Get Healthy, with Dr. Casey Means and Dr. Mark Hyman

Welcome to the Megan Kelley Show live on Sirius XM channel 111 every week day at Meast. Hey everyone I'm Megan Kelley welcome to the Megan Kelley Show and today's Sunday mega episode today another of our Get Healthy series. This time with two favorites from the archives. First Dr. Casey means talking about good energy and ultra processed foods. She gave us so many great tips in this episode. I don't even know where to begin. I've like changed half my house because of what she told us in this exchange. And then we'll have Dr. Mark Hyman on functional medicine and reversing chronic disease. How you can detoxify your life and everything around you in a way to reduce disease from coming into your world as you age. This is very interesting. I've also done a bunch of these enjoy and we will see you on Monday. I'm so excited to talk to Dr. Casey means now this book has been out for a couple of months but I confess I had not heard about it until my pal Tucker Carlson had Casey means on his show. And then I listened almost with baited breath to the interview. I could not believe some of the things I was hearing. I had heard before but they were expanded on in very easy to digest ways. And by the way speaking of Tucker Carlson, I was with him last night in Kansas City, Missouri. And we had just a chat on this sort of open tour he's doing with a bunch of folks across several cities and it was super fun. I think he'll be dropping that as a podcast today if memory serves. But I'll just want to say before we get started. What a great way for two X cable newsers, XTV newsers to get back together on our own terms as independent broadcasters and be able to talk about anything totally liberating. It's just more validation that I'm in the right lane and I think you guys know that. And to those of you who actually spent money and got in cars and got in planes and got yourselves to Kansas City last night to listen. Thank you so much. I just, that takes a lot of effort and I was very touched by the big turnout and it was wonderful to meet some of the people who listen and watch, listen to and watch this show every day in person and hug you and to hold each other depending on the level of emotionality and it did vary. And shake hands and hear what motivates you in your own life, what you care about. So thank you. Thanks to all of you, whether you're there or not, I appreciate you listening to the show. Okay, so I love you so much that I'm going to extend your life today. I literally feel like Casey Means has extended my life. This book, Good Energy, you can see it's got all my highlights on it. It's pretty, isn't it? It's got a nice cover. Good energy. And I also listened to the audio book because you know that's how I consume most of my books these days. And that other interview with Tucker that I just mentioned and now today we're going to expand on some of the things I learned, which I will help short form so we can move things along and get to some very practical advice. That's my hope that you can walk away today saying, maybe I can't do all 20 things, right? But maybe I can do five and these small changes can make all the difference in your life. And five is a start, you know, in a year, maybe you will have done 10 and in two years, maybe you will have done 20. But let's get it started because Casey Means along with her brother, Kali have been sounding the alarm for us all about America's health crisis. They're really kind of responsible for the make America healthy again movements, spearheaded by RFKJ. Kali has been advising RFKJ and Casey is his brilliant surgeon sister, who is author of this New York Times bestseller, Good Energy, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. And she joins me for the full show today. Casey, welcome to the show. Megan, thank you. Oh, the pleasure. I'm so glad you're here. Yeah, me too. I have so much I want to ask you. So let's get folks up to speed who haven't heard the interview that I refer to or haven't read the book because, you know, good energy. They may be like, what is that like vibes? Is there sick vibes at this point in this election cycle? It's not vibes. So when we're talking about good energy, we are talking about the very foundational way that our bodies work. We're talking about metabolic health, a word that fortunately we're hearing more about these days. But we're talking about how ourselves power themselves, which might be something that people have never thought about before. And yet, metabolic dysfunction is the root cause of nearly every chronic disease torturing American lives today from childhood all the way into our elderly, elderly years. So it's a term we've got to get familiar with. And the reason I wrote this book is because I had trained in the conventional healthcare system. I'd done whatever good medical student does, rise the ranks of that academic ladder, went to Stanford Medical School, did five years of head and neck surgery training. And at the end of that training before launching out into being a, you know, private practice or academic attending physician, I looked around me at what was happening in American health more broadly and realized that even though, you know, I'm working hard in my lane as an ear nose and throat surgeon, more broadly, American health is just getting destroyed. It's getting destroyed. Chronic illness is exploding across the lifespan. And that's not something that I really learned about in medical school. I didn't learn about, you know, why are these diseases going up? What are the factors that have changed recently in human history that are making us have this explosion of chronic disease? And that's a journey that I needed to go on before really launching out. And when I did that, what I found was that when you look at the science, the lens of root causes, not just the symptoms we're treating, not just the drugs that we need, you know, to prescribe to all of these different ailments that we have, when we look at root causes, what we find is that nearly every chronic disease torturing American lives today is rooted in metabolic dysfunction. And that is an issue with how our bodies literally power themselves. So that's what I'm talking about with good energy. When our cells make good energy, I have good metabolic health. So many of the conditions that are plaguing us can improve. And so that needs to be the central focus of our American health care system. And right now it is the intentional blind spot of the American health care system. And so that's what this book is all about. And so it covers a lot. It covers the biggest thing is food. And what we're, you know, and that seems to be the biggest driver of cellular health. But it covers some exercise too and it covers environmental toxins and things that we may be putting on our bodies and so on. So it's got the full penapply of things that will affect your cells and how you can improve. That's why I say if people, you know, feel overwhelmed, they can pick and choose and just get started. But I think the food being such a huge influencer is empowering because if you're not yet an exerciseer, just start thinking about the food. If you don't want to think about your shampoo and your makeup and your carpet and all that, then just start with the thing that you're most actively involved in because everybody's putting food in their mouth every day and these critical changes can genuinely extend lifespan and improve health along the way. That's exactly right. The unique thing about this moment in time that we're living right now is that our world has radically changed, just exponential rate of change over the past hundred or so years with industrialization and urbanization and technological advancement. But from a cells perspective, we have 40 trillion cells in our body, the world is very different than what it's been expecting through all of human history. And so what's really happening with our health being destroyed right now in our country is that there is a severe mismatch between what our cells need to thrive and work properly and what our environment looks like right now. And that's across lots of different domains. It's across of course food, which I believe is really that number one domain that we've got to get back to the basics because that's really the two to three pounds of molecular information that we put in our mouth every day to tell ourselves basically what to be built from and how to function. But we're also talking about sleep habits. We're talking about the fact that we are sleeping 20% less than we were a hundred years ago. Our emotional health, the fact that we have low grade chronic stress all the time now from these devices in our hands 24 hours a day that are streaming, fear inducing sensationalist news stories from all around the world straight to our eyeballs when we're at the dinner table. And when we're in our beds, we're talking about the sedentary behavior, the fact that Americans are literally sitting 80% of the day where the only bipedal upright mammals and yet we choose to lock ourselves in a chair for 80% of the day, just squandering the miraculous gift of being able to move. We're talking about the environmental toxins. We're talking about the 80,000 plus synthetic toxins that have entered our food, water, air, and homes over the past hundred years by industry virtually unregulated many of which are destroying our cellular health. We're talking about our relationship with light, the fact that we for ever since the incandescent light bulb was invented just a couple hundred years ago. And now at the advent of blue light and a meeting technology, we're literally blasting our retinas with artificial light all the time. And this is totally destroying our circadian biology and our core foundational cellular health. So these are some of the things that we're dealing with as a body, as a group of cells that make up our body, this looking for information from the environment and not getting the signal needs to function. So what the chronic disease epidemic really represents is this just sheer and utter confusion of our bodies with the signals that it's getting from all around us. And getting back to food, this is the one that, I mean, each of these pillars that I'm speaking about has a profound impact on our core cellular health and metabolic health. Food, we have to realize, we eat somewhere between 40 and 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime. And this is not just calories, this is not just energy. This is the building blocks, the atomic molecular building blocks of our cells. And what people don't really realize is that our cells are actually constantly turning over throughout our lifetime. Even though, you know, I kind of, we kind of look the same day to day. You know, I'm kind of going to look pretty similar tomorrow that I just today, actually hundreds of billions of cells are dying and being reborn and they are re-3D printing themselves out of food. Isn't that incredible? We don't, we don't think about the body that way as a process. So we've got to give the body good information every single day and pay that bill of healthy, good food every day because we're constantly, constantly changing over our body. Our gut lining, our entire skin cells completely terms over every few weeks. So we've got to constantly be feeding the body with good information. Right now, 70% of our calories are coming from ultra processed, industrially manufactured, Franken food, ultra processed foods, devoid of nutrients, filled with toxic additives, a modern invention created by food scientists in the past 50 years that now make up the majority of our calories. Of course, we're sick. We are eating 70% of that molecular information that builds our body from essentially garbage that does not have what our cells need to function. So that's why food is so important. But the second piece is also that food is what tells our genes and our cell signaling pathways. What to do? We think of our genes as our destiny. It's not true. Our genes are a blueprint and how those genes interact with the environment is what our outcomes are. And food is one of those key things that changes our genetic expression. I'll give you a simple example that I talk about in the book. You look at an herb like turmeric. It has thousands of molecular compounds in it that the earth and that the soil has made for us to help our genes and our cell signaling function properly. And one of those is curcumin. Curcumin actually goes into our cells. It binds to proteins within the cells and changes the expression, decreases the expression of our key inflammatory pathway, which is called NFKAPAB. So you're eating this food and you're actually turning the knob down on inflammatory pathway that drives disease. And we could talk about any natural food in this way filled with thousands of chemical compounds natural from the earth, from God, to help us live our highest purpose life. And we instead of using that precious gift with real, unprocessed food from good soil that's filled with nutrients, we have decided that food is nothing more than calories and it doesn't matter if we eat nutrient-devoid ultra-processed food from a factory for 70% of their calories. Well, this is a science experiment that has failed. Things are just absolutely getting astronomically ill and food is a key piece of that. And unfortunately, there's a lot of systems issues that lead to why we have become enamored with ultra-processed foods because of so many incentives at the level of the farm bill and at the level of how media is funded that essentially make us believe that ultra-process foods are fine and normal when in fact they are not. Well, I am old enough to have lived through the moment in time when the messaging changed from what's bad for you is sugary foods and fatty foods are fine to fat as the problem. Sugar is the solution. They took all the fat out of the foods to make them taste better. They put all the sugar in and then we got hooked on this. We got hooked on these sugary foods. I mean, it wasn't that long though, I guess 20 years ago that I actually thought a healthy snack would be one of those packs of snack well cookies. My God, the shame, the shame, but I'm not alone, this I know. And one of the illuminating points of the book is that I thought that and many others think this way because we've been led to belief, we've been defrauded by virtually every person in charge of every industry that touches the food that arrives in our kitchen. Yeah. Yeah, this is the unfortunate part that I think people really do need to understand because people do actually listen to the science. We do listen to doctors in this country when the USDA food pyramid said eat six to 11 servings of grains and cereals per day, we did it. We got very sick, but we did it when Fauci said get the jab, the majority of Americans did it. You know, we do listen to doctors, but unfortunately at the highest level of our medical institutions, there are conflicts of interest and corruption that are actually making the science that we're getting not as accurate and not as clean as we'd want it to be. So you look at some examples, NIH, tax payer funded institution that we would ostensibly believe is its sole interest is to keep Americans healthy. But 80% of NIH researchers have a conflict of interest with industry. So we're getting paid also by process food industry, pharmaceutical industry. There was a report that came out that 8,000 NIH funded researchers have a major conflict of interest with industry. So we would assume that would just be clean, clean money from the NIH from taxpayers with a singular goal of American health, but in fact, it ends up becoming a PR arm to do scientific research that's mostly focused on pharmaceutical interventions in our standard conventional model of care, which is very reactive and very sick care and not focused on root causes. Then you go to the US, just jump in on that case, you just jump in on that. So basically you're saying with the like the FDA or the NIH, the people who are looking at our food and what's okay and what's not okay, suffer from the same conflict as the FDA did in Doepsyk as evidenced by that movie where the opioid industry got going because the people who are deciding whether that could be safe and marketed as non-addictive or whatever the initial disclaimers were, they're on the take, they either are getting money from these drug companies or in the case of the food industry, these big food manufacturers. Or they're banking on joining those companies immediately after their government stint is over. Right. Right. I mean, you see this all the time with their evolving door between, you know, FDA commissioner and then pharmaceutical company right after they finish got Gottlieb, FDA straight to Pfizer. It's just back in white. Right. But it's across every single industry. So NIH, we've got 8,000 major conflicts of interest in researchers, FDA, we've got 75% of the FDA's drug budget coming from pharma, not taxpayers. USDA, we've got 95% of the people who made the USDA food guidelines for America, which come out every five years. So from 2000 to 2025, had major conflicts of interest with the process food industry. You look at medical schools. You've got medical schools receiving huge, multimillion dollar grant from pharmaceutical companies. And for medical school, Stanford medical school received a $3 million grant from Pfizer for curriculum reform. So we've got NIH, USDA, FDA, medical schools, all taking money and then you add on the professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Diabetes Association, which work to create the guidelines that doctors practice by and that doctors actually, if they step out of line of what the clinical practice guidelines are, they're at risk for liability. And these professional organizations are getting a majority of their budget from industry. You've got the American kind of pediatrics, getting money from Abbott and from me Johnson and from vaccine manufacturers. These are the organizations that write the guidelines. So then it's no surprise that you look at the recent American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for treatment of childhood obesity. And all of a sudden what crops up is that they're recommending, as first line treatment for childhood obesity, GLP won agonist injections. We've seen injections for kids, ozempic. And so you just look at every single layer of our government agencies, how doctors are taught and who's making the guidelines and the money is astronomical what's going in from industry. And that's of course going to cloud the way research is done and how we even think about health in the body. So I as a medical student and all my peers who go into medical school to with this very noble intent to help people and to improve children's health, improve American health. We go to these elite institutions with just wanting to work our butts off. What happens? You enter a curriculum where the science is conflicted, the science that you're seeing at its most foundational level has conflict of interest where the school has been funded by pharmaceutical industry, you know, the medical school is not getting funded by big kale or big exercise, they're being funded by big pharma and where the guidelines that you have to learn and memorize and practice by also have a conflict of interest. So what you get is all these doctors who, you know, we start, you start medical school around age 21, 22, you're young and you know, you're, you're, you're deeply, deeply trusting of this system, right? But what you see is that the body is 100 separate parts, you see that what your path is going to be a little more. to go through four years of medical school and then pick one of 100 different surgical or medical sub-specialties that you're going to focus on just one little part of the body. You see that really what a disease is is a collection of symptoms and signs and you don't really think about disease until it gets to that place and then you just need to figure out what the symptoms are, label the disease and prescribe a medication or do a surgery. You don't think about proactive health. You don't think about root cause health. You don't think about environmental factors because that's not what being taught. Then you go into your practice and you're getting pressure from everyone around you, from the administrative staff, the bureaucrats and the billers to basically see as many patients as you possibly can because you are paid by volume, which further insidiously pushes you to not think about root causes, how to really reverse or prevent disease, because that takes a long time. That takes long conversations with the patient. What's easier, what's faster is to see the patient label their signs and symptoms as a disease and then give them a drug or send them for surgery. That's what's fast. And since we have this system, this incentive structure in American healthcare that's focused on volume, how many patients can I see for week? The outcomes is not really the thing that we're focused on. So you're taking these incredible great bright young minds and putting them into a system that at every level has conflicts that's pushing us to see the body as a collection of separate parts that's inevitable to get disease and that your job as a doctor is to label that disease and give it a pillar of surgery. That unfortunately is where we're at and why doctors, even with the best intentions, are not focused on root causes. There's no incentive to do so. There's little education. I think about it sometimes with respect to the very, very wealthy people I know. I'm taking billionaire wealthy. I don't know that many of them, but I know some and they all live into their 90s. Now, how do they do that? It's because they have an individual doctor who's on staff or constantly available to them. I mean, take the most extreme case, Queen Elizabeth, right? How did she live in to 93? Her entire life, she was probably eating clean. She had people around her monitoring things like her blood glucose just to make sure she was where she needed to be on all these things, full-time attention and care. I think about my old boss at Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, same thing. He's like, in his mid 90s, he's had falls and things like that, but onward, he trudges. Then I've known younger people who are with the B on the money front. They travel for business and I'll see them on a business trip and they'll have their own food that they've brought with them. I've asked more than one of these guys like, why are you bringing your own food? We're at this beautiful event. I'm sure they're going to feed us. No, because they know if they put themselves in the care of just some random chef in some random place, they're not going to get the right beef. One guy I knew, multi-billionaire, one of the richest Americans we have, has his own cows that are butchered on his own ranch and that's the beef he travels. It's just like, there is a level of eating and wellness that the average person has no idea about, but you don't actually have to be a billionaire to get it. You just have to have the information truly in this book, Good Energy, by Dr. Casey Means, and listen to the life changes you can bring on for yourself. It's true. I also see this as well in a community of people who have a woken to this idea that the reasons were sick in America, the reasons that life expectancy right now is going down in America. And a child born today is on track to live 600 days less than someone who is age 40 right now. Like, this is astronomical. We spend almost 2x more than any other high-income country in the world on healthcare. We also spend 23% of the largest GDP in the world on, quote unquote, healthcare. And we're not even able to keep life expectancy stable. It's going down in our country. If that doesn't kind of rip you out of your slumber, I don't know what will. And so it's not for a lack of medication, right? We're prescribing medications just more and more. The more statins we prescribe, the more heart disease we're getting. The more ozemic we're prescribing, the more obesity rates are going up. The more SSRIs we're prescribing, the more people have depression. You know, it's not correlating with the amount of drugs. It's so there's something else going on that's insidious, that's environmental. And like you say, people who are aware of what's going on are doing essentially everything they can to protect their bodies from the normal inputs that you are going to be exposed to if you're just living in America today, today, all of these. Can I just say I'm so annoyed listening to this because I know you guys are tight with RFKJ and I know Callie, this is an interesting piece of your story, Callie's your brother. And I've been following him for years on Twitter and watching him and listening to his expertise as well. But I know he's connected with RFKJ and helped him come up with Maha and that, you know, you guys have been doing some input there. But here's what's so infuriating. RFKJ has been raising some of these issues for a long time. He's an environmental lawyer. He's an environmental lawyer at heart. That's how he actually made his living. And Casey, no sooner did he pop up and say like, I don't know about these vaccines. Forget COVID vaccine long before that. Like I were pumping these babies through a lot with a lot of shots at a very early age and they don't really need this stuff. And so and then his warnings went well beyond vaccines. He came on this show a couple of years ago and said, you know, why, where do all the ticks come from? Why is autism shooting up like all these things? And nobody would platform him at all. They decided he was part of the so-called disinformation dozen. That was the Biden White House. He was totally silenced on raising the alarm on a lot of these same issues because there really are and you sound like a conspiracy theorist when you're like the powerful forces are silencing him. No, they actually were because they really do have financial skin in keeping him and probably you and Callie quiet. