Rethinking ADHD: Root Causes, Real Healing, and the Power of Functional Medicine

ADHD and other brain-based conditions such as depression, autism, and even schizophrenia are increasingly understood as inflammatory disorders of the brain—deeply rooted in the complex interplay between genetics, environment, and lifestyle. Many individuals go undiagnosed for years, internalizing harmful labels like “lazy” or “difficult,” until the weight of unaddressed symptoms finally becomes too much. But there is hope: Functional Medicine offers a radically different approach by uncovering and addressing root causes such as nutritional deficiencies, gut microbiome imbalances, food sensitivities, toxin exposures, and lifestyle factors. Stories of transformation emerge when these root drivers are corrected—children once labeled disruptive begin to thrive, adults regain focus and emotional balance, and families find relief. This emerging paradigm offers not just symptom management but the possibility of genuine healing through personalized, whole-body care. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. George Papanicolaou and Dr. Jaquel Patterson, how ADHD and other mental health challenges are often rooted in inflammation and imbalances in the body—and how addressing diet, lifestyle, and root causes can lead to real healing. Dr. Papanicolaou is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and is Board Certified in Family Medicine from Abington Memorial Hospital. Over time as the healthcare system made it harder for patients to receive personal care, Dr. Papanicolaou decided a change was needed. He began training in Functional Medicine through the Institute of Functional Medicine. In 2015, he established Cornerstone Personal Health—a practice dedicated entirely to Functional Medicine. In August 2017, I invited Dr. Papanicolaou to join The UltraWellness Center and we’ve been successfully helping people together ever since. Dr. Jaquel Patterson is a nationally recognized naturopathic physician, success coach, three-time Amazon bestselling author, and Forbes contributor. She owns a successful medical practice, Fairfield Family Health in Connecticut, and brings over 16 years of clinical experience, specializing in Lyme disease, autoimmune conditions, integrative psychiatry, and environmental medicine. A sought-after speaker, Dr. Patterson has been featured in USA Today, New York Magazine, and Forbes, and on CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC. She’s the past president of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians and currently serves on the board of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. Certified by the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), she’s also completed a fellowship in functional medicine with a focus on psychiatry and ADD/ADHD. In addition to her naturopathic medical degree, Dr. Patterson holds an MBA in Healthcare Management from Quinnipiac University and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here:Why ADHD Is Not A Psychiatric Disorder Or Brain Disease What’s Fueling Our Mental Health Crisis and How Can We Fix it? 7 Strategies To Address ADHD

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. What we now know is that ADD, autism, depression, dementia, Parkinson's, these are inflammatory diseases of the brain, even schizophrenia, bipolar disease, all these are inflammatory brain disorders.

• 0:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, The Hyman Hive, for live Q and As, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap "Try Free" to start your seven-day free trial.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  The thing with ADHD, first off and foremost, is it's primarily been looked at as a medical model. In the psychiatric world, it's a medical model, it's a, sometimes it's seen more as a behavioral issue, and it's treated with medication.

• 1:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a brain disease.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  It's a brain disease, and as you've said before, the brain, it's a, it's really, it's a, it's a body disease that affects the brain.

• 1:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Okay? And you've said that. Now, in ADHD, there are some, some issues around the brain itself that make adults and children more susceptible to this inattention, or their ability to fail at executive functioning. And the other piece is the self-regulation piece. And so, you have this combination, ADHD, where you have self-regulation as an issue, and you have the executive functions of an issue. And now, it's been given this label, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and that's just a cluster of symptoms that everybody experiences to some degree in their lifetime. Now, there's one kid in kindergarten

• 2:04Speaker 01

  that maybe he didn't pay attention once in his lifetime. Right? You know, he's, he's, he's a spy. I don't know what he's doing, but he's doing something, he's doing something like where you have to pay attention all the time. And then there's, you know, the other person, where they're so disabled by their ADHD, it's hard for them to work. It's hard for them to maintain a relationship, and even marriages. And then, everybody else falls somewhere in between. And I think it's important to understand that piece, that it's a medical model. And that when we see kids and adults, the other piece is, is that more and more adults are being diagnosed. And at least 4% of adults are found to have ADHD and maybe even more.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  You know, I think we'll find out there's more as we go on, that they carry on the traits of the ADHD. They go undiagnosed and then as they're adults, it becomes more prevalent as life piles up. And their compensatory mechanisms become overwhelmed. All of a sudden, they're getting older and they're not eating right and they're not exercising. Their ADHD becomes more prominent and then they come seeking help.

• 3:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and on top of that, we live in an ADHD culture where we're all driven to consume huge amounts of information by the addictive nature of social media and the internet. And it literally is taking people who are not even ADHD and making them like that. Where they're hooked on their phones and they're constantly distracted and they're constantly getting the dopamine hit. And it's magnifying it. And if you have ADHD, it's even worse.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and here's, and here's how they come to us. They come to us as families, as a mom or dad bringing a kid in and, and they're discouraged. They're, they're frustrated. The child is feeling left out. He's feeling alone because he's being labeled as a behavior disorder. He is unable to keep up in the regular curriculum in the school where you have to sit and get. And he can't sit and get, right? He has to move around. He has to see pictures. He has to have creative illustrations or she, you know? And it's, and, and that, that's how they come to us and they've heard, oh, Johnny's so smart. If you'd only work harder, you know, Suzie, if she would just, you know, apply herself, you know? I sometimes I think she's a little bit lazy, right?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And they start to hear that language and then they start to inculcate that as their own identity. And, and that becomes a negative self-talk. That becomes discouragement. That becomes hopelessness for some people as time goes on.

• 4:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, it's seen as a psychiatric disorder, treated by psychiatrists.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and maybe it isn't really a psychiatric disorder.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 4:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. And, and in fact, most psychiatric disorders are not psychiatric disorders. That's why I wrote the book.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. You even said it. You even said it in that book. Right.

