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Jonathan: Hey, everyone, Jonathan Bailor here and I am even more excited
than I usually am. We have a gentleman whose work I’ve
followed personally for many, many years. A man who is out
there in the mainstream helping really hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of people live better, illustrating just how much
deeper ultra-long term wellness is than counting calories and
how we can dig so much deeper but still keep things simple.
He’s the author of a myriad number one New York Times
bestselling books including The Blood Sugar Solution, Ultra
Metabolism, The Ultra Mind Solution, The Ultra Simple Diet, and he’s
also the co-author of Ultra Prevention. I am ultra-excited to
welcome Dr. Mark Hyman to the show. Hi, Dr. Mark, how’s it
going?
Mark: I’m great. Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks for having me.
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Jonathan: Dr. Hyman, it is an absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure to have
you here. Before we dig into all things medical and deeper than
calories, can we take a step back? You’re an MD, you’re a
practicing physician. How did you make the transition from let’s
call it your normal, everyday physician to the sort of Superman
physician that you’ve become today?
Mark: Well, you mean how did I get into the ideas that I’m working with
now or how did I get to have bestselling books?
Jonathan: A little bit of both. You’re still a practicing physician. How do you
fit it all in?
Mark: That’s right, hard work basically. I think I started out predisposed
to these ideas. I actually was very interested in integrative
medicine before it was called integrative medicine, nutrition I
studied in college, I studied yoga. I was raised in the world of
nutrition and health.
In fact, in medical school I was sort of an outcast and a pioneer
thinking about these ideas. In college I read a book called
Nutrition Against Disease which was a very profound book by
Roger Williams, the father of sort of biochemical individuality,
one of the fathers of functional medicine. That book really kind
of woke me up to the possibility of using food as medicine.
That was just in my consciousness. Then when I went through
medical school I got brainwashed and I basically realized that
after a while of doing this that giving prescriptions to patients to
deal with symptoms wasn’t the solution, that I needed to get to
the root cause. The root cause was usually what they were eating
in their lifestyle and environment.
That’s what functional medicine is. It’s a way of dealing with the
causes, not just the symptoms. It’s medicine by cause, not by
symptom. It’s a very profound way of thinking about how to
create health and it’s really the science of creating health.
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That’s what I do every day in my practice. I have an ultra-wellness
center in Lenox, Massachusetts and we work with thousands of
patients and we help them regain their health from complex
issues that really no one else can figure out because they’re not
thinking the right way.
It’s really a thinking problem and when you use a road map, the
architecture of functional medicine, you begin to look through a
different set of lenses and you begin to see patterns and how
things connect and how everything relates to everything else.
Using that information you can help someone create health.
Food is just a natural part of that. In fact, it’s the most powerful
drug that I have. I use other treatments but food is by far the
most powerful drug on the planet.
Jonathan: Food seems like it’s so much more than just calories, Dr. Hyman.
Why is it still controversial in the mainstream western medical
community that things that we put into our body, other than
prescriptions, can have a pharmacological effect?
Mark: Yes, well that’s great. I’ve written a lot of books and I wrote my
first book talking about this ultra-metabolism about eight or nine
years ago really where I brought up the idea that all calories are
not the same, that really the calories, the thing that you talked
about is really what’s keeping us back which is the idea that it’s
all about energy balance, calories in, calories out, food is just
energy and if you focused on that you’d be successful losing
weight.
Well, it’s not really working. Exercise more, eat less just doesn’t
work. The question is what’s really going on here. Food is not just
calories, it’s information. It’s a big headliner, food is not just
calories, it’s not just energy, it’s information.
What do I mean by that? Well, information gives instructions to
your body. It’s like a software coding your body, telling it what to
do. It’s messages sent directly to your DNA with every single bite.
It’s not just protein, fats and carbs. It’s not just fiber. It’s not just
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vitamins and minerals. There’s also other components,
phytonutrients and phytochemicals from food that we don’t
think are essential but are actually regulating all sorts of
chemical processes, regulating information, detoxification and
immune function.
