was on a walker, I was emaciated, I was close to death.

And when I put the right inputs in, my body healed.

And it's amazing.

I've had patients who are sixty five with heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, kidneys failing, liver failing, who actually didn't take ten days, but like you know, three months.

They were off all their medications, all the reverse, all these conditions.

Even at sixty five or sixty six years old, the body can do that.

And so that's really what I want for people.

I want them to have access to the knowledge, the ability and the tools to be able to do this for themselves and to try it.

And I don't say the smartest doctor in you room is your own body, if you listen to it.

Gee, when I eat this, my stomach doesn't feel good.

When I have that, I get a headache.

But most people don't connect the dots machine what they eat and how they feel.

Yeah, we base it all on lifestyle, and we also, like the gentlemen you were treating, we still live in this world of oh I'm not that big, small looking at this physical attribute when actually the inflammation is all happening on the inside.

Yeah, he was jogging every day.

Yeah, he's doing all the right things, but there's this hidden part.

One of those hidden things is sugar.

I find it really shocking when I was playing pickleball the other day and someone said to me that, oh, let's have this drink.

Like we didn't have we we didn't have any water accessible at the time.

We were waffling thirsty.

It was pretty hot.

Yeah, and he had these like packs of drinks, and so he handed to me.

My wife has trained me to I turned it around and it was like, forty percent of your daily sugars in this little pack.

Right, it was tiny.

I don't even know.

It's cool forty percent of your daily sugars had all these other non natural ingredients I didn't recognize at all, massive lists.

And I said to him, I said, dude, like I'm not drinking this.

Yeah.

I was like, I'm not, I'm not gonna have it.

I was like, I'm not gonna have forty percent of my sugars in this.

And I try and avoid refined sugar anyway, And but to him that was crazy.

He was just like, oh, dude, it's fine, Like we're running for like three hours, like we you know, it's just a hydration.

I was like, yeah, but you don't need the sugar with it, And I find that sugar is something I still get a lot of pushback on real.

Yeah people even that's that's my reaction because I feel like I've been so like well educated by yourself.

The other experts on the show, my wife who were constantly because I used to be addicted to sugar easy, and all of a sudden, you get so talk to me about sugar.

Because I think there's a way in which we've been brainwashed to think it's okay.

Yeah, no, actually, Jay, you know, we know alcohol is addictive, right, But there's been large studies done using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a scientifically validated metric that measures food addiction, and it's primarily sugar and starch.

And fourteen percent of people in this country are alcoholics, but fourteen percent are also addicted to food, and fourteen percent of kits, which is a lot of kids.

So it's biologically addictive a little bit.

It's not going to hurt you if you're healthy, if you're fit, you can have some.

It's it's just the volume that we have in this culture.

I mean, it's something that our biology doesn't know what to do with.

Historically, we were one hunter gathers.

We had twenty two teaspoons a year.

Now the average percess twenty two teaspoons a day.

Wow, Yeah, that is mind blowing.

Yeah.

If you had two teaspoons a year, so.

You were a hunter gatherer, you'd like, get some honey.

Oh my god, I found honey, you know, and you'd eat it.

But it was hard to get.

Sugar, and you were more active than to Yeah.

And you're running yeah all the time, you're.

Looking for that job honey.

Yeah, no, jaw, Sorry, it was actually I was.

I was in the Hadza tribe, which is one of the last time gathered tribes in Africa, and they eat a lot of honey.

They eat like twenty percent of calorie of honey.

But they're super fit healthy because they're just like eating tons of fiber.

So they basically all the roots in the tubers have massive amounts of fiber.

Americans eat about eight grams of fiber a day.

We were historically as hunter gatherers, having one hundred and fifty grams a day, and fiber basically is like a sponge.

So for example, if you take your coca cola and you're throwing a bunch of meta musil, it's going to have a very different effect on your blood sugar.

It's going to turn to gel first of all, if you leave it there for long enough, and then if you drink it, it's not going to cause the same spike.

So it's just the whole context of our diet has just become highly processed.

Lots of sugar, and it drives the visceral fat, so sugar and starch.

And by the way, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of corn flex and a bowl of sugar or a blowf of bread and you know, a bowl of sugar it's the same.

In fact, it sometimes in terms of glycemic index, the bread is worse because it's pure glucose, whereas sugar is fryctose and glucose, which has different effects on your blood sugar.

But basically they're both the same.

And what that does is that is that drives the deposition of belly fat, and that belly fat which is not just holding up your pants it's it's metabolically very active.

It produces tons of inflammation, screws up your hormones.

It causes infertility, it causes Alzheimer's disease, it causes cancer, it causes diabetes, causes heart attacks, it causes aging itself.

And when you look around in America, ninety three percent of us, well ninety three point two to be exact, have this metabolic dysfunction.

I mean, six point eight percent of us don't, which is frightening, frightening, And it's not how humans evolved.

We didn't evolve like that.

People, the Native Americans there, you know, genetically diabetic, Well, no, they're not like the Pema Indians one hundred years ago had no diabetes, no obesity, no heart attacks.

And now they're you know, get eighty percent good diabetes by the time you're thirty, and even two year olds get type of diabetes because they're just drinking tons of sugar, sodas and flower and all the commodities that we sent to the reservations that are all the crap we should meeting.

So so, yeah, if you put your genes in the wrong environment, the jeens may load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.

I want to give a shout out to this incredible company that you brought my way, Function Health.

