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

Do you struggle to focus on simple tasks? Do you feel mentally “slowed down” during the day? Today, Jay welcomes back his dear friend and trailblazer in functional medicine, Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark Hyman, MD is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Function Health, the fastest growing health company in the U. S. In this extremely vulnerable conversation, Mark recounts his near-death experience after a severe spinal infection left him unable to walk and fighting for his life. Despite decades of living and teaching optimal health, he suddenly found himself dependent on others for even the simplest tasks. Over the course of five determined months, Mark applied the very principles he has championed for years: nutritional excellence, disciplined daily movement, and an unshakable mindset. Not only did he make a full recovery, but came back stronger than ever at the age of 65, proving that the body’s innate healing capacity can be reignited at any stage of life. The conversation explores the critical role mindset plays in recovery and underscores the often-overlooked connection between diet, lifestyle, and overall well-being. Mark explains how chronic illness is frequently driven by hidden inflammation, fueled by ultra-processed foods, sugar, and environmental toxins. He breaks down the science behind his 10-Day Detox, a simple yet powerful reset proven to dramatically reduce symptoms such as fatigue, pain, and digestive distress. The discussion also delves into the growing prevalence of autoimmune conditions, the hidden epidemic of nutrient deficiencies, and why personalized health data is essential for identifying risks before they become life-threatening. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Rebuild Your Health After a Major Setback How to Use Mindset as Your Greatest Healing Tool How to Reduce Inflammation Through Diet How to Spot the Early Signs of Autoimmune Disease How to Use Food as Medicine Every Day How to Take Small Daily Steps Toward Lifelong Wellness Healing isn’t instant, but each intentional choice, a nourishing meal, a mindful moment, a restful night, builds momentum toward changes far greater than expected. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Join over 750,000 people to receive my most transformative wisdom directly in your inbox every single week with my free newsletter. Subscribe here. What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:33 Overcoming a Life-Threatening Health Crisis 05:39 What is the Key to Healing? 08:15 Breaking Free from Chronic Pain 09:52 The Powerful Tool That Can Reprogram Your Body 15:03 How Inflammation Silently Damages Your Health 18:51 The Hidden Dangers of Sugar Addiction 23:59 Transforming Health Through Functional Medicine 30:34 Why Autoimmune Diseases Are on the Rise 37:04 Signs Your Immune System Needs Help 40:51 Do You Have an Undiagnosed Autoimmune Condition? 42:41 A Simple 10-Day Reset for Your Body 48:06 The Secret to Healing: Treat the Root Cause 52:44 How AI Is Revolutionizing Healthcare 56:32 The Truth About the Chronic Disease Epidemic 57:55 Understanding How Your Body Really Works 59:02 Expanding Access to Quality Healthcare 01:00:56 The Case for Regulating Ultra-Processed Foods Episode Resources: Mark Hyman | Website Mark Hyman | Instagram Mark Hyman | Facebook Mark Hyman | YouTube Mark Hyman | X Mark Hyman | Pinterest Mark Hyman | Books Function Health See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favorite podcast. Choose a cellar or northeast regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. Confidence isn't something Mazda finds, it's something they practice. That's the thinking behind every Mazda. With proactive safety features designed to help keep you more aware, more connected, and more engaged with the road ahead.

• 1:14Jay Shetty?

  It's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand and has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand as of July 2026. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.

• 1:39Mark Hyman?

  The average newborn baby today has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  The ongoing debate over which foods are most healthy is the subject of

• 1:51Speaker 04

  Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Function Health, Dr. Mark Hyman.

• 1:56Jay Shetty?

  What is inflammation doing to your body?

• 1:59Mark Hyman?

  Inflammation is at the root cause of almost all chronic illnesses and aging itself. That visceral fat is like an incubator for inflammation. You have fire in your belly. It causes heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes.

• 2:12Jay Shetty?

  What are the highly inflammatory foods?

• 2:13Mark Hyman?

  It's the sugar and starch. In America, average, you eat a pound of sugar and flour a day per person.

• 2:19Jay Shetty?

  What do you think the US healthcare system needs to be focused on?

• 2:22Mark Hyman?

  All the ultra-processed food, which is 60% of our diet. You know, we have a whole food system that's turned into ultra-processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts. It's 73% of what's on the grocery store shelves.

• 2:32Jay Shetty?

  Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an autoimmune disease?

• 2:36Mark Hyman?

  You might be a little bit tired. You might be a little constipated. You might have a little dry skin. Your nails might crack a little bit. You might feel a little depressed. You might have lower sex drive. Gain a little bit of weight. People don't think of these as a disease, but when you add them all together.

• 2:48Jay Shetty?

  If someone's listening right now and they're thinking, I feel like crap. What do they do?

• 2:55Speaker 05

  The number one health and wellness podcast.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.

• 3:04Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed, where we talk to the experts and the thought leaders who illuminate us how we can truly transform our lives. Today's guest is one of your favorites, one of our favorites here on On Purpose, someone that I know personally and grateful to know off the screen as well as on the screen, talking about none other than Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician, founder of the Ultra Wellness Center, and founder of the Functional Medicine Center at the Cleveland Clinic. A leader in functional medicine, Dr. Mark Hyman authored 15 New York Times bestsellers

• 3:46Jay Shetty?

  and hosts The Dr. Hyman Show, a podcast that you should definitely subscribe to if you haven't already. And he's known for his food as medicine philosophy and work in addressing the root causes of chronic disease through nutrition and lifestyle. Please welcome back to On Purpose, Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark, it's always great to have you on the show. I'm so happy to have you back.

• 4:08Mark Hyman?

  Thanks, Jay. It's good to be here. I love this place.

• 4:11Jay Shetty?

  Mark, I'm actually really grateful you're here because we actually had a date scheduled for you to be on the show.

• 4:16Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Jay Shetty?

  And then I sadly learned from your team.

• 4:19Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Jay Shetty?

  That it had to be canceled. But it was for

• 4:23Mark Hyman?

  Cause I almost died.

• 4:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it was really extreme.

• 4:27Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Jay Shetty?

  Talk to us about this near death experience because I've known you to be a longevity expert,

• 4:33Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Jay Shetty?

  A health expert. You always look in great health, you always feel in great health. Every time I've been around you, your energy is radiant.

• 4:40Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Jay Shetty?

  You, you carry it with you. I know you practice what you preach. I know it's not made up.

• 4:45Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Jay Shetty?

  You're, you're an authentic person in the work that you do. It impacts millions of people worldwide. And then you have a near death experience.

• 4:52Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Jay Shetty?

  Walk, walk me through what happened.

• 4:55Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you know, thanks Jay for asking. I, um, I joked that my biological age is thirty nine, but my back age is a hundred and thirty nine. And when I was thirty two, I lived in Idaho in a logging town. I was chopping wood and carrying heavy wood and I ruptured a disc. And it, it basically caused massive damage and a permanent paralysis of my right calf. So I've limped for thirty odd years and my back's just degenerated and I developed, you know, a lot of degenerative disc disease. And so I felt a lot of back pain and I ended up having an injection, which is pretty common treatment to help relieve pain. And one of the risks of injections of any needle is infection. And in a closed space of the spine, it just took off.

• 5:38Mark Hyman?

  And very quickly, within a couple of days, I couldn't walk. Uh, within a week I had surgery. They opened me up, they closed me up because they couldn't reach the abscess. It was on the front. And they said, uh, we can't do anything and basically left me to die. Gave me antibodies and said, cross your fingers and here's some painkillers and.

• 5:57Jay Shetty?

  They said there was no, no cure.

• 5:59Mark Hyman?

  Mm hmm. And, and then a friend of mine was, uh, a doctor called me and said, what's happened? I heard you're sick. And I told him, he says, you need a second opinion. So I got an opinion from the top neurosurgery center in the world, the UCSF. And they said, get out here right away. So I took an ambulance jet and, and had surgery, another surgery a month later that was really relieved the abscess. But in that intervening period, I got septic, I was feverish, I lost twenty five pounds from where I am now. I was in bed, I couldn't eat, sitting up. I literally had to lay down with four pills under my leg. And after the surgery, thank God it worked, but it was a, it was a hail Mary surgery. And they said I was maybe a couple of days away from dying. And I remember, you know, going under anesthesia.

• 6:41Mark Hyman?

  On the day of the second surgery, and I was like, this could be my last moment of consciousness. In the aftermath of that, you know, I had to, I was on a walker. I couldn't stand up. I couldn't brush my own teeth. I couldn't wipe my own ass. I was like, it was bad. And I had to depend on other people, but slowly, you know, just determined I clawed my way back to health. And using every principle that I know of how to create health, and I'm 65, I'm not a spring chicken. And I know what to do and I did it. And it, and I wasn't sure if it was going to work at 65. You know, how much can you get back? But I put on more muscle and I'm stronger than I was even before the surgery.

• 7:22Mark Hyman?