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it really, this all comes back to money unfortunately. And when you realize that around 60% of mainstream media's advertising funding is coming from the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, you can't watch five minutes of commercial on TV without seeing a medication commercial. And you realize that the funny thing is that these companies that are paying that much to to have the ad spots on mainstream media, they're not actually really trying to advertise to you the consumer. They're trying to get a direct line of communication to the media companies so that they can have an impact on the message that goes out that makes our news. That's a key point is that it's not about getting you to talk to your doctor about ozempic. It's about having a direct line of communication to the media network so they can have more control over what is said and who is platformed. And this is why the emergence of independent media is one of the most disruptive and exactly what you're doing, right? It's the most disruptive and powerful force right now in the world because what you see is that when you look at independent media that are getting hundreds of millions of downloads per month, what are they talking about? Root cause health. The dietary and lifestyle factors like getting sunshine and taking supplements and eating real food and regenerative agriculture. This is what's being talked about on independent media when we're not in a chokehold from the advertisers to talk about a specific dogmatic narrative about that pharmaceuticals are the only way to be healthy. And so I think that's very, very heartening and I think we're in a really interesting moment right now where post-COVID, which was probably the worst public policy disaster in human history, where COVID was really fundamentally a metabolic disease. People, we died at much higher rates than other countries that had better metabolic health. This virus went after people who were immunocompromised because of metabolic disease. This is why people with comorbidities were dying of COVID and people who were otherwise healthy really weren't and children were dying at much lower rates. And people saw that despite knowing that from month two, month three of the pandemic that this was a virus that went after people who were compromised from lifestyle-related and food-related diseases, metabolic disease, that zero airtime and zero information coming from our federal agencies in charge for health had anything to do with improving our metabolic health. I think it created a crack where people realized that there's a bigger problem here. So just to get back to what you were saying about our FK, you know, I think there's a moment right now where there's been some distrust that has been bred in the agencies and the healthcare system. Also costs are going up for everything with inflation and right now our healthcare costs are premiums. The United States are astronomical. The number one cause of bankruptcy the United States is medical costs. So people are feeling it in a new different and poignant way. And I think we're also seeing this inflection point with how health even got worse after COVID to the lockdowns and other factors. Kids are really suffering. We've got 34 percent of kids with the behavioral, mental, emotional disorder. We've got one in 36 kids in the United States with autism, one in 22 in California. We've got ADHD skyrocketing. We've got young adult cancer skyrocketing. We've got pre diabetes and teens reaching 30 percent. We've got 52 percent of children overweight or obese. So there's a confluence of factors. I think that are happening that are making this the moment where this is finally making it to the mainstream, which is really, really exciting, but this is why the concept of freedom of speech, and what Elon's talking about, and what RFK is talking about, and this idea of all the gaslighting that's happening around misinformation from the social media companies excluded, and mainstream media, this is why that issue is actually so important, and why that issue needs to be thought about in lockstep with the healthcare crisis, because when we start silencing the people who are able to use the disruption of independent media to get these messages out, that's when we're screwed. People say, are you hopeful? And I say, I am hopeful, because this is able to be talked about in our beautiful country where we can have discourse. But if that gets threatened, then I think it becomes a much scarier place. To me, it's not totally dissimilar from just to bring it to the current news cycle, what's happened in the past few days after the debate. It was placed in the hands of the mainstream media. We had fake news fact checks on the statements that were absolutely true by Donald Trump. Kamala Harris was allowed to get away with lie after lie with no fact checks, no interruptions, no follow-ups, and the internet melted down after watching it because we knew in our guts it was wrong. It was unfair. We knew. And so we've had three days now of fact checkers all over the internet, citizen journalists, independent journalists, firing off, tweet after tweet on X, showing the video of Kamala Harris's positions, which she denied, showing the FBI stats on crime are false that were cited by David Merritt, things like that. And so this independent voice, this collective of the voices to make one strong counterbalance voice, is correcting the record and changing the national conversation and the national knowledge and maybe even the national vote. And the same thing is now happening in healthcare, which is far more important. This is about whether we live or die. This is about whether our children live or die and for how long and how well. And you really are at the pointy head of the spear on this issue. And thank God now your message is getting out. And I know Tucker talked about this and you mentioned at the top of like your credentials could not be any more stellar. Casey, our audience already knows this, but I mean, to say she's not fringy is just an insult even say that anybody might consider that about you. You were at the top of every single medical thing you ever touched until you grew really disillusions with the system and walked away voluntarily. Stanford, top of your class, top resident on your way, what you were a fifth year of residency, they begged you not to leave. You didn't want to go you would done everything right, everything right. And then you realized you've been sold a bag of goods. >> Yeah. Well, thank you. And I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's going on here. It really doesn't. And I appreciate that. But I mean, it's really just about looking at the completely unemotional facts and stepping back for one second to ask why. I think that's what Americans are doing right now. And just to list, just to list a little bit about what I'm talking about here. Because we obviously talked about this on Tucker. But I think it's worth just zeroing in on what I mean by American health getting destroyed. Because then it becomes more, like why isn't every doctor stopping and truly like pausing their practice to get together to figure this out. We've got 74, we have 74% of American adults with overweight or obesity. 74%. Three quarters of Americans have overweight or obesity. We've got 40% of children with obesity or overweight. We've got 52% of American adults with prediabetes or tied to diabetes. This should be close to zero. It's 52% with an overt metabolic disorder. 30% of teens now have prediabetes. You know, 50 years ago, a pediatrician might have gone in their entire career without seeing a single case of prediabetes in a teen. Now it's 30%. We've got again, one in 22 kids in California with autism. This is astronomically higher than it was 20, 30 years ago when it was one in 150 and then one in 1500 farther back. We have again, 34% of young adults with a mental health or emotional health issue. Young adult cancers are up 79%. We are on track to have two million new cases of cancer in the United States this year. Highest, highest absolute number ever recorded in human history, autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing, especially in women of middle age by some reports going up three to 12% per year. Infertility is going up 1% per year. Spurne counts are going down 1% per year at a sustained rate since the 1970s. 77% of American young adults are not fit to serve in the military because of these chronic health issues. We've got 18% of teens with fatty liver disease. Again, pediatricians would have never seen this 50 years ago. As I mentioned, life expectancy is actually going down in the wealthiest country in the world. Ignore credentials, ignore Stanford, ignore all of it. Look at those facts, all of which are referenced on my website for all the people who want to know our health is getting destroyed. And at the best institutions in America, the hospitals, the medical schools, we're not talking about why. We're talking about how to medicate these conditions. We're talking about how to operate more on these conditions. We're talking about how to increase access to the healthcare system that is not improving these. We've got to be talking about these. The fact that this was not a topic on the debate stage is an abomination of our media. Why is this not the first order thing being talked about that we are that children close to 50% of children America have a chronic disease? What is going on? We should be outraged. We are spending more on this problem in a way that is not fixing the problem than almost any other line item in the American budget. Taxpayers are paying for it. And it's not being talked about. So everyone really needs to realize that this is not a fringe issue. It is not something that, you know, it's just an accident that we're ignoring. We are actively ignoring this at every level of our government agencies and media. And that that that needs to stop immediately. Okay, so the first thing we're going to take up I'll take a quick break, but we're going to talk about three of the demons. Sugar, ultra processed foods and foods that you think are healthy, but which are covered in pesticides. You get your big leafy lettuce salad and you dive right in without worrying about whether it's organic or not. And you may be doing far more harm than good. We're going to pick it up with a specific food discussion and then we'll move on to some of the other toxins that are around us and ways to clean our bodies and our lives right after this. Casey states with us for the full show. Again, the book is Good Energy by Casey Means MD. Okay, so Casey, I did the teas before the break. That's a very short form summary of what you're recommending on the health front, but put in your own words in terms of the massive overhauls to eating that are required. At the highest level, we need to move away from ultra processed foods and start eating real foods, unprocessed foods that are grown in good soil, ideally local, and not covered in the toxic invisible pesticides that are literally covering 99% of the foods we're eating in the United States. So it's a move away from this factory made food back to natural food. That's number one. I mean, when we get more specific in there, we want to be eating foods that actually support our cellular and our metabolic health so that allow ourselves to have the molecules they need to function properly. Because right now, all the chronic diseases that I talked about, they are all rooted in the exact same thing, which is dysfunctional cellular biology largely rooted in this issue of metabolic dysfunction that can be very much improved by giving cells the nutrients they need from food to function properly. So in the book, I talk about really five things that we should try to look for in food and include in almost every meal. And I call them the five elements of good energy eating. And this is making sure that in most of our meals, we have a fiber source, we have an omega-3 source, we have a probiotic source, a really healthy protein source, and some source of really good antioxidants and micronutrients. So what this does is that boils, there's a lot of components of food that we want to get. But if you are focusing on getting those five things in most meals and knowing a few foods in each of those categories that you like and stalking your kitchen with them, you can put together a meal that is going to have a really good chance of supporting your cellular biology. So for me, what I do is I just have my mental checklist of foods that are rich in fiber that I can keep in my house. So this would be like black beans and chickpeas and legumes and hemp seeds. If I'm thinking about omega-3s, I'm going to always have some wild caught salmon in my fridge. Maybe some canned sardines, canned mackerel, things like that. For a healthy protein, I've got a freezer full of game meats and grass-fed meats that I can just defrost and easily make a meal with. And then for probiotics, I've got my sauerkraut and my kimchi and my beet kevass and my Greek yogurt and things like that. So if you just have a mental checklist of a few things from each category, that you enjoy, eating for help becomes as simple as kind of piecing together a meal that has these components. So that's just sort of really high level. When we think about grocery store shopping, you know, I'm not going to say that every packaged food in the grocery store is a problem because everything exists on a continuum of processing. You know, one of my favorite foods is like flax crackers, flax or something like that. And that's just literally organic flax seeds, apple cider vinegar, and spices. It comes in a bag. It was made in a factory, but it's really a simple whole organic food in that bag. Compare that to something like a twinkie or a pop tart where there is a list of 40 ingredients. Things that, you know, you've never heard of before. I mean, you see on these packaged foods things like polysorbate, 80 and maltodextrin and red 40, we don't know where those things come from. We can't visualize them. Those are things that we should avoid. So just really being clear about, you know, what is going into my body? And I think at the highest level, this just comes down to backing up and building a new relationship with food and really not just really understanding it for what it actually is, which is this miraculous substance that comes from the ground by the ground interacting with sunlight through plants and through photosynthesis and that we get to take into our body to really determine our mental health, our physical health, our longevity, our mood, our thoughts. I mean, food is making really everything. And so we should both be, I think, in awe of what food can do for us. We should really respect that it is just this incredible process that happens on Earth as really a gift for us to be able to use to reach our highest purpose. And we should invest a lot more time and money in our lives and in our families in prioritizing the highest quality food we can because high quality food will lead to a high quality life. And Americans spend a fraction of a percentage of their total income on food as compared to European families who are much healthier than us. And so it's just, I think a lot of it, a mindset set shift towards remembering what food is and that there's an alchimal reaction between ourselves and food that really determines our health outcomes. And having more respect for the whole process and having more respect for our bodies, you know, realizing that our bodies are truly miracles. Each of our lives is a miracle. And one of the ways that we can honor this incredible experience of being able to have this life and be here on this beautiful planet for, you know, no just sort of a reason. Like it's just such a gift and a joy that we get to be here. One of the ways we can honor that miracle and this opportunity of life is to eat, you know, unpoisoned, unprocessed fresh food from farmers that we know. And so I just tell people like if there's an opportunity to get your family out to the farmers market once a week, talk to farmers, look people in the eye who are growing the food because that food is going to become your body. It's going to become your thoughts. It's going to become think about that food is going to become your body. Oh my gosh. It's so well put that brings it home. Keep going. Yeah. I think it's just, it's, we need to just wake up from the slumber that has been indoctrinated to us that, that, that, you know, these, these foods that are so devoid of life, you know, you think about there's some really interesting actually studies on this where if you take food straight out of your garden or food that was picked by a farmer that day. And so it's farm fresh and you eat it. It's filled with things like vitamin C and antioxidants and polyphenols and all these things that are going to support our health. But the average piece of food travels 1,500 miles now from the soil to our plate. And every day that food is out of the soil, it is one more day that it has been dead. And as something is more dead, so more disconnected from the life source, which is the soil and the water and the sunlight that kept it alive, there's going to be a degradation of nutrients. So food. So your Christmas tree. Think about what happens to your Christmas tree over the 10 days is starting there. So we are eating not only in the grocery store food that's in the grocery store may have been out of the soil for two, three, four weeks. It's traveled in a refrigerated van, you know, or truck hundreds, if not thousands of miles or flown from Chile or Mexico to your plate, just dying, losing nutrients. How do we expect to be vital and to have longevity if the food we are eating is more dead than it has ever been in history? Then you take that fresh food and you put it in a factory and you process it and you strip it of all of its helpful nutrients. And then you put chemical preservatives in it to make it essentially be shelf stable. What do we think that's going to do to our biology when we are eating something that is so devoid of life? So these types of reframes I mentioned just because we are so disconnected from nature 150 years ago, 97% of Americans grew some of their own food. Now it's less than 3%. So we are just so disconnected from this miracle. And I think part of the reckoning and the awakening to reverse the chronic disease epidemic and also get back on top of, I think this darkness that a lot of us feel in culture and society today that's just sense of emptiness and darkness that's kind of taking over. I think part of it is going to actually just be getting closer and touch with our food and with the soil and with this beautiful miraculous dance that happens between the environment and our bodies every day to create the lives that we want and investing more in that. We'll take a break in two minutes so I'm going to start a discussion that we won't possibly finish before the break but this is where organic comes in, right? Because I had friends 15 years ago and they actually ghost wrote a book on what an organic foods. And their conclusion was the only thing that you really need to make sure is organic when you do your grocery shopping is strawberries. Other than that, it's not really worth it. This is not good information and you're sounding a very different alarm. So would you say that if it's a fruit or a vegetable, you know, if it comes out of the earth, either from the actual earth or from a tree, et cetera, it has to be organic? I know we have to go to break, but I think my short answer would be it is absolutely beneficial for it to be organic. And we need to be implementing the precautionary principle when we think about organic or non-organic food, which is that even though the data may be muddied in large part because the industries that make these pesticides like Behramon, Santo have a huge interest in making us confused about whether they're safe. We know that a lot of these pesticides are linked to cancer, autoimmune disease, behavioral issues, endocrine disruption and hormone disruption. And so for me, thinking about the fact that six billion pounds of synthetic pesticides are sprayed in our food system every year, and chronic disease rates are skyrocketing. And there's mechanistic evidence of why I certainly feel that it is important to choose foods that don't have those toxic substance on them. Yeah. And then when you get those foods home, those organic foods, do you have some special washing technique for them? You know, personally, I just do a quick rinse of my food, but that's because I'm actually now buying food from all farmers that I know. So when I go to the farmers market, you know, I am getting it from the apricot lane farm stand. I have been to apricot lane farms. I know Molly Chester, who runs that farm. I get my meat from white oak pastures. I know Will Harris, who owns white oak pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. I get my meat from tribal pastures. Easier if you. Yeah. Oh, wait. No, so he's in Georgia because you're an Oregon, aren't you? I'm in California, but you can get these things shipped now and hold that thought. That's a good tease. I'm going to take my break. We're picking it up right there. This is where we're getting down to brass tax. What, how exactly should we eat and how do we get the good food? The book is called Good Energy. Casey, we were talking about what specifically, like, how do you get your beef? Because I will tell you, like, a frustration of mine here in Connecticut, and you would think in Connecticut, there'd be farms everywhere. They're really aren't. It's very hard to find a farmer's market or actually glad hand with an actual farmer. So you're limited to the whole foods, but the whole foods is really not that great. It's not exactly whole. So you are giving us some options, like for people like me who don't have a farmer down the road. Yeah, so I think when it comes to meat, there are some great frozen options. Today, freezing is actually a great way to preserve nutrients in both fresh produce and also in meats. If foods are frozen right at the time of harvesting or slaughter, they retain more nutrients than if they are just left at ambient temperature. So, you know, now there's a lot of great services that you can order, regenerative, grass-fed, organic meat from around the country and have it shipped to you. Force of nature is a great brand that is in whole foods, and like I mentioned, ordering from our regenerative farm like white oak pastures, and many others, it's a great option today now that we're able to ship. And then I would say for people who are trying to find organic produce, if you don't have anything fresh near you, that's where I think getting a lot of frozen produce like from Costco or places like that or even Walmart has quite a bit of organic selection. today. Those are good options. Farmers market is ideal because if you're speaking to the farmer and you know that food was harvested recently, it's likely going to have the highest nutrient composition because it's traveled less. And so that's ideal if you can. And you know, really just making it a family event, you know, this should be something we do with our families. We should get kids talking to farmers interested in food early. And so, you know, googling trying to find a farmer's market near you and then walking around and just speaking to the people growing your food and learn how it's done. I mean, this is. What do you do in the winter back in touch with? Yeah. Fortunately, I live in Southern California. So we have some great produce around. But yeah, yeah. So, well, there's a few options. I mean, certainly again, frozen food, you know, buying some of the dry staples in bulk like something like beans and legumes and, you know, nuts and seeds and those things are less perishable. And then I think, you know, frozen companies. There's like daily harvest, which can get you organic frozen food direct to your home. And then I would also say there's actually some really unique options. You can do like growing your own food indoors. I have a product called a let us grow in my house, which is a vertical indoor farming system. Yeah. And we're growing food all the time in our kitchen. How much room does this take? I want to tell me everything. I did want to introduce Elon Musk's brother who is doing this kind of thing. He's big into indoor farming. So I know a little bit, but keep going to explain this. Yeah. You know, I mean, compared to like regenerative agriculture in the soil, it's different, you know, because you're not growing it in like the ground. You're going in a vertical farming tower. So mine has 36 slots and you stick a little sprout in each slot. And over the course of one to two months, you get a gigantic head of lettuce, a gigantic head of cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, herbs. And so you can actually grow these indoor, you're around. So when I lived in Bend, Oregon, and it was snowy for four or five months a year, I was actually growing all sorts of produce in my kitchen and in my office. And it basically cycles water through a tower and can grow it with very, very little energy. So unfortunately, the price point of these are still a little bit high. But you know, I think it's amazing how much it gets you back in touch with the miracle of how food is grown. And it's kind of like a gateway growing a little bit of your own food, even if it's herbs is almost like a gateway drug to getting to be more inspired by sourcing a food. 100%. I mean, I know that even from my own lame little garden at the beach where we just did the typical cucumbers and tomatoes. But suddenly it was like, oh wow, our own food, it had no pesticides on it. It was grown right outside of our home. It tasted delicious. And we did notice the difference. The pesticides, you know, you know, Dr. Mark Sisson, he's not a doctor. Mark Sisson, he's behind primal kitchen brand, which is amazing. And I know you must love. He said on the show, he's very leery now of fruits and vegetables. He's just, he's very worried about the number of pesticides on your average fruit and vegetable. And he's very, I don't know if he's full paleo on, you know, all the meats and so on. But he was leaning that direction more and more. What are your thoughts on that? Because you do have some interesting conclusions on diet and like the various diets that are out there and so on. Yeah, you know, I think that we do need to have a bigger conversation about pesticides in this country because