616 Dr. Mark Hyman: Heal Your Body with Food

“FOOD IS MEDICINE. IT WORKS FASTER, BETTER, AND CHEAPER THAN ALMOST ANY DRUG.” I know how hard it is to eat a healthy diet. It requires time and energy that you often feel like you don’t have. But what if I told you the time and energy you think you don’t have is because of the food you’re currently putting into your body? It's easy to be skeptical about this idea. But that’s what the food industry wants us to think. It wants us to continue eating its food, not giving a second thought to the sugars and fat we’re putting into our system. To break free from this mindset, it's really helpful to talk to the experts. And today, I have one of the most knowledgeable people in the field: Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman, M. D. is the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center, Director of the Cleveland Clinical Center for Functional Medicine, and the Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is a New York Times bestselling author with books like 10-Day Detox Diet and Eat Fat, Get Thin. His latest book Food: What The Heck Should I Eat? provides an explanation of the nutritional science around food and why the political, environmental, economic and social issues corrupt our understanding of food. Dr. Hyman is one of my favorite people to learn about health from because he is so honest about what's going on. Instead of trying to push his own agenda, he's got humanity's best interest at heart. If you’re looking to learn about the connection between food and energy or how the food industry manipulates what we see on TV, tune into Episode 616 to forever change your eating habits. Some Questions I Ask: How does our food impact everything? (6:45) How does funding affect the public discourse about food? (12:47) Do you think all inflammation, chronic pain and disease can be eliminated from the foods we eat? (16:30) Can you gain muscle mass living a fully vegetarian/vegan lifestyle? (20:48) What are the 3 basic food rules you live by? (24:55) What do you think the main thing people are feeding themselves that’s hurting them? (30:42) What’s the biggest challenge you face in your life? (32:13) Is there anything now you believe in that you think will eventually be debunked? (38:15) In This Episode You Will Learn: How Dr. Hyman sees food affecting our environment (8:13) When Dr. Hyman’s opinion was influenced by the food industry (12:59) What Dr. Hyman, being a functional doctor, sees as the root of disease (16:38) The question Dr. Hyman asks himself when food shopping (25:00) What Dr. Hyman sees as the greater footprint beyond your own health (28:24) How Dr. Hyman sees the power of the individual vs. the food system (34:00) What Dr. Hyman sees as the problems with grouping disease by symptoms and not causes (38:15) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 616 with number one New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:32Lewis Howes?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The first wealth is health." And if you're not thinking about your health, my friends, you need to start making it a priority every single day. How can I optimize my nutrition, the way I move, the way I think, the way I feel? How can we optimize this? Because an optimal health will give you an optimal life. But if your health is under attack on a consistent basis, or it's struggling, it will build negative momentum over the long run, and you will suffer and struggle, my friends. That's why we brought on the number one New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Mark

• 1:13Lewis Howes?

  Hyman, who's the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, chairman of the Board of the Institute of Functional Medicine, and founder and director of the Ultra Wellness Center. He's an 11-time New York Times bestselling author, and his books include Eat Fat, Get Thin, The Blood Sugar Solution, and many other massive books. His newest book, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, provides an explanation of nutritional science, the political, environmental, economic, and social issues around food. This is fascinating stuff. And then it dives deep into food as we eat it and the questions surrounding the food,

• 1:53Lewis Howes?

  and provides a guide on how to make the best choice for real food in each category. And Tony Robbins said, "If you're confused about what to eat, then read this book." And what we cover are some fascinating things. Number one, how, what we hear on TV shows. Shows about health is actually manipulated by sponsors and a lot of time not actually true or good for you. Also, the five causes of disease and which one is the biggest that Mark talks about. Why Mark is a reliable doctor to listen to over the other nutritional experts and I ask him that question. Also, the connection between our food and our mood and our energy and why your

• 2:36Lewis Howes?

  genetic makeup isn't as significant as you think. This is going to be interesting. I'm so excited about this. Again, I don't want to be confused about my nutrition, my food and what is good to eat, what's bad, how to optimize your health and nutrition. That's why we bring on the expert, the one and only Dr. Mark Hyman.

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. We have the legendary Dr. Mark Hyman in the house. Good to see you, sir.

• 3:09Mark Hyman?

  Thank you, Louis.

• 3:10Lewis Howes?

  Very excited. The last time you were on was two years ago, actually.

• 3:12Mark Hyman?

  Two years ago. Talking about fat.

• 3:14Lewis Howes?

  Talking about fat and now we're talking about food. What the heck should I eat is the new book. Make sure you guys check it out. New York Times bestseller already. Crushing it and helping a lot of people. The No Nonsense Guide to Achieving Optimal Weight and Lifelong Health. So what should I eat? You know, you were talking about this before, that every day we get multiple times to vote on what we want to put inside of our body, right? And what we should be eating. And we have control over this. Or I guess most people do, right?

• 3:43Mark Hyman?

  Most people do. Not everybody on the planet, but most people do have choice about what they eat and what they put in their bodies and how it impacts everything that matters in the world.

• 3:51Lewis Howes?

  How does it impact everything?

• 3:54Mark Hyman?

  Well, I wrote this book because people are confused. Like, they don't know what to eat. They're herring, paleo, vegan, keto, low fat, high fat, low carb, high carb, raw, whatever.

• 4:05Lewis Howes?

  No sugar.

• 4:05Mark Hyman?

  No sugar. It's like, you know, there's no soda diet that everybody believes in, but pretty much everything else, you know?

• 4:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:12Mark Hyman?

  And so I really want to answer that question. And in answering that question, it really became clear to me that the field is so confused because there's so much money in the food system that's driving the food we eat. And the way we grow the food. And the kind of food that we produce and the way it's marketed, the way it's distributed and the way it's promoted are literally driving almost everything that's wrong with our society. And people don't understand how it all connects together. For example, yes, we know that we eat bad food, we get sick and fat. But the truth is that food is the most powerful driver of chronic disease, which affects one out of two people now. And it costs 84% of our $3.2 trillion healthcare costs or for chronic disease.

