Bonus: Why Chronic Disease Is Exploding (Full Conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger)

This is the full, unedited version of Dr. Hyman’s conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. The original episode was edited for pacing and clarity. This extended cut includes the entire four-hour dialogue as it happened — a deep dive into the systemic roots of chronic disease and the future of real prevention.

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

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. You're about to hear the full unedited version of my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. The original episode was edited for pacing, but this is the complete three and a half hour discussion, every moment just as it happened. I hope you enjoy the full depth of this important conversation.

• 0:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, The Hyman Hive, for live Q and As, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. All right, Daniel, I'm so excited to have you on the show.

• 1:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is a long time in coming. We had many conversations, which I've tried to keep up with, and understand how you think, because I don't imagine many people have heard of you, know about you, or know who you are. But your background and your thinking is so remarkable in its depth and its clarity and its ability to bridge many different disciplines and come up with an overarching understanding of what's wrong in our society and where our existential threats are and how we can fix them. And today, we're going to talk about, we can talk about a lot of things from AI to the nuclear war to everything that you think and do. But we're going to focus on on health and

• 1:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  healthcare today, because I think this is an area where we really We're in a mess. I'm just gonna be straight. We're in a really shitty situation where we have more and more health care, quote, sick care, and more and more illness, and it's exploding at such a rate that we can't even keep up with it. Just in my 40 years of being a doctor, it's gonna be, two years will be 40 years, I've seen just the acceleration of chronic diseases and both in the amount of suffering, the severity, the scope of them, the increase in new diseases, it's just, it's remarkable. And, you know, when you look at the kind of

• 2:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  history of trajectory of human experience, you know, we, we had a pretty good run through most history and, and we say, well, the, you know, the, there was all this early death and life expectancy was 40, and a lot of that had to do with high rates of infant mortality, overcrowding in cities, urbanization, pollution, sanitation lack, and, and they were more sort of infrastructure problems. And, and those infrastructure problems of sanitation and basic, basic cleanliness and things that were, were sort of were solved in the 20th century led to an increase in life expectancy. But it really kind of misses the point because a lot of, a lot of populations looked very old. I mean, the, the Plains Indians had the

• 3:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  highest number of centenarians at the turn of the century of any population. They were hunter-gatherers. And so it wasn't like every hunter-gatherer died at 40. But the last, you know, 100 years, we've seen this sort of inversion of, of the life expectancy curve. It's kind of got, starting to dip down and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy. And, and I think it has to do with the kind of rise of what you have termed anthropogenic disease, which basically, I want you to define it, but it, my understanding is, is, is it sort of echoes what I, I think Paul Farmer talks about, who's one of my heroes, who I got to know before he died.

• 3:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, you know, when he saw the horrific conditions in Haiti that were breeding grounds for TB and AIDS and every public health community given up on them, he said, it wasn't that we need better medication or surgery, it was that, you know, we had structural problems, he called it structural violence, what are the social, economic, political conditions that drive disease? And I would add, what are the environmental conditions that drive disease? And, and I, I kind of like to start out by, by sort of having you kind of define, what do you mean by this concept of anthropogenic disease?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. First, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I, um, I followed your work for a very long time before we got to know each other through Institute of Functional Medicine and things like that. And, um, I have huge respect for your work bridging between traditional, conventional allopathic medicine and kind of integrative processes and having such a huge data set over 40 years with Cleveland Clinic like that to be able to really kind of advance medicine. You're bridging those worlds in a way I don't know many people who are bridging and also kind of cutting edge science and research with Leroy Hood and systems biology and things like that.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And then now starting to actually help policy work at the level that you are. And I know-

• 5:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Can't help myself.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Just haven't got to spend a day here with you and your friends and everything coming over. It's so clear that your, your friend group and your colleague group spans political ideologies and parties and that you're almost blind to that. And just like a doctor, I'm here to help people get better.

• 5:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  And I will work with any, I would work with any administration, any institution, if it helps kids and mothers and elderly people be healthier. And I just have mad respect for that and grateful to be here speaking with you. In prepping for this, I watched your talk on Andrew Huberman and a bunch of them. And one of the things that's so cool is that they were ones on mainstream news and these topics I've never seen on mainstream news, especially kind of long form. But a lot of the things that I would describe first, you have described really well in terms of what are the underlying causes of complex chronic disease, which is that they're anthropogenic, meaning things that are not just problems of nature.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Meaning our biology or nature, the way life is, but things that are the results of the way our civilizational system is, our agricultural system, our industrial systems that create pollution, our systems that affect human behavior.

• 6:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're not inevitable. I mean, I just interrupted you. The thing that I think we have a way of talking about disease in medicine, you, I got cancer, I got heart disease, I got diabetes, I got Alzheimer's. You don't get it. It's like, it's not like a bug that you catch or a cold. It's a consequence of the environment in which we live. And that's that's sort of what you're talking about.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're saying that you have seen a rise over the 40 years that you've been in practice. And obviously, the 40 years you've been in practice, that was already after the better living through chemistry boom started and, you know, modern industrial agriculture started. So it would be even a more extreme picture if we went back further. You've obviously studied the history on going back further. But a lot of people think, oh, well, the rise in diseases is just a result of we're diagnosing more or something like that as opposed to, no, there are our ways. Like, we have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism and democracy and whatever. And there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story, right?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  And there are areas where some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution, or cheaper healthcare, or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect the environment but help affect our bodies. I really like the framework that you shared about what the upstream causes are. Do you mind recapping that? Because you do it a lot better than I can.

• 7:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's complicated. There's a, there's a, there's a really important principle in functional medicine, which is that you want to look for the root cause. And you want to find the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause. And, and keep digging until you find out what's at the root of all of it. And, and most of medicine is not focused on root cause. It's focused on diagnosing based on symptoms and geography. Where is the disease? And what are the symptoms? Not mechanism and cause. And, and medicine is now shifting where we're beginning to actually understand what those causes are. And actually, I'm excited about an upcoming

• 8:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Commission report from the HHS department and the Presidential Commission on Americans' health, looking at what are the causes of chronic disease and how do we begin to identify those. And rather than just labeling disease and then treating the label with a drug, we call it the name it blame it and tame it system. We name the disease and we blame the name for the problem and then we tame it with the drug. So we say, oh, you're hopeless and helpless and sad and depressed and I know what's wrong with you. You have depression. Well, no, that's just a name we give to people who share those symptoms. It's not the cause of those symptoms. It could be a myriad of things from what you're eating, your microbiome, from nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D or folate or excess of toxins

• 9:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  like heavy metals or mercury or gluten, the creative lane inflammation. So there's a lot of reasons why you can have any particular disease and we just, we have it all wrong. And I think it's a real shift. It's a real shift in thinking. So medicine needs to move from this name and blame it process to what we call thinking and linking where we start the thinking process. Once we make the diagnosis, we start to try to create an understanding of what are the patterns in the data, what are the story that's being told? How do you take a deeper diagnostic history? How do you do deeper diagnostic laboratory testing and work to kind of see what's at the root cause of everything? And by peeling back

• 9:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  that layer, you can start to see emerge a picture of a chronic disease epidemic that it is rooted in things that are caused by, I would say, man. And I would probably say man because it's mostly men who've done it. And I think that's something in a way is good news because it means we can have agency over it. It's not something that just falls from the sky that hits us on the head that we get struck with some illness. It's actually now something we understand what it's about. Yeah. It's not just better diagnosis. Trust me, like the autism epidemic is an example. We went from one in 10,000 when I was born to, you know, one in 130, even if 50% is better diagnostic or 75% is better diagnostic criteria, it's still something's going on.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Now, you're running off a list of things that can be underlying causes, and you mentioned vitamin D deficiency and mercury. And I think it's worth just going into this a little bit because vitamin D deficiency in terms of acute causation is rickets. And not many people have rickets. But there's a pretty big level between you have rickets and you have optimal levels.

• 10:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And the same is true for vitamin C and scurvy or berry berry or whatever. So the idea that deficiency means you don't have an acute disease that is killing you in a fast way from it. But that as soon as you're above that, we're fine as opposed to what are optimal levels. Would you speak to that a little bit in terms of also what you find in your practice and what you find when you take someone above rickets?

• 11:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Treat them and treat them and they get better.

• 11:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think this is just a really important idea that it's sort of medicine is trying to catch up with. You know, we, we used to talk about having type 2 diabetes and then we said, wait, wait, there's prediabetes. And then we talked about having hypertension or high blood pressure. Now there's pre hypertension. And we say, oh, you have an autoimmune disease. Oh, now there's pre autoimmune disease. And the reason it's pre anything is because we're understanding there's consequences even at levels we thought were quote, "normal." And so this idea of disease being an on or off phenomena is wrong. It's a continuum from mild biochemical imbalances, which are barely detectable, which we might be able to now screen for with metabolomic testing and proteomic testing and

• 12:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you know, more subtle things that we can measure to sort of pre symptomatic to symptomatic disease, symptoms to finally full blown disease and death. And so there's a whole long continuum that can start in utero or even, you know, with your mother's health before she was born that impacts your health through epigenetics and through the, you know, intrauterine experience and through early childhood influences and all those things you, you can start to map out if you listen carefully to somebody's story about what's happening early and, and pick these things up. And so, you know, the fact that we have these sort of arbitrary cutoffs for you know, blood sugar, blood pressure, vitamin D, you know, folic acid. I mean, Function Health, which is a company I talked to you about that

• 12:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  allows people access to comprehensive lab testing and have their own personal health data set. You know, the reference ranges there are ridiculous for some of the things that they have, like homocysteine, which is a measure of your B vitamin status, very important in methylation and genetic control and neurotransmitter function, detoxification, mood, I mean, a lot of things. Their cutoff level is like, I think, 15 or 16 or something. And any level over 14, according to the literature, increases your risk of dementia by 50%. The optimal level should be six to eight. Same thing with insulin. I think we see insulin levels being reported as normal, anything up to 16 or 18. That's because we have a sick population.

• 13:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the way we determine what's quote "normal" is basically on a bell curve in a population. So if the bell curve is shifted to the right or the left because people are sick, you're picking up what's normal in the population, not what's optimal.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  All right. There's a lot of topics in there to unpack. So the first is obviously absence of acute symptomology does not equal a good definition of health because we all know cases where someone went to the doctor for a routine checkup and they find out that they have cancer and not that long to live and that cancer's been developing for a long time. And as you're mentioning with prediabetes, a long time before the acute diagnosis of now you have diabetes and you have to take a med for it, you were in metabolic syndrome. And a long time before the autoimmune disease that produces enough symptomology, you had inflammatory markers that you could see. Like, how many years ahead can you see signs of...

• 14:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Decades.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. Now, if you see it decades ahead and you haven't had a humongous amount of tissue damage, you can do stuff about it. By the time you've got to advanced tissue damage, it's a lot harder, right? You can still do stuff about it, which is amazing. And, you know, your clinic will attest to that. But, um, so, I mean, in med school, there's this stages of disease, which is you start with health is all the homeostatic systems. And homeostasis is kind of a silly term because it's not stasis, right? Homeodynamics. So you have all these homeodynamic systems in the body that are responding to various stressors. And the level they're at matters less than their responsive capacity, right? You want to be able to respond to hot and cold and to pathogens and whatever well. So you've got... Homeostasis or homeodynamics, then you've got deviation from homeodynamics.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Something comes, it takes you out of range and you don't respond properly. What is that something, right? We'll get back to that. If that doesn't come back into range, if it comes back, great, you're still healthy. If it doesn't come back in, then you have pathophysiology, right? The physiology is operating differently as a result of that. If you keep operating differently for a long time, you'll start to get pathomorphology. The structures will start to change. And oftentimes it's not till after that that the symptoms occur. And that's when you go and you get the diagnosis and you've been in a very advanced development of illness that whole time. So obviously you don't want to wait till symptoms and most people are walking around with a lot of symptoms. Which means actually pretty advanced disease relative to what good health would be. And so obviously the an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of care thing.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  I think you have two really good pieces of news. One is even once you're in the symptomology stage, a lot of things that we think are untreatable are treatable.

• 15:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely, yeah. Even pretty late stage things like heart failure and Alzheimer's and autism and.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Will you tell a couple, just so we can wrap it together, I know you have another place, but tell like a couple of stories about that? Of things that people used to think were totally irreversible and most people still do.

• 16:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, in medical school and throughout my medical training and even in continuing with medical education and postgraduate training, where you go CME courses. The orthodoxy is pretty rigid about certain beliefs. If you have heart failure, it doesn't go backwards. You can't improve it. If you have dementia, you can't reverse it. If you have type 2 diabetes, it's not reversible. You can manage chronic diseases, which is great for the medical industrial complex because it provides the ability to have a pharmaceutically driven healthcare system that makes huge amounts of profit off of long-term chronic use of medication.

• 16:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What I've seen is surprisingly, when you apply these principles of creating health, which is what functional medicine is, it's not about treating disease, it's trying to understand what is health, what are the deviations from health, and how do we measure those dysfunctions and the lack of resilience and balance and function in the body and kind of tweak things to correct it, you can actually see reversal of these diseases, complete remission reversal of type 2 diabetes. That's, that's easy. That's an easy one. And there's now that's sort of-

• 17:21Speaker 01

  But that's a humongous deal because like, what is the curve of type 2 diabetes from when you were born to now? How many upstream diseases does that contribute to? And how many people, how many doctors treat it like it's reversible?

• 17:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's the thing that's causing everything. So the phenomenon of insulin resistance which underlies type 2 diabetes is causing dementia. For example, your risk of dementia is four times higher if you have all type 2 diabetes. Your risk of heart attacks is dramatically higher. Risk of cancers, many of the most common cancers, breast, pancreatic, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, these are diseases of insulin resistance.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And to say all those diseases are largely, not perfectly, but largely preventable with some pretty basic stuff-

• 18:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  And oftentimes even reversible is a really important thing everybody should know and start to update.

• 18:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, they're even taking, you know, some, I mean, I've talked to Siddhartha Mukherjee about this, or doing, you know, studies of stage 4 pancreatic cancer using ketogenic diets and seeing remissions in some of these patients, which is almost like heresy in medicine. And so I think, you know, we, we're not taught that these things are fixable. But if you understand the underlying root cause model of medicine and understand how to identify the root causes and figure out also how to create a thriving human and provide those conditions. Because right now, as you know, you sort of talk about this anthropogenic disease, this really means we've created an environment in which disease flourishes. It's sort of a disease causing culture, society, environment, food environment, toxin environment. When you kind of remove those things as best you can, these diseases

• 18:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  can reverse. I had a guy who was living in Pittsburgh, who was seven years old and he, and I didn't know this, but Pittsburgh, you know, they, they had the steel plants and they, they, they use coal to- Yeah, make steel and they use the coal ash to cover their fields and to when there's snowy icy roads to put them on the snowy icy roads and coal ashes full of lead and mercury and he was extremely mercury toxic and also had other issues. He had insulin resistance. He had gut issues his whole life. So he had a lot of dysbiosis and gut inflammation. He had methylation issues. It'd be vitamin problems. We had a whole series of things. It wasn't just one thing, but you add all that together.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Plus his APOE double four status, which puts him at risk and he was presenting with Alzheimer's and yet by a very aggressive detoxification program, by getting the metals out of his system, by chelation, which is heresy in medicine, by giving him methylating support, optimizing his gut function, fixing his insulin resistance, he reversed his cognitive decline and he was actually able to improve his mental status and go back to work, which was again, something you just never see. I mean, who's, who's seen a survivor of Alzheimer's?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Well, I know that you have for a long time known Dale Bredesen and his work in the space and I think you are friends with someone I'm a good friends with Dr. Heather Sanderson, who wrote the book recently reversing Alzheimer's. And I think that was a number one, you know, New York Times bestseller for a while. And that particular study that she did there was inpatient using a Bredesen like protocol.

• 20:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  That was reversing the MOCO scores in 70% of the people that went in within six months with pretty basic stuff like largely diet, lifestyle and a little bit of

• 20:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  functional medicine.

• 20:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the MOCO score is a sort of a cognitive assessment that's easy to do and it's pretty predictive of where you are in the trajectory of memory loss and dementia.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Now, this is another one. If you look at Alzheimer's historically versus now that is really a disease of modernity.

• 20:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Do you want to say anything about even your?

• 21:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Alzheimer's did diagnosis way back when in the turn of the century with, you know, this patient he had, but it, the rise in dementia is staggering and it's, and it's one of the most costly conditions for humanity, not because of the direct medical care, because of the long-term care that they need and because of the loss of the ability to work for their caregivers, their family members. But I've, I've seen a dramatic increase in dementia and cognitive decline and, and it's sort of paral the rest of the chronic diseases that we're seeing increasing. And people say, oh, we're winning the war on heart disease. Nonsense. We're seeing less deaths because we have better advanced medical treatments,

• 21:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  like bypasses and stents and thrombolytics and blood clot dissolvers, but we, we are seeing more and more people getting heart disease, more and more people getting cancer, more and more people getting diabetes, more and more people getting dementia. So despite the fact that we're spending trillions of dollars on healthcare, we're, we're not getting much for our money. And this is kind of shocking.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  This is why people need to understand statistical warfare as part of information warfare is that you can cherry pick your stats, right? And you can lie with facts. You can mislead with facts. You can say less people are dying and what you're alluding to is the issue's getting better as opposed to, there was even one case in which the stats were used at less people were dying of gun violence. And they were suggesting in that the gun violence went down, gun violence went up, just emergency care. So people didn't die after getting shot.

• 22:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  And so it's entirely possible just to speak to the larger political environment. And this is a bipartisan kind of universal marketing driven issue is people who are pushing a narrative at scale usually have a motive to push the narrative, political motive, a capital motive of something, right? And so you can take the whole story, just take parts of it and you can have facts that make it through the most rigorous fact checker that are true, but are still misleading, right? And so.

• 23:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, what Mark Twain said, he said, there's liars, there's damn liars and there's statisticians.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yes. And so as you're mentioning, winning the, winning the war on heart disease, what you're actually seeing is the rates of heart disease are increasing. And so this is like this mortality morbidity trade-off, right? Which is, oh no, where people are living longer. And recently there's been a downturn in, you know, living longer, but like that kind of doesn't matter if. The latter part of their life is on is on polypharmacy, is on a huge amount of meds with decreasing quality of life and only being kept alive kind of artificially like if someone gets off their meds, they die. That's kind of like they're on life support.

• 23:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Which speaks to quality of life. I think a lot of people don't understand the mortality morbidity trade off and that the stats that are cherry picked to say longevity is going up or heart disease is going down, what it's not indicating. Is there more on that, you would say?

• 23:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're we're we're losing the battle on disease. We're we're spending more and more. I mean, we spend twice that of any other nation, often three, four, five times as much. We're forty eighth in life expectancy and going down. Our or a lot of our statistics are worse than most other countries.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  That's just, it's worth saying again, forty eighth in life.

• 24:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Forty eighth, I think we're going down. It's getting worse. And that's crazy.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  With a five trillion dollar a year healthcare budget.

• 24:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, we're, I think thirtieth among the the top developed nations in healthcare metrics like infant mortality and and, you know, we're we're spending huge amounts. I think forty percent of people who are over sixty five take five or more medications a day. Twenty percent take ten or more medications.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Some of which are for the side effects of the other meds.

• 24:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you know, eighty one percent of Americans aren't at least one medication. So is this making us healthier? I don't think so. I mean, it's mitigating symptoms sometimes, maybe it addresses issues sometimes. But, you know, we know that our healthcare system itself is and is the third leading cause of death through prescribed drugs given for the right reason, at the right dose, for the right patient, not mistakes. Medical errors is another huge category. But, I mean, the.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Wait, let's put those together because when Ralph Nader was kind of popularizing this topic, some of the issues have gotten better on iatrogenesis. But if you take iatrogenesis to mean diseases that come from interaction with the healthcare system writ large, the broadest definition. So then it includes, as you mentioned, prescriptions that are rightly given, prescriptions that are wrongly given and allergic reactions to meds and drug interactions and whatever, surgeries, infections you get well in the hospital, et cetera. If you add those up, many people add those up and it's the number one cause

• 25:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  of death of Americans in the country.

• 25:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So basically we shut down all the doctors and hospitals, got rid of all the drugs. We do better.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  We're not saying that because of course, we don't want to do statistical warfare because they're also saving lives.

• 26:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  But we can say, damn, we should be able to do better on that side and we can, right? Like you have plenty of clinical cases where you're saving more lives and causing much less iatrogenesis and it actually costs less money than you factor all the matriculated thing.

• 26:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. If you know what to do. And I think this concept of iatrogenic disease, you know, we were just chatting earlier before the podcast and I remembered this book I read when I was in college by Ivan Illich called Medical Nemesis. And it really influenced me because it talked about the failure of our healthcare system back then and talked about this idea of iatros, which means physician and genesis means is origin. So the origin of disease being caused by the physician. And in that, that's something that I think is sort of underappreciated by most people. Doctors don't intentionally cause people to be ill. They're not bad people. They're well intentioned. They're trying to right thing, but they're trained in the wrong paradigm.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Let's just double score. This is not actually a critique of doctors. It's not even a critique of hospitals. It's a critique of some systemic mistakes.

• 27:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  That affect what the doctors are even allowed to do. Sometimes the doctors are really upset about it. And it affects how the doctors are trained. And so where the critiques we're giving are systemic.

• 27:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So, so let's talk about that. I mean, let's dive into what, you know, we're sort of set the stage for the fact that, you know, we were having increasing rates of these chronic diseases, increasing rates of mental health crisis, increasing rates of neurodevelopmental issues.

• 27:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Decreasing life expectancy. I mean, it's a grim, it's a grim situation and we're spending more and more and getting less and less. So the question then is, you know, what is this context in which the disease is occurring? Why is this happening? And what are the anthropogenic reasons for this chronic disease epidemic?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  So you were, as you were going through the list, you mentioned vitamin D, you mentioned mercury, that's obviously deficiency, toxicity, you mentioned some pathogens, you mentioned stress. So you have a model of like, what the underlying categories are. And a lot of them are things like, everybody knows what acute deficiency is, what acute toxicity. You just got a bag of chemicals poured on you, you have acute poisoning, you're vomiting, you have to go in for toxicology. But there is something that is called toxicity that is not just a hippie nonsense idea, it's a real thing. It is not acute poisoning.

