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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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Increasing data is showing that our inflammatory diet is affecting our mental health in profound ways.
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Ultra processed foods have been linked to depression, to suicide, to anxiety, to even things like bipolar disease, schizophrenia.
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Sounds crazy.
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This is not my opinion anymore.
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I basically came up with this idea decades ago when I wrote my book, Ultra Mind Solution, about how the body affects the brain.
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But we re seeing this disease of despair and increasing mental health crisis and it s dwarfing all our other problems and it s leading us to make bad choices.
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It s affecting our brain by causing inflammation in the brain.
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The problem with that is that our impulse control and our executive function, the adult in the room,
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doesn t have control over the three-year-old in our brain.
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And that s why we make bad choices.
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That s why our biology is hijacked.
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Our brain chemistry is hijacked.
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Our mood is hijacked.
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Our metabolism is hijacked.
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Our taste buds are hijacked by the food industry.
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And so we really have to learn how to take back our health.
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And part of it is starting to understand what s happening under the hood.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 404 of Passion Struck.
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Consistently ranked by Apple, it s the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back to the show every week to listen and learn how to live better, be better and impact the world.
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I have a special invitation for you.
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I m excited to introduce our new Passion Struck quiz.
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It s a unique opportunity for you to discover where you stand on the Passion Struck continuum.
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Are you an orchestrator who masterfully balances various aspects of life with passion and purpose?
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Or are you a vanquisher, conquering challenges and turning obstacles into opportunities?
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Take the quiz on PassionStruck.com and find out which one resonates more with your journey to living a passion-struck life.
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want to introduce this to a friend or a family member and we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that were organized into convenient tops that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed my interviews from last week, they included ones with Jen Gottlieb, a towering figure in the realm of personal branding and authentic communication.
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Jen, with her illustrious background as VH1 host, Broadway actress, co-founder of Super Connector Media, brings a rich tapestry of experiences to the table.
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Her Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Be Seen, is not just
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title, it s a manifesto for those seeking to make a genuine impact in their field.
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I also interviewed coach Matt Doherty, who not only played on the University of North Carolina National Championship team with Michael Jordan and James Worthy, but also was the coach for the Tar Heels.
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But in 2003, Matt faced one of the toughest moments in his career when he was forced to resign from that dream job.
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My discussion with Matt focuses on how he rebounded from that event and how to rebuild yourself and prepare for your next opportunity.
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And if you liked either of those previous episodes or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star rating and review.
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They go such a long way in strengthening the Passion Star community, where we can bring people more inspiration, hope, and meaning into their lives.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Throughout the month of January,
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trying to highlight different individuals who truly embody what it means to live a passion-struck life.
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And today s guest absolutely fits that build.
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I wanted to welcome back my friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, a trailblazer in the world of functional medicine, who joins us today to delve deeper into the future of medicine, a topic that resonates with anyone who s invested in their health and longevity.
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In my last conversation with Dr. Hyman in episode 258, we explored his number one New York Times bestseller, Forever Young,
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uncovering the pivotal role of intentional daily choices in influencing our biological age and overall lifespan.
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Today, we re diving further into how these conscious decisions from diet to lifestyle profoundly impact our long-term health and well-being.
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Dr. Hyman will also shed light on individual behaviors and choices in shaping broader trends in medicine, discussing the shift towards a more proactive, preventative healthcare approach.
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We ll explore the tantalizing possibility of reversing age, the principles of longevity, lifestyle, and diet, and the concept of becoming the CEO of your own health.
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Additionally, we ll address the staggering statistic that over 92% of Americans face metabolic health issues and the role personal health data can play in reversing this trend.
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Dr. Hyman will highlight exciting breakthroughs in diagnostic care, the shift from disease focus to health optimization models in Western medicine, and how individuals can use personal health data to make informed nutritional choices.
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The discussion will also encompass Bernard s biological terrain theory, the evolution of functional medicine, the educational gap in medical training, and advances in regenerative medicine,
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as well as strategies for living a pain-free life.
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We ll delve into combating chronic conditions, the impact of exponential technologies on longevity in healthcare, the significance of mindset and health outcomes, and the future of anti-aging treatments.
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Join us as Dr. Hyman enlightens us on these crucial aspects of health and medicine, offering insights that could transform the way we view and manage our health in the years to come.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back my friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the show s most requested guests.
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Welcome back, Mark.
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Oh, so great to be here.
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I m so happy to be with you again.
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The last time you were on the show, and for reference, if the listener hasn t listened to that episode, it s episode number 258.
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You absolutely want to check it out because we dived into your latest book, Forever Young, which, congrats, it s become a number one New York Times bestseller.
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Thank you so much.
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Yeah.
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One of the biggest takeaways I had from that book and our interview was the importance of our intentional daily choices and how they play an active role in our health and the impact of both our biological age and ultimately our lifespan.
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Can you elaborate on how those conscious decisions in our daily lives from diet to lifestyle significantly impact our long-term health?
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It s true, it s true so much, John, that our brain and our mind basically determine everything.
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Our beliefs, our choices, they re governed by everything that has come before us in our life.
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And so often there s a lot of unconscious thing that s in our way from making the right choices.
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Are we going to just take that sheet cake and eat the whole thing?
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Or are we going to go for a five mile walk up the mountain?
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So our mind plays a big role and our choices play a big role.
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And I think we have far more influence over our wellbeing,
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over our health span and even our lifespan than we ever thought possible.
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So for the first time in history, we re actually unpacking the science of what makes us grow biologically older.
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And we ve come to understand that biological aging does not have to run at the same rate as our chronological aging.
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So I m biologically 43, even though I just turned 64 chronologically.
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How is that possible?
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It s because my tissues, organs and cells are not aging at the same rate as my chronological clock.
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I was born in 1959.
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I can t do anything about that.
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But I can do something about the influences that I have over my health and wellbeing by the choice I make every day about what I eat, how I move, what I think, my mindset, my community connection.
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my ability to be in deep relationships, my connection to nature, my exposure to environmental toxins, my microbiome, my nutritional status.
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These are all things I have control over.
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The amount of sleep I get, how I deal with stress.
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These are things that are within my control.
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And I think most of us sit around thinking disease just happens.
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Well, I got diabetes.
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I got a cold.
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I got a heart attack.
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I got cancer.
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Even the language we use, it implies a passive phenomena being at the effect of life itself or disease or some random event.
