Are You Nutrient Deficient? The Hidden Factors of Accelerated Aging | Rhonda Patrick

We’re overfed, but undernourished. Despite having access to more food than ever, most people are walking around with nutrient deficiencies that could be accelerating aging, increasing disease risk, and depleting energy levels. That’s why I sat down with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a leading expert in nutritional science and aging, to break down what we’re missing—and why it matters. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, we explore: Why nearly 70% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D and what that means for longevity. The overlooked role of magnesium in metabolism, blood sugar, and brain function. Why our food system leaves us malnourished—even if we eat a “healthy” diet. The best way to assess and correct micronutrient imbalances for optimal health. Your body can’t function properly without the right nutrients. This episode will show you how to fill the gaps and take control of your health. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Seed, BON CHARGE, Pique, Perfect Amino, and AirDoctor. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Go to boncharge.com and use code DRMARK to save 15% on your PEMF mat today. Head to piquelife.com/hyman to get 20% off + a free beaker and frother today. Get pure essential amino acids today. Go to bodyhealth.com and use HYMAN20 to get 20% off your first order. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at airdoctorpro.com/drhyman.

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.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  What the study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo controlled, right? The multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they were less, people taking the multivitamin mineral supplement were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction, memory loss. And in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.

• 0:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Okay. Randomized controlled trial, here we are 10 years later.

• 0:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 0:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, The Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. So Rhonda, so great to have you on the Dr. Hyman Show. Welcome. And I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I think you're one of the few scientists out there in the public sphere who's actually communicating science and data in ways that have a lot of

• 1:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  integrity and adhere to kind of some common sense principles that, you know, a lot of things out in the blogosphere or the podcast world are often, you know, a little bit, you know, extreme. And you kind of really take a very science-based approach. So I'm really thrilled to have you on the podcast. And the topic I want to really dive into is micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, maybe some phytochemicals. But, you know, there's so much confusion and controversy. And, and, you know, the medical profession has historically said, you know, you don't really need multivitamin mineral if you're eating a healthy diet. Well, first of all, most of us don't eat a healthy diet. And second of all, you know, the idea that

• 2:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  vitamins and minerals just cause expensive urine doesn't quite make sense. I always say, if you know, you say, why should you drink water? You're just going to pee it out. It's like, your body uses what it needs. And I think there's, there's a lack of understanding of the widespread insufficiency and often deficiencies of nutrients in, in America. You know, we're overfed and undernourished. And so there's a, a problem that I think we're facing, which is people don't understand the need. To actually obtain the right nutrients in the right amounts for not just preventing a deficiency disease, but for optimizing health, preventing the disease of aging. And I want to sort of dive into that with you. I want to go through sort of the overall framework of like, you know, where we're at

• 2:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  in terms of the nutritional status of American population, what things should we be worried about? And, and, you know, can like dive into the science of each of the key nutrients and what they do and how they affect us. And, you know, one of the things that kind of really got me excited when I was sort of, you know, when I have you on was that you studied with a scientist named Bruce Ames, who is someone I've, you know, really admired, has been someone who inspired me and a lot of my work and thinking has come out of a lot of his work, which was really looking at how do we, how do we really understand the nature of aging and micronutrients and, and how do we get a metabolic tune up? You know, he wrote these incredible papers that were, I think, landmark papers. And, you know, you, you had the privilege of actually working with him, studying with him.

• 3:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So maybe kind of you can share with us how you sort of got into this with Bruce and what, you know, what you've learned from him and what the sort of whole idea of the role of micronutrients is in health and wellness.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, Mark, I want to thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate what you do as well, and I also appreciate the, the kind words. So, sorry.

• 3:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Did it make you cry?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Bruce Ames passed away a couple of months ago, and he was my mentor and a very good friend of mine. Unbelievable guy. And it kind of a funny story about how I ended up in his lab. You know, I was, when I was wrapping up my graduate research, my PhD at St. Jude's Research Hospital, while I was there, I really got into health and for just wanting to be healthy and also. I had done some previous research before graduate school in an aging lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. And so I was already very interested in aging, you know, even though I was in my twenties when I was working in that lab, you know. There was always-

• 4:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The thing people think about when they're twenties is living to a hundred, but yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I was definitely thinking about it. And specifically, I was thinking about like, things that I can do in my diet and lifestyle. Because I had done some research on how insulin affects aging and, you know, glucose metabolism. And so it was very real to me that there's a very strong connection between our diet and lifestyle and the way we age. And so that led me to reading a lot of Bruce's studies on mitochondrial health, on micronutrients. And I continued reading him throughout grad school. And I started a blog at that time. I was, you know, blogging about vitamin D and omega three. And I kind of decided I didn't want to be a professor necessarily. I didn't necessarily want to go and write grants and do the sort of classical pathway

• 5:24Speaker 01

  that a lot of scientists do when they're doing their training. And I had told that to my mentor and my mentors at the time, and they were very distraught about that because they were saying that I was a very good scientist and I was completely-

• 5:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Draw your life away.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Destroying, destroy my scientific career. They begged me to please at least go interview for some postdoctoral, you know-

• 5:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  -positions.

• 5:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  And so I did. I said, "Okay, well, I'll go ahead and interview." And I went on a few interviews and some very prominent labs, I interviewed for very, even aging labs. In fact, one of the guys that I interviewed with at Stanford looked me up and saw that I was blogging and said to me, "You can't do this if you're going to come to my lab. You need to work for me." So then I go to Bruce and I meet Bruce and he is absolutely just, he blew me away with not only his excitement for science, but his excitement for science communication and what I was doing.

• 6:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And he was so enthusiastic about it. And he was basically like, "Oh, you need to continue doing this. This is a very important thing you do." Now, remember Bruce, you know, he kind of switches fields every few years or so. He started out- Looking at enzymes and then he developed this test known as the Ames test. That is a very, very simple test for testing for mutagens, things that can damage your DNA, which is the precursor for cancer.

• 6:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  It's still widely used today and he had done a lot of, you know, research back in the, the late seventies and early eighties and he found that chemicals that were in things like women's hair dye, children's pajamas.

• 6:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Were mutagens and carcinogens.

• 6:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  And he published this paper on it and nobody was doing anything about it. And so he was on the phone calling up these companies. Have you seen my paper? It's, you know, and he was responsible for getting these chemicals out of women's hair dye, out of children's pajamas. I mean, he has had an amazing impact on public health, continues to have an impact on public health.

• 7:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Isn't he one of the most cited scientists of all time?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  He is.

• 7:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  He is. And then, you know, he, he got into, you'd wonder, well, he's doing this cancer research and then he gets into, to micronutrients. So, you know, these are about 30 or 40 essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids that we need to get from our diet. We need them to survive. But as Bruce would argue, we also need them to age optimally. And he, he got into this field quite, I would say, it was an accident. He had, he had a, a guy in his lab doing a sabbatical, Dr. McGregor. And this guy was a, a cytobiologist. He, he was, he was looking at red blood cells and doing a lot of experiments with red blood cells. And it turns out he, he used a media that didn't have folate.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, he started noticing all these double stranded breaks in DNA.

• 8:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So DNA was like being damaged.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Being damaged. And, and so he was like, oh, what's going on? And he, you know, finally traced it down to, oh, we have this media that we've used that doesn't have folate. So then he decided to do some animal work. Well, let's see what happens if we don't, if we deprive, you know, rodents of folate. And sure enough, widespread DNA damage, just completely, you know, and double stranded breaks in DNA are the precursor to basically.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Oncogenic mutations.

• 8:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cancer.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, cancer. So Bruce, of course, was like, wow, this is amazing. Not having a important micronutrient can potentially cause cancer. And that's kind of what it was doing in the rodent studies. And then he'd done some human, he had found some humans that were low in folate and did some experiments as well, found a similar thing, gave them back the folate, DNA double-stranded breaks, went away. He worked out the mechanism, which was folate is a precursor for, for making DNA. And so if you don't have that there, your body will put something there from RNA, a uracil, instead of a thymine. And

• 9:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Those are like nucleotides.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Nucleotides.

• 9:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  DNA that built DNA.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Right. And so it basically causes these double-stranded breaks. So, long story short, that's how Bruce got into micronutrients. And he started to really dive into understanding how these vitamins and minerals are affecting the way we age, because cancer, you know, is, is a disease of age, for the most part. There are some childhood leukemias and childhood cancers, but those are mostly linked to genetics.

• 9:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Aging in general is, is a major driver of cancer. Bruce came up with this, this theory called the triage theory.

• 10:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And this

• 10:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Tell us about that.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a, it's a theory that he came up with that posits that vitamins and minerals that we get from our diet, they get triaged to essential functions in our body that are important for preventing, basically, acute death, right? So if you think about blood coagulation, vitamin K1, very important, like you need to have your blood clot. Otherwise, you could have, you know, a pretty severe injury and you could have a hemorrhage and that would be detrimental, right? So vitamin K is one example, and there's some other examples like selenium that Bruce

• 10:45Speaker 01

  has published and showed there are proteins that have a stronger binding to vitamin K1 that are important for coagulation. So these are proteins in the liver versus, for example, other proteins that stay in circulation and are activating proteins that are important for calcium signaling and trafficking, moving calcium out of the bloodstream, moving it to muscle, moving it to bones, right? So, so he's published a couple of papers showing that, so the idea is that your body will triage them to essential functions to prevent, you know, short-term death at the expense of these long-term sort of health functions, right?