• 4:57Mark Hyman?

  So that's a big deal. And that is affecting our economy, right? Because most people don't understand that Medicare and Medicaid are gonna go bankrupt in 20 years because 100% of our federal revenue from taxes will be required to pay for Medicare and Medicaid for chronic disease. Today, 1/3 of the budgets of most states is for chronic disease through Medicaid. So that's just the health and economy. Then it goes on, the climate. I mean, food system itself is the number one cause of climate change. Food waste, we waste 40% of food. We grow food in terms of soil practices that deplete the soil. We've lost 1.1 billion acres of arable land to deserts, which then affects carbon in the environment.

• 5:39Mark Hyman?

  Because soil holds carbon, healthy organic soil actually sequesters carbon that if built back up at scale could take us back to the pre-industrial era of climate change. And on top of that, the carbon goes in the environment, goes in the oceans, and then kills the phytoplankton by acidifying the oceans. And the phytoplankton are these single-syll organisms that are essentially the bottom of the food chain in the ocean, but they produce 50% of our oxygen. So every other breath you take comes from the ocean, not the rainforest. So the way we're growing food, tilling, industrial agriculture, all is damaging that. Factory-farmed animals is really the number one cause of climate change. Factory-farmed? Why is that? Just because of all the pollution they put out? Yeah, because, one, we use industrial agriculture practice to grow the food.

• 6:23Mark Hyman?

  So 70% of our agricultural lands are to grow food. For animals, for human consumption. In other words, soybeans and corn and all the feedlot cows that eat not grass, but eat corn and soy, which they're not supposed to eat, and who knows what other junk. Right. Plus, given antibiotics and so forth. Then all the chemicals that are used in industrial agriculture, the fertilizers, the pesticides, herbicides, all run off into the waterways. Then it kills the waterways. And you have dead zones the size of New Jersey, in the Gulf of Mexico, from our agricultural practice. And so all these things are combining to actually drive climate change. Plus, one-fifth of our fossil fuel consumption is used for industrial agriculture. So it's a huge problem that most people don't realize. So our environment and our climate are being driven by the food we eat.

• 7:08Mark Hyman?

  And then, of course, there's the social issues. People don't understand that the quality of the food we eat, the processed food, the refined oils, the sugars, the chemicals, the additives, affect behavior. We know, for example, Louis, that in prisons, if you give people a healthy diet in prisons, they will reduce violent crime in the prison by 56%. If you add a vitamin supplement, it goes down by 80%, because they're all nutritionally depleted. I mean, I had a patient, not a patient, he was a, I don't know, he was a guy who was in jail, was a murderer. He wrote me a handwritten letter years ago. He said, "I followed your program in jail. I realized I was a murderer. My behavior was so violent my whole life. And when I changed my diet, I became a completely different person. I realized it was what I was eating.

• 7:52Mark Hyman?

  And now I'm so thankful for having my life back." So you think our diet also determines our behavior? Absolutely. There's clear evidence about that. I was just reading a study the other day that showed that people who eat a lot of carbohydrates and sugars and starches have much more violent behavior. We know that people who eat refined oils, which we now have 10% of these as our calories, from soybean oil, it's in everything. It's not necessarily put in our food. It's in every packaged processed food. That has led to increase in homicides and violence and suicides around the world. And we've gotten higher on these refined omega-6s and low on omega-3s. So the evidence of how it affects behavior, mood, poverty, it keeps poor communities down. And then the food industry targets these communities disproportionately. So you have all these things happening at the same time, and then kids.

• 8:37Mark Hyman?

  Kids can't learn in school because they're eating Doritos and Coke. And they can't actually focus and learn, and their behavior is all erratic, and they're on these chemicals which alter their behavior. That's why, you know, one out of six kids has some neurodevelopmental problem, which is enormous, right? ADD now affects, you know, one out of 10 kids. I think 14% of kids have ADD, and about 1 in 10 kids are on medication.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  You think ADD can be removed if we have a better diet? Or is that something?

• 9:04Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely.

• 9:05Lewis Howes?

  Is that something at the brain or?

• 9:06Mark Hyman?

  No, absolutely. No, it's not a brain problem. It's a body problem, and the body problem is caused by our diet and by environmental toxins. And I've had hundreds of ADD patients who've transformed their lives. I mean, I just, we were talking about the Broken Brain documentary series I did. I had a guy, I was in a New York Russian bathhouse the other day. So I come to that, I saw your series, I would have been on ADD medication my whole life, and it helped me get off my medication. We see this. So you've got health, you've got the economy, you've got social justice and poverty issues. You've got climate, you've got environment, you've got education. It's all connected, and the issue is that most people don't connect the dots, number one. And most people don't realize that we're in this situation because of money in the food system that's driving our policies.

• 9:49Lewis Howes?

  You were mentioning how there's some press hits that you do. I won't mention who, but that would say you can't talk about certain things because of a sponsor that's funding the program.

• 9:59Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:59Lewis Howes?

  So you can't talk negative about one brand or one product or because of that, yeah?

• 10:04Mark Hyman?

  That's right. I was told, well, you can't cover this subject because we get our funding from this sponsor. I can tell you a story from the past, because the show's not on the air anymore. It was The Martha Stewart Show. And I was on the show, and we were working with a producer, and we were talking about getting healthy and working out and detoxing. And Martha had her trainer there. And the producer says, well, we're gonna have to do a bit as part of the segment on dairy, and how dairy is such a great sports recovery drink.

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 10:30Mark Hyman?

  Yes. And so I was like, you know, I'm just sorry to tell you, but there's all this evidence that that's not true. So I downloaded all the scientific papers documenting the science behind the fact that dairy isn't a sports drink.

• 10:44Mark Hyman?