  And I just did it every day. It was like compounding interest. Every day I ate the best I could. I got in the gym with my physical therapist, a trainer every day, sometimes twice a day. I got treatments and acupuncture and I just clawed my way back. Took my supplements, took my creatine, took all the things I needed to do. And it took about five months and, and then I really started to kind of come back. And it's only been seven months from the recording of this podcast. And so I'm, I'm back and I feel good. And I feel actually better than I ever have because I've doubled down on my health practices.

• 7:56Jay Shetty?

  Oh my gosh.

• 7:56Mark Hyman?

  But it sort of shows you, you know, if you, if you know the laws of nature, the laws of biology, how the body works, how it's designed, how to create health, right? Cause doctors don't learn about that. They don't learn about how to create health. They learn about how to diagnose and treat disease, which is important. But if you say to your doctor, how do I create health, doctor? And they're like, well, I don't know, just eat better, exercise. But there's, it's a very specific methodology. It's really what functional medicine is about. It's about how do you create optimal function and how do you create optimal health? And what is the science of that? And so doing that, I was able to actually build myself back up and create health and actually feel better now than I did before the surgery.

• 8:33Jay Shetty?

  Oh my gosh. What did it take for you to rebuild? Because? We always talk about being proactive. We always talk about being well first, which you focused on and you have.

• 8:44Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Jay Shetty?

  And when you end up in a position like that, it's hard mentally.

• 8:49Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Jay Shetty?

  And then, of course, it's harder physically. As you said, your body is sixty five, even if your biological age is thirty nine. There's a reality to that.

• 8:57Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Jay Shetty?

  What were the key things you had to work on? You talked about building muscle again. What were the things you had to do in order to get back to standing in front of me right now and looking great?

• 9:08Mark Hyman?

  The biggest component, I think, of your health is the thing that's between your ears. It's your mindset, something you talk about a lot. It's your determination. It's the belief that you can actually get better. And I was physiologically depressed. I lost half my blood volume. So my blood count was half of what it should have been. I was super anemic. My hormones all were in the toilet, my testosterone, my thyroid, nothing was working. I was very nutritionally depleted. I hadn't really eaten.

• 9:45Mark Hyman?

  And so for me, it was just the will to get up every day and do the little things, even when my mind was like, just stay in bed, just give up. It's not worth it, you know? And I think for a lot of people, it's hard to divorce your thoughts from reality. I think, you know, you lived in a monastery and that's basically what you learn is how you're not your thoughts. You're not your beliefs. You're not your body. You're not, right? And so, you know, but when you're in it, like it's, you're in a body, you're in a physical body that feels bad. How do you, how do you fix that? And so that's what I've done for thirty plus years with my patients with Fluxual Medicine is when they feel bad. A lot of Americans out there feel bad, you know?

• 10:30Mark Hyman?

  Six out of ten of us have a chronic illness and ninety three percent of us are metabolically unhealthy. Most of the population has what I call FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap.

• 10:42Mark Hyman?

  You know, whether it's just little things like painful periods, or headaches, or constipation, or joint aches, or skin rashes, or whatever it is, you know, people suffer and there is a way through that. And so for me, it was, it was a mindset of not believing my thoughts. And no matter how physiologically depleted I was, to just do the baby steps every day that got me to where I am now, which is feeling awesome. And I was in the gym at Equinox, working out for an hour this morning. I was like, right.

• 11:11Jay Shetty?

  That's amazing. And I'm so, I'm so glad that you've, I mean, you've helped so many people over the years, but it's a special feeling when you reuse your own work to rebuild. I mean, you must have so much conviction and confidence and everything you're about to share.

• 11:27Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Jay Shetty?

  Episode now to help everyone else. You must have a double sense of

• 11:32Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Jay Shetty?

  affirmation that this stuff works because you've had to do it in the most dire of circumstance.

• 11:37Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely. And I had to track all my blood work and I had to track my, my nutrient status and, you know, adjusted and customize it. But it was, you know, having the, the knowledge that I have and the data I have, which really now is, is through the magic of technology and the explosion of the changes in our scientific framework of how we understand the body. Like, we're in this paradigm shifting moment in, in medicine and healthcare and, and the, the promise of actually reversing chronic disease, of creating health, of people getting free from a lot of the suffering, the needless suffering that they have, is, is now really possible. And that's really what I'm so excited about. I mean, I'm just like 65, but I'm working harder than I've ever worked because I believe that there's

• 12:21Mark Hyman?

  this moment where all the things that I've done one-on-one with people, or through my books, you know, people come up and say, oh, Dr. Hyman, you saved my life, or whatever. I'm like, it's one by one by one. But what if, what if this can scale through, through the ability of technology to make sense of all your personal health data, customize an exact plan for you and guide you exactly on what to do, when to do it, and how to adjust it over time. It's, it's, that's where we are. It's pretty, it's pretty cool.

• 12:47Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 12:47Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Jay Shetty?

  What do, if someone's listening right now, and they're saying, Dr. Mark Hyman, I feel like crap.

• 12:54Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Jay Shetty?

  Like, if someone's listening right now and they're thinking, I feel like crap.

• 12:58Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Jay Shetty?

  Where should they start? What do they do?

• 13:00Mark Hyman?

  That's a great, great question. You know, there's a more serious version, Jay, it's called FLS. That's when you feel like shit.

• 13:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, right.

• 13:08Mark Hyman?

  You know, I, I, you know, have found that food is the most powerful tool to change your biology. It's basically code or instructions that changes your physiology with every single bite. It changes your gene expression, it changes your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, neurotransmitters, everything has changed, not in like years or decades, but literally in minutes. And, and so food is the most powerful way to quickly shift your biology. And most people, Jay, have no clue that what they're eating is making them feel bad. Or that their sense of how they are and their conditions that they're suffering from are caused by food.

• 13:51Mark Hyman?

  And so what, what I've done through functional medicine is, is it's often called an elimination diet, but I like to call it an addition diet because you're adding in all the healing medicinal foods in your diet, you're taking out the inflammatory foods. And so I created a program that I've used my patients called the 10 day detox diet. And sometimes I would have people on for a year, you know, if I call it the 10 year detox diet, nobody would do it.

• 14:14Jay Shetty?

  No one's gonna sign up.

• 14:16Mark Hyman?

  But, but I call it the, because in 10 days, it's, it's kind of miraculous. And I run programs around the world where I have people come together and we spend a week. And, and the average reduction in symptoms from the FLC syndrome, you know, whether it's, you know, sinus issues or allergies or irritable bowel or headaches or joint pains or acne or insomnia or depression or all the little stuff that isn't like, you know, cancer or dementia or, you know, heart attack that's more serious, all that stuff, literally you don't have to suffer from.

• 14:45Jay Shetty?

  In 10 days?

• 14:46Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And it's, there's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. I mean, I was like, when I first got to Cleveland Clinic, I, I gave a talk and this gentleman comes up to me and says, Dr. Hyman, I have rheumatoid arthritis, but I did your 10 day detox and it went away in 10 days. Is that possible? I'm like, yes, possible. What happened to you?

• 15:07Mark Hyman?

  You know?

• 15:07Jay Shetty?

  Walk me through the the two types. What are the medicinal foods?

• 15:11Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Jay Shetty?

  And what are the highly inflammatory?

• 15:13Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so the highly inflammatory foods are obviously all the ultra-processed food, which is sixty percent of our diet. You know, we have a whole food system that's designed to produce commodity crops. It's turned into ultra-processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts. Seventy-three percent of what's on the grocery store shelves. It's hard to get away from it. And it's it's, you know, stuff that, you know, you wouldn't have in your kitchen. You wouldn't have butylated hydroxytoluene to sprinkle on your vegetables or mono and diglycerides and bottle it to put on your salad dressing, right? It's maltodextrin, like all the crab is in there is super inflammatory. Emulsifiers, additives, colors, dyes. And then there's just the sugar and starch.

• 15:53Mark Hyman?

  I mean, we we each in America average eat a pound of sugar and flour a day per person. That's insane amount of sugar and flour, and that's incredibly inflammatory. Some people react to dairy, some people react to gluten or grains. And so I take away all the things that that are potentially reactive. Not that they're necessarily bad foods, but a lot of people have gut issues. And that that people have gut issues have trouble with grains. And gluten in this country is very different than other places like in Europe, where we were just talking about we both were this summer. And and they're the it's a different genetic strain. They don't use the same chemicals on it. They don't spray it with glyphosate, which is a microbiome destroyer. And so that that often is a factor in causing leaky gut and inflammation.

• 16:38Mark Hyman?

  So remove that, me all that sugar, processed food, flour, grains, and add in all the foods that are healing, alcohol, caffeine sometimes. And then add in lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, you know, good quality protein, lots of good fats, avocados, coconut, all that stuff. It's just pretty simple. It's like, it's not that hard. And it doesn't have to be that expensive. And in a very short amount of time, people feel better. The first few days, people feel bad. Because what happens is when you stop eating the foods that you're reacting to, you get what's called a die-off reaction. So basically, all the immune cells that are Busy dealing with all the crap you're eating all the time, have nothing to do.

