What's your thoughts on milk?

It's problematic. Current dairy is not something we should consume. So you might not know this, but ha.

That's crazy.

Doctor Mark Hyman, one of the world leading doctors in functional medicine and an.

Expert in helping people understand how they can live their longest, healthiest life. What are your thoughts on this mpec?

So we have a massive obesity problem and we don't have any good solutions. And so something comes along that makes you lose weight. That's a huge attractive, but the side effect profile on this is scary. People are not aware that. And by the way, they're thinking of giving it to five year old kids, which is just terrifying. But we live in a toxic landscape of enticing, addictive, highly processed food, which is why 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction. We know that it causes mental health issues, depression, anxiety, add, gun violence. It kills 11 million people a year. But these are not inevitable problems. So, for example, I had a kid with add who was so bad that you couldn't read his handwriting at twelve years old. But after two months, he went from having severe add symptoms to excelling in soul. And there's so many things that you can do, but people have to understand that you cannot use willpower to control your food behavior. It's a problem of education. For example, if you eat sugar in the morning, cereal, pancakes, bagels, it's the worst possible thing we can do. Strength training three times a week, 20 minutes is really key for longevity, and this is really important.

We call it the five f's for getting healthy, but most of us do the opposite.

So it's congratulations. Diary of a seogang. We've made some progress. 63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe, which is down from 69%. Our goal is 50%. So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know. And the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Mark, if someone's just clicked on this podcast, can you tell me why they should stay and listen?

Great question, great question. The answer is quite simple. You're going to be able to have a window into the future of your health and the future of medicine itself, and the way to think about things, the way you think about your health, the way you think about symptoms you have, or diseases you have, or your family members have. The way you think about optimizing your health, you're going to have a window into what the next generation of thinking is about. This a paradigm shift that's akin to Columbus saying the earth is not flat or Galileo saying the earth is not the center of the universe. These are massive scientific paradigms. Evolutionary theory by Darwin. Think about physics at the turn of the last century and how much that changed with Einstein's discoveries of relativity. We are now at that stage in biology where we're understanding, for the first time in history of science and medicine, the natural laws of biology and how the body works.

What is functional medicine? How do you like. I've heard the word before, but I've never really understood the tree definition.

Yeah, I mean, I don't particularly like the word, to be honest with you, Stephen. I think it has kind of, you know, confusing implications for people. But essentially the way I would describe it, as a new way of thinking about solving the puzzle of chronic disease, looking at root causes, seeing the body as a system, as a network. It's the medicine of why not? What not what disease do you have, but why do you have it? It's a science of creating health. How do we create health? What are the things that are impediments to health? How do we get rid of those? And what are the ingredients for health, and how do we provide those? And it's not that big a list. Like, we're biological organisms, right? And so functional medicine is a systematic way of thinking. It's an operating system or methodology, a heuristic, let's say, to unpack all of your biology and all the inputs we call the exposome and make sense of what your personal story is and personalize an approach to diagnosis and treatment. So, you know, we always say in functional medicine, you can have one cause that creates many diseases or one disease that can have many causes.

So. So, for example, gluten can cause everything from osteoporosis to autism to schizophrenia to rheumatoid arthritis to anemia to hair loss, alopecia. I mean, it can cause a million things, and it's one inciting event. Or you can have one disease, like depression, that can be caused by many things. Depression's a symptom, right. It's not a Prozac deficiency. Right. It's caused by many factors. It could be that you had a major trauma or a loss. It could be that you're vitamin D deficient. It could be that you're eating gluten. It creates inflammation in your brain. It could be that youre not taking an acid blocker for years for reflux because youre having the wrong diet and that causes b twelve deficiency that causes depression. Or it could be because youre eating a lot of sushi and that has mercury that causes depression. Or maybe its because you hate sushi and fish and you dont need any fish and you have omega three deficiency or you maybe have insulin resistance and diabetes that can cause depression and inflammation in the brain. So depression is just a name we give to people who share a collection of symptoms.

Most of the diseases we have that we describe as obesity or diabetes or heart disease or cancer, they're not really helpful to understand the true root cause. They're just describing the symptoms. It's descriptive, right. And so functional medicine is a really different model. It's also can be called network medicine. There's a textbook out of Harvard by Borazn Lakhazi that talks about the network biology. We have how we need to think about multifactorial cause of disease. There's many factors and not just one. And then multimodal intervention is not just one. We're looking at that one cure for Alzheimer's. Were never going to find it. But a study that looked at multiple interventions of diet and lifestyle and exercise and aggressive treatment of risk factors showed a regression of Alzheimers, not one drug, but many different modalities to optimize health. So its really to me the most exciting time in medicine. This paradigm is happening, its happening fast, and its being accelerated through this advent of our ability to do deep phenomic diagnostics. Phenomics is essentially the expression of your biology. In any moment, your genome is fixed, right. But your phenomenon is essentially the things that your body expresses, whether it's health or disease.

Was there any personal experiences that made you more drawn towards focusing your life on health and helping people?

Absolutely. I mean, I've always been interested, so I don't know why. I think I was with my sister at Amherst College and went to the veggie room and had whole grain bread and peanut butter and honey. I'm like, this is good. I'm vegetarian. So I just got into it. And then I studied Buddhism and got into that. So I think all that was sort of seeded in me. And then I started asian studies and yoga, which is sort of the science of really healing the mind. And the Buddhism is healing the mind. So I always sort of got into that. But there was something that happened after I went to work at this place called Canyon Ranch. It's a health resort. And I got very ill. I had lived in China and basically was breathing in mercury, latent air in Beijing in the winter, and I had an air filter, I would clean it every day. And that air filter was full of mercury because it's in the soot, it's in the coal that they burn. They burn rock coal in the city. And I hailed it every day. And when I got back from China, there was something that happened.

I got some gut infection and my system just collapsed. One day I was riding my bike 100 miles a day, the next day I couldn't walk up the stairs. One day I had 30 patients, and I could remember everybody's name and story and everything without notes and dictate everything at the end of the day, with no problem, to not being able to remember where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started. And I couldn't read a book to my kids out loud and actually understand it. I could either read it and try to understand it, or I could read out loud and not know what I was saying. My brain just stopped working, my immune system not working, my gut stopped working, my whole body just collapsed. I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and I felt like I was walking through mud. And it took me years to figure it out, early years. And I got introduced to functional medicine at that time. I heard about it, I said, this either is lunacy or it's genius, and if it's true, I devoted to finding out whether it's true for me, for my own healing, and for my patients, because if it was true, everything was going to be different.

It's like discovering the earth wasn't flat. Well, if that's true, then everything is different. And so I dove into it headfirst to heal myself, and then I started using my patients. And that feeling of being sick drove me because I was clear that I wasnt crazy. Chronic fatigue syndrome was thought to be a psychological disease, and now the data is really clear. The NIH just came out with a large paper, I think, last week, talking about the biomarkers and the biology and immunology and the mitochondrial dysfunction and the inflammation and all the things that do go wrong. I knew I wasnt crazy. I knew I wasnt mentally ill, and I knew I wasnt depressed, I knew I didnt have add, I knew I wasnt getting dementia at 30 years old. And so I really had to understand my biology internally on a cellular level and reverse engineer my way back to health. And so that forced me, just out of survival, to dig deep into the science of what was happening, and then to unpack that and then start to use it on my patients. And when I would use it on my patients, I was shocked.

I mean, have someone come with autoimmune disease they had for years, and I say, do this, this and this based on the principles, and they would get better. Or I would say, oh, I've had migraines for 20 years, and I would check and they would have a food sensitivity to eggs, they stop and go away. Or I would take someone who's had diabetes and put them on the right approach with food as medicine, and the diabetes would go away. So I started seeing all these, what I thought were miracles or things that wouldn't change, or treating kids with autism, or add, we can share in the show notes, but I had a kid with add who was so bad that you couldn't read his handwriting at twelve years old. And after two months, he went from having severe add symptoms and all these other health issues, and I fixed his gut, I optimized his nutrition, I, I get the lead out of his system, I got all the processed food out, and he went from being completely non, barely non functioning to excelling in school to having perfect penmanship after two months. And I'm like, wow, this is crazy.

If you just look at the image of this, you can share it in the show notes if you want. It was like, okay, something is going on here that, that we dont completely understand, and if its something as simple as optimizing his gut and optimizing his nutrition, and getting rid of the toxins in his body and the brain could function again, then so many people who are suffering dont need to suffer. And thats really what drove me was just seeing so many people suffering without need, and how easy it was to fix them. Once you understood, right, we're at that stage in medicine where the answers are here, the science and technology is here, it's just not applied. And so my whole life has been driven by the passion of trying to relieve needless suffering for millions of people. These chronic diseases that are now accounting for almost one in $5 of our entire economy, that are bankrupting America, and I think the NHS is not far behind us in the UK. These are not inevitable problems. Heart disease, diabetes, many cancers, dementia, autoimmune diseases, these are just exploding in the last 100 years, they weren't around before.

It wasn't because we didn't live long, it wasn't because of that. It was because something changed. And what changed was our diet, was environmental toxins, was our microbiome our nutritional deficiencies because of the ultra processed food we're eating. I've been driven to both solve problems individually for people with their health, as well as take on the bigger issues of the root causes of our chronic disease, which, if it's food, right, so. And environmental toxins. And I. And I realized that I couldn't cure diabetes in my office. Right. Diabetes was caused on the farm and the factories and the grocery stores and the restaurants, not in my office. And so I really had to go upstream and deal with the root causes of why my patients were sick, because I could change your diet and I could get them to be better, and I could fix a lot of things, but they would just kept. More people would just keep coming in. I'm like, this is ridiculous. And so I realized I had to do something about it. So I wrote a book called Food Fix, which essentially lays out how food is the nexus of everything we care about, and create a nonprofit where I work in Washington to try to change food policies, like child friendly labeling and medically tailored meals, and changing nutrition education and changing our dietary guidelines, changing the kinds of food they rebel through snap or food stamps.

Why should we be giving 10% of our $100 billion budget for food stamps for soda, which we know kills people? So I've been working on these issues both on the macro and the micro.