  And he's like, mm, I know, but we kind of have to because this spot is sponsored by the dairy council.

• 10:49Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 10:50Mark Hyman?

  If you're ever on television, you know that the experts don't get notes. They don't get cue cards. They don't get teleprompters. They have to know their stuff. Well, this woman, who was the trainer, had all these cue cards that was being held up about dairy with all the bullet points of why dairy is such a great food and sports drink. It's insidious. So we think we're getting news. We're thinking getting authentic.

• 11:09Lewis Howes?

  From experts too. From doctors or specialists or experts. And we are influenced by these experts.

• 11:15Mark Hyman?

  Huge. I mean, the evidence is so clear that industry is heavily funding science. And they're funding corrupt science. So if you look at the data, for example, artificial sweeteners, 99% of the studies done by the food industry show that they are safe. 99% of the studies on artificial sweeteners done by independent scientists find that they're not safe. You know, if your industry funds a study, they're eight to 50 times more likely to find a positive benefit for their product.

• 11:40Lewis Howes?

  Right, of course.

• 11:41Mark Hyman?

  And then you look at the American Heart Association, the American Diabetic Association, the American Nutrition, I mean, the American Nutrition Dietetic Association. These are all funded by the food industry. And if you look, it's Coca-Cola, it's Pepsi, it's Cargill. It's frightening to see how much money is. You have Trix cereal for kids as a heart-healthy cereal. Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms. I mean, Trix has seven teaspoons of sugar, red dye, blue dye, yellow dye, you dye. You know, it gets all in there and it's a heart-healthy food. Why? Because they get $300,000 for every time they put that check on a box. Yes, way. And this is happening globally, globally.

• 12:20Mark Hyman?

  I mean, there's a huge battle going on in Malaysia now because Nestle has promoted this drink called Milo, which I never heard about, but it's a big drink in the developing world and Asia and South America. And it's basically Ovaltine. It's basically a malted beverage with sugar that has the same glycemic index as Coca-Cola. And they have athletes on there and sports characters and how it's a great drink for health. And they had this commercial, which I saw, which was a Filipino rock star singing this great rap song about how... Everybody who's a kid has an energy gap. Four out of five kids have this thing called an energy gap. I was at a medical conference.

• 12:57Lewis Howes?

  What's an energy gap mean?

• 12:58Mark Hyman?

  I was at a medical conference of 1,500 doctors. I says, "Anybody here heard of an energy gap that four out of five kids have?" No, they completely made this up. And they say these kids need Milo for the energy gap.

• 13:10Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 13:10Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and they, this guy who lives over in Malaysia called them out on this. And they came out with this huge propaganda campaign against him to discredit him and manipulating the facts and, you know, lying. And I was, I was just watching this whole thing. It's unbelievable. So it's, it's not an accident that we're in this situation.

• 13:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow, the manipulation, yeah. And do you think that all inflammation, chronic pain and disease can be eliminated from the foods we eat or is caused by foods?

• 13:40Mark Hyman?

  I think.

• 13:40Lewis Howes?

  Besides having like a car accident or something?

• 13:42Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I'm a functional medicine doctor. You know, run the Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic. And so we look at the root causes of disease. And there are many, right? There's environment, there's lifestyle, there's genetics. All affect these very systems in your body, right? So, we always say there's five causes of all disease. Based on how they influence your genetics and combined with your lifestyle. Toxins, so environmental toxins, that's not your fault. That's just the fact that we put 80,000 chemicals in the environment without testing them. We have 3,000 food additives we eat every year. As Americans, about three to five pounds of it, which is frightening. And, you know, there are heavy metals and pesticides everywhere. So we're exposed to a lot of toxins and they make people sick. Infections, which we can get, whether it's viral infections, bacterial infections, Lyme disease, tick infections.

• 14:26Mark Hyman?

  Allergens, which are increasingly common or food sensitivities, things where your body's creating an immune response, whether it's gluten or dairy, those are big. And then poor diet and stress. All of those are contributing to disease. But by far, the biggest cause is food. By far. What's amazing is it's not like a little bit. It's like people say, "Oh, my migraines or my arthritis or my irritable bowel." People don't connect the dots between how they feel and the food they're eating. And then when you switch, people have transformations very quickly.

• 14:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:56Mark Hyman?

  You know?

• 14:57Lewis Howes?

  They notice it quickly.

• 14:58Mark Hyman?

  Quickly, yeah, I mean.

• 14:59Lewis Howes?

  Pain goes away, the weight goes off, all these things.

• 15:01Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I always say food is medicine. It's not just like a medicine. It works faster, better and cheaper than almost any drug. I mean, we have people who are off insulin, who are type 2 diabetics, within a week.

• 15:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 15:11Mark Hyman?

  You know, and, and get off all their medications. I mean, there was a huge study just published on a ketogenic diet intervention for type 2 diabetics. And I don't think ketogenic diets are right for everybody, but. In extreme situation where your metabolism is so broken, it can help reset things, basically reducing carbs to 30 grams a day, 70% fat, and help in a context of a healthy, plant-rich diet. And they were able to get 100% of the people in a year over diabetics off of the main diabetes medication and 94% off insulin, or dramatically lower, with an average weight loss of 30 pounds, about 12% of body weight. And this is unprecedented in the research. Because food, if you know how to apply it in the right way, at the right dose for the right person, it's the most powerful drug.

• 15:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, here's the thing. You talked about in the book that you've been studying food for 35 years.

• 15:59Mark Hyman?

  40 now.

• 16:00Lewis Howes?

  40 years.

• 16:01Mark Hyman?

  I was like, oh, I did the math. It's 2018, I was started in 1978 in college. And I'm like, that old.

• 16:07Lewis Howes?

  Here's the thing, you've got 11 New York Times bestselling books. You've probably done how many books total?

• 16:12Mark Hyman?

  14.

• 16:13Lewis Howes?

