How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman

Andrew Huberman 0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman is a medical doctor and an internationally recognized leader in the field of functional medicine. He is a practicing physician, and the head of strategy and innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. Today, we discuss what is functional medicine, how the different systems of the body interact to improve or degrade our health, the science of mitochondria and metabolic health, nutrition, inflammation, and how you can leverage these factors to improve your physical and mental health and cognitive performance at any age. We also talk about how to confront any health challenges you might face by taking a systems-level approach. Dr. Hyman's work is unique in that it integrates conventional medicine, because after all, he is an MD, with what he calls good medicine, which is an amalgamation of the best practices from both traditional and alternative approaches. During today's discussion, you'll see that Dr. Hyman's expertise on a diverse range of topics really comes through. For instance, we talk about food, both sourcing, micronutrients, macronutrients, timing. We talk about exercise, and we talk a lot about supplementation and which supplements can provide tremendous benefit for certain people in particular. Dr. Hyman grounds all that knowledge in the latest discoveries in human biology to provide you with actionable tools that you can apply in any case and at any age. By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that everybody will glean at least one and very likely several important protocol updates that they can incorporate to improve their general health. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr.

Andrew Huberman 1:48 Mark Hyman, welcome.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:50 Thanks, Andrew. (laughs) So good to be here.

Andrew Huberman 1:51 Great to see you. We go back a few years.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:54 Uh, l- yeah, like almost 10. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:56 Yeah. It's been awesome to see your arc, and you were at it long before I met you. I think to kick things off, probably best if you explain to people what functional medicine is and what your orientation towards health and medicine is.

Dr. Mark Hyman 2:11 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:11 Because I think there are a few misconceptions out there, both about functional health and you, but I think also you provide a very unique perspective. You've been at this vista that no one else has had where you know people who are deans of medical schools, you know people who are biohackers, you know the general public-

Dr. Mark Hyman 2:29 (laughs) Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:30 ... you've treated and treat patients-

Dr. Mark Hyman 2:31 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:31 ... and you also are an experimentalist with yourself-

Dr. Mark Hyman 2:34 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:35 ... to the extent that, um, you find and can, uh, make suggestions about things that can help people. So yeah, tell us how you parachuted into this whole thing and how you look at this whole thing that we call health and medicine.

Dr. Mark Hyman 2:49 Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. And it, it, you know, I, I would say that, you know, I didn't choose what I'm doing, it chose me. Uh, I was super healthy, fit, you know, riding my bike 100 miles a day. I was 36 years old and then wham, I got really sick, and I went from being able to memorize 30 patients in a day and dictate their notes and ride my bike 100 miles to not knowing where I was at the end of a sentence and not being able to barely walk up the stairs, and I got hit with chronic fatigue syndrome. And I tried to figure out what it was. I went to, you know, doctors at Harvard, at Columbia, here, everywhere, and they, "Oh, you're depressed, take some Prozac," this and that, and I realized that I, I, you know, I... traditional medicine wasn't having the answers. And even though I sort of came from the perspective of like a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, you know, studied Buddhism-

Andrew Huberman 3:39 Were you?

Dr. Mark Hyman 3:39 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 3:39 A yoga teacher?

Dr. Mark Hyman 3:40 I was, it was back in the '80s.

Andrew Huberman 3:41 You're a tall guy, long mat. (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 3:42 It was, it was... they didn't have yoga mats when I was doing yoga. You put a towel on the ground, there was no Lululemon.

Andrew Huberman 3:48 Okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman 3:48 It was, it was like on top of like the, it was this bookstore in New York City, there was like one yoga class in the early '80s.

Andrew Huberman 3:54 Okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman 3:55 That was it. Uh, and I studied Buddhism in college, but I also studied systems thinking and systems theory and Gregory Bateson and, you know, the nature of the network effect of life and biology and everything else. And so I kind of went through medical school, but when I came out, I was pretty straight traditional medicine doctor. But then I got sick, and it turned out I had gone to China to live there for a year and work as a doctor to help start expatriate medical clinics 'cause there were no Western medical clinics in China, and people were terrified who were 60,000 expatriates to go to the Chinese hospital. So I spoke Chinese 'cause I studied Asian studies, I went there. But what I n- inadvertently had happened was I got exposed to huge amounts of mercury from the air, 'cause they burn coal, and coal expels lead and mercury and lots of other toxins, and they... there's 10 million people in Beijing in the city at the time and they all heated their homes with raw coal, and I had an air filter that I would clean out every day and breathe the black soot in, so I got like a whopping dose of mercury. And it took a couple of years for it to kind of cause this problem, but from one day to the next, I went from being great to not being great, and my gut broke down, I had diarrhea for years, and my cognitive function completely went south, it was like I had dementia, ADD, and depression all at once. I ended up ha- having autoimmune stuff going on, and just rashes and sores and I couldn't think. I literally almost had to go on disability. And I met a person who introduced me to this guy Jeff Bland, who studied with Linus Pauling and had a very different view of health that really was more around the framework of the body as a network, as a system, as an ecosystem where everything is connected and that it wasn't reductionist, it was inclusive. And when, when we go to medical school, we're, we're taught to ask for the symptoms, look for the signs, do the lab testing, and come up with a singular diagnosis to explain everything. And, you know, if, if there's extraneous symptoms that don't fit the thing we're looking for-... then we dismiss it. You know, if you go to the, the, the, the, the doctors for, uh, for migraines and you say, "Well, I got irritable bowel." "Oh, go see the GI doctor." Or, "I have this rash." They go, "Oh, see the dermatologist." But the truth is, the body's connected and everything's connected. And so functional medicine is really about understanding the body as a network, as a system. And it's a, it's a meta-framework for understanding biology. It's like a ne- it's, I think of it as an operating system.

Andrew Huberman 6:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 6:16 Uh, it's not based on just diagnostic testing or supplements, which a lot of people think it is. It's really based on understanding the network about. So we were doing microbiome testing. We didn't call it that. It was just poop testing back then. (laughs) You know, we were, we were looking at hormones, at mitochondria, at inflammation, at insulin resistance, at all the things that are toxic, environmental toxins and their role in health. And we were trying to understand how the body started to sort of work. And it's through that process, I literally had to reverse engineer my way back to health, by understanding all the systems. So my adrenals shut down. My thyroid wasn't working. My mitochondria were terrible. My muscle enzymes were super high, like CPK were super high 'cause I had a mitochondrial injury, which is the little, you know, the factories in your cells that make energy. I had severe cognitive issues and neurotransmitter issues and sleep issues, I mean, uh, immune issues, rashes. So my whole system broke down, so I literally had to learn every system of the body and how it worked and how it connected to every other system, and then create, uh, a healing plan for myself, and that allowed me to recover. So that really taught me that there's this new way of thinking. And I remember when I, I was working at Canyon Ranch as a, as the medical director, and I would see all these patients coming in. And I, I, I started to think, "Well, you know, I'm gonna try to do this on my patients and see what happens, and just apply these principles." Uh, I call them the laws of biology, right? We don't have laws, laws of biology that we can easily describe, or laws of medicine. We have laws of physics, but there, it doesn't mean there aren't laws of biology. And what functional medicine, I believe, is, is the, is the first clinical application of this understanding of the laws of biology. And there's, like scientists like Leroy Hood who created the Institute for Systems Biology and folks like at Harvard, but Likehosian Barabasi was studying this and wrote a book called Network Medicine about the body as a network. But for me, I had to start to, you know, apply this in clinic, and so I would... Pe- people would come in with autoimmune diseases or with intractable depression or with terrible gut issues or dementia or autism or you name it, diabetes, and I would apply these principles, and they'd get better. And I literally always said, "Eat this way. Don't eat that." You know, simple stuff. Like it was not, (laughs) you know, that complicated.

Andrew Huberman 8:23 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 8:24 And six weeks later, I'd say at their follow-up visit, I'd say, "Oh, so how you doing?" "Oh, all my symptoms are better." I'm like, "What? Really?" (laughs) "Your migraines are gone?" Like 'cause I couldn't believe it. Like it was such a shock to me as a ph- traditionally trained physician that people were actually getting better. And so then I knew. I knew this was something real, even though it was sort of 30 years ago. It was just sort of not even on the radar. It still is pretty, pretty much not on the radar, although like New York Times-

Andrew Huberman 8:46 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 8:46 ... is doing articles about it now.

Andrew Huberman 8:47 Things are changing.

Dr. Mark Hyman 8:48 Things are changing.

Andrew Huberman 8:49 Slowly, but they're, but they're changing. I think

Andrew Huberman 8:51 which sort of, um, dovetails with the question I was going to ask, which is, um, how did the medical establishment view this stuff? You know, these days, it's so complicated without, you know, um, taking off on a tangent here, you know, the word expert is gated politically.

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:08 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 9:08 Like one side feels like they, you can only be called expert if you're with their camp.

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:12 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 9:12 The other side is now associated with kind of more of a, um, like a, like a wellness aspect.

