The Mental Health Crisis Starts in the Gut | Dr. William Li & Dr. Mark Hyman

What if brain fog, anxiety, and mood swings aren't simply all in your head? What if the health of your mind actually starts deeper in your body, in your gut, in your hormones, metabolism, and your immune system? Well, let me tell you, the connection is real and it affects how you think and you feel every single day. And that's why I created Brain Shaping Academy, a six-week program that shows you how healing your body can help you heal your mind. Brain Shaping Academy relies on the same target nutrition and lifestyle strategies that I've used for 30 years to help my patients improve their mental, emotional, and cognitive health. So if you want to feel calmer, clear, and more in control and stay sharp and protect your brain as you age, check out Brain Shaping Academy at Dr. Hyman.com. I kind of want to take us down a path of helping us understand food as medicine from the perspective of the mind and mental health because we have a serious mental health crisis now. I don't think we have a crisis of mental health because there's somehow a design flaw in human beings. Our software is not failing. We have a screwed up operating system that got installed. I want to talk about the new term called the flavorome. The flavorome. The gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria, or disease bacteria can actually text message your brain up the vagus nerve back to the brain. The irritable bowel causes the irritable brain, not the other way around. It turns out that the graveyard is the garden when it comes to actually the microbiome. Have you heard of a mentoflavone? No, I haven't. A mentoflavone actually lowers anxiety. Cantalopas like the natural valium. You can change your brain. You can change your mind. And you can heal both. William Lee is a renowned physician, scientist, and New York Times bestselling author whose work has transformed how we understand the connection between nutrition, disease, and the body's natural healing systems. 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That's K-O-R-R-U-S dot com slash sphere and use the Kothamansphere 15. I recommend magnesium to most of my patients and for good reason. It's involved in hundreds of biochemical reactions in the body, including regulating the nervous system, supporting muscle recovery and helping your body transition to a restful sleep. Now what's interesting is that newer research is starting to look at how certain forms of magnesium may support brain health and sleep quality. Now one randomized clinical study, adults who took a brain-available form of magnesium reported improvements in sleep quality and daytime functioning compared to placebo. Now magnesium is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies I see and low levels can contribute to stress, poor sleep, muscle, tension and low energy. And the challenge is that most magnesium supplements only contain one or two forms and they're not always well absorbed. And that's why I recommend magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers. It's a full spectrum formula that includes seven different forms of magnesium, designing to support your brain, your muscles, your stress response and your sleep. I take it as part of my evening routine. Try it today and go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use the code hymen to check out to say 15% off your order. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S dot com slash hymen and use the code hymen. William, so good to have you back on the podcast. Always good to be talking to you, Mark. I know. We've done this virtually. We've done this in person. I think this might be the third round. I don't know. I don't know. Is it? I've lost count. I'm thinking about how food is medicine, but from a deep science perspective. And not just, oh, it's food is medicine. That's cool. Eat your blueberries. But really understanding the role of the molecules. And there was an interesting article, I don't know if you saw it in the English Journal of Medicine, about the dark matter of nutrition. It was about 139,000 different compounds in food that regulate our biology that are from petrochemicals. And I've heard even up to 3 million. I think that number keeps changing. The dark matter of nutrition is called that because we just thought of food as protein, fats, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals. And that's pretty much it. And maybe some nice stuff from polyphenols, but didn't really have a complex understanding of it. And so there's this whole other world of nutrition that is waiting to be discovered. And so we're mapping out a whole world of the way food interacts with our receptors and our metabolic pathways and our microbiome and our immune system and our brain chemistry and ways that have never been really uncovered before. And you've been deeply thinking about this for a long time. And I personally learned a lot from you and from your books, Eat to Beat Disease and all of your work. And so I kind of want to take us down a path of helping us understand food is medicine from the perspective of the mind and mental health. The brain and the mind are related. And the mind reflects what's happening in the brain. And if we don't understand how to create a healthy brain, we can't have a healthy mind. And so fundamentally, how do you think about using food and nutrition and food as medicine in the realm of mental health? Because we have a serious mental health crisis now. How do you think about it? And the last few years are you kind of looking at this field. Where's your take on all this? Yeah, I'm glad you actually connected the brain and sort of the mental health aspect. And then we should just dive and connect the head to the gut. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah. So this is really the second brain, the second brain that connects to the first brain, which connects to our emotions and really our behavior. So it's all really connected. You know, if you take a systems biology approach, which means you don't isolate one thing, you look at how everything is interconnected and think about how the dominoes you hit in one side might affect the dominoes on the other side. You realize we're just at the beginning of a new frontier of understanding our behavior and our brain and as it relates to food. You mentioned biology and I want to, you've heard about the genome. Is it our DNA? I heard about that. Right? And you've heard about the microbiome, which you've actually alluded to. I want to talk about the food and its many components, this so-called dark matter, and bring up a new term called the flavorome. The flavorome. The flavorome is actually what flavors food, which is what we prefer, which influences our emotions, including pleasure or a negative reaction, repulsion. And it's connected to the substances in the food, the molecules in the food, which then interact once we eat them, starting from the mouth, going all the way down to our lower gut, and then ultimately to our gut microbiome, and the cecum, where the microbiome is located. A lot of people don't realize exactly where the microbiome is in the gut. Most of it. That's the last part of your large intestine. Okay. Yeah. Let's back up a second. Cecum, what is that? Let's talk. Let's talk. Let's talk. Let's talk. Right? Okay. So you've got 40 feet of intestines starting in the mouth, ending in the anus, and the, goes from mouth to esophagus to stomach. After the stomach, then you switch to a different part of the gut below the diaphragm. Small intestines is a long, snakey tube, like your garden hose. 22 feet. Exactly. Then you finally, it finally goes to the large intestine, small to large, okay, size up and the connection between the small intestines, the small tube, and the large intestines, the large tube. Right