In an election season characterized by mistrust, misinformation and a howling sea of venom, we hear at the 10 percent happier podcast or serving up some deep counterprogramming. Stay tuned for our special Election Sanity podcast series. We're going to have arguments. We're not going to talk polls. We're not going to pick sides. Actually, we are going to pick one side your side. We're going to help you navigate all of this tumult and toxicity with some degree of steadiness and calm.

We are dedicating this whole month to cultivating qualities that can support and strengthen us during this election season.

So make sure to tune in every Monday in October where we're going to help you build a toolkit to stay connected and engaged during the election season without going off the rails altogether.

From ABC, this is the 10 percent happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

One last thing before we get to the episode, we care really deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the best ways to do that. Customers of the 10 percent happier app say they stick around specifically for the range of teachers and the deep wisdom these teachers have to impart for anybody new to the app. We've got a special discount for you. And if you're an existing subscriber, we thank you for your support.

So to go claim your discount visit, 10 percent reward. That's 10 percent one word, all spelled out, dotcom reward. And if you're already a subscriber, thank you for your support. Hello, today, we're going to get a deep take on the old cliche, you are what you eat. Usually that expression speaks to the impact of food on our bodies, but what is often overlooked is the impact of nutrition on our minds.

Dr. Mark Hyman is the author of the new book Food Fix. He studied Buddhism in college and then went on to become a practicing family physician and a leader in the field of functional medicine. He has written 13 New York Times best selling books, including his new one, The Aforementioned Food Fix, and he's also the host of a podcast called The Doctors Pharmacy.

In this episode, we talk about the impact of food on our mental health and Dr. Hyman's view that food is really a social justice issue that impacts everything from chronic diseases to climate. Before we dive in, I should say that we recorded this right as the pandemic was taking off, but we held it just to deal with all of the breaking news. All of it remains extremely relevant, deeply interesting. And so here we go with Dr. Mark Hyman. So how and why did you come to meditation?

Well, I actually was introduced by my sister to meditation when I was 15 in nineteen seventy five because her boyfriend was a TM teacher and she also called him up listening to him and not listening to me because he always like to meditate and bliss.

And I started TM back when I was 15 and got very interested in Eastern thought and religions. Heard Robert Thurman give a talk at Amherst in nineteen seventy six or something. And when I went to college I just happened to sit next to this guy at lunch at my dorm the first day of classes and he said, you got to take a class with this guy Alan Greer part. It's on Asian studies. It's amazing. This guy's amazing. I'm like, all right.

So I drop a class and I took his class. And that was of that. And I started taking every class and Buddhism in Eastern thinking and the Asian religions and got really steeped in it and started practicing and sort of doing Zen meditation. Started of with Suzuki Roshi would do ten day sitting meditation retreats back in the 70s when it was pretty weird and became a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, actually very, very focused on sort of that whole thinking.

And I began very sort of innocently. But it really led me down the path of inquiring about how the mind works and why we suffer and how we get into cognitive minds that disrupt our happiness and how do we get out of that. And I think that's really been the foundation of my life. And as far as Buddhism goes, I mean, it really is a healing technology for the mind. It's not really a religion, although it's become that and it's sort of informed my beliefs about how to be in the world passioned service, and that's why I end up becoming a doctor.

So it all sort of is connected in a circuitous way.

I've heard John Cavitt Zen make the case that. And I don't know if this is true, I suspect it's true because coming from him and I've never heard him say anything untrue, that the root of medicine and meditation are the same. And that's not a coincidence.

Yeah, yeah, I imagine that's true. I think it's all about healing. I mean, meditation is a healing tool for the mind.

Do you think that your interest in meditation fueled your subsequent interest in medicine and decision to go one hundred percent?

One hundred percent? I mean, I took a class in Cornell with this guy, Raul Birnbaum, a nice Jewish boy who wrote a book called The Medicine Buddha. And I took the class in the medicine Buddha and sort of got me thinking about what I want to do with my life and where am I going. And I mean, I got a degree in Buddhism. What am I going to do with that? I'm not going to become a guru.

So I just really thought a lot about what I wanted to do.

And I did not become a monk. To your degree was in Buddhism? My degree was in Buddhism. I didn't I was an afterthought. Yeah. My degree was in Buddhism. I just they're like, OK, you have to have a major. And I'm like, what do you mean? Well, yeah, you have to major a lot of Asian studies classes. So I'm become an Asian studies major. I'm like, OK. And then I had to study a language.

I'm like, well, a billion people speak Chinese. I might as well try that. And so I studied Chinese and Buddhism and that's what I did at Cornell.

So how about now? Like, what's your practice look like these days? Well, I do twice a day they stick to the primordial sound meditation, basically TM, you know, it's a version of TM.

So you switched from Buddhism to Hindu meditation.

Yeah. Yeah. Sitting for forty five minutes twice a day. It just was a lot in quiet spot on a cushion. And I have a crazy life so I need to be able to meditate on airplanes and subways and back at cars and, and I just found it a really easy way to drop deeply in in a way that was quick and powerfully restorative and helped anxiety, stress. I didn't think I was anxious. I didn't think I was stressed.

