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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, breakdown the psychology of our twenties.
Today's episode has a little bit less to do with psychology and more so to do with the twenties component.
Our health in our twenties is kind of a little bit of a black box.
We have a general understanding of how to be healthy and how to be well.
But there is kind of a mystical nature to exactly what we should be doing, what we should be eating, what we should be consuming, how much exercise we should be doing, what is the right balance to strike between having fun and taking care of ourselves.
And there's a lot of lingering health questions.
How are the behaviors that I am performing now going to show up in my health in 20 years?
Is that something I should even care about?
Simple answer is yes, but if you have ever wanted to just sit down with a doctor and say, tell me what to do.
Tell me where to start.
Tell me where to go.
Today is that perfect opportunity.
I had the absolute pleasure of getting to interview and talk to a leading medical professional, a leading doctor, doctor Mark Hyman on all of the best health tips he would personally recommend for people in their 20s.
Without further ado, Dr. Mark Hyman, it's so nice to meet you.
Can you introduce yourself to the audience?
Yeah, hi everybody.
It's Dr. Mark Hyman.
I'm a physician. I'm a practicing doctor, a sort of advocate and practitioner of functional medicine.
I'm an author, written 15 New York Times bestselling books, and basically focused on addressing the root causes of disease rather than just treating symptoms. I spent my whole career helping people optimize their health through foodist medicine, lifestyle changes, cutting -edge science, and my goal is really to help people live longer, healthier, more vibrant lives, and understand how their bodies work and give them the basic manual for their body, which they didn't get when they were born, and when you understand how it functions and it's functional medicine, you can make it function better, And that's
really the whole goal here.
I love that. They didn't get the guidebook when they were born.
Certainly didn't get it in school.
I feel like people are still kind of scrambling for how to look after their bodies.
And that's why we all get pulled in different directions by different information.
But some things are definitely certain about what's good for our health.
Can you give us like a little list of what is like approved?
Like exercise, sunlight?
I mean, you know, I always joke that I get paid a lot of money to tell people to do the most obvious, simple things that work.
And I don't know why we don't realize that we spend millions and actually maybe billions of dollars on pet food that's just the perfect food for our dogs or cats.
We understand that we shouldn't feed them McDonald's and a big fries and a Coke, but we feed them to our kids.
And so we knew they knew the exercise—I mean, take their dogs to the park if you have a pet.
And so we have this intuitive sense of what's good except somehow we think because we're humans we're exempt from the laws of biology, and we're not.
Our bodies are biological organisms, we need to treat them with respect.
And when you give them the right food, the right kind and quality of exercise, getting them enough rest and best relaxation of the nervous system.
When you get enough sleep, because they're different things.
One is sort of a nervous system reset and one's actual sleep, which is basically medicine in itself.
and you get some basic support from nutrients which are lacking in our diet or in our food, then that provides the foundation for most of what you need.
And the other piece I would say that often isn't included in these sort of basic lifestyle concepts around health is the power of community, the power of connection and belonging and meaning and purpose which are more kind of squishy.
You can't just go, I'm gonna go do a five mile meaning and purpose run.
and just snap your fingers and have instant connection and community.
I mean, you know, a large percent of the population is very lonely and the Surgeon General in the United States recently actually wrote a report on the epidemic of loneliness.
It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
So that is a really important component of longevity and health and the Blue Zones have talked about this.
So it's really, it's an important piece of the puzzle.
And the problem is most people just don't even know what the pieces of the puzzle are or how to apply them and they hear so much confusing conflicting information.
They don't know what's going on in their body.
They don't know how to assess it.
The doctors don't know how to do anything about optimizing health.
If you go to your doctor and say, I want you to help me create health.
They're gonna be very confused.
You know, come back when you have symptoms, you're out of disease.
I don't know your tests are fine.
I can't find anything on your exam.
So you must be crazy.
Here's some Prozac and come back when there's something really wrong with you.
And they're missing something.
You know, there's a whole syndrome, what I call FLC syndrome.
that's when you feel like crap.
And most people walk around without knowing they have these subtle imbalances or dysfunctions that we're seeing actually with like my new company I co -founded called Function Health, where we actually can see the level of deficiencies and nutrients at one moment today, she had low vitamin D, I was talking to her like 20 which was very low.
And I was just saying, it can make you tired, have brain fog, seasonal depression, can cause muscle aches, can cause even things like increased susceptibility, cold, infections.
And she's like shaking her head, like, yep.
Yup. That's what I got.
And, and here she was walking around as a 30 something year old thinking she was great and healthy, living in New York city, trying to live a healthy lifestyle, uh, was a health reporter, actually, but just had no clue that she had, that's so funny.