• 28:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  That is chronic, that is subclinical or subacute. Same with infections, there's, you have acute infection, you're producing symptomology versus kind of subclinical infections, which is in Lyme disease, or in, you know, viruses that cause cancers, or whatever it is. Would you outline the model as you see it in your practice of what are the things that cause the deviation from homeostasis or homeodynamics to begin with? What are the kind of categories of things that can be part of a causal landscape of illness?

• 28:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, you know, the question is, is important because we do know a lot of what are the anthropogenic reasons for disease, or things that may not necessarily be anthropogenic, but are still issues that are making us sick. And, you know, the framework that we use in functional medicine is really simple and elegant. I think of it like the E equals MC squared of disease. You know, you have a, something called the Kinsillians Project, which is incredible, because there, this book I read years ago, and I'm wondering if that's where you got the title of this, this project that you're doing, was from E. Wilson's book, The Unity of Knowledge. Is that where you got it from?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I mean, Kinsillians is a great term, he definitely popularized it, and he's definitely somebody that I respect.

• 29:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so I remember reading that book, which is kind of heady and thick, but.

• 29:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There was one section of the of the book where he talked about medicine. And he said, medicine has no theory. It's just a hodgepodge of reactive assumptions that don't necessarily connect to any fundamental principles. Like, what are the laws of nature? And we know the laws of physics, pretty much. Not all of them, but most of them, we've kind of sorted out. And we can do great things with that. We can build bridges, we can build rocket ships, we can do all sorts of stuff, make computers. It's basically physics.

• 30:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And for medicine, there are no laws. You say, well, evolution, that's a kind of a law. Okay, well, that's one. But how does that apply to human health? What are the laws of biology when it comes to human health? Medicine really hasn't described those. And and what what Pierre Le Plas, who was an incredible scientist back in the, I don't know, 17th century, he had, you know, Le Plas's law and all that was a law of physics. But he, he talked about how you can have a great number of observed phenomena from a small number of general laws. And and medicine has failed to produce those laws. So instead of having like, a few principles that explain everything, we, we, we get

• 31:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  more and more granular about the diseases we describe. For example, the Diagnostic Manual for Diseases is called ICD-10, the International Classification of Disease, Volume 10 or Version 10. And there's 155,000 diseases, you know, it's gone up from 12,000. We used to have things, they were like visitation from God, we got rid of those. But, you know, it's, it's basically descriptive. It's phenomenological. It's based on symptoms, not on our understanding of the disease or the pathogenesis of the disease. And and so functional medicine, I think, is the first attempt to create a set of principles of laws. And and the the equals MC squared, that explains the, what you're asking, which is what is anthropogenic disease, is, is.

• 31:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Are you suffering from exposure to much of something that your body doesn't like? It doesn't agree with you? Or are you lacking certain things that your body needs to thrive and be resilient? And so for me, being a functional medicine doctor is just a detective work for figuring out what you have too much of or too little of. And it's not just one thing. It's often many things. So you can't just treat one thing, which is what we learned in medical school, just Occam's razor, just single disease, single drug, that's the best practice of medicine. That's your gold standard. That's what you should shoot for. And that's just unfortunately not how the body works. It's a complex, dynamic system, and it's infinitely unknowable. But you can, you can actually determine from these basic laws and principles how to treat

• 32:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  disease, even if you've never seen it before. In The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, she talks about this idea that, you know, following these basic principles, you can treat diseases and be successful, even if you've never seen them. So often people say, well, have you treated this? Have you treated that? Have you fixed this or that? I'm like, maybe not. I've seen that, I've never seen it, but I know what to do. I know how to get to the bottom of this problem. And so my job is to go through that list, and it's a really short list, and maybe you can add to it. But, you know, it's toxins, and these can be environmental toxins, all the petrochemical based toxins, like the forever chemicals or pesticides, LAs, PCBs, the toxin, flame retardants, the list goes on. It can be elemental toxins, like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsen, cadmium, and they're,

• 33:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  they're buried in the earth, and we've kind of excavated them and industrialized different processes that, you know, liberate these things, like coal burning is a great one. And they can be, you know, biological toxins, right? If you, your liver kidneys aren't working, you're gonna be pretty sick and die pretty quick. I mean, and, and then there's, there's allergens, which are, can be both environmental allergens, food allergens. Toxins can also be things like mycotoxins, mole toxins, which I put in that category, although it can also be an allergen. So some of the things crossover. It can be, in the allergen category, it can be sensitivities or imbalance, like, you

• 34:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  know, things that you might not think of as a true allergy, like we'll call an Ig allergy, which would be a food sensitivity, which is like gluten, for example.

• 34:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then there's microbes. So it could be infections that are persistent like COVID or Epstein-Barr or CMB, which kind of burden your immune system and lead to all kinds of symptoms. Or it could be a more subclinical but debilitating conditions like tick infections, or it could be an acute infection. Like, you know, I had an abscess recently in my back. That was an acute infection that almost killed me. So it can be microbes, it can be microbiome. So imbalances or dysfunction in your microbiome, which is we're all suffering from in modern society as a core driver of disease. And it can be stress, as a physical stress, or psychological stress. And that creates physiological change in your body,

• 34:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  or it can be a poor diet. And we can get into what that is, but we all eat a pretty crappy diet in America. And all those influence your gene expression. All those dynamically are interacting and are often in combinations in any individual that may be precipitating a problem. Like I mentioned, the Alzheimer's guy, he had, you know, poor diet, he had gut issues, he had heavy metals, you know, he had a lot of these things. And then there's the too little. Are you not getting enough of the whole nutrient dense food? Are you not getting enough of all the nutrients? Right? So you can have deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, which play a role, or even conditionally essential nutrients that are things we don't necessarily think of as necessary. And I think there's a whole conversation around

• 35:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  phytochemicals and are those conditionally essential? Have we co-evolved with plants to use their compounds to upregulate our biology? Like, I did a podcast recently with someone who was studying this compound that comes from pomegranates and walnuts and berries called allogitanins that gets converted in the gut through the microbiome to a compound called your lithin A that helps recycle old mitochondria. And there's not very many things to do that. So maybe we've kind of evolved with these plants to help us do our bodies work. And then there's, you know, the right balance of hormones. It can be hormonal deficiency, it can be Deficiencies of light and circadian rhythm and clean water and clean air, which are all

• 36:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  things we need, and movement, exercise, rest. So it could be like parasympathetic activities, like meditation that restores our nervous system's function, sleep, adequate sleep, connection, love, meaning, purpose. These are all, you know, belonging. These are all things that we need. And if you, even something as obvious as belonging, if you're lonely, you know, you're, it's like smoking two bags of cigarettes a day in terms of your risk. So you kind of go through that whole list and you can kind of see where people are. And, and some of those things are just a consequence of our modern world, like the increasing isolation, lack of connections, lack of belonging, lack of being part of a tribe. And it maybe is why we see such an increase in tribalism and divisiveness

• 37:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  in society, because people are wanting to be part of something, even if it's bad, you know, like a gang, right? Or it could be AA, or it could be Weight Watchers, it's all still a club. So I think, I think we have this kind of interesting moment where we're starting to kind of map out what these things are that impair human resilience and function. And that's really why we call it functional medicine.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think everything you're saying is kind of intuitive if someone is not excessively indoctrinated in an alternate thought process and makes sense, but I want to formalize it a little bit. So the first thing is that you're mentioning disease having many causes. And that's in distinction to the idea that it has no cause. It's just whatever. We don't understand what it's from.

• 37:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just random acts of the universe.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Or a single cause, right? In which a single molecule for a single molecular target would make sense.

• 38:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. You eat saturated fat, you get high oil cholesterol, you get heart disease. It ain't that simple.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  And so, complex causation versus simple causation is a major part of the story, right? And simple causation is usually immediate, right? You're exposed to something, a pathogen, a poison, you're starving, and a disease that correlates to it exactly starts to happen immediately.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Delayed causation, as you mentioned, certain diseases, you can find early signs that were moving in that direction in utero, or even the predispositions in the mother's body that are going to affect the developmental environment of the baby. So acute versus kind of chronic is a major part that we want to make a distinction. The other is single cause versus multifactorial, because you're mentioning this person's dementia was a whole suite of toxins, lead and mercury and whatever, and a whole suite of deficiencies, and a whole suite of maybe subclinical infections, and maybe behavioral patterns, and maybe psychological patterns. So it's not one thing is causing, one deviation is causing one

• 39:03Speaker 01

  disease that will be treated with one process. It's each thing is taking the system out of optimal performance.

• 39:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  It's causing a deviation from homeodynamics, it's causing pathophysiology. Now, that system is more susceptible to the next one, because it's already operating a little bit suboptimally. And so this low-grade toxicity that's messing up the liver and kidneys and lymphatic system makes it to where the normal toxins, metabolic waste the body produces, it has a harder time with, right? And then this nutrient deficiency that is part of the detox processes compounds on that. So the key is you get a compounding effect of a lot of things that are, some of them happened a year ago. The thing that might have caused it, seemed to have caused it, was actually just a trigger. It was the last step of a causal cascade that took somebody over the threshold.

• 39:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The straw that broke the camel's back, yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think these concepts of delayed causation as opposed to immediate causation, multifactorial as opposed to single factor, subacute issues, things that cause no symptomology immediately, but are part of a compounding effect, also unique patho-ideology, right? That two people's MS or two people's rheumatoid arthritis are not the same disease.

• 40:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  And as opposed to-

• 40:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But I would say you can have one cause that creates many diseases, like mercury or gluten, and you can create, have one disease that has many causes.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  So I think just maybe speak to that a tiny bit more in terms of when people think cause and effect, there's a reductionist thing where they think billiard ball, one thing caused one effect immediately. And yet, when you're talking about a complex organizational system where, you know, a circuit board, or a computer, or a car, you can take a part out, put another part back in, upgraded, it didn't grow. It's not self organizing. It was built. And we apply that methodology from clocks to computers, to something that grew and self organized, where each, there's no such thing as a lung outside of a body, or a liver outside of a body, right? So when you try to separate gastroenterology and oncology and neurology, you get still a bunch of diseases that make no sense.

• 41:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it is. It's such a failure of imagination and thinking that we have these specialties in medicine, and we divided up the body into these organs and parts, which is still how we teach medical students. And my daughter just finished medical school, and it's just so antiquated. And, you know, there's emerging from the scientific community, not necessarily the medical community, but I would say the scientific community, this emerging paradigm of multi causality and multimodal treatments. In other words, there's multifactorial causes, many causes for any condition, and there's multimodal treatments that are needed, not just one thing. And, and this, the body is seen to be a network, and a web, where everything

• 41:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  is inextricably tied to everything else, and you can't separate all these things out. But you can start to understand how they influence each other and are dynamically acting together to create dysfunction in the body and disease. And, and it's very personalized because, because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with that person.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  And the name of the disease, that person might be missing some of the symptoms that usually go. They might be missing some of the biomarkers. They might have other biomarkers. They might have other symptoms. We just said there's enough of a cluster to meet the diagnostic threshold for insurance to cover it.

• 42:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  But this person, this unique person, who we say has rheumatoid arthritis, and this other person we say has rheumatoid arthritis, don't have the same presentation. They don't have the same medical history, but they don't have the same presentation, right? You run enough labs, they have totally different stuff going on in their blood. They have a to, and they have different symptomology. So what does rheumatoid arthritis mean?

• 42:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just the name we give to a group of people who share certain criteria that have been established that create the diagnosis based on symptoms, morning stiffness, certain joint pattern of inflammation, certain lab tests, but it doesn't tell you anything about why. It could be an entomibohistolica parasite that causes it, or it could be gluten that causes it.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  But it's almost never one of those, right?

• 43:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. No, it's usually not, right?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 43:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's usually not. And that's, that's, that's what's so hard in, in, in the research paradigm. And I, I'd be very curious to what you think about this, because, you know, the, the entire medical research paradigm has been set up for drug discovery. It's the randomized, double-blind.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I want to go there. I want to get to reductionist medicine, but before we go there, you just mentioned, you're like, it could be entomibohistolica. So you already explained kind of subacute toxicity, but subacute infection you didn't get into yet. Most people are like, dysentery is very obvious. But there are things where there is a chronic GI infection.

• 43:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  That isn't dysentery.

• 43:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Can you talk about that for a little bit?

• 43:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you know, I think, I, I think we think of infections as something that, you know, come and go. But the truth is, and AIDS, and I, I grew up in the era of AIDS. I, I went to medical school in that era. I, I did residency at UCSF, which was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic with the gay community there. And it was the number one admitting diagnosis to the hospital where I trained in my residency. And, and nobody died of HIV infection. People died of all the other bugs that happened to live in us and on us that get unleashed when your immune system isn't working.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So whether it's pneumocystis, uh, infection of your lungs, or cytomegalovirus, which is a common virus that we all carry, like, you know, people have herpes, and, you know, and people know this, right? You have herpes, and you get a cold sore when it's-

• 44:39Speaker 01

  People know it for oral herpes or genital herpes, but they don't know there are more kinds of herpes.

• 44:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, there's a lot of kinds of herpes. CMV is herpes, EpiVirus herpes, there's just herpes, the whole family of viruses. But, but people know, oh, I have herpes, which means when I'm stressed, or when it's cold out, or when I'm tired, or when I get a cold, I get a cold sore.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That, and people understand that there's this latent infection in their body. But there's so many of those. And, uh, there are, there are often hidden, and they're latent, and they're- Maybe marginally symptomatic or not symptomatic. Even tick infections can cause all sorts of issues and be latent and then they emerge. Or, you know, even, even with COVID, we're now seeing these, you know, when we're seeing replicating COVID viruses in people who've recovered months or years later in, in their bodies that are producing ongoing effects that lead to long COVID and, and persistent disease.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  So, so just so people have a sense, what percentage of people have CMB? What percentage of people have Epstein Barr? What percentage of people have some strains of HPV that are part of pathogenic predisposition?

• 45:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a lot. I mean, I would say everybody's walking around with something, you know, probably. If you look, most people have some Epstein Barr that's kind of hanging around that can emerge and be problematic. Probably half the population has CMB.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Uh, you know, it's, it's a lot of people.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  There was a, there was a study I found interesting that was looking at, um, removed prostate cancers that were removed for cancer and that were biopsied and doing, um, virom assessment on it and found that the combination of EBV and HPV was present in the vast majority of them.

• 46:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And so that's not one or the other. It was actually the combination.

• 46:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  And obviously we know HPV causing cervical cancer, causing throat cancer. That's kind of new though, right? That people really understand that and H. pylori causing stomach cancer. And obviously like EBV causing chronic fatigue, but it's pretty reductionist to say EBV causes chronic fatigue. There are people who have EBV who get other diseases, MS or something. There are people who have EBV who never get chronic fatigue and there are people who have chronic fatigue who have a load of other viruses or pathogens.

• 46:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  That aren't EBV.

• 46:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, we're talking about like the, the, the virus, the, the infections can cause a myriad of problems, like, uh, herpes can lead to increased risk for Alzheimer's. Which doesn't just cause a cold sore, but maybe something more serious. And that doesn't mean Alzheimer's is caused by bacteria. But you know, you look at Rudy Tanzi's work and there, who's an Alzheimer's researcher, and he talks about how there's, they do brain bops, he's are finding all these bugs in the brain from the microbiome, from viruses, from other bacteria that may be causing an irritation that leads to the deposition of the amyloid plaque that everybody sees on the microscope, but is only a secondary response to some other triggering factor.

• 47:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That if you dealt with that triggering factor, you might not actually get Alzheimer's.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  So this is something that Rudy Tanzi's work is good at, Bretisson's work is good at, is Alzheimer's doesn't one disease.

• 47:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Right. There's, some people have described it as type 2 diabetes of the brain, some people as rheumatoid arthritis of the brain, some people as infection of the brain. These are all true.

• 47:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Different times, which means different treatments. So if you hear that somebody has rheumatoid arthritis, or MS, or Alzheimer's, you don't instantly know what you're gonna do.

• 47:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, I don't, I don't. I know, I know there's a, there's a group of things I'm gonna look at.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like, I'm gonna look at things that piss off the immune system, right? Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet, right? All the deficiencies of certain things, like vitamin D, we know is increasing risk for MS because it's important in neurologic function and immune function. So, you know, I think we, we kinda have to come to terms with this framework of multifactorial causes and multimodal treatments. And we just, we just have failed to be imaginative in how we do research.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  No, I think we're saying, you're saying two things at once that are important. One is, the disease doesn't have one cause. So, but you're saying, think about causal stuff. But the disease doesn't have one cause. So it could seem overwhelming, like, what, it's this, all these things. But there's also a framework that's really simple.

• 48:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  So the treatment of everyone's going to be personalized, not based on a disease diagnosis, but based on their actual medical history, their symptomology, their labs, and what's uniquely going on for them. But it's going to be personalized within a framework that is kind of not that hard.

• 49:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, the laws of nature are pretty simple, like Pierre Laplace said, they're the laws of biology when I think we're describing them, and I think we're getting toward approximation of what that looks like. And there's, you know, functional medicine is just a heuristic. It's not the end all and be all. It's just a framework that we're continually evolving to understand the complexity of human biology, which is infinitely unknowable. But even though it's so complex, you know, a rocket ship is complicated, right?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's but it's knowable. It's a known known.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Well, there's a blueprint that specifies it completely.

• 49:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  And DNA is actually not a blueprint.

• 49:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  It's a generator function which can make a new protein that's never made exposed to a new thing.

• 49:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Right? And it evolved rather than was designed, which is why it's self repairing, right? The rocket ship doesn't self repair.

• 49:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  It doesn't self evolve.

• 49:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And so biology is is not mechanics, right? It's like it's a different, unique thing that to have a system that self organizes, wasn't created by from the outside, that has an immune system, right? Like, it'd be dope if our computer had an immune system, but it doesn't, or our car, right?

• 50:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Antivirus software.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Self evolve. And so we're like, okay, what's happening in a system that is building itself, evolving itself, repairing itself is obviously different in type than a system that doesn't repair itself, that doesn't evolve itself. So we have to make sure we're using the right epistemology, right? The right kind of scientific framework. And so you were talking about laws of biology. And you mentioned, well, evolution's kind of that. And we're talking about anthropogenic stuff, which is like stuff in the current world that is different than the evolutionary environment, even though our genes aren't different.

• 50:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Right? Like modifying the environment in a way that we are not actually genetically fit to.

• 50:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That mismatch is really why we're sick.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think the first thing is a lot of people are still suffering from the propaganda of Hobbes. And Hobbes's descendants, right? Man in the state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty and mean. And as you already mentioned, the average life expectancy was thirty and their life was shit the entire time until they were thirty and, you know, that's nature, right? That's just nature. That's human biology. That's nature and our civilizing ourselves. Technology is creating longer lives and everything's getting better and better. And this is like awesome propaganda. If you're colonialist and you want to kill all the natives. And

• 51:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're helping them by killing them because they want to suffer so much.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  I mean Churchill has a famous quote that says, uh, I'm gonna paraphrase it. Actually, I have a whole list of quotes about um, manifest destiny of kings. I mean, manifest destiny in the US and divine right of kings and like just stuff that when we look back, we say, wow, that was the most dreadful propaganda nonsense. We still do the same kind of thing.

• 51:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  But Churchill said something like, you know, I don't hold for one second that our treatment of the red man is a bad thing in any way because evolution selects for higher life forms and a higher species replacing the lower species is good. Right? And you're like, shit, that's a big deal. So Nate, North and South America, the Americas before Col- Columbus, et cetera, right? Before colonization was roughly, depending on who you look at, a hundred and forty million people. And within a short period of colonization, both from infections and war and driving them out of viable habitats, the population was decimated by ninety percent.

• 52:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And if you look at that and you compare it to whatever, six million Jews in the Holocaust, right? And you're like hundred and ninety percent of a hundred and forty million, which is so many different civilizations that had different languages and songs and art and pharmacologies and just gone.

• 52:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Right? And similarly, so many ecosystems, so many species, like we don't have the giant sloth. We don't have the mammoth. Those were largely, uh, you know, tho- many of those were early human extinction from overhunting, from destroying habitats.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  But so there's the story. No, no, those. And and of course, it makes sense that like if the winner writes history, of course, they're the good guy.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Right? The winner's not going to say, we were the bad guys, but we were better at weapons than them. And they, we destroyed them because they were peaceful and lovely. No, we're going to say they were, they were brutish and terrible. And we brought democracy and Christianity and whatever, you know, you can, you can say Christianity, you can say Islam, you can say whatever the thing is that is justifying why it won. So there's something where it's like the dom, the dominant narrative of a power system has to justify the power system.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And so it's going to be apologism for the power system. We saw that through the Crusades, through the dark ages, through the, and so history is hard, right? Because we got to read this stuff that's written by the winners.

• 53:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  And you're like, in general, more peaceful cultures got slaughtered by more war ring cultures. It's not like everybody that Genghis Khan slaughtered was a less good civilization. They were less good at war, but how many people that knew how to live in more peace got slaughtered in the process because they didn't build maximally lethal militaries. And yet we are the descendants of who made it through history.

• 54:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  People are good at war and weapons and killing.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Growing massive populations, not keeping populations in stable relationship with their environment. Good at technology that can be used in competition and war. And so it's a really interesting selection criteria. So then we tell the story, oh, they only lived for 30 years and life was terrible. But you were just saying like, hey, no, actually some of the plains Indians were living to a hundred, a lot of them were living to a hundred. This is such an important story because I think one of the things that I want to get across in this conversation is there's still this general idea that is a part of the progress narrative, that is a part of just propaganda, say. That is, the diseases come from nature. Right? Man in a state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty, I mean.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  And the progress comes from science and the application of science, the technology brought to the world via the market, blah, blah, blah. And now look at how long we live and, you know, vaccines solved all these issues and whatever. And it's not that there's no truth to it, but it is cherry picking. The stats are pretty heavily.