I didn't think I was on edge. But when I started digging back into it, after many years of being crazy in my life, I actually found it a game changer and I can't live without it.

So you meditated for a while. Seriously, I teach you yoga and then your life got weren't in it got back in through Vedic medicine. Yeah.

Then I became a doctor parent, you know, just crazy life. And it really has been one of the biggest gifts. I mean, I focus clearly on attrition and lifestyle and in medicine healing. And I always sort of gave lip service to stress reduction and healing. And my dream was yoga. So I've been doing yoga for forty plus years and I thought that was enough. I oh, that's my meditation in motion and I sort of justified why I wasn't meditating so myself.

And I hear this a lot. I feel like I do yoga, I'm good, you know, and it just a totally different experience.

In fact, yoga is just the preparation for meditation.

That's how it was originally designed. So I think I kind of was conning myself and I stopped doing that. And it really has transformed my cognitive abilities, my energy, my joy, my happiness, my reactivity, my ability with stress, my focus, my mission in the world.

It's just, you know, it's like, wow, I don't meditate to get better meditating. I meditate to get better at life.

So let's go into your mission. How would you define what's been the overarching theme of your career?

It's pretty simple. I was very sick early on in my medical career and I had to figure out how to get better. And I found a system of healing called functional medicine that is about understanding the root causes of illness that often or have to do with lifestyle. Diet is a big factor. Food is medicine and genetics and so forth. And I was able to heal myself and so many patients through this approach, which is in the periphery of medicine, although now we have a center, Cleveland Clinic that I was asked to come in, established by the CEO there, Toby Cosgrove, and I would say my mission is to end needless suffering for millions of people through the power of functional medicine and food as medicine and the power of community and love, which is basically sort of what I'm trying to do.

So, OK, there's a lot there. There's a lot there.

And needless suffering through functional medicine, which I think I need you to define again. Gas and food is medicine and love.

Yes. The floor is yours. OK, so more so, so functional medicine is essentially a systems thinking approach to looking at the root causes of disease and health. It's actually the science of health and it's where medicine is going. You might have heard of the microbiome everybody talks about.

My wife has done a lot of study in the microbiome.

The microbiome is blowing apart our notions of disease. How does your gut bacteria get linked to autism? I mean, I was talking to the CEO of Cleveland Clinic is like, Mark, you know, there was a study where they transplanted the poop out of a normal kid to a kid with autism and the kid normalized. Right. Or you take the poop out of someone who was skinny and put them in a diabetic person and their blood sugar gets better.

Or that heart disease, cancer, depression and all these autoimmune diseases can be linked to your microbiome. It doesn't make any sense. You go to the rheumatologist, like, how is your poop? You go to the cardiologist or how's your boob? They don't ask you that. But that's really how the science of medicine is advancing to understand the body's one interconnected ecosystem and that functional medicine is a way of thinking about how to create health and restore balance and systems.

It's really an operating system for sorting through all the data we have now that we didn't have our own systems, biology and how to apply that clinically to get people better.

One of the critiques of modern medicine is that doctors often are just treating symptoms and treating the whole. Exactly. So it sounds much more holistic.

One hundred percent. It's treating the system, not the symptoms. It's the difference between an industrial agricultural farm and a regenerative farm, which I hope we can talk about. An industrial farm is putting chemicals like pesticides and herbicides and fertilizer and intensive methods and using all these sort of technologies to grow food which destroys the soil and the environment and modern medicine very much like that. Whereas functional medicine is like regional medicine, that's about restoring the health of the ecosystem.

And when you do that, you have a healthy plant.

You have more questions about the three pillars you listed of your sort of mission of mission. But just one quick comment on the microbiome. So for those who don't know, you think of yourself as it's all you need. Actually, there's like a trillion other beings living in your gut. It's called the gut microbiome. I know, but that's only because I'm married to somebody who is very smart and explain it to me.

Interesting just anecdote. I don't this is not dispositive in any way. In other words, this is just an anecdote. There's no scientific validity to what I'm about to say.

But interesting nonetheless is that my wife and I, even though we had flu shots, both got the flu this year, knocked out, knocked out, and four or five, six weeks later, we were still not feeling well and we started taking probiotics.

Yeah. And within days, both of us started feeling better.

I have no idea if that's correlation or causation. Don't know. But it is interesting. It's very powerful.

Our guts are the center of our health. And like you said, we're only basically 10 percent human and the rest of us is microbiome or bacteria. We're all genetically we only have one percent of our DNA and there's 99 percent of bacterial DNA in terms of the number of genes in us. So if you look at your blood test, there's all these microbial metabolites probably far exceeding our own metabolites, which is crazy, and we don't even know how to make sense of that.

So functional medicine is essentially a framework. It's a sort of theory in the sense of a medicine that we never had before. It's all been reactive. And then the fundamental theory is that food is medicine and the food is both the cause and the cure for most of what ails people.