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But the truth is these are all optional.
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Many of these conditions just never even existed before the last century.
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And they re pretty much optional if we understand how our bodies work and have the data about our own biology to make informed choices about how to optimize our health.
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And I think many of the listeners understand what functional medicine is, but it s something that you ve been pioneering for three decades now.
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And the best explanation I can think of it, and I ll turn this back on you is I think Western medicine today is such a disease paradigm focused apparatus.
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And the way I see it is all these protocols.
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that we run into in the modern medical system, we re treating the leaves of a tree, our system, instead of treating the bigger thing as a whole.
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And that s the biggest difference I personally see when I think of functional medicine versus traditional medicine.
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Yeah.
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That s a good way to start thinking about it.
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It s not because anybody had bad intentions, right?
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Medicine evolved out of people responding to what symptoms they had.
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I have a headache.
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Oh, I go to the head doctor.
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I have a joint ache.
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I go to the joint doctor.
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I have a neurologic problem.
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I go to the neurologist.
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But the body isn t actually organized as all these subspecialties.
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And all these things we call diseases are just dysfunctions that are underlying biology.
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And they have common roots.
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So your headache could be caused by someone hitting you in the head with a hammer.
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It could be caused because you re dehydrated, because you didn t have a sleep, because you re eating gluten, because you have a mitochondrial dysfunction, because you have an autoimmune disease, because you
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maybe have magnesium deficiency.
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So this could be because of bacteria in your gut that are causing inflammation in your brain.
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So there s many reasons for the symptoms.
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And we say you have diabetes, or you have depression, or you have rheumatoid arthritis, or you have Alzheimer s.
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These are really meaningless labels because the causes are different.
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And as you mentioned, we re treating the leaves and the branches of the tree, not the roots and the root causes.
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Functional medicine is really about understanding the root causes of disease.
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It s about understanding the body as the ecosystem.
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It s the medicine of why, not what disease do I have and what drug do I get, but why do I have this?
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And it helps us understand
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how to work with the body as a system.
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And we don t even have to call it functional medicine, honestly.
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This is just an intermediate term.
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It is what medicine will be.
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It is how the body s organized.
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It s understanding the fundamental laws of biology.
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And it s not my idea or sort of alternative medicine concept at all.
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It s basically now embedded in leading academic institutions at Harvard.
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There s a textbook that was written by leading professors there called Network Medicine.
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understanding that the body is a network.
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There s the Institute of Systems Biology that was started by Leroy Hood, who won the Lasker Prize in Science, who helped develop the machines that decoded the human genome, and is one of the leading scientists in the world.
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And he understands that the body is a network or a system.
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That s all we re talking about here.
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It s rethinking disease based on the underlying causes and looking at the patterns in your data that determine where you are imbalanced or out of balance and how to create balance in your
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biology.
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In a sense, functional medicine is the science of creating health.
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And when you do that, disease goes away as a side effect.
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I don t really treat diseases.
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I just figure out what are the impediments to health and I remove them.
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And it s really not that hard.
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It s bad diet, stress, toxins, allergens, bugs could be infections or even your microbiome.
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And it s a lack of the ingredients for health, the things that make us thrive, right?
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It s the right food, whole real food.
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It s the right amount of nutrients for us and vitamins and minerals and so forth.
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It s the right amount of phytochemicals, right balance of hormones.
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It s light and we need light as medicine and water.
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and air, and sleep, and movement, and deep restoration, and connection, and meaning, and love, purpose.
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These are all ingredients for health.
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You can feed animals exactly the same diet, give them exactly the same exercise, and basically one will be in a community of other animals, and one will be isolated by themselves.
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The one that s isolated will actually wither and die despite having all the same inputs, right?
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Except for the love and meaning.
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So these are all ingredients for health.
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And I think we have to just get rid of these notions of disease that we have.
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They re just constructs that have no relation to reality.
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It s almost like, it looks like they re real, right?
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You look out at the earth.
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I m now in Costa Rica over the holidays.
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I m woken up in the morning.
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I look out at the ocean and it s endless.
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It s like flat.
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I m like, sure, the world is flat.
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It s gotta be flat.
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Of course it s flat.
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and yet it s not flat.
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So it looks like there s these things called diseases, but they really are just ideas that actually bear no relation to the reality of the underlying science and biology and the laws of biology.
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Thank you for that explanation, because I want to use that as one of the key backdrops and foundational pillars that we re going to build today s conversation on.
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There s another one that I also want to equally build it on, which I think is a huge paradigm shift, and I m going to introduce it like this.
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Over this past year, I got to interview my friend Bill Potts, who s beaten cancer now six times over a 25 year plus period.
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I also recently had on the show Maria Menounos, who has also herself recently beaten a brain tumor and pancreatic cancer.
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And both of them told me that the key for them beating cancer was this idea of making yourself the CEO of your own health.
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Can you talk to me about this and why I believe, and I think you do, this is so central to the future of medicine?
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Yeah, it s so central.
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And I think we need to start to map out what s going on underneath the hood.
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We need to look at our own biology, not in an abstract of
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large studies and randomized control trials and observational data that gives us sort of general direction about what to do, but it s not about each of our own individual biology.
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And so where we re headed is toward an era of personalized medicine and personalized nutrition and personalized exercise and personalized supplements and personalized microbiome optimization and personalized optimization of our gene expression.
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And all that s becoming possible as we re
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gathering enormous amounts of data that we never had before.
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So John, there s 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in your body every second, right?
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There s an infinite number of complex things going on that the average doctor has no clue about.
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There s your microbiome.
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Your microbiome has a hundred thousand terabytes of data in there.
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There s a hundred times as much bacterial DNA as your own DNA.
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Probably half the metabolites in your blood are from bacteria.
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They re regulating every function of your body.
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The blood tests you get at your annual physical are maybe 20 to 50 different analytes, but there s literally millions of things we could be measuring that are not being measured, that they re actually able to find where we are at any moment in terms of the trajectory from wellness
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to illness.
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It doesn t happen all of a sudden.
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Boom, I got diabetes.
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Boom, I got a heart attack.
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It s been cooking for decades.
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Or even autoimmune disease.
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We see pre-autoimmune disease rising now.
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We see pre-hypertension, pre-diabetes.
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Those are just stupid terms because they re just saying it s before something, but it s not before.
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It s actually a problem all along the way.
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And so now we re able to do something called deep phenotyping.