• 4:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. Cause it's the body affects the brain and the brain affects the body. The mind affects the body, but the body affects the mind.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I think the cure for brain disorders is often outside the brain. And I think that's what we're talking about here. Now it's, it's actually becoming part of conventional medicine. I, I recently interviewed for our podcast, a expert in nutritional psychiatry and the microbiome and psychiatry from Harvard. And another one who was in Stanford studying metabolic psychiatry. So we now know that, that there are so many factors influencing our brain function that

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  have been ignored by psychiatrists and they're using psychiatric drugs like stimulants, like Ritalin to help people focus, but it's just like pouring, you know, water on a fire with somebody else pouring gasoline on it at the same time. You have to get to the root causes.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Right. And which, yeah. And, and I know we're going to get to the root causes, but one of the things I just really wanted to mention is in that discouragement that parents come and they say, you know, they're worried about their child's performance. And even adults who now have piled up failure after failure after failure because of their inability to really deal with their ADHD and they didn't even know they had it. Right? I had a patient, she was 40 years old. She, she came to me because she saw one of my nurse practitioners. And my nurse practitioner said she wants a refill on her Ativan, but she, you know, I'm uncomfortable giving it to her. Um, and, cause she was a new nurse practitioner. I said, well, let me see the case. I saw the name of the patient. I saw that they were coming to get their, their Ativan again. Um, and they had a gap of using it.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  So I said, you know what? Schedule her with me. And she said, you know, I use it because I get overwhelmed. So what do you mean overwhelmed?

• 6:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's an anxiety medication.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  She takes it because she gets anxious and overwhelmed. I said, well, what do you mean? Well, I get anxious. Well, what do you mean by anxious? I get overwhelmed. What does overwhelm mean? And she started to describe all the symptoms of ADHD, right? And she's a teacher. She was 40 years old. I took her through the DSM four classification. And then she went on to get a diagnostic.

• 6:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Psychiatric manual for how we label people.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  How we label people.

• 7:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mental illnesses by symptoms.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  I did use it. I'm sorry.

• 7:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's good to sort of get a label, but I always say just because you have a label, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. You don't know the cause of your depression or ADD or whatever is going on.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So I told her, you know, we did it. I said, you have ADHD. She was devastated. She was truly devastated. And, you know, she came back in tears because one, all the regrets, like, why didn't I get diagnosed sooner? And then the denial, maybe I don't really have it. Maybe there's something else wrong that can be fixed easier. Anyhow, it's like now eight years later and I run into her because we're friends and she got an ADHD coach. She, she did take Adderall for a short period of time. I got her to work on her nutrition, so forth. And so she's doing amazingly well, amazingly well. But the point I want to make is that ADHD can be a really devastating experience.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And one of the things that I like to do when I'm working with my patients is the first thing we do. We've got to normalize it. We've got to let you know, everything's going to be okay.

• 8:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's right. There's a stigma, George, around mental illness.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and that's really why I wrote the book Ultra Mind Solution, because it's very clear to me seeing patients where I would treat their biology and their psychology would get better. And I wasn't treating their brain.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I was treating their body and I would notice the quote side effects of their ADD going away, their autism getting better, their depression going away, their panic attacks going away. I'm like, what is going on here? So that really through the lens of functional medicine, what we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, where we practice, is we go deep into these root causes.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So with ADHD, what are the things that are the most common drivers? Because it's not a riddle deficiency, as we said, right? It's something else.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What are we seeing in these patients that we find that then we can treat and help them get better?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I start. With the understanding that there are some structural differences in the brains of a person with ADHD.

• 9:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's a predisposition.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  There's a predisposition, it's genetic, it's physiologic. And so you can't ignore that starting point. Now, that's not the first, you know, so that's my first line of thinking. And I know that I'm going to, I'm going to find out what that is.

• 9:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's remember important to remember for people that genes load the gun, but the environment pulls the trick.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you might have a predisposition, it doesn't mean you're predestined.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then that's exactly right, Mark, that's a point I, and that's where I go next is like, I know the predisposition is there. And I have tests that I can figure out what some of those predispositions are actually expressing themselves in that child or adult. And then I will address them. But I also, as you just, you know, pointed out, is I go back to the environmental pieces first. And because those I can, I can start working on at the very first visit.

• 10:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You can modify.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Modify the very first visit without having to any tests. And that is to go through lifestyle. And where, and where's the first lifestyle piece I go to? It's nutrition, right? And because the nutrition does a couple of things. There is the, the nutrition, the actual macro and micronutrients and minerals and phytonutrients that the child needs that they might not be getting.

• 10:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And then there's the impact that that diet he's on is having on his body, on his, particularly on the gut microbiome.

• 10:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  On the bad diet.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Right, the bad diet, right? Which is filled with, you know, all the things that you talk about all the time, the high fructose corn syrup, the GMOs, the hormones, the pesticides.

• 10:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The additives and colors and dyes, those, those chemicals have been linked in research to ADHD issues.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Really clearly.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a diet, the fine gold diet is, is based on, you know, removing those from the, from the diet. So I can modify that right off the get go. And I can get them to start to think about how to change that child's diet and simply remove some things, right? And add some things in their place to start moving them in the right direction.

• 11:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the diet you're talking about that they're getting usually is an inflammatory diet.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what's fascinating to me is we start to look at the research on all these brain issues, whether it's autism, or ADHD, or Alzheimer's, or depression. There inflammation in the brain.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we never knew that before.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So do you take an Advil if you have depression? Or if you have ADD? No, you have to figure out why there's inflammation in the brain. And that's what functional medicine does. It's a, it's a methodology to get to the root cause of whatever it is. And in this case, it's inflammation in the brain. And all these kids often have other inflammatory issues too. And you have a case and I want to share a case where we, we talk about this. But, but how, how, how do we sort of begin to tease apart? What aspects of the diet are the most important in these kids?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  First I interview, like I ask, I even, I need to tease it apart. You have to ask like, okay, what?

• 12:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What are you eating?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Mom, what are you feeding? You know, and I'll, I'll ask them, right? And as soon as I, as soon as I asked a child what they eat, here's what happens. I'm just pick this up. Mom's, mom's holding a folder or a newspaper or something. And as I asked a child what they're going to eat, I see this. Okay. I usually see she's going to hide because she knows what's going to come out. All right. We're going to hear about, we're going to hear about Lucky Charms. And we're going to hear about Hot Pockets. And we're going to hear about, you know, the Gatorade and, and.

• 12:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Flaming hot chips.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And, and she, she's, she's doesn't, she feeds the child that because that's what the child wants to eat. And because they, they can't self-regulate, she knows that there's going to be, you know, there's, there's hell to pay when you're not giving them what they want. So yeah, so first off, you tease it out by find, doing a three day diet history, talking to the mom, talking to the child. And once you begin to tease that out, then you can get an understanding of what you need to add back in. And most of the time it's like everything.

• 13:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  You know, and.

• 13:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We also do food sensitivity testing.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For gluten and dairy, which often causes inflammation in the brain for these kids, right?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, um, I, I don't know when you want to, when you want me to talk about the testing piece, but the thing I want to say about the gut microbiome and your diet is that inflammatory diet, remember? Uh, and I, you don't have to remember, but for the, our listeners, that the gut microbiome does things for us. It's like another organ. And so 70 to not, you know, 70% of our serotonin resides in the gastrointestinal tract.