What is the current state of food in your point of view? Because it's difficult, isn't it? Especially when we come to America as Brits, I feel like we always get fat. It's very, very difficult to come to Los Angeles or New York, where we frequent as Brits, to run the show.

Yeah.

And to not get fat.

I'm sorry, but it's difficult.

Like, you know, I do these podcasts about health and food all the time, but then I think, okay, it's all good and having this, all this advice, but when you walk outside and you walk into a convenience store, you are doomed.

Yeah. Yeah. We live in a toxic nutritional landscape. It's a nutritional wasteland. A carnival of enticing, colorful, addictive, highly processed, food like substances that drive our biology in all the wrong ways. And so it's very difficult to be healthy in America, which is why 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction. This is according to the, we call the National Health and Nutrition Examination survey, the government does, which is hundreds of thousands of people looking at their blood work over many, many years. And we're messed up. And it's not an accident. It has to do with the food we produce, how we grow it, what we grow, how its processed, how its made into different food like substances, how its marketed, sold in grocery stores, restaurants. So its very difficult unless you really know what youre doing to stay out of trouble in America. I mean, I do it because im highly educated, but its very tough and its easy to make the wrong choice.

How do you do it?

Well, im very sort of religious about what I put in my body. I mean I dont eat anything that comes in a package or is processed. I just dont hard and fast rule. If it's basically, I mean, if it's something that's like a can of sardines or a can of tomatoes, obviously if it's minimally processed foods, that's fine. You know, we've been minimally processing foods forever. Sauerkraut is processed. Yogurt. Yogurt's processed. That's not bad. It's how it's processed. And so I eliminate all ultra processed foods. I won't, I won't even think of it as food. If I go into a store, convenience store and I see all these different things to buy, it just, it looks to me like a rock. Like the way that process in my brain, well, that's not really food, why would I eat that? I'm not going to pick up a rock and eat it. So I tried to cook my own food and I bring food with me. So for example, today I had another podcast I did earlier and I knew I wasn't going to have time for lunch, so I had earlier bought some snacks and I actually have a care package, basically an emergency snack pack.

So I don't have a food emergency in my backpack all the time. So it's like a days rations and that was my lunch. So basically, even though I didn't have time to kind of go out to eat today, I pre planned. So it takes a little planning. Like you came to the United States from the UK, you didn't just like leave your house and go to the airport. You thought about your packing, you brought the right clothes, you brought your crew, you want to bring your cameras or whatever you have to bring, you have to plan. But somehow we don't think we have to do that for our health. We have to plan it. And so I'm very careful about planning and occasionally I get stuck and you know, usually I can find some nuts or something somewhere, even if they're in oil they don't like. So it's tough.

I got told the other day, which helped me understand myself. I got told that when we're hungry, especially when it's sort of like late at night, the logical center of our brain, like the prefrontal cortex, is less active, and the amygdala, the sort of emotional part of our brain that wants the dopamine, is much more active. And it helped me to understand why maybe late at night, if I haven't planned my food, I'm much more susceptible to make a bad food choice that I then regret. I'm much more acceptable to lean in for sugar or something that's like super high in carbs or whatever. That really helped me. And this is why the planning thing makes a lot of sense, because I can use my prefrontal cortex, my logic center of my brain, to make the food choice in the morning so that I don't find myself making a mistake.

It's so important, Stephen, because people have to understand that willpower is not the answer. You cannot use willpower to control your food behavior. Its part of your ancestral evolutionary, limbic, reptile, dinosaur brain. And so when your blood sugar drops, youre going to eat whatever in front of you. If theres a vending machine, if theres a donut, if its cookies, it doesnt matter. Even if you know better and ive experienced this, youre just going to eat whatever, because its a life threatening emergency. Your body doesnt know that theres grocery stores and restaurants. It means youre going to go out and try to hunt and gather and do something. Emergency. So when you have that food emergency and you don't have the right food on you, you're in trouble.

I have that all the time. I have this, like, constant fight, fight with myself where this one voice is like, do the fucking right thing. And then this other part of my brain is like, just today, break the rule. And but obviously, that voice is louder sometimes than others, and typically, late at night, it's louder.

Sleep deprivation, stress, stress, sleep deprivation. All that increases your appetite. It increases cortisol, it increases ghrelin, which is ghrelin, which is a hunger hormone. I mean, you can take young, healthy college kids and sleep deprive them, and they're going to crave carbs, they're going to crave sugar, and they're going to gain weight. It's not rocket science.

What about for someone that doesn't have any money at all? So they can't, they don't have the ability to. A lot of the privileges that me and you have, what are some of the very basics that they should be thinking about in order to remain healthy in a world where every convenience store is trying to sell you something cheap and sugary?

Yeah. So really good question. You know, I think the economics of being healthy is a problem. And we know that there's a huge disparity in health, but it's not only economics, it's education. You know, I met with a woman who was a doctor at a clinic in Bed stuyvesant, which is in Brooklyn. It's a very underserved area and in a very low socioeconomic status group, very unhealthy. And she said, mark, you know the number one predictor of health? Is it money? Nope. Is education. So even people who are wealthy but haven't been educated still have issues. So for me, it was really about education, and so people can be educated to do the right thing, and it doesn't have to be expensive. And I was part of this film ten years ago called Fed up, that looked at childhood obesity and our food system and the advent of sugar and marketing and processed foods. And we visited a lot of families. And I work with a family in South Carolina and Easley. Its one of the poorest areas in America, and it has worst called the food deserts, one of the worst food deserts in America, basically, where theres not a lot of healthy options to choose from.

And theres something called the Retail Food Environment Index. How many healthy grocery stores are there to fast food and convenience stores were like ten to one. It was terrible. And his family lived on $1,000 a month for food for a family of five. They lived in a trailer. They were in disability and food stamps. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight. The father was very overweight, had type two diabetes, and was already at 42 years old, was on dialysis for kidney failure, which is amazing because you usually dont see that till later. The son was 16 years old and 50% body fat. Guy should be ten to 20. And was about diabetes to be diabetic, was pre diabetic. And rather than kind of, they were part of the movie. I said, why do you want to do this? And they were like, well, in order for my dad to get kidney transplant, he asked, wait, were trying. We dont have to do. Were doing all this low fat stuff and were doing all these diet stuff we have in the house not working. So I went to their house, their trailer, and I, rather than giving a lecture about what to do, I said, lets cook a meal together, but first, lets do an inspection of your kitchen and lets see whats in here.

And so we pulled out everything from the freezer and the fridge and the cupboards and everything was packaged, box processed. Everything was very high in high fructose corn syrup. From the peanut butter to the salad dressing. Everything had trans fat in it, which is deadly. And a lot of it said diet this. And my basic rule is if it has a health claim on the label, dont eat it. Its gluten free. Potato chips doesnt make it healthy. Right? Coca cola is gluten free. It doesnt make it healthy. I showed them what they were doing and I said lets just make a simple meal. Heres a guide called good food on a tight budget. How to eat well for you, for the planet and your wallet. And its made by the environmental working group. You can get up on ewg.org comma. Its free. And it was like how do you choose the cheaper cuts of meat or the beans or the grains or the veggies? Onions and carrots and celery are not expensive. A lot of veggies are not expensive. Turkey chili. We made a salad from fresh ingredients, olive oil and vinegar dressing, not dressing that was full of chemicals and high fructose corn syrup and refined oils.

I showed them how to roast sweet potatoes. I showed them how to stir fry vegetables. We had some asparagus. They never eaten anything fresh. They never cooked in the kitchen. The kids came out or playing video games. They came running in the kitchen like, what's that smell like? I think it was like the roasting of the sweet potatoes. We had this beautiful dinner together. They loved the food. And I was like, you know what? I don't know if it's going to work, but they didn't even have cutting boards. They didn't have knives. They literally hadn't, like, we tried to cut the onions and the sweet potatoes with a butter knife because that's all they had was like a butter knife. It was really hard. So I bought them on the way home, I bought them cutting boards on Amazon and on Ives and I sent it to their house. Next week, the mom texts me, she says, mark, we lost 18 pounds this week as a family. A year later, the father lost 45, got a new kidney. The mother lost 100 pounds. The son lost 132 pounds and went to medical school. First guy in his family to go to college.

And he asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school. And they lived in one of the worst food deserts. They didn't have much, you know, economically. And they were able to figure it out because eating real food doesn't have to be expensive. You don't have to have a $70 wagyu ribeye steak, right? You can eat real food and it's just as simple as not eating the ultra processed food. Its so bad for us and it kills 11 million people a year. We know this data is so strong, it causes mental health issues, aggression, violence, depression, anxiety, gun violence. I mean, the studies are there. I just. I did a podcast on the doctors pharmacy, my podcast, about this, talking about how our food is affecting our mental health, not just obesity and diabetes, but our cognitive function and add and memory issues. I mean, it's all linked to what we're eating. So we have, like I said, the best of times, the worst of times. We know what to do, but we have the ability to do it. It's a problem of education, a problem of political will to change the policies that are driving us to do the wrong thing.

And right now there's a bill being proposed in Congress that would limit as a pilot ultra processed food for kids with food stamps, which I think would be amazing. The food industry is fighting back tooth and nail, right? So we're fighting big forces. The food industry is the biggest industry on the planet.

When I was growing up and I was trying to be healthy, one of the things I used to do was chug milk because I got told that it would make me tall like my brothers. So I used to drink milk like crazy, straight from the carton, just as many gulps as I could take from the freezer.

Did it work? Did you grow?

I have no idea. I'm still shorter than they are, so I guess not. But that's one of the big myths that I think a lot of families still believe, that milk is great for our bones and to help us grow. What's your thoughts on milk? Yeah, so, you know, it's a controversial topic as well.

Yes. I mean, the dairy industry is big. Our current secretary of agriculture worked for the dairy industry. It's problematic because the science isn't there. There was the paper called Milk and Health that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, top medical journal in the world, arguably maybe the Lancet if you're from the UK. But it basically was written by two Harvard scientists that dissected all of the scientific evidence around milk. And whether the claims were right or not, and just maybe for the audience in Europe, you might not know this, but in the states, who will remember this, there were all these got milk ads. So there were famous people, celebrities, you know, sports athletes, politicians, all wearing a white milk mustache, and they're like, got milk as a promotion. And in those ads, it would say, it's going to build better bones. It's going to do this, it's going to do that. And the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission actually, or I think it was, you can't do that because it's, it's not true. Like, you have to take those ads out. So those ads went away and it was the government promoting those ads with the dairy council.