Yeah, but they just, you just don't know unless you test, you know, you can't guess you have to test. And so I think it's really important for people to understand that, that they need to know what's happening with their bodies.
They need to know how it works.
And basically, you know, at any point in life, you can hit the reset button and get yourself back to health if you know what to do.
This really, listening to you say that is just A, incredibly powerful.
B, I love that you talk about community because obviously this is a podcast for people in their 20s and we talk about it a lot, but C, you can't just start focusing on your health the moment you're diagnosed with cancer or the moment you're diagnosed with some life -threatening thing.
And I remember like having something similar That kind of happened where I had this huge health scare and I was like, why is it only a priority now when I could have done so many things that were preventative, that could have stopped me from getting here?
Yeah, and the truth is, you know, that the, remember the disease starts early on, even in childhood, so whether it's bone loss or cardiovascular disease or dementia or diabetes, which now unfortunately is one in 14 ages, pre -diabetes or type three diabetes.
Yeah, it's pretty scary.
We used to call adult onset diabetes when I was in medical school, and they changed the name to juvenile diabetes and from juvenile diabetes in adult onset to type one and two which, you know, basically because type two is occurring in little children, it's not just two years.
So, you know, these things start early and there are dysfunctions that then don't become, let's say, a disease until...
Let's say you're low in vitamin D your whole life.
You might have a little low energy.
You might be a little depressed, you might have a little muscle soreness, it's just some cognitive issues, brain fog.
But it's not the thing you think would be like a disease.
But then at some point, if you go long enough with low vitamin D like that, you end up with osteoporosis and you break a hip and that's a serious problem because half the people who break a hip when they're older don't make it out the rest of the year.
Their mortality rate is about 50%, it's worse than cancer.
So, this is something you could have prevented if you knew when you were 20, but if you wait till you're you know 50 or 60 it's a problem we've been seeing you know cancers in the young people now we're seeing 30 year olds and even 20 year olds are getting colon cancer and things that we never saw before because the change in our diet and the antibiotic use and the toxins in our environment and it changed our microbiome.
So it you know it's never too early to start paying attention to your health because when you're 20 you feel like you're invincible you know you just do whatever you want you can eat whatever you want you can stay up all night and party you can drink you can you can smoke, you can vape, you can take drugs, and to a certain degree, you have some resilience when you're younger, but you're basically borrowing off your future self.
And at some point, your bank account's gonna be empty.
So you know, like, if you just have a certain amount of money in the bank, and you keep spending it, eventually you'll run out, as opposed to keep making deposits in your health bank account on a regular basis, you'll have plenty of health equity left in there, you know?
You know what, the perfect example of this, I always think about as my parents.
And my parents are like, my mom's like 60 and the woman still has a six pack.
Like she is so fit.
My dad just set a PB on his marathon time.
Also like 60. And I look at them and I'm like, how?
And I think I compare them to other people in that age and all the things that I, that my parents have now that make me not have to worry about them started when they were in their twenties And they implemented such a holistic lifestyle.
And back then that was really difficult to eat organically 30, 40 years ago, really hard to avoid alcohol.
And they're from Australia.
You know, everyone's drinking down here, everyone's smoking.
Like it was really difficult, but it is such a longterm payoff.
And it's such a perfect segue into this huge question I want to ask, which is during a period where a lot of us take our health for granted and I used to be someone that was included in that.
What do you think is one thing that people in their twenties really need to start doing early to see the most successful long -term results?
I think, one, I think, you know, all the behaviors around what you eat, exercise, um, sleep, stress management are critical.
I think one of the things that.
people do when they're younger, is they tend to cut back on sleep.
They wanna party, they wanna stay up all night, they wanna just not sleep because they can get more done or they're more functional or they can be more productive, but at the end of the day, they're barring off their future self and that causes low -grade inflammation, immune dysregulation, can increase your risk of cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and memory loss.
So I would say don't skimp on sleep, you'll be more productive, you'll be happier, you'll be healthier, you'll less likely crave carbs and sugar or alcohol, and have addiction issues.
So really important to make sure you get plenty of good quality sleep.
And you don't have to sleep 10 hours a night, but you can sleep seven to eight, as opposed to like sometimes people going, it's a badge of honor.
Well, I'm only sleeping four hours a night, and that's like a value proposition for them somehow, but unfortunately it's not.
The other thing is, understand the harm of sugar and starch. These are just two things that unfortunately are just ubiquitous in our society, whether you're in Australia, or America, or any Western developed nation.
Even developing nations are now more and more exposed to the American food supply.
And what's happened is that, you know, that's led to an epidemic of obesity globally.