Say more about that and what should we know about this and how would we live our lives once we know what we need to know? Absolutely.

Well, you know, you talk a lot about meditation in the mind on your show, but the truth is, if you're eating crap, you're not just affecting your body. You're affecting your mind, your ability to think, focus, be attention, meditate.

It's been said that gut health is mental health. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, they know take antibiotics. It leads to more depression, right. Because it destroys your microbiome. So food is such a powerful drug that modifies everything in your body in real time. And if you have the wrong food, it's going to turn on the wrong signals. If you have the right food, it's going to turn on the right single. So what people need to know is that food is not calories only or energy.

It's information. And its instructions are like code, they can upgrade or downgrade your biological software with every bite in real time. So when you have a bite of processed Doritos, let's say that's going to affect your microbiome in a very specific way. That's bad and make bad bugs grow that make you sick and gain weight when you eat, for example, you know, whole grains or lots of veggies with lots of fiber or probiotic foods like artichoke hearts, it's going to turn up the good bacteria in your gut, which are going to have the opposite effect, is going to help you lose weight, feel better, do all the things like, you know, you sort of just said you felt better.

So food is information that changes your gene expression. It changes your hormones, it changes your brain chemistry. It changes your microbiome. It changes your immune system literally every bite. And when you understand that, it changes your relationship to what you're eating because you're not just eating for energy, you're eating for actually up regulating or down regulating all sorts of things and upgrading or downgrading your health. And so then when you want to grab some junk, you go, well, wait a minute, what am I actually doing to my biology and how does it make me feel?

Because people don't connect the dots between how they feel and what they eat. They feel like crap, but they don't get it because they're eating crap.

This is a vehicle and vehicles run on fuel and the food is the fuel.

It's fuel, but it's also programming. Yes. Yes. It's more than just fuel. Yes. Yes. But I think this is an area where meditation can be useful. I notice often doesn't really change my eating habits, but I notice often how I feel. Actually, it has changed my eating habits. I'm not giving myself enough credit how I feel after I eat certain things. And it can really change the decisions you make about what you eat.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I mean, the Buddhists know this is what you shouldn't eat garlic or you shouldn't eat onions when you're meditating because it might affect your meditation. I don't know why exactly, but there are a lot of theories about how to eat and fasting. And in Thailand, the monks meditate a lot and they're deep in their practice and they fasts a lot. But they were finding they were just having exploding rates of diabetes and they didn't understand why.

And it turned out that to keep their energy up all day, they were sipping soda, you know, so, yeah, it's a big factor.

So, OK, we've hit two of the pillars of your mission, functional medicine, food as medicine. Third one is the one.

I'm curious how you're feeling. How are you going to justify this as a scientist?

Love is medicine. So there are two things that we know. One is that food is both the cause. The cure of everything pretty much is wrong with the world and certainly with chronic disease.

And to that it's very hard to get people to change their behavior around it. Right. And we also know that the science of behavior tells us that people change with community, with the power of peer pressure, whether it's good or bad. Right. And I discovered this when I went to Haiti after the earthquake. I got lucky enough to have one of my patients who had a jet say, you want to go to Haiti. And we flew down there with a whole medical team where the first ones on the ground, we brought Paul Farmer, who created Partners in Health and in Haiti, which is the second poorest country in the world, the worst in the Western Hemisphere.

Where there was tremendous TB and AIDS, which was basically given up on by the public health community because it was too complicated to deal with, they were poor, they didn't have water, they never watched it or take their medication. It's complicated. It's like we can fix this. And he created community health workers, basically peers, friends to help each other be accountable. And he did this successfully. It's been a model scale across the world used by the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation.

I went there and I said, wait a minute, chronic disease is also a contagious disease. Obesity is also contagious, not just to be an AIDS, because we know, for example, from aristocracies work at Harvard that if your friends are overweight, you're more likely to be overweight than if your parents or your siblings are overweight, like one hundred and seventy percent more likely to be overweight. And that's a very interesting fact.

And so I took that fact and I went to work with a guy named Rick Warren who wrote The Purpose Driven Life pastor or an evangelical pastor.

Yeah. And he came into my office and said, you know, I want to get healthy and can you help me? I'm like, sure. So I did my thing. And afterwards I'm like, let's go to dinner. So we had dinner and I said, start, tell me about your church, because I don't really know much about churches. I'm a Jewish guy from New York. What do I know about evangelical churches?

And he's like, well, we got thirty thousand people. I'm like, wow, it's a big church. He's like, well, yeah, we have five thousand small groups that meet every week to help each other live better, healthier lives. And I'm like, oh, I said, this is the megachurch. This is thousands of many churches. And I'm like, the light bulb went off like, Rick, why don't we put a healthy living program in your groups?

I want to highjackers groups to actually try this out. Things like great idea because I was baptizing my church last week and after about the 801, I'm like, we're a fat church and I'm fat and we do something about this. And so we did. We created the Daniel plan. We launched that. Fifteen thousand people signed up the first week. They lost a quarter million pounds by doing this together in small groups. And now we're doing this, a Cleveland Clinic where we're using small groups to actually help people change behavior.