When you first brought it to me, I was so impressed at what it does because I think everything we're talking about, the challenges, we don't know until we feel something in quite an extreme way, right, So we just don't know.

As humans, we don't know these things.

We were never taught them.

If I didn't meet my wife, if I didn't have this podcast, I wouldn't be educated.

Just how would I know this?

And when you talk about the ninety three point two percent, that's all of us who just don't know.

And then you, my wife and you and people like that, the six point eight percent, I love you by the way, Yeah, And all of a sudden you get educated.

And then that's what Function Health does.

The fact that you can take.

These look under the hood.

You can get all the results.

You know it from being at home or or you know, popping to get a get a test done.

You have access to actually know what's happening inside your body.

And I became a proud investor in the company when you first brought it to me because I'd never seen someone make that kind of data available at mass and at scale.

I was going to some concierge services, which I'm very fortunate to have access to, but I didn't see how the world the night is roupe one two per second kind of access to these things.

And that's what function heal's doing.

Yeah, I mean, imagine imagine driving your car.

You don't have any dashboard.

You don't know how fast you're going, and how much gas to the car, you how much oil in there.

You don't think engine light's good, you have your tire pressure's good.

I mean, think of the amount of sensors and information you get from your car these days.

Right, we practice medicine today like listening to the noises a car makes and hoping we can figure it out instead of looking under the hood.

And so, you know, I believe we should be testing and not guessing and what's going on with their health.

And the wearables are great, you know, or a ring or a fitbit or you know, apple washed awesome boop.

They tell you a lot, but they don't go under the skin.

And so you need to know what's happening in your biology.

And the truth is that disease doesn't just happen like that.

One day you get a heart attack.

It's a slow progression over decades, and you can see the continuum of what happens, and you can see slight changes in variations that will compound over time and make you ultimately very sick.

And the beautiful thing about functional health is you can actually get your biomarkers done.

There over one hundred and ten biomarkers or initial tests, you do a second test mid year.

You can add on tests for looking at other things, whether you want toxins or allergens or lime disease, whatever you want to know about yourself.

And then you get this beautiful dashboard that shows you exactly what's going on, like you know, you've got like on a car dashboard, and you can see the change over time, and then you can learn what to do about it and what's going on with your body and how to make adjustments.

And you get all the information supported by all the scientific literature in the world, by knowledge experts, by your own personal data set, and it's really medicine designed for you.

And it's really quite a remarkable thing, and people seem to have taken to it because we have, you know, hundreds of thousand members and people are learning so much about their health, and I've been shocked at the data that we're finding, you know, like we've found all these cancers that I was just reviewing our cancer screening and god, you know, people don't know they have cancer.

I mean, I had a friend that just died like a month ago from breast cancer at forty five years old.

Is heartbreaking, you know.

And now through the blood tests you can get through function health, you can actually see like a liquid biopsy for fifty different cancers.

And I was reviewing the spreadsheet of all the people and what they found and in a follow up, and like they didn't know they had cancer, and then they found it in an early stage and then it saves their lives as opposed to waiting until too late.

So you know, it's always and the whole thing of the metabolic health.

I mean, most doctors don't check insulin, which is it's really important to know about because insulin is what goes up first, not your blood sugar.

Most doctors don't look at the right cholesterol test ApoB is the most important.

Has had a friend send me an article doctor him and look at this article.

It's about this latest new test for predicting heart attack risks.

It's better than any other tests, and like, what is it.

I'm like, I looked it up and it's like, oh, it's called apo B.

I'm like, I've been testing that for thirty years.

It's the most predictive partment.

But people check your LDL cholesterol, that's not the thing that matters.

And so we do that, and we do deeper analysis of your metabolic health, your nutritional health, looking at toxins, your hormones, and we're finding autoimmune diseases.

I mean, I looked it up before I came on the podcast Curious because it you know, about eight percent according to the you know, CDC of Americans have an autommune disease.

But when I looked at our data, we're seeing thirty three percent have a positive automne to anybody, which is incredible.

I mean that's a third of Americans have some either autoimmun disease or pre autoimmun disease.

And there's stuff you can do about it and get to the root cause.

And what's beautiful about it is that we use root cost medicine, not just oh you have an autommunitsease, take this drug or you have high cholesterol, take this drug.

It's like, well, how do I solve this using all the world side of knowledge about how to best do this through lifestyle and dealing with root causes and creating health rather than just mitigating symptoms or suppressing symptoms.

So it's it's pretty exciting.

And I think, you know we now have full body imaging for four and ninety nine.

You know you can get your whole blood test for four nine dollar dollar thirty seven a day.

I'm really impressed by what you offered.

And I love what function Health has done so much that I didn't just invest.

I've got every member of my team and membership.

That's amazing because I couldn't think of a better gift.

That is, if people then accessing their knowledge and knowing what's happening inside their body, like if I want people to perform at work, feel their best, and care about their health.

To me, it felt like the right thing to do.

And so and I know you've actually created a You've created a discount for our community.

Yeah, yeah, for us, Yeah, what are you doing for us?

It's it's functionhealth dot com slash Jay Shetty and you get one hundred dollars off your membership.

It's a membership twice you're testing, so it's you know, four hundred bucks or three ninety nine and uh, and you get to know what's going on.

It's and the gift of health is you know, what you did for your employees is amazing, because there is no better gift than the gift of health.

You only realize that when it when it goes away.

And I've had many episodes in my life where my health has not been great, and that's when you realize just how valuable it is to know sooner, you know earlier and no before and you know, I'm glad.