So there's something called checkout programs that the government has where it's supposed to support agriculture. Well, the government was paying in part for these ads with taxpayer dollars and the science wasn't there. And the dietary guidelines for Americans says that the average American should have three glasses of milk a day and kids should have two glasses of milk a day to be healthy. You cannot get money in funding for school lunches in America without having milk on the menu. Now, there is no evidence to support this. In fact, there's opposite evidence that skim milk causes weight gain because it doesn't satisfy your appetite. That milk can cause cancer, prostate cancer, that it doesn't create strong bones. In fact, there's higher risk of fracture with high milk drinkers, that it creates a lot of digestive issues for people. It can create autoimmune diseases like type one diabetes. It has common allergies or food sensitivities that people get. And I remember I was in the emergency room once, and when I was working the ER, and this mother comes in with this kid with like this 10th ear infection a few weeks. I was like, what happened?

When did this start? Oh, it started when he was twelve months old. I said, what changed? Well, I stopped breastfeeding and I started giving him milk. And all of a sudden he started getting these ear infections. I was like, oh, this is before I even knew about all this, which is kind of an interesting footnote. But we really have to look at the data and be science driven. And the problem is we have corporate capture in America where the food industry has captured our food agencies, our political system, from the FDA to the USDA. They spend, for example, half a billion dollars just on the farm bill, which has, for example, food stamps and other food programs, child infant nutrition. So it's really unfortunate, but milk is not nature's perfect food. It's only nature's perfect food if you're a calf.

Is there health benefits to milk?

Yes. So that's the other side of it. Now, what milk should we be drinking, right, if we're drinking modern milk? Modern milk is from Holstein cows that are almost homogenous. Not homogenized milk, but homogenous breed. They have very few bulls inseminating them. They have like massive insemination program from a very few bulls that have a limited genetic stock, and they're what we call a one cows. So most heirloom cows, most sort of historical dairy, had something called a two casein, which is less inflammatory, less likely to cause gut issues, less problematic for the body. So sheep and goat milk have a two. Certain cows, like Jersey or Guernsey cows have a two in them, and you can get a two milk, you can a two ice cream. Now, a one casein is potentially very problematic. So I think the current dairy is not great. And then we pasteurize it and homogenize it, and then we add growth hormone to the cows that goes in there. We have estrogen that we add into the cows in the milk, 60 different hormones in the milk, some of them naturally occurring. But we milk pregnant cows, and that milk has a lot more hormonal effects.

So I think current dairy is not something we should consume. Now, if you have a chance to get sheep milk or goat milk, or a two milks from a cow, that may be okay. Yogurts may be okay. It depends on your genetics, too. 75% of the world's lactose intolerant. Many people have dairy sensitivities, but I think if it's from the right source, it's okay. For example, I use goat whey as my morning protein shake. So goat whey is from goats. Obviously, theres very little casein in it, but its a two casein if theres any, and I dont react to it. But if I have regular whey, I do have a reaction. I get congested, ill get pimples, or I get regular stuff. So I dont think dairy is something we should be consuming in large amounts, unless its certain kinds of dairy.

What do you think of this conversation at the moment around the Zempack? It seems like its just exploded in culture. I mean, the share price of the company, that maker Zempeg, has gone through the roof.

Yeah.

In a way that I've just never seen in biotech before.

Yeah.

It appears that there's no apparent side effects. If you ask people, they struggle to take any side effects. But I actually think I saw you make a video about it. If I'm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to say about it.

What are your thoughts on a Zen tech? You crossed your arms, you're gonna get yourself in trouble.

I'm trying not to bang the table.

Okay.

But first of all, we have a massive obesity problem, and we don't have any good solutions. And so something comes along. That's an injection you can take once a week that makes you not hungry and bypasses your normal biological mechanisms, and you lose weight. That's a huge, attractive thing. And that's why Nova Nordisk is the biggest company now in Denmark. It's the biggest part of the GDP of Denmark. I don't know if they even allow it in Denmark.

They're the people that make ozempic.

Yeah, people that make ozempic. And recently, the CEO of Nova Nordisk, who makes Ozempic, publicly said he was getting calls from processed food manufacturers, very concerned because their market share was dropping, and they were very concerned that it was going to affect their business. Think about that. So, I think ozempic is effective. It works with a natural part of your biology called glp one, which is something your body makes, and we can make more of it by doing lots of different things from certain probiotics and bacteria in our gut to certain foods, just certain ways of eating. But the effect of the drug is very strong.

Just for context. For anyone that doesn't know what a zenpak is, let's give them some context.

It's a drug that was first used for diabetes, and then it works by acting on a pathway called glp one, glucagon, like peptide one, which is just a pathway, and it regulates insulin function, it regulates weight and appetite. And so it really works to help with blood sugar. But the side effect was weight loss. So it was like, we studied Viagra for blood pressure, but the side effect was it helped men with erections. So it was like, well, it's like, kind of like that, right? It was like. Wasn't designed for this, but it actually had the side effect. And, you know, since obesity affects so many people, there's now 2 billion people on the planet who are overweight.

So you take this injection, and you basically, your appetite drops out. So you don't feel as hungry, you.

Don'T feel as hungry. You can feel nauseous, you can throw up, you can not want to eat. And people stop it because of the side effects. So those are short term side effects. So the plus side is that it works, it's effective, it has some metabolic benefits when you lose weight, which can help your health benefits. I don't think it's the drug that's having the health benefits. It's the weight loss. But there's a lot of downsides. One, uh, it costs not a lot of money. So if you were to put everybody who's overweight in the country on it, it would be $5.1 trillion. So it's an enormous, enormously costful.

How much does it cost?

Like $13 to month.

$13 to month?

A month, which is like, you know, probably, you know, 1500 pounds or something. It's a lot, it's a lot of money every month, forever. Right. When you stop it, the weight gain comes back, unless you really rigorously change your lifestyle. So its not a lifestyle change program. Its not a, it doesnt help you change your behaviors or habits. Its a pharmacological appetite straight jacket. And that can be effective if you, if some people really need it, they need it. If some people are massively overweight and they dont want to get a gastric bypass, I think it may be okay. But heres the rub. One, you have to take it forever. Two, its expensive. Three, most people are not aware that not only do you lose fat, but you lose muscle. So about 50% of the weight you lose is muscle. And muscle is where your metabolism is. It burns seven times the calories as fat, and you need it for longevity and health. And so when you lose muscle, your whole health declines, its center of your health, and its very tough to get that back. So you have to really increase protein and you have to hit the gym hard with weights if youre going to be on a drug like ozempic longer term, and that, that can be managed, but its most people dont.

Right. That can be managed. And you need to be tracked with Dexa scans and body composition testing and really know what youre doing because it can really mess you up. And then you lose the weight, but then your metabolism is slower at the end of that process than it was before you started because you've lost your metabolic engine, which is your muscle. The other thing that happens, and we're now seeing this because it's not been around that long. There was an article in the New England journal years ago that said, be sure to use new drugs as soon as they come out, before the side effects develop. Now we're seeing two, three years out, serious side effects. So in medicine, when we see an effect of 20 or 30% on a study, we go, that's, that's a great thing. Let's, you know, statins lower heart disease by 20 or 30%. Great. Number one drug in the world. The side effect profile on this is scary because bowel obstruction, which is not a trivial thing, essentially, where your bowels stop moving and you need surgery to release them, is increased by 450%. Pancreatitis, which is not a fun condition, which is where your pancreas becomes inflamed.

That affects your digestion, it affects your insulin, affects everything you can die from it, is increased by 900%. So these are not trivial things. There's other side effects, kidney and so forth. So I think the longer this is out there, we're going to see more and more consequences of this drug, and I think it misses the real issue, which is, how do we fix the problem causing this? It's not an ozempic deficiency, right? Like, this is weight gain. Obesity is not. Ozempic deficiency is because of our toxic environment, lifestyle, food system, lack of exercise, environmental toxins. It's complicated, and it's not an easy fix, and it requires policy change. It requires us to rethink our agricultural system, our food processing and manufacturing system. It requires massive education for people what to eat. It requires us, really to make wide scale change in our society, which is going to cause significant loss for a lot of companies. I mean, like I said, the food industry is the biggest industry in the world. There's $716 to $17 trillion a year industry that's bigger than the gdp of most countries, or I think of, like, I mean, the entire United States is, I think, 16 trillion.

So it's a big industry with a lot to lose. And so there's a lot of pushback about changing the things that have to change for us to become healthy. So taking this drug seems great, and I think it's got benefits, but it's not just a risk free solution.

It's funny because it feels like it's a window into the future of how we're going to treat things like obesity. Because the price play this forward, the price is going to come down because more companies are going to release very similar iterations that cause the same effect on GLP. One. The price will come down so quickly. There'll be this kind of price race, I'm sure. I imagine a Zen peck got ahead of the pack because they ran the clinical trials. So they invested all that money, which means they got approved first. That window's going to close, and then the price comes down, and then I don't know if. Do they prescribe it here? And can doctors prescribe it?

Oh, sure. Prescribe it? Yeah. Oh, really?

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

So it can be subsidized by your insurance?

No, it can't be. I mean, most insurance won't pay for it. They might pay for it if you're diabetic. But for non approved indications, they typically don't pay for it. Now there's Rogovi, which is the approved version, and some insurance will pay, some insurers won't, but it's not something they're excited to pay about.

Interesting. Do you know this, with those side effects that you named linked with Zenpak, what is it about the drug that's causing that? Because I was wondering, as you were saying it, is that because people start eating less, or is it the chemical?

It's the effect of the drug. It thickens the bowel wall. It has effect on the gut. So its working on the gut in a lot of the hormones and the metabolic functions of the gut are affected by ozempic in ways that change its function and slow the emptying and do a lot of things. So eventually it seems to cause problems for a lot of people.