There's over 2 billion people who are overweight.
More than twice as many people who are hungry every night.
Yeah, I mean, think about it.
there's more than twice as many people who go to bed obese or overweight than who go to bed hungry every night, which is still a lot of, like, 800 million people, but it's like, you know, it's like what?
We got the math wrong in that.
Like, we could have dispersed that a little bit, but yes, I'm sorry, continue.
It's true, and so, I think just, understanding that your health is like your bank account.
And if you want to, for example, have plenty of money when you're older, I did this for my kids when they were little.
I put money into retirement account for them, when they were like babies and in elementary school and junior high school and high school, and even stopping when they left home, even then it's grown to an astounding amount of money just by the power of compounding interest and investment over time.
And so, you put little deposits in early and you got big dividends on the backend.
And so I'm 65 and when I was young, I don't know exactly why.
Maybe because my sister was in college and I looked up to her and she took me to the veggie room in Amherst College in Massachusetts and they had peanut butter, crunchy peanut butter and holy bread and honey.
And I'm like, Oh, this is good.
I'm going to be a health nut, you know, like.
So I think I, I basically started eating healthier.
I started eating whole, more whole foods.
Although my mother did do a lot of that because she missed the fifties in America.
She lived in Europe for the whole time.
And so she didn't really get the whole ultra processed food thing that got happening in America.
And was just had a garden, we had a garden and fruit trees in our backyard, in the suburbs when I grew up, literally, in the suburbs.
And so, I kinda grew up with that.
But then I started running.
I did yoga. I made sure I didn't abuse my body with excess alcohol or drugs.
And so, I ended up having those investments when I was young, pay off now in terms of the level of my health, the lack of any chronic diseases, like high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes.
Most people my age are on two, three, four medications and 40 % have more than two chronic diseases.
Probably more over 65, that's the average in the population.
So I think it's like 83 % of people who are on Medicare have some type of chronic disease.
You know, that's a lot of people who are, who have these issues and I don't because I just put in these health deposits.
I think it's so valuable because when you are at that age, you know, we're in our twenties now assuming most people listening to this, you're in your twenties.
Of course, you're going to feel most of us, a baseline level of like stamina and an ability to bounce back and all the good things.
And then when you're 60, you're still like, you're going to be very present at that age wishing that you had done things earlier.
And it's this weird thing I do sometimes in my head where I'm like, would I rather have fun for longer or have really intense fun times now that might not even feel that great, you know, like abusing alcohol, like really, how fun is it to be blackout drunk?
You know, how fun is it actually to feel disgusting the next morning?
Like it's actually not that fun.
And I want to talk about alcohol consumption because obviously it's such a huge drug and I have to remind people of this, like alcohol is a drug and I still drink, I love a little glass of wine, I love a martini, but what should we be wary about in terms of alcohol consumption in our 20s?
Well, you know, it's one of those things that we thought was fine and maybe it prevented heart issues and was good for your heart health and we had a little story about it, but that was based on population data.
But when you start really looking at the science and there's been reviews of the science.
And again, the Surgeon General, the kind of head doctor of America.
But I report on the linkage between alcohol and cancer, which is increasingly clear that there is some link among many common cancers.
I mean, just for women alone, if you have one glass of wine a day, which is not excessive, just one glass of wine a day increases your risk of getting breast cancer 40%.
And I can't tell you how many young women can...
I mean, in my practice in Massachusetts, in Lenox, Massachusetts, that's the doctor who I've been working with there for 25 years, she's my medical director.
She was 30 years old, she got breast cancer, so this happens, and younger and younger women, and I'm not saying she was a heavy drinker, I'm just saying it happens because of environmental toxins, because of the sugar in her diet or the microbiome, because of the level of alcohols consumed.
And when you consume alcohol, if you're a woman you're gonna increase your estrogen, you're gonna create more stimulation of your breast tissue, and overall estrogen issues.
It might affect your periods, it might affect fertility issues.
Certainly it affects fertility for men and women.
If you're younger and you're drinking, you wanna have kids, just be aware that it can certainly affect fertility.
And obviously aside from all the normal issues of driving and drinking and things like that, which people tend to do when they have poor judgment, there's a reason you can't rent a car until you're 25.
The insurance companies know that you're not mentally an adult until you're 25 years old and you're gonna make poor judgment and have poor decision making, which is gonna reach a risk of having a car accident, so you don't want to have that, yeah.
It's so absolutely true, and I always like to tell people about this study.
So, I'm sure you remember back in the day when they were like, one glass of wine, the antioxidants, it actually makes people healthier.
And they talked about this.