And we're seeing the same results were incredible. Change becomes from the community and from support and from love and from connection. That's the biggest problem is loneliness. I know you had Vivek Murthy here talking about loneliness and it's such an epidemic and we're so isolated and disconnected enough and we use food to help assuage our suffering.

Coming full circle now. Yeah. And so putting all that together is just a powerful recipe for health.

Yes. It's much more, as I said before, holistic than just treating whatever symptom you're presenting with right now. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so let's talk about this new book, Food Fix.

I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of your oeuvre to date of all of your books to date. But I do.

I mean, my understanding is they have been very sort of how to, you know, here's how to eat certain things to work with your blood sugar, et cetera, et cetera.

This book seems like a radical departure.

It is. Talk about it. It is. I remember I remember I did something with you in my ten day detox diet and I gave you the book. And I know if you remember I signed, I said, this will make you 10 percent healthier.

We've done this. I put you on GMA with no fun.

So this book really is resulting from the same type of thinking that functional medicine is based on, which is looking at the root cause. I'm in my office seeing patient after patient with chronic disease and I feel like I'm in the boat that's sinking, bailing the boat with a little paper Dixie Cup and it's just hopeless. So I begin to think, OK, well, if my patients are sick from food.

Then why are they eating the food that they're eating? Well, maybe it's the food system and then I'm like, why do we have the food system we have? It's because of our food policies and why do we have our food policies? It's often because of the influence of food industry. And so I begin to start to look broader at the scope of how do I hear my patients? And in suffering, I can't do it by sitting in my office.

I can't cure diabetes in the office. It's cured in the kitchen, in the grocery store, on the farm. That's where those diseases are cured. And so I begin to sort of dig in the rabbit hole of the food system. And it became clear to me that it's probably one of the biggest misunderstood, invisible factors that's driving so many of our global crises from chronic disease, which is obviously caused by ultra processed food. In fact, six out of 10 Americans, four out of 10 Americans have two or more.

And within 10 years it's going to be eighty three million, have three or more chronic diseases. And 11 million people die every year from eating ultra processed food around the world that causes two hundred fifty million years of disability every year across the world. A lot of suffering there. Well, that's not a good thing. And then the economic burden of that is staggering. You know, we have one out of three Medicare dollars is for diabetes. Medicare is one out of three federal dollars spent by twenty twenty five.

It's going to be forty eight percent, almost one and two dollars on the federal budget. Mandatory spending is going to be for Medicare and Medicare for all. Sounds like a great idea, but unless we figure out how to stop the inflow of people into the system, we're screwed.

So the economic impact. Then I started digging deeper and looking at how food affected mental health. You know, mental health is such a huge issue in this country with suicides and depression and the opioid epidemic. And why are we having this? And if everybody meditated, I think it'd be better. But I think a lot of it has to do with how food is affecting cognitive function and affecting mood and brain and behavior. And I discovered some striking things here in terms of even things like violence and prisoners.

By giving prisoners healthy diets in prison, they will reduce violent crime by fifty six percent and a multivitamin reduced by 80 percent.

And the same thing in juvenile delinquency are seeing tremendous drops and aggression and use restraints and suicide, 100 percent drop in suicide in these three thousand juvenile study that was in detention centers, which is a controlled environment where you give half them good food and have them bad food, where the usual food, they had one percent drop in suicide rate.

So that's the mechanism there.

Great question. They actually did a study where they looked at kids who were aggressive, violent, so forth, in these detention centers, and they found that they were extremely nutritionally deficient in vitamin B 12, vitamin D, zinc, all sorts of things, omega three fats, which all affect brain function and neurochemistry.

And they did eggs on them before and after they change your diet and did the supplementation and they dramatically changed their brain chemistry and their brain function. So you are what you eat. I mean, if you're eating crap, your brain is going to be crap.

And, you know, in the book I show a graphic of a a kid who had aid in his handwriting, was illegible before, and he was eating the most processed diet you can imagine. I tested him. It was severely nutritionally deficient. I got him eating Whole Foods, gave some supplements that replaced the nutritional deficiencies, and his handwriting went from illegible to perfect penmanship. And you can see this, you know, you can't see it on the podcast, but it's pretty.

I can see it is impressive. It is impressive.

And it's like, well, what's happening there? How does the brain go from dysfunctional, chaotic, disorganized to actually functional and synchronous and coherent?

And this isn't just my idea. This is a CDC produced an incredible report called Health and Academic Achievement, where they detail that there was a tremendous link between nutrition and academic performance. I mean, we're thirty first in reading and math in the world. Vietnam's like twenty first. These kids had lower test scores. They had lower grades. They had poor cognitive function. They had less alertness, less attention, problems with memory, visual processing and problem solving and increased absenteeism.

I mean, I went to a school den in Cleveland and one of the really underserved areas, because I was doing a lot of community stuff in Cleveland with this African-American Hispanic school. And the superintendent told me they had a 40 percent absenteeism rate. One percent were ready to go to college. I walked down the hall and it was a very overweight young girl walking by with double fisting, a slushie in one hand and thirty two ounces in a soda another.

