How to use FOOD as MEDICINE | Dr Mark Hyman | Feel Better Live More Podcast

Dr Mark Hyman 0:00 So your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet. So I wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues. I would double down on eating what we've talked about today, and it'll have a profound effect on your immune system. People don't understand that within a very short time, a couple of weeks maybe, you can really radically reverse your poor metabolic health. As I say, the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. [upbeat music] You see, that's the whole point of the pegan diet, is that, is that we, we let our ideology trample over our biology. In other words, we let our ideas about what we should do get in the way of what our bodies need us to do and what they prefer. So, uh, you know, as, as a, as a theorist, you can say, "Well, everybody should be vegan," or, "Everybody should be paleo. Everybody should be a carnivore, or eat raw, or keto," or da-da-da-da, whatever, all those crazy diets. And as a doctor, and you know this, as a doctor sitting in the office seeing thousands and thousands of patients or running s- even more umpteen blood tests, lab work about what's going on with your biology, you become very humbled when you realize that no, we're not all the same. [laughs] You know, a study can show X or Y, it might be applicable to that person in that study in that day, but not necessarily to everybody. And so really, it's about finding what works for you, a precision personalized nutrition. In The Pegan Diet, in my book, I talk about how do you eat in a way that's personalized? How do you figure out what is right for you? Among many other things, but it's really driven off of the two foundational principles of food is medicine and personalized nutrition. And when you combine those two, uh, it's a recipe for a great life. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36 Yeah. You mentioned ideologies, and that's really what food tribes have become, haven't they? You know, they start off-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:47 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47 ... in a place of wanting to help people, but nutrition has become very divisive now. It's become actually quite toxic now-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:56 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:56 ... and quite scary for people to enter that world. And, you know, was it always this way, or is it a reflection of everything in culture and the world these days that we've become polarized and everything's black and white? You know, tell me how the landscape has changed.

Dr Mark Hyman 2:12 Well, that's a very interesting question. I, I went to a talk once when I, uh, started Cleveland Clinic by Peter Orszag, who worked for Obama, and he, he showed these, these graphs of voting records in Senate and Congress in the '60s and '70s and '80s and '90s to show that all... What was happening with- In the '60s, there was this complete overlap of Republicans and Democrats. And as time went on, these sort of, these Venn diagrams sort of split and there were two separate completely [laughs] camps. And I think, you know, in, in very much in the same way in nutrition, uh, we've had this divisiveness that [clears throat] is really so unnecessary 'cause we agree if we look at the science on a few basic principles. But when I started out on this, you know, there was the vegetarian, Diet for a Small Planet, Whole Foods kind of movement, and then there was everything else. Uh, there wasn't, you know, 14 different fad diets or approaches. Now, they all have a role, right? Uh, keto is a therapeutic diet I use in my practice. Or if people, you know, wanna be vegan, we can figure out how to do that. But the, the, the truth is that most of these dietary approaches are focused on how do we create, uh, health? How do we help the planet? How do we do something good? There's no bad intention. Um, and they have far more in common with each other than the traditional American diet, which is 60% processed food. So I would say let's stop fighting each other. Let's agree on some certain basic ideas and principles, and let's go after the real problem, which is our processed American diet that's killing, uh, so many of us and, and it's, you know, causing six out of 10 people to have chronic disease, and around the world it kills 11 million people a year. It's driving the huge economic cost and makes us susceptible to COVID because of our poor health and poor immune function when we're overweight or poor metabolic health. And it's, you know, the economic burden of it. And it, it's just everything has to do with, with, um, our current food system, which is driving so much of our global crisis. Even things like climate change, which people don't connect the dots, but it is, the food system is the number one driver of climate change, uh, around the world.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:03 What drives you, Mark? Because you have written so many books now, and we spoke about a year ago or so, or just over a year, about your last book, Food Fix, which is, which is brilliant, right?

Dr Mark Hyman 4:16 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:18 And what is it that drives you to keep producing content to help people in all these different corners around the globe?

Dr Mark Hyman 4:26 I'm trying to keep up with you. [laughs] Sorry. Every week there's a different book and a new podcast. [laughs] You see it on some cover of some newspaper. It's awesome. [laughs] I'm kidding. The, the... What really drives me is, is, um, is this, is this desperate, almost evangelical feeling, like I have found the truth and no one's listening, and I need to tell the world [laughs] about it. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I was sick in, um, oh, 35 years ago, I was really sick with chronic fatigue syndrome from mercury poisoning, and I was desperate to get better. I wasn't, you know, um, getting any help from traditional doctors. And I heard Jeff Bland speak, who's the father of functional medicine, and I thought, "This guy's crazy or he's a genius, and I better figure it out." And so I started applying it to myself. I started using these principles on myself. I started healing myself. I started using it in my practice and healing patients, and I, I was under shock, like, "Wow, your rheumatoid arthritis went away when you did that?" Or, "Your migraines went away that you've had, you know, three times a week for 20 years?" Or, "Your irritable bowel or diabetes just went away, or your memory got better if you had Alzheimer's?" I'm like, "What is going on here?" And, and so I began to sort of really deeply dive into this, not because I was trying to, you know, write books or do anything, I just... Because I, I felt that there was this incredible secret of functional medicine that, you know, didn't, didn't fix everything, but it was such a better, uh, way of, of addressing health and disease, and that, that so many people were suffering needlessly, millions and millions needlessly, that- We're really, uh, missing a very straightforward and easy solution for most part. So I, I feel like I just get so frustrated when I see people unnecessarily suffering. I mean, listen, there's a lot of suffering you can't do anything about. You, you know, my parents died last year or a couple years ago. You know, COVID is causing great tragedy, you know, economic hardships. There's certain things we can't do anything about and are, are, they're challenging. But, uh, this is easy. I mean, I, within a few days, and you know this from your work, Rangan, in, in a few days people have health transformations [laughs] you know? Like, they-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:28 Yeah

Dr Mark Hyman 6:29 ... like, like their diabetes can, you know, get better in a week if, um, if people are aggressive with their diet. So we see, we see radical transformations. We just, as traditional doctors, we don't really know about it, and that's really what's driven me for the last 35 years is this overwhelming drive to help tell the world about this incredible gift that we've learned about, which is how the body actually works rather than how it was taught to us in medical school. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:54 Yeah. I mean, you mentioned food is medicine, and it's something you've been talking about for many years. It's-

Dr Mark Hyman 7:02 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:02 ... it's written within the, the brand new book as well. And I'd love, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I don't know if it's the same in the States or not, but there is a-

Dr Mark Hyman 7:12 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:12 ... growing number of doctors in the UK who are sort of rebelling against that and saying that-

Dr Mark Hyman 7:18 [laughs] Wow

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:19 ... and saying that food is not medicine. And so what would you say to that?

Dr Mark Hyman 7:23 We're doctors. We do medicine. We don't do food, right? So, yes, I get that. I mean, you know, we were trained to not just to ignore food, but to explicitly determine that it wasn't related to the, the conditions that our patients were suffering from. We were taught that diet had nothing to do with autoimmune disease or cancer. I mean, maybe if you eat too much fat you get heart disease or too much sugar you get diabetes, but that was about it. So I think, I think we're, we're, we're really, uh, in this paradigm shift right now where, where science has allowed us to

Dr Mark Hyman 7:53 dive into what are the components in food and how do they interact with our biology in ways that we've never really understood. And it turns out, you know, we know that what's in food, right? It's protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and that's true, but that's not all that's in there. It's, uh, it, it's all this other stuff that turns out is really important. There may not be causing an acute deficiency disease like scurvy. But if you don't have enough of these m- powerful medicines in food over your lifetime, your own biology doesn't work quite well. And, and for example, you know, when you get grass-fed animals, they're, they can forage on 100 different plants and they eat this plant to get this phytochemical and this medicine. They eat this plant to get this nutrient. And over time, they, they really are able to modulate their health through a robust array of a wide variety of different plant foods. It turns out there's 25,000, 25,000-plus molecules in food that are medicines, these phytochemicals, and The Rockefeller Foundation is spending, I think, $200 million [laughs] trying to map out the periodic table of food, of phytochemicals and how they interact with our biology. And, and the, and, and the concepts of these chemicals in our biology is really quite interesting. I, I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means that we've evolved symbiotically with these plants and have adapted our biology to use their compounds for our own benefit, which is, you know, we do this all the time. We, we, you know, we take a vitamin from vitamin C from an orange. We don't make vitamin C, so we use it for our benefit. Well, it turns out that, you know, if you want your detoxification system to work well, you need certain classes of compounds in broccoli family called glucosinolates and sulforaphane. So it turns out if you want to clean up your mitochondria and recycle all the old parts so you have healthy aging, you might need a compound that comes from pomegranate called urolithin A. Or maybe if you wanna, you know, regulate your gut and have a, a, a, no, no damage to the barrier and that can lead to autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, and you want a grow bacteria called akkermansia, that bug likes certain things like cranberry, pomegranate, and green tea. [laughs] Or, or maybe, uh, you know, you have, um, these zombie cells running around from your white blood cells that have been damaged from t- uh, various kinds of insults over years and, and they're causing aging, and maybe if you eat these, these phytochemicals, there's over 132 phytochemicals from this buckwheat that Jeffrey Bland has, has disc- rediscovered, uh, that are, some are 100 times more potent than any other food source, and you eat these, it kills the zombie cells, these phytochemicals. So the question is how do we begin to incorporate all these principles into upgrading our biology and, and healing disease?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:34 Yeah. I mean, just hearing all those powerful compounds that exist within foods, you know, it's mind-blowing really. I'm sure we're gonna discover more. There's plenti- probably plenty out there we don't even know yet. We don't even know the names, what they do.