Yeah, and they talked about this study of Like we compared 10 ,000 people who don't drink and 10 ,000 people who do drink.
And the people who do drink, the healthier, the happier, they're living longer.
You should drink alcohol.
Firstly, that study was funded by an alcohol lobbying body.
So let's get that out of the way.
And secondly, the other huge thing to know the people in the non drinking category.
Have, have a thought, have a, just a quick ponder why people would not be drinking at all.
either they don't like alcohol.
The abstinence maybe for religious reasons, or they've previously really abused alcohol and now they have to go back to zero.
And so they didn't actually limit their sample to remove these individuals.
So they were basically, I don't want to say spoiling, but yeah.
Let's just use a better word. Spoiling that second, that first group and pulling down the average health of the first group.
So it looked like the non -drinkers were less healthy, but it was actually because some of the people in that group had been abusing alcohol for so long.
And now, it's this study that is huge.
You hear it even referenced in pop culture.
There's an episode of The Office where they talk about it.
There's an episode of Parks and Recreation.
It's one of those studies, you know how every now and again a study will just enter the psychobabble and enter our collective dialogue, and we'll be like, oh, have you heard about this?
but I think when I really started looking at that study I was like, oh, so alcohol is this like huge thing that no one's telling me about.
And it's so funny because it links so much with community.
Oftentimes, out - Yeah, it's like social, right.
Social drinking. What advice would you have there?
You know, for 20 somethings, so much of our socializing revolves around booze.
It's interesting you say that Because you know what, I think there's a growing movement and I don't know if it's occurring in Australia, but it's certainly United States, of a psychedelic renaissance, which is drugs that have very low toxicity or no toxicity, you know, like, you basically can't kill yourself on them.
Although you know, a friend of mine literally just sadly told me that his wife, his ex -wife, well, a soon to be his ex -wife, just drank herself to death, literally, just poisoned herself with alcohol.
You can't do that with psychedelics, whether it's LSD or psilocybin or MDMA, there's a lot of renaissance in terms of both research and the application of these compounds, both in a therapeutic setting, but also in a social setting, I'm seeing more and more people who are moving away from alcohol and more towards these substances, which are entheogens, they're connecting drugs, that are not things that are, you kind of get into a depressive stupor.
I mean, alcohol is a depressant.
You become stupid and you become depressed as opposed to these other categories of drugs, which are fun and you can enjoy a great time, and you can also use them for therapeutic reasons for post -traumatic stress disorder, depression.
I mean, psilocybin, major papers published in major journals like the New England Journal or the Journal of the American Medical Association, in other key journals showing that this is a better therapy for resistant treatment problems like PTSD or depression than any drug ever discovered or studied.
And by orders of magnitude, not just by like 10%, but by two or three times better.
When we see a big effect go, it's a 20 % improvement of this or a 20 % risk of that, that's fine.
But when you're talking about a two or 300 % increase benefit then that's something real.
So I think we have to sort of rethink how to have fun, and alcohol is...
I mean, I was lucky because when I was 18, I went out west in Canada to work on an oil rig kind of exploration company.
You know, I was young, I was 18, and I never really drank much at all, and had a few times in high school.
and these guys were sort of egging me on the bar in the middle of nowhere in the Bloody Indian Reservation in Alberta and they were egging me on to just drink more and more beer and some kind of stupid game they were playing and I just did it and I got so ill that I was vomiting blood, I was vomiting all night, I had the worst hangover the next day and I literally didn't drink a single thing from 18 to in my mid 30s when I had to start having a little wine because I was just like, I don't want that was like the most powerful deterrent.
So I think, you know, I think everybody has to sort of find what that sweet spot is for them.
And occasionally if you want to have a drink and you're otherwise healthy, if you have a tequila or glass of red wine, you know, every few weeks, I don't think it's an issue.
It's the consistent steady use over time is the problem.
And you feel it, like when I was in college, I felt it.
Like I feel healthier now than I did at 18 because I don't drink as much. I just think there are other ways, healthier ways of achieving that, even like new tropics, like as well, also amazing, even just like, this is gonna sound, just have a Diet Coke.
I know we don't want all that processed junk, but a Diet Coke versus binge drinking or like a Coke versus binge drinking, if you wanna pick your evils, you know, and you still wanna feel like - We do that too often either, but yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you can just get a soda or - It's an issue.
I mean, I think the advent of the wearables and things like your O -ring.
I think it helps people see how alcohol harms their sleep.
And I think from my friends and colleagues, it's something I've heard a lot.
It's like, oh, I noticed that when I got my wearable, it really affected the quality of my sleep, my deep sleep, my REM sleep, my heart rate variability, and my nervous system was adversely affected by this.