  14 books, 11 New York Times, including this one, Food What the Actually I Eat. And for 40 years, you've been studying food and you say even the experts are confused by the science.

• 16:24Mark Hyman?

  They are, they are.

• 16:25Lewis Howes?

  So how come you're...

• 16:27Mark Hyman?

  How come I figured it out?

• 16:28Lewis Howes?

  How come you know all the answers?

• 16:29Mark Hyman?

  I don't think...

• 16:30Lewis Howes?

  After 40 years.

• 16:30Mark Hyman?

  I don't think I know all the answers, but I don't have a bone to pick.

• 16:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Mark Hyman?

  In other words, I haven't spent my life dedicated to the low-fat diet. I haven't been dedicated my life to...

• 16:38Lewis Howes?

  Paleo.

• 16:39Mark Hyman?

  Veganism. I mean, I'm looking at like what works. And the other thing I know is that I'm not an academic. Well, I do research, but that's not how I started. I'm a practicing doctor. So what's happened over the years is the latest thing comes in, I try it, see what happens, see what happens to the patient. So seeing 10s of thousands of patients, doing thousands and thousands of lab tests over the years, seeing what happens when people change their diet and how their biology responds, that's the best laboratory you'll ever see. And I even noticed on myself, I was a vegetarian for 10 years. And I see pictures of myself when I was 28. And I am so scrawny, even though I ate really healthy. I ran five miles a day, I did yoga all the time. And I look at myself now doing far less exercise. And I'm far more muscular and have more muscle mass than I did when I was 28.

• 17:24Mark Hyman?

  Cause I learned how to change my diet. And we know that the right kind of high fat diet and adequate protein actually increases muscle mass.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 17:34Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I literally just got off the phone with a friend. Who says, you know, I went on a vegan diet and three days into it, like I can't lift anymore.

• 17:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but then you see some like, you know, athletes that are all vegan.

• 17:45Mark Hyman?

  That's true.

• 17:46Lewis Howes?

  Gain muscle mass and gain strength in your life. But what is.

• 17:48Mark Hyman?

  Maybe they're taking steroids, I don't know.

• 17:50Lewis Howes?

  Who knows? So you think living a vegetarian or vegan, fully vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, that it's hard to gain muscle mass?

• 17:57Mark Hyman?

  I think it's hard, it's hard. It's not impossible. I mean, if you really work at it and really work out and there are great vegan athletes out there. But there's never been a historically voluntary vegan society ever. And when you look at.

• 18:09Lewis Howes?

  The blue zones or?

• 18:10Mark Hyman?

  No, they were never exclusively vegan.

• 18:13Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 18:13Mark Hyman?

  They always had some animal food.

• 18:15Lewis Howes?

  Got it. Fish or something.

• 18:17Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and you know, as hunter gatherers, we eat 800 species of plants. So we had a very plant-rich diet. But we also included wild animals when we could catch them.

• 18:29Mark Hyman?

  It's part of revolutionary history and our bodies are well adapted. And the protein in vegetables is different. So for example, there's something called leucine, which is an amino acid. That is the rate limiting amino acid for muscle synthesis. In other words, in order to milk bustle, you need this amino acid. And it's very low in plant proteins, very high in animal proteins.

• 18:48Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 18:48Mark Hyman?

  So.

• 18:49Lewis Howes?

  Why not just live a plant-based diet and then have the supplements?

• 18:52Mark Hyman?

  You could, you could. And I, you know, I've faced with vegans, monks, I mean, I'm not going to force people not to eat it. But it's much harder to do and you have to know what you're doing. And I see people over time, initially when they switch from a processed American diet. To a whole foods vegan diet, they are going to get so much better. Of course, yeah. But the real issue is compared to what? Right. Right? And they've looked at over time, these big studies, looking at animal and plant proteins and stuff over time, looking at what people do. There was a vegan vegetarian omnivore study, which was 245,000 people. It was an observational study, but they didn't find any difference in outcomes. Another study, 42 country study, looking at food pattern consumption over long periods of time, showed actually the people had animal fat and protein did far better than people who focused on cereal grains in their diet. Less heart disease.

• 19:36Mark Hyman?

  Another study, the PURE study, just came out recently, 135,000 people. It was five continents, I think 18 countries, 10 years. And there was actually improvement when people had more saturated fat and more good fats and less cereal grains and more animal protein. More animal protein or more animal protein? Yeah, it was not a risk factor. Right. These are difficult studies to interpret sometimes because they're observational, but you look at interventional studies where you intervene by giving people a high fat, protein diets with lots of plant foods, people do better metabolically. So. Really? Yeah, it's very hard to eat a low glycemic diet if you're a vegan. You can, but it's very hard. I have a friend who's a keto vegan and she's a type 1 diabetic and she's rocking it. But you have to know what you're doing. So disciplined.

• 20:21Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, super disciplined, super smart about it. That's challenging. Yeah. I think, you know, and the data on meat, honestly, which I go into the book in great detail, is confusing for people because there's this. So it depends on the factors of the meat. Yeah. Where you get it, the environment it's in, how it's fed, how it's raised, the stress of it. Right, exactly. How it's processed, everything, right? Totally, right. So people go, we shouldn't be eating meat because it's bad for the animals, it's bad for the environment. Yes, we should not be eating factory farmed meat. This is really bad. It's bad for the animals, it's bad for the planet, it's bad for us because the quality of the meat is very poor. But let's say a wild elk or a grass finished bison or even cow, very different. And it turns out that these animals actually have higher levels of omega-3 fats

• 21:06Mark Hyman?

  and higher levels of antioxidants and minerals and nutrients and beneficial fats and actually are a great source of protein and don't have the harm that we think they do. When you look at the studies that showed there was harm, the reason they show that is because. When you do a study, observational study, you give people a questionnaire every year. So you take 10,000 people, 100,000 people, and every year you give them a questionnaire. What'd you eat? What'd you eat last week? If you can remember. And people answer according to what they think they should answer a lot of times, right? So if meat is bad, they're gonna underestimate the amount of meat they're eating. So during the time of these studies, meat was considered bad. So people who ate meat didn't really care about their health. And the data show it. When you look at the factors of these people, their characteristics, which you can read in the studies,

• 21:48Mark Hyman?

  which I read, they were overweight, they smoked, they drank, they didn't eat fruits and vegetables, they didn't exercise, they didn't take vitamins, they ate more processed food, more sugar. Of course, they were sicker.