And the kitchen had only deep fryers and microwaves. And we see this over and over. We think we're having behavior issues in kids. One in ten kids have. And we're just all coming from.

And I, I think we have to come to terms with the fact that our food system is driving so many of these crises. In the last few early environmental climate, I didn't realize it. I started digging in. But the food system is the number one driver of climate change through all sorts of mechanisms from deforestation. We kill seven billion trees a year. We denude an area the size of Costa Rica every year through factory farming of animals, the methane and the manure lagoons and the.

That's a farming to our farming practices that destroy soil through food waste, which is a big issue, but I didn't realize that the way we're growing food not only produces terrible food, right. Processed, commodity driven food, which is 60 percent of our calories, but the way we grow food destroys the soil at 30 to 40 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the environment have come from the loss of organic matter in the soil. And people think of rainforests as a carbon sink.

But the soil is a bigger carbon sink than all the rainforests on the planet. And we've lost a third. And according to this UN, we're projected to lose all of our topsoil within 60 years, 60 harvests, which means no soil, no food, no humans.

Right. So this is a big crisis.

And then there is all the other things like destruction of our waterways, the impact of fertilizers on, you know, dead zones and climate change and fracking, and the loss of water through irrigation that uses up a lot of our freshwater resources, the loss of pollinators and biodiversity just through the poisoning of our farms. So there's so much that's connected to food in the food system. I'm like, if I want to heal my patient, I can't do it in my office.

I have to start thinking about these big issues and working to change them. And we are. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Mark Hyman right after this. 10 percent happier is supported by better help online counseling. We're in extraordinary times, and if you're struggling with stress, anxiety or depression, you're not alone. Better Help offers online licensed professional counselors who are trained to listen and help simply fill out a questionnaire and get matched with a counselor in under 48 hours.

Join more than a million people taking charge of their mental health with better help. Better help is an affordable option. And our listeners get 10 percent off your first month with a discount code happier. Get started today at better help. Dotcom slash happier. That's better. H e l.p dotcom shapir. OK, so on food and mental health, yeah, I clearly get that you look at certain populations, you look at children in school or people who are behind bars, and you can draw a link apparently between the food intake and behavioral performance.

But there's also a huge problem in our culture of people having a problematic relationship to food, overeating under eating, eating the wrong things, getting in their head, comparing themselves to other people via Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. What about all of that? And do you address that here?

I think the world would be a better place if we block the selfie function. All right. Oh, it's not just the fact that you can go in there and edit out. You give yourself everything.

I think, you know, we live in a very media driven culture where the messaging is causing all sorts of emotional distress to people. And I mean, look, clearly, mental health is complicated. It has to do with childhood environments, with trauma and stress and all sorts of things. Clearly, it's not only food, but it's like I always say, it's very hard to become enlightened meditating if you're V12 deficient or vitamin D deficient or you're eating Doritos six times a day.

It's like it's very hard to have your brain work well. So give yourself an edge by fixing your biology so you can fix your emotional and psychological and spiritual life.

But again, it's not just about what you're putting in your body.

It's also how you feel about yourself as you're eating and how much time are you spending, you know, beating yourself up for what you ate at the last meal and obsessing over what you're going to eat next meal for sure. Seem like really big issues.

They are. I mean, I often ask my patients, like, you know, not what you're eating, but what's eating you, you know, and ask to put on the fridge, you know, two questions.

What am I feeling and what do I need? Am I feeling angry or I need to yell at somebody? Am I feeling lonely? Do I need to call a friend of my tired? Do I want to take a nap? You know, my hungry, maybe I should eat, but most of the time the reason we eat is not because we're hungry. And then I think, you know, our food environment is a carnival of horrible foods that are driving all these problems.

So it's not like it's easy to make the right choice. It's easy to make the wrong choice. And that is part of the challenge.

So for those of us who hear what you're saying and buy it and are thinking, OK, well, I need to think of food as medicine, what are some broad outlines for how to how to eat better, how to how to program ourselves via the fuel we're putting in our body?

It's very hard for people because there's so much misinformation and confusing marketing. I was getting some things that the CBS This Morning, I walked in the checkout counter and there was a freezer with ice cream in it and Haagen-Dazs. Now I have a weakness for us, but I was like it was a dairy free Haagen-Dazs. I'm like, oh, that's good. I'm going to go check it out. And I looked at it and said, gluten free, plant based, dairy free.

And I go, oh, this is good, right? And then I turn it over. And it was like corn syrup and all these process ingredients made by Nestle. And I'm like, you know, it's really hard for people to do the right thing.

So I talk about in the book something called The Peak and Diet, and it's kind of a joke peak and paleo vegan, OK, as a sort of spoof on all the diet wars and all the craziness around food and what do we actually know, what's common sense. And it's not that hard to eat real food, right? If your great grandmother ate it, it's probably OK. Right? They all hate organic food. They all hate unprocessed food.