• 13:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like a second brain.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Second brain. 30% of our dopamine resides in the, in the, in the, in the intestinal tract. Uh, when you're eating a bad diet and you, you're shifting the, the microbiome, you're shifting the balance of good bacteria and bad bacteria. You're now, you're now going to create an environment where a child cannot produce some of those neurotransmitters. You're going to create an environment where they're not breaking down their food completely. Because of the inflammation, you could be getting something called leaky gut. And that dysbiosis, that leaky gut, that leads to a lack of absorption of some really important nutrients. And that begins to have a big effect.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  So now they're not absorbing their magnesium. Now they're letting too much copper in and not enough zinc. Now you're not getting enough iron. And we know that if you're anemic and you don't have enough iron, you're going to not be able to concentrate well. That's the, that's the real important impact of your diet. It's not just, oh, sugar's bad for them. Well, what's it doing to, you know, you may notice that-

• 14:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The microbiome.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  The microbiome. We gotta fix that. And that's why I said, I know what the predisposition is, but the first place we're going to go is to the lifestyle. And what, because that lifestyle's affecting the most important thing, and that's the gut.

• 14:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, nutrition is so huge. And we see this with these kids, that they have poor quality nutrition, they're eating a lot of processed food, they're not getting the good nutrients they need, they're eating foods that are inflammatory, they're having gluten and dairy often, which can be very neurotoxic for some kids. They're eating additives and chemicals in their food that can trigger hyperactivity. And so there's this whole range of food interventions that have been shown to be very effective for these kids. Even removing food sensitivities.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's one study published in the UK. So there's a lot of literature on this.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But again, it's not, it's not something that you get when you go to the psychiatrist.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  It's not mainstream.

• 15:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They don't talk about, no, they don't talk about this. So, so we're looking at the role of nutrition.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Nutritional deficiencies, food sensitivities, and lack of the right nutrients.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What are the other things we should think about? The gut, you said, the gut plays a huge role, right?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you have leaky gut.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything I just mentioned, you know, with the leaky gut, the alterations, the microbiome, you're going to have less serotonin made, less dopamine made, you're not going to get the nutrients that we just talked about. And so that we look there and we can do tests to determine, we have, very sensitive tests that can look at, we do organic acid tests that can look at amino acid levels, which are the precursors for making your neurotransmitters. So that if you're not, you know, eating enough protein, which kids don't eat enough protein, you're not eating enough protein, and then you have already disordered your microbiome, which includes your gastric acids, which includes your pancreatic acids. Those are very important for breaking down your proteins,

• 16:24Speaker 01

  your carbohydrates, and your fats. You get all the nutrients you need. So we need to make sure that they're, you know, if that's not happening, they're not getting their amino acids, then they're not going to be able to make those neurotransmitters. We can measure that using organic acids. We can look at carbohydrate metabolism that's important, and energy production, energy that's needed for the body to work, particularly the brain, since it has the most mitochondria in the entire body, because it needs the most energy. And if that brain's not making energy because you're not getting the appropriate amounts and the types of carbohydrates, that child's not going to do well.

• 17:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  And we can, we can determine that, the organic acids or an ion profile. So

• 17:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  These are the kind of tests you don't normally get at a regular doctor. And these, these tests tell us about things like mitochondria. You mentioned mitochondria. I just want to sort of loop back on this because there's a woman named Suzanne Goze, a pediatric neurologist, went to Harvard, Oxford, and studies autism. And she's found in these autistic kids, there's a subset of these kids that have impaired mitochondrial function in their brain. And it's an energy deficit which can cause these neurologic symptoms. And so she provides the substrates or the basic building blocks for making energy in these kids that are supplements, like CoQ10 and carnitine and other nutrients that are so important for building energy in the system. So we sometimes find this in these kids, they have energy issues.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  You know, we've seen that with our autistic kids, that we, when we give them, you know, those, we give them amino acids. When we, when we give them methyl cabalamin, which is a basic nutrient, yeah, you see changes in how they, dramatic. When you address the mitochondria, you're going to see those dramatic changes.

• 18:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they also have Issues around toxins these kids sometimes, right?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Talk about toxins and mental health and particularly ADHD.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Right, so the toxins that we look for the most and they're tested for, you know, in schools as part of your-

• 18:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Lead.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Lead, there you go, got lead. So we have lead, we also have mercury and we have arsenic.

• 18:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Those are three very common heavy metals that you're going to find in your environment. So those, each one of them are going to be able to block the, the energy producing pathways in cells. They're also going to limit the, the neurotransmitter metabol- the metabolism neurotransmitters in the brain. Directly, they're directly neurotoxic and they also have effects on the body's ability to make energy in their mitochondria. So we test for heavy metals in kids all the time. And, and why do kids have-

• 19:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Surprising what you find.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And why do we find that? Because I tell people, it's not a matter of whether you're toxic. You know, it's not a matter of whether you have heavy metals, it's how many do you have?

• 19:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Right? And how much? And, and that's going to be, that's going to be a product of several things. One, we go back to genetics. You just may not be a good detoxer.

• 19:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Right? You may have, you know, SNPs, which are single nucleotide polymorphisms. Those are like one single nucleotide change in the blueprint that makes the protein. And if that is off, then that protein's not going to work correctly. Well, if your detox proteins and enzymes are not working, you, you just don't detox that well. And we can determine that. And then we can determine what your lead levels are and then we have ways that we can bring those down.

• 19:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's so common, you know, I remember this kid I had who was like 10, 11 years old, just a terror. ADD, getting kicked out of class, disruptive behavior issues. And the mother was just desperate.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  I wasn't in your class.

• 20:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  She was, she was a young mother, but she was very smart and she kind of came to us. And it turned out he, he's school was across the street from a cement plant. And the cement plant burns coal and coal releases mercury and lead. And, and every day they go in the parking lot, at the end of the day, the cars were just dusted with this ash from the cement plant. And the kids were playing in the playground with this cement plant. And I tested him and he had very high levels of heavy metals. And we detoxified him, we fixed his metabolic pathways and this kid got better. So, you know, it's not that every kid with ADD has lead or mercury. It's just one of the things to think about. And just like I always say with functional medicine, just because you know, the name of the disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. Right?

• 20:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  ADD can be many, many things and many, many factors can be gluten, it can be metals, it can be nutritional deficiency, it can be magnesium issues, can be, you know, your gut microbiome, can be gluten.