Dr Mark Hyman 10:47 Mm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:47 But, but that time is coming. But, you know, I think about this concept food is medicine, and philosophically I think in a culture where 80% of what we see is driven by our collective modern lifestyles, I kind of feel philosophically as doctors, I feel unless we give it the same priority and call it medicine-

Dr Mark Hyman 11:06 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:06 ... it's not gonna have that same impact, right, uh, with our patients. So we prioritize the drugs and say, oh, uh, we've got to give it-

Dr Mark Hyman 11:11 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:11 ... that, that weight. But then culturally I feel, well, hold on a minute. Well, I grew up in an Asian family, in an Indian family, where we grow up with the concept of food is medicine. You know, if we're, if we're not doing so well or we've got a cold or something, our mom might give us more food with turmeric in and, um, you know, with the South American cultures where they talk about the concepts of food is medicine. So I, I kind of find, I find there's a slight arrogance when we try and say food is not medicine and it almost, there's almost this kind of, um, attitude of, oh, you know, we, we now in Western medicine, we figured this out. In 2021, we figured out actually that food-

Dr Mark Hyman 11:50 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:51 ... is not medicine. Okay. Great. I'll go and tell my grandparents that and everyone else who's done all that research for years.

Dr Mark Hyman 11:56 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:56 Do you know what I mean? I kind of feel, I feel-

Dr Mark Hyman 11:58 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:58 ... it's a no-brainer.

Dr Mark Hyman 12:01 Yeah, it's pretty striking. Um, the, you know, the, um... There's a quote from R.D. Laing, who was a psychiatrist back in the '60s, said, "Scientists can't see the way they see with their way of seeing." In other, in other words, paradigms are really hard to break. When you're a doctor and you're saying, "Well, eat better and exercise more," or, "Eat less and exercise more," and it doesn't work, you go, "Well, nutrition doesn't really work." [laughs] But that's not really helpful. [laughs] That's the same as saying, "Why don't you just, uh, fly to, fly to London?" Well, how do I fly there? Do I need a plane? Like, [laughs] how do I get there? Do I swim? You know? Like... [laughs] And, and what's, what's really striking is that, is that most doctors don't know how to apply food as medicine. So if, if, if you have a headache and I would say, "Well, I'm gonna give you, like, one milligram of aspirin," you think it's gonna work? [laughs] Right? It's like you need 600 milligrams of aspirin to get your headache to go away. So we say, "Well, you know, food didn't work." Uh, well, it didn't work because you didn't know the right medicine, which, well, foods to use. You didn't know the dose. [laughs] You didn't know the frequency. You know, like, it, it's really sophisticated. That's why the Pegan diet isn't really like a fixed diet. It's really a set of principles that allows you to sort of eat in a way that meets your dietary preferences and cultural preferences, but also, um, helps you to figure out which are the foods in each category that you should be eating that have the most medicine, and what are the principles that we might wanna learn about personalized nutrition or how to eat like a regenitarian, which we can talk about [laughs] or how to eat for your mood or longevity, or how to feed your kids, or how to eat in a way that's affordable. So it's a really practical guide. Uh, it's sort of one of those things you can kinda refer back to over and over again-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:38 Yeah

Dr Mark Hyman 13:38 ... to see exactly, you know, what's the, the, uh, digestible bit. And it's sort of, sort of like little snacks of [laughs] information that allow you to really get the point and, and follow through on it. Um, there's a t- ton of theory I've written about before, and the science, but this, this is... There's a lot of science in it, but it's really a very, very practical book.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:56 Yeah. Uh, and on, on the book, I, I agree. It's, it's a really good, uh, digestible read for people who want to learn more about foods, the various properties in different foods, and the various principles. And as you say, it's kind of... It's called the Pegan diet, but it's kinda not really a diet in the conventional-

Dr Mark Hyman 14:17 No

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:17 ... term, right? It's, like, the way we think about diets, it's really-

Dr Mark Hyman 14:20 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:20 ... not that. As you say, it's 21 foundational principles which, frankly, are gonna be helpful for so many of us.

Dr Mark Hyman 14:29 Yeah. I mean, that, that's sort of the joke of it all. That's like when we're in these different diet wars and diet camps, we're all fighting with each other, and I... That's how the, this whole name came. I was sitting on a panel with a vegan cardiologist and a sort of a militant paleo doctor, and they were fighting. And I'm like, "Hey, if you're paleo and you're vegan, I must be pegan," and everybody cracked up. [laughs] And I thought, "Okay, well, there's something here." And I went home and thought about it as I was flying home, and I was like, "Wait a minute. They're, they're identical." They're exactly the same principles except for one, which is where you get your protein, which is animals or grains and beans. Otherwise, no dairy, no sugar, no processed food, whole foods, vegetables, good fats. You know, all the same principles except, uh, except that one. And, and then the truth is they have far more in common with each other than the traditional American diet. And so I began to sort of realize, wait, wait, maybe we can all come together with, with a, a movement that actually helps to, you know, crystallize what we do know and, and then personalize it, and that's really the whole point of the Pegan diet. It's sort of an un-diet. It says, wait a minute, if you're focusing on... I mean, the traditional American diet, yes, that's, that's an easy sort of win. Uh, but even if you're, you know, keto or vegan, I mean, how do you be a healthy vegan? I see, I see people run into trouble with that all the time. And so, you know, I talk about how to do that in the book. So I think it's really, uh, kind of a fun little, uh, sort of kaleidoscope. And as, actually, someone, someone, someone [laughs] has said to me after, said, "Dr. Hyman, there's no chapter on weight loss." And I said, "That's right." I said, "There's no chapter on weight loss because I never tell patients to lose weight." I just don't. I, I, I don't actually think it works, and I don't think it's helpful advice. [laughs] And I think what I teach them is how their body works, how to work with it, and the weight loss is automatic. I don't, I don't say start-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:06 Yeah

Dr Mark Hyman 16:06 ... starve yourself, restrict calories, said, "Eat these foods. Don't eat these foods. This is really what is gonna help you thrive," and people just have the most amazing results. I mean, literally 100 pounds, 50 pounds, 75 pounds. It's really pretty amazing. But it's never, it was never a goal. And I, I, I think, uh, you know, it was sort of shocking to people that it was a book on diet with no, no, no mention of weight loss. [laughs] But that's how it goes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:30 Yeah. No, absolutely. So there are all these principles in the book. I wanna sort of dive into some of them. Uh, and you mentioned eat like a regenitarian, and I think that would be, that would be a good place to go into. Um, let... Before we do that though, Mark, can we just sort of set out the, the foundations of the Pegan diet? You know, uh, you, you sort of touched on a few of those principles. So for people who are coming to your work for the first time and are trying to understand, well, you know, what is the component, you know, is it paleo? Is it vegan? You know, what is it? What are these sort of foods that you're recommending? How would you sort of simplify the concept for them?

Dr Mark Hyman 17:08 Yeah. It's, it's really pretty easy. I mean, and I, I, it's embarrassingly easy, actually, 'cause as, it's so... It's like people aren't gonna really a, be able to sort of disagree with anything [laughs] because it's all pretty common sense and straightforward. So the first thing is, you know, really use your food as your pharmacy. So when you are eating, think of what you're eating as medicine. Are you eating a french fry that's fried in rancid oils, that's, you know, got 14 different ingredients in it, uh, that is gonna kind of fry your arteries and, you know, cause all kinds of problems, or are you gonna eat, let's say, a wild blueberry, and it has all sorts of phytochemicals and so forth? So how, how do you, how do you begin to sort of think of food as your medicine? The second is you wanna eat a lot of medicine, so eat the rainbow, which is essentially all the colors in plant foods are where all the benefits are. So the more deeper, darker colors and pigments, that's where all the phytochemicals are. And also think about your diet as mostly vegetables, [laughs] like it should be 75% non-starchy veggies, which is, like, uh, really what the majority of your plate should be, with a little side of protein. Um, when you're picking any kind of category of food, whether it's beans or grains or nuts and seeds, um- Um, it's important to understand which ones in each category are the best. For example, peanuts might have aflatoxin, which you want to stay away from or be careful where you source it. Or, you know, you probably don't want to eat a lot of the gluten in grains here, but if you're having heirloom grains like rye or maybe heirloom wheats, that might be okay because they're less inflammatory and so forth. Or maybe you have gluten issues and you shouldn't eat at all. Um, or which beans are the best beans, or which, which seeds are the best seeds, and so forth. And then, uh, I have a, a whole section there on, on, you know, meat, which is, I think a little shocking for people, but it's talking about how to eat your meat as medicine. Um, and, and some of the research on this is just stunning that, that, that these, uh, grass-fed animals have high phytochemical contents, just like plants, and have all these health benefits. [laughs] So we're, we're learning more about it. This is out of Duke. Um, so whether you're eating any kind of protein, how do you pick the best eggs or chicken? How do you, how do you understand, uh, what are the right fats to eat? How do you think about dairy, which is, you know, really, uh, often a big problem, and it's... And the mo- modern cows we have are pretty harmful. And then there's some, you know, just guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you, but not only good for you, but good for the planet and good for society. Like eat like a regenitarian or, you know, think about, uh, sugar is fine, but it's like a recreational drug. [laughs] You know, how do you, uh, personalize your nutrition or detox or, uh, eat for your gut or eat for longevity or mood or, or how do you afford what you're, what you're doing in a way that actually is, makes it doable? 'Cause it doesn't have to be expensive. So it really guides people through a way of thinking about food that it, it will last them as a roadmap for their life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:44 You mentioned meats there, and you mentioned phytonutrients. So let's just-

Dr Mark Hyman 19:47 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:48 Let's just start off explaining what phytonutrients are, and then I agree that, that, that section on meat is really fascinating. And, you know, meat has become one of these controversial items as well. And one thing I do know, Mark, like myself, you're very respectful of people's individual choices, their ethics, and how they choose to live and, and their cultural beliefs. So yeah, just walk me through phytochemicals, but then also let's then go from that into meat and how meat potentially might be medicine for some people.