We have also RNA. Plant RNA we realize is being absorbed into
our bodies and regulating our own genes. Plant genetic material
is talking to our genetic material, telling it what to do.
Also, protein, fats and carbs are not all created equal. We have
different qualities of the foods. Protein from let’s say a feed lawn
cow is very different from like a wild elk in terms of its
composition, in terms of the fatty acids that are there, in terms of
its effect on your immune system, in terms of the effect on your
metabolism.
It’s really important to understand these very fine differences
between these foods. You begin to realize that food is actually
medicine, that when you go to the grocery store you should be
thinking of it as your farmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, right? We need to
be thinking of farmacology in a different way which is F-A-R-M-O-
C-O-L-O-G-Y.
Farmacology is really the idea that what we’re growing our
plants, is really the medicine that we should be using. It’s not like
a drug, it actually is a drug. In fact, it regulates your gene
function, it regulates your enzymes, your biochemistry in very
direct and specific ways that are very well mapped out.
I think that’s what people don’t get, that what they put on their
fork at the end of the day is really the most important thing they
can do for not only their health but for the health of the planet
and the environment as well.
Jonathan: Dr. Hyman, with all the patients you see I can imagine that you
may once in a while get someone who comes in and says, “Mark,
come on, wasn’t there that professor that ate 1,400 calories of
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Twinkies and Ding Dongs every day and lost weight? Why can’t I
just do that?”
Mark: Well, you could. You could absolutely do that and you might lose
weight. If you restrict calories enough you will lose weight, but
how will your health be? Weight loss is not the same as health
creation. In fact, the thing that I focus on with patients, I never
tell patients to lose weight. I have never said, “You need to lose
30 pounds,” or, “You need to be on a diet and lose weight.”
Never.
What I teach them is how their body works and how to create
health. When you create health, weight loss happens
automatically. You don’t have to make people lose weight. You
just teach them how to eat in a way that nourishes their body.
We know that processed dough, drinks that people use like Slim
Fast or Twinkies or Subway diets, those can help people lose
weight but that doesn’t mean you’re healthy. We have to simply
not equate the idea of weight loss and health and teach people
that the information that they put in their bodies is really the
main determinant of the quality of their health and the quality of
their lives.
Jonathan: It sounds like, Dr. Hyman, there’s a critical distinction between
weight loss and health. Have you also seen a big distinction
between weight loss and long-term slimness? It seems like we’ve
all lost weight, that’s not really the issue. The issue is keeping it
off and then enjoying our lives throughout the process.
Mark: Right. Right. Last night I had a group of people over for dinner.
One of them was my patient and a friend who’s also a patient. I
have her on a diet that’s a healthy diet.
People think it’s about deprivation, it’s about not having good
quality food, it’s about going on and off a diet. It’s not. It’s eating
in a way that sustains you.
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We made roasted chickens, they were organic chickens. I had an
incredible salad I got from a farmer’s market with lettuce and
spinach and fresh shaved beets and carrots and fennel. We had
roasted sweet potatoes. It was a completely nutrient-dense diet.
I had roasted vegetables. I roasted peppers I got and brussel
sprouts and cauliflower roasted in the oven with a little olive oil.
Just really amazing food.
It was not a deprivation diet. It was something that’s incredibly
delicious. Someone said, “This is the best chicken I’ve ever had.
This is the best meal I’ve ever had.” That’s what we should be
saying every day, not that this is a job. It’s eating medicine. It
doesn’t taste like medicine, it tastes like a delicious, nourishing
meal.
That’s the difference. People don’t have to go on a diet and go off
a diet. If you lose weight and you go on a diet to lose weight,
that’s a bad idea. You want to eat in a way your body was
designed to eat and then it’ll automatically lose weight and
create health.