And then when you do that over and over again, you end up with really damaged sleep architecture, that lack of sleep leads to things like cancer and dementia and heart disease and diabetes and just is bad for your brain.
I think it accelerates aging when you drink.
It can increase risk of liver disease, gut damage, the microbiome gets affected.
So it's not something I encourage people I don't know how much else to do.
Explore some of these other things.
Some of them are legal, some of them are not, but I'm not gonna recommend anybody do anything illegal, but I think people can choose what they want.
And that's really important to understand that there's a renaissance happening.
Yeah. And I love that.
People can choose what they want.
Like it is still at the end of the day, your body, your health, your choices.
Just know what you're doing.
Yeah, know what you're doing.
Do I have ice cream sometimes?
Sure. Do I know it's got a lot of sugar and stuff?
am I willing to do that?
Because life without ice cream just seems so sad.
Of course, but do I have ice cream every night?
No. I mean, do I have it maybe once a month or every couple of months or twice a year?
Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't really worry about it if it's in the context of a real healthy life.
Yeah. The 80 20 rule.
We're gonna take a short break here but we will be back very shortly with Dr. Mark Hyman.
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So, the question everyone always asks me when it comes to the health in the 20s is about nicotine.
We've talked about alcohol, let's talk about vaping.
Now this might be, let's just get your general thoughts on vaping because I know, at least in Australia, it was kind of promoted as this way to stop smoking.
I mean, it's not a cigarette.
So it doesn't have some of the harmful things that are in the burning of tobacco.
And it's marketed sort of as a healthy alternative to smoking, but it's not safe at all.
The chemicals in vapes cause all sorts of issues.
Lung damage, you get serious pneumonitis and people have ended up in the hospital and had severe permanent lung damage from this.
It leads to systemic inflammation in your body, a cardiovascular risk.
Plus nicotine itself is highly addictive.
It disrupts your brain chemistry, it leads to more anxiety, and dependencies, you become addicted to it, and you only feel good when you're taking it.
Like a friend said, he had a nicotine spray, or a nicotine pack that he put in his mouth for being alert for something he had to do.
That's fine once in a while, but vaping is not safe.
And it also gives a quick dopamine spike in the brain, which creates this cycle of craving and reward. And they're kind of easy.
They're socially acceptable.
They've been constantly throughout the day.
It actually makes you probably smoke, quote, smoke more, which makes the addiction worse.
And so it's a pretty toxic habit.
And the key is really looking at how do you get over that?
How do you kind of stop a vaping addiction or even use a vaping?
Well, you've gotta support your brain chemistry.
You've got to make the habit.
So get rid of the triggers.
If your vape is in your pocket, you're going to reach for it, don't believe it there.
You can replace the habit with other habits, right?
Things like deep breathing or going for a run or chewing gum.
And then also you want to make sure you support your brain chemistry.
You can take things like tyrosine, which is an amino acid.
You can support your brain chemistry with healthy fats, amino acids from protein, B vitamins, often very helpful in repleting, a lot of things that get damaged during use of nicotine.
Sometimes behavioral therapy helps or nicotine replacements, like patches can help you sort of transition off.
Those aren't permanent though, you don't wanna keep doing that, but it's definitely not safe.
It's definitely not safe.
And I would say it's not even not safe, it's harmful, it's very harmful.
And I've seen many people and patients with serious issues as a consequence of vaping on a regular basis.
And that's the things that you don't really see as much in the media, right?
It's, it's scary, but it's not something that's like coming to the surface.
I was speaking to someone the other day who was also an MD, also a doctor.
And I asked him, I was like, oh, you know, what do you think is going to be the thing that we look back and go that was such a terrible idea.
The same way that we look at spooky.
And he was like, well, it's vaping.
And I have, I have, I have friends who were so addicted to it.
I had one friend and she has now quit, but she was telling me this compelling storytelling, storytelling, scary, however you see it, of how she would wake up in the morning.
And the first thought she would have was to find her vape and the first breath of air she would have in the morning was, and she would fall asleep and the same thing.
So she, and she was just like, it was just every, every single day I was so addicted to it.
And to the point where she even said when she needed to quit, was she would wake in the middle of the night, sweating and feeling like craving nicotine, because her body literally couldn't even do the seven, eight hours withdrawal of sleep.
And that's just the thing, it's so addictive and it tastes great, they smell delicious, it's fruity.
It's like what's not to love?
Yeah, it's not like a smelly old cigarette An ashtray, right?
It's like... Yeah, um, and I've even seen this...
this strange trend of people going back to smoking to get rid of their vaping addictions.