• 17:20Mark Hyman?

  So they form these things called immune complexes, like they glomp together. And then it's like, you feel like you have the flu and that lasts maybe a couple of days. And then after like day three, four, five, you're like sleeping better. You have more energy, your head's clear, your symptoms are getting better. And even in five, six days, 70% reduction. And, and you know, we, we have an online program, it's called the 10 day detox diet. You can go to 10daydetox.com, we've done it with thousands of people. And it's, it's like, I'm always astounded when I see like, does this really work that well? You know, cause it's like, it's almost sounds too good to be true.

• 17:51Jay Shetty?

  That's incredible.

• 17:52Mark Hyman?

  But it's just, it just shows you that food is medicine and it's not, it's not metaphorically medicine. It literally is medicine.

• 17:58Jay Shetty?

  Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors.

• 18:03Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed. According to Indeed data worldwide, spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast.

• 18:46Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them. Whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process. And once something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part, there are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn.

• 19:26Jay Shetty?

  It's a simple way to clear out your closet, be less wasteful and maybe make some extra money along the way. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees. So you keep every dollar you earn. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one hour workout to build strength, burn fat and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives.

• 20:11Jay Shetty?

  Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details. And back to our episode. I want to dive into each of those three areas of the inflammatory foods. First of all, for anyone who's not aware or doesn't totally understand, what is inflammation? What is that doing to your body? Why is it important to have medicinal foods and avoid inflammatory foods?

• 20:36Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, well, you know, the inflammation is is something that now is being understood to be at the root cause of almost all chronic illnesses and aging itself. You know, you'll know if you have inflammation, right? You have a sore throat, you get an infected finger from a splinter, you sprain your ankle. You know, those are signs of inflammation. Yeah, those are signs of inflammation. But there's another kind of inflammation that's a little more silent. And and we can measure that through blood tests like C reactive protein, which we do through function health. And the the amount of of people who are inflamed is just so massive because of our diet. And so that creates this elevation in in these molecules in our body called cytokines.

• 21:20Mark Hyman?

  And you from COVID, everybody heard about the cytokine storm. What killed people was this overwhelming inflammation. And and why did Americans die at a far greater rates? We are 4% of the population, but 16% of the deaths and cases of COVID in the world. So four times what we should have been. It wasn't because we didn't have access to medical care or we didn't have good doctors. It's because we're all pre inflamed. We're all metabolic and healthy. And the the worst kind of inflammation is that that comes from your belly fat. So I just saw a guy a couple of days ago who was fifty two years old and you know, looked pretty healthy, but he had like a little gut on him, like not big. And he had thirty two percent body fat in his belly.

• 22:05Mark Hyman?

  And that visceral fat is like a incubator for inflammation. It's basically a fire in your belly. And that visceral fat causes heart attacks, strokes, cancer, obviously diabetes. And that he had a blockage, a ninety percent blockage in his heart. And it was because he had this inflamed silent killer inside of him. And so, so it's not just the inflammation that you know by getting a sore throat. It's, it's the quiet inflammation that you don't know you have. And, and that leads to all these things like, like not just the obvious things like autoimmune diseases, which we can talk about allergies, but you know, things that are more subtle, whether it's, you know, hormonal issues like menstrual cramps or issues like migraines

• 22:48Mark Hyman?

  or headaches or fatigue, or all these things are signs of, of this fire raging through your body that you don't know about that's killing you. And so by eating an anti-inflammatory diet and removing the inflammatory foods, like your body will quickly reset. I mean, your body has innate intelligence. This was such a miracle for me when you think about it. Your, your body is a healing machine. Like, look what happened to me. Like, I mean, I was in bed, I was, couldn't walk, I was on a walker, I was emaciated, I was close to death. And when I put the right inputs in, my body healed and it's amazing. I've had patients who were sixty five with heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, kidneys

• 23:30Mark Hyman?

  failing, liver failing, who actually didn't take ten days, but like, you know, three months, they were off all their medications, all the reversal, all these conditions. Even at sixty five or sixty six years old, the body can do that. And so that's really what I want for people. I want them to have access to the knowledge, the ability and the tools to be able to do this for themselves and to try it. And I don't, I don't say the smartest doctor in your room is your own body. If you listen to it, gee, when I eat this, my stomach doesn't feel good. When I have that, I get a headache. But most people don't connect the dots between what they eat and how they feel.

• 24:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, we base it all on lifestyle. And we also, like the gentleman you were treating, we still live in this world of, oh, I'm not that. Big, small, we're looking at this physical attribute when actually the inflammation's all happening on the inside.

• 24:18Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, like he was jogging every day, he was eating healthy.

• 24:21Jay Shetty?

  He's active, yeah. He's doing all the right things.

• 24:23Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Jay Shetty?

  But, but there's this hidden part. One of those hidden things is sugar.

• 24:27Mark Hyman?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:28Jay Shetty?

  I find it really shocking when I was playing pickleball the other day.

• 24:32Mark Hyman?

  Hmm.

• 24:32Jay Shetty?

  And someone said to me that, oh, let's have this drink. Like, we didn't have, we, we, we didn't have any water accessible at the time. We were all feeling thirsty. It was pretty hot.

• 24:41Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 24:42Jay Shetty?

  And, and he had these like packs of drinks. And so he handed it to me. My wife has trained me to.

• 24:46Mark Hyman?

  Look at labels.

• 24:47Jay Shetty?

  Look at labels. But I turned it around and it was like forty percent of your daily sugars in this little pack, right? It was tiny. It was, I don't even know what it's called.

• 24:55Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Jay Shetty?

  Forty percent of your daily sugars had all these other non-natural ingredients that I didn't recognize at all.

• 25:01Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Jay Shetty?

  Massive list. And, and I said to him, I said, dude, like.

• 25:04Mark Hyman?

  I'm not drinking this.

• 25:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I was like, I'm not gonna have it. I was like, I'm not gonna have forty percent of my sugars in, in this. And I try and avoid refined sugar anyway.

• 25:11Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Jay Shetty?

  And, but to him, that was crazy. He was just like, oh dude, it's fine. Like, we're running for like three hours. Like, we, you know, it's just a hydration. And I was like, yeah, but you don't need the sugar with it. And, and I find that sugar is something I still get a lot of pushback on.

• 25:25Mark Hyman?

  Really?

• 25:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, people, even, that's, that's my reaction. Cause I feel like I've been so like well educated by yourself, the other experts on the show, my wife, who are constantly, cause I used to be addicted to sugar.

• 25:35Mark Hyman?

  Well, easy to.

• 25:36Jay Shetty?

  And all of a sudden you get, so talk to me about sugar because I think there's a way in which we've been brainwashed to think it's okay.

• 25:45Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, no, actually, Jay, you know, we know alcohol's addictive, right? But there's been large studies done using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a scientifically validated metric that measures food addiction. And it's primarily sugar and starch. And fourteen percent of people in this country are alcoholics.

• 26:04Mark Hyman?

  But fourteen percent are also addicted to food and fourteen percent of kids, which is a lot of kids. So it's biologically addictive. A little bit is not going to hurt you if you're healthy, if you're fit, you can have some. It's it's just the volume that we have in this culture. I mean, it's something that our biology doesn't know what to do with. Historically, we were hunter gatherers. We had twenty two teaspoons a year. Now the average person has twenty two teaspoons a day.

• 26:29Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 26:30Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Jay Shetty?

  That is mind blowing.

• 26:31Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Jay Shetty?

  Twenty two teaspoons a year.

• 26:34Mark Hyman?

  So you were a hunter gatherer, you'd like get some honey. Oh, my God, I found honey, you know, and you'd eat it. But it was hard to get sugar.

• 26:43Jay Shetty?

  And you were more active then, too.

• 26:44Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and you're running.

• 26:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Mark Hyman?

  All the time.

• 26:47Jay Shetty?

  Because you're looking for that jar of honey once a year. No jar, sorry.

• 26:50Mark Hyman?

  It was actually, I was I was in the Hadza tribe, which is one of the last hunter gatherer tribes in in Africa. And they eat a lot of honey. They eat like about twenty percent of calories of honey, but they're super fit, healthy, because they're just like eating tons of fiber. So they basically, all the roots and the tubers have massive amounts of fiber. Americans eat about eight grams of fiber a day. We were historically as hunter gatherers having one hundred and fifty grams a day. And fiber basically is like a sponge. So for example, if you take your Coca Cola and you throw in a bunch of Metamucil, it's going to have a very different effect on your blood sugar. It's going to turn to gel, first of all, if you leave it there for long enough. And then if you drink it, it's not going to cause the same spike. So it just not, it's just the whole context of our diet

• 27:32Mark Hyman?

  has just become highly processed, lots of sugar, and it and it drives the visceral fat. So sugar and starch, and by the way, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cornflakes and a bowl of sugar, or a loaf of bread and a, you know, a bowl of sugar. It's the same. In fact, sometimes in terms of glycemic index, the the bread is worse because it's pure glucose, whereas sugar is fructose and glucose, which has different effects on your blood sugar. But basically, they're both the same. And and what that does is that is that drives the deposition of belly fat. And that belly fat, which is not just holding up your pants, it's metabolically.