Dr Mark Hyman 20:20 Yeah, for sure. I mean, before we get down in the weeds, I just, I just want to say that, you know, I, I, my personal goal is to live healthy and vibrant, to be 120 at least. So I, I don't want to eat a meat or anything else if it's gonna hurt me. So I, I took the time to really dive into all the research. I locked myself away for a week with, you know, a stack of scientific papers, you know, four feet high, and went through it all, and these are the... I mean, there's 100,000 papers online on meat on the National Library of Medicine. But if you, if you find the major ones, you can find, you know, what is it saying? What is it not saying? Really, there were three issues. One was, um, moral and ethical, um, and, and the other is in, in climate, environment, and the last is health. And so they're all kind of smooshed together, right? So if you want to be saving the planet, if you want to be healthy, and you want to do the right thing morally and ethically, you should be a vegan. And that, and everybody should be a vegan because that kind of deals with all that. But unfortunately, it's not so simple. [laughs] Um, and, and, and, you know, kind of getting back to like what is meat, uh, and, and phytochemicals, it, it, it also sort of speaks to the theme of the book, which is meat is not meat is not meat, right? If you're eating a feedlot cow, it's different than eating wild elk in terms of your health, the wellbeing of the animal, you know, the, the effect on the environment and climate. So people need to understand that quality matters in every aspect of what you're eating, and that's the whole premise of The Pegan Diet, is how do you pick quality in each area? So in terms of meat, you know, most of the meat that's eaten and consumed, and even that we have done research on, is feedlot industrial meat, which is fed all kinds of weird garbage, [laughs] and is, is really full of, of, uh, hormones, antibiotics, and it's mostly corn. But wild, wild or grass-finished animals, uh, can forage on hundreds of different plants, each with medicinal properties. And those chemicals from the plants, these phytochemicals, we call them phytonutrients or phytochemicals, phyto means plant, they get absorbed and they, they start to become part of these animals' tissue. And you eat them, you actually can get, for example... For example, goat milk, if the goats are foraging on different shrubs, uh, you can have the same level of catechins, which is the powerful anti-cancer, antioxidant, detoxifying compound in green tea, as green tea. [laughs] So, so it's like drinking green tea when you're drinking goat's milk that's fed on certain bushes. That's just an example. But we're learning more and more about, about these powerful medicinal properties and then how it affects your biology. And if you look at kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat, in a study in Australia, they found that when they eat the feedlot meat, same portion, they got inflammation. When they eat the kangaroo meat, their biology was totally different. They actually reduced the inflammation. So that's kind of striking to me when you see, you know, eating identical amounts of food, kangaroo, feedlot, profoundly different effects on biology.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 23:03 On that, Mark, in the, in the spirit of the book, which is, um, you know, Pegan bringing in, you know, paleo and vegan and where the s- where the sort of similarities are-

Dr Mark Hyman 23:15 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 23:16 ... and where do we all agree, I think one thing we can all agree on, no matter what side you sit on, on, and the dietary wars potentially, is that factory farming is a bad thing. Would you agree with that?

Dr Mark Hyman 23:31 I mean, listen, you know, the, [laughs] the, the moral ethical issues really have to do a lot around that. But, you know, factory farming is, is an abomination. It's bad for the cows and the animals that are raised in these confined animal feeding operations. It's bad for the environment. I mean, uh, just Tyson Chicken alone is the second biggest polluter in the United States after U.S. Steel, I think. [laughs] It's like...

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 23:52 Wow.

Dr Mark Hyman 23:52 And the health of the animals is the moral ethical issues. Uh, and, I mean, and the health of the meat that it produces, or lack thereof. So I think, you know, it's, it's sort of a triple whammy for, for the planet, for the animals, and for humans, and it should be banned, and there's no question about that. And I do, I do think that there's, uh, evidence that, uh, it's moving in this right direction, that there's a bill produced by, I think, um, a couple of senators who- Who put forth the idea that we should get rid of regener- get rid of factory farming by 2040, which is now 20 years from now. So I th- I think

Dr Mark Hyman 24:22 we're, we're heading there. Um, but I think, yeah, it's an abomination and we should never eat factory farming. [laughs] So I think the other consideration around m- eating animals is what is the effect on the ecology and climate? And I think we know that factory farming is a huge contributor, that traditional farming and, i- is, is probably the number one contributor to climate change when you add in deforestation, soil erosion, factory farming animals, food waste, transportation, refrigeration, all of it end to end, probably half of all climate change. And, and so the question is, you know, um, is it, is it all animals that will do that? And I think that there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture which sort of focused on a really simple idea, which is not the cow, it's the how, right? So [laughs] it's not, it's not the fact that you're actually raising animals, it's how you're doing it. And the truth is that, that most of the land we, we now farm is used to grow food for animals, um, about 70%. And, and it is soy and corn, all the sort of stuff that we feed them that's highly, uh, different than their normal diet, which is grass. And it creates all sorts of secondary problems, changes the quality of the meat and so forth. But the, but the way we grow these foods actually destroys the soil, uses up tons of water from irrigation. It causes the collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity because of the use of pesticides and herbicides. It, the nitrogen fertilizer runs off into the rivers and streams and oceans and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish every year. So we, we really have this sort of destructive agricultural system that, that is u- often used to produce food for animals. And then that, that's just a bad idea, 'cause the way we grow it is the number one cause of climate change and how we do that. So I think we need to sort of change what's happening with the animals and put them back where they belong, which is on rangeland. And 40% of our land of agriculture... So we should just grow vegetables. Well, you can't. 40% is, is not, uh, suitable for growing crops. It's only suitable for grazing. So what do you do with that? Well, you have to put animals on it. Turns out that they will build soil, they'll conserve water, they'll, they'll reduce it or eliminate the need for pesticides, herbicides, and they will draw down carbon out of the atmosphere because the soil gets built, uh, and produce better quality and, and even more scalable than, than traditional agriculture right now for, for animals. So we have this potential, and everybody's talking about it. There's movies like Kiss the Ground, there's books on it, there's, there's conversations that are happening in Washington, D.C. now about it. So I th- I think we're, we're on the precipice of sort of a, a real sea change around thinking about how we grow food in a way that's regenerative. And, and, and meat has got to be a key part of that. You can't have an ecosystem on a farm that actually builds soil

Dr Mark Hyman 26:53 without actually having, uh, uh, animals poop and pee and, you know, put their saliva on the grass, which makes it grow. It's like actually a growth factor for the grass. So we wanna keep building roots and building soil, and, and that's really through the, the kind of reuse of animals rotating through a farm ecosystem. So I th- I think we have to sort of think about all these pieces. Now, the last piece is health. So, um, [smacks lips] if people are [laughs] thinking, "Oh, well, meat's gonna kill me, I don't wanna eat it, it causes heart disease and cancer," pretty much you can go and find any study that, you know, supports any belief that you have, and you can ignore all the rest. But when you look at the totality of the evidence and you look at the kind of ways in which studies were done, you know, I don't, I, I'm not convinced that meat is bad for you. In fact, you know, there are many large reviews recently that, that sort of refuted that idea and, and looked at all the data. And when, turns out when, when a lot of the studies were done on meat, they were population studies. They looked at groups of people over time. They really can't prove cause and effect. They say, "Well, what did you eat for the last 30 years? Oh, you ate more meat than this guy? Okay, you had more heart attacks. It's probably the meat." But you can't prove that. It doesn't create proof. And, and it may be something else, right? When you look at the habits of the meat eaters in those studies, 'cause this was done when we were told meat was bad, so if you ate meat, you, you were basically somebody who probably didn't care about their health, right? [laughs] So yes, it was true. You smoked more, drank more, ate less fruits and veggies, more processed food, more sugar, you know, didn't exercise, so c- didn't take your vitamins, so of course you had more, more disease. Was it the meat or was it all the other stuff? So, and then when they looked, like as I mentioned, when they looked at people who shopped at health food stores, um, who both were, were eating healthy food, some ate meat in the context of a whole foods diet, others just didn't. And there was the same reduction in death in both groups by half. And when you look at cultures like the Maasai, you know, who d- live on milk and meat, they live very long, they have very healthy... But they also do something really interesting, was they actually... It's not even necessarily how you, how you raise the animals, it's maybe how you prepare the meat. If you're, for example, if you're cooking it on a high char grilling, that's probably not good. The slow cooking with tons of spices, those spices have phytochemicals that alter any kind of harmful reactions that can happen from cooking meat. So there's, there's a lot of, uh, incredible science around how we actually can include meat as a healthful part of our diet. In fact, probably for most of us, we probably need to, uh, especially as we age, 'cause it's very difficult to build muscle without adequate protein.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:14 Yeah, I mean, super fascinating. And this is one of those very emotive and divisive topics, uh, meat, plant-based eating, uh, you know, veganism. These are things which are becoming... People are becoming very, you know, very solid in what they believe, very sort of entrenched in their views, to the point where even saying something like that, Mark, is potentially gonna really inflame some people who believe that actually everyone on the planet should only be eating plants. And, you know, something you said right at the start of this conversation, Mark, and it's something that's been very clear to me from observing you for, uh, for, for many years, is that you are a clinician. You have seen tens of thousands of patients. And, you know, I'm, I'm certainly, I'm only 20 years into my clinical career. You are, you've got a lot more clinical experience than I do. But it, within that time, if you are a practicing clinician and you have seen thousands of thousands of patients, they teach you. You soon-