• 21:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When this state of inflammation is going on in the brain, what's actually happening? How, how do neurotransmitters get affected? You know, what's happening with, with the, the brain that causes all these psychiatric symptoms?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  So you'll actually see altering of, for example, NMDA receptors being impacted, which can cause that issue with glutamate. And then there's this altered, you should have an altered balance of, for example, GABA, which is more relaxing, an inhibitory neurotransmitter versus glutamate, which is triggering. So if you're having those ratios change, you're going more into a state that's excitatory, which is going to cause anxiety, depression. You'll also see some of those protective cytokines like IL-10, which are going to help with inflammation will go down because you're going to have more of the pro-inflammation. And that is actually one of the big factors feeding into things like dopamine, which make you feel good.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  And dopamine is one of the ones that can go lower for somebody that's depressed.

• 22:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And when you're inflamed, your dopamine gets lower.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. It'll go lower as those inflammatory markers increase up. So it kind of, it change, shifts the whole balance. So we need, we need a little bit of. Each one, so it's not, I always tell people, it's like, we do want a little bit, you know, we do want some dopamine. We want, we want those things, but it's, it's what that balances and what happens is with inflammation. It changes, um, not only causing the direct damage to the area of the body. Um, but also cha- changing that, the neurotransmitter, um, the ratios, which will put you more in a state. That is going to be more imbalanced.

• 22:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, you, we end up causing trouble with. The overproduction of excitatory neurotransmitters that stimulate pathways, like you mentioned in New York. Or the lack of, of neurotransmitters that help us with mood, like dopamine or serotonin, right? Uh, and, and, uh, you know, one of the tests we do in functional medicine is called an organic acid urine test. Which seems like a crazy thing to do is check your urine if you're having psychiatric issues, but. In, in my patients is one of the most important tests that I do, and it's something we used to do. Only for people with inherited metabolic disorders. Uh, and you can get it a lot, but it's, it's really about the more subtle changes that occur. In the biomarkers that relate to what's going on in your body.

• 23:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and, uh, you know, one of the, one of the things we see is an increase in kineuric acid. Which is a sort of a marker of.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Pathway that increases up in terms of inflammation and is also a marker looked at when we're looking at neuroinflammation. And it changes tryptophan and these are all precursors for things like serotonin. Um, so carinin pathways also marker to of, uh, concern when it comes to neuroinflammation.

• 23:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  See like a, that's sort of a sign of B6 to functional deficiency. And that is B6 is required to convert tryptophan from a diet into five hydroxytryptophan in serotonin. And then when that's not working, or when there's inflammation, it also blocks an enzyme. Can you talk about that enzyme, the IDO enzyme?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so it blocks the enzyme that's going to help with, um, it's causing more of the increased metabolism to. Like you said, in terms of the five HIA, in terms of serotonin, so it's going to impact that pathway. Directly, which is going to be increasing up inflammation, but then again, the ones that are helping with things like anxiety. Are now getting blunted or impacted negatively where it's actually interfering with the production of it.

• 24:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And one of the biomarkers we see on the organic acids is quinolinic acid. A lot of big words I know out there, but this is a biomarker you can check in your urine. That indicates that, that the serotonin is getting shunted down a different pathway. Which then leads to more anxiety, more depression. And you're getting this byproduct, which is highly inflammatory in of itself.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 24:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's it's a toxic kind of metabolite in the brain. And you can see it in the urine. And I can tell when my patients' brains are inflamed, they have high levels of this, whether it's a neurodegenerative disease, or there's ADD, or autism, or or depression. And so, you know, we can start to understand the biochemistry of this and the neurobiology of this in ways that allow us to actually directly intervene with therapies that can fix these problems.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. And the cholinine pathway is like kind of the precursor to all of those ones that you just discussed. And so also, the great thing with like the OAT test, which you mentioned, there's also a section that tests for catecholamines. And those are all connected with norepinephrine, epinephrine. It checks for like HVA and all of those pieces in terms of your dopamine. And also even like fatty acid metabolism, because we know fatty acids help to drop down CRP, which we're talking about with inflammation. And so if you don't have a good balance of omega three, omega six, omega nine, you're going to be, again, more proinflamm- you know, proinflamed, which also is going to negatively impact your mental state. So and your physical body, obviously. But there's been tons of studies on just omegas as well, just for the mental health.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  And part of it is that down regulation of decreasing of the CRP levels.

• 26:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, you know, one of the things that I have been reading about, which I find fascinating, and it sort of kind of kind of comports with what we're seeing in our society, which is just this increase in dysregulated social behavior, right? Aggression, divisiveness, friends can't talk to each other anymore, families are breaking up over political issues. There's just whatever's going on, there's just some something happening where our social cohesion is breaking down. I mean, I think most Americans are pretty middle of the road and are not on the extremes, but the extremes are what we see and hear about. But there is still a level of real divisiveness at our side and a real level of like increased in aggression and school shootings and violence. And now, I mean, we see it every

• 26:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  day and I become almost immune to these stories, which, you know, if you ever had had one, it would have been a big deal. And we didn't have this when I was growing up. It wasn't like every day or every week, there's, there's a new shooting in some school. And, and the level of, of just sort of oppositional behavior and anger and hostility. And I mean, it's, it's like I, you know, I have a social media account. I just like sometimes I put stuff up that's sort of benign and you get like a litany of hatred. And I'm like, what is going on out there? And why are people acting like this? And part of it's, you know, they can hide behind their social media handle or whatever. But I, I do think there's something fundamental happening to the brain. And I, I mentioned this before in the podcast, but when I was writing my book about the food system and the way our food was affecting us, I wrote a lot about the social aspects of it. And particularly so studies that I

• 27:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  came across around prisoners who, when fed a healthy diet would decrease their violent crime in prisons by 56%. And adding a multivitamin reduced it by 80%. And in juvenile detention centers, when kids were fed healthy diets versus the crap that they were eating, the violent crime went down by 97%. The rate of restraints went down by 75%. Suicide, which you mentioned, went down 100% in an age group of teenage boys, which is the third leading cause of death. And that's just simply cleaning up the diet, which is moving them from an inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory diet. So I have this theory, which is that a lot of our, our, our social disruption right now is, is really related to some level of

• 28:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  neuroinflammation. And when I was sort of reviewing your work, you, you, you were talking a lot about the, the, what happens to the adult in the room, which is sort of the person that, you know, knows we shouldn't go punch somebody in the nose, right? That we want to.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  That's in charge, yeah.