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 9:19 And, you know, and I don't even have to say which side I'm referring to here, and it's, it's become a real clash of-

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 9:24 ... you know, we only believe in randomized control trials or, um, you know, there's clearly evidence that, you know, nutrition matters. And it's like, of course both things are important.

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:34 Right, right.

Andrew Huberman 9:34 And so what you're describing here is that you-

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:36 This intersection.

Andrew Huberman 9:37 This intersection, and there really isn't a political home for the intersection-

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:40 No.

Andrew Huberman 9:41 ... unfortunately. Maybe in these, um, new, uh, in this new obviously-

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:45 I didn't know cells had a political ideology. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 9:49 (laughs) That's right. That's right. Um, no. That's, that's right.

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:51 Like the red cell and the blue cell.

Andrew Huberman 9:53 That's right. Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman 9:53 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 9:53 And, and that's what I love about you is that you, you are, you have friends in both camps, and, and you're willing to trudge forward. What, what did the medical establishment think?

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:01 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 10:01 And, um, and how many of you are there now?

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:07 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 10:07 You know?

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:07 It's a great question. I mean, I remember talking about leaky gut-

Andrew Huberman 10:10 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:11 ... almost 30 years ago and talking to allergists and immunologists and g-

Andrew Huberman 10:14 People thought you were crazy.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:15 And people thought I was a Looney Tune.

Andrew Huberman 10:17 Mm-hmm. Same thing with chronic fatigue, by the way.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 10:19 I remember when chronic fatigue syndrome was considered a psychosomatic-

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:23 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 10:24 ... it's just, it's, you know, people are crazy if they think they have this.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:26 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 10:27 And, um, we now know, uh, like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and leaky gut, this all used to be, for those that are listening that are a little bit younger, uh, than Mark and I, that, um, that was considered pseudoscience.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:40 Totally.

Andrew Huberman 10:40 Just the whole notion. There are now departments at major university medical centers devoted to each one of these.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:46 That's right. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 10:47 Maybe not whole departments but, but sectors within departments.

Dr. Mark Hyman 10:49 Yeah, I think it's cr- it's crazy how things have changed. And so now, you know, we have people who are talking about mitochondria in medicine, like p- like Christopher Palmer who's a Harvard professor, a psychiatrist who's studying psychiatric disease and the application of diet and nutrition to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia or Suzanne-

Andrew Huberman 11:10 I will say Stam- Stamford, sorry to cut you off, now has a division within our Department of Psychiatry on metabolic psychiatry-

Dr. Mark Hyman 11:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 11:18 ... in large part thanks to Chris's work.

Dr. Mark Hyman 11:21 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 11:21 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 11:22 And yeah, and so, so metabolic psychiatry is about, you know, the role of sort of insulin resistance and inflammation in the brain as causing depression and causing anxiety and more severe things like bipolar disease and schizophrenia. And these are the things that I saw like in my patients, so I wasn't an academic, but I, I would just look at their story and listen to it, and then I would look at the underlying biology 'cause, you know, you, you talk about the sort of intersection of the sort of the biohacking kind of wellness and medical community. Lee Hood has a term for this. He calls it scientific wellness.And when people ask me what functional medicine is, I say it's a science of creating health, as opposed to the science of treating disease.

Andrew Huberman 11:58 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 11:58 When you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. So if you optimize your basic body systems, your gut, your immune system, your mitochondria, your detox system, your hormonal regulatory system, when you optimize those things, symptoms go away.

Andrew Huberman 12:12 (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 12:12 And you don't have to treat all the different branches of the trees and the leaves on the trees. You treat the root and the trunk, which is what functional medicine does.

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Dr. Mark Hyman 15:06 For example, can I tell you a quick story?

Andrew Huberman 15:07 Please.

Dr. Mark Hyman 15:08 I, I wanna tell a story about a patient I had at Cleveland Clinic, which actually, by the way, was amazing that Toby Cosgrove, who's one of the most renowned figures in medicine and is CEO of, was the CEO of Cl- Cleveland Clinic for years, invited me to come start a center for functional medicine there. And we, we've done, you know, been 10 years now. We've done a ton of research. This one patient came to see me, and she had a whole list of problems. And that's why I jokingly call myself a holistic doctor 'cause I take care, care of people with a whole list of problems. I wanna know everything. And functional medicine's inclusive rather than exclusive. It's like rather than discarding things that don't fit your h- diagnosis, we wanna know everything about you, how you were born, whether you were breastfed, whether you took antibiotics, any traumas, any toxins you're exposed to, whether you eat fish. Like, we wanna know everything. (laughs) And so this woman came to see me. She has psoriatic arthritis, which is a terrible disease where your joints break down. You got, you know, those p- hard, breakout psoriasis, the rashes and itchy plaques on your skin. But she had a whole bunch of other stuff too. She had migraines. She had pre-diabetes. She had depression. She was a 50-year-old health coach who li-, I mean life coach who, and business coach who was very successful but was struggling. She had terrible reflux, irritable bowel syndrome. So she had all these clusters of diseases. And I said, "Gee, what do these things have in common? What's the root?" Inflammation. And I know you've talked a lot about this on your podcast, but inflammation is a, sort of the root of many chronic illnesses, whether it's obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, autism, depression. I mean, the list goes on and on. Autoimmune, allergy, obviously. And I said, "Why don't, you, you, why don't we look at your gut? Because you're having a ton of gut symptoms." You have terrible bloating, distension, and what I call food baby. (laughs) You know?

Andrew Huberman 16:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 16:38 You know when you eat something, it's like, get a food baby.

Andrew Huberman 16:40 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 16:41 And she also, um, had been on a history of lots of antibiotics and steroids for her rheumatoid, her psoriatic arthritis. And so I said, "Look, why don't we just treat your gut and then see what happens?" So we put her on an elimination diet, and we eliminated all the inflammatory foods and things that were causing fermentation that could kind of cause the bac- bad bacteria in her gut to ferment the foods and cause the bloating and leaky gut. We, uh, basically took out dairy, gluten, grains, sugar, processed foods, put her on a whole foods, anti-inflammatory, microbiome-healing diet. We gave her a, I think, I think we were on vitamin D, fish oil, some probiotics, really simple stuff. And I says, "Come back in six weeks, and we'll do some diagnostics, and in the meantime, do, do this program, then come back." She came back. She says, "Well, all my symptoms are gone, and I stopped all my medication." I'm like, "Oh, I didn't ask you to stop your medication."

Andrew Huberman 17:28 Right, right. (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 17:29 But she was on Stelara, which costs $50,000 a year.

Andrew Huberman 17:32 Wow.

Dr. Mark Hyman 17:32 It's a immune biologic. She was on a host of other do- drugs from her psychiatrist, from her migraine doctor for her irritable bowel, for her reflux. I mean, it was like a whole pile of pills. She was off everything, and she had no symptoms, and she was all better, and she lost 20 pounds.And it wasn't an, it was an anomaly or a miracle, it was just following the principles of how the body works. You know, and, and, uh, in that textbook Network Medicine, they talk about how we need to understand mechanisms and causes, not just symptoms and diagnoses. And we need to understand that, that there's multi-causality for different problems. So, it may be not just one thing-

Andrew Huberman 18:05 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 18:05 ... that causes the disease. Right? You might have toxins, it might be your diet, you might have your microbiome issues, you might, you know, have some other trauma or stress. And all those things, like, kind of are the soup that then breaks the system down so it gets sick. And so, my job is basically to see where the things that are broken down and how do I help repair them, how to remove the root causes, whether it's mercury, or whether it's mold, or whether it's, you know, your microbiome having dysbiosis, or whether it's a trauma that you can deal with through MDMA-assisted psychotherapy-

Andrew Huberman 18:36 (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 18:36 ... which hopefully will be passed soon. You know, there's all sorts of things to do to help the body, but we have to have the, the framework for having the right assessment of someone, otherwise they don't get better. And, and, you know, I've had the privilege as, uh, working at Canyon Ranch and my own private practice, of doing tens of thousands of dollars worth of testing potentially on tens of thousands of patients over decades, and seeing literally millions and millions of data points of their story and their labs and their treatment and their outcomes. And so, I have this really deep understanding of all the ways in which these systems interact and connect. And so, I think people, you know, can map out what's happening in their biology in ways that now tell them what's really going on. And we're seeing that happening, that the testing community is growing and, uh, that people wanna know what's going on in their bodies, and they're using wearables and they're using CGMs and all ki- uh, of self-diagnostic tools, which I think are important 'cause people aren't getting the answer from the traditional medical system.

Andrew Huberman 19:28 Well, and a lot of physicians, unlike you, frankly, don't look very healthy, which people can say, "Okay, well, it shouldn't be about, about looks." But, you know, if I was at the dentist-

Dr. Mark Hyman 19:39 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 19:39 ... and I look up and my dentist is snaggle toothed and decaying teeth, it doesn't bring me a lot of confidence.

Dr. Mark Hyman 19:45 I look pretty good for 100, huh?

