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

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

My guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., a physician and world leader in the field of functional medicine. We discuss a systems-based framework for diagnosing and treating the root causes of disease, rather than simply managing symptoms. We also cover cutting-edge health and longevity tools such as peptides, NAD/NMN, exosomes, proactive blood testing and cancer screening, as well as nutrition, supplementation, detoxification, and strategies for addressing specific diseases and health challenges. This discussion will benefit anyone seeking to improve their vitality or combat specific health concerns. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Mark Hyman 00:01:48 Functional Medicine, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Mercury; Systems Medicine 00:08:51 Metabolic Psychiatry; Medicine, Creating Health vs Treating Disease 00:12:19 Sponsors: Joovv & Eight Sleep 00:15:06 Wholistic View of Body, Root Causes 00:19:48 Medicine & Research; “Exposome”, Impediments & Ingredients for Health, Whole Foods 00:26:30 Seed Oils, Starch & Sugar, Ultra-Processed Foods; Obesity Rise 00:36:27 Sponsors: Function & ROKA 00:40:05 Tool: Ingredients for Health, Personalization; Multimodal Approach 00:46:25 Essential Supplements, Omega-3s, Vitamin D3, Multivitamin, Iodine, Methylated B12 00:56:54 Supplements & Traditional Medicine; Limited Budget & Nutrition 01:02:54 Air, Tool: Air Filters; Tap Water Filter; Tool: Health, Expense & Whole Foods 01:09:03 Food Industrialization, Processed Foods 01:14:23 Sponsor: AG1 01:16:18 Declining American Health & Nutrition, Politics, MAHA 01:26:03 Toxins, Food Additives, Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) 01:29:25 SNAP Program & Soda, Food Industry & Lobbying 01:36:58 Big Food, Company Consolidation, Nutrition Labels 01:44:21 GLP-1 Agonists, Doses, Risks; Food as Medicine, Ketogenic Diet 01:51:29 Cancer, Diets & Alcohol 01:54:03 Blood Markers, ApoB, Cholesterol, Tool: Test Don’t Guess, Individualization 02:02:54 Mercury; Tool: Detoxification, Sulforaphane, N-Acetylcysteine (NAC) 02:04:56 Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, Fertility, Tool: Hormone Panels; Heavy Metals 02:11:36 Upregulate Detox Pathways, Gut Cleanse, Tools: Cilantro Juice, Fiber 02:17:08 Peptides, PT-141 (Vyleesi), BPC-157, Thymosin Alpha-1; Risks, Cycling 02:22:03 Cancer Screening, Data & Personalized Health; Alzheimer’s Disease 02:30:45 Longevity Switches, NAD, NMN; Exosomes, Stem Cells 02:39:50 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman is a medical doctor and an internationally recognized leader

in the field of functional medicine. He is a practicing physician and the head of strategy and innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for functional medicine. Today we discuss what is functional medicine, how the different systems of the body interact to improve or degrade our health, the science of mitochondria and metabolic health,

nutrition, inflammation, and how you can leverage these factors to improve your physical and mental health and cognitive performance at any age. We also talk about how to confront any health challenges you might face by taking a systems level approach. Dr. Hyman's work is unique in that it integrates conventional medicine, because after all he is an MD,

with what he calls good medicine, which is an amalgamation of the best practices from both traditional and alternative approaches. During today's discussion, you'll see that Dr. Hyman's expertise on a diverse range of topics really comes through. For instance, we talk about food, both sourcing, micronutrients, macronutrients, timing. We talk about exercise, and we talk a lot about supplementation and which supplements can provide tremendous benefit for certain people in particular.

Dr. Hyman grounds all that knowledge in the latest discoveries in human biology to provide you with actionable tools that you can apply in any case and at any age. By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that everybody will glean at least one and very likely several important protocol updates that they can incorporate to improve their general health.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome. Thanks Andrew, so good to be here. Great to see you. We go back a few years. Yeah, like almost 10. Yeah, it's been awesome to see your arc and you were at it long before I met you. I think to kick things off, probably best if you explain to people what functional medicine is and what your orientation towards health and medicine is. Because I think there are a few misconceptions out there,

both about functional health and you, but I think also you provide a very unique perspective. You've been at this vista that no one else has had where you know people who are deans of medical schools, you know people who are biohackers, you know the general public, you've treated and treat patients, and you also are an experimentalist with yourself to the extent that you find and can make suggestions about things that can help people. So yeah, tell us how you parachuted into this whole thing and how you look at this whole thing

that we call health and medicine. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. And I would say that I didn't choose what I'm doing, it chose me. I was super healthy, fit, riding my bike 100 miles a day. I was 36 years old and then wham, I got really sick. And I went from being able to memorize 30 patients in a day and dictate their notes and ride

my bike 100 miles to not knowing where I was at the end of a sentence and not being able to barely walk up the stairs. I got hit with chronic fatigue syndrome. I tried to figure out what it was. I went to doctors at Harvard, at Columbia, here, everywhere. All your depressed, take some Pro here, everywhere, and they're all, you're depressed, take some Prozac, this and that. And I realized that I, you know,

traditional medicine wasn't having the answers. And even though I sort of came from the perspective of like a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, you know, I studied Buddhism. Were you? Were you a yoga teacher? I was, it was back in the 80s. You're a tall guy, long mat.

It was, they didn't have yoga mats when I was doing yoga. He put a towel on the ground There was no Lululemon. It was like on top of like the East West bookstore in New York City There was like one yoga class in the early 80s. Okay, that was it and I studied Buddhism in college But I also studied systems thinking and systems theory and Gregory Bates and and you know the nature of the network effect of life and biology and everythingon and the nature of the network effect of life and biology and everything else. And so I kind of went through medical school, but when I came out, I was pretty straight traditional medicine doctor.

But then I got sick. And it turned out that I had gone to China to live there for a year and work as a doctor to help start expatriate medical clinics because there were no Western medical clinics in China and people were terrified who were 60,000 expatriates to go to the Chinese hospital. So I spoke Chinese because I studied Asian studies, I went there, but what I inadvertently had happened was I got exposed to huge amounts of mercury from the air,

because they burn coal, and coal expels lead and mercury and lots of other toxins, and there's 10 million people in Beijing and the city at the time, and they all heated their homes with raw coal. And I had an air filter that I would clean out every day and breathe the black soot in. So I got like a whopping dose of mercury. And it took a couple of years for it

to kind of cause this problem. But from one day to the next, I went from being great to not being great. And my gut broke down, I had diarrhea for years, my cognitive function completely went south. It was like I had dementia, ADD and depression all at once. I ended up having autoimmune stuff going on and just rashes and sores and I couldn't think.

I literally almost had to go into disability. And I met a person who introduced me to this guy, Jeff Bland, who studied with Linus Pauling and had a very different view of health, it really was more around the framework of the body as a network, as a system, as an ecosystem where everything is connected and that it wasn't reductionist, it was inclusive. When we go to medical school, we're taught to ask for the symptoms, look for the signs, do the lab testing, and come up with a singular diagnosis to explain everything. And if there's extraneous symptoms

that don't fit the thing we're looking for, then we dismiss it. If you go to the doctors for migraines, and you say, well, I got irritable bowel, oh, go see the GI doctor, or I have a rash, you go, oh, see the dermatologist. But the truth is the body's connected and everything's connected.

And so functional medicine is really about understanding the body as a network, as a system. And it's a meta framework for understanding biology. Like I think of it as an operating system. It's not based on just diagnostic testing or supplements, which a lot of people think it is. It's really based on understanding the network about. So we were doing microbiome testing.

We didn't call it that. It was just poop testing back then. We were looking at hormones, at mitochondria, at inflammation, at insulin resistance, at all the things that are toxic, environmental toxins, and they're all in health. And we're trying to understand how the body started to sort of work. And through that process, I literally had to reverse engineer my way back to health by understanding all the systems. So my adrenal shut down, my thyroid wasn't working, my literally had to reverse engineer my way back to health by understanding all the systems.

So my adrenal shut down, my thyroid wasn't working, my mitochondria were terrible, my muscle enzymes were super high, like CPK were super high, because I had a mitochondrial injury, which is the little factories in your cells that make energy. I had severe cognitive issues and neurotransmitter issues and sleep issues, I mean, immune issues, rashes. So my whole system broke down. So I literally had to learn every system of the body and how it worked and how it connected every other system

and then create a healing plan for myself and that allowed me to recover. So that really taught me that there's this new way of thinking and I remember when I was working at Canyon Ranch as a medical director and I would see all these patients coming in and I started to think, well coming in, and I started to think, well, you know, I'm going to try to do this on my patients and see what happens

and just apply these principles. I call them the laws of biology, right? We don't have laws of biology that we can easily describe or laws of medicine. We have laws of physics, but that doesn't mean there aren't laws of biology. And what functional medicine, I believe, is the first clinical application of this understanding aren't laws of biology and what functional medicine I believe is is the first Clinical application of this understanding of the laws of biology and there's like scientists that like leave our hood Who created the Institute for system biology and folks like at Harvard? But the Cosmo Barbasi was studying this and wrote a book called network medicine about the body as a network But for me, I had to start to you know apply this in clinic

and so I would people come come in with autoimmune diseases or with intractable depression or with terrible gut issues or dementia or autism or you name it, diabetes, and I would apply these principles and they'd get better. And I literally would say, eat this way, don't eat that. Simple stuff, like it was not that complicated. And six weeks later, I'd say, they followed visit, I'd say, oh, so how you doing?

All my symptoms are better. I'm like, what, really, your migraines are gone? Like, because I didn't believe it. Like, it was such a shock to me as a traditionally trained physician that people were actually getting better. And so then I knew, I knew this was something real, even though it was sort of 30 years ago,

it was just sort of not even on the radar, it still is pretty much not on the radar, although like New York Times is doing articles about it now. Things are changing. Things are changing. Slowly, but they're changing, I think, which sort of dovetails with the question I was going to ask, which is,

how did the medical establishment view this stuff? These days, it's so complicated without taking off on a tangent here, you know, the word expert is gated politically. Like one side feels like they can only be called expert if you're with their camp, the other side is now associated with kind of more of a, like a wellness aspect. And you know, and I don't even have to say

which side I'm referring to here. And it's become a real clash of, you of, we only believe in randomized control trials, or there's clearly evidence that nutrition matters. And it's like, of course, both things are important. And so what you're describing here is that you... This intersection. This intersection, and there really isn't a political home for the intersection, unfortunately. Maybe in this new... I didn't know cells had a political ideology. That's right. That's right. No, that's right.

They got the red cell and the blue cell. Exactly. And that's what I love about you is that you have friends in both camps and you're willing to trudge forward. What did the medical establishment think? And how many of you are there now? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I remember talking about leaky gut almost 30 years ago and talking to allergists and immunologists. People thought you were crazy.

And people thought I was a loony tune. Same thing with chronic fatigue, by the way. I remember when chronic fatigue syndrome was considered a psychosomatic. Yeah. It's, you know, people are crazy if they think they have this. And we now know, like fibromyalgia,

chronic fatigue and leaky gut, this all used to be for those that are listening that are a little bit younger than Mark and I, that that was considered pseudoscience. Just the whole notion. There are now departments at major university medical centers devoted to each one of these. That's right.

Maybe not whole departments, but sectors within departments. Yeah. I think it's crazy how things have changed. So now we have people who are talking about mitochondria in medicine, like Christopher Palmer, who's a Harvard professor psychiatrist who's studying psychiatric disease and the application of diet nutrition to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia or- I will say Stanford, sorry to cut you off,

now has a division within our Department of Psychiatry on metabolic psychiatry, in large part, thanks to Chris's work. Yeah. And yeah, so metabolic psychiatry is about the role of sort of insulin resistance and inflammation in the brain is causing depression and causing anxiety and more severe things like bipolar disease since born schizophrenia and these are the things that I saw like in my patients

so I wasn't an academic but I I would just look at their story and listen to it and I would look at the underlying biology because You know you talk about this sort of intersection of the sort of the biohacking kind of wellness and medical community at their story and listen to it and I would look at the underlying biology because you talk about this intersection of the biohacking kind of wellness and medical community. Lee Hood has a term for this. He calls it scientific wellness. And when people ask me what functional medicine is, I say it's the science of creating health as opposed to the science of treating disease.

When you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. So if you optimize your basic body systems, your gut, your immune system, your mitochondria, your detox system, your hormonal regulatory system, when you optimize those things, symptoms go away. And you don't have to treat all the different branches of the trees and the leaves on the trees, you treat the root in the trunk, which is what functional medicine does.

I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, JOOVE. JOOVE makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light sources have been shown

to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellar and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, even mitochondrial function and improving vision itself. What sets Juve lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths,

meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal seller adaptations. Personally, I use the Jove whole body panel about three to four times a week, and I use the Jove handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to try Jove, you can go to Jove spelled J-O-O-V-V.com slash Huberman. Jove is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off Juve products. Again, that's Juve spelled J-O-O-V-V.com slash Huberman to get up to $400 off. Today's episode is also brought to us by 8 Sleep.

8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each and every night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop about one to three degrees.

And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. Now I find that extremely useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night,

even colder in the middle of the night, and warm as I wake up. That's what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. And I know that because 8Sleep has a great sleep tracker that tells me how well I've slept and the types of sleep that I'm getting throughout the night. I've been sleeping on an 8Sleep has a great sleep tracker that tells me how well I've slept and the types of sleep that I'm getting throughout the night.

I've been sleeping on an 8Sleep mattress cover for four years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. Their latest model, the Pod4 Ultra, also has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees in order to improve your airflow and stop you from snoring. If you decide to try 8Sleep,

you have 30 days to try it at home and you can return it if you don't like it, no questions asked, but I'm sure stop you from snoring. If you decide to try 8Sleep, you have 30 days to try it at home and you can return it if you don't like it. No questions asked, but I'm sure that you'll love it. Go to 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350 off your Pod4 Ultra. 8Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman

to save up to $350 off your Pod 4 Ultra. For example, can I tell you a quick story? Please. I want to tell a story about a patient I had at Cleveland Clinic, which actually, by the way, was amazing that Toby Cosgrove, who's one of the most renowned figures in medicine

and was the CEO of Cleveland Clinic for years, invited me to come start a center for functional medicine there. And we've been 10 years now, we've done a ton of research. This one patient came to see me and she had a center for functional medicine there. And we've been 10 years now, we've done a ton of research. This one patient came to see me and she had a whole list of problems. And that's why jokingly call myself a holistic doctor, because I take care of people with a whole list of problems.

I want to know everything. And functional medicine is inclusive rather than exclusive. It's like rather than discarding things that don't fit your diagnosis, we want to know everything about you, how you were born, whether you were breastfed, whether you took antibiotics, sent traumas, any toxins you're exposed to, whether you eat fish. Like we want to know everything. And so this woman came to see me, she had psoriatic arthritis, which was a terrible disease

where your joints break down, you got those heart breakups, the rashes, and itchy plaques on your skin. But she had a whole bunch of other stuff too. She had migraines, she had pre-diabetes, she had depression, she was a fifth-year-old health coach, I mean life coach and business coach who was very successful but was struggling. She had terrible reflux, irritable bowel syndrome. So she had all these clusters of diseases and I said, gee, what are these things having in common? What's the root? Inflammation.

And I know you've talked a lot about this on your podcast, but inflammation is sort of the root of many chronic illnesses, whether it's obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, autism, depression, I mean, the list goes on on autoimmune allergy, obviously. And I said, why don't we look at your gut? Because you're having a ton of gut symptoms. You have terrible bloating, distention,

what I call a food baby. You know when you eat something, you get a food baby. And she also had been on a history of lots of antibiotics and steroids for rheumatoid, her sort of like arthritis. And so I said, look, why don't we just treat your gut and then see what happens. So we put her on an elimination diet. We eliminated all the inflammatory foods,

things that were causing fermentation that could kind of cause the bad bacteria in her gut to ferment the foods and cause a bloating and leaky gut. We basically took out dairy, gluten, grains, sugar, processed foods, put her on whole foods, anti-inflammatory, microbiome healing diet. We gave her, I think I gave her vitamin D, fish oil, some probiotics, really simple stuff.

And I said, come back in six weeks and we'll do some diagnostics and in the meantime, do this program and then come back. She came back and she said, well, all my symptoms are gone, and I stopped all my medication. I'm like, oh, I didn't ask you to stop your medication. But she was on Stellara, which costs $50,000 a year,

it's an immune biologic. She was on a host of other drugs from her psychiatrist, from her migraine doctor, for her interval bowel, for her reflux, I mean, it was like a whole pile of pills. She was off everything, and she had no symptoms, and she was all better, and she lost 20 pounds. And it wasn't an anomaly or a miracle, it was just following the principles of how the body works.

And in that textbook network medicine, they talk about how we need to understand mechanisms and causes, not just symptoms and diagnoses. And we need to understand that there's multi-causality for different problems. So it may be not just one thing that causes the disease. You might have toxins, it might be your diet, you might have your microbiome issues, you might have some other trauma or stress, and all those things like kind of are the soup

that then breaks the system down so it gets sick. And so my job is basically to see where the things that are broken down and how do I help repair them, how to remove the root causes, whether it's mercury or whether it's mold or whether it's you know your microbiome having dysbiosis or whether it's a trauma that you should deal with through MDMA-assisted psychotherapy which hopefully will be passed soon. You know there's all sorts of things to do to help the body but we have to have the framework for having the right assessment of someone otherwise they don't get better.

