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This episode of the Tony Robbins Podcast is brought to you by Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within.
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The past year has been full of challenges and circumstances outside of our control.
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Now, more than ever, it is important to create the life of your dreams.
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Life on your terms.
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A life that truly fulfills you, no matter what obstacles come in your way.
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Unleash the Power Within will awaken your spirit and pave the way for breakthroughs to make it all happen.
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Learn more at upwvirtual.com forward slash pod.
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That s upwvirtual.com slash pod.
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Welcome to the Tony Robbins podcast.
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Tony s had the privilege of working with some of the greatest doctors and experts in peak performance and vitality.
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And today s guest is no exception.
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Dr. Mark Hyman is the founder and director of the Ultra Wellness Center, the head of strategy and innovation for the Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine, and board president for clinical affairs of the Institute for Functional Medicine.
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He s a practicing family physician, a 13-time New York Times bestselling author, and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate for the field of functional medicine.
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In today s sit-down, Dr. Hyman discusses his new book, The Pegan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World.
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He also talks about using food to biohack his way to high performance and an abundant life.
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Dr. Hyman discusses eating the rainbow, using food as medicine, and the inherent nutritional wisdom of animals.
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Dr. Hyman, thank you so much for your time.
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Well, thanks for having me.
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Okay, let s start with some background.
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Tony s always been a fan of your work.
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You ve known each other for years.
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You ve spoken at so many of his events, like Unleash the Power Within and Life Mastery.
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You re both huge proponents of science-based plans for detoxification and eating real, whole foods.
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That s right.
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So let s start off with talking a little bit about your relationship with Tony, and then how have you guys partnered over the years?
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I mean, combined, you ve reached, what, hundreds of thousands of people?
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Maybe millions.
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You know, listen, Tony is all about optimizing your life and performance.
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And a lot of the focus obviously is on your mental health and your mental resilience and your ability to achieve your dreams.
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But all that is completely limited.
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by any kind of physical ill health.
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And unless you optimize your biology, it s hard to optimize your life.
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They go hand in hand.
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And that s really the synergy between Tony and I is that he s a master of resetting people s intellectual, emotional, spiritual lives.
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But on the biological level, you know, there s a whole set of principles that is about designing a way of eating and living and being
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that leads to peak performance, optimal health.
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It allows you to really engage with your life fully, which means showing up, which means being fully in relationships, which means actually being able to do whatever you want in the morning when you get up so you don t feel limited by the limitations of your body.
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And how do you show up for work, for love, for relationships, for connection, for friends, for anything that you love to do?
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How do you do that?
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And I think that s really the key synergy here.
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So Mark, we re here today because you have a new book coming out.
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It s called The Pegan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World.
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So can you talk a little bit about the term Pegan, when you first came up with it, and a little bit about why you decided to write this book at this time?
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That s a great question.
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Well, you know, I as a doctor on the front lines of seeing patients for 30 years and treating tens of thousands of patients, testing them,
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with literally millions of analytes that I ve seen looking at their stories and seeing what works and what doesn t work.
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It s really clear to me that all the dietary dogmas out there are unfortunately rigid and restricted and don t allow for flexibility, for personalization, for understanding that food is medicine.
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And I was like, wait a minute, we need to come up with a set of principles that is
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coherent, it s science-based, it s based on common sense, and it was spurred by this panel I was on once with a friend of mine who was a paleo doctor, another one was a vegan cardiologist, and they were fighting like cats and dogs, and I was in the middle going back and forth.
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And if you re paleo and you re vegan, I must be pegan and everybody started laughing.
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I thought that s a good joke.
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Okay.
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That was fun.
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And then I started thinking about on the way home on the plane.
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I was like, wait a minute.
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They re identical.
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They re exactly the same, except for one thing where you get your protein animals or grains and beans.
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Otherwise they both promote a plant rich diet, both promote,
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Eating good fats both promote eating whole foods, both promote getting off of dairy and getting off of processed foods, and even getting off of all the additives and hormones and antibiotics and chemicals and pesticides.
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The truth is that they re far more alike than they are different, especially when compared to the traditional American diet.