Andrew Huberman 19:46 Yeah. (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 19:47 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 19:47 You look great and

Andrew Huberman 19:48 you're s- and you're super vital. I think, you know, this, this idea of, of systems, biology, and health, um, is really important for people to understand because, you know, I, I always say, um... Well, there are two sayings. I didn't say the first. The first one, uh, was taught to me when I was a graduate student, which is, you know, a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or human produces a scientific paper, meaning-

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:09 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 20:10 Meaning, anytime you manipulate a variable... Uh, there are two things-

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:13 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:13 ... that if you... Uh, oftentimes-

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:15 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:15 ... i- if you inject a drug at a high enough dose, you'll see an effect.

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:18 If you deprive sleep, you'll see an effect. And that points to several things, but I think both of them, uh, have a vector in the direction of this, uh, systems biology.

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:30 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 20:30 You know, if... Everything modulates everything else, so if your gut is off, it's gonna modulate your sleep, which is gonna modulate your cognition. And if your, um, if you were to boost your, uh, you know, some vitamin level, um, ridiculously high or have it ridiculously low-

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:45 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 20:45 ... it's involved in thousands of processes in the body.

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:48 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:48 And so if you look at any one of those, you might see a subtle effect. I think the challenge of reductionist science and reductionist medicine is, because the goal in good science is to isolate variables-

Dr. Mark Hyman 20:59 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:59 ... you can't, by definition, actually look at a whole system. Although now with AI, maybe you could explore how adjusting one variable impacts pretty much every major system of the brain and body.

Dr. Mark Hyman 21:11 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 21:11 But it's just very hard to do. And as somebody who's done laboratory science for, gosh-

Dr. Mark Hyman 21:15 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 21:15 ... well over 25 years and instructed other people how to do it, and graduate students and postdocs, I mean, it's, it's, it's an art, but it's a, it's limited in terms of what it can reveal.

Dr. Mark Hyman 21:26 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 21:26 And, and we work as a system. So, I think this is what we're getting at here.

Dr. Mark Hyman 21:30 So, you're saying the scientific process itself precludes us from really understanding things because we can't study things in the way that need to be studied?

Andrew Huberman 21:36 Well, yeah. Like, let's say you come into my lab and I wanna study, um, how, uh, you know, increasing L-carnitine, for instance-

Dr. Mark Hyman 21:42 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 21:43 ... um, impacts your mood, immune system function, and sleep. I can do that study, but even that is just an infinitely complex study. I gotta do dose response. I'll probably do oral versus injectable. And then I can't control, unless it's in laboratory animals-

Dr. Mark Hyman 21:57 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 21:57 ... on a, on a same genetic background, I can't control whether or not one person's, you know, having a Snickers and the other person is having a Snickers and telling me, and then one person's lying.

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:07 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 22:07 I mean, it is so hard to do controlled science. So, what we end up doing is we end up creating very artificial environments, very artificial conditions, and isolating variables and outcomes.

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:16 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:17 And, um, at the same time, genomic sequencing, proteomics have allowed us to identify interesting genes that have a potential role in longevity, or stem cells and Yamanaka factors.

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:27 And so I feel like it cuts both ways.

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:29 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:29 And so as a physician, when somebody comes in, and I, and I'm asking this question so that people can think about their own health, if people are feeling, like, not well-

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:39 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:39 ... right? Where do you start?

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:41 Like, like, this thing med-

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:43 Great question.

Andrew Huberman 22:43 Like, where do you start? You start with how you're sleeping, how you're eating, uh, skin tone.

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:47 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:47 I imagine you can look at somebody and kind of get a sense of their-

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:51 I do. I can. I can.

Andrew Huberman 22:51 ... vibrancy with the level of their eyes. Like, where do you start?

Dr. Mark Hyman 22:53 I c- I can, I can tell people's blood works sometimes just by looking at them. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 22:55 There you go. So, uh, so where do you start? Like, what, what's the, what should we, when we look in the mirror in the morning, what sh- what are we looking for?

Dr. Mark Hyman 23:03 I think that's a great question. I, I think that, uh, you know, just to back up o- one second, I think, you know, when you talked about, you know, putting h- high dose of something in or a lack of sleep, functional medicine is about understanding the answer to two very simple questions, and then designing a treatment model based on the answers to those questions. And the questions are, one, what are you exposed to that's interrupting your normal function?

Andrew Huberman 23:28 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 23:29 Hence, functional medicine. What is it, what is this bugging you? What's pissing your system off? Is it-

Andrew Huberman 23:34 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 23:34 And there's a short list, Andrew. It's, it's toxins, and it can be internal, uh, endogenous toxins or external toxins like heavy metals or pesticides or glyphosate or a million other things. It's-... infections or microbes. So, it can be, you know, post-COVID syndrome with persistent spike protein, it can be Epstein-Barr virus that leads to MS, it can be Lyme disease, it can be your microbiome being off, which is the truth for (laughs) most of us. It's allergens, which are things that your body's reacting to, both environmental allergens, or it could be food allergens or food sensitivities. Which is not truly an allergen, but it's more of an adverse reaction to food from leaky gut. It can be poor diet, which I think most of us understand what that is. It can be stress, and that can be physical, mechanical stress, like being hit by a car, or psychological stress, or your, the meaning you make from a (laughs) psychological stress, which is really what caused you to be sick. I know you've had Gabor on your, your podcast.

Andrew Huberman 24:27 No, not yet. We haven't-

Dr. Mark Hyman 24:28 Oh, you haven't?

Andrew Huberman 24:28 ... had Gabor on.

Dr. Mark Hyman 24:29 Oh.

Andrew Huberman 24:29 No, but, but we've had a number of people talking about the relationship between mind and body-

Dr. Mark Hyman 24:32 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 24:32 ... and stress. And, um-

Dr. Mark Hyman 24:34 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 24:34 ... certainly, it's a profound connection.

Dr. Mark Hyman 24:36 Yeah. So, you have this list of five things. That interacts with your genome and y- is, is really what we call the exposome. What s-

Andrew Huberman 24:44 Hm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 24:44 What your genes are exposed to is far more predictive than your genome. Your exposome includes the sum total of everything you're exposed to on the positive and negative, all the things I just listed, but also all the ingredients for health. So, I identify, what are the impediments for health, and then what are the ingredients for health? And the ingredients for health are not (laughs) complicated.

Andrew Huberman 25:00 (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:00 We're biological organisms, right? Despite trying to live outside of our biological constraints, we need the right kind of food.

Andrew Huberman 25:08 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:08 Right? Whole food.

Andrew Huberman 25:08 What does that look like?

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:09 Michael Pollan said, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." Right?

Andrew Huberman 25:14 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:14 Or not too much, mostly plants, something (laughs) like that.

Andrew Huberman 25:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:16 And it's basically eating foods that's, that's as close to nature as you can find it. Right?

Andrew Huberman 25:20 Grew out of the ground or had a pulse.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:22 Yeah. Yeah, exa- (laughs) basically right. He says, "Eat food that's grown in a plant, not made in a plant." And I used to lecture at these churches, and I said, "It's really simple to figure out what to eat. Ask yourself, did God make it, or did man make it? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did he make an avocado? Yes."

Andrew Huberman 25:36 Would our ancestors recognize it?

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:37 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:38 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:38 Like, would your great-grandmother know what a Lunchable, uh, was, or a Go-Gurt was, or-

Andrew Huberman 25:41 So, so this generally means eating foods that are single ingredient foods, or foods that combine only-

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:48 Combined single ingredient foods.

Andrew Huberman 25:48 ... single ingredient foods.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:49 Yeah. Like you go to the label-

Andrew Huberman 25:50 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 25:50 ... you gotta r- I read the labels. Like, you look at it, do I recognize this? Would I have this in my kitchen? Do I have butylated hydroxytoluene in my kitchen, or Red Dye Number Three? Probably not, right? (laughs) Unless you're a grandma making cupcakes that are really red. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 26:03 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:03 But, so, so food. N-

Andrew Huberman 26:05 Fruit, vegetables-

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:06 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:06 ... meat, fish.

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:07 Fruit, vegetables, yeah. It's-

Andrew Huberman 26:08 Quality dairy.

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:09 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:10 Those kind of things.

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:10 I mean, I've written so many books on this, The Pegan Diet, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?. I wanted to call it Food: What the Fuck Should I Eat?, but my publisher wouldn't let me. (laughs) But-

Andrew Huberman 26:16 Nowadays they probably would.

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:17 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 26:17 I feel like they curse everywhere

Narrator 26:18 (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:20 So there's like ... we can, we can dive into nutrition, but just assume like you need, depending on your age and your sex and your, what you're doing with your life, you need the right nutrition of whole, real food.

Andrew Huberman 26:29 Can I just ask

Andrew Huberman 26:30 you, uh, we'll just quickly double-click into there. What's your view on seed oils?

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:36 Oy. (laughs) So, so, so, so-

Andrew Huberman 26:37 No, just, you know, I mean, I'll say mine. I like olive oil and butter-

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:40 ... uh, coconut oil, and things like avocados and some Brazil nuts and walnuts and stuff. So, I, since I don't count calories, I kind of have an intuitive sense-

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:49 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:49 ... um, of what I'm taking in, how much fat, how much protein, how much-

Dr. Mark Hyman 26:52 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:52 ... starch, how much, you know, fibers, carbs, et cetera. So for me, like, I wouldn't pick canola oil 'cause I could pick olive oil.