there, that connection is called the cecum. It's kind of a floppy bag. It's where your appendix actually is. And then if you were to keep on going in a large intestine, the colon, it goes up, takes the elevator up, and then it crosses the building across your gut, and then it goes back down, and then it empties out. Okay. I misspoke. It's the beginning of your large intestine. It's the beginning of the large intestines, and it's a sac, and it's where the intestines is, and that's actually where most of the gut microbiome lives, not all of it, but most. Right where the appendix lives, and now we're beginning to reconsider whether the appendix is truly a useless organ. God, I mean, God's been so dumb. Exactly. Exactly. Nothing is left without some purpose. But back to this idea of the gut microbiome being signaled by the food that we eat, and then the gut microbiome can basically message our brain through nerves that involve the vagus nerve, right? So you've heard of vagus nerve simulation and everything else about how to affect our mood and depression and anxiety. Well, it turns out our gut microbiome is actually doing vagal nerve stimulation all the time, and so the vagus nerve coming out of our brain, and this is the connection. So out of our brain, in our hind brain coming out of our cranial nerves, popping out of the bottom of our brain, and the vagus nerve, which is our 10th cranial nerve, courses out the big, thick cables come out, go down our neck, wrap around our esophagus like a fishnet stocking, then penetrate the diaphragm and then go down into our gut and then ramaphysical horses tail. All those nerves go everywhere. And guess what? The gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria or disease bacteria can actually text message your brain up the vagus nerve back to the brain. 80 to 90% of those nerves run upwards to the brain, not just downwards. Yeah, that's fascinating. I remember reading an article in JAMA years ago where they talked about irritable bowel syndrome, and it was a revolutionary article from my perspective because in medical school, we learned that irritable bowel was a psychological problem, that it was because people were anxious and stressed, and that was the cause. But it actually is the reverse. When the microbiome is altered and there's inflammation, it creates irritation that sends messages back up like you see like test measures to the brain that causes an irritable brain. So the irritable bowel causes the irritable brain not the other way around. Exactly. And then the brain feels it and then you feel uncomfortable. And by the way, do you remember those many hours in med school where all we're supposed to be doing is learning and taking notes or seeing patients? And it was more frequent than not, like something in our gut wasn't doing well and you weren't feeling great, you couldn't show it. Well, that's actually signals from our gut microbiome, communicator brain saying, not all is well here. And we have to hold our behavior in in order to be able to just keep performing. But inside something's going on. And so again, this whole other issue of what it has to do with brain, mental health and behavior connected to our gut is all interconnected. So we ate more healthy. Think about all the crap we ate in med school. Yeah, it's so true. Right. So I didn't. I was I was that weird, weirdo. I brought my own yogurt and granola and fruit in the morning and it made me so stupid. Well, think about all the things that were brought by drug reps to the lunches. And so the point is that even in medicine, we've actually been not properly trained, at least in the past, to think appropriately about the connection between the gut and the brain. Not at all. No. And I remember, you know, I was just practicing functional medicine and treating patients with all kinds of issues. And I was often brought kids with behavior problems or ADD or other issues. And, you know, it was just sort of learning or even adults with sort of autoimmune things or weird diseases who had mental health issues like OCD or behavior, anxiety, issues, depression. And, you know, I began to see that there was this big connection and I would do stool testing and I would do urine organic acid testing, which looked to metabolites of the microbiome in the urine that you can pick up bacteria or fungi. And it was this one little girl who was so beautiful, but so violent and aggressive. She was like nine years old and she would get kicked out of school multiple times a day to be in the hallway. She on the bus, they had to stop the bus like 10 times on the way home. She was, you know, the terror at home with her sister. She would tear up family pictures. I mean, she was just a nightmare. And I worked her up and I found she had massive overgrowth of bad bacteria in her gut and she had massive overgrowth of fungi in her gut. And I gave her an antibiotic and an antifungal. And like overnight, she turned in this beautiful sweet little girl. You know, it was unbelievable. And I was like, holy shit. Well, that's the power of understanding the gut and you intercepted the problem. But I want to actually bring out one thing that you just said that I think is important for anybody listening to this to consider. You said you intercepted a problem, microbiome, that was causing behavioral changes and mental, you know, torment with an antibiotic. Right. So too often we tend to black and white things in medicine, especially in a health and wellness space. But here's an example of where the judicious selection of the right antibiotic to slightly tip the odds of favoring the good bacteria to overcome the bad bacteria. It's about balance, not about extremes. And it got the result that you were hoping for. You know, there's a whole world that we are just beginning to understand that science is beginning to unpack. And I think, you know, the whole relationship between the gut and the brain and mental health and mood is so important. And when you think about it, I want you to kind of dive in this, because I kind of learned a lot about this from you. The first time I really heard about polyphenols and the microbiome was from you actually at a milk and conference, like a decade ago or something. And you were showing slides and I was like, oh, wow, this is amazing. The microbiome is fed by what you eat. You're not just eating for you. You're eating for the trillions of bugs in your gut. Right. So tell us about why that's important and what we're eating, how that destroys or messes them up and what we should be feeding them to actually enhance them, the right bugs. Yeah. OK. So first of all, and how this blades back to mental health and brain health. The theme of what we've just been talking about is that our brain health and mental health is connected to our gut health, which is fed by food. Right. And here we are thinking of ourselves as individuals, right, with our own cognition, our own emotions and our own appetites and our own behaviors. But in fact, when you once you factor in the gut, 39 trillion bacteria and counting, you're really talking about a single organism that's you sitting over there and me sitting over here. We are single organisms made up of 39 to 40 trillion pieces. Yeah. All right. And so we're not even single organisms. We're more like a coral reef and just like a coral reef with the clownfish and an an anemone and the barracuda and the octopus. You know, basically how we how things how we the whole reef performs has to do with how well the fish are fed. If you've got starving fish or your bleached coral, you're going to wind up having a very sick ecosystem. And that translates directly to the brain. And as you said, this is a just an emerging area of research, which makes it challenging. I want to come back to the point of like, how do we test? How do we know? Because we're beginning