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That goes for any diet where people are trying to aspire to better health, whether it s keto or paleo or low-fat or low-carb.
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Everybody s trying to do the right thing.
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But we have to understand that we re all different.
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Like I said, at the beginning, we have to personalize this approach and we can t just have a one size fits all approach.
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And some people may tolerate grains and beans.
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Some people may not.
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Some people may thrive on animal protein and with or without it, others might not.
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Some people.
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might do OK being vegans, others really get into trouble.
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And it depends on what s going on with you.
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For example, if you have terrible bacterial overgrowth in your gut and your gut s a mess and you re starting tons of starchy foods and grains and beans, you re going to be in trouble.
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But if you have an autoimmune disease, you might not be able to eat gluten.
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So we really personalized the approach.
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And the vegan diet is at once a set of practical principles that apply to everybody that talk about the common ground we all share about eating real food.
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And second, it s really about food is medicine, understanding that food is not just calories, but it s information or instructions that can upregulate or downregulate your biology with every bite.
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And lastly, it s about personalization.
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So we have to be adaptable and we have to listen to our bodies, not our ideology.
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We don t want our ideology to trample over our biology.
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If you believe you should be a vegan, but your body says no,
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That s not good for you, right?
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If you believe you should eat pale ale, but your body says no, then you have to listen.
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So listen to your body.
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It s the smartest doctor in the room.
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That is really true.
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Your body really is the best doctor.
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And so many of us don t listen to our bodies, you know?
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So let s talk more about the vegan diet.
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What are some of the principles and how would you eat this way long term, like as a lifestyle?
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Use food as your pharmacy.
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When you go shopping, think you re going to the drugstore.
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Everything you re buying is a drug, and it s either gonna hurt you or it s gonna heal you.
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So whether you re buying, you know, I don t know, let s say Triscuits, which are full of trans fats and gluten, or you re buying, you know, wild blueberries, the frozen wild blueberries, they have profoundly different effects on your biology.
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So you, when I go to the grocery store, I literally am thinking about it as my pharmacy, and I m like, oh, I m gonna buy this, it s gonna be great for my microbiome, and I have some jicama and artichoke,
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I m going to get some sauerkraut for probiotic foods.
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I m going to use these polyphenols from cranberry green tea to help my microbiome.
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I m going to get some broccoli because I know that s going to upregulate my glutathione, my detox system.
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I know that if I get some turmeric to make curry, I m going to reduce inflammation in my body.
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eat foods with certain fibers that are resistant starches like plantains, it s gonna help balance my blood sugar, that s gonna lead to better blood sugar profile and correct my hormonal imbalances.
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I know that if I eat the right combinations of amino acids from the right kinds of protein, mostly animal proteins, I m gonna upregulate my muscle synthesis.
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So I really am thinking all the time about how do I use food to biohack my way to high performance, great energy, great focus and abundant life.
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And so that s the first principle.
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The second is eat the rainbow.
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And it sort of follows along with that, which is, you know, in plant foods, there s 25,000 different phytochemicals and those are mostly uncharted territory, but they are, it turns out they re really critical for regulating our biology.
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So we re really kind of lazy.
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If, if, uh, we don t need to make vitamin C as a human, we don t, we get it from our food, but there are so many other pathways that depend on all these
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plant chemicals, the reds, the blues, the greens, the yellows, oranges.
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These contain all these plant chemicals, phytochemicals, flavonoids, terpenes, all kinds of stuff.
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So powerful.
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And that s why it s important to eat the rainbow.
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And then 75% rule is my favorite, which is 75% of your plate should be non-starchy vegetables.
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And you can, you can load up.
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I get mushrooms, I have roasted eggplant.
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I ll have a broccoli rub.
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I ll have maybe a salad with lots of different vegetables in it.
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So I might have, you know, two dozen different types of vegetables at dinner or at meals.
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Because that s where all the yummy good medicine is.
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And then when you re eating, whether it s grains or beans, you have to understand, one, who should be eating them, two, how to prepare them, and three, which grains and beans should you eat?
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Because they re not all created equal.
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For example, you know,
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a commercially raised wheat that s a hybrid dwarf wheat.