it's, it's, it's just so unchecked. When we think about the companies that are making pesticides in the US, we are buying a lot of these chemicals straight from China and straight from Germany. And two American companies, one of the, the largest merger ever in Germany was the merger of Behrmann, Santo. So a pharmaceutical company and an agrochemical company that are no teeming up and what's so devastatingly, I don't even want to use that word ironic because it trivialize is how serious this is. But you know, Behrmann, Santo, Behr makes pharmaceuticals to treat non-hodges lymphoma and glyphosate, which is made by Monsanto, has strong links and mechanistic links to the development of non-hodges lymphoma. So you think about how dark that is. And it's almost like a revolving door between a merger of a company that creates a product that's virtually unregulated in our country that leads to cancer and then has merged with a company that creates a treatment for that cancer. So that's a type of darkness that we're seeing in the pesticide industry. And, you know, chem China that makes a huge amount of pesticides we buy. We're just funneling billions of dollars towards China to basically sell us chemicals that are invisibly poison our food. And these pesticides, if you look at the scientific links to diseases, we know that pesticides are linked to ADHD, to thyroid disease, to sperm dysfunction, female infertility, male infertility, cancer, autism, liver disease. The list goes on and on and on, and that they actually poison the part of our cell that does metabolic activity, which is the mitochondria. People remember from high scobiology, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, it's the key part of the cell that's involved in metabolic health. And it is damaged by pesticides of which 99% of American foods are grown non-organically. So we're using these synthetic pesticides, which have a link, wildly, to Nazi Germany, who was developing organophosphate pesticides as part of their war effort to increase yields to feed German soldiers. And so it's just a very, very dark link. There's been a lot of corruption in that data. The Monsanto papers was this scandal that came out years ago about Monsanto essentially, you know, working to silence the data and massage the data that said the pesticides are safe. And then you look at how this sort of, you know, how this is happening on the systemic level. Well, we have a farm bill that's renewed every five years. And this is a 500 billion plus dollar bill that is used to help support farmers with crop insurance and subsidies for commodity crop growth. But unfortunately, what this 500 billion dollar bill does is it funds the commodity crops that are turned to ultra-processed food. So corn, wheat, soy, sugar, beats, things like that, which then become the cheapest possible commodities on the market. Because tax payers have funded the subsidies, which then gives a cheap, basically raw material to all the ultra-processed food companies to then turn into these ultra-processed garbage foods that are built on the backbone of commodity crops. Then they add in toxic colorings and natural flavors and doe conditioners and preservatives to make it taste like food. But really it's built on this bland taxpayer-funded pesticide-covered commodity crop through our farm bill. So at the policy level, this is how it gets on our plates. And this is why the unhealthy food is cheaper. Because tax payers are paying for it to be subsidized to be cheaper. And then taxpayers are paying for the environmental externalities from this destructive type of agriculture and for the healthcare costs of Americans who are getting sick because of this food. So we're paying four times over for the unhealthy food that is making us sick. And the devastating part, because it's not necessarily the farmers who are responsible for our health. It's the doctors who are there to help us out our health. But this is the part that's devastating, is that there's a devil's bargain that exists right now between ultra-processed food who wants to make food as cheap and addictive as possible. So we'll buy more. And the healthcare industry that benefits off of financially benefits off more patients being sick with chronic illnesses and needing treatment over longer periods of time. You would think that doctors would be in the front of the line to be studying what pesticides and plastics and microplastics and artificial colorings and preservatives in our food are due into our chronic illness. But have you ever heard, you know, someone in the Fauci realm getting up and talking about these things on a microphone saying we have to investigate our foods of like, no, someone like RFKJ who's then being silenced for talking about these things and, you know, being called a fringe lunatic for bringing these things up. And so there's something very dark and backwards around the incentives between these two of the largest industries in the country that unfortunately, and this is an unemotional statement of fact, benefit from more Americans being addicted to taxpayer subsidized ultra-processed foods filled with toxic additives and a healthcare industry that benefits from more patients having chronic disease over a longer period of time. >> I, that brings me to seed oils, which I really want to discuss. But before I get there, I wanted to say the conclusion that I reached from reading the book on the number of diets, the kinds of diets, whether it's keto or paleo or Mediterranean. And what I think, you correct me if I'm wrong about your conclusion, it's like been reading a lot of you, so I may have confused it. But I think you reached basically the same conclusion that Peter Atia reached and that he espoused on our show, which was he said he's come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter which one of those you choose that you shouldn't be too rigid. But what does matter is the things you're talking about, eating real whole foods, no sugar, no added sugar. We're not talking about the sugar that naturally occurs in like a raspberry, but like the added sugar, avoiding seed oils, trying to at least limit, ideally eliminate alcohol, those kinds of things. But do you have the same conclusion just on, you know, eat kind of the general plan you want, but make sure you follow these guidelines? Yeah. We have to realize that the diet wars are a charade. Diet controversy is intended to confuse us so that as consumers, we're spinning our wheels and not sure what to eat and grasping for different solutions sold to us by marketers and the food industry. We are being distracted from what matters, which is that the vast majority of American calories and the foods that are being govaged down kids' throats is pesticide-covered, plastic-filled, chemical-laden, science-experiment food from a factory that is destroying our society. cellular health. So step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is to get off ultra-processed foods, before even talking about a dietary philosophy. So that's number 1. The second piece, and just look at the world, there are so many different traditional types of diets all over the world with different macronutrient compositions and different types of foods that people are eating. And we are designed as humans to have all these redundant pathways in our body that can use different types of foods to generate cellular health. But the common denominator between a carnivore diet that leads someone to improve their metabolic health and a vegan diet that leads someone to improve their metabolic health is real, unprocessed, clean food. So there's more commonalities than differences. So I just want to be very clear. The diet wars are a distraction from what matters, which is eating high quality nutrient-filled, and chemically-laden food. So that is the key point is that many industries benefit off of our mass, confused about diet. And there's another piece of the puzzle here, which I think is actually a really beautiful aspect of the world that we're living in right now. And the technological advancements that have happened in science was that we have access to a lot of testing and bio-marker lab work, things like that that can actually tell us each if our diet is working for us. So right now over 50% of Americans, when you survey them, they're completely confused about nutrition. They don't know what to eat, and they feel paralyzed by all the choices and the different diet wars. But what people don't understand is that when we understand the basics of our foundational lab work, simple tests that any doctor can order, then we take some ownership and start really being the CEO of our health, and not just fully outsourcing our health data to daddy doctor. When we start taking some more ownership over that, which the healthcare system has indoctrinated patients to believe that they are not smart enough to understand their lab work, which is incorrect. I think every fifth grader in America can understand their basic lab work and the physiology behind it, and that's why I laid out in my book. Things like triglyceroid levels, HGL cholesterol, fasting glucose levels, what does a blood pressure mean? These basic lab work, if we track those over time and we understand the basics about them, we can see whether the diet we're eating is generating metabolic health and is generating the conditions in our body that will help us avoid chronic disease. So the two key points here are eat, unprocessed real food as local as possible, ideally connect with farmers if you can, and check your biomarkers every two to three times a year. The basics, you don't need to do any fancy expensive stuff, stuff that's covered by insurance, and track whether it's working for you. Right now when we look at basic metabolic lab work, 93% of American adults are not getting a good mark for the basic five metabolic biomarkers, which is glucose, triglycerides, HGL cholesterol, waist circumference, and blood pressure. 93.2% of Americans are not optimally managed on those biomarkers. So each of us needs to know those things for ourselves. And then as we, as we engage in dietary strategies and try different things on, check routinely, and you can actually be very clear whether it's working for you or not. You don't have to be confused and you don't have to outsource that information completely to your doctor. I saw recently a card, my cardiologist I go once a year, and we were talking about how to make sure you maintain heart health and he was saying, make sure you have a low insaturated fat diet. But we did not discuss any of this. None of this was raised by one of the best cardiologists in New York, which is obviously a big city. And what you are saying is it's really not about the amount of saturated fat in your diet. It's about what kind of foods are you taking in net net on a 24 and seven day a week basis. And if you're eating low insaturated fat, but you're eating high in processed foods and seed oils and a lot of sugar, you're probably still going to have unfavorable heart results. Right. And I think that, you know, we all are biochemically individual. So what really matters is the interaction between the saturated fat and your body and then how that's actually leading to your health outcomes. And right now we can understand a lot about our health outcomes with the tools available to us. So the biomarker testing, you know, we have all the wearables that we can wear now like the horror rings and there's even continuous glucose monitors that can track that. And then there's also studies that we can do to actually see inside things like our heart vessels like calcium scores or clearly scans or grotted into the thickness ultra sounds. There's tests that we can do to truly know what our risk is. And so I think there's a huge emergence really outside the healthcare system, more in the entrepreneurial world, to democratize access to this testing so that we don't have to walk around feeling confused. And we can have some more empowerment about understanding, you know, the biomarkers that truly tell us about foundational cellular health and how this confluence of factors in our environment is interacting with our own bodies to generate health or not. And so what is the horror ring show? You held up your finger. I've seen people wear this, but I haven't looked into it. The horror ring, it's using essentially a light spectroscopy technology to understand some factors that are going on in your body. So it tells you about your resting heart rate, tells you about your sleep. So different stages of sleep, how much deep sleep, light sleep you were getting, total time is sleep, total time and bed, which are often very different. It's telling you about your heart rate variability, which is a metric of basically how much time is between each heartbeat. And that's actually an objective measure of how much stress our bodies are under. It also tracks my temperature and pairs with an app called the Natural Cycles app, which is the only FDA approved form of birth control that's essentially a digital app. And so the temperature, and then this is astonishing, Megan, I think most women, I didn't learn this until I was in my mid 30s, but you can actually track where you are in your hormonal cycle and your monthly cycle by just looking at your basal body temperature, which can be done through the ring. And so I have just learned so much about my own biology and my own cycle just by wearing an aura ring and then understanding how that relates to my monthly cycle. So I can know the exact day I'm ovulating. I can, it can predict the exact day I'm going to get my period. And I just feel so much more in touch with that beautiful cyclical nature of my female body by having a ring that's telling me that. So, you know, resting heart rate, that's a really important biomarker because the lower our resting heart rate is sort of the better our cardiac outcomes are be the less stress the heart is under to be, you know, pumping blood. So that's that's something you can see from the ring. And I really want to see my resting heart rate be in that like high 40s, low 50s. You know, the, the, the Mayo Clinic says 60 to 100 is fine, but we actually know that as we get up closer to a resting heart rate of 100 beats per minute, it, it pretends much worse health outcomes than if we're in that lower range. And so it lets you just zoom in on kind of day to day, what's happening with these inputs, like how much sleep am I getting and how much movement am I getting? It also tracks your steps, of course. And so you can stay accountable to the key metabolic input puts that we know have an impact on our health outcomes. So if you talk about the continuous glucose monitor too, which you said, I mean, the book goes through in detail how this will help you monitor your life and how well you're doing and the glucose in your body and the insulin and all that. But I don't understand. Is this something like does it puncture you? Like how, how does it work? Yeah. So it's a sensor that you wear on the back of your arm and it does have a small little probe that's four millimeters long. It's like fishing wire. It's very small. You can't feel it. And that does puncture the skin. So this little probe is essentially sitting in the fluid around your cells in your arm and it's constantly sampling your blood sugar levels and send that affirmation to your smartphone. So you can see in real time what's happening to your blood sugar levels and your blood sugar levels matter because as we become metabolically dysfunctional, we serve this problem in the body with how the body's making energy, how the mitochondria converting food to energy in our bodies, what's going to happen? And as I mentioned, that problem is happening not just the food we're eating, but also because of the lack of sleep and the lack of movement and the environmental toxins that's all synergistically destroying our cellular health. What's going to happen when we come metabolically dysfunctional is the cells are actually going to reject glucose sugar from coming into the cells because they can't do a good job of processing anymore because the cell is essentially metabolically broken. So our blood sugar levels are going to rise in the bloodstream because it's not being able to be taken out of the bloodstream into the cells. So because metabolic dysfunction is affecting 93% of Americans today, tracking your blood sugar can give you this this basically constant movie of what's happening with this key metabolic biomarker. So when you have breakfast, you can look and instantly see how did that breakfast affect your blood sugar and then you might be able to make some tweaks. Okay, well, I had oatmeal and my blood sugar went up 100 points, which is very, very high. Maybe tomorrow I'll add a little bit of fiber, I'll add some fat, I'll add some protein, I'll take a walk after breakfast to try and minimize that huge blood sugar rise that I had after that meal. So it lets you have this closed loop feedback between what you're eating, how your sleep is, what exercise you're doing and what's actually happening with your blood sugar, this key metabolic biomarkers. I want to tell the audience that there are so many helpful tips in the book. Again, it's called Good Energy by Casey Means MD, like take a 15 minute walk after your meals. That actually helps with the insulin and the glucose levels. When you're eating a meal, let's face it, people are not going to give up carbs, they're not going to give up pasta permanently or rice or all that. But there's a way of eating your meal where if you if you have Casey writes like a handful of almonds maybe before you go out, have a little, a little bit of fat and maybe when you eat eat your meal, you have that salad first and then you eat your protein first and then you finish up maybe 10, 12, 15 minutes after that with the starchy thing like your potato or your pasta, even that can help you keep these glucose and these insulin levels managed. So you're not totally unrealistic, like we're just never going to have pasta again, you know. We're just, the people realistically won't live like that, but there are these little tips where you can live like a normal person, but minimize the damage that you have been doing. That's exactly, that's exactly right. And I think everyone's had the experience where they've had a post meal crash, you know, where you have a meal and then a little bit later you feel exhausted and you want to take a nap and, you know, are feeling tired. And what's so interesting with something like a continuous glucose monitor is you can actually see what's happening in your body when you have that subjective experience of a crash and often what's happening is that we've skyrocketed our blood sugar levels with probably refined sugars, refined carbs, not a balanced meal. And then the body sees that huge blood sugar spike and wants to lower it because it doesn't like that. Big blood sugar spikes can lead to problems like inflammation and sugar sticking to things in the body, which is not good. That's called glycation. So the body releases all this insulin to soak up all that glucose out of the bloodstream into the cells and sometimes it will overshoot and you will crash and you'll see your blood sugar actually going beneath your baseline, pre meal. That is often when people feel tired, low energy, jittery, have more cravings for carbohydrates because the body really wants to get the blood sugar back up to baseline. And so it drives you to want carbohydrates. So I think for many people, when we're eating the standard American diet, we're on this blood sugar roller coaster all day long. We're up down and then we have to compensate to get back up so we eat some carbs and then we're up and down. And what's just amazing when you're using tools like this is that you can really see that as you stabilize your blood sugar with simple tweaks, like what you were just talking about pairing carbohydrates with protein and fiber, taking walks after meals, getting better sleep, managing your stress better, our day actually feels a lot more stable like subjectively, like our mood and our mental health and our sense of ability to focus and our energy and things like that. That's not to say that people need this technology to reap the benefits of what you can learn from it. There's lots of principles like the ones we just talked about that anyone can apply to the way they craft a meal with or without a sensor and still get the benefits of more flexibility. The information is right there. You don't have to live. You don't have to move in to Casey's house. You can have some of this information feedback in your own house for relatively inexpensive price. How much I want to get to in the half an hour we have left. Can you do? Can you explain quickly seed oils because Dr. Kate Shanahan, she came on the show. They are the hateful eight canola soybean corn, sunflower, safflower, grape seed, red brand and cotton seed oils. Good oils would include avocado, coconut, what else? All of oil, coconut, avocado, and then things like ghee and beef talo, duck fat, things like that. Things that are much more natural and have been less refined. These are facts that our bodies have evolved to eat over millennia. The issue with seed oils, which is one of the most controversial topics right now in the world for whether they're healthy or not. I think you've got to back up a little bit and realize a couple things. One that this is now, the predominant source of calories in the American diet is these seed oils that are in everything. They are in every processed food. They're in salad, right? So hard saying. So hard saying. Marinate. You can barely go to whole foods and find a food without seed oils anymore. Nine less. Last Friday, I had on Dr. Murdo McCarrie and I was saying, okay, we want to get nuts, just healthy nuts for the kids to snack on, right? So you go, good luck finding a nut. The only ones you can find is maybe pistachios and macadamia nuts that haven't been treated with canola oil, and the kids, they don't want the raw nuts. They want something that's been like a little flavored, but I have been able to find macadamia nuts and pistachios that say ingredients, nuts and salt. That's it. But everything else, canola, canola, canola, always, always. And it's devastating to see like what's even happened to whole foods, the integrity and the standards of what they used to consider healthy have slipped so much where nine of the 10 things I pick up at a whole foods, these days have too much sugar, seed oils, or they're not organic. So it's unfortunate, but so these seed oils have burst onto the scene and many of them were actually created in the wake of Rockefeller's work with oil refining, as essentially they needed something to do with some of the byproducts of the oil refining. And so in a sense, we're kind of eating like an engine lubricant when we eat these seed oils and they are not foods that we had 152 hundred years ago, they're brand new and they're highly concentrated and rich for omega-6 fats, which are pro-inflammatory. They get incorporated rapidly to our cell membranes and have an impact on our how our cells function. They outcompete other healthier forms of fat for places in our cell membrane. So they're actually changing really the structural integrity of our body. And I think, you know, we have to take into account the fact that these are generally stored in clear plastic bottles that plastic can, you know, anything that's stored in a thin plastic bottle like a vegetable oil or can oil can have those microplastics leaching into it. You know, you often see avocado oil or olive oil in a glass bottle, but these seed oils are almost always in a plastic bottle. Clear plastic bottles that light is getting in. It's oxidizing the oils that can make them more damaging and they're just the majority of fats we're eating. And they're devoid of really any nutritional value. I think if you really want to lose your lunch, you should Google a video of how canola oil is made. You know, how we did it. We did it because I heard you say that. And so we have at least one. Here is a little look at how they make it. The very natural canola oil watch. It's the flakes into a screw press. It has a large revolving screw shaped shaft enclosed within a slotted cage. As the shaft turns, its threads squeeze the flakes with high pressure, forcing out the oil, which then drains out through the slots, a 70 minute wash with a solvent. This chemical extraction process removes all but a trace of oil. So the next step is to cool the oil to five degrees Celsius. This thickens those waxes so they can be filtered out. The waxes don't go away, either. The factory uses them, after washing and filtering the oil, they bleach it to lighten the color. And then uses steam injection heating process to remove the canola odor. The oil is now fully refined and ready for bottling. For losing audience, it looks like they put that through a car engine. That's really what it reminded me of. It's kind of why that in my body. You know, and then on top of that, you do have to think about the bigger picture environmental impact because these are, again, taxpayer-funded commodity crops that are covered in glyphosate and pesticides, which are hormone disruptors. And so you're essentially by buying that oil and using it, we're also promoting a system that's driving this monoculture that's destroying the soil in our country, and we'll probably lead to some type of food collapse in the future because of what we're doing to our soil. And so much of that land is being used to grow this stuff that's just going into sedals. It takes like- Wait, I'm just having my aha moment here on how kids are going into your early puberty and the sperm count is going down and girls are having PCOS more than ever. And if you have a household that's feeding them vegetables and fruits, unless you're eliminating seed oils, they're getting the pesticides that you just listed, that glucose, the fate, whatever it is. That way, they're coming in through what's in your pantry, and this stuff could be leading to a lot of that, no? There's absolutely, there's three things that we really need to be thinking about when we're talking about hormone disruption that is rampant right now. Like you said, I mean, a devastating statistic is that early onset puberty is now becoming like epidemic in our