• 21:59Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:59Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Lewis Howes?

  Now, what are the three basic food rules that you live by?

• 22:04Mark Hyman?

  Me?

• 22:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Mark Hyman?

  Well, I was joking, because I used to teach a lot of churches and I go, if, ask yourself one question when you're shopping. Did God make this, or did man make this, right? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did God make an avocado? Yeah. Pretty simple rule.

• 22:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Mark Hyman?

  And you can even take that to its logical extreme. Did God make a feedlot cow? No. Did God make a grass-fed cow? Yes, right?

• 22:29Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 22:29Mark Hyman?

  So you can kind of go down the line on all that. That's the first principle. The second principle is we should be eating mostly a plant-based diet. We call it plant-rich. I like to call it plant-rich.

• 22:38Lewis Howes?

  About 80/20, right?

• 22:39Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, 80%, 70% of your foods on your plate should be lots of vegetables, nuts and seeds, fruit, whole foods. And the third principle is we need a lot of good fats. Avocados, olive oil. I think there's controversies about certain things. Nuts and seeds are good, but then there's the whole saturated fat debate, which we can get into, where refined oils. But essentially, we need a lot of good fats, low starch and sugar, plant-rich diet, and stay away from processed food.

• 23:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Now, should that be true for everyone? Or does it depend on your body type, your blood type, your genetics?

• 23:14Mark Hyman?

  I jokingly call this the Pegan diet, right? Because I was sitting on a panel with friends of mine. One was paleo, one was vegan. They were fighting, and I'm like, listen, guys, you're paleo, you're vegan. I must be a Pegan. And I was joking, and then it occurred to me that, you know, there was more in common than there was different.

• 23:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Mark Hyman?

  And we could come up with these general nutritional principles that nobody's going to disagree with, right? Nobody thinks we should be eating a lot of starch and sugar. Everybody thinks we should be eating more plants. Everybody thinks if we eat animal protein, that we should eat only sustainably raised or harvested or grass finished protein. That we should eat fish, but it should only be fish that's low in mercury and toxins. That doesn't overfish the oceans. If it's farm raised, it should be sustainable. We should eat lots of good fats. I mean, there are a few outliers who still are holding on to low fat dogma, but the train has left the station on that one.

• 23:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:57Mark Hyman?

  And so there's these simple, that nobody thinks we should be consuming pesticides and herbicides and GMO, that we should be having three pounds of food additives per person every year. I mean, nobody thinks we should be eating those things. Like, nobody's gonna say, okay, I think you should have more butylated hydroxytoluene with your salad.

• 24:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 24:13Mark Hyman?

  Right? Or red diet number 40, right?

• 24:15Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 24:15Mark Hyman?

  These are things that are sort of inserted into our diet. So those are principles that I try to outline, and it's adaptable. What about grains and beans? Well, some people do well on them, some people don't, and it really is individual. But I talk about if you are going to, here's the things to know about, here's the grains to eat, here's what you should or shouldn't do. Gluten, why is it a problem? Who is it a problem for? Is our current wheat the wheat we used to eat? No, it's not. So that has an impact. What should we focus on? Could you have rye, which is, you know, has gluten in it, but it's probably, if you're not gluten sensitive, a much better food. So it goes through every single chapter. I go through meat, poultry, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, grains. And I talk about the controversies. What are the people fighting about? What does the science say? What do we know? What do we not know? There's still stuff we are learning, right? We're still discovering every day.

• 24:59Mark Hyman?

  So it's really kind of a foundational principle book. It's not extreme, it's sort of the middle of the road.

• 25:04Lewis Howes?

  This is kind of the bible for you, then?

• 25:06Mark Hyman?

  Kind of.

• 25:07Lewis Howes?

  All the things you've learned.

• 25:08Mark Hyman?

  Pretty much.

• 25:09Lewis Howes?

  Forty-plus years now, 14 books.

• 25:12Mark Hyman?

  Yes, it's actually different than other books I've written, because the other books are more topic specific. They're on the brain, or they're on metabolism, or diabetes, or sugar. This is really, if you're an eater, and there's about nine billion of us, it's probably something that'll help. And I also talk about how do you eat, not just for your own health, right? But what is the overall footprint of the food you eat? What's the health footprint, the economic footprint, the carbon footprint, the environmental footprint, the educational footprint, the national security footprint, and even poverty and social justice footprint of what you eat? Because there are things we can't change as individuals. We can't end nuclear war. We can't... Single-handedly in climate change. But we can change what we eat because we do it all the time.

• 25:57Mark Hyman?

  And the choice we make matter. I mean, I was just with the vice chairman of Pepsi, who's my new best friend. You can imagine, we had a great time together and, you know, we don't agree on a lot of things. But it was fascinating listening to him talk about what's happening in the company as they're trying to shift to meet the consumer demand.

• 26:14Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 26:15Mark Hyman?

  So they're like, how do we create special? And he introduced me to this engineer who's working for him. How do we create special types of packaging that's compostable, but that keeps the food fresh? We don't need to use preservatives or artificial ingredients and we can have whole foods that we distribute globally. I'm like, wow, that's a great thing to be looking at, right? So they're thinking, and he said, I was also asked to talk to the USDA Annual Meeting, the Agriculture Department. And I'm like, yes, Pepsi. But he's talking about regenerative agriculture. He's talking about how we're losing water by our farming practices. We're losing soil. We need to change that. And they have enormous power because they're, count their bottling facilities. They're probably the number one food company in the world, up there with Nestle.