Dr Mark Hyman 30:20 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:20 ... very quickly learn that I cannot subscribe to one ideology because The patients are proving that ideology wrong all the time. Different people are coming back saying, "Oh, really? That's working for you? Well, I didn't think that would work, but this is working." And so-

Dr Mark Hyman 30:36 Right

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:36 ... you know, you know, um, if somebody is 100% plant-based and they're listening to this conversation or watching it on YouTube and they're thinking, "Well, you know what? I, I, I... people shouldn't be eating animals because actually, you know, it's compassion to animals. We shouldn't be killing animals," what would you say to them?

Dr Mark Hyman 30:57 Hmm. Listen, I, like I said, I have, I have monks and abbots that are my patients, and I don't force them to eat meat if it's against their religious or spiritual or moral beliefs, and I think that's a perfectly fine choice that anybody can make. Um, however, I would, I would make sure that y- people fully understand that if you're a human being or... living on this ecosystem called Planet Earth, that there are consequences to everything, uh, including any type of agriculture. So unless you're gathering all your wild foods, you're, you're basically in a destructive act, right? So, so most traditional agriculture was they, they destroy natural habitats, they till the fields, they use machinery to harvest your cabbages or your grains or your beans [laughs] or whatever you're eating, and guess what? There's a lot of animals that live on, in those ecosystem. Rabbits, moles, mice, you know, birds. I mean, 50% of the bird species have been killed through agriculture in this country. Uh, 90, 75% of our pollinator species are gone. And, and, and there's been estimates that, you know, just e- just growing vegetables in this country for people to eat, health- healthy food, you know, and plants, uh, has kills over seven billion animals a year. Um, and is the life of a rabbit any, any less valuable than the life of a feedlot chicken or a, a pig or a cow? I don't know. [laughs] I think... So we're just gonna have to be real about, you know, what we are doing in terms of our, our behavior as humans. We can't avoid the cycle of death and life and birth and renewal. I mean, it's just sort of what we're doing. You know? And I think that, that, uh, fooling yourself to think that, that you're not part of that, even if you're at distance from it... It's like, well, people say, "Well, I'm not gonna go shoot a, a, uh, an elk, but, but I'll eat a cow" [laughs] Like, you know? I think we, we were so divorced from the, the sources of our food and what we're eating, but I think if we kinda drew the chain back, we'd see that, you know, we're all involved in this essentially destructive agricultural system, um, whatever we're eating, vegan or not, and that that, that may be a problem. And, and you know, there may be sort of other levels of destruction. For example, if you're looking at these brand-new, uh, fake meat companies, and some of them are okay, but, you know, some of them are, like, using GMO soy, which is highly destructive to soil, uses tons of glyphosate that's creates, you know, harmful effects on humans, destroys the microbiome of the soil. Um, you know, uses lots of irrigation and causes all sorts of issues as a consequence of growing these GMO soybeans that we're using for plant-based meats. So I think, I think we just have to kinda get the whole picture instead of just kinda looking at a sliver of the truth from here and there. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:19 I- isn't what you just said there, that we're divorced from where our food comes from, isn't that-

Dr Mark Hyman 33:23 Hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:24 ... it strikes me that that's at the heart of this problem, that-

Dr Mark Hyman 33:27 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:27 ... you know, I grew up completely divorced from where my food was coming from, you know?

Dr Mark Hyman 33:30 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:30 It arrived in packets. You know, if you go out, let's say, to, to an extreme, so a hunter-gatherer tribe, you know, they know where their food is coming from. They know that's their, their raison d'être every day is to acquire food to live. You know, their, their diet is dictated by, by geography, by the climate. You know, they don't have-

Dr Mark Hyman 33:50 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:50 ... the choices that we've got, whereas we're just disconnected. We're disconnected from-

Dr Mark Hyman 33:53 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:54 ... so much in the world-

Dr Mark Hyman 33:54 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:54 ... but we're disconnected from our food supply, which leads to these ideologies and these kind of, the, these sort of theoretical concepts that actually when you go out into nature, maybe they're not-

Dr Mark Hyman 34:07 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:07 ... quite as clear-cut as we might have thought.

Dr Mark Hyman 34:12 Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, just the divisiveness and the... I don't understand it. I just, you know, I'm like, "Hey, we're all [laughs] like, we're all here just trying to do our best, and let's work together to find out a way to live better for ourselves, live better for the planet and, and the world." So I think, I think everybody has a good intention for sure when they're trying this or that or a different approach, but the, the advice I'd give to people is, is don't let your, you know, ideology trample your biology and, and end up in trouble, and I've seen many people who do this. I th- I should be keto, and that's what I need to do, and then it doesn't work for them. Or some other, I should be vegan, and it's like, well, it doesn't really work for them. So I th- I think we need to be honest about, about it and actually, um, listen to our bodies. As I say, the, the, the smartest doctor in the room is your own body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:55 Yeah. A- and that's the theme I get from The Pegan Diet, Mark, is that, you know, you, you are... you're trying to give the reader the ownership, those, those, those foundational principles, say, "Hey, look, this is the science. These are the principles. Play around with it a little bit. Find out what's working for you," right?

Dr Mark Hyman 35:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:16 That's kind of-

Dr Mark Hyman 35:17 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:18 ... you know, because, you know, we can talk about therapeutic diets, for example. So, um, you know-

Dr Mark Hyman 35:26 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:26 ... let's say somebody comes to see you in your clinic and they've got type 2 diabetes, right?

Dr Mark Hyman 35:30 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:30 You may, I guess, approach that differently from someone who just generally wants to eat better for their overall health and their longevity, or is it the same?

Dr Mark Hyman 35:42 No, it's totally different. I mean, if someone comes in with diabetes, they're, they're [laughs] ... it's like they need a rescue mission [laughs] as opposed to someone who's just generally fit and healthy can have a more robust, resilient metabolism, will be able to tolerate a wide variety of foods. For example, if I'm riding my bike, you know, three hours a day, I might tolerate a lot more starch, right? I might tolerate more sweet potatoes or rice or even a little sugar. But if I, if my metabolism has been screwed up for 30 years of eating sugar and soda and starch, and I can't even regulate my blood sugar and my insulin goes sky high, then I, I'm really carbohydrate intolerant. I should really avoid those. So it's really about looking at, at what is each person's biology doing? Uh, what's their gut doing? Do they have a leaky gut? Do they have food sensitivities? What is their metabolism like? Are they tend to be more carbohydrate intolerant, kind of pre-diabetic spectrum? Or are they more sort of the lean kind of guy who sort of maybe doesn't do that well on saturated fat? So I think we have to really understand that we're all so different, and the, the, the, the dietary approaches can be customized based on what really is needed. And, and I talk about that in the book, and there's many other resources in functional medicine that, that are available to help people understand how to personalize diets. If you have an autoimmune diet, for example, there is an autoimmune diet that actually works really great for colitis, but that's a very specific diet. It might be very different than I'd give a diabetic, for example, or someone with Alzheimer's, right? So it's very, it's very important to understand that it's personalized.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:09 Yeah. There's a theme in the work over the last years, Mark, that there's a real big, um... There's a real big mission I, I sense from you about talking about food, not just for individual health, but for wider population and planetary health and the environment and the climate.

Dr Mark Hyman 37:29 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:30 Clearly, you went in a deep dive in your last book, Food Fix-

Dr Mark Hyman 37:34 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:34 ... on that.

Dr Mark Hyman 37:35 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:35 Um, but that theme still is, is very present in The Pegan Diet. It's something that is clearly-

Dr Mark Hyman 37:42 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:42 ... very important to you.

Dr Mark Hyman 37:44 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:44 Uh, you've mentioned regenerative agriculture. Um, in the book you also talk about food waste and just how problematic that is.

Dr Mark Hyman 37:53 Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:53 Um, I wonder if you could expand a little bit on food waste and what that's doing for the climate.