country. American girls are starting puberty years earlier than any other continent in the world. And it has declined about six years, the onset of puberty in the past hundred years. And we're also seeing a huge rise in hormone-driven cancers, like breast cancer, which is an estrogen-driven cancer. On top of that, we're seeing a sustained decline in sperm count and a sustained decline in total fertility rate. And women's infertility, the leading cause of which is polycystic ovarian syndrome is skyrocketing. So across the hormonal spectrum, we are being destroyed and devastated. I mean, I can't, I'm 36 years old, I cannot talk, I cannot have a conversation with friends in my age group without the topic of infertility or IVF or egg freezing coming up. So we have to back up and say, what the hell is going on? Two of the big factors I think we need to be investigating are both pesticides and plastics. So, you know, plastic is everywhere. Plastic is ubiquitous. It's literally in every single thing. It's our sheets are made of polyester, our clothes are made of polyester. Every bottle in our home is made of plastic. All our food containers are plastic. Plastics are now in our air, nanoparticularized plastics in our air. It's in our water supply. It's on our food. It's in our homes. We're covered in it. And plastics and pesticides can disrupt estrogen receptor signaling act as Xenoestrogens, which essentially create a proestrogenic environment in our bodies and other pesticides like at vaccine, which is illegal overseas, but which we use about 70 million pounds of in our country each year can actually convert testosterone to estrogen. And so, you know, just as a real wake up call to people, we talk about does organic matter. It's like these, these chemicals that are invisible and are on our food can convert testosterone to estrogen. So why would we not be, be worried about that when all of these hormone related issues are skyrocketing in our culture? So one of the easiest things that I think we can do to clean things up is to just, you know, we got to filter our water. We, you know, we should avoid pesticides on our foods and we should really try and minimize the amount of plastic that's in our, you know, in our homes and on our foods and things like that. So I have a question for you from Debbie Murphy, who is my executive producer for news. She's been with me forever. And she has a question I think a lot of moms want to know about, which is, okay, you get the, you get the, you know, non-pesticide leading fruits and veggies into your house. And then you send your kid off to school and you put it in the little plastic baggie. And your alternative, you don't want to put in the little plastic baggie to send your kid to school with it is to try to put it in glass, which is heavy and the little kid could break it and the school doesn't love it. And so I think a lot of us struggle with that. Like, you may have this good clean food and then you shove it in plastic or you shove it in Reynolds wrap and it's like, there, well, that's aluminum, you know, same thing with bottled water. You, you, you have it in plastic or wait, what is the aluminum any healthier? Like, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, yeah, we want to avoid the aluminum too because aluminum is, is a neurotoxin that, you know, filling the vaccines that we're using and that's in, you know, we're drinking these aluminum cans that are also lined with plastics. We're getting both plastic and aluminum, I mean, it's everywhere. I think, I think it comes back to, I mean, we don't want to get discouraged. I think one of the things that always Casey hopeful is realizing that like all of this is just a few decades old. Like we have forgotten that, but we actually got into this mess just over the course of like half a century. So we can absolutely get ourselves out of it, but we do need to wake up and realize what's happening and think about our priorities, right? Like we need to get creative, we need all hands on deck, we need our brain to be functioning properly so that we can address these issues that are all of this is slipping into culture because of industry interests and we're kind of allowing it to happen, but we have a lot of agency and I think we need to like, we really need to, like I talked about earlier, get back in touch before, before solutions, before talking about like, well, what better than a plastic bag year or Reynolds wrap? We need to get back to the basics, which is more spiritual, I think, which is the fact that like what do we want from this lifetime? What do we even think about this lifetime? Are we connecting with our spirituality and the fact that we are having this like absolutely miraculous cosmic experience as spirits in a body for 70 to 90 years on this planet once in eternity? You know, like what are our priorities, you know, and then if we ground in that, whether that's a spiritual belief or a religious belief and really invest in that and just kind of unplug a little bit from this distraction industrial tech complex that wants us to totally forget about the miraculousness of experience of life. Once we do unplug from that, then think about, okay, what do I want to do in this lifetime? What is my purpose? You know, where am I trying to get? And I think realizing that the temple of the body, which is impacted by all of these things we're talking about, this is our gateway to reaching our highest purpose, to connecting with God during this lifetime. And I say all that not to take us off topic, but because it's, we get really caught up in how difficult all the micro decisions are around our lives and how tough it is with the schools and the school lunches and the baggies and the lotions have artificial fragrances in them and the plastics. But I think we got a ground this in like the real core truth, which is that, you know, we're off course to the culture. Our priorities are misaligned. We're missing what matters, we are totally distracted by tech and by all of this environmental stuff to join our biology and making us not think clearly. We got to get back on track from that place. Then we can talk about solutions, which is like, yeah, I, I want to invest my time and in sourcing healthy food and in trying to find alternatives. So that might be a silicon baggie. I don't know. It might be, you know, wrapping your kids sandwich in butcher paper rather than a plastic baggie. But I think, you know, I mean, you know, there's certainly infinite solutions to kind of like piece through each of these filter our water, you know, this and that. But fundamentally, I just think it needs to be grounded in a sense of like, not overwhelm, but actually like, I'm committed to prioritizing this in my life because I am just just one day decision. Like I'm going to get a walled water filter on at least my kitchen sink. And then you do it. And then you're done with that one, like some of it is just like, I'm going to do some planning to improve my life. I want to say a couple of things because I just want to get these out because I know our time is short and you have to catch a flight. Okay. So there's, we should spend a minute on sugar. Sugar's the devil. I just did the thing, I did a Google search and found out that your, my kids are allowed to have 25 grams of sugar a day, according to the recommendations. So that's not so bad. I could have like one ice cream a day that your, your position is it's zero. It's zero. Hello, we, the sugar is terrible for us. So I want to go back to that. But just a couple of the things quickly. We do need to be exercising, walking is great throughout the day. Not one exercise, not one hour, not sit at a desk all day and then do one hour of exercise. All day long, little movements, wall sits, mini little squats, even if it's one minute or two minutes an hour. It's actually better for you than just the one hour and eight hours of sitting. And actually you cite somebody in there, I think it, I can't remember who it is, but in any event, it's saying, in fact, if you sit all day and then you just do that one hour of exercise, you're probably undoing the effects of all that, of that one hour of exercise by all that sitting. Sitting is the devil, sitting is death, you will die if you sit all day. So that's one thing. And the other weird thing, I'm just jumping around so I can get these things out while you're still here, see what, which one you want to talk about is the hot and cold therapy is good. Like saunas are good, cold plunges are good. You don't have to have necessarily a cold plunge to do it. You can just turn on the cold, cold shower for two minutes at the end. All that stuff is like testing your body and sleep, sleep, sleep. This is in your book and we've had other sleep experts on, but it matters. It matters. Get at least seven hours. And here's the weirdest, but most interesting thing that jumped out of me in this whole thing. Do not take your grocery store receipts, say, I don't want my receipt. Okay, so take your pick out of all those, but those are just quick rules for the audience listening at home. >> Yeah, those are the keys. And as you read the book, you realize that all of these things are basically doing the same thing when we sleep and we avoid the toxins and we move more throughout the day. What we're doing is we're giving our bodies signals to help mitochondria and ourselves do their best work. Do it all funnels through this core foundational pathway that lets us have just foundational health. And these are of course, didn't learn any of these things in medical school, had to learn all of this after medical school. And so yes, absolutely. I think that it is helpful to talk a little bit about the walking that you were talking about because I think this is very free and practical and actionable for people. But the research shows that if we're able to move a little bit every hour throughout the day, so just get up and walk around the block or walk around our house, do a few air squats, just move our muscles. What that does is it actually keeps our glucose channels, our blood sugar channels on our cell membrane all throughout the day so that we're constantly able to take blood sugar out of the bloodstream and use it. If we sit all day and just exercise for one hour during the day, we're actually keeping those glucose channels inside the cell for most of the day. And keeping that blood sugar floating around the bloodstream. And so it's a very different physiology if we're just doing these little micro hits of movement all throughout the day versus sitting all day and then exercising for an hour. Of course, that hour has a huge benefit and it's great for your mitochondrial health and your aerobic health. But what we want to do is we want to be exercising, but also sprinkling little two-minute bursts of motion throughout the day to keep those cells constantly metabolically active. So this is the simple stuff like park farther away from the store when you're in the parking lot. So you can walk a little bit farther, setting those little alarms on your phone for every 45 minutes or an hour to remind you to get up and move. It actually has a monumental impact on our 24 hour blood sugar levels. One of the things you recommend is the treadmill desk, which I said to the team, I'm like, what is this treadmill desk? Can you guys get me a videotape of it? And three of the members of my staff said, we all have them. Here's Debbie Murphy. This is Canadian Debbie for those of you listening at home. You know her well. She's been with me since 2007 at Fox and here she is up in Canada, boo, Canada. On her walking on her treadmill onto this is Kelly McGuire. Here we go. Another Canadian producer. All my staff is in Canada. I don't know why. Okay. This is Natasha. She produced this segment. She's busy. There's your book. So she's not in Canada. She's down in Texas. But anyway, three of my staff are actually reading and writing and doing real work on the treadmill desks. Yeah. Pretty much the only thing I do sitting indoors is podcasts because it's a much better environment. And I've got the good background. But to my right right now is my treadmill desk. I have a bright pink treadmill desk. This desk will raise after the podcast. And I actually have a standing desk outside. I'm pointing to my glass sliding door right now, just an old desk that I have a little structure on top of so I can stand. And I move my treadmill desk indoors and outdoors throughout the day. And that gets to another point about metabolic health that I think is sort of under the radar, which is we need to be spending more time outside, astronomically more time outside. The research on this is insane. Humans are spending about 94% of their time inside a house or inside a car. About 6% of their time outdoors on this spectacular, beautiful planet that we have this privilege to live on. And this is so, I know, I mean, it's, so my, my ask, my invitation for people is try to find things that you are doing right now, indoor and seated during the day and just find a way to do some of them outside and ideally some of them outside and standing. So this could be, instead of catching up with your partner on the couch at the end of the day, take a walk around the block together. If you are opening your mail that you just got from your mailbox instead of bringing it inside and sitting to look at the mail, maybe stand outside at a table and do it. The reason for this is a multifactorial. The first is that our circadian rhythms are being destroyed in our modern culture where we're being blasted with blue light from the screens and we're spending 94% of our time indoors separated from sunlight. Sunlight is a form of, of, of energy that actually hits ourselves and our retina and on our skin and tells our body what time it is. It tells our body that it's daytime and the absent of light energy. It tells our body it's nighttime. That's important because we're diurnal animals. We do certain biological activity during the day and we do certain biological activity at night. And in our modern world where we're separated from sunlight all day and we're blasting our retinas with blue light at night, our bodies are completely confused about what to do during different times of the day. And again, the chronology epidemic is basically mass confusion of ourselves and circadian biology is a big part of that. And the way we can actually fix that is spending more time exposing our retina without sunglasses. You don't want to look straight at the sun, but you want to just be outside with the sunlight. Even if it's cloudy, that's fine. There's still photons coming through and you want your skin and your retina to basically see what time of day it is so it knows what genetic and self signaling pathways to do. And then at night, of course, once the sun goes down and different pathways need to be activated in our body for biology, we want to basically separate from all that blasting light. So dim lights, you know, maybe use the blue light blocking glasses, turn your devices onto dark mode or put a red light's filter on your computer. You want to reduce that blue light blasting your retinas and all of this is to help your body know what time it is. So the second piece aside from circadian biology about going outdoors, it's so important is that the air is actually cleaner outside than it is inside our homes. Our home air is actually usually more polluted than what it would be outside. There's no exceptions to this. Like if you live right next to a big highway, but typically because of all the carpeting and the paint and the plastics and the dust in our homes, it's actually more polluted. And air pollution is a huge cause of why we're sick. So just get outside, spend more time breathing fresh air. And of course, the third piece gets back to the spiritual and we go outside. We get away from our myopic tunnel vision that happens when we're locked inside these cages of our four walls of our offices and we see that there's a bigger picture. We see that there is beautiful nature doing its thing out there. We see that there's stars and moon and sun in the sky. We see that there are birds flying around and we realize that this is all bigger than us and we need to actually realize that we're interconnected to everything else on planet earth and in the universe and have more awe for that. And so for multiple, and that actually, and that sounds a little bit, you know, woo-woo. But in reality, there is research that shows that when you spend time around trees and when you spend time outdoors, it significantly lowers our stress hormone levels which have an impact on our metabolic health. So circadian biology, less polluted air and lowering our cortisol levels are all reasons that just spending more time outdoors can transform our health. And when we sit inside our desks on our computers on our phones, we get scared, we get small, we think the world is a terrible place because that's all we're seeing. So that's why it matters. Let me ask you a couple quick, quick ones, okay, because we only have a couple of minutes less left and I'd love to get these answers. Why shouldn't we take our groceries to our street? And so that thermal ink on receipts actually is an endocryndrycephaline chemical and can actually affect our hormone health. And so we don't want to touch our receipts, yeah, and that thermal ink, we should just not touch. So just decline the receipt or ask for an electronic receipt. Brilliant. Got it. Bottle water. Avoid bottled water from a plastic bottle. These are filled with nanoparticles of microplastic which again can have estrogenic effects and actually we now know that plastics that are in these bottled waters and they actually can go into our cells, these nanoparticles and disturb our mitochondrial function by actually going inside our cells. One thing that I think is astonishing that is not being talked about yet by doctors is the fact that the ubiquity of plastic in our air, water, food and homes, which is an invention that was only created a hundred years ago, brand new. It's changing the way we're going to have to practice medicine because now, coronary plaques, like the plaques that block our arteries that go from our heart to our brain, we can do a surgery called a crud and anorectomy to take out those plaques. And they're looking at those plaques under a microscope now and 55% of plaques are now filled with microplastics. So we not only have- That's just too much of a bummer because I feel so powerless over the plastics, sorry to cut you off, but we have got 60 seconds left and I got to get these out. If you get a filter on your kitchen sink, do you need one on your shower? You know, probably it would be good. I don't have one yet. There's kind of just too many things to do, but there are shower filters now. And I think that that might be a beneficial thing. Do or a whole house filter if you are, if you can, but certainly drink your water. What do you buy? You buy one of those reusable, I take it, you don't get a plastic. What material do you get a bottle of water, you know, like a thermos and- I just, I use a stainless steel or a glass water bottle. I carry multiple with me all the time, so I have enough water. Usually I'm carrying two liters at a time and I have a VersaSmosis filter that gets reminemorized and that's under my sink. So, you know, we bring, I even will check bags now instead of taking carry on so I can bring three or four liters of water with me on a trip just so I can like have something to start with when I get there. But otherwise a glass bottle would be your best option, like spring water. Okay, so we ended it on a very small myopic note and we started on big notes, but that's fine because people do need like practical advice for what to do, including yours truly. Please come back. We've only scratched the surface. There's so much goodness in here, Casey, thank you. Thank you, Megan, so much for being a warrior on this health issue. I so appreciate what you're doing. I am 100% with you. And I should tell the audience Nicole Shanahan's going to be on the show this show soon. Here's the book, Good Energy. Go buy it by Casey means get it now. God bless you Casey and your brother Cali as well. We all have nothing if we don't have our health. And we have the perfect guest to discuss how you can take control of your wellness and life. If you're in the maha, this is the show for you. If you're into living, this is the show for you. Dr. Mark Heimann is a practicing family position and a leader in functional medicine. We'll talk about what that means. He is a 15 time New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Dr. Heimann show podcast and the founder of Function Health, a resource that gives you the tools to own your own health. Dr. Heimann was on with us back in February 2023, on episode 498, and I'm super excited to dive into him with him for the full show today. Great to have you. Good to be here, Megan. Okay. Can we just start with that? What is functional medicine? Because it's not the same as like traditional medicine. No. Tradition medicine is really about sick care. It's diagnosing and treating disease as opposed to the science of creating health. That's what functional medicine is. Instead of reframes our whole perspective, you get to root causes rather than just downstream symptoms. So medicine sort of divided into specialties and different organs and different parts. But your body is one whole ecosystem, and now we begin to understand that and how things like environmental factors, toxins, our diet, stress, allergens and so forth, interrupt our biology, or lack of certain things we need, like the right food, nutrients, amounts of hormones, light, air, water, sleep, connection, movement, all these things are ingredients for health. So functional medicine is about identifying the root causes, which are the lack of things you need to thrive, and too much of the stuff that does it in your body is not like whether it's heavy metals or whatever it is, and taking those away. And then your body has this natural intelligence and healing system that allows your body to repair, heal and renew, and when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. So functional medicine is really about this new paradigm of dealing with the body as an ecosystem rather than going to a different doctor for every inch of your body. It should just be medicine. Yeah, it just makes sense. But it's not. It's not. It will be. It's coming. It's where the science is. It's where we're headed. It takes the generation or two to see if science. I was doing some of these things like a year ago. I was getting my life in order physically and in every way. And the woman who was advising me was like, we should get you a test for the heavy metals in your body. And my doctor was like, no. He refused. It was actually something he would have had to order, I guess, and he's like, we're not doing that. And like, he was not open-minded to it at all. Some of the other stuff, he was like, okay, because I had mold in my apartment or my house at the BH and he's like, I guess, you know, you can get tested for mold. But then he was like, do you really think it's an issue? [BLANK_AUDIO] If mold were killing people, everybody who lived in the jungle would be dead, a lot sooner than people who live in the desert and they're not. So I've been pulled between these two, because functional medicine makes so much sense to me. And yet my very no-nonsense, traditional doctors like, no. >> Yeah, I mean, the two things that make us sick are diet and environmental toxins. And those things are ignored by traditional medicine. My doctor just graduated at medical school, I mean, she'll have nothing about these things. Yet, every day in my practice, I see people with chronic illness, whether it's auto-immune diseases, or whether it's metabolic diseases, or whether it's digestive diseases, or neurodegenerative things like Alzheimer's. And there are all things that we now begin to understand the root causes. And we can actually change those and reverse those chronic illnesses. Like, nobody ever heard of reversing diabetes before. Nobody ever heard of reversing Alzheimer's or reversing auto-immune diseases. And you can, and that's the beauty of what this approach does. It's really where medicine is headed, it's where major sort of academic institutions are researching. But it takes a couple of decades for science to become practice. >> With RFKJ, who I know is a personal friend. Callie and Casey means Callie in particular, like a big advisor to him. That's great. He's totally on board with all this. And then you mentioned Dr. Bretuson, he's the Alzheimer's doctor, I mean, he's an expert in Alzheimer's and dementia. He's been on the show a couple times. And he's been saying, you don't have to get Alzheimer's. You can do things in your life to prevent Alzheimer's. But the so-called traditional community looks at him as like, you know, not, I won't say Snake Rayleigh, but like, yeah, exactly, fringe, and like, you can't listen to him. I first got introduced to him by Maria Shriver, who was having on when she was on the Today show. She's very into Alzheimer's. >> Absolutely. >> Anyway. >> Well, she's not interested in stopping it. >> Yeah, yeah. She knows Alzheimer's. Yeah, but so, but that's what's happening right now. And the same way we saw, you know, doctors who were like, you might not want to get your seventh COVID vaccine booster, who got dismissed by people like Fauci as fringe, Jay Bhattacharya as focus protection, that's fringe. Now we're having functional medicine doctors looked as fringe, but I think there's a different effort and it's future. >> That's right. It's future. That's changing. I mean, Toby Cosgrove, who was one of the most visionary leaders in healthcare, was a CEO of Cleveland Clinic for many years, and he invited me to come to Cleveland Clinic to establish the Center for Functional Medicine, because he realized that the future is going to look different when it comes to chronic disease, that the old model of looking for a drug for every disease or a pill for every ill is not going to solve the problem. We saw this massive failure with Alzheimer's. We saw billions of dollars of money, federal money and private money and pharma money going to researching the drugs that they thought would cure Alzheimer's. And none of them have worked, billions of dollars, hundreds of hundreds of studies. Why? In the right place to solve the problem, we're looking at the pathology downstream, not at the upstream causes. And so the causes are not that hard to understand. It's our metabolic crisis. Pre-diabetes are calling Alzheimer's type three diabetes, which is because of the sugar and metabolic issues in the brain. That's why keto diets work so well for Alzheimer's. They're looking at environmental toxins, and they have how they play a role. There's heavy metals or petrochemicals or other toxins, mold may be a factor, tick infections may be a factor, nutrition deficiencies might be a factor. And a patient who was diagnosed with early dementia, and she was an older woman who had absorption issues of B12 and also some genetics around vitamin B6 and folic, or folic acid. I gave her like a vitamin B12 such and high doses of B12 and B6 and folic and her dementia went away. Now that's not saying all causes, all diseases with people at dementia have that as a cause, but you have to personalize medicine. And where everything is going is personalized medicine. And this is just where we're headed. We were a hood who was the father of systems biology, which is how everything is connected and works together as the bodies and network. He called it P4 medicine. It's preventive. It's predictive. So you can identify biomarkers or things along the continuum of disease. Not way for you to get something. So, well, you know, I have this problem and I don't feel good or my test problem. Well, you don't really quite have a disease yet. So come back when you have a really have a disease, then I'll give you a drug. It's not how we should be doing it. So it should be predicted. I see this. I call it like the queen's medicine. You know, how did the queen live to be in, you know, her mid 90s? I don't know. She should be 101 or two like because they had personal care that was looking at them all the time. That's right. On this level, you know, not just like an annual, but and honestly having known some super rich like mega billionaires in my media career, they all have somebody who's looking at this stuff all the time. I saw this one guy, super billionaire at this event. I went to it two years ago. And this is a swanky event. We were there for a few days, put on by, you know, another billionaire, but notwithstanding billionaire number one, had brought all of his food with him. Yeah. You know, like he was at that level where he was being advised at that level on his health. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because all these people who have money or royalty or whatever, they're invested in making sure it's one-on-one care. Someone's looking at their markers, advising them on what they're putting in their body. It's not just like try to eat better, get a little exercise, don't smoke or drink so much. Right. It's much more creative. But you're like with functional medicine and with your program, too, you can get this without being a billionaire, without being royalty, it's basically five hundred bucks a year. That's right. So, function health, you know, I'm one doctor and it's going to take a generation to change medicine or two, maybe. So how do we leapfrog over that? We need to have business innovation and that's where we created function health, which was a health platform. This personalized allows you to understand your own biology, be proactive, be the CEO of your own health. And we're learning so much about what's going on underneath the hood for the population that never had been done before. We now have over 180,000 members who have over 20 million data points on these people. We can see trends like the severe metabolic crisis we're having in America with high levels of insulin and blood sugar and A1C and also their lipids, which we do in a very deep way to look at their cardiovascular risk that traditional doctors don't do less than 1% of all tests or for this special new advanced lipid profile and less than 1% of all doctors measure insulin, which is the most important test you want to know if you're going to live a long time. It would be healthy. That's prediabetes. Yeah, prediabetes. But it's not just prediabetes. It causes heart attack, strokes, cancer, dementia. These are all diseases of insulin resistance, what your body doesn't like sugar and it keeps blocking the effects of insulin. You need more and more insulin and that insulin causes storage of belly fat, it causes inflammation. It makes you hungry. It just creates this whole cascade. And so we're seeing all these amazing things that people didn't know they have. Like inflammation is a big driver of disease, 46% of our population has inflammation. 33% have an autoimmune biomarker, which is sort of amazing to uncover because I don't know what it's causing and is in our load of environmental toxins that are a leaky gut, is it the COVID post-COVID phenomenon? Well, the vaccine and even just COVID has led to this long COVID phenomena, which is often driving autoimmune disease. And we're also seeing nutritional deficiencies. 70% of our population has deficiencies in nutrients at the minimum level to prevent a deficiencies disease. So how much vitamin C do you get scurvy? Very little. I know that happened in my husband's good friend on Wall Street when he first started an investment banking. He was eating so poorly, he went to the doctor and this is going to work in Manhattan. I went to the doctor and I was like, you have scurvy, have you been at a ship for six months? He's like, no, I've just been at my desk. But you know, I've heard you discuss this on your show where we have what percentage of the population now that's obese and yet you're saying they're malnourished. Yeah. People are overfed and undernourished. So we see this double burden of obesity and malnutrition at the same time, especially in kits who are eating junk food. We're seeing zinc deficiencies, you know, folate deficiencies, iron deficiencies, deficiencies in vitamin D. These are omega-3 deficiencies. These are rampant in our population. And what people don't realize is these nutrients are the basic lubricants that oil the wheels of your metabolic machinery. So every chemical reaction in your body and there's 37 billion trillion every second has to be facilitated by a helper, which is usually vitamin and mineral. And we're deficient in this because we're eating 60% of our diet as ultra-processed food. It's 67% of kids diet. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So you do the math. I'm not going to math. But it's a lot of -- It's a lot of -- Those are omega-3's you mentioned. So you can get those in something like fish. Fish, yeah. And then the bad omega's are the sixes, which you can get in like vegetable oil. Yeah. And unfortunately the average kid has a ton of omega-6's in their potato chips and all this. Yeah. They're not really necessarily balancing them out. And then if you do try to balance them out with seafood or fish, the odds are if you just get it from the grocery store, it's riddled with mercury. That's right. And it may not even be worth the time. You have to get like -- Can't win the losing. But not just any salmon, has the wild caught Alaskan salmon, Mackerel, anchovies, anchovies, and sardines. Sardines, right? Yeah. I love those. I'm Jewish. I like them. Have you been to wrestling daughters in New York? No, no. Have you ever like opened up a tennis sardines and actually eaten fish right back there? 100%. Every day. Is it the whole body? The little bones? The bones are great. Because sardines are one of the superfoods out there. It might help. No, come on. It's a superfood. You've got incredible amount of protein. You've got calcium from the bones, which is highly absorbable. Is it crunchy? A little bit. You've got -- you've got -- you've got a rich source of omega-3s that are great for your brain health and many other things. And you've got colonine, which is also critically important for your brain. So it's an incredible food. Is this available to me via supplement? Yeah. You can take sardine supplements for sure. Well, that actually just hurts so many interesting because I was taking fisch oil capsules for a while since I ate no fisch. But then somebody's like, you know, you've got to watch that, too, because be careful who you buy it from. Yeah, you need to rep those source. Right? Because they, too, could just be getting it from mercury-infested fish. Yeah. So you're basically taking two mercury capsules every night. Yeah. Most of them don't have that. But they filter it. They purify it. You can look at the -- before and after testing and see. if it's gone. Okay, that's good to hear. But anyway, so that's just one of the many lists that you gave that like your kids are doing. And I do worry about the kids a lot because you said something that I was like, oh my God, that makes so much sense. Bobby Kennedy's been talking about this too. I cross examine him for four hours over vaccines. That's part of his resurrection story. And it was great. He was very strong. He had answers for all of his critics, questions about him, which is what I was fronting. And the one of the things he was saying was, no, I have not maintained that vaccines cause autism. But I think that we need to look at the toxic stew, the children are growing up as a cause of potential, a potential cause of autism and what's in the vaccines like the extras and the vaccines like mercury or aluminum should also be factored into that discussion, made perfect sense to me. But he listed it for me in this discussion saying, look at all the things that kids are going through that we're not present when I was a kid. He was talking about like ticks and ADHD, like everywhere, autism spectrum diagnoses all over the place, and so that made perfect sense to me. And then I listen more to you and you're even next level with it, I think, because you're like part of the toxic stew is those potato chips and the soda and the absence of cauliflower and broccoli and kale or any of the cruciferous vegetables that might help absorb some of the terrible shit we're putting in our bodies, the kids and we're allowing it. I mean, I'm guilty of this too, in part, we're allowing the kids to treat their bodies like dumpster fires. >> Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, when you look at what happened from when I was born in 1959, it was about 50s to now, the change in our chronic disease epidemic is staggering. The change in autism rates have gone from one in 10,000 to one in 30, something kids depending on where you look at the data. The rate of neurodevelopmental issues is now affecting one in six children. We have rising rates of autoimmune disease and allergies and kids. We're seeing obviously obesity and kids which never saw before. I mean, when I was in medical school, there was no type two or type one diabetes. It was juvenile onset or adult onset. Then kids started getting it. Now 30 plus percent of teenage teenagers have prediabetes or attempted diabetes. It's staggering. The question is, why is this happened? What's changed in our culture, in our environment, in the food? Well, we industrialized our food system. We've made convenience king. Food industry is basically taken over, and when I say food, I mean the food and agonistory have taken over our society in ways that are pervasive and actually measurable. They fund academic centers to do research. They fund 12 times as much "nutrition research" as the federal government. They fund academic associations like the American Heart Association, which hits $192 million from the food and the infarm industry. They fund the cadmium nutrition diatetics, which is 40 percent of their revenue comes from the food companies. When you go to their meetings and I've been there, I've spoken there. There's big exhibit halls that say, "No pictures allowed. Why?" Because it's full of junk, and they're promoting to the nutritionists as sort of healthy alternatives. We've got them creating front groups like the American Council on Science and Health that is actually some of those guys that have been in jail for Medicare fraud and they're a bunch of quacks who are funded by big tobacco, big food, big agonistory. They pesticides, trans fats, and effort to its current syrup are all healthy for you. And then they fund social groups like NAACP and Hispanic Federation to get them to oppose things like soda taxes, which we can argue is good or bad, but they want to lie themselves so they don't push back on them. And they target those groups more directly than other groups themselves. By the way, remiss, if we didn't mention, they also fund our lawmakers. >> Yeah, well, I was about to say that. And they're the biggest lobby group. So they fund huge amounts of miseducation and misinformation. >> No, either party is immune from this. The Republicans are just as corrupt as the Democrats are and taking money from these groups and voting accordingly. >> 100 percent. I mean, I Roger Marshall, who's now the head of Mahakakis in Senate, I called him out in my book, Food Fix. I said, you know, there was a panel on chronic disease and hearing in Congress. And he was emphasizing, he was just exercise that was the issue. Wasn't died at all. And he was funded by the Confections Association of the Shashel. And now we become friends. And I said, listen, Roger, I called you out in that book, just hope you don't mind. This is no worry. >> He's seen the lights in. >> Yeah, yeah. So, you know, people have changed. >> No, there was an update today, hold on, before it came to air, this just happened. Yeah. We're trying to get Cali means and RFKJ are trying to get, to make it such that people cannot use food stamps to buy soda to try to encourage our poorest Americans when they need food stamps to use them for high nutrition foods and not the worst or the worst. And tooth and nail, the soda companies are fighting this. It's worth something like $60 billion a year to them. And this just happened in Arizona where there was a bill to remove soda from the things you could buy with food stamps with snap. And they voted against it. And the bill failed to make it out of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Arizona legislature by a vote of 6/6 and who cast the deciding vote against it, a Republican Ralph Heep voted against it alongside the Democrats. By the way, not for nothing, but here is, I think we have Cali means, yeah, here's Cali means reacting to that and so on. >> So there's no correlation or causation between soda and obesity rates. >> If your concern is obesity, then we should be talking about obesity. We shouldn't be talking about obesity for snap recipients who have social determinants of health beyond just what they eat. >> I think is that the general public would consider unhealthy. >> I mean, who knows what the general public considers unhealthy? >> The government tries to define in state statute what's a good food and what's a bad food. It's very, very complicated. >> We are not going to subsidize sugar drinks and candy for our kids, it's criminal. This is a no-brainer situation and frankly, these two speakers performing should be ashamed of themselves. >> We're crossing a line right there, you're crossing a line. God bless him. Good. >> It's hard to imagine how those guys go to sleep at night saying what they say, no, we know. I mean, to say there's no connection. >> Social factors that's causing all the obesity amongst them. >> Yeah, it's not just poverty. By the way, it's affecting all sectors society, not just the poor, but- >> As last I checked, JB Pritzker is pretty rich and he's morbidly by obese by anyone's standards. When you look at snap or food stamps, it's called supplemental nutrition assistance program, but it's really about food security, which means you get enough calories. You can eat 2,500 calories a day and that's enough to fuel your metabolism, but it's going to kill you. >> Yeah, for some substance. >> It's not nutrition security, which is what we need in America, which is providing enough nutrients to people who have also food insecurity. When you look at snap, 20% of Coca-Cola's US profits come from food stamps. It's a big chunk of Walmart's profits, and the people don't realize that we pay for the problem multiple times. There's a new kind of concept called the commercial determinants of health, which is how multinational and transnational corporations privatize profits and socialize the costs and subvert public health. And so the taxpayers paying the bill, we pay like probably four times, for example, for the food. >> We pay it by that soda. >> That's right. We pay for the farmers to grow the corn that makes the high fructose corn syrup that goes in the soda. Then we pay for the soda with snap. And then we pay for Medicare, Medicaid on the back end to deal with the chronic diseases like diabetes that result from it, and who's paying for the environmental consequences of how we grow the food using methods that disrupt our soil, the loss of soil organic matter. We've lost a third of all our top soils, so we're going to lose all of it, the amount of water resources we use to irrigate, which are because the farming methods don't retain water in the soil. If there ever be one percent organic matter, you retain 25,000 gallons of water per acre. So we're losing huge amounts of our water infrastructure. And we're also poising the rivers and lakes because all the neuro-attrition fertilizer flows down to them and causes the overgrowth of algae, which sucks all the oxygen out and kills the fish. And so we have dead zones, the size of New Jersey, and the Gulf of Mexico or America. But I want to call it now. There's just 400 of those around the world, the feed half a billion people, and then we lose biodiversity. 75% of pollinators are gone. So the list goes on, who's paying for all that? Who's paying for the bees being destroyed, who's paying for the water being destroyed, who's paying for the fish being destroyed? So basically, it's us. >> This is the part of conversation where I just want to open up a bag of Doritos, like I give up. I give up. I can't. Like, there's no winning, right? We're probably inhaling enough microplastics to kill us right now, you know? It's like, by the way, that was another thing I learned in preparation for today. The average person, is it here? The average person now today has, it was on the New York Times today, on microplastics. The human brain samples from 2024 had nearly 50% more microplastics than brain samples from 2016. They estimate there are five bottle caps worth of plastic in the average. >> Can't be good. Can't be good. >> Five bottle caps? Can't spare it. >> No. >> It's overwhelming, like, the farming, let's just start there. You know, that's what Casey and Cal even saying. We need regenerative farming, which I don't really totally understand. But it seems like it's going to be really hard to make the farmers do that and really expensive. And when I sat in on those RFKJ confirmation hearings, even the Republican senators seem to be like, a little like, I'm chowly for you, except when it comes to the farmers. >> Yeah. Well, the thing is, the farmers are a big voting base, and so you don't want to lose them. But you also want to take care of them because when you look at farmers in this country, suicide rates are higher than almost any population. Chronic disease rates, Parkinson's, cancer, because of how they're farming. They're not able to make significant profits. They're really marginalized in terms of their way they're stuck between the bank loans, the crop insurance. and the seed and chemical companies that they have to buy the seeds and the chemicals from. So they're kind of the stuck in the middle. And there is a way out. And it's been demonstrated, the science is there, the economics are there to convert farms that are industrial farms to regenerate farms. And that can be done at scale. And this has been well shown in a movie coming up called Common Ground. I think it's gonna be released in about a week on Amazon. - A regenerative farm. - Yeah, and it shows how, you know, like these big corn farmers can actually do this. And they make more money. They restore the ecosystem and what is regenerative farming. It's basically mimicking nature. You know, Gabe Brown was a farmer in North Dakota in conventional farmer. And his farm was destroyed by drought and hail and all kinds of things. And he was like, what am I gonna do? And he started reading Thomas Jefferson's journals. And in the journals, it explained how he used methods to restore the ecosystem, to use natural pest control methods to actually use methods that actually restore soil, the retained water, that do all the things we want to do. And Gabe Brown has demonstrated this on his 5,000-acre farm in North Dakota. And it actually makes 20 times as much money, restore the soil, doesn't use irrigation, doesn't use chemicals, produced much more food, much more nutrient-tense food. And it's all been well-documented through science. So it's possible. It's just a matter of how do we transition farmers? How do we support them to do that? And private equity is investing in this. I mean, private equity is in paying farmers to convert, 'cause they know they're gonna return on the back end. - To regenerative. - Yeah, they know it's a profit center. And they're gonna make more money than industrial funds. - I was just thinking about wind turbines, which many of us absolutely hate. - Yeah, probably. - Most environmentalists hate them. Yeah, they kill the birds, they kill the land. It's like they're full of toxins, the blades are as long as a football field. Each blade is as long as a football field and several tons and they're like just, and you get up to hundreds of them in a wind farm. Anyway, we have a summer home along the Jersey Shore, and they're about to get pummeled by one of these wind farms, and it's just so disgusting. Thank God for Trump for stopping most of them in progress. I don't think that order was gonna help us. But in any event, all the money that Obama and Joe Biden have been funneling into wind and solar energy, which is very inefficient. It costs so much. It requires so much land and toxins and reliance on the Chinese and so on. Why don't we funnel that into American farmers to help them switch over to regenerative? 100% is it's one of the best things we can do for the environment, for the climate, for energy. I mean, there's so much oil used in farming. People don't realize it's a huge amount of the inputs are oil-based, of fertilizers, the pesticides, the amount of oil used to drive the big machinery. All that is an enormous amount of oil that we use just to grow vegetables and grow corn and grow soy wheat. So that can be changed. By the way, my husband wrote a book on Rudolph Diesel who invented the diesel engine. They should be using diesel engines and powering them with corn. That's a place we could use good corn oil or vegetable oil. They can power the engines with the factors. - Better to use it in the engines than in our body. - That's how the diesel engine was born. Okay, so regenerative farming is definitely one of the things. Now, what happens when the average patient comes in to see you? You do the blood tests. And where do you start? For the average listener, what are the top five? 