Dr. Mark Hyman 27:00 Right. Right.

Andrew Huberman 27:00 Um, and I make sure it's real olive oil. And, uh, but, it, I don't think seed oils necessarily will kill me, but guess why they, I know they won't kill me. 'Cause I don't eat them.

Dr. Mark Hyman 27:10 We should be eating whole food fats as much as possible, right?

Andrew Huberman 27:13 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 27:14 Avocados, coconut, nuts and seeds, you know, omega-3 fats from fish. Uh, olive oil, which is minim- the most minimally processed oil you can get, extra-virgin olive oil. And, and, a- a- and when we're eating nuts and seeds, we're getting a lot of omega-6s. So, the big theory behind seed oils is that it's omega-6 rich, it's imbalanced with omega-3s, they cause inflammation. The way they're produced and grown is problematic. They're usually GMO crops, like canola oil. They spray lots of chemicals on them. Those chemicals get in the oil. They are manufactured in an industrial way that oxidizes them, that uses hexane to get rid of sort of the, some of the compounds in it. Deodorizes them, bleaches them, and then they're easily oxidized. So, would I want to eat an industrial food product? Probably not. Do we know for sure that it's a problem? I think the data is mixed. I mean, there's some studies that show epidemiologically that, you know, people who eat more of these plant-based oils or seed oils have reduced risk of diseases. But we don't know what they're doing, and there's food frequency questionnaires-

Andrew Huberman 28:15 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:15 ... and there's, these studies are proving correlation, not causation.

Andrew Huberman 28:18 And what it's replacing. Sorry to interrupt here, but you know, I'll see the, uh, data that seed oils are better for people than butter. Okay. I like grass-fed butter, but I don't eat it in excess.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:29 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 28:30 I once joked about that, and then I, like, um ...

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:32 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 28:32 I made some jokes early on in having a podcast, not realizing the implications.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:35 (laughs) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 28:36 But anyway, I am very careful now. Uh, I have some butter in moderation.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 28:41 But, so I could imagine that if you're eating a lot of lard and butter and bacon fat, and you replace it with seed oils, you'll get healthier, but-

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:47 Maybe.

Andrew Huberman 28:47 Maybe.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:48 Maybe.

Andrew Huberman 28:48 But you could imagine ... I, I guess it depends on what else you're ingesting.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:50 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 28:50 'Cause the carbo- the starch-fat combination is the one that gets people, in my opinion.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:55 That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 28:55 But right, somebody could be eating a lot of meat and fruit and doing okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman 28:59 Don't, don't eat like your butter with a bagel. Put it on your broccoli.

Andrew Huberman 29:03 (laughs) Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:03 'Cause that, the, the saturated fat-refined starch combo is what's killing us.

Andrew Huberman 29:09 I wish people would really hear you on this. It's not fat per se. It's not starches per se. It's the combination of fat and starch, and in particular, fat, starch, and sugar.

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 29:24 Does that make-

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:24 Well, starch and sugar, starch and sugar-

Andrew Huberman 29:26 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:26 ... is, like below the neck, your body can't tell if it's a bowl of sugar, a bowl of corn flakes, or a bagel, or a bowl of sugar, literally.

Andrew Huberman 29:31 So if I put a pat of, of butter on a, on a bowl of white rice, is it that bad?

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:35 No. Not really.

Andrew Huberman 29:36 Okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:37 I mean, it d-

Andrew Huberman 29:37 But if I put a pat of butter on a muffin, it's Bad News Bears.

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 29:41 Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman 29:41 It's double-, you're doubling down on the sugar. Yeah. And I think, you know, to, to answer your question about the seed oil-... the data's not really cl- completely answering this, and it's part of the problem with nutrition. There's not enough nutrition science. The one large randomized controlled trial that was done on, like, 9,000 people, not on 90 people or 50 people or 30 people, which a lot of these studies are, but on 9,000 people that were randomized in a psychiatric hospital. It would be unethical to do today. It was done by Ancel Keys. It was the Minnesota Cornery (laughs) Experiment funded by the NIH, where they basically gave half the group butter and half the group corn oil. Now, corn oil is a pure omega-6 oil, as opposed to soybean, which is mixed omega-3, canola, mixed omega-3, 6 oils. And what they found was str- striking. They found that the group that had the corn oil, for every 30 point drop in LDL cholesterol, the risk of death from heart attacks or strokes went up by 22%, which is completely the opposite of what we think in medicine, which is LDL is the boogeyman. This LDL is the bad cholesterol, or L for lousy cholesterol. It's not so simple, and I think, I think these oversimplification of, you know, let's say, "These seed oils lower LDL, therefore they're good," is just too simplistic. But, but if, would I, would I, for example, have, uh, a corn oil that was expeller-pressed or that was organic or canola oil that was, or sunflower or safflower oil? Yeah. I mean, I don't, I'm not worried about those in small amounts.

Andrew Huberman 31:11 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 31:11 But that's not what most people are doing. Most people are eating, most of their diet is ultra-processed food. 60% of adults, se- 67% of kids is basically junk food, and the major oil in those are these refined oils. So is it the oils? Is it the junk food? They're just a vehicle for this, and we've increased our consumption. For example, the main seed oil or bean oil, it's not really a seed, is soybean oil by a thousandfold since 1900. Now, I'm sort of an evolutionary thinker. I'm like, "What did our, m- how are our bodies designed and what should we be doing with them?" And like, you know, w- you talk a lot about light. That's like, you know, you went to sh- sh- sleep with the sun, you woke up with the sun. It was just how things were.

Andrew Huberman 31:52 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 31:53 And you had circadian rhythms, and our whole biological clocks and rhythms are screwed up because of how we live.

Andrew Huberman 31:57 Yeah. Well, we evolved-

Dr. Mark Hyman 31:58 And-

Andrew Huberman 31:58 ... under the major constraint of sunrise and sunset.

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:01 That's right.

Andrew Huberman 32:02 And-

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:02 That's why we have Friday.

Andrew Huberman 32:02 ... artificial lighting is a wonderful thing, but, um, I think there's highly processed light.

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:07 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 32:07 It's devoid of long wavelengths.

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:08 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 32:08 The, the eradication basically of incandescent bulbs and all these LEDs and-

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:13 Oh, my God, highly processed light everywhere. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 32:14 ... d- and daylight savings times, it, i- i- it's really messing people up.

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:18 Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 32:18 Everybody's saying, "Oh, it's just an hour." No, actually it's your mental health.

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:21 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 32:22 When, when it comes to the seed oil thing, I, I actually predict that seed oils will lose. I think in the end it's just obvious. Like why wouldn't people just say, "You know what? The seed oil thing may or may not be a problem. I'm just gonna eat olive oil and a little bit of butter."

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:34 Yeah, that's kinda my view.

Andrew Huberman 32:35 It seems so simple to me.

Dr. Mark Hyman 32:36 That's my view. Like until, it's k- my view is if you have a new, new to nature kind of compound or a, uh, an unnaturally high amount of something that we're having in our diet... I mean, sugar was always around. We would get honey, we would get whatever, but we'd have 22 teaspoons a year as hunter-gatherers. Now we have that every day for every American. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 32:54 If you had a magic wand and you could get rid of seed oils or you could get rid of, um, highly refined sugars in a modern American diet, what, which one would you choose?

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:03 Yeah, no contest. It's starch and sugar that's driving our metabolic crisis, like, by huge factor, by huge factor. If-

Andrew Huberman 33:11 Does that mean no pasta, no bread, no-

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:12 It doesn't mean no, no anything. It just means the volume of stuff we're eating is, like, we're eating pharmacologic doses. It's 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour, which has a higher glycemic index than sugar.

Andrew Huberman 33:25 Really?

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:26 Yeah. Well, that's how it's set. It's set at, at white bread as 100-

Andrew Huberman 33:29 I see.

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:29 ... and then sugar is 80 'cause it's fructose and glucose, so you have to break that apart. And so your ins- your glycemic load, which is how it affects your blood sugar, fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar. Glucose raises your blood sugar.

Andrew Huberman 33:40 So where did we go wrong? Because I was a-

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:42 (sighs)

Andrew Huberman 33:42 ... teen in the '90s. I don't... Until I discovered fitness, I, I, I didn't eat poorly at home. My mom cooked-

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:51 I didn't.

Andrew Huberman 33:52 ... whole food.

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:52 We had Pop-Tarts, Kraft macaroni and cheese. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 33:53 Yeah, so we weren't allowed that stuff, but, but yeah, we-

Dr. Mark Hyman 33:56 Tang, Parchman's margarine. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 33:57 We weren't allowed that stuff, but we had our, like, Honey Nut Cheerios and that kinda stuff.

