Most Replayed Moment: Is Milk Healthy? The Truth About Dairy, Sugar, Fruit And Fasting

Dr Mark Hyman is a physician and bestselling author specialising in food, longevity and metabolic health. In this moment, he reveals why willpower fails around food, what the science says about dairy and milk, whether fruit is actually good for us, and how the timing of your meals could affect your health and ageing. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/U6SytX86w3b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/v3YPvgd7w3b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr Mark Hyman: https://drhyman.com/

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

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  I got told the other day, which helped me understand myself. I got told that when we're hungry, especially when it's sort of like late at night, the logical center of our brain, like the prefrontal cortex is less active and the amygdala, the sort of emotional part of our brain that wants the dopamine is much more active. And it helped me to understand why maybe late at night, if I haven't planned my food, I'm much more susceptible to make a bad food choice than I then regret. I'm much more susceptible to lean in for sugar or something that's like super high in carbs or whatever. That really helped me. And this is the why the planning thing makes a lot of sense. Cause I can use my prefrontal cortex, my logic center of my brain to make the food choice in the morning.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  So that I don't find myself making a mistake.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It's so important, Stephen, because people have to understand that willpower is not the answer. You cannot use willpower to control your food behavior. It's part of your ancestral evolutionary limbic reptile dinosaur brain. And so when your blood sugar drops, you're going to eat whatever in front of you. If there's a vending machine, if there's a donut, if it's cookies, it doesn't matter. Even if you know better, and I've experienced this, you're just going to eat whatever because it's a life threatening emergency. Your body doesn't know that there's grocery stores and restaurants. It means you're going to go out and try to hunt and gather and do something. It's like an emergency. So when you have that food emergency and you don't have the right food on you, you're in trouble.

• 1:30Steven Bartlett?

  I have that all the time. I have this like constant fight with myself where this one voice is like, do the fucking right thing. And then this other part of my brain is like, just today, break the rule. And but obviously that voice is louder sometimes than others. And typically late at night, it's louder.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Sleep deprivation.

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  Stress.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Stress, sleep deprivation, all that increases your appetite, increases cortisol, it increases ghrelin, which is a ghrelin, which is a hunger hormone. I mean, you know, you can take, you know, young, healthy college kids and sleep deprived of them and they're going to crave carbs, they're going to crave sugar and they're going to gain weight. So it's not rocket science.

• 2:07Steven Bartlett?

  What about for someone that doesn't have any money at all? It's so they can't, you know, they don't have the ability to. A lot of the privileges that me and you have, what are some of the very basics that they should be thinking about in order to remain healthy in a world where every convenience store is trying to sell you something

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26Steven Bartlett?

  cheap and sugary?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really good, good question. You know, I think, I think the economics of being healthy is a problem and, and we know that there's a huge disparity in health. But it's not only economic, it's education. You know, I met with a woman who was the doctor at a clinic in Bed-Stuy, which is in Brooklyn, a very underserved area and, and a very low socioeconomic status group, very unhealthy. And she said, you know, Mark, did you know the, the number one predictor of health? Is it money? Nope, is education. So even people who are, were wealthy, but haven't been educated, still have issues. So for me, it was really about education.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  And so people can be educated to do the right thing and it doesn't have to be expensive. And I was part of this film 10 years ago called Fed Up. It looked at childhood obesity and our food system and the advent of sugar and marketing and processed foods. And we, we visit a lot of families and I work with a family in North Carolina, South Carolina, and easily, it's one of the poorest areas in America. And it has the worst, call it the food deserts, one of the worst food deserts in America, basically where there's not a lot of healthy options to choose from.

