714 Use Food to Heal Your Body with Mark Hyman

IT'S TIME TO GET THE ROOT OF YOUR HEALTH PROBLEMS. Are you constantly feeling like crap? You don’t need to live like that. The food that you put in your body has a lot to do with how well you function. Your body is incredible in how it can heal itself when you change your habits. Not only do we need to work on our personal health, but we also need to be aware of how our country’s policies affect our nation’s health. That’s why I’m sharing part of a conversation I had with a leading health expert who is working to transform the healthcare system: Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman is the Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine, the Founder of The UltraWellness Center, and a ten-time #1 New York Times Bestselling author. He is dedicated to tackling the root causes of chronic disease by harnessing the power of Functional Medicine to transform healthcare. Dr. Hyman says that the science of healthy eating is the same no matter what eating program you follow. The important thing is to implement a practical, sustainable nutrition plan that will help restore your body. Learn how you can be more in control of what you put into your body and how the healthcare system in America should change on Episode 714. In This Episode You Will Learn: How to go from sick to well (1:30) Why 21 days is all you need to reset your body (2:15) About the IFLC (I Feel Like Crap) Quiz and how it can help you eat healthier (3:30) What Dr. Hyman believes is causing our socioeconomic problems (4:10) The American policies that Dr. Hyman wants to change (4:45) Why it’s so important to teach nutrition in school (6:30) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  Thomas Jefferson said, "If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong." I am super pumped you guys are here for this special episode with Dr. Mark Hyman. For those that don't know him, he is the Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, the Prickser Foundation Chair in Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, Chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine, and Founder of the Ultra Wellness Center. He's also the number one bestselling author of 12 books and just came out with a new one called Eat Fat, Get Thin.

• 0:50Lewis Howes?

  So if someone is listening and they're on some type of medication, or they're just feeling constantly sick, you know, something's constantly happening to them, what do you think is, because there's so much information online that is scary?

• 1:04Mark Hyman?

  It's scary, right.

• 1:05Lewis Howes?

  You know, the 11B stuff, just like looking up anything and Googling it and seeing all the nasty photos and just like, ah.

• 1:10Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Lewis Howes?

  What is an approach that someone should take if they have some challenge that's constantly happening in their health? Should they first analyze the food they're intaking and do like an analysis? Do you have like a process?

• 1:21Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a great question, Lewis. So, you know, what I am is a doctor, and what I do is see patients in my office. That's my main job. Yes, I've written a dozen books. Yes, I do a lot of stuff, but that's my main job.

• 1:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:33Mark Hyman?

  And so I've learned over 30 years of doing this, how to create sustainable, practical programs to help people get from sick to well, very quickly. And what I've done, because not everybody can come see me, and there aren't that many of us out there yet.

• 1:48Lewis Howes?

  You have so many hours in the day.

• 1:49Mark Hyman?

  And there's not that many functional medics. So I've written books and programs to help people operationalize this in their own lives. So Eat Fat, Get Thin, and I'm, look, I'm... You know, I could say, you know, do my program, but I'm not, I don't really care what program you do, as long as it's based on the basic principles. And there are a lot of my colleagues who are writing great books about this. It's all, it's all the same information because it's all the same science. And if you're telling the truth, there's only one story here, the truth, right? And so the, the, this, this EFAT, then is a great program that I put together to make people have, you know, no friction. It's easy. It's very straightforward.

• 2:24Lewis Howes?

  Twenty one days, right?

• 2:25Mark Hyman?

  Twenty one days, practical, goofproof, and it tells you what to eat. And when you get to the end of that, you'll see how you feel because most people in twenty one days will change their habits, but they'll also allow their body to reset. It's like putting your body back to its original factory settings, right? And then if something's left over, then you know, gee, maybe I need to go deeper. Like if you still don't feel great, maybe you have Lyme disease, maybe you have header metal poisoning, maybe your thyroid's not working, maybe you have a parasite, maybe, you know, like you could be eating the perfect diet, but still feel bad.

• 2:52Lewis Howes?

  Do the twenty one days first.

• 2:53Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, but most, eighty percent of the time.

• 2:55Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna kill yourself.

• 2:56Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, eighty percent, I mean, eighty percent of the time, this works for people. And then the twenty percent who add to get extra help, they need to come see somebody.

• 3:03Lewis Howes?

  And the body's pretty incredible in how it can heal itself very quickly, once you change habits, right?

• 3:07Mark Hyman?

  Unbelievable, unbelievable. We, we did the survey of a thousand people who did this. I mean, they lost weight, yes, and they lost inches, yes, and it's all, that's all impressive. And their blood sugar dropped twenty points and their blood pressure ten points. But the thing that really matters to me is I have everybody fill out what I, what I call the FLC quiz. You know what that is? That's when you feel like crap.

• 3:25Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 3:26Mark Hyman?