• 11:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Your body hijacks whatever nutrients we have to deal with the immediate needs we have, but then it kind of misses the boat on what they're doing to protect us long-term from the ravages of aging.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so magnesium would be another one. Magnesium is an essential mineral. It's involved in over 300 different enzymatic, you know, processes and ATP production and utilization is one of those. And ATP is the energetic currency of our cells. We need to make energy to survive.

• 11:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. So runs our cells is energy, everything.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. But it's also essential for DNA repair enzymes. They use it to repair damage to our DNA. Every time we make a new cell, whether that's a skin cell or a liver cell or a blood cell, there's, there's damage that occurs even with just the process of cell division, right? Let alone the external processes that we're exposed to, UV radiation, unhealthy diet, things like that. So we need to repair that damage. But magnesium is essential for those DNA repair enzymes. And so if you don't get enough magnesium, it's only going to those essential roles of ATP production and not the DNA repair enzymes. And this is important because about 50% of the US population does not have adequate levels of magnesium.

• 12:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  50%.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Close to 50%, yeah. And, you know, magnesium, as Bruce would say, is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. Chlorophyll give plants their green color.

• 12:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So magnesium is very high in dark leafy greens.

• 12:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  You're supposed to eat your greens, you get your magnesium.

• 12:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And so people aren't eating enough of their greens and they're not getting enough magnesium.

• 13:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Greens and beans.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Greens and beans, oats, almonds.

• 13:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, things that aren't typically staples of American diet, which is 60% ultra-processed food, right?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 13:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, the magnesium RDA is about 350 to 400 milligrams a day, depending on if you're male or female. Males require a little bit more. And so you're really supposed to be getting the majority of that from your diet. People aren't getting that from their diet. And, you know, just in terms of, we talked about triage theory in cancer. There are a variety of studies that have looked at, these are observational studies, so it's always difficult to establish causation, of course, from observational data.

• 13:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  But nonetheless, there are studies that have found a dose-dependent effect of low magnesium. So for every 100-milligram dose, about less, 100-milligrams less intake per day was associated with a 24% increase in pancreatic cancer incidence.

• 13:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  So instead-

• 13:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of magnesium.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Of magnesium. So eventually, and that's dose-dependent, right?

• 14:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So let's back up a little bit, because years ago, at 20, god, it's more than 20 years ago, I wrote an article called Paradigm Shift, really about the sort of end of normal science, which is this sort of our current view of how things are in medicine, and how the body works, and shifting more toward a systems view and understanding the body as a network, as a sort of,

• 14:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  an integrated organism that requires basic raw materials to function optimally. And what I wrote about in that, in that article, was that, you know, micronutrients are really kind of miraculous, because back in the turn of the century, we didn't really know about them, the 1900s, not 2000s, but, we still, I kind of don't know much about them, from the consumer and medical point of view, for sure. The amount of serious deficiency that Jesus- Like pellagra and berry berry and rickets and you know xerophthalmo, which was like a vitamin A deficiency and causes blindness, just widespread, you know, zinc deficiencies. And these cause really significant, serious diseases that could

• 15:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  literally be cured almost in minutes with infinitesimally small amounts, you know, milligram amounts of nutrients. There's no drug that can do that. And you were talking about magnesium having 300 different enzymatic reactions. When you take a drug, it usually has one target, like one receptor and one action. But nutrients have our pleomorph, which means they can do many, many, many things. And they do many things. And each nutrient literally can have hundreds of different reactions in different systems of the body that regulate almost everything we can think of. And, and what's really frightening to me as a physician, and we do testing of this. I co-founded a company called Function Health, and we do a lot of micronutrient testing as part of that, which is not typically done, whether it's, you know, methylation, testing

• 15:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  for homocysteine, methylic acid, you know, the B vitamins, we're talking about like folic acid, or the, you know, vitamin D, or omega threes, and you know, zinc, and the selenium, and the list goes on. And we see iodine, the tremendous amount of deficiencies that exist in red blood cell magnesium, you know, that exist within the population that are being undiagnosed. I mean, and what we're seeing, I know, we have 110,000 people in our cohort, 67%, last time we looked at the data of the cohort, which is, I think, a more health forward cohort, who would be like proactive about their health, going to function health, getting room dives done,

• 16:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  67% have a nutrient deficiency, iron, omega threes, vitamin D, homocysteine, whatever, at the level that the lab reference range says, not at what you or I would think would be optimal, right? So like, you know, we probably would think vitamin D should be over 45 or 50, but their level's 30, or ferritin, I think their level's 16, which is your iron stores, probably, I think it should be a 45 or more, you know, for optimal health. So we're talking about 67% being deficient at like a level that I I think is already pretty low. So what about the general population? And maybe you could talk about the degree of nutrient deficiencies. And and then talk about like how how these things actually do their magic?

• 17:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And why they're not just causing expensive urine? And then I want to sort of get into, you know, what what should people be taking? Because that's I think we're going to get into at the end. Because I think it's important to know what are the foundational things that are going to protect you long term? You know, for pennies a day that could actually save your life.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Well, I want to start out with the multivitamins and vitamins don't do anything and they're expensive urine, which you also mentioned earlier, because this is a pet peeve of mine.

• 17:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Me too.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you, I'll tell you.

• 17:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  About right, it was funny that you I just get into trouble. It's like, sorry, I go to these medical conferences and I'm like, I ask, okay, doctors, you know, how many of you recommend supplements to your patients? And like a few hands will go up, you know. How many of you personally take supplements? I'm like, almost everybody's hand goes up.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 18:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's very funny.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  It's a great question.

• 18:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  So.

• 18:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's no evidence, but I take.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  But I take. Here's here's a big flaw with a lot of those studies that are cited by journals.

• 18:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Great journals like JAMA, for example.

• 18:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're poorly designed.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  They're they're poorly designed, so, you know.

• 18:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're designed like drugs, I guess.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly, right.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the problem is, when you when you have a drug trial, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard, right? You have a drug and then you have a placebo. But the thing is, is that with a drug, everybody has zero levels of that drug in the start of the trial.

• 18:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Right? So you don't have to measure anything, right? Because there's nothing to measure until you take the drug.

• 18:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's no like pre Ozempic level, although actually with Ozempic is true, you have a GLP-1.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, bad, bad example, but like statins. So, you know, but when you when you're doing a.

• 18:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You don't have a normal blood level of lipitor, right?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. When you're doing a study on vitamin D or omega-3 or fill in the blank vitamin mineral, everybody has varying levels of these micronutrients in their body. And so you have to measure things. You have to measure things at the start of the trial. You might have someone that's already got sufficient levels of vitamin D. They may have 50 nanograms per milliliter level vitamin D. And so you give them a vitamin D supplement and it's not going to do anything because they're already sufficient.

• 19:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Or the converse is they're so deficient and you give them a supplement that's 400 IUs or 800 IUs, which doesn't raise their blood levels hardly at all, that it doesn't really do anything. And so you won't.

• 19:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The dose is wrong. You don't measure who's sufficient. Like, yeah, I mean, like if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything, right? So it's like if you, if your levels are great of omega threes and you add omega threes, you won't see a change in your health, right?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, so that's the, um, the fundamental flaw of clinical trials in nutrition. That right there is that, that the, the M Ds that are running these trials are running them like they're drug trials. And they're not.

• 20:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well-done trials. And in fact, I remember.

• 20:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just interrupting. The other thing, the other flaw is that they, they will use a single dose of a nutrient that usually works as a team, like, and that can actually make things worse. Like the beta carotene trials, the smokers show that it can cause cancer, but oxidative stress is managed by a whole team of nutrients. So like I always say, you could be, you know, uh, you know, Michael Jordan, but if you're playing one against five on a basketball team, you're going to lose every time, right? Even if he's the best player in the world. So you need a team of, of, of these nutrients, particularly in terms of oxidative stress cascade, to actually modulate free radicals. And if you give a high dose of one nutrient, you're going to kind of screw up the whole chain.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is possible. Not to mention the, I, the fact that smokers, I mean, if you give beta carotene to non-smokers, it doesn't cause cancer, but smokers are doing so much oxidative damage and they're getting DNA damage that a high dose of something like beta carotene, which can be an antioxidant, may then allow, you know, some of that. It, it's basically, um, it's, it's allowing some of the cells that would otherwise die from the oxidative stress, you know, not to die. Right? And so it's, yeah, it's a very complicated thing when you're doing things like that. But it, you know, I think like it was about 10 years ago. There was a huge study in the annals of internal medicine and it was called enough is enough. Vitamins and mineral supplements not only don't do anything that may be harmful.

• 21:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  I think that was, do you remember that study?

• 21:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  It was about 10 years ago.