'Cause they don't know how to read their blood tests. I consider myself a relatively sophisticated consumer in this department. I don't know how to read my blood tests. I know you're supposed to look at the HDL and the LDL and beyond that, I don't really know what to do. - Oh, no, right, right, right. - So what should the average person be looking at? What's one of the most important things? - Well, I think we've had this edifice in medicine where the doctor is the gatekeeper and health assistant is the gatekeeper between you and your own biology. And I believe that needs to be changed. And people should be empowered to know what's going on in their bodies and to have the information to interpret it. And that's really why we co-founded function health was to allow us to break down that barrier to allow a personalized health platform to allow you access to your data and then to know what to do about it. What does it mean? - Yeah. - And how do you give them a code? - A code? - I mean, like you have all the numbers now, after you get your blood tested through function, but like now what do you do? Yeah, how do you figure out what it means? - Essentially, we're building the engine and we have tens of thousands of pages of content that educates people about what it means, what to do about it, what the root cause or. So let's say you have a positive autoimmune antibody. In a traditional healthcare system, you say, okay, you're gonna go to the rheumatologist, they're gonna see if they can diagnose you with some autoimmune disease. And then they're gonna give you an anti-inflammatory drug that's gonna suppress your immune system when there's a steroid or a biologic that costs 50,000 dollars a year. They're not gonna go, why is this abnormal? So we guide you through understanding of what it means and why is this potentially an issue? Is it because you have a leaky gut and your microbiome is messed up? Is it because you're eating gluten in this driving that autoimmune biochemistry? Or is it because you're exposed to environmental toxins that are immunotoxic that affect you? So we begin to sort of sift through or is it because you had COVID or because you have Lyme disease or whatever, and then you can sort of sift through and say, oh, gee, this is why I may be sick. And then we say, here's how you further investigate it. And here's the kinds of doctor you wanna see and here's the next steps or here's the things you can do on your own. So it's really about self-empowerment. And I move. - All this stuff that Dr. Bretusen says about preventing Alzheimer's, this is so worth it for everybody's time. - 100% it's preventing everything. Because it's like, you know, there are a few common causes that drive all the chronic disease we're seeing. And it's not that hard. It's too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff that our bodies need. And when you take out the bad stuff, if you put in the good stuff, which is essentially what functional medicine is, the body knows what to do. So I'll give you an example. So I had a patient come in and she had sore dachrothritis. She had terrible inflammation of her skin and joints were swollen, you know, the heartbreak of psoriasis. But she also had terrible heartburn, refluxia, terrible irritable bowel syndrome. She had migraine, she had depression, she had pdiabetes. She was overweight and she was, you know, 50-year issue of business coach. And I said, gee, you know, what are all these things, how are all these things related? Instead of, you know, seeing the best doctors, what she did, including clinic, the best doctors from mythology, the best migraine doctor, the best GI doctor, the best depression psychiatrist. And she was seeing the best of every class and got the best of the state of the art current model treatment, which was just pharmaceutical drugs. Nobody said, why is she having these problems? It's the medicine of why not what? Why do you have this, not what disease do you have, not what drug do I give, but why? And then we investigated, because she had all these gut issues, a lot of your immune system is in your gut. And so I cleaned up her gut, I got rid of the bad bugs, I gave her an antibiotic and any fungal, we stored her microbiome with probiotics, gave her some fish on vitamin D, came back six weeks later and she's like, doc, everything's gone. - Wow. - I lost 20 pounds. My psoriasis is gone, my arthritis is gone. - What? - My migraines are gone, my depression is gone. I feel great, my irritable bowel, reflux are gone and I stopped on my medications. I'm like, I didn't tell you to do that. She's like, no, I just was feeling so good, I stopped them. And so once you understand how to unlock someone's health and give them the roadmap, they can do it. - Have you seen this in children, too? - Yes, of course, I mean, I'm a family doctor and I've treated thousands and thousands of kids. And it's just so disturbing to me when I see the kinds of things that really are affecting these kids. I mean, I had one little girl who was 10 years old and she had this horrible autoimmune condition that was triggered by her eating crabby sugary diet that was causing tons of yeast overgrowth in her gut. She also had gluten antibodies that were causing some injury to her gut lining that can trigger autoimmunity. She also loves sushi, which was weird for her kid, but she liked a lot of mercury laden, too. Now she was eating a lot of that. She also had mercury toxicity. And we basically reset her gut. We put an elimination diet, I gave her some things to get rid of the overgrowth of yeast in her gut and I gave her a chelation to get rid of the mercury. And she had something that was, she was on like 1200 milligrams of salimedra, which was like a horse dose of steroids. - Wow. - Every three weeks intravenously, she was on chemo drug called methodorexia, she was on drugs to help with her rain nose and other other gut issues. So calcium channel blockers, she was on a whole list of things. Aspen because she had more blood clotting, she was on a pile of drugs. And she really couldn't function really very well. She completely fixed it. She was 100% better. And you know, I checked in with her 10 years later, she's doing great. She's gone to college and is really healthy. And so we see that we start to dig into the root causes and help people understand how their body is actually organized, not how medicine currently organizes it. We can do tremendous amounts. And that's really why I think function helped us so important because it helps us leaf frog over the current medicine and empowers people with their data and helps them understand what to do about it. - I heard you talking with someone, forgive me if you weren't the one with this drive. I think it was you talking about a kid's handwriting. - Oh yeah, that was me. - Yeah. So I mean, we can hopefully show this on the show, but there's a kid I had about ADD. And this is what first got me to realize that what was happening in the body effect of the brain in a very profound way. It wasn't just the mind body effect, but the body mind effect. And many of our psychiatric illnesses are caused by dysfunctions that we can treat, not with ADD medication, which is now. - We are going to definitely spend time on this. This is interesting. - Yeah, I mean, and this kid had ADD, but he had also all these other issues. He had asthma and he had allergies and he had stomach aches, and he had headaches, and he had a whole list of stuff. And he was seeing seven different doctors. It's about seven different prescriptions. And he was not really even kicked out of kindergarten, he was that bad, and his writing was terrible. He had these kids often have what we call dysgraphia. I mean, so you can't read their writing, a really poor handwriting. But like at 12 years old, you couldn't even read it. And his mother came to see me. We put him on a clean diet. He was only eating processed food. We did an nutritional testing. And it was like so malnourished. He wasn't really overweight, but he was really malnourished. - I don't know. It's just so strange that a mother who would be like taking it with all those doctors and like having. - She finally got to me. She didn't like it, but she's like doing the best she could as a mother, you don't know. And then she heard about it. - It doesn't even occur to you that maybe it's nutrition. I think for a lot of people, it doesn't occur to you, because especially with a child who you think can process anything the matter that you do. - It's true. And two months later, the mother brings them back, and he's doing better at every level. And he's off all the medications, but what was so striking to me was his handwriting before and after. She showed me his handwriting from his homework. And it was like a different kid. And it was at that moment, I go, wow, how did his brain going from being chaotic and dysfunctional and synchronizing properly to being kind of functioning and organized and structured so that he can actually function in the world and not have ADD and his handwriting go back to normal. Because it wasn't like I gave him a handwriting class. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. And that led to me writing this book called the Ultramine Solution, which is how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. And this was like 15 plus years ago. And now there's departments of metabolic psychiatry, Stanford, nutritional psychiatry, Harvard, guys, Chris Palmer, is a Harvard professor, is a psychiatrist discovered accidentally. You could cure schizophrenia on a ketogenic diet. And now, you know, there's $3 million grant that just got given a mail to study ketogenic diets and severe mental illness, like bipolar disease and schizophrenia. And we had to just dig me against this. Instead of understanding that this is something that actually is because our biology is just not functioning properly. >> You know what I'm thinking about right now, after we had, did you watch that round table that they had in the US Senate with Ron Johnson and Callie and Casey were there? And the Atlantic did a big write-up of it after and called it the Wubu Caucus. >> Yeah, yeah. >> They were so dismissive and disgusting about these ideas being discussed in a serious way. And that's what we're up against, is that you know, you start to say like, maybe we can head off schizophrenia with diet and they say, I'm out, you're crazy. >> Yeah, but it's actually looking at academic medical centers. This is what they're studying, like they're looking at these things seriously, because the data is there. And so, you know, Max Plank, who was a physicist, said, you know, scientists doesn't advance by convincing your opponents in helping them see the light, but because a new generation grows up, that's familiar with. In other words, medicine advances one to funeral at a time. >> Yes, right. And so, it's unfortunate, people get very ossified in their ideas and Thomas Coon wrote about this in the structure of scientific revolutions, how it's very difficult to convert people who believe a certain thing, like the earth is flat or the earth is the center of the universe or that species arise in their fixed state. You know, basically. >> That it was an insurrection. >> Whatever. Yeah. Like, people basically just have this very fixed view of the way things are and it's very hard to change that. Paradox are really hard to change. We just think autism was caused by refrigerator mothers, that ulcers were caused by stress. And the guy who actually was a gastronologist would notice in the box, he said, the stomach that there was this bacteria hanging around. He's like, what is this? Maybe this is the cause. And everybody laughed at him. The whole gastronology field just made him a joke. And he said, well, I'm going to prove it. He drank a beaker of this bacteria. He got his partner to, like, he got an ulcer. He got his partner to scope him before and after. He took antibiotics, cured the ulcer, and then proved it and he won the Nobel Prize for it. >> Oh, wow. >> But one day seems like a quack and the next day is actually a standard of care. >> To me, it just doesn't seem quacky at all. It seems like absolutely logical and sensible to people won't accept it. And I think part of it is, it's so much easier to take a pill. You much rather be told, just take this drug and you're good as opposed to completely change the way you eat and by the way, you need to move more. >> I mean, it's so hard to do in our environment because everything is set up for us to fail. We have a toxic wasteland of nutrition that we live in. We don't need to move our bodies at all if we don't want to. >> Right. >> We don't get outside very much. We have so much stress. We have high levels of stress. We don't sleep well. These are just fundamental things that the human organism needs to have in order to thrive. And we take care of our dogs and our animals and our race horses in ways that are so much better than we take care of ourselves. We wouldn't feed our million-dollar race horse McDonald big fries and a coke. We feed it to our kids. >> Right. Well, I was thinking about what you just said about how we're just not set up for success here. The family went to Scandinavia and June. We did Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And they're all basically the same country. But in terms of their approach to lifestyle and so on. But in Denmark, they have it set up, there's some waterways there. And they have it set up so that almost every office building has a stairway down to the water. And it's encouraged that on your lunch break, you would go to take a swim. You would go downstairs, you'd eat outside and it's cold there. They know that. But they all bike to work, first of all, everybody bikes. Even the royalty in Denmark and Sweden, they bike around, a very sort of mobile culture. And then think about it. If you went to the office and the office culture was during lunch, we eat healthy, we go outside, we swim in the water, and then there are showers to shower off when you get back into the office. You have a 90-minute break where you can do all of that. And then back to work. We're the opposite. Like, what the hell were you doing away from your desk for 90 minutes? 90 seconds. You know? Scandinavia? No, we're the USA. We produce. We're the envy of the world in terms of our production and so on. That's our mindset. There are some benefits to it. But in the health department, not really. No. No, it's very disturbing. I mean, when you look at us compared to every other country, where we spend more than twice any of the national health care, which is almost $5 trillion, $1 in five dollars of our economy, the federal government pays for 40% of that and is one in three federal dollars. So we're footing the bill and we're 48th in life expectancy, I think Cuba and Albania are better than us. Oh my God. I think so. Albania. Maybe they don't have good records, but when you look at the list, what are we doing here at the bottom of the list? And I mean, Trump on Joe Rogan, he showed this wrap. What reason for that? What's the number? If you had to pick one. I think it's our diet. Ultra-processed foods? It's the takeover of the American food supply by the industrial food system. Yeah. Chemicals everywhere. Like, within that, what's the number one culprit? Ultra-processed chemicals all over the world. I think it's sugar and starch. Sugar and starch. And then you can add in the chemicals and all the rest of it. And by the way, is bread bad? It's bread, basically, sugar. Yeah. Well, actually, the glycemic index, which is how much it's given food, raises your blood sugar, is based on white bread. So that's a hundred. So that's the highest. Yep. Sugar is actually 80. Because it's made up of fructose and glucose, but it's a little bit trick because fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar. But it's- They both have the same- Yeah, below the neck, your body cannot tell the difference between a bowl of cereal or a bowl of sugar. Wow. Or a loaf of bread? Or a loaf of bread. It's just the same thing. So when you eat white bread, you're basically eating sugar. And the American population consumes 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person per year. That's almost 3/4 of a pound per day. You know, I mean, the die care regardless, which need to be fixed, and I'm working on that within our profit, that 10% of our diet, they say, can be sugar. That's 12 teaspoons in an average 2,000 kind of diet for a kid. The average kid's eating 36 teaspoons of sugar a day. Well, that- I think it might have been cally or a case of one of them was saying, at the turn of the 20th century, you know, the 1900 itself, the average, you know, recommended daily- You know, the average intake of sugar amongst American children was zero zero on a day-to-day basis. Now they say, kind of like 28 grams. Yeah, that's crazy. It was zero. Yeah. Well, you know, when the World Health Organization tried to reduce the recommended amount of sugar to 5% of your diet from 10% in the recommendations, Donald Rumsfeld, who was under Bush too, flew to Geneva and said, we're going to pull our $400 million of funding from you, if you do that. It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, that's how powerful the food industry is. They have implemented every aspect of our society. Oh, and- Not to mention that they're basically accounted for most of the marketing and TV besides pharma. Yeah. It's all junk food. I mean, I watched the Super Bowl last year. It was 11 junk food ads in the first half. They're pushers. Yeah. They're pushers that they were doing this with, you know, heroin. We would see the danger, but- Well, it's addictive. I mean, the science is so clear in this, Megan, 14% of adults and kids are biologically addicted to food. So according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale, it's a scientific evaluate metric for looking at food addiction. And I'm not talking about just like, oh, I love cookies because I love cookies. But like, people who really can't stop, like an alcoholic. That's staggering. And in these companies know this, they've designed the food to be like this. The tobacco companies bought in the '70s, a lot of the food companies like RG and Abisco and thought more as craft, right? Yes. And then they- Got out of cigarettes and into crackers. And they engineered these foods with taste institutes where they had craving experts to create the bliss point of food, to create heavy users. These are their own internal terms they use. And in fact, they actually have- take little two-year-olds and put them in MRI scanners to see which images will light up their brain in their pleasure centers so they'll see their mommy when they go to the grocery stores buy this, buy that, you know, give me the cocoa pebbles or whatever it is, right? So dark. I was just thinking about my little guy today at breakfast who was like, mom, there's this meal surface that will deliver the meals pre-made if you want to, you know, sign on to that. And I was like, well, they did a good job if they got to my 11-year-old who brought it to me at the breakfast table. That's right. That's right. But there's so much to go over. I wanted to say something about the food. Oh, is it true that bear got my sense out? So one of the biggest drug companies in the world, but one of the biggest chemical companies in the world that's spraying our food with everything, getting us sick by the day. And then where do we go back to the medical companies? That's right. But actually, bear makes some of the drugs for non-Hush, Islamfoma. And there's been multiple lawsuits that have been won. Yeah. 2.1-dollar settlement for glyphosate, which is a roundup or basically an herbicide that is sprayed on 70% of crops that is in most of our bodies and most of our urine, when I tested this. And you can see it. It's pretty scary. They basically, on one hand, cause the disease, and then they, on the other hand, treat it with the drugs. That's sick. It's a good business model. That's a great one. I'm going to say he really scares me because one of the things you don't think about, even if you try to eat healthy, back to that guy who's carrying around his food everywhere at that billionaire, is what about when you go out to eat? You don't know. What about when your kids go to school? You don't know. I mean, it's true. I mean, you could have your own garden in the backyard. But if you were to eat or if you're out on the road, I mean, you like you and I are out there doing stuff, you can't always control your food. It's coming from unless you're a billionaire with your own private chef and your kitchen that flies around with you on your jet. But then I met with a super billionaire who had his own cows. He got his own meat from his own cows that were like, I mean, like, there are so many levels in the show. But keep going. You don't know because they're in the restaurant. Those vegetables are probably treated with roundup, not getting organic vegetables in the restaurant. You're probably not getting grass-fed beef, not getting pastured chicken. So it's like, you need to eat at home. That's expensive. It's harder. People are busy. It's to the point of, it's also overwhelming. Yeah. But, you know, Megan, there's not an accident that Americans have been disenfranchised from their own kitchens. This is a deliberate plan by the food industry to make convenience king happen in their early 60s. They were worried about the advent of this woman named Betty, who was a homeic teacher, was teaching about families how to cook and grow gardens and- Ms. Crocker? No. Get to that. Okay. I'll get to that. But, you know, there was federal extension workers that were teaching on families how to take care of themselves and actually do the things that are not that hard if you know what to do. And so the food industry freaked out about this and they invented Betty Crocker, who was not a real person. I thought she was a real person. I didn't know that. Yeah. She was not a real person. Make sure you tell me, "Anchim, I was not real." She's not real. But, Betty Crocker, cookbook, if you remember it, because you probably had in your mom's kitchen. Yeah, yeah. I do. Add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to your casserole, add one roll of Ritz crackers. They insinuated processes. It was delicious, though. Okay. All right. But, it was like they insinuated all this crap into our diet and then they- And then they got TV dinners, and then we got, you know, the use of a break today. We got flashburns, margarine, and tang, and all these foods that were- Twinkies. Yeah, Twinkies. I grew up on that stuff, you know, and it turns out that this was not an accident. This was a deliberate attempt to sort of- you deserve a break today. It was sort of the classic thing where- and women's lip also kind of facilitate that because I get women out of the kitchen and women's liberation- And no one was in the kitchen at all. Right. That's right. And so we had now had generations of Americans who don't have a cook. I don't have basic life skills. I was- I was- I did a movie with- with, um, years ago called Fed Up, which was- Yeah. I think it's on Netflix. Yeah, yeah. It was about childhood obesity, and I was talking about these issues. And it's part of the movie I went down to South Carolina into one of the worst food deserts in America in easily South Carolina. I worked with a family of five who lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability. So they had very limited resources, and very limited access to good food. And the mother was in a massive way. The father was already at 42 on dialysis for kidney failure from type 2 diabetes. The son was like 50% body fat. A kid should be 10%. He was a big guy. He's like, "Dr. Iman, am I going to be 100% body fat?" I'm like, "No, you're not." You're so sad. And I said, "I'm not going to give them a lecture. I'm going to go to their kitchen." And I'm going to show them what's in their- their pantry. I'm going to show them what's in their freezer and in their fridge. And I'm going to help them understand the things that are harming them because they're thinking they're trying to do the right thing because they want the father to lose weight or they can't give them a kidney. So rather than giving them a lecture, I taught him how to cook a simple meal called- and it was from a little guide, but called good food and a tight budget. Food that's good for you, good for your wallet, good for the planet. And it was like cheaper cuts of meat, cheaper vegetables. I mean, you know, stuff that would be considered some of his peasant food that my family grew up on. And I did it with them and I didn't know what was going to happen. And the mother texted me a week later. She says, "We lost 18 pounds of family and a year they lost 200 pounds." You know, they didn't even have cutting boards and knives. Everything was, you know, microwaved or whatever. And they did it. And they learned how to cook. And I gave him a cookbook and it was like, I was like, "Wow, we're one meal away from transforming society." And I realized, I had a bias. I had a judgment. I thought people who are overweight and I bought the implicit bias in medicine, which is eat less and exercise more, meaning it's your fault, you're fat. You're lazy, glad, and it's your fault. So get your shit together. Yeah. But that's not true because people are hijacked. They're biochemistry's hijacked, their brains hijacked, their metabolism hijacked, their hormones are hijacked, their immune system hijacked, their microbiome is hijacked. And that drives you into this disease state that we have in America today. And so in this kid, it was the 16-year-old. He lost 50 pounds, had to go get a job and there was no place to get a job except fast food places on there. He gained 50 pounds back. He's just like putting alcohol to work in a bar. Yeah. Totally. And then he texted me later. He's like, "Hey, would you help me?" And I helped him. He lost 132 pounds. First kid and his family to go to college, finished college, emailed me and said, "Hey, Dr. Hyman, would you write me a letter of recommendation for medical school?" And now he's a doctor. Oh my God. And to me, that story is emblematic of the fact that we're literally one meal away from chance for me to health America. If we can go in and Paul Farmer did this with TB and AIDS and Haiti, it was an intractable problem. You know, they didn't have clean water, they said patient and watches and these drugs are complicated to take back then. And for multi-drug resistant TB and AIDS. And he was like, "We can fix this." And he was community health workers, neighbors helping neighbors. And so we, like, imagine if we created a workforce of community health workers to go out there and go to people's homes and show them how to do this. And we did this in Cleveland Clinic. We did this. Honestly. I have the idea we should take all the DEI instructors who are about to lose their jobs and train them in nutrition and send them into all communities and educate people on it. I was shocked. I was at Cleveland Clinic and there was a hospital there that just takes care of a big African American community that's very underserved. And we had a cooking class. And I thought a few people would show up. 300 women showed up. Oh, God bless you. And we had this big cooking class. That's what I need to do. I need it just to make food, period, never mind, healthy food. All right, we're going to take a quick break and we will be back with Dr. Mark Heimann after this. Plus a special function health discount for our audience. That's exciting. Stand by. We have Dr. Mark Heimann with me for the full show today. He's the co-founder of Function Health. And I want to tell you that you can go to FunctionHealth.com/Megan or use the code Megan100. Is it /a? I'm reading the prompt. Is that it? Oh, so it's not just / Megan. It's functionhealth.com/a/Megan. All right. So you have two slashes in there. Slash A/Megan. Like functionhealth. A Megan. Functionhealth.com/a/Megan. And that will get you $100 off your function membership, or you can just use the code Megan100 on checkout to get it. So, Doc, what does that do for people? Well, it gives you an unlock for your health and the way you've probably never had it. And testing things that your doctor probably doesn't even know about. Doesn't and won't. It shouldn't. It shouldn't be tested. Or that you might ask in bone test, right? Like your vitamin E level. Why should you know that? For example, and for $1.37 a day and less with your discount, you get deep insights about what's going on with your biology from your metabolic health and how your blood sugar regulation is to your cardiovascular health, your hormones, to environmental toxins like lead to mercury, deep analysis of your nutritional status, things that you're -- I mean, we literally worked with Quest, and we broke their testing for essential fatty acids for omega-3 machines because we were doing such a volume where one of their number one clients, we do cancer screening gallery screening, which is quite amazing to look at cancer detection. We found one and 180 of our members who's tested have a diagnosed cancer, which you can get. What? Detect in a blood test now. Oh, that's amazing. And it's more accurate than many other screening tests we have, and it's something that should be available to everybody. And we're one of the number one providers in the world for this. So, it's