• 28:10Mark Hyman?

  Very active. It produces tons of inflammation, screws up your hormones. It causes infertility. It causes Alzheimer's disease. It causes cancer. It causes diabetes. Causes heart attacks. It causes aging itself. And when, when you look around in America, ninety three percent of us, well, ninety three point two, to be exact, have this metabolic dysfunction. I mean, six point eight percent of us don't, which is frightening, frightening. And, and it's not how humans evolved. We didn't evolve like that. People go, the Native Americans are, you know, genetically diabetic. Well, no, they're not. Like the Pima Indians a hundred years ago had no diabetes, no obesity,

• 28:50Mark Hyman?

  no heart attacks. And now they're, you know, get eighty percent get diabetes by the time you're thirty. And even two year olds get type diabetes. Cause they're just drinking tons of sugar or sodas and flour and all the commodities that we sent to the reservations that are all the crap we shouldn't be eating.

• 29:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Mark Hyman?

  So, so yeah, if you put your genes in the wrong environment, the genes may load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.

• 29:13Jay Shetty?

  I want to give a shout out to this incredible company that you brought my way, Function Health. When you first brought it to me, I was so impressed at what it does because I think everything we're talking about. The challenge is we don't know until we feel something in quite an extreme way.

• 29:31Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Jay Shetty?

  Right. So we just don't know as humans. We don't know these things. We were never taught them.

• 29:35Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Jay Shetty?

  If I didn't meet my wife, if I didn't have this podcast, I wouldn't be educated. I just, how would I know this?

• 29:41Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Jay Shetty?

  And when you talk about the ninety three point two percent, that's all of us who just don't know.

• 29:45Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Jay Shetty?

  And then you, my wife and you and people like that, the, the six point eight percent.

• 29:49Mark Hyman?

  I love your wife, by the way. She's great.

• 29:50Jay Shetty?

  And all of a sudden you get educated and then that's what Function Health does. The fact that you can take these tests.

• 29:57Mark Hyman?

  Look under the hood.

• 29:58Jay Shetty?

  You can get all the results. You know it from being at home or, or, you know, popping to get a, get a test done. You have access to actually know what's happening inside your body.

• 30:10Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Jay Shetty?

  And I became a proud investor in the company when you first brought it to me because I'd never seen someone make. That kind of data available at mass and at scale.

• 30:21Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 30:21Jay Shetty?

  I was going to some concierge services, which I'm very fortunate to have access to. But I didn't see how the world, the ninety three point two percent could have access to these things. And that's what function health's doing.

• 30:32Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, imagine, imagine driving your car. You don't have any dashboard. You don't know how fast you're going, how much gas the car, how much oil's in there. You don't think engine lights good, your tire pressure is good. I mean, think of the amount of sensors and information you get from your car these days, right? We practice medicine today, like listening to the noises a car makes and hoping we can figure it out. It's a looking under the hood. And so, you know, I believe we should be testing and not guessing what's going on with our health. And the wearables are great, you know, or ring or Fitbit or, you know, Apple Watch. Awesome, boop. They tell you a lot, but they don't go under the skin. And so you need to know what's happening in your biology. And the truth is a disease doesn't just happen like that. One day you get a heart attack. It's a slow progression over decades and you can see the continuum of what happens.

• 31:18Mark Hyman?

  And you can see slight changes and variations that will compound over time and make you ultimately very sick. And the beautiful thing about function health is you can actually get your biomarkers done. There's over a hundred and ten biomarkers, your initial test, you do a second test mid-year. You can add on tests for looking at other things, whether you want toxins or allergens or Lyme disease, whatever you want to know about yourself. And then you get this beautiful dashboard that shows you exactly what's going on. And like, you know, you got like in a car dashboard and you can see the change over time. And then you can learn what to do about it and what's going on with your body and how to make adjustments. And you get all the information. It's supported by all the scientific literature in the world, by knowledge experts, by your own personal data set. And it's really medicine designed for you.

• 32:01Mark Hyman?

  And it's, it's really quite a remarkable thing. And people seem to have taken to it because we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of members and people are learning so much about their health. And I've been shocked at the data that we're finding, you know, like we found all these cancers. I was just reviewing our, our cancer screening and. God, you know, people don't know they have cancer. I mean, I had a friend who just died like a month ago from breast cancer at forty five years old. It was heartbreaking, you know, and and now through the blood tests, you can get through function, health, you can actually see like a liquid biopsy for fifty different cancers. And I was reviewing the spreadsheet of all the people and what they found. And in the follow up, and like, they didn't know they had cancer. And then they found it in early

• 32:42Mark Hyman?

  stage, and then it saves their lives as opposed to waiting until too late. So, you know, it's always and the whole thing of the metabolic health. I mean, most doctors don't check insulin, which is extremely important to know about because insulin is what goes up first, not your blood sugar. Most doctors don't look at the right cholesterol test. ApoB is the most important. I just had a friend send me an article. Dr. Hyman, look at this article. It's about this latest new test for predicting heart attack risk. It's better than any other test. I'm like, what is it? I'm like, I looked it up. And it's like, oh, it's called ApoB. I'm like, I've been testing that for thirty years. It's the most predictive. But people check your LDL cholesterol. That's not the thing that matters. And and so we do that.

• 33:24Mark Hyman?

  And we do deeper analysis of your metabolic health, your nutritional health, looking at toxins, your hormones, and we're finding autoimmune diseases. I mean, I looked it up before I came on the podcast, I was curious because it, you know, about eight percent, according to the, you know, CDC of Americans have an autoimmune disease. But when I looked at our data, we're seeing thirty three percent have a positive autoimmune antibody, which is incredible. I mean, that's a third of Americans have some either autoimmune disease or pre autoimmune disease. And there's stuff you can do about it and get to the root cause. And what's beautiful about it is that we use root cause medicine, not just, oh, you have an autoimmune disease, take this drug, or you have high cholesterol, take

• 34:08Mark Hyman?

  this drug. It's like, well, how do I solve this using all the world scientific knowledge about how to best do this through lifestyle and dealing with root causes? Creating health rather than just mitigating symptoms or suppressing symptoms. So it's, it's pretty exciting. And I think, you know, we, we, we now have full body imaging for $4.99. You know, you can get your whole blood test for $4.99, $1.37 a day.

• 34:33Jay Shetty?

  I'm really impressed by what you offered and I love what Function Health has done so much that I didn't just invest. I've got every member of my team a membership.

• 34:42Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing.

• 34:43Jay Shetty?

  Because I couldn't think of a better gift.

• 34:45Mark Hyman?

  That is.

• 34:45Jay Shetty?

  Give people than accessing their knowledge and knowing what's happening inside their body. Like if I want people to perform at work and feel their best and care about their health, to me, it felt like the right thing to do. And so, and I know you've actually created a, you've created a discount for our community.

• 35:01Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:03Jay Shetty?

  What are you doing for us?

• 35:03Mark Hyman?

  It's functionhealth.com/jshetty and you get a hundred dollars off your membership. It's a membership, twice your testing. So it's, you know, 400 bucks or $3.99. And, and, and you get to know what's going on. It's, and the gift of health is, you know, what you did for your employees is amazing because there is no better gift than the gift of health.

• 35:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you only realize that when it, when it goes away.

• 35:25Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Jay Shetty?

  And I've had many episodes in my life where my health has not been great.

• 35:29Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Jay Shetty?

  And that's when you realize just how valuable it is to know sooner, you know, earlier and know before. And, you know, I'm glad. So that's great. So functionhealth.com/jshetty.

• 35:40Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 35:40Jay Shetty?

  Hundred dollars off.

• 35:41Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Jay Shetty?

  And, and as I said, I'm an investor and, you know, really proud to be involved and really excited to, to get it out. I want to talk about the autoimmune diseases.

• 35:50Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Jay Shetty?

  Because it feels like, I feel like right now I'm at that age where I'm either hearing about autoimmune or cancer.

• 35:58Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Jay Shetty?

  Or sadly, people dying.

• 36:00Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Jay Shetty?

  More than I ever have in my entire lifetime. That's not just because I'm getting older then.

• 36:06Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 36:06Jay Shetty?

  It's becoming more prevalent.

• 36:08Mark Hyman?