Dr Mark Hyman 38:00 Sure. You know, I, I mentioned that, you know, when you look at the food system end to end, it's probably the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions, estimated at 30 to 50% or more. And, and one of the biggest, uh, contributors is not just soil erosion and factory farming animals and deforestation, is food waste. Uh, we throw out about 40% of our food around the world. If we actually would have to grow that food again, we'd need a land mass the entire size of China. We throw out $2 trillion or more of food every year. Uh, it's different reasons in the developing world versus developed world. The developed world is mostly what we throw in our trash in the house. In the developing world, it's often lost in the food chain because there's no refrigeration, and, and it's often difficult to transport food. Um, but we [laughs] you know, when you think about it, you know, when you look at, uh, food waste, just, just for example, as a... If it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. That's how bad it is. Um, if you think, well, those factory farm animals and the methane, and that's causing greenhouse gases from the cow farts, well, guess what? The greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, from the off-gassing of the rotting vegetables which produce methane, is three times as much methane. Three times as much methane as cows. [laughs] So, uh, if you're vegan and throwing out all your vegetables that you, you let rot in the fridge, or you, or you maybe are just throwing away food scraps, you know, that actually adds up and it, it is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. I encourage everybody to compost. Uh, we should not be... I mean, in certain countries you cannot. You cannot throw out your garbage. In San Francisco, you can't throw out food waste. You have to put it in compost. In the airports there's a compost bucket. It's not that hard to do. It's just another trash. We have recycling, we have garbage, and we have, like, compost. [laughs] Uh, and it, and it can be a huge benefit. And it's something that the government's working on, uh, across, uh, America and across the world there's governments that are really focusing on food waste. In France, you know, I think you can't throw out your, your garbage. You have to, you have to recycle it. Or if you're a f- company, you can't just get your, throw your food waste out and you do, you get a fine. You, I think you get a five year, five-year jail sentence or something [laughs] and a big fine. So it's really important. And, and in Europe, uh, they have way... They have the anaerobic digesters, which they don't have so much here. But, um, there's ways to handle it, not just, you know, for example, you making compost, but there are large companies that can be mandated to actually deal with food waste differently. So in Massachusetts they're like, "Hey, you, if you make a ton of food waste, uh, w- a week from your, you know, grocery store or restaurant or whatever, you can't throw it out. You have to do something with it. You have to give it to the farmer, you have to compost it, you have to something." And, and so they, they... This company was developed called Vanguard Renewables that built these anaerobic digesters, basically like a big kind of furnace. They throw in the food scraps, they throw in manure, and it kind of cooks. Uh, and it provides electricity for 1,500 homes. The dairy farmers who are losing money are now making 100 grand a year. The Vanguard Renewable sells the excess electricity up the food, up the, um, up to the grid. And so basically it's a win-win-win for everybody, and there's only five of them here. There's, like, 17,000 of them in Europe. [laughs] So there's a lot of ways to solve the food waste problem, but it is, it is a huge problem. And, and I think also, you know, we, we, we're so strange in this country. We w- only want to eat perfectly shaped vegetables or perfectly shaped ve- or fruit. I mean, I don't know what it's like in the UK, but, you know, if there's funny shaped things, they just go, they go in the garbage. Like, if it's a funny shaped apple or a funny shaped carrot or if it's got two legs or, you know, it's like, [laughs] it's like a potato that's not perfectly round or, you know.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:37 But it's, it's, it's like what we were saying before, isn't it? That we, we're divorced from where the food comes from, 'cause if you had grown it yourself, you would know that they're not all perfectly round, beautiful. Um, that's half the problem, isn't it? We're presented shiny, pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables in stores, and we from a young age think that, well, that an apple should always be perfectly round and ripe and red.

Dr Mark Hyman 42:01 You know, it's interesting, um, that, that, uh, when I was a kid my mom had a garden and we had fruit trees in the backyard, and we lived in the middle of suburbs. [laughs] And in America during World War II, and I know it was like in, in the UK, but, but we were implored to grow our own food. And so 40, 40% of food in America was grown in victory gardens, literally in people's backyards. Uh, so I think, I think, you know, we, we need to get back to figuring out how to have a better, closer relationship to our food.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:32 If someone's listening to this, Mark, and they've never thought about their food waste before, 'cause, because it's just not the cultural norm, I think, in many countries still. Certainly I think in the UK, it's, yes, we're talking about it, some of us, but it- we've not been grown up, we've not grown up with that as a concept, as a, uh, as something that we do, right? So people might be listening and go, "Yeah, okay, so if something's rotten in the fridge, I might just throw it into my regular dustbin."

Dr Mark Hyman 43:03 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:04 Can you explain to them why that's problematic and what they should be doing instead of that? Because yes, there's societal, there's things that companies can do, but individuals can play a role here as well.

Dr Mark Hyman 43:15 Absolutely, yeah. And then there are, and there are, you know, there's legislation helping with compost and there's, there's companies that are sort of, you know, made to, to sort of change their ways because of these regulations, which is all a good thing. And there are cities that, that have, you know, ordinances for compost. So that, that's all happening. But at individual level, you know, w- it's one of the most powerful things you can do to sort of help address climate change is just don't throw your food scraps in the garbage. Start a compost pile. Now if you live in the country, it's easy. Just, you just can build like a little 2x4 little box, and you just throw the stuff in there, and you can throw in leaves or f- garden waste or whatever in there. And then over time it just... Like, I'm really lazy about it, but over time it just turns into this incredible soil. Um, there's, there's ways to do it w- in a more sophisticated way, but it's pretty simple. And if you live in the city or an urban enviro- environment, there are Amazon, uh, or other places you can buy these, these home composters where you just put the food scraps in and it's a little thing, it doesn't smell in your house. And then it turns into soil, and you can drop it off at the local farms. Um, even in New York City, there's a, you can drop off your compost, uh, scraps in, in the local farmer's market. So there's, there's definitely a way to, to sort of help encourage people to start to think about doing this because, uh, you know, this is one of those things, particularly in the developed world, where we have control over. It's really... And, and the food is, is w- often most of it, 30-plus percent, is wasted in the home.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:33 It, it just strikes me that there will be some people who are fighting on social media about the climate and what we should be eating and what we shouldn't be eating, but at the same time be throwing out their food waste [laughs] into their dustbin.

Dr Mark Hyman 44:47 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:47 And it's, you know... And, and, and I don't say that with... I'm not judging anyone for that or criticizing. I'm just saying sometimes we just can't see the perspective, can we? That actually-

Dr Mark Hyman 44:56 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:56 ... you know what? This will make a huge difference if I could just start doing it.

Dr Mark Hyman 45:02 Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:04 Yeah.

Dr Mark Hyman 45:04 And, you know, and so there's, and there's also other ways to join in. For example, there's a company I, I... a couple of companies, one's called Imperfect Foods, which just basically takes all the ugly food from farms that are gonna be thrown out and, and, and sells them, you know, direct to delivery. So you can get funny-shaped carrots and potatoes and veggies that are kinda weird looking, but they're, they're the same veggies, they just taste, they just taste the same, they're just different shape. Uh, and there's other companies as well that, that, that do the same. So they, there's a lot of ways for us to get involved, whether it's, you know, buying ugly food or whether it's, uh, composting, or whether it's just being more careful or using various s- strategies. There's a company called Apeel that creates a second coating on plants, uh, vegetables, so they last longer, or, um, Fresh Paper, which is actually like this is a, um, uh, an Indian woman who developed this concept 'cause she would go, she went home to India and she got very sick, uh, from, I think traveler's diarrhea or something, and she ended up, um, getting her grandmother to give her all these, like, spices and herbs and fixed her whole system. And then she thought about, you know, all these rotting, uh, [laughs] rotting vegetables and she put this, uh, herb infused with cloves and all these, you know, and, and medicinal herbs into this paper and put, you put it in the drawer of your, uh, of your, uh, fridge and the vegetables last two or three times longer. So there's all kinds of innovation happening, but you can all be part of the solution.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:29 One of the sections in the book is about children. Uh, feed your kids what you eat.

Dr Mark Hyman 46:35 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:35 And, you know, as you-

Dr Mark Hyman 46:35 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:36 ... talk about the environment, you talk about compost. Of course, these are great things that we can start to instill in our kids, uh, which means that they're much more likely to be engaging with that as they get older. But it's also about what we feed our kids, and you are, like myself, very passionate about this, and I love that. Feed your kids what you eat. When did that start to become so, like, controversial? When, when, when, when did we start having kids meals and Happy Meals? I mean, what, what happened that we actually give our children different-

Dr Mark Hyman 47:06 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:07 ... foods to what we give ourselves?

