Leading Doctor Warns: Fix This Before It’s Too Late

Pretty much all the chronic diseases that we have today and somewhere or another are either caused by or worsened by the food we're eating. After a few months she lost 30 pounds. She reversed her heart failure, no longer need oxygen. She was able to go back and live on her own for many years. This is something that's a solvable problem. It's not like we don't know how to do it anymore. And yet it's not reaching most people. If you believe God lives in you, why are you feeding the crap? Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome to Biohacket. I'm so excited to be sitting down with you and sell the Rabia Riyadh out of all places and from DC from when I met you at the White House to bring you down here. So thank you for coming on to the show. My pleasure. I wanted to ask you what is the biggest threat to our health today? That's easy. The biggest threat to our health is the global multinational food system. Which is the biggest industry on the planet, $17 trillion. It's producing food that is not actually definitionally food, which is definitely something that's supposed to support the growth and health of an organism. Most of the food produced in industrial food system is killing us. It's the number one killer in the world by far. It's driving the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia globally. And it's something that is reached every corner of the planet and is something that has been insidious, deliberate and intentional by the food industry. And it's something that most people are unaware of, but it's literally designed to hijack our brains, chemistry, our metabolism, our hormones, our immune system, our microbiome, in ways that actually cause us to be ill. And it's affecting everything from mental health to metabolic health to cancer, to autoimmune diseases, to other disorders. Pretty much all the chronic diseases that we have today and somewhere or another are either caused by or worsened by the food we're eating. So at scale, you know, individual choice matters, but it's very hard to make the right choice when everywhere you go, all there is is industrial process food. It's 60% of our diet in America. It's 67% of kids diets. 73% of us on the store shelves. It's now everywhere in the world. I mean, I'm sitting here in Saudi Arabia and, you know, it's a status symbol to eat KFC and McDonald's. It's a status symbol to drink Coke. I was at dinner with a physician in their night and he was drinking Coca-Cola. And I'm like, why are you drinking Coca-Cola? Thank God the Coke here are, you know, six or eight ounces and not 20 ounces, but still it's just one of the biggest problems that we're not dealing with. And the food industry has deliberately created a strategy to completely circle the wagons at every Arab society. They've co-opted public policy, particularly in the United States around the world where they lobby to allow their foods to be used at scale across the food system. They control science. So they fund 12 times as much, quote, nutrition research as the NIH. They fund all the professional societies like the American Academy of Diet. I'm sorry. Scratch that. They fund all the professional societies such as the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics with 40% of their budget comes from the food industry. The American Heart Association gets $192 million from food and farm every year. They fund American diabetes association. They also create front groups like the American Council of Science and Health to create propaganda that it says that trans fats pesticides and smoking is healthy for you. They've attacked me many times. Thank God they attacked me because that's side of a badge of honor. They fund social groups like the NLACP and Hispanic Federation. So they get the social groups to stop supporting policies at harm. For example, in Philadelphia, there was a soda tax on the ballot. And they actually funded $10 million for the children's hospital so they would stop doing the soda tax. In California, Jerry Brown is the most liberal governors in history of America. There were soda taxes passing left and right in California. The food industry started a ballot initiative to prevent any law from passing in the state. Nothing to food. If there was not a tooth or a majority, it would have crippled the state government. They said to Jerry Brown, they said if you don't prevent any future soda taxes legislatively, we're going to pass this ballot. We're going to put millions and millions of dollars behind it. They collude at all sorts of levels. The consumer brand association is now including to actually come up with strategies to fight what's going on in America around food policy change. So it's at every level, they've circled the wagons, co-opted every aspect of society, control policy, control medicine, control the social groups, control fake science groups, control research. And they have literally created a society and a system that is a propagating disease left and right. And it's really criminal. And do you think it is because they want to control the masses or it is because our health is for profit? Would you think it's going as far as is there control sick people? We have a capitalist system. And so profit is at the center of it. And there's industry people who try to change us like Indra Nunuya, Pepsiature, try to move Pepsi towards more healthier foods. She was fired. Denise Morrison at Campbell's Campbell's started to create healthier for you products and got GMO out of their soups. She was fired. So as industry leaders try to make the change, they're cut out of the process because it's affecting the bottom line. And that's the problem. We don't really look at