to, you know, understand how important the microbiome is. But for somebody listening to this, how do I know my microbiome isn't well? You can't go to your regular doctor to ask for that kind of test. But let's go back. You can go to an irregular doctor like me. Or an irregular, exactly. Or regularly irregular, right? That's the HL for a relation doc. All right. Research on the microbiome has made it increasingly clear just how central they've got microbiome is overall health influences everything from digestion and immune function to skin health and even how our bodies process nutrients. But not all probiotics are created equal, which is why I pay close attention to the science behind the companies working in the space. Now, one company is doing that particularly well. It's called SEED. Their DS01 daily symbiotic is formulated with 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains designed to support gut health, healthy regularity, skin health, immune health and gut barrier integrity. DS01 is also the number one digestive health probiotic. What impressed me most about SEED is their level of scientific rigor, which is what led me to join their clinical board. They're helping set a new standard for what a symbiotic should be. If you're looking for a simple daily habit to support your gut and whole body health, this is a great place to start. 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Just go to Maui, Newie venison.com slash hymen to claim your free starter pack has M-A-U-I-N-U-I venison.com slash hymen. So let's talk about polyphenols. Yeah. So what is a polyphenol anyway? Okay. Polyphenols basically mother nature's pharmacy with a F and not a pH. It's thousands of different kinds of molecules. Most of them make the colorful foods. A rainbow. Millions. What's that? Millions. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The billions. The colorful, the colors you see in the produce market, many of them are attributed to polyphenols. These are just natural chemicals that are found intrinsically in food. What's very interesting about polyphenols in food is not only what they do for people, which is a good thing. They're anti-inflammatory. They help to metamethasins work better. They can help fight excess body fat and decrease visceral fat, feed the gut microbiome, but as prebiotics, but it turns out that a more interesting question is now being asked, which is, why do plants even have polyphenols? Yeah. What do they do for the plant? And, you know, they're not there for us. They're not there for us. Okay. But it turns out that mother nature imbued plants that make foods with polyphenols to fight the disease, to fight for the health of the plant itself. So. It's immune and defense system. It's immune defense system. It's a repair system. It's a plant's healing system. So if you were to ask me in plain people speak, what is a polyphenol doing in a plant? I would say it's there to heal the plant and keep the plant healthy. Right. So, you know, I'm going to come to this in a second. And like, how does it affect the choices that we make? Turns out that if a plant is growing naturally in as a regenerative in environment as it possibly can, natural, okay, without artificial chemicals and spiking the soil and doing all kinds of crazy things to it. What do you have in a natural field or forest? You've got little bugs that are nibbling on the stems and the leaves of the plant. That's an injury. And the plant is going to respond to the injury, the natural injury, by healing itself by creating polyphenols. So it turns out that more naturally grown food plants actually will have more polyphenols. The more stress a plant is under, it's called hormesis, right? Which is the stress that doesn't kill you to make you stronger. That's why a wild strawberry explodes with flavor and a giant red strawberry from the grocery store that's industrially produced tastes like cardboard. And we've actually studied strawberries for what's inside it. And again, there's our hundreds of molecules, but we're just getting to the one by one. Strawberries have a lot of acid as one of their bioactives. That means biologically active. It's not just about the strawberries. Well, how a body responds when we eat the strawberry. That a lot of acid does a lot of things. It feeds our gut microbiome, healthier gut. It also lowers inflammation all by itself, but it also helps a healthy gut bacteria, lower inflammation by releasing short chain fatty acids. So now you got a twofer, right? You've got a lot of acid, which is inherently anti-inflammatory. How do we know this? Because if you actually grow inflammatory cells in a petri dish, in a tissue culture, and you put a lot of gas in there, they will stop having a riot. They'll calm down. If you actually put the short chain fatty acids, the gut microbiome in the same dish, they'll also calm down. So these are truly a double headed kind of action of, of allagic acid. Now, what's interesting is the clinical data also shows that people who eat strawberries, about a cup of strawberries a day over the course of a couple of weeks will also change mental state. It'll actually lower depression, improve cognition, specifically improve memory. Make sure you eat the organic ones because the strawberries are the most contaminant. And this is the point is that basically if you want the most potent allagic acid, this was studied by horticulturalists in England. You want to have organic strawberries because they're the ones that have to defend themselves against mother nature just to stay robust. So they actually have the greatest hormetic generation of these polyphenols. And when we eat them, we get the, we get a benefit that the plant, you know, the plant doesn't need anymore. Now we get the benefit from it. And it turns out that the organic strawberries have the most. Now, that's the most of the good stuff. You just talked about the least pesticides. And here's the deal with the fruits that are worth getting organic for. You cannot wash off pesticides from a strawberry because you can't skin a strawberry. You would never skin a strawberry. And there's other fruits that you want to pay attention to as well that benefit the gut that can improve, that can improve your mental state. Like apples, for example, you can peel an apple to skin the apple, but actually the fiber in the skin is really, really beneficial. And so too is the orsoic acid, which improves blood flow, which improves brain blood flow, which improves cognition. Yeah. Right. So again, when you can think more clearly, you have less brain fog. You actually are less anxious or depressed. You're getting a better mood. So again, turns out studies that you mass, University of Massachusetts have studied, if you take regular pesticides, spray them on an apple, like in a conventional farm, basically the pesticides will penetrate into 20% deep into the skin of the apple. Now you try washing it out of it, it won't happen. So again, that's another example of where making, choosing organic with anything that you're going to have the skin or you can't, or you want the skin or you can't skin it would be actually beneficial. Yeah. And I always thought, you know, like you taught me this, but I always thought the probiotics and prebiotics were the key to healthy gut microbiome. But it turns out the third P polyphenols is just as important. And that, that collection of molecules, those dark matter nutrition, it's a lot of what actually creates a healthy microbiome. So eating all these various plants. I mean, you taught me, for example, had pomegranate and gree tea and cranberry have super beneficial effects on a keystone species called acromancem. You sinophilia that protects the lining of the gut and prevents leaky gut and reduces inflammation, helps metabolic health, has all these benefits around certain treatments