And if it comes from Whole Foods, it's probably OK.

So look at the ingredients. If there's something you recognize on there, eat it. If it's something you don't recognize or wouldn't have in your cabinet or can't pronounce, it's probably not a good idea. You have mutilated hydroxide following in your cabinet. Did you sprinkle on your salad? Probably not. Right. And yet that is something that's a common preservative that's banned in Europe, but it's in everything here. So I think it's eating tons of food that is plant rich, not necessary, plant based.

But we eat a lot of plants, non starchy veggies, lots of good fats from avocados, nuts and seeds, whole foods, lots of whole grains and beans and I mean whole grains.

I don't mean whole grain flours like wheat bread that's made of finely ground flour, which acts just like sugar in your body. And that's a pretty common sense way of eating. And then get rid of this stuff that's causing all the problem, which is a lot of the sugar and the starch, the chemicals, the out of the average person eats three to five pounds of additives and many of them have been shown to be psychoactive and their effects in Europe, they don't allow a lot of these things.

They've done studies where they look, for example, at certain dyes. They'll give a red Kool-Aid dye drink compared to like pomegranate dyed drink that looks the same. The kids who have the one with all the atoms have behavior issues, aggression and focus problems, you know, so I think there's really a real simple principle of eating real foods, eating on processed foods. Don't eat the commodities that we produce from our. Farms like corn, wheat and soy in their forms of high fructose corn syrup, refined soybean oil and white flour.

That's a good place to start.

You specifically say, should we go vegan? No. So I was curious about that because I'm a vegan. I'm not a militant vegan any stretch. I only did it because I'm not down with the cruelty. Yes, that's the only reason I did it. I didn't do it for health reasons. I didn't do it because I thought I was going to affect climate change. I did it because I was feeling bad for the animals. Yeah, that's fair.

So are you saying that's a bad call from a health standpoint? Well, it's complicated, right?

There's three issues. And you named them all moral, environmental and health. And there are different reasons people choose to be vegan. So my Buddhist monk patients, you know, fine, I'll help them find a healthy way of eating vegan diet and supplement where they're deficient. Right. That's that's pretty easy. But the data is pretty clear. If you are consistently vegan over time, you'll become omega three deficient and become often more deficient iron, zinc and other nutrients.

So as long as you supplement and you're smart about it and good about it, I think it can be a healthy way of eating.

But the truth is that is an environmental issue, which is most often what it's played as, that if you avoid animals, you're going to save the planet. It's not completely true. And here's why. So if you take a traditional factory farm 100 percent, it's bad for the animals, bad for humans, bad for the planet. So we should not be eating any animals that come from factory farming. You can't be a purist, but that's the goal.

The second is that a form of agriculture that actually can reverse climate change is called region of agriculture. And what that means is regenerating the soil, regenerating the ecosystem, conserving water. And it's done through specific techniques that are varied from cover crops, crop rotations, not using chemicals and actually integrating animals into the ecosystem. Now, whether you eat them or not, that's up to you. But if you look at how we got 50 to 80 feet of topsoil in the Midwest, it was because we had 60 million bison running around, pooping, peeing, digging, eating, and they weren't causing climate change.

You know, we have about the same number of cows here in America now, but they are causing climate change because of the way they're raised. And when you look at some of the plant based alternatives, like Impossible Burger, which sounds good, and now you can get a big whopper with impossible burger. It's made from GMO soy, which is certainly better than factory farm animals, but it's still grown away. That's monoculture soy that as glyphosate that actually contributes to climate change.

It adds three and a half kilos of carbon for every burger. That's a soy burger. But on the other hand, originally raised beef burger and this is a life-cycle analysis done by the same company, reduces carbon by three and a half kilos.

So from an environmental point of view, we need to actually create a different form of agriculture that integrates animals and then you can eat them or not. It's up to you, but it's better for the animals, is better for the humans and better for the planet.

And the truth is, even if you're a vegan or vegetarian, people don't realize this. But I read a study recently where they looked at agriculture and it's an inherently destructive act. You're destroying the habitat of animals. You're destroying moles and rabbits. And it's estimated that just vegetable and plant agriculture kills seven billion animals a year, which is far more than the 20 million cows we kill every year. So wherever, you know, you know, we're not getting our eating anything without killing something.

So that's just sort of a fact of life. I hear you. I hear you. But let me just go back to the impact of making a vegan lifestyle choice on the climate. Are you saying there's no benefit? There is one hundred percent.

If you're not eating factory farm animals, you are making a huge contribution to benefiting climate change. However, if you go to regenerative agriculture, which incorporates animals and you can eat vegetables from Rajendran Farm to the biggest little farm is a great movie that goes through how that all works.

The biggest little farm, the biggest little farm is a great documentary that talks about how they took a degraded piece of land and turned to this rich ecosystem with all these plants and animals and production. If you really want to save the planet, you need to do regenerative culture. The UN has said that if we take the two million of the five million degraded hectares of land around the world and converted to regenerative agriculture, which would cost three hundred billion dollars, which is less than America spends every year in Medicare on diabetes or less than the total military spend of the world for 60 days, that we could stop climate change for 20 years because of the benefits of drawing down carbon into the soil and out of the atmosphere.