Interesting, because the narrative out there is very positive at the moment. These drugs come along and its like theres no side effects and theyre super.

Millions of dollars of advertising and billions of dollars of revenue at stake. Nobody's talking about the bad side.

Interesting.

And by the way, they're thinking of giving it to five year old kids, which is just terrifying to me for life.

I do think with these things, there's no such thing as a free lunch, is there, in life. So I think we'll eventually figure out what the trade off is, and then people can decide for themselves if the trade off is worth it based on their own circumstances.

Yeah, I mean, listen, people are like, I want to lose five pounds, and I don't think that's a good idea. If you're severely obese person, you have severe health conditions. You're really struggling to get going. You know, it, can it be a helpful aid? Absolutely. You know, should it be given to everybody who wants to look good for a party or a wedding? Absolutely not.

What's your position on fruit?

I love fruit. How much fruit? I think it depends. Right. So if you're a diabetic and you're metabolically completely out of whack, um, and you don't have any metabolic resilience, you know, eating a plum might be a problem for you. And now we have continuous glucose monitors. You can track your blood sugar and see, and I, I've had patients like this, gee, I eat a plum and my sugar goes through the roof. So. But if I ate an apple, it doesn't. So I think different fruits have different effects on you. Uh, but for most part. Fruit is full of phytochemicals, fiber, phytonutrients. It does have a little bit of sugar in it. Uh, I would say no fruit juice. I think fruit juice is definitely to obesity in kids and other things. But if you want to have an apple or a peach or a plum, its fine. I think you shouldnt have it first thing in the morning. I think protein and fat in the morning is important because it activates your metabolism and your protein synthesis. If you eat sugar in the morning, which is essentially what we eat in the world today, cereal, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bagels, you know, sweetened yogurts, sweetened coffees.

I mean, its the worst possible thing we can do for our biology. It jacks up our blood sugar and insulin ends up causing us to gain weight and be hungry and, you know, be craving more stuff. So having, having fruit, for example, you have frozen berries in your. I had frozen cherries, for example, in my whey. Protein. That's okay, because there's protein in there and it mitigates the effect. So what about eating times when to eat?

Yeah. Have you got any thoughts around when we should and shouldn't be eating?

Yeah, for sure. I think, you know. You know, we had something called breakfast before, which was breaking the fast. And now people eat all night. They eat till they go to bed, and as soon as they wake up, they eat or have something sugary stuff in the morning, I get sugary coffee. And they dont give themselves a window of fasting, which is critical for our biology. And I wrote about this in my book, young forever, where we talked about how do we have our own repair renewal system kick in? Because the body. Think about it, Steven. Your body, when you cut yourself heals. The skin closes, it heals. How does it know how to do that? Its so smart. Your bones break, it heals. I broke my arm a few years ago. It healed, right. Whats going on? Im not going in there. It knows what to do. It recruits stem cells. It recruits repair factors and growth factors, and it knows what to do. So the body has this innate healing, repair, renewal and regeneration system, and we need to learn how to activate it. And most of us do the opposite. We do everything in our power to deactivate it, and that causes a disease.

So food is the most important thing we do to interact with these regenerative renewal repair systems. It's one of the things we call the hallmarks of aging, and theres one called deregulated nutrient sensing. And it really relates to how our bodies relate to food, how our nutrient sensing systems are dysregulated by our highly processed diet, by high sugar and starch and not enough of the right foods. So, so in the, in the long answer to your question, you know, its important to give yourself a break of 12 hours. So if you eat at six at night, you could eat six in the morning minimum. But best probably 14. So if you eat dinner at six, eat breakfast at eight, that's okay. That's a 14 hours fast. And in that time your body is doing its cleanup, recycling, repair.

Is there an evolutionary story here for sure?

Absolutely. You know, when, when, you know, we didn't have grocery stores, we didn't have, you know, whole foods, we didn't have restaurants, we didn't have takeout, we didn't have convenience stores, so we had to go out and find food. And I just came back from Tanzania and visited the hunter gatherers there, the cadza, which is one of the last few tribes that hunt and gather. And we went hunting and gathering. I was like man, it's a lot of work to go dig up some roots and kill a bird in the tree. It was a project we ran around for hours and so we don't know where we're getting our next meal. And so the body has had to deal with periods of feast and famine before. And so what it's got built into it is a system of conservation and repair when we dont eat. And so the system gets activated that improves our blood sugar control, that recruits new mitochondria and builds new mitochondria, that reduces inflammation, that activates cellular cleanup and repair processes. So you have all these old cells and damaged proteins. Your body has a little like digester, almost like a little vacuum cleaner that goes and sucks this all up and then digests it and then uses the parts, its almost like a recycling system in the body.

We need to activate that. And so that fasting period is a time to do that. And weve seen, even, for example, we know, for example, concentration camp survivors who live really long like they live 9100 plus years old, many of them. And its because they had this period of deep starvation that had an effect on their biology. And we know this from many animal studies, that starvation and fasting will extend your life by a third. If you eat a third less calories, youll live a third longer. Now its not fun, right? But you dont have to do that. So timing of eating is important. So give yourself 3 hours before bed for no food and give yourself at least twelve to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.

How do we know in the animal studies it wasn't just the calorie restriction that caused the sort of longevity effect?

It was.

Oh, it was the calorie.

It was.

So what if I just restrict my calories instead of fasting?

Well, you can do that. I met a guy who was from the calorie Restriction Society.

As a calorie restriction society.

Yeah. Which is based on these research in animals where, think about it, if you eat a third less, you live a third longer. For a human, that would be 120 years old. And I said, what do you have for breakfast? He said, well, I had five pounds of celery. And I'm like, okay, you go do that. I'm gonna figure out another way. So you have to eat enormous amounts of like, low calorie food just to feel full. Right. That's why you don't have food. So he was starving. And there are a lot of downsides to starving. You lose muscle, which is necessary. There's certain things that go wrong, and so its not really the optimal strategy. You want to do things that mimic starvation. So how do you mimic this period of starvation? That causes something called autophagy, which basically means to eat yourself, to basically clean up your cells. Its like self cleaning or self repair. Right. So theres a lot of ways to hack that. You can do it by this longer term, overnight fast. You can do it by certain supplements and certain medications, like rapamycin is being studied for longevity, which is a drug thats used for cancer and for other immune suppressing treatments.

But it works on this pathway called mTOR, which essentially is the activation of cellular buildup. It causes muscle synthesis. So if you want to build muscle, you want to activate mTOR with protein, which is good, but you dont want to activate it all the time. So this drug inhibits mTOR, which is what happens when you starve yourself. So it mimics starvation, and then you get this kind of benefit. Or drugs like metformin are being studied, which is another drug thats looking at how do we activate this longevity switch called AMPK, another pathway thats regulating your nutrient sensing. So when you have enough, you dont have enough nutrients, this activates. But if were running around eating well, you can actually take this drug and it may have an effect. Theres a large trial going on now. Im still agnostic about it. Im neither pro or against it. The data is not in it for me to start taking it or for my patients to start taking it. But it works on some of these sort of starvation mimicking hacks, let's call them.

So starvation is good for us.

Yeah, I mean, yes, I would say you have to be careful because, you know, people go really to the extreme. They go like, I'm going to not activate mTOR because activating mTOR caused me to age faster and it prevents autophagy and it builds cancer and it's bad. So I'm going to become a vegan and I'm going to eat less calories. And eventually what happens is you lose muscle. So it's, it's like goldilocks, you know, you need both mTOR activation and mTOR ambition. You need to take a breath in, you need to take a breath out. You need to be awake, you need to go to sleep.

Yeah.

That's how your heart needs to beat. It needs to relax. It's just how the body works.

Difficult conversation as well, because of it can provoke disordered eating. Yeah, various eating disorders, which are obviously extremely bad in terms of health outcomes. Yeah. Blue zones. You visited some blue zones, haven't you?

I have.

What are blue zones and what did they teach you about the nature of being healthy?

Well, my friend Dan Buettner basically came up with this concept of the blue zones after visiting these areas in the world where people had extremely long lives, and somebody on the map circled them in blue ink, which is why they're called blue zones. And I visited Ikaria and also Sardinia.

How many of them are there?

There's five. There's Okinawa, Japan, Loma Linda, California, and Nicoya peninsula in Costa Rica. But there are many more. I mean, I was in Turkey and I saw villages where people were very, very old. And so those are the ones that have been studied.

How old are we talking?

Well, about. I mean, one couple there was like collectively 210 years old. So they lived to be 100, 105, 109, 110. I mean, Emma Morano was 117 when she died. So the question is, what is different about these areas? And what's different is that they're very isolated and remote, so they havent been burdened with all the modernization of our food system. They still grow their own food. I mean, I visited this couple. He was, I think, 90. Penaquintas, he was like 97. His wife was a young 87, and they had land and the farm they lived on. He was more chill. But she was out there showing us around all the fruit trees, the olive trees, the garden she planted, I mean, its massive mini farm that she managed herself on the side of a hill when she was running up faster than I could get to her, at 87 years old, cooking everything from scratch. All, it wasn't, like, organic, but it was because that's just what they did. They used all heirloom animals, like sheep and goat. So they had heirloom sheep and goat.

With, what's heirloom sheep meaning, it's not.

Like some industrialized, hybridized cow that's producing this nasty milk, which we shouldn't be drinking. Theyre having goat milk and goat cheese, but their goats are eating wild plants that have phytochemicals. Some of those cheeses and goat milks have actually higher phytochemicals even than green tea, which has a lot that comes from, for example, catechins that you can get from the goat milk, which is from the goats that are eating the plants that have these compounds that benefit their health. Theyre also active. Like, petraeo was, like, 95 years old, and he was in Sardinia, and he had to hike 5 miles a day up this extremely rocky, mountainous terrain to herd his sheep. At 95 years old. I mean, most 95 year old aren't hiking the mountains, right? He was booming, voice stood up straight, eyes clear, not hunched over, funny as heck. Sang me a song. And then. So they move naturally. They have amazing food, phytochemical rich food that's rich in all these plant compounds that are found to connect to longevity. Uh, in ikari, I was sitting with this guy who was making, milking the goats, and and we're making goat cheese together, and he, like, he gives me this tea.