• 55:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Ninety percent of measles was gone when they introduced the vaccine because of better sanitation and health.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  This is pretty important part of the story. And so if you rewind a little bit to say,

• 55:31Speaker 01

  you know, dark ages, Europe.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  This is not an indigenous culture. And then if the indigenous cultures you're studying post-science, which is very recently, or post-trail of tears, after you've already slaughtered most of them, moved them to an area where they don't understand the plants or animals and that were like crap areas, and then they're drinking and whatever, you're like, this is not a study of indigenous people. So there's a lot of indigenous scholars, they're like, come on, this is ridiculous. Like, no, we had a lot of people that were 100 years old. And there's a lot of diseases we just didn't have. And so this idea that like, that diseases just come from nature, our genome is a bummer, right? Like, nature's a bummer, tech is gonna solve it. As opposed to like, actually, technological agriculture has really made

• 56:16Speaker 01

  a lot of people sick. Technological mining and etc. that has caused ubiquitous pollution made a lot of people sick. So when we say anthropogenic disease, we're not just talking about iatrogenic, right? Anthropogenic meaning, diseases we have that are a result of our own action as a species, right? And so if you take mining, for instance, right, there's, there's 2 billion tons of municipal waste produced every year. Waste that, you know, like comes from our house. It's a lot, 2 billion tons, like mind blowing when you think about it. There's about 190 billion tons of mining waste produced every year. That's a lot. Because you mine stuff, but that rock isn't, it's not all the thing you want, right? You want a particular metal. All the stuff you don't want is waste, is tailings. That

• 56:59Speaker 01

  stuff is almost all super toxic. And it gets put in some big dam that eventually breaks and all goes in water. And this is comprehensively undoing what took the biosphere a billion years to do that made life possible in the first place. This is, you had actually mentioned something, I want to, it's a tangent, but I want to double down on this. Maybe there's aliens, who knows? We're not going to get into that part right now. But when we look out at the universe, we see a lot of planets that are not habitable. And we don't see a lot of places that look habitable. This place is pretty awesome.

• 57:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Any.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Right? Carl Sagan's pale blue dot is as relevant today as it was back then.

• 57:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  So this, like, the fact that it's habitable to life is a big deal. We should want to protect it more than anything.

• 57:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Not move to Mars?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Obviously, if you deal with radiation and other issues, point four G is a pretty tricky issue to deal with. Right? As you see, the people who go into zero G and they do a lot of resistance training and everything to try to deal with it. Bone density goes down, neural density goes down, neural density drops pretty massively. So, you know, like, obviously, we evolved to this planet. We have a planet that supports life. It's rare as can be. Right? It's everything we care about depends on that. And it took a long, like, the other planets didn't do that. At least in the time period that we can see, that's very special.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  It took a whatever, a billion-ish years for geological hydrological processes to make a space where a biogenesis could start to happen, right? Where life could start to emerge. And that was trapping all the super toxic stuff in which life couldn't emerge in rocks in the lithosphere and making a certain temperature range. And, you know, whatever that life could emerge in. And then it took like a billion years of just single cell creatures to make a biosphere in which multicellular creatures could emerge and on and on. And and then you look at the biosphere, a complex biosphere, and you're like, it's pretty much six atoms. Right? Like, there's ninety two elements in the periodic table. Yeah.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Oxygen first, right? Like sixty five percent of our body by weight is oxygen. Because of water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium make up ninety six percent of our weight.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  And you add a few electrolytes in there and it's ninety nine percent of our weight. And then you have trace minerals and the trace minerals are important. They're a tiny bit, but roughly every animal, plant, whatever, has the same distribution of trace minerals, the same building blocks, the same type of molecular bonds. This is a humongous deal to understand. Me and you and a dog and a mouse and a scorpion and a tree and a fungus are made of the same stuff, same atoms, same molecular bonds, which is why any of them can die, go on the soil, turn into soil, turn into new stuff. A tree can fall. Body can fall. An animal can defecate. Rattlesnake poison, right? Like super duper poisonous stuff, still the nature of the bonds. It dies, breaks down. Doesn't stay as an enduring toxin.

• 1:00:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm like plutonium, which stays around forever.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yes, or PFOS or whatever, right? Styrofoam. Because those are either atoms that were not part of the biosphere that we got through mining or molecules that we made up in a chem lab that nothing in nature knows how to break down, right? Like your bond. So just to get a sense of like, part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all made of the same stuff. And we need the same physics, right? Obviously, the North Pole to the equator are different temperatures, so polar bears don't do very well in the savanna and cheetahs wouldn't do very well in the Arctic. But the temperature difference from the North Pole to the equator is almost nothing compared to everywhere else in outer space. Right? Suns are really hot. Well, some things are very hot, some things are very cold.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  But like, everything here operates with the same pressure, the same physics, the same ionizing radiation, the same chemicals, the same temperature ranges. That's a big deal to get. And the same chemicals and the same molecular bonds is a huge deal and it's part of why co-evolution works, why there can be mutual symbiosis is we are literally recyclable into each other.

• 1:01:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Now, if you think about from that perspective, how rare life in the universe is, how rare the biosphere is, how it's all based on basically the same six atoms, same molecular bonds and a little bit of trace minerals. Then you start to think about how mind-blowingly stupid mining is.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Like mining, just to think about it.

• 1:01:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Taking other weird things out of the earth that should be buried in there and

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Things?

• 1:01:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That we should be protected from because they don't do well with our biology.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Things that are omnitoxic to all life forms, right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms. Cadmium is bad for all life forms. Lead is bad for all life forms, et cetera. So fortunately for us, the earth has a lot of those, but they're all bound in rock in the lithosphere under the biosphere, not part of the biosphere. We don't have to deal with them. So what do we do? We say those are useful for industrial purposes. So let's actually destroy the biosphere on top to make a mine. Let's pull this rock up. Let's pull that super toxic thing out through smelting and metallurgy and whatever. And if we just kept it all in a perfect metal and recycled, it'd be one thing. But we burn the coal and put the mercury and lead in the air. We put the lead in the gasoline, you know, and aerosolized it. We, um, and then the also the rest of the part that is toxic

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  tailings also goes out. So you're like, we have one planet that we know is habitable. It's habitable because of specific chemistry and we are as fast as possible making omnitoxic shit that chemistry can't deal with.

• 1:02:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that's a big part of what's making us sick. And it's something that medicine sort of ignored, which is this chronic low level burden of toxins that we're all exposed to. And we're all basically assessable. If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat. You know, the average newborn has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 1:02:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before they take their first breath.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  We see the same thing in the mother's breast milk, right? And her blood, like just people need to have this sink in. Mother breast milk, mother's blood, baby umbilical cord, 200 to 300 petrochemical and industrial toxins.

• 1:03:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. It's crazy. I mean, you should still breastfeed.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  To even call it low level is ridiculous, actually.

• 1:03:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I, I, I, I thought of a business of creating a, you know, breast milk filter. I don't know how you'd do that, but.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Well, the lymphatic system is a filter.

• 1:03:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  But it can only filter like in our evolutionary environment, we were not exposed to organophosphates. So what evolutionary process can deal with organophosphates?

• 1:03:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Right? Like, and so we figured out organophosphates, napalm, awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food. Right? Life is hate. Yeah. But to, to think about this thing that we invented as a chemical weapon to destroy nature at scale.

• 1:03:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Napalm, which is doxin.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Same molecular class. We figure out, oh, we can kill weeds. In agricultural settings, but we're going to spray it on all the food and humans are going to eat trace amounts of all of it. And the pesticides, like the thing that blows my mind about pesticides, you're like, okay, nuclear modeling. Nuclear war happens, nuclear winter, almost everything dies. The only things that may get are bugs with exoskeletons. We want to make something poisonous enough to kill bugs. They can make it through a nuclear winter and we spray it all over our food. And then eat it. And just because we're bigger, we, it's, it's not a lethal amount, but it's a long.

• 1:04:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it accumulates and it's additive and over time, it's sort of like, that's what I see so many, so many of the times that we see, and in many of the diseases of aging and chronic diseases we're talking about, including autoimmune diseases, are all a result of this total load phenomenon. It's not just one thing. It's a total load of everything. And you keep adding and adding and adding.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  So when you say low level, it's important to say, so we're talking about lead poisoning. Right? There's like, you have acute lead poisoning, you have Madda Hatter syndrome. Okay, that happens because you're working in a lead mine or some industrial source, right?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  But how much was there in an evolutionary environment? None. So what amount is good for you? None.

• 1:05:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:05:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's why I laugh when I see the reference range on the lab of like, the level of mercury that's considered normal is one, zero to 10. I'm like, well, there's no biological requirement for mercury. It's zero is the normal level.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yes. And yet that would mess up so much industry that the industry is going to lobby the EPA to make a number that doesn't mess up the industry too much. And the cost, the externalized cost is your children's health. And your grandparents' health and your health and the cancers that everybody's going to get.

• 1:05:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I see this. I mean, I, I, I saw this kid, my practice years ago. His mother was just so, such a good attentive, observant mother and she, she saw this kid who went from a normal little kid to being extremely difficult, extremely aggressive, violent, learning difficulties, dysgraphia, dyslexia, just a whole bunch of things, neurodevelopmental things.

• 1:05:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you know, she, she said, we live north of Albany in this town where

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's a cement plant across the street from the school. This is, this is why the history is so important. How many doctors ask their patients if they live near a cement plant or a coal plant? Not, nobody asks that, right? But it's part of the history that we find really essential. And she said, every day after school, the, the cars would be coated, like in Austin here. When it's pollen season, like your cars is coated with pollen. Their cars every day were coated with dust from the cement plant. And that, quote, dust was a toxic soup of chemicals. And when I actually did a chelation challenge test, which again, it's something we don't do in traditional medicine, but we look at your blood levels and that can tell you if there's any acute exposure. And often there, there are levels that are significant.

• 1:06:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You see kids, for example, with high lead from environmental exposure, but it's, it often is stored in the tissues. And so we give a drug called the DMSA, which is a FDA approved drug for chelation. That's a Greek word that means to claw, to bind some things, or binds the metals. And then we collect the urine and we saw this kid was just, everything was just lit up, you know, arsenic, aluminum, mercury, lead.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  One of the things you said is you had to use a different testing method.

• 1:07:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Right? Because of course, if there's something that's circulating in the blood, it's going to cross the blood brain barrier, that's going to go into the kidneys and hurt the nephrons, it's so dangerous to keep in the blood, the body will excrete it as fast it can. If it can't excrete it fast enough, it wants to get it out of the blood.

• 1:07:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  So it goes into a tissue. So you do a blood level. Blood level is the wrong thing to do, right? If you're not looking at tissue levels, which is what, but tissue biopsies are not a non-invasive thing to do. But this is just important to be like, people could say, oh, this nonsense. I've ran the labs and nobody has heavy metal. Well, are you running the right labs? Very important topic. And again, there's some theory under it.

• 1:07:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And one of the, one of the, you know, one of the gold standard tests for lead, for example, is looking at, at bone levels through various specialized types of imaging that are used in research. And that's what you should be looking at. It's sort of like the joke I always tell that, you know, this guy drops his keys on the street and he's looking for them in his, on this light post and his friend's like, what are you doing? He's, I'm looking for my keys. He says, where did you drop them? He's like, I dropped them down the street. He says, why are you looking here? He said, the lights better here. And that's what we do in medicine. We tend to do testing that we have available, but not the right testing. And, and I even remember an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, or a JAMA, was one of those, I was talking about like mercury and. And they said, well, we checked the blood because that's the easiest thing to do. I'm like, well, that's not where you want to check, you know, to see what's really going on.

• 1:08:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so this kid, these kids who were living at the cement plant were severely affected by these. And by treating them and getting rid of the metals and decreasing their toxic burden, they were able to actually recover and do well.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is important. People will say N equals one nonsense, whereas the RCT randomized control trial and placebo effect could do that. No, placebo effect couldn't do that. Placebo effect does some things, it doesn't do other things. It's not going to increase bone density, right? It's like, it's not going to reverse in a kid who's not even paying attention, really severe diseases and biomarkers. So it's hard to do a randomized control trial on a bespoke process.

• 1:09:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  And yet, if you're seeing things that placebo does not describe, meaning placebo never does that thing enduringly, that should not be an immediate dismissal.

• 1:09:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  And if it's something that there would be no way to set up an RCT easily for and or no one has money to do it, someone should not immediately dismiss based on that, right? It should be like, well, let's look at the total body of evidence and try to understand it. Let's try to make sense of it.

• 1:09:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and I think where medicine is also going is the N F one studies, which is now understood to be a really valid type of research, which is where you measure your own biology against your own biology with different interventions over time. And, you know, we also had a whole group of special forces,

• 1:09:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  soldiers at Cleveland Clinic who were coming with all sorts of weird, mysterious chronic illnesses. And they were having fatigue and metabolic issues and cognitive issues. And, you know, these guys in special forces are not whiners or complainers. You get through a training, you're like a tough guy. And, and they were being dismissed. And we started looking and listening to the stories and they were often guys who were exposed to burn pits or were in blast houses, so they were training how to blow up shit. Like how to blow up a door, blow up a building. And they would practice.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  TBIs from it.

• 1:10:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they would, well, they would get brain injury, but they would also.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Chemical exposure.

• 1:10:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They would get the release of the metals. And they were very high in lead and mercury and. And by getting rid of these in these patients, they did remarkably well. And then it was a guy, actually, it was in the New York Times where this expert in lead, who I think it was at Albert Einstein, who studied the bone lead levels with this fancy test, said he'd never seen anything like this, where lead levels decreased.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm like, well, you've never seen it because you just don't practice medicine that actually helps you detoxify these compounds from your body. That it's possible. We know how to do it.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's again, it's it's sort of on the fringes of medicine.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Okay, I want to talk about lead for a minute. So everybody, or most people know the story of leaded gasoline, tetraethyl lead being added to gasoline. Most people don't know the story well. There's actually an exceptional video on this made by Veritasium, a YouTube channel online that describes the, you know, tetraethyl lead story.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  But it was an additive for gasoline in the early phases of internal combustion engines that stopped engine knocking, as in not even absolutely crucial. Heaps of other chemistries that could stop engine knocking, as obviously we know because we don't have lead anymore. The early studies that were done on tetraethyl lead, the on toxicity, the people did get sick, including the researcher, and the results were hidden. So it wasn't that we couldn't have possibly known. It was we actually knew, hid it and brought it out anyways because of the economic interest. And then to think about like what what adding lead to gasoline means, which is you're aerosolizing it, right? You're not just putting it in the water or the soil. You're literally atomizing one of the most toxic chemicals that exists and

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  putting it into the air at scale. Right? So of course, even though it was already known toxic, that was hidden. And then the companies that were producing the tetraethyl lead fought really hard to keep it there and not ban it. And it only finally got banned after the preponderance of how much harm it was causing got proven decades later. The effects, when you look back in just America, are estimated at a billion points of IQ loss for Americans.

• 1:12:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  And

• 1:12:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's staggering.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  I just would like people

• 1:12:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Make Americans dumber.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. A billion points of IQ loss for a population that was less than 300 million people. Is a lot of IQ loss. And then there were also studies on increased violence and aggravation.

• 1:13:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  That showed that populations that were heavily exposed had something like four X the impulse control disorders.

• 1:13:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Impulse controls, cold performance, cognitive deficits.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Not to mention the bone issues, the osteoporosis, the cancer, everything else. But if we just look at even the psychocognitive elements, because one of the, like, again, one of the bullshit stories that is real politic is like, it goes back to the Hobbesian stories, like, humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why we need rule, right? Humans are kind of dumb and nasty. Well, empirically, we made humans dumber and nastier with just the aerosolizing lead. And you're like, who would the humans be?

• 1:13:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  If we weren't, if we hadn't done that. So then you say, okay, well, that's an old story because we got rid of lead. Well, no, those effects are enduring.

• 1:13:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Lead doesn't go away. It's in the soil still.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  It's still in most of the pipes.

• 1:13:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's in the pipes, right?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Right? It's like, we still see it in water.

• 1:13:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That whole thing that happened in Flint, Michigan.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  But Albany's worse than Flint, Michigan.

• 1:13:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Right? Still.

• 1:13:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  And, um, but even though we supposedly banned lead in gasoline, it's still used in prop planes, it's still used in certain military and farm equipment and other kinds of things. So we're still using it. It's supposedly banned around the world, but it's still used because not enforced in the third world pretty heavily. But then the lead that comes from mining, specifically mining affluent, there's a study I saw in 2019 that showed children under five lost 780 million IQ points just in 2019, just from lead.

• 1:14:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's not just that it affects your cognitive function, it affects everything. You know, there, there was a really pioneering study that I, I saw in, um, American Journal of Cardiology, where they found that anybody with a lead level of over two, and by the way, the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Then it was 20, then it was 10. Now it's 10.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  But that was not based on proving that they weren't. That was based on lobbying from the company, from the industries that produced the lead that wanted to not have that much restriction.

• 1:15:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But still, the lead levels that quote normal is one to zero to 10, right?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and this American Journal Cardiology study, they found that.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Excuse me, I was saying the arguing for it being higher was the lobbying side. The proving the toxicity brought it lower, but it's still, as you're mentioning, one to 10.

• 1:15:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, still one to 10. So it's still pretty bad. And, and what they found was in terms of kids cognitive function.

• 1:15:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was a continuum from zero to 10 still causing a problem. It wasn't like you had no effect. So that that's been well proven. But what was was really interesting was the American Journal of Cardiology found that that if your lead level was over two, not two out of 10, that which is 39% of the population of adults and kids. It was a bigger risk factor for stroke and heart attack than having abnormal cholesterol. Which nobody talks about. So you go to the cardiologist, they're not checking your lead levels. And one of the

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  And even if they did, that's only one fifth of the allowable level.

• 1:16:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. And what's really interesting is that there was this whole movement in the 70s and 80s for chelation therapy, which was thought to be quackery. And the NIH did a $30 million trial called the TAG trial, where they use EDTA IV chelation. EDTA specifically removes lead. And they found that it was very actually effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks. And yet it's not part of standard medicine.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so lead increasing heart disease more, you said more than cholesterol markers? Yeah. And how much do people hear about the safe, quote unquote, safe levels of lead compared to cholesterol when it comes to heart disease from the cardiologist, right? But and again, we're not just saying within the safe range, we're saying not even close to the top of the range. Right? Someone would look at it and they'd be like, oh, I'm near the bottom of the range.

• 1:16:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm too, I'm good, I'm like, yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Except the range, you're like, in evolutionary levels, it's not even the right scale because what we're calling one to 10 is actually like one to a million in terms of what should be the right part per billion scale.

• 1:17:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, there were moments in human history where there were volcanoes and there was exposures, but not much, right? Not much, yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  In terms of like the famous topic people like to talk about right now of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire, there's a whole

• 1:17:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Lead pipes.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Hypothesis about, well, lead was added to sugar to make a particular kind of sweetness. And lead was actually added as a food additive and to alcohol, plus the lead pipes, plus the lead

• 1:17:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Actually, I'd love the story. I have a few patients who, you know, are wealthy and, you know, they they get fine crystal or they they have wine out of leaded crystal. I remember buying wine glasses once and I went to the store and I'm like, you know, these are $5 a piece and these are $50 a piece. I'm like, why is this $50 wine glass? He said, well, it's, you know, it's leaded crystal. I'm like, Lead and crystal, why? He's well, because the lead makes the wine taste sweeter. That's why I kid eat paint chips because it tastes sweet. I was like, wow. And then they have fancy glazed plates, which are from Italy or France, which is the glaze is full of lead. So you can get it in lots of different ways.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  But, okay, so the fact that in 2019, children under five globally had 780 million points of IQ loss. That's like, that should be up there in crimes against humanity as like whoever the fuck did this needs, like the whole industry needs to be punished like, because those kids' lives are ruined, right? Like massively ruined forever. The civilization that those kids run with less cognitive power as we're moving into an increasingly complex world. And the IQ is obviously just one thing. It's increased heart disease, increased cancer, increased osteoporosis, and increased impulse control disorders, aggression. Like there's psychiatric components, so sicker, dumber and meaner. And we're just talking about one.

• 1:18:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  One compound. And, and, and you're right. I mean, you know, they looked at, at the children of the farm workers in California who were exposed to large amounts of pesticides and herbicides. That, that cohort of kids that they studied lost 41 million IQ points just from exposure to pesticides. It was not just.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  So you add the pesticides up, you add the lead up, you add the mercury up, you add the, the,

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  there's 350,000 chemicals that are in regular industrial use that are regulated, something like that. There's 280 million chemicals in the database of the American Chemical Society. And we're talking about like, things that were not part of our evolutionary environment, are not part of the makeup.

• 1:19:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, DuPont was wrong. It's not better living through chemistry?

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's just like satire now to say better living through chemistry because they were advertising DDT.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  They were advertising, you know, the better living through chemistry stuff was advertising methamphetamine, methadone, right? You remember the advertisements like makes mom happier and more productive and helps with weight loss for the whole family. And, um, and they were advertising asbestos and at the same time is prefrontal lobotomies.

• 1:20:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Right? The propaganda has gotten a little bit more sophisticated now, but it's the same shit.

• 1:20:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And I think, you know, we were chatting a little about this low level toxicity and the antipigenic disease. I think, I think it's one of the most underappreciated things in medicine. I mean, the microbiome is finally getting its day. Um, you know, diet nutrition is well being understood, although it's not being implemented in medical care.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  The subclinical deficiency from soil management?

• 1:20:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  And even which types of plants, hybridized crops and diversity and seasonality, not.

• 1:20:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I want, I want to get into that because that's a whole nother.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How we've screwed up our food system. But the, what's, what's really interesting is that this low level toxicity framework is not accepted at all. And it's not taught in medical schools. Doctors don't know how to assess toxins in the body. They don't know how to treat toxicity.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  The preponderance of data of looking at it is clear. Like you mentioned the NIH study, but also the common sense of it's pretty clear.

• 1:21:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Right? And like, I just want people to just step back from a moment from like emotional reactions and just think about it. Right? And you're like, yeah, the biosphere is the only one in the whole universe we know.