• 28:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The adult in the room gets disconnected from the ancient limbic reptile brain. And there's this weird disconnection that happens. So the adult is gone. And so where the, it's like, we call it the amygdala hijack, which is the hijack of our, of our behavior and our thoughts by this ancient part of our brain, which is all about survival, fight or flight, right? So can you talk about the science around? This phenomenon that we're seeing around neuroinflammation affecting the connection between the kind of grown up, mature person who's supposed to know how to conduct themselves socially and in life with the ancient part of our brain that just, you know, would kill anybody or do a stupid shit. So what is the science behind that? Can you unpack that?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  And also the trauma, like when you look at kids, they said have shown the trauma from all these events like that you were talking about, there's just long term, we don't even know yet, longer term issues with things like anxiety and depression as a result of the trauma that's, that's happening during that time.

• 29:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's epigenetic.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Exactly. There's, there's, there's complete changes. So we have what's called the prefrontal cortex that develops for kids up until, you know, 26 years of age. We have what's called the amygdala.

• 29:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's why they, the car rental companies don't rent cars to anybody over under 25.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Because of that.

• 29:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because they know that the brain's not fully developed. The grown up in the room is not in the car.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Is not actually going to be the one driving, right?

• 29:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  So we have the hippocampus, which is like for memory and those actually both take a hit for anxiety and depression, which makes sense because you look when somebody has like significant depression or anxiety, you'll, you'll see like a lot of memory issues, like flightiness for people, anxiety, brain fog, forgetfulness.

• 30:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, we even call it pseudo dementia. When people get older, they get pseudo dementia and depression.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, and actually even the risk of dementia is up higher for people with mental health issues as well because likely because of the neuroinflammation. So you'll see like those areas, amygdala is more connected with like anxiety and that's what controls emotions and that piece with like the nine year old driving the bus versus, you know, the adult driving the bus. And so if you're constantly getting taxed with that and everyday, day to day trauma, that is going to be more dysregulated. I mean, they've had studies that show women passing like in terms of being anxious during pregnancy, having an impact on their, their, their babies that are born, the baby, the child having more anxiety and things like that. So the development of the, the, the prefrontal cortex, which is like impulse.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Impulses can develop up until 26 years of age. Other areas of the brain that get affected, amygdala, like I mentioned, hippocampus, and other centers that help to regulate like our emotions. So if there's constant inflammation on those areas or constant stress, which causes a dysregulation of cortisol levels, those will all, could potentially impact those long term too as well.

• 31:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So do you think, like, my theory is right, that a lot of the social discord is happening as a result of brain inflammation that's caused by all the factors we talked about?

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they have tons of studies on technology's impact on dopamine and that every time you have like a hit, like even a ring on your cellphone or, you know, did it, like when you get your texts, you get a dopamine hit for that. So one of the pieces is the more and more you have it, the more of a reserve, like you're having less, your body's constantly needing to push out dopamine for everything with technology. One example I had, it was great because I did a urinary test and I was trying to get the person, I was actually working with someone that I didn't know was a big gamer. And so we did the test and at the evening, the cortisol was like, was the same that you would have in the morning to wake up because your cortisol should be higher in the morning to wake up.

• 32:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And low at night.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And then I said, what were you, and I knew right away, I'm like, were you playing like video games? And she looked and was like, how did, how did you know? I'm like, this number, there's just a lot of like hyperactivity. Her dopamine levels were high, norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol was through the roof. So of course she's going to have sleep issues, which she was having. So you'll see that too. I mean, a lot of young people that are also in technology, they're staying up till late at night, as you know, and it interrupts their sleep. And if they're not getting good quality sleep, of course, they're not going to be able to focus in class. Of course, they're not going to be able to emotionally regulate as well. So all of those things have these like kind of added effects that can cause, cause issues. But definitely technology with dopamine and as much as the parent can work with reducing

• 33:02Speaker 02

  it in small bits, I don't try to say, stop completely. I say, let's cut 15 minutes, you know, at a time. So it doesn't seem as significant. But that's what the great thing about tests are because you can actually see and show and demonstrate and then it's easier to get people to say, oh, okay, this is why.

• 33:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so, I mean, I had a nephew who was a super addicted gamer and just didn't have a life other than gaming. And Long story short, he lived with me for a while and I took it all the way. I literally just hit it.

• 33:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it was literally like watching someone go through hair and withdrawal.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like, he went ballistic. And I was like, wow, this is like a highly addictive thing. So I think that, and he had ADHD and it just made it worse. It made it a lot worse. And I think, I think we, we had this incredible moment happening in the field of psychiatry where we're beginning to understand the brain in mental health, not just the mind. And, and you know, talk therapy can be helpful. Sometimes psychiatric medication can be helpful, but it's a pretty limited toolset. And now we have a whole new set of tools. So when you, when you see sort of someone come in and, and you know, they could have anything, or anything from schizophrenia to bipolar disease to depression. There's a process you go through to try to figure things out, you know, like, like,

• 34:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you know, because depression is not a Prozac deficiency, right? And, and you know, it's kind of how we treat it, right? We, we, I call it the naming, blaming and taming game. This came from my mentor Sid Baker. He says, we, we name the, the disease by the symptoms. And then we blame the name for the cause and then we tame it with a drug. So we say, oh, the reason you're hopeless and helpless and have no interest in life and don't, can't sleep and have no interest in sex and don't have an appetite. And you feel sad and you want to cry all the time is because you're depressed. That's what's causing your symptoms. Well, no, that's just a name that we give people who share those symptoms. The cause could be you're eating gluten and that's creating brain inflammation, or you're had a, been having a bad diet and had reflux because you eat too many fried foods and end up on an acid blocker for 10 years, which depletes your B12 and zinc and magnesium.

• 35:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or because you maybe have no vitamin D and that causes depression.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And you're looking to see like, where does it land? I always say that for autoimmune conditions. It's like, to me, it's all the same thing. There's different names.

• 35:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  You know, but it's like, where does it, I say, like, land? And then that's why people have like three autoimmune conditions. And I'm like, is it really three different ones? Or is their, their system just attacking itself and it's finding their weakness?

• 35:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. It's like, it's like aspen trees, you know, like they all look like separate trees, but they're all one underneath.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. Still the same.

• 35:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so that's kind of how most diseases are. They're not comorbidities or not things that just happen to be randomly showing up. I'm like, you know, this, this, you know, kid that I was mentioning before had ADD, had like 12 different diagnoses, like, and was on seven different medications and was seeing five or six or different specialists. And, and no one asked, how are all these things connected? Like, are these just?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  And when did it start? And how did it start?

• 36:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Things like that.