So that's great.

So function health dot com forward slash Jose Sheddy that's right, one hundred dollars off.

And as I said, I'm an investor and you know, really proud to be involved and really excited to get it out.

I want to talk about the autoimmune diseases, yeah, because it feels like I feel like right now at that age where I'm either hearing about autoimmune or cancer or sadly people dying.

Yeah, more than I ever have in my entire lifetime.

That's not just because I'm getting older though, it's becoming more prevalent.

It is, I mean the hockey stick of chronic diseases is going like this.

It's really striking.

I mean things that were rare one hundred and fifty years ago, you know, turn the or one hundred and twenty years going turn of the nineteen hundreds.

If you had a heart attack in a hospital, it would be like seeing this rare case of malaria in like Manhattan, you know, like all the doctors would rush around to see this unusual case.

Wow, diabetes wasn't even the thing, type two diabetes.

If you look at the records of Mass General and then the eighteen fifties, it wasn't even a diagnosis.

You know, people didn't have it.

So why are we seeing this explosion?

And autommune disease.

They're over one hundred different automun diseases, you know, everything from hashimotis thyroiditis, which is affecting one in five women that's an automne thire condition, one in ten men, lupis, rheumaturistritis, MS colitis, Crone's disease.

There are over one hundred different automune diseases and people are suffering from these things and the drugs that we use are incredibly toxic.

They basically suppressed your immune system.

They have all these side effects, and they're extremely expensive, and they don't necessarily always work that well.

And the question then is why are we doing this?

I mean, this is what functional medicine is about, is what function that's created on the basis of this idea of why not what disease you have?

And what drug do I get?

But why?

And the reason why we're seeing such an explosion about immune disease is a combination of different factors.

One, Our diet has changed dramatically over the last fifty to seventy years because of industrialization of agriculture, the use of pesticides, herbicides, the increasing rates of c section means you don't colonize your gut and sixty percent of your immune systems in your gut, and a lot of aout immune disease is caused by trouble with the gut, the increasing it's a formula feeding, you know, not breast milk, which protects the baby's immune system, is necessary for the development of them.

I mean, twenty five percent of the calories in breast milk is not digestible by the baby.

It's to feed the microbiome, which is amazing.

Yeah, it's crazy.

And when you eat have formula, you don't have that in there, and so the microbombs are disturbed and then you get leaky gut.

We use lots of antibiotics and children, we have accelerated vaccine schedules.

Vaccines, I believe in.

I think they're important.

But like when I was a kid and when my kids were kids, was that long ago, there was you know, a limited set of vaccines and now it's free for all.

And the vaccino that's how you take fifteen or sixteen.

Yeah, it's like seventy two different jabs of shots, and so that that affects your immune system.

And they do they do things that affect your immune system by putting in irritants like aluminum, and then the exposure to environmental chemicals.

It's exploded metals, pesticide.

The average newborn baby today a j has two hundred and eighty seven toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath, including stuff that's been banned for years like DDT and dioxin, PCBs, dalades, flame retardants, lead, mercury, pesticides, herbicides, I mean, you name it, it's in there.

And so all that has an impact, and they're called otogens.

There's a whole science around this that these are environmental toxins that cause autommunity.

And I've seen many patients with autommune diseases that we cured by getting rid of their heavy metals or detoxifying their bodies.

And so these toxins are a huge factor.

And then you've got all the modern stresses.

You know, we low's sleep, you know, we're under too much chronic stress, you know, light pollution, who knows what EMF.

I don't even know if that's the thing, but I'm not saying it is.

I'm saying it is all this stuff that we never had to deal with, and we're just seeing our immune system become sodisregulated.

And the ultra processed food revolution has been another huge factor because in ultra processed food there's all these emulsifiers.

Mulcifiers are basically the things that make stuff creamy.

And you know, like if you ever got some of the like nut milks, and they separate out when you put in your coffee, it's because they don't use the multifiers right, and must fires basically make things creamy, and they're using almost all ulstra processed food and they damage the gut lining and they cause a what we call a leaky gut where the cells come apart and then food and bacteria leak in between your cells.

And then right underneath your cell lining, which is just one cell thick, is most of your immune system.

And think about why why is most of your immune sism in your gut?

Well, it's because where you're exposed to most of the foreign stuff.

Every day, you're putting pounds of foreign food in there, and you're putting all the bacteria from your microbiome.

There's three pounds of bacteria in there that is, you know, basically a sewer, you know, and it's like one you're one cell away from a sewer.

And so when that breaks down, your immune system to go, this isn't me what's going on, and it starts attacking things and then it creates just a lot of mistake and identity things we call molecular mimicry, where it thinks it's attacking a bacteria or food, but then it'll attack your joints or your eyes, or your your your nerves and get MS and your thyroid gland.

So basically we're seeing this explosion and and the beautiful thing is by understanding the root causes that you can actually reverse it.

I had an automune disease.

I actually had mold in my house.

I've gotten everything known to man.

I got lined to these mold and I had I lived an old barn.

I got really bad mold poisoning.

And then on top of that, I had a root canal, had it removed, had an antibiotic.

The antibodic called something called seed diff, which is a bacteria that causes really bad gut infections that turned into all sort of colitis.

My whole intestinal track was just one big red mess and I had to heal it.

And so you know, there is a methodology for creating health.

And that's that's that's that's what I want people to know.

Why function hell.

It's so important because it teaches you how to turn on your own innate healing system.