• 26:59Mark Hyman?

  And they are interested in doing this. And I'm like thinking, wow, here's the vice chairman of Pepsi talking about regenerative agriculture. I'm like, holy cow.

• 27:06Lewis Howes?

  It's pretty cool. They want to make an impact.

• 27:09Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, they can have an impact, but it's, they're responding to the demands of the culture. They're responding to people who are voting with their forks. So it's a hopeful message. You not only get to change yourself, but you get to impact everything. I mean, imagine if everybody in the world for one day had an eat-in where they only ate real, fresh, whole food and they didn't shop or buy anything in a package that's processed in any way and didn't go to any fast food restaurants and just ate at home and cooked a meal together.

• 27:33Lewis Howes?

  Game changer.

• 27:34Mark Hyman?

  Totally. Just for one day. Imagine if we did that for a week or a month, the whole system would change.

• 27:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 27:39Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Lewis Howes?

  Now, as a functional medicine doctor.

• 27:43Lewis Howes?

  I believe that you're more of like a therapist for a lot of people too. They come to you with all their challenges. They feel pain in one thing, but there's something else that's affecting them, right?

• 27:50Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Lewis Howes?

  What do you think's the main thing that they're feeding themselves? Maybe that's not food.

• 27:54Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Lewis Howes?

  That affects them on the pain or their body or?

• 27:58Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I think people are feeding their feelings a lot of time. I mean, it's a, you know, food has such an effect on mood. It's so connected to how we think and feel. And so when we're feeling sad or depressed, we can stimulate our biology through food, whether it's caffeine or alcohol or sugar or other chemicals in food that actually stimulate our brain to sort of feel better for a minute, right? And so we do that and we're human and we don't understand the difference and we don't know what's going on. We don't see we're in this vicious cycle and it's tough and people have hard lives and hard situations, but I believe in the power of community. I believe in the power of each other to help support the change. It's gotta happen that way and that's what we do. We work with communities. We work in churches. We help people become empowered in schools to actually start to do this together and

• 28:43Mark Hyman?

  it's so much more fun. It holds people accountable. It inspires people to change and it works. And if we look at behavior change, which is the biggest thing we're talking about here, the hardest thing to do is on your own.

• 28:54Lewis Howes?

  So.

• 28:54Mark Hyman?

  I always say friend power is far more powerful than willpower.

• 28:58Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. It's way easier to stay consistent with something with someone else supporting you, an accountability partner, a coach, whatever it may be, than trying to do it on your own.

• 29:06Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely.

• 29:07Lewis Howes?

  It's almost impossible to do it on your own.

• 29:08Mark Hyman?

  Right, and that's why people listen to your podcast and seek out these things because they're looking for some connection to something that they can hold on to, that inspires them, that uplifts them, that gives them an idea of how they can be better.

• 29:19Lewis Howes?

  What's the biggest challenge you face in your life right now? That you could improve on or get better at?

• 29:24Mark Hyman?

  Health wise?

• 29:25Lewis Howes?

  Anything. You know, you're this, this top expert, super credible doctor, Cleveland Clinic, seems like you got it all figured out, but what's the thing, either personal or fitness or emotional or?

• 29:37Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 29:37Lewis Howes?

  That you can improve on?

• 29:38Mark Hyman?

  Well, I'm, I recently got married and I have the most amazing wife and I'm just growing and growing and learning and how do I be like the best version of myself? How do I be fully expressed and honest and in integrity and like value what's actually happening? And I think that's like my most important work. A lot of my career, I just focus on my work, work, work and I'm like, I'm like, wait a minute, you know, this, this, something else here going on.

• 30:03Lewis Howes?

  Right, so what's the biggest challenge you face with this new chapter?

• 30:07Mark Hyman?

  I think my phone.

• 30:11Mark Hyman?

  So I actually, I'm giving, I'm giving her for our anniversary present, a box. Which is a little like sealed box that I'm gonna put my phone in when we're together. For what, an hour? No, for a weekend. Wow. Or longer. Okay. And I'm gonna tell my assistant if she needs anything to call her phone. If it's an emergency. But I'm like, I, it's symbolic, but it's like, sort of invasive. And I'm like, you know, nothing is that important that should interfere with our human connections. Right, right. There's one other thing though I'm working on, it's struggling, it's a struggle for me because I feel like I've been lucky enough to see the emerging patterns that are changing in medicine.

• 30:52Mark Hyman?

  And how we've come to think about disease quite differently based on the science called functional medicine. But it's taking a long time to get it up to running in scale. And that's, that's a challenge, I fear how to do that well. And the second thing is the food system, because I feel like if we can all get how powerful we are as individuals, as communities, when we band together to do something around the food system, it's bigger than anything we could ever do, because, you know, for example, civil rights, that affects one group of people. Women's rights, a large group of people. Gay rights, a large group of people, but small. Food affects everybody. And people don't understand how our food system is keeping them down. And is limiting our ability to thrive and succeed as individuals or as a society.

• 31:37Mark Hyman?

  That's my real, I think my next phase of my work is figuring out how do we empower people around the food system to understand these connections, to understand how to become empowered, how to activate movements and communities to sort of change the way we do things. And just to then inspire policy change, because all has to come to that. Right now, our food policies, I mean, just the farm bill alone, which is every 10 years, it's about a trillion dollar bill. There's 600 lobbyists that spend half a billion dollars funding and lobbying congressmen on this farm bill. And, and I remember when I went to Washington during the Obamacare era, and I was advocating for funding for lifestyle interventions, so we could incentivize doctors to do the right thing, not just do medicine or surgery. Right.

• 32:21Mark Hyman?