• 3:39Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  And there's something called the Retail Food Environment Index. How many healthy grocery stores are there to fast food and convenience stores? And there was like 10 to one, it was, it was terrible. And his family, you know, was, lived on a thousand dollars a month for food for a family of five. They lived in a trailer. They were in disability and food stamps. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight, the father was very overweight, had type 2 diabetes and was on, already at 42 years old, was on dialysis for kidney failure. Which is amazing because you usually don't see that till later. The son was 16 years old and 50% body fat guy should be 10 to 20 and was about to be diabetic, was prediabetic. And rather than kind of, they were part of the movie. I said, why do you want to do this?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  They were like, well, in order for my dad to get kidney transplant, yes, he was wait, we're trying, we don't know what to do. We're doing all this low fat stuff and we're doing all these diet stuff we have in the house, not working. So I went to their house, their trailer, and I, rather than giving a lecture about what to do, I said, let's cook a meal together, but first let's do an inspection of your kitchen and let's see what's in here. And so we pulled out everything from the freezer and the fridge and the cupboards and everything was packaged, boxed, processed. Everything was very high in high fructose corn syrup, from the peanut butter to the salad dressing, everything had trans fat in it, which is deadly. And a lot of it said diet this. And my basic rule is if it has a health claim on the label, don't eat it. You know, it's gluten free potato chips, doesn't make it healthy, right? Coca-Cola is gluten free, doesn't make it healthy.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So I showed them what they were doing and I said, let's just make a simple meal. Here's a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget. How to Eat Well for You, for the Planet and Your Wallet. And it's made by the Environmental Working Group. You can get it on ewg.org, it's free. And it was like, how do you choose the cheaper cuts of meat or the beans or the grains or the veggies? You know, like onions and carrots and celery are not expensive, you know, like a lot of veggies are not expensive. So we made turkey chili. We made a salad from fresh ingredients, olive oil and vinegar dressing, not dressing that was full of chemicals and high fructose corn syrup and refined oils. We, I showed them how to roast sweet potatoes. I showed them how to stir fry vegetables. We had some asparagus. They never eaten anything fresh. They never cooked in the kitchen.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  The kids came out, were playing video games, they kept running in the kitchen, like, what's that smell? Like, I think it was like the roasting, the sweet potatoes. We had this beautiful dinner together, they loved the food. And I was like, you know what? I don't know if this is gonna work, but you don't, they didn't even have cutting boards, they didn't have knives. Like, they literally hadn't, like, we tried to cut the, you know, the onions and the sweet potatoes with a butter knife, because that's all they had, was like a butter knife. It was really hard. So I bought them on the way home, I bought them cutting boards on Amazon and knives and I sent it to their house. Next week, the mom texts me, she says, Mark, we lost eighteen pounds this week as a family. A year later, the father lost forty-five, got a new kidney, the mother lost a hundred pounds, the son lost a hundred and thirty-two pounds and went to medical school. First guy

• 6:38Speaker 01

  in his family go to college and he asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school. And they lived in one of the worst food deserts. They didn't have much economically and they were able to figure it out because eating real food doesn't have to be expensive. You don't have to have a seventy-dollar wagyu ribeye steak, right? You can eat real food and it's just as simple as not eating the ultra-processed food. It's so bad for us and it kills eleven million people a year. We know this data is so strong, it causes mental health issues, aggression, violence, depression, anxiety, gun violence. I mean, the studies are there. I just, I did a podcast on the doctor's pharmacy, my podcast about this, talking about how our food is affecting our mental health, not just obesity and diabetes,

• 7:21Speaker 01

  but our cognitive function, ADD and memory issues. I mean, it's all linked to what we're eating. So we have, you know, like I said, the best of times, the worst of times. We know what to do, but we have the ability to do it. It's a problem of education, a problem of a political will to change the policies that are driving us to do the wrong thing. And right now, there's a bill being proposed in Congress that would limit, as a pilot, ultra-processed food for kids with food stamps, which I think would be amazing. The food industry is biting back tooth and nail, right? So, so we're fighting big forces. Food industry is the biggest industry on the planet.

• 8:02Steven Bartlett?

  When I was growing up and I was trying to be healthy, one of the things I used to do was chug milk.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:09Steven Bartlett?

  Because I got told that it would make me tall like my brothers. So I used to drink milk like crazy.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:14Steven Bartlett?