I'm like, what is this? He said, oh, this is wild sage tea. And I looked at, he said, what is it? I said, what is the plant? I looked it up, and then I looked up the plant, and I analyzed, you know, what it was, and turned out it's an extremely phytochemical rich plant that has a lot of these same longevity compounds in it called catechins, that, no, we don't drink a lot of green tea has it you can get from Japan, for example. And then we just basically see that not only do they have good food, they have the activity. They have very low levels of stress. There was one guy, Silvio. I was having dinner with him. He had this mountainous area that his whole family had had for years, and they had about 200 sheep and goats, and they had a little kind of restaurant. They started for people to come, and so they basically had the family cooked, and you had everything from the farm. And I said, sylvia, after dinner, I said, sylvia, do you have any stress, like, in your life? He looked at me like, stress. He almost didn't understand the word.

When things are difficult and hard, things are hard, and you feel stressed. And he's like, oh. He says, yeah, well, sometimes at night, a goat will get out and I'll have to go get it. And sometimes the goats are giving birth. I have to go get up early. So they have very low levels of stress. And then they also have something which is really important, which is community. So they have a sense of belonging and connection. I met Julia, who was 100 years old. Sorry, 103 months. She told me, I guess it's like when you're five, I'm a five and three quarter, I'm 103 months. You count in the months. And she was still working. She was still making stuff for weddings and doilies and all things. And she didn't have any kids, but her niece and her nephew invited her to come stay with them. And so she was living with them. Or another guy, Carmine had lost his wife, but he was living with family members and it was running this big garden in 86. And animals and sheeps and rabbits. So they all are part of community. They have gatherings they celebrate together.

There's a sense of belonging. There's no nursing homes. There's no loneliness. Loneliness is the new smoking, really. I mean, we have an epidemic of isolation and loneliness in America and increasing around the globe. And it's lethal. It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

How do we know?

How do we know that it's dangerous?

Yeah.

There's so much science around this. The evidence of this is immense. In fact, the surgeon general of America just released a statement about this and an initiative to redress loneliness because it's such a driver of not just unhappiness, but actual disease and death. Why?

Why are we so lonely? What is it that's happening? Do you think it's. What, is it the Internet?

Or is it. Yeah, I mean, think about it. We used to, you know, rely on each other in communities to live like. Like they do. For example. Well, I said, you know, how did it work, Silvio, when you have all these sheep, how do you manage? Well, you know, I have, like, all my friends, they come over and it's time for shear the sheep. They come over and they help, and it's just. Life is just naturally connected. And you go to someone's house, you walk down the street, you know, you sit in the cafe, you have a neighborhood, you have a family. We've lost that. We're all mobile. We're all moving around. We are all disconnected from our families. We're online most of the time. We have Facebook instead of actually real face to face time. It's great to sit here with you in person. Right. It's something we've lost, and we've lost the value of relationships and our culture of achievement and success. And it's just disconnected us from what really matters, which is the human community.

Is there any way back for that, do you think? Because I was thinking about this the other day. Listen, I've talked about this once or twice now, but I tried the vision pro the other day.

Oh, you did?

Yeah. And incredible in terms of the technology, but terrifying in terms of the potential implications over the long term.

Yeah, you just could wear that all the time and forget about everything.

Exactly. It was incredible. Like the fact that I can just sit there and just the things I do with my hands that are on my lap impact all of these massive screens in front of me. You can see again, when you play it forward, that this is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, more accessible. The apps are going to get better. And then we think about what that's going to mean for loneliness.

Yeah.

When I could go hang out with my friends in a virtual world and do my work in a virtual world and date in a virtual world, watch pornography in a virtual world and all.

Of these things, I still like hugging and holding hands. How do you do that?

You can't do that in there. Are you hopeful for us being able to turn around the loneliness and isolation epidemic?

I mean, it's a tough one. I think we have to rethink how we live and what we do and the communities we build. And I think there are efforts of that happening all around. So just at the same time, we're seeing this epidemic of loneliness. We're also seeing a lot of initiatives of community building and connection and belonging. And so there's a lot of these communities that I'm involved with that are happening. And I'm on the board of something called the Belong center, which is really about addressing loneliness and creating ways and mechanisms for people to connect and be with each other in real time.

I think it needs to be a systemic thing. I think with a lot of the issues we've talked about relating to longevity and diet, the best answers are probably going to be the really truly systemic ones that come from how we design societies like regulation and policy, and just how we design cities and green spaces and libraries and community centers and all these kinds of things that seems to.

I realized this was a problem a long time ago. And I went to Haiti after the earthquake, and I went helping there when it was just a disaster, one of the first medical teams on the ground. And in that process, I met Paul Farmer, who was an incredible visionary doctor from Harvard who went to Haiti and helped solve the problem of TB and AIDS by building community health workers. And he then went on to build a network of community health workers, over 11,000 globally. It was a model for the Clinton and Gates foundation. And what he realized was that we didnt didnt have a lack of the right science or the right medicines to heal these problems. We know what to do with TB and Aids. It was a lack of people being able to do the basic things that they needed to do, like clean water or have a watch, you know, what time it was. And so he built this network of community health workers and realized that community was medicine, and so he was their neighbors. And so I came back from that very moved, and I realized that chronic disease was also an issue, that chronic disease wasnt infectious, but it was contagious.

Youre more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family members are overweight. Your social networks are more important than your genetic networks in determining your health. Youre basically you look around at your five closest friends. Its probably the way you are, too. I realized that we needed to use the power of community to transform our health and our behavior. I can tell you what to eat and what to do, but if all your friends are doing the opposite, its going to be hard, right? So I created a program with Rick Warren called the Daniel Plan, Faith based wellness program, where we got 15,000 people to sign up in the first week. A quarter million pounds were lost in the first year. We created a book called the Daniel Plan of how to do this in community. So we call it the five fs for getting healthy. Right. Its faith, friends, food, fitness, and focus, which is your mindset. And it was amazingly effective. We scaled it to 1000 churches around the world. It really was helping people in small groups do this together. So there was no health coach, there was no nutritionist.

It was just me and another doctor. And we basically created this program which could be delivered in a curriculum that people did in small groups together. And this church at Saddleback church with Rick Warren had an infrastructure already of groups meeting every week. So we just hijacked that and put the curriculum in there and people did it. And it was really powerful. And we've seen that now at Cleveland Clinic where I work, and we've done that with groups there as well.

That last f focus. Do you, is that an umbrella word also for purpose?

Purpose. Meaning and purpose, yeah.

From reading your work, I came to learn that purpose is a sort of longevity factor. To what extent?

I mean, the data is really clear. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical association showed that those who had meaning and purpose lived seven years longer.

And what do they mean by meaning and purpose in that context?

It's whatever your meaning and purpose is. It could be you want to be there for your grandchild. It could be you're a scientist and want to make a discovery. It could be that you, you're a novelist, you want to write your next novel.

It's not a job, necessarily.

No, it doesn't have to be. I mean, for me, my purpose is ending needless suffering for millions of people through the power of this new thinking and model and the new company that I co founded, function Health, is, I think, the tip of the spear that's going to be able to do that at scale by empowering people with their own health data, giving them an AI copilot to uplevel their health and to help them understand what's going on in real time. And to me, building that, creating that, scaling that, giving people access to things that are really hard to get for people, that it's not happening in your doctor's office or your healthcare system and happening in your annual physical, you're not getting the latest science in medicine. So how do we accelerate that change? So, for me, that drives me every day. It gets me excited to wake up. And I'm very passionate. But, of course, I'm also passionate about my friends and my community. I'm passionate about my health. I'm passionate about having fun and doing things that I love. So I think it's really important to design your life. And in terms of your values, what do you care about?

What matters to you? What makes you come alive? What gives you energy? What takes away your energy and focus on those things that take you to where you want to go.

Why would not having a purpose make us die earlier?

I mean, you see it all the time, Stephen. I mean, you look at people retire, literally in the retirement age here is 65, which I'm going to be this year, which is a little scary to say that I'm just getting started. And people are thinking, if you look at people who retire, the death rate happens so fast. Like, people who retire die like they have a much higher death rate. If, for example, you're married and your spouse dies and you've been together your life, whole life. You're likely to die very quickly after that.

Is there stats to support that?

100%. 100%.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Why? What happens? You stop moving, you get depressed.

Yeah, you get depressed, you stop moving. I had a patient who, the most beautiful relationship. It was such a deep love, and they were together for, like, 40 years. And his wife got breast cancer, and she just didn't make it. And when he died, and he was healthy guy, he was fit, healthy, ate well, he went into heart failure, like, literally heart failure. His heart couldn't pump, and he had a true medical condition that showed up on scans and imaging. He was in trouble. And it was like, wow. You know, I looked it up, and there's actually evidence for emotional shock and loss, heartbreak. Literally, his heart broke. And that caused his heart to literally break physically, not just emotionally. And we were able to get him back and fix it by dealing with that emotional heartbreak and by using energy, healing, and a lot of other things with him that helped him overcome it. But that's when I was like, wow, you know, the mind, you know, listen, Stephen, the biggest and most powerful pharmacy in the world is between your ears, you know, and it can do all kinds of stuff.

Trauma.

Yeah.

Does trauma play a role in all of that?

100%. I mean, you know, it's amazing how in medical school, we just did not learn this, but there's such a link between trauma and everything in your life, but particularly disease. There's a questionnaire we use called the Ace Questionnaire, adverse childhood events, and it basically asks you a series of questions. You can look it up online, you can link to it in your show notes. It's free. And it says, well, were your parents divorced? Was there alcoholism in your family? Did your parents fight in front of you? Did anybody hit you? Were you sexually abused? And you just go through this whole list. Is there any family members in prison? You know, and the higher your score, the more likely you are to have health issues, be obese, have autoimmune disease, get cancer, get heart disease, get diabetes. Its really striking. And so trauma is registered in your body, and theres a book called the Body keeps score. And Carolyn Mace, whos sort of a mystic, said your biography becomes your biology, and it works the other way, too. From up down, right. Your biology can become your biography. If youre eating crap and youre nutritionally deficient and you have all these health issues and mercury poisoning, well, that can kind of affect your mental health, too, in your story.