for cancer and boost your immune system for cancer. Yeah. This is just one bacteria. And there's, you know, like you said, 39 trillion in there and maybe a thousand species and I'll tell you something even more profound that is emerging as a theme in gut health research that is quite important for thinking about brain health. We used to always, okay. I used, when I was a kid, my grandparents used to take probiotics. I never knew what they were. Really? Yeah. They came in from, the proberics were sent from Japan and they used to arrive at my, my parents house and my grandparents were living with, with us and they would open them up and I remember they would like some bacillus. I'm like, why would you eat a bacteria? Right. Wow. Really weird. And by the way, so this is showing that long before the current trend of probiotics, it has been done in past generations. There was some ancient knowledge, right? All the fermented foods is all probiotics. Totally. Yeah. So I used to wonder if a probiotic bacteria was dried, this has to be dead. And if it's dead, how could it do something beneficial to you? Right. And to this day, if you really think about it, live bacteria in your gut makes sense. Doing all those things we're talking about, you need a live bacteria to text message your brain, right? Wrong. It turns out that even dead bacteria, the shell of the bacteria, the carcass of the bacteria is biologically active. And this is why pasteurized bacteria are now being shown to also be bioactive. I'll tell you an experiment that was done that was really amazing. So there's a professor named Susan Erdman, who's a colleague of mine at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying bacteria, a gut bacteria called lactobacillus rudorite. This is a fascinating bacteria that actually is often found in mother's milk, healthy mother's milk injected into the baby to colonize the bacteria. It's a lactobacillus. All right. Lactobacillus rudorite actually helps the wound seal. So we were, helps wound healing. So we actually did a research study where we were actually looking at whether or not feeding lactobacillus rudorite is a probiotic speed of wound healing. And indeed, it doubled the rate of wound healing. And it did it from the gut by increasing the gene expression, turning on the gene genetic machinery for a protein called vasculinothelial growth factor, just to probably let us grow a VEGF, just to be able to heal the wound. That's pretty amazing, right? The gut skin axis. Now, what about the brain? Turns out lactobacillus rudorite also text messages your brain and tells your brain to produce oxytocin, social hormone. All right. Now, I'm not getting to the, I haven't gotten to the punch line yet. The punch line is, can we destroy, this is the experiment, can we destroy the bacteria's effect by pulverizing it? So in the lab, you can actually take an ultrasound, not the kind you would actually do in a pregnant mom to look at the baby, but there's like a destructive ultrasound. So think about like a naval weapon, the sound weapon, and you can beam it at the lactobacillus rudorite and pulverize it into a gagellium pieces. All right. You feed it to an experimental system, to animals, just putting in a drinking water. And guess what? The dead pulverized bacteria will also make the brain release oxytocin. Totally not. No, no chance it's alive. It is completely pulverized. Because the dead stuff has signaling molecules? Signaling molecules, like, you know, like the, you know, like, so I was, I sort of think about it as the graveyard of the microbiome is also a garden that's actually active. It's still able to do things. This is just like compost or something. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, more powerful than we thought. You know, what one patient of mine said, you know, Dr. Hemant, I took this probiotic and I was just looking it up and, and it was a specific strain, Bifidobacterium longum 1714 improves the quality of deep sleep. Thinking about a probiotic that actually improves your sleep. So everything is connected here. That's total sense, right? I mean, I think that we, here's the thing, you know, when we as communicators and also medical experts talk about the microbiome and mental health and brain health, you know, we make it seem very logical and common sense. I think it's important to say that, you know, what we're talking about is this really kind of a realization. And we're taking whatever pieces of evidence that currently exist and trying to help people understand the connections and the importance of having, they've gone good brain health and good mental health. You really need to have good gut health at the same time. And that's a connection on food, but we don't really have all the answers yet. That's the key thing. We, there's, you know, before anybody runs out and after hearing this and just goes and buys whatever bacteria there is, recognize that there's a, there's a long way to go before we actually have mastered how to actually map out that to get to the results that we need. But in the meantime, we can eat pre-biotic foods, probiotic foods, fermented foods, you know, polyphenols. We can kind of hack the game a little bit by having a broad array of these different types of foods that are microbiome enhancing foods without worrying too much about which probiotic it take. Exactly. Exactly. Cause you know what? Foods actually are wrapped up with, if you take fermented foods, it's already got some polyphenols. It's got some dietary fibers, it's got the prebiotics and it's got the bacteria. And you know, if you ever ask like, okay, do all the healthy bacteria, are they alive in fermented foods and sauerkraut or yogurt? Some of them are probably dead. Yeah. Okay. And that's okay. It turns out that the graveyard is the garden when it comes to actually the microbiome. I want to double click on something you said. Could you like set it and we whizzed over it? And I think it's so important and it's called the flay roam. Like I never heard that term before, but you know, it reminded me of a gentleman has been on the podcast a few times, Fred Provenza, who's a rangeland ecologist from Utah and the Utah State for most of his life. He's retired now. He wrote a book called Nourishment, essentially about what we can learn from animals about how to eat. And he studied the behavior of rangeland animals out West, looking at what plants they ate and what they did. And you know, there were some general food and props or calories, but then they ate and sampled many, many different plants. For their phytochemical benefits and their medicinal benefits. And they would only eat a certain amount of them because at certain levels, they could be toxic or it was like, they knew what to eat. And they had this natural intelligence based on the flavor. And what always, what always sort of blew my mind is that when you think about the taste of food, the flavor of food, it always comes from the phytochemical richness of the food. That's what brings the flavor. Dan Barber figured this out. He probably didn't think about this, but he created something called Roe Seven Seas, essentially to reverse engineer flavor back into foods that have had that flavor engineered out of them. Like butternut squash is tasteless, but he created honey and squash, which is basically a phytochemically richer food that makes it taste sweeter, better naturally. So we put all these flavorings on foods instead of actually eating the foods that have that flavor naturally. So the explosion of a wild strawberry is a different flavor than a store bought strawberry that's not organic, or even organic is not as good as the wild one. And so it's people don't understand that if you seek out foods that have a natural richness of flavor, if you go to your garden and anybody is at a garden, I've had gardens