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It s got far more sugar and starch than sugar, so it s got a super starch called amylopectin A, because it s bred for that.
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Two, it s got more gliadin proteins because of how it s bred, so it s more likely to cause autoimmunity and inflammation.
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Three, it s sprayed with glyphosate, which destroys your microbiome and links to cancer.
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And four, it s preserved with calcium propionate, which has been linked to autism and ADD and behavioral issues in kids and even adults.
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So that s one grain.
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Or you could have, for example, Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which I talk about in the book, which is an ancient Himalayan grain that was grown in the most roughest conditions that expresses over 132 phytochemicals that regulate your immune system and rejuvenates you.
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It has high levels of protein.
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It s low glycemic.
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It has tons of minerals.
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It s a superfood.
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But you could have one cup of white flour or one cup of Himalayan buckwheat flour, totally different on your biology.
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So the book really focuses on quality.
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And whenever you re eating, whether it s beans, grains, nuts, seeds, figure that out.
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In the book, you don t just talk about principles, you also include recipes, right?
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So what are some of the combinations of the rainbow that, you know, what is your favorite recipe actually in the book?
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I d love to know.
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Yeah.
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Well, I mean, it s surprising, right?
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Because it s not what you d normally think, but it s pancakes.
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You re like, Dr. Hyman, have you lost your mind?
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And why are you telling people to eat pancakes?
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Because it s not exactly healthy.
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Well, are they made from the flour that you referred to?
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Well, so yes, so these pancakes are made with buckwheat flour.
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Now, I ve got a super lucky circumstance where I can get access to these Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour pancake, which is such a powerful superfood and power food, but you can do it with regular buckwheat too.
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And not only does it have this amazing buckwheat flour with 132 phytochemicals and also incredible
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incredible phytochemicals that help rejuvenate your immune system like quercetin and rutin and so forth.
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But it also has prebiotic fibers in there that help your gut.
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And on top of that, it s made with other non-grain flours like almond flour, which is great as far as source of protein and extra good fats.
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It s so delicious.
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And then of course, it s got pasture-aged eggs, which have wonderful
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properties for your antioxidants.
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All the dark yellows you see in those are from the carotenoids, which are really great for your eyes and skin and hair.
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And then, of course, there s the vitamins and minerals in there.
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And then you ve got the spices.
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And now, spices,
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are the amazing things.
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This is chai pancakes.
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All the chai spices, which includes cardamom, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon.
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These spices, like cinnamon, for example, helps regulate blood sugar.
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It s a powerful anti-inflammatory.
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Each of these has their own medicinal superfood powers.
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So spices are among the most potent superfoods.
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So you basically can get high protein, low starch, good fat, phytochemically rich pancakes that taste fricking awesome.
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Sounds so good.
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So a lot of diets, right, they come with their ups and downs in terms of energy throughout the day or, you know, differences between how you feel on day one and day three.
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And it s, you know, it s very prescribed.
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How would you describe what we can expect from this particular plan?
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Well, it s really rough.
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First, you lose weight.
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Then you have mental clarity.
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Then your joint pains and aches go away.
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Then you sleep better.
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Then you have better sex.
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Then your skin clears up.
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And then your digestive problems go away, and your post-menstrual drip is gone, and you feel 20 years younger.
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So those are the side effects you have to be careful and watch for, for sure.
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So these are all clear physical health benefits, right?
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But we re, and you mentioned mental clarity, but I d love if you could talk a little bit about the chapter that you have on food and mood, right?
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So we re facing higher levels of depression and anxiety than we ve ever had before.
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So how can you use food as medicine for your mind?
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Well, most people don t connect what they eat with how they feel.
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And it s really striking to me.
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And I mean, people come with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, or more severe issues, even things like,
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ADD and autism and bipolar disease schizophrenia and what really became clear to me as i was practicing functional medicine for decades as i treated their physical problems their mental problems went away.
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I jokingly call myself the accidental psychiatrist because i never intended to treat their brain what i realize when you create health in the body.
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The brain is connected to the body, despite what we learned in medical school, and everything you do influences your brain, what you eat, how you feel, your nutritional levels, your hormone levels, your gut microbiome, environmental toxins, your mitochondria and energy systems, your immune system.
