Mark Hyman: The Longevity Expert: The Truth About Ozempic, The Magic Weight Loss Drug & The Link Between Milk & Cancer!

00:00What's your thoughts on milk? It's problematic. Current dairy is not something we should consume. So, you might not know this, but... That's crazy. Dr. Mark Hyman. One of the world-leading doctors in functional medicine. And an expert in helping people understand how they can live their longest, healthiest life. What are your thoughts on his MPEG? So we have a massive obesity problem and we don't have any good solutions. And so something comes along that makes you lose weight.

00:26That's a huge, attractive thing. But the side effect profile on this is scary. People are not aware that... And by the way, they're thinking of giving it year old kids, which is just terrifying. But we live in a toxic landscape of enticing, addictive, highly processed food, which is why 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction. We know that it causes mental health issues, depression, anxiety, ADD, gun violence, junk It kills 11 million people a year, but these are not inevitable problems.

00:55So for example, I had a kid with ADD who was so bad that you couldn't read his handwriting at 12 years old, but after two months, he went from having severe ADD symptoms to excelling in school. And there's so many things that you can do, but people have to understand that you cannot use willpower to control your food behavior.

01:10It's a problem of education. For example, if you eat sugar in the morning, cereal, pancakes, bagels, it's the worst possible thing we can do. Spring training three times a week, 20 minutes, really key for longevity. And this is really important. We call it the five Fs for getting healthy, but most of us do the opposite. So it's... Mark, if someone's just clicked on this podcast, can you tell me why they should stay and listen? Great question. Great question.

01:44The answer is quite simple. You are going to be able to have a window into the future of your health and the future of medicine itself and the way to think about things, the way you think about your health, the way you think about... symptoms you have or diseases you have, what your family members have, the way you think about optimizing your health, you're going to have a window into what the next generation of thinking is about this, a paradigm shift that's akin to Columbus saying the earth is not flat, or Galileo saying the earth is not the center of the universe.

02:20These are massive scientific paradigms, evolutionary theory by Darwin. Think about physics at the turn of the last century And how much that changed with Einstein's discoveries of relativity. We are now at that stage in biology where we're understanding for the first time in history of science and medicine, the natural laws of biology and how the body works. What is functional medicine? I've heard the word before, but I've never really understood the true definition.

02:48Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't particularly like the word, to be honest with you, Stephen. I think it has kind of confusing implications for people. But essentially, the way I would describe it as a new way of thinking about solving the puzzle of chronic disease, looking at root causes, seeing the body as a system, as a network. It's the medicine of why, not what, not what disease do you have, but why do you have it? It's a science of creating health.

03:14How do we create health? What are the things that are impediments to health? How do we get rid of those? And what are the ingredients for health and how do we provide those? And it's not that big a list. Like we're biological organisms, right? And so functional medicine is a systematic way of thinking. It's an operating system or methodology, a heuristic, let's say, to unpack all the all of your biology and all the inputs, we call the exposome, and make sense of what your personal story is and personalize an approach to diagnosis and treatment.

03:45So we always say in functional medicine, you can have one cause that creates many diseases or one disease that can have many causes. So for example, gluten can cause everything from osteoporosis to autism to schizophrenia to rheumatoid arthritis to anemia to hair loss, alopecia, I mean, it can cause a million things and it's one inciting event. Or you can have, you know, one disease like depression that could be caused by many things. Depression is a symptom, right?

04:13It's not a Prozac deficiency, right? It's caused by many factors. It could be that you had a major trauma or a loss. It could be that you're vitamin D deficient. It could be that you're eating gluten. It creates inflammation in your brain. It could be not taking an acid blocker for years for reflux because you have the wrong diet and that causes B12 deficiency, that causes depression. Or it could be because you're eating a lot of sushi and that has mercury, that causes depression.

04:36Or maybe it's because you hate sushi and fish and you don't need any fish and you have omega-3 deficiency or you maybe have insulin resistance and diabetes, that can cause depression and inflammation in the brain. So depression is just a name we give to people who share a collection of symptoms. Most of the diseases we have that we describe as obesity or diabetes or heart disease or cancer they're not really helpful to understand the true root cause.

04:57They're just describing the symptoms. It's descriptive, right? And so functional medicine is a really different model. It also could be called network medicine. There's a textbook out of Harvard by Borussia Malkhazi that talks about the network biology we have, how we need to think about multifactorial causes of disease. There's many factors. There's not just one. And then multimodal intervention is not just one. We're looking at that one cure for Alzheimer's.

05:23We're never going to find it. But a study that looked at multiple interventions of diet and lifestyle and exercise and aggressive treatment of risk factors showed a regression of Alzheimer's.

05:33Not one drug, but many different modalities to optimize health. So it's really, to me, the most exciting time in medicine. This paradigm shift is happening. It's happening fast. And it's being accelerated through this sort of advent of our ability to do deep phenomic diagnostics. So phenomics is essentially the expression of... your biology at any moment. Your genome is fixed, right? But your phenome is essentially the things that your body expresses, whether it's health or disease.

06:03Was there any personal experiences that made you more drawn towards focusing your life on health and helping people? Absolutely, I mean, I've always been interested. So I don't know why, I think it was, and I visited my sister at Amherst College and went to the veggie room and had whole grain bread and peanut butter and honey. I'm like, this is, I'm a vegetarian. So I just sort of got into it. And then I studied Buddhism and got into that. So I think all that was sort of seeded in me.

06:28And then I started Asian studies and yoga, which was sort of the science of really healing the mind. And Buddhism is healing the mind. So I always sort of got into that. But there was something that happened after I went to work at this place called Canyon Ranch. It's a health resort. And I got very ill. I lived in China and basically was breathing in mercury-laden air in Beijing in the winter. And I had an air filter. I would clean it every day.

06:55And that air filter was full of... mercury because it's in the soot, it's in the coal that they burn. They burn raw coal in the city. And I hailed it in every day. And when I got back from China, there was something that happened. I got some gut infection and my system just collapsed. One day I was riding my bike a hundred miles a day. The next day I couldn't walk up the stairs. One day I had 30 patients and I could remember everybody's name and story and everything without notes and dictate everything at the end of the day with no problem.

07:22And to not being able to remember where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started. And I couldn't read a book to my kids out loud and actually understand it. I could either read it and try to understand it or I could read it out loud and not know what I was saying. My brain just stopped working. My immune system not working. My gut stopped working. My whole body just collapsed. I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I felt like I was walking through mud.

07:45It took me years to figure it out, really years. And I got introduced to functional medicine at that time. I heard about it. I said, this either is lunacy or it's genius. And if it's true, I devoted to finding out whether it's true for me. for my own healing and for my patients. Because if it was true, everything was gonna be different. It's like discovering the earth wasn't flat. Well, if that's true, then everything is different. And so I dove into it head first to heal myself, and then I started using it on my patients.

08:15And that feeling of being sick drove me because I was clear that I wasn't crazy. Chronic fatigue syndrome was thought to be sort of a psychological disease. And now the data's really clear. The NIH just came out with a large paper, I think last week, talking about the biomarkers and the biology and the immunology and the mitochondrial dysfunction. the inflammation and all the things that do go wrong. And I knew I wasn't crazy, and I knew I wasn't mentally ill, and I knew I wasn't depressed, and I knew I didn't have ADD, and I knew I wasn't getting dementia at 36 years old.

08:48And so I really had to understand my biology internally on a cellular level and reverse engineer my way back to health. And so that forced me just out of survival to dig deep into the science of what was happening and then to unpack that. And then... start to use it on my patients. And when I would use it on my patients, I was shocked. I mean, have someone come with autoimmune disease they'd had for years. And I'd say, do this, this, and this based on the principles of, And they would get better.

09:16I would say, oh, I've had migraines for 20 years. And I would check and they would have a food sensitivity to eggs. They'd stop and it would go away. Or I would take someone who's had diabetes and put them on the right approach with food as medicine. And the diabetes would go away. So I started seeing all these what I thought were miracles or things that wouldn't change or treating kids with autism or ADD. And we can share in the show notes, but I had a kid with ADD who was so bad that you couldn't read his handwriting at 12 years old.

09:42And after two months, he went from having severe ADD symptoms and all the other health issues. And I fixed his gut. I optimized his nutrition. I get the lead out of his system. I got all the processed food out. And he went from being completely, barely non-functioning to excelling in school to having perfect penmanship after two months. And I'm like, wow, this is crazy. If you just look at the image of this and share it in the show notes if you want.

10:10it was like, okay, something is going on here that we don't completely understand. And if it's something as simple as optimizing his gut and optimizing his nutrition and getting rid of the toxins in his body and the brain could function again, then so many people who are suffering don't need to suffer. And that's really what drove me, was just seeing so many people suffering without need and how easy it was to fix them once you understood. We're at that stage in medicine where the answers are here.

10:37The science and technology is here. It's just not applied. And so my whole life has been driven by the passion of trying to relieve needless suffering for millions of people. These chronic diseases that are now accounting for almost $1 in $5 of our entire economy that are bankrupting America and I think the NHS is not far behind us in the UK. These are not inevitable problems, heart disease, diabetes, many cancers. dementia, autoimmune diseases, these are just exploding in the last 100 years.

11:12They weren't around before. And it wasn't because we didn't live long. It wasn't because of that. It was because something changed. And what changed was our diet, was environmental toxins, was our microbiome, our nutritional deficiencies because of the ultra processed food we're eating. And so I've been driven to both solve problems individually for people with their health as well as take on the bigger issues of the root causes of our chronic disease, which is food, right?

11:42And environmental toxins. And I realized that I couldn't cure diabetes in my office. diabetes was caused on the farm, in the factories, in the grocery stores, in the restaurants, not in my office. And so I really had to go upstream and deal with the root causes of why my patients were sick. Because I could change your diet and I could get them to be better and I could fix a lot of things. But more people would just keep coming in.

12:07I'm like, this is ridiculous. And so I realized I had to do something about it. So I wrote a book called Food Fixed. which essentially lays out how food is the nexus of everything we care about and create a nonprofit where I work in Washington to try to change food policies like child-friendly labeling and medically tailored meals and changing nutrition education and changing our dietary guidelines and changing the kinds of food that we rib all through SNAP or food stamps.

