these companies have organizations called taste institutes where they hire craving experts and they they design their products in a specific way to create the bliss point of the food what is that perfect crunch taste sugar whatever it is salt and it's about dopamine it's like heroin or cocaine one of the top executives from one of the big soda companies said to me mark you want to come to our lab and see what we've done we've
actually been able to extract the taste buds from humans and we grow them in a culture in the lab and then we can stimulate them and see what's happening i'm like you do not want me to go in there [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose i'm so glad you come back every single week to listen learn and grow and today i'm super excited to be interviewing a guest that i actually had on instagram live a few months ago
and we weren't able to dive in even as deep as i wanted to in that instagram live which was amazing so i thought why not bring him onto the podcast where i can really quiz him on the things that i'm interested about the things that i know insights that will really help you and of course get to know each other better so today's guest is none other than dr mark hyman he's a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader
speaker educator and advocate in the field of functional medicine he's the founder and director of the ultra wellness center the head of strategy and innovation of the cleveland clinic center for functional medicine a 13-time new york times best-selling author and board president for clinical affairs for the institute for functional medicine now he's the host of one of the leading health podcasts the doctor's
pharmacy highly recommend listening to it and checking it out dr hyman is a regular medical contributor to several tv shows and networks including cbs this morning today good morning america the view and cnn he's also an advisor and guest co-host on the dr oz show this is an episode i'm so excited about where we will dive deep into how to save our health our economy our communities and our planet one bite at a time
with the discussion about his latest book food fix welcome to the show mark i'm in thank you so sweet thank you jay so fun to be with you oh it's so fun to be with you i loved our instagram live we were just sharing we did that just before lockdown and the pandemic and and everything kind of shifted and i'm remembering back to doing it with you and i i loved it so much and i'm so glad we're actually getting to spend this
quality time together now and really dive into this great book you've written thank you thank you it was a it was really the combination of life's work to connect the dots between everything we love and care about and how they're connected in ways that we don't imagine but that we actually solve the problem of food we solve the problems of chronic disease of the stress in our economy of the disintegration of our communities
of racism of environmental destruction climate change national security kids education i mean all of this connected to food and and it's really such a joy to be able to share how those things are connected and actually what we can do about it because it's not called food apocalypse it's called food fix absolutely absolutely and i can't wait to dive into all areas of that with you because i think we don't realize how powerful
and influential food is not just in our bodies not just in our minds but in the world and i know that inside this book you've gone into so many studies and so much research to really show the impact of food in the world but i actually want to start somewhat a bit more personal with you because i uh was discovering some fascinating things about you and this was one that i loved uh that i feel there's no better way to
start this interview than letting our audience know that you were a yoga teacher before you were a doctor that is true i mean that fascinated me when i was i was like wow that's cool like yeah actually i made i majored in buddhism and asian studies in asian religions uh in college and um i wasn't going to be a doctor i was going to be a monk and i actually decided well you know i'm not sure i want to be a monk maybe i'll
just try to be a doctor and be a service in that way and it was really driven out of the notion of compassion and service that was so embedded in buddhism and i learned about in college so yeah and i then become a yoga teacher and uh decided to become a doctor after that so it wasn't an afterthought and i'm still working at it i love that i love that but when we get onto that it means you're thinking like a monk for sure so i i love that but um
i tell me about how you think that tell me a bit more about that compassion piece that you were sharing there because i think it's really interesting that you know people get involved in medicine for so many reasons people get involved in being authors for so many reasons but it sounds like your your kind of foundation was one thing to help people wanting to make a difference yeah that was good i mean i think you know when i really
studied buddhism you know obviously looking for answers as a young man of 18 19 years old and what's the truth and what's the meaning of life and in it i realized it was a description of how to heal suffering and the focus of buddhism isn't a religion it's a it's a methodology for healing and relieving suffering and understanding that the way our minds work that cause us to suffer so much and i began to really focus on this
notion of how we don't have to suffer and why we suffer and and it was really that led me to understanding that i could actually be in that space of service and working on healing through not just you know being a monk but actually being a doctor and and actually helping patients and people understand how to heal chronic disease which is what i do and so i i think you know there's so much suffering in the world there's so much
burden that everybody suffers from both psychologically physically and so many different ways and i was really drawn to doing something to help deal with that and and that's really what led me to becoming a doctor yeah that's beautiful thank you for sharing that i think it's uh it's a really unique way of looking at it because i think for so many of us sometimes we can be dealing with physical or emotional
pain or issues for such a long time before we even think that there's something we need to do about it yeah sometimes people are living with chronic issues for such a long time and we we don't really listen or hear from the body or from the mind what we need to change so when you look at it that way that you can change what suffering you choose and what you allow in it's it's huge tell me uh one more thing oh sorry go on