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In fact, many of these problems of the brain are inflammatory diseases of the brain.
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Depression is brain inflammation.
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And we know from now large clinical trials when you swap out crap for good food, depression goes away.
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When you look at even more serious issues like violence and behavioral issues, it s striking what happens in prisons where
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They can improve diets in the prisons by swapping out the junk food for healthy food, and the violent crime goes down by 56%.
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You add a multivitamin, it goes down by 80%.
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In juvenile detention centers, violent and disruptive behavior goes down by 91%, and suicides by 100%.
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I mean, suicide is the third leading cause of death.
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in teenage boys.
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And to have a treatment that cuts suicide by 100%, you d think it would be headline news, but it s not just because it s healthy food.
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So we know even in the academic form, the CDC put out a report called Nutrition and Academic Performance and showed how clearly how processed foods and high sugar foods and foods with chemicals and additives and lack of protective whole foods, which are really the foundation of the Pekin diet,
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leads to poor academic performance and poor attention and poor focus and, and less, um, likelihood of success in life, less likely to go to college, get a good paying job.
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And all of that is just really related to food.
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So, and now, you know, I wrote this other book, the ultra mind solution almost 12, 30, 40 years ago.
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And I was thinking considered, you know, way out there, I was talking about the microbiome and the brain and,
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And they were like, who are you?
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And now there s departments of metabolic psychiatry at Stanford and nutritional psychiatry at Harvard.
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And one of the top Harvard psychiatrists just wrote a book about how the microbiome affects the brain and mood.
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So I think we really have this moment of reckoning where we see this massive amount of depression and mental illness.
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In fact, if you look at the healthcare costs over the next 35 years, the majority of the $95 trillion that we re going to have to
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deal with in terms of direct and indirect costs.
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The majority of that is not what you think.
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It s not diabetes or heart disease or cancer.
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It s mental illness.
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It s depression.
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And yet we know how simple it is to often treat these things by fixing these underlying biological causes.
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And then of course, there s sometimes challenges with life and traumas and stresses that will cause depression that are real.
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But often people are suffering at the scale we have not because they have a crappy life but because they re what they re eating and they don t connect the dots and so eating foods like fatty fish and and and which have omega-3s and berries with their brands of sanitants and the Fiber-rich and fermented foods to help your gut and nuts and seeds which have tryptophan Help mood and energy.
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Um, the flana green tea has great polyphenols and theanine that helps with anxiety So there s a lot of benefits there just from eating foods
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that are going to help upregulate your brain and in turn your mood.
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So if there are issues among teenagers and within prisons for getting access to healthy food and being able to eat in a way that is going to produce more positive physical and mental benefits, how do we deal with the problem of access?
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Do you think there s a problem with access in terms of distribution and the ability to get the highest quality ingredients?
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Or do you think it s also a problem of access in terms of education?
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People just don t know.
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I think it s both.
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I think, you know, there legitimately are food swamps, which is where there s an abundance of foods that ll kill you that are often going with food deserts, which have lack of healthy foods that are hard for people to get.
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I mean, I had one woman crying to me in Cleveland who was learning to be a chef at the community college and we had a chance to chat and she s like, listen, my mom wanted to feed us healthy.
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She had to take two buses.
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It took an hour each way just to go to the grocery store to get some vegetables because we had nothing in our neighborhood, all we could get were
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Little Debbie s or I think like Toast s Cupcakes and whatever junk they could have, you know, it was just, it was horrific.
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So I think there is a real problem of inequitable distribution of food and access.
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But I also think it s a big problem of education.
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And I think for me that this really was highlighted by an experience I had in South Carolina.
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And I just have to admit that I did have a bit of prejudice before I really went down there in South Carolina and met this family.
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I thought, oh, well, people kind of know they shouldn t be drinking Coke and having
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and all this junk food and going to McDonald s.
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And they do it anyway.
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And the truth is, they just don t know.
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And I went to this family s home.
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They lived in a trailer, a family of five, on disability and food stamps.
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The father, at 42, already had diabetes, had kidney failure, was on disability at 42 years old from diabetes.
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And it wasn t type 1.