• 1:21:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  And everything really is made of the same stuff and stuff that is in high amounts omnitoxic to it and that our body didn't evolve to process at all that are totally alien. Maybe we shouldn't put everywhere.

• 1:21:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And I think, I think there's some groups like American Cancer Society and others and cancer research groups that have said, look, one of the big drivers of cancer is environmental chemicals, but it doesn't really tell you what to do about them, how to deal with it.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  WHO said air pollution is number one cause of death worldwide recently.

• 1:21:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I think, I think food is, but I don't, maybe that's changed, but it's.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Attribution is difficult, but like it's up there.

• 1:21:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's up there. Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Cause they're looking at third world and they're looking at, you know, again, like you mentioned the coal burning that causes all the lead, et cetera, plus.

• 1:22:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then in detoxification is considered this really fringe lunatic. Heretical framework of medicine that we shouldn't be thinking about. Your body detoxifies, your liver's work, your kidneys work, you sweat, you know, pee, poo, you, you know, your hair grows out, your skin falls off, like you're detoxifying, you know?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  This is true, which is why you want to support detoxification systems if they have an increased burden.

• 1:22:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's true, but there are more, more interventional ways to actually detoxify, which I've been doing for decades through various treatments, whether it's.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  But you would do those after supporting the organs of elimination.

• 1:22:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you want to make sure the pathways are open to get rid of that stuff.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Talk about the lymphatic system not having a pump and exercise and evolutionary movement versus this, that's a good one.

• 1:22:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, we, you know, a lot of us are very sedentary and the only way your body gets rid of toxins is it dumps all the pollution into your body, into your lymph system, which is a parallel circulatory system that goes along with your veins and your arteries.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Doesn't have a heart.

• 1:22:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it doesn't have a heart, right? And the only way it moves through your body is through exercise, through the pumping action of your muscles.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  But exercise is a nonsense concept to an indigenous person.

• 1:23:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're just moving.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  They're just moving, right? Like you gotta climb trees, you gotta run, you gotta, and the number of moving hours relative to sedentary hours per day for the entire evolutionary history of our genome was a lot of moving hours.

• 1:23:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's probably reversed to what we have now, right?

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  And so the fact that the lymphatic nodes are in the armpits and in the crotch and in the areas that move, so they get pumped, they, they were the amount that you needed when you had eight hours of movement today, or whatever it was, and complex dynamic movement. And so then, if you're not having that movement, but the system evolved that that was the pump.

• 1:23:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  That's a big deal.

• 1:23:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  And so you don't, even before chelation, right? Like sedentary means that even if you weren't being exposed to more toxins than normal, just the metabolic toxins, your body couldn't deal with them.

• 1:23:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So, you know, we've got, we've got like a few major anthropogenic causes, environmental toxins and liberating toxins from deep in the earth, whether it's through elemental toxins like heavy metals or petrochemical toxins, which, you know, is basically how we, whether it's.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  And that's not deep in the earth, that's chem lab.

• 1:24:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's chem lab, but it also it's from plastic petrochemicals. A lot of these things are synthesized like plastics or PCBs or dioxins. Or these are, these are things that can be.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Including all the ones in the paint.

• 1:24:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I tried to get clean paint when my house painted.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Well, you do, but.

• 1:24:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Who knows if it actually is.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  The formaldehyde and the other VOCs in paint that cause indoor air pollution to be worse than outdoor air pollution.

• 1:24:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Environment where people spend.

• 1:24:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, Cleveland Clinic, we, we, I was very insistent that when we built our 15,000 square foot center there, that we made sure that the, they had a very good air filtration system, water filtration system, that all the materials used, the paint used, the furniture used was non-off gassing, disposing producing volatile organic compounds that are absorbed in your body and create havoc. So it, it actually was an incredible place to work because people would walk in and just feel better.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was the healthiest place in the whole.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  This is something I, you know, there's this phenomenon that when people get drunk or the, the part of their mind and brain that can assess drunkness is also getting drunk, right? So they can misassess and think they're less drunk than they are.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Dunning Kruger is another kind of effect like that. There are, people don't know how bad they feel relative to what they would feel in an evolutionary environment. Cause like, when you think about the decrease in sperm count, which we haven't talked about ubiquitous fertility issues, right? That we are becoming a species that cannot reproduce is a big deal. People should be like, whoa, that's not a good sign. We, we shouldn't all need IVF to be able to reproduce. The healthier being is, the more reproductive capacity it has, right? And, but when you look at the decreasing testosterone, decreasing sperm count studies that, you know, sperm count has dropped 50 to 60% in the last 60 plus years and the testosterone has and other androgens have similarly, you're like.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  That means that everybody feels so bad in comparison to how they like the low sperm count environment is also a low vitality environment, but you don't know because you don't have a reference range.

• 1:26:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, that's true. I think it's often a comment I would hear from my patients when I treat them. They say, Dr. Hyman, I didn't know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling so good.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They literally did this thought it was their normal. It's normal to be achy, to be tired, to have all these weird low grade symptoms, brain fog. They don't maybe rise to the level of a disease that's classified as a disease, but you feel like shit.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Very low vitality.

• 1:26:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They call it FLC syndrome, feel like crap. And it's real. And it's amazing how easy it is to fix that if you know what to do.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  But it's also amazing how and heartbreaking how much

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  low grade sickness and IQ loss and psychiatric illness, whatever, is totally normalized and people don't think there's anything wrong. But then, of course, they crave stuff a lot because they feel bad.

• 1:27:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  They want to feel better. And then now that's part of an ongoing cascade cycle.

• 1:27:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You mean crave, bad food, drugs?

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Anything that's going to give a hit of a hypernormal stimuli, bad food, drugs, news, porn.

• 1:27:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Bullshit productivity that is just checking the list so that you have some hit of dopamine.

• 1:27:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. Yeah, no, it's true. I think we have to sort of stop normalizing feeling bad. And then we have to help people understand what's happening in their biology and to be proactive about doing something about it. Because despite all this doom and gloom we're talking about and all the the amounts of insults that are a result of our society and industrialization and technology and some of those things are good, you know, we all benefit from them. But, you know, there are methods to actually help optimize your health, to detoxify, to improve your microbiome, to regulate the fundamental physiological systems that you need to be working in order for you to be healthy, whether it's your mitochondria or anything.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  I don't want to say doom and gloom because like talking about real things is real things.

• 1:28:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  And people shouldn't have the bias to be like, I don't want to look at real things. Right?

• 1:28:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's better if it's hope on the other end. Say, we're all toxic waste dumps and there's nothing we can do about it. We're all gonna get sick and die.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  I can only do something about it as soon as I know about it. As soon as I know about, of course you could do something. So one of the other ubiquitous illnesses is learned helplessness.

• 1:28:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  This is an ubiquitous psychiatric illness where people go from not knowing about an issue at all to the moment they hear about it feeling helpless. It's like, what the fuck? What about that? You heard about it and you study for a little while the issue before jumping straight to helplessness and be like, what do the people who know a lot think we could do? What, what, and so the, the straight to, I heard about it and I'm straight into doom and helplessness is total nonsense, right? People need to be able to learn about an issue and know, once I understand it, I have some chance of thinking about what might actually be able to improve it.

• 1:29:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  And so, you know, if we go to Okinawa, we see a very advanced society that has advanced technology where the rate of people that make it to a hundred is way, way higher. So we're not saying everybody has to be cavemen, right? Like, we're not saying a Luddite thing. We're saying, could you

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  manufacture stuff in a way where you just actually cared about the pollution? Could you do longer term studies first to make sure something was super toxic? Like totally, could you do a better agricultural system? Totally. These are not scientifically hard problems. Does it make it totally market unviable? No, look at how huge the margins are in the areas that are externalizing all the costs. The margins don't seem to be that high.

• 1:29:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what you're saying is there are ways to do things better.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Obviously.

• 1:29:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And, and they don't.

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  And necessarily.

• 1:29:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. I mean, it's just sort of what we're dealing with lately with the, with the food dyes, you know? There, there's no need for these things in food. They're designed to make unpalatable food attractive and palatable. And, and I think that, you know, there's, there's a movement to try to remove a lot of these compounds that are used in ultra-processed food that, that are used for flavor enhancers or for color enhancement to make it attractive. When you take those things away, those foods are going to disappear because they're going to be like, I mean, imagine taking like Pringles, which, you know, I've eaten Pringles, they're not that bad, but they're all perfectly formed, perfect shape. They fit in the, the container perfectly.

• 1:30:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you take them out and just crush them, which would take about two seconds, they're they're not really potato chips or a bunch of cocktails of weird chemicals and some potato, I think, and then you could kind of turn into a powder and you just put on your plate and try to eat it with a spoon, it would be gross. No one would want to eat it, right? And so I think if we remove a lot of these things from foods, it's going to change the food landscape, but.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so I want to go to the topic of food in our evolutionary environment. We've talked about toxicity, we haven't talked about deficiency.

• 1:31:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  But I want to go back and just kind of underscore something that you said, which was you're like, all right, there are toxins, which means too much of something for optimal health. That's pretty simple. There are some toxins where any amount is too much. It may not be causing immediate acute illness, but like, less would be better for you. Lead and mercury and organophosphates and BPA and whatever, all fit in that category and it's a lot and there are hundreds in the umbilical cord. Blood, right? So it's like, it's a lot, a serious thing. There are other toxins that are too much of something that the body actually needs is just too much. And it might be too much in absolute. And so this is where we look at cholesterol, or we look at zinc levels or something, right?

• 1:31:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Blood sugar, whatever.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  Blood sugar, too much of something relative to something else or what it should be. Those are different categories, but just the idea, and it's important to make the distinction where you want to bring something down to zero versus you want to bring it into right evolutionary balance. And then there's not enough of some stuff and not so little that again, you're acutely dying of rickets or berry berry, but you're very far from optimal. And that can be vitamins like that, but it can be trace minerals. And soil can be like a lot of things. And so you're like, okay, well, many of those things that there's not enough of, that there's a deficiency are also parts of the immune and detoxification system that would deal with the toxicity. So you get these compounding effects.

• 1:32:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  Right? And so deficiency.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of people who are like, hey, most people are obese today. This seems like diseases of excess, not deficiency. It seems like we have caloric excess.

• 1:32:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  So talk to me about deficiency. And obviously, we're going to be talking about micro versus macronutrients and stuff. And evolutionary environment diet versus this diet.

• 1:32:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, you brought up something really important is that, and I remember reading these studies, you're just being flabbergasted, that the most obese are the most malnourished.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Yes. That's why they're hungry all the time.

• 1:33:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Kids, right. And, you know, we're looking for love in all the wrong places. And this is phenomena as well described in medicine. Kids, for example, are iron deficient. They get something called pica, which is they eat dirt because they're trying to get iron. The body craves the things that it needs. You know, I remember going to the Amazon and it was fascinating because there was this kind of wall, like minerals, like a kind of exposed along the bank of the river of dirt. It looked like dirt, but it would just flock with parrots. It would come and just eat that dirt because they were trying to get the minerals. And, and when you have a diet that's so nutritionally depleted, it's so high in sugar, starch, and bad fats, and chemicals, but has very little nutrients.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Now, this is important because sugar equals carbohydrate calories equals a macronutrient.

• 1:34:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  So for people who don't have macro versus micronutrients.

• 1:34:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Would you break that down real quick?

• 1:34:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the macronutrients are protein, fat, and carbohydrate. And you can maybe say fiber. There's vitamins and minerals, which are micronutrients. And there's, you know, phytochemicals, which I think are a different category, but I think they're conditionally essential nutrients. And then there's other things that, you know, you might not necessarily, the body can make, but you might not necessarily have enough quantities like KU10, which you can get from certain foods, but, or lipoic acid, but you need to sometimes supplement with those. But I think the, the, the, the amount of. Bad macronutrients we have, namely sugar and starch, and the lack of of good macronutrients that we had, like good, certain good fats, and even protein, that's another conversation.

• 1:34:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But there's there's such depletion of the micronutrients because of the way we farm, because of the soil, because of how plants are bred, they're bred for starch content and for yield and for disease resistance and drought resistance, they're not bred for nutrient density, they're not bred for flavor. And except except now there's a Dan Barber, who's been on the podcast, created Stone Barns, which is a sort of a regenerative farm up in upstate New York, he created row seven seeds, and now you can buy these row seven crops that are in the supermarket. For example, he was said butternut squash is tasteless, and as a chef, I don't want to cook this, I want I want to reverse engineer flavor.

• 1:35:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And he, you know, reengineered with peppers, tomatoes, you know, winter squash, a whole series of foods that are are more flavorful because they have more nutrients, they're more phytochemically rich, more nutrient dense, he didn't breed it for that, but it's a sort of natural consequence. And in in nature, flavor always follows phytochemical richness, the colorful, like if you eat a if you eat a wild strawberry, it's so dense and some of these amazing phytochemicals like folic, which is great for longevity and killing zombie cells, and a tiny little strawberry will create this flavor explosion in your mouth, but if you have a giant strawberry that looks red and delicious, but it tastes like cardboard, it's grown in a sort of industrial way, you're not going to get those phytochemicals.

• 1:36:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But the problem is that so many people who are obese or overweight are nutritionally deficient, and when you look at their levels of nutrients like vitamin D or minerals or vitamins, they're often very low. And so they're constantly hungry, they're constantly looking for more food, more nutrients, but they're not getting it.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  So we know that a lot of the studies of blue zones were flawed, and there's kind of debate about what makes the areas where people make it to 100 the way they are. But one thing that is pretty commonly known that led to all the caloric restriction studies is that

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Very rarely do overweight people make it to a hundred.

• 1:36:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  And

• 1:36:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  More of the obese hundred year old.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  They're they're skinny and typically they're what we actually consider malnourished from a just macronutrient chlorine perspective, but their diet is actually micronutrient dense, macronutrient low.

• 1:37:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Which means they're getting protein, fat and carb, but they're getting a little bit less total calorie, but a lot more mineral, vitamin, phytochemical enzyme per calorie.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  This makes a lot of sense, right? And if you, this is where, you know, talking about evolutionary environment food, because sapien is depending upon who you ask, 200,000 years old, 300,000 years old, something like that. And hominids are three million years old. And obviously it goes back because we are genetically almost identical to the chimpanzees and other things. Right? So evolutionary environment, billions of years of life being a particular way. We evolved to that environment. This is actually one of the concepts I think is so important is

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  evolution is a process by which creatures emerge, they are selected for based on fitness to an environment. Right? The environment is shaping the creature. The environment has leaves up really high and the mutation that leads to a long neck gets selected for. Right? And you get a giraffe, you wouldn't get a giraffe if there were not things really high. So it's the environment shaping the creature. There's a little bit of the niche creation where the creature will try to modify the environment. And of course, like next to humans, the most environment modifying creatures are like beavers.

• 1:38:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  You know, maybe a termite. If you look at a beaver and then you look at Tokyo. Right? You look at a beaver dam, then you look at like Tokyo or New York City or LA. And you look at LA when you're flying in and you're like, as far as I can see is this orthogonal grid of concrete.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  There's actually no sign of the natural world left. Right? It's an anthropocene technosphere that has eaten the biosphere. Then you look at a beaver dam, you're like, we are not like any of the other creatures. Like really obviously we are like them in terms of made of the same stuff, but our capacity to do tech has really changed up profoundly. So we're a creature that started to change our environment rapidly.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  But change it to something that is not the environment we are genetically adapted to faster than our genes can adapt.

• 1:39:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. It's a mismatch. It's a genes environment mismatch.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  So the idea that we are not paying attention to the way that our environment continues to shape us as creatures, and we're making an environment we're actually not fit to, is the concept of antiprogenic disease. Right? It's the concept of, and this is not romanticizing that in an evolutionary environment, everything was awesome. Like famine was difficult. There were a lot of things that were difficult, but we still need to pay attention to what did we actually evolve to have fitness in? And, you know, you've been, you've mentioned vitamin D a few times. Actually, you know, it's a good example. We spend 90% of our time indoors. We evolved outdoors. We evolved to have vitamin D synthesis per unit time based on spending most of our time outdoors.

• 1:40:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In the sun, yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Not only does indoor light not do what sunlight does, but energy efficient light is even worse.

• 1:40:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Right? Like, we try to take the UVB out, and then we try to take the warm parts out to make it energy efficient, which the reason you have red lights downstairs is because the synthesis of nitric oxide and other things, where we actually do photosynthesize some stuff, right? We actually modulate chemistry based on different frequencies of light. And so again, like, there's an externality on health of being indoors, an externality of health of even the attempt to make environmentally friendly lighting. But does supplemental vitamin D do the exact same thing as sunlight?

• 1:40:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Not really. No. It's good, but it's not the same.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  No, because you get, it's, you know, first, are you supplementing calcifetal or calcitriol or some enzymatically processed form or just, you know, just D3? And then the binding proteins, the light plays some role in that, right? The light plays a role in a whole complex of things. And so supplementing it better than not supplementing it. But again, this is a, it makes sense that if you evolved outdoors. Moving a lot that your body would need to move for a lymphatic system. It's like, oh, we don't need a pump on this thing because the body's moving all the time. And an extra pump would be metabolically, evolutionarily expensive. And just when you stop moving, you don't automatically get another pump.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Right? And we will synthesize vitamin D from light and nitric oxide and other things based on the amount of light exposure. And so the idea that we can create an environment without realizing it where you do something for a reason. Right? You make a building for reasons, but it's doing other things than the thing it intended. And a lot of the other things were not what we optimized for our problems, i.e. an externalized cost. And the externalized costs to the environment are also reflected in the externalized costs to our health. Right? If you look at the planetary boundary perspective, the chemical pollution in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the chemical pollution in people's bodies.

• 1:42:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  The species extinction in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the species extinction in the microbiome.

• 1:42:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, diversity loss, right?

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  And so, you know, Chief Seattle might sound like a hippie saying, we're not the web of life. We're merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves, but it's like just also straightforward ecological science.

• 1:42:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  And medicine.

• 1:42:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  And so let's talk about food systems a little bit more in terms of in an evolutionary environment, what was different about food and the micronutrients and macronutrients? And like what has first the agricultural revolution, plow and stuff, and then kind of the green revolution, Haber-Bosch, and then pesticides, et cetera, done to food?

• 1:42:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, going back historically, you know, and then sort of that analysis of, you know, paleolithic diets. And, and there was such a high level of micronutrients in the diet. There was such an incredibly high level of fiber, of omega three fats. There was an inversion of our sodium potassium intake. So we had much higher potassium, lower sodium intake. And and you kind of look at the amount of sugar and starch, it was almost nonexistent. You know, we might have twenty two teaspoons a year. We now have fourteen thousand times that, which is staggering. And human biology.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Again, that's something people really underscore, fourteen thousand times.

• 1:43:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  What we evolved to process.

• 1:43:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, we got a honey, you know, we found a honey thing that was great. Or we got some berries, we got some.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  But it was also very expensive to try to find honey.

• 1:43:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Evolutionarily, right? Like the bees were not just giving it up.

• 1:43:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, no, like the Nepalese honey hunters figured out they would climb these trees with burning sticks to smoke them out. But yeah, it wasn't so easy. You had to climb a tree with a burning stick every time you want a cookie, it would be a different thing.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  As opposed to push a button on Amazon and show up at the door.

• 1:43:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, my wife's really good at that. Like, what is going on with all this ice cream showing up at the house?

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Well, if you have to climb a tree to get honey, you're not going to get diabetes because you just exercise.

• 1:44:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  And if you had to like chase game.

• 1:44:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  Right? There's a lot of things where also the the reward was following an activity that had evolutionary relevance.

• 1:44:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So so we have changed our food system. And then the the phytochemicals in the food is dramatically changed because of our agriculture practices. And so what happened, you know, we mentioned Fritz Hopper, that basically the ability to extract nitrogen from the air and turn into fertilizer happened, you know, in the early nineteen twenties. And then we, after World War Two, we took all the factories that were making nitrogen to make bombs, because that was how what was used for it. It wasn't for agriculture initially, turned them into fertilizer, which now, you know, are these huge companies that actually to make the fertilizer takes up two percent of the world's global energy supplies.

• 1:45:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then, of course, it does all these downstream consequences when we put it on the soils. The nitrogen causes the release of nitric oxide, which has adverse climate impacts. The runs into the rivers and streams, causing eutrophication, essentially fertilizing all the plant life, sucking out the oxygen from river streams and estuaries and create dead zones. There's 400 around the world, feed half a billion people. That's just the fertilizer. Then we turned the bioweapons factories, which were neurotoxins. So the gases in World War I were all nerve toxins. They're chemical weapons, right? Those got turned into pesticides.

• 1:45:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then we developed herbicides. And then we started hybridizing plants to breed for different traits, not GMO, but just plain old breeding, plant breeding. And the traits we bred for were increased yield, increased starch content, increased drought resistance, pest resistance. So we basically.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  But when we hybridized for that, the plants got less good at other things.

• 1:46:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so then you had less protein, there's increasing protein deficiency in the world because there's less protein in these foods. There's less vitamins and minerals, there's certainly less phytochemicals, there's more sugar. So you kind of created this disaster. I mean, and gluten is a great example where, you know, I remember being in Sardinia and they had this incredible wheat they used to make, that these flat kind of crackers that would get rehydrated that the shepherds would use. They'd go out and hike and spend days and weeks out in the middle of nowhere, raising their animals. And they would have these, you know, large amounts of this brano capelli wheat that they made into these crackers that they would rehydrate and take with them. Very different than dwarf wheat, which was made by Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this hybridization process.

• 1:46:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But basically, then I actually met his daughter. I don't know why, I got invited to this food conference and I, it was an agriculture conference. I gave a talk on food as medicine and I was sitting next to this guy, Mr. Cargill, and meeting this, it was like, it was like I was in a strange, and I said to the guy, I was like, so what do you do? He said, I do plant medicine. I'm like, really? Plant medicine? What's that? He said, you know pesticides. I'm like, wow. So it was very funny, but I digress. And so when we hybridized the wheat. When we breed plants, we combine the genetics of the plants. It's not like humans where you get half of your genetics from your mom and half from your dad. You don't get half from one strain of wheat and half from the other strain of wheat. You add them.