And I've had the privilege as working at Canyon Ranch in my own private practice, I'm doing tens of thousands of dollars for the testing potentially on tens of thousands of patients over decades and seeing literally millions and millions of data points of their story and their labs and their treatment and their outcomes. And so I have this really deep understanding of all the ways in which these systems interact

and connect. And so I think people can map out what's happening in their biology in ways that now tell them what's really going on. And we're seeing that happening, that the testing community is growing and that people want to know what's going on in their bodies and they're using wearables and they're using CGMs and all kinds of self-diagnostic tools, which I think are important because people aren't getting the answer from the traditional medical system. Well, and a lot of physicians, unlike you, frankly, don't look very healthy, which people can say, okay, well, it shouldn't be about looks, but you know, if I was at the dentist and I look up and my dentist is snaggletooth and decaying teeth, it doesn't even bring me a lot of confidence.

You look pretty good for a hundred, huh? Yeah. You look great and you're super vital. dentist is snaggletooth and decaying teeth, doesn't bring me a lot of confidence. You look pretty good for 100, huh? Yeah, you look great and you're super vital. I think this idea of systems, biology and health is really important for people to understand because I always say, well, there are two sayings. I didn't say the first. The first one was taught to me when I was a graduate student,

which is a drug is a substance that when injected into an animal or human produces a scientific paper. Meaning, anytime you manipulate a variable, there are two things that if you, oftentimes if you inject a drug at a high enough dose, you'll see an effect. If you deprive sleep, you'll see an effect.

And that points to several things, but I think both of them have a vector in the direction of this system's biology. You know, if everything modulates everything else, so if your gut is off, it's gonna modulate your sleep, which is gonna modulate your cognition, and if you were to boost your, you know, some vitamin level ridiculously high

or have it ridiculously low, it's involved in thousands of processes in the body. And so if you look at any one of those, you might see a subtle effect. I think the challenge of reductionist science and reductionist medicine is because the goal in good science is to isolate variables, you can't by definition actually look at a whole system.

Although now with AI, maybe you could explore how adjusting one variable impacts pretty much every major system of the brain and body. But it's just very hard to do. And as somebody who's done laboratory science for gosh, what, over 25 years, and instructed other people how to do it, and graduate students and post-docs,

I mean, it's an art, but it's limited in terms of what it can reveal. Yeah. And we work as a system. So I think this is what we're getting at here. So you're saying the scientific process itself precludes us from really understanding things because we can't study things

in the way that need to be studied? Well, yeah, let's say you come into my lab and I want to study how increasing L-carnitine, for instance, impacts your mood, immune system function, and sleep. I can do that study, but even that is just an infinitely complex study. I could do dose response, I'll probably do oral versus injectable, and then I can't control, unless it's in laboratory animals, on a same genetic background, I can't control whether or not

one person's, you know, having a Snickers, and the other person is having a Snickers and telling me, and then one person's having a Snickers and the other person is having a Snickers and telling me and then one person's lying. I mean, it is so hard to do controlled science. So what we end up doing is we end up creating very artificial environments, very artificial conditions and isolating variables and outcomes. And at the same time, genomic sequencing, proteomics have allowed us to identify interesting genes that have a potential role in longevity

or stem cells and Yamanaka factors. And so I feel like it cuts both ways. And so as a physician, when somebody comes in, and I'm asking this question so that people can think about their own health, if people are feeling like not well, right, where do you start? Like this thing, like where do you start? You start with how you're sleeping,

how you're eating, skin tone. I imagine you can look at somebody and kind of get a sense of their vibrancy at the level of their eyes. Where do you start? I can tell people's blood works and I was just looking at them. There you go.

So where do you start? Like what should we, when we look in the mirror in the morning, what are we looking for? I think that's a great question. I think that, just to back up one second, I think you talked about putting high dose of something in or a lack of sleep. Functional medicine is about understanding

the answer to very simple questions and then designing a treatment model based on the answers to those questions. And the questions are one, what are you exposed to that's interrupting your normal function? Hence functional medicine. What is it that's bugging you?

What's pissing your system off? And there's a short list, Andrew, it's toxins and it can be internal endogenous toxins or external toxins like heavy metals or pesticides or glyphosate or a million other things. It's infections or microbes. So it can be post-COVID syndrome with persistent spike protein. It can be Epstein-Barr virus that leads to MS. It can be Lyme disease. It can be your microbiome being off, which is the truth for most of us. It's allergens, which are things that your body's

reacting to, both environmental allergens or it could be food allergens or food sensitivities, which is not truly an allergen, but it's more of an adverse reaction to food from leaky gut. It can be poor diet, which I think most of us understand what that is. It can be stress, and that can be physical mechanical stress, like being hit by a car, or psychological stress,

or the meaning you make from a psychological stress, which is really what caused you to be sick, And you've had Gabor on your podcast. No, not yet. We haven't had Gabor on. But we've had a number of people talking about the relationship between mind and body and stress. And certainly it's a profound connection. Yeah. So you have this list of five things that interacts with your genome. And it's really what we call the exposome. What your genes are exposed to is far more predictive than your genome. Your exposome includes some total of everything

you're exposed to on the positive and negative, all the things I just listed, but also all the ingredients for health. So I identify what are the impediments for health and then what are the ingredients for health. And the ingredients for health are not complicated. We're biological organisms, right? Despite trying to live outside

of our biological constraints, we need the right kind of food, right? Despite trying to live outside of our biological constraints, we need the right kind of food, right? What does that look like? Michael Pollan said, eat food, mostly plants, not too much, right? Or not too much, mostly plants, something like that. And it's basically eating foods that's as close to nature as you can find it. Grew out of the ground or had a pulse. Yeah, yeah. Basically, right. He says, eat food that's grown in a plant, not made in a plant. And I used to lecture these churches

and I said, it's really simple to figure out what to eat. Ask yourself, did God make it or did man make it? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did he make an avocado? Yes. Would our ancestors recognize it? Yeah, like would your great grandmother know

what a Lunchable was or a Gogurt was? So this generally means eating foods that are single ingredient foods or foods that combine only single ingredient foods. Like you have to go to the label. I read the labels. You look at it, do I recognize this? Would I have this in my kitchen?

Do I have butylated hydroxythalium in my kitchen or red dye number three? Probably not, right? Unless you're a grandma making cupcakes that are really red. But so food. Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish. Fruit, vegetables, yeah.

Quality dairy. Yeah, I mean I've written so many books on this, The Pegan Diet, Food But The Heck Should I Eat, I wanted to call it Food But The Fuck Should I Eat, but my publisher wouldn't let me. Nowadays they probably would, I feel like they curse everywhere. So there's like, we can dive into nutrition,

but just assume like you need, depending on your age and your sex and what you're doing with your life, you need the right nutrition of whole real food. Can I just ask you, we'll just quickly double click into there, what's your view on seed oils? Oy.

No, just, you know, I mean, I'll say mine. I like olive oil and butter, coconut oil, and things like avocados and some Brazil nuts and walnuts and stuff. So since I don't count calories, I kind of have an intuitive sense of what I'm taking in, how much fat, how much protein, how much starch, how much, you know,

fibers, carbs, et cetera. So for me, like I wouldn't pick canola oil because I could pick olive oil. Right, right. And then I make sure it's real olive oil. And, but I don't think seed oils necessarily will kill me, but guess why I know they won't kill me? Because I don't eat them.

We should be eating whole food fats as much as possible. Avocados, coconut, nuts and seeds, omega-3 fats from fish, olive oil, which is the most minimally processed oil you can get, extra virgin olive oil. And we're eating nuts and seeds, we're getting a lot of omega-6s. So the big theory behind seed oils

is that it's omega-6 rich, it's imbalanced with omega-3s, it causes inflammation. The way they're produced and grown is problematic. There are usually GMO crops like canola oil, they spray lots of chemicals on them, those chemicals get in the oil. They're manufactured in an industrial way that oxidizes them, that uses hexane to

get rid of some of the compounds in it, deodorizes them, bleaches them, and then they're easily oxidized. So would I want to eat an industrial food product? Probably not. Do we know for sure that it's a problem? I think the data is mixed. I mean, there's some studies that show epidemiologically that, you know, people who eat more of these plant-based oils or seed oils have reduced risk of

diseases. So we don't know what they're doing and there's food frequency questionnaires and there's these studies are proving correlation not causation. And what it's replacing. Sorry to interrupt here, but you know, I'll see the data that seed oils are better for people than butter. Okay. I like grass fed butter, but I don't eat it in excess. I once joked about that and I like, I made some jokes early on and having a podcast, not realizing the implications. But anyway, I am very careful now. I have some butter in moderation, but so I could imagine that if you're eating a lot of lard and butter and bacon fat and you replace it with seed oils, you'll get healthier.

But maybe. Maybe. But you could imagine, I guess it depends on what else you're ingesting. Because the starch-fat combination is the one that gets people in my opinion. But right, somebody could be eating a lot of meat and fruit and doing it okay. Don't eat like your butter with a bagel, put it on your broccoli. Because that saturated fat, refined starch combo is what's killing us.

I wish people would really hear you on this. It's not fat per se. It's not starches per se. It's the combination of fat and starch, and in particular, fat, starch, and sugar. Yeah, well starch sugar, starch sugar, like below the neck, your body can't tell if it's a bowl of sugar, a bowl in particular, fat, starch and sugar. Yeah, well starch and sugar, starch and sugar are like below the neck, your body can't tell if it's a bowl of sugar

or a bowl of cornflakes or a bagel or a bowl of sugar. So if I put a pat of butter on a bowl of white rice, is it that bad? No, not really. Okay, but if I put a pat of butter on a muffin, it's bad news bears. Yeah, you're doubling down on the sugar, yeah. And I think, to answer your question about the CDRL, the data's not really completely answering

this, and it's part of the problem of nutrition. It's not of nutrition science. The one large randomized controlled trial that was done on like 9,000 people, not on 90 people or 50 people or 30 people, which a lot of these studies are, but on 9,000 people that were randomized in a psychiatric hospital would be unethical to do today.

It was done by Ansel Keys. It was the mini coronary experiment funded by the NIH where they basically gave half the group butter and half the group corn oil. Now, corn oil is a pure omega-6 oil as opposed to soybean, which is mixed omega-3, canola mixed omega-3, 6 oils mixed omega-3, six oils. And what they found was striking. They found that the group that had the corn oil, for every 30 point drop in LDL cholesterol, the risk of death from heart attacks or strokes

went up by 22%, which is completely the opposite of what we think in medicine, which is LDL is the boogeyman. LDL is the bad cholesterol or L for lousy cholesterol. It's not so simple. And I think these oversimplification of, you know, let's say these C2O's lower LDL, therefore they're good. It's just too simplistic. But if would I, for example, have a corn oil that was expeller pressed or that was organic or canola oil that was, or sunflower or safflower oil? Yeah, I mean, I'm not worried about those in small amounts.

But that's not what most people are doing. Most people are eating, most of their diet is ultra-processed food, 60% of adults, 67% of kids is basically junk food. And the major oil in those are these refined oils. So is it the oils, is it the junk food? They're major oil in those are these refined oils. So is it the oils? Is it the junk food? They're just a vehicle for this.

And we've increased our consumption, for example. The main seed oil or bean oil, it's not really a seed, is soybean oil by a thousandfold since 1900. Now, I'm sort of an evolutionary thinker. I'm like, how are our bodies designed and what should we be doing with them? And you talk a lot about light, and that's like, you went to sleep with the sun, you woke up with the sun.

It was just how things were. And you had circadian rhythms, and our whole biological clocks and rhythms are screwed up because of how we live. Yeah, well, we evolved under the major constraint of sunrise and sunset. That's right. And artificial lighting is a wonderful thing, but I think there's highly processed light. It's devoid of long wavelengths. The eradication basically of incandescent bulbs

and all these LEDs and- Highly processed light. And daylight savings times, it's really messing people up. It means, oh, it's just an hour. No, actually it's your mental health. When it comes to the seed oil thing, I actually predict that seed oils will lose. I think in the end, it's your mental health. When it comes to the seed oil thing, I actually predict that seed oils will lose.

I think in the end it's just obvious. Why wouldn't people just say, you know what? The seed oil thing may or may not be a problem. I'm just going to eat olive oil and a little bit of butter. Yeah, that's kind of my view. It seems so simple to me. That's my view. It's kind of my view is if you have a new to nature kind of compound or an unnaturally

high amount of something that we're having in our diet. I mean, sugar was always around. We would get honey, we would whatever. But we'd have 22 teaspoons a year as Hunter gathers. Now we have that every day for every American. If you had a magic wand and you could get rid of seed oils or you could get rid of highly refined sugars in a modern American diet, which one would you?

No contest. It's starch and sugar that's driving our metabolic crisis. Like by a huge factor, by a huge factor. Does that mean no pasta, no bread? It doesn't mean no, no anything. It just means the volume of stuff we're eating is like we're eating pharmacologic doses. It's 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour,

which has a higher glycemic index than sugar. Really? Yeah, well, that's how it's set. It's set at white bread as 100, and then sugar's 80, because it's fructose and glucose. So you have to break that apart. And so your glycemic load, which is how it affects your blood sugar,

fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar, glucose raises your blood sugar. So where do we go wrong? Because I was a teen in the 90s. I don't, Until I discovered fitness, I didn't eat poorly at home. My mom cooked whole food. We had Pop Tarts, Kraft Macaroni and cheese. We weren't allowed that stuff. But... Dang. Yeah. Lechvitz margarine. We weren't allowed that stuff. But we had our

like honey nut Cheerios and stuff. We had our honey nut Cheerios and things like that. But we ate mostly whole foods. And then not from, there wasn't a whole foods market back then, but whole unprocessed, minimally processed foods. But I ate my fair share of pizza slices and burritos in college and stuff like that. And I was active, but I wasn't a serious athlete. But then somewhere around 2010 forward, I feel like everything, again, just to be very direct, there was probably one kid or two kids in my school

that were obese. Now, depending on where you live, you see 60, 70, 80% of kids are obese. Yeah. So, I mean, what happened? I wanna answer that, and then I wanna come back to the loop of what I was trying to complete on the big thought of how does the body work and how do you create health

and what do you do? Because you asked me that question, I wanna lose that question. What happened was there was this rise in cardiovascular disease in America and there was this thought that saturated fat and fat was the bad guy. And this was the McGovern report in the 70s that went on to be dietary guidelines, that

went on to be the food pyramid. And the food pyramid essentially told us that fat was the enemy. So it's only the very tippy top fats and all this sparingly. Bottom of the pyramid was six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day. Which sounds like a recipe for being hungry all the time. And being obese. Right. Now we didn't know at the time,

but it became really clear that that was a bad idea. Pretty quick, and the hockey stick rise in obesity, type two diabetes tracks perfectly with that information. The American public trusted the government. They trusted the scientists, and when they said, fat's bad, carbs are good, everybody listened. Eggs are bad.

Eggs are bad, fat's bad, cholesterol's bad, red mats beat, so people ate less red meat, they ate less eggs, they ate less fat, and then we got snack-bill cookies. We got low-fat ice cream, and the sugar just went through the roof. And so that's when you see this, this explosive rise. And then there's other factors, our microbiome affects our weight,

environmental toxins affect our metabolism. So there's a whole bunch of things happen in tandem, but that probably is the single biggest thing. So if someone asking for me, should I worry about soybean oil or sugar and starch? It's 100% sugar and starch. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member

after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing my blood, urine, and saliva to get a fuller picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune regulation status, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status,

and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had an elevated level of mercury in my blood.

Function not only helped me detect that, but also offered insights on how to best reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption. And frankly, I had been eating a lot of tuna at that time while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, an acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification.

And by the way, it worked. My mercury levels are now well within healthy range. Comprehensive lab testing like that is super important for health because basically a lot of things are going on in our blood and elsewhere in our body that we can't detect without a quality blood and urine test.

And while I've strived to get those tests for many years, it's always been overly complicated and frankly, quite expensive. Function dramatically simplifies all of it and makes it very affordable. I've been so impressed by Function that I decided to join their scientific advisory board. And I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring this podcast.

If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman for this week only, April 14th to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman for this week only April 14th to April 20th, 2025. Function is offering a $100 credit to the first 1000 people to sign up for a Function membership. To get this $100 credit, use the code Huberman100 at checkout.

Visit functionhealth.com slash Huberman to learn more and get started. Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka. I'm excited to share that Roka and I recently teamed up to create a new pair of red lens glasses. These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down. They filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights, which are the most common indoor lighting nowadays.

I want to emphasize Roka red lens glasses are not traditional blue blockers. They do filter out blue light, but they filter out a lot more than just blue light. In fact, they filter out the full range of short wavelength light that suppresses the hormone melatonin. By the way, you want melatonin high in the evening and at night, makes it easy to fall and stay asleep. And those short wavelengths trigger increases in cortisol. Increases in cortisol are great in the early part of the day, but you do not want increases in cortisol in the evening and at night. These Roka Red Lens glasses ensure normal, healthy increases in melatonin and that your cortisol levels stay low, which is again, what you want in the evening and at night.