12:29Why should we be giving 10% of our $100 billion budget for food stamps for soda, which we know kills people? So I've been kind of working on these issues both on the macro and the micro. Yeah. What is the current state of food in your point of view? Because it's difficult, isn't it? Especially when we come to America as Brits. I feel like we always get fat. It's very, very difficult to come to Los Angeles or New York where we frequent as Brits to run the show.

12:56Yeah. And to not get fat. I'm sorry. But it's difficult. Like, you know, I do these podcasts about health and food all the time. But then I think, okay, it's all good having all this advice. But when you walk outside and you walk into a convenience store, you are doomed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we live in a toxic nutritional landscape. It's a nutritional wasteland, a carnival of enticing, colorful, addictive, highly processed food-like substances that drive our biology in all the wrong ways.

13:30And so it's very difficult to be healthy in America, which is why 93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction. This is according to what we call the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey the government does, which is hundreds of thousands of people looking at their blood work over many, many years. And we're messed up. And it's not an accident. It has to do with the food we produce, how we grow it, what we grow, how it's processed, how it's...

14:00made into different food-like substances, how it's marketed, sold in grocery stores, restaurants. So it's very difficult, unless you really know what you're doing, to stay out of trouble in America. I mean, I do it because I'm highly educated, but it's very tough, and it's easy to make the wrong choice. How do you do it? Oh, well, I'm very... sort of religious about what I put in my body. I mean, I don't eat anything that comes in a package or is processed.

14:24I just don't. It's a hard and fast rule. If it's basically, I mean, if it's something that's like a can of sardines or a can of tomatoes, obviously, if it's minimally processed foods, that's fine, you know? We've been mentally processing foods forever. Sauerkraut is processed. Yogurt is processed. That's not bad. It's how it's processed. And so I eliminate all ultra-processed foods. I won't even think of it as food. If I go into a store, a convenience store, and I see all these different things to buy...

14:52It looks to me like a rock. Like the way that process in my brain, well, that's not really food. Why would I eat that? I'm not going to pick up a rock and eat it. So I tried to cook my own food, and I bring food with me. So for example, today I had another podcast I did earlier, and I knew I wasn't going to have time for lunch. So I had earlier bought some snacks, and I actually have a care package, basically an emergency snack pack, so I don't have a food emergency in my backpack all day.

15:21all the time. So it's like a day's rations.

15:23And that was my lunch. So basically, even though I didn't have time to kind of go out to eat today, I pre-planned. So it takes a little planning, you know, like you came to the United States from the UK. You didn't just like leave your house and go to the airport. You thought about what you're packing. You brought the right clothes. You brought your crew. You want to bring your cameras or whatever you have to bring. You have to plan. But somehow we don't think we have to do that for our health.

15:45We have to plan it. And so I'm very careful about planning. And occasionally I'll get stuck. And, you know, usually I can find some nuts or something somewhere, even if they're in oils they don't like. So it's tough. Yeah. I got told the other day, which helped me understand myself, I got told that when we're hungry, especially when it's sort of like late at night, the logical center of our brain, like the prefrontal cortex, is less active. And the amygdala, the sort of emotional part of our brain that wants the dopamine, is much more active.

16:15And it helped me to understand why maybe late at night, if I haven't planned my food... I'm much more susceptible to make a bad food choice that I then regret. I'm much more acceptable to lean in for sugar or something that's like super high in carbs or whatever. That really helped me. And this is why the planning thing makes a lot of sense. Because I can use my prefrontal cortex, my logic center of my brain, to make the food choice in the morning so that I don't find myself making a mistake.

16:41It's so important, Stephen, because people have to understand that willpower... is not the answer. You cannot use willpower to control your food behavior. It's part of your ancestral, evolutionary, limbic, reptile, dinosaur brain. And so when your blood sugar drops... You're going to eat whatever in front of you. If there's a vending machine, if there's a donut, if it's cookies, it doesn't matter. Even if you know better, and I've experienced this, you're just going to eat whatever because it's a life-threatening emergency.

17:11Your body doesn't know that there's grocery stores and restaurants. It means you're going to go out and try to hunt and gather and do something. It's like an emergency. So when you have that food emergency and you don't have the right food on you, You're in trouble.

17:24I have that all the time. I have this like constant fight with myself where this one voice is like, do the fucking right thing. And then this other part of my brain is like, just today, break the rule. And, you know, and, but obviously that voice is louder sometimes than others. And typically late at night, it's louder. Sleep deprivation. Stress. Stress, sleep deprivation, all of that increases your appetite, increases cortisol, it increases And ghrelin, which is a hunger hormone.

17:50You know, you can take young, healthy college kids and sleep-deprived them, and they're going to crave carbs, they're going to crave sugar, and they're going to gain weight. It's not rocket science. What about for someone that doesn't have any money at all, so they don't have the ability to... a lot of the privileges that me and you have, what are some of the very basics that they should be thinking about in order to remain healthy in a world where every convenience store is trying to sell you something cheap and sugary?

18:20Yeah, so really good question. You know, I think the economics of being healthy is a problem. And we know that there's a huge disparity in health. But it's not only economic, it's education. You know, I met with a woman who was the doctor at a clinic in Bed-Stuyvesant, which is in Brooklyn. It's a very underserved area. And in a very low socioeconomic status group, very unhealthy. And she said, you know, Mark, did you know the number one predictor of health?

18:52Is it money? No, it's education. So even people who are... are wealthy but haven't been educated still have issues. So for me, it was really about education. And so people can be educated to do the right thing and it doesn't have to be expensive. And I was part of this film 10 years ago called Fed Up that looked at childhood obesity and our food system and the advent of sugar and marketing and processed foods. And we visit a lot of families and I work with a family in South Carolina and Easley.

19:19It's one of the poorest areas in America. And it has the worst, call it the food deserts, one of the worst food deserts in America, basically where there's not a lot of healthy options to choose from. Oh, yeah. And there's something called the Retail Food Environment Index. How many healthy grocery stores are there to fast food and convenience stores? And there was like 10 to 1. It was terrible. And his family lived on $1,000 a month for food for a family of five.

19:48They lived in a trailer. They were in disability in food stamps. The mother was 100 plus pounds overweight. The father was very overweight, had type 2 diabetes, and was already at 42 years old, was on dialysis for kidney failure. which is amazing because you usually don't see that until later. But the son was 16 years old and 50% body fat, guys should be 10 to 20, and was about to be diabetic, was pre-diabetic. And rather than kind of, they were part of the movie, I said, why do you want to do this?

20:17And they were like, well, in order for my dad to get kidney transplant, he asked his weight, we're trying, we don't know what to do, we're doing all this low fat stuff, and we're doing all this diet stuff we have in the house, not working. So I went to their house, their trailer, and rather than giving a lecture, about what to do. I said, let's cook a meal together. But first, let's do an inspection of your kitchen and let's see what's in here. And so we pulled out everything from the freezer and the fridge and the cupboards and everything was packaged, boxed, processed.

20:43Everything was very high in high fructose corn syrup from the peanut butter to the salad dressing. Everything had trans fat in it, which is deadly. And a lot of it said diet this. And my basic rule is if it has a health claim on the label, don't eat it. You know, it's gluten-free potato chips. Doesn't make it healthy, right? Coca-Cola is gluten-free. Doesn't make it healthy. So I showed them what they were doing. And I said, let's just make a simple meal.

21:06Here's a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget. How to eat well for you. for the planet and your wallet. And it's made by the Environmental Working Group. You can get it on ewg.org, it's free. And it was like, how do you choose the cheaper cuts of meat or the beans or the grains or the veggies? You know, like onions and carrots and celery are not expensive, you know, like a lot of veggies are not expensive. So we made turkey chili. We made a salad from fresh ingredients, olive oil and vinegar dressing, not dressing that was full of chemicals and high fructose corn syrup and refined oils.

21:38I showed them how to roast sweet potatoes. I showed them how to stir fry vegetables. We had some asparagus. They never eaten anything fresh. They never cooked in the kitchen. The kids came out, we were playing video games. They came running in the kitchen, like, what's that smell? And there was like the roasting of the sweet potatoes. We had this beautiful dinner together. They loved the food. And I was like, you know what? I don't know if this is going to work, but you don't, they didn't even have cutting boards.

22:00They didn't have knives. Like they literally hadn't, like we tried to cut the, you know, the onions and the sweet potatoes with a butter knife. Cause that's all they had was like a butter knife. It was really hard. So I bought them on the way home. I bought them cutting boards on Amazon and on eyes and I sent it to their house. Next week, the mom texts me. She says, Mark, we lost 18 pounds this week as a family. A year later, the father lost 45, got a new kidney.

22:24The mother lost 100 pounds. The son lost 132 pounds and went to medical school. The first guy in his family to go to college, and he asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school. And they lived in one of the worst food deserts. They didn't have much... you know, economically, and they were able to figure it out. Because eating real food doesn't have to be expensive. You don't have to have a $70 Wagyu ribeye steak, right? You can eat real food.

22:49And it's just as simple as not eating the ultra-processed food. It's so bad for us. and it kills 11 million people a year. We know this data is so strong, it causes mental health issues, aggression, violence, depression, anxiety, gun violence. I mean, the studies are there. I did a podcast on the doctor's pharmacy, my podcast about this, talking about how our food is affecting our mental health, not just obesity and diabetes, but our cognitive function.

23:16ADD and memory issues. I mean, it's all linked to what we're eating. So we have, like I said, the best of times, the worst of times.

23:24We know what to do, but we have the ability to do it. It's a problem of education, a problem of a political will to change the policies that are driving us to do the wrong thing. And right now there's a bill being proposed in Congress that would limit, as a pilot, ultra-processed food for kids with food stamps, which I think would be amazing, right? The food industry is fighting back tooth and nail, right? So we're fighting big forces. The food industry is the biggest industry on the planet.

23:55When I was growing up and I was trying to be healthy, one of the things I used to do was chug milk. Yeah. Because I got told that it would make me tall like my brothers. So I used to drink milk like crazy. Yeah. Straight from the carton. Just as many gulps as I could take from the fridge. Did it work? Did you grow? I have no idea. I'm still shorter than they are, so I guess not. But that's one of the big myths that I think a lot of families still believe, that milk is great for our bones and to help us grow.

24:24What's your thoughts on milk? Yeah, so... It's a controversial topic as well, the subject of milk. Yeah, I mean, yes. I mean, the dairy industry is big. Our current Secretary of Agriculture worked for the dairy industry. It's problematic because the science isn't there. There was a paper called Milk and Health that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, top medical journal in the world, arguably, maybe The Lancet if you're from the UK.