Dr Mark Hyman 47:10 It's true. I mean, you think of like, what do kids eat in Japan? They eat raw fish and seaweed, you know? [laughs] You know, what do kids eat in, you know, India? They eat spicy curries, right? [laughs] And I, I think we, we've kinda gotten away from, from what our traditional knowledge and wisdom is, and we feel like we have to feed our kid Go-Gurts and Lunchables and snack packs and Goldfish and I don't even know what else. Like [laughs] I'm so out of that world now. And it's, it's a giant marketing scam, and it's, uh, uh, frightening to think, you know, you wouldn't feed your kid, you wouldn't feed your dog a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke, but you feed your kids that. You wouldn't feed your dog chicken nuggets and fries, uh, or pizza, but you would feed your kids that. [laughs] And I think we really have to take a look at, at, you know, what we're doing to our future generations because the level of malnutrition in the youth is so high. Uh, not just vitamins and minerals, but just their overall, um, poor quality diet leads to poor intellectual development, violent behavior, inability to actually have good academic performance, to, to, to even security as they get older because if, you know, they're overweight or unhealthy, I mean, uh, they're less likely to get a good job or get married or be happy. And if you're overweight as a kid, your, your life expectancy's 13 years less. So I, I think, you know, my, my joke in my house was, uh, you know, there was, there was no menu. [laughs] There was only two things on the menu, actually, take it or leave it. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:33 [laughs]

Dr Mark Hyman 48:34 You either, you either gonna eat it or you're not. And my, my mother taught me that. She's like, "Well, you know, when your sister didn't wanna eat her eggs for breakfast," she didn't make her eat them. But she gave the same eggs to her at lunch and at dinner [laughs] and figured, figured out she was pretty hungry. She ate them and never refused food again. So [laughs] I think we, we coddle our kids in that way. And, you know, I had a friend who fed his kids macaroni and cheese and pizza till he was 16 years old. I'm like, "What are you thinking?" Like, this is not good. And it's, you know, the kid has all kinds of health issues and consequences [laughs] for that. So I think we, we have to understand that, that, that we need to acculturate our kids very early to real food. Uh, you know, we should be, we could be making our own baby food in a blender or Vitamix. We can, you know, give kids, uh, the food that we're eating from the table. We can eat... You know, we can maybe mush it up a little bit, but it's really pretty important to feed them real food. Uh, and, and when you think about the, these baby foods which are full of sugar and, and the formula which is, you know, gi- given these kids, and sometimes, you know, m- mothers can't breastfeed, but, you know, there, there's lack of, uh, key things that we don't even know we're missing. For example, like DHA for brain development or oligosaccharides, which are these powerful, um, undigestible starches that feed good bugs that aren't in, in, in formula. They're only in, in breast milk. So we really kinda have to get back to getting our kids, um, sort of out of the lure of the food industry, which is tough because, you know, they, they spend billions of dollars of ads trying to, of dollars in ads trying to hook these kids. I think in Facebook there's over 5 billion, with a B, ads, you know, on, on, on social media for, uh, various junk food things, which are often invisible. They're called stealth advertising. It's not like it's a commercial on TV and you... So when you're my kid's not watching TV, but I can guarantee they're probably on their phone or on their computer, and they're getting all this stuff served up to them. So, I, you know, getting your kids eating right from the beginning is so important. Getting them in the kitchen. You know, we had a, a book called Pretend Soup, a cookbook which had all these yummy, delicious, healthy vegetarian recipes we used to make together. Uh, you know, I have a picture of my son literally sitting in a salad bowl [laughs] in the kitchen or, you know, a video of him making, you know, like he's like maybe a year old, and he's like just making a huge mess with all the flour, and my daughter's, you know, cooking. But I got them cooking. I got them planting gardens. I got them harvesting. And now, now they're both very much, uh, even though they strayed a little bit, very much focused on, on healthy eating.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:57 Yeah, I think it's hard for, for parents these days in so many ways. You know, y- you mentioned the stealth advertising, but I think also-

Dr Mark Hyman 51:05 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:06 ... you know, parents feel so busy. They're, they're rushing around trying to do so much. And obviously we're talking in a time of this, uh, you know, these sort, sort of lockdowns and these restrictions. So certainly here in the UK at the moment, there's a full on lockdown across the entire UK. Um, most people are at home. Parents are really struggling with trying to homeschool their children, uh, and do their jobs, and I think it just highlights the pressures that many parents feel. And then when you add in some stealth advertising, it, it, it seems just too hard for people to actually change things or... You know, a lot of people say, "Well, my kids won't eat that stuff, you know, because I've been... You know, they've been eating other foods." And it's really hard, isn't it, when they've been conditioned into eating more processed foods? It can be quite hard, that initial, uh, transitional phase to try and change that and getting them back onto real, unprocessed whole foods.

Dr Mark Hyman 52:05 Oh, it can be worse than that. I mean, some of these foods are highly addictive, so these kids will literally go bonkers. Uh-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:11 Yeah

Dr Mark Hyman 52:11 ... fits, tantrums, banging, raiding the kitchen. I mean, [laughs] you hear these stories, it's like, whoa, it's like a crack addict trying to find the crack in the kitchen. Uh, and so, you know, if, if you make your home a safe zone, you can't control what your kids do once they get the car keys or go out, but, but you can definitely control what's at home. And so I think it's important to make your home a safe zone. There shouldn't be anything in there that the kid can eat that's gonna harm him. I mean, you wouldn't leave medicines out. You wouldn't leave poisons out. You wouldn't leave all these things that we, we worry about. But the truth is that, that what we feed our kids every day is far more harmful and deadly than any of these [laughs] other things in terms of the, the, the, the, the impact on the population. So I think, I think we have to really, um, sort of as a families come together and go like, "What do we want? And how do we, how do we live the life we want? And how do we meet the values that we have as a family?" And a lot of it has to do with health and wellbeing and being able to do the things you love, and that has a lot to do with food. And so when people sort of connect the dots, they can begin to really start to just sort of bring in a different way of, of thinking and being around food.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:10 What you said before just reminded me of when I was a kid, Mark, um, you know, my parents both came over from India, uh, to the UK.

Dr Mark Hyman 53:18 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:19 I was born and brought up in the UK, and my brother and I and my family, every other summer, we'd go to Kolkata in India and spend six weeks there with our, with our cousins and our family.

Dr Mark Hyman 53:30 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:30 And I remember, I remember two of my cousins. I, I've got this vivid memory. I, I must have been around, I don't know, eight years old, something like that, and they were all in their school uniform, dressed, ready to go out to school for the day.

Dr Mark Hyman 53:45 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:45 And they'd be sat down at 7:30 in the kitchen with a full plate of rice, dal, vegetable curry, um, what, two or three different vegetable curries. Like a proper real food meal that they would have-

Dr Mark Hyman 53:59 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:59 ... in the evening. That, that, the parents were giving that to them because it's like, "Okay, here you go. Here's your breakfast, then you're off to school for the day." And then when I started to go in my early 20s, not with the same cousins, but I noticed how things had changed, that a lot of my family were-

Dr Mark Hyman 54:14 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:14 ... that, that there was marketing from various, uh... A lot of Western companies actually were marketing-

Dr Mark Hyman 54:19 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:19 ... you know, uh, you know, uh, bread that's easy to toast in, like, 30 seconds and cereals. And I saw, you know, over 10, 12 years, I saw that change.

Dr Mark Hyman 54:30 Hab change. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:30 Yeah. But, but literally you would change, 'cause that was an aspiration. It was like, "Oh, that's what they're doing in the West," the aspirational West, uh, that's what people eat when they're busy and they get out. And it, it's amazing how quickly through advertising and through perception that these age-old habits that we've had for donkey's years can just change.

Dr Mark Hyman 54:49 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:49 So we're starting to have these higher sugar, highly processed breakfasts, and that's considered normal.

Dr Mark Hyman 54:56 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I honestly, the, uh, the whole invention of cereal was one of the biggest scams propagated on humanity. [laughs] I mean, when you think about it, it was Kellogg and others who wanted to take, you know, grains and turn them into cereals. But the, you know, uh, the cereals we're eating now are mostly sugar. Uh, you know, this, the, the [laughs] they're like 75% sugar, some of them, in terms of when you look at the carbohydrate. They might have six forms of sugar in them. Uh, and they are what we think of, quote, as a healthy breakfast when we feed our kids, you know, cereal and milk is a good breakfast. But it's, it's really toxic, and it leaves them nutritionally depleted, it m- makes them gain weight, it causes them to sort of probably not be able to focus and, you know, often be hungry before lunch. So I, I jo- often joke, I say I'm a cereal killer. I don't think we should be eating cereal. [laughs] We need protein and fat for breakfast, not, not sugar.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:49 For, for, for a family or a parent listening, Mark, who thinks, "Okay, I get this. I, I need to, I want to change how I feed my children and feed myself," but they feel it's too hard, right? They feel, uh, "I don't know where to start because this is how we've been doing things for the last four or five years."

Dr Mark Hyman 56:06 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:07 Dr. Hyman, tell me where to start. What would you say to them?