You've got a healing regenda, repair and renewal system.

That's why I could come back from the dead, because I knew how to turn on, you know, And that's what I want everybody to know.

And that's really why I do what I do, Why have the podcast, why I write books, why travel?

I speaking like you, it's the same the same movie, different different story.

And you know, what are the signs for someone who's listening of a weak immune system and a strong immune system?

Yeah, how do they tell?

I mean, you know, the inflammation immune system are little bit different because you're you know, you're you're you can be inflamed, but have a weaker immune system.

So frequent infections, frequent colds, feeling run down.

I mean, there are signs that that your immune system's not working, and you get you know, less resilient to stress, you get sick more easily, and so there's those are signs that there's problems.

And and one of the things we find through functional health is that so many people have nutritional deficiencies and nutrients like zinc and vitamin D and iron's big role in your immune function.

And it's actually even supplements is such a bad word for supplements because it sounds like something that you know, you're just supplementing.

But it's like, yeah, exactly, that's what I mean.

Right.

The word supplement in and of itself feels like it's an add on, rather than like this is necessary right right, Like I think we're still living in this time where supplements haven't become the norm.

People see it as some health hack tip as opposed to know this is just what your body needs is nutrients.

My joke is, I don't think anybody needs supplements, but only under certain conditions.

They have to hunt and gather their own wild food.

They have to drink pure clean water, be exposed to no environmental toxins, have no chronic stress, sleep nine hours a night, go to bed with the sun, wake up with the time.

Then then if you do all that, you might not need to.

Like I'm the last six the first three, and.

You haven't gone hunting today.

Yeah, And so our soils that become damaged because of the soil right in the way your plants get nutrients is because of the organic matter in the soil.

It has a symbiotic relationship with the microbes in the soil and with the plant roots that then allows it to extract the nutrients.

But if you basically grow plants in dirt, not soil, where there's no nutrients or they're not accessible because the body that the plants can't get them because they don't have the right organic matter to create the symbotic relationship.

Your broccoli today is fifty percent less nutrients than it did fifty years ago.

Plus you know, we do a lot of things to cause more stress for our bodies.

We need more nutrients, and like magnesium is a very big nutritional deficiency because when you're stressed, you pee out magnesium, and then we don't eat a lot of magnesium rich foods like nuts and seeds and beans and leafy greens.

Right, It's not a big part of American's diet.

So a lot of people are low in magnesium and low vitamin D.

We see eighty percent of people being insufficient or deficient in vitamin D, which is incredibly important for immune function.

And I mean COVID.

If your vitamin D was low, you were seventy five percent more likely to end up in the ICU and die, whereas if your vitamin D was over fifty this big Israeli study there were no deaths.

So that's that powerful there.

There.

There are things that regulate almost every biochemical reaction in your body.

And you've got thirty seven billion trillion chemical reactions every second happening every one of those, and that's a big number on you know, nominy zeros is.

I think it's twenty seven zeros And every single one of those reactions requires a nutrient to work as a cofractor for the enzymatic reaction, and most of us are deficient in fact with function health.

We do deep nutritional testing Omega three's vitamin D, all the B vitamins, iron and so forth, and we find sixty seven percent of our members, who you think would be forward thinking about their health, are deficient in nutrients, not at the level that I would think would be optimal, but at the level that prevents a deficiency disease, so like, not the ideal amount, but the bare minimums you don't get like rickets or scurvy or you know, like and that's that's sixty seven persents.

If you've expanded the criteria to be what's optimal, it would probably be even more.

Yeah, it's it's scary to think about it, but it's so important to start being aware right now.

Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an autoimmune disease, Like is it possible.

Well, there's pre autommune disease, like there's pre diabetes or pre hypertension.

And I don't like those terms because they imply that it's you haven't gotten into trouble yet, but you are in trouble.

There is something bad happening, and so you have to actually look at the blood work to help you identify if you're heading in the wrong direction, and you can see, but then you could you could be somebody who's suffering from low grade symptoms.

You might not know it like fire, it is really common.

You might be a little tired, you might be a little constipated.

You might a little dry skin, Your nails might crack a little bit.

You might be losing out of thirugh of your eyebrow.

You might feel little depressed.

You might have lower sex drive, and the things people don't really getting a little bit of weight.

People don't think of these as a disease, but when you add them all together, it's an auto immune thyroid issue, right, and even gut issues.

You know, irritable bewel.

A lot of people have digestive issues, and it's a really continuum from irroo beillel to automune bowel disease, which is where you get colitis or Crow's disease, and so it's a continue A lot of people have this low grade inflammatory stuff going on in their bodies, and it's really it's unfortunate because we know how to fix it.

And this is really what we do in functional medicine.

Is why I think testing and understanding what's going with your body before you get in trouble.

It's like, you know, the first symptom of a heart attack, you know what it is for most people, For fifty percent of people with heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death updeate of heart attack.

Like this guy was telling you about.

He was jogging and he kept having chest pain and he was ignoring it, and then he finally decided to go check it out because his girlfriend made him go, and turned out he had a nine percent blockage and he wouldn't know anym he could have just dropped out of a heart attack like that.

Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors.

Thanks for taking a moment for that.

Now back to the discussion.

What are the shifts we should be making right now?

If someone's listening, they're going to go get the test if they can.

If they can't, because you know, for whatever reason, they don't live in the States because we're not available internationally.

No, not yet, get no, yeah, yeah, I get a lot of that in my comments.