unlocking things that you'd have to go through the firewall of medicine to get. And then on the back end, you'd only get your results, but you get deep insights about what they mean. They give you a printout of this is what you're high on this, and this is what you should look into. Well, it's a beautiful dashboard that you can track your data over time, and then as a physician, when I see a patient, I have to pull up the PDF of the results and then look at the one from last year or the last month, and it's a pain in the ass, it's not digital. It's not visually -- like, presented in a graphic way that helps you understand where your trend lines are, and function has all that. But more importantly, it really has the deep insights that are formed by all the scientific literature in the world. I mean, imagine your doctor would read every scientific paper that was ever published. Right. Now, technology can do that, right? Imagine having the knowledge experts informing what things mean from all domains, and imagine it being formed by your data, your personalized data, so you actually can understand what it means for you, and then what to do about it, and how to act on it to level your health. What happens if I have a question? Like, who do I call? Well, we're still building the platform, because we lived a long two years ago. We have a success that we never quite imagined, but we're building a chat where you can interact with your own data and ask questions. But you can go to your family doctor, you can go on to learn more from the platform itself, because there's so much in -- You're not dispensing medical advice there, but you are giving people tools to go to their own -- Well, we're giving deep insights about what things mean, and they are medical insights, but we're not telling you what to do or not to do. Well, this leads me to my other important question, which is, how do people find a functional medicine doctor? Good question. We need more of them. But I think part of the reason I co-founded a function was that there aren't enough. There's, you know, thousands -- there should be hundreds of thousands of practitioners, so that millions and millions of people can access this. But before I die, I didn't want to die not having functional medicine being exposed everybody or having their own health data being available to everybody, and so it's a way of leapfragging over a period where we don't have the infrastructure yet. And we will. I promise you, we will. Megan, have the future of medicine come to pass as a way should be, just as we now don't any longer do blood leeches or -- Right. -- other we do for some wound healing. We don't have like, drill holes on people's skulls to land out the bad evil, humorous. I mean, we advance in medicine. And I think, you know, this new generation of the network systems medicine, it's going to, this scientific paradigm, it's going to come to pass. - This may, it's exciting. - But this is exciting. - It takes accelerating. - It takes that school in today's day. It's like, this is a way of truly healing people and helping people get better as opposed to just, you're going in, you're gonna be governed by the insurance companies. You've been up or limited on how much you can make and how much you can help. - Yeah. - And Dr. D for you. I mean, food is the biggest cause of disease and the biggest cure. And doctors learn nothing about it. And in Texas, nothing. In Texas, I was testifying in front of the Health and Human Services Committee about a bill that was to actually start to educate doctors about nutrition and to mandated in medical schools and a graduate medical education and residencies. I'm so excited about that because that'll be a domino effect. Once the state starts to do it, it'll sort of be a trend. And then we can actually start to train the new generation of doctors that is in the right paradigm. And nurses too, I mean. - Nurses. - Every medical school. - There's so many people who can do this who short of getting an MD, which would be more accessible and more affordable for a lot of people too. So you've mentioned it several times. The keto diet. I've had it mentioned to me many times. I don't understand it still. No, I think I've looked it up and it says it's more like fat. - Well, it's pretty easy to understand. So your body is like a hybrid car. You can run an electric or a gas. Gas is dirty burning, electric is clean burning. Gas is carbohydrates. So your body runs very well in carbohydrates, but there's a lot of downstream consequences of having a high-starch carbohydrate diet. For certain conditions, and this was first discovered in medicine with epilepsy, we found that if you took away all the sugar and starch and you increase fat to like 75%, you could actually stop seizures that no medications would touch. If you look back at the history of medicine and diabetes, dreaming of type one diabetes where your pancreas just shuts down. - That's serious. - All these kids would die. And the way they would treat them would be putting them on a 75% fat diet. Jocelyn. - Saturated or unsaturated? - Everything. The lard, butter, everything. And I mean, by the way, Megan, 25% of breast milk is saturated fat. - Yeah. So. - It's gotten about rap. I mean, we can go into that too if you want. But what was fascinating back in the teens and 20s was that medicine was actually prescribing ketogenic diets for type one diabetes to save their lives. And now we see that we can actually reverse what is predominantly a carbohydrate intolerant society where we have 75% overweight, 93% metabolically broken, meaning we have some problem with regulating blood sugar and insulin. 93% of us, I mean, 6% of us aren't. Probably you and me are probably at 6%. But it's not a lot of people. And when you restrict carbohydrates and you increase fat, you actually switch basically from a gas burning car to an electric burning car. And it's clean burning. But now we're finding it's effective for reversing type two diabetes, for treatment of Alzheimer's, for cancer. Cedarthamucogy, you may have heard of him. He's a famous oncologist from Columbia written a book called The Emperval Malatmalities when the Pulitzer Prize. He's now doing research on ketogenic diets for end-stage cancer like melanoma and pancreatic cancer and seeing complete reversals. - What? - Because, yeah, because basically cancer runs on sugar, but it's not like a hybrid engine. It can only run on carbs. It can't run on fat. So you starve it of the carbs and cancer cells die. It's pretty remarkable. So across the spectrum, whether it's autism or Alzheimer's or cancer or detection of diabetes or schizophrenia or depression or bipolar disease. - How does this jive with the old eat food mostly plants? - Not too much. - Not too much. - Yeah, I think you can do it on a plant-rich diet and you can do it in a way that doesn't include a lot of junk. And so- - Just put a lot of olive oil over your salads. - Olive oil, about potatoes, nuts and seeds. And even people do well. I mean, I think you have to understand that there's certain people who do better or do worse, depending on their genetics. And so I had a patient who was overweight, who was struggling with lots of inflammation, who was pre-diabetic, whose cholesterol was like 300, which should be 200, her triglycerides were 300, should be 100 or less, her good cholesterol. We don't really like to call it a good or bad, but the HDL was low, which is a sign of this metabolic dysfunction. And she was desperate to try to do something. This is the pre-ozympic era. - All right. - I said, "Why don't you try a kidney jacked eye to see what happens?" And let's follow your numbers and see how you do. Everything corrected. Her cholesterol dropped 100 points. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points right. HDL went up 30 points. She lost 25 pounds and she felt great. And so, and her pre-diabetes went away. So depending on the person, it can be a very effective tool. But it's not like a one-size-fits-all. - Why? - Is that much fat bad for like somebody who has heart disease in their heart? - There may be, but there's actually a paper coming out soon, which looks at what we call lean mass hyperresponders. So there are certain people who, when you have a perfect sort of metabolic health, in other words, you have no pre-diabetes or insulin resistance and no inflammation. And you're fit athlete. And you have basically a lot of lean mass and not a lot of fat on your body. When they consume high saturated fat or kidney-genic diets, they'll have a really dramatic increase in their LDL cholesterol. Now, this is something that doctors have been trained as bad and that you immediately have a knee-jerk reaction to prescribe a statin drug, which is the number one class of drugs sold in the world. Now, some of these people have LDLs, not under 70, which cardiologists would like, or even under 100, which is their lab reference range. But they have LDLs of 200, 300, 400, 500, 700. And they have no heart disease through imaging stress. - Right, 'cause like the calcium score. - Calcium score. And so this is like a revolutionary new bit of data that's now emerging from the scientific literature like what is going on here? How does this work? Well, when you don't need sugar, you have to transport energy around the body. And how do you do it through fat, right? And what is the biggest fat carrier? It's your lipoprochines, which is fat and water don't mix, right? So you can't just put fat in your blood, you have to connect it to proteins. So what is LDL? It means the low density lipoprochine. It's a lipomines fat protein. So you put fat and protein together. It can be transported through your body for energy and other sources. So it's really, it's fasting the signs is constantly evolving. And I think for certain people, ketogenic types can be life changing. Like life changing. I've treated schizophrenia with it, Alzheimer's with it, autism with it, depression with it. Obviously typed with diabetes with it. And you can reverse up to 60 to 70% of type two diabetes that's very advanced where people are on insulin. When I was in medical school, chronic diseases were chronic. They never went away to reverse heart failure, to reverse diabetes, to reverse kidney issues, reverse hypertension. These things don't happen in traditional medicine. Well, what about the thought of mixing the keto diet with Mediterranean? Because that's the other one that everybody loves Mediterranean. Well, you can eat Mediterranean diet, but that's not necessarily a ketogenic diet. Ketogenic is a very specific thing that happens in your body. Do you go on keto like forever? I need you to know. Some people do, and they thrive on it. Other people don't do well on it. So I think it's very inconvenient. Like try it for a month and get your inflammation. You need about, you know, usually six weeks to adapt to become fat adapted to your metabolism shifts over. And then you can see where you're at and then check your numbers. But, you know, there's a company called Verda Health that's reversing type two diabetes with an online program of ketogenic diets. And not only have they seen 60% reversal, and not only they've seen 12% weight loss, which is massive, it's as good as any of these drugs that are out there now. That may actually have done a parallel study like comparing just, you know, their program to those ampeic and those drugs. And they were equally effective in the outcomes. So it's not, there's something magic about ozemic. It's the weight loss, you know, and it's the, it's the change in metabolic health. And so you can do it through various ways, whether it's a drug or whether it's a ketogenic diet. And they found their lipid biomarkers. That were 20 different cholesterol and hard to disease risk factors. All got better by eating a super high fat diet, right? So. - And again, so you're saying, but also saturated fat. So like, well, that would be like red meat, like the fat that you get. - Well, yeah. - I'm gonna think what's good for you saturated fat. I know bad for you saturated fat is in the ultra-process foods. - Well, trans fat is basically the worst as the worst you can do. - And that's basically vegetable oil shortening. And they call it shortening 'cause it shortens your life. - You know, you know, many things call for that by the way, having like a daughter who's in eighth grade. Every time she has to make brownies or cookies for the school. But you know, all of it wants actual vegetable oil. And like, she's like, I don't know if you can use olive oil. I'm like, you're using it. - It's olive oil cake. - I mean, yeah, it's fine, actually. It tastes a little different I can best, but it's healthier I think. - Yeah, you can't. And so, you know, there's a tremendous amount of emerging data that saturated fats aren't the boogie men we thought they were. You know, it was the long history of the scientists, named Ansel Keys in the '60s, who basically did a study called the Seven Country Study, which show that people who had higher levels of saturated fat had higher LDL and higher heart disease risk. But they left out the other 14 or 15 countries where their data didn't match that. Like Switzerland or France or right. So they were like, I was cherry picking a little bit. And then we got in this era of low fat. And that led to the food pyramid, which told us to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, your own pasta day, which we did like a beautiful population. - I mean, that was a nice topic, let's be honest. - We did it. - It was a good old day. - Beautiful citizens. And what happened to America? We exploded. - I mean, I mean, that sourdough I need more. - That's right. Well, sourdough's not so bad, but the diabetes rates explode. I mean, we've tripled the obesity rates. So we've tripled the diabetes rates. - You can see it. - And this is not a genetic problem. - Do you see those memes online where they show Americans in the 1900s? And they're all first of all, they're well dressed. And second of all, they're all slim. All of them are slim. It's very rare to see an obese person, even in the United States 100 years ago. - 100 years ago, I mean, I forget Americans in the '60s were healthier than white Americans. They were thinner. and they had less disease. Now, it's the opposite, which is how COVID attacked certain communities like New Orleans or Chicago. And there were 70% of the deaths were from 30% of the population, which was African-American. And when you've watched, there's a movie called Amazing Grace, where the Reether Franklin was filmed in 1970 in Oakland. There wasn't an overweight black person in the audience, and she wasn't overweight. - Mm-hmm. - Wow. - And you go like, "Whoa, wow, that's crazy." And now 80% of African women are overweight, and obesity rates, and heart disease rates, and hypertension rates, and kidney failure rates, forex, see that-- - And you can tie this to ultra-process foods into the demonization of fat and elevation of sugar. - Yeah, yeah. And that was the problem. And now we've kind of reversed that trend. And I think it's a big sort of tinkership to move, but we have to do it, because we're not only threatening our personal health. We're threatening our national security. 70% or 77% of recruits for the military are rejected because they're unfit to fight, because they're overweight or other reasons, because of their diet. You've got global competitiveness being challenged. We're like 30-something in math and reading in the world, because kids are at can't learn in school, because they're all doped up on these drugs, and eating sugar, and these chemicals in the food, that are causing ADD, behavior issues, and all sorts of things. - And depression. - And depression. - I heard you talk about this, too. This is like, everybody, you go to a therapist today, whether it's you or a child. The first thing I want to do is prescribe you something. They want to get your college-aged kid hooked on a drug like that. They helped a lot of people. There's no explanation of no one would ever ask, "What are you eating?" - No. - No one. - No one. It's true. It's true. I mean, it's the most amazing thing to me, because it's so obvious. But as doctors, we learn that disease really doesn't have anything to do with nutrition. If you go to your dermatology, I'm not immune to disease, I was nothing to do with nutrition. If you go to GI doctor, I mean, I'm like, what do you mean? - I do. I don't. - I mean, think about it. You're putting pounds of this foreign stuff in your mouth every day. How does it not impact what's going on in your gut? - Right. - It's like, it's kind of gross. - So I mean, if you're feeling depressed or you're feeling anxiety, rule number one should probably be, take a look at what you're eating. - Yeah. - What are you eating? - Yeah, I mean, I have an incredible approach to one of my patients, where I put them on a reset program. It's like hitting your body's factory reset button, so go to back your original factory settings. - Yeah. - And I call the 10-D detox diet. I've written a book about it. It is a website where you can kind of go and 10-D detox diet. And actually learn about it and do it if you want to. And what's amazing is that in 10 days, there's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. What sounds crazy for me to say it, but I've done this so many times. It's so many people and track their symptoms and how they feel. And it allows them to see the connection, meaning what they're eating and how they feel. Oh, I didn't know that this constant congestion I had was from when I was eating. I didn't know that this rash that I got in my body all the time. I can't get rid of. It's from what I mean. I didn't know that my stomach issues were related to my, or my sleep issues are my depression or my migraines or whatever it is. Food is generally the first place to look. And if you can clean the deck and take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff, take out all the processed foods, all the sugar and starch, put in lots of vegetables, good healthy protein, lots of nuts and seeds and get out all the ultra processed foods. The body is so smart. It's like quickly changes. And I'm sort of shocked when I see it. And it's repeatable every single time. Can we talk about red meat? Is there a lot of people doing this carnivore diet? There's hardcore red meat all the time. Yeah, the vegans are the carnivores on one side. No, yeah, we have a good friend who's Argentinian. And he's like every single member of my family had LDLs through the roof and no hard disease. And they lived into their low hundreds. Yeah. And all they did was eat steak. Yeah, well, they had breastfed steak in Argentina. Yeah, right. So there's no industrial. But what's, I mean, when I was growing up in like the 80s, they were like, I remember because I was a young aerobics instructor. Yep. And my fellow aerobics instructors were shaming themselves having meat more than once a week. Yeah. And I was like, I didn't even know that was bad. Well, that was the result of this demonization of saturated fat. Because meat has some saturated fat. So if you eat that, you're basically going to kill yourself. So there's a whole era where people were eating very low amounts of meat. And their meat consumption has gone lean down. And it didn't mean that all the disease rates went down. So something didn't kind of line up. And what happened with meat is that we kind of got confused. Because a lot of the population studies that were done at that time and population studies do not show cause and effect. They just look at trend lines. And then it may be a cause or it may be a correlation. And what they found was that people who were meat eaters in those eras actually had more disease. But when you look at the specifics of their behaviors, the meat eaters in those studies, they ate 800 calories more a day. They drank more. They didn't eat their fruits and vegetables. They eat more sugar. They didn't exercise. They smoked. Yeah, there you go. That's why they were sicker. It wasn't because of the meat. And when you look at studies, for example, when they've done this with 11,000 people who shopped at health food stores who were rather omnivores and ate meat or beagons or vegetarians, they both had their risk of death reduce in half. It's because they weren't eating all the crap. So it's not the meat. It's what you eat with it. Is it the burger or is it the bun? And the sugar, I just noticed this the other day. But for example, my kids love ice cream. And I was just looking at those. You can get those dark chocolate bars at Whole Foods. I like the one that's like mint blackout. And any event, it's over 90% cut out. Yeah, which is going to mean it has less sugar. You can have four squares of that chocolate, which is a decent size. If you're watching this on YouTube, it's like about this big. Make it a little smaller, but about around there. And it's only five grams of sugar. If you really have a Jones for something sweet after dinner, you could have that for five grams. Or you could have a big bowl of ice cream, which might have 30, even more grams of sugar in there. People even know what a gram. And then, I mean, this is an example of how the food industry has taken over our government in labeling. And we're trying to change front-of-package labeling and food labels. But no one knows what a gram of sugar is. If I say four grams to the teaspoon, if I say this soda has 15 teaspoons of sugar, you're going to like blink and look twice. If you say it has 39 grams of sugar or 40 grams of sugar, you're not going to know what that means. >> No. >> And that's on purpose. >> That's on purpose. >> Right. >> You know, I mean, you have to have a PhD nutrition to decipher one of those labels. >> Right, they make it so hard. >> Make it really hard. So I think in other countries, they have better front-of-package labeling, which is either red. This is going to kill you. Yellow, eat with caution. Green, you can be as much as you want of it. Or they put warning labels in South America. They have big octagon stop signs with this thing. >> Got grasp of it. >> Yeah, basically. I mean, I don't even know South America. If you go on a plane in South America, you get your snacks. It's like, you can't eat any of them, because we're all like three different stop signs on them with basically warning labels. >> That's a good idea. >> Yeah, I mean, on a can of soda, which is a dye soda, they put in warning labels that says, this is going to harm your kid. This can cause neurologic issues and don't drink it. Don't feed it to them. >> Oh my god. >> I mean, great. More like it. Our executive producer has a third grader. He has two kids, but one of them is in third grade. And he has a question I bet a lot of our listeners have. >> Yeah. >> Which is, what can you pack in a lunch that is healthy for a third grade child? And frankly, for most children, because you try to send your kid to school with a bag lunch, or send your kid on a field trip, the bag lunch. >> Yeah, I'll trade it with the other kid for the junk food. >> You know, and try. >> Yeah. >> I too don't know where to begin. It's so hard. They're not going to eat a salad, first of all. >> No, you don't need a salad, but it should be real food. And there's lots of yummy things that kids can eat that they like that aren't bad for them. And what we need to do is stop putting lunchables and gogurts and all these sort of industrially designed foods. That aren't technically good. >> My doctor says yogurt is a lie. >> Right. >> He doesn't mean non-fat Greek yogurt. He's talking about-- >> Or full-fat Greek yogurt. >> No, he's not talking about that. He's not talking about, you know, yogurt that's not sugary. >> Yeah, I mean, be able to realize that you can get your like, you know, sweetened yogurt that's low fat. That has more sugar per ounce than a soda. >> Yeah, but you can, you know what? I have this almost every day for breakfast. I have, I'll even get non-fat or 2% the phage, phahe, yogurt, Greek yogurt. >> You can get the full-fat, Megan. >> Can I get the full-fat? I don't know. I don't want to, you know, I'm a little worried. >> You can. >> And I'll put like blueberries in there. And I'll put some chia seeds in there. And I'll put some hemp seeds in there. I don't even know why I'm just told those are good for you. They're protein, I guess. >> Protein and good fats. >> And sometimes else, Prinkle, just a little low sugar granola in there, which you can get with no seed oils on it. You got to like- >> They have paleo granola now, yeah. >> You got to look for that. But not too much, because you don't want to like, completely overload it with, you know, sugary products or whatever. But it's so good. >> Yeah. >> It, it tides me over for hours. And I love it, and I know it's good for me. >> And if, you know, if you make your home a safe, so on your teacher kids about food, you cook with them, you show them what food's about, that's what they learn. >> Okay, but let's give them an actual possibility. That could go in there. >> What could be in their school lunch? >> Yeah, what could go in there? >> I mean, you could put, like, I don't know. I mean, like, you could make a sandwich out of healthy stuff, right? You could have, I'm just blanking now, because I haven't packed my kids lunch. >> Like, chicken, you can't do chicken nuggets, can you? Or can you do like the organic ones that you get it on? >> Yeah, you could do that. I mean, you could do that that are not, you know, deep fried in the middle. >> But you can't get sliced deli meat, right? >> No, sliced deli meat is not good. >> That's the devil. >> Yeah, the bolognese sandwiches with mayo and- >> Bread, I mean, you shouldn't be putting a sandwich in there. >> I mean, go ahead if it's, if it's whole grain bread and you, you know, you know, the source of it. I think the kids need to eat real food. And what's the problem is that they're not eating real food. And there are, there are great guides on how to do this. I'm like, I'm banking on school lunches, because basically- >> Well, an apple. >> An apple, fruit. >> Cheese. >> Cheese can be fine. >> Or, okay, with cheese. >> Yeah, cheese can be fine. I prefer sheep or goat cheese. >> What else, Steve? What else do we need, do we need to know? Well, I see if there's a follow-up. What, what kind of meat? Yeah, what kind of meat in the sandwich? [BLANK_AUDIO] >> I