  It is. I mean, the, the, the hockey stick of chronic diseases is going like this. It's really striking. I mean, things that were rare 150 years ago, you know, turn the, or 120 years ago, turn to the 1900s. If you had a heart attack in a hospital, it would be like seeing this rare case of malaria in like Manhattan, you know, like all the doctors would rush around to see this unusual case. Wow. Diabetes wasn't even the thing, type 2 diabetes. If you look at the records of Mass General in the 1850s, it wasn't even a diagnosis, you know, people didn't have it. So why, why are we seeing this explosion? And autoimmune disease, there are over 100 different autoimmune diseases, you know, everything from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is affecting one in five women, that's

• 36:53Mark Hyman?

  an autoimmune thyroid condition, one in 10 men, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, colitis, Crohn's disease, there are over 100 different autoimmune diseases and people are suffering from these things and the drugs that we use are incredibly toxic. They basically suppress your immune system, they have all these side effects and they're extremely expensive and they don't necessarily always work that well. And the question then is, why are we doing this? I mean, this is what functional medicine is about, is what function is created on the basis of this idea of why, not what disease you have and what drug do I get, but why? And the reason why we're seeing such an explosion of autoimmune disease is a combination of different factors. One, our diet has changed dramatically over the last 50 to 70 years because of industrialization

• 37:38Mark Hyman?

  of agriculture, use of pesticides, herbicides, the increasing rates of C-section means you don't colonize your gut and 60% of your immune system is in your gut and a lot of autoimmune disease is caused by trouble with the gut. The increasing rates of formula feeding, you know, not breast milk, which protects the baby's immune system is necessary for the development of the, I mean, 25% of the calories in breast milk is not digestible by the baby, it's to feed the microbiome, which is amazing. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy. And when you eat, have formula, you don't have that in there and so the microbiomes are disturbed and then you get leaky gut. We use lots of antibiotics in children.

• 38:23Mark Hyman?

  We have accelerated vaccine schedules, vaccines I believe in, I think they're important. But like when I was a kid and when I, when my kids were kids, which is not long ago, there was a, you know, a limited set of vaccines and now it's free for all and the vaccine.

• 38:37Jay Shetty?

  That's like you gotta take 15 or 16.

• 38:38Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's like 72 different jabs of shots. And so that, that affects your immune system and they, they, they do, they do things that affect your immune system by putting in irritants like aluminum. And then the exposure to environmental chemicals has exploded, heavy metals, pesticides. The average newborn baby today, Jay, has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath, including stuff that's been banned for years like DDT and dioxin, PCBs, phthalates, flame retardants, lead, mercury, pesticides, herbicides. I mean, you name it, it's in there. And so all that has an impact and they're called autogens. There's a whole science around this, that these are environmental toxins that cause autoimmunity.

• 39:22Mark Hyman?

  And I've seen many patients with, with autoimmune diseases that we cured by getting rid of their heavy metals or detoxifying their bodies. And so these, these toxins are a huge factor. And then you've got all the modern stresses, you know, we don't sleep, you know, we're under too much chronic stress, you know, light pollution, who knows what EMF, I don't even know if that's a thing, but I'm not saying it is, I'm saying it's all this stuff that we never had to deal with and we're just seeing our immune system become so dysregulated. And the ultra-processed food revolution has been another huge factor because in ultra-processed food, there's all these emulsifiers. Emulsifiers are basically the things that make stuff creamy and, you know, like if you ever got some of the like nut milks and they separate out when you put in your coffee, it's because they don't use emulsifiers, right?

• 40:06Mark Hyman?

  And emulsifiers basically make things creamy and they're using almost all ultra-processed food and they damage the gut lining and they, they cause a, what we call leaky gut where the cells come apart and then food and bacteria leak in between your cells and then right underneath your cell lining, which is just one cell thick, is most of your immune system. And think about, why is, why is most of your immune system in your gut? Well, it's because we're exposed to most of the foreign stuff every day. You're putting pounds of, of foreign food in there and you're putting. There's all the bacteria from your microbiome, there's three pounds of bacteria in there that is, you know, basically a sewer, you know? And it is like one, you're one cell away from a sewer.

• 40:48Mark Hyman?

  And so when that breaks down, your immune system will go, this isn't me. What's going on? And it starts attacking things and then it creates just a lot of mistaken identity, things you call molecular mimicry, where it thinks it's attacking a bacteria or food, but it then will attack your joints or your eyes or your nerves and get MS and your thyroid gland. So basically, we're seeing this explosion. And the beautiful thing is by understanding the root causes, that you can actually reverse it. I had an autoimmune disease. I actually had mold in my house. I've gotten everything known to man. I've got Lyme disease, mold, and I had, I lived in an old barn. I got really bad mold poisoning.

• 41:28Mark Hyman?

  And then on top of that, I had a root canal, had it removed, had an antibiotic. The antibiotic called something called C. diff, which is a bacteria that causes really bad gut infections. That turned into ulcerative colitis. My whole intestinal tract was just one big red mess and I had to heal it. And so, you know, there is a methodology for creating health. And that's, that's, that's, that's what I want people to know. That's why functional health is so important, because it teaches you how to turn on your own innate healing system. You've got a healing, regenerative, repair and renewal system. That's why I could come back from the dead, because I knew how to turn it on, you know? And that's what I want everybody to know. And that's really why I do what I do, why I have the podcast, why I write books, why I travel around speaking like you.

• 42:12Mark Hyman?

  It's the same, it's the same movie, different, different story. And, you know.

• 42:17Jay Shetty?

  What are, what are the signs for someone who's listening of a weak immune system and a strong immune system?

• 42:23Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Jay Shetty?

  How do they tell?

• 42:25Mark Hyman?

  I mean, you know, the inflammation immune system are a little bit different because you're, you know, you're, you can be inflamed but have a weaker immune system. So frequent infections, frequent colds, feeling rundown. I mean, There are signs that your immune system is not working. And you get, you know, less resilient to stress, you get sick more easily. And so those are signs that there's problems. And one of the things we find through function health is that so many people have nutritional deficiencies and nutrients like zinc and vitamin D and iron, these play a big role in your immune function. And

• 43:00Jay Shetty?

  It's actually, even supplement is such a bad word for supplements. Because it sounds like something that, you know, you're just supplementing, but it's like

• 43:07Mark Hyman?

  Like it's not necessary.

• 43:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean, right? The word supplement in and of itself feels like it's an add on.

• 43:13Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 43:13Jay Shetty?

  Rather than like, this is necessary.

• 43:15Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 43:15Jay Shetty?

  Right? Like, I think we're still living in this time where supplements haven't become the norm.

• 43:20Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Jay Shetty?

  People see it as some health hack tip as opposed to, no, this is just what your body needs as nutrients.

• 43:27Mark Hyman?

  My joke is, I don't think anybody needs supplements, but only under certain conditions. They have to hunt and gather their own wild food. They have to drink pure clean water, be exposed to no environmental toxins, have no chronic stress, sleep nine hours a night, go to bed with the sun, wake up with the sun. Then, then if you do all that, you might not need supplements.

• 43:44Jay Shetty?

  I'm good with the last six, but bad at the first three.

• 43:48Mark Hyman?

  You haven't gone hunting today?

• 43:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I didn't go hunting today, yeah.

• 43:51Mark Hyman?

  And, and so our soils have become damaged because of

• 43:55Jay Shetty?

  Soil.

• 43:56Mark Hyman?

  The soil, right? And the way your plants get nutrients is because of the organic matter in the soil has a symbiotic relationship with the microbes in the soil. And with the plant roots, then allows it to extract the nutrients. But if you basically grow plants in dirt, not soil, where there's no nutrients, or they're not accessible because the body, the plants can't get them because they don't have the right organic matter to create the symbiotic relationship. Your broccoli today is 50% less nutrients than it did 50 years ago. Plus, you know, we do a lot of things to cause more stress for our bodies. We need more nutrients. And like magnesium is a very big nutritional deficiency because when you're stressed, you pee out magnesium.

• 44:39Mark Hyman?

  And then we don't eat a lot of magnesium rich foods like nuts and seeds and beans and leafy greens. Right. It's not a big part of Americans diet. So a lot of people are low in magnesium. And low in vitamin D, we see 80% of people being insufficient or deficient in vitamin D, which is incredibly important for immune function. And I mean, COVID, if your vitamin D was low, you were 75% more likely to end up in the ICU and die. Whereas if your vitamin D was over 50, this big Israeli study, there were no deaths. So if that's that powerful, there, there, there are things that regulate almost every biochemical reaction in your body. And you've got 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second happening. And every one of those, and that's a big number, you know, how many zeros that is slot is, I think it's 27 zeros.

• 45:22Mark Hyman?

  And, and every single one of those reactions requires a nutrient to work as a co factor for the enzymatic reaction. And most of us are deficient. In fact, with function health, we do deep nutritional testing, omega threes, vitamin D, all the B vitamins, iron and so forth. And we find 67% of our members who you'd think would be forward thinking about their health are deficient in nutrients. Not at the level that I would think would be optimal, but at the level that prevents a deficiency disease. So like, not the ideal amount, but the bare minimum. So you don't get like rickets or scurvy or, you know, like, and that's not, that's 67%. So if you expanded the criteria to be what's optimal, it would probably be even more.