you're going to say something no you'll say you know like what's your mission in life you know it's like it's really to end needless suffering there's some suffering you can't avoid but there there is a lot of needless suffering and and the place where i i feel most effective is really helping people understand that that they they can't heal from chronic disease using a new strategy which is functional medicine it's really an
approach of using food as medicine but it's understanding the root causes it's understanding the body the system it's really helping restore and regenerate health as opposed to treat disease and and people suffer necessarily and i think this this goal of of for my life has really been to sort of bring this way of thinking and and helping people into into a broader perspective and that's really what i do at cleveland clinic is
we're publishing research on this it's really gratifying to see that actually that it's catching on that people now understand what this is that they understand that our current medical paradigm isn't really solving a lot of their problems and you know i i got there because i was sick i got very very ill when i was young from chronic fatigue living in china got mercury poisoning and ended up having as you know my body
just collapsed and i had to literally reverse engineer my way to health using principles of functional medicine of how to restore my health and and i realized it was applicable to so many patients you know people with autoimmune diseases and digestive disorders and mood disorders and alzheimer's and autism diabetes and metabolic issues all the things that people suffer from that we don't really deal well with traditional medicine is what i
really focused on yeah that's that's incredible and i love how so much of the good we do always comes from some sort of pain in our own life it's you know it's it's it's amazing that you've been able to go and take it so far and not just take it far but you're really challenging the status quo let's start there actually we in food fix uh you know i doubt people take the time to actually think that the food industry has an
agenda of their own but can you share some ways in which the industry is strategic and how it advances its own goals and missions i feel like oh boy that's a can of worm so uh there are uh a lot of unintended consequences that have led to our current food system that were born out of good intentions right we wanted to feed the world we wanted to have the ability to grow lots of food for a lot of people and provide a lot of
calories at scale and modernize agriculture and and that was happening in the 50s and 60s which led to this commercialization of of industrial agriculture which led to enormous amounts of starchy industrial food being produced right so it was we were all enamored with you know astronaut food and processed food and tang instead of orange juice and unfortunately that's led to a method of growing food that's produced
the worst food on the planet it's mostly ultra processed food which is made from soy corn and wheat in different extruded colors size shapes and forms it's all deadly about 60 of our calories and it's also led to destruction the environment through destruction of the soil and biodiversity of plants and animals and insects and also stresses on our water and and increasing climate change and all the pollution from the incredible amount
of pesticides and herbicides and we use 6 billion pounds around the world of glyphosate which is pretty toxic and we use you know 400 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer which has all kinds of devastating consequences so the way we're growing the food and the food that we're growing is devastating our health and devastating planetary health and and and so the problem is that the food industry is the biggest industry on
the planet it's 15 billion sorry trillion with a t dollar industry uh that is now trying to maintain the status quo unfortunately which is not a good one so it wasn't like they said oh we're going to make people sick and fat and we're going to destroy the environment they just didn't know but now they know and so there's a very concert effort to control our food policy which is you know what as a doctor why would i be caring about
politics and food policy but it occurred to me as i'm sitting in my office seeing patients one-on-one that i can't cure diabetes in my office it's cured in the kitchen in the grocery store on the farm and i need to sort of look upstream and look at the root causes and they begin to say well what's causing the food that they're eating that's making them sick well it's the food system what causes the food system
it's our food policies and why do we have the food policies we have because it's a food lobby that drives that and so they drive a lot of the status quo and that and they do it in in in they do it in government policy and we spend half a billion dollars just on the farm bill uh in one year in 19 i think in 2005 the uh the gmo labeling law was defeated uh because the food industry collectively spent 192 million dollars
on one bill in the lobby uh and they do this uh by driving our dietary guidelines policy our agricultural policies they promote the growth of these um raw materials or commodities for ultra processed food they do it through controlling what we can say on food labels uh they control the the restrictions on marketing so we can't actually limit marketing for junk food and across the whole you know multiple ten agencies of the government
there's there's so many policies that are influencing our food system that are often at odds with each other contradictory but they're in the interest of the food industry so so that's happening and then they're also co-opting science so the national institute of health spends a billion dollars on research for nutrition food industry spends 12 billion most of its propaganda like you know if the dairy council says milk
is nature's perfect food well all the studies show that or coca-cola finds it you know when they fund a study that obesity has nothing to do with soda you know so it doesn't make sense they also fund uh uh groups that are friend groups like the american council on science and health which sounds like a great noble cause with crop life or you know uh the group for sustainable agriculture and they're all
front groups for the food industry to propagate their agenda and create misinformation uh and then there's the co-op uh public health groups like the american heart association american diabetes association academy nutrition dietetics 40 of their budget is from the food industry so they're they're they're not giving independent advice and then they they co-op uh social groups like the naacp and hispanic federation and groups that