most of my life and you know, you get an asparagus that you kind of crack off the stem and you eat it. It's like, it's unbelievable. Or you take broccoli and you eat it, or you take a tomato off the cherry tomato. It's ripening in August sun on the plant. And it's a totally different set of flavors that comes from these phytochemicals. And that's where the medicine is. That's where the dark matter nutrition is. And we've essentially bred our plants that we eat to not have these anymore. You know, I was, I know Dan Barber very well. We're doing a collaboration. I went out to visit his regenerative farm in New York and he gave me a pitchfork. And we went out there and I dug up potatoes. Which I've always considered to be the most tasteless. Yeah. No, not necessarily. Plucked it out of the ground, brought it to the kitchen. He cooked it for me. And it tasted amazing. I mean, it was sort of like a different food altogether. And let's talk about flavor for a second, because flavor is what draws us to our favorite foods, right? And flavor, by the way, is connected to the brain, not only through our taste buds, but also through our nose. And our natural homing system that we've then had hijacked away from us by the food industry. Yeah. And also the flavor industry. Think about the candles burning in your home or in the hotel or the sense or the car smell. We have been inundated with industrialization of our senses, right? Our taste buds by the food industry, our olfactory nerves, our nose from, you know, the people that want to make things smell nice, like the laundry detergent or their dish soap. And the reality is that we, you know, we, I think what we're learning is that by going back to nature and appreciating the intensity that can be packed into food, we will naturally gravitate towards the foods that we individually, so this is personalized nutrition. We all have our own preferences of flavor profile. Some people are super tasters. Some, oh man, it's way too hot for me or I don't prefer this kind of sour food. I can't take it. Other people go, man, I really like that. I like bitter food. And so I think that, you know, by recognizing the part of the flavor, flavor is linked to preferences, which is part of our individualization, which is part of our humanity, right? And then think about the diversity of foods out there. Okay, if you could eat a food that you preferred, that you love the flavor on, it's going to make you happier. And so that's also hardwiring above the gut. So we're not talking about the gut microbiome here. You haven't even put it in your mouth. You've just smelled it. You see it. Our eyes are basically radar dishes that connect right to our brain. We can even feel happy seeing foods, right? So again, talking about mental health, brain health, mood, emotion, you know, how our emotions are, it is so complicated because it's not only our gut, it's our eyes, our nose, it's our taste buds that all work in concert. But you know, I think what I've learned is that your body will naturally gravitate towards things that support its health if you remove the things that are interfering with those signals. So if you're, for example, having artificial sweeteners, which are a thousand times sweeter than regular sugar, or you're having a lot of sugar and you have some blueberry, it's going to taste bland. But if you don't eat sugar, and I do this, I take people on these retreats and I get them off all the sugar and the starch and all the crap for like a week. And then I give them a treat at the end, which is like blueberries. And they're like, wow, this is like so sweet. And it's because we've had our natural instincts hijacked by the food industry. And so we're not attracted to those foods, which are good for us. We're attracted to those foods that are bad for us. And we've had our senses almost homogenized and removed from what naturally is good for us. And I think we need to learn how to get back to that and hit the reset button. That's why I created the 10-day detox diet. You're going to 10daydetox.com and learn about it. But essentially, it's a full reset of your system so that you can then start to go, OK, what do I like? What do I want? I mean, I walk by, you know, like I'll walk by a store or like a restaurant. It's like whether you have like muffins or bagels or whatever. I don't want to eat it. It doesn't. It looks like a rock to me. Like it doesn't attract me because my body is naturally seeking those things that support its health because I've trained it. And I've let it kind of uncovered from all the crap. I don't know if you saw the research that looked at chimpanzees knowing inherently when they're injured that they'll pick specific plants to chew on them. That will give them the bioactive as a polyphenols from certain plants in order to be able to heal their wounds. That's what I'm talking about. The animals have this natural intelligence. We've lost it. We've lost it. We lost touch of it. And it's part of what's caused our mental health to be screwed up because we're eating a diet that is so damaging to our mental health. All the starch and the sugar and the refined foods and the ultra processed foods and all the additives and chemicals. Such an adverse effect. Not just in a microbiome but on a metabolic function or health and and you know, the harbor there's now departments of metabolic psychiatry. I mean, there's nutritional psychiatry. This is because there's there's an understanding that there's this relationship between the the the amount of sugar and starch and processing over diet in our mental health. Right. And it's causing an epidemic of mental health issues. I don't think we have a crisis of mental health because there's somehow a design flaw in human beings. It's like, yeah, there was always a few maybe crazy people in the tribe, but like basically most people were pretty stable and good. Our software is not failing. Right. I mean, basically every we have a screwing up operating system that got installed though. We're spilling coffee on the on the keyboard. Yeah. Everything right. Here's something interesting to think about when it comes to mental health. What are there's obviously a lot of things that if we introduce it or a system that are going to cause inflammation. So regardless of what mental health condition that you're talking about everything from schizophrenia to autism to the major depression bipolar disorder, you know, so far what's been looked at as a common denominator of these syndromes. It's actually inflammation in the brain. Yeah. That's right. That's right. I think that's so important. Let's double click on that because inflammation is what's behind a lot of the mental health crises. Right. I mean, I read a study that they were showing they were interested in using TNF alpha blockers for depression, which is a stupid idea, which is like an autoimmune drug. Or it's a brilliant idea. Well, it's a brilliant idea in the sense that it's oh, it's inflammation, but it's a bad idea because there's better ways to reduce inflammation without all the side of it. Right. So, but you know, if we're really trying to address this root cause of mental illness or let's not call it mental illness. Let's call it kind of deviating from our own mental health. You've got this like smoke screen that's put up by inflammation. And, and although there are underlying things that might make something depression versus anxiety disorder versus OCD versus, you know, schizophrenia, the reality is if you can strip away the inflammatory layer, that's actually an important thing that people are empowered to do. We can do that ourselves. You don't need a psychiatrist to lower brain and body inflammation and hence brain inflammation. And so removing the bad stuff to actually lower inflammation is actually it's, you know, it's, it's a low hanging fruit, literally