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And this is not quite ready for prime time, but it s what deep research and science is now looking at is how do we map out an individual s biology, looking at their whole genome sequence, their transcriptome, their proteome, their microbiome, their metabolome.
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and how all that interacts with the regular lab tests and with all their biometrics that you can measure now through watches and rings and wearables and plantables like glucose monitors and how does that sort with your own medical history and your symptoms and your...
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past medical records, and we re gonna be able to gobble that all up into a medical system to healthcare platform that will allow us to make sense of it all with the help of machine learning and data-driven science to actually understand what it means and what to do for you.
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Because what works for you, John, is different than what s going to work for me.
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What you need to be eating might be different than what I m supposed to be eating, or how I m supposed to exercise might be different than you re supposed to exercise, or what supplements you re taking that will optimize your health may be different than the ones I need to take.
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So we re going to be able to actually have that nuance and be able to understand that.
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And that s where medicine s heading.
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It s so exciting.
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Yeah, Mark, I want to unpack this a little bit and we re going to explore it even more, but I thought I d use myself as a personal example of how this has transformed my life.
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I remember, and before we got on the show, we were talking about Joe Rogan.
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I happened to hear this episode on Joe s show where he d interviewed Dr. Mark Gordon, who specializes in hormone imbalances in the brain.
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And I m a person who has suffered from a number of traumatic brain injuries and I have long-lasting post-concussion syndrome.
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And it manifested itself for years into sleep issues and migraines and body pains and cognitive fog.
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And so what he put me through, which was far different
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in my life up until that point was I remember going and getting was like 15 or 16 vials of blood taken and he ran this huge panel on me.
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And I know it s I don t want to scare the listeners because it s gotten a lot better since I did this a while ago.
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But he found that not only were my hormones out of balance, but I was lacking in many key nutrients and it was causing a whole bunch of biomarkers to go out of whack.
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And since that time, I have incorporated all these practices, better sleep hygiene, better diet, et cetera.
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And similar to you, I m 53, but the last time I had
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My biological age tested, I was 36 or 37 now.
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And so I m sharing this because a lot of people hear this and they re like, boy, these guys are talking about theoretical crap here.
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And I m living proof.
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You re living proof that this stuff actually works.
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Yeah, it s actually true.
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Most of us feel like we re at the effect of life.
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As I mentioned that we re just sitting ducks and we cross our fingers and hope we don t get heart attack or cancer or diabetes or
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dementia or autoimmune disease or whatever it is.
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Or many of us just think it s normal to suffer with all sorts of low-grade symptoms, whether it s headaches, or itch of a bowel, or joint pains, or fatigue, or just brain fog, or things that aren t serious, but they re signs that things are out of whack.
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And most of us don t realize that these can be fixed, that these are not part of being human, that we should feel good, that we should have energy, that our body should work properly, that it wasn t a design flaw by God where we re all supposed to feel like crap.
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And I think we need to step back and go,
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Traditional medicine does not have a roadmap to create health.
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It s good at emergencies.
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I had a atrial fibrillation.
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It s runs in my family.
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I needed an electrocardiac exam and a very kind of significant surgery where they mapped out my whole heart with very sophisticated imaging.
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And they looked at all the electrical signals and they very micro tuning of the electrical signals and zapped a little area and
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It was five hours surgery, fantastic, great, fantastic.
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It s awesome.
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But that s not what most of us are suffering from.
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And I think that aside from some of the acute care issues and surgical treatments, I used to be an emergency room doctor.
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For most people who are suffering from chronic illness, which affects six out of 10 Americans, affects four in 10 have more than one of these chronic illnesses.
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As you get older, it s up to 80% of people have a chronic disease or more.
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their health span is shortening our lifespan, maybe still 70 80 something.
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But maybe we start getting sick in our 50s and 60s.
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So the last 20 years of our life are in poor health.
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And that s called a shrinkage of the lifespan and the health span, you want your health span equal your lifespan.
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So most of us don t realize that we have the power to
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optimize our biology, just like you did when you found you had this traumatic brain injury, you didn t go, this is what happened to me.
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And this is what I got.
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And now I got headaches.
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And I can t think and I m sleeping bad.
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And I feel crappy.
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And no, these are signs of dysfunction that can be modified if you understand what s going on.
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Like, maybe you have low vitamin D or omega threes or B vitamins that are really essential for brain function.
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And when you have these, then your brain can work better.
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So it s pretty straightforward when you understand biology, rather than treating disease, we optimize biology.
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So if you re planting a garden, you can have crappy soil, but you throw on fertilizer and you throw on pesticides and herbicides and you can make a plant grow, you can force it.
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And that s like traditional medicine.
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But what I do is more like regenerative agriculture, where you take care of the soil, and you make sure the nutrients are there, and you make sure the ecosystem is healthy, and then the pests don t come, the weeds don t come, and plants grow better, and you just take care of the terrain, we call it.
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In functional medicine, we talk about the biological terrain, which is how do you optimize the underlying
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health of the person, so disease has nowhere to land.
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COVID-19 was a great example of this.
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It didn t affect everybody the same, right?
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In America, we re 4% of the world s population, but we re 16% of the cases and deaths of COVID.
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Why should we have four times the rate of cases and deaths and hospitalizations as every other country?
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even though we had, quote, have the best medical system.
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It s because we re all pre-inflamed, we re all overweight, we all have metabolic issues, we re all have chronic disease, and so we re sitting ducks.
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So if you look at people who had high vitamin E levels or who were metabolically healthy, they either didn t get COVID or they didn t end up in the hospital or they didn t get sick and they didn t die.
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So it s not just for chronic disease, but even infectious disease, we see that the host makes a big difference.
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Yeah, and I want to go into that a little bit because what you re describing is something that Bernard termed the biological terrain theory.
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And that really came about as you were talking about during COVID.
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How do you think his theory aligns with the use of personal lab data and understanding one s health status and how these specific markers or indicators should be something that we re paying attention to?
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Very important.
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Most people don t know what s happening under the hood and we know our symptoms, but we don t really know what s happening.
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So we can now wearables.
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So we can measure our sleep and deep sleep and REM sleep.
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We can measure our heart rate and our respiratory rate and our blood saturation oxygen.
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And we can measure our exercise activity, our heart rate variability.
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These are all great.
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And these are things you can measure from the outside with watches and devices and so forth.
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Maybe even get a continuous glucose monitor.