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:00 That's why I'm looking. Some preserves. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 34:01 (laughs) No. We had our Honey Nut Cheerios and things like that, but we ate mostly whole foods and then, um, not from wh- There wasn't a Whole Foods Market back then, but, uh, whole, unprocessed, minimally processed foods. But I ate my fair share of, you know, pizza slices and burritos-

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:14 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 34:14 ... in college and stuff like that, but... And I was active, but I wasn't a, a serious athlete. But then somewhere around 2010 forward, I feel like everything... You know, again, just to be very direct, there, there was probably one kid or two kids in my school that were, were obese.

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:31 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 34:32 Now-

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:32 Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 34:33 ... depending on where you live, you see 60%, 70%, 80% of kids are obese.

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 34:39 So-

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:39 Well-

Andrew Huberman 34:39 ... I mean, what, where, what happened?

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:41 I wanna answer that, and then I wanna come back to the loop of what I was trying to complete on your, the big thought of like how does the body work and how do you f- create health and what do you do?

Andrew Huberman 34:49 Please, yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:50 'Cause you asked me that question. I don't wanna lose that question.

Andrew Huberman 34:51 Yeah, mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 34:52 Um, what, what happened was there was, uh, this rise in cardiovascular disease in America, and there was this thought that saturated fat and fat was the bad guy.

Andrew Huberman 35:05 Mm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 35:05 And this was the McGovern report in the '70s that went on to be the dietary guidelines, that went on to be the food pyramid. And the food pyramid essentially told us that fat was the enemy, so it's only at the very tippy top. Fat's allowed sparingly. Bottom of the pyramid was six to eleven servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day.

Andrew Huberman 35:25 Which sounds like a recipe for being hungry all the time.

Dr. Mark Hyman 35:27 And being obese.

Andrew Huberman 35:28 Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman 35:29 Now, we didn't know it at the time, but it became really clear that that was a bad idea pretty quick, and, and the hockey stick rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes tracks perfectly with that in- information. The American public trusted the government. They trusted the scientists, and when they said, "Fat's bad, carbs are good."... everybody listened. (laughs) And-

Andrew Huberman 35:51 Eggs, eggs are bad.

Dr. Mark Hyman 35:52 Eggs are bad. Fat's bad. Cholesterol's bad.

Andrew Huberman 35:54 Red meat's bad. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 35:55 Red meat's b- So people ate less red meat, they ate less eggs, they ate less fat. And then we got SnackWell cookies. You know? (laughs) We got, like, you know, low fat ice cream and l- like... And the sugar just went through the roof. And so that's when you see this, this explosive rise. And there's other factors. Our microbiome affects our weight. Environmental toxins affect our metabolism. So, there's a whole bunch of things happen in tandem, but it... That probably is the single biggest thing. So if someone asking for me, "Should I worry about soybean oil or sugar and starch?" It's 100% sugar and starch.

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Andrew Huberman 40:05 So, um, so the '90s low fat thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:08 Yeah. Was a disaster. And I wrote a book-

Andrew Huberman 40:10 Was a disaster.

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:10 ... called Eat Fat, Get Thin, where I cataloged the whole history of how we got there and what the problems were and what the science is telling us about what we should be eating, about the... reconsidering saturated fat being bad. It's bad if you're eating it in the context of starch and sugar. For most people it's not. And if you're obese or metabolically unhealthy, it actually can be better for you. (laughs) There's a lower risk of diabetes in epidemiological studies with butter and milk fat. So I don't... I think e- I think we have to kind of like... I know nutrition's a very complicated subject, but I mean-

Andrew Huberman 40:40 Or not, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:41 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 40:41 I don't know. I'm beginning to think that nutrition-

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:42 Well, it's contro-

Andrew Huberman 40:42 ... is a very straightforward subject.

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:44 It should be. It should be.

Andrew Huberman 40:45 But the... Yeah, and I- I confess, I've had some pretty diametrically opposed views, uh, from guests on this podcast. We had Robert Lustig on the podcast.

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:52 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 40:52 We had Layne Norton on the podcast.

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:53 Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 40:53 You get those two on separate podcasts, and they are, like, at loggerheads with one another.

Dr. Mark Hyman 40:58 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 40:58 Right? Now, Layne's correct in that total caloric load matters.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:03 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:03 It's not everything, but it matters.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:04 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:05 I would say many people have a hard time limiting their intake of starchy carbohydrates, especially if you put a little bit of fat on there.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:14 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:14 It just becomes a different food entirely.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:16 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:17 Eating a bowl of white rice is pretty tasty. Eating a bowl of white rice with a pat of butter-

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:21 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 41:21 ... and a little bit of salt on there-

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:22 Right. Totally.

Andrew Huberman 41:22 ... is a completely different experience. A piece of sourdough bread is one thing. A piece of sourdough bread soaked in a little bit of olive oil with some salt?

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:30 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:30 I'm eating half the loaf.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:31 Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 41:31 Right? And I have pretty good self-control. So, so this is where I think, like, we-

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:35 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:35 There's... The debates have become almost silly.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:38 And I- I appreciate that you're being very direct with us here. So le- take us back. So you said there are ingredients for health and there are impediments to health.

Dr. Mark Hyman 41:45 Yeah. So the, the ingredients for health, uh, are- are no- again, not a long list 'cause we're human beings. We need the right food, we need the right num-... amount of nutrients, and it's different for different people. Our, you might not know this, but Bruce Ames did an incredible paper, who had recently died, one of the giants of science, saying that one-third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes. All enzymes require cofactors. Most cofactors are vitamins and minerals. And there's a huge genetic variability in how much different people need. Some people need a thousand units of vitamin D. Some people need 5,000. Some people need 400 micrograms of folate. Some people need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so he, he kind of explained that very carefully. So to find the right amount of nutrients for you, you need the conditionally essential nutrients, which people don't think are absolutely essential, but things like CoQ10 and various things that, that the body requires that we may not get enough. Then you need light, you need water, you need clean air, (laughs) you need, uh, movement, you need rest, and I would say that in a parasympathetic state, where kinda what I mean by rest, you need sleep, you need connection, love, meaning, purpose. These are all ingredients for health. Mm-hmm. And, and any one of those can make you sick, whether it's just being isolated and alone or not having a purpose in your life. If you have meaning and purpose in your life, there was a JAMA paper published that you're likely to live seven years longer. Now, s- if you cut out all cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, the extension of life expectancy is seven years. (laughs) The mind is incredible. I have a colleague at Stanford who works in the sleep, uh, in the, in the sleep division, sleep medicine, and he said, and I shouldn't tell people this 'cause everyone's supposed to get enough sleep, right? But he said if you positively... they've done stu- he has a, a study that shows that if you positively anticipate next-day events- Yeah. ... your sleep need is actually reduced pretty substantially. That's amazing. That's good. And the quality of sleep that you get is remarkable. You, you know- Well, that's why I slept so good last night. Mm-hmm. I was looking forward to this. (laughs) Exactly. Well, these small things, right? 'Cause we all know the experience of, like, "I only slept five hours, but I got this thing today I'm really looking forward to." You feel great. Yeah. And so I'm not, I don't think people should only sleep five hours. (laughs) Most people need more than that. So the idea is basically with functional medicine, you take out the bad stuff, and you put in the good stuff. Mm-hmm. And each person has a different set of bad stuff and a different set of good stuff, and you have to be detective. And it's the opposite of traditional medicine, which is just use a single drug to treat a single mechanism with a single disease and a single outcome. You know, like you have high blood pressure, take a high blood pressure drug to lower your blood pressure. (laughs) We need multimodal treatments for multicausal diseases. And so what engli- English that means is we need to do a lot of different things. Like, if you want a garden, you don't just say, "I'm gonna put the plant in the air and not water it and not give it soil." Or you say, "I'm, I'm just gonna plant it in the soil but no light and no water." I mean, you know, and this is the way science is. I remember trying to do a study on Alzheimer's at Cleveland Clinic, and the top scientist there was like, "We wanted to study these multimodal dimensional approaches to, to," called it the black box approach. Okay, we f- everybody's getting a different treatment. It's super personalized, customized based on their own unique biology. There's no such thing as Alzheimer's or different Alzheimerses. I don't know if that's a word, but (laughs) you know what I mean? (laughs) Mm-hmm. And that's why we failed so miserably with the amyloid hypothesis 'cause we're just looking at the end stage phenomenon, which is plaque going into an area that's inflamed to kind of s- s- deal with the inflammation. What caused the inflammation is really the question. And it can be variable things. So we start to kind of map these out, and when, when you do that and you, you actually get to the root causes and you try to treat all the things that are out of balance, people get better. So if you have a vitamin D deficiency and a folate deficiency and you have a, you know, m- tons of small bowel overgrowth and you have heavy metals and you have all these different problems, you can't just treat one thing and expect the person to get better. You've gotta look at all those things. And some are more primary, some are secondary. But that's the job of a functional medicine doctor. It's a detective. And, and for me what's exciting is, you know, you said, "How many people do this?" Not that many. How many people are, like, experts who've done this for decades and have seen thousands of patients? A few hundred. Wow. You know, have we, we've trained 100,000 people. All, we've p- have 3,500 I think certified, another f- I think f- three or 4,000 in the pipe to be certified. Not that many people who can do this. And this is part of the why, uh, I created this company called Function Health, which you've been n- you know, so, so supportive of, which is to allow people to understand what's going on in their own biology, to be empowered to be the CEO of their own health, and to get the data that's gonna help them identify the different things that are going on to actually do something about it. Before we move to, um, health, uh, metric monitoring, I do wanna ask about ingredients for health. Two things- You talk about them. They're your protocols. Yeah, yeah. So you said, you don't ta- you don't use that framing, but that's the framing is take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. Mm-hmm. The body knows what to do. It's got an innate healing system. Just give it a chance. I think what's