  And everybody was like, this is the greatest idea, greatest idea. And they would say, "What lobby group are you from? Like, who are you from?" I'm like, "Nobody." It's just, "I'm here for the patients and the science." Like, "I'm lobbying for the science." And they was flabbergasted. All these staffers and the congressmen, the senators we met with, they were like, they didn't understand it. Because they don't experience individuals advocating, not as part of some big, massive lobby group.

• 32:48Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right. That's interesting. I'm curious now, when did you become a doctor? When did you...

• 32:54Mark Hyman?

  When did I go to medical school?

• 32:55Lewis Howes?

  Forty years ago, when you...

• 32:56Mark Hyman?

  I graduated medical school thirty-one years ago.

• 32:59Lewis Howes?

  Forty-one years ago?

• 33:00Mark Hyman?

  Thirty-one years.

• 33:00Lewis Howes?

  Thirty-one years ago.

• 33:01Mark Hyman?

  I graduated medical school, yeah.

• 33:02Lewis Howes?

  Graduated, but you got into it forty years ago.

• 33:04Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, well, I got into nutrition when I went to college.

• 33:06Lewis Howes?

  Got you, okay. So thirty-one years, you've been... Is it called licensed doctor? Or what do you call certified doctor?

• 33:12Mark Hyman?

  I got my M.D. degree nineteen eighty-seven.

• 33:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay, thirty-one years ago. I'm curious, what were the beliefs that you had going in thirty-one years ago that was industry standard? That was like, "This is the belief of medicine, or food, or the body" that you believed in so wholeheartedly, but now you've realized thirty-one years later is completely false?

• 33:36Mark Hyman?

  Well, actually, I have ODD. You know what that is?

• 33:39Lewis Howes?

  What's that?

• 33:39Mark Hyman?

  I'm odd. And I was weird from the beginning. So I was a vegetarian in college. I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I studied systems thinking in college. I studied alternative systems of healing and medicine from around the world. My thinking was already there. And I was studying herbal medicine. I was gonna go to China. I spoke Chinese. I was gonna go to China and study Chinese medicine, but I didn't want to grow up in a communist dictatorship. So I basically said, "I'll try medical school and see if I like it." And I was fascinated with the body. And I really never went away from it, although I did really... Take it all in. I had to suspend all my criticism, disbelief, and just learn it as a

• 34:22Mark Hyman?

  system, then I could unpack it. And so then I began to sort of unpack it and discovered functional medicine early on. And since then, I've just been focused on that as the new model for thinking about the body as a whole dynamic system.

• 34:36Lewis Howes?

  Was there any belief that you had after you learned everything from medical school where you realized you believed in something that became debunked over the last 31 years?

• 34:44Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I really believed that there were these diseases that we label and name and that they were real things. Just like, you know, when you get a TB bacteria, that's a real thing, that you get tuberculosis when you have TB bacteria exposure. But chronic disease isn't like that. So we've created these categories of disease, like dementia, or diabetes, or cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, or irritable bowel, whatever it is. And we group people according to symptoms, not according to causes. You know, I was just with Thomas Insel, who was the former head of the National Institutes of Mental Health. And I'd asked him before, I said, "What do you think of the DSM-5, which is the diagnostic category

• 35:26Mark Hyman?

  for psychiatric illness?" He says, "I think it has 100% accuracy, meaning it groups people according to depression or anxiety. It's very good, but it has 0% validity. Meaning, it's not valid because it doesn't describe the why, only the what." And that was a big aha for me to understand that all these diseases I learned about in medical school as these finite things, they weren't something you get. You don't get heart disease. You don't get diabetes. You don't get dementia. You can get a cold, but you don't get these things.

• 35:58Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 35:59Mark Hyman?

  And it's a very different way of thinking about disease. It's a systems problem. It's how the body is out of balance. It's a way of working with the body that looks at the body as a whole dynamic, interacting ecosystem that you can change by taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff.

• 36:15Lewis Howes?

  But that was a belief you had early on through medical school?

• 36:17Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  Because that's what was taught, right?

• 36:18Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Lewis Howes?

  Now, is there anything now that you believe in that you think will eventually be debunked in 30 years, or 10 years, or five years, that you're like, "This is the truth. This is the facts." But who knows? Maybe there's not enough research, or science, or proof in that in 30 years.

• 36:38Mark Hyman?

  I think it's going to turn out that our genes aren't as important as we think.

• 36:42Lewis Howes?

  Because that's where a lot of this stuff is coming from. The genes, all about your genes.

• 36:45Mark Hyman?

  We were in the genomic era.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  Your grandfather.

• 36:48Mark Hyman?

  In the omics era, genomics and proteomics and metabolomics and all this stuff.

• 36:53Lewis Howes?

  In terms of genes aren't important in terms of disease or in terms of like?

• 36:56Mark Hyman?

  I think that for not the diseases that we're seeing. So yes, if you have Huntington's Chorea or you have Down's Syndrome or you have, you know, some horrible inherited genetic condition, that's a dominant disease, which is we call autosomal dominance. It's a type of genetic, single gene mutation that's kind of fixed. Although you can modify how those people do. I'm talking about the rest of the chronic disease we have. And I think it turns out, looking at the research, that your zip code turns out to be more important as a determinant of your health than your genetic code. That your friends in your social network is a bigger determinant of your health than your family. So we know from Christoxys work at Harvard, looking at obesity, that people who are obese are more likely to be obese

• 37:41Mark Hyman?

  if they have obese friends than if they have obese parents. Or siblings. Because it's our social connections that drive our behavior. If you're eating fries and soda and burgers and watching TV all day and all your friends are doing that, you're more likely to be overweight. If you're going to yoga and drinking green juices, you're gonna probably be healthier if all your friends are doing that, right? So if your friends are modeling healthy behaviors. And we live in a totally peer socially driven world. I mean, look what happened with the Me Too environment. All of a sudden, it was okay to say the truth. And then you had like millions of women speaking up. Because it was okay, it was socially acceptable. The peer group said yes. That's how powerful. And I think, I'm hoping for that kind of change around food.