• 21:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, I was, I just dug in and it was a meta-analysis and I went and looked at all those studies and I found that all these flaws, again, come

• 21:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We looked at the actual studies that they made their conclusions from. So they do a review and they go, we're going to look at all these studies and we're going to make a sort of summary. And that's called a meta-analysis. And then from that, you didn't just take their conclusions. You actually went and looked at the data itself from the original studies.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. And I put out a video about it like years and years ago. And again, all these flaws that we just talked about were there. And here we are 10 years later and the Cosmos Trials was just published, right? So this is another meta-analysis of a couple randomized controlled trials where older adults were given a multivitamin. They had about 20 or so essential vitamins, essential minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, right? Magnesium, this was all present in this multivitamin and they were given it for two years.

• 22:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  What the study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo-controlled, right? It, the, the, the multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they had, they were less, people taking the multivitamin mineral supplement were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction, memory loss. And in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that is equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.

• 22:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Randomized controlled trial, here we are 10 years later.

• 22:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And there's many, many other studies that show the value of nutrients in many, many different conditions, right?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. I, you know, I think that it, it comes down to, yes, you should try to get your micronutrients from diet. However, taking, you know, a multivitamin supplement, taking vitamin D, taking omega-3s, like these are insurance, right? This is insurance to make sure you're getting your optimum levels. So you asked about deficiencies and what are some of the common ones? Well, omega-3, okay, so about 80% of the world's population and 90% of the US population

• 23:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  does not meet the requirements for omega-3 fatty acids.

• 23:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 23:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is basically what your body's made of, you know, the cell membranes, your brain, you know, nervous tissue.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's

• 23:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  runs the regulators, inflammation. I mean, it's, it's, it's critical to everything.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And there's been a lot of work by Dr. Bill Harris. So I'm an associate professor at the Fatty Acid Research Institute with Bill Harris. And so I'm involved in a lot of research on omega-3. And he's published just an array of studies that are quite convincing. So looking at the omega-3 index, so this is the omega-3 levels in red blood cells, which is sort of like a long-term marker for omega-3 because they take about what

• 24:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What does the index actually measure?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  It measures the EPA and DHA levels, along with a bunch of other fatty acids, if you're interested in that. But it's really the EPA and DHA level in the red blood cell membrane.

• 24:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which gives you the index and you want a certain number.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  So he's published studies using like the Framingham cohort. So these are large cohort studies with a lot of people. And he's looked at the omega-3 index and correlated with all-cause mortality. So dying from a variety of different causes. And what he's found is that people that have what is defined as a high omega-3 index, so this would be 8% or more.

• 25:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people that have a 4% omega-3 index, which is low. And actually, the average omega-3 index of the US population is about 5%, pretty close to that 4%.

• 25:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we actually measure that in Function Health Labs.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's great to see when we see that.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Five-year increased life expectancy, if you think about Japan, Japan, who eat, they eat a lot of seafood in Japan.

• 25:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Their omega-3 index on average is like 10%. So they're above the high, the 8%.

• 25:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah. But their mercury levels are probably also very high.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  What's funny, what's funny that you say that, Mark. There's been studies like in pregnant women.

• 25:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  You probably remember this, that decades ago, women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury. And that actually had a detrimental sort of effect because omega-3 fatty acids, as you mentioned, they're so important for the brain, very important for neurodevelopment. And there have now been a whole host of studies that have come out showing that omega-3 fatty acids actually protect from any potential mercury toxicity in the developing fetus. And in fact, there's been studies looking at children that were born to mothers that had a high level of omega-3 and high mercury. Those children had scored higher on intelligence tests, so IQ scores. Even like even if so, so high mercury was actually biomarking intelligence. It wasn't actually the mercury, it was high omega three.

• 26:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's crazy.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  But yes, you get, you get the point.

• 26:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Although other than in Japan, they eat a lot of seaweed, which seaweed is a chelator for heavy metals.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Oh, is it?

• 26:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So is green tea, by the way.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  I think garlic, garlic, the beta, beta mercaptans in garlic as well. But back to the omega three and this study I was talking about from Bill Harris is so interesting because he also, this is a huge cohort of people, the Framingham, there's people that have all sorts of lifestyles, including smoking. And so he did a sub-analysis looking at smokers and non-smokers and their omega three index. And what Bill and his associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega three, so they had a high omega three index of eight percent, they had the same mortality as non-smokers with a low omega three index.

• 27:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, everybody, this does not mean you can smoke and take your own fish oil pills. Don't get any ideas.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Or if you're not getting enough omega three, it's like smoking, right? I mean, if you look.

• 27:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's another thing I got, right?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  If you look at the graph of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect.

• 27:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 27:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fascinating.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  So having a low omega three index had the same mortality risk as smoking.

• 27:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, so we're talking about 90% of the American population is in that category.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And, you know, there's also been a whole host of randomized controlled trials looking at omega threes being protect cardio protective, right? So they're, they're very important for cardiovascular health, triglycerides.

• 27:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, there's actually prescription omega threes, which you can pay much, much more than you would go get a basic omega three for lowering triglycerides as a therapies.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And you mentioned inflammation, you know, so this is another thing they do, they play a major role in lowering inflammation. And so that's a driver of aging in many ways, brain aging, you know, cardiovascular aging. So omega threes are, I would say, one of the most profound lifestyle factors that can play a role in, in negating inflammation, aside from exercise.

• 28:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and they're just, they're so, well, like, like the word I use is pleomorphic, but it's a big medical word, but essentially it means it does a million things, right? It's not just one thing, it's great for your skin, for your hair, for your nails, for your brain health, for. Preventing dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, I mean, it's, it's, it regulates inflammation. So these are, these are nutrients that do so many things in the body. Then they're work differently than drugs and they're, they're essential. They're called essential because they are essential.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you know, one of the challenges is that we're looking for that in a quick fix. And we're trying to diagnose a, a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure familiar with Robert Heaney, who was a vitamin D researcher. And he wrote this beautiful paper years ago called long latency deficiency diseases. And the basic thesis was that in the short term, if you're a nutrient deficient at severe level, like we used to see, you know, in the 1900s, if your vitamin D is super low, you'll get rickets. Or if you don't have enough vitamin C and you're a sailor, you get scurvy, right? Or if you don't have enough, eat too much white rice and white flour, which they started to do in the third century,

• 29:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you get beriberi and pellagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies. The, the thesis you had essentially is that you can correct those vitamin deficiencies in the short term to fix those deficiency diseases, like if you're low in folate in the short term, it'll cause anemia, a form of anemia we call, which is big cells called megaloblastic anemia. But in the long run, it can cause cancer and heart disease and dementia. And same thing with vitamin D, you know, in the short run, you'll get rickets. In the long run, you'll get osteoporosis and cancer and die sooner. And so medicine hasn't really gotten that concept. It's like, yeah, if you're deficient, take a vitamin, but otherwise you don't need them, right?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And that's also very much in line with Bruce's triage theory, right? Says these, these, these micronutrients are running our metabolism, which runs everything from our heart pumping blood to neurotransmitter function to repairing DNA. So there's a lot of, you know, you can look in the mirror and if you're, you're vitamin C deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, oh, I've got scurvy. I've got scurvy, right? But like when you're magnesium deficient, like you're not going to see DNA damage happening.

• 30:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you might feel muscle cramps and you might have anxiety, you might have. Patient, you might have muscle twitching or headaches or a million other things that are symptoms of magnesium deficiencies.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I studied loud noises. And so like as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at micronutrient deficiency symptoms that are not necessarily pure true deficiency, but more like insufficiency. And I think, I think people don't make that distinction. And I think when you treat people, it's often a miracle. When you, when you get them complete in the nutrients they're deficient in, so many things get better.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  I like it is insufficiency because most, most people are not deficient. We do have a lot of fortification, even in our ultra processed foods.

• 31:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Because of, you know, preventing neural tube defects, preventing pellagra, like all these diseases that were sort of cropping up, like you mentioned in the early.

• 31:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fortified, but it's like junk fortified.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  It is, it is, but it seems to stop some of those deficiencies, right? But it's the insufficiency and with vitamin D, it's a really big one because it is converted into a steroid hormone. So this is something that is going into the nucleus of our cell and binding and interacting with DNA. It has a little sequence of DNA called a vitamin D response element. It's so important that it's encoded in our DNA, right? So to not have enough vitamin D, so 70% of the US population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is about 30 nanograms per mil, 70%.

• 32:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  30.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Which would be.

• 32:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And if you add it up to 45 or 50, it's probably like 80 plus, 90%.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. So, and, and so that would be, there have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin D levels. Of course, this is again observational, lots of meta analyses out there, even dating back for like 30 years. And it seems as though having at least 40 nanograms per mil seems to be a sweet spot, you know, 40 to 60.

• 32:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Is a really good place to be.

• 32:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Where you're having a good level of vitamin D. But again, it's a steroid hormone. It's not, it's, it's regulating over 5% of the protein encoding human genome. That's like thousands of genes.

• 32:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  You know, everything from immune function, it plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity.

• 32:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Brain function, it regulates genes that are important for converting tryptophan into serotonin.

• 33:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter that regulates mood, cognitive function, impulse control, you know, so vitamin D.