Actually, yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of people I know in Uken, Europe who really want it and Australia and other places.

But you've got your results, you know what's going on.

Where would you encourage people to begin if they they don't have anything serious right now, but they want to make sure they get this.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not trying to say anything here, but I think doing a short term reset is powerful.

The way I think about it is, how how do you turn your body back to its original factory settings.

A baby comes out, it's generally perfect, it's beautiful, it's healthy, everything works right, And then think breakdown.

But imagine it like if your computer is you know, not working or it's on the fritz, and like my WhatsApp wasn't working today and I just had to reboot it right or reboot my computer.

How do you do that with your body?

And that's really what this dietary change that I call the ten day detox side is about.

It's about really putting your body back to its original factory settings.

For most people, it will create a dramatic shift.

If you don't get better from it, it's usually because there's something more serious, like you have lime disease, you have mold exposure that's causing toxicity, you have maybe environmental toxins or lime disease, or something serious that needs another treatment.

But for most people, just a simple ten day approach to resetting your system by getting into sleep, by cutting out the bad stuff, by taking walks, by doing a little breathing exercises, and radically changing your diet.

Oh my god, you could do that at home.

This isn't you don't you know?

And it's basically afford to.

Go on a retreat or do you.

Get percent Most of people do it at all.

And it's so it doesn't really cost you any extra, and maybe it'll cost you less because you're not buying all these extra grab and so days.

And if you try it, it's like the body just has this desire to be healthy, and illness is just your body's best attempt to deal with a really shitty set of circumstances.

Change of circumstances meaning what you're exposed to, your diet, lifestyle, and then you'll change, you know, because ninety three percent, it's been determined, of our health issues are not genetic.

They're from our collective environment.

What we call the exposed home, not our genome.

Or exposed home is what it sounds like.

It's everything that we're exposed to.

It's what we eat, it's movement, it's sleep, it's stress, it's our gut microbio it's environmental toxins.

It's our thoughts.

Our thoughts actually transform a biology.

Literally, it's the biggest pharmacy is between your years, and so all those things you have control over, which is what's so exciting to me.

It's about being empowered to actually make those change.

And people just suffer so badly.

I mean, I think I told you maybe.

Then I did a program with a faith based wellness program with Rick Warren at this church where we got a quarter million pounds loss out for fifteen thousand people in a year by doing a faith based wellness program, and the amount of people that had radical changes in their health was just so remarkable.

This one woman had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

She'd been on every psychiatric medication you could imagine from any deepressants, to anxiety medications, anti psychotic medications.

She was about to commit suicide.

You know.

She was also overweight, and she did this dietary change.

Essentially, I did the faith based wellness program included the Tendee detox diet.

And she's like, I'm completely cured, Like I don't have any depression, I'm off all my medications.

I feel good.

How is that possible?

And you know that's the other thing, Jay, You know, there's so much mental illness.

There's so much depression, anxiety, my poldicgy.

You know, I think more serious things like severe OCD or even schizophrenia.

These things actually are physiological problems.

Are not always emotional problems.

So sometimes they are like you know, your bouse dyes are depressed.

You know, I get it, you know, But a lot of times, and for many people, there there's actually a physiological reason.

You know, we talk about the mind body effect, which how a mind effects the body, which is profound, but there's also the body mind effect.

So if you're magnesium deficient, you can be anxious, right, if you're vitamin D deficient or a Mega three deficient, you can be depressed, or you can have add if you don't have enough folid or be twelve, you can get depressed.

I mean, these are things that you can fix.

If you have heavy metals, which I did, it can cause you to have depression and insomnia and anxiety.

I mean, I'm treating a little girl right now who's got severe OCD and it turned out she had a strep infection that turns into this autoimmune reaction against your brain that's causing her to have OCD behaviors like ticks and weird things that we think is psychological.

So I think, you know, I often call myself the accidental psychiatrist because I was treating people for all these physical things and then these psychiatric problems will get better.

And I wrote a book about it called the ultramind Solution, How to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first, And you can just get that off the table, and then you know, if you have other deeper trauma or things.

Yeah, I think the revolution now in metabolic psychiatry and nutritional psychiatry and then psychedelic medicine and psychiatry are I think going to change the face of mental health care for the long term.

Absolutely.

What are some of the mistakes you see people making and curing autumnin diseases.

What are some of the mistakes?

What are the things we get wrong?

Well, because they don't treat the cause.

It is the biggest thing, you know.

I had a patient when I was a Cleveland clinic who was a business coach, who was fifty years old, and she had a lot of problems.

And I jokingly call myself a holistic doctor because I take care of people the whole list of problems, you know.

And she had everything, you know.

She had irrable bow, she had reflux, she had migraines, she was depressed, she had pre diabetes, and she had this horrible autoimmune disease called soriatic arthritis, you know, the heartbreak of psoriasis, These horrible thick, scaly, red, itchy plaques on your skin, and it also can attack your joints.

And it was attacking your joints.

She was on a drug and she was seen by the top doctors and she was gone a drug that cost fifty thousand dollars and it wasn't really fixing her.

And she was seeing the top specialist for neurology for her migraine, psychiatry for depression, gostrology for her.

God had achronology for her pre diabetes, a rheumatologist for her arthritis and issues, a dermatology.

I was like, she had a doctor for every introver.

And I said, gee, you know you're getting all these medications.

You're not really better.

You're mitigating your symptoms a little bit.

Maybe we think about treating the root cause.