• 1:47:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So like forty six chromosomes, instead would be ninety two. And what genes do is they make proteins. So all of a sudden, you've got this wheat that's making all these extra proteins. And what are those proteins they're making? They're extra gluten proteins, glycin proteins, and they're way more inflammatory. And then they create, and the amount of starch it created was a super starch called amylpectin A, which is much more starchy, higher glycemic load and creates, you know, diabetes, basically. So you have all these benefits of drought resistant, hardy, short, stubby wheat. That's replaced the old amber leaves of grain that I think is in our national anthem. You know, which is tall fields of wheat. But there are many harmful consequences of that breeding.

• 1:48:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's just one example. And so we're seeing increasing levels of nutritional deficiencies of protein and zinc and minerals because of this. And then we destroy the soil with the chemicals we put on with the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and the tillage and the industrial farming methods that deplete the soil organic matter. In order to actually get the nutrients out of the plants, you've got to have a living soil with bacteria that act in symbiosis with the mycorrhizal fungi to extract the nutrients for the plant. So you might have a soil that's full of minerals, but it can't get to the plant. So you created this cascading set of effects that have ended up with a diet that is highly

• 1:49:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  industrialized, highly processed, scalable, shelf stable. You know, when was that show? I forget. They found the guy, found a hamburger in his pocket. It was twenty years later or something, a Big Mac, and it was still perfectly preserved. No, it doesn't break down. I mean, there's that joke, you should only eat food that rots, you know? So we've gotten so far away from that. So it's no wonder our diet's killing us.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so you were mentioning the way Ivan Elge's book influenced you. One of the ones that I read early was.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  Bernard Jensen's work, one of the kind of founders of anthropopathic medicine. He wrote Chemistry of Man, which was looking at what all the different trace minerals do in the body and what the trace mineral deficiency does. But then he wrote a great book, and there are many like this. It was just the first one I read called Empty Harvest. It was about correlating deficiency of trace minerals in the soil with specific kind of trace mineral deficiency diseases. And he was showing like when agricultural soils in the US in the USGS surveys started showing almost no selenium levels and then heart disease becoming rampant. And of course, heart disease is multifactorial. It was from sugars, from a lot of things, but like that was a thing. And where chromium and vanadium started to become lower, type two diabetes also got higher, which play roles in insulin penetration.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  And so if you think about it again, and from the evolutionary perspective, that everything in the biosphere is made of the same stuff. So then it makes sense that if you're eating stuff, your body can break down that form and make it into the stuff that you're made of because it's made of the same stuff. But as soon as you start engineering food that is not actually this made of the same evolutionary stuff and you start changing the soil, that's going to change a lot, right? So even before you deep fry the stuff. Yeah. Like the plants you're talking about are already just not food. Yeah. Even when they're taken from the ground, because again, you in a forest, there's no such thing as waste, right? Everything that falls on the soil turns into soil, turns into plants, turns into animals.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  And so it's important to get in an ecosystem, all the loops are closed, right? All of the old stuff turns into new stuff. And there's no such thing as unrenewable resource extraction, right? The forest is not doing mining unrenewably. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, right? That's what we now call cradle to cradle as if it's a fancy thing. But obviously, closed loop cycling is how nature works. We start extracting stuff from nature faster than it can replenish, leading to deficiency issues on one side of the ecosystem and then turning it into trash and pollution on the other side faster than it can be processed. That's ecological overshoot, right? But in our food systems, right, like what is the fertilizer in a forest? Everything that came out of the forest goes back into the forest. Nothing's removed, nothing's extracted from the forest. So if we clear cut a forest.

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  And then we turn it into cropland and then we grow a single kind of crop. It's going to pull out of that good soil, all kinds of nutrients. We're going to take all of that out, then we're going to spray it with NPK. Right? So we've got nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and that's it. Maybe some calcium or something depending. But what about the whole rest of the 72 critical trace minerals? And what and that NPK is going to kill the living matter, which as you mentioned, the living matter not only helps the plants uptake the nutrients, but also modulates its genetic expression and all those things. Once you do that a few times, there's just nothing left in the soil, which is why you get desertification. And then you can keep it alive artificially. It's not alive. It's just like some weird growing substrate.

• 1:52:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  And then because it's minerally deficient, the plants are sick. Right? They don't have good immune system. They can't produce volatile oils. So now they're much more susceptible to pathogens. And because they're monocroped, right? Because in a natural environment, you'd have a little bit of one plant that a that a bug might eat. But you'd have plants that produce something that that bug doesn't like right next to it that grow in symbiotic guilt.

• 1:52:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think it's so important you just said, plants have their own defenses. They have an immune system. And that the way that they keep away pests and and diseases and things is through these phytochemicals that they make. And we essentially created a food system that's bred phytochemicals or engineered phytochemicals out of the food.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Both by removing everything from the soil, then by hybridizing the crop.

• 1:53:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  So if you think about hybridizing, like we started learning this with animal husbandry, call it 10,000 years ago, right? Six to 12,000, whatever. And as we and before that with dogs, right? Like even well before we started to do with goats and then cows and stuff, the the wolf part, but we didn't want to keep them like wolves. Right? So we started to breed them. And we've got chihuahuas and we've got St. Bernards. And they're both wolves.

• 1:53:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  And you're like, damn, these are really different creatures. This is not synthetic biology and genetic engineering. This is literally just selective breeding. But we learned that we started being like, man, we can do that to plants. We can do it to all kinds of things.

• 1:54:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's unintended consequences. We have a, we have a hybridized dog. It's a Bernadoodle.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we just found out it has allergies because these, these dogs have more allergies. So they're not.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  And so you don't get

• 1:54:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Very sweet.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Only upside, right? You get upside and you get downside from that. So then we start hybridizing all the animals. And if you look at a, what used to be what we call a chicken, this beautiful, colorful, small bird that lives in trees in Southeast Asia. It's a gorgeous bird. It doesn't have much meat on it, right? In a natural environment, it'd be very gamey. And you look at the hybridizing of that to this, and, and that's even before you shoot it full of estrogen and steroids and antibiotics and give it a super toxic feed.

• 1:54:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Full of arsenic.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  But you're like, okay, so these are not the same genetics at all. And in the same way that those animals now are going to have hip dysplasia and allergies and whatever. When you eat them, that a lot of those effects translate, right? And now because the plants don't have the volatile chemicals, they, and because you didn't plant them in gills, you've monocrop them. You're going to get locusts, right? You're going to get pesticides issues. I mean, you're going to get pest issues. So now you got to spray them in pesticides. And again, like we said, are toxic enough to kill the thing that makes it through the nuclear blast on the food. And then we don't want any other crops because we're designing for tractors. So then we spray the herbicides, which, and so you're like, okay, we, we took all the nutrients out of the soil. We just put back the nutrients to make the thing look like a thing, but there's no actual micronutrient in it, right?

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  It looks like a tomato, but the nutrient deficiency is pretty radical. The genetics are hybridized to be like an, an heirloom citrus has got a lot of seeds in it.

• 1:55:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  Like, what does it mean to make a seedless thing when it's growing for reproduction?

• 1:55:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Right? You're growing this weird sterile thing. Like obviously the thing that can't reproduce is not healthy. And so in the process of getting it seedless or making it huge or whatever, you also breed all these nutrients out. And like you mentioned, you might breed types of proteins in the gliadin or whatever that are hard to digest, cause inflammatory issues. And then, then you spray it with pesticides and herbicides. And then that would be what you put in your salad if you're trying to eat like raw or fresh stuff.

• 1:56:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Now then it gets even worse because you're like you go to the grocery store to buy an apple and it's about to be apple season.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  You're like, wait, it's about to be apple season. Where was this thing? Maybe it was a greenhouse somewhere else that got shipped here. Usually even worse conditions, soil. Maybe it was actually stored.

• 1:56:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, most apples are stored for about a year before they're eaten.

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. So they're stored in a, in a nitrogen environment. So it doesn't oxidize in a fridge. And so the thing that even if you're trying to do fresh stuff, you're like, this is hybridized, demineralized, poisoned and a year old. And so, you know, you were mentioning, what does it mean in another podcast to eat? Not ultra hybridized. What, what's the term ultra processed foods? The, one of the people who I got a study with when I was young that influenced me the most was Dr. Everett Loomis, Healing for Everyone. I don't know if you ever came across, he was one of the other early naturopaths, Dr. Christopher and those guys.

• 1:57:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  And my family had actually had some quote unquote incurable illnesses that got help through alternative processes that kind of got us in that path. And we actually got to go live with that guy. Dr. Loomis on his healing clinic when I was a kid. And I got to see people coming in in wheelchairs and leaving non-wheelchairs, just having really radical kind of change. And it was very old school. It was kind of Ann and Wigmore like stuff. And, but it was real interesting to hear. He was also a medical doctor, but like he was eighty five by the time I met him and he had boiled it down to a very simple thing. And he's like, number one principle of nutrition is eat as close to that living ecosystem as you can.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Number two is pay subtle attention to how the foods feel in your body.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  Everything else, whatever.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  And like nightshades and ratios of macronutrients and whatever.

• 1:58:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  So he had these gardens, these kind of huge gardens and orchards, and he told people, go pick the food you feel called to and eat it right there. Don't even like just stand outside with your feet in the dirt and eat it.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  And that and that's it. That's your diet while you're here. It's an impatient thing. And it was amazing how much people got better if the only food they could eat was standing by the tree or the plant that they picked it off of while they ate it. And of course, he emphasized heirloom species and good soil and no pesticides.

• 1:58:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, you know, there's, there's a guy who kind of looks like you a little bit with the beard. His name's Fred Provenza. Do you know him? Oh, God, you would love him. You guys would just jam. He's a someone I got to know recently, who's a professor for years at Utah State University and studied range line ecology and the relationship between plants and the soil and animals and humans. And basically, he wrote a book called Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom. And, you know, he, he, he basically said that, that animals intuitively know what to eat when to keep themselves healthy. So they forage on some major food crops, but then they'll forage if they're left their

• 1:59:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  own devices and there's enough variety of wild plants around on different plants that have different medicinal properties or different nutrients. And in the book, he talked about this study that was done, I think in the 20s in an orphanage in Canada, where they took kids who really hadn't been exposed to a lot of whatever drunk food or American diet, and they, they gave them like weird stuff like brain and organs and all kinds of weird food that we wouldn't think would be things we want to eat or the kids would want to eat. And these kids actually were eating completely in harmony with what their bodies needed and seeking out those foods and nutrients and the food that they needed and were far healthier than kids were control group that were fed a regular diet.

• 2:00:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I was like, that's fascinating that humans have lost their ability to understand their sort of nutritional wisdom and, and to understand how things affect us.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  If people pay attention, like, okay, I'm eating this food.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  Do I feel sleepy afterwards? Do I feel very heavy and lethargic? Does my belly hurt? Am I still craving stuff? Do I have stronger craving? Like, most people just don't notice, right? And if you, this is why his second principle was kind of pay detailed attention to how your body feels, which doesn't mean just, you know, what food sounds good to your mind. It's when I eat this thing, how do I actually feel? And he's like, if you eat close to the living ecosystem, as close as possible, and you pay attention to how you feel, you're gonna do pretty well. And it's true, like, there are some other things you could add to that, but you should start with that as the foundation. I remember one study from an indigenous scholar that said the pharmacopeia of plants that the Native Americans considered edible plants,

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  when, obviously, there are many Native American groups, but there was some pharmacopeia they were referencing, that had their list of edible plants, there's about 5,000 plants in North America.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  And you go to the grocery store and you're like, there are not 5,000 foods in the produce section. And even of the ones in the produce section, I don't get the bok choy or whatever all that often. And you're like, how many different plants? So the plants I'm getting, one, probably were grown a long time ago and stored, right? Because they're not seasonal. Two, they're hybridized. Three, they're grown in crap soil and sprayed with stuff. And I'm eating very few. And each one has different phytochemicals and different things at moduli genetic expression. So, again, evolutionary environment, you don't have very much of any one plant before you start row cropping. You have a very little bit. They're seasonal, and the whole ecosystem has shared needs. Yeah, I mean, I think 60% of our diet is corn, wheat, soy, and depending on where you are in the world, rice.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  And then the rest of the 40% is another 12 plants, like carrots and onions and potatoes and iceberg lettuce, you know? And those, for you mentioned, were how much of a hunter-gatherer diet? Uh, zero. Zero?

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a significant thing, because we're not trying to, like, do some romantic savage myth where, like, but we are saying we evolved to be fit to a particular thing. Yeah. And our genes haven't changed when we have changed what we've exposed us to so radically.

• 2:02:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, the whole idea of the in, in, like, intuitive eating, it's really what animals do. And we've lost the ability to do that. And not only that, but we've, the foods we produce have hijacked our normal regulatory pathways and dysregulate our appetite, dysregulate hunger, have immune effects on our body that create inflammation.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  So people don't crave what's good for them most of the time anymore, right? Because the system has become addicted to hypernormal stimuli.

• 2:03:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I crave, I crave chopped liver.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Well, if you're pretty healthy, you crave what's good for you. But if you're pretty unhealthy, you typically crave what will make you feel better instantly because it's providing some dopamine-ergic hit.

• 2:03:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's interesting, because I, I, I had a surgery and I lost half my blood volume four months ago. And I've gotten most of it back, but my, my iron stores are low because I basically sucked up all my iron reserves, like all the money in my bank account, I got used up to pay for what I needed to sort of run my body. And I noticed myself like craving things like liver. Like, I want some liver. And my wife's like, what are you doing?

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  But talk about the craving in Super Size Me.

• 2:03:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  Because that's different, right? And most people find that they're dealing with cravings for things that are totally not good for them.

• 2:03:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's different than, than like your instinctual wisdom. It's really a hijacking of the brain through its effects on dopamine. And the way these foods are designed to create a dopamine hit that creates sort of short-term pleasure and long-term pain. And these are highly addictive. And the shocking stat, and this is sort of amazing to me. And I, I obviously had many patients who I knew had food issues and were craving the wrong things. But according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a validated metric for looking at, not just like, oh, I crave ice cream, but like actual people who are truly addicted and who go through withdrawal, whose life is occupied by food, who can't think of anything else,

• 2:04:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  who, who's had their lives destroyed by food, just like the criteria for being an alcoholic or any other addict, your life kind of degrades dramatically. It's fourteen percent of the world's population, including fourteen percent of kids, which is pretty frightening when you think about it. I mean, it's like one in five or one on one. And I'm not good at math, one in seven. I think people have have a food addiction that's that's controlling your lives.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  But on the not quite that bad gradient there is like almost everybody.

• 2:05:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:06Speaker 01

  Which is pretty important because if you define addiction in the broader sense of just a compulsive behavior for something you know isn't good for you, but you can't really stop. Most people's relationship with food would be described that way.

• 2:05:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  And meaning they know they do not eat what they know the best diet for themselves would be.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Not because of money and not because of time.

• 2:05:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, I mean, I it's it's like the body snatchers. The food industry has understood how to design foods that are hyper palatable, that hijack your brain chemistry, your microbiome, your metabolism, your immune system in ways that and your hormones in ways that never happened before in human evolution. And they're, I mean, nobody wakes up and goes, I want to be overweight. Nobody wakes up and goes, I want to be to become diabetic. I want to be three, four, five hundred pounds. It is is it is not something that people willfully choose.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  I was very overweight as a young teenager and, you know, my my family just didn't know better about that particular thing of like, uh, which they should have, having met Dr. Loomis, but uh, but it was like all pizzas and that kind of food. And I remember feeling really bad about being overweight, really wanting not to eat and just having such a hard time, especially because my environment was everyone else was eating around, right? And then I remember when I started to learn more, kind of early teenager about it and switched to

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  like started to eat salads where it wasn't iceberg lettuce. It was like a bunch of deep, dark kinds of greens with a bunch of fresh seeds and nuts and seaweeds and like whatever. You couldn't eat that much, like a very morally rich thing that is very fibrous and takes a lot of chewing. And yet with the other thing, like after you're already in pain because you're full, you want to keep eating.

• 2:06:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's true. Right. I mean, I think that's what I say. No, nobody been. On a bag of avocados or ten, ten, you know, ribeye steaks, right? You just can't, but you could easily eat, you know, two quarts of ice cream or a giant bag of cookies on your own.

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  And what the cookies and the ice cream have in common is it is the combinatorics of salt, fat and sugar with palatability. Right? Which is like, this is the interesting thing of like, okay, so we need some macronutrients, but we need a lot of micronutrients is what we're made of. Right? Is we're, it's enzymes that catalyze stuff. We're obviously made of proteins, but we're also made of minerals that make up bones and all the stuff. And so in an evolutionary environment, as you mentioned, you got very little sugar, right? You got little bits of sugar that were naturally in fruit, but that fruit, again, the orange before it was hybridized or the berries, there was just, they were not that many of them. They were only around a certain time of year. Other animals were competing for them.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  So because though there people could die of famine, anyone who could fill up on something that could create some caloric storage, there was an evolutionary incentive for that, right? So you get a dopamine hit when there is sugar because there's almost.

• 2:08:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, they're designed to gain weight. That's what we're designed to do in the face of. Yeah, excess food or calories will store it or later.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  And if there's a, there's very little fat in the evolutionary environment that you can get super easy, the, the wild game is gaming, right? Not.

• 2:08:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Hunter gathers would, would, when they would kill an animal and then the Hadza like this, we visited them in Africa. They would break the bones and suck the marrow to get the fat because that was the most prized part.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  So there's not a heap of fat. There's not a heap of sugar. Salt's hard to come by. So those things in an evolutionary environment, you get a dopamine hit for because they're important. Right? There's a lot of green vegetables, right? Like leafy things. There's a lot of plants and so that you don't need a dopamine hit for those. Cause those are the things you kind of have to do most of your eating on. So then we figure out how to produce excessive amounts of food, extract the sugar, fat, salt, and recombine it into shakes and donuts and hamburgers and whatever. But it's basically least amount of chewing, right? Like maximum palatability or easy chewing, salt, fat, sugar combos. It have almost no real nutrients, but are maximally dopaminergic.

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  And that process of make something that is a hyper normal stimuli. But it was a stimuli because it was evolutionarily relevant because one, it was rare. It's not rare anymore. Two, you had to go do exercise to get it. And three, it was bound with trace minerals and phytochemicals and other things. So when you separate, you don't have to do that evolutionary work to get it. It's not rare. We have way too much of it and it's devoid of all the nutrients. Yet your genetics still have a dopamine response. And so from a supply side economically, this is awesome.

• 2:09:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Right? Because if I'm just a businessman thinking about, I actually have a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. Like I can literally be in committing a crime of fiduciary responsibility. If I do not maximize shareholder profit, how am I going to maximize shareholder profit? Well, I want the most customers I can have. So how do I max my total addressable market? And I want the most revenue, but lifetime revenue. For lifetime revenue, addiction is awesome.

• 2:10:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  Especially addiction starts in childhood.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  And if it's food, total addressable market is everybody. So from a business point of view, like that's just almost.

• 2:10:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Stomach share. I call it stomach share. And it's, it's interesting. We know there's an extra 500 calories a day created in our agricultural system per person in this country that people are eating. You know, the calorie consumption has gone up historically from the seventies, although there's been an interesting decrease in calorie consumption. With an increase in obesity, which is a very interesting conversation. There's a separate conversation really about how all calories are not the same and certain calories are more problematic. That did cause the body to store the calories, which is this fuel partitioning theory of obesity, which is different than the energy balance theory,

• 2:10:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  which has to do with just too many calories and not enough exercise.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  So if you look at calories multiplied by the type of calories, right? Glycemic index, whatever.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Kind of subtracted or divided by the.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Trace mineral micronutrient density and exercise needed to get the food. That ratio looks pretty bad.

• 2:11:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Terrible.

• 2:11:18Speaker 01

  It's not just 500 more calories, it's that whole ratio of thing.

• 2:11:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then there's a deconstruction of the food. That's even worse. The, the sort of industrial chemical separation of all the components of food, like corn or wheat or soy into different things that are not found in nature. And the chemical structure has been altered and the properties have been altered. And that seems to have this unique effect on us. And this is why we're seeing such an increase in the research that's showing the ultra-processed food, which still needs to be defined more carefully. But, you know, we kind of intuitively understand what is a cheeto is an ultra-processed food. It's like, what is that? You know, like there's no cheeto tree out there. And that, that has a really unique effect on our biology and it's driving so many chronic

• 2:12:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  illnesses and it's causing such food addiction. So, you know, Daniel, we've kind of covered a lot. We've covered the load of environmental toxins that we're all exposed to and that none of us is exempt from. And this is sort of evidenced by, you know, the Bill Hulcourt studies or fat biopsy studies they've done on humans where everybody's pre-polluted. We've talked about the problems with our diet and they, both the depletion of our food supply through the hybridization and the soil damage, as well as the growth of ultra-processed food and the reduction of the variety of foods we eat. But there's other ubiquitous things that are causing us to be ill. And you know, one of the things I think you talk about is the fact that there really are no healthy humans left.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  I mean, there are people that are healthier than others, but how many times do you see someone who is an athlete, who is still, shows markers of diseases on their way?

• 2:13:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A lot.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And of course, those athletes then later in life will get diseases where you trace back and like they were already in pathoetiology. Right? And

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  so the idea of disease is this individual thing is different than disease that is a result of systemic factors everybody's swimming in. And that's kind of one of the things we want to talk about is there's like, there is ubiquitous pathology. That is not necessary. It's not obligated. It's stuff that we could change.

• 2:13:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So we're swimming in a disease causing soup essentially.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  And disease meaning lots of things, right? Like if we think back about an evolutionary environment.

• 2:13:44Speaker 01

  The unit of selection was not the individual. So she's such an important topic. An individual.

• 2:13:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was a group.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  It was a group. Right? Like, there are animals that are pretty solo animals and there are animals that are social animals and they have different selection processes. But a solo sapien in the Serengeti is dead.

• 2:14:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Bad news.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Still leopard, they'll get by.