Jonathan: When you say automatically lose weight and create health, this
is a message that really resonates with me and the research I’ve
done. Can you explain a little bit about the underlying
biochemistry? Let’s geek out a little bit here, Dr. Hyman. How is it
that when we nourish our body properly it will automatically
pursue a healthy weight as it might now automatically be
pursuing an unhealthy weight?
Mark: Sure, let’s just take a few examples. Let’s just sort of break it
down like protein, fat and carbs so people understand those.
When you eat protein, are all proteins created equal? Yes or no?
The answer is no. In fact, if you eat a feed bought beef cow it’s
full of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, it has a different fatty
acid composition. It creates an increase in inflammatory
molecules called cytokines like CRP and others, tin alfalfa, IO1,
all of which are promoting disease and aging and cause you to
gain weight.
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Whereas if you eat a grass fed or wild animal you’ll have 500
percent less bad fats in them. You will produce anti-
inflammatory molecules in your body. It will help improve your
metabolism. The quality’s really important.
Fat’s the same thing. Gram per gram, if you eat trans fat versus,
say, omega-3 fats, trans fats which are manmade fats that are
made by taking a vegetable oil, injecting hydrogen and making it
solid at room temperature, margarine basically or shortening, it
actually binds to receptors in your cells called p-bar which are
little receptors on the nucleus of your cells. Is this too icky?
Jonathan: No, this is not icky. I’m just like woo hoo, I love it, keep going.
Mark: Okay. When you said geek out I thought that was like permission
here to geek out.
Jonathan: It absolutely is.
Mark: These little receptors on your cells called p-bar, these regulate
insulin, the regulate inflammation, they regulate your
metabolism. When you eat trans fat or shortening, let’s say Cool
Whip or a Twinkie, you’re binding these fats to the receptors.
What that does is, one, it creates inflammation. Two, it slows
your metabolism. We call it oxidated phosphorylation which is
how you process food in your mitochondria. You basically slow
your metabolism. It makes you more insulin resistant so you
become diabetic.
You take, for example, omega-3 fats which our body was
designed to eat, you eat that and it binds in the same spot in
your cells in the nucleus, but it has the exact opposite effect. It
improves your metabolism, speeds it up. It improves insulin
sensitivity so it prevents diabetes. It reduces inflammation and it
does that through regulating your gene expression.
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When you eat one fat it turns on bad genes, when you eat
another fat it turns on good genes. Even though it’s the same
gram of fat, same calories.
Same thing with carbohydrates. If you take carbohydrates from
broccoli or you take carbohydrates from soda they are both
carbohydrates, right? Not all carbohydrates are the same. Soda
will be all high fructose corn syrup or sugar. It will drive a fat
factory in your liver, it will produce a fatty liver, create
lipogenesis which is like this fat factory and you create the
production of a fatty liver.
It increases insulin resistance, increases inflammation. It messes
up your hormones. In men it lowers testosterone, in women it
increases testosterone. It leads to a whole cascade of events that
leads to heat disease and diabetes and cancer.
Whereas if you have the same number of grams of carbohydrate
from, let’s say broccoli, it’s full of fiber, full of phytochemicals like
sulfuorphane, glycocynolate, it’s full of folate, magnesium,
other vitamins, all which optimize your metabolism. None of
which raise your blood sugar, none of which create insulin
production, none of which make your cholesterol abnormal,
which the carbohydrate from sugar will do.
Even though it’s exactly the same calories, totally different
biological effect.
Jonathan: This calorie myth, it really seems like it’s missing the point in the
sense that what you just said, if I’m understanding it correctly,
you could consume the exact same number of calories and have
a wholly different metabolic response that has nothing to do
with that number of calories at all. It’s completely irrelevant. It’s
everything other than calories.
Mark: That’s right. In fact, it’s even more than that. There’s information
molecules in food, but if you for example take the same protein
grams, same fat grams, same carb grams in different qualities of
this, it will have a different effect. Even if you juggle around the
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protein, fat and carbs and have the same calories, it can have a
very different effect.