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But the reality is we don t go deeply under the hood.
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And when you go to the doctor for your annual physical, they re doing basically a blood count, a urinalysis, a chemistry profile which looks at your blood sugar, kidneys, liver, electrolytes and they do a cholesterol panel and that s what you get.
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It s antiquated, John.
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It s something we ve been doing for decades and decades that is now bypassed by the science we have.
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So we need to be going much deeper.
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And the good news is the costs are going down, right?
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To get your genome sequenced the first time was, I think, $3 billion.
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Now it s about $300, right?
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So it used to cost a lot of money to get a lab test, but now you can get access to your own blood data
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which never was possible before through a platform called Function Health that I m a co-founder of and chief medical officer.
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And in Function Health, you can get over 110 biomarkers that if you paid retail, it could cost $15,000 for $499.
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And you get twice a year testing as a membership model.
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And you get all of your data tracked over time.
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You can see what happens after changes that you make in terms of your diet and lifestyle.
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The data is not just showing your lab results, but it s showing you
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what they should be showing the change over time.
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It s giving you insights from experts, including myself, about how to make lifestyle changes when you need to see the doctor.
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We picked up all sorts of stuff.
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In fact, I just saw a woman last night who was a 31-year-old woman.
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She thought she was healthy.
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She s a vegan, but it turned out she was omega-3 deficient, very severely omega-3 fat deficient.
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She was vitamin D deficient.
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She was iron deficient.
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She had poor metabolic health.
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Even though she was a normal weight, she had signs of prediabetes and poor cholesterol.
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She also had low AMH, which is a marker of your fertility.
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So here s a 31-year-old woman who looked like she had the fertility rate of a 47-year-old woman.
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And it was because she had all this stuff going on because of what she was eating or not eating.
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She decided she wanted to be vegan for ethical reasons, but it was hurting her health.
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And it wasn t like she was eating potato chips and croissants all day.
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She was eating a pretty healthy diet, but still naturally it s low in these nutrients.
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And so we were able to say, Hey, if you just took iron and vitamin D and omega threes, and you actually ate a little more protein and fat and cut down some of the starchy stuff, you ll be fine.
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So we were able to customize the plan to this person and optimize her health.
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And we found all sorts of things doing this profile.
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We re finding 95% have some metabolic issue with small cholesterol particles.
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They don t look at cholesterol properly with the normal cholesterol test that your doctor does.
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Less than 1% of cholesterol tests are the one we should be doing, which the science says we should be doing, but most doctors are still delayed in their adoption of this.
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And we re seeing 95% of people with problems with this.
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We re seeing 46% of people with levels of inflammation that are putting them at high risk of heart disease and cancer and dementia.
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We re seeing 30% without immune disease.
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We re seeing 67% of just a few biomarkers for nutritional markers for B vitamins, vitamin D and iron, 67%.
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have a deficiency, not at the level I think would be optimal, but at the level that s very severe.
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For example, vitamin D deficiency is under 30 on a regular lab test, but it probably should be over 50 to be optimal.
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If you counted those, it d be a lot more, 67%.
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So people are walking around like you were with all this stuff that they don t even know.
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that they could use to optimize their health and tune themselves up.
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And I ve had patients, for example, with vitamin D deficiency that had recurrent infections.
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They get on vitamin D, they re fine.
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Or people who had vitamin D deficiency that had muscle aches and pains and depression, get vitamin D, they re fine.
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So it s something that is really, we found people with the pituitary tumors that saved their life.
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We did cancer screening.
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through a liquid biopsy test called Gallery as part of the function health platform.
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And we found hidden cancers that were detected before they would ever be symptomatic or ever be picked up on a scan.
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And so it s really revolutionizing our ability to look deep into our biology and then be guided by insights by experts about how to optimize your health and how to think about your health in a right way proactively rather than reactively.
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Mark, and I want to make this real for the listeners, because to me, you can hear all the information you want, but until you start applying it in your life, you re not going to make a change.
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Cornell did this study in 2018 where they looked at thousands and thousands of individuals who were nearing death and they asked them,
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What the greatest regret they had in life was 76% came back that they didn t live the life that they aspired to live.
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And when they started to examine that number and why they weren t able to do it.
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people s health kept coming up again and again, that their health let them down and it wasn t allowing them to pursue the life they want.
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And I heard you mentioned earlier a statistic that Kara Fitzgerald also talks about that two thirds of us have one, if not more than one underlying condition by the time we re 50.
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And so we live 20 to 40% of our lives in this poor health.
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Another statistic, just to make this even more real, but I heard
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talk about on your show was you said that only 6.7% of people have proper metabolic health.
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Said another way, it s 93% of people are facing metabolic health issues
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And to me, if these things aren t making people wake up, that 93% of us aren t eating a correct diet and nutrient rich diet, because that s where all this comes from is our gut health.
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Why aren t people listening to these statistics?
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Good question.
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I think we re all narcotized by the food, to be honest with you.
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I think what you re saying, and just to unpack it a little bit, is that according to the science, 93.2% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.
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And what that means specifically is they either have high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, they re overweight, or they ve already had a heart attack or stroke.
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So that means 6.8% of us don t have that.
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which is crazy, right?
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42% are obese, 75 plus percent are overweight.
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But even those who aren t overweight can be what we call skinny fat.
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So that s what accounts for the difference between the 75% and the 93%, right?
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So we re all walking around pretty sick.
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And we saw this on our function health panel.
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After 20,000 people have gone through, we ve got over a million data points.
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We re shocked.
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This is the health ward population.
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These aren t people who are eating McDonald s.
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or sitting around drinking 20-ounce sodas every day.
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These are people who are actually conscious about their health.
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And still, because of our underlying diet and our health, we re basically in severe metabolic chaos.
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And then that s leading to heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, rapid aging.
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I think what part of the reason is people are not getting this is because of not just the effect on our metabolic health and our belly fat, but on our brain.
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I don t want to highlight this because increasing data is showing that our inflammatory diet
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is affecting our mental health in profound ways.
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Ultra-processed foods have been linked to depression, to suicide, to anxiety, to even things like bipolar disease, schizophrenia.
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Sounds crazy, but this is the work out of Harvard by Chris Palmer.
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There s now departments of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry at Harvard and Stanford.
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This is not my opinion anymore.
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I basically came up with this idea decades ago when I wrote my book, Ultra Mind Solution, about how the body affects the brain.