  So it's a quiz. How do you, like, you know, do you have your bloating, do you have asthma, do you have headaches, can you sleep, like joint pain, muscle pain, what's your mood, are you depressed? Like, so you fill this whole score in zero to four for every symptom, and you get a score. They do one before and after. And the before and after score, there was a sixty nine percent reduction in all symptoms from all diseases.

• 3:45Lewis Howes?

  Whoa.

• 3:45Mark Hyman?

  Because you don't have to treat everything individually. If you put in the right information, the body knows what to do.

• 3:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 3:51Mark Hyman?

  Right? So the information in food is so powerful that if you figure out what to eat, you don't have to worry about how much, you don't have to count fat grams, carbs, calories, nothing. I don't do that. I don't.

• 4:01Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 4:02Mark Hyman?

  If you're off a hundred calories a day, you're gonna gain like fifty pounds in thirty years, right? You can't, you can't do it by willpower. You have to use science. And low glycemic food, like low sugar food is really powerful. It's magical. The thing that I think is driving so many of our economic and social ills is our food system. To kind of list, what are the policies that would really radically change things, not just in America, but around the world, if we became the beacon for this? And I met with the Surgeon General a couple of days ago, and he asked me to come to Washington to help change and shape this policy. So the things that matter are, you know, ending food subsidy, ending agricultural subsidies for commodity products like corn, soy and

• 4:47Mark Hyman?

  wheat that go into all our processed industrial food. Subsidizing fruits and vegetables and things that actually promote health.

• 4:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Mark Hyman?

  Ending food marketing to kids. We market junk food to kids. I think we're one of only 50 countries that, one of the only countries that doesn't do this. 50 countries control food marketing to kids.

• 5:03Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 5:03Mark Hyman?

  Regularly, yeah. Us and Syria, no, are the only ones.

• 5:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 5:07Mark Hyman?

  And all use of antibiotics in animal feed, except, except in animal husbandry, except for treatment of disease.

• 5:12Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 5:13Mark Hyman?

  Full stop. I would have clear food labeling so that people know what they're eating. Is it good for you? Green. If it may be, you know, a little tricky, well, eat with caution, yellow. Is it bad for you? It might kill you, red. Simple.

• 5:26Lewis Howes?

  Like, we have cigarettes now. There's, this will cause, this will kill you.

• 5:30Mark Hyman?

  I would, and this is controversial, but I would, I would put a tax on junk food and soda, which has been proven to work and reduce consumption. This was just done in Mexico, it was super effective. Done in Berkeley, first place in America, very effective.

• 5:41Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 5:41Mark Hyman?

  It's like cigarettes. Tax cigarettes. You know, if a Coke was actually $10, I would actually make things cost what they really cost. The only reason McDonald's meal is so cheap is because the government pays for and subsidizes it.

• 5:51Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 5:51Mark Hyman?

  I met with the Vice Chair of Pepsi. He said, "Why are you using high fructose corn syrup in your soda?" He says, "Because, Mark, the government makes it so cheap for us by subsidizing agriculture and the growing of corn to turn into high fructose corn syrup. That's why we're using it. It's good business. I wouldn't use it if the government didn't make it so cheap." So I would end subsidies. I would end any food that wasn't promoting health in any federally funded program. Food stamps. You can buy $4 billion now of food stamps are spent on soda for the poor. $4 billion. It's the biggest single amount of item that's bought.

• 6:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, soda.

• 6:22Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. You can buy a four, a two-liter bottle of soda, but you can't buy a rotisserie chicken. You can't buy with food stamps online because of some stupid regulation. We're trying to change that. I would implement a whole series of policies like this. I would also make sure that we really promote science and nutrition in school. So kids know very early on what's going on. There should be no food that doesn't promote health in schools. We know that there's clear evidence that kids who are fed poor foods, and I'm not talking about like school lunches that are quote healthy, right? I mean pizza is considered a vegetable. Pizza is a vegetable. According to Congress, pizza is a vegetable. Oh my gosh, that's all I ate every day. Yeah, and so we need clear policies that we could change all this in America. And I think people are ready for it. People want it.

• 7:04Mark Hyman?

  People know the issue is here in the kinds of industrial agriculture we're doing that are actually promoting degradation in the environment. And we need to label GMOs because the centralization of seed production has caused huge problems. Glyphosate is now round up is used on soybeans. 98% of soybeans are Monsanto soybeans. 98%? I think it's something like 98% of world. So the centralization of seed production, and then, you know, even if you debate GMOs are good or bad, they're using all this pesticides and herbicides because of these that are actually now getting into the water. Now, we know that glyphosate now, according to the World Health Organization and an international board of scientists, is a cancer-causing agent, which is, and I actually, I'm excited because I'm going to, in my practice, I'm going to start doing glyphosate testing for like seed people because people don't know what they're consuming.

• 7:48Mark Hyman?

  So I would do a series of things that would really, if I had all the money in the world, to really change this.