24:48It basically was written by two Harvard scientists that dissected all of the scientific evidence around milk and whether the claims were right or not. And just maybe for the audience in Europe, you might not know this, but in the States, you'll remember this. There were all these got milk ads. So there were famous people, celebrities, sports athletes, politicians all wearing a white milk mustache. And they're like got milk as a... promotion. And in those ads, it would say, it's going to build better bones.

25:16It's going to do this. It's going to do that. And the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, actually, or I think it was the federal, you can't do that because it's not true. Like you have to take those ads out. So those ads went away. And it was the government promoting those ads with the Dairy Council. So there's something called checkout programs that the government has where it's supposed to support agriculture. Well, the government was paying in part for these ads with taxpayer dollars and the science wasn't there.

25:48And the dietary guidelines for Americans... says that the average American should have three glasses of milk a day and kids should have two glasses of milk a day to be healthy. You cannot get money in funding for school lunches in America without having milk on the menu. Now, there is no evidence to support this. In fact, there's opposite evidence that skim milk causes weight gain because it doesn't satisfy your appetite, that milk can cause cancer.

26:14Prostate cancer. Prostate cancer, that it doesn't create strong bones. In fact, there's higher risk of fracture with high milk drinkers. that it creates a lot of digestive issues for people. It can create autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes. It has common allergies or food sensitivities that people get. And I remember I was in the emergency room once and when I was working in the ER and this mother comes in with this kid with like, you know, had like...

26:40his 10th ear infection in a few weeks. I was like, what happened? Like, when did this start? Oh, it started when he was like 12 months old. I said, what changed? Well, I stopped breastfeeding and I started giving him milk. And all of a sudden he started getting his ear infections. I was like, oh, this is before I even knew about all this. It was just kind of an interesting footnote.

26:54But we really have to look at the data and be science driven. And the problem is we have corporate capture in America, where the food industry has captured our food agencies, our political organizations, system from the FDA to the USDA. They spend, for example, half a billion dollars just on the farm bill, which has, for example, food stamps and other food programs, child infant nutrition. So it's really unfortunate, but milk is not nature's perfect food.

27:25It's only nature's perfect food if you're a calf. Yeah. Is there health benefits to milk? Yes. So that's the other side of it. Now, what milk should we be drinking, right? If we're drinking modern milk, modern milk is from Holstein cows that are almost homogenous in the same, not homogenized milk, but homogenous breed. They have very few bulls inseminating them. They have a massive insemination program from very few bulls that have a limited genetic stock.

27:52And they're what we call A1 cows. So most heirloom cows, most sort of historical dairy had something called A2 casein, which is less inflammatory, less likely to cause gut issues, less inflammatory. problematic for the body. So sheep and goat milk have A2. Certain cows like Jersey or Guernsey cows have A2 in them. And you can get A2 milk. You can get A2 ice cream now. And so this A1 casein is potentially very problematic. So I think the current dairy is not great.

28:25And then we pasteurize it and homogenize it and then we add growth hormone to the cows. That goes in there. We have estrogen that we add into the cows. It's in the milk. We have 60 different hormones in the milk, some of them naturally occurring. We milk pregnant cows and that milk has a lot more hormonal effects. So I think current dairy is not something we should consume. Now if you have a chance to get sheep milk or goat milk or A2 milk from a cow, that may be okay.

28:53Yogurt may be okay. And it depends on your genetics too. 75% of the world is lactose intolerant. Many people have dairy sensitivities. But I think if it's from the right source, it's okay. For example, I use goat whey. as my morning protein shake. So goat whey is from goats, obviously. There's very little casein in it, but it's A2 casein if there's any. And I don't react to it. But if I have regular whey, I do have a reaction. I get congested, I'll get pimples, or I get regular stuff.

29:18So I don't think dairy is something we should be consuming in large amounts unless it's certain kinds of dairy. What do you think of this conversation at the moment around a Zenpec? It seems like it's just exploded in culture. I mean, the share price of the company, that maker Zenpec has gone through the roof. Yeah, yeah. in a way that I've just never seen in biotech before. It appears that there's no apparent side effects. If you ask people, they struggle to take any side effects.

29:43But I actually think I saw you make a video about it. Yeah, yeah. I have a lot to say about it. What are your thoughts on a Zenpec? You crossed your arms. Are you going to get yourself in trouble? I'm trying not to bang the table. Okay. First of all, we have a massive obesity problem and we don't have any good solutions. And so something comes along that's an injection you can take once a week that makes you not hungry and bypasses your normal biological mechanisms and you lose weight That's a huge, attractive thing.

30:24And that's why Nova Nordisk is the biggest company now in Denmark. It's the biggest part of the GDP of Denmark. I don't know if they even allow it in Denmark. They're the people that make a Zempick. Yeah, people that make a Zempick. And recently, the CEO of Nova Nordisk, who makes a Zempick, publicly said he was getting calls from processed food manufacturers very concerned because their market share was dropping and they were very concerned that it was going to affect their business.

30:51Think about that. So I think Ozempic is effective. It works with a natural part of your biology called GLP-1, which is something your body makes, and we can make more of it by doing lots of different things from certain probiotics and bacteria in our gut to certain foods, to certain ways of eating. But the effect of the drug is very strong. Just for context, for anyone that doesn't know what a Zempec is, let's give them some context. Well, it's a drug that was first used for diabetes, and then it works by acting on a pathway called GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide 1, which is just a pathway, and it regulates insulin function, it regulates weight and appetite.

31:34And so it really works to help with blood sugar, But the side effect was weight loss. So it was like we studied Viagra for blood pressure, but the side effect was it helped them with the rations. So it was like, well, it's kind of like that, right? It wasn't designed for this, but it actually had the side effect. And since obesity affects so many people, there's now 2 billion people on the planet who are overweight. So you take this injection and basically your appetite drops out, so you don't feel as hungry.

32:03feels hungry and you can feel nauseous, you can throw up, you can not want to eat. And people stop it because of the side effects. So those are short-term side effects. So the plus side is that it works. It's effective. It has some metabolic benefits when you lose weight, which can help your health benefits. I don't think it's the drug that's having the health benefits. It's the weight loss. But there's a lot of downsides. One, it costs not a lot of money.

32:31So if you were to put everybody who's overweight in the country on it, it would be $5.1 trillion. So it's enormously costful. How much does it cost? Like $1,300 to $1,700 a month. $1,300 to $1,700 a month. A month, which is like, you know, probably, you know, 1,500 pounds or something. It's a lot of money every month forever, right? When you stop it, the weight gain comes back unless you really rigorously change your lifestyle. So it's not a lifestyle change program.

33:00It doesn't help you change your behaviors or habits. It's a pharmacological appetite straitjacket. And... And that can be effective if some people really need it, they need it. If some people are massively overweight and they don't want to get a gastric bypass, I think it may be okay. But here's the rubb. One, you have to take it forever. Two, it's expensive. Three, most people are not aware that not only do you lose fat, but you lose muscle. So about 50% of the weight you lose is muscle.

33:33And muscle is where your metabolism is. It burns seven times the calories as fat, and you need it for longevity and health. And so when you lose muscle... your whole health declines. It's the center of your health. And it's very tough to get that back. So you have to really increase protein and you have to hit the gym hard with weights if you're going to be on a drug like Ozempic. Longer term, and that can be managed, but most people don't, right?

33:59That can be managed and you need to be tracked with DEXA scans and body composition testing and really know what you're doing because it can really mess you up. And then you lose the weight, but then your metabolism is slower at the end of that process than it was before you started because you've lost your metabolic engine, which is your muscle. Okay. The other thing that happens, and we're now seeing this because it's not been around that long, right?

34:20There was an article in the New England Journal years ago that said, be sure to use new drugs as soon as they come out before the side effects develop, right? And so now we're seeing two, three years out serious side effects. So, you know, in medicine, when we see an effect of 20 or 30% on a study, we go, that's a great thing. Let's, you know, statins lower heart disease by 20 or 30%. Great. Number one drug in the world. The side effect profile on this is scary because bowel obstruction, which is not a trivial thing, essentially where your bowels stop moving and you need surgery to release them, is increased by 450%.

35:00Pancreatitis, which is not a fun condition, which is where your pancreas becomes inflamed, that affects your digestion, it affects your insulin, it affects everything, and you can die from it, is increased by 900%. So these are not trivial things. There's other side effects, kidney and so forth. So I think the longer this is out there, we're going to see more and more consequences of this drug. And I think it misses the real issue, which is how do we fix the problem causing this?

35:27It's not an ozempic deficiency, right? Weight gain and obesity is not ozempic deficiency. It's because of our toxic environment, lifestyle, food system. lack of exercise, environmental toxins, it's complicated. And it's not an easy fix. And it requires policy change. It requires us to rethink our agricultural system, our food processing and manufacturing system. It requires massive education for people to know what to eat. It requires us really to make wide-scale change in our society, which is going to cause significant loss for a lot of companies.

36:02I mean, like I said, the food industry is the biggest industry in the world. It's a $16 trillion to $17 trillion a year industry. That's bigger than the GDP of most countries. Or I think of like, I mean, the entire United States is, I think, 16 trillion. So... It's a big industry with a lot to lose. And so there's a lot of pushback about changing the things that have to change for us to become healthy. So taking this drug seems great. And I think it's got benefits, but it's not just a risk-free solution.

36:37It's funny because it feels like it's a window into the future of how we're going to treat things like obesity. Yeah. Because the price... I hope not. Play this forward. The price is going to come down because more companies are going to release very similar iterations that cause the same effect on GLP-1. The price will come down so quickly. There'll be this kind of price race. I'm sure... I imagine as MPEC got ahead of the pack because they ran the clinical trials, they invested all that money, which means they got approved first.

37:03That window's going to close. And then the price comes down. And then, I don't know, do they prescribe it here? And can doctors prescribe it? Oh, sure. Anybody can prescribe it, yeah. Oh, really? Okay. Oh, yeah. So it can be subsidized by your insurance or something? No. No, it can't be. I mean, most insurance don't pay for it. They might pay for it if you're diabetic. But for non-approved indications, they typically don't pay for it. Now, that's for Govi, which is the approved version.