Dr. Mark Hyman 46:25 so, um, terrible about traditional medicine, it has many wonderful features, is that at least it, the way it's communicated in this country is that it assumes that people are lazy and uninterested in their own health, and I fundamentally disagree, hence this podcast, your podcast, et cetera. Thank you, I agree too. (laughs) I believe people want and are willing to take care of themselves if they know how. Mm-hmm. Okay, so le- let's just assume that the pillars of health, right, like, like, sleep, sunlight, um, exercise, nutrition, social connection, stress modulation, microbiome- Yes. ... et cetera, okay. Assuming that people are making some effort to do those things correctly, or a lot of effort, what are some of the things that you believe cannot be accessed through diet and behaviors- Yeah. ... that warrant s- supplementation? And there, and I've been interested in supplements and taking supplements for 35 years. So to me when people say, "Oh, supplements aren't regulated," I say, "Actually they are regulated to some extent," right? Like there's, they're m- monitored. Um, you wanna find ones that are third-party tested. Um, indeed there are a lot of junk supplements out there. There are probably a lot of supplements that don't do much. There are probably a lot of supplements that are only, uh, use cases for certain people who have a major deficiency. But what are some of the things that are just very difficult to get from food and from sun? Um, because we hear, you know, the soil's depleted in magnesium. It's hard to get enough D3. Like, what, if you, if you were to list out- A hierarchy? ... let's just say about ten things that you f- you feel like, listen, you probably could get it from food, but it's just hard to get these micronutrients. Yeah. What are those things? And w- and by the way, folks, this is not a preloaded conversation. We've never had this conversation. No, no. (laughs) I know what I take, but I'm just curious. What, what would you... n- because people will try hard to get things from food. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 48:09 But w- what are the things that they can't get from food, or can't get from food easily, that you believe everyone should take?

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:14 Yeah. H- great question. I, I thought you were going somewhere else. I thought you were going where, what are the things that if you did everything perfectly and you're still sick, what do you do?

Andrew Huberman 48:20 Oh. Well, we'll get to that.

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:22 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 48:22 We'll get to that because-

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:22 'Cause there, there's a list of the things that you-

Andrew Huberman 48:24 W- we will get to that.

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:24 80% of it, you can take care of it.

Andrew Huberman 48:25 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:25 But there's some things you need help.

Andrew Huberman 48:27 Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:27 And that, we can talk about that.

Andrew Huberman 48:28 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 48:29 I, I think because of how dramatically our diets changed after the industrial revolution and because of urbanization and our disconnection from nature, we have a l- lower nutrient intake than we did as hunter gatherers. You know, I, I just came back from Africa. I went to the Hadza tribe, which is one of the last hunter gatherer tribes. And I got to spend a few days with them. And the, the nutrient density of the diet was so much higher, omega-3s, vitamin D. You're outside running around in loincloth, or if you're not, you're living in some coastal area where eating extremely fatty fish, which is one of the great sources of vitamin D in the food. Um, they were eating phytochemicals at an incredible rate through eating 800 different species of plants. Now we have three main ones, and 12 of the, or, uh, altogether comprise probably 95% of our diet instead of 800 plants with all kinds of phytochemicals and vitamins and minerals. The soils we're growing food in have depleted the organic matter because of industrial farming and soil erosion. And the organics matter, the living soil is what actually helps to allow the plants take up the nutrients from the soil so that there's a symbiotic relationship between organisms in the soil and the plant. And it uses them to help get nutrients free so they get into the plants, or there's less magnesium, there's less zinc, there's less all these things in our diet. And when you look at the surveys of the American population, there's an ongoing government survey called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. And essentially goes around the country with vans, tests people's blood all the time. And so it's like decades old survey. And it's incredible 'cause you get all this data. They find that like 90 plus percent are low on omega-3s. Uh, probably 80% are insufficient or low in vitamin D. 50 something percent are, are magnesium deficient. About the same iron, you know, zinc a little bit less, selenium a little bit less. And it depends on where you live and what you do, and also depends on your diet, you know, so... and what your stage of life is and what your age is and how your absorption is. For example, when you're older, you know, your, you get decreased ability to absorb nutrients and decreased ability to absorb, for example, vitamin B12. So at different ages you might need different things.

Andrew Huberman 50:33 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 50:33 Right? Uh, and so one of the basics that I think everybody should take, I think everybody should take omega-3 fats, at least a gram or two of EPA/DHA. Most people need between 2 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D3. I think a good multivitamin can cover the rest for most people. And when I say good multivitamin, I mean one with the right bioavailable forms of nutrients.

Andrew Huberman 50:55 (laughs)

Dr. Mark Hyman 50:56 I was in the hospital recently for back surgery, and this resident came by and he was, uh, you know, attending and saying, "Well..." I said, "I think I need some, you know, magnesium because I, I, I'm taking all these painkillers for my surgery and I don't wanna be constipated." He says, "Oh, you can get this one." I'm like, I said, "That's magnesium oxide. That's not well absorbed and it doesn't... N- not the greatest for-"

Andrew Huberman 51:16 You mean magnesium citrate?

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:17 Yeah. So I said... and I was... he was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know that." He wrote it down. But like... (laughs) so I think-

Andrew Huberman 51:22 Yeah. I have a lot of friends who are physicians.

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:24 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 51:24 And I'll tell you, they come to me for health advice.

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:26 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 51:26 So that tells you something.

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:28 That's right.

Andrew Huberman 51:28 I'm not an MD. Yeah, folks, magnesium, magnesium citrate, l- great laxative.

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:33 Yeah. Glycinate-

Andrew Huberman 51:34 Malate for muscles, glycinate and anthranionate for-

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:37 For brain.

Andrew Huberman 51:37 ... brain and sleep.

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:38 Yeah. And, uh, glycinate for, for also, uh, if you're not, you know, tending to be constipated, it's one that you can tolerate and not be constipated. This also helps with detoxification and sleep and other things. So, uh, and, and so those are the big ones.

Andrew Huberman 51:50 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 51:50 And I think... You know, I've been diagnostically testing people for decades in nutritional testing. With Function, we do deep nutritional testing including omega-3 testing and homocysteine, looking at methylation, which is a really important thing you've talked about in the podcast, B12, folate, B6. We do vitamin D testing, and we see over 67% are deficient. And this is, this is important to understand, Andrew. 67% are deficient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease, not the optimal level that you or I might think is good, like vitamin D over 45 or ferritin, iron store over 45. They're like, "Oh, if your vitamin D is 30 or more, you're okay." Or, "If your ferritin is 16 or more, you're okay." Well, if your ferritin is 16, you're gonna be tired. You're gonna have brain fog. You could have potentially hair loss, you could have insomnia. And that's from having low iron stores. And so I... when we're looking at that and we're like seeing what an incredibly, uh, depleted population we are in terms of the f- of the nutrients we have. So I wish we wouldn't need them, and I wish we didn't need them, but the fact is that unless we're eating a very structured diet... And I had a patient once who was... had OCD, and she's like, "I don't wanna take any, any vitamins." I said, "Okay." She says, "But I'm gonna eat... I know z- there's... pumpkin seeds have zinc, so I'm gonna have like 14 pumpkin seeds a day, and I need 200 micrograms of selenium. So I'm gonna take four Brazil nuts a day." (laughs) And she went on and on like, "I, I know I need this nutrient, so I'm gonna have this much liver a day." (laughs) And so she, she was able to figure it out, but-

Andrew Huberman 53:16 Most people won't do that.

Dr. Mark Hyman 53:16 ... it's not easy. No.

Andrew Huberman 53:18 So it sounds like magnesium, getting a gram of EPA omega-3, um, 3,000 IU minimum of D3 per day, um, some iron, some zinc, selenium, sounds like the, the basics.

Dr. Mark Hyman 53:31 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 53:32 Um... And would that be true for teens, twen- teens with-

Dr. Mark Hyman 53:35 And, and, and... Well, for example, you're, you're an older guy. You don't wanna take a lot of iron because you're not getting rid of it and you can get iron toxicity. So if you're a menstruating woman, you need more iron. So, but, but what, what I think is the key is figuring out what's right for you. Test, don't guess. Most people don't know, and some people may need, you know, 10,000 units of vitamin D to get the same blood level as somebody else with 1,000. And that's 'cause there's different vitamin D receptors, and they're genetically determined and you can't know by just guessing. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 53:59 Right. I totally agree, but I also totally know that a lot of people won't blood test. So the argument against supplements has always been-You just are creating expensive urine, which I-

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:13 (laughs) I love that.