You can't do that just by growing plants. You have to include animals in the ecosystem.

This is a little bit different from what we've been talking about before, but I wanted to highlight it in this interview. I find it personally of interest is you really take a run at big food.

So I want to I want to let you sound off on that. Yeah, sure.

I'm actually hopeful. Believe it or not, Burger King released an ad that showed a big whopper over forty five Sextons in timelapse or. Biography turning into a moldy, rotten burger over thirty four days, and that tagline at the end was no artificial preservatives. Big food is changing in response to consumer choices. Kellogg's announced there are going to get glyphosate out of their food by twenty twenty five, General Mills committed a million acres to regenerative egg.

The known and General Mills are funding farmers, paying them to convert their farms from conventional to regenerative ag. So I see a lot of hope. I've been to nestlings headquarters in Cleveland. They are changing the formulations, improving better ingredients, despite my hogging the story at the beginning.

So I think just to start with that note, is a sea change happening and these companies are getting it. But we're still in a bad situation because our food policies and the food industry are often working at cross purposes with what we need. I knew the head of Nestle for the USA and he's you know, he said we pulled out of the grocery manufacturers of America because they were trying to obstruct all the policies. They were trying to advance important improvements in our food system.

Just a quick example. Grocery manufacturers, America was the big trade association for all the big food companies. And they went to Washington State because they were about to pass a GMO labeling law and they spent millions of dollars in an illegal way, violated campaign finance laws. And the attorney general found out and sued them. Won the suit was like an 18 million dollar judgment against them, of course, for them it's 18 million compared to billions of sales.

So it's nothing. But what it led to was a lot of the companies bailing on grocery manufacturers America and forming the Sustainable Food Policy Alliance, which is impressive. And Gmod literally just folded and became something else. So I think the food industry acts in nefarious ways sometimes, but I think there's a shift. But they oppose things like changing food stamp regulations. Right. They'll do a number of activities. And I will in the book that are across the sectors that are designed to shape opinion, shape policy and shape activities of various groups so they no one spend more than any other group in Washington by far on lobbying.

Just one bill alone, the GMO labeling bill in Washington, they spend one hundred and ninety two million dollars in one year on that one bill. They spend half a billion dollars just lobbying the farm bill. They fund 12 billion dollars of nutrition, quote, science, which shows that candy is a great weight loss tool for kids. No joke. I reference a study in the book and of course, the NIH only spends a billion dollars. So we have a lot of misinformation out there in the science.

They fund professional organizations like the Academy Nutrition Dietetics and the Americans Decide nutrition is funded by the big food companies and they came up with Kraft singles as being a health food. I mean, you can't call it Kraft American cheese. Why? Because it's not fifty one percent cheese. So the food industry funds science for, quote, science. They fund it, lobbying, they get in professional associations. So it's hard for Americans to understand what's true or not true.

So they're hijacking the narrative, hijacking the narrative.

So last year, I wanted to ask you about an.

This is not unrelated and it's also not unrelated to some of the things you talked about earlier about the impact of food on vulnerable populations like inmates, but you also use food as a lens to investigate so many aspects of our society.

But social justice, you talk about food is sort of a social justice issue. I do. So can you say some things about that?

Yeah, I think, you know, most people don't understand the link between poverty and food. And I think, you know, if you look at these poor communities, is it a chicken or egg thing? You know, but the food industry specifically targets minorities, of course, and children, the average African-American or Hispanic kids. He's far more ads for junk food. Those places are far more prevalent in their communities for fast food and for soda. And all the food deserts are they should be called food desert.

They should be called food swamps because they're just, you know, horribly burdened with processed food. They're all sorts of ways in which these populations are targeted directly and they're affected by this far greater than the rest of the population who look at African-Americans, they're twice as likely to have diabetes. They're four and a half times likely to have kidney failure, three times more likely to have their legs amputated. And part of it is genetic susceptibility. But not really only that, it's really the food culture they live in and Hispanic the same way they're much more targeted.

And I think we have to sort of come to terms with a lot of the health disparities in our country. Turns out your zip code is a bigger determinant of your health than your genetic code. I mean, one study I saw, what shocked me was they took people who are diabetic and overweight from a sort of a very poor, underserved neighborhood, and they put a slightly better area, slightly better apartment, better neighborhood. Their blood sugar and their weight went down with no other intervention, then come to eat better, didn't come to exercise, didn't get medical advice, nothing.

Just simply moving from a worse to a better zip code. Is there anything I should have asked but didn't?

That's a great question. I think the real issue is this is a problem. It's a big, invisible problem. But the question you didn't ask is how do we fix it? Because the book is called Food Fix, not Food Apocalypse.