And so, because she had so many digestive symptoms and she made a loss of antibiotics, she made on lots of stayeroids for her that really messed up.

They got too I said, you have reflex, you have bloating after eating.

You have all these gut issues.

Why don't we treat your gut.

So I basically gave her an antibotic to kill off all these bad bugs that were in her gut.

And I gave her in any fungal because she had a lot of fungal overgrowth from all the steroids in the antibotics.

To kill off the bad bugs, I gave her some probotics.

I put her on the ten day ducks tie.

Basically got rid of all the inflammatory foods, got her the sugar processed food.

She comes back in six weeks and she's like, I'm all better.

I mean, what do you mean, Well, I stopped all my medication.

Well, I didn't tell you to do that.

She's like, no, I just was feeling so good.

I stopped everything out of migraines.

I'm not depressed.

My lost twenty pounds, My skin's cleared, my jointstone hurt, my reflex is gone, my ir overbell is gone.

And so if you treat the route, which was her gut in this case, and I just gave her, you know, I just gave her the umlation diet, and I gave her the antibotics and the anti fungals.

I gave her probotics, Vita Madie, some fish oil, not a lot.

In six weeks, not only was she feeling better, but she like, save the healthier system, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.

Yeah, it's it's almost like it sounds like magic, and you go, yeah, no, it's not, because we've just been trained to believe that this way makes sense.

Yeah, well, it's funny.

We're more convinced that a manufactured pill will solve our body than the things that our ancestors have lived off.

That's right, for years and years and years.

That's right.

So if you don't know how to turn on the body's healing system, then yeah, you need medication.

And what's so exciting, Timmy Jay, is like we're in this revolution in medicine right now where we're finally understanding root causes and it's in the scientific literature, but it takes decades for that to get into clinical practice.

I mean, to change medical education, to change reimbursement, to change how doctors practice.

Is just such a It's like it's like we're all walking around thinking the earth is flat when it's really And so this paradigm shift is such a profound change in how we think about disease that it's going to revolutionize everything we do.

And it's and it's only now be accessible to people through things like function because we're able to through technology, be able to get the amazing amount of world scientific literatures.

You know, AI can read it in like five seconds day and it can synthesize it, and then it's your own personal health data set.

It's not like you're you know, doctor's treating you based on a study it was on seventy kilogram white men from Kansas, which doesn't apply to an Indian guy, you know, or somebody who's in like you know, Vietnam, right, And so basically we are treating to the masses where we should be treating to the individual.

We call this precision medicine, personalized medicine.

But medicine should be personalized.

It should be predictive, it should be preventive, and it should be proactive that you actually don't have to react like we do in medicine, but proactive.

And that's really you know, my Lafe's work is not only you know, taking people with very series illnesses in reversing them, but actually getting people earlier.

I mean, Benjamin Franklin said it right, and ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, And so I can give a pound of cure, but it's a lot harder than an ounce of prevention.

What are you most excited about at the forefront of medicine and functional medicine at the moment?

Is it ai?

Is it?

Yeah?

Well, you know I sent you like there's thirty seven billion and trillion chemical reactions in the body.

It's the body so complex, it's it's physics is complex.

Think about how complicated a rocket is.

Like I can't even understand that.

But that's a knowable thing, right Scientists and physicists can figure it out and then send a guide to the moon or build a spaceship that goes to Mars like Elon Musk.

But like, the body is so instantly complex, and we see it in this reductionist way where every different organ has a different specialist and the body is all these different parts.

But that's not how we're designed.

Everything is in the ecosystem, everything connected.

You know, we're one whole web like organism where where everything's interacting with everything else all the time.

And so that paradigm of thinking that way, and functional medicine isn't a test, it's not a supplement, it's not a new specialty.

It's literally a meta framework for thinking about the nature of health and disease based on root causes and based on the body's system, and based on asking the question why not what disease do you have?

And what drug do I get?

But why do I have this?

And how do I create health, not treat disease?

And when I create health, disease goes away as a side effect.

And so that scientific paradigm is now emerging, and before it, you know, you know, it was frustrating for me doing this work for thirty years because you know, just it was hard to convince people like, look, the earth is around like no, no, no, it's flat.

See right there, it's flat, and they go, there's that disease and it's real.

Like yeah, you know, rheumatorized price is a thing, but it's not how we think about it, and we're thinking about it the wrong way.

And so I'm so excited now because of AI and the ability to synthesize massive data sets.

I mean, you have one hundred thousand petabytes of data in your mind microbiome.

A petabyte is a million gigabytes.

Okay, your computer has four terabytes maybe right, which is a thousand gigabytes or something.

I mean, it's just such a massive amount of information that's just your microbiome.

And so your body is so complex, and we need technology and AI to help us start to understand that and then apply it to you as an individual and then help create a roadmap for looking at where your weak points are and how do you correct those and then how do you optimize And so that's what I'm so excited about, and that's that's why at sixty five, I'm like doing the startup.

I mean I was.

I was with one of the one of the investors on a panel and I'm like, She's like, somebody said, well, how do you how do you figure out what companies to invest in?

They go, well, we invest in the founders, and I'm like, well, have you ever had a founder that's been on medicare before?

You know?

I'm like, what am I?

I'm like, I mean, help to live to be one hundred and something.

But you know, I'm doing this because I don't want to see so many people suffering.

They don't have to suffer.

And I get these calls every day from friends and would you help this one?

They help that one.

No one can help me, And I'm like, I'm only one guy.