For example, one example is my friend, Dr. David Ludwig from
Harvard. He found that if you took patients and put them on a
higher fat, higher protein, lower carb diet, a low glycemic diet
with the same calories and you took another group and put
them on a higher carb, lower protein, lower fat diet, the group
that was on the higher carb, higher glycemic diet, the one that
raises your blood sugar more, even though it was exactly the
same calories they burned 300 less calories a day.
That’s like running an hour a day. If you run an hour a day, that’s
the difference between 300 calories. [Inaudible 00:14:58] one
diet will speed up your metabolism, another diet will slow down
your metabolism even on the same calories. This has really
broad implications for your health. Does that make sense?
Jonathan: Absolutely. These isocaloric studies have gone on for decades,
Dr. Hyman. They blow my mind. People still seem to be surprised
by them. What is not getting communicated to them? You do an
amazing - I admire the time you spend in the mainstream media
trying to communicate this message. Coca-Cola still puts out
billboards that say it’s just 140 calories. Why is everyone freaking
out? How do we get this message across?
Mark: That’s right, I love what the food industry did. They co-opted
Michelle Obama. When she came up with the Let’s Move
campaign they said, “We’re going to partner with you. What we’re
going to do is we’re going to take a trillion and a half calories out
of the food supply. How great is that?”
Do you know what they did? They made Oreo cookies 90 calories
instead of 100 calories. That’s what they did. They made Twinkies
120 calories instead of 130 calories. It’s still Twinkies, it’s still
Oreos, it’s still bad information.
We really are stuck on this whole idea of calories and I love the
fact that you created this book The Calorie Myth because it speaks
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to this whole idea. I’ve written a lot about this in my books but it
really needs to get out there more and I appreciate the work
you’ve done to synthesize the data.
It’s real and we’re totally confused. The real issue here is that the
government, the media and most physicians and nutritionists
still believe in calories. Almost every major agency like American
Heart Association, American Diabetic Association, American
Nutritionists I think it’s the Dietetic Association, all of them still
believe in the calorie myth.
Until we really shift our policies, until we sort of shift our
recommendations we’re not going to really get much change in
our obesity epidemic.
Jonathan: It seems like there’s another insidious myth that is a close
brother or sister to the calorie myth. Maybe it’s not a myth, let’s
see what you think. It’s this myth of moderation because when
we talk about calories sometimes people say, “Well, it’s just 140
calories,” or just a little bit. When you talk about it’s not like a
drug, it is a drug, we don’t say smoke in moderation, we say don’t
smoke.
Mark: Right, right. I think there’s two issues here. One is you have to
eat, so what do you eat? Two is the calories really matter and
why should we focus on calories and what about a different way
of thinking about things?
I really never focus on calories with patients. I think it’s a bad
idea. Plus, who can count calories? I’m a trained physician,
nutritionist, studied nutrition for decades. I have no freaking
idea. You can buy a calorie book and counter but only if you eat
processed foods. You have to weigh and measure everything.
Who’s going to do that? It’s insane.
You have to have a different methodology that works for people
and that makes sense. Counting calories doesn’t even make
sense even if we were able to do it, which we’re not.
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I did a segment on the Today Show which is 100 calories of, let’s
say blueberries, versus 100 calories of Oreos. They have these
100-calorie packs of food and we think, “It’s only 100 calories, it’s
no problem.”
It has a totally different effect on your body. The net calories is
different. It’s even more complicated than that because the
calories lead to the effect of gut flora that you have. You have
this entire universe of gut bacteria called the gut micro biome. It
actually uses the food that you eat and transforms it and then
regulates your metabolism through its own metabolic activity.
Your gut bacteria are in effect controlling your metabolism.
What controls your gut bacteria is what you eat. If you eat
blueberries versus Oreos, very different effect on your gut flora,
very different effect on your metabolism.
Our biology is a web, it’s a complex web that has an enormous
impact on your health and it directly interacts with our
environment all the time with what we’re eating, what we’re
thinking, what we’re feeling, toxins. We have to kind of
understand the complexity of this.