• 46:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's, it's scary to think about it, but it's so important to start being aware right now. Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an autoimmune disease? Like, is it possible?

• 46:16Mark Hyman?

  Well, there's pre autoimmune disease, like there's prediabetes or pre hypertension. And I don't like those terms because they imply that it's, you haven't gotten into trouble yet. But, but you are in trouble. You're, you're, there is something bad happening. And so you have to actually look at, at the, the blood work to help you identify if you're heading in the wrong direction and you can see. But then you could, you could be somebody who's suffering from low grade symptoms. You might not know it like thyroid is really common. You might be a little tired. You might be a little constipated. You might a little dry skin. Your nails might crack a little bit. You might be losing the outer third of your eyebrow, you might feel a little depressed, you might have lower sex drive and these things, people don't really, maybe gaining a little bit of weight, people don't think of these as a disease, but when you add them all together, it's an autoimmune thyroid issue, right?

• 47:01Mark Hyman?

  And even, even gut issues, you know, irritable bowel, a lot of people have digestive issues. And it's really a continuum from irritable bowel to autoimmune bowel disease, which is where you get colitis or Crohn's disease. And so it's a continuum, a lot of people have this low grade inflammatory stuff going on in their bodies and, and it's really, it's unfortunate because we know how to fix it. And, and this is really what we do in functional medicine is why I think testing and understanding what's going on in your body before you get in trouble. It's like, you know, the first symptom of a heart attack, you know what it is for most people? For 50% of people with heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death. Drop to the heart attack, like this guy was telling you about, he was jogging and he kept having chest pain and he was ignoring it.

• 47:44Mark Hyman?

  And then he finally decided to go check it out because his girlfriend made him go and, and turned out he had a nine percent blockage and he wouldn't know and he could have literally just dropped out of a heart attack like that.

• 47:55Jay Shetty?

  Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine. Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective and with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct, enjoy access to award winning airport lounges, three times the points on dining and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A member FDIC, subject to credit approval, terms apply.

• 48:40Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision making and that extends to the practical stuff too, like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are and they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state, coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

• 49:15Jay Shetty?

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• 50:00Jay Shetty?

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• 50:20Jay Shetty?

  Thanks for taking a moment for that. Now, back to the discussion. What are the shifts we should be making right now? If someone's listening, they're gonna go get the test if they can. If they can't, because, you know, for whatever reason, they don't live in the States, because we're not available internationally.

• 50:34Mark Hyman?

  No, not yet.

• 50:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, not yet. Yeah, I get a lot of that in my comment section.

• 50:37Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:38Jay Shetty?

  Like, hey, Jalen, what are we here? There's a lot of people I know in UK and Europe who really want it, and Australia and other places. But you've got your results, you know what's going on. Where would you encourage people to begin if they don't have anything serious right now, but they wanna make sure they get this?

• 50:54Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to sell anything here, but I think doing a short-term reset is powerful. The way I think about it is, how do you turn your body back to its original factory settings? You know, when a baby comes out, it's generally perfect, right? It's beautiful, it's healthy, everything works, right? And then things break down. But imagine it like if your computer's, you know, not working or it's on the fritz and like my WhatsApp wasn't working today and I just had to reboot it, right? Or reboot my computer. How do you do that with your body? And that's really what this dietary change that I call the 10 day detox diet is about. It's about really putting your body back to its original factory settings. For most people, it will create a dramatic shift. If you don't get better from it, it's usually because there's something

• 51:39Mark Hyman?

  more serious, like you have Lyme disease, you have mold exposure that's causing toxicity, you have maybe environmental toxins or Lyme disease or something serious that needs another treatment. But for most people, just a simple 10 day approach to resetting your system by getting enough sleep, by cutting out the bad stuff, by taking walks, by doing a little breathing exercises and radically changing your diet. Oh my God. You could do that at home. This isn't, you don't, yeah. No, it's basically. You can't afford to go on a retreat or you could do this at home. A hundred percent. Most people do it at home. And it's so, it doesn't really cost you any extra. Maybe it'll cost you less because you're not buying all these extra crap. And so. 10 day reset.

• 52:23Mark Hyman?

  10 days. And if you try it, it's like the body just has this desire to be healthy. And illness is just your body's best attempt to deal with a really shitty set of circumstances. Change of circumstances, meaning what you're exposed to, your diet, lifestyle, and then you'll change. You know, because 93% it's been determined of our health issues are not genetic. They're from our collective environment, what we call the exposome, not our genome, our exposome is what it sounds like. It's everything that we're exposed to. It's what we eat, it's movement, it's sleep, it's stress, it's our gut microbiota, it's environmental toxins, it's our thoughts. Our thoughts actually transform our biology,

• 53:04Mark Hyman?

  literally. It's the biggest pharmacy is between your ears. And so, all those things you have control over, which is what's so exciting to me. It's about being empowered to actually make those changes. And people just suffer so badly. I mean, I think I told you maybe that I did a program with a faith-based wellness program with Rick Warren at this church where we got a quarter of a million pounds lost out for 15,000 people in a year. By doing a faith-based wellness program and the amount of people that had radical changes in their health was just so remarkable. This woman had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She'd been on every psychiatric medication you could imagine from antidepressants to anxiety medications to antipsychotic medications. She was about to commit suicide.

• 53:49Mark Hyman?

  She was also overweight and she did this dietary change. Essentially, I did the faith-based wellness program, included the 10-day detox diet. And she's like, I'm completely cured. Like, I don't have any depression. I'm off all my medications. I feel good. How is that possible? And that's the other thing, Jay. There's so much mental illness. There's so much depression, anxiety, polydisease, more serious things like severe OCD or even schizophrenia. These things actually are physiological problems or not always emotional problems. So sometimes they are. Like, your spouse dies, you're depressed. Yeah, I get it. But a lot of times,

• 54:32Mark Hyman?

  and for many people, there's actually a physiological reason. We talk about the mind-body effect, which is how the mind affects the body, which is profound. But there's also the body-mind effect. So if you're magnesium deficient, you can be anxious, right? If you're vitamin D deficient or omega-3 deficient, you can be depressed or you can have ADD. If you don't have enough folate or B12, you can get depressed. I mean, these are things that you can fix. If you have heavy metals, which I did, it can cause you to have depression and insomnia and anxiety. I mean, I'm treating a little girl right now who's got severe OCD and it turned out she had a strep infection that turns into this autoimmune reaction against your brain that's causing her to have OCD behaviors like tics and weird things that

• 55:16Mark Hyman?

  we think is psychological. So I think, I often call myself the accidental psychiatrist because I was treating people for all these physical things and then these psychiatric problems would get better. And I wrote a book about it called The Ultra Mind Solution: How to Fix Your Broken Brain by Fixing Your Body First. And you can just get that off the table. And then if you have other deeper trauma or things, yeah, I think the revolution now in metabolic psychiatry, nutritional psychiatry, and then psychedelic medicine and psychiatry are, I think, going to change the face of mental health care for the long term.

• 55:47Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. What are some of the mistakes you see people making in curing autoimmune diseases? What are some of the mistakes? What are the things we get wrong?

• 55:56Mark Hyman?

  Because they don't treat the cause is the biggest thing. You know, I had a patient when I was at Cleveland Clinic who was a business coach. She was 50 years old and she had a lot of problems and I jokingly call myself a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems, you know, and she had everything, you know, she had irritable bowel, she had reflux, she had migraines, she was depressed, she had prediabetes and she had this horrible autoimmune disease called psoriatic arthritis, you know, the heartbreak of psoriasis. He's horrible, thick, scaly, red, itchy plaques on your skin and it also can attack your joints and it was attacking her joints. She was on a drug and she was seen by the top doctors and, and she was on a drug that cost $50,000 and it wasn't really fixing her and she was

• 56:41Mark Hyman?

  seeing the top specialists for neurology for her migraine, psychiatry for depression, gastrology for her gut, endocrinologist for her prediabetes, rheumatologist for her arthritis, she was a dermatologist. I was like, right, she had a doctor for every inch of her. And I said, gee, you know, you're getting all these medications, you're not really better, you're mitigating your symptoms a little bit. Maybe we think about treating the root cause. And so because she had so many digestive symptoms and she'd been on lots of antibiotics, she'd been on lots of steroids for arthritis, that really messed up the gut too. I said, you have reflux, you have bloating after eating, you, you have all these gut issues, why don't we

• 57:23Mark Hyman?

  treat your gut? So I basically gave her an antibiotic to kill off all these bad bugs that were in her gut. And I gave her an antifungal because she had a lot of fungal overgrowth from all the steroids and the antibiotics to kill off the bad bugs. I gave her some probiotics. I put her on the 10 day detox diet, basically got rid of all the inflammatory foods, got rid of sugar, processed food. She comes back in six weeks and she's like,

• 57:47Mark Hyman?