and figuratively. Right. I mean, all of those polyphenols and fruits and vegetables that you would eat can actually lower inflammation. So you can get a head start on anything that you're doing for mental health by eating foods that lower inflammation. You know, and by the way, the other thing that's interesting about inflammation, which most of us are walking around with, even those of us who take care of ourselves. You know, life is tough. Stress causes inflammation. Most of us have a little bit of more stress than we want in our lives. And so we're always a little bit inflamed, which is why, you know, we need to actually have that fire extinguisher to regularly put things out three times a day whenever we're actually making a choice. Make that choice to lower inflammation in your body is good for brain health, good for mental health as a practice, I think as just a matter of actually how you choose your, your, your foods, your meals. Now, the other thing is staying away from things that can cause inflammation as well. And this is really the, the other part of the dark matter in manufactured foods and ultra processed foods. And by the way, the dark matter is a good thing. It's not bad. The dark matter is all the things we haven't seen that are good in food, but there's also a darker matter. It's a darker matter, which is a shitty food we're eating. Right. That's what you're talking about. That's the, that's the dark side of the force. Yeah. Right. Okay. So then you actually put all those chemicals that are, that our body tries to process, tries to detox our liver, our kidneys, all these organs try to kind of remove, has to, has to do extra work, has to, has to consume energy, part of the energy that we would normally have for enjoying life, for brain function. If we have to divert that energy to detoxing the, the chemicals that we find in our foods, you know, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, artificial preservatives, you name it, the fillers, all these kinds of transformed additives that are actually found in our foods. Not only does it steal from our life energy and our life force, but they actually directly trigger inflammation as well. And by then triggering inflammation, just think about the dietary pattern. You eat less foods with polyphenols, more junk food with all these chemicals. You're tilting these scales towards inflammation. And the most inflammatory thing is sugar and starch. That's what's the majority of Americans diet. And that, that's creating insulin resistance, which creates belly fat deposition. Those cells in your belly are not just holding up your pants. They're, they're little factories of inflammation, creating adipocytokines, which are inflammatory molecules from the fat cells that go to your brain and affect everything. And the food industry that makes foods with sugar and starch tend to add to those foods, a lot of other additives, right? So you're talking about sort of, you know, something that can be damaging. You get the double whammy. Yeah. So I think, I think you're right. I mean, the inflammatory issue is huge. So all these polyphenols tend to be anti-inflammatory, whereas all the foods we're eating tend to be inflammatory in a very basic level, you know, to simplify things. You know, when your brain's inflamed, your mood's inflamed, you're depressed, you're anxious, you're irritable, you're, you're bipolar disease, schizophrenia, you have autism. These are all brain disease, even Alzheimer's is brain inflammation. Or you actually have and, you have and or brain fog. And that actually steals from your quality of life. You know, this is not where I leave my keys. This is like, I can't focus on anything. Right. And so this is when you kind of, when anybody who's in that situation feels like, you know, they really, really need to have some kind of reset to be able to get back to clear thinking. I don't mean to push it, but I'm telling you, the tend to detox is literally like that reset. And that's one of the things that people say most often when they do it, that their brain fog. What are the, what are the steps? Basic steps. Getting rid of all the crap is adding in the good stuff, taking out the bad stuff. So it's lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, good quality protein, lots of good fats, olive oil, eggs. You're taking out gluten, dairy, grains and beans, not that they're wholesale bad, but for a temporary period, because they tend to be more starchy and cause some good issues for people. Dairy, which are modern, dairy is terrible. And I do like yogurt and I like particularly cheaper goat yogurt. But, but just for a short period of time, these tend to be the very inflammatory foods that people are sick from. And, and when you do that for, and you obviously take out all the ultra processed foods and all the, and the sodas, all the sugar, all the starch, all the additives, all the chemical, all that goes away, all the alcohol, all the caffeine, all that goes out. And you do it for 10 days. I mean, anybody can do anything for 10 days. And when you do that, we see across the board, I've done this with thousands of people online and in person. There's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. Based on a symptom questionnaire that we do, or regrade your symptoms like headaches to zero to one, two, three, four, you know, ear, bowel, you know, zero to four. And there certainly must be improvement in gut health too. Yeah, 100% ear, bowel, reflux, all this stuff. I mean, one person came up to me at Cleveland Clinic and said, Dr. Heimann, I did this and my rheumatoid arthritis went away. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible because it went away. You know, another woman was like, I've been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I've been on so many psychiatric meds. I've never really felt good and I feel completely normal. So that's a baseline approach that anybody can do. Yeah, it's basically free. By removing the bad, adding the good and trying to get to your own personal reset. Yeah, I just want to say this is like hitting the factor reset button. Yeah. I was like, how do you go back to the original factory settings on your phone so you don't get like screwed up? And that's what most of us have no clue how to do. And I've just come upon this through practicing functional medicine and learning the science of food as medicine and all the things we were talking about. But it's not that complicated. And so anybody suffering from anything out there, it's worth a try. There are more extreme versions like a ketogenic diet, which is now being explored for schizophrenia and bipolar disease and OCD and cancer and severe depression and diabetes. And I mean, it's like, it's kind of like this weird thing where you kind of re-change the way your metabolic function works. And it has a broad reaching effects across so many disease categories. So whether it's diabetes or cancer or Alzheimer's or autism, you know, I've always believed that one of the most powerful things you can do for your health is to cook your own food. In fact, I was at my house recently and made short ribs for a small group, slow braised, deeply flavorable, simple ingredients. And after when someone said, wow, you're such a great cook. I laugh because I always tell people what my mother told me, if you can read, you can cook. Cooking isn't about being a chef. 