In doing so, these Roka Red Lens glasses really help you calm down and improve your transition to sleep. Roka Red Lens glasses really help you calm down and improve your transition to sleep. Roka Red Lens glasses also look great. They have a ton of different frames to select from, and you can wear them out to dinner or concerts, and you can still see things. I don't recommend you wear them while driving just for safety purposes, but if you're out to dinner, you're at a concert,

you're at a friend's house, or you're just at home, pop those Roka Red Lens glasses on, and you'll really notice the difference in terms of your levels of calm and all the sleep stuff I mentioned earlier. So it really is possible to support your biology, be scientific about it, and remain social at the same time, if you like.

If you'd like to try RoCA, go to roca.com, that's R-O-K-A.com, and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's roca.com, and enter the code Huberman at checkout. So the 90s low fat thing. Yeah, was a disaster. And I wrote a book called Eat Fat Get Thin, where I catalog the whole history of how we got there and what the problems were and what the science is telling us about what we should be eating about the reconsidering saturated fat being bad. It's bad if you're eating it in the context of starch and sugar. For most people, it's not.

And if you're obese or metabolically unhealthy, it actually can be better for you. There's a lower risk of diabetes and epidemiological studies with butter and milk fat. So I think we have to kind of like, I know nutrition is a very complicated subject, but ... Or not, right? I don't know. I mean, do you think that nutrition is a very straightforward subject? It should be. it should be.

Yeah, and I confess, I've had some pretty diametrically opposed views from guests on this podcast. We had Robert Lustig on the podcast, we had Lane Norton on the podcast. You get those two on separate podcasts, and they are like at loggerheads with one another, right? Now, Lane's correct in that total caloric load matters. It's not everything, but it matters. I would say many

people have a hard time limiting their intake of starchy carbohydrates, especially if you put a little bit of fat on there. It just becomes a different food entirely. Eating a bowl of white rice is pretty tasty. Eating a bowl of white rice with a pat of butter and a little bit of salt on there is a completely different experience. A piece of sourdough bread, it's one thing, a piece of sourdough bread soaked in a little bit of olive oil with some salt, I'm eating half the loaf. Pretty good. Pretty good. And I have pretty good self-control. So this is where I think the debates have become almost silly. And I appreciate that you're being very direct with us here. So take us back.

So you said they're ingredients for health and they're impediments to health. Yeah the ingredients for health are again not a long list because we're human beings. We need the right food. We need the right amount of nutrients and it's different for different people. You might not know this, but Bruce Ames did an incredible paper who recently died, one of the giants of science, saying that one third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes. All enzymes require cofactors. Most cofactors are vitamins and minerals. And there's a huge genetic variability in how much different people need. Some people need 1,000 units of vitamin D,

some people need 5,000. Some people need 400 micrograms of folate, some people need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so he kind of explained that very carefully. So you have to find the right amount of nutrients for you. You need the conditionally essential nutrients so people don't think are absolutely essential but things like coq10 and various things

that the body requires that we may not get enough. Then you need light, you need water, you need clean air, you need movement, you need rest, and I would say that in the parasympathetic state where kind of what I mean by rest, you need sleep, you need connection, you need connection, love, meaning, purpose, these are all ingredients for health. And any one of those can make you sick,

whether it's just being isolated and alone, or not having a purpose in your life. If you have meaning and purpose in your life, there's a gem of paper published that you're likely to live seven years longer. Now, if you cut out all cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, the extension of life expectancy is seven years.

The mind is incredible. I have a colleague at Stanford who works in the sleep division, sleep medicine, and he said, and I shouldn't tell people this because everyone's supposed to get enough sleep, right? But he said if you positively, they've done, he has a study that shows that if you positively anticipate next day events,

your sleep need is actually reduced pretty substantially. That's good. And the quality of sleep that you get is remarkable. Well, that's why I slept so good last night. I was looking forward to this. Exactly, well, these small things, right? Because we all know the experience of like,

I only slept five hours, but I got this thing today I'm really looking forward to, you feel great. Yeah. And so I don't think people should only sleep five hours unless people need more than that. So the idea is basically with functional medicine, you take out the bad stuff and you put in the good stuff. And each person has a different set of bad stuff

and a different set of good stuff, and you have to be detective. And it's the opposite of traditional medicine, which is just use a single drug to treat a single mechanism with a single disease in a single outcome. You have high blood pressure, take a high blood pressure drug to lower your blood pressure. We need multimodal treatments for multi-causal diseases.

And so what English that means is we need to do a lot of different things. Like if you want to garden, you don't just say, I'm going to put the plant in the air and not water it and not give it soil. Or you're saying, I'm just going to plant it in the soil but no light and no water. I mean, you know, and this is the way science is. I remember trying to do a study on Alzheimer's at Cleveland Clinic, and the top scientist there was like, we wanted to study this multimodal dimensional approach to call it the black box approach.

Everybody's getting a different treatment, it's super personalized, customized, based on their own unit of biology. There's no one such thing as Alzheimer's, or different Alzheimer's-es, I don't know if that's a word, but you know what I mean? And that's why we fail so miserably with the amyloid hypothesis, because we're just looking at the end stage phenomenon,

which is plaque going into an area that's inflamed to kind of deal with the inflammation. What caused the inflammation is really the question. And it can be variable things. So we start to kind of map these out. And when you do that and you actually get to the root causes, and you try to treat all the things that are out of balance, people get better.

So if you have a vitamin D deficiency and a folate deficiency, and you have tons of small bowel overgrowth, and you have heavy metals, and you have all these different problems, you can't just treat one thing and expect the person to get better. You've gotta look at all those things.

And some are more primary, some are secondary, but that's the job of a functional medicine doctor. It's a detective. And for me, what's exciting is, you know, you said how many people do this? Not that many. How many people are like experts who've done this for decades and have seen thousands of patients? A few hundred. Wow. You know, have we trained a hundred thousand people? We have 3,500, I think, certified, another, I think, 3,000 or 4,000 in the pipe to be certified. Not that many people who can do this. And that's part of the why I created this company called Function Health, which you've been so supportive of,

which is to allow people to understand what's going on in their own biology, to be empowered to be the CEO of their own health, and to get the data that's gonna help them identify the different things that are going on to actually do something about it. Before we move to health metric monitoring, I do wanna ask about ingredients for health.

You talk about them, they're your protocols. You don't use that framing, but that's the framing. It's take out the bats and put in the good stuff, the body knows what to do. It's got an innate healing system, just give it a chance. I think what's so terrible about traditional medicine, it has many wonderful features, is that at least the way it's communicated in this country

is that it assumes that people are lazy and uninterested in their own health. And I fundamentally disagree, hence this podcast, your podcast, et cetera. I agree too. I believe people want and are willing to take care of themselves if they know how. Okay, so let's just assume that the pillars of health, right, like sleep, sunlight, exercise,

nutrition, social connection, stress modulation, microbiome, et cetera. Okay, assuming that people are making some effort to do those things correctly or a lot of effort, what are some of the things that you believe cannot be accessed through diet and behaviors that warrant supplementation? And I've been interested in supplements and taking supplements for 35 years. So to me, when people say, oh, supplements aren't regulated, I say, actually they are regulated to some extent, right?

Like they're monitored. You want to find ones that are third party tested. Indeed, there are a lot of junk supplements out there. They're probably a lot of supplements that don't do much. They're probably a lot of supplements that are only use cases for certain people who have a major deficiency. But what are some of the things that are just very difficult to get from food and from sun because we hear the soil's depleted magnesium, it's hard to get enough D3. If you were to list out, let's just say about 10 things that you feel like, listen, you probably could get it from food, but it's just hard to get these micronutrients.

What are those things? And by the way, folks, this is not a preloaded conversation. We've never had this conversation. No, no. I know what I take, but I'm just curious. Because people will try hard to get things from food, but what are the things that they can't get from food or can't get from food easily that you believe everyone should take? Great question.

I thought you were going somewhere else. I thought you were going where what are the things if you did everything perfectly and you're still sick, what do you do? Oh, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. There's a list of those things. We will get to that. 80% of it you can take care of, but there's some things you need. Yeah, we can talk about that

I think because of how dramatically our diets changed after the Industrial Revolution and because of urbanization and our disconnection from nature We have a lower nutrient intake than we did as hunter-gatherers You know, I just came back from Africa and went to the Hadza tribe, which is one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes, and I got to spend a few days with them. The nutrient density of the diet was so much higher. Omega-3s, vitamin D,

you're outside running around on loin cloth, or if you're not, you're living in some coastal area where you're eating extremely fatty fish, which is one of the great sources of vitamin D in the food. They were eating phytochemicals at an incredible rate through eating 800 different species of plants. Now we have three main ones and 12 of them are altogether comprised probably 95% of our diet

instead of 800 plants with all kinds of phytochemicals and vitamins and minerals. The soils we're growing food in have depleted the organic matter because of industrial farming and soil erosion and the organic matter because of industrial farming and soil erosion. And the organic matter, the living soil, is what actually helps to allow the plants to take up the nutrients from the soil so that there's a symbiotic relationship between organisms in the soil and the plant.

And it uses them to help get nutrients free so they get into the plants where there's less magnesium, there's less zinc, there's less all these things in our diet. And when you look at the surveys of the American population, there's an ongoing government survey called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It essentially goes around the country with vans, tests people's blood all the time, and this is like decades old survey. And it's incredible because you get all this data.

They find that like 90 plus percent are low in omega-3s, probably 80 percent are insufficient or low in vitamin D, 50 something percent are magnesium deficient, about the same iron, zinc a little bit less, selenium a little bit less. It depends on where you live and what you do and also within your diet and what your stage of life is and what your age is and how your absorption is. For example, when you're older, you know, you get decreased ability to absorb nutrients and decreased ability to absorb, for example, vitamin B12. So at different ages, you might need different things, right? And so what are the basics that I think everybody should take? I think everybody should take omega-3 fats, at least a gram or two of EPA DHA. Most people need between two to 4,000 international units of vitamin D3. I think a good multivitamin can cover the rest

for most people. And when I say good multivitamin, I mean the right bioavailable forms of nutrients. I was in the hospital recently for back surgery and this resident came by and he was attending and he was saying, I think I need some I, I'm taking all these painkillers for my surgery and I don't want to be constipated. He said, oh, you can get this one. I'm like, I said, that's magnesium oxide. That's not well absorbed and it doesn't, not the greatest for-

Eating magnesium citrate. Yeah. So I said, and I was, he was like, oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. He wrote it down. But like, so I think- I have a lot of friends who are physicians and I'll tell you, they come to me for health advice. So that tells you something. That's right. I'm not an MD. Yeah, folks, magnesium citrate, great laxative, malate for muscles, glycinate,

and threonate for brain and sleep. Yeah, and glycinate for also if you're not tending to be constipated, it's one that you can tolerate and not be constipated. It also helps with detoxification and sleep and other things. So, and so those are the big ones. And I think, you know, I've been diagnostically testing people for decades in nutritional testing. With Function, we do deep nutritional tests, including omega-3 testing and homocysteine, looking at methylation, which is a really important thing you've talked about in the podcast,

B12, folate, B6, we do vitamin D testing. And we see over 67% are deficient, and this is important to understand, Andrew, 67% are deficient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease. Not the optimal level that you or I might think is good, like vitamin D over 45 or ferritin iron store over 45. They're like, oh, if your vitamin's 30 or more, you're okay. Or if your ferritin's 16 or more, you're okay. Well, if you're ferritin 16, you're gonna be tired,

you're gonna have rain fog, you're gonna potentially have hair loss, you're gonna have insomnia, and that's just having low iron stores. And so when we're looking at that, we're like seeing what an incredibly depleted population we are in terms of the nutrients we have. So I wish we wouldn't need them and I wish we didn't need them, but the fact is that

unless we're eating a very structured diet, and I had a patient once who was at OCD and she was like, I don't want to take any vitamins. I said, okay. She says, but I'm going to eat, I know there's, pumpkin seeds have zinc, so I'm going to have like 14 pumpkin seeds a day and I need 200 micrograms of selenium. So I'm going to take four Brazil nuts a day." And she went on and on like, I know I need this nutrient,

so I'm going to have this much liver a day. And so she was able to figure it out, but it's not easy. So it sounds like magnesium getting a gram of EPA omega-3, 3000 IU minimum of D3 per day, some iron, some zinc, selenium, sounds like the basics. Yeah. And would that be true for teens?

Well, for example, you're an older guy. You don't want to take a lot of iron because you're not getting ready to bid and you can get iron toxicity. So if you're a menstruating woman, you need more iron. But what I think is the key is figuring out what's right for you. Test don't guess. Most people don't know. And some people may need 10,000 units of vitamin D

to get the same blood level as somebody else with 1,000. And that's because there's different vitamin D receptors and they're genetically determined and you can't know by just guessing. Right, I totally agree. But I also totally know that a lot of people won't blood test. So the argument against supplements has always been,

you just are creating expensive urine, which is a silly one because that's based on water soluble vitamins only, right? And by the way, it's a stupid argument because you're like, why drink water? I just pee the rest out of, I mean like, why I'm creating? It's silly. It's a silly one. But so, but the water? I just pee the rest out of it. I mean, like, why I'm creating?

It's a silly one. But the list that we just talked about, D3 omega, magnesium, maybe some iron if you're not an older guy, zinc selenium, it seems to me those would be good things for most everybody to add to their already healthy diet that has enough prebiotic, postbiotic fiber. And we're seeing iodine, interestingly, because people are eating the iodized salt. So they're having sea salt and Himalayan salt.

We got too fancy with our salt. We need table salt. We're not eating iodized salt. Now, iodine is not normally found in salt, but it was added to salt as a fortification to Brent Goiters or thyroid problems. But a lot of people have thyroid issues. One in five women and one in 10 men have low thyroid function and 50% are not diagnosed. And sometimes just a little iodine supplementation can help.

Or you can eat seaweed or fish. But a lot of people don't eat seaweed or fish. So that's how you would get iodine otherwise. So I think people need to kind of figure out what's going on with themselves and based on their diet and their preferences. And if you're a vegan, I mean, you know, I think, you know, we're seeing tremendous deficiencies in vegans if they're not supplemented. We hear a lot nowadays about methylated B12.

I decided to just start taking methylated B12. Is there a danger to taking methylated B12 if you quote unquote don't need it, if you're not a poor methylator? It depends on what you're taking. Mostly not, but you can over methylate or under methylate. And so you don't want to be doing too much of either the other. And there's genetics that are involved in actually assessing how your methylation pathways work. So the genetics are on B12, around B6, around folate, and you have multiple genes that regulate

all these different pathways. So it depends is the answer. But for most people taking a good multivitamin, and when I say good, I mean it doesn't have any fillers or binders or additives, it's not blue, it doesn't have titanium dioxide in it. It has forms of the nutrients that actually can get utilized and it's more better by the body.

We talked about magnesium oxide versus glycinate or citrate. And that you make sure the company has integrity, that they've third party tested for the purity and the potency, meaning if it says 1,000 units on the label, it's 1,000 units, not 10,000 or 2,000. And then it hasn't had any cross contamination with additives or chemicals. So sometimes you'll get something when an herbal product comes from China the the company didn't realize it was full of lead or whatever

You know like we're now we're seeing all these plant proteins with lead in them Yeah, I want to make sure that we talk about the impediments things like mold air water cleanliness things of that sort But I want to spend just a little bit longer on this supplement thing. Maybe because it's so near and dear to my heart. And because it has sparked a lot of confusion for me. Not supplements per se, but the reaction to them.

By traditional medicine? Yeah. Why is it that supplementation has received so much pushback from the medical community and yet I would argue that since 2020, you're going to find vitamin D3 and omegas, essential fatty acids and magnesium in many, many more people's kitchens Meaning they're taking it then prior to that. Yeah, and and this reminds me of yoga Resistance training, you know yoga was for yogis resistance training was for bodybuilders and people in the military now Everybody knows men and women. Yeah, maybe even young people should do it. Is there some argument that they should?

I have my thoughts about young people lifting really heavy, but in any case, breath work, you know, there's a lot of science now, meditation, there's tons of science. So these things that at one point were considered niche, biohacking, woo, and unsafe, inevitably seem to become mainstream. And I think supplements is starting to happen now.

Yeah, well it was interesting. When I got to Cleveland Clinic in 2014, I said let's do a survey with 3,000 physicians. Let's do a survey of the physicians about their beliefs, practices, desires, goals, needs around supplements. I was shocked, we got a lot of answers. And I'm not remembering the exact percentages,

but I'll give you the sort of ballparks. It was over, do you take supplements yourself? Over 70% of the doctors did. Do you recommend supplements to your patients? Probably like 20% or less did. Would you like to have a source where you knew the quality and had recommendations about the safety? Yes, we desperately wanna do that. Would you prescribe them have a source where you knew the quality and had recommendations about the safety? Yes, we desperately want to do that.

Would you prescribe them to your patients more if you did? Yes, and it's used if you look at every medical specialty. Cardiologists are using CoQ10 and fish oil, and you've got gastroenterologists using probiotics, and obviously OB-GYNs recommend supplements for prenatal vitamins, and you've got pediatricians recommending certain vitamins for kids. So you look across all the specialties,

and you're like, well, they're already kind of integrated, kind of on the margins, but integrated into their practices. I think this is kind of a weird thing, where you'd go to a conference, and I would do this, doctor, how many people recommend supplements to their patients? And you know, a few hands would go up. How many of you guys take supplements

that like, most of the audience would raise their hand? And I thought that was so peculiar because in medicine we're told from a scientific perspective that they're probably expensive urine and yet most doctors personally want to take them for themselves. That says a lot.