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But we re seeing this disease of despair and increasing mental health crisis and it s dwarfing all our other problems and it s leading us to make bad choices.
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It s affecting our brain by causing inflammation in the brain.
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It s uncoupling in a way the control center of the brain, the frontal lobe from the amygdala, which is a reptile impulse control part of our brain, the fight or flight part of our brain that we ve evolved with since we re lizards basically.
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I don t know if we were ever lizards, but anyway, you know what I m saying?
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The problem with that is that our impulse control and our executive function, the adult in the room,
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doesn t have control over the three-year-old in our brain.
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That s why we make bad choices.
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That s why our biology is hijacked, our brain chemistry is hijacked, our mood is hijacked, our metabolism is hijacked, our taste buds are hijacked by the food industry.
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We really have to learn how to take back our health.
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Part of it is starting to understand what s happening under the hood.
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I think a company like Function Health is so important because for the first time it s giving people access to all this data.
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And even if you went to your doctor, they might go, well, you don t really need that test, or this is too expensive, or your insurance won t pay for it.
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Someone said to me, I want to get a vitamin D from my doctor.
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And they said, oh, it s going to be $200 or $300.
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at the lab.
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I m like, well, actually it doesn t really cost that much, but that s the variability in your healthcare system, which is crazy.
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If you go to buy a Toyota Camry, it s the same price pretty much wherever you go within a few bucks, right?
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But imagine if you went to one Toyota dealer and it was 5,000 and another Toyota dealer was $500,000, but that s how it s happening in medicine now.
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I went to get an MRI of my knee in Chinatown in New York, it was 400 bucks.
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to get the same one where I live in Massachusetts was 2,500 bucks, the same test.
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So I think there s a lot of variability, which is why we ve been able to offer really low cost, accessible lab testing that looks over 110 biomarkers, allows you to track your health over time.
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and uplevel your health by using the insights that are embedded in the system that are personalized toward your own biology.
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And it s quite amazing what we re seeing as we begin to do this.
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People are really taking this seriously.
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You can track your biological age and many other important biomarkers.
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I m glad you brought Chris Palmer up because I had him on our show last year and I think it was one of the most enlightening discussions I had last year.
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I just remember when he said all mental disorders are metabolic disorders and the light bulb just went off.
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And I think it completely plays into your emphasis on food as medicine.
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And I want to take that a step further because once you get this personal health and lab data, how does it help you to make more intentional choices then about the things that are unique to your dietary needs?
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We ve talked about supplements, but how do you incorporate different foods then into it as well?
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Yeah, for sure.
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It s part of the guidelines that are provided on your tests.
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For example, one of the things we measure is insulin levels, not just your blood sugar.
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We measure something called lipoprotein fractionation, which is not just the total cholesterol panel, but it s the quality, the size, the density of your cholesterol numbers, which is far more reflective of your metabolic health.
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And it s not something that s picked up.
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You can have a normal LDL cholesterol, but you can have really
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lots of small particles, lots of small, dangerous LDL particles, and be at a higher risk for heart disease.
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So it really can tell you what s going on with your metabolic health.
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For example, when you have a profile, which we re seeing in 89 to 95% of the people we screen, it tracks with this poor metabolic health thing that we re talking about.
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So we re seeing what s going on in the population.
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Well, hey, this abnormal cholesterol profile, this high insulin level is caused by
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our ultra processed diet is caused by the excess refined carbohydrate and sugars in our diet.
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It s caused by not enough adequate whole foods or not enough good fats or not enough fiber or not enough phytochemicals.
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So then we guide you on here s the foods you should incorporate that will help optimize your health.
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And here s the food you probably want to eliminate
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so you don t end up in more metabolic chaos, which we have.
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The good news is these things are reversible.
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If you don t track it, you re going to end up with a problem.
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It might be when you re 50 or 60 or 70, but think about it, you work hard all your life, you re 65, you retire, and then boom, you get a heart attack.
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How fun is that?
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You want to make sure that you re tracking these things early.
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You can detect
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plaque in arteries of 15-year-olds who ve been eating a bad diet.
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You can see changes on a brain scan that reflect Alzheimer s 30 years before you forget your keys for the first time or where you put your iPhone, right?
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We know there s changes that are happening
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at a subclinical asymptomatic level that are like a smoldering fire inside your body waiting to ignite.
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And then by the time you get the symptom or get the diagnosis, you re way down the road, right?
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So the beauty of this ability to test and track your numbers is you can see where you are in the trajectory from wellness to illness, and you can change that.
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You can reverse that course.
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Even people who are very far along, we ve seen at Cleveland Clinic, for example,
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We did a group program, I did a faith-based wellness program called The Daniel Plan with Rick Warren, which was called The Daniel Plan for Daniel from the Bible, who resisted the king s temptation of rich food and was healthier for it.
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And we did this with 30,000 people were invited, 15,000 people signed up.
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They lost a quarter million pounds over the year.
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We did this in small groups in the church, it was amazing.
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And we just guided them on just how to optimize their health.
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And we learned to do the same program, we did this in Cleveland Clinic in a secular way, which was a small,
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a shared group, a medical appointment.
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And we had one woman who came in who was 66 years old, who had eaten ultra processed food her whole life.
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That s what her family did.
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It s what she grew up with.
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It s all she knew.
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She was actually quite educated.
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She was actually a faith-based minister and leader in her community, but was super sick.
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She had type two diabetes on insulin.
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She had a heart failure.
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She had multiple stents.
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She had high blood pressure.
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She had fatty liver.
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She had kidney disease, all related to this poor metabolic health.
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She was on a pile of meds.
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I think her co-pay was 20 grand a year.
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And most people would say she was on her way to a heart transplant and a kidney transplant.
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Well, simply by putting her on a whole foods, low glycemic, low sugar starch, high fat, high fiber, phytochemical rich diet with adequate amounts of protein,
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We got her off of all ultra-processed food.
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In three days, she got off her insulin.
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In three months, she went from an A1C of 11, which is like a sugar that should almost be hospitalized for, to five and a half, which is normal.
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Her heart failure reversed, her kidneys normalized, her fatty liver normalized, her blood pressure normalized.
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She got off all her medication.
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And in a year, she lost 116 pounds and is still healthy and vibrant and functioning.
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And it wasn t, she was stuck in that place.
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Now you could take,
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you know, drugs or gastric bypass, but they come with all kinds of side effects.