are doing you know good in the world they fund them for for example i i was um i was showing a movie as that was in this a number of years called fed up which is about childhood obesity and the the problems we have with the food industry and sugar and starch and i went down there and i met with the the head of the ebony baptist church which is martin luther king's church met with his daughter bernice king and they were very
excited to get behind this and and have a screening at the king center atlanta and i was excited about this and a few days later i got a call said we can't have this showing at the king center i'm like why so well coca-cola funds the food industry funds the king center so it's pretty frightening when you see all these different strategies to target certain groups to put out wrong science to support misinformation through these front
groups through influencing public health groups through controlling policy and and it's it's it's a really devastating effect which has led to the fact that six out of ten americans have a chronic disease that 75 percent of us are overweight that 42 are obese that 88 are metabolically unhealthy i mean just take that in for a minute 12 percent of americans are metabolically healthy that means 88 are not and and these
people are more risk for covet 19 and other other chronic diseases so we really have this this crisis moment here and and i think we need to understand how all these things are related and then we need to design a strategy to to both from a grassroots level from a business innovation level from philanthropy and from clearly policy to change what's happening wow i mean that that is uh one news update in in a great way i was
with you the whole time you know when when i hear that and i think about my community my audience listening or watching or or anyone consuming this right now it's like it can feel very overwhelming to an individual for the individual that yes doesn't have the feeling of just like there's two things that come to mind one is like do these people realize that they're actually destroying people's lives because you know it almost at the end of
the day it's like you said it's not a conspiracy theory it's not like it started that way but now that people are aware and we continue to fund it in that direction it may leave people feeling quite helpless where is a great place for people to get started of course this book for people to get educated because i feel like the biggest challenge in making choices when you're like oh my god i can't trust the labels
i can't trust uh the the ingredients on the back where do people trust where do they find trust is really yeah well you know i spent a lot of time when i wrote the book food fix to dive into practical solutions both for individuals for businesses policies and i created a food fix action guide it's free they can go to foodfixbook.com and download it essentially it gives you 20 of the top things you can do as citizens and
individuals to have an impact to change change your health and change society and change planetary health and drive policy and drive businesses and it works when we when we change what we want to do we vote with our wallet we vote with our voice we vote with our fork and we vote with our vote we see massive change i mean general mills and danone which are two big food companies are now funding farmers to convert their lands to
regenerative agriculture so they're literally stepping up and doing what the government isn't doing and funding farmers to transform agriculture to produce nutrient-dense food in a way that restores the soil restores the plant nutrition and restores human health that that's groundbreaking and it's because we we can make those choices so i talk about how do you become a regenetarian how do you regenerate your own health
and how do you regenerate planetary health and our social communities and their health and it's pretty simple right it's eating real food it's not buying into the industrial food that we're all eating which is hard to do for some people but i get real clear resources on what to look for where to buy things where to buy things that are not necessarily expensive because people think it's expensive to do this but actually can be done
really at scale in a way that isn't going to break the bank you have to become a smart consumer you have to read food labels you have to seek out different sources of food whether it's community support agriculture or farmers markets or or online retailers that sell direct to consumer like thrive market or mariposa ranch which actually sell regeneratively raised beef and other animal foods that are really healthy for you and there's
things you can do if you if you get inspired in your own community you can be an agent of change right maybe you want to get your local government to start a compost ordinance you'll compost your food because food waste is a huge problem like 40 of our food is wasted and it's one of the biggest drivers of climate change it's bigger there's a bigger contributor methane than cows and it's all your vegetables
you're throwing in the in the compost that i mean in the in the landfill and you can you can actually um start to understand how to how to do these things for yourself you maybe have a compost pile in your in your group if you want to become an active activist you can turn up the heat on your politicians and and food companies by finding organizations that are doing it and supporting them or lobbying your representatives i mean you
can actually have an impact locally and you can decide maybe you want to work in your school and help the school lunch and nutrition be better and people have done that and so in the book just full of examples of actually how to take control of your own health and your own life and your own community and it's working i mean it's why we're seeing the changes we're seeing yeah absolutely and thank you for
creating that action guide everyone that's foodfixbook.com if you want to go and grab that because i think that's what people are looking for i really believe that people are looking for action guides because that's where they know they need to start and one of the things i'm fascinated by when i was looking at the book and i've been looking at your work you talk about how i think it's like the average
child between something like 2 and 13 or 14 you say like sees on average like 10 to 11 junk food ads per day on oh it's terrible i mean the average kid sees probably 10 000 ads a year and that's television now we're seeing stealth advertising so this a lot of these studies were done on food marketing to kids it was there's about 17 billion dollars spent in 2004 when it was tracked on junk food advertising to kids and the worst the food