And I think we're entering an era where I think there's more and more science, we're understanding more about the complexity of individuality and biochemical individuality. And this was this personalized precision medicine, this is where we're all headed, right? And one of the fathers of sort of the thinking in functional medicine was Roger Williams,

who discovered pantothenic acid or vitamin B5. He wrote a book called Biochemical Individuality. And actually his book was the one that got me interested in this in college because I lived with a nutrition PhD student who was talking about basically the gut flora of cows, which he was studying to understand fiber and the microbiome. And he gave me a book called Nutrition Against Disease

by Roger Williams. And this is like in 1980. And I read it and I was like, oh wow, this is nutrition is such an important thing. So I think doctors are beginning to understand the value of nutrition, the value of nutritional sort of supplements, the value of testing for nutrients. It's still slow, but I think we're gonna get there.

There's a whole generation of physicians and scientists that I do think in the current shift in funding for science, different conversation entirely, are going to retire. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I don't mind saying this. I don't mind saying it. I think they've done a really wonderful job and now it's time to pass the baton. The younger generation and the forward thinking people in their 60s and 70s are changing the game. It's a very different game now.

And I think it's hard for them to understand that and it's gotta be scary, but the younger generation is much more versed. I will say that I actually would like your reflections on something for someone that's listening to this conversation and you think, oh goodness, now I have to buy organic foods and buy all these supplements.

And let's say somebody has a limited budget. Yeah, yeah. Do you think it's fair to say, okay, if you have a limited budget, you would be very wise to get cardiovascular exercise at least three days a week, do some resistance training, which can be done with body weight. And could you say, eat eggs, fish, meat,

fruits and vegetables. Nuts and seeds and olive oil. And you're there, right? And if you look at the cost of buying food out versus that, you're probably coming out ahead. Cause I'm thinking about the college student. I'm thinking about me in college or as a postdoc or a graduate student.

So I think for people that have more disposable income, it makes sense. You eat as well as you can, organic, you supplement, you blood test, and I wanna talk about those things. Let's talk about some of the impediments, and I do wanna keep budgetary restraints in mind because I think people fall into the category of poor,

some disposable income, and lots of disposable income. And all too often in the biohacking sphere, we're talking about that last category and we don't want to lose anyone along the way. So air, we had fires here in Los Angeles. It was dreadful. The beach now all the way down to Marina Del Rey, I ran down there yesterday, it was completely littered with chunks of charcoal, they mow it under the sand, it's going out to ocean. Most people don't, listening to this probably,

don't live in Los Angeles. How bad is our air in the United States, Northern Europe, Australia? Like, is there any clean air left? I mean, yeah, maybe in the mountains, in Colorado. Okay, so the air's dirty. I think, you know, compared to any clean air left? I mean, yeah, maybe in the mountains in Colorado. Okay, so the air is dirty. I think, you know, compared to what is the answer? Like, if you go to India or China or some of these developing nations

that are not even developing anymore, the air is so bad. I mean, they have all kinds of petrochemical products they burn, they have coal factories, I mean it's really bad. So in America I think the air quality in general is much, much higher. I think when you have things like wildfires, it's a different ballgame. Then just the wood smoke itself,

if it's just a tree's burning is bad enough, but then you're burning houses and batteries and plastics and you've got PFAS chemicals and we actually found that those chemicals go up on their function testing in people living in LA who've actually been in the fires. Yeah, I need to get tested again because I haven't been tested since the fires. I mean, I feel fine. Yeah.

But I got out of town. I drove up to San Luis Obispo, parked myself at a big pink hotel called the Madonna Inn and looked at the horses and worked on my book. That's good. The air felt clean, but is the air clean when there isn't a fire? I mean, not necessarily. I mean, for example, and it just helps people understand

that air moves. It's not like there's just LA air or Colorado air. In Seattle, they had a big mercury problem in the air because of China, because Northeast China, like Beijing and Harvard, in the winters, they just burn huge amounts of coal, and it goes up in the air, and it goes across in the gulf streams and the air streams,

whatever they call them, and it gets all the way to Seattle, and it rains heavy metal rain. And so, no matter where you live, you're kind of exposed to the collective air. There's some for sure areas that are much cleaner, but I think that most people, if they have an air filter in your house where you spend most of your time, you're probably okay.

So is it a separate unit air filter? Yeah. You can get one for your house, which most houses have, make sure you change the filters, or you can get a special HEPA air filter if you live in a more urban area or more environmentally toxic area. I love to exercise outside,

is running and breathing harder outside. In LA? Well, I like to do that wherever I go, but when I'm in New York City, I love to run along the freeway. Probably breathing in a lot of junk. You are, yeah. I mean, and the question is,

what's gonna be a problem for you? Like all of us are toxic soups, right? So it's just the amount over time that builds up, and then eventually sometimes things can happen. It causes cardiovascular disease, it causes dementia, it causes cancer, it causes diabetes. So toxins are direct causes of these things, among other things, diet and other things.

So I think you can't go crazy about it. We're living in the 21st century, we are where we are unless you wanna move to some remote island in the South Pacific or something. Iceland's looking pretty nice. Iceland's looking good, yeah. Greenland seemed to be the 51st state. Is that gonna happen? I don't know, I'm just joking.

I'm making fun of it. But there are places, but I think for most of us, we have to just manage it. And we filter our water. I wouldn't drink tap water. There's an average of 37 or eight wastewater contaminants, including drugs, including pesticides, including glyphosate. I mean, in hormones, if women are taking the pill

or taking hormone replacement therapy, where does that go? There's some amount that gets excreted in the urine, it goes taking the pill or taking hormone replacement therapy, where does that go? There's some amount that gets excreted in the urine, it goes into the water treatment plants. They don't filter that stuff out. I mean, they get the bugs out, but you're getting all that stuff in your water. So having a reverse osmosis water filter is a good idea.

But I think the costing is really important, Andrew. I think one of the problems people think about is that, oh, it's expensive to be healthy. And I think that's a myth. I think you mentioned the problems people think about is that, oh, it's expensive to be healthy. And I think that's a myth. I think you mentioned a lot of foundational things like eating real food, exercising, getting up sleep, managing stress, breath work. These are things that are free.

Your breath is free. You can move your body. You can do body weight if you can't even afford bands. Food is interesting because the food industry has been very good at brainwashing Americans that they need highly processed, cheap junk food. Not accounting for the actual cost of that food, which is $3 for every $1 you spend on that food,

you're gonna spend $3 in collateral damage to your health, to the economy, to the environment, to social fabric. I mean, this is a Rockefeller report on the true cost of food. But if you actually just look at the actual price of the food, if you eat real food, it doesn't have to be expensive. Now you might not be getting a $70 ribeye

that's grass-fed from New Zealand. You might be getting short ribs that aren't organic or grass-fed, that's okay. Like whole grains, beans. I mean, I grew up poor and we used to have liver and onions, which is like the cheapest. And that's chicken liver. Chicken liver, yeah. Chopped liver, what are you gonna say? Yeah, chicken liver not for me.

But there's been studies that it may cost the same or maybe 50 cents extra day to eat well. And there's a guide from the environmental working group called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which is how to eat well for you and for your wallet and the planet. And there, you know, we grew up, we have borscht, like it was short ribs, which is like the cheapest kind of meat, onions, cabbage, carrots, tomato, canned tomatoes. It's pretty darn cheap, and you could feed your,

like a family of like six for a few bucks, you know? So, and there's been a lot written about this, but the food industry is great at convincing us that it's elitist, that it's expensive, that it's all very organic. Forget about organic, non-organic, regenerative, non-regenerative. If you don't have a lot of resources, just focus on eating real food, and you will do better and feel better and be more productive and walk around not feeling like crap. Do you think that one of the reasons food and nutrition is so complicated in this country

is that with the exception of the hamburger, the hot dog, apple pie, and ice cream, that there isn't really an American cuisine? What's wrong with all that? Years ago. Hot dog, hamburger, apple pie, ice cream. Right. Years ago, I had a girlfriend who was from the south of France. She grew up very modestly, did not have wealth at all, but her family ate very well. They put a lot of effort into food.

They put a lot of time into food. They had garden, they had animals. And she knew about... She was in her early 20s, I was in my mid-20s. She knew probably 200 recipes for soups and soufflés. I mean, it was amazing. I ate very well. So I feel like one of the things that's really missing

in this country is a sense of pride in the healthy food that we can produce here. And there's never really been a history of it. We have kind of a picture of the farmer and the rancher, and then on the West Coast you have more of the kind of like natural food movement, the healthy food movement, Alice Waters and Michael Pollan and that kind of thing, but that's considered kind of hippie dippy. I lived in Berkeley, so I can say that.

And they've made great effort to try and popularize that. But I think that's one of the reasons that we've commoditized food now. So American food is junk food, cotton candy. That's true. What happened was – and it was after World War II, because my mother and grandparents were pre-that generation. So they had an incredible food culture of real food. My grandmother tells me stories – or told me stories, she died, of plucking chickens at the local butcher

so she could get a nickel to go to the movies. But I feel like that came by way of people's ethnic past because they were first and second generation immigrants. Maybe, maybe, fair enough, fair enough. But still, what happened was the industrialization of the American food system. So after World War II, there was all these bomb-making factories and all these biochemical,

biological warfare factories. So they got turned into bomb factories, got turned into fertilizer, which was nitrogen, and the biological weapons were pesticides and herbicides. So basically pesticides are biological weapons. They're neurotoxins. That's how they killed the insects. They sport sterilized them.

And then we thought everything industrial is good. You know, remember in the 60s, you probably remember, they had like better living through chemistry through DuPont and didn't realize it was killing everybody, right? And the World's Fair, and I mean, I grew up in Queens and the World's Fair was in Queens in 1965 and I went and I didn't obviously remember that skit,

but I've seen things about it. So the industrialization of the food supply, the agricultural industrialization with mechanization, the destruction of the soil, the gro agricultural industrialization with mechanization, the destruction of the soil, the overgrowing of starchy carbohydrate crops to feed a growing hungry world. We wanted that. Like, we now produce 500 calories more per person in America than we actually need to eat, and we export a lot of that.

So the industrialization was a thing. And then in the 50s, the food industry started to make a lot of processed food. And they were completely taken off guard because there's this woman named Betty who was a home ec teacher who was part of the federal extension workers that was paid for federal program to send people out to young families to teach the mothers how to – and it was sexist because it was the mothers – how to cook and how to garden and how to grow their own food and how to be independent and how to eat real food.

It was like really great. And there was a big meeting in Minnesota around that time, Jonah Mills sponsored, but all the big food companies came and they decided convenience had to be king and we had to make that a value. And they vented Betty Crocker, not a real person, Betty Crocker cookbook, you might remember that cookbook, but it was like, oh, add one can of Campbell's

cream of mushroom soup to your casserole, or add one roll of Crits crackers to your broccoli casserole. So they insinuated that, and there were TV dinners, and I grew up in that area, and then there was like, the food of astronauts, like tang, and Fleischmann's margarine, better than butter. And so it was- And there was cup of noodles. Yeah, yeah, so we basically got this whole culture

of like convenience, and then you deserve a break today from McDonald's, and we basically disenfranchised people from their kitchens, we have a whole generation of Americans who don't know how to cook, who don't know anything about shopping or where vegetables come from. I mean, Jamie Oliver did a whole television show series in West Virginia where kids didn't know what a tomato was, and they saw a tomato or a carrot,

or they couldn't name a vegetable, right, because they had never seen one. And now most of America's like that, and so they have succeeded in disenfranchising ourselves from our kitchen. We need to, they've hijacked our kitchens, our brain chemistry, our metabolism, our hormones. We need to take it back, and it's like the body snatchers.

Like we need to take our bodies back, own our own biology, understand that we're in charge, understand that we shouldn't abdicate our health to anybody else, including the doctor. You have a doctor as a partner, as an advisor, as a collaborator, but like they're not God and they don't know everything. And now with the advent of self testing,

like function health is like $1.37 a day. It's still money, but it's affordable for most people. And our- It's a lot less than a latte. Yeah, it's like, and we do $15,000 for the test for 4.99 a year, and you get a panel of tests that tells you what's really happening, and people can own their data and own their biology

and be proactive and preventative and actually understand what's happening way before they get into real trouble. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking AG1 way back in 2012,

long before I even knew what a podcast was. I started taking it and I still take it every single day because it ensures that I meet my quota for daily vitamins and minerals and it helps make sure that I get enough prebiotics and probiotics to support my gut health. Over the past 10 years, gut health has emerged as something that we realize is important,

not only for the health of our digestion, but also for our immune system and for the production of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, things like dopamine and serotonin. In other words, gut health is critical for proper brain function. Now, of course, I strive to eat healthy whole foods from unprocessed sources for the majority of my nutritional intake, but there are a number of things in AG1, including specific

micronutrients that are hard or impossible to get from whole foods. So by taking AG1 daily, I get the vitamins and minerals that I need, along with the probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and in turn brain and immune system health, and the adaptogens and critical micronutrients that are essential for all organs and tissues of the body. So anytime somebody asks me if they were to only take one supplement, what that supplement should be, I always say AG1,

because AG1 supports so many different systems in the brain and body that relate to our mental health, physical health, and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1, you can go to www.drinkag1.com Huberman. For this month only, April, 2025, AG1 is giving away a free one month supply of Omega-3 fish oil, along with a bottle of Vitamin D3 plus K2. As I've highlighted before in this podcast,

Omega-3 fish oil and Vitamin D3 plus K2 have been shown to help with everything from mood and brain health to heart health and healthy hormone production and much more. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get the free one month supply of omega-3 fish oil plus a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 with your subscription. The confusion for me has been the pushback on self-directed health. You know, it's, I had something come to mind as you're saying all this,

which is that I do believe that until health becomes a point of national pride for Americans, that we're going to become the sickest nation in the world. And we are already. Well, we're going to continue to be right. But there's this thing that happens when you start taking care of your health. And I know this because in college, I decided to stop drinking as much as everyone else around me drank.

It was insane. It was unbelievable, the amount of binge drinking and just the frequency, like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So I was like, this is crazy. And I got really into working out and sleep and studying. And I had to be a bit lonely in order to preserve that life. But I got teased a lot for being healthy. But the point being that it still takes some self-confidence, rigidity, and determination

to push off the people like, oh, it's so self-focused to focus on your health. You're spending money on these on vitamin D3, or oh, you can't have a slice of pizza. It's like, no, you can, but the point is, maybe you don't want to because you have a certain amount of self-pride, not because pizza can't be amazing. There are some amazing pizzas, by the way, but most pizza's crap and some pizza's amazing.

And it's worth it to wait for the amazing pizza, in my opinion. So I guess the idea here is what we really need, it seems, is it's kind of a psychological, cultural medicine revolution, and true revolution, given the way things are going with the obesity rates. And so I do want to talk about Maha,

make America healthy again. I'm not formally involved in Maha. I know people involved in it. Know people who know people who know people. I know people who know people, and I am in discussions with them. They've asked questions, I've provided answers where I could provide answers,

but the pushback on Maha is what I'd like to understand because you and I sit from a unique vantage point in you in particular, where you have a lot of colleagues and understanding of the traditional medical community. So as they always say, like, that's not the guy you gotta get. You don't need to get the guy that's watching podcasts and taking supplements, but what about the guy or gal

who is like, I don't know, my doctor says this is crazy. They wanna get rid of vaccines and they want everyone doing pushups and you know, and they don't wanna take a Zempik and you know, and so maybe, cause I see you Mark as somebody who can potentially bridge this divide. Knowing people on both sides, I really see you as somebody who can do that.

I'm not saying that just cause you're sitting here and large part you're sitting here because of that. So how do you change millions of people's mindset about health when now Maha has become a red label thing? How do you do it? It's crazy. Either Republicans are gonna get healthy and Democrats aren't. It's crazy to me. Or there's an opportunity here. And I do think that... I know they're drawing you in for

this and I'm so glad they are because I do think that you're somebody who really believes in inclusivity in the real sense of the word. So what do you think it's going to take to make America healthy? And this is not Maha propaganda. This is just, can Maha do it? What do they need to do better? What can you do? What can we all do? Great question. And it was funny to me, I was thinking as you're talking about how when Michelle Obama started her Let's Move campaign, it was a blue issue. A lot of the people who were pushing this agenda was Shelley Pingree, who's a Democrat from Maine,

or Tim McGovern, who's from Massachusetts, or Cory Booker, who issues all these bills about food safety, last Congress. And all of a sudden, it flipped and became a Republican issue, which is staggering to me. And we now see bills in a few dozen states or more, actually, and every day I hear about new bills that are helping push forward an agenda to fix our food system.

And before you dive in, I just wanna see this answer with one thing, forgive me audience, they don't like it when I interrupt, but the goal of the left, if I may, seems to be to make anyone associated with health and maha on the right, a jock, not a scientist. Yeah. That's what I'm seeing.

They're trying to take away their science credential and make them a jock. Now, Bobby Kennedy is not a formally trained scientist, but the scientists that are going into NIH directorships, who I can't share who they are besides Jay, who's been announced, the other ones, but you know who they are, these are serious scientists. These aren't jocks.