stakeholder value. We look at shareholder value. But everything going on in the current administration, you know, a lot of us supported the Maho movement. So many of you yourself were so vocal and you've been one of the biggest voices in the space coming out and talking about your experience, what you're seeing, what are some of the policies you're excited that the government has put into place? And what do you think they should do more off? Or you're hoping we'll get established while they're in office? Well, I think it's unfortunate. A lot of the media is highlighting controversial things like Tylenolotism, which I think is unfortunate. And I think they're kind of vilifying the entire system. And when you look at what's behind it, it is the food industry. I mean, you look at the advertising in the media. Most of it is food and pharma. In the first half of the Super Bowl last year, ads, 11, they were 11 ads for junk food. I literally had to turn it off. It made me so sick. So I think there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that people don't know about that I'm involved in. For example, revising the dietary guidelines is happening. I've been very involved in advising on that. We are working on food labeling, front-of-package labeling. Like I have, for example, in Chile and South America where they put black stop signs so that people have a clear consumer's clearly going to understand it. Not some bunch of things that say high-low, medium-salt, sugar, fat, nobody knows what that means. The food labels are designed to confuse people. So we're working on clear front-of-package labeling, working on an effort to it and food marketing the children, which they've done in South America. And it's been very effective. We're looking at initiatives to fund nutrition research to the NIH and create a national Institute of Nutrition. There's a massive effort to change the status of the refined starches and sugars that are in ultra-processed food to be non-grass. Grass means generally recognized as safe. And this is based on an FDA ruling that was from the Food Act in the 1950s that basically said if a substance or food in food is deemed to be not healthy, the burden has to shift back to the food industry to prove it's safe. So David Kessler, who is the commissioner of the FDA under Clinton and under Bush, both Democrat and Republican, who's also a lawyer and a doctor created a petition in the FDA, which we've been supporting, essentially breaking on the science, showing that today's science shows that these refined starches and sugars that come from industrial processes who are causing disease are harmful and should no longer be considered safe to eat, which would force the industry to actually prove that they're safe. They'd have to then be removed from the marketplace. But working on an effort to change medical education, a very big effort by using the levers that the government has around accreditation, because they accredited all the accrediting bodies for medicine around, for example, preventing funding of any academic institutions that don't have a curriculum and nutrition, change the licensing. So there's a lot of levers were pulling around medical education. That's happening. So we're doing many, many efforts across many, many agencies to do this. There's never a form and snap that's happening, which I think is very good. So I think there's efforts to change the snap, where snap waivers are happening that allow states to eliminate soda and sugar for food stamps. This is never before possible. I know there's people who are working with Brook Rollins, who's the Secretary of Agriculture, Educator about regenerative agriculture, because all she's hearing from is industry. So there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that people don't know about. That's in process right now. That's good. So I would say that we don't know how it's all going to roll out, but I know there's a lot of good stuff happening that needs to happen. There's also Medicare demonstration projects that are they call it's like an innovation hub in Medicare, called CMMI Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. And the way that works is if they can do a pilot study, it shows that something creates value. In other words, the lowers costs or improves health outcomes, then it bypasses the normal legislative process to make it covered by Medicare. So we're looking at innovative projects to fund nutrition research to fund studies on functional medicine for autoimmune disease, for diabetes reversal. There's a lot of stuff happening that people don't really know about. So I think people here set things in the news that make them say this is kind of all BS, but I would say I would assure you that there's a lot happening below the surface that nobody knows about. It's actually moving things in the right direction. This is historic and never been possible before. If you know me, you know, I'm intentional about what I put into my body. That's why I'm so excited to share something that's genuinely changed my wellness routine. Seeds new, cobiotics. Cobiotics are supplements designed to support your body and microbiome. The community of microbes that plays a major role in nutrition, energy recovery, immunity, and honestly, every single part of your health. The three formulas, DMO2, daily multivitamin, AMO2, energy focus, and PMO2 sleep plus restore, working sync with your biology to fill nutrient gaps, boost clean energy without caffeine and support deep restorative sleep, which I promise you, you all need more than you know. What really stands out to me about seeds, cobiotics is a capsule and capsule design. It is absolutely genius. Each capsule delivers two formulations, one for the