  Straight from the carton, just as many gulps as I could take from the fridge.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Did it work? Did you, did you grow?

• 8:19Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea. I'm still shorter than they are, so I guess not. But that's one of the big myths that I think a lot of families still believe that milk is great for our bones and to help us grow. What's your thoughts on milk?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  It's a controversial topic as well.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yes, I mean, the dairy industry is big. Our current Secretary of Agriculture worked for the dairy industry. It's problematic because the science isn't there. There was a paper called Milk and Health that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, top medical journal in the world, arguably, maybe The Lancet if you're from the UK. But it basically was written by two Harvard scientists that dissected all of the scientific evidence around milk and whether the claims were right or not. And just maybe for the audience in Europe, you might not know this, but in the States, you'll remember this, there were all these Got Milk ads. So there were famous people, celebrities, you know, sports athletes, politicians, all wearing a white milk mustache.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  And they're like Got Milk as a promotion. And in those ads, it would say it's going to build better bones, it's going to do this, it's going to do that. And the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, actually, or I think it was Federal Trade, you can't do that because it's not true. Like, you have to take those ads out. So those ads went away. And it was the government promoting those ads with the Dairy Council. So there's something called checkout programs that the government has where it's supposed to support agriculture. Well, the government was paying in part for these ads with taxpayer dollars, and the science wasn't there. And the dietary guidelines for Americans says that the average American should have

• 10:00Speaker 01

  three glasses of milk a day and kids should have two glasses of milk a day to be healthy. You cannot get money and funding for school lunches in America without having milk on the menu. Now, there is no evidence to support this. In fact, there's opposite evidence that skim milk causes weight gain because it doesn't satisfy your appetite, that milk can cause cancer.

• 10:21Steven Bartlett?

  Prostate cancer.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Prostate cancer, that it doesn't create strong bones. In fact, there's higher risk of fracture with high milk drinkers. That it creates a lot of digestive issues for people. It can create autoimmune diseases like type one diabetes. It has common allergies or food sensitivities that people get. And I remember I was in the emergency room once and when I was working in the ER and this mother comes in with this kid with like, had like this 10th ear infection. A few weeks I was like, what happened? Like, when did this start? Oh, it started when he was like 12 months old. I said, what changed? Well, I stopped breastfeeding and I started giving him milk. And all of a sudden he started getting these ear infections. I'm like, oh, this is before I even knew about all this. It was just kind of an interesting footnote. But we really have to look at the data and be science driven.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  And the problem is we're, we have corporate capture in America. We're, we're the food industry has captured our food agencies, our political system, from the FDA to the USDA. They spend, for example, half a billion dollars just on the farm bill, which has, for example, food stamps and other food programs, child infant nutrition. So it's really unfortunate, but milk is not nature's perfect food. It's only nature's perfect food if you're a calf. Is there health benefits to milk? Yes, so, so that's the other side of it. Now, what milk should we be drinking, right? If we're drinking modern milk, modern milk is from Holstein cows that are almost homogenous, same, not homogenized milk, but homogeneous breed.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  They have very few bulls inseminating them. They have like massive insemination program from a very few bulls that have a limited genetic stock. And they're what we call A1 cows. So most heirloom cows, most sort of historical dairy had something called A2 casein, which is less inflammatory, less likely to cause gut issues, less problematic for the body. So sheep and goat milk have A2. Certain cows like Jersey or Guernsey cows have A2 in them. And you can get A2 milk, you can A2 ice cream now. And, and so this A1 casein is potentially very problematic. So I think the current dairy is not great.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And then we pasteurize it and homogenize it and then we, you know, and we add growth hormone to the cows that goes in there. We have estrogen that we add into the cows. It's in the milk. We have 60 different hormones in the milk. Some of them are naturally occurring, but we milk pregnant cows and that milk has a lot more hormonal effects. So I think the current dairy is not something we should consume. Now, if you have a chance to get sheep milk or goat milk or A2 milks from a cow, that may be okay. Yogurt may be okay. And depends on your genetics, too. 75% of the world's lactose intolerant. Many people have dairy sensitivities. But I think, you know, if it's from the right source, it's okay. For example, I use goat whey as my morning protein shake. So goat whey is from goats, obviously.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  There's very little casein in it, but it's A2 casein if there's any, and I don't react to it. But if I have regular whey, I do have a reaction. I get congested, I'll get pimples during I get regular stuff. So I don't think dairy is something we should be consuming in large amounts unless it's certain kinds of dairy.