These are people that may or may not lift weights. But there seems to be this effort to say, we're going to strip Maha of its power by making it a bro-science, bio biohacking jock thing. Real science is about reductionist stuff. And I just say, listen, it's all valuable. And so I'm fundamentally frustrated and it hasn't even begun. So educate us. I mean, listen, my friend Rick Warren said, I'm not left wing or right wing, I'm for the whole bird, otherwise you'll fly around in circles.

I like that. Who said that? Rick Warren. Who said that? Rick Warren. Who's Rick Warren? Rick Warren is the head of Saddleback Church, which is an evangelical church in Southern California. We did a whole program with this church where we got 15,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year by doing health together in groups.

And it was amazing, actually. I love that quote. It was a great quote. And health isn't red or blue or purple. It's like a human issue. And to make it partisan, it doesn't make any sense to me. And yet, we live in a partisan world. And anything the Democrats do,

the Republicans are gonna hate, anything the Republicans do, the Democrats are gonna hate, it's like, hey guys, can't we just talk to each other and have civil discourse and agree on the things we can agree on and disagree on the things we're gonna disagree on? And I know behind the scenes,

there's collaboration bipartisan on these issues, there's bipartisan caucus that. Well, on the psychedelic issue, I was at a meeting where, you know, Governor Rick Perry, former Governor Rick Perry, Texas, like who describes himself as a knuckle dragging Republican. Those are Rick's words, by the way, Rick's a very nice guy.

And there were several members of the Dems there, and you got Rick Doblin, who was like a counterculture, conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. And they're all up there being proponents for psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD and veterans. So they've joined hands. I think that's one area that's very exciting. It's not happening in nutrition. It's not happening on this thing of get exercise

Those have become red labels. Yeah, it's unfortunate because you know Americans are suffering, you know Americans are really suffering those 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction Psychiatric illnesses on the rise in both kids and adults autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing Obviously obesity is a huge problem. Diabetes is a huge problem. Heart disease, deaths are going down, but the incidence is going up, meaning there's more people getting it,

but because we have better treatments, they don't die from it. Same thing with cancer. So we're not winning on the health front in the war on chronic disease. We're losing disastrously. And so we have to come together as a country to solve this. And it's unfortunate to be polarized. I think the good part about COVID

was that people became aware that this edifice of science and medicine had cracks in it, and that they needed to be more empowered around their own health and to start questioning things. And I think that's part of the genesis of this bigger, wider movement around make America healthy again, and why Bobby Kennedy was able to catalyze a huge base.

He was Democratic candidate at first, then he was independent, now he's in the Republican administration. It doesn't mean he shares all the ideology that they have, but he cares about this issue. And so I think what's happening behind the scenes is there's a lot of bipartisan interest in how do we begin to address this.

Look, the healthcare bill is $5 trillion. Of that, the government, federal government pays 40%. It's one in three federal tax dollars. So one in three dollars you pay for your taxes goes to healthcare. Of that, 80% is mostly for chronic disease. It's either preventable or reversible through intensive lifestyle therapy.

And some things are on the margins. If insurance is private, how does that work? How is it that my money is going to take care of somebody who has heart disease? For example, if you get onto Medicare Advantage, that's a government program, but it's administered by Humana or by Cigna or by these insurance companies kind of deploy federal resources to deliver healthcare.

But if you actually look at the end-to-end, Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, federal employees, children's health program, you just add up all the things that the government pays for. It's almost two trillion dollars a year for healthcare. Most people don't realize that. So the government has enormous leverage. And when I was sitting in my office treating my patients who are just endless stream of people with chronic illnesses coming in,

diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, this, that, the other thing, I'm like, why is this patient sick? Well, it's mostly because of the food they're eating. And if that's the problem, then what's the cause of the food they're eating? Well, it's our food policies. And what's the cause of our food policies?

It's the food industry has pressured our government into creating a food system that's harming us. And we have very different policies than they do in Europe. For example, they don't allow many GMO foods or glyphosate. They don't... High fructose corn syrup? They have it there, but it's limited.

I mean, more limited. The toxins, there's 10,000 additives to food in America. There's 400 that are allowed in Europe. Okay. Let me ask you a question about toxins because I've been watching this very closely online recently, and folks who are more of the traditional science background who are kind of like to spend a lot of their time trying to debunk folks like you,

or people that talk about food additives, say that these are infinitesimally small amounts of these dyes, that the amount required to kill a rat, like the, you know, is 3000 times higher. My stance on this is the same as going through the X, you know, the X-ray machine at the airport, which is true, you can walk through and not get cancer. But if you're going through it multiple times per month

or year, then, you know, and it's compounding with other things. So it's, like you said, dose, year, and it's compounding with other things. So it, like you said, does frequency and duration. And the interactions. Right. When these things are studied, they might be studied one at a time. But what if you put thousands of them together, whether it's environmental chemicals or food additives?

And I don't think the food additives themselves, although there are many that are problematic, that are linked to cancer, linked to allergy, linked to ADD, I think there are a lot of data about this. But the real issue is where do you find these? You find these in extremely low quality, health destroying foods that are ultra processed foods, that are high in starch and sugar, high in refined oils, high in these additives. They're not creating orange steaks.

Yeah. You're not like, you're not getting these chemicals when you order broccoli at a restaurant, right? So how do you tease out all of it? How do you do human trials on this? It's very hard, but in Europe, they have the precautionary principle was you have to prove it safe before we add it to the food supply. Crisco is a great example.

Crisco was invented in 1911. It was shortening because there was a butter shortage. And so they basically created this product, which is blowing hydrogen atoms into liquid vegetable oil that makes it act like an animal fat, like lard or butter. And it was cheap, and it was good. So it was in the supply from 1911 to 2015. It wasn't until 50 years after the data

had started to become clear that this was a cause of heart attacks, that this was very dangerous, so we shouldn't be eating margarine. I remember a tub of that in our cupboard when I was a kid. Yeah, I grew up on fleshless margarine, you know? And it wasn't until the scientists who'd been studying for 50 years,

it was 90 years all the time, sued the FDA and forced them to really do something about it that it got taken off the generally recognized safe list, which is called the grass list. Now, you asked about Maha, well, one of the first things Robert F. Kennedy did, and I helped advise him on this, was to help address the grass problem. Because there's something called the grass loophole.

If you're a food company, you can go to the FDA and say, hey, I got this great new chemical, we checked it out, totally safe, not a problem, we're gonna add it to the food, just take our word for it. And the FDA goes, great, no problem, you go right ahead. Imagine if a drug company did that and said, oh, we have this great new drug, we've done all our tests, it's perfectly safe, it's very effective,

can you please give us approval and we're not gonna give you any data. That's exactly what happens in America. Now that's different than in Europe, which they do the opposite. You have to prove that it's safe before it's added to the food supply. Here you're innocent until proven guilty,

which is fine for humans, but not for chemicals we put in our food. The other day I saw something on X that, if true, and I'll put a link to it, was probably the most troubling thing I've ever seen in public health discourse. And I want that to lead to a question for you. This was an example of a hearing in Washington where

a young woman, I believe she's from Austin, who's a kind of like health food advocate. Yeah, advocate, but with training from a university down there, was lobbying against soda in the government-funded lunch program. Lunch or food stamp? Snap program. Snap is the food stamp. Okay. It's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but there's no N in there.

Okay. Our goal is to put the N back in snap. Got it, okay. Just to clarify, food security is having enough calories. Nutrition security is having enough nutrients. We provide it for food security, meaning you can get all your calories from soda Calories, nutrition security is having of nutrients. We provide it for food security, meaning you can get all your calories from soda

and sugar, but that doesn't mean you have nutrition security. And we see many of the people who receive these federal aid programs are the ones who are most sick, the most using our healthcare system. Thanks for that clarification. This young woman advocating for healthier food was arguing for getting

a sugary soda, this wasn't diet soda, sugary soda out of the SNAP program. And she made her case, it was a terrific case, well articulated, I think, and was well received by both the blue side and the red side of the room. And then someone tapped into the microphone, this was a gentleman representing the American Heart Association, the American Heart Association. And he proceeded to say that he opposed the removal of sugary soda. Do you know why? I thought, okay, this has got to either be AI generated, it's fake. But then one of the women on the panel who was listening, one of the people making decisions or at least

running it up the flagpole for decisions, said, wait, do you realize what you're saying? And he just kept repeating this like a broken record. And I thought, okay, the American Heart, if it was the American Soda Association or Beverage Association or Hydration Association even, I would have thought, okay, maybe there's something here, but he was there representing

the American Heart Association. I have no skin in this game, okay? I don't drink sugary soda. I can answer that question. And I was shocked. And I will provide a link to this in the show no captions. I was shocked. He shouldn't be, he shouldn't be.

And I thought to myself, this guy's arguing for sugary soda on behalf of the American Heart Association, and these are sugary sodas that the American taxpayer is paying to try and help some of the least healthy and lowest income people in the country drink more soda. And it wasn't like take away soda and don't replace it with anything. It was, you know, replace it with some other food. There's double bucks for fruits and vegetables. Right. Or even water. Right? So So I was shocked. Yeah.

I verified it's real. Yeah. And OK, so I'd like your thoughts on that, but I'm guessing what they are already. But here's what I want to know. Is the FDA and our government so strongly impacted by these food companies? You hear this, but it always sounds

like a bunch of conspiracy stuff. Let me roll it back, Luj. General Mills and really like lobbying behind scenes. I mean, is there really a network of people trying to harm us for profit? A hundred percent, yes. A hundred percent, yes. So I was telling the story about how I was in my office seeing patients with diabetes. I'm like, what caused the food policy? And then I started to go down that rabbit hole. And I wrote a book called Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Communities, Our Economy, Our Communities,

and Our Planet One Bite at a Time, where I mapped out from field to fork the problems with our food industry, how it's making us sick, how it's costing us trillions of dollars, and how to fix it. Then I started a nonprofit where I'd been in Washington doing this work over the last five years, way before it was, MAHA was a thing. What you just described is part of a large cohesive strategy by the food industry to undermine science, manipulate public trust and information, to control the government and academic institutions and many things.

So I'll just kind of lay it out for you. Sounds conspiracy. It sounds like it is. And it kind of is kind of, I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy. It's just their business strategy, right, which is to circle the wagons. They fund the American Heart Association. So the food and farm industry spent 192 million dollars

that they give to the American Heart Association. What does the American Heart Association do with it? They educate people about nutrition, they hold meetings, they have scientific panels. But what is the basis for sugary soda? Like there can't, there's no single argument for sugary soda. If you get $20 million from the soda industry, I mean, it's like that, Andrew. But maybe diet soda of all, then we could argue artificial sweeteners, but at least

we know it can help people lose weight, they're adjusting less sugar. No, this is like 40% of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which is the national nutrition organization, comes from the food industry. The American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Family Practice. This has to change. I mean, Coca-Cola gave a multi-million dollar donation

to the American Academy of Family Practice, and there were family doctors that quit in droves because of this. When did this start? I think it's been growing, and there were family doctors that quit in droves because of this. When did this start? I think it's been growing, and so there's multiple strategies they have. One is massive lobbying, two is funding professional associations.

But was this in the 80s, the 90s? I think it's been slow creep since probably the 70s, is my guess. If you look in the 60s and the beach pictures, like there's nobody overweight, right? When I was growing up, there were probably two fat kids in school. Yeah, yeah.

They've done all these strategic things around lobbying, around funding professional associations, funding academic research, 12 times as much academic research on nutrition as the federal government spends. They co-op social groups like NAACP and the Hispanic Federation so they won't oppose things that they care about or they'll oppose things they care about like soda taxes. And they fund fake science groups like the American Council on Science and Health that's attacked me maybe attacked you too. Not yet. I'm sure they will after this episode. I'm buying science and all these great sounding organizations that are simply front groups for misinformation, crop life and so

they have a whole strategic approach that is very detailed. And I map the whole thing out in my book and how it's so insidious and how it happened while everybody else was asleep. And I know personally now that some of these big associations that are the lobby groups for these big food companies and ag companies, that they're circling ranks, that they're creating a war plan, that they have a complete strategy of how to put forth this kind of, I would say, manipulative science. They have grassroots lobby efforts where they're activating fake grassroots movements. They're lobbying, they're looking at how to pressure state governments to not do what they're doing.

I mean, I know personally the governor of West Virginia, who has now, there's a state bill to actually, which probably hopefully passed by the time this podcast comes out, And I know personally the governor of West Virginia, who has now there's a state bill to actually, which probably hopefully passed by the time this podcast comes out, that gets rid of chemicals in the food in West Virginia, which is the fattest state in the nation. And I know the amount of pressure, millions and millions of dollars of pressure they're putting on him to not do it. It's going to destroy their businesses. It's going to destroy the economy.

It's going to create the people of West Virginia suffering. I mean, so much pressure on politicians who don't actually understand these issues. to destroy the economy, that's going to create the people of West Virginia suffering. So much pressure on politicians who don't actually understand these issues. So they're like – and I remember – What's confusing, even as somebody who is fairly versed in health and nutrition, like I'm – I'll give you an example. It's not confusing.

I'll give you an example. So I was working on a bill that was with Andy Harris, who's a doctor in Congress, to do a pilot study to see the impact, not to change policy, just to study the impact of what would happen if you took soda off the list of acceptable things you could buy with food stamp dollars. Just to do a pilot in a couple of states. We think, well, let's just do a scientific study

and see what happens. The Democrats were completely opposed to it. They shut the whole thing down. On what grounds? The hunger groups. It's based on this idea of like, we're gonna take care of the poor, it's discriminatory, it's regressive,

it's gonna hurt the poor. And the hunger groups that are these big groups that try to deal with hunger in America are funded by and their boards of directors are staffed by, people from Big Food. So if you just follow the money, you see how it all is connected,

and how it all flows together. And what are Big Food? So, like, what are the companies? Okay, so there are companies you know about. There's even things like Primal Kitchen, which you think is like a great natural brand, and it's started by Mark Sisson, and it's salad dressings in ketchup

without high-fructose corn syrup. It's a great product. They're all Mark Sisson and it's salad dressings and ketchup without high fructose corn syrup, great product. They're all bought up by the big food companies like Mondalase or by Kraft Heinz for example bought that or Hugh Chocolate which thank God will stay the same forever because Jason Carp was a friend, made sure they would, but they bought Hugh Chocolate which we think is a natural brand, it's the biggest selling premium chocolate in America.

So they buy all the other companies. So it's Nestle, it's Junilever, it's DeNone, it's Mondelais, it's Kraft Heinz. So it's a few companies that really probably at 10 or so companies that basically are the big companies. And then there's all the ag and seed and chem companies. It's all consolidation. So there used to be like hundreds of seed companies,

now there's five. There used to be like dozens of fertilizers companies, now there's just a few. If I take a step back from this, I say, okay, well, Mark, I haven't tried Primal Kitchen, but I hear good things, right? Mark seems like a very health conscious guy. So Mark Sisson, right?

So if his brand was bought up by one of these major companies, why aren't they promoting the healthier foods in their catalog? Well, they do. They do. But also, without, if there's like Jason Carpfer with Hugh chocolate Made them in the contract promise. They would never change the ingredients ever

I see and and when you often get these other products that have been bought up by these big companies They modify the recipes they make it cheaper. They squeeze their margins to be bigger So it's it's not like you're gonna get like, you know Amy's whatever, pizza or whatever sounds like great healthy pizza, but they modify it. I see. And so I think as a whole they still get most

of their profit margin from their legacy products of junk, right? So they don't wanna cannibalize that, but they also wanna suck up the rest of the market so they have a monopoly. I see. But there's probably a few dozen CEOs that are in control of everything

from what seeds are planted, to what chemicals are sprayed, to the food companies that process the food, to the fast food companies. It's not that many companies, and it's a few dozen CEOs that control the biggest industry on the planet that employs more than everybody else,

because everybody eats. It's like 16 trillion dollars. And so- So are you and Bobby going to change the way that works? I mean, that's the goal. I mean, the idea is to raise awareness, to create transparency, to help people understand what's what, and to take the veil back and say,

you can choose whatever you want to eat. We're not taking away your McDonald's, we're not taking away your soda, but at least you should know what's going on. If you go to South America, you're from Argentina, I'm sure you've been there not too recent past, if you pick up something that's not good for you, it tells you on the label. It's like black warning signs and hazard signs and stop signs. Well they're the opposite problem exists.

As the child of a first generation immigrant, my dad always said the United States is the one country where the poor are overweight because calories are cheap. You go to Argentina and you see these neighborhoods are of immense poverty, right? And people are not overweight. People are struggling to find food. Some are, but some aren't. Like if you look at – there was a whole series in the New York Times a few years ago about how, for example, Nestle went into the ghettos of, I think, Peru and Colombia, and they were just Brazil, and they

were just pushing through local community members and reps would drive around with little carts or push the carts around where there's not even a street to sell all this crappy processed food to people for pennies. And so that's what they've done. They've infiltrated everywhere on the planet. It was far back as 1986, and I did a public health expedition with Johns Hopkins to Nepal. We got off the plane at some remote airport

on a grass strip, and then we walked for a week, up into the, almost to Tibet. And, you know, there were no roads, there were no cars, there was no electricity, there was no running water, were no cars, there was no electricity, there was no running water, but there was Coca-Cola. And you see these sherpas literally with like probably, I don't know, 100, 200 pounds of Coca-Cola on their back climbing up the mountains, bringing it to every little village.