Dr Mark Hyman 56:10 Well, it's like anything else, you know? If you don't know how to do it, it's hard, right? Uh, but, uh, last night I had some friends over and, um, you know, I was busy up until they showed up. And, um, you know, I threw some sweet potatoes in the oven an hour and a half before they came, let them cook, and then we made really simple salad. I made some stir-fried mushrooms and some grass-fed steak, and it literally, the whole thing took 15 minutes. [laughs] And it was super easy. So I, I think it's really about skill and it's about knowledge. It's about understanding how to navigate the grocery store, navigate your kitchen, to have the right tools in place, to have things ready and easy for you. So I think, I think it's often, you know, we don't, we don't know the skills of how to cut vegetables or how to shop or how to prep- prepare food or how to cook. And so we really have lost these arts, and it's important for people to start to learn them back. But once you do, it's really pretty simple. And I, you know, I have no problem feeding myself really well, uh, and have for years, even in a very, very busy life. So I think, uh, in the book I do talk about how do you, how do you make it easy? How do you make the habit stick? How do you make it affordable? And I think the messaging that we've gotten is that it's, it's complicated, it's difficult, it's time-consuming, it's expensive to eat well, and that's just not true. I mean, when you look at the data on affordability and whole foods, you know, maybe, maybe it costs 50 cents more a day. Other studies show it may not cost any more at all. So I think we have to sort of understand that the, the propaganda of, "You deserve a break today," you know? [laughs] You know, "Leave the cooking to us," you know? Outsourcing our cooking to corporations is killing us, and we need to, we need to take back our kitchens. They've been hijacked by the food industry, and we need to start, uh, enjoying, enjoying at home. And I think, you know, COVID has had that silver lining. A lot of people are starting to cook at home, and, uh, you know, people are getting in a little trouble 'cause they're, they're not necessarily thinking they wanna eat healthy stuff. They wanna bake. But you don't wanna have that COVID-19 or the quarantine 15 pounds. You, you wanna, you wanna make sure you stay metabolically healthy because if you don't, you're more risk for getting sick from COVID and more risk for dying. So I think, I think, you know, we, we have to sort of get over this myth that it's difficult, time-consuming, hard, and, and just understand that there are some basic skills you need to learn, uh, and it's not that hard. I mean, I had a family of five who lived in a trailer, uh, disability, food stamps, uh, never cooked a meal in their life, uh, all seriously overweight. The father was 42 on dialysis, uh, from kidney failure because of diabetes. I mean, Type 2 diabetes at 42. Uh, and the son was, you know, 100 pounds overweight. It was a pretty, pretty bad scene. Desperate to do the right thing. Desperate to lose weight. He couldn't get a new kidney if he didn't lose the weight. So they were all struggling. And, um, they never cooked a meal. So I said, "Let's, let me not give you a lecture, but let's, let's go to your house, and let's go to, um, shopping, and let's get some simple food." And I gave them a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, and we made, you know, food from, from inexpensive ingredients that are whole foods, right? You don't have to have a $70 grass-fed ribeye steak, but you can have, you know, ground turkey that's organic. So we had ground turkey chili, uh, we had stir-fried asparagus. We made a salad, roasted some sweet potatoes. They didn't have knives or cutting boards, and within, well, within a few minutes they realized this is fun, and two, when they ate it, they were like, "This is delicious." And the son was like, "Do you cook like this with your family every night?" And I'm like, "Yeah." [laughs] And then, and then I was like, "I don't know what's gonna happen," so I gave them a guide on how to eat well for less, and then I gave them my cookbook with some recipes. And I said, "You guys can do this." And, uh, on the way home I bought them a cutting boards and knives, and I sent them to their house online. And they, first week she texted me back, "We lost 18 pounds." The mother lost 100 pounds in the first year. The son lost 50, gained it back. He went to work at the Bojangles', which is a bad fast food store. But then en- ultimately ended up lost 138 pounds going to college, into medical school. I wrote him a letter of recommendation because of a simple meal that we cooked together that changed their lives, right? Just think about that. It's not like you need, you know, 10 years of culinary education. Just here's how you chop things. Here's how you... Here's the principles of stir-frying, baking, roasting. [laughs] Like, it's just really simple. And, and it was just, uh, it was just so, so powerful for me to have that insight, that it's, that people don't really know. It's not a lack of desire. It's a lack of knowledge and skill. And again, it's not that hard to, to get those skills. So I, I think, uh, you know, we're really only one meal away from a real food revolution. Jamie Oliver really has talked a lot about this, you know? How if we can just get a couple people to cook, everything's gonna change, [laughs] and I agree.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:40 Yeah. It really is something, isn't it? The skill of cooking that, you know, until, I don't know when it was, when we probably couldn't have lived without the skill of cooking until, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago. If you couldn't cook-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:00:54 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:54 ... you probably, you didn't have access to takeaways and, um, all these, these cafes to, to give you that food. You, you had to figure it out. And I, I do wonder-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:01:03 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:04 ... I touched on this in, in my last book, Mark. I touched on this re- The, the, the rise of the influencer and the Instagram influencer, and again, nothing wrong with that at all, but sometimes I feel that people who don't know how to cook, and they're a bit scared, a bit intimidated, and then they follow food influencers and they see this-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:01:23 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:24 ... gorgeous meal that, that is-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:01:26 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:26 ... picture perfect. And we think they just whip that up in their kitchen. We don't realize that, you know, a lot of, uh, food photography, you know, is set up over two, three hours to actually get all the lights right so it actually, you know, looks the right way, and then they think that their standard, um, w-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:01:42 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:42 ... leg of lamb, broccoli, and potatoes is, like, somehow a failure compared to what they see around them. So there's-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:01:48 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:48 ... there's that myth to sort of bust as well, I think.

Dr Mark Hyman 1:01:51 Mm-hmm. Absolutely. [laughs] You know, it's, uh, funny that it, it is, it is, um, y- you know... Listen, if you wanna be a five-star chef, fine. A Michelin chef. I'm not looking for that. I'm looking to make simple ingredients into delicious food. And it, it just doesn't have to be hard. It just doesn't have to be hard. It's, uh, if you get real food and good ingredients, the food itself just tastes good. You know, I just made a beet salad. I just took the... And beets aren't that expensive. So I just cut the beets, boiled them, I chopped them up, and then put in like olive oil, lemon, dill, parsley, cilantro, salt and pepper. It was just this delicious beet salad. Super simple. And the beet greens, I chopped them up, stir-fried them with a little onions and ginger, and had this beautiful, you know, beet green side dish of, of cooked greens. Um, and it's easy. Like, it's just, you don't need fancy recipes. I mean, I've written five cookbooks but, like, honestly, it's, it's like I don't really use a recipe book. [laughs] It's just, once you learn the... It's like learning the scales, you know? Once you're a musician and you've gotten really good at the scales, you can play anything, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:49 Yeah.

Dr Mark Hyman 1:02:49 So I think that's sort of how it, how it works with cooking as well.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:51 Uh, we're having this conversation at my dinner time, Mark, and you talking about those foods, I can, I can feel my stomach juices just, uh-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:02:58 Uh-huh. Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:59 ... you know, I- I know you've just woken up, it's morning time, but I'm, I'm, I'm getting-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:02 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:02 ... super hungry as you say that, so I-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:04 Oh, me too. I'm like, I'm like, "It's breakfast time."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:07 It is breakfast time.

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:07 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:07 But, um, you mentioned COVID, and, um, you know, looking after your diet and the way you live was important 18 months ago, was very, very important-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:17 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:17 ... already.

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:19 It's almost been heightened in the last 12 months in terms of what we're seeing around the world, and it, in, in some ways this could be the biggest wake-up call to say, "Hey, look, you know what? It is time to really start putting our wellbeing, our health, our lifestyles first."

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:37 Mm-hmm. Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:37 I mean, what's your experience been of that, and, you know, can you talk about some of those real risks with COVID and how your food choices, how, um, you know, how it can impact that potentially?

Dr Mark Hyman 1:03:51 Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I would hope that we're gonna have a wake-up call around this, Rangan, but I'm not hopeful. I don't know what it's like in the UK, but in America it's like crickets here except for Bill Maher, who screams on television about how we need to face the fact that the reason in America we're overwhelmed by COVID is 'cause we're metabolically so unhealthy. 88% of Americans have poor metabolic health, which means that they're, like, in the spectrum of prediabetes, which means they have belly fat, which means they have inflammation. And so when the COVID lands on them, it's almost nine out of 10 Americans, they're m- like a sitting duck. And so it's like putting gasoline on a fire, and all of a sudden you get this cytokine storm that ends up killing people. And, and, and wherever you are on that spectrum, we know that the poor metabolic health is a driver, uh, for, for, for really bad outcomes. With that said, people don't understand that within a very short time, a couple of weeks maybe, you can really radically reverse your meta- poor metabolic health, and I'll just give you a quick example. You know, we had a type, Type, uh, 2 diabetic on insulin for 10 years, heart failure, angina, liver, kidneys failing. I mean, just, she was a mess. She was, uh... Had a body mass index of 43, which, you know, normal is under 25. Over 30 is obese. She was in the severely obese category. Uh, 65 years old, and, um, taking insulin every day and tons of medications. Uh, within three days of changing her diet, like three days, she was off her insulin. Completely. Within three months, she was off all her medications and her metabolic parameters were all normal in blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, everything. Kidneys, liver were normal. [laughs] And so it doesn't... It might take 30 years to get there. It can be very quick to get back. And even if you don't lose all the weight, I mean, if you're, for example, a gastric bypass patient, uh, and you have diabetes, you get your gastric bypass, within a week or so your, your diabetes is gone. Uh, you're, you're still very overweight, 'cause it takes a little longer to lose weight, but, uh, your diabetes is gone. So your metabolic health, level of inflammation, all can change very quickly in response to your diet. So I wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues. I would double down on eating what we've talked about today on this show, the Pegan Diet or just a similar whole foods philosophy approach, and, and, and it'll have a profound effect on your immune system.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:02 I just wanted to touch on y- one of the principles is around habit change, one of the chapters, which is-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:06:07 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:07 ... uh, super interesting, and there's a few things-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:06:09 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:09 ... in there I really liked, but one of the things that you wrote was, "Friend power is more important than willpower." And you shared how, at the Cleveland Clinic, how you guys use groups and how powerful that can be. And so, you know, for people listening who have tried to change before, struggle to do it by themselves, I think this could be-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:06:29 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:29 ... quite a helpful tip for them, right?