  I'm all better. I mean, what do you mean? She's, well, I stopped all my medication. Well, I didn't tell you to do that. She's like, no, I just was feeling so good. I stopped everything. I don't have migraines. I'm not depressed. My lost 20 pounds. My skin's cleared. My joints don't hurt. My reflux is gone. My irritable bowel is gone. And so if you treat the root, which was her gut in this case, I just gave her, I just gave her the Lashon diet and I gave her the antibiotics and the antifungals. I gave her probiotics, vitamin D, some fish oil, not a lot. And in six weeks, not only was she feeling better, but she like saved the healthcare system, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.

• 58:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's, it's almost like, it sounds like magic when you're listening to it. And you go, yeah, no, it's not because we've just been trained to believe that this way makes sense.

• 58:30Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Jay Shetty?

  Well, it's, it's, it's funny. We're more convinced that a manufactured pill will solve our body than the things that our ancestors have lived off.

• 58:42Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 58:43Jay Shetty?

  For years and years and years.

• 58:44Mark Hyman?

  That's right. So if you, if you, if you don't know how to turn on the body's healing system, then yeah, you need medication. And, and what's so exciting to me, Jay, is like, we're in this revolution in medicine right now, where we're finally understanding root causes. And it's in the scientific literature, but it takes decades for that to get into clinical practice. I mean, to change medical education, to change reimbursement, to change how doctors practice. It's just such a, it's like, it's like, we're all walking around thinking the earth is flat when it's really round. And so this paradigm shift is such a profound change in how we think about disease, that it's going to revolutionize everything we do. And it's, and it's only now be accessible to people through things like function, because we're able to, through technology, be able to get the amazing amount of world scientific literatures, you know, AI can read it in like five seconds, right?

• 59:35Mark Hyman?

  And it can synthesize it. And then it's your own personal health data set. It's not like you're, you know, doctors treating you based on a study that was on 70 kilogram white men from Kansas, which doesn't apply to a, an Indian guy, you know, or somebody who's in like, you know, Vietnam, right? And, and so basically, we are treating to the masses where we should be treating to the individual. We call this precision medicine, personalized medicine, but medicine should be personalized. It should be predictive. It should be preventive, and it should be proactive, that you actually don't have to react like we do in medicine, but. Proactive and that's really, you know, my life's work is not only, you know, taking people with very serious illnesses and reversing them, but actually getting people earlier, I mean, Benjamin Franklin said it, right?

• 1:00:19Mark Hyman?

  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And so I can give a pound of cure, but it's a lot harder than announcing prevention.

• 1:00:25Jay Shetty?

  What are you most excited about at the forefront of medicine and functional medicine at the moment?

• 1:00:31Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Jay Shetty?

  Is it AI? Is it?

• 1:00:32Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Well, you know, I said to you, like, there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body. It's, the body is so complex. It's, it's physics is complex. I think about how complicated a rocket is. I, like, I can't even understand that, but that's a noble thing, right? Scientists and physicists can figure it out and then send a guy to the moon or build a spaceship that goes to Mars like Elon Musk. But like, the body is so infinitely complex. And we, we see it in this reductionist way where every different organ has a different specialist and the body is all these different parts. But that's not how we're designed. Everything is an ecosystem, everything's connected. You know, we're, we're one whole web-like organism where, where everything's interacting with everything else all the time.

• 1:01:16Mark Hyman?

  And, and so that paradigm of thinking that way, and functional medicine isn't a test, it's not a supplement, it's not a new specialty. It's literally a meta framework for thinking about the nature of health and disease based on root causes and based on the body's system and based on asking the question, why not? What disease do you have and what drug do I get? But why do I have this? And, and how do I create health, not treat disease? And when I create health, disease goes away as a side effect. And so that scientific paradigm is, is now emerging. And before it, it, you know, you know, it was frustrating for me doing this work for 30 years because, you know, it was, it was hard to convince people like, look, the earth is round, like, no, no, it's flat. See, right there, it's flat. And they go, there's that disease and it's real. Like, yeah, you know, rheumatoid arthritis is a thing, but it's not how we think about

• 1:02:01Mark Hyman?

  it and we're thinking about it the wrong way. And so I'm so excited now because of AI and, and the ability to synthesize massive data sets. I mean, you have 100,000 petabytes of data in your microbiome. A petabyte. Is a million gigabytes. Okay, your computer has four terabytes, maybe, right? Which is a thousand gigabytes or something. I mean, it's just such a massive amount of information. That's just in your microbiome. And so you, your body is so complex and we need technology and AI to help us start to understand that and then apply it to you as an individual and then help create a roadmap for looking at where your weak points are and how do you correct those?

• 1:02:43Mark Hyman?

  And then how do you optimize? And so that's what I'm so excited about. And that's, that's why at 65, I'm like doing the startup. I mean, I was, I was with one of the, one of the investors on a panel. And I'm like, she's like, somebody said, well, how do you, how do you figure out what companies to invest in? They go, well, we invest in the founders. I'm like, well, have you ever had a founder that's been on Medicare before?

• 1:03:06Mark Hyman?

  I'm like, what am I, I mean, like, I mean, hope to live to be a hundred and something, but you know, I'm doing this because I don't want to see so many people suffering that don't have to suffer. And I get these calls every day from friends and would you help this one? They helped that one. No one can help me. And I'm like, I'm only one guy. I could like work 24 hours a day for the rest of my life and I wouldn't make a dent in the amount of suffering there is in the world. But imagine if we could put, you know, a thousand or a hundred thousand doctors in your pocket that are trained on the future paradigm of medicine and make it accessible to you in real time on a day to day basis to guide you and coach you and support you. That's a function of how it's aiming to do. And I'm so excited about it because it's like,

• 1:03:48Mark Hyman?

  wow, we couldn't do this before. We couldn't take this amazing, amazing complexity of human biology and help a single doctor understand. It's just hard. Like I, I see the pattern. So I can look at something quickly. And I know in a few minutes, like what to do, but it's only because I've seen tens of thousands of patients and millions and millions of biomarkers that I can make those connections. And I'm not that good compared to like what technology is going to be able to do.

• 1:04:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. What, what do you wish doctors were taught today?

• 1:04:18Mark Hyman?

  Oh my God, don't get me started. My daughter just graduated from medical school. She's brilliant and she she's now going to be an orthopedic surgeon, which I think is great because you need that, like, you know, if you break your hip, you need to have. So that's a kind of medicine that I think is we're really good at is is acute care medicine. But what what she didn't learn about was nutrition, which, okay. We have a chronic disease epidemic in this country. It's caused primarily by food. It can be cured mostly by food, and yet doctors know nothing about food. Right? So nutrition, didn't learn about the microbiome. Didn't learn about environmental toxins.

• 1:05:01Mark Hyman?

  Didn't learn about how to create health, didn't learn about the body's networks and systems. Didn't learn about mitochondria. I mean, yes, she got like her first, you know, semester. She learned about the Krebs cycle and biochemistry, but didn't understand how to diagnose people with mitochondrial issues, which is our energy's powerhouse and how how everything works in our body. So those are the things that doctors don't learn anything about. Didn't learn about how to optimize your immune function. Didn't learn about how to treat gut issues in the right way by fixing a leaky gut. So there's so many areas that that are part of the framework of functional medicine that they don't learn anything about.

• 1:05:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. So no wonder when you go and talk about how you're feeling.

• 1:05:41Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Jay Shetty?

  You're not getting the information that you need.

• 1:05:43Mark Hyman?

  I mean, you know, you go, doctor, you know, I feel this and that and the other thing. And they go, well, you know, I did your exam. That's okay. Your lab tests look okay because they do a very limited set. And, you know, you're fine. Just go home and take Prozac, you know. But there there are only one or two things. It's true. One, either you're crazy and making it up or your doctor's missing something. And nine times out of 10, they're missing something because they don't know how to think. They don't know how to think about the human body, except in a very reductionist way. And it's just not how things are. You know, we are a dynamic ecosystem and everything is interacting with everything else in real time and changing. And how do you play with that? How do you, as a, as a, as a practitioner or even as an individual,

• 1:06:25Mark Hyman?

  learn how your body works? I mean, most of us have no clue how our bodies work and how to create a better functioning body. You know, we take better care of our animals than we do our dogs, our health, right? I mean, you wouldn't feed your dog a Big Mac fries and a Coke, would you?

• 1:06:39Jay Shetty?

  Definitely.

• 1:06:39Mark Hyman?

  And a milkshake? No. We give that to our kids.

• 1:06:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. As someone who grew up in London, England and had the National Healthcare Service and then you moved to the United States and of course, most of it's private and

• 1:06:53Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Jay Shetty?

  there's not really any healthcare available as far as I know, you know. What do you think the US healthcare system needs to be focused on?