Not sure that's a good idea.
I know. So Dr. Mark Hyman's advice, I'm gonna paraphrase you, is stop with the vapes.
There's no... They're not a healthier...
They're not a... they're not a healthy option.
Full stop. They're not like a healthy version of smoking, they're unhealthy version.
It's just creating even different issues.
I think long -term we don't know, but for sure in the short -term, usually people have to smoke for decades to get permanent lung damage.
With vaping, it can happen very quickly and it causes this inflammatory response in the lungs that puts people in the ICU on ventilators.
So you don't hear that, but I hear that because I'm a doctor.
But it's quite a concerning habit, and I would recommend if you're...
And all care about your health and wellbeing, there's lots of ways to have fun, there's lots of ways to get dopamine.
Personally, my favorite dopamine addiction is exercise.
It's like, I love to be outside riding my bike, playing tennis, working hard, sweating.
I mean, that just makes me like feel great.
and you can get high without having to do a bunch of drugs.
Yeah, fantastic advice.
Or breath work even.
Breath work is... Breath work?
Let me just say this.
Breath work, the first time you do it in particular will make you feel high, drunk, whatever.
Like it's actually so insane.
I remember the first time I did it and now it's quite a regular part of my routine, I was at this yoga event and they brought in this practitioner who does it.
And I remember coming out of it and being like, ooh, I actually feel so like weird. Yeah and so alive and I was like, wow.
Just look at my skin.
Look at my hand. I was like, when was the last time I intentionally breathed?
And it's so funny you saying you get paid a lot of money to just tell people really simple things and what is more simple to being a human than breath.
I want to take a quick pivot.
The first thing we do and it's the last thing we do.
Take a breath. There we go.
That's going to be the quote of the day, I think.
Quick pivot, let's talk about mental health for a second.
How do you think our mental health and our physical health intersect in our 20s?
What's important about that relationship?
It's so huge. I think there's so many people that struggle with mental illness, whether it's depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, or OCD, I mean, the list goes on, eating disorders.
And our understanding of mental health has really changed.
And I'll just maybe take a minute to dive in here because I think it's such an important topic, but classically in psychiatry, we diagnose people based on their symptoms, not the causes.
So if you're sad and hopeless and helpless and have no interest in normal activities and can't sleep and don't have sex and don't wanna eat or you eat too much or whatever, we go, I know what's wrong with you, you have depression.
But depression is not the cause of those symptoms. It's the name we give to groups of people who share those symptoms. And the cause of depression can be many things.
It can be because your mother just died or because your boyfriend, you know, left you or because something horrible happened.
We've kind of taken a completely twisted view of mental health over the last, you know, hundred years.
And now it needs to change to not sort of blame the person I mean, if you have a inflammation of your joint, we see over arthritis, we don't, it's not some kind of moral stain on you.
But if we say you're mentally ill, there's a stigma to it.
There's sort of a moral, or sort of judgmental view of this, something wrong with you, right?
But as opposed to, wow, this is something that, yeah, there's something wrong, but it's not in your head and it might be in your body, and that more and more we can start to tease out these things through lab testing and through medical history, and that's really why I love it.
Hormones play a big role.
I mean, you can have, women know this if they're going through their menstrual cycles is I'm gonna have premenstrual syndrome.
It's not you, what is it?
You know, you get depressed, you get anxious, you can't sleep, you're irritable, and then you have your period and everything goes back to normal.
Clearly, there's a link between your biology and your psychology, right?
And what we've missed is that link.
And that's what I spend a lot of my work doing is helping to advance both treatments of the physical body but also the brain and mental health by really addressing these underlying root causes.
So your gut health, your diet, sleep, exercise is so important, and any inflammation from any source, whether it's an environmental toxin, and sometimes it's not your fault.
Sometimes it's like you're living in a place where there's no sun, you don't get a vitamin D, or some doctor recommended you take an acid, a locking drug, because you have heartburn and then you don't have vitamin B12 or you don't like fish, and you love omega -3s, or maybe you love fish and eat tuna all the time and you have mercury poisoning.
All those things can cause depression, right?
And so you kind of have to individualize treatment based on the root cause.
And that's really what we do at Function Health.
That's what I've been doing for 30 years with my patients with functional medicine.
So it's a really important moment and where our whole psychiatric shift has happened and just completely flipped people upside down.
I mean, right now at Stanford University there's a whole department of metabolic psychiatry.
Chris Palmer at Harvard has, you know, done a lot of work on this.
He wrote a book called Brain Energy, very much similar to the book that I wrote, Ultramind Solution, years ago, but that was a little bit more in depth around all the various factors, not just metabolic or mitochondrial health.