37:27And some insurance will pay, some insurance won't. But it's not something they're excited to pay about. Yeah. Interesting. Do you know this with those side effects that you named linked with Zempec? What is it about the drug that's causing that? Because I was wondering as you were saying it, is that because people start eating less or is it the chemical itself? No, no, no. It's the effect of the drug. It thickens the bowel wall. It has an effect on the gut.

37:52So it's working on the gut in a lot of the hormones and the metabolic functions of the gut are affected by Ozempic in ways that change its function and slow the emptying and do a lot of things. So eventually it seems to cause problems for a lot of people. Interesting, because the narrative out there is very positive at the moment. These drugs come along and it's like there's no side effects. Millions of dollars of advertising and billions of dollars of revenue at stake.

38:21yeah you know nobody's talking about the bad side interesting by the way they're thinking of giving it to five-year-old kids which is just terrifying to me uh for life i do think with these things there's no such thing as a free lunch is there in life so i think we'll eventually figure out what the trade-off is yeah and then people can decide for themselves if the trade-off is worth it based on their own circumstances i mean listen people are like i want to lose five pounds and i don't think that's a good idea if you're

38:46severely obese person, you have severe health conditions, you're really struggling to get going, you know, can it be a helpful aid? Absolutely. You know, should it be given to everybody who wants to look good for a party or a wedding? Absolutely not. What's your position on fruit? I love fruit. How much fruit? I think it depends, right? So if you're a diabetic and you're metabolically completely out of whack and you don't have any metabolic resilience, eating a plum might be a problem for you.

39:20And now we have continuous glucose monitors. You can track your blood sugar and see. And I've had patients like this. Gee, I ate a plum and my sugar goes to the roof. So, but if I ate an apple, it doesn't. So I think different fruits have different effects on you. But for the most part, fruit is full of phytochemicals, fiber, phytonutrients. It does have a little bit of sugar in it. I would say no fruit juice. I think fruit juice is definitely linked to obesity and kids and other things.

39:46But if you want to have an apple or a peach or a plum, it's fine. I think... You shouldn't have it first thing in the morning. I think protein and fat in the morning is important because it activates your metabolism and your protein synthesis.

39:58If you eat sugar in the morning, which is essentially what we eat in the world today, cereal, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bagels, sweetened yogurt, sweetened coffees, I mean, it's the worst possible thing we can do for our biology. It jacks up our blood sugar and insulin and ends up causing us to gain weight and be hungry you know, be craving more stuff. So having fruit, for example, you have frozen berries in your, so I had frozen cherries, for example, in my whey protein.

40:24That's okay. There's protein in there and it mitigates the effect. What about eating times? When to eat? Yeah. Have you got any thoughts around when we should and shouldn't be eating? Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, we had something called breakfast before, which was breaking the fast. And now people eat all night. They eat until they go to bed, and as soon as they wake up, they eat or have something, sugary stuff in the morning, like a sugary coffee, and they don't give themselves a window of breakfast fasting, which is critical for our biology.

40:52And I wrote about this in my book Young Forever, where we talked about how do we have our own repair, renewal system kick in. Because the body, think about it, Stephen, your body when you cut yourself heals. The skin closes, it heals. How does it know how to do that? It's so smart. It's got your bones break. It heals. I broke my arm a few years ago. It just healed, right? What's going on? I'm not going, would you please heal in there? It knows what to do.

41:17It recruits stem cells. It recruits repair factors and growth factors, and it knows what to do. So the body has this innate healing, repair, renewal, and regeneration system. And we need to learn how to activate it. And most of us do the opposite. We do everything in our power to deactivate it, and that causes a disease. So food is the most important thing we do to interact with these regenerative renewal repair systems. It's one of the things we call the hallmarks of aging.

41:43And there's one called deregulated nutrient sensing.

41:45And it really relates to how our bodies relate to food, how our nutrient sensing systems are dysregulated by our highly processed diet, by high sugar and starch, and not enough of the right foods. So in the long answer to your question, it's important to give yourself a break of 12 hours. So if you eat at six at night, you could eat six in the morning minimum, but best probably 14. So if you eat dinner at six, you eat breakfast at eight, that's okay.

42:14That's a 14-hour fast. And in that time, your body is doing its cleanup, recycling, and repair. Is there an evolutionary story here? For sure, absolutely. You know, when, you know, we didn't have grocery stores, we didn't have, you know, Whole Foods, we didn't have restaurants, we didn't have takeout, we didn't have convenience stores. So we had to go out and find food. And I just came back from Tanzania and visited the hunter-gatherers there, the Kadza, which is one of the last few tribes that hunt and gather.

42:39And we went hunting and gathering, and I was like, man, it's a lot of work to go, you know, dig up some roots and kill a bird in the tree. And like, it was a project. We ran around for hours. And so we don't know where we're getting our next meal. And so the body has had to deal with periods of feast and famine before. And so what it's got built into it is a system of conservation and repair when we don't eat. And so the system gets activated that improves our blood sugar control, that recruits new mitochondria and builds new mitochondria, that reduces inflammation, and that's what we're doing.

43:14that activates cellular cleanup and repair processes. So you have all these old cells and damaged proteins. Your body has a little digester, almost like a little vacuum cleaner that goes and sucks this all up and then digests it and then uses the parts. It's almost like a recycling system in the body. We need to activate that. And so that fasting period is a time to do that.

43:37And we've seen even, for example, we know, for example, concentration camp survivors who live really long, like... They live 90, 100 plus years old, many of them, and it's because they had this period of deep starvation that had an effect on their biology. And we know this from many animal studies, that starvation and fasting will extend your life by a third. If you eat a third less calories, you'll live a third longer. Now, it's not fun, right?

44:01But you don't have to do that. So timing of eating is important. So give yourself three hours before bed for no food and give yourself at least 12 to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast. How do we know in the animal studies, it wasn't just the calorie restriction that caused the sort of longevity effect? It was. Oh, it was the calorie. It was. So what if I just restrict my calories instead of fasting? Well, you can do that. I met a guy who was from the Calorie Restriction Society.

44:28It's a calorie restriction society? Yeah, which is based on this research in animals where, think about it, if you eat a third less, you live a third longer. So for a human, that would be 120 years old. And I said, what do you have for breakfast? He said, well, I had five pounds of celery. And I'm like, okay, you go do that. I'm going to figure out another way. So you have to eat enormous amounts of like low-calorie food just to feel full, right?

44:56That's why I had a lot of food. So he was starving. And there are a lot of downsides to starving. You lose muscle, which is necessary. There are certain things that go wrong. And so it's not really the optimal strategy. You want to do things that mimic starvation. So how do you mimic this period of starvation that causes something called autophagy, which basically means to eat yourself, to basically clean up your cells? It's like self-cleaning or self-repair, right?

45:23And so there's a lot of ways to hack that. You can do it by this longer-term overnight fast. You can do it by certain supplements and certain medications, like rapamycin is being studied for longevity, which is a drug that's used for cancer and for other immune-suppressing treatments, but it works on this pathway called mTOR, which essentially is the activation of cellular buildup. It causes muscle synthesis. So if you want to build muscle, you want to activate mTOR with protein, which is good, but you don't want to activate it all the time.

45:56So this drug inhibits mTOR, which is what happens when you starve yourself. So it mimics starvation. And then you get this kind of benefit. Or drugs like metformin are being studied, which is another drug that's looking at how do we activate this longevity switch called AMPK, another pathway that's regulating your nutrient sensing. So when you have enough, you don't have enough nutrients, this activates. But if we're running around eating, well, you can actually take this drug and it may have an effect.

46:23There's a large trial going on now. I'm still agnostic about it. I'm neither pro or against it. I think the data is not in it for me to start taking it or for my patients to start taking it. But it works on some of these sort of starvation mimicking hacks, let's call them. So starvation is good for us. Yeah, I mean, yes, yes. I would say you have to be careful because, you know, people go really to the extreme. They go like, I'm going to not activate mTOR because activating mTOR causes me to age faster and it prevents autophagy and it builds cancer and it's bad.

46:59So I'm going to become a vegan and I'm going to eat less calories. And eventually what happens is you lose muscle. So it's like Goldilocks. You know, you need both mTOR activation and mTOR ambition. You need to take a breath in. You need to take a breath out. You need to be awake. You need to go to sleep. Yeah. Your heart needs to beat. It needs to relax. It's just how the body works. It's a difficult conversation as well because it can provoke disordered eating.

47:24Yeah. Various eating disorders, which are obviously extremely bad in terms of health outcomes. Yeah. Blue zones. You visited some blue zones, haven't you? I have. What are blue zones? And what did they teach you about the nature of being healthy? Well, my friend Dan Buder basically came up with this concept of the blue zones after visiting these areas in the world where people had extremely long lives. Yeah. And somebody on the map circled them in blue ink, which is why they're called blue zones.

47:59And I visited Icaria and also Sardinia. How many of them are there? There's five. There's Okinawa, Japan, Loma Linda, California, and the Koya Peninsula in Costa Rica.

48:13But there are many more. I mean, I was in Turkey and I saw villages where people were very, very old. And so those are the ones that have been studied. How old are we talking? Okay. Well, I mean, one couple there was like collectively 210 years old. So they lived to be 100, 105, 109, 110. I mean, Emma Murano was 117 when she died. And so the question is, what is different about these areas? And what's different is that they're very isolated. and remote.

48:46So they haven't been burdened with all the modernization of our food system. They still grow their own food. I mean, I visited this couple. He was, I think, 90, he was like 97. His wife was a young 87. And they had land in the farm they lived on. He was more chill, but she was out there showing us around on all the fruit trees, the olive trees, the garden she planted. I mean, it's massive. It's massive. mini farm that she managed herself on the side of a hill where she was running up faster than I could get to, her, at 87 years old, cooking everything from scratch.

49:23It wasn't organic, but it was because that's just what they did. They used all heirloom animals, like sheep and goats. So they had heirloom, Sheep and goat. What's alum? Meaning it's not like some industrialized, hybridized cow that's producing this nasty milk, which we shouldn't be drinking. They're having goat milk and goat cheese, but their goats are eating wild plants that have phytochemicals. Some of those cheeses and goat milks have actually higher phytochemicals even than green tea, which has a lot that comes from, for example, catechins that you can get from...

49:56The goat milk, which is from the goats that are eating the plants that have these compounds that benefit their health. They're also active. Like Petreo was like 95 years old. And he was in Sardinia. And he had to hike five miles a day up this extremely rocky mountainous terrain to herd his sheep at 95 years old. I mean, most 95 years old aren't hiking the mountains, right? He was booming voice, stood up straight, ice clear. Yeah. not hunched over, funny as heck, sing me a song.