• 33:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Maybe I need more of that then.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Well, and the problem is, is that, you know, vitamin D typically you make it from UVB radiation exposure from the sun.

• 33:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  But.

• 33:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're all told to shield ourselves from the sun and sun's locked and so we live indoors, work indoors and yeah, it's a problem. And when you're all running around half naked, hunting and gathering, we got a lot of vitamin D and when we ate, and we're coastal areas and we ate, you know, fish, small fish like herring and so there's that they're high in vitamin D or if you're foraging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin D. So there's ways in which our historical population got it, the Paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, we don't. And so, you know, I do think, so people, the simple solution is a vitamin D supplement, right? And so about 4,000 IUs a day will generally get someone from a deficient range, which is 20 nanograms per mil up to a sufficient range.

• 33:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, but you're just talking about 10 times what's normally in a multivitamin or what doctors will recommend, 10 times.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  I am, I am, because you, yeah, you really do, it's about 1,000 I, it's 1,000 IUs of vitamin D will raise blood levels between 5 to 10 nanograms per mil. But it all, we have genes, we have different variations of our genes that are able to do this. And this again comes down to these clinical studies showing that, you know, nothing happens.

• 34:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're all different.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  We're all different. And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose, right? Because they have genes that aren't doing, converting vitamin D3 into 25 hydroxy vitamin D, which is the circulating form of vitamin D or the steroid hormone, 125 hydroxy vitamin D, you know, so.

• 34:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, let's go down this rabbit hole because I think, you know, there's a paper you just reminded me of that Bruce Ames wrote, it was published in, I think, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition years ago, about how one third of all of our DNA codes for enzymes. And an enzyme is a catalyst that converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts or the coenzymes or the helpers are micronutrients. And so what he said in that paper was that there's a huge variation in the population's need for different nutrients. So some people might need 400 micrograms of folate. Some people might need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so it's really about personalized nutrition. It's about testing, not guessing. It's about figuring out what your body needs, what your genetics are.

• 35:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it gets really fascinating that you can actually start to customize your own diet and your own supplement management based on what your own particular genetics and your your levels are. And so I think there's this, it was sort of a wake up call for me like, holy cow. When you think of our DNA and everything it does, if one third of it is coding for enzymes and all those enzymes require vitamins and minerals, if we don't have enough of those nutrients, it's like, it's like a, like an assembly line in a factory. If you don't have one station, the thing can't get made, right? So you gum up the whole works of your metabolic machinery. If you don't have the right levels of nutrients to optimize the function of your body. And that's, that's why we call it functional medicine because it's about how do we optimize function, right?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It's true. You know, these minerals and vitamins, so you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins. Like, these are, these are co-factors for these enzymes, to make these enzymes run properly. And if you have, if you don't have, you know, sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally, right? So in the case of, we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not going to be repairing damage as well. Zinc is also involved in DNA repair as well. You know, so B vitamins are involved in serotonin production. Magnesium's involved in vitamin D production, right? You were talking about, you know, nutrients working together. And it's very true.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  So I think a really great way to think about eating diet is what do I need to run my metabolism? Right?

• 36:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And when you say metabolism, like, what do you mean by that? Because it's not like my weight, you're talking about metabolism as sort of a bigger concept in medicine.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I guess when people hear the word metabolism, they think about weight loss.

• 37:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I got a slow metabolism.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Right, right. What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes, you're talking about, you know, one third of the protein encoding genome that are doing enzymatic reactions that have, that are making proteins function. So they are producing energy, they are, you know, running neurotransmitter synthesis, they are causing, you know, your, your liver to function properly, your heart to function, the lungs, everything.

• 37:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So every chemical reaction all the time.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't know if, I heard, I read this somewhere and I, I can't find the original citation, but that there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body every second. It's just like an insane amount of activity is going on chemically and biochemically and converting one molecule to another. And if you, if you don't have enough of these nutrients, that whole 37 billion trillion chemical reactions may not work optimally.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I, you know, getting, getting the micronutrients you need from food and, and nature sort of color coded them in a way, right? I mentioned, you know, chlorophyll, that's magnesium, you have vitamin K, also the, the

• 38:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What color is that? What color is vitamin K?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I, I guess it's green too. I would say green.

• 38:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Green, green, green.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Vitamin K1.

• 38:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then the orange ones.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  The orange, right? And then you've got like the phytochemicals, right? So that would be the purples. But, you know, you really do need to get a lot of vegetables and, and fruits and then you need your protein, right? And fiber. When you're, when you're getting your micronutrients, you're also getting the fiber because a lot of the micronutrients are coming from plants.

• 38:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Which are a great source of both fermentable and non-fermentable fiber, right? So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there, right?

• 38:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, paleo.

• 39:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And I'll, I do think paleo is the closest thing to what I'm talking about.

• 39:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  But what I'm talking about is even simpler because what it really means is that you understand what, why you need food. What's the purpose of food, right? The purpose of food is to provide you with these essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids like omega three and protein and fiber to improve gut health. That's the purpose of eating.

• 39:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And fuel.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Right. And so. That's was that means you don't need ultra-processed foods. That that means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet, you're going to be missing out on a lot of micronutrients. It's going to be very hard.

• 39:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I have a theory, which is is like I have many theories. One theory I have is that is that, you know, we're so depleted in these nutrients. And it this regulates our appetite. And so when you're eating ultra-processed food, there's no nutrients in there. And and so when a kid is iron deficient, it'll eat dirt. It's called pica and try to get some iron from the dirt. And I think so many people in this country are so nutrient deficient that they're just eating more and more of the ultra-processed food. It's like they're looking for love in all the wrong places.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis?

• 40:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Uh, yes.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's kind of the same thing where, you know, your your body needs a certain amount of protein to to run optimally. And if you're eating, there's been a couple of randomized controlled trials on this. I think it's like Steven Simpson is one of the proponents of it. It was like 2000s or something. And that essentially, if you're eating ultra-processed foods, which are high in, you know, a lot of refined carbohydrates, low in protein, that you overeat to sort of try to get enough protein.

• 40:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  So it does make sense if your your body is looking for more of micronutrients, more vitamins, more minerals, more protein, that you start to overeat. And have you are you familiar with Kevin Hall's study that he published a couple of years ago?

• 40:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You mean the ultra-processed food, where they had 500 calories more?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  They had 500, yeah, so for people listening, I mean.

• 41:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Ultra-processed food.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Exactly, there they had, you know, two diets. They had a whole foods diet, which was essentially mostly they were getting salads and they were getting poultry and lean meats and some fish, oatmeal. And then there was the ultra-processed foods diet.

• 41:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they were trying to match them for macronutrients.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So they were, yeah, so they were matched for calories. They were matched for total sugar, although the refined, the added sugar in the ultra-processed foods group was, it was like a huge difference. I mean, it was like something like 70 or 80% versus 1%. So the sugars in the whole foods diet were coming from fruit, which has a fiber matrix, right? So they were matched for that. Exactly. So the added sugar was not matched, although total sugar was, right? And then protein was somewhat matched. The Whole Foods had a little bit more protein. It was like something like 14, 15.6% in Whole Foods diet versus 14% in the ultra-processed foods diet. And they were given, so a lot of, a lot of things were matched and they were given these foods,

• 42:01Speaker 01

  you know, in a sort of metabolic ward where they came in and eat and they had 60 minutes to eat the meal, add limit, right? So they could eat as much or as little as they want.

• 42:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So you got, you got a big, as much like giant buffet, eat as much as you want. Like you got 60 minutes.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then they did it. And then they grouped that eat the ultra-processed food, ate 500 calories more a day. And then just to do the math on that, 500 calories times seven is 3,500 calories. That's one pound of weight gain. So you add that up, that's 52 pounds of weight gain in a year. Now, what are Americans overweight?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't do that math. I know that I just read the results, which was two pounds. They gained two pounds in two weeks, whereas the Whole Foods diet lost two pounds in two weeks.

• 42:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, let's say it's two pounds, right? Two weeks, 20, it's like, you do the math. It's like, but you add that up over a year. And then you add up year over year. It's like, that's why we're seeing this sort of just incredible level of severe obesity and diabetes. And I mean, it's just, you know, the latest data I, I saw was sort of shocking was that 38% of teenagers have prediabetes.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 43:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like, what? I mean, it didn't exist when I graduated. I'm old, but it didn't exist when I graduated from medical school. Like, we didn't have it. We didn't have a stock kid.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  There's been studies that have looked at like healthy individuals and they've given them, and they're actually young men. They give, they gave them a 20 ounce sugar sweetened beverage, sort of akin to like a soda, Coke or something. And they did this for three weeks. And after that three week mark, their C-reactive protein biomarker for inflammation went up 100%. Their small dense LDL, so this is, these are lipoproteins that are transporting.

• 43:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The ones that are causing more heart disease.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. Causing more atherosclerosis. They went up as well. This was just after three weeks, you know, and

• 43:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Being a process.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Of, of a sugar sweetened beverage, which is the ultimate, right? That's the ultimate.