I could work twenty four hours a day for the rest of my life and I wouldn't make a dent in the amount of suffering there is in the world.

But imagine if we could put, you know, a thousand or one hundred thousand doctors in your pocket that are trained on the future paradigm of medicine and make it accessible to you in real time on a day to day basis to guide you and coach you and support you.

That's a functional health's aiming to do.

And I'm so excited about it because it's like, Wow, we couldn't do this before.

We couldn't take this amazing complexity of human biology and help a single doctor understand.

It's just hard.

Like I see the pattern, so I can look at something quickly and I know in a few minutes like what to do.

But it's the only re is I've seen tens of thousands of patients and millions and millions of biomarkers that I can make those connections, and I'm not that good compared to what technologies can able to do.

Yeah, what do you wish doctors were taught today?

Oh my god, don't get me started.

My daughter just graduate medical school.

She's brilliant, and she's now going to be an orthopedic surgeon, which I think is great because you need that, like you know, if you break your head in.

So that's a kind of medicine that I think is we're really good at, is acute care medicine.

But what she didn't learn about was nutrition, which Okay, we have an a chronic disease epidemic in this country.

It's caused primarily by food.

It can be cured mostly by food, and yet doctors know nothing about food, right, so nutrition, didn't learn about the microbiome, didn't learn about environmental toxins, didn't learn about how to create health, didn't learn about the bodies networks and systems.

Didn't learn about mitochondria.

No, I mean, yes, she got like her first you know semester.

She learned about the crab cycle in biochemistry, but didn't understand how to diagnose people with minochondril issues, which is our energy is powerhouse, and how everything works in our body.

So those are things that doctors don't learn anything about.

Didn't learn about how to optimize your immune function.

Didn't learn about how to treat gut issues in the right way by fixing a leak you got.

So there's so many areas that are part of the framework of functional medicine that they don't learn anything about.

Yeah, so no, wonder when you go and talk about how you're feeling.

Yeah, you're not getting the information that you need.

I mean, you know, you go out doctor, you know, I feel this and that the other thing, and they go, well, you know, I did your exam, that's okay, your live tests look okay because they do a very limited set and you know, you're fine, just go home and take prozac, you know.

But they're only one or two things that's true.

One either you're crazy and making it up, or your doctor's missing something.

And nine times out of ten they're missing something because they don't know how to think.

They don't know how to think about the human body except in a very reductionist way.

And it's just not how things are.

You know, we are a dynamic ecosystem and everything is interact with everything else in real time and changing, and how do you play with that?

How do you as a as a as a practitioner, or even as an individual learn how your body works?

I mean most of us have no clue how our bodies work and how to create a better functioning body.

You know, we take better care of our animals than we do our health, right.

I mean, you wouldn't feed your dog a big mc fries and a coke, would you?

Definitely no?

But we give that to our kids.

Yeah.

Right.

As someone who grew up in London, England and have the National Healthcare Service and then you move to the United States and of course most of it's private and there's not really any healthcare available as far as I know.

You know, what do you think the US healthcare system needs to be focused on?

Yeah, one hundred percent.

Well, I'm excited.

I mean, I'm working right now with Medicare and with NIH on how do things need to change, because they're very open and they're very interested in changing the way we look at things.

And I think, you know, the even having access to good health care, which we don't in this country.

I mean, in the UK you have the NHS, the National Health Service is great, but you know, maybe the quality isn't always as good.

The reality is that most of your health is not happening in the doctor's office.

Eighty to ninety percent of it happens with things that you can have control over.

It happens in your kitchen, It happens you know, where you play and eat and pray and work.

That's where health happens.

I mean, my wife's now studying at Columbia for her master's in public health, and she's just so excited telling me that how she's learning about how they're talking about the real drivers of disease, and it's like eighty to ninety percent is not stuff that the doctor has control over it.

It's the environment that you live in, and it's your choices every day, and so those things you don't really need health care for.

And so I think if we can build a health system that activates people around that, then you won't need the doctor most of the time.

And then they're there for a cute care medicine.

You know, if you I had back surgery, thank god, there's some guy who knows how to deal with a spine infection and can put in hardware and like, you know, kind of build my backup.

Great, thank god.

But you know, but if I if I said to him, like what do I do to recover and become stronger than I was before, He's like, I don't know, just do physical therapy or eat better or very healthy.

How do we hold ultra processed food manufacturers more accountable for getting away with putting excess sugars and multifiers, unidentifiable objects into our food.

Yeah, yeah, good question.

I mean, I think, you know, we've had a pretty lax system of regulation this country, and you know, we have I think ten thousand chemicals that are allowed in our food here in Europe is about four hundred chemicals and and they go through a very different standard of regulation in terms of older processed food, and they they are very restrict restrictive around GMO and around herbicides and lots of things that we don't do here.

And I think, you know, this's changing.

There's this whole Moha movement.

People are waking up.

And I was with my friend a couple of days ago, Jason Karp, who was really founded a Huge Chocolate of people like Huge Chocolate, and he was very vociferous writing a letter as a shareholder of Kellogg's to the company saying, you have fruit loops that you make in America that have all these dyes and chemicals that are known to cause hyperactivity or immune issues or other problems and kids, and in Europe they don't allow it.

And you make the same fruit loops but with natural colorings like from blueberries or whatever.

And basically they were ignoring him.

And then my friend Vonnie Harry, they all went to Battle Creek, Michigan, and they had a protest in the fall in October of twenty four and finally this week Kellogg's agreed they're gonna actually take all that crap out.