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It was type 2.
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And it was all diet related.
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And the mother was well over 100 pounds overweight.
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The son was well over 100 pounds overweight.
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And they were struggling.
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And they were trying to do the right thing, because the father had to get a new kidney.
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And he couldn t unless he lost the weight.
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And they were desperate to do the right thing.
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And it turns out that they just didn t know.
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I went into their kitchen.
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I did a biopsy of their fridge and their cupboard and their freezer.
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And I showed them what was in their food.
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They re like, oh, look at this.
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It s a low-fat, low-calorie dessert topping, Cool Whip.
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I m like, yeah.
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It says zero trans fat on the label.
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I said, yeah.
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Well, let s look at the ingredients.
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Because it s mostly air, they get away with legally lying.
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And the number one ingredient is trans fat and high fructose corn syrup.
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So it s poison.
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And yet, they re selling it as a healthy dessert.
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And that s what they thought.
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So we just cooked a simple meal from real food.
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I gave them a guide on.
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How to eat good food on a tight budget from the environmental work group and they live in one of the worst food deserts in america according to rating standard which is the.
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Retail environment food index which is how many junk food and can be stores there are two grocery stores and they were like one of the worst but somehow in this rural area in the middle of nowhere in south carolina they figured out.
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With the right education a little bit of cooking skills and they were able to lose 200 pounds as a family the father lost 45 Got a new kidney and the mother lost well over a hundred and the son Lost 50 gained it all back because he went to work at Bojangles But eventually got his act together and lost 138 pounds and went on to go to medical school the first person to go to college nonetheless medical school in his family, so I think there s a real a real Educational gap as well as a an access gap and both of those have to be addressed.
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I
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I m glad you mentioned meat because meat is a big part of our diets today.
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How does it fit into the vegan diet?
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Is it possible to simply lower your meat consumption?
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And how does that fit in and how would you go about it?
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Well, I think it s important that we lower our meat consumption to zero.
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from any factory farm, whether it s pigs, chickens, meat, beef, it should be zero.
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The reason for that is that one, it s not great for you.
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The meat produced is obviously of lower quality and has hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides and all kinds of crap.
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Two, it s bad for the animals and the way they re raised.
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Three, it s bad for the environment and climate.
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They should be banned.
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That s not to say that if we all, for example, were able to
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grow regenerative meat or raise pasture-raised chickens or have sustainable fish farms that we couldn t be eating.
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adequate amount of meat without having hugely limiting them.
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I mean, of course, we eat way more in America than we need to, obviously, but I think, you know, it s okay to eat, you know, a palm size full of animal protein once a day or twice a day, that s okay.
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And if it s done regeneratively, that actually is a net benefit, right?
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It s a net benefit to the planet.
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The UN says that if we took two out of the 5 million hectares of degraded land around the world and converted to regenerative agriculture, that we would be able to stop climate change for 20 years.
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And this is land that s degraded, that can t be used for anything else.
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And you start to put animals on them, you start to graze them, you start to do it in the right way.
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Because you can t just throw them on land and let them run around and whatever, they ll eat everything down into stubs, which is how we get deserts.
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It s a very specific type of grazing called adaptive multi-padded grazing, and there s a lot of other terms for it.
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So I think it s really important to think about not how much, but what, right?
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The quality matters.
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So as I said before, it s not the cow, it s the how.
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And if we focus on that, sure, then we can find sources of meat, whether it s from Mariposa Ranch or Belcampo Farms, and we can buy stuff online that may be cheaper per serving for meat than a McDonald s hamburger.
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Because you could buy, for example, a cow share.
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You could buy a whole cow with a bunch of friends, chop it up, and put it in a freezer,
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And it s great, and I think people can learn how to shop in ways to get cheaper access to some of these things.
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So the more we do that, the more it ll drive the market, the more businesses will come online, the more the big companies will start to do this.
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What you talk about in The Pegan Diet is that it s not just about creating and sustaining the health of a single person, but it s the health of an entire planet.
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So can you talk a little bit specifically about principle nine in your book, how to eat like a Regenitarian to help save our planet?
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Why should we care about soil specifically?