• 43:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, ultra-processed.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  But, but the reality is, is that

• 43:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's gluten free.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  It's gluten free, yes, but it's definitely, it's causing inflammation, massive inflammation at the level of the gut. And so you, you can take healthy people and dramatically change their profile within a matter of weeks of, of having, you know, this ultra-processed foods, these sugar sweetened beverages, you know, which again, like-

• 44:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they deplete nutrients because I think people don't realize that, one, you're not getting them, but two, you're, you actually need nutrients to actually run your biochemistry. And so you're trying to burn these calories and burn the food, but you're actually depleted in the very nutrients required to run them, metabolic pathways to actually metabolize the food. So you're kind of, you know, getting it from both sides.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Like a two-hit.

• 44:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So again, it's, it comes down to, I think, you know, thinking about why you need to eat is so important because then it's like, I need to get micronutrients. I need to get my, my fiber. I need to get protein. When I say fiber, carbohydrates, right? But it needs to be carbohydrates in the form of,

• 44:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  fruits and vegetables, which have the micronutrients and the fiber, right? And nuts and seeds, yeah, and oats. And then, and then avoiding ultra-processed foods. I think, I think if people were to do that and think about eating that way, and then you have to move, right? You have to be physically active. Being sedentary is a disease.

• 45:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Like that's, like, there's, there's data out there that show people with a low cardio respiratory fitness. So this is a marker of, you know, I mean, it's a, it's a marker of how physically active you are, essentially. That's an oversimplification, but, people with a low cardio respiratory fitness have the same disease risk as people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, smokers. So.

• 45:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How do you measure your cardiovascular fitness?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Well, cardio respiratory fitness is something typically you can measure if you go into like a lab that measures them and they put that like, it's a VO2 max, so it's measuring your maximal oxygen uptake under maximal exercise. They put a mask on you and that's, that's really how you empirically quantify it. However, if you, you know, if you have like a smartwatch, Apple Watches do sort of measure it. It's not really entirely accurate.

• 45:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I like mine Garmin because it says I'm 45, but I don't, I don't believe it.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Well, you can actually do it. You can do what's called the Cooper test. And so that's basically you do a 12-minute run on a flat surface like a track. If you have hills. It's harder to run hills and so you can't, you're trying to run as fast as you can maintain for that 12 minutes. So it's like a, it's a maintainable 12 minute pace, right?

• 46:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And, and that is, and there's a calculation, you can look it up, the Cooper test, and you can sort of get a good estimate of your VO2 max.

• 46:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  But essentially, you know, having-

• 46:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's assuming you could run for 12 minutes, which most Americans can't.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  You know, there is, there's an argument to be made for exercise snacks, you know, so these are short bursts of, you know, physical activity where you're getting your heart rate above, you know, 70% max heart rate. So you're getting to more into the vigorous exercise, you know, range. And there've been some studies, they're called the VILPA studies. Are you familiar with these? These are vigorous intermittent lifestyle activity studies. And Martin Gabbala, who, he's a, you know, expert on high intensity interval training, I've had him on my podcast, he's involved in a lot of this research.

• 47:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Jump down and then 10 burpees and then go back to work?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Sort of, yeah. People are wearing these, you know, wearable devices that they can measure their heart rate. And so scientists can see when they're getting these bursts of high intensity exercise. So, so this type of exercise is actually not structured. What you're talking about would be structured, right? Where you like, and get up and do burpees, or air squats, or high knees, or jumping jacks. This is where people sort of take advantage of everyday situations. So they sprint up the stairs, right? And run, you know, they're running to some, some place rather than walking. So they're really using their everyday lifestyle to kind of get their heart rate up.

• 47:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Well, people that do that, do anywhere between three to nine minutes a day, have a 40% reduction in cancer mortality, a 50% reduction in cardiovascular related mortality, all cause mortality. So this is beneficial for people. And this is even in people that identify as non-exercisers. So just getting like some sort of exercise does have benefits for people in, in general.

• 48:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, you look at the, the data on mortality and longevity, one of the biomarkers that's the most correlated with longevity is VO2 max, is your level of cardiovascular and respiratory fitness, which is basically how fast your metabolism can run. Cause it's basically an indirect measure of how much- Calories you can burn per minute and how much oxygen you can burn per minute. Cause they're very correlated and your metabolism being having a slower fast metabolism is really about your VO2 max. Cause if you have a high VO2 max, you can burn a lot of oxygen and then you can burn a lot of calories. Cause you need both to actually combust in your mitochondria. The energy factories to actually produce ATP, which is the source of energy for the runs everything in your body.

• 48:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's like you, you actually, uh, you actually have this incredible system, but, but we don't really, uh, take advantage of it. And we don't maximize our fitness, which is so correlated. And I think the other number that's sort of a little easier to get is your waist to hip ratio, which you need a tape measure. And that again is the, the bigger your waist, the shorter your life, basically.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Is that also for visceral fat, measuring visceral fat?

• 49:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, it's, it's, I mean, your waist to hip ratio is a crude measure of visceral fat. I mean, but yeah, if you did a DEXA scan or an MRI, you could look at body composition for sure. It's like, it's had belly fat, but again, that's all relates to insulin resistance and prediabetes and inflammation, which again, I want to getting back to micronutrients. All those things actually accelerate your risk of, of, um, how many of these, like magnesium is very involved in blood sugar regulation, right? So if you're talking about 45% of Americans being deficient and our 50% being deficient magnesium, that affects blood sugar. We have an epidemic of diabetes and prediabetes in this country.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Are you familiar with some of the, there's some, um, gene variations in the transporter that transports magnesium into cells? And people with a, a gene variation that obscures the transport. So basically they're not getting as much magnesium into their cells are much more likely to have type 2 diabetes. So there's really some, I would say more causal evidence there, right? Because one would argue, well, people that are low in magnesium are also eating a refined sugar diet and they're not exercising. And all these other potential unhealthy lifestyle factors that could be contributing. But when you look at the genetics, right? I mean, it doesn't lie. So you're, you're, you're looking at someone that's not getting enough magnesium. There are, you know, insufficient and deficient in some cases, and their risk for type 2 diabetes just skyrockets.

• 50:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think this is so important that, you know, we, we are walking around with a population that is got such treatable. Cheap solutions for so many issues. And that we're looking for sort of drugs to treat this and drugs to treat. I'm not against drugs at all, but they're it's like we're missing the boat because yeah, somebody doesn't have scurvy or rickets, but they're still insufficient and they're going to need these nutrients and actually optimize your health. And you kind of started to unpack the degrees of different nutrient deficiencies. And, you know, as, as you're going through the list, you're going through the things that are the most common deficient in, in our, in our country. I know omega threes, vitamin D, magnesium, and there's others, right?

• 51:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So there's other there, you need every essential vitamin and mineral, right? You need all of those for sure. But, but the ones that are really causing havoc are, you know, deficiencies in, you know, the methylation nutrients like the B vitamins, folate, B6, B12 deficiencies in iron deficiencies in zinc, potassium. These are like, yeah, because we, we, we die this very plant poor. And that's where you get your, you know, potassium, which is from, you know, plants and, and, and you need to actually not get as much sodium, which is what we're reading on lots of processed foods. So not like salt is bad. We need salt. It's just, it's all the salt added by corporations to your food to make you palatable because otherwise it tastes like cardboard. They had sugar and salt and fat and it makes you addicted to it.

• 51:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So we, and we, and we leave out all the key nutrients that are needed to regulate everything in our body. And so, so maybe you can kind of take us down that, that list a little deeper. So we've got, we've got to get omega threes. We've got to get vitamin D. We've got to get magnesium and, and literally we could spend a podcast on each nutrient and probably 10 podcasts on each nutrient. But we're just going to go through, so people understand like these are the things that are non-negotiables that you've got to have and that you've got to test, you've got to measure and figure out whether your levels are okay. Because the average physician or a practitioner isn't going to do it and they don't know how to do it and they don't get taught this in medical school. And I'm working on trying to change that in Washington, but it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a travesty because it's, it's, it's like a staring us in the

• 52:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  face that we have this epidemic of micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies and they're not being addressed and often worse for being told not to fix them.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the vitamin D. Magnesium, omega three, we talked about, right? You know, believe it or not, a lot of people, I don't remember the exact percentage, but quite a bit of people are not getting enough vitamin C. Something like thirty or forty, forty percent, forty percent or something like that are not getting enough vitamin C.

• 53:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I heard that ten percent are deficient at the level that would cause scurvy in America.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  That's unbelievable, just not eating any vegetables or fruits because vitamin C is also in vegetables, not just in fruits. Calcium is another one. So, I mean, these are things that can be tested for and measured. Another one is vitamin E. People are not getting enough vitamin E. Again, that's also found in things like avocado, nuts, whole grains. And then potassium is a big one because it's so important for the sodium-potassium pump, which plays a role in blood pressure. And so when you're talking about too much sodium and not enough potassium, it's really exacerbating that not getting enough potassium aspect, right? Because that ratio is so important. And so not only are, I think it's something like ninety-six percent of the US population

• 53:51Speaker 01

  doesn't meet the adequate intake for potassium.

• 53:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  It's essentially everyone.