the the more the ads and the the worse the ads were so and and now facebook for example last year had you know 500 billion ads for junk food on facebook right it's just it's just unbelievable how much and they're stealth uh games for kids like advert games where they're literally embedded propaganda for food companies so little mcdonald's go to the mcdonald's store and go to you know get your burger king whatever it's
it's it's terrifying so we see the the biggest impact actually is this changes in food marketing and in this country there's the first amendment you can't restrict people's right first you know right right to free speech and it's you know but i don't think there's any law that prohibits us from protecting our children from these kinds of messages because they can't tell the difference between uh reality and an ad until they're about
eight or nine years old and they're targeting these kids and in chile when they actually repealed the ability or remove the ability for these companies to market between 6 a.m and like i think 10 p.m the there was dramatic reduction in the use of these foods and dramatic reductions in obesity but this country doesn't want to do that because it's it's such a it's such a big money maker for these companies yeah that's that's that's really
alarming because ultimately the people making the decisions are obviously aware that the food's not healthy for people and it's not going to benefit their body or their mind but they still continue to invest in you know creating challenges for kids and you know i always whenever i get asked randomly to invest or be a spokesperson for different brands or whatever it may be and uh whenever it's something that's aimed
at young people i'm always just like well would you let how old you i always ask you how do your son or daughter and then tell me their age and i'll be like would you recommend them to use this product and the amount of times i've heard people say no i wouldn't but i'm like but you're selling this like that you know and it it i'm just so confused by that do you think that that's do you think that's the level at which
we have to change it like it needs to change on the level where people go my profitability is not important not as important as people's children like yeah i think that's changing you know i was really excited to hear you know there's a group called the business roundtable which is all the top businesses in america they get together the ceos and the last meeting they they made a stand they said we have to look not only at
shareholder value but stakeholder value meaning what is the impact of our company on our customers on the workers you know on the environment you know who are the stakeholders in the products we're creating and it's not just about profit and shareholder value which i thought was a big step forward so i think we're seeing more movements towards conscious capitalism but there's definitely entrenched
companies that just don't want to change and they're not they're not going to do it voluntarily so there has to be sort of a parallel system that grows up that that shows that this can happen and i think we're doing it and i want it to happen faster but i i think it's i think it's happening yeah and how much of it is also and and i know you you know the answer to this but it's how much of it also is is our addiction and the habits
because of the way those products have been created so we also find it hard to let go of them so i'll give you a personal example you know i grew up eating four sugar products a day uh when i was young and so sorry for chocolate products today sorry not fresh chocolate products today and so i would eat a chocolate biscuit a chocolate bar a chocolate ice cream and a chocolate yogurt nearly every day of my life
and i was overweight as a child uh i struggled with it whether it was bullying or whether it was just feeling unhealthy and as i grew older i started to realize that i was addicted to sugar especially in chocolate and i got so used to having it and it took me to who i've talked to you about before meeting my wife who was able to find me alternatives because that's what i said to my wife i was like i need an alternative if i'm gonna have
to shake this habit yeah and so i ended up finding things sweetened with monk fruit and yeah and other things which have been amazing but that's good for you monk fruit right i know how ironic i do not own the brand i have any affiliation with it whatsoever but but the intriguing thing to me about that is that there are alternatives that exist but but i want to share this for the audience it's like i get what it feels like to be
addicted to a food that may not be good for you but tell us about how much we're addicted to these things yeah i mean this is a real problem jay and i think most people don't realize it and they internalize the feelings they have about what they eat and blame themselves so oh why can't i stop eating this oh i'm gaining weight i just can't stop myself and they they think it's their fault that they're overweight or that they're sick
and that is just a bunch of nonsense and scientific nonsense because when you look at the science of of these foods these ultra processed pulverized foods that are high in starch and sugar they're really designed to hijack our brain chemistry our hormones and our metabolism in a very specific way and and the um these companies have organizations called taste institutes where they hire craving experts in the science of craving and they they
design their products in a specific way to create the bliss point of the food what is that perfect crunch taste sugar whatever it is salt is going to make you go boom and have this pleasure sensation and it's about dopamine it's like heroin or cocaine and it works in the same area of the brain and and it's not just a theory they know this uh of course they deny it although one of one of the top executives from
one of the big soda companies said to me mark you want to come to our lab and see see what we've done we've actually been able to extract the taste buds from humans and we grow them in a culture in the lab and then we can stimulate them and see what's happening like you do not want me to go in there because i don't put this all over social media and uh it's a very scary thing and so the science has shown for example that
if you take a group of overweight guys and one day you give them a milkshake that's a regular milkshake and the next day you get my trick milkshake which is exactly the same except for the way in which the sugar is absorbed so there's starch and there's the same carbohydrate the same protein the same fat the same fiber the same calories exactly the same and they taste the same so they don't know what they're drinking