Andrew Huberman 54:14 ... which is a silly one because that's based on water sol- soluble vot- vitamins only, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:18 Sure. And by the way, it's a stupid argument 'cause you're like, "Why drink water? I just pee the rest out of it." I mean, like-

Andrew Huberman 54:23 Right, right.

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:23 ... why create... You know?

Andrew Huberman 54:24 It's silly. It's a silly one. But so, but the list that we just talked about, D3, omega, magnesium, ma- maybe some iron if you're not an, uh, older guy, um, zinc, selenium, it seems to me those would be good things for most everybody to add to their already healthy diet that has enough prebiotic, um-

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:43 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 54:43 ... you know, postbiotic fiber that sort of thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:45 And we're seeing iodine, interesting, because people are eating the iodized salts, right? I mean, sea salt and Himalayan salt and-

Andrew Huberman 54:51 We got too fancy with our salt.

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:52 ... because, and so, we're taking-

Andrew Huberman 54:53 We need table salt.

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:53 ... we're not eating iodized salt. Now, iodine-

Andrew Huberman 54:56 Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman 54:56 ... is not normally found in salt, but it was added to salt as a fortification to prevent goiters or thyroid problems. But a lot of people have thyroid issues. One in five women and one in 10 men have low thyroid function, and 50% are not diagnosed. And sometimes just a little iodine supplementation can help. Or you can eat seaweed- (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 55:13 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 55:14 ... you know, or fish. But m- a lot of people don't eat seaweed or fish.

Andrew Huberman 55:18 Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman 55:18 (laughs) So-

Andrew Huberman 55:19 Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman 55:19 ... you know, that's, that's how you would get iodine otherwise. So, I think, I think people need to kind of figure out what's going on with themselves and based on their diet and their preferences, and if you're a vegan, I mean, you know, I, I, I think, uh, you know, we're, we're, we're seeing tremendous deficiencies in vegans if they're not supplemented.

Andrew Huberman 55:34 We hear a lot nowadays about methylated B12.

Dr. Mark Hyman 55:37 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 55:38 I decided to just start taking methylated B12. Is there a danger to taking methylated B12 if you, quote unquote, "don't need it," if you're not a poor methylator?

Dr. Mark Hyman 55:47 It depends how much you're taking. Mostly not, but you, you, you, you, you can over-methylate or under-methylate, and so you don't wanna be doing too much of either or the other. And there's genetics that are involved-

Andrew Huberman 55:56 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 55:57 ... in actually assessing h- how your methylation pathways work, so the genetics around B12, around B6, around folate, and you have multiple genes that regulate all these different pathways. So, it depends is the answer.

Andrew Huberman 56:09 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 56:09 Um, and, and, uh, but for most people, taking a good multivitamin, and when I say good, I mean it doesn't have any fillers or binders or additives. It's not blue. (laughs) It's doesn't have titanium dioxide in it. It has forms of the nutrients that actually can get utilized and absorbed better by the body. We talked about magnesium oxide versus glycinate or citrate. Um, and that you, that you, uh, make sure the company has integrity, that they've third-party tested for the purity and the potency, meaning if it says 1,000 units on the label, it's 1,000 units, not 10,000 or 2,000 or... And then, i- it hasn't had any cross-contamination with additives or chemicals. So sometimes, you know, you get something with an herbal product that comes from China that the company didn't realize it was full of lead or whatever, (laughs) you know, like, now we're seeing all these plant proteins with lead in them and (laughs) -

Andrew Huberman 56:53 Yeah, I wanna

Andrew Huberman 56:54 make sure that we talk about the impediments, things like mold, air, um, water, cleanliness, things of that sort. But I wanna spend just a little bit longer on this, um, supplement thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman 57:07 Hm.

Andrew Huberman 57:08 Um, maybe 'cause it's so near and dear to my heart-

Dr. Mark Hyman 57:10 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 57:10 ... and because it's, has sparked a lot of confusion for me, not supplements per se, but the reaction to them. W-

Dr. Mark Hyman 57:17 By traditional medicine or by-

Andrew Huberman 57:18 Yeah. Uh, w- why is it that supplementation has received, um, so much pushback from the medical community, and yet I would argue that since 2020, you're going to find vitamin D3 and omegas, uh, essential fatty acids and magnesium in many, many more people's kitchens, meaning they're taking it than prior to that?

Dr. Mark Hyman 57:48 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 57:48 And, and this reminds me of yoga, resistance training. You know, yoga was for yogis. Resistance training was for bodybuilders and people in the military. Now everybody knows, uh, men and women-

Dr. Mark Hyman 57:59 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 57:59 ... maybe even young people should do it. Uh, there's some argument that they should. Um, I- I have my thoughts about young people lifting really heavy, but, um, in any case, the, uh, breath work, you know, there's a lot of science now, meditation. There's tons of science.

Dr. Mark Hyman 58:12 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:13 So, these things that at one point were considered niche, biohacking, woo, and unsafe-

Dr. Mark Hyman 58:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:20 ... inevitably have be- seemed to become, uh, mainstream.

Dr. Mark Hyman 58:24 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:24 And I think supplements is starting to happen now.

Dr. Mark Hyman 58:27 Yeah. Well, what was interesting, when I got to Cleveland Clinic in 2014, I said, "Let's do a survey." There's 3,000 physicians. "Let's do a survey of the physicians about their beliefs, practices, desires, goals, needs around supplements." (laughs) I was shocked. We got a lot of answers. And I, I'm, I'm cr- I'm not remembering the exact percentages, but I'll give you the sort of ballparks. Like, it was over, like, h- "Do you take supplements yourself?" Like, over 70% of the doctors did. "Do you recommend supplements to your patients?" Probably like 20% (laughs) or less did. "Would you like to have a source where you knew the quality and had recommendations about the safety?" "Yes, we desperately want to do that." "Would you prescribe them to your por- patients more if you did?" Yes, and like, and it's used. If you look at every medical specialty, car- uh, cardiologists are using CoQ10, right, and fish oil, and you've got gastroenterologists using probiotics, and obviously, OB-GYNs recommend supplements for prenatal vitamins, and you've got, you know, pediatricians recommending certain vitamins for kids. And so, you look across all the specialties, and you're like, "Well, they're already kind of integrated, kind of on the margins, but integrated into their practices." I think there's this kind of weird thing where you go to a conference, and I would do this. "Doctors, how many people recommend supplements to their patients?" And, you know, a few hands would go up. "How many of you guys take supplements?" And like, (laughs) most of the audience would raise their hand. And I thought that was so peculiar because in medicine, we're told from a scientific perspective that they're probably expensive urine, and yet most doctors personally (laughs) want to take them for themselves. That says a lot, and I-

Andrew Huberman 1:00:01 It does say a lot. I do think-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:00:02 ... and I think we're entering an era where I think there's more and more science. We're understanding more about the complexity of individuality and biochemical individuality. And this was, this was, you know, this personalized precision medicine, this is where we're all headed, right? And, uh-... one of the, one of the fathers of, sort of, the thinking in functional medicine was Roger Williams, who discovered pantothenic acid or vitamin B5. He wrote a book called Biochemical Individuality. And actually, his book was the one that got me interested in this in college, 'cause I lived with a nutrition PhD student who was talking about the, basically, the gut flora of cows, which he was studying to understand fiber and the microbiome. And he gave me a book called Nutrition Against Disease by Roger Williams. And it was... This is, like, in 1980. And I read it, and I was like, "Oh, wow, this is... nutrition is such an important thing." So, I think doctors are beginning to understand the value of nutrition, the value of nutritional, um, uh, sort of supplements, the value of testing for nutrients. It's still slow, but, you know, I think, I think we're gonna get there.