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That's right. $1,600. That's sunlighten.s-u-n-l-i-g-h-t-e-n.com and use the code HIMEN. Okay. So one of the things that I think, so one of the things we just talked about is lowering inflammation, avoiding by eating better things that good for gut and polyphenols that lower inflammation, and then staying away from some of the lowering the harmful intake, adding more polyphenols to your diet. But you know, the latest research also begins to identify specific polyphenols and plant-based substances that can make your brain healthier, which then makes your mental state more optimized in any event. So for example, have you heard of a mentoflavone? No, I haven't. A mentoflavone actually is a natural polyphenol substance that's found in cantaloupe, breakfast food, okay? And that actually lowers anxiety. So a mentoflava has been shown to lower the state of anxiety. So we're again, part of this flavor realm, like everybody knows that characteristic scent or flavor of a cantaloupe, like a really ripe cantaloupe, right? It's got a very strong flavor. Exactly. A smell. A mentoflava. That actually can lower, it's anxiolytic. It actually lowers anxiety. Okay. So that's a... Cantaloupe is like a natural valium. Of sorts. What about anandamide? Do you know, have you heard of anandamide? All right. So I'm... Tell me. I'm throwing some... This is great. I always knew stuff from you. I love it. Right. Anandamides are actually found in foods that many people like, like dark chocolate. Right? Now, chocolate is a candy, is a confection, but dark chocolate is made with more of the plant-based substance, cacao. And cacao has all these polyphenols in it, like proanthocyanidin and others, including anandamide. All right. And what do anandamides do when you eat them? They not only lower inflammation, but they stimulate the endocannabinoid system in your brain. So an endocannabinoid system is basically what marijuana, THC, stimulates. You feel better, you get more relaxed, you know, you kind of zone a little bit. You feel happier in general. Dark chocolate, you know, that happy feeling people have. Anandamide activating the, that receptor system, which is related to the opioid system. Okay. The endocannabinoid system. Really? That's why I like chocolate. Another food that people consider to alter your state of being towards happiness for people that like it are truffles. Truffles like, like, oh, not like truffle, chocolate. I'm switching out the four floors. Mushrooms. Mushrooms. Well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's not exactly a mushroom, but it's a, it's more related to a, like a fungus, but truffles, which are, you know, prizes the Mediterranean at certain seasons, right? I think you and I had a meal once where we had some truffles and the, the, the, the factor of the matter is that it, it has this incredible aroma. Yeah. And some people really love truffles and it makes them feel good. Anandamide in truffles and chocolate. So again, this whole idea of like elevating our mood, we're not always treating depression. Sometimes you're elevating your mood. It's like an enhancement. It's like an enhancement. This whole word called neotropics, which means current pounds that actually help increase your cognitive function and mood that are not, you know, actually treating a disease. They're just causing an elimination or an outpropment. And that's the point I'm trying to get at it, which is that we're not only trying to take a sledgehammer against inflammation. We're not only trying to, you know, remove harmful substances from your plate, but we're also thinking about for happiness and joy, elevating our own mood. And that's also connected to the, to the gut and the food that we choose. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, lion's mane is another mushroom that I, it looks like a brain actually, and it has incredible effects on the brain in terms of connectivity, brain repair, healing. I've used a lot with people who have traumatic brain injury. It's, it's quite interesting. Can you tell us more about that? Well, lion's mane is, belongs to a whole family of medicinal mushrooms, which include Rashi, turkotail, you know, and in Chinese medicine, the mushrooms are a big part of that. Yeah. And sort of in Asian medicine traditions, you have all these medicinal mushrooms. And by the way, it's distinguished from a culture perspective, from culinary mushrooms, where you get the portobello and the porcini and the white button mushrooms and, but there are overlaps. So two overlaps are shiitake mushroom and mytake mushrooms are both medicinal and culinary. And increasingly, people are now interested in looking at these medicinal mushrooms and incorporating them into their food. And that's another example of sort of a modern way of looking at food as medicine or medical foods into, into regular foods. It seems we can actually elevate our mental state. And again, there's anti-inflammatory effects. There are in, there is no question that there are brain effects that are beneficial as well with some of these medicinal mushrooms. Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty amazing. And I think, you know, speaking of mushrooms, I mean, psilocybin is undergoing a lot of research now for things like depression, anxiety for PTSD. And it's kind of fascinating how it works. And I don't think it just works through its ability to reduce your anxiety through lowering the function of certain areas like your default mode network, which is your ego and your anxiety or amygdala. But I think it has other effects and, and some has these newotropic effects using activation of things like BDNF or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which increases the connectivity in the neurogenesis in the brain. It's like miracle growth for the brain. Neurogenesis, you, you said a word that we haven't talked about yet. That's right. Basically, as we get older, our nerves kind of start to get a little weaker, maybe not as vibrant as they once were. And importantly, our nerves, actually, which are capable of regenerating, don't regenerate quite as quickly as they once did. And so this whole idea about foods that can stimulate regeneration is a really interesting one. So how does regeneration occur? Well, there are signals in the body that foods that you eat can trigger and release that will draw out stem cells that are naturally found in our body to help us regenerate silently. So, you know, most people think about stem cells from like a therapeutic perspective, you go someplace to get your stem cells. Well, actually, Mother Nature already packed the suitcases inside our body. We already have our own stem cells. And so one of the interesting things are foods that might help to stimulate neurogenesis. And this is where my field of angio or blood vessel growth connects to nerve growth because blood vessels and nerves go hand in hand and nerves that grow out need blood vessels to support them because they're really, really metabolically active. And so foods that stimulate angiogenesis can be beneficial. We've already talked about dark chocolate as being beneficial. Barley can also be beneficial. Barley has beta-D glue can, which is also found in mushrooms, culinary mushrooms as well as medicinal mushrooms. It's a kind of dietary fiber. They grow blood vessels and it can stimulate nerve growth as well. So this is a whole other dimension of brain health and mental health is, you know, we're not stuck with what we were born with. We can tend the garden by encouraging neurogenesis as well. Well, it's interesting you say that because I, I, well, I did a podcast this summer with Nolan Williams about Ibogaine, who was a Stanford researcher who sadly died this summer, but he, he talked a lot about Ibogaine. And Rick Perry, who was the former governor of Texas for 15 years, heard the podcast and invited me to this dinner at this group called Americans for Ibogaine. And at that dinner, I spent a couple of hours talking to him about his experience. And he went down there and he, you know, he's 75 and he went down there to address, you know, his own brain health because there's data that improves brain health and the veterans who've had brain drama, I mean, brain drama, brain