• 2:14:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? Cats are more solitary in most environments. Lion's a bit of an exception, but humans are a social primate. And so it was groups of humans. Coordinating together that were what was selected for. So things that make humans physiology unhealthy, things that make their psychology unhealthy, things that make the social relationships break down are all breaking down the evolutionary substrate.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Really important. Right? And so if we think about

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  ubiquitous psychopathology for a moment. So in the same way, you've got like, okay, your vitamin C solo, you got scurvy. Or your vitamin D solo, you got rickets. Well, above vitamin D solo, you got rickets. You've got way increased likelihood for immune disorders and osteoporosis and stuff.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  With the DSM and mental illness, you have this person has major depressive disorder. But below that is this person's depressed.

• 2:15:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  This person has diagnosable generalized anxiety disorder. We're going to put them on benzos. Well, that's actually a lot of people. It's actually really sad and benzos are a horrifying drug from a side effect. An addiction point of view.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  And a society responding to its problems is pretty hard when a lot of people are on benzos and SSRIs and opiates. It does not make a.

• 2:15:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Forget sugar. That's really the opiate of the masses.

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  But opiates are also the opiate of the masses, right? More people died of fentanyl last year in the US than all the soldiers in the Vietnam War over 11 years by 2X.

• 2:15:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  Right? That's a, that's a lot. And when you look back at the like opioid crisis Sackler family thing, that case got prosecuted.

• 2:15:56Speaker 01

  This, there are a lot of cases like that that don't get prosecuted, right? The perverse incentive is really profound. So iatrogenic disease, disease that is caused by some aspect of the healthcare or medical system is a subset of anthropogenic disease, right? Mining is causing diseases. Agriculture is causing diseases.

• 2:16:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then we have to medicate those with more drugs, right?

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, we said earlier that from a business point of view, lifetime revenue of a customer minus costs to do business, multiplied by total addressable market and then the penetration of total addressable market is kind of the equation, right? Well.

• 2:16:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For profit.

• 2:16:33Speaker 01

  Well, all of that equals total profitability.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  And so if I think about it, I want addiction is really good for lifetime revenue, but so is upsell and cross-sell. And so if there is a medicine, the side effect of which is another medicine I also own, and whether it's the company or whether it's the financial institutes that invest across the companies. If there is food that you make a lot of money on, that causes diseases that the medical system make money on, you're like, okay. Just if if one was just following their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit, they would do it that way. This does not equal making healthy humans at scale. And then you can say, well, caveat emptor, what the market, you know, like buyer beware. And no, this is total nonsense.

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  If you think about, it's really important to understand how much our core social systems. When you're reading Adam Smith of the founding fathers were a different world in 1700s. Or, you know, so when you look at free speech in 1776,

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  there wasn't much classified stuff. There didn't have to be much classified stuff because and nobody's talking about free speech absolutism is saying, let's declassify all the classified military stuff. Now, when you have the whole continent, because nobody was here that had militaries to defend themselves at the same scale. There were a lot of people here, but they could all be kind of destroyed. You got the whole continent and the fastest way to, if you share information with the population, your enemies, they would literally have to take a boat, a very slow moving sailing ship to get somewhere. And then they would have to take a boat back. It's very different than when they can send a signal message and then send a missile or a cyber attack.

• 2:18:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In like back seconds, yeah.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  So now, so as soon as you start getting a world where if the if the citizens know, the enemy knows. And more and more things in systemic warfare are an aspect of national security. Do you want them to know where the big aquifers are? And do you want them to know where the fertilizer supplies are? Because it's weapons and food and phosphorus and blah, blah, blah. So you get more and more things that the public couldn't know about because they're classified, because they're national security. Because if the public knows, the Chinese know, the Russians know. You're like, okay, the founding fathers did not have to deal with that issue. There were no cyber attacks, there were no strikes. So you gotta like rethink through it and say, well, how should we do it today? Right? We want as much open society as possible. Thinking through national security seems reasonable, but we've got kind of got to redo it. Founding kind of market theory.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  Founding market theory, if you think about like, we're going to a market and I'm going to sell some stuff and you're going to buy some stuff. I'm going to sell some stuff, me and a couple of people. Right? There is a symmetry between the supply side and the demand side. Where you can literally go to all the people making shoes and you can see what is the best product. I can feel them moving around. What's the best product at the best price? And you can do that, which creates an incentive for the suppliers to make the best product, the best price. Okay, that seems cool. But as soon as you're dealing with

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  the supply is getting larger and larger and the demand in aggregate is, but the consumer is still the consumer. So now you've got multi-billion dollar multinational corporation employing massive amounts of psychologists, split testing, whatever, to be able to manufacture demand. And the individual person who can't begin to compete with the information warfare of that.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  Now to say, well, demand is driving supply. Demand is obviously not driving supply.

• 2:20:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's the line I hear from these big CEOs of food companies. Well, we're just giving your customers what they want.

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  No, every drug pusher says that.

• 2:20:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you, if you, that rationale, you say, well, they could sell $2 bags of cocaine. They could say, we're just giving our customers what we want.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  And you give them the first hit for free. And then you say, I'm just giving them what they want. That's the plausible deniability to be driving addiction. Now, if you have that much power relative to the other side, and you're starting with kids, what the mark, like what buyer beware, no, that's absolute nonsense, right? And so this is asymmetric information war on people. And then you didn't have the, like, humans were small then relative. You think about time of Adam Smith, there's a half a billion people in the world. We don't have an industrial revolution at scale. Couple hundred years go by, you 16x the population. You 100x the resource consumption per capita.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  How big we are relative to the planet changed. Externalities are a much bigger deal. You can't just think of nature as a place you can pollute and put trash and steel from for free forever. And so now not pricing in the externalities is a really big deal because my margin goes up if I don't pay my externalities. The pollution that I don't have to pay to process is better.

• 2:21:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're not really externalities. They're just, I, they call these side effects of drugs. They're not side effects, they're just effects we don't like.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  When we say externality, what it means is it's externalized from the cost equation. Right? This is a financial term, which means, so my.

• 2:21:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like the, the, the guy who makes soda is not paying for the diabetes care. They're not paying for the.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  They're not paying for the diabetes.

• 2:21:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're not paying for the damage to the soil to grow the corn syrup that they're putting in their soda. They're not.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  So those are real costs that.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  People are gonna have to pay. The environment pays, but they're not paying. So they are socializing the cost and privatizing the game, right? At this scale, that is a totally catastrophic thing. This shit has to be rethought.

• 2:22:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because that leads to a disease creating economy, which is what we have.

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  Of course. So when people are sick and need to buy more medicine, GDP goes up.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  And if maybe even total GDP long term will go down because of productivity issues, that business's GDP that is being optimized for is still going up. And so like, so think about, think about this way for a moment. So you mentioned there were people that lived to be 100 years old.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Now, when we're looking at diseases,

• 2:22:37Speaker 01

  we have a complex of an IP structure, an intellectual property structure, a regulatory apparatus, and a set of financial incentives, and a reductionist epistemology that all clustered together into a clusterfuck. And I want to just kind of describe this.

• 2:22:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:22:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Unpack that.

• 2:22:55Speaker 01

  The, to be able to say this is going to treat a disease, you have to go through a phase three clinical trial. And we like that. We say that's the government protecting us because you're testing that it's safe and effective. You know, phase three clinical trials are not cheap. Almost anybody can afford them, right? They're getting a little bit cheaper, but they're still most of a billion dollars. And when you factor all the ones the company does that fail in phase one or two or whatever, and you amateurize those, it's like it's most of a billion dollars to get a drug through approval. It's a lot of pre-revenue money for a company.

• 2:23:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  If you think about it from the point of view of almost any other company, hey, we're gonna spend years and a billion dollars before we make a penny. The lean startup model, well, it is a good business model if you can make enough back. And making enough back is going to be.

• 2:23:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We need chronic drugs. We need chronic drugs.

• 2:23:44Speaker 01

  I need chronic drugs for large populations. I have to make enough money to pay for the class action lawsuit and to pay for the legal firms to try to make class action lawsuits illegal. Right? Like, that's all part of it. And, but to, to pay that most of a billion dollars for the.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Phase three clinical trial. To ever make that money back, I have got to patent that thing. So I'm the only one that can sell it because if I was studying a vitamin or an herb or an endogenous chemical the body produces, and once I put the billion dollars in, anybody else could produce it at the same cost as me, then I my business model wouldn't work. Now, why isn't NIH paying for that? It's a good question.

• 2:24:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They should.

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  But as a result, I can't patent vitamins. I can't patent minerals, nutrients, and or parts of the human physiology. So I'm only going to study novel synthetic chemicals that were never part of any healthy human or any evolutionary environment. And to just think about how batshit absurd it is to say, the only things we will study to treat illness are synthetic chemicals, talk alien to any healthy human or any evolutionary environment.

• 2:24:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  New to nature molecules, yeah.

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  You're like, yeah, it's weird. It's weird that the only things we would study are those things.

• 2:25:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  And what about like, the things that healthy people have more of naturally than unhealthy people and that when you were young, you had more of, right? So you start looking at peptides that your thymus gland produces or whatever. And you're like, maybe that stuff is used, but the patent structure makes that difficult. And you kind of don't want people to own a patent on something the body produces. So maybe the funding structure has to become different, right? But then again, if like, okay, so the five billion dollar a year, five trillion dollar a year budget in the US for healthcare, it's a lot of money, right? Which roughly half the government is subsidizing. You look at the desire to cut trillions from the government spend right now, and you say

• 2:25:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Nobody's talking about this.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  Talk about it. You talk about it for a minute. This is, this is what make America healthy again should do. And this is totally nonpartisan. It's just straightforward science and economics.

• 2:25:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, considering our federal deficits exploding and that, you know, our economic system is now shaky, that, you know, the trust in the dollar as a world currency is kind of crumbling. I mean, we're, we're kind of in due to, and a lot of it has to do with the incredible amount of healthcare costs that the government covers. And most people don't know this.

• 2:26:11Speaker 01

  But I want to say, this was all true during Biden, and it was true during Obama and Bush and whatever. This is like, this is not new stuff.

• 2:26:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, this is not new. It's been going on for a long time.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, so of, of the total tax revenue collected by the United States. One third of it is used for healthcare. And of the total healthcare bill, which is almost five trillion dollars on the whole country. About forty percent of it's paid for by the government in various health programs, not just Medicare and Medicaid, but Indian Health Service.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  VA.

• 2:26:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Children's Health Insurance Program, the VA, the Department of Defense, federal employees, the list goes on.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  Wait, I just, I just want to make sure everyone hears that this is a T, not a B. Right? Five trillion.

• 2:26:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, five trillion, yeah. Five trillion. So the government pays like upwards of two trillion dollars.

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  And how much money are we hearing right now? We want to try to cut from the government, something like a trillion.

• 2:26:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  Or like a trillion. Now. Isn't it something like a half of all the Medicare costs would go away if you just fix food?

• 2:27:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, if you fix food, yeah. And it's tough to get people to understand this.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Please break this down, because it's like cutting, okay, sure, if there are some government services that are lame and we need to redo them. But we need less government services of the lame type, but we need more of certain other types, whatever. But if, if half, if the, if we spend more money on healthcare than we do and on war or anything else.

• 2:27:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Way far.

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  If more than half of it, you just change food and goes away simultaneously now. People's fertility goes up, their depression goes down, their health goes up, the DOD can have fighting guys again, because right now they're all obese and there's no, like, it's kind of omni better for everyone. GDP will go up because there's not as many sick days and people work longer. Like, outside of.

• 2:27:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For everybody.

• 2:27:53Speaker 01

  Outside of maybe some pharma companies and some food companies, this is omni better for everyone.

• 2:27:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right. That's right. And there's not that, I mean, there's not that many food companies, like, I think ten big, you know, processed food companies. There's, you know, a handful of ag companies that make fertilizer, probably four big ones, there's probably five or four or five seed companies.

• 2:28:14Speaker 01

  There should not be four or five seed companies.

• 2:28:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There should not, but there used to be hundreds of seed companies and now there's just a few. One of the big ones in China, you know, Monsanto and a bunch of other big ones now bear.

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  There should not be Terminator props.

• 2:28:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But, you know, when you think, right now, we're talking to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is an innovation hub of Medicare and of the CMS. And, and they, they're looking at, you know, diabetes reversal. Imagine if we could find a treatment for obesity and diabetes that wasn't Ozempic. And, and not only just manage the problem, but actually got rid of it and didn't come with a whole bunch of side effects.

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  How much diabetes was there in 1950?

• 2:28:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Almost none. I mean, there was just so little. Back, back 150 years ago, there was pretty much none. If you go back and look at the hospital records of Mass General back in the 1800s, it just was not, not happening.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  Even the fucking photographs.

• 2:29:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  Right? The obesity rate was not the same thing.

• 2:29:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, I mean, you just, I mean, you just look at pictures from the seventies, like a Woodstock. I mean, there's no chubby kids there or look at the beach pictures or, I mean, I, I remember seeing Amazing Grace, which was a movie made in 1970, uh, that Aretha Franklin, you know, was in Oakland and she was giving this concert in this church and it was incredible. And there was not a single overweight black person in that church. And in the sixties, they were healthier than whites and now there's, obesity rates are higher than the rest of the population.

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  Okay. So this is important. We're not talking about figuring out how to do some new, super hard, unprecedented shit. We're actually talking about reversing a completely new, unnecessary retarded phenomenon.

• 2:29:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's just amazing to me, Daniel, that, that physicians and the NIH doesn't go, wait a minute, where were all these diseases 60 years ago and like, what happened? And maybe we should study that and maybe we should design this healthcare system that reimburses for doing the right thing.

• 2:30:06Speaker 01

  Does our, does our NIH pay for all the nutrition studies?

• 2:30:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 2:30:10Speaker 01

  No, who pays for them?

• 2:30:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The food industry is 12 times as many nutrition studies as the government funds and and they spend about $12 billion a year. And and they find that there's when they look at government versus industry funded studies, the industry funded studies find a positive benefit for their product eight to 50 times more than a independently or government funded study.

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  So for everybody who wants to take all of the studies, put them in AI to know what's going on, most of the studies are shit. This is important. Don't like crap in crap out. Most of the studies are propaganda.

• 2:30:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  And like, I love science. Science is rad. We don't have much science in the world.

• 2:30:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  Science is, as Eddington defined it, the earnest endeavor to put into order the facts of our experience. Earnest endeavor, not the motivated endeavor to prove something in particular that we have an incentive to try to prove. And can you lie with facts? Yes. Can you manipulate science? Totally. So everybody is paying attention to the replicability crisis. Yes, there's a huge replication crisis. People are paying attention to P hacking. There's a huge issue with P hacking.

• 2:31:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  P hacking means is the P value of a study is how how accurate is that? And more likely to predict that the certain outcome was not the result of chance, but the result of whatever intervention or thing you did.

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  And then the study can say, yes, it improved that one molecule. That's true. It did a lot of other stuff, too. So that doesn't mean the fact that it passed the phaser clinical trial doesn't mean it was awesome like BIOX passed.

• 2:31:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Clumarin passed.

• 2:31:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:31:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:45Speaker 01

  And then they had to get pulled from the market because they killed too many people. And so what about the long term? When we realize there's not only acute causation, there's long term causation. What about the long term studies on new chemicals?

• 2:31:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Don't exist.

• 2:31:59Speaker 01

  That's ridiculous. If you're saying, let's enter something, let's enter something into the human body or into the biosphere the human body will take in.

• 2:32:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  That never existed before. That has molecules in it that nothing has ever interacted with before, that is designed to be biologically active. Let's, we understand that someone gets diagnosed with, you only have six weeks left to live with cancer, but that cancer is growing for 20 years or whatever. Right? We understand that there is long term. Issues.

• 2:32:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  And we test the drug for a very tiny amount of acute safety issues over a couple of years and then put it out. What the?

• 2:32:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or a couple of months.

• 2:32:41Speaker 01

  Yes, a couple of years being generous.

• 2:32:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  Right? Now, from the point of view of like, I gotta make all that money back that was in the Phase 3 clinical trial before the patent life ends. Because once the patent

• 2:32:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on R and D. People don't know that, but they always have to price the drug so high because of all the R and D. Well, nonsense, and you know, most of their costs in pharmaceutical companies are in marketing.

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  So I consider most of the science kind of like the R and D arm of capitalism. Because there are, like, science costs money. Who's gonna pay the money? Well, some pool of capital is gonna go to it. That pool of capital came from capital accumulation. It's not gonna put it in to lose it. It's gonna put it in because it sees a ROI on that investment.

• 2:33:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  So if we say, hey, here's a thing that we could study that would make people healthy on their own and they don't need to buy anything. Who's gonna fund that thing?

• 2:33:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Has to be the government.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  And now, everybody right now might be concerned about how much we'd ask the government to do. Yes, the government

• 2:33:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or philanthropists.

• 2:33:43Speaker 01

  And philanthropists have weird agendas, so.

• 2:33:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Some of those are not bad. I mean, there's a group called the Bozinski Group that's funding a lot of studies on psychiatry that have never been done before, looking at dietary interventions at Mayo Clinic, but they're spending millions and millions of dollars, which I think is good.

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, there's good philanthropy and we want that, but like, whether you're looking at kind of the Koch philanthropy on the right, driving the dark money thing, or the Gates philanthropy on the left, or like, there's a lot of people dubious of philanthropy right now. Fair. Right? So, and there's a lot of people dubious of government. Fair. Now, does that mean you don't have them? Or does it mean you fix them? You have to fix them, right?

• 2:34:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:23Speaker 01

  You can't, like, the, the, the market incentives alone here is the most powerful organization seeing people as extractively as they see the environment. That doesn't work. So you need something that can serve a protective role. It is not currently a adequately integrous, trustworthy system. The answer is it must be made better.

• 2:34:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. That's the question. How do we redesign civilization for health rather than what we have now, which is?

• 2:34:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Some by design, but I think most inadvertently by just ignorance or lack of paying attention, you know, has been a civilization designed for disease.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, okay, I wanna, how much is, like when we were mentioning the tetraethyl lead, they actually knew tetraethyl lead was toxic, put it out anyways, not a mistake.

• 2:35:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

  We mentioned the sacklers and the opioid crisis, knew, not a mistake. When.

• 2:35:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, tobacco companies initially didn't think tobacco was bad, but then they.

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  They started covering stuff up?

• 2:35:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Then they started covering stuff up, yeah.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so there's more of that. So PFOS is a very famous one, right? Like when we're talking about ubiquitous pollution.

• 2:35:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  PFOS, as in PFOS, the whole category of molecules.

• 2:35:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Teflon.

• 2:35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's about 10,000 molecules in the fluorinated surfactants, right?

• 2:35:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm a little nervous. I just had my PFOS levels checked in my quest, in my new function labs through Quest, and I'm excited to see what that's gonna be.

• 2:35:53Speaker 01

  But nobody can check all 10,000 of them, right? You're gonna check some tiny subset. But this is really important is right now, some studies that came out last year showed that every rain sample in the world has PFOS in it. Every single rain sample in the Amazon, in the Himalayas, in the Arctic snowfall, has PFOS in it because the molecules are so small that they evaporate and then come down the rain, which means also the water surface area in lakes and oceans and whatever all has PFOS affecting the gas fluid exchange, which is really fundamental to how life continues to exist here. And that means it's of course in the blood and in people.

• 2:36:36Speaker 01

  And why we call them forever chemicals is because nature does not do these polyfluorinated things, so there is no natural process, no bacteria, no nothing that can break it down.

• 2:36:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 2:36:46Speaker 01

  And so this is like, you can't be a prepper and move off grid if it's in the rainwater ever and get away from this. You have to actually lean in to helping change the civilizational system. We should not be putting PFOS into the atmosphere at the scale. Could we solve that? Yeah, we never used it before. Are there other solutions that can be surfactants? Yeah, totally, but you just have to be motivated enough to do the thing. So the reason I bring this up is I don't remember right now if it was DuPont or Dow. It was one of the two or three, actually, it was one of the three that originally developed Teflon PFAS. And then they sold it to the other one. And there was a court case that was just won this last year where they had to pay out 10 billion in damages

• 2:37:28Speaker 01

  from the fact that they knew it was toxic, covered it up and put it out anyways.

• 2:37:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, there was a movie called Dark Water about this.

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  They did a study, they did studies where they laced tobacco with it. All the people got respiratory illnesses. They gave it to mice, the mice got cancers and stuff. Then they hid all that, did everything they could do, suppress it in the scientific literature, whatever, get it out. Now it's in the rainwater everywhere. This was not a mistake, right? Now, um, there were, so they had to pay 10 billion in damages. There was a study done by a group of environmental scientists on what it would take to remove the PFAS from the environment, because we don't know how to break it down. So you have to absorb it, adsorb it particularly. Current technological processes to remove the existing PFAS will cost 160 trillion dollars.

• 2:38:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yikes, that's a lot of money. It's more than the global GDP.

• 2:38:15Speaker 01

  Yes, so the, even the idea externality is nonsense, right? Like, it's not like you externalize a little bit of the cost. It's that you externalize almost all the costs. The only thing you externalize, like, what is the cost of wood or a tree? It's literally the cost for me to cut it down, just the cost of extraction. The cost of oil, cost of extraction. Would it cost nature to make it? Not relevant. What would it, what are the harms? Not relevant. So literally, the only thing we internalize is the cost of extraction.

• 2:38:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:45Speaker 01

  Right, or production and nothing else. And so you're like, 160 trillion dollars to fix that. That's, and that's not, that's not including the healthcare effects of it.

• 2:38:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:54Speaker 01

  Or the permanent modification of the soil organisms. So we.

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  Have been optimizing for narrow, short-term goals in ways that affect lots of other things that cause some really serious problems. There is a comprehensive thing that has to be addressed. Like in functional medicine, you find, hey, there's a lot of people that are told they have an incurable disease. And you find they're not all incurable. You find that a lot of those people, if you know how to do the approach, a personalized approach, they can get a lot better.

• 2:39:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, if you know how to think about it.