And so, you know, there's a real understanding now in these major academic centers that there's a problem with our psychiatric paradigm and then we need to challenge it.
Mayo Clinic just got $3 .3 million as a donation to study the effect of ketogenic diets on mental health, including things like schizophrenia and bipolar disease, and even more mild, I would say call them mild, they're not mild if you have it, but like not as serious mental health issues as just depression.
So the body has this amazing way of repairing and healing if you allow it to.
And I think, unfortunately, we get in the way with drugs.
And Chris Palmer actually did a, you know, tells a story about how he had a patient with schizophrenia who we think is one of the most intractable problems we see.
And there's no cure for it and nobody really quite understands it.
And yet, and yet we really have this incredible understanding that the brain is a metabolic organ and when he said to this patient who is schizophrenic who took drugs that make them get diabetic and obese, the patient was like, I want all this weight, I don't like being fat.
And he's like, well just, and he wasn't gonna see anybody else, he wasn't a nutritionist, another doctor, he wouldn't go anywhere and he'd only see this one doctor there was a psychiatrist, I don't really know, but I've kind of heard that, you know, as ketogenics, ice might be helpful.
And he recommended him for weight loss.
And then, you know, it was like, the guy came back and all his voices were gone his head all his schizophrenia symptoms were gone.
Yeah, it was pretty remarkable.
I feel like that's going to be the new wave of psychology and mental health.
But I'm conscious we only have a few more minutes.
I wanna ask you two final questions.
One's a big one. You can keep it short and simple, or you can elaborate.
It's up to you. That's my favorite flavor of ice cream.
Yeah, well actually, yeah, we'll leave it at the end.
Mine's boysenberry.
What do you think is the biggest risk to our health currently as a population, but specifically for 20 some things, specifically for a younger age demographic.
Yeah, so I think we've come to sort of accept our food supply as safe as something that has been approved by the government as something that we shouldn't really worry too much about.
But the truth is the biggest threat to our species, aside from the change in climate and nuclear war, is the obesity and diabetes epidemic That's a result of the amount of ultra processed food that is in the market.
Now in America, at 60 % of Americans diet, at 67 % of kids diet and essentially think of ultra processed food as a bucket of food that you wouldn't make in your kitchen, right?
You wouldn't make a pop tart or a lunchable or you wouldn't make Doritos or, you know like.
Yes, yes. Or Coca -Cola.
Gummy bears. Yeah, I mean maybe, I don't know if you could make them.
I think if you can, my view is I can make French fries, make them at home.
Like if you want to eat something like that.
And so we basically have a food system that is designed to create very cheap calories because they're subsidized.
Both on the front end with subsidization of agriculture and on the back end by paying for the consequences of people eating that food with health care dollars.
But it's ultra processed food, it essentially is a vehicle for a massive amounts of refined sugar and refined starch, and it's also the repository of inflammatory oils, also the repository of additives and chemicals, things like emulsifiers, which you shouldn't even think about that are almost all processed, but they basically make food a little bit like, kind of creamy, and that thickness that they'll put in, even thinking like almond milk, you go, that's healthy, but if you look at the label, and there's emulsifiers like gums, guar gum, and you know, Carrageenan, and these things that seem like
they even come from natural products, they're harmful.
They cause leaky gut, they damage your microbiome, they cause inflammation in the body, they lead to pre -diabetes, they spike insulin, they make you hungry, they cause depression, they cause inflammation, and so you think, oh, it doesn't matter if I'm eating junk food or whatever, my weight's okay, it doesn't matter.
It does matter. You know, like a lot of times it'll cause you to gain weight and create obesity, but for some people it won't.
But in and of itself, it's probably one of the biggest threats to humanity.
I love that answer, thank you so much. And when you eat when you're 20, you're like, I can eat anything, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, yeah. Like I would have grape nuts and ice cream for breakfast in college.
I don't even know what a grape nut is.
It's kind of like a healthy -ish cereal, it's refined grain essentially.
And so I think we needed to understand that we're setting the ground for our future selves.
And you don't want your future self to regret what happened in the past. You wanna set up yourself for success.
And I mean success in every level because if you feel like crap, hard to be successful in school, it's hard to be successful at work and pay attention and focus or something called presenteeism which is being at the job, but not on the job.
It's hard to have a good quality relationships because you're dysregulated.
You feel gross all the time.
Yeah. So there's an immediate dividend.
It's not like you're just doing this for your 60 or 70 year old self.
You're doing it for yourself now, so you can feel good now and not walk around with what I call FLC syndrome, that's when you feel like crap or a more serious version.
It's called FLS, that's when you feel like shit.