Even, for example, toxins have a role. We talked about calories
but if your body’s toxic you can’t necessarily even metabolize
your calories. We injected toxins into rats. Sorry for all your
animal lovers out there but sometimes science uses animals and
I didn’t do the research, I’m just reporting on it.
The rats were infected with toxins and they were eating the same
calories. They were gaining weight even though they ate the
same calories, because the toxins poisoned their metabolism.
We need to kind of get away from counting calories, we need to
get away from this idea of it’s all about the calories. I think the
whole idea of moderation, as you said, is really interesting.
Part of what I recommend is unlimited amounts of foods. I like to
eat. If you tell me to restrict my eating, I’m not going to do it
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because I love to eat. I’m just not going to do it. I have to eat
foods that I can eat a lot of.
Last night, we had an enormous salad so I must have had three
plates of salad, which was spinach and a great kind of lettuce,
some funky lettuce from the farmer’s market, grated beets,
grated carrots, fennel. Oh my God, it was so good. I just ate three
plates of that because I ate unlimited refills. I have unlimited
refills. If I want to eat a large volume of food I get to eat it
because I like it.
I wouldn’t do that for other parts of my diet. I might have a sweet
potato but I wouldn’t have ten sweet potatoes. I might have a
half a sweet potato. There are areas of my plate that are for
unlimited refills. Those are the areas that I put on all the non-
starchy vegetables, the things that are very low glycemic, very
nutrient dense, relatively low calorie. You can have large volumes
and be completely fine.
If you wanted to have 750 calories you could have a piece of
cheesecake and it’s 750 calories. Or you could have 21 cups of
broccoli. Good luck if you could eat it, but 21 cups of broccoli is a
lot of broccoli. The point is you can just eat as much of that stuff
as you want. There’s a lot of benefits to it because it provides all
the nutrients and nutrient-dense compounds you need.
Jonathan: You mentioned the term metabolism and regulating your
metabolism. That really seems at the heart of this issue. I don’t
want to take this too far, but we consciously need to regulate our
metabolism by counting and doing math when we eat and then
monitoring and doing what the treadmill says.
This isn’t mushy, this is as scientific as it gets, versus tapping into
this internal balance system that already regulates our
metabolism and our gut flora working with our hormones,
working with our hypothalamus. Why do people think our body
is broken innately versus understanding that wisdom that’s
within it?
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Mark: Right, that’s so true. We have to sort of recognize that if you eat
in the way we’re designed to eat and you just eat real food, that
your body knows what to do. It’s way smarter than any of us.
Hormones shift into balance, your gut flora balance, your
immune system balances, your mitochondria start working
better, everything kind of happens.
Really, for me it’s about balance and abundance and joy and
energy and that’s what I want to feel, that’s what I want to give
my patients. The best way that I found to do that is by just
picking quality food, real food. What should we be eating? Fruits
and vegetables, nuts, seeds and beans, lean animal protein or
just good quality animal protein, it doesn’t even have to be lean if
it’s good quality fats. Very limited amounts of whole grains,
limited amounts of starchy vegetables.
Then really pretty much no processed foods, just zero. Do I eat
processed foods? Yes, I’ll have a piece of chocolate. Dark
chocolate, that’s processed. Will I eat ketchup that’s organic
ketchup, yes I’ll have that sometimes. I’ll eat some things that are
minimally processed but basically if you can give the product to
someone in fifth grade and they can’t read the label then you
shouldn’t eat it. If they can’t pronounce the ingredients and they
don’t understand what’s on the label then you shouldn’t eat it.
By the way, most of us even who’ve had multiple college degrees
can’t read most food labels that we eat, processed food, and
actually tell you what it is. That’s not really food, that’s a factory
made science project and we should not be eating it.
Jonathan: Speaking of factory made science projects, what do you say to
patients when they say, “I’m going to eat this Ding Dong,” and
then I’m going to jog for half an hour to cancel it out?