Dr Mark Hyman 1:06:32 Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, um, for years I, I studied the minutia of functional medicine. I was sort of a nerd about the biochemistry, the genomics, the physiology, the microbiome. I just wanted to know every little aspect of our c- cellular functioning and bio- all this sort of nerdy stuff. And I was really good at getting people healthy if they did what I tell them to. [laughs] But often, you know, we know in medicine that half of people don't fill the prescriptions they get and, uh, half that do don't take them. So, you know, the doctor writes a prescription for a statin, 25% of the people take it and 75% don't. So that's not a good odds, and I think in, in medicine and nutrition and what we're doing, it's maybe even harder. So, uh, you know, I, I had this epiphany a number of years ago, well over 10 years ago, um, when I went to Haiti and met Paul Farmer, who, um, was able to deal with TB and AIDS, uh, in one of the worst places in terms of healthcare and poverty in the world, Haiti, not by better drugs or surgery or technology, but just by the power of community. He called it accompaniment, and he trained, uh, thousands of community health workers to help each other, accompany each other to health and make sure they took their medications 'cause we know how to cure TB and AIDS or potentially treat them using the right cocktails of medications, but these people didn't have a watch, they didn't have running water, they didn't have often a place to be. I mean, so it was dealing with a lot of these, these, these fundamental, we call structural violence issues, the social, economic, and political conditions that drive disease. We see that in this country, you know, with food swamps and food deserts. I'm sure it's like that in the UK too, and I think we, we have a tremendous, um, uh, sort of deficit of understanding how, how we really create an environment that, that supports people to h- health. And so the big epiphany for me was, okay, I know how to change biology, but I'm gonna fail unless I understand how to change behavior. And so, so I realized w- at the same time when Paul was treating infectious disease using this pa- this model, I was like, wait a minute. Um, I, I said, wait a minute. You know, chronic disease is also contagious, right? Obesity is also contagious. You're far more likely to be overweight if your friend, friend's overweight than if your family's overweight. We know that, that your social threads affect you or maybe more imp- your genetic threads in determining your health outcomes. We, we just know this from the science. So if that's true, you know, if your, if your bad behavior, uh, it goes along with, with, uh, you know, bad habits, in other words, if all your friends are, you know, eating at McDonald's and smoking and drinking beer and having Coca-Cola, you're probably gonna be doing the same thing. But if all your friends are, you know, drinking green juices and going to yoga, well, you might be doing that [laughs] . So, so there's a tremendous amount of peer pressure that, that we all are subjected to because we're social animals. Uh, it's how we, that's how we live. We have to be social or else we would die as humans. We would just... We're not, we're not like a, a wild, you know, lion that can roam around by himself or whatever and just eat whatever he wants [laughs] . Like, we're, we're dependent on each other. And so what we know is that, that it's much more effective to use friend power, uh, than, than to use, uh, willpower, uh, and when you wanna change behavior, uh, and particularly for chronic disease. So, so I k- I kinda had this experiment that we did with this church in Southern California where we got 15,000 people to sign up for a six-week healthy living program, a sort of faith-based wellness program, and it was striking what happened. People just did so well. They lost over the course of a year, they lost a quarter of a million pounds, probably like, I don't know how many stone that is, but it's a lot of weight. And I think we, we, we saw that the power of, of these community-based solutions was so massive. Uh, and it wasn't even an expert. They, they, they had these groups that they had in the church that were met every week to support each other. So they would meet in six to eight, uh, uh, people, and it would have these, these little learning sessions, and we just sub- sort of substituted in the curriculum for the healthy living, and they'd support each other, they'd encourage each other, they held each other accountable. They had Jogging for Jesus, you know, [laughs] and like all kinds of stuff that they did, uh, to actually do stuff together. Um, and that was really, was an insight for me that I was like, wait a minute, this is how we have to change medicine. And so at Cleveland Clinic, we're doing the same thing, and we're about to publish our data in the British Medical Journal actually, uh, soon, uh, where we, we show that, that the, the group visits, the community support, uh, was more effective than one-on-one visits with a functional medicine [laughs] doctor, which were more effective than with a traditional doctor. So we've got some interesting data about the power of this model to really, to accelerate change in terms of the speed of recovery and getting better, but also the adherence and the, the level of change. So I, I'm excited about using this model, and we're trying to scale this up around the country and, and, and use this power of community. I call it love is medicine. So food is medicine. Uh, love is also medicine.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:13 Yeah. I love it, Mark. Mark, you, you've just... You know, you're someone who has been dedicated to the cause of empowering and inspiring people, both patients and physicians, all over the world for so many years. I, I can't imagine what it's been like for you. You know, I'm sure you've faced all kinds of opposition at various times but, you know, you're driven in that mission and, you know, it's, it's fantastic to see. It's very inspiring. I know for many, um, you know, for many of my colleagues or myself, we see what you have been doing and how you have paved the way for many of us to start-

Dr Mark Hyman 1:11:48 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:48 ... spreading our messages. So I wanna publicly acknowledge you for that and say thank you.

Dr Mark Hyman 1:11:52 Thank you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:54 Um, and just to finish off, Mark, you know, it's, as I say, it's, The Pegan Diet is a brilliant book. I think it really helps to simplify nutrition for people. Uh, some really, some core principles there. Um, I always love to leave my listeners with some actionable tips. So we, we covered a lot of ground today, um, phytonutrients, we covered the climate, regenerative farming, kids, all kinds of things, but just to bring it all down for people at the end, this is called Feel Better Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. What are some of your top tips for people listening to the show right now?

Dr Mark Hyman 1:12:32 Well, I try to synthesize this at the end of the book and, you know, sort of getting started, and it, it's just some simple things that are easy to remember. First, when you're going to eat something, ask yourself a simple question, "Did God make this or did man make it?" If you don't believe in God, is it a nature made? So did God make an avocado? Yeah. Did he make a Twinkie? No [laughs] . If, if, if, if God made it, you can eat it, if nature made it, you could eat it. But if man made it, you probably don't [laughs] wanna eat it, right? Second is, is a similar idea is, you know, try not to eat food with labels, or if it has a label, make sure you read very carefully what the ingredients are. If it's broccoli, it just says broccoli. If it's a piece of chicken, it's chicken. If it's an egg, it's an egg. If it's an almond, it's an almond. It doesn't have a, a label or nutrition facts. And so most of the food I like to eat is without labels. Now sometimes, you know, if you wanna buy a package of nuts, it might say a label on it and it has your little [laughs] nutrition facts on it. It might say salt or something, or if you buy a can of sardines, it might say olive oil and sardines and salt. That's okay, but just try to avoid foods with labels. S- the next, the next kind of principle is i- i- if you don't Have it in your kitchen cupboard and you can't pronounce it, you probably won't want to eat it, right? So if, do you have a, a jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your stir-fries? Probably not. But it's otherwise known as BHT, banned in most of Europe, but available here in the United States, and it's a, it's a carcinogenic, uh, preservative. [laughs] So you don't wanna eat that stuff. Also, when you go shopping, don't go down the middle of the aisles. Uh, stick around the outside where there's just real food, vegetables, and the produce, and the dairy, and the meat section. Uh, if you're eating, just focus on plants. Like, I, I always focus on two or three servings of, of plant dishes at each meal, whether it's just served with asparagus, or mushrooms, or salad. So last night I had beets, we had mushrooms, I had salad, um, and we had sweet potato. So we had like four, four vegetable dishes and, you know, a small piece of, of, of meat on the side, so that's where meat is a condiment or a condi-meat. Um, and fat is so important, too. Remember to eat good fats. Olive oil, avocados are my favorite. Um, but there's other good fats, too. Uh, make sure you eat a lot of phytonutrients. You wanna pick your medicines and your food, so, like, learn about some of the colors and what they have, and try to eat like the rainbow as a way of getting phytochemicals. It's an easy thing to do. Uh, and, you know, enjoy nuts and seeds, and, and, and certain beans are fine. Uh, so I just... And enjoy your food. I mean, it's just gotta be fun and delicious and pleasureful. So I wouldn't really, um, get crazy about following a particular thing. I don't, I don't count ca- calories. I don't count carb grams, fat grams, protein grams. I don't, I don't think of any of that. I just think about what I eat. If you fi- focus on what you eat and quality, you don't have to worry about how much you eat, literally. I mean, I could eat, you know, a giant bowl of salad till I couldn't move, and nothing would happen, right? So I think, I think you can, you can find out what your natural rhythm is and your biology by just getting on real food, and then, and then actually just focusing on quality. And if you focus on quality, all the rest takes care of itself, diseases, weight, metabolism, all that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:30 Yeah. Love it, Mark. Mark, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for all the great work you continue to do, and, uh, yeah, I look forward to the next time we get to have a conversation.

Dr Mark Hyman 1:15:41 Thank you, my friend. It's great to be here.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:43 Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life. Inspiration is not enough. You need to take action. If you did enjoy that, please do press Subscribe, hit that notification bell, and why not check out this conversation that I've picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up? [outro music]