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  Now, what you have to look for is, do they have mercury? Do they have lead? Do they have cadmium? Do they have mycotoxins? Do they have glyphosate? Are they nutrient deficient in these things? Do they have these subclinical infections? Blah, blah, blah. But all of those issues shouldn't exist for anybody. Those are all ubiquitous. So what percentage of people do you find has one or more heavy metal elevated?

• 2:39:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Most people. If they're eating fish, almost all people have mercury in their, in their blood. If people have fillings and fish, it's more in their systems. The only people I've seen when I'll do a chelation challenge is who don't have heavy metals or mercury are people who are, don't eat fish and don't have never had any fillings.

• 2:40:15Speaker 01

  And this is not looking at if they have lead from the pipes in the water system?

• 2:40:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, lead is out there. And so some people have more or less lead. And I'm sort of shocked at how many people have really high lead levels and how many horrible diseases it causes.

• 2:40:31Speaker 01

  And again, what, what percentage of people do you see have more mycotoxins or gliotoxins or biotoxins than is healthy?

• 2:40:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, a lot. I mean, a lot of people have these mold toxins. That's what you're talking about. And they're probably half of all buildings are water damaged. And a lot of people absorb these mycotoxins that don't get out of their bodies and recirculate and cause havoc and inflammation.

• 2:40:51Speaker 01

  So you said something earlier that's important, which is you were talking about gluten. And there's a lot of people that are like, man, very few people have celiac. Everything else is some kind of psychogenic nonsense. This is not true. When you're talking about gluten intolerance, you're not talking about full-blown celiac disease. You are talking about...

• 2:41:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, that's kind of 400%.

• 2:41:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because of these increase in these proteins and how damaged the art of the gut.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  So if you're talking about an evolutionary wheat plant that had like a few berries on it, and then hybridizing it to something that has a gazillion berries where you changed the chemical structure, then you sprayed glyphosate on it and it's grown in de-mineralized soil, like it kind of makes sense and you eat a humongous amount of it, kind of makes sense that maybe it would not respond as well for a lot of people. Now, so this is not saying everyone evolutionarily had a bad time with a native grain.

• 2:41:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 2:41:42Speaker 01

  To say that gluten toxicity is kind of ubiquitous.

• 2:41:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:46Speaker 01

  I mean gluten intolerance. So the same way with mold, because people be like, everybody lives with mold forever.

• 2:41:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 2:41:52Speaker 01

  Every tree breaks down with mold. We weren't all dying. What's the issue? So would you say a little bit about why mold is a way bigger deal today than it was? And this is not psychogenic nonsense?

• 2:42:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot more sort of mold damage and water damage buildings. There's also the sort of pre-existing kind of

• 2:42:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  dysregulation of your biology that makes you susceptible. So it's the total load phenomenon. Like mold in and of itself may not be an issue, but if you've got a load of environmental toxins, if your diet's crap, if your microbiome's crap, if you're nutrient deficient, then you get hit with mold, it's going to be a bigger issue.

• 2:42:30Speaker 01

  So partly the issue is because that person who's inside getting the indoor air poisoning is also not moving. So the lymphatic system is not flushing it out. They are not sweating. So their sweat system is not flushing it out. Just that alone would make a huge difference. Now they're also missing key nutrients that are needed for how the detoxification works. They have other toxins that are messing up the pathways. The indoor air not moving can allow concentrations to build up beyond what outdoor air has.

• 2:42:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:57Speaker 01

  It's a big deal.

• 2:42:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  The indoor air also has-

• 2:42:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We lived outside most of the time, right?

• 2:43:01Speaker 01

  The indoor air also has the VOCs and stuff. The outside environment, those funguses were balanced with microbiome of the soil and heaps of other things that made it to where you didn't get species overgrowth in the same way. But also, we started adding fungicides to all the paints.

• 2:43:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:18Speaker 01

  Right? So as to not get mildew inside.

• 2:43:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 2:43:20Speaker 01

  And just like using antibiotics didn't give you no bacteria, you got MERSs.

• 2:43:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:24Speaker 01

  And now the MERSs are super nasty.

• 2:43:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  More, more molds, yeah.

• 2:43:27Speaker 01

  The, we have fungicide resistant molds that produce more dangerous mygalotoxins.

• 2:43:33Speaker 01

  And and then building wise, like drywall is a lame thing to build with and and fast growing, cheap, soft woods, right, is really not the same as stone or hardwood or things. So like you, you basically build with a mold substrate.

• 2:43:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:51Speaker 01

  Like if you wanted to say, what would a perfect mold substrate be? We build with a perfect mold substrate, you make it to where the air doesn't move through the place. You put fungicides in the paint to make fungicide resistance. You make susceptible people, like of course you're gonna have a mold epidemic.

• 2:44:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's it's a big deal. And it's again, it's one of those areas in medicine's kind of a black box. Nobody looks at it. Nobody thinks about it.

• 2:44:10Speaker 01

  So if somebody's living in a house that has mold, are they, and you

• 2:44:17Speaker 01

  take them to a kind of traditional medicine where you're just gonna put them on meds, are they really gonna get better?

• 2:44:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, they don't even know how to diagnose it. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know how to look for it. They don't know the biomarkers that go off.

• 2:44:28Speaker 01

  They might end up calling it autoimmune disease and putting them on biologics and steroids and stuff.

• 2:44:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or say you're you're tall and you're had and you're Pearson Prozac, more likely.

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  And then you'll get an iatrogenic cascade from that. But then also, even if someone goes to like a functional medicine doctor, a naturopath, can you get rid of the mold if you're still in the moldy environment?

• 2:44:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, you have to get out of it. Yeah.

• 2:44:52Speaker 01

  And so if you start, now we're talking about like, there's one transition from medicine that is only thinking about synthetic, like giving a drug or a surgery as the solution or radiation, right? Like some toxic thing. Every one of those is like toxic.

• 2:45:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Our toolkit's pretty narrow. And the toolkit in functional medicine is pretty broad. And that's the difference.

• 2:45:15Speaker 01

  So the functional medicine thing is let's deal with the upstream causes in the body.

• 2:45:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:19Speaker 01

  But then the next thing, the systemic healthcare thing is, nobody should be having elevated mercury and light and microtoxin in the first place. You could build differently.

• 2:45:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:26Speaker 01

  You could do industry differently. And then

• 2:45:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So how do we have all the things we want in the society we want, the things we like, like our computers, which are full of toxic metals, our iPhones, and have a different environment? How do we redesign civilization for health? Because we've kind of unpacked a lot of the disease issues and the risks and the problems. Because I think, I think, you know, we need to rethink food, we need to rethink industrial processes. How do you envision a future that where, where we can actually create a better?

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  Well, let's just say some super basic things. First, you said we're number 50 in health. A lot of those other countries have laptops.

• 2:46:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hmm, that's true.

• 2:46:10Speaker 01

  Japan has laptops.

• 2:46:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:13Speaker 01

  Right? And, and Okinawa does, so.

• 2:46:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, the food is a big difference, too.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  They are nowhere near as healthy as absolute optimum would be, because they're dealing with some of these same systemic issues, but they're not dealing with all the same ones, because they've done a better job of certain parts of the healthcare system, or the environment management system. And so, you know, an average life expectancy of 76 or whatever here, while on a dozen meds and shitty quality of life for the last long time, and maintained with surgeries and stuff, versus 100 autonomous for most of the time, still have laptops. So just empirically, we can do better.

• 2:46:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:49Speaker 01

  Right? Now, could we do better than them? Totally.

• 2:46:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 01

  Now, what are some of the obvious things? Should we only study alien synthetic chemicals for health? Nothing else gets to make it through phase three clinical trials, because there's no way to fund it. We don't study anything that was in an evolutionary environment, a young body or healthy body. That seems batshit crazy. How about figure out how to fund the study of the things that make people healthy, that decrease with age, that correspond to more diseases, that you just couldn't say, let's do more of those things?

• 2:47:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, like peptides, or hormones, or...

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  And those things make a huge difference. Or vitamins, minerals, and herbs, right? Like, when people say, oh, well, vitamins, supplements don't work, whereas if, basically, clinical trials, who's going to pay for it? Like, who?

• 2:47:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And when they do them, they're fatally flawed in their design, because they're treating the nutrients like drugs, in terms of how the state do the study design.

• 2:47:40Speaker 01

  I got so upset during COVID, when some, some agencies reached out to me for help, I was trying to help them, and... Early on, we're like, okay, let's do studies on all the small molecules that have antiviral effects that already exist, particularly the old ones. So ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, but you know, valacyclavir, acyclovir, whatever, all the things. Why do you want to use old ones? Because you already know the long-term safety profile. What about a new one? Well, okay, so we're making a remdesivir or what? We don't know the long-term safety profile. How about let's start with ones where you already know the long-term safety profile. So all you got to study is efficacy. It just makes fucking sense, but where's the money in it? There's no money in it because they're already past patent. So I'm like NIH should be funding

• 2:48:24Speaker 01

  studies on just efficacy. They don't have to be long-term on things where we already know the long-term safety. We already know the drug interactions. We already know that shit on these old antivirals. Did that happen? No. And yet we saw things like

• 2:48:38Speaker 01

  synthetic, like drug vitamin D, calcified, all people got better. And like even a combination of an H1 blocker and an H2 blocker and people got better. And then, you know, like miraviric and hydrocortisone together and from long COVID, like there were a lot of things, right? And let alone, I'm not even going to talk about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or those things. Since it's become so politicized, you're like, this should not be a political topic. This is just an empirical topic. So I remember saying doctors should have in the very beginning, emergency authorization to prescribe the things that have antiviral effects based on patient presentation.

• 2:49:11Speaker 01

  And I won't say who, but someone put very, very strong pushback and said, no, no, we have to do randomized control trials first. I'm like, okay, if you're going to do the randomized control trials, do it for pre or post-exposure prophylaxis. Don't do it once people are already in the ICU because what antivirals work late stage? Like

• 2:49:29Speaker 01

  valacyclavir really works for herpes, but only in the first 24 or 48 hours. It doesn't work once you have a full-blown outbreak. So if the whole pharmacopeia of antivirals only works at the beginning. And so they said, okay, yeah, we'll do that. And then they funded the study and it was in the ICU when people were already sick as shit. And then it said they don't work. And I'm like, what antiviral would work in that?

• 2:49:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Intentionally designed to create a negative outcome.

• 2:49:50Speaker 01

  This is information war based on financial incentive. This was not just innocent. Like I know this was not just innocent. Because the people who are funding that ended up being.

• 2:50:04Speaker 01

  I won't say the rest of it. Invested in other things that happened.

• 2:50:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:08Speaker 01

  And that, that shit has to go, right? So.

• 2:50:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So one of the kinds of, what kind of, these are all like sort of perverse incentives that make us do the wrong thing and not actually study the right things or do the right kinds of research or create products and services that actually promote health.

• 2:50:24Speaker 01

  Who should research nutrition?

• 2:50:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, well, the NIH should, I think.

• 2:50:29Speaker 01

  Not food companies.

• 2:50:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 2:50:31Speaker 01

  Food companies research should be suspect. Duh. Particularly if it says their food is good for you and you should eat lots of it.

• 2:50:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, just look at the funding.

• 2:50:41Speaker 01

  So how about like, one of the things government science does is nutrition? Duh. How about we study old drugs again for new purposes, like the redo project for cancer or whatever? We actually put real money into that because we already know the long-term safety profile and we just have to look at efficacy. How much money does that get? This is not hard.

• 2:51:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's so, it's hard for the average layperson. I mean, I, there was this sort of, there's this debate going on about the kind of calories we eat and whether some are different than others. In other words, are sugar and starch calories worse for you than?

• 2:51:17Speaker 01

  This is not a hard topic.

• 2:51:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I mean, it's not.

• 2:51:19Speaker 01

  If you look at the science.

• 2:51:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you look at the science, it's not, but there, there are debates published in major journals, back and forth. I just read one.

• 2:51:26Speaker 01

  Funded by who?

• 2:51:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, well, it depends who, who was, who was the, the person who was the researcher? And, and one of them was this guy, Dr. Anstrup, who's, I think, a Belgian physicist scientist, who, you know, got funded by Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and who works for Novo Nordisk now.

• 2:51:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And like, trying to find ways to sort of bypass the mechanisms with food design. And, and he's debating and saying, you know, look, yeah, Coca-Cola calories are the same as any other calories. Doesn't matter where you get them, as long as you don't exceed your calorie need for the day.

• 2:52:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're gonna be fine.

• 2:52:01Speaker 01

  No thinking person.

• 2:52:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It doesn't even make sense logically, right?

• 2:52:04Speaker 01

  Because it's absurd.

• 2:52:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 2:52:06Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:52:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, but they go.

• 2:52:07Speaker 01

  It's empirically wrong and it's absurd.

• 2:52:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, then the argument as well, it's just thermodynamics. You know, who are you to argue with physics? I'm like, yeah, but if you understand the law of thermodynamics, energy is conserved, yes, but the final part of that sentence is in a closed system. And the body is not a closed system.

• 2:52:23Speaker 01

  Wait, when, like, that argument is so dumb.

• 2:52:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I agree.

• 2:52:31Speaker 01

  Can, energy is energy, sure. Can I just plug me into the wall and run on it? No, I need different forms of energy. Can I run my DC computer on AC without running through the transformer? No, energy is not energy. AC and DC are different. If I put AC into my computer without a transformer, it's going to blow the computer up. Can I feed my computer hydrocarbons? No, it doesn't know how to do that. Can I put gasoline into a diesel engine? No. Gasoline and diesel are more similar to each other than evolutionary food to the shit we eat now.

• 2:53:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  By a lot. The fact that we are so metabolically flexible is amazing. But it doesn't, you pay for it.

• 2:53:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:10Speaker 01

  And like, can, can I make one mineral out of another mineral? No, no amount of potassium gives me any amount of phosphorus.

• 2:53:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 2:53:22Speaker 01

  And so it's all thermodynamic. What the fuck? That is just like, it's just trying to say sciency sounding shit to make people stop thinking.

• 2:53:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's, it's a lot of, there's a lot of money to kind of declare that all calories are the same and.

• 2:53:35Speaker 01

  All atoms are different.

• 2:53:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:37Speaker 01

  All amino acids are different. All enzymes are different. They are not interchangeable. They are not all fungible.

• 2:53:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, but, yeah, I agree. But if you look at the medical literature, it's so full of this nonsense.

• 2:53:48Speaker 01

  Paid for by fucked up interests. So it's bad epistemology, but it's also fucked up interests.

• 2:53:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So these perverse incentives, sort of malalignment of, you know, of our institutions, our research infrastructure, our healthcare system, the payment systems, reimbursement systems, how do we get out of this mess?

• 2:54:06Speaker 01

  The whole thing has to be.

• 2:54:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If we have anthropogenic disease, how do we create the opposite anthropogenic health?

• 2:54:12Speaker 01

  Yes, so. Kind of the idea of ontological design is like most creatures are being designed are being designed by their environment. They're evolving to fit environmental niches. That's what they're being selected for, right? We're changing our environment. In turn, the environment's changing us back. We should think about how we want to change the environment that makes the kind of people we want to be. And rather than just like this provides something you want and like the consumers demanding it. Yeah, the consumers demanding it after you made it requisite to operate and manufactured demand, right? So like someone would be, oh, just don't use Facebook. Well, your company cannot competitive compete in marketing if you don't have Facebook because they have a monopoly on attention. So you say, don't use it. Fuck off. That's not true.

• 2:54:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:53Speaker 01

  Right? And if there is a patent on a drug, that's the only drug that does a thing, that sounds a lot like a monopoly. And so we have to think about, let's make stuff. Like, what are the other ways of doing the thing? And what are the total set of effects? And is this making healthier, happier, better people or not? And could we do it a better way? And if we're already getting worse outcomes in an area than we used to get, we for sure can do it a better way. Just reverse it. Right? Of course, we can innovate new, better stuff.

• 2:55:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That easily. I mean, we can't all of a sudden turn a dime and change your agricultural system or get rid of 70% of the foods in the grocery store. And I mean, we can eventually do it, but.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  How much money subsidizes conventional agriculture?

• 2:55:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Depending on the year, I mean, it's 13, 14 billion. And then you've got the extra payments that just got made, like 30 billion or.

• 2:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you look at the direct subsidies, the tax credits, the research credits, the blah, blah, blah. And you got like $100 billion that goes to subsidizing the super toxic stuff. And the argument is, well, we need food security. And without that, the food system wouldn't work. And only these big companies are the ones that can produce enough for food security. Hogwash, that's not why. It's because only the big companies lobby well. Little bitty farmers don't know how to lobby. So they're not going to get subsidies. And revolving doors, the person who's running the regulatory agency that used to work at the company that does the interest of the company. Like, so one of the things, fix revolving doors.

• 2:56:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Corporate capture is a big.

• 2:56:23Speaker 01

  Duh. Like, you should not be allowed to be the regulator of an industry that you have owned stocks in and all of your friends own stocks in.

• 2:56:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, it's just amazing to me that Vilsack, who's the Secretary of Agriculture. And is sort of supervising the dietary guidelines, which tells you to drink three glasses of milk a day as adults and two as kids, for which there is no scientific justification, was on the board of the Dairy Council in between his two stints as ag secretary. I mean, that's just crazy to me.

• 2:56:51Speaker 01

  So just start to look at everybody in government regulatory positions and look at what they did in commerce before and then what they do in commerce afterwards, right? Because it's also after, because someone can just say like, hey, you don't make that much work in government. You're going to leave public sector, go to private sector. I'm going to bring you here and pay you a lot of money, but not if you hurt my business by regulating against its interests.

• 2:57:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a little disturbing to me that the chief of staff for the Secretary of Agriculture now was a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association, the Corn Refiners for America, and, you know.

• 2:57:26Speaker 01

  I am going to avoid mentioning names, but I'm going to say, look up all the names.

• 2:57:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:30Speaker 01

  Look up everybody in USDA, look up everybody in HHS, and just say what industry connections, and then look at the policies they make, and just look at how often the policies they make are aligned with industries they have been connected to or that they go work in afterwards. And Jesus Christ, it's obvious.

• 2:57:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So fix the revolving door.

• 2:57:48Speaker 01

  That's really crazy.

• 2:57:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fix the incentives, right?

• 2:57:50Speaker 01

  Now, the government's...

• 2:57:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Do we try to build in the externalities in terms of cost and the price?

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

  We just said NIH doesn't study food, but it subsidizes the toxic food. But we don't have the money to study. Shut up. Like, why 100 billion? So if you just didn't put the 100 billion to the toxic food and the market, that's not even a market, right? Let the market just compete. The regenerative agriculture actually beats it in many areas. Now, the trillion dollars of capital markets start to flow to the other thing. We are literally making something that is less profitable and that makes everybody sick or win because of government subsidies from taxpayer money that nobody got to vote on.

• 2:58:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's less profitable for the farmers. It's more profitable for the seed makers and the fertilizer makers.

• 2:58:36Speaker 01

  Especially when they get subsidies.

• 2:58:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. I mean, even advertising, I think, you know, the food industry spends about $14 billion a year on ads, all of which is a tax deduction. And the average kid sees about a thousand ads for junk a year.

• 2:58:53Speaker 01

  Buyer beware when it's a kid going against a multi-billion dollar company that employs childhood psychologists to split test what ad makes the kids cry the most when they don't get the food until they get it.

• 2:59:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And not only, not even just psychologists, but use neurologists to look at functional MRI imaging to see which foods are the most attractive.

• 2:59:11Speaker 01

  Like this, this is not just mistakes. This is worse than mistakes. Mistakes are a cover story. There are mistakes, but even the mistakes are because there was no incentive to try to figure it out.

• 2:59:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:20Speaker 01

  So how about like, before you come up with a new drug, study all the old drugs? How about?

• 2:59:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. It's interesting that RFK Jr. is saying we should study vaccines against placebo and it's getting so much pushback because most vaccines are not studied against placebo.

• 2:59:36Speaker 01

  Duh.

• 2:59:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, imagine if you were studying.

• 2:59:38Speaker 01

  But also cumulative effects, combinatorial cumulative effects. So how many drugs are there that by themselves are fine, but combined the wrong way kill you? A lot, right? Don't do your opiates, your benzos, and your alcohol together. And so you want to study not just the individual effects, but the effects in combination with other things. We know that that's included. So of course, every new vaccine is studied in combinatorial effect with all the other vaccines, right?

• 3:00:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  For long-term safety.

• 3:00:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 3:00:06Speaker 01

  Why? When you mandate them all together?

• 3:00:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's what they talk about evidence-based medicine. It makes me a little crazy, you know? Where's the evidence that taking five drugs all independently studied together is effective or safe? Where are the studies that say that, you know, one vaccine may be safe in itself, but when you combine them with 10 other vaccines or 20 other vaccines, are they safe?

• 3:00:27Speaker 01

  So I want to talk about-

• 3:00:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We don't know the answers to those questions.

• 3:00:29Speaker 01

  I want to talk about a few things. Small molecule drugs versus vaccines and kind of biologics in general. A small molecule drug that is going to have been flushed out of your system in 72 hours.

• 3:00:42Speaker 01

  If you're taking it for a short period like an antiviral, the likelihood that it produces long-term negative effects is smaller than something that's intended to permanently or long-term affect your immune system. Like, just duh. If something is intended to produce lasting effects versus only effects while it's there and it clears. So what should get longer-term studies? The thing intended to have long-term effects? Like, of course it should. So in general, I'm going to default to small molecules over long-term endogenous modifiers every time. Only if all the small molecules can't do it, would I look at the other thing. And then next is I'm going to default to old ones over new ones. We already have long-term

• 3:01:21Speaker 01

  studies. There's no money in either of those things. So, but then the net result is sicker people that then mess up long-term GDP in terms of productivity and whatever. So like, just, we could change that.

• 3:01:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, we have, we have a, you know, a system that's driven off of business and business innovation, but the incentives are wrong there. And either we have to fix.

• 3:01:42Speaker 01

  There's nothing not innovative or scientific about studying a drug for a different purpose. It already exists. There's just a financial incentive issue.

• 3:01:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. That's what I mean. So it's.