And those are real things and I think it's important for people to sort of try and we created the 10 -day detox diet which is really great.
And you can go to 10daydetox .com, just the number 10 day detox.
And it guides you through a program that is just remarkable.
Just read the testimonials.
I've done this with tens of thousands of people over 20 years, and it essentially takes in all the bad stuff, puts in all the good stuff.
And then you see, like how do you set your body back to its original factory settings?
You have rashes all over your body, you have migraine headaches, you have irritable bowel syndrome, you can't sleep, you're depressed.
Whatever the symptom is, there's been a 70 % reduction and all symptoms from all diseases when people do this for 10 days.
Now, sometimes people don't get all the way better because they might have some serious, like they might have Lyme disease or they might have mold or they might have mercury in their system or some more significant thing they need to treat.
But for most people, it's like, boom, hit the factory reset.
And knowing your computer's not working, you just restart it and it works, right?
Or an appliance isn't working, you unplug it and plug it back in.
And so it's sort of like that.
And then you can decide, oh, this is how I could feel.
I could feel really great.
I could cure my FLC syndrome or FLS syndrome and you know, I really like ice cream.
So I've noticed that dairy causes me to have issues but I don't really care because if I get pimples and a rusty nose and my stomach's upset, it's worth the trade -off for a once or twice a month or something.
So then you can be educated about how this stuff's affecting you, because most people have no idea the connection between what they eat and how they feel.
And I think it's so important for you to make that connection.
So that's why I recommend that.
And I also recommend for people to start to learn about their bodies early on and track it over time.
We've got one more question.
This is the question I ask all of my guests.
What is your biggest piece of advice for people in their 20s that has nothing to do with what we talked about today?
So nothing to do with physical health.
Just advice in general.
In my house today, my best friend came And we met on top of a mountain when we were 18 years old, and I've been my best friend for almost 50 years.
And we invest in our friendship, we invest in time together, we stay current.
And I do this with many people because I think our social relationships and connections are so important.
And I don't mean like on social media, or by text, I mean in -person, deeply connected experiences is where you put your phone away and you show up and you're present in the moment with people and get the true experience of what it is to be in connection and community, because that's medicine.
And I worry that the younger generation is just like stuck on their phone like this or on Tik Tok or Instagram, or, you know, chatting with their friends and don't even know how to pick up the phone to make a phone call.
I mean, you can FaceTime someone, that's okay.
That's better than, you know, not but actually in person time that you invest in is gonna pay off so much in the future.
And I see so much loneliness, so much isolation.
So many people have prioritized their careers and their work over their friends and their family.
And at the end of the day, you know, on your deathbed, you're like, you're not gonna go, well I'm glad I emptied out my inbox.
Or, you know, I'm glad I did that extra whatever it was at work.
You're gonna remember those special moments with people.
And I think life is really about creating happy memories.
And so, invest in creating those memories with your friends and your community.
Oh, I'm in 100 % agreement.
I've got to ask, what's your favorite ice cream flavor?
For the people who made it this far?
It depends, it depends.
I had one and now I got a new one.
So my previous one was Chunky Monkey Ben and Jerry's.
I love Chunky Monkey because I loved the banana and the walnuts.
That's my favorite!
Chocolate, I love Chunky Monkey.
but there's a version of ice cream in here in America called Van Lewin's and it's kind of a premium ice cream, but they have a Sicilian pistachio which I really like.
So that's kind of the way - That's so bougie.
Those are my guilty pleasures.
I'll have to try that next time I'm in the US, but Chunky Monkey is my favorite Ben and Jerry's flavor.
And it's not the same as banoffee pie.
It's not the same. No, no. Like if this is the banoffee pie flavor.
Well, if you've made it this far, drop a comment of an ice cream emoji below So that we know that, you know, the fun fact of the day.
And I just want to thank you again, Dr. Mark Hyman for coming on the show and for giving us such invaluable advice for free, which is just crazy.
My pleasure. My pleasure.
I'll link everything below your podcast and I really would recommend following Dr. Mark on Instagram.
If you just want some like really great facts on your feed for how to take better care of yourself, it's remarkable.
Um, and health hacks.
So are you still doing health acts or is it just the Dr. Hyman's show?
The Dr. Hyman's show and we, you know, created the Hyman Hive, which is a community where people can actually support each other and change their behavior together and learn together.
And so it's called the Hyman Hive, yeah.
There's something for everyone, honestly, I promise you that, but I'll make sure that's all down below and lovely listeners, make sure that you leave a five star review, follow along.
Follow us on Instagram at that psychology podcast and until next time, stay safe, be kind, Be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very, very soon.
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