50:30And then, so they move naturally. They have amazing food, phytochemical rich food, food that's rich in all these plant compounds that are found to connect to longevity. For example, in Ikaria I was sitting with this guy who was making, milking the goats and we were making goat cheese together. And he gives me this tea. I'm like, what is this? He said, oh, this is wild sage tea. And I looked at it. He said, what is it? I said, what is the plant? I looked it up.

50:58And then I looked up the plant and I analyzed, you know, what it was. And it turned out it's an extremely phytochemical-rich plant that has a lot of these same longevity compounds in it called catechins that, you know, we don't drink a lot of. Green tea has it. You can get it from Japan, for example. And then... You know, we just basically see that not only do they have good food, they have the activity, they have very low levels of stress. There was one guy, Silvio, I was having dinner with him.

51:27He had this mountainous kind of area that his whole family had had for years. And they had about 200 sheep and goats. And they had a little kind of restaurant they started for people to come. And so they basically had the family cooked and you had everything from the farm. And I said, Silvio, after doing it, I said, Silvio, do you have any stress in your life? And he looked at me like, stress? Like he almost didn't understand the word. Like, you know, when things are difficult and things are hard and you feel stressed, and he's like, oh.

51:59He said, yeah, well, sometimes at night a goat will get out and I'll have to go get it. And sometimes when the goats are giving birth, I have to go get up early. So they have very low levels of stress. And then they also have something which is really important, which is community. So they have a sense of belonging and connection.

52:21I met Julia, who was 100 years old. Sorry, 103 months, she told me. I'm a hundred and I guess it's like when you're five, I'm a five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months, you count on the months. And she was still working. She was still making stuff for weddings and doilies and all things. And she didn't have any kids, but her niece and her nephew invited her to come stay with them. And so she was living with them. Or another guy, Carmine had lost his wife, but he was living with family members and it was, running this big garden in 86 and animals and sheaves and rabbits.

52:53So they all are part of community. They have gatherings. They celebrate together. There's a sense of belonging. There's no nursing homes. There's no loneliness. Loneliness is the new smoking, really. I mean, we have an epidemic of isolation and loneliness in America and increasingly around the globe. And it's lethal. It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. How do we know? How do we know that it's dangerous? Yeah. There's so much science around this.

53:16The evidence of this is immense. In fact, the Surgeon General of America just released a statement about this and an initiative to redress loneliness because it's such a driver of not just unhappiness, but actual disease and death. Why are we so lonely? What is it that's happening? Do you think it's, what is it, the internet? Oh, yeah, I mean, think about it. We used to, you know, rely on each other in communities to live like they do, for example.

53:41I said, you know, how did it work, Silvio, when you have all these sheep, how do you manage it? Well, you know, I have like all my friends, they come over and when it's time for the sheep, they come over and they help and it's just, life is just naturally connected and, and, You go to someone's house, you walk down the street, you know, you sit in the cafe, you just, you have a neighborhood, you have a family. We've lost that. We're all mobile. We're all moving around.

53:59We are all disconnected from our families. We're, you know, online most of the time. You know, we have Facebook instead of actually real face-to-face time. I mean, it's great to sit here with you in person, right? It's been on the Zoom call. And it's something we've lost. And we've lost the value of relationships and our... culture of achievement and success. And it's just kind of disconnected us from what really matters, which is the human community.

54:25Is there any way back for that? Do you think? Because I was thinking about this the other day. Listen, I've talked about this once or twice now, but I tried the Vision Pro the other day. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, um... Incredible in terms of the technology, but terrifying in terms of the potential implications over the long term. Yeah, you're just going to wear that all the time and forget about it. Exactly. It was incredible. Like the fact that I can just sit there and just the things I do with my hands that are on my lap impact all of these massive screens in front of me.

54:55You can see when you play it forward that this is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and more accessible. The app's going to get better. And then we think about, well, that's going to mean for loneliness. Yeah. Yeah. When I could go hang out, you know, with my friends in a virtual world and do my work in a virtual world and date in a virtual world, watch pornography in a virtual world and all of these things. I still like hugging and holding hands.

55:16How do you do that? You can't do that in there. Are you hopeful for us being able to turn around the loneliness and isolation epidemic? I mean, it's a tough one. I think we have to rethink how we live and what we do and the communities we build. And I think there are efforts of that happening all around. So just at the same time we're seeing this epidemic of loneliness, we're also seeing a lot of initiatives of community building and connection and belonging.

55:39And so there's a lot of these communities that I'm involved with that are happening. And I know I'm on the board of something called the Belong Center, which is really about addressing loneliness and creating loneliness ways and mechanisms for people to connect and be with each other in real time. I think it needs to be a systemic thing. I think with a lot of the issues we've talked about relating to longevity and diet, the best answers are probably going to be the really, truly systemic ones that come from how we design societies.

56:01Yeah. Like regulation and policy and just how we design cities and green spaces and libraries and community centers and all these kinds of things. Yeah. That seems to... You know, I did a... I realized this was a problem a long time ago, and I went to Haiti after the earthquake, and I went helping there when it was just a disaster, one of the first medical teams on the ground. And in that process, I met Paul Farmer, who... was an incredible visionary doctor from Harvard who went to Haiti and helped solve the problem of TB and AIDS by building community health workers.

56:37And he then went out to build a network of community health workers of over 11,000 globally. It was a model for the Clinton and Gates Foundation. And what he realized was that we didn't have a lack of the right science or the right medicines to heal these problems. We know what to do with TB and AIDS. It was a lack of people being able to do the basic things that they needed to do, like get clean water or have a watch, know what time it was. And so he built this network of community health workers and realized that community was medicine.

57:04And so he was their neighbors. And so I came back from that, very moved, and I realized that chronic disease was also an issue, that chronic disease wasn't infectious, but it was contagious, right? You're more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family members are overweight. Your social networks are more important than your genetic networks in determining your health. You're basically, you look around at your five closest friends, it's probably kind of the way you are too, right?

57:34And so I realized that we needed to use the power of community to transform our health and our behavior. And I can tell you what to eat and what to do, but if all your friends are doing the opposite, it's going to be hard, right? So I created a program with Rick Warren called The Daniel Plan, a faith-based wellness program where we got 15,000 people to sign up in the first week. A quarter million pounds were lost in the first year. We created a book called The Daniel Plan of how to do this in community.

57:59So it was, we call it the five Fs for getting healthy, right? It's faith, friends, food, fitness, and focus, which is your mindset. And it was amazingly effective. We scaled it to 1,000 churches around the world. And it really was helping people in small groups do this together. So there was no health coach. There was no nutritionist. There was just me and another doctor.

58:23And we basically created this program, which could be delivered in a curriculum that people did in small groups together. And this church, the Saddleback Church with Rick Warren, had an infrastructure already of groups meeting every week. So we just hijacked that and put the curriculum in there, and people did it. And it was really powerful. And we've seen that now at Cleveland Clinic where I work, and we've done that with groups there as well. That last F, focus, is that an umbrella word also for purpose?

58:52Purpose, meaning and purpose, yeah. Yeah, from reading your work, I came to learn that purpose is a sort of longevity factor. 100%. To what extent? I mean, the data is really clear. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that those who had meaning and purpose lived seven years longer. And what do they mean by meaning and purpose in that context? It's whatever your meaning and purpose is. It could be you want to be there for your grandchild.

59:18It could be you're a scientist and you want to make a discovery. It could be that you're a novelist and you want to write your next novel. So it's not a job necessarily. It's not. No, it doesn't have to be. I mean, for me, my purpose is ending needless suffering for millions of people through the power of this new thinking and model. And the new company that I co-founded, Function Health, is, I think, the tip of the spear that's going to be able to do that at scale by empowering people with their own health data.

59:43giving them an AI co-pilot to up-level their health and to help them understand what's going on in real time. And to me, building that, creating that, scaling that, getting people access to things that are really hard to get for people. That it's not happening in your doctor's office or your healthcare system, that it's not happening in your annual physical, you're not getting the latest science and medicine.

60:03So how do we accelerate that change? So for me, that drives me every day, it gets me excited to wake up. It's a lot And I'm very passionate. But of course, you know, I'm also passionate about my friends and my community. I'm passionate about my health. I'm passionate about having fun, you know, and doing things that I love. So I think, you know, it's really important to design your life in terms of your values. What do you care about? what matters to you, what makes you come alive, what gives you energy, what takes away your energy, and focus on those things that take you to where you want to go.

60:32Why would not having a purpose make us die earlier? I mean, you see it all the time, Stephen. I mean, you look at, you know, people retire, literally... The retirement age here is 65, which I'm going to be this year, which is a little scary to say that. I'm just getting started. People think, if you look at people who retire, the death rate happens so fast. People who retire die fast. die like there's a much higher death rate if if for example you're married and your spouse dies and you've been together your life whole life you're likely to die very quickly after that is there stats to support that a hundred percent a hundred percent that's crazy yeah Why?

61:14What happens? You know, I'm wondering if you stop moving, you get depressed. Yeah, you get depressed, you stop moving. I had a patient who had the most beautiful relationship. It was such a deep love. And they were together for like 40 years. And his wife got breast cancer and she just didn't make it. And when he died, and he was a healthy guy, he was fit, healthy, ate well. He went into heart failure, like literally heart failure. his heart couldn't pump and he had a true medical condition that showed up on scans and imaging.

61:46He was in trouble. And I was like, wow, you know, I looked it up and there's actually evidence for emotional shock and loss, heartbreak, literally his heart broke.

61:57And that caused his heart to literally break physically, not just emotionally. And we were able to get him back and fix it by dealing with that emotional heartbreak and by using energy healing and a lot of other things with him that helped him overcome it. But that's when I was like, wow. You know, the mind, you know, listen, Stephen, the biggest and most powerful pharmacy in the world is between your ears. You know, and it can do all kinds of stuff.

62:23Truma. Yeah. Yeah. Does trauma play a role in our longevity? 100%. I mean, you know, it's amazing how in medical school we just did not learn this, but there's such a link between trauma and everything in your life, but particularly disease. There's a questionnaire we use called the ACE questionnaire, Adverse Childhood Events. And it basically asks you a series of questions. You can look it up online. You can link to it in your show notes. It's free.

