Mark Hyman: Struggling With Brain Fog, Weight Gain, and Low Energy? It’s Likely Hidden Inflammation! (Do THIS to Reverse It)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
What is inflammation doing to your body?

Speaker 1 (00:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
What are the highly inflammatory foods?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
The sugar and starch In America average meet a pound
of sugar and flour a day per person.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
What do you think the US healthcass needs to be focused.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an
ultraimmune disease?

Speaker 1 (00:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
If someone's listening right now and they're thinking, I feel
like craw, what do they do?

Speaker 1 (01:15):
The Number one Health and Wellness Podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
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

(01:38):
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.

(02:00):
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,

(02:23):
doctor Mark Hyman. Mark, It's always great to have you
on the show. I'm so happy to have you back.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Thanks, it's good to be here. I love this place.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Four because I must die.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
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

(03:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
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.

(03:38):
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

(04:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
And they said there was no cure.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
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,

(04:41):
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

(05:01):
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

(05:24):
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

(05:44):
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

(06:06):
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

(06:27):
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

(06:50):
up and create health and actually feel better now than
I did before the surgery.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
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,

(07:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
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

(07:49):
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

(08:10):
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

(08:31):
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,

(08:52):
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

(09:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
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.

(09:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
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

(10:21):
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

(10:42):
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.

(11:05):
It's that's where we are. It's pretty it's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Absolutely, yeah. Do If someone's listening right now and they're saying,
doctor Mark common, I feel like crap.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Like, if someone's listening right now and they're thinking I
feel like crap, where should they start? What do they do?

Speaker 1 (11:20):
That's a great, great question. You know, there's a more
serious version, Jay, It's called fls. You feel like shit?

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah, right?

Speaker 1 (11:27):
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,

(11:53):
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

(12:14):
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

(12:38):
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

(12:59):
or dementia or you know, a heart attack that's more serious.
All that stuff literally you don't.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Have to suffer from in ten days.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
You know, walk me through the two types. What are
the medicinal foods and what are the highly inflammatory?

Speaker 1 (13:33):
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

(13:53):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:36):
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

(14:58):
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

(15:19):
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

(15:41):
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

(16:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
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

(16:41):
and avoid inflammatory foods?

Speaker 1 (16:43):
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,

(17:05):
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

(17:26):
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

(17:47):
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

(18:07):
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

(18:29):
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

(18:51):
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

(19:14):
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

(19:34):
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

(19:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, he was jogging every day.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
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

(20:50):
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,

(21:10):
like I'm not drinking this.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
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.

(21:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
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

(22:12):
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

(22:34):
twenty two teaspoons a day.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Wow, Yeah, that is mind blowing.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
If you had two teaspoons a year, so.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Sugar, and you were more active than to Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
And you're running yeah all the time, you're.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
Looking for that job honey. Yeah, no, jaw, Sorry, it
was actually I was.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
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

(23:20):
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

(23:43):
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

(24:05):
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

(24:26):
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

(24:46):
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

(25:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
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

(25:42):
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.

(26:02):
The fact that you can take.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
These look under the hood.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
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

(26:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
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,

(27:01):
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

(27:24):
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,

(27:45):
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.

(28:08):
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

(28:28):
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

(28:48):
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

(29:09):
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

(29:31):
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

(29:54):
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,

(30:14):
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

(30:35):
and ninety nine. You know you can get your whole
blood test for four nine dollar dollar thirty seven a day.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
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

(31:01):
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?

Speaker 1 (31:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
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

(31:51):
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

(32:11):
not just because I'm getting older though, it's becoming more prevalent.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
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

(32:35):
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,

(32:56):
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

(33:19):
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

(33:41):
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

(34:03):
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,

(34:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
And the vaccino that's how you take fifteen or sixteen.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
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

(35:06):
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

(35:30):
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.

(35:51):
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

(36:12):
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

(36:35):
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.

(36:55):
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

(37:17):
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

(37:38):
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

(37:58):
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

(38:22):
different story.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
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?

Speaker 1 (38:32):
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,

(38:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Like I'm the last six the first three, and.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
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

(40:17):
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

(40:37):
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

(40:59):
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

(41:19):
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

(41:42):
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

(42:05):
that's that's sixty seven persents. If you've expanded the criteria
to be what's optimal, it would probably be even more.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
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

(42:45):
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,

(43:06):
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

(43:29):
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

(43:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
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

(44:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
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

(45:02):
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

(45:23):
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

(45:45):
the bad stuff, by taking walks, by doing a little
breathing exercises, and radically changing your diet.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Oh my god, you could do that at home. This
isn't you don't you know?

Speaker 1 (45:56):
And it's basically afford to.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Go on a retreat or do you.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
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

(46:19):
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

(46:40):
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,

(47:03):
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

(47:27):
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

(47:48):
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

(48:11):
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

(48:31):
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

(48:51):
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

(49:11):
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

(49:31):
face of mental health care for the long term.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
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?

Speaker 1 (49:42):
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

(50:04):
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

(50:26):
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.

(50:48):
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.

(51:09):
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.

(51:30):
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

(51:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
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

(52:28):
lived off. That's right, for years and years and years.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
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

(52:53):
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

(53:15):
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,

(53:38):
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

(53:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
What are you most excited about at the forefront of
medicine and functional medicine at the moment? Is it ai?

Speaker 1 (54:18):
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

(54:40):
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

(55:00):
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

(55:21):
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,

(55:42):
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,

(56:04):
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

(56:27):
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,

(56:48):
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.

(57:10):
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.

(57:31):
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

(57:53):
of biomarkers that I can make those connections, and I'm
not that good compared to what technologies can able to do.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
Yeah, what do you wish doctors were taught today?

Speaker 1 (58:05):
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,

(58:30):
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,

(58:54):
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

(59:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Yeah, so no, wonder when you go and talk about
how you're feeling. Yeah, you're not getting the information that
you need.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
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

(59:51):
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

(01:00:14):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
Definitely no?

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
But we give that to our kids. Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
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

(01:01:09):
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

(01:01:31):
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

(01:01:52):
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

(01:02:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
How do we hold ultra processed food manufacturers more accountable
for getting away with putting excess sugars and multifiers, unidentifiable
objects into our food.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
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.

(01:03:00):
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

(01:03:23):
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

(01:03:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
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

(01:04:15):
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

(01:04:36):
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

(01:04:59):
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

(01:05:20):
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

(01:05:40):
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

(01:06:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
Like that's a big one, you know, like like.

Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
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.

(01:06:39):
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

(01:07:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
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

(01:07:33):
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.

(01:07:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:08:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
They've got to live that way.

Speaker 1 (01:08:16):
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,

(01:08:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
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

(01:09:07):
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,

(01:09:29):
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

(01:09:51):
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

(01:10:12):
another episode of On Purpose. Thanks for listening and thank
you Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:10:15):
Thanks see.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with
doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your life by
changing your brain.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
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.

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