But we know really clearly that your trauma is influencing your biology. And so we have to, we have to deal with this in medicine, whether it's depression or whether it's autoimmune diseases, or whether it's other health issues. And we now have an incredible revolution in psychedelics, which is for the first time showing us that we have treatments for things like PTSD, which really were very hard to treat. You can give people a sedative, you know, but that was it. Maybe some therapy, which barely worked, if that. But you, you start to work with these, these compounds that change the structure and function of the brain, which is really amazing to me. Its not just uh, like our normal drug where you take the drug and you have to keep taking it. Menu took ozempic once and you would stay losing weight forever, right. Its like taking these psychedelics. You do it once or twice and it changes your physiological functioning and your brain response. It changes compounds in your brain like BDNF, that grow new brain connections and repair and heal things in your brain. And so were seeing new ways to deal with trauma that I feel really exciting.

And Maps is an organization, the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies. You can share that link, but it's sharing all the research about treating depression, anxiety, trauma responses, PTSD, relational issues.

What do you think of psychedelics? Have you tried them?

Yes.

Which ones have you tried?

You know, all of them.

Which ones haven't you tried?

I haven't tried iva gain.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

It's quite strong for addiction, right?

Yeah. But, you know, I grew up in the seventies, so mushrooms were psychedelic. Mushrooms were a big part of my awakening and my personal journey. Tried LSD, I've tried peyote, I've tried ayahuasca, I've tried buffaux, I've tried pretty much all of them, because I'm just. I'm sort of an adventurer in my biology and my mind, and I can tell you that they really helped me.

Which one helped you the most? And give me a story of how it helped you. My girlfriend's actually in Costa Rica right now serving ayahuasca, and I spent a year and a half investing in, and we took a psychedelics company public called the Thai Life Sciences. So I worked in partnership with maps and compass pathways at a time. We invested in compass pathways, so I'm quite heavily.

Oh, you're very into that?

Yeah, yeah. I spent about a year as a year and a half, about a year as the creative director of the company, purely because I just was interested. So I invested about seven figures in the business. Then I joined as a creative director to stay close, and then my contract was basically to leave on the day of the IPO. So IPO'd on the Nasdaq 3.4 billion, and I left the next day. Yeah.

Amazing.

But it was so it was because I was interested in mental health. I heard about this epidemic of mental health. There's no good answers.

Yeah.

And psychedelics and the clinical research that was coming out around things like psilocybin, which is the active compound of magic mushrooms, were just really interesting.

Yeah.

And I didn't need to work, so.

I just, it's fascinating. I mean, you know, there was this recently heard a presentation by a Stanford scientist who's studying ibogaine for trauma, depression, anxiety, but addiction. And it's quite interesting. It's a compound that you take from a bark of a tree from West Africa, the iboga tree, and it somehow shuts off the withdrawal. We know medically that when you stop narcotics, you go through physiological withdrawal, which is a medical phenomenon. It just stops that somehow. It's like a magic that's in one dose, one dose. Now, there is metabolites that stay for a long time, nor ibogaine that may mitigate those effects and block those receptors. And we don't really quite understand it yet that, but I did have a thought, which is that when you look at the Yale Food Addiction scale, which is a validated metric for food addiction, now, different people have various degrees, right? There are people who cant stop eating sheet cakes and theres people who crave ice cream once in a while its not food addiction. But when you look at the data, globally, 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the criteria according to the Yale Food Addiction.

Gail, for food addiction from ultra processed food, from sugar refined carbohydrates. So I actually talked to one of the leading rib, again, researchers. I said, wouldnt it be interesting to do a pilot where we took people who had food addiction and we gave them ibogaine and we saw what happened? I mean, it could be fascinating, you know, it could shut that off and maybe theres going to be, and I think there will be a nor ibogaine, which is a metabolite of ibogaine that I think may be doing a lot of effect. And that's something you can take on a daily basis instead of ozempic, for example.

What I heard about ibogaine is that the side effects are quite, yeah, it.

Can be quite significant, but the main side effect is a heart side effect, it increases something called the QT interval, which can put you into an arrhythmia, which can fatal heart rhythm and you have to be moderate when you're taking it. But we found that if you take higher doses and even iv magnesium, which is actually what we use in the emergency room to treat arrhythmia, like, if your hearts beating like crazy and youre going to die, we give you intravenous magnesium as the last resort. Well, you can pre treat with magnesium and that stops that phenomena. So theres a lot of ways to deal with it. But I do think were in a psychedelic era and its really heartening to me because I think theres so many problems as a doctor I cant solve. You know, if someone has a health issue, but their trauma is controlling their behavior, and unless they deal with the trauma, it's hard to address the things that they need to do to fix their behavior in their life. Right. So if you're traumatized because you were raped or had sexual abuse when you were a kid, and I've had my own trauma.

I had incest when I was a kid. I had kind of a rough childhood in many ways.

Incest when you were a kid?

Yeah. Yeah. So I've had to deal with this myself, and doing that has really helped me to kind of recover and repair my own emotional architecture and have really a sense of security and safety, which I didn't have before.

Did you have symptoms of that trauma in your early life or your adult life?

100%. You know, I was highly functional, obviously. I mean, I'm doctor, I've written many books and a lot in the world, but it was really affecting my way of being in relationships.

Your sexual health or your sort of relationship?

Not my sexual health, but more my romantic relationships and even sometimes work relationships where I really developed a pattern. And it was also a trauma that I had for my mother, who was a wonderful woman. She was a child of deaf parents, so she had to become their parent. And she basically was what you call a parentified child, and she was the adult, so she never had a childhood. And then she did the same thing to me. She made me her therapist because she was depressed and in bad marriages and chose men who were broken because she thought love was taking care of broken people. I developed this place where I just felt this big hole in emptiness in my heart, and I couldn't really overcome that. And so I did a lot of work, did medicine journeys. I did a lot of different kinds of therapy, and I was able to really break through and release that. And when I did, it was like, it was like literally the programming changed. You know, you have that little voice in your head all the time, sometimes a very annoying voice in your head and it just says stuff all the time that, you know, you just wish it wouldn't or it dictates your behavior in certain ways that you wish it wouldn't.

I never thought this was possible, but literally that voice changed and what it said changed and how it was in relationships changed and it was physiologically different. And I didn't have that sense of trauma and I had another friend who had the same thing and he had a mother who was a yeller and a screamer and it was traumatizing, couldn't tell the truth and wasn't honest because he was afraid he was going to get attacked and hurt. He was that little boy and this part of his brain that wasnt working and we helped him get MDMA therapy, which is MDMA is a compound that isnt like a psychedelic, but it has effects on PTSD. And he said its like that part of his brain just turned off and he stopped having that feeling and he was able to tell the truth and speak what he felt. It was powerful.

And the symptoms that you experienced in your later life with relationships, what was that? Just like a bit struggling to fight form attachments.

You know, I had what was called an anxious attachment style. So basically I was anxious about the relationship and wouldn't be honest with how I felt or what I was doing. And it wasn't like I was lying, like I'm lying, but omission, or if I, if I say how I'm feeling or what I want, then they're going to leave me or they're going to be gone. And so I developed this hole and this emptiness that affected my relationships and it was bad. So if my partner, for example, this partner, she was a perfectionist and she really had a hard time opening up and she had an avoidant attachment style. So one time I hadn't seen her in three weeks and she didn't really want to connect or hug or be together and she's like, I need to get used to you. And I'm like. And so I just could feel this like visceral reaction of panic and fear and hurt and like, now I don't have any of that.

What was it that you did that fixed it?

Do your, do your work earlier. Your life is going to be difficult, I think. I wish. It's like when I was sick with chronic illness and I had chronic fatigue syndrome, and I had mold issues and lyme disease, and I was so sick, and I didn't have a roadmap, I didn't have a path, I didn't know what to do. And so I was groping in the dark and finding a crumb here and from there. And I would talk to this person and that person. I would patch together this whole approach that had finally allowed me to get well. And I wish I'd known now what I knew then. It would have been better in a year, not ten years, that it took me to get better, or maybe even shorter. And if I had done the work on myself when I was 20 and 30 and not waited till I was 50 and 60, I would have not prevented a lot of suffering. And so my advice to people is to, if you are struggling with any of these relational issues with yourself, there's work to be done. There's great, amazing paths out there to help.

Look at things like Byron Cady's work called the work, which is a way of looking at your own thoughts and your own. Your own perspective. There's so many things that you can do. Psychedelic medicine, MDMA assisted therapy, psilocybin assisted therapy. It's coming. It's not available to everybody yet, but it's coming fast. I think maybe even this year, the MDA assisted therapy will be FDA approved. So I feel like, you know, everybody's on their own journey, but you don't have to stay stuck in the biological or psychological framework that you are now. Like, there is a way to heal at any time, whether you're 65 or 25.

I think this is central to the concern a lot of people have. But also the resistance is we kind of see ourselves as being fixed, especially the older you get. You kind of assume both our health, our motivation, our trauma, our mind. It's all kind of, this is just who I am. This is who I am now. I can maybe act differently or whatever. I can learn tips and tricks to, like, I don't know, become better at sales or speaking, but fundamentally, my bullshit is my bullshit. It is me.

Exactly.

And that holds us. Kind of imprisons us.

Yeah. So my message is, number one, we now have the science in technology and medicine to upgrade your biological software and reverse chronic disease. Reverse your biological age. My biological age is 43, even though IM 65.

How do they know your biological age?

Well, its a kind of fancy technology that looks at something called the epigenome, which is the above your genome, the regulator of your gene expression, which changes based on different insults and things in your life, whether it's diet, toxins, lifestyle. So we can measure that now. So that's what it was. So you can upgrade your biological software and you can upgrade your psycho emotional spiritual software. It's really possible. And I've seen it happen and I've seen it happen. Many people, I think the psychedelic revolution is probably like ozempic for mental health, but with a lot of side effects. I mean, there's really incredible safety profile for these compounds. They're really, really safe and they don't really have side effects, and you don't need to use them that often to have the benefit.