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So it s like a gastric bypass without the pain of surgery, vomiting and malnutrition, or ozempic without all the side effects, which are quite serious, like muscle loss and risk of bowel obstruction and pancreatitis.
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retitus and nausea and vomiting.
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There s an increased cost of poison control center now for Mozambique that are going through the roof because it s something handed like candy.
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So I think the body has this incredible capacity to heal and that s what s so incredible John.
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God gave our bodies this innate intelligence to repair, heal, rejuvenate and recover and
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All we need to do is learn how to do that.
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It s not that hard.
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It s like activating the healing switch instead of the disease switch.
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And it s exactly what Function Help s goal is, to provide people with a roadmap of what s going on in their biology,
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in real time, they can track over time with insights that help them transform their life and then see the results.
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And it s really one of the most important things for me that I ve done in my career, because I m only one doctor.
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Now I ve seen tens of thousands of patients, but I can t see millions of patients.
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I can t see billions of patients, but my fiance has a website.
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She says, I want to be a billionaire.
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And I m like, that s interesting.
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And so the subtitle was, I want to positively impact the lives of a billion people, right?
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Now that kind of, I want to be that kind of billionaire.
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And I think the only way to do that is through scalable models like this, where we re not waiting for doctors to catch up to the science that takes decades and decades, you know.
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I completely agree with you and what a lofty goal.
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I remember watching Lewis Howes one time saying that he wanted to influence a billion people.
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And recently I saw he s up to 650 million views.
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So he s getting there.
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Mark, I wanted to touch on something that s a little bit controversial and that is.
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Yeah.
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We oftentimes think that our doctor is the person that we should be talking to about our nutrition.
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But as you and I know, there s a huge educational gap in medical training.
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And if I understand it correctly, you have a daughter who s in medical school.
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So you re seeing this firsthand.
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So how do you, it s interesting because my fiance is a primary care physician as well.
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And she tells me as she was going through school, she might ve had maybe one, two courses on nutrition the whole time.
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How do you think we could evolve the medical education system to incorporate some of these principles that we ve been talking about?
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Great question, John, my daughter, Rachel, she s now in third year and she s been in medical training for a few years.
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And I said, Rachel, when you re learning about nutrition, anything she s well,
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Yeah, we learned about amino acids and fatty acids and sugars.
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And I m like, what are you going to tell your patients to eat for lunch?
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It s just so antiquated.
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And yet, as we ve been talking about this whole time, almost all the diseases that she s going to see in her career are in some way or another, to greater or lesser degree, caused by and can be improved or cured by diet.
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If you were thinking about treating infections and you have streptococcal pneumonia, imagine if you
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didn t learn about penicillin in medical school.
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And that s all you were seeing was pneumonia.
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So that s what s happening right now.
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And it makes me a little crazy, honestly, because I just see how antiquated the educational system is.
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And I m working to change this.
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I have a nonprofit called the Food Fix Campaign.
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People can learn more about it by going to foodfix.org.
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And it s attempting to change food policy
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to incorporate food as medicine and to support regenerative agriculture as two pillars that I think can transform our health of our nation and have many other downstream benefits.
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One of the efforts we re working on, and we introduced bills with Senator Cassidy and Senator Marshall from Kansas,
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to mandate that medical schools and residency programs, postgraduate education, include nutrition in their curriculum.
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Now the government, the federal government spends $17 billion and just gives it to residency postgraduate training programs without any strings attached.
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So I was like, Hey, this is free money.
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You guys can t get free money.
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How about you teach what matters?
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And so there s now an agreement from the American, I think it s the college of graduate medical educators.
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which has actually agreed to this and is going to provide nutrition curriculums for postgraduate education.
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We re also working on the undergraduate medical education, like my daughter s in medical school, to also include this and to put it on the licensing exams.
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Right now on the licensing exams, there s no nutrition class.
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And I see this with my daughter every time I talk to her.
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So I just did the practice test for this.
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Everything in school is guided toward the test.
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So if there s no questions about nutrition on the test, they re not going to learn about it.
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So if we actually incorporate nutrition, maybe 5, 10% of the questions could be about nutrition.
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That means the medical schools are going to be forced to actually include it.
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So we re working on this on a federal level.
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We re working with the medical colleges, graduate medical education groups to actually transform these policies.
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And I think it s going to happen.
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So I m excited about it, but it s a lot of work.
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Yeah, I d love to hear that because your doctor should be the person that you go to for more information on this.
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And right now, it s just not the case.
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Mark, the audience wanted me to talk to you about a couple more topics, and they re a little bit out of what we ve been talking about.
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One of them happens to be advances in regenerative medicine.
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And last year, a lot of people saw Tony Robbins on the road supporting his book that came out.
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And he was talking about the use of stem cells and how they played a huge role in him getting over his severe back pain and other things.
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Can you share some of the recent changes and advancements that you ve seen in regenerative medicine?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I want to put this in context.
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Remember I said how the body has its own inherent healing system and repair system.
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We do everything to actually screw it up.
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How we live, what we eat, the fact we don t exercise, all the junk we eat, the environmental toxins, the stresses, all these things muck up our body s own innate intelligence to repair and heal and renew.
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So what is our own renewal system, our regenerative system?
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We have it.
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It s stem cells, it s exosomes, it s peptides.
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It s things that actually our bodies already have, but are decreased as we get older with illness or that aren t directed always to where we need them.
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And so now science has been able to actually extract these compounds from our biology.
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Like stem cells are not something that s made in a pharmaceutical lab, right?
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It s a natural compound that our body has.
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Peptides, which are
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like various informational healing compounds are things that our body uses.
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There s thousands and thousands of these that our body uses to regulate everything in our body.
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Exosomes are, for example, the compounds, little kind of bubbles or vesicles of packets of healing factors that are in stem cells that we can give and they go throughout the body.
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I think there s other procedures like plasmapheresis.
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It s not exactly something we give, but it s basically taking out all the old damaged proteins and inflammatory things that cleans our blood like an oil filter change.
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So all of these therapies can be extremely helpful for various conditions.
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And in particular for things that traditional medicine doesn t work well for.
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I ve had stem cells, I ve had a knee injury, I was supposed to have surgery.
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I went in stem cells and I m going trekking in Patagonia next month.
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The body has this incredible healing capacity and we can use some of these things to help.
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Now, right now, most of these are inaccessible to people, they re expensive, they re not available everywhere, you have to often travel to foreign countries to do it.