• 36:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The beauty is then we can start to actually think differently about how to approach these problems and start to think about the common, the common causes and how to, one, do the diagnostic evaluation, which can pick a lot of these things up, and also the, the treatment strategies. And it can be something simple, like, you know, like I mentioned with depression, well, I mean, it could be a B vitamin deficiency. And I was writing my book and I think I was talking to somebody on the phone about it, whatever. And he heard me, we were talking, it was like I was fixing my TV in my office and he happened to be working when he was there. And he's like, oh yeah, this is what you're saying. And, you know, I was really severely depressed. And, and then I took, you know, these B vitamins, like B6, folate, B12, and it went away. And, and, and actually, methylfolate or

• 36:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Duplan is actually a prescription drug, quote, drug, which is an activated form of folate that psychiatrists use for treating depression.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's all like, kind of this, like, one thing at a time. It's like, still the drug model. It's not really a holistic view of the body as a system. So, so, Dr. Johnson, when, when someone comes to you, see you, and they're suffering from, whether it's depression, or whether it's more PTSD, or maybe they're having some psychotic kind of borderline issues or bipolar, where do you start? And then how do you kind of find the things that are driving the problem? And then what, what are the sort of steps you take to help resolve that?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I think my most important thing is to also meet people like where they're at. So initially, I'm trying to do extensive.

• 37:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I just want people to do what I want to do. I know how to get you better.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  That would be a lot easier.

• 37:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You don't get the shoes.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  That would make life a lot easier, right?

• 37:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I'm pretty actually convincing because like I said, look, let's try this for 10 days.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  That's, that's what I say. I'm like, let's try removing this food for a week and see how you feel. And then people come back and they're like, oh yeah, it worked. So I think the one thing when people see like naturopathic doctors, functional medicine doctors, they're going to get tons of lab work done initially. That's always really important to me in the assessment because I'm going to look at environmental factors like I mentioned, like metal, lead. You mentioned when you were saying about juvenile delinquency of like changing food. There's studies that even show there's a higher rates of schizophrenia after the age of 14 being or schizor actually juvenile delinquency and schizophrenia. If they've drank, drank from like private well water and poor water. So even when you're talking about food, it's like, what is the quality of their water? What is their environment by way of pollution?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  I've had children that we've had. Exactly. Even parasites where they've had ADHD and then they found that there was a lot of mold in their bedroom and they removed that and all the kids' symptoms were gone. Or I've had even adults that were exhausted. And then when I did the assessment, I find out they drink four ounces of water. And I'm like, okay, if you try to drink water, they come back, they're like, I feel completely new. Like, how is your body eliminating toxins? So that's what I said, meaning people were at because there could be just basic things that people aren't even aware of. But typically with assessments going to include like their metals, it's going to include things like you said, like O tests. I'm going to look at other infections, organic acid tests I'm going to look at, especially if someone's like that rule of like ever since of like, I got sick at this time.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  And then ever since then, this happened for women, a lot of times hormones. So like after they have a baby, after they have a kid, you'll see those hormones drop down, which hormones actually are like estrogen. Um, can be if it's in a high amount more pro-inflammatory and testosterone more anti-inflammatory. So you'll see when there's a shift of that or um, the cycle or perimenopause autoimmune conditions will go up too. So I'm looking to see like what that pattern is of like when it actually became dysregulated and and getting as much like laboratory assessment, but like really having deep in-depth conversations of their story.

• 39:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause you can, you go, oh yeah, I was fine until I moved to that house.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 39:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Tell me about that house. Well, you know, it was okay, but it was a little damp basement or had like, I think we had mold in the bathroom or something and you get, you get these clues. And I think, you know, in traditional medicine, we sort of ignore most of those clues. Like, you know, your psychiatrist didn't ask about mold or how much tuna you ate or.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  That's true. Or were you inflamed or?

• 40:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. No, it's true. And I, you know, I think you mentioned lab testing. You know, I co-founded a company called Function Health and we do a full panel of lab testing and we look at a lot of things that do affect psychiatric health from your nutritional levels of vitamin D, of, of valuation of the B vitamins, your homocysteine and methyl lactic acid, which are ways of looking at B12, folate and B6. We look at red cell magnesium and we look at zinc. We look at also other factors like metabolic health, insulin resistance, which can affect depression. Look at sex hormones can affect mood. We look at uh, heavy metals. So we, we got to really, and we look at inflammation, you know, we've, I don't, it's mind blowing to me, but in our population, we've done uh, five million biomarkers on over 40,000 people and 46% have high CRPs.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Oh wow.

• 40:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Thirty, thirty percent have high ANA. Sixty-seven percent have a nutritional deficiency, whether it's iron, like you mentioned, or homocysteine problems, or magnesium or omega threes. We look at all these things as part of a fundamental panel to see what's going on. And it's amazing. If you start to fix these things, people get better. And sometimes you have to go deeper, right? It's not just always just cleaning up your diet and, and, and eliminating inflammatory foods and adding a number of nutrients that may be helpful for your brain or nutrient deficient in. It may also be like, okay, well, I gotta deal with the heavy metals, or I gotta deal with Lyme disease, or I gotta deal with the beast here, I gotta deal with mold. And those are, those are things that we don't really deal with well with traditional medicine. But if you're seeing a functional medicine doctor, you know, they can see you and your practice in Connecticut,

• 41:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  they can come to our center in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Ultra Wellness Center, and we deal with all these chronic, complex issues. And we deal with the sort of the crises in mental health. And I, you know, I did a documentary series years ago called The Broken Brain. And it's really about, you know, how most of our brains are not working properly. And we don't really have a great way to deal with brain disorders, because our whole thinking has been completely wrong.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  And focus and I mean, I have so many, like, I feel like over half my patients, you ask about brain fog or focus, it's like, more than half of them have an issue. It's this like, of the activity with their brain and managing everything that they're doing and rates of what ADHD going up and anxiety, is it truly that? Or is it, you know, we're just doing too much as this, you know, as a society? Part of what I talked about in the presentation giving for IFM, too, were the other things outside of like even diet is like, the benefits of like sauna and how that showed to decrease the CRP levels and also in studies that they did in Europe for men that there was like decreased chance of like things like schizophrenia, forest bathing.

• 42:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's crazy. Wait, let me just wanna stop there. You just said, take a second, sauna can help reduce psychiatric symptoms and even schizophrenia.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, schizophrenia. Yeah, and this, this was a study of men at large for like decades. And they showed that there were lower rates of things like schizophrenia. If you look at, also, it decreases CRP levels, which we keep talking about with inflammation, you also look at like forest bathing. There was a study in Japan to show that the CRP levels went down significantly with more forest bathing and lasted for a period of time. So these are all the things that you can get people to do in small steps. That just shows there's that lack of connection, like loneliness, I think is a huge factor. And that's one of the biggest things we're always trying to work at in our office. Even with anxiety, they've shown the most effective is doing that with group therapy, like treatment

• 43:29Speaker 02

  plus therapy. I think it takes a community, but it's like you doing things to detach yourself from technology, like, you know, ground, grounding, sauna, those things, but then also your community of people around you to be able to support you as well.