62:51And it says, well, were your parents divorced? Was there alcoholism in your family? Did your parents fight in front of you? Did anybody hit you? Were you sexually abused? And you just go through this whole list. Is there any family members in prison, you know? And the higher your score... the more likely you are to have health issues, be obese, have autoimmune disease, get cancer, get heart disease, get diabetes. It's really striking. And so trauma is registered in your body.

63:16There's a book called The Body Keeps Score and Carolyn Mace, who's sort of a mystic, said your biography becomes your biology. And it works the other way too, from up down, right? You're biology can become your biography. If you're eating crap and you're nutritionally deficient and you have all these health issues and mercury poisoning, well, that can kind of affect your mental health too and your story. But we know really clearly that... your trauma is influencing your biology.

63:45And so we have to deal with this in medicine, whether it's depression or whether it's autoimmune diseases or whether it's other health issues. And we now have an incredible revolution in psychedelics, which is for the first time showing us that We have treatments for things like PTSD, which really were very hard to treat. You can give people a sedative, you know, but that was it. And maybe some therapy, which barely worked, if that. But you start to work with these compounds that change the structure and function of the brain Which is really amazing to me.

64:17It's not just like a normal drug where you take the drug and you have to keep taking it. Then you took Ozempic once and you would stay losing weight forever.

64:25It's like taking these psychedelics, you know, once or twice, and it changes your physiological functioning and your brain response. It changes... compounds in your brain like bdnf that grow new brain connections and repair and heal things in your brain and so we're seeing new ways to deal with trauma that i i feel really exciting and maps is an organization um the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies you can share that link but it's it's sharing all the research about treating depression anxiety trauma responses ptsd relational issues what do you think of psychedelics have you tried them yes which ones have you tried You know.

65:02All of them. Which ones haven't you tried? I haven't tried Ibogaine. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's quite strong for addiction, right? Yeah. But, you know, I grew up in the 70s. So, psychedelic mushrooms were a big part of my awakening and my personal journey. I've tried LSD, I've tried peyote, I've tried ayahuasca, I've tried bufo, I've tried pretty much all of them because I'm sort of an adventurer in my biology and my mind. And I can tell you that they've really helped me.

65:36Which one helped you the most? And give me a story of how it helped you. My girlfriend's actually in Costa Rica right now serving ayahuasca. And I spent a year and a half investing in, and we took a psychedelics company public called the Thai Life Sciences. So I worked in partnership with MAPS and Compass Pathways. At a Thai, we invested in Compass Pathways. So I'm quite heavily... You're very into that. Yeah, I spent about a year as the creative director of the company, purely because I just was interested.

66:11So I invested about seven figures in the business, then I joined as a creative director to stay close. And then my contract was basically to leave on the day of the IPO. So IPO'd on the NASDAQ, 3.4 billion, and I left the next day, basically. Amazing. But it was because I was interested in mental health. I heard about this epidemic of mental health. There's no good answers. Yeah. And psychedelics and the clinical research that was coming out around things like psilocybin, which is the active compound of magic mushrooms, were just really interesting.

66:41And I didn't need to work, so I just thought... It's fascinating. I mean, you know, there was this... I recently heard a presentation by a Stanford scientist who's studying Ibogaine for trauma, depression, anxiety, but addiction. And it's quite interesting. It's a compound that you take from a bark of a tree from West Africa, the iboga tree, and it somehow shuts off the... Withdrawal. Yeah. We know medically that when you stop narcotics, you go through physiological withdrawal, which is a medical phenomenon.

67:11It just stops that somehow. It's like a matter. With one dose as well. One dose. Now there is metabolites that stay for a long time, nor Ibogaine, that may mitigate those effects and block those receptors, and we don't really quite understand it yet. I did have a thought, which is that when you look at the Yale food addiction scale, which is a validated metric for food addiction. Now, different people have various degrees, right? There are people who can't stop eating sheet cakes and there's people who crave ice cream once in a while.

67:39It's not food addiction. But when you look at the data globally, 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the criteria according to the Yale food addiction scale. for food addiction from ultra processed food, from sugar, refined carbohydrates. So I actually talked to one of the leading Rybingen researchers, I said, wouldn't it be interesting to do a pilot where we took people who had food addiction And we gave them ibogaine and we saw what happened. I mean, it could be fascinating, you know, it could shut that off.

68:10And maybe there's going to be, and I think there will be, nor ibogaine, which is a metabolite of ibogaine that I think may be doing a lot of effect. That's something you can take on a daily basis instead of Ozempic, for example. What I heard about ibogaine is that the side effects are quite Yeah, it can be quite significant. But the main side effect is a heart side effect. It increases something called the QT interval, which can put you into an arrhythmia, which can have a fatal heart rhythm.

68:34And you have to be monitored when you're taking it. But we found that if you take higher doses and even IV magnesium, which is actually what we use in the emergency room to treat arrhythmia. Like if your heart's beating like crazy and you're going to die, we give you intravenous magnesium as the last resort. Well, you can pre-treat with magnesium and that stops that phenomena. So there's a lot of ways to deal with it. But I do think we're in a psychedelic era and it's really heartening to me because I think there's so many problems as a doctor I can't solve.

69:04You know, if someone has a health issue, but their trauma is controlling their behavior, And unless they deal with the trauma, it's hard to address the things that they need to do to fix their behavior in their life, right? So if you're traumatized because you were raped or had sexual abuse when you were a kid, you know, I've had my own trauma.

69:22I had incest when I was a kid. I had, you know, kind of a rough childhood in many ways. Incest when you were a kid. Yeah. Yeah, so I've had to deal with this myself. And doing that has really helped me to kind of recover and repair my own emotional architecture and have a really a sense of security and safety, which I didn't have before. Did you have symptoms of that trauma in your early life or your adult life? 100%. You know, I was highly functional, obviously.

69:48I mean, I'm a doctor, I've written many books, I've done a lot in the world. But it was really affecting my way of being in relationships. Your sexual health, or your sort of romantic... No, my sexual health, but more my romantic relationships. Okay. And even sometimes work relationships, where I really developed a pattern. And it was also a trauma that I had from my mother, who was a wonderful woman. She was a child of deaf parents. So she had to become their parent.

70:15And she basically was what you call a parentified child. And she was the adult. So she never had a childhood. And then she did the same thing to me. She made me her therapist because she was depressed and in bad marriages and chose men who were broken because she thought love was taking care of broken people. And so I developed this place where I just felt this big hole and emptiness in my heart. And I couldn't really... overcome that. And so I did a lot of work, did medicine journeys.

70:40I did a lot of different kinds of therapy and I was able to really break through and release that. And when I did, it was like, it was like literally... The programming changed. You know, I've got a little voice in your head all the time. Sometimes it's a very annoying voice in your head. And it just says stuff all the time that, you know, you just wish it wouldn't. Or it dictates your behavior in certain ways that you wish it wouldn't. I never thought this was possible, but literally that voice changed.

71:11And what it said changed and how it was in relationships changed. And it was physiologically different. And I didn't have that sense of trauma. And I had another friend who had this same thing. And he had a mother who was a yeller and a screamer. And it was traumatizing, couldn't tell the truth and wasn't honest because he was afraid he was going to get attacked and hurt. And so he was that little boy. And so this part of his brain that wasn't working...

71:34And we helped him get MDMA therapy, which is, you know, MDMA is a compound that isn't like a psychedelic, but it has effects on PTSD. And he said it's like that part of his brain just turned off and he stopped having that feeling. And he was able to tell the truth and speak what he felt. And, you know, it was powerful. And the symptoms that you experienced in your later life with relationships, what was that? Just like a bit struggling to form attachments?

72:03You know, I had what was called an anxious attachment style. So basically, I was anxious about the relationship and wouldn't be honest. with how I felt or what I was doing. And it wasn't like I was lying, like I'm lying, but omission. Or if I say how I'm feeling or what I want, then they're going to leave me or they're going to be gone. And so I developed this hole in this emptiness that affected my relationships and it was bad. So if my partner, for example, I remember this partner, she was a perfectionist and she really had a hard time sort of opening up and she had an avoidant attachment style.

72:44So like one time I hadn't seen her in three weeks and she didn't really want to connect or hug or be together. And she's like, I need to get used to you. And I'm like, I just could feel this like visceral reaction of panic and fear and hurt. And like, now I don't have any of that. What was it that you did that fixed it? Do your work earlier. Your life is going to be difficult. Yeah. I think I wish, you know, it's like when I was sick with chronic illness and I had chronic critique syndrome and I had mold issues, Lyme disease, and I was so sick, you know, and it was, I didn't have a roadmap.

73:21Yeah. I didn't have a path. I didn't know what to do. And so I was groping in the dark and finding a crumb here and a crumb there. And I would talk to this person. And that person would patch together this whole approach that had finally allowed me to get well. And I wish I'd known now when I knew then it would have been better in a year or not 10 years that it took me to get better or maybe even shorter. And if I'd done the work on myself when I was 20 and 30 and not waited till I was 50 and 60, I would have, you know, not prevented a lot of suffering.

73:53And so my advice to people is to, if you are struggling with any of these relational issues with yourself, there's work to be done. There's great, amazing paths out there to help look at things like Byron Katie's you know, work called The Work, which is a way of looking at your own thoughts and your own perspective. There's so many things that you can do. Psychedelic medicine, MDMA-assisted therapy, psilocybin-assisted therapy, it's coming. It's not available to everybody yet, but it's coming fast.

74:18I think maybe even this year, the MDMA-assisted therapy will be FDA approved. So... I feel like, you know, everybody's on their own journey, but you don't have to stay stuck in the biological or psychological framework that you are now. Like there is a way to heal at any time, whether you're 65 or 25. I think this is central to the concern a lot of people have, but also the resistance is we kind of see ourselves as being fixed, especially the older you get, you kind of assume both our health, our motivation, our trauma, our mind, it's all kind of fixed.

74:49This is just who I am. This is who I am now. I can maybe act differently or whatever. I can learn tips and tricks to like, I don't know, become better at sales or speaking. But fundamentally, my bullshit is my bullshit. It is me. Yeah, exactly. And that holds us, kind of imprisons us. Yeah. So my message is, number one, we now have the science and technology and medicine to upgrade your biological software and reverse chronic disease, reverse your biological age.