Mark: That’s a good idea. Did you know you have to run four and a half
miles or walk four and a half miles to burn off one soda? You’d
have to run four miles every day for a week to burn off one
super-sized meal. That’s every single day for a week to burn off
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one meal. If you eat that every day you’d have to run a marathon
every day.
If you want to run a marathon every day, fine, do whatever you
want. Even then I think you’re not getting the right information.
I think the whole idea that you’d get to have a work-out treat, you
work out and you get to have a drink of this and that, these are
just bad ideas. Unless you’re Kobe Bryant running around the
court for 48 minutes flat out, you don’t get Gatorade. Even then
there’s all kinds of issues with it.
I think we have to forget about counting calories, forget about
even calories when we exercise. We need to figure out what kind
of exercise we need to do, what’s the quality exercise, what’s the
quality food. Then forget about it and your body will figure it out.
Your body figures it out. You don’t have to get into all this kind of
technical mumbo-jumbo. We didn’t do that for centuries, we still
won’t do it. If we focus on what’s true, what’s real and
essential, the rest all works out.
Jonathan: Dr. Hyman, what can we expect? Let’s say we are one of these
individuals. I’ve seen this in my own life and the lives of my loved
ones where maybe we are really active and we can get away with
eating some of these foods which spike our blood sugar and
infuse us with these toxins. That gets back to your earlier point
about, sure you can be skinny and sick, can’t you?
Mark: Yes. What’s really frightening is we have about almost 70 percent
of Americans that are overweight. That means about 30 percent
are thin. Of those who are thin, a quarter of them are what we
call skinny fat. They look thin on the outside but they’re fat on
the outside. They’re sick on the inside and look okay on the
outside.
How is that? The information they’re putting in their body is
creating changes that lead to obesity. It’s not obesity that you
can see. It’s the same metabolic, biochemical picture as if you
were fat, but you’re thin because you lose muscle, you gain fat,
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you change your hormones, you increase inflammation, all of
that happens as a result of eating the wrong things.
In fact, in a study of children they found that there was almost
one out of four kids who have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes,
adolescents. More frightening, there were about 37 percent of
the skinny kids. Thirty-seven percent of the skinny kids had
either pre-diabetes or some other biochemical abnormality. They
were hypertensive, they had high cholesterol, high blood sugar,
abnormal lipids. They were thin.
Think about it, almost 40 percent of thin kids are metabolically
obese. What are the implications for that in terms of heart
disease, diabetes and all of the rest of the things that we see as
people age.
Jonathan: Dr. Hyman, that really breaks my heart and is one of the things
that gets me up in the morning. If you go into a school cafeteria
and you look around it’s not like there’s a group of kids who are
eating kale and wild caught salmon and they’re the thin kids and
then there’s a group of kids who have Cheetos and Pepsi and
they’re the overweight kids.
All the kids are eating basically the same garbage in most schools
and some are skinny and some aren’t. What’s going on there?
Mark: Well, I think we’re all genetically quite different. Some of us are
more likely to gain weight, others just get skinny fat, which is
skinny on the outside and fat on the inside. Some people have
very resilient metabolisms and can tolerate a more wide range of
stresses.
Eventually it catches up with you. U.B. Blake lived until he was
100 years old. He said, “If I knew I was going to live so long I
wouldn’t have smoked and I wouldn’t have drank so much.”
There are people who just got the lottery and that’s true. For
most of us it’s just not true.
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Jonathan: What is this? It seems to be more of a moralistic view many of
us in our culture have on obesity. You’ve probably seen this in
your clinic where an obese person will come in and say, “I swear
to you, Dr. Hyman, I’m not eating any more than my peers. I stop
when I’m full. I don’t know what else to do.” Then the media just
tells these people they’re weak and should try harder. What do
you say to them?
Mark: It’s interesting, the sort of social stigma on obesity’s huge.