• 43:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When you look at ADD and ADHD, it's basically described as a set of symptoms. The way we diagnose in medicine is based on, basically, I think, a very outdated model, which is describe the symptoms, and if somebody fits those symptoms, they have the disease. We say, oh, you have trouble focusing or paying attention, you're inattentive, you're hyperactive. I know what's wrong with you. You have ADHD. No, that's just the name of the disease. It's not the cause of the disease. And so we describe every disease, including particularly mental diseases, mental disorders, through this lens of describing symptoms,

• 44:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  not causes. Punctual medicine is about causes. So what are the causes? Well, I'm going to take you through a case, because I think it'll be a very interesting way to think about this story. And this is a case that really blew my mind. The mother brought in her kid to see me, who was 12 years old, and then two months later, brought him back. And the transformation was remarkable, but she brought his homework, and we're going to put it in the show notes, so you can actually see graphically changes in brain function in just two months with a kid who had severe brain disorder. He had a broken brain, and he could not write legibly to save his life. It was like chicken scratch or a three-year-old

• 45:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  writing versus a 12-year-old. And then, within two months, his handwriting totally normalized. And the question is, what happened? So I'm going to take you through what happened. I'm going to explain you a story, and I'm going to actually help you understand how we need to start approaching these disorders in a very different way. So, basically, one day, this woman walks in my office, a professional woman, businesswoman with her 12-year-old son, who had multiple psychological and physical diagnoses, who were seen by many doctors, seven different doctors, right?

• 45:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  He had, you know, a psychiatrist, he had a GI doctor, he had an allergist, he had a pulmonologist. I mean, the list goes on. So, nobody was talking to each other and they were all treating different things. So, he was diagnosed with ADD and no one seemed to sort of say, how does this one kid have all these problems? Right? Is it just bad luck or are they connected? And so, functional medicine is about looking for the patterns in the connections that give rise to the clues about the cause. So, basically, he was diagnosed with ADD when he was a little kid. He couldn't focus in school. He was zoned out. He was disruptive. I mean, he was kicked out of kindergarten. I mean, who's kicked out of kindergarten, right?

• 46:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  He had terrible writing. We call it dysgraphia. He was pretty good in math, but basically was a disaster. You know, behaviorally, academically, socially, was just not thriving. And physically, he had all these issues, right? He had asthma, he had environmental allergies, he has sinus problems. He had postnasal drip, he had sore throats, he got skin issues, eczema, nausea, stomach aches, diarrhea, headaches, anal itching, which we'll get to why that is. He had canker sores, which are immune things, right? All this immune inflammation, muscle aches, muscle cramps. He was hypersensitive to loud noises, to smells. He was sneezing a lot. He had hives, itchy skin, bumps, frequent infections. He couldn't sleep well.

• 47:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  He had trouble breathing when he slept. He had like anxiety, he was fearful all the time, and he had tons of sugar cravings. Now, that is a long list of problems. My joke is I take care of patients and I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. And he had a whole list of problems. And nobody says, how are all these connected? They're all inflammation. What we now know is that ADD, autism, depression, dementia, Parkinson's, these are inflammatory diseases of the brain. Even schizophrenia, bipolar disease, all these are inflammatory brain disorders.

• 47:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So doctors were treating and all these specialists treating all the symptoms with seven different medications from five different doctors, Ritalin for ADD, allergy medicine, inhalers for asthma, acid blocking medicine for his stomach, painkillers for his headaches. I mean, it's quite a drug cocktail for a 12 year old kid and he didn't really get that much relief anyway on any of his symptoms. And no one said, you know, how is this connected? Right? How is this connected? And why is this kid suffering from all this? And so really, this is just how medicine is. We see specialists after specialists. We get pill after pill. We get a pill for every ill and it was just kind of a mess. So most psychiatrists are trained about the brain, or really the mind, right? They don't really learn much about

• 48:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the brain. They don't, they think, you know, basically, you know, their job is from the neck up and it's all emotional, psychological. But we often misappropriate psychological or psychiatric diagnoses to physical things, right? If you have mercury poisoning, it can cause depression, right? If you have huge amounts of inflammation from an altered microbiome, you can have ADD. So you need to figure out what the root causes and not just be slapping on different drugs for different diseases. So, you know, it's important to understand what the physical things are, but not to get stopped there and not to just say, let's treat each one separately. We have to see how they're connected. So the

• 49:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  medications he was on were kind of nuts and they weren't helping much. But he's not alone. Most kids own tons of medications from allergy medication to antidepressants to stimulants. And we're seeing kids with mental, behavioral, emotional problems like Clayton had, and they're now getting drugs like antipsychotic medications they give to schizophrenics like risperdal or anti-seizure medications, trileptal or antidepressants, like I said, like Prozac or all the stimulants like Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, or Vivance.

• 49:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When we dug below the surface with Clayton, we found all sorts of stuff. Now, in functional medicine, I don't actually treat disease. I don't really care that much about the name of your disease. What I care about, what is going on in the systems in your body that is out of balance? And how do I figure that out? And one of the basic categories of things that matter, right? It's our lifestyle and all the nutritional, exercise, sleep, relationships. It's various factors that cause us to get out of balance, toxins, allergens, microbes, poor diet, stress, all these things wash over these systems and create imbalance. So my job is a detective to figure out where this particular child's imbalances were and fix them and see what happens, right? I just kind of put things back in balance like tuning up a car. And then you kind of hope, crush fingers, and usually it works.

• 50:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sometimes you kind of get stuck or there's something else you missed, but it's actually quite effective. So the first step was nutrition. I mean, Clayton had, which was his name, had the worst diet. All he ate was junk food, processed food. I don't think he ever saw vegetables in his life. And it's typical of a lot of these kids who are on the spectrum of autism or ADD. They typically have very finicky dietary habits. They typically eat tons of carbs. They love gluten and dairy. But he wasn't just eating, you know, whole wheat bread and, you know, sheep cheese. He was eating junk food, trans fats, food coloring, additives, tons of sugar. And all these things have been associated with ADD. Now, when we looked at his lab testing, we found some really interesting things. And I think, you know, most people do not dig below the surface to look at labs.