75:14My biological age is 43, even though I'm 65. Wow. How do they know your biological age? Well, it's a kind of fancy technology that looks at something called the epigenome, which is above your genome, the regulator of your gene expression, which changes based on different insults and things in your life, whether it's diet, toxins, lifestyle. So we can measure that now. So that's what it was. So you can upgrade your biological software and you can upgrade your psychoemotional, spiritual software.

75:42It's really possible. And I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen with many people. I think the psychedelic revolution is probably like ozempic for mental health, you know, but with a lot of side effects. I mean, there's really an incredible safety profile for these compounds. They're really, really safe, and they don't really have side effects, and you don't need to use them that often to have the benefit.

76:06When you think about biological age, if you were giving me some advice on lowering my biological age, I'm 31 now. Yeah. You're 31? I'm 31. I'm just a baby. I'd like to be 25 biologically or 21 biologically. Yeah. I know you had Brian Johnson on the podcast. He probably gave me some advice. Yeah, he's got a lot. I eat breakfast at 11, go to bed at 8, go to bed at 8, No, no, when I speak to Brian Johnson, I have to buy some like $5,000 contraption and strap it to myself in the morning.

76:36And I just, it's a lot. You have two blades of grass for lunch. Yeah, yeah. But the simple things that have had the biggest impact on your biological age, what are those? What's the 80-20 on this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wrote a book about it. Yeah, you did. Called Young Forever. Yeah. And it's not that hard. You know, as we talked about the blue zones, it's eat real food. I would say eliminate ultra-processed food, dramatically reduce or limit sugar and starch from your diet, flour, products particularly.

77:07Make sure you exercise. So I think in terms of, and by the way, in terms of eating, just to make a few more points, give yourself 12 to 14 hours overnight from eating. first meal should be protein. And it should be 30 to 40 grams of protein that'll help you build muscle, which is the currency of longevity. So if you wanna live long and be strong and be able to do stuff and not, you know, have trouble getting up out of a chair or tying your shoelaces, you need to build muscle.

77:34And that protein is critical in the morning. You need to have a phytochemically rich diet, which means lots of colorful vegetables, lots of good fats, and the right kinds of protein. So that's pretty straightforward. And again, I've written lots of books. I talk about the diet in there, but those are sort of the main things. In the Young Forever Longevity Diet, you talk about the 75% of your plate should be vegetables. This point about limiting the protein to sort of 25% of your plate, is there a risk in having too much meat products?

78:03I mean, you know, this is an interesting question. You know, we looked at, for example, the Plains Indians, like the Lakota, at the turn of the last century in the 1900s. They were the longest-lived population on the planet. They were 100 years old plus, and all they ate was bison. That was their diet, pretty much. And a few berries and maybe a few things they could dig up from the ground. All they ate was bison. Pretty much, yeah. They could eat the liver, they'd eat the organs, they'd have the bone marrow, they would eat the meat, and they would have, I think, some veggies from the berries or roots or things that they would have.

78:39But it was very limited. And they had lots of longevity. I mean, meat is a very nutrient-dense food. So I think the challenge with meat... and this is a whole other tangent that would take us an hour to go through, but vegan or not vegan, meat, not meat. Meat's one of the most nutritionally-dense foods on the planet. It's the best source of protein to build muscle. And we should be eating regeneratively raised meat, which is hard to find, but there's places like Force of Nature where you can get it online.

79:08You can get elk, bison, venison, and even beef. And you can eat good quality fish, pasteurized chicken, You know, we need that kind of protein, particularly as we age, to build muscle because we get something called anabolic resistance. Our bodies resist building muscle and you need more protein and you need more exercise. And so, you know, the amount of meat depends on what you're doing and your size and your lifestyle. So if you're very active and you want to build muscle and you want to lift weights, which you should, you probably need between, you know, Now, half to a gram per pound of protein per day, that's more than people think.

79:52So the way we sort of say protein needs is based on deficiency diseases. So the recommended dietary allowance is 0.8 grams per kilo. I'm talking about double that. Now, 0.8 grams is the amount that you need to prevent a protein deficiency disease, not how much you need for optimal health and functioning. So you need to be able to have the right protein at the right time. You also need fasts and... times to not have protein so your body can heal and repair, but it's like Goldie Knox phenomena.

80:23You need both. And so I would say, depending on your activity level and how much you're doing, you need more. But roughly about 30 grams three times a day, which is not that much. I just had a bag of biltong, which is a little bag. Of beef, right? It's like beef, yeah, it's South African like beef jerky. And after I ate, I looked at the package. I was like, oh, it's 32 grams. So I had 32 grams of protein for lunch, right? That's hard. I could have a 30 or 40 gram protein shake what I had this morning.

80:50I'm already at like 70 grams. So I think the body needs that protein. So I think food is really important. And I talk about how to activate longevity switches with food and phytochemicals in the book. The resistance training is really key for longevity. So if you want to do cardio, that's great. And I think we need to both. But strength training three times a week, minimum 20 minutes, is the key to health and longevity. It will keep your muscles strong.

81:17It'll prevent what we call sarcopenia, which is muscle loss. One of the biggest things that happens as you get older is you lose muscle. And that leads to metabolic issues, inflammation, prediabetes, arthritis. You know, just all kinds of health consequences. Sugar? Yeah, I said get rid of sugar. Okay. What about artificial sugars, like in diet cokes? Artificial sweeteners? Yeah. I mean, there's so much debate about this. I was actually reading a couple of papers yesterday, Stephen, because I was not related to this, but something else I was working on.

81:44And there were these two papers that were basically discounting the fact that artificial sweeteners had any bad impact on health. And I was like, oh, interesting. Because, you know, there's some biology around this.

81:55And I said, let me see who funded this study. And it says, this study was entirely funded by the American Beverage Association, formerly known as the American Soda Pop Association. Oh, wow. And the other study was a similar study. It said, funded by so-and-so who's funded by Coca-Cola and who works for the International Sweeteners Association. So follow the money. Is it better than drinking soda? Yes. Is it better than drinking water? No. Are there potentially untoward consequences?

82:28I think so because of its effect on the microbiome and other things. So if you're asking, what are the things to do for my biological age? It's how I eat. It's exercise. It's community. So I'm really focused on community, friends, relationships, love. Yeah. It's like medicine. Love is medicine. And also making sure that I manage stress. I meditate. I mean, I like this app called NuCalm, which basically is like binaural beats. And I put it on. It just takes you into an altered brainwave state.

82:57And, you know, having fun, man. Having fun is so key. Longivity. Enjoying life. Yeah, it makes life worth living as well, doesn't it, I guess? Yeah, I mean... We talk about longevity a lot, but I guess you have to like the life you live. Exactly. Yeah, that'd be fun. Exposome. Exposome. Exposome. Yeah, what is that? Yeah. I mean... You know what I'm going to tell you? Yeah, never heard the word before. So the first time I heard it was researching you.

83:22Yeah. So it's a scientific term that, you know, like your genome, right? Your metabolome, your microbiome, your exposome is the sum total of everything that you've been exposed to in your life and how it's impacted your biology in this moment.

83:37So it's... The really interesting thing about this, though, that I was particularly interested in was that this includes what's happened to your ancestors. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, well, the epigenetics is really fascinating. But the exposome, just to quickly define it, and I'll lump back to the ancestor thing in a minute. But the exposome is what you eat, it's exercise, it's your thoughts, your feelings, your microbiome, environmental toxins, everything, your relationships.

84:02All of that is your exposome, right? So all that influences your expression of your genes. And it turns out that 90% of disease is related to the exposome, not the genome. Which is a good news because we have control over that. So how the things that happen to us impact the expression of our genes. Exactly. Okay. And how it affects our biology, right? How it turns them on and off. Yeah. Turning on and off genes, regulates our hormones, our brain chemistry, our microbiome, everything, right?

84:29Everything you're exposed to determines the quality of your life and your health. In terms of ancestral effects, there's a phenomenon called epigenetics, which is how we measure biological age, which is the effect of this. Think of your genes as the keys on a piano. There's 88 keys. And you can create any kind of music from that. Think about that. You can create classical music, rock music, jazz, ragtime, reggae, whatever you want. And it's just 88 keys.

84:56The epigenome is the piano player. that controls the songs of your life, right? And it is determined by your life experience and what you do and what you eat and how you think and your stress level and your relationships and your gut microbiome. Everything is affecting this in real time. It is a dynamic process. So we now know that using different interventions – of lifestyle or diet or various supplements that you can reverse your biological age, that you can turn back the biological clock, that you can get biologically younger as you get chronologically older.

85:36And so it's really exciting research. There's even... scientists from Japan who won a Nobel Prize finding these transcription factors that regulate our gene expression that can be inserted into us and reprogram our genes and our epigenome to become younger. In other words, can create an original stem cell, what we call a pluripotent stem cell. So it'll take back the clock all the way back to embryonic, like Benjamin Button, all the way back. Now, you don't want to go all the way back.

86:06But we have these systems built in us. And so we now can actually regulate this through epigenetic behavior changes that we know work. And there are drugs that do this too. There are pidochemicals that do this. So it's a new era of study. Do you believe that we inherit the trauma of our ancestors? Yes. I don't think it's a belief, Stephen. The data is really clear. If you look at Holocaust survivors, their children have way more issues in terms of psychological distress, anxiety.

86:379-11, there were a lot of women pregnant during 9-11 in New York City. And those offspring have reprogrammed genetics based on the trauma that their mother experienced during that time.

86:50And those can be measured. Different genes are expressed, different pathways are expressed that cause, for example, a higher level of anxiety, decreased ability to process the stress hormones, and many other phenomena that happen that are programmed epigenetically. We know that if you take, in animal studies, if you take, for example, glyphosate, which was sprayed on 70% of all crops, it's a weed killer, Roundup we call it in this case. If you give it to, let's say, a grandmother mouse, but not to the daughter and not to the granddaughter or grand whatever kid.

87:23I don't know what you call grandkid mice. Anyway, that there will be changes three generations down caused by that toxin that that original ancestor was exposed to. They will cause increased cancer, metabolic issues, kidney issues, a whole series of phenomena that are caused by epigenetic changes. So, You spray the grandmother, and then she has one generation of kids, and then the next generation of kids are still impacted by spraying the grandmother.