They’ve done studies on this where they’ve asked kids, “Would
you rather be in a wheelchair or be fat?” They’d rather be in a
wheelchair and be disabled than be fat because of the level of
stigma.
Part of it is because we really blame the fat person in this
country. If someone’s in a wheelchair we don’t blame them for
being in a wheelchair, but if someone’s fat it’s your fault, you’re
just a fat, lazy pig and you eat too much. Just stop stuffing your
pie hole and everything will be fine. Get out of your chair and
start walking and you’ll be fine.
Unfortunately this is so not true. Nobody wants to be fat.
Nobody wakes up and says, “I want to be fat. I’m going to just
make myself fat because I want to be fat.” It just doesn’t happen
like that. What happens is there’s a hormonal and biological
reality to us that gets triggered in response to eating 150 pounds
of sugar and 146 pounds of flour every year per person.
That’s almost a pound of sugar and flour combined every day for
every man, woman and child in America. When you do that it
triggers biological addiction, which is actually the subject of my
next book The Blood Sugar Solution Ten Day Detox Diet that’s
coming out in February.
We get triggered into a set of physiologic responses that create
this ongoing cycle of chaos, of hormonal imbalance or chaos that
creates obesity.
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When you are in that state it’s almost like your biochemistry is
locked in this state. Even if you actually don’t eat that much there
are all kinds of factors that are driving to keep the weight on. It
could be the type of food you’re eating. If you’re not eating that
much it will increase insulin. It could be that it’s inflammatory
foods. It could be that you’re allergic, it could be that you’re toxic,
it could be that you have abnormal gut flora. All these things will
drive you to gain weight independent of your calorie intake.
Jonathan: Beautiful segue there, Dr. Hyman. You’d think we planned this.
Speaking of your wonderful February release of The Blood Sugar
Solution Ten Day Detox Diet and addiction, you have a different
take on detox. Cleanses and detoxes have been talked about for
a while but I’ve always admired your metabolic understanding.
What can we expect to see in this book and how is it different
from some of these more gimmicky cleanses and detoxes out
there?
Mark: Listen, you can do a juice cleanse, you can do a flush, you can do
all kinds of stuff. All that’s great. All that’s wonderful and people
can get a short-term benefit and clean out their diet. I encourage
people to experiment with that.
What I’m really talking about is true detox, like detox from heroin
or detox from cocaine or detox from nicotine or caffeine. These
are biologically addictive substances. The science has shown us
unequivocally that these foods are biologically addictive.
Processed foods and sugar is biologically addictive. Sugar is eight
times more addictive than cocaine.
There was a study at Connecticut College a few weeks ago that
showed that Oreos lit up the brain like cocaine. Not even like
cocaine, worse than cocaine. Would you give your kid a line of
coke? No. You give them Oreo cookies when they come home
from school. Does that really make sense given what we know
about the biology of food addiction?
Most people are hooked in this cycle of food addiction. The
purpose of my book is to bring consciousness to the idea that
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processed foods, sugar in pharmacologic doses, is biologically
addictive. Two, to provide a clear path to people to detox and
reset their hormones, reset their metabolism and get unhooked
from food addiction.
Using the science of functional medicine, treating the whole
system, we devised a strategy to balance all the hormones and
all your molecules and change your biochemistry very quickly
through food and through some simple lifestyle practices that
reset everything.
We did this with 600 people. We had a few thousand start, about
600 finished filling out all the data, which is what they had to do.
Most people didn’t feel like filling out the data. We had 600
people actually fill out the data.
We had extraordinary results. Not only did people see dramatic
improvements in weight and the reduction in waist size and so
forth, but their overall symptom score from all diseases and all
symptoms reduced by 65 percent. They got healthy.
Thirdly, their addiction was gone in a couple of days. You go
through a physiologic withdrawal, if you take rats and you give
them sugar and then you cut the sugar out they go through
withdrawal just like if you were getting them off of heroin or
cocaine. They have agitation, they have the shakes, they’re
irritable, they’re just agitated. Just like what happens when you
get off sugar.