• 53:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And our potassium intake, as Hunter gathered, should be ten to one potassium to sodium. Now it's the other way around.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  It's the other way around, exactly. And so there's, there's, you know, all sorts of problems with blood pressure and, you know, gosh, it's like, even like thirty percent of like individuals aged twenty to thirty-nine have hypertension.

• 54:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  You know, these are young adults with hypertension. And we now know that hypertension isn't just a risk for cardiovascular disease, it's a risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, particularly if you start earlier, right? If you're like a younger person, so like it's cumulative exposure to hypertension.

• 54:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, it's important because you have to get blood flow to your, your brain. And, you know, you've got all these tiny, like ninety percent of the, of the brain vascular, vasculature surrounding the brain is made of these tiny, tiny blood vessels that are like the smaller than the size of a hair in terms of diameter. And they have to get blood flow to them, so exercise helps that. But hypertension exacerbates the lack of blood flow. Going to those blood vessels and what happens is they're so tiny, they start to sort of constrict.

• 55:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  And and sort of fall fall off.

• 55:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you can get mini strokes and.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Mini strokes, but also neurons don't get the nutrients and the oxygen they need. And so then you start to lose neurons. Right. And you get brain atrophy. And so there's this connection between hypertension and dementia. And, um, you know, I'm talking about potassium here because potassium does play an important role in.

• 55:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Very lean blood pressure.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So does magnesium, too.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  So does magnesium. So does magnesium.

• 55:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a relaxation mineral.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And then exercise, of course, is one of the best things that you can do.

• 55:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I I mean, in in, and I mean, as a doctor, when a patient comes in with preeclampsia, which is a a problem of high blood pressure in pregnancy. Or has preclamtic seizures or they get seizures, the treatment is intravenous magnesium.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right? Sure. Think about it. And so like this is someone with like with uncontrollable high blood pressure. What do we do? We give them intravenous magnesium because all the drugs don't work.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  I think there's some evidence also I've seen that vitamin D plays a role in preventing that as well.

• 56:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  And it was, it's funny, like when I was pregnant, I asked my OBGYN for a vitamin D test. And do you want to know what his answer was?

• 56:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You don't need it.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Why? It's going to be low.

• 56:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Why is it be low?

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Why? It's going to be, you're going to, it's going to be low. And like, I was like.

• 56:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Vitamin, just take it anyway.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me?

• 56:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Like, you're you're telling me, why do I need a test? It's just going to be low. And you know, and I'm like, well, I want to test. And I, yes, I'm going to be supplementing, but I want to know with how how much I'm going to be, you know, should be supplementing with. But it was just really astonishing to me, that mentality, you know, and actually just recently I went in for, um. I didn't go to my normal doc. I went into, um, it was like a, you know, a a sort of ER kind of urgent care doc. And I wanted to get my vitamin D levels measured. And he goes, you know, that's falling out of vogue now. And I just, I just gave him this long lecture. I mean, I was like, I went in deep. I looked at him and he goes, is this your area to area of expertise? And I was like, yes, it is. I've done research on it. I've published studies on it. And he kind of was like, okay.

• 57:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, it's not their fault. I mean, I I'm a physician and, you know, I don't fault them. And, um, and my daughter's graduating from medical school this year and. Like zero nutrition.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  It is, it is.

• 57:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like even micronutrients, like I don't even think they covered any of that. And, and it to me, it's like, this is the center of our biology. And if we don't, we don't understand how our bodies work and how to work with them and how to facilitate normal function. And it's not like the micronutrients is the only thing, but they're a very key foundational part of being healthy. And when you go through the litany of things that we're deficient in, you know, it's, it's a lot of things and or insufficient and, and it's different degrees of insufficiency in the population for different nutrients, but you know, it widespread deficient, you know, iron, zinc, selenium, a lot of things that iodine, I mean, it just, I, I see this all the time in our testing that function health. And I'm like, kind of shocked.

• 57:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I've done testing for, you know, a lot of patients who've come to see me over the decades, but this is like 110,000 people. It's not like I can see 10,000 people or 20,000 in my lifetime, but like this is a huge amount of people and it's sort of shocking to me. And yet it's not really being talked about as a, as a sort of critical step in helping address our chronic disease epidemic. And what you're saying is that yes, you can get deficiency diseases like scurvy, but what's really the issue is how these contribute to our long latency deficiency diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and diabetes and osteoporosis and all muscle aging and all the things that we don't want, right?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so, you know, one of the last papers that Bruce published is his second to last paper was called longevity vitamins. And, and you know, it was about these vitamins like vitamin D and magnesium and omega three, taurine, or some other like essential amino acids that play a role in the way we age and, and slowing age related decline.

• 58:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  And you know, there was just a recent study that came out on vitamin D, sufficient levels of vitamin D, people that supplemented with vitamin D were 40% less likely to have dementia.

• 59:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  You know, so the, the reality is, is that.

• 59:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Me and vitamins, don't you just create expensive urine?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  They, they don't, they don't, that, you know, these micronutrients are running everything in our body.

• 59:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  And when you have insufficient levels of them, you're not going to necessarily. See it, although you probably feel it, you know.

• 59:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You might have symptoms, but you don't attach it to that.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Right. You don't attach it to that, but it's causing this insidious damage, right? This insidious DNA damage, a little bit of oxidative stress, a little bit of inflammation.

• 59:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or just I get sick all the time because my vitamin D is low.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Right. Or you're getting sick.

• 59:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or my muscles ache, you know, because vitamin D is low. Or, you know, I've muscle cramped because my magnesium is low, right? So, or I have depression because my, you know, methylation vitamins are low. Like, people have symptoms, they just don't correlate it with nutrient deficiencies.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Depression is interesting. There's a, there's a pretty classic study that no one ever talks about, where healthy individuals were injected with lipopolysaccharide. So for those listening, this is a component of your bacterial outer cell membranes. It's present in our, in our colon because we have about, I don't know how many trillions of bacteria, like so many bacteria in there, right?

• 1:00:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Forty or fifty trillion.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Okay, forty or fifty trillion. There's about a gram of lipopolysaccharide in our gut because those bacteria do die off.

• 1:00:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And these are bacterial toxins. This is what pisses off your immune system to no end.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  It does. And when we have gut permeability, lots of things that cause that, it releases, right, also known as leaky gut, it leaches the LPS into our bloodstream. Well, this study took healthy individuals and injected them with an amount of LPS that would be equivalent to something that you could get from intestinal permeability.

• 1:00:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  And it caused depressive symptoms in these individuals. Okay, one, that links inflammation to depression.

• 1:00:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Two, if those individuals were given EPA, so this is one of the omega-3 fatty acids. It does play a major role in dampening inflammation through a variety of mechanisms like resolvins and merrisons and the SPMs. These are all molecules that are resolving inflammation very quickly. They did not experience those depressive symptoms.

• 1:01:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  If they were injected with the LPS.

• 1:01:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If they got omega threes.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  If they have the omega threes.

• 1:01:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  So it comes down to like, again, you know.

• 1:01:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And omega threes have been shown to actually help with depression.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  They have.

• 1:01:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And ADD.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  They have, yeah.

• 1:01:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  With depression, specifically EPA seems to be very important for depression. And I think that's because there's a really big inflammatory component to depression.

• 1:01:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Where, you know, there's now studies showing that people that don't respond to classical SSRIs, so serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

• 1:01:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like Prozac.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. People that don't respond to that, they typically have very, very high levels of C-reactive protein, inflammation. So there's like a subset of people. Some people respond and it helps them.

• 1:02:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  But there's a subset, a quite large subset of people that have very high inflammatory biomarkers and do not respond to SSRIs. And so logically, the next question would be, should we lower their inflammation?

• 1:02:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  How can we lower their?

• 1:02:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I read some paper that was like hypothesizing that we should use TNF-alpha blockers, the biologics for depression. In other words, these are drugs that massively suppress inflammation in the body, used for serious autoimmune diseases, and they're talking about using it for depression. I'm like, wait a minute. Like, how about we find out why there's inflammation in the first place and get to the root cause of it? And which is really what we do in functional medicine. I think what you're kind of hitting on, just sort of prooffully, and I want to sort of tie the dots together, is that when you don't have enough of the right nutrients and you don't have a proper functioning metabolism, there's a lot of downstream consequences. You get inflammation, you get oxidative stress, and you get damaged mitochondria, and you get DNA damage. And when you look at these processes, these are the fundamental things that have to be working

• 1:03:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  for you to be healthy across every organ, across every disease state. And it's what we're now calling hallmarks of aging, including many of these things. And what you're talking about is, and Bruce Ames figured this out, he went before there was a word, hallmarks of aging. He figured out that these nutrients are critical, these pathways that degrade and become problematic as we age, but that we can off. Set that and actually take longevity nutrients and get a metabolic tune up. And he's even talking about things that I think are, we don't think of typically as essential nutrients that are, we call conditionally essential nutrients. And whether it's carnitine or taurine or things that may not be kind of a typical deficiency disease vitamin or mineral, but that are still really important for our biological function. And then we're still low in them.