when they found that when they had the one that had the sugar that was absorbed quickly compared to the one that's absorbed slowly it created this pattern in their brain that lit up the same area called the nucleus accumbens as heroin or cocaine and you can see it on a functional mri so this is not just a theory that oh it's maybe addictive it's not really a true addiction it actually is and when they looked at
their other biomarkers or blood levels of insulin sugar adrenaline cortisol stress hormones you literally eat sugar your stress hormones go up so you can be meditating all day but if you're eating sugar all day you know you're in trouble and i think we don't understand how powerful these foods are and how they hijack our biology but within a very short time literally just 10 days or less you literally can reset your biology
reset your brain chemistry reset your hormones and your taste buds and get out and i remember i ran this uh course once in a couple which is a yoga center near me i know it yeah yeah and um and it was it was it was sort of a sugar detox and this woman came in she's like there's no way i can do this i've been addicted to sugar my whole time my whole life i'm never gonna be able to get off this i said just do exactly what i'm saying
and just try to do this and eat in a way that's gonna reset your biology because food is medicine and she's like okay i'll try it with day two she's like i can't believe it anymore cravings i don't want it i don't need it it's like my whole biology has changed so i think people can be very empowered by by making those kinds of changes and and does it just just to dive into that slightly a tiny bit more does should that change
for people be extreme or is it incremental so it's like let's say someone's listening they got it they they are consuming too much sugar or they're having too many sodas or whatever is it like they should go the next no sodas what's that almost that 10-day program what yeah so do you have like one ounce less of soda a day or 12 sodas is 11 okay you know i i think as a doctor um you know i want people to be able to have the experience
of health you know it's like an awakening i want them to actually quickly be able to experience that so i usually convince people to do a dramatic change for a short time you know like a week or ten days and then their bodies tell them how they feel like oh my god my migraines are gone my digestion is better i'm sleeping better my sinus drip is gone you know my skin's clearing up my acne is gone i feel
better i don't cravings my energy is good and they go well wow i'm getting the connection between what i eat and how i feel so i always like to give people that experience and i i created a program called the 10 day reset uh and it's essentially giving them that opportunity you can download it free at getpharmacy.com it's just a simple way of eating in a specific time frame in a specific way that's going to really regulate your
your biology because every bite of food you take regulates your entire biology it changes your gene expression it changes your hormones your brain chemistry your immune system your microbiome everything literally with every bite and when you understand that you can upgrade or downgrade your biology literally with every bite your biological software can change you can really see rapid changes and we've seen incredible
things from people you know getting off insulin in three days for example so it's really powerful and people make the choice to try this and i think you know tiny steps and tiny habit changes are good and vijay fog talks about this for some things but i think if you really want to see the power of this you know a short-term dramatic change can give you enormous benefit i'm completely with you on that i i think that
when you experience something immersively in an extreme way you're more likely to quickly feel the benefits of it and to recognize it's powerful now that may mean you may go back to your old habit quicker but you now know what you're trying to move towards as opposed to not having a tangible experience so i'm perfectly with you i wanted to check that with it with an expert that definitely i i can totally relate uh relate to that
tell me about you talk a lot about in the book and and what i'm really trying to do for anyone who's listening or watching right now is the book is just fun and you can already tell dr mark hyman is a phenomenal storyteller he's got a ton of great studies that you know i i'm a i'm massively into studies and so that is i'm like i i get really fascinated and intrigued the book is full of the the insights the the tools and the actions that you
can take in each of these areas but i do believe that the first step is education and awareness so i'm hoping that as you're listening to this the podcast is going to give you the insight about each of these areas of our life that food impacts but when you read the book that's going to give you the full set of you know what part of it you need to change and where the action is so what i'm fascinated by the book is you
talk a lot about how there's food racism and i think that this is so obviously uh relevant right now yeah and it's so important for people to understand because i think either we don't believe it exists or we're so consumed by it that we we're not going to explain that concept to us well i mean i think you know we we have certain populations in this country that are so disproportionately affected by chronic disease uh and by poor health
uh the african-american community hispanic community native american communities and when you look at covet 19 it is far and away hurting these populations more than anybody else you know for example in louisiana and chicago african americans are 30 of the population but 70 of the deaths you know native americans are experiencing the same thing and and they if you're african-american in america you have twice the rate of
getting diabetes you have probably four times the rate of getting kidney failure and three and a half times uh likely uh to get amputations because of diabetes uh you're uh and you're targeted more than the the rest of the population then food marketing is often more directed to minorities uh and and we see this this is from yale's studies that have shown that we actually are targeting these populations more so there
these health disparities are huge and there are a lot of reasons for it i mean there's called structural violence you know we talk about structural racism but there's a bigger concept which is what are the structural violence the social economic political conditions environmental conditions that are driving disease right we see this with other infectious disease or chronic disease and and this is what we have in america