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And how do we accomplish the goal of ongoing soil quality?
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I think increasingly, people are very excited about eating in a way that s not only good for them, but good for the planet, and understanding the link between our food and food system and climate change.
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In fact, when you look at the data, it s pretty frightening.
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Depending on how you slice it, when you add everything together from deforestation, to soil erosion, to factory farming, to transport refrigeration, to food waste, our food system end-to-end is probably the number one cause of climate change, up to 40% to 50% of all greenhouse gases.
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So the question is how do we how do we start to shift our diet and our choices to eat like a regenerator?
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Uh, and yesterday I was shopping and I went to the grocery store and I bought some coconut oil and there was dr Bronner s coconut oil and I have no relationship financially with them, but they they have created this regenerative organic certification along with Rodale institute and patagonia and others who are working on this standard standard, which is not just organic but regenerative organic and what that means is
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that we have to grow in a way that restores the ecosystems.
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On the earth and on the farm right now.
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We are in a destructive extractive system of agriculture that basically mines the soil depletes the soil and the nutrients in the soil and It leads to all sorts of downstream horrible consequences one the nitrogen runoff and one the nitrogen, uh that we use for fertilizer produces more methane than than cows three times as much and that s used to fertilize the
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The runoff from it goes into the river streams and lakes and kills 212,000 metric tons of fish in the Gulf of Mexico alone.
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And there s about 400 similar dead zones around the world that feed half a billion people seafood.
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So that s all getting damaged.
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And then you have the overuse of irrigation, depletion of our freshwater resources.
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You have the soil that can t hold carbon anymore.
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Because the carbon that we have in the atmosphere, people don t understand this.
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But a third, about 300 billion tons of carbon,
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Tons of carbon dioxide comes from the destruction of the soil which has carbon from the plants It puts it in roots and it s and it forms organic matter when you when you mine the soil.
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It s basically just dirt It s not soil.
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And so we ve lost about a third of our top soil We re projected to lose all of it within the next 60 harvests, which is terrifying.
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That s faster than any consequences.
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We d see from climate change And so the game really here is how do you eat the water?
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that supports a system that regenerates agriculture.
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And we re having a hearing with the new house committee chairman on agriculture, on regenerative agriculture very soon and on nutrition.
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So people are starting to get this in Washington and talk about ending factory farming, supporting farmers to put carbon in the soil, supporting regenerative agriculture.
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And so we right now don t have a large amount of access to it, but we can start to move our diet in that way.
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So start with just eating a whole real unprocessed food.
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Start with
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Eating food from community supported agricultures if you can or farmers markets if you can Uh, if you can find the new regenerative organic certified label, that s great.
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Uh, if you Actually are throwing out your com your food scraps.
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I mean even if you re a vegan you throw out your food scraps
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Uh, the methane produced from food scraps in landfills produces three times as much methane as cow farts and burps, right?
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and and if it were a country food waste would be the the third leading emitter of greenhouse gases after the u.s in china and it would it really we waste the amount of food that would feed over 10 billion people and would be have to be grown in the
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landmass the size of China.
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And it costs over $2 trillion that we waste every year.
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So just composting is such a simple idea.
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Some countries, like France, mandate it.
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You can t throw out waste.
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You go to jail.
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You get a fine.
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In California and San Francisco, they ve mandated in the city.
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And they have citywide composting.
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You go to the airport, you have to compost your food scraps.
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So this is all doable.
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And these are simple actions we can take.
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And as we move more and more towards eating real food, as we drive the marketplace, we re starting to see the shifts.
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And we see even companies like General Mills and Danone funding farmers to convert to regenerative agriculture.
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General Mills has committed over a million acres to regenerative agriculture.
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I mean, we need way more than a million.
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But yes, it s pretty exciting.
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That s why I just love the idea of
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using regenerative agriculture to create complex farm ecosystems that must include animals.
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You don t have to eat them, but you must include animals in order to regenerate soil.
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How did we get 50 feet of topsoil in some areas in America?
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We had 168 ruminants running around, peeing, pooping, digging with your host, saliva, chewing the grass.
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The saliva is like a growth factor for the plants.
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They wouldn t chew it all the way down.