And the idea is that there is an effort going on, somewhat disorganized to change the food system. And there's so much that we can do as individuals. There's so much that business innovation can do and there's so much the government can do. And I think the map is clear. There are some things we can't solve. We can in natural disasters, we can end war. But this is a problem that has solutions. And I think we need to do it through citizen action.

I mean, that's why Burger King and General Mills and Kellogg's and Danone honestly are changing because we are asking for different products and we are making choices with our wallets that affect them. So I think we have enormous influence. We need to work on the business innovations. And there are a lot of there's billions and billions flowing into the food and ag tech sector to actually improve that. And I just give a great example. There's a group called Vanguard Renewables in Massachusetts that is taking advantage of a law that Massachusetts put into place where if you make a ton of food waste a week, whether you're a food service company or your Whole Foods or, you know, Safeway, whatever, you can't throw in the garbage.

You have to figure out whether to give it a farmer or whatever. The Vanguard renewables partner with dairy farmers who are losing money. Nobody's drinking milk anymore. Their economics are terrible. The average farmer loses six hundred dollars a year. They created these anaerobic digesters where they truck in three tractor trailer loads full of food from Whole Foods and other places every day. Throw some manure in there from their dairy farm cows and it turns into electricity for fifteen hundred homes.

The farmer makes one hundred thousand dollars. You end the problems from the manure and the methane and then the problems in the food waste and the methane. Why food waste is a problem because when you throw it in landfill. It actually off gases, methane, and if it were a country, would have the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases and we throw away 40 percent of our food. Basically taking like your groceries home and throwing away 40 percent and it's about a pound a day per person in America, about eight hundred dollars for a family for a year, and it's a global problem.

We have more than enough food to feed the world. It's just being thrown in the garbage. So we have to fix that. And this is a solution partly that. And there's other innovations that are happening in the food waste system. So I think we have to be encouraged to leave. There's action and and action. Working on a campaign nonprofit we started and an advocacy group otherwise known as a lobby group, because there's no lobby for the good guys to change policy.

And yesterday I met with our team, which is a bipartisan team of Republicans, Democrats and Sam Kass came in, who was the former senior policy adviser for Obama, and he walked in the room to sort of be part of the discussion. Everybody went around intrusive. They were the former chief of staff for Senate majority leader or former top legislative aide to the minority leader in the Congress. And this one on that one and Republican Democrat. He looked and said, I don't understand what's happening here.

I was in the White House for eight years and I never saw this happening. I never saw Republicans and Democrats working together on this issue. And I'm so encouraged. It's like a unicorn.

So our goal is to really catalyze all the good things that are happening, to leverage the movement to actually be a movement, because now it's just a bunch of the people trying to do good things and drive change in policy, which drives change and everything else. And I think it's going to happen.

Great. I like your outfit and I appreciate your optimism. I'm glad it's not food apocalypse. I'm a pathological optimist.

Well, actually, the studies are really clear on this. You live longer if you're an optimist, even if you're wrong.

Duly noted. Had to rewire my thoughts before we go.

I like the like to do a little thing called the plug zone cause people to plug. So remind us about the book. Remind us about any other books you want us to know for you and where we can learn more about you on the Internets. Absolutely.

So if you want to learn about the book, go to Food Fix Book Dotcom and you can watch it. Free video on five steps, a healthy planet and healthy you. And you can access the action guide, which will tell you how to eat better and how to take care of yourself, your families, all kinds of things. And you can get the book anywhere. You get books, Amazon and Barnes Noble's and bookstores. And I encourage people to sort of learn about this issue because they may not think it affects them, but it does.

And everybody's touched by in some way and everybody needs to be a part of the solution. So that's one place. If you want to learn more about me, Dr. Hyman Dotcom, I got a podcast which is always neck and neck with your podcast at Doctors Pharmacy Doctors Pharmacy, which you have been on. Thank you. And that's really, I think, a good place to start. And you have a bit of a big operation on Facebook.

You do a lot of Facebook stuff, Facebook and Instagram, all Instagram, Facebook.

It's just Dr. Mark Hyman on every platform, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. And we do a lot of fun stuff on Instagram. So it's all there for people who are interested. Great, great job. As you can tell, I'm a man on a mission. Yes, a busy guy. No wonder you need meditation. I do.

I can't function without it. Great job. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Dan. Big thanks again to Mark, really appreciate it. One last thing before we go, we would appreciate it if you would do us a solid if you would take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey. The team here is always looking for ways to improve. So if you want to help us out, hook us up. Please go to 10 percent dotcom forward slash survey, 10 percent dotcom forward slash survey. Thank you.

And as always, a big thanks to the team. These people work incredibly hard on this show. Samuel Johns is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boynton. And on Yoshiki from Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wartell is our production coordinator. We drive a lot of wisdom from our colleagues such as Jen Point, Matoba, Ben Rubin, Liz Leverne, and, of course, a big thank you and salute to my ABC News colleagues Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen.

And we'll see you on Wednesday for a fascinating episode. We're going to talk to a scientist who's been researching fear and whether overcoming fear is a trainable skill. Her name is Abigail Marsh. That's coming up on Wednesday.