Right? I mean, there's even a TED Talk on this, but I think I was somewhere, Melinda Gates or something, about how Coca-Cola is a business model for how we, you know, get safe stuff around the world because they had the incredible distribution. So even where you can't get water, you can get Coca-Cola. Where they actually need quality. Protein is what scares. It's often cheaper than water in many countries, like in Mexico. So I think we have to face the fact that we've had this sort of unadulterated, uninhibited run from the industry and now there's somebody talking about why they need to think about doing things

differently, how they need to reformulate, how they need to be partners. I mean, there was a big meeting with the Consumer Brand Association and Robert F. Kennedy last Monday in the White House where he said to them essentially, here's what you need to do, do it or we're're gonna make you do it. Get the crap out of the food and let's get focused on the harm that this is causing in terms of the amount of starch and sugar and processing and products in there that are not good for human health.

And if you don't, we're gonna do something about it. They can create better front of package labeling to transform people's perception of what's good or not. And labels are super confusing in this country. I mean, I know how to read them, but you have to be a PhD or study this your whole life to understand how to read the nutrition facts label, how to read an ingredient list, what it means,

what the serving size is, what the calories are, what the this and that is. It's like, you know, it's not easy for the average American. It should be easy. Like you should be- It's intentionally confusing. 100%. Well, single ingredient or minimal ingredient food

solve that. I'd like to take us from one controversial topic, and thank you, by the way, I should say before moving on from that, for being involved and staying involved. I know your inherent goodness and your desire to keep things nonpartisan and to do what's best for people and to keep it out of the politics as much as possible. These are the things I've been working on for years. And so I'm just, whether it's medical. You're just being you.

I'm just being me, whether it's medical care meals or raising the awareness around chronic disease or the effect of toxins in our environment or the role of sugar and starch in our metabolic crisis. I mean, these are things that are not new. I've talked about these for decades. Now, all of a sudden it's a political issue. I don't understand why.

You're not putting on a new hat. You're not putting on a new hat. Government's putting on a new hat, getting involved in these things. I'm hopeful. They've always been involved, but they just have been involved unknowingly by allowing policies to be implemented

that support things like soda and junk food. If you look at other countries' food assistance programs, you can't buy that shit. Right, right. Let's talk about something almost as controversial. Something that I have kind of a neutral opinion on that I think is a beautiful scientific story, which is GLP-1 agonists.

Discovered on the basis of the helo monster, which doesn't need to eat very much, over synthesizes a lot of this peptide, which limits its hunger and it works at the level of the brain and at the level of the gut. There are, however, lots and lots of cells, including neurons, outside the appetite system that use and bind GLP-1.

The drugs that increase GLP-1, we had a guest on here, so Zachary Knight came out on here and beautifully explained how the drugs that increased GLP-1 increase it many thousandfold above natural levels to have it exert its effect of reducing hunger. It is reducing obesity, yes, people lose muscle, they break it down for us.

Let's assume that somebody has just had a terrible time losing weight. They don't even feel like they can exercise for either motivational reasons or they're structurally, we all know they should exercise and maybe they'll get there, one would hope. But you can't exercise your weight of a bad diet. Right, right.

Do you think there are use cases for GLP-1 that warrant its prescription? And what's the controversy with GLP-1 all about? Is it the dependents, the insurance? I mean, we don't have three hours to parse this, but- I can give you the quick- Yeah, what's your view on GLP-1? Because I think some people have clearly benefited from it.

Other people probably don't need it at all. I don't take it, I wouldn't take it, but I'm pretty good at regulating what I put in my mouth. Look, I mean, I think, like you said, this is a molecule that the body naturally makes to regulate appetite, but is being given at doses that are far greater than that which our body naturally makes.

And when you overdo something, there are downstream consequences. Insulin is a peptide. Ozempic is a peptide. GLP-1, these drugs are peptides. These are small mini-proteins. Think of that as what a peptide. GLP-1, these drugs are peptides. These are small mini-proteins. Think of that as what a peptide is. And insulin, if you take too much of it, will kill you.

Like literally, you'll go into hypoglycemic shock. So when you start messing with big doses, it has not side effects. We call these side effects. These are just effects we don't like, and we call them side effects. They're effects of the drug, and they can lead to everything from things you mentioned,

like muscle wasting, which is a big problem because you lose the weight and you lose muscle and fat, and if you lose half of it as muscle, then your metabolism slows down, because muscle burns seven times as much calories as fat, and when you gain the weight back, if you stop, which over 65% of people do. Is that right?

Yeah. People who come off it gain the weight back. A hundred percent. They just start eating more again. Yeah. And they have lower muscle mass. And then you're in a worse situation because you have a lower muscle mass. So you could eat literally the same amount of calories as you were before you lost weight and gain weight because your metabolism was messed up.

What if they exercise using resistance training to offset that? I personally think it should be illegal to prescribe these drugs unless they're combined with a nutrition consult to educate people about their protein requirements that are increased and with an exercise or a trainer, a physiology or a trainer to help them develop a strength training program. And then I'd be more okay with it. And I think doses also, do we need the doses that people are prescribed through pharmacologically approved drugs, or there's a whole black market of GLP-1 peptides you can buy for 20 bucks a month,

not 16 or 17 hundred bucks a month. People are starting to discover those. They're very inexpensive. They're very inexpensive. And you know, you have to know what you're doing and you have to probably get the guidance of the physician. And there are doctors who do prescribe these sort of subpharmacologic doses that are being given and they work and they work, and they can be a useful tool,

but they're a tool like anything else. And I was mentioning my nonprofit Food Fix, the woman who's working with us there lost 112 pounds in the last few years working with me without GLP-1s. I've had literally probably dozens and dozens and dozens of patients who've lost 100 pounds or more without these drugs and naturally keep their weight off and regulate their appetite when they understand how to

use food as medicine to regulate their hormones, their peptides, their brain chemistry, their microbiome, all of which regulate our appetite and weight. So there's ways to do it. It's harder and some people are stuck, and I'm not opposed to using these drugs, but we have to understand they come with risks and they have increased risk of bowel obstruction, increased risk of pancreatitis, increased risk of potentially thyroid issues, of kidney issues. I think people need to, if they're monitoring their cells, fine, you should get a DEXA scan before and during and after.

You should be checking your kidney function tests and your amylase and your lipase because it can cause pancreatitis. You should be checking what happens to your other hormones and what happens to your liver function tests which can amylase and your lipase, because it can cause pancreatitis, you'd be checking what happens to your other hormones and to happens to your liver function tests, which can be affected by these drugs. And the longer you take them, the more the side effects are. So for example, initially we're seeing very little data and then the data started coming in.

And for example, if you're on it for four years, your risk of bowel obstruction goes up by four and a half fold. That's by 450%. Or your risk of pancreatitis goes up by 900%. That's, you know, seems like a lot. It is a lot, but pancreatitis is a more rare condition. But it does have an adverse impact. And a lot of people have nausea, vomiting,

all kinds of other side effects that are sort of more mild, not as serious, but they come with side effects. So I think, can they be used as part of an overall strategy with nutrition counseling, exercise counseling, and integrating lower doses, and modifying the dosing regimen? Yeah, but I don't think most people need it if they understand how to change their hormones

and their brain chemistry and their biology without that. And that's the power of food as medicine. And when I say food as medicine, I'm not saying that as a sort of a general, oh, food can be healthy or not healthy. I'm saying food literally can be used as a drug, and different foods have different properties. And again, you don't use the same drug for every disease. You would prescribe different diets for different problems.

Such as? For example, if you look at the crisis in mental health in this country, we have a severe mental health crisis. And we've used ketogenic diets in neurologic conditions like epilepsy and medicine for decades. We now know, for example, that ketogenic diets can be very effective for schizophrenia, for things like autism, for Alzheimer's,

for people with bipolar disease or depression or anxiety. And this has to do with its effect of the metabolism and the way it affects our brain and our mitochondria. And I wrote a book about this ultramind solution. I say this, I've wrote a book about everything, and I pretty much have. I've written like 20 books. So it's like.

I'm impressed. I'm, you know. You're working on one, I know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's big enough to serve as a workout for lifting. No, it's not that thick, but- It doubles as a advice book and a training. It's got a lot in there.

But you have an impressive catalog of really terrific books. But Mayo Clinic just got funded over $3 million to do research on the role of ketogenic diets in serious mental illness. You mentioned Stanford has a department of metabolic psychiatry. At Harvard, they Stanford has a department of metabolic psychiatry. At Harvard, they have a similar department

of nutritional psychiatry. So this is- What about other diets? So ketogenic, a lot of people think of that as high protein. It's really more high fat, moderate protein, very low starch, right? What about for cancer and cancer avoidance?

Again, when you look at the data, cancer rates are going up, and it's because our metabolic crisis is going up, and many cancers are obesity-related. Colon cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, many, many prostate cancer, and they're driven by insulin resistance. And we know the cancer has a metabolic capacity

to only burn carbs, it can't burn fat. So if you stop carbs and you eat fat, you can often change the trajectory of cancer. Is that true for all cancers? Are there any cancers that react negatively? Yeah, I don't think that's true for all cancer. For certain lymphomas, I probably don't think it is. But Siddhartha Mukherjee, I don't know if you've had him on the podcast, but he's an incredible giant in the field of medicine and brilliant scientist at Columbia who was

actually an oncologist who wrote a book called The Emperor Ball Maladies. Oh yeah. He wrote that book? Yeah, he wrote that book. He wrote The Cell, he wrote The Gene. That was a book about cancer. Yeah, yeah. He wrote a book called The Gene, The Cell. He talks about his research on ketogenic diets for reversing stage four melanoma and stage

four pancreatic cancer. Very impressive stuff. You probably couldn't like it. Well, I remember The Emperor of All Maladies. I read that and I read the Eight-Day Creation in the same, roughly the same time period, both were super impressive books. I didn't realize he was involved in a ketogenic diet.

Yeah, but there's a whole metabolic theory of cancer. So I think that's key. And certain cancers like brain cancer responds incredibly well. If you have a glioblastoma, which there's really no treatment for, it can be very effective. Yeah, I'll tell you, having lost some friends to cancer,

pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma are the two, I mean, I don't want any cancer, but those are the two I really don't want to get. These are all super important topics. It seems to come back over and over again to these pillars of health, food, circadian rhythm, meaning sleep-wake cycles. Obviously the last 50 years in this country

were characterized by like smoke less or don't smoke. We now know alcohol is problematic for cancers and other things. Not to say that one can't enjoy a drink every once in a while, but I don't personally drink, but I don't have a propensity for alcohol either. So it's easy for me to say, I've had to become a little bit softer on my stance on this

because I think like, if you told me that caffeine was bad, I'd tell you I'm drinking it. I'd say, how long do I have? Yeah. It's like Warren Buffett. He says, I don't care if I eat this shit. It makes me live a couple of years less. I'm still going to do it. Right. So, you know, some people like a drink now and again, and I'm, I sure I would say do as you do as you want, but know what you're doing. But I'd like to talk a little bit about markers that are an outgrowth of this conversation about food, so blood markers.

So ApoB is one that gets a lot of attention nowadays. For years, all we heard was you want your HDL high, you want your LDL low. Now we also realize that elevated APOB can be problematic. And I and many people I know who eat some meat, it's not meat heavy diet, but some good quality meat, we're not talking about deli meats and things like that, fruit, vegetables and limit starchy carbohydrate intake

to some extent, maybe not completely, but to some extent, have observed elevated APOB when we do that, including olive oil, butter, coffee, or bramate, this kind of thing. So healthy diet, largely anti-inflammatory diet, noticed elevated APOB as compared to when some of that red meat, even if it's grass-fed meat, is replaced with things like fish

or chicken and so on, which makes me wonder if there really is a red meat, again, quality red meat, ApoB link. And should I worry if my ApoB is elevated? My ApoB is a little bit elevated, but I haven't yet gone on any prescription drug to lower it. I'm taking some other approaches. Yeah. It's a great question.

And I learned that from function and yes, they're the sponsor of this podcast, but I hadn't had an APOB test and that was the problem. I go to the doctor, I get a blood panel and it didn't include APOB. You got like your 19 tests and they have the same old stuff and you get your regular cholesterol. It was like high weight, you know.

I mean, the regular cholesterol panel is what most doctors use to manage cardiovascular risk, which is your total, your LDL, HDL, and triglyceride levels. That's just like so 20th century. The way we look at cardiovascular risk now is way more complicated, and we need to look at the quality of the cholesterol, which is the particle size and number. And we were talking earlier about sugar and starch and some resistance. Insulin resistance is essentially a metabolic state where your body can't respond like it

normally should to insulin and you need more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. That has secondary consequences, which causes your cholesterol to become abnormal. So it may not raise your LDL per se, but it'll lower your good cholesterol, triglycerides, or HDL, which there's good and bad HDL, so it's a little more complicated than that. But it'll raise your triglycerides, and it will raise your APOB. It'll raise your particle number of LDL particles, and it'll make the size of those particles small.

These are all things that people should be testing. Do all these biomarkers, including APL-B. But APL-B, all you can get is an APL-B from your doctor. Even the American Heart Association recognizes this as a better predictor of your risk of having a heart attack than your LDL cholesterol. And yet they're trying to include soda. Sorry, had to go back to it.

I know. And the way I think about, the way I think about APL-B, because there's really cool tests now. You can use mass spec to look at C-peptide and insulin to look at your insulin resistance, which is really cool. But if you can't get that, you can ask your doctor for an APO-B, because it's sort of a surrogate marker for every non-good type of cholesterol particle. Does that make sense?

So what do you advise somebody if they're APO-B? Is 90 or above? Yeah. So you can test yourself. Everybody's the in the one. So the next thing I was gonna say was that we treat all lipids as sort of a uniform approach, which is everybody should drive their LDL over 70.

That- Under 70. Under 70, that's what cardiovascular recommendations are. How do you do that? Exercise, nutrition. Can be diet, can be exercise, can be drugs. Are you a fan of statins? Not a big fan, but they're a tool. can be drugs. Are you a fan of statins? Not a big fan, but they're a tool. It's like, am I a fan of hammers?

Well, yeah, when I need one. But not for everybody. I think the key thing to understand is that if you're looking at your cardiovascular risk, you have to look at the quality of these cholesterol particles. There's also a large amount of variation or heterogeneity in the population in the response to the exact same food. And I'll just tell you a quick story. I had one patient, she was overweight, couldn't lose weight, pre-diabetic, inflamed, and she

was really struggling. And I said, well, look, let's try a ketogenic diet. There's good data on it. Let's see what happens. Her cholesterol dropped 100 points. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. Her HDL went up 30 points. She lost 20 pounds.

She felt great. Her inflammation levels normalized. She did great. Another guy heard about a ketogenic diet, who was in his 50s, one of my patients, elite athlete, was like riding his bike 50 miles a day, he was in his mid 50s, super fit, thin, lean. He said, I wanna try it.

I heard it's good for performance. I'm like, okay, but let's monitor your numbers. And we did, and the opposite happened. His total cholesterol went through the roof, his LDL went through the roof, his particle number went up through the roof. I'm like, wow, same diet, different response. I've talked to Ron Krauss about this.

He's from Oakland. You might know about him. He discovered the particle size concept. He basically used MRI machines and now he's got a different technology which measures the quality and the number of your cholesterol particles, not just the weight of them, which is what you get with a regular test. And so we saw this variation and we realize now in the population it depends on who you are.

So there's a whole category of people called lean mass hyper responders. You're maybe one of those where you're fit, you're healthy, you're athletic, and you eat saturated fat and boom, your numbers kind of go wacky. Or you could be an overweight diabetic person and they do the opposite, like you'll lower your LDL like this woman. So it depends on your metabolic type, on your level of insulin resistance, on your overall health and people can switch over. So let's say you're an overweight diabetic and you become ripped and healthy and fit,

then the same food might have an opposite effect on you at that point. And it all has to do with cholesterol transport, cholesterol synthesis in the liver. It's kind of a little complicated scientifically. I know you might have a guy named Nick Norwitz from Harvard on the podcast who's great. He can talk about this all day long. Nick has great online content. Folks should check out Nick Norwitz's ex and Instagram handle. He's a very smart kid.

Very smart kid, very spirited. I've encouraged him from the first time I saw his content to keep going. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, he's like he's an Oxford PhD in metabolism. Harvard. He's got a Harvard MD. He's graduating medical school this year. And he's not afraid to go against the grain.

No. He just goes with his experience and the data. Yeah, and you're speaking about different types of people. He had colitis and almost died. He went on a carnivore slash keto diet and actually ended up curing it and is fit and healthy now, right? But his cholesterol, his LDL went up to five hundred percent. He's got a lot of cholesterol.

He's got a lot of cholesterol. He's got a lot of cholesterol. He's got a lot of cholesterol. He's got a lot of cholesterol. He's got a lot of cholesterol. He's got a lot of cholesterol. He's got a lot of cholesterol. He went on a carnivore slash keto diet and actually ended up curing it and is fit and healthy now, right? But his cholesterol, his LDL went up to 500. Is that where it sits now? Yeah.