we have this structural violence that has led to incredible amounts of disease in these populations it's it's leading to these health disparities and we we have to understand why and the reasons are complex right there's the racism issues and the segregation we had and the lack of access to education housing and opportunity and funding and there's a lot of issues but the problem with food is that is it it
drives these populations to be more sick less able to learn in school less able to succeed in life and more likely to get disability in chronic disease as they get older so we see this sort of just dismantling of these populations and scale in ways that we don't see in other populations and it's it's uh it's really heartbreaking because it's it's so fixable and i've seen this happen you know i it went down and it's even if you're
poor and you're white a lot of these things are still evident and it's part of that movie fed up i went down to this little town in easley south carolina there was a family of five living in a trailer food stamps and disability the father was 42 already on dialysis from kidney failure from diabetes the mother was like overweight two plus 100 pounds the son was practically diabetic at 16. and i said listen
i'm not going to lecture you let's just cook a meal together here's what's in your kitchen like here's all the junk and i showed them everything that they were eating they thought was fine a cool whip which said zero trans fat but was all trans fat because the fda left a loophole that said if you have less than half a gram per serving you can say no trans fat but it's all air so it's just like it's just all the food industry influence and they
were like horrified and then i said let's cook a meal of turkey chili let's create a nice salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing and salt and pepper let's stir fry some asparagus let's roast some sweet potatoes simple simple meal it wasn't expensive uh and they they actually loved it they never cooked in their kitchen before and i just get a little bit education i said here's a guide on on how to eat well for less good food
on a tight budget from the environmental working group and uh where i'm on the board and i and i gave them a cookbook i said you can do this and they did it and within a year they lost 200 pounds together the father was able to lose enough to get a new kidney the son lost 50 but then went to work at bojangles which is a fast food restaurant down in the south and still facing a job for these kids
there and he gained 50 pounds it's like it's playing an alcoholic to work in a bar and and then he figured it out and he lost 138 pounds and he got into medical school he asked me to write a letter recommendation so people can can actually come out of this if they're given the right education tools but i've worked in these communities and populations and they just don't know they just are unaware of this sort of level of food
racism and food uh and food um even apartheid is happening in these communities where you see the lack of ability to access food and lack of ability to find you know quality ingredients because they're buying food at the gas station that's where they get their food yeah thank you so much for raising awareness about this super important issue because i feel like it's it's just not talked about no no yeah no it's internalized you know
like i i went on a rafting trip and i write a story in the book uh with a hopi chief was a native american chief and they he lives in one of the oldest uh inhabited cities in america robbie which has been somebody's lived in there for over a thousand years and he was very very overweight and he was just struggling to get down to the raft and threw up because he just was so out of shape and we got on the raft and
we kind of got to know each other i said you know you can actually fix this you can get rid of your diabetes and so what do i have to do he said well um i i said well you have to get rid of the starch and sugar in your diet the sodas and sweets and all that he's like wow well okay but what are we gonna do for our traditional hopi ceremonial foods we have these traditional hopey ceremonial foods and i'm like
what foods it's like cookies cakes pies i'm like thinking to myself those are not your traditional ceremonial foods and what's happened was that the government put everybody on renovations they cut off their food supply and their traditional ways of hunting or fishing or even growing food they diverted and hopefully as they diverted their water so they had no access to rivers anymore and then they piled in these commodity foods
flour sugar and shortening right and that became their diet and they these government commodities were the staples so they made indian fried bread and indian tacos there was nothing indian about that and and and these foods are so so toxic and now that's why we see 80 of them have diabetes by the time they're 30 and life expectancy in some of these communities is is 46. and it's terrible and it's not just the native american
communities but he's internalized this this food concepts that he thinks are his traditional foods and this is in true in the african american communities latino communities uh and you know i think in chicago um there's something called the chicago loop if you live outside the loop your life expectancy is 16 years less if you take a subway from midtown manhattan to the bronx which is a very poor african-american communities
your life expectancies goes down six months for every subway stop you know to harlem and then to the bronx so these things are are really not talked about much and i gave a lecture a few years ago was on the 50th anniversary of martin luther king junior's assassination at the harlem riverside church and it was really about food oppression and you know it was a little intimidating for me because mostly african-american
community i'm a white jewish guy from new york and what do i know about it but uh it was it was you know governor cuomo spoke there i spoke and and i i just was able to share what i was seeing from the science and from the data about how these communities were being affected and it was it was an incredible response and people really resonating with a very short ten minute talk you can find it online just do hymen food impression you'll
find it but it's it sort of is really catapulted me into really trying to raise these issues because we can't we can't resurrect our communities unless we have resurrect our health and and we can't resurrect our health unless we resurrect our food and we can't resurrect our food until we fix the food system and fix the agriculture and sort of pull that thread that connects everything together yeah absolutely and what i'm trying to