• 3:01:53Speaker 01

  But it's still science and it's still innovation. If you want to tell that story.

• 3:01:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's not, right. It's innovation, but it's not going to create a profit. And so that, that's where the government has to come in. But, you know, think about the, how much of our tax dollars should we be spending for this? I mean, yes, we'd have a trillion extra dollars if we fixed the food problem in this country. We'd have, you know, a lot of extra money.

• 3:02:14Speaker 01

  So if you just don't, like, think about this, just don't pay the subsidies on food that is toxic for everybody. Just don't, don't, like, let the market be a market. Just don't artificially.

• 3:02:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, the farmers are the ones that are suffering and they're the ones that are caught in this grip of the banks and the bank. Loans, the crop insurance slash subsidies and the seed and chem and fertilizer companies. And they're just kind of spinning around in the middle and everybody else is winning.

• 3:02:46Speaker 01

  Yes, but the smaller farmers do better when you they move to a system that is not based on.

• 3:02:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They do, they do, they do, but there's no incentives to do that, that they can't get out of it. They have all their.

• 3:02:54Speaker 01

  There's no incentive for them because the larger guys are better lobbying. But now if we and and they're doing revolving doors. But if you just look at, don't subsidize the toxic thing. Maybe if anything subsidize the better thing, invest in nutrition research. So you see what's actually new, good. Make companies pay for some of the externalized cost. If it is causing diabetes or whatever, and maybe make some regulation around what can you advertise to children? Right? Because buyer beware for children does not work with asymmetric information warfare. Right? Like this is just reasonable governance. And then

• 3:03:29Speaker 01

  all of a sudden, if you just don't, we're not saying a more expensive government thing. Don't put a hundred billion into that stuff. Then you start having the market naturally start to favor what we call regenerative agriculture. Which is also just how agriculture was.

• 3:03:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:45Speaker 01

  And as a result, you're you cut a trillion dollars off the medical spend right away. And actually towards, because it's five trillion and it's going to do half. It's more like two and a half trillion gets cut, which is all deficit kind of money. And then productivity goes up. So the debt to GDP ratio gets better and you have to spend less to make it happen upfront.

• 3:04:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sounds like a good winning deal.

• 3:04:07Speaker 01

  This is not super duper hard.

• 3:04:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No. Well, it's hard if you have people who are running things who are incentivized to not do that.

• 3:04:15Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:04:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, like I I just, you know, working on a project where we're sort of looking at root causes and environmental chemicals and toxins, their effect on health. And there was a letter that was written by Senator Grassley and others in Senate and Congress. Basically calling out the fact that the pesticides and agricultural chemicals were not harmful, that the data was clear that they were safe and that we should continue to use them and we should not heed to a bunch of hippies who say that we shouldn't be using them. And I was like, wow. And then you do a little homework on them and you see they're all funded by the big ag and seed and chem companies.

• 3:04:53Speaker 01

  So like, what are some things we can do?

• 3:04:57Speaker 01

  Stop revolving doors, really make some laws that regulate revolving doors. That should be super duper obvious. You should not be regulating industry to protect the people, but actually in the benefit of industry, because you have a perverse incentive as the regulator. Like, I don't know anyone who thinks that's a good idea.

• 3:05:15Speaker 01

  Have things that their companies have an incentive to research badly. Get government and nonprofit funding for that and get enough oversight that you can trust it. Okay.

• 3:05:27Speaker 01

  Company funded stuff, company funded research that did not have replication, that says their stuff is awesome, should be suspect to non vested interest verification.

• 3:05:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Should have a warning label on it.

• 3:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This study was not replicated and it was funded by industry.

• 3:05:45Speaker 01

  And then I heard Bobby Kennedy talk about something that is a very common sense good thing, which is he's like, look, I believe in the market, but you should actually have to pay the costs. So if the cost is, you know, your coal company put a bunch of mercury in the environment and made a bunch of people sick and they have to pay medical costs and their life is fucked, but you don't have to pay it, that's not the market, that's stealing. Right? You're stealing from those people's lives.

• 3:06:15Speaker 01

  And if it's really a market, it's just revenue minus cost, but it should be your whole costs and so only the things that are actually profitable and you pay all the costs, those things happen and the other things don't happen. So he's like, I just want to identify empirically where the externality is causing harm, what it would currently cost to fix it and just force those companies to have to do that thing.

• 3:06:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But then these whole businesses have gone out of business, right? I mean, if, if, if the food companies had to pay for the cost of chronic disease.

• 3:06:45Speaker 01

  But, but think about how nonsensical it is to say. In the whole history of humanity, humanity always fed itself and that right now there is no economically viable way to feed ourselves. We're just saying, go back to a previous system.

• 3:06:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:59Speaker 01

  So like

• 3:06:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, the argument is, oh, we can't feed a growing hungry population. We need to feed this the world and that's what America's doing, but you know.

• 3:07:07Speaker 01

  This is not an earnest conversation though, right? Because the healthier food is not necessarily more expensive. And when you take the amateurized healthcare costs and the loss of productivity, it's way more expensive the way we're currently doing it. So if you had a little bit of long-term thoughtfulness, which is why the healthcare outcomes in Finland and Japan and certain other places are better is because they actually make some choices slightly better by looking longer term. They're like, this actually doesn't even make sense for our own country's well-being.

• 3:07:43Speaker 01

  So, so another example, you know, DDT, better living through chemistry and you spray it over the kids while they're all the nonsense, right? And then, oh, by unfortunate DDT is super lethal and the thing that kills the bugs kills people too.

• 3:08:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:01Speaker 01

  Okay. So then we get rid of it. But what do we do? We sell it to Mexico for them to use on the food and we buy the food back. And then we replace it with methylethion. And we say, oh, that's bad. Then we replace it with parathion. Come on. Like, how about, there's a lot of toxic things you can come up with. We put the toxic thing out there before studying toxicity and then only regulate it after so many people have died. How about, no, no, you have to do longer term studies to show safety before you put a new thing in the environment.

• 3:08:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 3:08:28Speaker 01

  This is not ridiculous.

• 3:08:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, it just makes, it's common sense. But again, Mark Twain, he's my favorite author to quote. He says, the problem with common sense is it's not too common.

• 3:08:38Speaker 01

  When you have no other planets in the foreseeable universe that are hospitable to life, the hospitability to life has to do with the chemical makeup of the biosphere.

• 3:08:49Speaker 01

  Maybe don't completely fuck the chemistry of the biosphere for super, super short-term interests.

• 3:08:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:08:56Speaker 01

  That seems pretty recent.

• 3:08:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what's a hopeful note we can leave on? Because we unpacked a lot of what's wrong. And I think, you know, we, the things you're talking about in terms of incentivizing the right things and revolving door changes and pricing and externalities all makes sense.

• 3:09:10Speaker 01

  And there's a lot more we didn't get into. I mean, I want to add one thing and then we'll do good notes to leave on.

• 3:09:17Speaker 01

  You know what a racket is, right? Like a protection racket.

• 3:09:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, racketeer.

• 3:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's say I've got a protection racket where I'm the mob and you're doing business in my turf. So I have some guys go rough you up and then you're scared of those guys. And there's not enough law enforcement here. Then I have some other guys say, hey, we can protect you, but you're gonna have to pay us a certain amount every week, right? But they're from the same group. That's a racket, right? Which is you're manufacturing the demand and then offering the supply.

• 3:09:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 3:09:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you make a food system that creates addiction so that people need to keep getting more of it, but then it also makes them need medicine that they wouldn't need otherwise that is profitable, where the side effects of the medicine make them need other medicines, that's a systemic racket.

• 3:09:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It is a racket, for sure.

• 3:10:01Speaker 01

  It's a systemic racket. It's a distributed systemic racket, but if...

• 3:10:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like Bayer. They bought Monsanto, which makes glyphosate, which causes lymphoma, and then they make the drugs to treat the lymphoma. That's a racket.

• 3:10:14Speaker 01

  So that's a direct racket if it's the same company. If they're separate companies that are just all owned by the major private equity or whatever, it's a systemic racket.

• 3:10:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:21Speaker 01

  But think about, just from a logical perspective, I'm trying to solve a problem. I got a problem. First thing I want to ask is, did we always have that problem? No, no, no, it's a new problem. Oh, when we didn't have it, what was happening then? Let's reverse something. The first thing should be, if it's a new problem that was caused by something, reverse the cause. How often in medicine do we do that? That should be the first thing you do before you try to come up with totally new novel shit. Say like, wait, this is a new disease that has a cause. Let's reverse the cause.

• 3:10:53Speaker 01

  And then only, and then you say, okay, well, if we can't, if their history is not good enough, is there anywhere else that doesn't have it? What are they doing?

• 3:11:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:04Speaker 01

  And then, only if you can't reverse the causes and there's no good existing prototype, then you look at research, but then you should look at technologies we already have, if any of them could be reapplied, that we already know a lot about.

• 3:11:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 3:11:19Speaker 01

  Like redo on existing drugs and stuff, right? So for instance, like, you've probably followed Project Redo on oncology, where you've got drugs that people were getting for other purposes, but while they were taking them, their cancers went away. And so they're starting to look at them and it's like, mabendazole and albendazole, like old anti-worming things that reverse bowel cancers, that are super cheap, that are actually quite safe.

• 3:11:41Speaker 01

  What the fuck? People should be researching that, right? Like, people should really be researching that. And so, figure out the financing for that. So, anything that looks like a racket should be investigated. Anything that looks like, oh, there's a problem, let's not look at what the root causes were. Let's not look at when we didn't have it. Let's say that we got this problem forever now and we can't possibly not have it. When we didn't have it for most of human history. Then let's come up with a new thing that we can make money on that will then itself cause new problems, that we will also cause a new solution for, that will cause new problems. That is a systemic, exponentially escalating racket. This is not a good method of problem solving. This is solving problems in a way that doesn't solve the cause, that symptomatically addresses it and makes worse problems in the process.

• 3:12:26Speaker 01

  Let's start actually trying to solve problems. What is the cause? How do we undo the cause? Earnestly.

• 3:12:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And how do we get people incentivized to do that? Because right now, everything's flipped.

• 3:12:35Speaker 01

  Everyone is actually incentivized if they pay attention to, we're talking about your own health.

• 3:12:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes, that's a fact. I mean, like, the guy who's, you know, running Coca-Cola or Bayer is not necessarily thinking about these things.

• 3:12:50Speaker 01

  Coca-Cola is not a food company, right? Because it's not food.

• 3:12:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Beverage, right.

• 3:12:55Speaker 01

  They call it beverage, but like, I remember talking to someone who's the CEO of Pepsi once, and they said they were thinking about categorizing it as an entertainment company because they're like, we know this is not food. This is something people do for fun. And it was like, Jesus. So, what good does this thing do? Well, it causes diabetes and increases likelihood for Alzheimer's in everybody. But what real good does it do? Well, it'll cause addiction. The world would be better if that company didn't exist. Any company where the world would be better if it didn't exist, we should figure out how to have it not exist. Not try to retrofit some fucking weird corporate sustainable responsibility or something on it. Just, if the world would be better if it didn't exist, we should do that.

• 3:13:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:42Speaker 01

  The number of companies that fit in that category are high.

• 3:13:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that's a problem.

• 3:13:48Speaker 01

  And just from the average citizen point of view,

• 3:13:53Speaker 01

  you have some say in your government. You have way more say than you think, right? You have way more say if you really wanted to be engaged. Now, I want to speak to a problem. We talk about ubiquitous pathology, right? Almost everybody that is gonna get Alzheimer's or autoimmune disease or cancer, endocrine disruption, they're already infertile or decreasing fertility or whatever. That's a bunch of subclinical disease. Ubiquitous. It's not their fault, right? It's systemic stuff. There is subclinical mental illness we were talking about. How many people have low-grade anxiety, low-grade depression, anhedonia, meaninglessness, loneliness, addictive compulsive tendencies?

• 3:14:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A lot.

• 3:14:30Speaker 01

  Right? Like, pretty much everybody. Now, derealization. Derealization is this very serious thing that happens when someone goes through a severe trauma where like, nothing feels real. I would say almost everybody I know is in some degree of

• 3:14:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It feels like that.

• 3:14:44Speaker 01

  derealization because, and here's how I can tell. If I tell somebody something about, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's about healthcare or whether it's about the increasing likelihood towards World War III or AI, whatever, it doesn't matter what it is, the environment. Their tomorrow will be identical.

• 3:15:02Speaker 01

  They cannot be moved by real information about the real world they're in.

• 3:15:07Speaker 01

  They are derealized. The real world does not matter to them. And they're like, no new information could change my life. Well, you're being a doomer. Wait, no, the Mongols are coming. If the Mongols are coming, do you want to know? Nah, I'm doo-doo-doo. No, you fucking want to know? You want to do something about it? Oh, I can't do anything. Did you try? Like, did you think about it for one whole day?

• 3:15:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:28Speaker 01

  What you could do before you said, "I can't do anything."

• 3:15:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Most people don't. They're just so

• 3:15:33Speaker 01

  So I want to just say, let's break the fuck out of ubiquitous derealization and learned helplessness. And say, problems that didn't used to exist that we caused, we can solve.

• 3:15:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:43Speaker 01

  And your own health and your parents and your children are an incentive.

• 3:15:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:50Speaker 01

  And if you think about it for a little bit, if you talk to the people who thought about it their whole life, they probably know something, you could do stuff.

• 3:15:57Speaker 01

  But you just have to act like reality is real and reality matters and your life matters. As opposed to the nihilism of like, I can't do anything. I've already given up on my life mattering. I can't possibly make sense of it. You've already given up on your life mattering.

• 3:16:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's hard and the, and the problem is that so many of people are not just derealized because of the trauma, psychological trauma of our society, but also the, the, the way in which our diet and lifestyle environment affects our cognitive function and brain and mood. So it's sort of a double problem because you're sort of stuck.

• 3:16:29Speaker 01

  If you look at the American revolution and the condition of the people who were involved in the American revolution or civil war, whatever it was historically. One, they were doing labor jobs and using a pitchfork all day translates to a much harder body that can do rebellion and whatever. But also they weren't obese, they weren't on opiates and benzos and they didn't doom scroll. Now, I have found that I don't care how outraged someone is or how horrified or how depressed. That emotion will not make it through 15 minutes of doom scrolling.

• 3:17:05Speaker 01

  Because they will actually forget they ever heard the thing. They'll forget all the emotion because in that 15 minutes, I see something that makes me excited and something that makes me feel left out and something that makes me feel belonging and something that makes me horny and something that makes me scared and something that makes me outraged and then something that's kind of funny. And I just flushed my entire system of continuity.

• 3:17:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:24Speaker 01

  Now I can go back to my life exactly the way it was.

• 3:17:29Speaker 01

  And a small number of people ensure that they don't do that. So they can actually work on controlling things at scale.

• 3:17:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:35Speaker 01

  And everybody else lets them.

• 3:17:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:37Speaker 01

  But you don't have to.

• 3:17:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, how do we have more agency? That's it. That's what you're talking about is, is creating a society where there are people feel agency in that their actions, that their thoughts, that their voice matters.

• 3:17:49Speaker 01

  So find all the things that damage your agency and get them out of your life.

• 3:17:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:54Speaker 01

  If you, if you reflect on like.

• 3:17:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Social media, bad food.

• 3:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So take the social media apps off your phone, even if you're going to still have it, have to do it on the computer. Don't have a, don't have it in your goddamn pocket all the time. Just take them off your phone. Simple.

• 3:18:11Speaker 01

  If you're on psych meds,

• 3:18:14Speaker 01

  go to a Cleveland clinic, go to an integrative doc who can see if maybe there's a better solution for you. I'm not telling people get off their psych meds. I'm saying, go talk to a doctor.

• 3:18:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's ways to do it.

• 3:18:25Speaker 01

  Talk to someone who knows other possibilities. Because you're not going to be self-regulating or think well or whatever, while you're intentionally altering your neurochemistry that way. Right? And so, and then if you're taking in any information streams that make you feel helpless, stop.

• 3:18:44Speaker 01

  Now, I will say, I know people high up in most of the major news companies. They are not news, not on the right, not on the left.

• 3:18:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's not news.

• 3:18:54Speaker 01

  No, it's not news.

• 3:18:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Propaganda.

• 3:18:56Speaker 01

  Yes, it is information war, right? Bannon at least admitted in an interview with Megyn Kelly recently, he's like, I'm not a journalist. I'm into information war, but he's just admitting like, I just make shit up. That's compelling because I have a reason. He's admitting it.

• 3:19:11Speaker 01

  I can criticize the most Airedy journals because, well, they'll lie with facts, but they cherry pick their facts. They like off frame them in a particular way, right? So you either call it an illegal alien or an undocumented migrant. It means the exact same thing, but you have a totally different emotional valence. You cherry pick your facts and you say this thing is getting better when it's actually getting worse, but you're treating the symptoms or whatever it is. So who puts narratives out there? Again, it takes a lot of money to fund research, takes a lot of money to put a narrative out there. Typically, capital streams associated with goals that support those capital streams or the political institutions and agendas that support the capital streams. Put out narratives that support what they do. So you should understand, whenever you're watching a piece of news or reading something, what you should be thinking about is, this tells me what some people want other people to believe.

• 3:19:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, not what's actually true.

• 3:19:59Speaker 01

  So every time you read Breitbart, you should also read Mother Jones on the same topic. Every time you read Al Jazeera, you should also read Jerusalem Post on the same topic. Every time you watch Fox, you should watch MSNBC. Every time you, and if you do that, and every time you scroll X, also go scroll Blue Sky. Do both. And you will realize that there is not real news. There is information war that is fighting for your mind.

• 3:20:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Someone gave me a link to a website, I forget what it's called, which basically had. The same news item, but reported from the right and the left and then the middle. And it was totally different stories.

• 3:20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:39Speaker 01

  And there really isn't a middle currently. So to just realize you cannot let someone speed, spoon feed you your narrative on what is true. Cannot. No one has the right incentive here. So you have to work at it a little bit, but you can't have a meaningful life devoid from what it, understanding what's real. Cause you, to make meaningful choices, they have to be in a relationship to reality.

• 3:20:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I think what you said was really important is take away the things from your life that interrupt your ability to have agency and then whether it's the food you're eating, the news you're watching, the social media scrolling, the friends you hang out with, the things you care about, like you, you know, we need to sort of have more agency. And I think that it's part of why I created Function Health, co-founded Function Health was to give people agency over their health because the healthcare system wasn't doing it. And I think that's what you're doing, a lot of the work you're doing. We didn't get into a lot of the things you're, you're about. So people can, can check out your work at.

• 3:21:28Speaker 01

  Now, I want to see Function Health have tremendous success because I think it can help a lot of things. But I also want to see that whole business not be needed because we're not causing all those issues in the first place.

• 3:21:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is true.

• 3:21:38Speaker 01

  Which is why I'm also super happy that you're engaging with policy.

• 3:21:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:43Speaker 01

  Now, right now, functional medicine is the most amazing thing because it says you can actually take some control over your health and have way better outcomes and your mom doesn't have to go through the completely ignoble, horrible process of dying of Alzheimer's when she was a smart person and whatever. And like, and your kids don't have to have diabetes and like, you can do something. That's amazing. But then it's like, damn, how about we just make industries and environment, environments that make people healthy.

• 3:22:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:12Speaker 01

  Or at least that don't make them sick. We could do that.

• 3:22:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:17Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:22:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We have to, otherwise we're going to go extinct sooner than later.

• 3:22:21Speaker 01

  Yes. When you have a population that is becoming ubiquitously infertile, that is an extinction process.

• 3:22:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:28Speaker 01

  When you have a population where nobody lives, like everyone's life depends upon a complex medical system with a five, six continent supply chain. This is not healthy people. That is a process of extinction.

• 3:22:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, there's a book you might've heard, uh, read about, uh, called Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn, who sort of like the Rachel Carson of her day, essentially talking about how these environmental toxins and chemicals are causing infertility and sexual dysfunction and hermaphrodinism and who knows if it's affecting this gender kind of crisis we're having now. I mean, it's sort of striking.

• 3:23:01Speaker 01

  When you, when you see the radical drops in fertility and even someone who's fertile, but the sperm count is really low, are the kids as healthy? I mean, just, just, just think about it, right? Just think about it. If someone's sperm count is 2% of what it was,

• 3:23:20Speaker 01

  a lot of things like, is the motility affected? Is the morphology affected? Is the like, this is not as healthy a person. They're not going to have as healthy a children. They're just not.

• 3:23:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:30Speaker 01

  Right? This matters.

• 3:23:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it does matter.

• 3:23:32Speaker 01

  This matters. And so that person whose fertility is decreasing, even if they're quote unquote fertile, but they're radically less fertile. They're also radically less healthy.

• 3:23:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:42Speaker 01

  They're also radically less happy. They're also radically less capable of solving the problems of the world today.

• 3:23:49Speaker 01

  And as you see in your clinic every day, it's all changeable.

• 3:23:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:52Speaker 01

  And it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take. And it's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes.

• 3:23:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Thank you. That is, that's a good point to end on. We each can do it for ourselves and we have to do it systemically. And I think I'm working on both ends of the problem. So are you. So thank you.

• 3:24:07Speaker 01

  You are.

• 3:24:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For everything you're doing.

• 3:24:08Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I really hope that function can bring a lot of these concepts and tools to everybody. Cause they have been very niche and they shouldn't be. And I love that you're making it not only medicine for the rich, but like medicine that everybody can afford. It's super important.

• 3:24:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:26Speaker 01

  And then I hope the policy work can really gain some success and gain success that can keep working across administrations. Cause science has nothing to do with political parody. And.

• 3:24:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's the plan. That's the plan. That's the plan. And for those who want to learn more about Daniel's work, look at the Consilience Project. It's consilienceproject.org. We'll put links in the show notes. We'll put links to a lot of references we talked about today. This has been an incredible conversation. And I, I feel like we could talk for another 10 hours and still keep going. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my sup- Store where I've hand selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking

• 3:25:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it. Drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top quality premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out Drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's Drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com. My friend. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr.

• 3:26:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at UltraWellnessCenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner

• 3:26:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.