• 1:03:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So I have this theory, I want to, I want to come back to in a minute about, that I, that I kind of made up, called symbiotic phyto-adaptation, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means that we've co-evolved with plants to borrow their phytochemicals to regulate key pathways in our bodies so we can stay healthy. And that without them, we don't get a deficiency disease. Like you don't get like, you know, like broccoli deficiency, but, but actually we kind of do. Because the phytochemicals like sulforaphane or the glucosinolates or isothionates, these are, these are molecules that regulate key pathways in our body. For example, liver detoxification or removing heavy metals or whatever, controlling oxidative stress. They work to actually facilitate these, these pathways. And so I kind of this theory that it's more than just like essential vitamins.

• 1:04:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's a whole bunch of stuff that's essential if you want to be really healthy.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  I completely a thousand percent agree.

• 1:04:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I just made this up, but.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  I think that humans evolve, we evolved to eat of plants and meat and things, but plants because of the phytochemicals, you know, there are, so you mentioned sulforaphane, right? So sulforaphane is present in a variety of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. It's much more, it's not present, I'm sorry, the precursor to it. Glucoraphanin is present in it and it gets converted into sulforaphane when the plant matter is broken, chewed, because it activates an enzyme called myrosinase, which converts glucoraphanin into sulforaphane.

• 1:05:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Big mouthful of words, but essentially when you chew your broccoli, you get cool chemicals that help your body.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if you go even further and chew the young plant, the broccoli sprouts, there's about a hundred times more glucoraphanin in it.

• 1:05:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Damn, I kind of, I'm trying to grow broccoli sprouts and I keep trying to forget. And then I think I gotta get back on that.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Yes, broccoli sprouts are really, really high and. In glucoraphanin, I also take a supplement that's been used in a lot of clinical studies called Avmacall. I don't have any affiliation with them, but they're, they've got a really great method of stabilizing that myrosinase enzyme, which is very unstable. It's also very heat sensitive. But before I get, before I get sidetracked, sulforaphane is the most potent dietary activator of a, what's called transcription factor in our body. It's N R F two.

• 1:06:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  And this is

• 1:06:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  N R F two.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a master regulator of, as you mentioned, detoxification enzymes. So they're called phase two detoxification enzymes, also phase one biotransformation enzymes. So those are enzymes that will convert procarcinogens into carcinogens. So N R F two activation will blunt that, it'll stop that from happening. So think things like nitrites being converted into nitrosamines. Nitrites are present in a lot of processed meats and so N R F two activation, typically it's like, it gets activated every 80 minutes or so inside of our cells. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets, sorry, it gets activated every 130 minutes. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets activated like every 80 minutes.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Something like that where it's like, you're getting like a 60% increase in the activation of this important transcription factor, which is regulating just hundreds of different genes that are antioxidant, involve the antioxidant function, anti-inflammation. Clinical studies showing that if you give someone broccoli sprout extract or sulforaphane or glucoraphanin plus the enzyme myrosinase, it increases glutathione in plasma and in the brain by F M R I. I mean, this is unbelievable. Glutathione, as you know, it's one of the major, major antioxidants that our body has. It's very important for the brain. Other studies in China where there's a lot of air pollution show that people that take about 40 micromoles of sulforaphane, they start to excrete some of the chemicals that are in air pollution like benzene,

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  which is a carcinogen. They excrete it by 60% after 24 hours. Again, because the activation of the phase two detoxification.

• 1:07:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm thinking of all the people in L A right now.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's very, so I've been telling all my friends in L A.

• 1:07:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Toxins get released into the air, dioxin and all the little organic compounds and.

• 1:07:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Heavy metals and

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, plastics. I mean, it's just, it's pretty frightening. So I think people can protect themselves to some degree by upregulating these pathways and, and taking the right foods and the right supplements.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  I, I think the, the phytochemicals, again, I, I'm 100% with you. I think we were, we were supposed, we're supposed to eat these. These are, these are pathways in our body that are activated by a little bit of stress. They're stress response pathways. And the phytochemicals provide that tiny bit of stress that activates them in a way that's powerful enough to not only deal with a little bit of stress, but to like, deal with the, the stress of aging.

• 1:08:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  And anthocyanins from blueberries. I mean, this is another one. We've got so many randomized controlled trials now on giving people blueberry extract powder with actual anthocyanins versus like the, you know, just taste of it. So it's placebo. It improves cognitive function across the lifespan. Kids, adolescents, older adults. It lowers damage to DNA. It improves blood flow to the brain. You know, these, this is equivalent to like a cup of blueberries a day. So it's so important to get these phytochemicals. It's not only important to eat the fruits and the vegetables because of the micronutrients, but the phytochemicals as well. And Bruce would argue that, like these, some of these phytochemicals, they're longevity vitamins.

• 1:09:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  We need them.

• 1:09:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  And he argues that.

• 1:09:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, that, that's sort of striking to me as I started dug into this, you know, 25, 30 years ago is like, wait a minute, like, how, how do these molecules know what to do? And how do they know to bind to this receptor? And what's this from a plant? Like, so why is it working in my body? And how's it regulating all these different enzymes or pathways that regulate, you know, immune function and your microbiome? I mean, it's, it's, the list goes on and on. And I, and I, and so it occurred to me that, you know, we, we, we grew through evolution, consuming over 800 different plant species. And now I think we have three are the main staples, you know, corn, wheat and soy and rice, depending where you live. And then another 12 make up the total amount of vegetables

• 1:09:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and plants. We typically like onions and cabbage and whatever carrots and tomatoes. But like when you look at the full array of plants out there, we ate all these plants and those molecules are not there for us. Like those plants didn't say, oh gee, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make this like some chlorophane so I can help my little human friend over there. They're the plant's defense mechanisms. So they're, they're actually there to help the plants protect themselves against damage, predators, UV radiation from the sun. Like pretty much they're their immune system. And so they are a little, can be a little toxic, right? But that's, that's what you're saying. It's a little kind of tiny stress, the xenohormesis kind of concept where you're taking some form thing and stressing your body with like

• 1:10:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  a sauna or a cold plunge or being up at altitude or being, you know, under the sea level, well, hyperbaric, but these are all stresses on the body that activate our body's own innate healing response. And so that's kind of how I see these phytochemicals.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. They're the antioxidant response element. You were talking about DNA having, there's a sequence in our DNA and genes in our DNA called antioxidant response elements that respond to this N R F two activation, right? So it is, we, it's evolved into our DNA and there's ways to do it. Xenohormesis, you're talking about plants and phytochemicals, exercise, all these different like, you know, ways that were meant to, to basically stress ourselves a little bit, right? And not just sit and be sedentary and have all the calories we want and, you know, consume all the ultra processed foods. I mean, it's

• 1:11:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Instacart. Holy cow. Terrible. I mean, I mean, it's crazy. You don't actually have to leave your house with Amazon, Instacart, you know, like Uber Eats or whatever. Like you don't need to go anywhere.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we really do need to move. I mean, it's not an add-on. It has to be something that's part of your hygiene that you do every day, like brushing your teeth. You have to do it. Like, it's not, like, even if it's just 10 minutes of exercise, like, you have to do it. It makes a difference. And our bodies need it. Like, you're depriving your body of it if you don't.

• 1:11:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, so let's kind of back up a little bit. We were talking about all these incredible things, and yes, exercise, 100%, but that's another podcast. This one is about micronutrients, the widespread deficiency we have in the population that's undiagnosed, that's not tested for, that people walk around with, that's fixable for pennies a day at levels that are relatively influent, testily small. Like, when you, for example, eat a piece of chicken breast, it's four ounces, that's 30 grams. We're talking about milligrams, or sometimes microgram doses, like, tiny little bits of stuff in micronutrients can

• 1:12:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  have profound effects on our well-being, and our health, on our mental health, our risk for chronic diseases. And yet, most of us are walking around in this invisible cloud of insufficiency or deficiency, and have no clue. And then you're a doctor, and a practitioner, but you're like a PhD doctor, not like an MD doctor. What do you recommend? And does it have to be difficult and onerous and expensive? Or how do you sort of stack the deck, so you're like getting the basic things you need, and not running into this trouble?

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do have some of the basic things that I think, well, that I take, but also that I think that would help a majority of people that are insufficient in a lot of these micronutrients. And first and foremost, vitamin D supplement. And again, I think, generally speaking... Vitamin D, 4,000 IUs a day, pretty, pretty, for the most part, gets people to a sufficient-ish level. You have to do a blood test to really know for certain. You may have to take a little more, you know, but starting at 4,000 IUs a day, which is the upper tolerable intake, is safe.

• 1:13:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And this is actually by the National Academy of Sciences, saying this is a safe level.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. Number two, omega-3 fatty acids. And, you know, this is something where Bill Harris's published studies, published studies, looking at how do you get someone who is low omega-3 index, so 4%, omega-3 index, up to an 8%? Turns out it takes close to about 2 grams a day.

• 1:14:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  2 grams of?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Of EPA and DHA.

• 1:14:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So when you get, just for clarification purposes, if you get a pill and it says a gram of fish oil, it might not have a gram of EPA and DHA. It might be like 300 or 200 milligram. So you have to look at the concentration of EPA and DHA in the milligram amounts on the label. Otherwise, you know, it might take one pill, or it could take five pills.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that, I think, is a pretty simple solution.