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But I think the price is coming down, the accessibility is going up.
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And I think like anything, it s going to become just part of medicine.
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But it s an exciting time for me to be in healthcare, because I can see that we re now using the body s own intelligence to fix itself.
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And there s ways we can do that, let s say, without getting all these treatments.
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That s a lot of what I talk about in my book, Young Forever.
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It s a lot about what s in the DNA.
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literally the DNA of function health, which is providing all the insights about how to activate your body s own healing system.
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Remember I said at the beginning, functional medicine is not about treating disease, it s the science of creating health.
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And when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect.
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I love it.
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And I have a friend who recently tore his rotator cuff and he was going to go through this large surgery to fix it.
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And he decided to use stem cell instead.
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And three, four months later is completely pain-free and it s healed itself.
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So it is amazing what this can do.
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Another topic they wanted me to ask you about is nootropics.
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And I recently went to Jim Quick s book signing event, and he had Dr. John and Dave Asprey on the stage.
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And Dave was up there talking about their benefits, but he was honing in on three different components.
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One was micro-use of caffeine, micro-use of nicotine, and then he talked about methylene blue.
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What do you think of nootropics?
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Are they something that people should be leaning in on or are they still new science that needs more exploration?
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Yeah, so first of all, what are nootropics, right?
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Nobody probably even heard that term.
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So basically it means things that enhance your brain function and cognitive function.
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And there are many nootropics that your body can use that are products that are available to everybody that are really easy to use compounds that are available and are safe, whether it s things like lion s mane mushrooms, or whether it s omega-3 fatty acids,
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or whether it s caffeine or various herbs like rhodiola or ginseng or ginkgo.
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As you mentioned nicotine, there s some drugs actually that may actually be working like modafinil or provigil or paracetam and other medication.
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So there s a lot of things.
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Methylene blue you mentioned.
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Ritalin actually is a no trope.
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People understand that, right?
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It s an ADD medication.
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But there s a lot of natural compounds that are extremely effective that we can use that are herbal or that are nutrients that can be something that can help our cognitive function.
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Everybody in America uses nootropics, right?
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We use caffeine.
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It s probably the most commonly used drug in America, but it s actually fine for most people.
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And so I think there are many things you can use, like I mentioned, but I do think it s important to understand
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First, what s causing your brain dysfunction?
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If you re eating sugar and you re not sleeping and you re not exercising and you re not managing your chronic stress, well, you can take all these nootropics you want, it s not gonna do much, right?
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These sort of smart drugs or compounds that boost brain performance that are memory and cognitive enhancers are great, but they have to be based on a foundation of good health as well.
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Okay.
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Another thing I wanted to touch on was exponential technology and its impact on longevity.
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So how do you see things like AI, biotech, genomics shaping the future of longevity?
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Yeah, this is so exciting, John.
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We re working on with FunctionHelp, which is how do we use technology in a way to inform medicine?
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When you think about how medicine is practiced now, it s analog.
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You ve got a stethoscope and a few little things, maybe you ve got some fancy MRI machine, you do a few blood tests, you poke around and you try to figure things out.
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And you can usually make a diagnosis that way, but it misses
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It s what s underneath.
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It s like the tip of the iceberg and what s underneath is much bigger.
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And so what s much bigger is what I earlier spoke about, which is this enormous wealth of biological data that is untapped, right?
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It s our entire genome sequence.
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It s all the proteins that are expressed from our genes.
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It s called the proteome.
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It s our metabolism, all the metabolites that are produced in our body.
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It s our microbiome and all the influence that has on our health.
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It s all our regular lab tests that we can do a much more extensive view of things that we never, we can now pick up little fragments of DNA particles from cancer way before it ever shows up on any kind of imaging or any other blood test.
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We can now look for fragments related to Alzheimer s that can be picked up years and years before you ever have a symptom.
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So we re gonna be able to take all this data and then we re gonna incorporate that with all your wearable data, right?
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the Oura Ring, or Apple Watch, or Garmin, or Whoop, or whatever you use, your eight sleep bed, your glucose monitor, all this stuff s gonna be all fed into this data system, along with all your past medical history, all your symptoms, all your previous data, all your imaging, everything, and then you re gonna be able to make sense of all this enormous amount of information, literally petabytes of data.
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I don t even know what s bigger than petabytes, but it s a lot of data.
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It s way more than you could ever fit on a hard drive in your computer.
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It would essentially be informed by deep learning that is informed by experts.
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So it s not just like random things, right?
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If I asked AI to cure chronic disease, it would say, well, kill everybody over 10 years old.
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It s amoral.
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It doesn t have, but it has to be informed by experts in the right paradigm to understand what it means and all the patterns in this data.
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And that data is then going to create a picture of your health
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in a dynamic way over time is what we call deep phenotyping.
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There s a whole called the Phenome Project by Leroy Hood, which is an attempt to do this work.
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And there s many other studies that are trying to do this like all of us, which is an NIH funded study.
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There s one in England, millions of people.
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So we re trying to get a large, these large data sets to see what s happening and to look at patterns, what s happening in the body that will inform
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our understanding of human biology in ways that we ve never been able to do before.
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It s like all of a sudden, we re looking at the stars, we don t know what the heck they are, they re little dots of light, but all of a sudden we get a telescope, or then we get the Hubble telescope, or then we get some bigger thing.
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It s like we have found the microscope, oh my God, we can see bacteria.
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Then we get the electron microscope and we can see cells and mitochondria and things we never could see before.
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We can see chemical reactions.
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down to the most sub-cellular, almost atomic particles.
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So we re gonna have that vision now in medicine.
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We ve had it in physics.
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We ve had it in astronomy and other places.
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We ve just been flying blind in medicine.
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And so this era of data-driven healthcare, and I think function health is at the forefront of this, and it s going to be able to scoop up all this data and help you understand what s happening in real time for you.
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So we re gonna be able to take this enormous data set, which is unique to you, and understand what it means
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in terms of your risk for disease, where you re on the transition from wellness to illness.
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We re going to learn about how we can use that information to create personalized precision recommendations for you about diet, lifestyle, supplements, medications, whatever you need to do to correct what s going on with your health.
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I think this is the most exciting era we ve ever had in medicine.
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It s like the discovery of bacteria or the discovery of penicillin or
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It s such a revolution in our paradigm.