• 1:07:01Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, I'm excited. I mean, I'm working right now with Medicare and with NIH on how do things need to change because they're very open and they're very interested in changing the way we look at things. And I think, you know, the, even having access to good healthcare, which we don't in this country. I mean, in the UK, you have the NHS, the National Health Service is great, but you know, maybe the quality isn't always as good. The reality is that, you know, most of your health is not happening in the doctor's office. Eighty to ninety percent of it happens with things that you can have control over. It happens in your kitchen. It happens, you know, where you play and eat and pray and work. That's where health happens. I mean, my wife's now studying at Columbia

• 1:07:46Mark Hyman?

  for her masters in public health and she's just so excited telling me that how she's learning about how they're talking about the real drivers of disease and it's like eighty and ninety percent is not stuff that the doctor has control over. It's the environment that you live in and it's your choices every day. And so those things you don't really need healthcare for.

• 1:08:03Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Mark Hyman?

  And so I think if we can build a health system that activates people around that, then you won't need the doctor.

• 1:08:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Mark Hyman?

  Most of the time. And then they're there for acute care medicine, you know, if you, like I had back surgery. Thank God, there's some guy who knows how to deal with a spine infection and can put in hardware and like, you know, kind of build my back up. Great. Thank God. But, you know, but if I, if I said to him like, what do I do to recover and become stronger than I was before? He's like, I don't know. Just do physical therapy or eat better or.

• 1:08:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's a great answer. Really great answer. How do we hold ultra-processed food manufacturers more accountable for getting away with putting excess sugars, emulsifiers, unidentifiable objects into our food?

• 1:08:51Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah. Good question. I mean, I think, you know. We've had a pretty lax system of regulations in this country and you know, we have, I think, 10,000 chemicals that are allowed in our food here. In Europe, it's about 400 chemicals. And, and they go through a very different standard of regulation in terms of ultra-processed food. And they, they are very restrictive around GMO and around herbicides and lots of things that we don't do here. And I think, you know, that's changing. There's this whole Maha movement. People are waking up and, you know, I was with my friend a couple of days ago, Jason Karp, who was really founded, Hugh Chocolate, if people like Hugh Chocolate. And he's been, was very vociferous, writing a letter as a shareholder of Kellogg's to

• 1:09:34Mark Hyman?

  the company, saying, "You have Fruit Loops that you make in America that have all these dyes and chemicals that are known to cause hyperactivity or immune issues or other problems in kids. And in Europe, they don't allow it. You make the same Fruit Loops, but with natural colorings, like from blueberries or whatever." And basically, they were ignoring him. And then my friend, Vani Hari, they all went to Battle Creek, Michigan, and they had a protest in the fall, in October of 24. And finally, this week, Kellogg's agreed, they're gonna actually take all that crap out.

• 1:10:08Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:10:08Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And, you know, the FDA has now said they're, they're working with food companies to either voluntarily or mandatorily have them remove food additives and colors and dyes.

• 1:10:19Jay Shetty?

  That's brilliant.

• 1:10:20Mark Hyman?

  I mean, I've been, I have a nonprofit called The Food Fix Campaign. I wrote a book called Food Fix.

• 1:10:24Jay Shetty?

  I remember.

• 1:10:25Mark Hyman?

  The new one's coming out called Food Fix Uncensored, next February. And it's basically, talks about how this problem needs to get fixed from field to the fork, and what regulations need to happen. But this, I've been working with my nonprofit for the last five years, and it's been amazing. And the woman who was my key person, who was my seeing eye dog in Washington, is now the governor's wife of West Virginia. She's the first lady of West Virginia. And that was the first state, because of her, to ban food dyes.

• 1:10:52Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:10:53Mark Hyman?

  And then they also got SNAP waivers, which means they are going to limit what you can purchase with food stamps, to not be allowed to buy soda or certain kinds of junk food. And this is happening across the country. There's like over 30 plus states where now there's, there's uprisings. And I'm living in Texas right now, and this woman, Senator Cole Corks-

• 1:11:18Mark Hyman?

  Is the head of the Health and Human Services Committee. She listened to my podcast. She was a huge fan. And she got so excited about this that she introduced a bill called SB 25 in Texas that limited the crap in the food, that limited crap in schools, that mandates nutrition education for doctors, that starts a chronic nutrition advisory group. And it passed the Senate, it passed the House there, and it got signed by the governor into law. And I testified at the hearing. And so there's this movement happening now, which I never thought would happen in my lifetime, that there's a shift. And I think the food companies want to do the right thing, but they're all in competition with each other. So no one company can act independently because their competitors will eat their lunch.

• 1:12:02Mark Hyman?

  So literally, and so they, now that this is happening at a nationwide level, they're fighting and they're kicking and screaming, but it's going to happen. And the new dietary guidelines are going to come out, which I've helped advise on. And that is really exciting to me to actually have something out there that's going to help guide people on what to eat. Food labeling is changing and working with the FDA on food labeling. Hopefully, we can make progress on food marketing, you know, like

• 1:12:27Jay Shetty?

  That's a big one.

• 1:12:28Mark Hyman?

  You know, like in Europe, if stuff has some dye in it or that's going to cause a problem with kids, they'll say, you know, this is bad for your kid. And if your kid eats it, they'll get ADD and whatever, hyperactivity. And so the food companies don't want that. So they change their formulations. And so food marketing is a big, big driver of behavior. And these companies know and they spend $13 billion marketing junk food every year. And there's a lot of ways to fix that, you know, the First Amendment might prohibit us from limiting the advertising, but they could have warnings like they do in drugs. They could, you know, prevent them from being, having a tax deduction for spending all that money on food marketing. And there's a lot of ways to put pressure, changing medical school education, also important because the doctor is more engaged in this.

• 1:13:12Mark Hyman?

  So it's a multi-headed hydro that needs multiple solutions across a lot of government policies. And also people making different choices at the checkout counter. You can vote with your fork.

• 1:13:25Jay Shetty?

  Mark, I am so grateful that you survived.

• 1:13:28Mark Hyman?

  I'll be too. I've got more work to do.

• 1:13:30Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you've got so much work to do and I'm so thankful that you're doing it because, you know, you are a startup founder at sixty five years. You've got so much renewed energy, enthusiasm. It's such important work and I'm so grateful that you came back on the show to share it because it's important work all the way from the micro level of the individual to the macro level of talking about government level change and national level change. And I'm so excited for people to listen to this conversation because I think there's some really quick fixes that people can take.

• 1:14:05Mark Hyman?

  Completely.

• 1:14:05Jay Shetty?

  And there's been a lot of warnings in this episode that I really appreciate you share. Just, I think sometimes we need to feel a sense of just how challenging it will be.

• 1:14:17Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Jay Shetty?

  If we don't make changes now. And I feel like you've really headlined some of them for us. So thank you so much.

• 1:14:23Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, Jay, for me, it's like people, people have all these things that they suffer with and they just think that they're.

• 1:14:29Jay Shetty?

  They've got to live that way.

• 1:14:30Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, they've got to live with that. And, and for me, I've been so sick so many times from so many different things. And I've had to recover and, and I see so many millions of people suffering needlessly. I mean, I can't end war. I can't end floods and, you know, famine and I mean, but like this is a solvable problem and they're not hearing about it. They're not learning about it. And that's why I'm obsessed. And that's why I'm a founder of a company at sixty five years old.

• 1:14:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, well, so grateful, Mark. Thank you so much. And again, I'm encouraging everyone to head over to functionhealth.com forward slash Jay Shetty to get a hundred dollars off to get all your hundred and ten biomarkers. Of course, as I said, I'm an investor in the company. So very excited to give access to the knowledge and information that you need to manage your health better, to take to your doctor, to have healthier conversations, to actually be aware. And I think all of our change, as we know, starts at awareness. And that's the baseline. That's the foundation. So very excited for you all to check that out. I hope you'll make the most of it. I want to give a big shout out to Dr. Mark Hyman again. For being here and thank you so much for sharing so many incredible insights. Hope you keep coming back. Please.

• 1:15:43Jay Shetty?

  I hope you stay well. And again, let me know what you're trying, what you're testing, what you're giving a go. Maybe you're going to try the 10 day detox, whether you're going to do it at home or with Dr. Mark Hyman. Maybe you're going to go off and get all the access to the data through function health and you're going to take a look at what you can avoid for you and your family. Or maybe you're going to just start making little changes, whether it's to your diet by adding more fiber, taking out ultra-processed foods, getting better sleep. All these tiny shifts can make such a huge difference. Tag me and Dr. Mark Hyman on Instagram, X, TikTok. Let us know what you're changing, what you're shifting, what you're working on. I love seeing how you're turning these episodes into action. And I'll see you again on another episode of On Purpose. Thanks for listening and thank

• 1:16:28Jay Shetty?

  you, Mark. Thanks, Jay. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

• 1:16:38Speaker 07

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• 1:17:11Speaker 09

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

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• 1:17:19Speaker 05

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  Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.

• 1:17:57Speaker 10

  Every mile matters. Whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter, the Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages. All to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.