• 38:22Lewis Howes?

  Right. So you think genetics don't play as much of a role as we think?

• 38:25Mark Hyman?

  I think we're gonna, we're gonna be disappointed by the human genome project. It's already failed to give us a lot of what we hoped it would, it would give us.

• 38:31Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 38:32Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Lewis Howes?

  Powerful.

• 38:34Mark Hyman?

  I mean, there's something called the exposome, which is how our genes are exposed to different factors, right? So we call the exposome what you eat, what you think, what you feel, your stress level, exercise, sleep, environmental toxins, your microbiome. All that is the world you're exposed to. It's what your genes are being washed over with every day. Turns out 90% of chronic disease is determined by the exposome, not the genome.

• 39:01Lewis Howes?

  Fascinating.

• 39:02Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Lewis Howes?

  Pretty amazing stuff.

• 39:03Mark Hyman?

  Which is very empowering. Because you think, oh, it's my genes. My dad had Alzheimer's. My dad had heart disease. My dad had diabetes. My mom was this. You're like, okay, what can I do? But the truth is, it's a very empowering message because people can change. They can change your gene expression. You can't change your genes, but you can change which ones are turned on or off and how they work.

• 39:22Lewis Howes?

  Now, did you believe at one point that the genes did play a big role?

• 39:26Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. All of us did.

• 39:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Powerful. I love it. Couple of questions left. Make sure you guys get the book though before we finish up. Food. What the heck should I eat? The No-Nonsense Guide to Achieving Optimal Weight and Lifelong Health. Make sure you guys pick it up. New York Times bestseller. It's crushing already. This is called The Three Truths. I don't know if I asked you this last time.

• 39:46Mark Hyman?

  You might have.

• 39:47Lewis Howes?

  Maybe. But we'll do it again and see what comes up. So imagine your final day. You live till you're 300 years old because you're the fountain of youth right now. Almost 60, right?

• 39:56Mark Hyman?

  Almost 60.

• 39:57Lewis Howes?

  58, is that?

• 39:57Mark Hyman?

  That's bad. Yeah, almost 60. I'll be 60 next year.

• 40:00Lewis Howes?

  You look like you're 25. And in the book, I love it. 60 next year?

• 40:04Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:05Mark Hyman?

  2019, I'll be 60.

• 40:07Lewis Howes?

  I hope I look like you when I'm 60. But you're gonna live for as long as you want and imagine it's your final day. And you choose the day. You've done everything you want to do. You've done it all. And you say, you know what? It's time for me. I'm ready to go.

• 40:19Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 40:19Lewis Howes?

  You go on your terms. You've written 75 New York Times bestsellers.

• 40:23Mark Hyman?

  God forbid.

• 40:24Lewis Howes?

  You know, every topic you could imagine, there's a book out there that you've come out with. You've done everything you want to do, but for whatever reason, you have to take it all with you. So no one has access to any of it. You've got to take it all with you. It goes with you in the grave, but you get a piece of paper and a pen to share your final three truths with the world. Your final lessons and truths. And that's what would stay behind, but everything else you'd take with you so they don't have access to anything else but these three truths that you would write down. What would you say are yours?

• 40:52Mark Hyman?

  I would say the first thing is, don't take yourself seriously. Show up with love in every interaction and everything you do. And have fun.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  It's powerful. I like it. It should be the book. Yeah, there's no more books, that's it. I want to acknowledge you for constantly showing up for, you know, four decades of the work you've been doing to help humanity live a better life. And I just acknowledge you for constantly showing up with love, with humility, with fun and passion. You make it easier for us to understand the complicated and scary things because this stuff is really scary for a lot of people. To understand what's happening to me, why am I feeling this way? Why do I have this pain? Am I going to die? Is this... And so to have someone of your level of credibility and authority who's doing the work, researching the science, and giving us simple ways to make better decisions.

• 41:45Lewis Howes?

  It's a powerful thing, so I acknowledge you for that.

• 41:48Mark Hyman?

  Thanks, Lewis.

• 41:49Lewis Howes?

  Of course. Of course. Now, where can we follow you the most online? And the book?

• 41:55Mark Hyman?

  You can look at the book. Lots of great free information at foodthebook.com. Or you can check me out at drhyman.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I'm everywhere.

• 42:04Lewis Howes?

  At Dr. Hyman everywhere, pretty much?

• 42:06Mark Hyman?

  It's Mark Hyman, M.D. on Instagram and on Twitter. And it's Dr. Mark Hyman. And Facebook, and it's not hard to find.

• 42:16Lewis Howes?

  All over the place, awesome. Is there anywhere you hang out personally the most? That you like to check in on, on social media?

• 42:21Mark Hyman?

  I don't really like it that much. I think it's distracting.

• 42:24Lewis Howes?

  It is distracting.

• 42:25Mark Hyman?

  I like Facebook because I keep in touch with my friends. And I like to see what they're doing, and my son.

• 42:30Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 42:30Mark Hyman?

  What he made last night for dinner.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Cool, awesome. Make sure you guys get the book. Awesome book, awesome man. And the final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

• 42:42Mark Hyman?

  My definition of greatness is showing up, being present, and love with everything you do. Dr. Mark Hyman.

• 42:50Lewis Howes?

  Thanks, sir.

• 42:51Mark Hyman?

  Thank you.

• 42:51Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it.

• 42:55Lewis Howes?

  And there you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please leave us a review over on iTunes and share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/616. The full video interview, the resources, the notes, the book that you can get of Mark Hyman is back at that link as well. LewisHowes.com/616. Make sure to check it all out and tag Dr. Mark Hyman over on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all the places. And let me know what you thought of this one as well over on Instagram. I hope you guys enjoyed this one again. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The first wealth is health." I love you. Take care of your health. It's the most important thing.

• 43:39Lewis Howes?

  And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.