do in our interview today is is really understand that the the role of the individual and educating the individual because i feel like if the individual is educated then we'll start to see this real change tell me about we've talked we've definitely tapped into this but we talked a lot about how it impacts our physical health but i know in the book you also talk about how nutrition and food can actually be medicine for
our mental health yeah and and i think that this is this link again i i feel like what you're doing in the book is just topics that i at least at least i can be honest and say i'm not hearing about in a non-conspiracy theory if i hear about some of this stuff it's always who loves conspiracy theories i don't love conspiracy theories i i like uh i like data and and fact and discussion and change yeah nation and so that's what i think you do
so well in this book but let's talk to me about the connection between mental health and and our diets yeah you know uh jay it was it was a surprise to me i i was practicing functional medicine working with patients they come up with these physical complaints they'd have an autoimmune disease or they would have some digestive issues or whatever was going on or they'd have add whatever and i and i would i would
treat them and restore their health by dealing with restoring these basic biological systems your gut your immune system your detoxification system your hormones all the things that we we do in functional medicine and and a lot of it's using food as medicine and then they would report back dr hyman i don't know what happened but my depression is gone my panic attacks are gone my aed is better my memory is better my brain fog's gone
i'm like what's going on here and i began to really investigate what was happening and i sort of jokingly call myself the accidental psychiatrist because i was treating people's body and their brain was getting better and i began to realize that you know let's just take depression for example you know depression turns out is an inflammatory disease which we don't think of it's like you know it's like a sore throat but it's in
your brain and your brain you know doesn't hurt but it can be depressed or feel sad or be anxious or have ocd or atd or whatever and and so it has different ways of expressing that inflammation whether it's alzheimer's even as an inflammatory disease autism is inflammatory and the question is what's driving the inflammation and it's our primarily our inflammatory process nutrient poor diet that's this
industrial diet it's lacking the nutrients that our bodies and our brains need to function and i i just saw case after case after i started people on a whole foods diet took off the processed food got rid of inflammatory foods like gluten dairy got rid of sugar gave them give them a moment to sort of heal and then put in the nutrients that their bodies needed miracles were happening and i and i began to sort of go wow you know the
body is so connected to the brain and so yes there's a mind-body effect but there's also a body mind effect and that body mind effect is worth fixing because you can do something about it you know if you want to deal with your mental health issues if you want to become enlightened it's a lot easier to do it if you deal with the problems first you know if you're if your gut is healthy if you are not low thyroid functioning
if your nutrition levels are vitamin d is good or your b12 level is good it's much easier to actually get to what you want to do in terms of your spiritual goals or your personal goals if you are feeling good right it's a lot harder to get enlightened if you're mercury poisoning or you have you know some nasty thing going on in your body and so so this really was the the genesis of this book the ultramine solution about how we
fix our minds and our bodies by fixing our body first something we don't have to work on our minds as well because that's that's that's your lane but but it's uh it's it's it was it was such an insight for me to go wow there's so many people suffering from mental health issues that are driven by physical issues no it's it's 1 000 it's all interconnected and even i find like sometimes people need their minds help
to change their body and they need their bodies help to change their mind it's it's you know it's and i think the the fixation over either or or where do i start it's almost like we need to be absorbed in all of it like i found that and i i can identify with what you're saying that i was someone who focused a lot on my mind and was able to find a lot of peace and calm in my mind but then i found that i'd neglected my body
and it's almost like real alignment in your life is felt when your body and mind are aligned right you can't have a advanced mind and a neglected body that's not alignment that's going to constantly cause friction in your life and it's the same with what you're saying where if people are feeling mind fog or uh struggling with a mental health illness and they're not taking care of their body and like you said their brain
yeah then then again you can't switch that so i i totally see the interconnectedness and i hope more and more people listening will realize that when you read the book food fix that you'll be able to start making those tweaks that you need to in your lifestyle yeah even education you know we talk about in the book and how our kids are so impaired i mean you know one in 10 kids has add kids have learning difficulties
dyslexia challenges with you know academic performance and the cdc put out a report that i talked about in the book on the influence of nutrition on academic performance and it's massive you know how do kids learn when they're eating junk food and going to school in the morning with flaming hot chips and a coke they can't function and they crash and so providing good nutrition can have radical effects on kids academic
performance and close what we call an achievement gap and i think it also affects behavior and you know we think about mood but one of the things i was shocked to discover is that is it violence and violent behavior and aggression are also connected to our diet and in prison studies that i talk about in the book prisoners who are fed who are violent who are fed a whole foods healthy diet in prison can you reduce violent crime by 56 and
if you add a multivitamin it goes down by 80 percent if you do it in kids in juvenile detention centers these kids 91 reduction in bad behavior and violence 100 reduction in suicides i mean it's so staggering and if there was a pill that could do that everybody'd be taking it there'd be a giant pharmaceutical company marketing and we don't hear about these issues because they're they're not something that's