If you've seen my most recent post on LinkedIn, you probably have seen that I'm on a bit of a hiring spree at the moment across my company, flight group, trying to find the world's best talent. And throughout these years of building these businesses, my first port of call for hiring has always been LinkedIn jobs, who are a proud sponsor of this podcast. This is because of two reasons. Number one, LinkedIn isn't just another job board. It has a vast network of more than a billion professionals and quality candidates, which I believe makes it the best place to find and hire professionals you can't find anywhere else. And number two, their process and features. LinkedIn is constantly finding ways to make the hiring process easier with super easy and intuitive features. Hiring is easy when you have that many quality candidates. In fact, 86% of small businesses get a qualified candidate within 24 hours through LinkedIn jobs. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com. Doac. That's LinkedIn.com dot d oac. To post your job for free right now. And of course, terms and conditions apply when you think about biological age. If you were giving me some advice on lowering my biological age, I'm 31 now.

Yeah, you're 31.

I'm 31.

I used a baby.

I'd like to be 25 biologically or 21 biologically.

I know you had Brian Johnson on the podcast. He probably gave you some advice.

Yeah, he's got a lot of breakfast.

And eating my eleven. Go to bed at eight.

No, no, when I speak. Yeah, speak to junk Brian Johnson. I have to buy some, like $5,000 contraption and strap it to myself in the morning. And I just.

Yeah, it's two blades of grass for lunch.

Yeah, yeah. But the simple things that have had the biggest impact on your biological age.

What are those? What's the 80 20 on this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wrote a book about it.

Yeah, you do?

Called Young forever. And it's not that hard. You know, as we talked about, the blue zones, its eat real food. I would say eliminate ultra processed food. Dramatically reduce or limit sugar and starch from your diet. Flour products particularly, make sure you exercise. So I think, you know, in terms of, and by the way, in terms of eating, just to make a few more points, give yourself twelve to 14 hours overnight from eating. First meal should be protein and it should be 30 to 40 grams of protein. That'll help you build muscle, which is the currency of longevity. So if you want to live long and be strong and be able to do stuff and not have trouble getting up out of a chair or tying your shoelaces, you need to build muscle. And that protein is critical. In the morning. You need to have a phytochemically rich diet, which means lots of colorful vegetables, lots of good fats and, and the right kinds of protein. So that's, that's pretty straightforward. I, again, I've written lots of books. I talk about the diet in there, but it's, those are the sort of the main things in the young forever, longevity.

You talk about the, the 75% of your plate should be vegetables.

Yeah.

This point about limiting the protein to sort of 25% of your plate. Is there a risk in having too much meat products?

Because this is, I mean, you know, this is a interesting question. You know, we looked at, for example, the Plains Indians, like the Lakota at the turn of the last century, in 19 hundreds, they were the longest lived population on the planet. They were 100 years old. Plus all they ate was bison. That was their diet? Pretty much. And a few berries and maybe a few things they could dig up from the ground.

All they ate was bison?

Pretty much, yeah. They could eat the liver, they'd eat the organs, they'd have the bone marrow, they would eat the meat, and they would have, I think, some veggies from the berries or roots or things that they would have, but it was very limited and they had lots of longevity. I mean, meat is a very nutrient dense food. So I think the challenge with meat, and this is a whole nother tangent that would take us an hour to go through. But, you know, vegan or is not vegan meat? Not meat. Meats one of the most nutritionally densest foods on the planet. It's the best source of protein to build muscle. And we should be eating regeneratively raised meat, which is hard to find. But there's places like force of nature where you can get online, you can get elk, bison, venison and even beef. And you can eat good quality fish, pasteurized chicken. You know, we need that kind of protein, particularly as we age, to build muscle because we get something called anabolic resistance. Our bodies resist building muscle, and you need more protein and you need more exercise. And, and so, you know, the, the amount of meat depends on what you're doing and your size and your, your, your lifestyle.

So if youre very active and you want to build muscle and you want to lift weights and you want, which you should, you probably need between, you know, a half to a gram per pound of protein per day, thats, thats more than people think. So the way we sort of say protein needs is based on deficiency diseases. So the recommended dietary allowance is 0.8 grams per kilo. Im talking about double that now. 0.8 grams is the amount that you need to prevent a protein deficiency disease, not how much you need for optimal health and functioning. So you need to be able to have the right protein at the right time. You also need fast and times not have protein, so your body can heal and repair. But its like golden ox phenomena. You need both. And so I would say, depending on your activity level and how much youre doing, you need more. But roughly about, you know, 30 grams three times a day, which is not that much. You know, I, I just had a bag of biltong, which is a little bag.

Beef, right?

It's like beef. Yeah, it's a South African, like beef jerky. And I was like, after I ate it, it was like, uh, looked at the package, I was like, oh, it's only, it's 32 grams. So I had 32 grams of protein for lunch. Right. That's hard. I could have a 30 or 40 grams protein shake. What I had this morning, that's, I'm already at, like, you know, uh, 70 grams. So I think the, the body needs that protein. So I think food is really important, and I talk about how to activate your longevity switches with food and phytochemicals. In the book, the resistance training is really key for longevity. So if you, if you want to do cardio, thats great. And I think we need to both. But, but strength training three times a week, minimum 20 minutes, is the key to health and longevity. It will keep your muscles strong. Itll prevent what we call sarcopenia, which is muscle loss. One of the biggest things that happens as you get older is you lose muscle, and that leads to metabolic issues, to inflammation, prediabetes, you know, just all kinds of health consequences. Sugar? Oh, yeah.

I said get rid of sugar.

What about artificial sugars? Like in dietificial sweeteners?

Yeah, I mean, there's so much, you know, the debate about this. I was actually reading a couple of papers yesterday, Steven, and I was, because I was not related to this, but something else I was working on. And there were these two papers that were basically discounting the fact that artificial sweeteners had any bad impact on health. And I was like, oh, interesting, because there's some biology around this. And I said, let me see who funded this study? And it says this study was entirely funded by the American Beverage association, formerly known as the American Soda Pop association. And the other study was a similar study funded by so and so, who's funded by Coca Cola and who works for the International Sweeteners association. So follow the money. Is it better than drinking soda? Yes. Is it better than drinking water? No. Are there potentially untoward consequences? I think so, because of its effect on the microbiome and other things. So if youre asking what are the things to do for my biological age, how I eat, its exercise, its, its community. So im really focused on community, friends, relationships, love. Its like medicine. Love is medicine.

And also making sure that I manage stress, I meditate. I mean, I like this app called Newcome, which basically is like binaural beats. And I put it on and just takes you into a altered brainwave state and, you know, having fun, man, having fun is okay. Longevity, enjoying life.

Yeah. It makes life worth living as well, doesn't it?

I guess, yeah.

I mean, we talk about longevity a lot, but I guess you have to like the life you live.

Exactly. Yeah. It has to be fun.

Expose them.

Exposome.

Exposome?

Yeah. What is that?

I, I mean, I tell you.

Yeah.

Never heard the word before.

So.

First time I heard it was researching you.

Yeah. So it's a scientific term that, you know, like your genome, right? Your metabolome, your microbiome, your exposome is the sum total of everything that you've been exposed to in your life and how it's impacted your biology in this moment. So it's, the really interesting thing about.

This, though, that I was particularly interested in was that this includes what's happened to your ancestors.

Yeah. Yes. Well, the epigenetics is really fascinating, but the exposome, just to quickly define it, and I'll lump back to the ancestor thing in a minute, but the exposome is what you eat. It's exercise. It's your thoughts, your feelings, your microbiome, environmental, toxins, everything, your relationships, all of that is your exposome, right. So all that influences your expression of your genes. And it turns out that 90% of disease is related to the exposome, not the genome, which is good news, because we have control over that.

So how the things that happen to us impact the expression of our genes.

Exactly. And how it affects our biology. Right.

How it turns them on and off.

Yeah. Turns on and off. Genes, regulates our hormones, our brain chemistry, our microbiome, everything. Right? Its everything youre exposed to determines the quality of your life and your health in terms of ancestral effects. Theres a phenomenon called epigenetics, which is how we measure biological age, which is the effect of this. Think of your genes as the keys on a piano. There's 88 keys, and you can create any kind of music from that. Think about that. You can create classical music, rock music, jazz, ragtime, reggae, whatever you want. And it's just 88 keys. The epigenome is the piano player that controls the songs of your life, right. And it is determined by your life experience and what you do and what you eat and how you think and your stress level and your relationships and your gut microbiome, everything is affecting this in real time. And its a dynamic process. So we now know that using different interventions of lifestyle or diet or various supplements, that you can reverse your biological age, that you can turn back the biological clock, that you can get biologically younger as you get chronologically older. And so its really exciting research.

Theres even scientists from Japan who won a Nobel Prize finding these transcription factors that regulate our gene expression, that can be inserted into us and reprogram our genes and our epigenome to become younger, in other words, can create an original stem cell, what we call a pluripotent stem cell. So itll take back the clock all the way back to embryonic, like Benjamin Button, all the way back. Now, you don't want to go all the way back, but we have these systems built in us, and so we now can actually regulate this through epigenetic behavior changes that we know work. And there are drugs that do this, too. There are phytochemicals that do this. So it's a new era of study.

Do you believe that we inherit the trauma of our ancestors?

I dont think its a belief, Steven. The data is really clear. If you look at Holocaust survivors, their children have way more issues in terms of psychological stress, anxiety, 911. There are a lot of women pregnant during 911 in New York City. And those offspring have reprogrammed genetics based on the trauma that their mothers experienced during that time. And those can be measured. Different genes are expressed, different pathways are expressed that cause, for example, a higher level of anxiety, decreased ability to process the stress hormones, and many other phenomena that happen that are programmed epigenetically. We know that if you take in animal studies, if you take a, for example, glyphosate, which was sprayed on 70% of all crops, it's a weed killer roundup, we call it. In this case, if you give it to, let's say, a grandmother mouse, but not to the daughter and not to the granddaughter or grand whatever kid. I don't know what you call grandkid mice. Anyway, that there will be changes three generations down caused by that toxin, that that original ancestor was exposed to. They will cause increased cancer, metabolic issues, kidney issues, a whole series of phenomena that are caused by epigenetic changes.

So you spray the grandmother, and then she has one generation of kids, and then the next generation of kids are still impacted by spraying the grandmother.