• 51:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we did a deep dive. We found he had omega-3 fat deficiency, EPA and DHA, which are incredibly important for brain function. 60% of your brain is DHA. And if you have low levels, it's associated with ADD as well as eczema, immune deficiency, a lot of the things that he had. We looked at his vitamin levels. We saw low levels of amino acids like tryptophan. We saw metabolic pathways that were indicating he had a deficiency of B6, which is important for making serotonin and from tryptophan and helping his mood, right? His mood was unstable. He had sleep issues. And so that, you know, B6 was a big factor and is often with kids with ADD or autism. And we see

• 51:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, also vitamin A deficiency, which is important for immunity. Uh, and the omega three deficiency and vitamin A deficiency led to little things like bumps on his backs. We call these hyperkeratosis pilaris. I could touch his skin. I could see little bumpy things. That was because of these nutritional deficiencies. He was low in vitamin D. He was low in vitamin E and beta carotene because vegetables, right? So it's a diet very high in junk food, which is nutrient poor and very low in nutrient dense food. He had low levels of zinc and zinc we know is important for immune function. It regulates hundreds of enzymes. It's important for getting rid of heavy metals. It's important for ADD and autism. And it was really consistent with his symptoms of infections of eczema, allergies, hyperactivity.

• 52:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  He also had low magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is really common. And it led to, you know, headaches, anxiety, insomnia, muscle cramps, spasms, aches, hypersensitivity to loud noises. All these are signs of magnesium deficiency. And we do testing and, you know, I recently started a, co-founded a company called Function Health to help people get access to their own labs and to be able to look at some of these deep nutritional testing as well as metabolic testing and many things we're going to talk about with Clayton. Things that are often missed by a traditional doctor are not checked. When was the last time your doctor checked your omega three level or vitamin A or magnesium or vitamin D? These are all part of our, our standard function health panels. And I think it's really important for you to think about. So go check out functionhealth.com.

• 53:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You can sign up for the waitlist and it gives you really great guidance on how to optimize your health using personalized recommendations. So the next thing we looked at besides nutrition was his immune system because he has so many inflammatory things. Right? He had, you know, infections, he had asthma, he had sore throats, he had allergies. He had all these inflammatory things. So it was like flashing red light, inflammation, inflammation. Inflammation is at the root of so many problems, including brain diseases. So. We looked at the factors that cause actually inflammation such as food allergies, environmental allergies, molds, toxins, chronic low-grade infections, maybe he had a whole bunch of these things. We found some testing. We looked at food sensitivity testing and

• 53:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  he had a lot of foods he was reacting to, about 18 different foods, including dairy, peanuts, yeast, citrus foods, gluten, especially gluten, and he had gluten antibodies, which again are not checked by most doctors, but actually were elevated. And so we found he really was sensitive to gluten. So gluten basically is a huge factor for these kids often with ADD or autism. It triggers this low-grade chronic inflammation in the brain and immune response. It makes leaky gut worse, causes canker sores. So when he had canker sores, I was clued in that he might have a gluten issue. It can be celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. And he had elevated antiglycan antibodies, which was basically

• 54:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  an autoimmune reaction to the proteins found in gluten and that are found in wheat, rye, barley, spelt, and oats. Now, so massive inflammation, and we knew we had gluten issues, we knew we had food sensitivities, and some other things that were causing it. He also had tons of gut symptoms, right? So we looked at his digestive system, nausea, diarrhea, stomach aches, anal itching. He had a sensitive stomach. He had lots of antibiotics for sore throats, and he had then yeast overgrowth because of all the antibiotics and abnormal gut flora. We looked at his stool test. He had leaky gut, which basically creates the damage in the gut that allows food proteins and bacteria to leak in. And his immune system was just so pissed off, and it wasn't just affecting his asthma

• 55:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and allergies, it was also affecting his brain. The next thing we looked at were toxins, because we take a look at nutrition, we take a look at gut, we took at immune issues, we look at the causes. And so we started to look at, you know, whether or not he had any environmental toxins, which we know can cause ADD and even autism. And heavy metals were an issue for him. He had high levels of lead and mercury. And he had, you know, similar probably exposure to other kids, but they're often not looked at and not treated. They might check up lead level, they don't ever look at a challenge test. And genetically, nutritionally, he couldn't really detoxify these. And we know mercury and lead are associated with GI symptoms, autoimmune issues, cognitive problems that lead has been actually very well linked to ADD and behavioral issues, cognitive problems, and

• 56:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's no doubt about the date on this. You don't have to believe me. Just go to PubMed and put lead and ADHD and you'll come up with plenty of scientific papers to explain how this actually is all working. So basically, maybe, you know, the world is polluted, right? We have so many cement factories, coal burning factories, all of which spew out lead and mercury. It goes into the soil. Kids are playing in the dirt, or maybe there's toys made from China or colored lead paint, or maybe the people have leaded paint in their house, or eating from lead covered glasses, or, I mean, crystal glasses or fancy plates. But basically, he was exposed to all these dangers of the Industrial Revolution. And he also had a little bit of mold in his house, and he had food additives that, you know, we can't measure

• 56:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  those things, but I'm sure they were causing a problem. So basically, his problem wasn't riddle deficiency or bad parenting, right? The cause was in his diet. It was environmental toxins. It was in his microbiome. And so we basically constructed a very simple treatment. So we think, oh, my God, there's so many things. You know, he's got 25 different diseases, right? Well, what do you do? So it was quite simple. We basically looked at the causes. So we basically looked at the nutritional efficiencies, the toxic environmental toxins he was exposed to, the food sensitivities, all the processed food we got rid of, the gluten, all the yeast overgrowth. And we found out what sort of was causing him to

• 57:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  be out of balance, right? So basically, the body is a system of equilibrium. And either you have too much of something that's causing you to be out of balance, or not enough of something that's causing you that you need to be in balance, right? He had all these deficiencies of nutritional stuff, and all these other things like yeast overgrowth, and heavy metals, and gluten, they were irritating his system. So we can't just do one thing. And I think in medicine, they go, well, let's do one thing and see what happens. Well, we won't know unless you do a randomized controlled trial with one intervention and one outcome. Well, that's just BS, because, you know, if you want to grow a plant, you don't go, well, I'm just going to give it water, but no soil and sun, and see what happens. Or I'm just going to give it soil, but no, you know, water, or, or, or, or, I'll give it

• 58:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  sun, but no soil and water. You know, it's just the whole thing is an insane. Backwards antiquated framework for thinking about disease. And it's why we we're in this really powerful transformation in medicine right now. It hasn't quite caught up to the clinic in most cases, but it really is where we're all going. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has

• 59:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the world's best selection of top quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my

• 59:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

• 1:00:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.