mean, a little bit turkey, sliced turkey, roast beef. >> Real, real, like not deli. >> No, not deli turkey, because that's like kind of ground up and mixed with all kinds of stuff. >> Like a chicken breast that you cooked yourself the night before in avocado oil. >> Something like that. >> That's pasteurized. >> Yeah. >> Okay. It's just so much harder than it should be. You know, it's like. >> Well, the defaults are the wrong choices, how do we make the defaults the easy choices and the right choices? >> Yeah. I don't know. Like, even in the summers, I'm sure there are a lot of parents out there who can relate to this, the summers, the family eating goes to hell. The kids, daily eating, because they're all over the place, you know, our kids go to this day camp, and then they swing by the ice cream place that has a great menu, like a diner kind of place. And they're all eating just terrible food all day long. I don't even know what the alternative is, you know, like without hiring a chef to live in your house and come up with healthy options for all three meals, you know, they're eating bagel with cream cheese in the morning, and then they're eating like a cheese steak for lunch and then, you know, I'll get them for dinner, but it's so hard. >> It is. And that's the whole point of what needs to change in our policies, to change the things from the top down so that we produce food that's healthier, that we have clear labeling on foods that people know what they're getting, that we have access in a way that we don't have now to down through options. And so those things will take time, and I think that's what the Trump administration is trying to do. >> Yeah. >> I hope they succeed. I think there's a sort of attention between the USDA and HHS, because the USDA basically is to support farmers and not necessarily support the health of Americans, and they essentially are creating all the diseases inadvertently that the health and human services and Medicare and Medicaid are having to take care of. >> So if we were of the USDA. >> Like the right hand is actually making the last hand jobs a lot harder. So. >> What do you, how do you like RFKJ's chances of succeeding in this job given all these forces? >> He's got a lot of forces right against him. I mean, there's a multi-trillion in our industry that is basically wanting him to fail, and that's threatened. The food industry, the farming industry, the pharmaceutical industry, it's not a small thing. And I think if President Trump gets behind him and supports him, I think if he's able to get clear on what his objectives are, if he's able to sort of get on the low-hanging fruit and have the easy wins, I think they'll win. So for example, getting all the added chemicals out of food is starting to happen. There's 30 plus bills around the country in different states. Some of them, 10 of them are, I think, are Democrat-led, some, most rest are Republican-led. And they're, for example, to get rid of the chemicals in dyes and food or to have snap waivers to get rid of soda and snap. These things are happening. You get nutrition education like in Texas for doctors or stop punishing kids by restricting recess and jab, you know, like they need it. There's things happening. And sort of the mom movement is sort of catalyzed, this groundswell that I'm sort of shocked. I mean, I never thought that I knew. >> It's awesome. I hear Callie Means drop it all the time. He's like, you're going to tell the maha mom's out there that you won't take sugar out and they're like, it's great. He's using it and he should. Because the maha mom thing is real, like they're out there and they're pissed off about what's been done. I'm 100% mom happily and proudly. Because I'm pissed off about what these industries have done to me, to my family, how hard they've made it for us all, how expensive they've made it for us. Why? >> And the government's been sort of inclusion a little bit, that's the problem. >> Yeah. Most people can't afford to shop at whole foods. It's very expensive. >> The Walmart is the biggest. >> The Walmart is the biggest, organic grocer in the country. >> It is? >> It is the biggest. >> There's not a Walmart near me. That's why. >> There are Walmart's near most of underserved populations. So, I mean, I shot the Walmart and during COVID, I was helping different people who couldn't get food and I would go get food. I was like, wow, I can feel like a giant grocery cart full of real food for 500 bucks. >> Grass fed, beans and all that. >> Like a giant Walmart cart. You're wearing the grocery cart. >> Yeah. >> Not grass fedness. But just like real food. >> Okay. >> Meat, vegetables, nuts. >> How important is the grass fed thing? >> In the hierarchy of things, I think it's less important. >> Okay. >> I mean, it's more important to have regent agriculture to rebuild our soil and to rebuild farms. In terms of your health, I think the kind of trade off between eating real food and eating processed food, I would skip the organic and I would skip the, I mean, this is my selling accuracy. But in terms of like having a choice, if you can't afford it, I would always choose the relative sense. >> Yeah, the real food versus the processed food. >> Back to RFKJ, they definitely want to destroy him. And so, one of my feelings is, for the next four years, hopefully he decides to keep the job that long, we need to be super wary of hit pieces on him because the odds are they've been planted by one of his detractors. In the news now, they're trying to blame him for this measles outbreak down in Texas in a community of men and nights who don't take vaccines and never have long before Bobby Kennedy. >> He came on the scene, right? >> Yeah, never mind. He became HHS Secretary. It's like, he went down there out of empathy to this little boys' funeral. And they're like, you're to blame. But I do wonder, because that kind of story gets amplified and I don't think it's totally organic. >> Oh, it's not. I mean, it's really not. It's sort of insidious. I mean, with Dr. Oz, they did this, and Eric Times published a piece on him years ago taking him down, because this group called the American Council on Science and Health had a wrote a letter to Columbia to take him off the faculty because he was a quack. And there was sort of eight or nine doctors on the letterhead that was from the American Council on Science and Health. When you look at who that group is, they're funded by the pesticide industry, by the big food manufacturer, by Big Pharma, by Tobacco. And they basically say that pesticides, cigarettes, and trans fats are fine, and we shouldn't worry about them. >> I remember this. >> And they come after me. >> Is it because he was pushing supplements on his show, like as an advertiser? >> I mean, maybe. >> That was their opinion. >> But maybe. But he also was challenging things about the food system. >> Yeah. >> Oh, no, I mean, I'm saying that's the excuse they found to come to help him. >> Yeah. And when you look at who that group was, one of the guys spent years in jail for Medicare fraud. >> Mike. >> And I was sort of shocked that the New York Times is an investigative journalist outlet. I thought, and it wasn't. I mean, it took me like 10 minutes to figure out who these people were by Googling them, and what their backgrounds were, and why they had this opinion, and what this group was about. And there's so many of these front groups out there that seem noble and high-minded. The American Council on Science and Health, who would not believe what they have to say, right? >> Or like, in another lane, the American Academy of Pediatrics. >> Yeah, 100%. >> We used to trust and now should not. >> All of them. I mean, there's American and Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics. They had some of them doing good things, but on the other hand, they are also funded in large part by pharma and food industry. >> Well, why are pediatricians still pushing the flu vaccine on us, and grown-up doctors, too? I tell you those things, I do not understand. In medicine and science, the whole point is to question your assumptions, and science is based on hypotheses that challenge-given assumptions. So it's really about the questions. When you start to ask questions about vaccines, you're all of a sudden a heretic, and you're -- >> Oh, you're actually making our video right now. For real information about vaccines, go to the CDC. >> Yeah, you're excommunicated as a scientist, as a doctor, when I was a Cleveland clinic. I had written an article years before I joined about a kid who was at autism that I treated, and in the history, I said, this is the history, and this is the kid had, you know, born by C-section, or took antibiotics, or had gut issues, or had this. And the mother said, and she was actually a VP of Pfizer, said, by the way, my kid had this MMR vaccine, and after that, he seemed to get regressive autism, and I'm not saying it was a cause. I'm just saying, I wrote about it as part of the medical history, and even at the beginning of the article, I wrote a disclaimer, I said, I'm not saying vaccines cause autism. I'm just saying, like -- >> This is part of the story. >> Part of the story. And this kind of got up through the drinks at Cleveland Clinic, and the pediatric department said, you have to write a letter stating that you are 100% in supportive vaccines, or you're basically fired. >> What? >> That's the kind of -- that's the kind of thinking in medicine, and whether you're Jay Bata-Charlie who got, you know, kind of blacklisted, or your people who started to question things. We should be asking questions. And when you look at vaccine history, there's great benefit, but also we should be honest. There are like any other medical treatment that has benefits and risks with the code vaccine. We saw microditis and other issues. I mean, young adults who got vaccinated more than once had a greater risk of microditis from the vaccine than they got from COVID. It's just this published in major peer-reviewed journals. This is not a horrific -- not a horrific opinion. >> But what's so annoying about it? So now you can say it because it's been published and so on. But at the time, when we were first seeing signs of it, and you had like pediatric cardiologist coming forward to say, hold on, I'm seeing this, you -- even then, when they knew something might be developing, they completely stifled debates or outing of those concerns. That's when it was most needed. But also, most band, you know, where like you couldn't talk about that. >> Yeah, it's kind of nuts. I mean, I think it's just that we can't trust the American public to deal with a nuanced conversation, to teach them about the benefits and the risks, to help them understand that it's been sterile immunity and disease immunity. Sterile immunity is you get measles vaccine or any of the measles. Disease immunity is you get a vaccine like the blue vaccine or code vaccine, you reduce your risk of getting the disease or the severity of disease or hospitalization or death. That's a very different thing. When they say it's safe and effective, that's a trope that doesn't make any sense. Nothing in medicine is safe and 100 percent effective or 100 percent safe. Whether it's, you know, getting an injection for a procedure, you can potentially get infection, you can get bleeding. I mean, I had baxzeria and I, you know, after, you know, I could be huge bleed into my spine. It was -- >> Wow. >> -- wasn't a doctor doing a purpose, but it was a complication that I, yeah, so there are benefits and risks to anything in medicine, to any drug, aspirin. I mean, we used to think aspirin was God's gift to mankind. >> People were taking it every day to prevent heart attacks. >> Everybody's taking aspirin to prevent heart attacks. And then the data started emerging as doctors continued to ask questions. They said, oh. let's look at this again. They looked at it again and they said, "Oh, shit." It's actually causing more deaths in people who are at low risk for heart disease from brain bleeds and GI bleeds, stomach bleeds, than from preventing heart attacks. So let's restrict the use of it to those who are at the highest risk, which is what we should be doing in medicine, causing learning, evolving, growing. But when it comes to vaccines, you can't even ask the question. So I've been vaccinated. I have my kids' vaccine. I'm not an anti-vaccine. I think they're an important part of our medical arsenal, but they're not perfect and they have problems and we should be studying this. Yeah, nothing is above questions in medicine or shouldn't be. And you know it, we're in a new era. And when people say it's debunked, it's been settled, and these are just things that are so anti-science. Those words should be retired. Exactly. But I mean, look, we're now we've got Trump. We've got Bobby. We've got Jay Bhattacharya. We've got Marty McCarry. We're slowly but surely turning this aircraft carrier around, but it's going to require like antenna for the attacks on them. Yeah. And voices. Yeah, we're going to have to get pissed off and follow the Cali means method of yelling at everybody. I told him he's got to calm down. I said, getting in the car. He's like, just chill out. No, never. I disagree, Cali. Don't listen to Mark. I said I'm going to take a break. We'll be right back. Don't forget, we are giving you discount if you would like to join Function Health and get one of these blood panels with all this information today. What's the, what's the URL, Steve? What is it? I'll stay by FunctionHealth.com/A/Megan/A/A/Megan, FunctionHealth.com/A/Megan, or just go to FunctionHealth.com. And when you sign up for the package, I think it's normally like 500 bucks a year. You get a hundred bucks off. That is so well worth it. I know you may be thinking, no, I can't. That's like you said about a dollar a day for your health, like actually to find out potentially if you have cancer, this seems smart. Now, let's talk about the weight loss drugs because it seems like one of the first things that Trump did in the mahaline was to take them off of the Medicare and Medicaid to options. But that seems counterintuitive because being fat causes everything. It's true. It's complicated. I mean, Medicare Part D is the drug benefit for Medicare. It's $145 billion. If you treated all the obese people in Medicare with those AMPIC, it would be, I think, $267 billion just for that. But wouldn't it then lower the cost of all the other things they need? It might. It might, but the question is, is there a different way to go about this? And can you get the same benefits? And what is going on with our food system and the causes of this? So it's easy to look for that quick fix or the quick jab. It's going to solve all your problems. But it doesn't come without risk. So when you take these drugs, when you might feel nauseous and not feeling right, so that's probably why it works. It makes you not want to eat because you don't feel good. So who wants to rock around with that? And most people discontinued after the first year. I mean, it's a big discontinuation rate because of the side effects. Not only that, those are short-term, kind of short-low side effects, but we see a 400 percent increase in bowel obstruction, which needs surgery. We see a 900 percent increase in pancreatic injury. We see increases in thyroid cancer. Let me be able to bait that, whether it's just an animal or not, but it's still a concern. And you see people losing half their weight as muscle. The muscle is where your metabolism is. So here's the problem. You lose, let's say, 50 pounds. Half of that's muscle. You get off the drug because most people stop it. You came back to the weight. Then what's all fat? All fat. So then you could be the same weight you were when you started. Accept a lot of laughter. Capitalism, metabolism will be slower because muscle room seven times the calories is fat. So you need to eat less at the same weight just to maintain that weight. So it's a slippery slope. Unless you are. And I think this is something that we've talked about in some of the policy conversations we have had. If you're going to give this drug, it must be delivered along with a nutrition counseling program that makes you eat at least a gram of protein per ideal body weight. So let's say per pound of ideal body weight. So let's see your 120 pounds and your 120 grams of protein. And a strength training program. So you keep your muscle. And if you don't do that, there's a huge risk on the back side of it. You're going to be skinny fat. Skinny fat, it's right. I know. It's a terrible situation. Nobody wants to be skinny fat. It's like, you look good in clothes, but then when you take the clothes off, it goes downhill. There's another word for it called tofu, not tofu, thin on the outside, fat on the inside. Oh yeah, nobody wants that. That's fine until you get to each season. And then it's. These are an important advance in medicine, but they have to be prescribed intelligently. They have to be done the right way for the right person. It's not a panacea for everything. And we have to fix our food system. And we have to fix the reason why we're better. If you want to be morbidly obese, come in person, come in to see you. You wouldn't consider like saying, you want to check out? Yeah, I think, you know, what did we do before this? You know, this woman working with me who's been working on my nonprofit for years. She's now the first lady of West Virginia. She lost over a hundred pounds, just following some simple guidance that I gave her about what to do. She's a brilliant woman, but she didn't ever know about nutrition. And it's another woman in clemen clinic who had heart failure, typed her diabetes, high hypertension, she had multiple stents put in, she had fatty livers, her kidneys were starting to fail. I mean, she was on her way to her kidney and a heart transplant. And within three days, and this sounds crazy, but she was offered insulin by changing her diet. In three months, she reversed her diabetes, her A1C, which is your average blood sugar, went from 11 to 5.5, which is normal. Her heart failure reversed. We'd call it the injection fracture with how much blood you can pump out her minute. Again, that got back to normal from being low. Her kidneys got better. Her fatty liver went away. She got her medications. She saved $20,000 in copay. I don't know what you Medicare was covering for her, but that was her copay. You save a lot of money. And it's just about teaching people the basics of what to do. And most people don't know like the family I was talking about. This was the pre-Ozambic era. A lot of people know and they just they some people very hard. Some people do say, well, just don't know. And I think, you know, that's what I have changed over the years. I sort of believe, like I said earlier, that people who are overweight or who have these conditions, they know better, but they just don't do it. No, it's more than that. They don't know because the whole society has sort of made it hard for them to know. I got to ask you, this is a different category, but I got to get this in. EMF and RF. This is like. Should we be worried about like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Yeah. And so-called dirty electricity coming out of your outlets. Yeah. How big of an issue is it? I don't know. I don't think that there's a lot of good data. I think there's some data that there may be some issues in human biology. When you think about it, we're electromagnetic beings. And you have your heartbeat, your brain waves. We can see the electrical signals. You know, I mean, you know that if you go into certain areas, there's interference with your phone. So the stuff actually we know impacts our electromagnetic system. How it's linked to disease, you know, how bad it is, I think it's very hard to understand or study because you can't do a randomized control trial with this. Yeah. Can't like take part. Wouldn't we all be coming down with cancer if well exposure to Wi-Fi caused it? Yeah. I mean, I mean, everybody. We are. I think as we are seeing increasing cancer rates. So people say, oh, heart disease deaths have gone down. Yes, because we have better treatments. But has the incidence gone down? No, we've seen more people with heart disease, more people with cancer, more people with every single chronic disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes. You name it, autoimmune disease, it's getting worse across the board. And so it's multifactorial. It's not just one thing and could it be a factor? Yeah. But I think you think twice about having Wi-Fi in your house? No, I do, but I turn it off in my bedroom. And I notice this, and this is totally anecdotal. But when I go camping or I'm sleeping outside, like I sleep better, my whole well-being changes. And I could be nature. It could be a lot of other things. But I always wonder if that or sometimes even when the power goes out, because you know, when the power goes out, sometimes it goes out for three or four days, like, wow, I feel a lot better. I sleep better. You know, I mean, it's kind of amazing. So that's anecdotal. But I think I think it's something we should study. What about that? What you see, you see a headline every other day that young people, like people in their 20s are getting colon cancer at really alarming. Yeah. Yeah. Is that true? And do you know why? Yes, 100% true. I think the why is a question. My view is that it's related to the change in a microbiome from our diet and from the increased load of environmental toxins. And that's probably driving most of it. What about antibiotics? You were talking about the one hormone with the messed up microbiome. And you mentioned you gave her antibiotics. I thought antibiotics caused a bad. Well, they can be good. They can be bad. So she had an overgrowth of bacteria called SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And she also had SIFO, which is small intestinal fungal overgrowth. So sometimes you need to get rid of the bad guys. Like if you have a parasite, you need an anti-parasitic medication. I would love to get a parasite. Every woman I know dreams of that. Yeah. Worms for weight loss. Yeah. It's our new company. No, my hair stylist and I were joking during the COVID pandemic. If Dr. Fauci would just say there's some ozempic in those COVID vaccines, everybody would get that. Every single woman on earth would be like, I'll take it. I want all my boosters. It's true. But you know, antibiotics have a role in medicine, but we know we weigh overuse them. I mean, there's 29 million pounds of antibiotics to use an animal feed to prevent infection from oral counting. There's about a couple of million that use for humans for therapy. So that's crazy. Antibiotic resistance. It kills 700,000 people a year. It's kind of a big issue and it's a big, big problem. But you know, for certain indications, for example, like bowel overgrowth, there's specific antibiotics that are not absorbed that can be taken that are generally well tolerated. And then you have to then rebuild the gut after. So you know, you have to. How hard is it to rebuild the gut after an antibiotics course? It's not that hard. If you take probiotics, if you eat healthy diet, if you feed your microbiome phytochemicals and fiber, it can come back. Okay. Yeah. I've been taking this like shot, not not for antibiotics, just because I was, I don't know, everybody says it was to be good for you. Of raw, it's like honey. What is the apple cider vinegar? Yeah. And some lemon. Yeah. It is the most disgusting You take it and you're like, "Oh, is this important?" - I mean, it can be good to change the pH and stuff. I'm not a big subscriber of that. - It's so painful, but I don't really like all that fermented stuff they say that you should eat. Like a sour crowd, and pickled this, and pickled that. I don't know. I don't like this stuff, and I haven't started Deans, and I'll love my vinegar drink, and I don't want to eat a bunch of sour. I do like that, but yogurt's good too, right? I mean, can I do that instead of the apple cider vinegar? - If it's not industrial yogurt, yes. - It's industrial. What do you mean? - I mean, like factory farm cows that are pummel antibiotics, hormones, and it gets into the mill. - I don't even know how I find that out. I didn't even consider that. - Well, you can buy organic yogurt. - I don't think mine is organic. I have got to go look at that immediately. I didn't even consider it. Okay, so in sum, we need to detoxify ourselves. We need to detoxify our environment. You mentioned mold, you mentioned lime, all the ultra-process foods, by organic. - Yeah, ultra-process foods. I mean, if you could get a message out that's simple, it's like, you know, if it's a food that you can't recognize, or make in your kitchen with the ingredients that you have in your kitchen, you probably should need it. - Don't eat it. - If you don't have mutilated hydroxy-talluine that you put on your vegetables or your drink on your steak, don't buy food with it. - Yeah. - Better save the story. - It's almost like you need to get rid of your pantry. - I think we need to fridge biopsy for most people, and the pantry biopsy, and we need to get rid of the stuff that's harmful. And I think that's the thing that most people can do. They can look at their kitchen, go through everything. And I've written a lot about this in my books, but how do you actually have a healthy pantry? How do you get rid of this things that are harmful? And if you go through there and look at the ingredients, if it's stuff you don't recognize, get rid of it. If you can't pronounce it, if it's in Latin, don't eat it, you know, like it has weird ingredients like mold. - You or your kids. - Yeah, or your kids, yeah, exactly. - Yeah, so what you're saying is that my mom is serving me wild berry high C with every meal was not exactly the best choice. - No, frankly not. - Linda. - Alley not. - Where this is where we went wrong. - That's right. - Dr. Mark Hyman, it's a pleasure. - Pleasure. - Function health is the name of the company, and you guys got to check it out again. It's function health, right? Functionhealth.com or function.com. - Function health. - Functionhealth.com/a/megan, and that will get you $100 off your membership there. Well worth your time, thank you all. Thanks, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. (upbeat music)