Andrew Huberman 1:00:57 There's a whole generation of physicians and scientists that I do think, in the current shift in funding for science, different conversation entirely, are going to retire. And, um-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:01:10 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:01:10 ... I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:01:11 Yeah. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:01:12 I, I, I don't mind saying this. I've, I, I'm-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:01:14 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:01:14 I don't mind saying it. I think they've done a really wonderful job, and, and now it's time to pass the baton. The younger generation and the forward-thinking, you know, uh, people in their 60s and 70s are changing the game.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:01:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:27 It's a very different game now.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:01:29 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:29 And I think it's hard for them to understand that. And, um, and it's gotta be scary. Um, but the younger generation is much more versed. I will say that I actually would like your reflections on something. For someone that's listening to this conversation and they think, "Oh, goodness, now I have to buy organic foods and buy all these supplements," and let's say somebody has a limited budget.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:01:50 Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:51 Do you think it's fair to say, okay, if you have a limited budget, you would be very wise to get cardiovascular exercise at least three days a week, do some resistance training, uh, which can be done with body weight, and could you say eat, you know, eggs, fish, meat, fruits, and vegetables, and-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:06 Nuts and seeds and olive oil, and you're-

Andrew Huberman 1:02:08 And you're there-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:09 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:09 ... right? And if you look at the cost of buying food out versus that, you're, you're probably coming out ahead. 'Cause I'm thinking about the college student.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:15 Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:16 I'm thinking about me in college or as a postdoc or a graduate student.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:20 So, I think for, for people that have more disposable income, it makes sense. You know, you, you eat as well as you can, organic, you supplement, you do you blood test-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:29 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:29 And I wanna talk about those things. Let's talk about some of the impediments. And, um, I, I do wanna keep budgetary, uh, restraints in mind-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:36 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:36 ... because I think people fall into the category of poor, some disposable income, and lots of disposable income.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:44 Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:44 And all too often in the bio... you know, the biohacking sphere, we're talking about that last category. And we don't wanna, we don't wanna lose anyone along the way.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:53 No.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:53 So,

Andrew Huberman 1:02:54 air. We had fires here in Los Angeles.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:02:57 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:02:58 It was dreadful. The beach now, all the way down to Marina Del Rey, I ran down there yesterday, it was com- completely littered with chunks of charcoal. They mow it under the sand. It's going out to ocean. Um, most people don't... listening to this probably don't live in Los Angeles. How bad is our air in the United States, Northern Europe, Australia? Like, like is, is there any clean air left?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:03:22 I mean-

Andrew Huberman 1:03:23 You know?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:03:23 ... yeah, maybe in the mountains in Colorado. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:03:26 Okay, so, so the air is dirty.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:03:27 I think, I think, you know, compared to what is the answer. Like, if you go to India or China or some of these developing nations, or not even developing anymore, the air is so bad. I mean, they have all kinds of petrochemical products they, they burn. They have coal factories. I mean, it's just, it's really bad. So, in America, I think the air quality, in general, is much, much higher. I think when you have things like wildfires, it's a different ballgame. Than just the f- wood smoke itself, if it's just the trees burning is bad enough, but then you're burning houses and batteries-

Andrew Huberman 1:03:59 Fiberglass.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:03:59 ... and plastics and fire-

Andrew Huberman 1:04:01 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:01 ... you've got PFAS chemicals. And we te- actually found that those chemicals go up on their function testing in people living in LA who've actually been in the fires.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:09 Yeah, I need to get tested again-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:11 Oh.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:11 ... since... 'cause it... I haven't been tested since the fires. I mean, I feel fine-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:14 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:14 ... but I got out of town. I drove up to San Luis Obispo-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:17 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:17 ... parked myself at a, um, at a big pink hotel called the Madonna Inn and, uh-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:23 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:04:23 ... looked, looked at the horses and worked on my book.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:25 That's good.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:26 Uh, cl- the air felt clean.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:28 But is the air clean when there isn't a fire?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:31 I mean, not necessarily. I mean, for example, and i- just, just to help people understand that air, air moves. It's not like there's just LA air or, you know, Colorado air.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:41 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:04:42 I- in Seattle, they had a big mercury problem in the air because of China. Because Northeast China, like Beijing and Harbin, in the winters, they just burn huge amounts of coal. And it goes up in the air, and it goes across in the, in the gulf streams and the, and the, and the airstreams or whatever they call them. Uh, uh, and it gets all the way to Seattle, and it rains heavy metal rain. And so, no matter where you live, you're, you're kind of exposed to the collective air. There's some, for sure, areas that are much cleaner, but, but I think that... And most people, if they have an air filter in your house where you spend sort of most of your time, you're probably okay.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:16 So, is it a separate unit air filter?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:19 Or not... Or, or, yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:19 You can get one for your house-

Andrew Huberman 1:05:20 Uh-huh.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:21 ... which most houses have. Make sure you change the filters. Or you can get a special HEPA air filter if you live in a more, you know, urban area or more environmentally toxic area.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:29 I love to exercise outside. Is running and breathing harder outside?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:33 In LA?

Andrew Huberman 1:05:34 Well-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:34 Or in general?

Andrew Huberman 1:05:35 Well, I like to do that wherever I go. But l- like when, whe- when I'm in New York City, I love to run along the-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:41 ... the freeway.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:42 Um, probably breathing in a lot of junk.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:05:44 You are, yeah. I mean, and the question is, what, what's gonna be a problem for you? Like, all of us are toxic soups, right? So, it's just the amount over time that builds up. And then eventually, sometimes things can happen. It causes cardiovascular disease. It causes dementia. It causes cancer. It causes diabetes. So, toxins are direct causes of these things, among other things, diet and other things. So, I think, you know, you can't go crazy about it. I mean, we living in the 21st century here. We are where we are, unless you wanna move to, like, some remote island in the South Pacific or something. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:06:12 Iceland's looking pretty nice.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:06:13 Iceland's looking good. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:06:14 Yeah, pretty nice.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:06:15 Yeah, I mean, like-

Andrew Huberman 1:06:16 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:06:16 ... Greenland soon to be the 51st state. Maybe. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:06:18 Is that gonna happen?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:06:19 I don't know. (laughs) I'm just joking.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:21 (laughs) Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:06:21 I'm making fun of it.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:22 That's fine.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:06:22 But I mean, you know, like, there are places, but I, I think for most of us, we have to just manage it. And, like, we filter our water. I think, you know, I wouldn't drink tap water. There's an average of 37 or eight wastewater contaminants, including drugs, including pesticides, including glyphosate. I mean, t-... in hor- like, hormones, who, if,if women are taking the pill or taking hormone replacement therapy, where does that go? Like, there's some amount that gets excreted in the urine, it goes into the water treatment plant. They don't filter that stuff out. I mean, they get the, the bugs out, but you're getting all that stuff in your water. So, having a reverse osmosis water filter is a good idea. But I think the costing is really important, Andrew. I think, I think one of the people, problems people think about is that, oh, it's expensive to be healthy, and I think that's a myth.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:05 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:07:06 I think you mentioned a lot of foundational things like eating real food, exercising, getting enough sleep, managing stress, breath work. These are things that are free. Your breath is free. You know (laughs) , you can move your body, you know, you, you can do body weight if you can't even, you know, afford bands. Food is interesting because the food industry has been very good at brainwashing Americans that they need highly processed, cheap junk food, not accounting for the actual cost of that food, which is $3 for every $1 you spend on that food, you're gonna spend $3 in collateral damage to your health, to the economy, to the environment, to social fabric. I mean, this is the Rockefeller report on the true cost of food. But if you actually just look at the co- the actual price of the food, uh, if you eat real food, it doesn't have to be expensive. Now, you might not be getting a $70 ribeye that's grass-fed from New Zealand. You might be getting, like, uh, short ribs that, you know, that aren't organic or grass-fed. That's okay. Like, whole grains, beans... I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm grew up, you know, like, eating poor, and we used to, like, you know, have, you know, liver and onions (laughs) , you know?

Andrew Huberman 1:08:07 Ugh.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:08:07 It's just, like, the cheapest, I mean, uh-

Andrew Huberman 1:08:09 And that's chicken liver.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:08:10 Chicken liver, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:11 Ugh. What?

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:08:11 Chicken (laughs) chopped liver, you know? What are you kids

Narrator 1:08:13 Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:08:13 ... saying? So-

Andrew Huberman 1:08:13 Chicken liver, not for me.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:08:14 So, but, you know, there's been studies that it may cost the same or maybe 50 cents extra a day to eat well. And there's a guide from the Environmental Working Group called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which is how to eat well for you and for your wallet and the planet. And there, you know, we, we grew up, we have borscht. Like, it was, was short ribs, which is, like, the cheapest kind of meat, onions, cabbage, carrots, tomato, can of tomatoes. It's pretty darn cheap, and you could feed your f- like, a family of, like, six for a few bucks, you know?

Andrew Huberman 1:08:41 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:08:42 So, a- and there's been a lot written about this, but the food industry is great at convincing us that it's elitist, that it's expensive, that it's all very organic. Forget about organic, non-organic, regenerative, non-regenerative. If you don't have a lot of resources, just focus on eating real food, and, and you will do better and feel better and be more productive and walk around not feeling like crap.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:01 (laughs) Do you think that one of

Andrew Huberman 1:09:03 the reasons food and nutrition is so complicated in this country is that, with the exception of the hamburger, the hot dog, apple pie, and ice cream, that there isn't really an American cuisine? You know, um-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:16 What's wrong with all that?

Andrew Huberman 1:09:17 Years ago-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:17 Hot dogs, hamburgers, apple pie, ice cream? (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:09:19 Yeah, well, right. Well, years ago, I, I, uh, I had a, a girlfriend who was from the south of France. Um, she did, she grew up very, uh, modestly-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:29 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:29 ... did not have, um, a, uh, wealth at all. But her family ate very well. They put a lot of effort into food.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:36 They had gardens, they had animals.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:37 They put a lot of time into food, and, and she knew about... Um, she was in her early 20s, I was in my, my mid-20s then. Um, she knew probably 200 recipes-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:46 Wow.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:46 ... for soups and souffles-

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:48 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:48 ... and, like (laughs) , I mean, it was, like, it was amazing, uh, very well.

Dr. Mark Hyman 1:09:52 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:53 So, I feel like one