• 13:30Steven Bartlett?

  What's your position on fruit?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I love fruit.

• 13:34Steven Bartlett?

  How much fruit?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I think it depends, right? So if you're diabetic and you're metabolically completely out of whack and you don't have any metabolic resilience, you know, eating a plum might be a problem for you. And now we have continuous glucose monitors, you can track your blood sugar and see. And I've had patients like this, gee, I ate a plum and my sugar goes through the roof. So, but if I ate an apple, it doesn't. So I think different fruits have different effects on you. But for most part, fruit is full of phytochemicals, fiber, phytonutrients. It does have a little bit of sugar in it. I would say no fruit juice. I think fruit juice is definitely linked to obesity in kids and other things. But if you want to have an apple or a peach or a plum, it's fine. I think you shouldn't have it first thing in the morning.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I think protein and fat in the morning is important because it activates your metabolism and your protein synthesis. If you eat sugar in the morning, which is essentially what we eat in the world today, cereal, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bagels, you know, sweetened yogurt, sweetened coffees. I mean, it's the worst possible thing we can do for our biology. It jacks up our blood sugar and insulin and ends up causing us to gain weight and be hungry and, you know, be craving more stuff. So having fruit, for example, you have frozen berries in your, I had frozen cherries, for example, in my whey protein. That's okay because there's protein in there. It mitigates the effect.

• 14:54Steven Bartlett?

  What about eating times?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  When to eat?

• 14:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Have you got any thoughts around when we should and shouldn't be eating?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, you know, we had something called breakfast before, which was breaking the fast. And now people eat all night, they eat till they go to bed and they soon as they wake up, they eat or have something sugary stuff in the morning, they get sugary coffee and they don't give themselves a window of fasting, which is critical for our biology. And I wrote about this in my book, Young Forever, where we talked about how do we have our own repair, renewal system kick in? Because the body, think about it, Stephen, your body, when you cut yourself, heals. The skin closes and heals. How does it know how to do that? Right? It's so smart. It's got to, your bones break, it heals. I broke my arm a few years ago, it just healed, right? What's going on? I'm not going, would you please heal in there?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  It knows what to do or recruits stem cells or recruits repair factors and growth factors and it knows what to do. So the body has this innate healing, repair, renewal and regeneration system and we need to learn how to activate it. And most of us do the opposite. We do everything in our power to deactivate it and that causes a disease. So food is the most important thing we do to interact with these regenerative renewal repair systems. It's one of the things we call the hallmarks of aging and there's one called deregulated nutrient sensing and it really relates to how our bodies relate to food, how our nutrient sensing systems are dysregulated by our highly processed diet, by high sugar and starch and not enough of the right foods.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  So, so in the, in the long answer to your question, you know, it's important to give yourself a break of 12 hours. So if you eat at six at night, you can eat six in the morning, minimum, but best probably 14. So if you eat dinner at six, you eat breakfast at eight, that's okay. That's a 14 hour fast. And in that time, your body is doing its cleanup, recycling, repair.

• 16:46Steven Bartlett?