going to create billions of dollars in profit but unfortunately it's where the it's whether where the real effect can be yeah absolutely absolutely everyone i want to recommend that you uh not only go listen to the doctor's pharmacy podcast but you also check out the book food fix that i have next to me right now again huge recommended recommendation for the book a to get educated become aware of
what's really happening what's working in the background that's going to give you enough confidence and enough of a reason and a why to go and actually make the changes in your life it's really easy to live in ignorance and in the pain and just allow for it to continue and feel like it's only because something outside's impacting you but actually take responsibility for our health and our futures is huge and if not for yourself then at
least your children yeah and the future generations and and dr mark hyman i believe you're doing such a a great uh service honestly you really are in in raising all of these issues in all areas in the depth of the research and the lens you've gone through to share this with us uh i'm super super grateful thank you we we end every interview with something called the final five which are your uh fast five round which is answers in
one word to one sentence maximum okay all right and uh dr ivan these are your final fives so question number one uh what's the best change you've made in your diet the best change i made was to dramatically cut out starch and sugar i don't eliminate it but i really don't eat any flour products and if i eat sugar it's usually part of some whole food right maybe i'll have a you know whole huge chocolate which i love
which is you know very low glycemic um and i think that and getting rid of industrial food is has been the best things i've done i love that of course you know adding in all the good stuff of course super practical okay great uh second question what do you know to be absolutely true about health that a lot of people would disagree with you wow that's a good question no one's ever asked me that jay i think that the biggest thing that
people don't understand is that uh you know the way we define disease is completely wrong so our normal conception of disease is completely flawed because it's not based on causes it's based on symptoms so i think people just don't understand that and so if you focus on causes not symptoms and treat that the root cause people get better i love that great answer all right third question uh what gives you the biggest
hope for the food industry i see i see hope because i see these food companies waking up i see companies like general mills and danone and other companies and nestle really understanding that this can't go on that their their survival depends on transforming our food system so i i see the they see the culture shifting and people demanding more consciousness about their food so i'm excited about that awesome question number four what's the
biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months wow well i've been traveling for 25 years and on the road and covet has has locked me down and i've realized that uh having a rhythm and stability and quiet and time to think is actually a good thing and i and i think i've i've really learned that it's time in my life to to shift how i'm doing things so i can actually cultivate more of that that's brilliant and your fifth and
final question is if you could create a law that everyone in the world would have to follow what would it be oh a law that everyone have to follow um well i think it would be it would be a law that would be that all governments would implement that that would influence every single policy around food which would be quality is king so no food policy can be made unless it's putting the quality of nutrition and nutritional
density first in every single thing we do whether it's dietary guidelines or what food we grow or what food we market or whatever it is it's going to transform everything if we can do that i love that that's beautiful i'm actually going to ask you one more question does this come to my mind do you think that it's possible to create healthy food that's affordable absolutely i mean the studies are really clear that it may cost 50 cents more a
day to eat healthier and like i said there are guys like good food on a tight budget that are are actually incredibly effective in helping people eat well for less it's good for them good for the planet and good for their wallet and i i think we get caught up in you know sort of elitism about eating healthy but it really this family in south carolina they lived on food stamps and disability for a family of five and they were able
to do it in one of the worst food deserts in america so it's really more about education and awareness than it is about money that's great to hear awesome dr mark hyman thank you so much uh for being a guest on on purpose what i'd love for everyone to do is tag me and dr mark hyman on instagram with your favorite insights your favorite uh thought or idea or concept or fact that mark hyman stated today that
stayed with you and how you're going to experiment with your diet i'd love for you all to think about what is that deep dive experiment you can do for the next seven days what could you remove from your diet or add to your diet uh based on the insights in the book based on the guidance in the book that you think is gonna make a massive change try and experiment for just seven days for one week and see how your life changes
and as i said go out and grab a copy of the book we'll put the links in the podcast description so you can go straight to amazon and grab your copy uh dr mark hyman is there anything that i haven't asked you that you'd love to share not nothing other than i think you know we're in this moment where everybody uh it can focus in on their own health and by doing that they will literally help us get through this cobit epidemic
and help solve so many of our global problems because what we do to ourselves we do to our communities and our families and what we do to ourselves we do to the planet and so understanding that is a circle and that we can actually impact that by making those small changes in ourselves uh i think is very a very powerful message people understand thank you so much this is great thank you everyone for listening and i'll see
you again next week hey everyone my name is jay shetty and welcome to my youtube channel every week i'm sharing three videos that are going to help you feel more fulfilled feel more happy and more successful make sure you subscribe to this channel so that you can find out about the videos as soon as they launch press the like button and leave a comment and let's keep making wisdom go viral together make sure you subscribe