And so there's a whole group of these people that have LDLs that are through the roof who would make most cardiologists have a heart attack just looking at the number. So what do we do? Let's say someone takes a ApoB test. What we do. Or from their doctor and they've got an ApoB, let's like 110. What do we do? Let's say someone takes a APOB test, what we do, or from their doctor,

and they've got an APOB that's like 110. What do you do? Well, the NIH basically is great. They now said that the N of 1 research is among the highest quality research. And what that means is you compared to you, right? I don't want to compare myself to a 70 kilogram white male from Kansas

or some five foot tall woman from like, I don't know, like Afghanistan, like we're all different. And so we need to see what happens to our biology. That's why I believe tests don't guess and do something, follow it up and track it. You know, track it. How often? Depends on what you're doing.

Lipids change very quickly. Typical person. Lipids can change within a month. So I'd give people a month of changing a diet or changing a lifestyle or behavior to see what happens. Vitamin D can take longer. If you're low, it can take up to three months to rebuild. If your iron is low, it can take three months

to rebuild your iron. So it depends on the test, but you can quickly see changes in your insulin resistance, in your insulin levels, in your blood sugar levels, in your lipid levels by changing diet. But you have to be systematic, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had a patient who was,

I have a program called the 10 Day Detox Diet, which essentially is a whole foods diet which eliminates a lot of the inflammatory foods that are problematic for people and it creates an incredible quick response. It's like, I call it setting your body back to its original factory settings. And she was like, I wanna check my blood after 10 days.

I'm like, no, it's going to be a waste of money. We shouldn't do it. Your numbers aren't going to change that much. But she insisted. And I was like, OK. And she did. And the numbers just dramatically changed. Her lipids, her insulin, her blood sugar, inflammation levels.

So the body is like a, you change the inputs and the outputs change dramatically. So I think it's really about finding out what's going on for you. So Angie, I'd say, well, try to go off of me and see what happens to your APOB or try to add more this kind of fat. I started eating more tuna and eating a little bit less beef and then I did a function test and I discovered my mercury was elevated.

By the way, I learned something the hard way also a few years prior to that, which is, I know this sounds crazy, but check your dishwasher. Some of them have mercury thermometers that are leaky. Now, I was told the mercury from the mercury thermometers in dishwashers is biologically inert, but I'll tell you, it's not pleasant to see a bunch of little mercury beads

floating around on your dishes. Considering it's the most potent toxin known to humans other than plutonium, I would probably avoid all forms of mercury. So do you eat tuna? Rarely. Oh, I love tuna sushi. And Raleigh. Okay.

But I actually have little hacks where you can take a chelating drug after you go to a sushi restaurant. Like what? DMSA, it's FDA-approved drug for heavy metal chelation. Prescription? Prescription, yeah. DMSA? Yeah.

Okay, what dosage? Depends, you can do like 500 milligrams or 200. You'll take that after you go out to sushi? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a doctor hack I can do where you can ask your doctor for it. I don't recommend it, it's like, you know. Well, as long as we're on this, let's talk, I love the range of topics

we're touching into today, by the way. By the way, I almost died from mercury poisoning, so I know how to manage it, how my body works. I've checked my genes and why I don't detox. This is from the China. Yeah, I know how to upregulate my detox pathways through food, through supplements. Are you a fan of sulforaphane?

When I did the episode on microplastics and PFASs, I started taking sulforaphane and increasing my cruciferous vegetable intake. Upregulates glutathione, which is the body's main detoxifying compound. So do you also take N-acetylcysteine? I do. Daily? Daily, yeah.

How much? 600. 600 milligrams? Yeah. Okay, I'll do three or four times that if I feel a cold coming on, but I don't take it daily. I should probably take it daily. Well, considering we live in a toxic soup, I mean, we just can't get away from it. In the air, in the water, in the food.

So, so, for a thing, and acetylcysteine, we already talked about the omegas and the basics, magnesium, et cetera. What are some things that, when people start to hit their 40s, 50s, 60s, that you think they should add in for their health? And is there anything female specific or male specific? For sure.

I mean, you know, what's really frightening Andrew is that because of the diet we have, which is hormonally regulating, sugar and starch tend to screw up in both men's and women's hormones. It makes women more like men and men more like women. So you get PCOS in women, which is hair growth on your face, loss of hair on your head, and endocrine.

It's androgen. Yeah. And then for men, their testosterone goes down. The bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone. So when you eat starch or sugar, you get belly fat. So I mean, young men have low testosterone. I would have said, if you asked me 20 years ago, I would have said, well, you know,

you start checking in your 40s and seeing the changes that happen, but now I think we gotta start looking earlier. And a lot of guys are getting on TRT Young. I'm on a bit of a campaign now to discourage that. Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea. I think that if they're doing everything right, like eating right and exercising,

and that doesn't mean over-exercising. If you over train, like you're running, running, running your testosterone, it's going to be diminished for sure. But encouraging them to do everything they can with behaviors and include nutrition and some supplementation before getting on TRT because of the reduction in sperm count

that comes from TRT, unless you offset it with HCG. So, you know, I've said before in the podcast, I take 25 milligrams of sippionate every other day, staggered with HCG, 600 IU every other day. I've been open about that for, from the beginning, but I started at age 45. And I do free sperm every year, just because there's some age related effects on sperm and like, why not? It's very inexpensive to cryopreserve. But I think young guys are, it's scary that their testosterone

is so low. So low, yeah. Especially if they're not overweight. So what's going on? Well, also there's endocrine disrupting chemicals. So her heavy metals, pesticides, a lot of these are what we call xenobiotics, meaning they're foreign kind of compounds that are biologically active.

And there's a whole book on this that I read almost 30 years ago called Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn, which lays out, it was kind of like the Rachel Carson silent spring version of a few years ago, which talked about the reproductive effects of these petrochemical toxins that are everywhere in our food and our water and our air. And they affect fertility rates,

they affect birth rates in terms of male and female. Shana Swan was on this podcast and gosh, if it wasn't for her and her incredible work and the fact that she's such a skeptic of any data that I don't think people would respect the data on pesticides as much as they knew, because I think it took somebody with her kind of front-facing image to, you know,

she's not, like, she talks a lot about the environmental working group and the real hardcore science types are like, oh, they're anti-environmental working group. I was shocked to learn that a lot of people in the scientific community are like anti-environmental working group. I thought, how could that possibly be? They call it woo science. I mean, the politics and all this

are really complicated, but what do you do to remove heavy metals? Just to answer your question about what you should be testing. I think most people should be testing, depending on where you are and what age you are, but your hormonal panels on a regular basis. So sex hormones, hormonal panels and a regular basis. So sex hormones, uh, male would be free testosterone, total testosterone, estradiol, D H T as well. D H G A, D H T. Sometimes we have hair loss that can be treated for men, for women. Same thing.

They need, you know, F S H L H, uh, sex hormones, I guess, for dial, progesterone testosterone for women as well. D H A sulfate, which can be an indicator of PCOS. And we are seeing with our function, it could be about 150,000 members now. We have literally 10s. 150,000. 150,000.

We have tens of millions of biological data points. And we can see anonymized data showing the trends in the population, and it's not good. And then the good news is you can do something about it. Can insurance cover a blood test like functions? Yes, if you get your health savings account or your FSAs, you can use those for Function health testing. But if you don't have that and you can't use that,

regular insurance doesn't cover it yet. I'm hoping we're gonna change that. Yeah, is that in the cards? That's in the roadmap for sure. Because once we can prove that we create value, and we're seeing this, when people use function, they get their lab tests done, and then we follow them for every six months,

and we can see the changes in the biomarkers toward the positive, how many people go from abnormal to normal. And it's not just by knowing their tests. There's tens of thousands of pages of content that have been highly curated and scientifically referenced on what to do if you have this or that normal biomarker. So you ask me, what do I do for mercury?

If you get a positive mercury and you double clicked on that, you would get a very deep analysis of what you need to do. Here's the way to reduce your exposures through your water and air. Here's how you reduce your exposure to food by reducing these kinds of fish, eating more of these kinds of fish.

Are you a fan of using charcoal as a chelator? I don't think charcoal's great for heavy metals, no. I think it's good for binding anything. So we use it. How does one take charcoal? I've been a little bit cautious about taking charcoal. You can take it as capsules. When I was in the ER though, we used to use it

if people came with a drug overdose. We'd make them drink a cup of charcoal, literally. Their teeth would turn black, it was awful. So if I- You try to kill yourself, then it's punishment for trying to kill yourself. So. This is gallows humor that only a physician

could laugh at. I know another physician and they all have this gallows humor. I think it's a survival tactic. You have to, you have to, because you're like in situations which would make you otherwise go crazy. Let's say I want to remove some heavy metals

and toxins from the body. I could take a charcoal tablet. No, you can take a tablet, but I wouldn't do that. What I would say is one, reduce your exposures, number one, eating tuna, big fish, it's basically, the bigger the fish, the more the mercury. I don't eat much tuna anymore.

So small fish, I call it the smashers, small wild salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines and herring, all your favorite fish. All your favorite fish. But is favorite fish. I hate all those. But is there anything I can take? So here's what I would do. I would, you know, there's a, I don't have any relationship with this company.

It's called SeaTopia.fish. It sources fish around the world from regeneratively. Oh yeah, I've seen their stuff. Regenerative fish farms. So it's farmed, but it's healthy. And it doesn't have all the heavy metals, and you can get good fish. There are some small tuna farms that are like smaller tunas where they actually do this too,

but they don't source from there. Second is I would upregulate all of your endogenous detox pathways. So this, your body has a system of elimination and doctors say detox is bullshit. Baloney, you poop, you pee, you sweat. You sweat. Like this is your, your liver has a whole series of pathways that are detoxification pathways, your kidney does, your gut does. I mean, this is what your body does, right? Your poop, pee, sweat, you know, all these things.

So you have to up regular body's own system. So you need to take foods that up regular liver. You mentioned eating more crisp surface vegetables. You could add more garlic. You could actually juice cilantro. It's a great hack for getting rid of heavy metals. Really? Yeah, it doesn't taste very good.

I like cilantro. But juicing a couple of bunches of that every day will help bring it down. And then there are things like fiber to help bind it. So you talk about charcoal, that's a binder. But just eating a higher fiber diet will help you eliminate things faster through your colon, like heavy metals.

And then believe in in gut cleanses. There's this, this, I'll want to just talk about it. There's this fermented plum product. Bosham. Maybe no, it comes in a beautiful packaging like this orange and black packaging. It's a fermented plum or pomelo that a friend of mine said, listen, you have to stay home the next day, but you take this before you go to sleep,

you drink like 16 ounces of water, you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, and you're not going anywhere that day except a few trips to the bathroom, but it completely empties your digestive tract. Well, then you can get a colonoscopy and get that too through the prep. Yeah, no.

So it's not something that I, well, I tried it because I was like, all right, I'll give this a try. Is it healthy or unhealthy or neutral to do a complete digestive tract emptying? I mean, I think it depends how you do it and what's causing it, like, you know, but it can disrupt your gut flora. So your gut will really repopulate often

with the flora that it had. But part of the reason we're so sick is our gut flora is so harmed by C-sections, antibiotics, lack of breastfeeding. The infant formula itself is a microbiome harmful compound for many reasons, not saying women shouldn't use formula, but there's better formulas and worse formulas. And so we kind of like had a lot of gut

issues. We've taken antibiotics, we've eaten food that's harmful to our microbiome, we're exposed to toxins. So somebody might want to flush their system. I think it can be helpful. And for example, we do this, for example, if people have liver failure and you're an alcoholic and you have liver failure, now liver failure comes mostly from eating sugar and starch. They changed the name by the way from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to metabolic associated fatty liver disease, which is just kind of... And so those people, if they come in with liver failure, they get crazy. Literally, it's called hepatic encephalopathy. You get delirium, they are seeing things, they literally go nuts.

The treatment, you give them a sterilizing antibiotics, you kill everything in their gut called neomycin, and then you give them lactulose, which makes you poop your brains out. And then they basically flush all that out, and all the toxins that you can't metabolize from your microbiome get flushed out, and you come back to normal cognition. And it's a standard medical treatment. It's like basically what you learn in medical school. Wow. So there is an argument, and I've done this with autistic kids who've had gut issues

with certain different issues. Parkinson's, if you're constipated, goes up by, your risk goes up by 400%. And that's a toxin-related neurological disease. Well, this thing is a hammer. But have you ever? It was sort of given to me as a joke. And I thought, all right, well,

this is going to be no big deal. You're going to be fine. Don't worry. Yeah. I only did it twice on separate occasions. And I was like, okay, that wasn't super pleasant, but I just want to know, is it a valuable tool? And I wasn't interested in taking a drug and it's like this fermented fruit or something like that. I did hear that from a colleague at Yale who studies the microbiome that if we fast or if we evacuate our digestive tract in kind of an aggressive way like that, that the healthy microbiome needs some time

to replenish itself. It does, that's right. It's not like you, like when you fast, you start eating away at the unhealthy and healthy microbiota or they aren't fed. And so it's not across the board a good thing necessarily. Yeah. So you want to be careful of that.

But I think in terms of answering your question about metals, so you want to upregulate your – you reduce your exposure, you want to upregulate your pathways by food, and then you can upregulate the pathways by nutrients. So we talked about N-acetylcysteine. So anything that boosts glutathione like poic acid, all the methylated B vitamins, B12, folate, B6, making sure you have enough protein. Cause a lot of the phase two pathways in your liver that help you detoxify are dependent on amino acids like

Euclidionidation and glutathione. It's, it's a, an important detoxifying compound and you want to, you want to basically open up all the pathways to get rid of. So I have a very specific detox protocol for heavy metals, includes all that and sometimes DMSA and binders. But I use silica, I use alginates from seaweed and others. I don't use charcoal for that.

But you can safely remove metals from your body. That's what happened to me. I was able to do it and I'm not demented anymore. I don't have chronic fatigue syndrome. If you look at pictures of me in my 30s, you're like, wow, you look terrible. Well, I met you demented anymore. I don't have chronic fatigue syndrome. And if you look at pictures of me in my 30s, you're like, wow, you look terrible. Well, I met you 10 years ago. Yeah.

And you truly have aged backwards. And you look great then. You look super vibrant then. You have a ton of energy. I mean, I think you embody a lot of the things that people would like for healthy aging. And I know you also exercise and you do all the things. I'd like to talk about some of the kind of more

cutting edge things that are happening that I've not tried but that I'm curious about. And you wanna know if I've done them or not? Well, or maybe, or just what we're- I've tried everything pretty much. Actually something I have tried but that I'm not an expert on but we've done a couple of podcasts about

but I'd like your thoughts on peptides. What are some of the peptides that you think can be useful to people if they can afford them and work with a doctor where they can get it safely? Let's just assume all that. What are the peptides that you think are of real value to people who aren't really sick but are doing everything they can? Optimization. Yeah, optimization and just generally trying to point all the boats in the direction of

health. Yeah. And it depends on what your needs are, what's happening with your health and like anything you're using, it should be used for a purpose, right? And peptides are simply mini proteins that have biological effects. And I think of them as your body's super high way of information and connectivity that drives everything. So they regulate your sex hormones, your growth hormone, your metabolic health, nerve function, I mean sexual desire.

I mean there's a million peptides, like GLP-1 is a peptide, insulin is a peptide, right? So there are tens of thousands of peptides that are made by the body that are used to regulate everything. And so there's a number of them that have been available that have been studied well. There are tens of thousands of peptides that are made by the body that are used to regulate everything. And so there's a number of them that have been available that have been studied well. Some of them are on the market like, you know, Ozempic or insulin or bilisi, which is something called PT-141. It's for hyposexual women, right?

Yeah, for women. But you guys are for men. It works for... But it's FDA approved for women. It's FDA approved for women. Yeah. It works for men too. Is it kisspeptin?

Is that what it is? No, it's not kisspeptin. It's FDA approved for women. It works for men too. Is it kiss pepton? Is that what it is? No, it's not kiss pepton. It's, I'm gonna butcher the name, it's like, it starts with a B, blemina of the tide or something like that. And it does make you nauseous, so you need to take,

actually be careful, you don't wanna throw up while you're having sex. Definitely not. Not too sexy, but it does work. But there's a number of, depending on your needs, for example, if you're athletic and you're in the gym a lot, you want to increase recovery and repair, there's peptides like BPC157 and TB500 and GHK that are regulatory peptides for tissue repair and healing. There are peptides that you can use for immune function like thymus and alpha 1, which is

great if you're getting a cold or you have an immune issue or you have COVID or... What's the pathway for thymus and alpha? We don't have to go through every biochemical step, but is the logic there that you're increasing the number of T cells and B cells? Yeah. So basically, when you're born, you have a giant thymus gland, which takes up your whole chest. And as you look at a baby, just take a Google image and put it up there.

Basically, your whole sternum, it's this big. But it involutes or shrinks as you get older, and it becomes smaller. But it's still a source of your immune function, and it helps with building your immune resilience. And as we age, it gets worse and worse. And so the thymus alpha one does increase your white blood cell function and number

and it helps improve that. Then there's peptides that are like a great, like PT-141 for sexual function. There's peptides like kissa-peptide that increases testosterone. There's ones like ipamorlin, intestamorlin that may help growth hormone. There's- Do you take it, you intestinal that it may help growth hormone this do you take it?