trauma, traumatic brain injury and brain drama actually, PTSD, actually show that their brains repair, looking at functional MRIs or quantitative MRIs. I was like, wow. And he said, yeah, his brain grew significantly over the course of the months and weeks and months after he took the Ibogaine. Rick Perry took it. And I was like, holy crap. So I went down and did it. And I did a quantitative brain MRI before. I have a functional MRI and I'm going to repeat it a week in a week from now. And is your brain growing? I don't know. I got to repeat it. I did only, I only do this like less than a week ago. So I'm going to repeat it next week and I'm going to repeat it again in a few months and I'm going to report back on the podcast. Everybody got to stay tuned to the podcast because I'm going to report back and share the data because if, if, if, if there's a plant compound that can do that, it's, it's kind of revolutionary because you think you're aging, your brain shrinks and it decreases connectivity. But if you can actually reverse your brain aging and I, and through Ezra, the company that is part of function health, it's an imaging company. So you can go to function health.com. You can get your brain scan. You can do what I did. You don't have to go through a doctor. I just went because, you know, I, I'm co-founder of the company. I can go do the brain scan and I, and anybody can do it. And I, and I measured my brain quantitative analysis and I'm going to continue. When you say quantitative analysis, you're talking about the amount of brain or the activity of the brain, the blood flow in the brain. It's not the blood flow. It's actually like, they can measure through various fiscated MRI through test machines, the, the size of each area of your brain, like how big is your hip of campus, how thick is your cortical matter, how big are different structures and things in your brain very precisely. And then you can repeat it and see if that changes over time. So to me, you know, when you're talking, we're talking not about a drug. We're talking about a phytochemical, essentially plant compounds that are in this bark of this root that is from West Africa. So, and some other plants. The method of analysis you're talking about getting functional brain scans. And quantitizing. Before, after and quantitated. It actually is sort of setting the stage for the future of us understanding what we can actually do to improve our brain. You know, I mean, you're, you're obviously describing something that you personally experience that, you know, gave you a reason to believe that there are significant changes occurring in how you feel. Now you're going to measure it. And then the other interesting things is where do you take it from there? How do you actually look at other plant based substances that could actually achieve it's amazing. There was a guy there who had crippling anxiety, went and got treatment while I was there, came out. He says, my anxiety is completely gone. I've never experienced this. There was a woman there who spent nine months a year in her bedroom because of crippling depression and would go out and work and she was a musician and would record and then she would go back and hide in her bedroom. She came there, had a treatment and was completely transformed. So we're, we're like, almost like, you know, looking up at the sky with our kind of naked eye, looking at the stars, trying to imagine what's going on and seeing things, we're just starting to actually understand this field. And I think we're going to be in the next five to 10 years in a, in a revolutionary period of understanding of the brain, the mind, how to repair the brain, how to heal the brain, how to deal with mood disorders, trauma, PTSD, brain injury, depression, anxiety. I mean, this, whether you talk about, you know, plant medicines and psychedelics or nutritional metabolic psychiatry or up-breakylating just mood through using all the things you mentioned, like from, you know, truffles, I'm like, it's a little expensive way to get your mood out. You can afford a kettle of that. Yeah, I can afford a kettle. So it's quite amazing. Like we're in the... Well, and it's also not just about the substance, it's also about how our body responds to it. And so this idea about discovering like new frontiers of discovery, like we didn't really think about when we were in medical school, in fact, we were encouraged to conclude that the brain can't regenerate. No. Right? Like basically once you had a stroke, that's it. Nothing, nothing's going to fix that. And we were taught that. So that way, if you actually wiped out a big portion of your brain with a stroke, like, oh, it's too bad. You might take a year to recover, but that's about it. It's, that's how you're going to get. Turns out that's not really true. We can actually reverse some of these diseases or conditions or the consequences of disease by encouraging our body's own capability regeneration. I read about this in my book, You Did a Disease. Yeah, you did. I remember that. And the whole idea is that we are hardwired to repair ourselves from the inside out. The mental health aspect and the brain health aspect is, I think, one of the most exciting frontiers. By the way, more recently, researchers are now beginning to focus on the eyes as a window into the brain and the status quo of the brain. Right? So think about it. When you go to the eye doctor, what do you do? You get your, you know, you look at the eye chart. Can you, what's the smallest lines that you can actually read? But actually, the imaging has become so much more sophisticated. The AI. And the AI connected to the imaging. Right? So anybody who's actually had a real serious back of the eye exam, what do you do? You put your chin on the rest. They flash these lights into you and they are looking at your brain. And then with the images that are capturing, you can see the thickness of the retina. You can see the optic nerve, the connection between the layer of nerves out of the carpet on the back of your eye that connected to the big cable that goes straight into your brain. We can see our brain, which is pretty amazing. And they can tell Alzheimer's on the kidney function. I mean, it's crazy to stuff that they're up to the check. And stuff that an ophthalmologist wouldn't be able to detect because the AI can start to see these things. And now they're beginning to think about it and use AI to their advantage. So I was just sort of building on the brain scans, the functional scans you're doing. I think you should take a look at your retina. Yeah. And the optic nerve as well. Interesting. It's amazing. It's an amazing conversation. As always, Dr. Lee, you are just a delight. And I'm always amazed how your brain works and the depth of knowledge you have around food and medicine and food is medicine. I can't wait to see what you have up to next. You have another book coming out? Working on it. It involves the brain. Really? Okay. We'll have to have you back on the podcast for that. Thanks for being here again. Thanks, everybody. I think the take home here is that you can change your brain. You can change your mind and you can heal both by optimizing your health through food as medicine and helping your gut microbiome for all the things we talked about. So thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you again. Thanks for having me. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the ultra wellness center. My work at Cleveland Clinic and function health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions, neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the ultra wellness center at ultra wellness center dot com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained licensed health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. 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