Yeah. So you might have heard of Lamarck. Have you heard of Darwin? Darwin, okay, you heard of Darwin. Darwin basically had the theory of evolution, which is that species evolved through natural selection, and they change slowly based on environmental pressures over time, they change their genes. Lamarck basically said, you can change genes, inherit things very quickly. And so they were kind of both, right, in a sense. Lamarck was more talking about epigenetics, and Darwin was talking more about genetic evolution and mutations over time, which both are true. Both are true. And neither of them knew about genes, but they were both observing phenomena that are explained by exactly what I'm talking about.

What is the most important thing you've discovered through your years of work as it relates to longevity and health and all of that that we haven't talked about.

We spend so much time being human doings and not being human beings. And the thing that I observed in the blue zones was there was a lot of being going on. There was a lot of just being and how important slowing down is to actually savor the things that really matter, that make life beautiful. Like, we were. I was with this two italian ladies that were taking me around these tour guides. And we were driving down out of this little village on the side of this mountain. And literally this car stops in front of us and just like, stops and kind of stops us and waves and says, get out of the car. We're like, okay, what's going on? So we got out of the car. It was an old man. He was relatively young by sardinian standards. He was 86, a named Carmine. And he said, come and we sat down on the side of the stone wall on the side of the street, and we talked for 2 hours. He talked about his life. He asked me questions. We were talking about philosophy, politics, religion, what it was like when he was younger.

And then he took me on a tour of his farm and showed me his sheep and the olive trees and the fig trees and the vegetables he was growing. And I couldn't keep up with him. He ran up the hill, he was so fit. And he told me the story of his life. When was the last time someone did that? They might give you the finger if you stop in front of them. We don't have this sort of value system anymore that values deep relationships and deep conversations and deep connection. And that's beautiful what you're doing. You're creating a space for deep connections. And you've gotten to know me in this last 2 hours in ways that most people don't, because you've asked questions and you spend time and you're curious, and I've been feeling safe to share it with you. And like, you know, I haven't said a lot of stuff about before, and so it's really something beautiful that can come out of that. And then I feel, oh, if somebody sees me, I'm seen, I'm heard. And that, that's a powerful medicine. So being seen as a powerful medicine, love is a powerful medicine.

Connection, belonging is powerful medicine.

I wonder how the lives we live now are really changing our brains as well. We talk about ADD and ADHD and autism, all these kinds of things, but the pace at which I live my life at, I often think. I think I'm developing a disease.

100%. I just got back from Patagonia, and I do a lot of stuff. I have multiple companies, businesses, I have a clinic. I have patients constantly dealing with million things every day. And, you know, sometimes I. I do. I feel like sometimes I have ADD. And I was in there, in Patagonia, in the middle of nowhere. There's no cell service, there's no wi fi, there's just mountains. Nature in me and my wife, we hiked for 1012 hours a day, sometimes more. And I felt my nervous system completely changed. And I realized I don't have add, I have NDD, which is nature deficit disorder. And I felt everything calm down. I felt everything kind of settle. I saw my heart rate variability, which is a metric that we can measure that checks our stress response double. And I'm like, oh, God. And I don't think of myself as stress, but it's like it's just this phenomena from being in our society, and it takes a will to stop and pause and breathe, to go slower and to smell the roses. It's a cliche, but it's really, it's a thing.

My friend, one of my best friends, called Dom, we used to roast him a little bit because his heart rate variability was very, very low. And so he was being roasted for a couple of weeks on end, a couple of months, really, because we all have this heart rate variability leak. Table and then he went on his honeymoon for a month to Australia, and his heart rate variability went from something like 20 or 30 to 140. And all that was happening was he was basically just spending his time in nature, in the sunshine as well, which is an important factor. And that since then, he's managed to maintain his heart rate variability predominantly by staying out in nature. And I thought, God, that's so interesting. But it regulates our immune system in a profound way.

It does.

Before the conversation started, we were talking very excitedly about your new company called function. Yeah, sounds incredibly exciting for someone that's curious about function. What is it and where can they find it?

So, you know, most of us don't have access to what's happening under our skin. We have to go to the doctor, we have to get an appointment. We have to hope they order the right tests. We have to hope that they know how to interpret the important tests. We hope they've kept up with the science. We hope they are, you know, doing all the right things, but the truth is, they're not. And medicine is unfortunately delayed in its adoption of new science. And so function is really an attempt to help you get access to your own biology, to be the CEO of your own health, to create a health database of your own data that will take everything eventually. Right now, it's your blood test, but eventually your biosensor data, your whole genomics, all your medical records, imaging data, your metabolome, your microbiome, and interpret all that in a way that helps you get a personalized picture of what's going on in real time with your biology, and then through evidence based science and through the influence of expert opinion, that also has value. And through the wisdom that comes from the patterns in your own data.

Being able to create a personalized roadmap for your health over time, and its not a one time test, its, its being a member of function allows you twice your testing. For $499, you get over 110 biomarkers. You track them over time, you see the changes and what were seeing Steven is striking. Were doing tests that are not part of your regular checkup, right. Were doing, for example, for cholesterol. Were doing lipoprotein fractionation, which looks at the particle number and size. Its less than 1% of all cholesterol tests. It was discovered 40 years ago, but 99% of people don't get it right. And it tells us that 95% have problems with that. 89% have small particles which shows poor metabolic health. We're seeing 46% of people have inflammation with a high c reactive protein. We're seeing 13% have autoimmune thyroid diseases undetected. We're finding cancers that nobody found through liquid biopsies. We're finding that 67% have nutritional deficiencies. And this is a very healthy population because we're still in beta and we're seeing that they didn't even know were affecting their health. So I had sort of a lead athlete, for example, who was great, but he had low iron and he had low vitamin D and he had low B vitamins and it was affecting his performance.

So it was like he had a disease. So we're able to map this for people and provide basically an AI copilot for your health based on the learnings. And you know, AI is a scary thing for people, but the truth is that in medicine, it's the best use case. Would you rather have a dermatologist who's seen a few thousand lesions look at your skin and see if its a cancer or not, or an AI that sees billions of lesions and can actually know whats really going on? So were going to be able to do this in a very safe way for you. Own your data and you can personalize your approach, you can upgrade your biological health, you can do that biological upgrade that I talked about, and you can share the data with your doctors and its going to, I think, transform medicine. And right now Weve just started in beta, but we have almost 30,000 members. Weve had seen over 3 million data points of peoples biology. We have this available now@functionhealth.com. Dot if you go to functionhealth.com mark, you can learn more about it and you can get off the waitlist and get to see, because we have 100,000 people on the waitlist and get to learn about your own biology and what people are discovering is really life changing for them.

Im very excited for you. And its so wonderful to see how AI is creating new opportunities within health and wellness that werent previously available. You know, it's all been happening over the last sort of twelve months in the world of AI. And from, I hope, some incredible solutions emerged that bring down the cost and access, the cost to access of healthcare.

Well, that's the thing is it's so affordable for most people. It's like less than you spend on a cup of coffee every day. It's like a dollar 30 something a day. And for most people, that's affordable. Some people are not. But when you think about what's your wealth, your health is your wealth. Like I said earlier in the podcast, a healthy man wants many things. A sick man wants one thing. I think it's a chinese proverb.

You have an incredible podcast called the Doctors Pharmacy, which is one of the top health podcasts, where you discuss the intersection between health, food and policy, which I recommend everyone to go and check out. You've written a lot of books.

A lot. 19 too many I haven't done for a minute.

I'm going to recommend one and then I'll let you recommend another one.

Yeah, yeah.

Which one would you recommend if you had to recommend one?

Young forever is my latest book, and it's where I poured my entire knowledge base and tips and ideas and strategies about how to optimize your health. And it's not just for longevity, for any area of health that you have issues with. It's powerful.

I was going to recommend that one as well, but I'm going to say food fix because that book is fantastic. And that's one of the ones. The book about longevity that you released recently, Young Forever, is a fantastic book, but the food fix book as well is really clarifying for a lot of people that are probably confused about food. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is interesting because it's a little bit similar to what I asked you earlier, but with a slight variation. What is the most interesting and revealing question Steve should have asked you but didn't?

Oh, and this is for the next guest.

This was left for you and they didn't know who they were leaving it for.

Oh, I see. Okay. I would say who were the biggest influences in my life, living or dead?

So, Mark, who are the biggest influences? You're going to have to answer now.

Because people are wondering. I would say living is a gentleman who's an unsung hero, a man named Jeffrey Bland, who's a nutritional biochemist, studied with Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel prizes, really the father of nutritional science in the modern way, who really established this field of functional medicine. And hes a nutritional biochemist, but hes a genius. Hes a synthesizer. So every time I would see him for decades, he would have a pile of scientific papers this thick, like a foot thick, carrying with them all the time. And he would hoover those things up and he synthesizes it. And hes seen patterns in that data for decades that have presaged the revolution we're seeing now in medicine. So most things I talked about today, he basically understood by seeing the intersections across specialties. So he's sort of a polymath in science. And he influenced my work. He saved my life personally. By learning about this model, I was able to save my health. He's helped me help millions of people. So he's a huge influence. The other, I think, main influence on my life was Henry Thoreau, who was a transcendentalist, lived in the 18 hundreds, wrote a book called Walden.

I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's a profound book. It was basically a guy who. Walden. Walden. How do you spell that, Walden? And it's a classic book about this man in the 18 hundreds who went and lived on a lake outside of Boston, Walden Pond, and lived there by himself in a cabin with nothing almost and wrote about, wrote about it. And he had this beautiful way of writing and describing nature and life and philosophy. And it really also included a lot of eastern philosophy embedded in it, which I didn't realize at the time. And so that book really impacted my childhood profoundly.

Doctor Mark Hyman, thank you so much for taking the time today. And thank you for all of your wisdom and honesty and openness. It's incredibly important. And the work you've done over the last couple of decades has changed lives, save lives, and more so than I think you'd probably ever realize and more so than we could ever count. So thank you for that.

Thank you.

Incredibly noble and worthy cause that you've been on but are on as well with function and all that's going to come with that. So I wish you the very, very best.

Thank you so much.

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