You don't have to share what you take but do you? Think any of these are kind of mainstays for people over 40 if they can afford them some of them I think but you had to be careful because they're there. They're they're not like just taking a vitamin I mean if you take an overdose of vitamin D Yeah, you get in trouble or if you have other fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A in trouble most water soluble vitamins You're not gonna get in trouble although beef six you have other fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A, you'll get in trouble. Most water-soluble vitamins, you're not going to get in trouble. Although B6, you have to be careful with in overdose. And magnesium, if you take too much of it, you just poop your brains out. And vitamin C, the same thing.

So your body can manage. But peptides are very powerful compounds. I mean, look at Ozempic. I mean, look at insulin. I mean, these are very powerful compounds. Not to be messed around with. No. So you really need someone who's educated in it well, and they should be

usually a doctor or some licensed professional who has studied and understands this. And they should be used with monitoring to the side effects, the effects on your lab work and hormones. What about cycling them? Yeah. So you don't want to necessarily always take them all the time. And you want to do cycle them, particularly ones that stimulate things like growth hormone. You don't want to be on that all the time. I worry about BPC one five seven because in my experience it is effective at treating, uh, minor injuries and things like that. But people now just take it continuously and it increases angiogenesis growth of capillaries and vessels and things like that.

And if you have a tumor, you do not want to increase angiogenesis to the tumor. You just wouldn't know if that was happening. There's no way to know until that tumor starts creating problems. Right. Although that's another thing, cancer screening. It's so antiquated, right? We do such poor jobs of cancer screening with a colonoscopy, a Pap test, a mammogram. What's a better cancer screen?

There's a new technology that has been developed using fragments of DNA that are released into the bloodstream from cancers way before it ever shows up on a scan or an imaging, which you can pick up cancers a year, two or three before they ever show up on any kind of other test and it's called Galleri. It screens 50 of the most common cancers, many of which there's no screening test for, and the false positive rate, which is what you worry about, is very low, like half a percent. That means it shows you have a cancer when you actually don't, which can be very terrifying.

It's about 75% accurate in finding the cancer early if you find it. And it's great. I mean, we've picked up so many people with issues. One in 188 of our members who've tested with this test have a cancer that they wouldn't have known about otherwise, and they can catch it in early stage before it kills you. The pushback on this early detection was surprising to me. Not this one in particular, but like a few years ago, I paid for a Pranovo scan.

Yeah, yeah. Then I started seeing some of the pushback on whole body MRIs from people in the standard medical community. So I asked my good friend, a neurosurgeon at UCSF, Eddie Chang, I said, hey, what do you think of these whole body scans? And he said, I get people coming in all the time

who have identified brain tumors and aneurysms and issues that they were completely unaware of that they would probably be dead in the next five to 10 years. And by the way, I don't get paid by Pranovo. I don't have any deal with Pranovo or any other of these whole body imaging things. And I realized there's a cost.

So I think the implication is from the people that give pushback like, oh, these things are expensive and we're gonna kind of push back on them as a tool because we don't want people to feel badly if they can't get them. We don't want to make it. They're gonna become commoditized. They're gonna become cheap. Just like we're able to get like $15,000 on a test for 499, we're gonna want people to feel badly if they can't get them. We don't want to make it. They're going to become commoditized. They're going to become cheap.

Just like we're able to get like $15,000 long-term test for 499, we're going to be able to get a whole body's game for 300 bucks. It's happening. It's not, it doesn't have to be 3000 bucks. So that's coming. And I think we're going to lean into that and function in the future. But it's really important to understand that you want data on your body as much as you can have and as much as you can afford. And the healthcare system should pay for it,

and they don't, because they don't understand the value of this because they don't see the benefit as the people transfer insurance companies so regularly and jobs so regularly that they figure, oh, if I invest in somebody's health, then the next guy's gonna get the benefit. If I'm United, then Aetna will get the benefit or Sigma will get the benefit.

And it's kind of like a, it's a perverse incentive system. But I think data-driven healthcare is the future. Really imagine a place where you can have all your personal health data. And this is where we're going, where you can have all your biomarker testing, where you can have all your wearable data, your full genome, your microbiome, all imaging data, not just the whole body scan but looking at your body composition, looking at AI heart scans that tell how much plaque you have and much more with your medical history, with all the world's scientific literature

informing it, with knowledge experts also overlaying their knowledge and expertise onto it in a platform that allows you to query it. So think about like an AI chat bot that's just based on you. Like it's your data. And what now in medicine is so amazing is we try to like make diagnoses and understand what's going on in people with such limited data sets. About them. About them. They're so antiquated. And so you've got guys like Lee Hood, who's literally measuring thousands and thousands of data points on patients, and he's using his project called the Phenome Project,

I think it's called Phenome Health, where he's being able to say, oh geez, I can detect this from a few molecules in the blood, I can see what's going on with your microbiome, or a few molecules in your blood, I can see if you're gonna be at risk for Alzheimer's. And now we offer this for, you think there was no test for Alzheimer's, right?

You had to do a brain biopsy or you had to wait till you got, you know, you forget your name of this or that or the other thing. And now we can through blood testing, look for things like P Tau 217 and amyloid 4240 made amyloid 4240 ratios. Can you do in response to that? Let's say somebody is a good question. That's a great question. I mean, Alzheimer's is a tough one.

I followed this field for a long time. I had people working in the bench right across from me as a postdoc. There have been so many hypotheses, not just the plaques and tangles thing, not just the beta amyloid hypothesis, but I'll tell you, my friends who are neurologists are not optimistic.

They're not, but they're not looking at the problem the right way, right? It's sort of like the blind man and the elephant. They're looking at their one thing and they don't see an answer. But you guys, guys like Richard Isaacson, who was at Cornell and now he's in Florida, who if you haven't had on your podcast, you should, who's a neurologist studying Alzheimer's and looking at deep diagnostics and personalized approaches to address the root causes and seeing remarkable outcome reversals.

He had a special on, I think CNN with Sanjay Gupta, where they literally showed that you can take these biomarkers and you find them early enough, you can intervene. And again, I've done this with dozens of patients who had dementia who were able to stop or reverse it. I have more- With diet?

Not just diet, it's everything. So Alzheimer's is, it's like saying, it's like just saying you can't remember stuff. Like, you know, we have all these fancy names we give to diseases and then we say, oh, I know why you can't remember things. You have Alzheimer's. No, Alzheimer's is the name we give to people

who can't remember things. It's a certain specific type of problem. It's a constellation of issues. But then the question is what causes it? And there are multiple causes. It's called type two diabetes, type three diabetes of the brain, or it's caused by insulin resistance.

We know diabetics have four times the rate of Alzheimer's. It could be caused by environmental toxins like heavy metals. It could be caused by mold, or it could be caused by Lyme disease like Chris Christopherson had, or it could be caused by change in the microbiome or by nutritional deficiencies. I had one woman who was diagnosed with early dementia and she was older, brilliant woman,

but was starting to lose it. Turned out she had severe methylation issues and B vitamin deficiency and Foley deficiency and I treated her with a vitamin B12 shot and some B vitamins and she came right back. So It's a multi again multi causal Multimodal treatments you got to figure out all the causes and you got to treat all the problems If someone has mercury issues and mold issues and they have Lyme disease and they have gut issues and they have Prediabetes and they have methylation issues. You got to treat all those things And then you can see real change in people's biomarkers. Ketogenic dyes have been affected,

but it's not like a keto diet will fix everybody with Alzheimer's, or that chelation will fix everybody with Alzheimer's, or that fixing their diabetes will fix everybody with Alzheimer's. You have to find all the things and treat all the things. Like if your roof has 30 holes in it, and you plug 25 of them and it rains,

it's still gonna get wet in your house. And that's the opposite of how medicine's practiced. And I ran into this at Cleveland Clinic and we were trying to study Alzheimer's and we had a guy who really wanted to look at the black box of functional medicine. People come in, you do personalized care, out the other side, what happens?

And the head of science there was like, no, no, we can't do that. We can only study one thing at a time. Vitamin D, we'll do that study. Then we'll do fish oil study. Then we'll do diet study. Then we'll do exercise study. then we'll do fish oil study, then we'll do diet study, then we'll do exercise study, then we'll do whatever study.

I'm like, that's not how the body works. You need, you know, if you wanna grow a plant, you can't just say I'm just gonna give it water and soil but no light, or I'm gonna give it light but no soil, or you know, like, it just doesn't make sense. So. The whole context.

Yeah, functional medicine is really about understanding this model and how do you apply it in a personalized way. And Richard Isaacs has done it, Dale Bredesen's done it, and their results are amazing. And I personally have seen this in my patients where they either stop progressing or they reverse it. Now sometimes they do progress and it's hard,

but I've had patients who've done incredible for years and years and years. Well, about a year ago, somebody who's probably one of the finest cardiologists in North America contacted me of all people and asked, what do I know about ketogenic diet for the treatment of Alzheimer's? And I said, I've known him since I was a kid

because he had a family friend, a phenomenal cardiologist. And I said, this is an odd moment because I remember years ago, I said I was going to go into neuroscience and he said, why would you go into neuroscience? Like there's nothing to the, like neuroscience is a ridiculous field. Why would you do that?

I think he- The joke about neurologists is you diagnose an adios. Like there's nothing to do. You could do a diagnosing problem, but you can't do anything about it. So exactly to that point. So, but he was very curious because his father had Alzheimer's and he was exploring the ketogenic diet

for the treatment of Alzheimer's for his dad and he was observing some really impressive results. So here's a cardiologist, among the best, asking me what I've seen about this. And I said, well, I know Dale Bredesen's work and I'm learning as I go and we will cover this on the podcast. This is very informative.

I want to make sure that we hit the other kind of cutting edge things. I'm curious if you take anything to augment NAD. I take sublingual NMN every day. I don't get paid by a company that makes NMN. I take it – the most noticeable effects that I've observed are increased energy. My hair grows super fast when I take NAD and my nails grow super fast. Those are not effects I was trying to achieve, but that's what I've observed.

Do you take NMN, NR, or do you do NAD infusions? Yeah, I do. And why? I think when you look at the data, and I wrote a book called Young Forever and talked about longevity and the pathways. When you look at the fundamental regulatory systems in the body around cellular repair, healing, renewal, regeneration. We have a built-in healing system.

Everybody understands that. If you cut your skin, you don't go, oh, would you please heal and please recruit these stem cells and read this androgenesis factors and bring cytokines over here to do the—your body knows what to do. It's not like you break a bone. It's got its own healing system. In the body, there's—I call these longevity switches. They regulate not just longevity, but they regulate chronic disease and much more.

They're embedded ancient pathways that exist from worms to humans, mTOR, MPK, sirtuins, and insulin signaling pathways. NAD in the body works to activate one of those longevity switches called sirtuins, which are involved in DNA repair. So when you get 100,000 hits a day to your DNA as it's unraveling and re-raveling and it gets damaged, you need an army to go out and fix it, right? A bunch of carpenter's kind of repair that broken DNA. NAD stimulates that.

It also stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis, forming new mitochondria, improves mitochondrial function, improves insulin sensitivity, improves mTOR induced autophagy. So there are a lot of redundancies in these pathways, but it's really quite amazing when you see how the body is organized. And so NAD is one of the things. It's not going to make you live forever or cure every disease, but it's an optimization tool because as you get older, NAD levels decline, and so your mitochondria decline, your energy declines, and it's great for all of that. So I take it and I think-

How do you get NAD? I get 1,000 milligrams of NMN. Okay. So you take that daily? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I do the sublingual N enamine and occasionally I'll get an NAD infusion, but it's so unpleasant as it goes in.

It's like you're getting stomped on by an elephant. That's true. Slowly. Gotta go slow, yeah. Slowly, but you do feel great afterwards. Exosomes. Yeah. Have you had them?

I've had them. I've given them. What are they and why would you get them? So again, the body has this amazing healing system and it's part of the body's healing system. And this whole field you're talking about, whether it's peptides, whether it's exosomes, there's NMN, it's part of this field of regenerative medicine.

How do we regenerate and heal and repair by activating our body's own built-in systems, which are way better and way stronger and work way faster than most medications, if you know how to use them. So exosomes are essentially the little packets of healing information that are inside stem cells and there's thousands of them and they get released,

think of like little kind of like, when you blow bubbles when you're a kid, it's like these little bubbles of stuff that go out into the body and then they go to where they're needed and then they release the packets of information that contain growth factors, healing factors, anti-inflammatory factors, tissue repair factors.

And that's how the body tends to repair and heal. And so I remember once I had COVID really bad. And afterwards, I've never really felt depressed. I may have been sad, obviously, my life, and lost parents, and had things happen. There were life issues. But I felt physiologically depressed. My brain felt terrible. I couldn't think. That's how I felt with COVID too. I had cognitive issues. I was like, I'm an idiot and I'm depressed and I wanna kill myself.

My higher self is like, this is not me. I took a load of exosomes, IV, I just got them, because I'm a doctor, I can get them, and I gave them to myself, and literally within hours I was resurrected. It was amazing, yeah. And I've used it for my knee, I have a meniscus injury, I've used them in my knee, I've used them in my back, so I think they can be very effective, I use them intravenously for-

Is it done in the United States? You can, you can give exosomes in the United States. So it's FDA approved? Yeah, but they're approved for skin issues or this thing. So there's like an off-label uses what they use them for. A lot of things like stem cells, you have to go out of the country to do it, and there's a regulatory issues or safety issues.

I'm still scared to do stem cells. I understand, I mean, you wanna not play with this stuff, but you also, it can be used effectively. Like my wife, for example, was a runner and she kind of tore knees up and had patella femoral syndrome and couldn't walk. And I mean, she's younger than I am and she shouldn't be feeling that like she's 80 years old in her knees. We went to Costa Rica to a very reputable center and I knew the, you know, the founders of it. I inspected the laboratory, the scientists who harvested them, who grew them, what they did,

their testing practice, I did my homework. And she ended up having no knee problems after she got her stem cells in her knees. I was like, that's amazing. And this is like, probably close to two years later. That's awesome. I mean, I've heard great things from many people. I haven't felt a need to do stem cells,

so that's why I haven't done it. But I'm curious about exosomes and been cautiously exploring the peptide space. We talked about some other supplements. Look, Mark, we've covered a ton. It was a whirlwind. I know. I'm ADD. I'm like, what are we talking about? No, no. At the same time, we talked about food as medicine. Yeah. Talked about core supplements that people really should, perhaps not even think about as supplements anymore,

but that's sort of up to the, that's in the ear of the beholder. My joke on that is this, I said, people say, do you need supplements? I'm like, no, you don't need supplements, but only under certain conditions. You drink pure, clean water, you breathe pure, clean air, you wake up with the sun, you go to bed with the sun,

you have no chronic stress, you're exposed to no environmental toxins, and you're only hunting and gathering your own wild food. If that's you, you don't need any supplements. And it's the 1930s. Right. So yeah, things like D3, omegas, I like that answer. Magnesium, selenium, iodine, you made a case for table salt in addition to all the fancy salts that we all enjoy. Or just having seaweed and fish, you know. Seaweed and fish, but not tuna. And thank you for touching on error and lack of cleanliness in the air,

heavy metal poisoning, things to be cautious about there as ways to detox and for illustrating that detoxification is possible through known pathways, that anti-aging, longevity, whatever you want to call it, and bodily repair pathways are inherent in us, and so we can encourage them. Yeah.

And I also really want to thank you for being willing to wade into the- Swamp. The swamp that is the public health debate right now, but especially the corner of the swamp that is, for lack of a better way to put it, the big food FDA relationship and what you and Bobby Kennedy and others, I hope they will recruit from the left.

I know Cory Booker has been actively involved in this. He's on the left, clearly, and trying to clean up the food supply, give people options. What I heard is that it's not about forcing things, but it's about giving people options and knowledge. Transparency, education. So, like I really appreciate you

and the entire population of people that care about their health, whether they realize it or not, they appreciate you because you're a real pioneer in this field and you've touched some really challenging waters. And I happen to know, and I feel very good saying that it is your inherent good nature, I think that's allowed you to go through one swamp

after another, after the other, with your optimism and your kindness of spirit intact. So thanks, you're a real role model to everyone who cares about their health and who's trying to help others care about their health. Yeah, I'm a pathological optimist. But the good news is optimists live longer, even if they're wrong. I was thinking about this the other day, I

met your new dog. Oh yeah, Lenny. Forgive me for saying this, but Lenny's got a great attitude. You know what my first thought was? It's kind of like Mark. He like came in, he crawled up on my lap, although you didn't crawl up on my lap.

I just want to make the point that he has no stranger danger. Yeah. He was very, but he's a really wonderful and beautiful dog, by the way, he's an impressive dog. And you just have that good nature about you. And I know you want the best for people. I just don't like people suffering when they don't need to.

I feel like I'm having a glass of water, they're thirsty, and there's a giant glass wall between us. And that's why I've been working my whole life to kind of get the message out about how people can heal, whether it's on their own or whether through my books or through a free education, my podcast, like your stuff. I mean, it's a public service because people are suffering and they don't need to. I feel that.

I know everyone listening feels that. And thank you for everything that you've done and again, for being such a pioneer and keep going. Thanks. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Mark. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman. To learn more about Dr. Hyman's work and to find links to the various sources

discussed during the course of this episode, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple,

you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast,

please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled, Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on

for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called, Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms,

I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter,

the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol

that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me

for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.