• 1:14:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So 1 to 2 grams?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  1.5 to 2 grams. You get, get most people that are in a 4% low range to an 8%.

• 1:14:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the balance of EPA and DHA, does it matter?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 1:14:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is it 50/50?

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Usually, usually it's like a 2 to 1 ratio, EPA to DHA. Yeah, for the most part, something close to that.

• 1:14:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  But I wouldn't sweat the small stuff. Like, number three and number four kind of tie, but I think, I think a multivitamin is a really good insurance because, you know, there's selenium, you know, boron, yeah, there's, you know, the B vitamins, you know, you're getting, there's vitamin A, there's so many different micronutrients, and it really covers a lot of the bases. So I think a pretty high-quality Multivitamin is good, along with magnesium. So magnesium, because such a large percentage of people are not getting enough magnesium, magnesium, it is so important for a variety of, you know, processes, DNA damage, brain function, muscle function, you know, people that are physically active, they sweat out

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  magnesium, so you might need anywhere between 10 to 20% more than the RDA.

• 1:15:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And stress and coffee also.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Stress.

• 1:15:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And alcohol.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:15:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're like, what is the American life? Stress, coffee and alcohol?

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's exactly right.

• 1:15:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's why we're all deficient. We're literally pee it out.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Yes, and so you want to make sure you're getting an organic salt. So that would be something like magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate, and...

• 1:16:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Citrate if you're constipated.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Right, so, so those, so those are the organic salts which are more bioavailable.

• 1:16:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'll tell a funny story. I just, I was in the hospital recently for a back surgery and I wanted to get magnesium and I talked to the hospitalist and he gave me magnesium oxide and I'm like, that's not bioavailable and I sort of went through this with him and like you did.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It wasn't as confrontational as that, but, but you know, he's like, oh, you're right, I looked it up and actually, no, true. I'm like, yep. So, but that's the main nutrient form of magnesium that you get in, in a lot of the supplements that you buy over the counter because it's the cheapest form. So magnesium oxide, if you see that on the label, just skip over.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Right. So that would be another one. And then I add to my essentials, the sulforaphane. I used to sprout and I no longer do that because...

• 1:16:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Life is busy.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  My excuses. Yeah, I'm, I'm, you know, so...

• 1:17:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're busy telling the world how to eat better and be healthy.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  It's like the worst thing you can do for your health. But I, I, I, I trust the, the science that I've read, looking at the supplement that I take, which again, it's, it's a really good supplement, Avemacall, and they have about, the advanced formula is what I take. I take about two to four a day, depending on...

• 1:17:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we'll put the link in the show notes for that.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  They're great and they're like, published studies on them, improving autism. So it's affecting the brain, so it's approved autism spectrum disorder in kids with autism, adolescents with autism. But it's a very strong activator of glutathione, right? So Nrf2 pathway. So that's my, my phytochemical.

• 1:17:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I actually wrote a blog about glutathione years ago. If anybody wants to sort of find out more about glutathione, go to Hyman and glutathione and you'll find it. And it... It's kind of the master detoxifier, the master antioxidant, the master immune regulator. It's like it's so critical and you get it through some of these plant foods. You get it by sulfur containing amino acids, you know, which are found often in animal foods or whey proteins, a great source.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  It is, yeah. It's a major, major antioxidant in the body. So I think those are really some of the there.

• 1:18:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Vitamin D, fish oil, vitamin D four thousand, fish oil, one or two grams of the actual EPDHA, a multivitamin and

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  High quality.

• 1:18:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  High quality, meaning it shouldn't be blue or purple or green or yellow.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  It's not from sulfur.

• 1:18:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Titanium and dyes and should be just, you know, the right and the bioavailability, the form of the nutrient matters. I mean, I think you and I both done a lot of work on this and people can dig around, but it's not just like go to get your, you know, Walgreens or CBS multivitamin.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A little more judicious. And then magnesium, and how much magnesium?

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  You know, it depends. So some people get a laxative effect and they want that.

• 1:18:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's what's so great.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Even with, even with higher doses of other forms, they can. But yeah, so I mean, I think it depends on your diet. Like if you're not eating a lot of plants, shame on you, you need to increase that. But you know, about three, 250, 300 milligrams, you know, is a good, is a good range. Now, if you're trying to treat like migraines and stuff, you might have to go higher. Like some studies show like 600 milligrams. And then there's the form of magnesium, magnesium threonate. That's thought to cross the blood brain barrier more effectively for brain health. Cause magnesium doesn't cross the blood brain barrier very well. But magnesium threonate isn't essentially, it's not necessarily gonna do the DNA damage repair aspect of magnesium.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  So make sure you're getting both if you're doing, doing that. Yeah. So like for me, I take like about 250 milligrams, maybe 300 milligrams.

• 1:19:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and it depends on you. I remember, I remember I had a big magnesium aha when I had a patient, you know, decades ago, who was a radiology. Resident, so the irradiation oncology resident at Mayo Clinic. And she had debilitating migraines, like, I mean, she saw the best doctors at Mayo Clinic. She sits with everybody. She tried every drug. She'd done everything. And she came to see me and we took a history. Amazing thing to do in medicine these days is to take an in-depth medical history. But it's like critical. I'm being facetious, but like, they don't, doctors.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  The root cause.

• 1:20:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I have a 32-page questionnaire. So I was like, oh, you're constipated. Oh, you have muscle twitches and muscle cramps. And you have headaches and you have anxiety and you have insomnia and you have palpitations. Hmm, this sounds like pretty severe magnesium deficiencies. So why don't we load you up? And so we gave her like 1,200 milligrams of magnesium. Like migraines just went away and she was fine and everything else is kind of corrected. And so she had all these quote, different problems, right? Everything constipation to insomnia to palpitations, which you don't think are related, but they're all connected as the body's one system. And that's what I'm talking about. These nutrients have so many different functions and they're so critical. So anybody listening to you, you know, you can't really get away from the fact that we live in a nutritionally depleted world.

• 1:21:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No matter how hard you try, even the foods, if you're eating organic, may not have the nutrients that they did 50 years ago. And, you know, most of us, you know, should test. And that's why I created Function Health with my co-founders to allow people access to this data because they weren't getting it. Like you said, doctors like, oh, you don't need vitamin D, you know, why bother testing? You know, that's what people are facing. And then, you know, just take a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, and then, you know, maybe a broccoli pill.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, then there's a bunch of other things you could add to that list as.

• 1:21:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's a dollar two a day, you know? And, and that's not an insignificant amount of money. But, you know, given the, the benefits, you know, the, the risk benefit, cost benefit ratio is pretty good on this.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  It is. It's amazing. I mean, I, I think, I think it's a, as Bruce would say, you know, it's a really, it's, it's affordable, it's, it's easily correctable for pretty cheap. And it will have a huge difference in the way you age.

• 1:21:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, this is amazing. So we're. Link to a lot of these studies from Bruce Ames, from your work. I want people to follow you, to learn about what you're doing, to listen to your great podcast, Found My Fitness. You've got a great website. Tell us all the places that we can find you and learn more about your work and keep up with your science.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Okay, great. Thank you. So I have a podcast. It's called Found My Fitness. I'm on YouTube.

• 1:22:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which I hope to be on someday.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's one of my aspirations.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Let me know when you're in San Diego.

• 1:22:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, all right.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  So Found My Fitness, it's on YouTube, it's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. I have a website, foundmyfitness.com. And I also, I'm on social media, Instagram, X as Found My Fitness, or you can look up Rhonda Patrick. I have some free guides out there. I have one on omega-3. We talked a lot about it. So how to choose a good omega-3 supplement. So I kind of have a guide on that in terms of like, and I talk about some of the science of omega-3. So you can find that at omegathreeguide.com.

• 1:22:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Free guides on how to do this and go into more detail and have the scientific papers and yeah.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  And then I have another free guide on improving brain health through brain-derived neurotrophic factor and a variety of exercise protocols and polyphenol protocols that have been published to improve brain health. And that's BDNFprotocols.com. You can find that there.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  I have a new guide out, How to Train, from all the exports that I've had on the podcast.

• 1:23:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, I want to see that one.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  It's a good one. It's How to Train. So it's like to improve VO2 max. We talked about that. How to train to improve muscle mass, strength, function. And it's according to all the incredible experts that I've had on my podcast. And that is the howtotrainguide.com. So those are all just free information that people can get by going and downloading the guide. So thank you so much, Mark, for having me on the podcast. Very interesting discussion. We share a lot of common passions with nutrition and micronutrients.

• 1:23:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Totally, totally. And you know, we didn't cover 1,000 topics from protein to exercise to hormesis. So I think I can see three or four more podcasts. I'd love to have you back to talk about these things. Because there's so many people out there who are, quote, "health influencers", who don't have a degree, who may be educated, some better than others, and some not seeing a degree to be smart or to have an opinion. But there's a lot of noise out there. And if people want the signal and they want the kind of juicy truth, go to Rhonda.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Appreciate it. Thank you, Mark.

• 1:24:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 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

• 1:25:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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. 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. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with

• 1:25:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 beneath 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 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.com.