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they would actually just partly graze it, and then they d move to the next part.
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And so you end up with this incredible ability to create soil.
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And we only have 90 million cows here, and we are destroying it, the earth, because of how we re farming.
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So using the 40% of lands that are not suitable for growing crops, I mean, you just can t grow vegetables or any crops there.
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These animals can go there and upcycle all the nutrients into incredibly nutritionally dense food.
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And in doing so, you will build soil.
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You ll actually draw down carbon from the atmosphere.
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You will conserve water, because you don t really need water.
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It s rainwater, mostly.
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And the water is held in this new soil that s full of organic matter.
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So you hold maybe 27,000 gallons of water per every percent organic matter per acre, which means you avoid droughts and floods.
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And then you don t need the fertilizer that doesn t end up running off into the streams and lakes and killing all those fish.
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I mean, nitrous oxide, which is what s
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the greenhouse gas emitted from putting on the fertilizer is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
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So people don t understand that.
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And producing this fertilizer takes 2% of global energy use.
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2% of all energy produced for everything is for basically making fertilizer.
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So you end up with this, instead of an ambitious cycle of destruction, you end up with a virtuous cycle of creation.
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And you then restore ecosystems.
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We ve lost 75% of our pollinators, 50% of our birds.
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those start to come back as you build these robust ecological systems that not only are better for the planet and not only conserve water, help draw down carbon and can reverse climate change and eliminate the use of all the needs for pesticides, herbicides, and agrochemicals, but it also produces far more nutrient-dense food.
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It actually produces more food per acre.
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And it also makes the farmers up to 20 times more money
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And revitalizes rural communities.
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So it s kind of a win, win, win, win, win, uh, except for the agrochemical companies who highly profit from all this sort of squeezing of farmers to buy their seeds and buy their chemicals.
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And, and the farmers are losing money and it s, it s really sad, but this is a way of revitalizing all of that.
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You know, I m glad you mentioned that because I was going to ask, is this something that needs to be solved on a, you know, when people think macro problems, they think, okay, you know, governments, this is something that, you know, you need to enact policies.
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But one of the recent podcasts that we did, Tony interviewed several entrepreneurs who are out to solve major global issues such as energy, also farming and space transportation.
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And one of the big economic incentives for small businesses is essentially that there s a giant market cap, right?
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So this is a huge problem that affects everyone.
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So can you talk a little bit more about what are some of the ways that you think businesses are going to move in and start implementing some of the ideas here?
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I think it s happening.
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Every day, there s billions of dollars flowing into food and ad tech.
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There s a company called Farmland LLP that buys up conventional farms, converts them to regenerative agriculture, and is able to create what we call ecosystem services.
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We literally consume billions, trillions, trillions of dollars of ecosystem services around the world, meaning we use up soil, we use up natural resources, we use up trees, we use up water.
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We re basically mining the natural resources.
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Ecosystem services are actually restoring ecosystems.
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So farmers can get paid for putting carbon in the soil, for not using water, for not using chemicals, for not polluting the waterways.
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I mean, you get this virtuous cycle of benefit.
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And what they re finding is that these farms actually are far more profitable.
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They re making returns of 70%, 80% on these investments that they make because they re just doing the right thing.
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And when they do the right thing,
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It actually is more profitable.
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There s all sorts of money flowing into food and ad tech.
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I mentioned before, General Mills and Danone are starting to understand that their supply chain is threatened in the future.
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If they don t actually figure out how to grow food in a way that s not going to destroy soil,
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They realize they re not going to have soil to grow their crops in that they need for their raw materials for their products.
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So I don t think it s a sense of altruism or moral integrity that s driving these big multinational food companies to drive regenerative agriculture.
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It s for survival, because they understand the fragility of our current food supply.
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And the very way we re farming is destroying our ability in the future to farm.
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Because of changes in climate change because of soil because of depletion of water and all these things are just one Vicious problem that have a beautiful solution which creates healthier humans Creates healthier soil Reverses climate change and is even good for the animals because they live in a natural state of running around grazing gas Grass and doing their thing.
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So I think it s kind of a win-win-win.