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It s really like the biggest paradigm is saying the Earth is not flat or the Earth is not the center of the universe that Galileo figured out when he was put in jail for that or Einstein s theories that totally upended traditional physics and said this table in front of me is mostly empty space and time is not linear and space-time is one thing.
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I still don t understand that.
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I m still trying to figure that out.
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But this is the kind of paradigm shift that s happening in medicine right now.
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And unfortunately,
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Most people don t have access to it.
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Most people can t take advantage of it.
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But I think in the next couple of years, we re gonna see this just explode.
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And I m very excited about what we re doing with Function Health as a tip of the spear in the transformation of healthcare and the empowering of people to be the CEO of their own health and understand what s going on in their body and use that information to make real-time choices to up-level their health, to feel good.
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And at the end of the day, it s not just about some narcissistic pursuit to live longer and feel good.
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be able to show up every day and do what your heart tells you to do, to be able to be passionate about life, to be able to actually do the service that you want to do.
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If you feel like crap, how are you going to serve God or do anything that you want to do?
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You can t do that.
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How are you going to be a good partner?
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How are you going to do good work in the world?
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How are you going to wake up and actually show up for the people that matter in your life and make a difference and have a good life?
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You can t.
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If you re suffering, it s hard.
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There s an old Chinese proverb that says,
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A healthy man wants many things.
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A sick man wants only one thing, to not be sick.
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Yeah, we don t recognize how important our health is until it suffers, and then it becomes painfully clear.
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Mark, I wanted to ask you one final question, and this is more of a personal related question.
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You are a person who, in all aspects, has created a passion-struck life.
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And I think a listener looks at you, you ve treated presidents, you re on the board of a number of key medical institutions, you ve founded companies, you ve pioneered.
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And I think the thing people struggle with is they don t see Mark back when he was getting started and how he built all this.
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What would be your advice to people?
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They see someone like you and they think that could never be me who s done this.
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What should they do if they want to create this passion struck life like you have?
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I don t know, it s different for everybody, but I had a mother that actually said something to me when I was a young boy and kept saying it to me over and over, which is you can do anything you want to do.
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There are no limits.
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She had this saying that used to drive me crazy, but now I understand it.
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She said, there s only room at the top, meaning if you excel at something, you can succeed.
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And it takes hard work.
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It takes time.
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It takes effort.
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It s not like.
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everything was handed to me.
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I worked my butt off.
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I ve written 19 books in 20 years.
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I ve started multiple medical centers.
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I ve built companies.
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I m just really working in policy.
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I do everything I can to try to make the world a better place.
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And it s really driven by my desire to do good in the world, to create more love, to create more healing.
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And that was just in me.
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I don t know.
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That came
5
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It came with the package.
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It was part of the original equipment from the manufacturer.
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And I just got that.
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And I remember even being like a young boy at 13 years old, thinking about how do I make the world a better place?
5
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And so you have to find out what calls you.
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And I didn t know what it was, but I knew it was something.
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And so I think you just lean in and follow your heart and lean in and believe you can.
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There s a saying, if you think you can or you think you can t, you re right.
5
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So I think I believed I could, even ways that seemed obviously dumb, because who could do that?
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Or like, why would I think I could take care of presidents or kings?
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Why would I think that I could build a center at Cleveland Clinic, one of the top medical institutions in the world?
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Why do you think I could create 15 New York Times bestsellers?
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Well, I just didn t have a doubt that I could do it.
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I just put my head down and did the work and did my best and just had trust in it.
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I think everybody s got to find out what calls them, but sometimes it takes some deep inner work.
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Sometimes it takes looking at what matters to you and just putting your head down.
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I love that answer.
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And I think at the end of the day, doing something that matters is absolutely key because it fuels that intrinsic motivation that keeps you going on the journey that you ve been doing.
5
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Mark, we ve talked a lot about a number of things.
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You ve brought up function health.
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I know the listeners are probably going to want to
6
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to learn more about this, what is the best way for them to get access to it?
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Well, it s pretty easy.
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You just go to function health.com and you can learn about it, read about it, see the tests that are available.
6
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There s information about what tester you can do, how to sign up.
6
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There s a waitlist currently.
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Maybe if you want to use the code young forever, you can skip the waitlist.
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I get ahead of the game, but we ve had over 20,000 people become members in the last six or so months.
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We re in beta now.
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We have over 100,000 people on the wait list.
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And it s pretty simple.
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And the process is pretty simple.
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You just sign up, ask a few questions about your health and demographics.
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They ll get your phone number.
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They ll text you and say, where do you live?
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What s your zip code?
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When do you want to go get your blood tests?
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You tell them where you live, they ll send you to the local Quest lab, you show up, everything s already in the system, you put it at your arm, they draw the blood, you re in and out in 15 minutes, and then you get your results in a beautiful dashboard tracked over time with all the explanation you need to understand what s going on to up-level your health.
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Marc, it is always such an inspiration and such an honor to have you on the show.
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Thank you again for coming on PassionStruck.
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Oh, thanks, John.
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Thanks for having me.
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I really appreciate it.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Mark Hyman, and I wanted to thank Mark for the privilege and honor of coming back onto the show.
6
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Links to all things Mark will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
6
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Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our Clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.
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I also wanted to remind you that we have started
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the Passion Struck Challenge, where every single week I will give you a new challenge to help you cultivate your journey to becoming Passion Struck.
6
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You can do so by going to our website at passionstruck.com and signing up to become part of the challenge.
6
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You can find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles.
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You can also sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter, Work Intentionally, and you can sign up for our personal development newsletter, Live Intentionally, at passionstruck.com.
6
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview that I did with Dr. Elisa Pressman, a developmental psychologist and the beloved voice behind the podcast Raising Good Humans.
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In our interview, Dr. Pressman and I discuss how to let go of the pursuit of perfection in parenting.
6
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She brings a refreshing perspective that challenges the high pressure norms of modern parenting.
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I think the thing that we don t know is transition to parenthood.
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actually changes your brain and you are motivated at that time to make changes that you wouldn t normally have the motivation to make.
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So a lot of ways to make changes in your life as an adult happen when you are incentivized with kids, like to be your best self in order to serve raising kids.
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And that is just a very specific time in life where we are really just growing.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others, so share the show with those that you love and care about.
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And if you found today s episode with Dr. Mark Hyman useful, then please share it with someone else who can use the advice that we gave here today.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become Passion Struck.