The way I’ve designed the program is to minimize all those
effects and to quickly redial your molecules and your hormones
so that you don’t feel that. I really want to bring to light the
addiction story, I want to bring to light that there’s a path out of
that and that there is rehab for your metabolism. It only takes a
few days and in ten days you’ll be completely reset.
Jonathan: It’s such a compelling message for two reasons, Dr. Hyman, I
feel. The first is that it really does show that this isn’t a moral
failing of people. It’s an information problem because I don’t
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know any parent that gives their child cocaine. Why? They know
how bad it is for them.
It seems like step one is, like you said in your book The Blood
Sugar Solution Ten Day Detox Diet, to educate people on how
much more serious this is.
Mark: It’s very serious. It’s very serious. I mean, when you really stop
and think about it it’s very serious. If this is true and I believe it is
and science shows it is, then the implications are huge. Why do
we allow this without warning labels? We allow alcohol, we allow
nicotine, right? There’s warning labels. Don’t drive when you
drink this, this will kill you if you smoke it.
Okay, we should have on every label of soda it should say, “If you
drink this it will cause addiction and make you fat and sick and
kill you.” Yes, that’s what it should say. It should be a food label.
I know that sounds like a crazy idea but if this is really true and it
is, then we regulate seat belts, we regulate vaccines, we regulate
all sorts of things in society. We make people regulate tobacco.
We have regulations that protect our citizens. We need to think
differently about this.
People say, “Well, people have to eat.” Yes, they do. They don’t
have to eat junk food, they don’t have to eat processed food. In
fact, these were just new inventions in the last 50 to 100 years.
They didn’t even exist before.
No, we don’t have to eat that. I think it’s a problem because we’ve
got a one trillion dollar food industry that profits from making
people sick and fat and that’s not going to go away easily. It’s
going to take people like you and me and others talking about
these issues, getting out there in the news, the media, changing
the conversation, getting people to have the experience, having
them talk about it and seeing the truth about this.
This isn’t just a new gimmick. Your book Calorie Myth, it’s not a
gimmick. It’s not a quick fix thing. It’s an intelligent conversation
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about why we’re in this pickle and why everybody’s advice isn’t
working. Just eat less, exercise more. It’s all about the calories, it’s
all about energy balance. This is a myth that’s getting us into
trouble.
Jonathan: Dr. Hyman, I’ve got a little chills here. I can’t think of a better way
to end the show but tell us a bit where we can learn more about
your upcoming book The Blood Sugar Solution Ten Day Detox Diet
as well as you just have so many free resources, where can we
get more info?
Mark: You can go to my website, DrHyman.com. I’ve written a book The
Blood Sugar Solution and the Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook which
are great resources. I have plenty of free articles and videos on
my website all the time.
In my book that’s coming out in February with a public television
show that’s coming out at the same time, I’ll be having an online
course that will be supporting people to actually participate. I
believe that it’s not just about doing it alone, it’s about doing it in
community.
The power of the community, the power of friends and social
networks and peers to sort of encourage you and connect with
you and support you is really going to make this much easier. All
those are available and if you want to pre-order the book I think
it’s up on Amazon now.
Jonathan: I love it. Well, friends, if you have not checked out Dr. Hyman’s
work, absolutely please do. One of the individuals out there
rooted in the science, and also as you can tell from this
conversation understanding this is about so much more than
weight loss.
This is about giving us back that which is innately ours and that
has been stolen from us, and that is health, vitality and the ability
to manifest the purpose that we were put here to live. We’re not
just all lazy and stupid, there’s something else going on. Dr.
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Hyman, thank you so much for all the work you do, all the lives
you save and for sharing your time with us today.
Mark: Thank you, Jonathan, that was great.
Listeners, again, thank you for joining us. Please check out Dr. Hyman’s work and
remember, this week and every week after, eat smarter, exercise smarter and
better. Chat with you soon.
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