  Is there an evolutionary story here?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  For sure. Absolutely. You know, when, when, you know, we didn't have grocery stores, we didn't have, you know, Whole Foods, we didn't have restaurants, we didn't have takeout, we didn't have convenience stores. So we had to go out and find food. And I just came back from Tanzania and visited the hunter-gatherers there, the Kadza, which is one of the last few tribes that hunt and gather. And we went hunting and gathering. It was like, man, it's a lot of work to go, you know, dig up some roots and kill a bird in the tree and like, it was like, it was a project. We ran around for hours. And, and so we don't know where we're getting our next meal. And so the body has had to deal with periods of feast and famine before. So what it's got built into it is a system of conservation and repair when we don't eat.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And so the system gets activated that improves our blood sugar control, that recruits pneumatic chondry and builds pneumatic chondry, that reduces inflammation, that activates cellular cleanup and repair processes. So you have all these old cells and damaged proteins. Your body has a little like digester, almost like a little vacuum cleaner that goes and sucks this all up and then digests it and then uses the parts. It's almost like our recycling system in the body. We need to activate that. And so that fasting period is a time to do that. And we've seen even, for example, we know, for example, concentration camp survivors who lived really long, like they lived 90, 100 plus years old, many of them.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And it's because they had this period of deep starvation that had an effect on their biology. And we know this, we know this from many animal studies that starvation and fasting will extend your life by a third. If you eat a third less calories, you'll live a third longer. Now, it's not fun, right? But you don't have to do that. So timing of eating is important. So give yourself three hours before bed for no food and give yourself at least 12 to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.

• 18:38Steven Bartlett?

  How do we know in the animal studies it wasn't just the calorie restriction that caused the sort of longevity effect?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  It was.

• 18:46Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, it was the kind.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  It was.

• 18:47Steven Bartlett?

  So what if I just restrict my calories instead of fasting?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Well, you can do that. I met a guy who was from the calorie restriction society.

• 18:56Steven Bartlett?

  Is a calorie restriction society?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is based on this, these research in animals where, think about it, if you eat a third less, you live a third longer. So for a human, that would be 120 years old. And I said, what do you have for breakfast? He said, well, I had five pounds of celery. And I'm like, okay, you go do that. I'm going to figure out another way. So you have to eat enormous amounts of like low calorie food just to feel full, right? That's why you all have food. So he was starving and there are a lot of downsides to starving. You lose muscle, which is necessary. There are certain things that go wrong. And so it's not really the optimal strategy. You want to do things that mimic starvation.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  So how do you mimic this period of starvation that causes something called autophagy, which basically means to eat yourself, to basically clean up yourselves? It's like self-cleaning or self-repair, right? And so there's a lot of ways to hack that. You can do it by this longer term overnight fast. You can do it by certain supplements and certain medications like rapamycin is being studied for longevity, which is a drug that's used for cancer and for other immune suppressing treatments. But it works on this pathway called mTOR, which essentially is the activation of cellular buildup. It causes muscle synthesis. So if you want to build muscle, you want to activate mTOR with protein, which is good.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  But you don't want to activate it all the time. So this drug inhibits mTOR, which is what happens when you starve yourself. So it mimics starvation. And then you get this kind of benefit. Or drugs like metformin are being studied, which is another drug that's looking at how do we activate this longevity switch called AMPK, another pathway that's regulating your nutrient sensing. So when you have enough, you don't have enough nutrients, this activates. But if we're running around eating, well, you can actually take this drug and it may have an effect. There's a large trial going on now. I'm still agnostic about it. I'm neither pro or against it. I think the data is not in it for me to start taking it or for my patients to start taking it. But it works on some of these sort of starvation mimicking hacks, let's call them.

• 21:06Steven Bartlett?

  So starvation is good for us?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yes, yes. I would say you have to be careful because, you know, people go really to the extreme. They go like, I'm going to not activate mTOR because activating mTOR causes me to age faster and it prevents autophagy and it builds cancer and it's bad. So I'm going to become a vegan and I'm going to eat less calories. And eventually what happens is you lose muscle. So it's like Goldilocks, you know, you need both mTOR activation and mTOR ambition. You need to take a breath in, you need to take a breath out, you need to be awake, you need to go to sleep.

• 21:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Your heart needs to beat, it needs to relax. It's just how the body works.

• 21:46Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.