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I
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Are there any other futuristic developments that really excite you in this field, like new research within your field of functional medicine, new directions that you think are taking us in the next 10 years?
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Yes.
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One of the things that s really excited me is
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this discovery that, and this is just incredible research from folks at Duke and, and, and, and, and, uh, from Utah state, uh, Stefan Van Vliet and Frederick Provenza have done some of this work and they are discovering that in, in animals who are able to apply their, their inherent nutritional wisdom that lets them seek out the most powerful medicinal plants, the most nutrient dense plants,
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they re able to actually upgrade their health and protect themselves from all sorts of problems while at the same time putting in these phytochemicals into the meat.
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So this was a massive discovery for me where yes, we knew that grass-fed meat was better because it had more omega-3 fats, it had more vitamins and minerals and more antioxidants and more CLA, which helps cancer and improve your metabolism and all that s great.
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And of course it was better for the environment and it wasn t cruel to the animals and blah, blah, blah.
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But the shocking discovery for me in the last year or so was that not only is food medicine, but meat is medicine.
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That grass-fed milk and meat can be as powerful in terms of phytochemical richness as some of these plants.
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For example, if you have goats that are foraging on certain kinds of shrubs in the wild, they
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can take those catechins, which are the same chemicals that you find in green tea, which is a powerful superfood that is antioxidant and detoxifying, that will actually lead to the same levels of catechins in the goat milk as you would find in green tea, which is kind of shocking.
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So, we really know that by digging deeper into this nutritional wisdom of animals, that if you grow them, not just eating a monocrop, but if you allow them to eat hundreds of species of different plants, they ll eat this plant because it has this particular phytochemical and that plant because it has this nutrient, and they ll literally be dosing themselves with all these different plants.
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And that s the kind of food we want to be eating.
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Wild food, you know, you get the same sort of same sort of experience.
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So I think it s really pretty it s pretty exciting I think we re in a really radical new Era of understanding the role of food is medicine and I would say, you know when it comes to Anything we eat and that s really the principle of the Pagan diet.
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We shouldn t think of it as calories or energy or fuel It s all that for sure, but it s also more more than that.
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It s information.
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It s instructions.
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It s like code that up regulates or downgraded like it s your biology
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With every bite and it affects every single function in real time more than any other single thing you do every day more than exercise or sleep anything else and it s certainly more powerful than drugs.
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And it works quickly if you understand what to do.
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And it s really why I wrote The Pegan Diet, which is subtitled as 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World, because we are all confused.
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And there are all these diet wars, and everybody s at each other.
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But the truth is there are, down the middle, a set of nutritional principles that we all agree on.
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We all agree we should be eating real food.
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We all agree that ultra-processed food is not good for us.
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We all agree we should be cutting out starch and sugar.
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We all agree we should be eating lots of good fats.
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We all agree that nuts and seeds are good.
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We all agree that fruits and vegetables are good.
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If we should be eating grains and beans, we probably shouldn t be eating highly processed ones.
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We also agree that if we have to eat animals or people choose to eat animals, that they should be raised humanely, that they should be grown in a way that s regenerative to the earth, not destructive, and that we can actually enjoy all the foods that are out there in nature.
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I think
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I read a beautiful quote from this guy, Fred Provenza, the other day.
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He says, the universe is basically a restaurant consuming itself.
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So we re all in a cycle of life and death and birth and eating and consuming.
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And even if you re a vegan, people don t realize that
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Just to grow food, you destroy natural habitats.
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And if you re growing a giant cabbage patch and there s a bunch of rabbits and a family of rabbits living in there, when that combine goes through, it s going to kill all the rabbits.
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So there s about 7 billion animals killed every year just from growing vegetables and plant food.
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So you can t get away from it.
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And we re all a part of that vicious and virtuous cycle of life.
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The virtuous cycle of life.
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I like that.
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It has a really good ring to it.
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Well, thanks so much for your time.
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My pleasure.
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That was fun.
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Thanks for having me.
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And listeners, we hope you enjoyed this episode.
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You can get Dr. Mark Hyman s book, The Pegan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World, everywhere books are sold.
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We ll see you next time.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is directed by Tony Robbins and produced by the Tony Robbins team.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.