Wow.

Yeah, And you know, the FDA has now said they're working with food companies to either voluntarily or mandatorily have them remove food added in colors and dies.

I mean, I have been nonprofit called the Food Fix Campaign.

I wrote a book called Food Fix and a new one's coming out called Food Fix Uncensored next February, and it basically talks about how this problem needs to get fixed from field of the fork and what regulations seem to happen.

But I've been working with my nonprofit for the last five years and it's been amazing.

And the woman who was my key person, who's my seeing eye dog in Washington, is now the governor wife of West Virginia.

She's the first Lady West Virginia, and that was the first state because of her to ban food dies.

And then they also got snap waivers, which means they are going to limit what you can purchase with food stamps, to not be allowed to buy soda or certain kinds of junk food.

And this is happening across the country.

There's like over thirty plus states where now there's uprisings.

And I'm living in Texas right now, and this woman, Senator cold Course is the head of the Healthy Human Services Committee.

She listened to my podcast You're a huge fan, and she got so excited about this that she interested to bill called SB twenty five in Texas that limited the crap and the food, that limited crap in schools, that mandates nutrition education for doctors, that starts a chronic nutrition Advisory group.

And it passed the Senate, it passed the House there and it got signed by the governor into law.

And I testified at the at the hearing.

And so there's this movement happening now which I never thought would happen in my lifetime, that there's a shift, and I think the food companies want to do the right thing, but they're they're all in competition with each other, so no one company can act independently because their competitors will eat their lunch so literally, and so they they now that this is happening at a nationwide level.

There they're fighting and they're kicking and screaming, but it's going to happen.

And the new dietary guidlines are going to come out, which I've helped advise on, and that is really exciting to me to actually have something out there that's going to help guide people and what to eat.

Food labeling is changing and working with the FD on food labeling, hopefully we can make progress on food marketing, you know.

Like that's a big one, you know, like like.

In Europe, if I stuff has some die in it or that's going to cause problem with kids, they'll say, you know, this is bad for your kid, and if you eat, if your kid eats it, they'll get add and whatever, higher activity.

And so the food companies don't want that, so they change their formulations.

So food marketing is a big, big driver of behavior, and these companies know, and they spend thirteen billion dollars marketing on food every year.

Uh.

And there's a lot of ways to fix that.

You know.

The First Amendment might prohibit us from limiting the advertising, but they could have warnings like they do in drugs.

They could you know, prevent them from being having a tax deduction for spending all that money on food marketing.

And there's a lot of waste to put pressure changing.

Medical school education also important because think doctor is more engaged in this.

So it's it's a it's a multi headed hydro that needss multiple solutions across a lot of government policies and also people making different choices at the checkout count you can vote with your fork.

Mark, I am so grateful that you survived.

Yeah, You've got so much work to do, and I'm so thankful that you're doing it because you know, you are a startup founder at sixty five year, You've got so much renewed energy and enthusiasm.

It's such important work, and I'm so grateful that you came back on the show to share it because it's important work all the way from the micro level of the individual to the macro level of talking about government level change and national level change.

And I'm so excited for people to listen to this conversation because I think there's some really quick fixes that people can take completely.

And there's been a lot of warnings in this episode that I really appreciate you shared.

Just I think sometimes we need to feel a sense of just how challenging it will be, yeah if we don't make changes now, And I feel like you've really headlined some of them for us, So thank you so much.

Yeah, I mean, you know, Jane, For me, it's like people people have all these things that they suffer with, and they just think that they're.

They've got to live that way.

Yeah, They've got to live with that.

And and for me, I've been so sick so many times from so many different things, and I've had to recover, and I see so many millions of people suffering needlessly.

I mean, I can't end war, I can't end floods, and you know, Famin and I mean, but like, this is a solvable problem, and they're not hearing about it, they're not learning about it.

And that's why I'm obsessed, and that's why I'm a founder of a company sixty five years old.

Yeah, so grateful, Mark, thank you so much.

Again.

I'm encouraging everyone to head over to function health dot com forward slash Jay Shetty to get one hundred dollars off to get all your one hundred and ten biomarkers.

Of course, as I said, I'm an investor in the company, So very excited to give access to the knowledge and information that you need to manage your health better, to take to your doctor, to have healthier conversations, to actually be aware.

And I think all of our change, as we know, starts ad awareness and that's the baseline, that's the foundation.

So very excited for you to check that out.

I hope you'll make the most of it.

I want to give a big shout out to doctor mark Himen again for being here and thank you so much for sharing so many incredible insights.

I hope you keep coming back please, I hope you stay well and again let me know what you're trying, what you're testing, or you're giving a go.

Maybe you're going to try the ten day detos, whether you're going to do it at home or with Dr mark Heimen.

Maybe you're going to go off and get all the access to the data through function Health and you're going to take a look at what you can avoid for you and your family.

Or maybe you're going to start making little changes, whether it's to your diet by adding more fiber, taking out ultra processed foods, getting better sleep.

All these tiny shifts can make such a huge difference.

Tag me and doctor Mark Himen on Instagram x TikTok.

Let us know what you're changing, what you're shifting, what you're working on.

I love seeing how you're turning these episodes into action, and I'll see you again on another episode of On Purpose.

Thanks for listening and thank you Mark.

Thanks see.

If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your life by changing your brain.

If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain.

You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scam over one thousand convicted felons and over one hundred murderers, and their brains are very damaged.