87:52Yeah, so you might have heard of Lamarck. Have you heard of Darwin? Darwin. Okay, I heard of Darwin. Darwin basically had the theory of evolution, which is that species evolved through natural selection and they changed slowly based on environmental pressures over time. They changed their genes. Lamarck basically said, you can change genes and inherit things very quickly. And so they were kind of both right in a sense. Lamarck was more talking about epigenetics and Darwin was talking more about, you know, genetic evolution and mutations over time, which, you know.

88:27Both are true. Both are true and neither of them knew about genes, but they were both observing phenomena that are explained by exactly what I'm talking about. What is the most important thing you've discovered through your years of work as it relates to longevity and health and all of that that we haven't talked about? We spend so much time being human doings and not being human beings. And the thing that I observed in the Blue Zones was there was a lot of being going on.

88:57There was a lot of just being, you know, and how important slowing down is to actually savor the things that really matter, that make life beautiful. Like we were, I was with this Italian ladies that were taking me around, these tour guides. And we were driving down out of this little village on the side of this mountain. And literally this car stops in front of us and just like stops and kind of stops us and waves and says, get out of the car. We're like, okay, what's going on?

89:23So we got out of the car. It was this old man. He was relatively young by Sardinian standards. He was 86 and named Carmine. And he said, come. And we sat down on the side of the stone wall on the side of the street. And we talked for two hours. He talked about his life. He asked me questions. We were talking about philosophy, politics, religion, what it was like when he was younger. And then he took me on a tour of his farm and showed me his sheep and the olive trees and the fig trees and the vegetables he was growing and everything.

89:54And I couldn't keep up with him. He ran up the hill. He was like so fit. And, you know, he'd tell me the story of his life. And, you know, when was the last time someone did that? They might give you the finger if you stop in front of them, you know? And we don't have this sort of... value system anymore that values, you know, deep relationships and deep conversations and deep connection. And that's beautiful what you're doing. You're creating a space for deep connections.

90:20And, you know, you've gotten to know me in this last two hours in ways that, you know, most people don't because you've asked questions and you spend time and you're curious and I've been feeling safe to share it with you. And like, you know, I haven't said a lot of stuff in public before. And so it's really... something beautiful that can come out of that. And then I feel, oh, if somebody sees me, I'm seen, I'm heard. And that's a powerful medicine.

90:44So being seen is a powerful medicine. Love is a powerful medicine. Connection, belonging is powerful medicine. I wonder how the lives we live now are really changing our brains as well. You know, we talk about ADD and ADHD and autism, all these kinds of things. But, you know, the pace at which I live my life at, I often think, I think I'm developing a disease. Yeah, 100%. 100%. I mean, I just got back from... from Patagonia. And, you know, I do a lot of stuff.

91:13I have multiple companies, businesses. I have a clinic.

91:16I have patients. I'm constantly dealing with a million things every day. And, you know, sometimes I do. I feel like sometimes I have ADD. And, I was in there in Patagonia in the middle of nowhere. There's no cell service. There's no Wi-Fi. There's just mountains, nature, and me and my wife. We hiked for 10, 12 hours a day, sometimes more. And I felt my nervous system completely changed. And I realized I don't have ADD, I have NDD, which is nature deficit disorder.

91:48Yeah. And I felt everything calm down. I felt everything kind of settle. I saw my heart rate variability, which is a metric that we can measure that checks our stress response, double. And I'm like, oh, God. And I don't think of myself as stressed, but it's just this... phenomena from being in our society and it takes a will to stop and pause and breathe and to go slower and to you know smell the roses it's a cliche but it's really it's a thing my friend one of my best friends called dom he we used to roast him a little bit because his heart rate variability was very, very low.

92:25And so he was being roasted for a couple of weeks on end, a couple of months really, because we all have this heart rate variability league table. And then he went on his honeymoon from a month to Australia. And his heart rate variability went from something like 20 or 30 to 140. Wow. And all that was happening was he was basically just spending his time in nature, in the sunshine as well, which is an important factor. And since then, he's managed to maintain his heart rate variability predominantly by...

92:51staying out in nature. And I thought, God, that's so interesting. But it like regulates our immune system in such a profound way. It does. You, before the conversation started, we were talking very excitedly about your new company called Function. Yeah. It sounds incredibly exciting. For someone that's curious about Function, What is it and where can they find it? So, you know, most of us don't have access to what's happening under our skin, right?

93:17We have to go to the doctor. We have to get an appointment. We have to hope they order the right tests. We have to hope that they know how to interpret the important tests. We hope they've kept up with the science. We hope they are, you know, doing all the right things. But the truth is they're not. And medicine is unfortunately delayed in its adoption of new science. And so function is really an attempt to help you get access to your own biology, to be the CEO of your own health, to create a health database of your own data that will take everything eventually.

93:51Right now it's your blood test, but eventually your biosensor data, your whole genomics, all your medical records, imaging data. your metabolome, your microbiome, and interpret all that in a way that helps you get a personalized picture of what's going on in real time with your biology. And then through evidence-based science and through the influence of expert opinion that also has value, and through the wisdom that comes from the patterns in your own data, being able to create a personalized roadmap for your health over time.

94:27And it's not a one-time test. It's being a member of function allows you twice your testing for $499. You get over 110 biomarkers. You track them over time. You see the changes. And what we're seeing, Stephen, is striking. We're seeing... We're doing tests that are not part of your regular checkup. We're doing, for example, for cholesterol, we're doing lipoprotein fractionation, which looks at the particle number and size. It's less than 1% of all cholesterol tests.

94:51It was discovered 40 years ago, but 99% of people don't get it. And it tells us that 95% have problems with that. 89% have small particles, which shows poor metabolic health. We're seeing 46% of people have inflammation with a high C-reactive protein. We're seeing... 13% have autoimmune thyroid diseases undetected. We're finding cancers that nobody found through liquid biopsies. We're finding that 67% have nutritional deficiencies. And this is a very health-forward population because we're still in beta.

95:21And we're seeing that they didn't even know were affecting their health. So I had a sort of lead athlete, for example, who was great, but he had low iron and he had low vitamin D and he had low B vitamins and it was affecting his performance. So it was like he had a disease. So we're able to map this for people and provide basically an AI co-pilot for your health based on the learnings. And AI is a scary thing for people. But the truth is that in medicine, it's the best use case.

95:45Would you rather have a dermatologist who's seen a few thousand lesions look at your skin and see if it's a cancer or not, or an AI that sees billions of lesions and can actually know what's really going on? So we're going to be able to do this in a very safe way for you to own your data and you can personalize your approach, you can upgrade your biological health, you can do that biological upgrade that I talked about and you can share the data with your doctors and it's going to, I think, transform medicine.

96:12And right now, we've just started in beta but we have almost 30,000 members. We've seen over 3 million data points of people's biology. We have this available now at functionhealth.com. If you go to functionhealth.com forward slash mark, you can learn more about it and you can get off the wait list and get to see because we have 100,000 people on the wait list and get to learn about your own biology and what people are discovering is really life-changing for them.

96:38I'm very excited for you. And it's so wonderful to see how AI is creating new opportunities within health and wellness that weren't previously available. So it's all been happening over the last sort of 12 months in the world of AI. And from that, I hope some incredible solutions emerge that bring down the cost and access, the cost to access of healthcare. Well, that's the thing. It's so affordable for most people. It's like less than you spend on a cup of coffee every day.

97:02It's like $1.30 something a day. And for most people, that's affordable. Some people are not. But when you think about what's your wealth, your health is your wealth. Like I said earlier in the podcast, A healthy man wants many things. A sick man wants one thing. I think it's a Chinese proverb. You have an incredible podcast called The Doctor's Pharmacy, which is one of the top health podcasts where you discuss the sort of intersection between health, food, and policy, which I recommend everyone to go and check out.

97:29You've written a lot of books. A lot. 19, too many. I think I'm done for a minute. I'm going to recommend one, and then I'll let you recommend another one. Yeah, yeah. Which one would you recommend? If you had to recommend one? I mean, Young Forever is my latest book, and it's where I poured my entire knowledge base and tips and ideas and strategies about how to optimize your health. And it's not just for longevity, for any area of health that you have issues with, it's powerful.

97:52I was going to recommend that one as well, but I'm going to say Food Fix, because that book is fantastic, and that's one of the ones. The book about longevity that you released recently, Young Forever, is a fantastic book, but the Food Fix book as well is really clarifying for a lot of people that are probably confused about food. um we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is interesting because it's a little bit similar to what i asked you earlier but with a slight variation what is the most interesting and revealing question steve should have asked you but didn't oh and this is for the next guest no this was left for you and they didn't know who they were leaving it for oh i see okay um I would say, who were the biggest influences in my life, living or dead?

98:40So Mark, who are the biggest influences? You're going to have to answer now. Oh, okay. Because people are wondering. All right. So I would say living is a gentleman who's an unsung hero, a man named Jeffrey Bland, who's a nutritional biochemist, studied with Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel Prizes, really the father of nutritional science in the modern way, who really established this field of functional medicine. And he... He's a nutritional biochemist, but he's a genius.

99:14He's a synthesizer. So every time I would see him for decades, he would have a pile of scientific papers this thick, like a foot thick, carrying with him all the time, and he would hoover those things up. And he synthesizes it, and he's seen patterns in that data for decades that have presaged the revolution we're seeing now in medicine. So most things I talked about today, he basically understood by seeing the intersections across specialties. So he's sort of a polymath in science.

99:42And he influenced my work. He saved my life personally by learning about this model. I was able to save my health. He's helped me help millions of people. So he's a huge influence. The other, I think, main influence on my life was Henry Thoreau, who was a transcendentalist, lived in the 1800s, wrote a book called Walden. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's a profound book. It was basically a guy who... Walden. Walden. How do you spell that?

100:08W-A-L-D-E-N. And it's a classic book about... This man in the 1800s who went and lived on a lake outside of Boston, Walden Pond, and lived there by himself in a cabin with nothing almost and wrote about it. And he had this beautiful way of writing and describing nature and life and philosophy. And it really also included a lot of Eastern philosophy embedded in it, which I didn't realize at the time. And so that book really impacted my childhood profoundly.

100:42Dr. Mark Hyman, thank you so much for taking the time today. And thank you for all of your wisdom and honesty and openness. It's incredibly important. And the work you've done over the last couple of decades has changed lives, saved lives, and more so than I think you'd probably ever realize and more so than we could ever count. So thank you for that. It's an incredibly noble and worthy course that you've been on, but are on as well with function and all that's going to come with that.

101:04So I wish you the very, very best. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time.