body and one for the microbiome. So both systems get what they need to work in sync with each other. I love that it's grounded in real science, but I also feel it day to day. More bounce energy, better focus, and genuinely deeper sleep. Want to experience the next level support for yourself, visit c.com slash biohack and use my code biohack20 for 20% off your first order. Now let's get back to the show. So one of the things when I was obviously I'm being following your work for so long, you've been such an inspiration to so many of us in the industry, I always try to get to where people's why comes from, what motivates them. And so I found this photo of you. How do you find that? Back in the day. I'm going to say I have a good team. That's good. There's a post that you put up on May 12, 2013 that you wrote. Today I want to celebrate my mother because she taught me something so essential and enduring that it has become my greatest passion, cooking. And through cooking, touching, feeling, preparing, and savoring good real food made from real ingredients, I get to fully inhabit my home and my kitchen, to heal my body and to connect with my friends, family and the earth and the larger community in which I live. It's so beautiful to see people's past and their families and how they affect their purpose and how they become their why. And I can see why you're so tied to really fixing the food system and changing it at not only a corporate level, but a global level. Yeah. Well my grandmother grew up in Brooklyn and she always had a motto, buy fresh, eat fresh. And my mother would tell me stories of how my great grandmother would go during Passover and get a carp and put it in the bathtub and then make it filter fish out of it, fresh. And my mother actually and father left America in the early 50s. And they went to Europe for 11 years. So they kind of missed the industrialization of the food system and the modernization of the food system. And when they went shopping, they went to all the European markets. So they'd go to the vegetable shop and the fruit shop and then they'd go to the butcher and they'd go to the dairy and the bakery. So they would have to go shopping every day. They didn't even have a fridge basically. They had to shop every for fresh every day and they made fresh food every day. And then when we moved back to the States, we had a backyard in the suburbia in Toronto where I grew up and we had fruit trees. So we had many, many fruit trees and we also had a garden. So my mother grew tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini and every time we just ate fresh food. And my mother always cooked fresh food from real ingredients. Now we did have, it was the 70s, we did have tang and we did have craft mac running cheese and we had sometimes TV dinners. But it mostly was really healthy whole food and she taught me to cook and she taught me the intro of real food. And so it was sort of built into my DNA. What is the first meal you ever cooked? I mean, I probably grew up Is that back in college? No, no, no, that was like my teenager. In college actually, I lived in a group home with the eight other Cornell students and we ripped up our backyard. We grew a garden in our backyard. We had maple trees in the front and we tapped the maple trees made maple syrup. We had an arrangement where every night a different person in the house had to be the chef. And so we would cook real food every night. There would be a helper in the main chef and we'd go through every week like that. So every night we had really delicious whole foods every single night together as a group. As a group. Kind of as a family-ish. And when's the last time you made your her cabbage soup? Your mom's cabbage? That's a great question. I literally just made it the other day. You did? Yeah, one of the things that my wife and I are going to do, we're republishing my book Food Fix, calling it Food Fix Uncensored, which is about the food system. And one of the things we're going to do is show how on a food stamp budget, which is not very much money. For $7 a day each, we're going to show how you can cook and eat real whole food for a week. That's incredible. Yeah, and do it in a healthy way. And that's what people need because the big argument is. Yeah, so the soup that I made was really simple. Onions, cheap food. Onions, carrots, cabbage, some of the cheapest vegetables. I threw in short rib, which is very cheap. It's a cheapest for me. My mother used to do that. We call it flanking, but it's basically short rib. I threw in a lemon and some raisins to kind of sweeten it up, cooked it up and it was delicious. A little salt and pepper. And we made enough soup for probably four meals. And I bet you was a dollar a meal. And so I think that was the last I made. It was a couple of days ago, actually. But the truth is, it's so delicious. I didn't make it because it was cheap. I made it because it's just delicious and nourishing and healthy. And I think most people don't know that you can do this. I worked with a small family with five and lived in a trailer. They were on food stamps and disability. It was part of the movie, fed up that I was in about 10 years ago. And they went one in the worst food deserts in America. There was a single piece of real food in their house. Everything was frozen, packaged. I mean, you look at the label. You couldn't tell it was a corn dog or a pop star by looking at the ingredient list because it was all the same. And I said, listen, you can make real food. And rather than give them an electric, I said, let's let's show you. Let me show you. And they never cooked. They didn't have a cutting board. They didn't have knives. We were cutting onions and sweet potatoes with a butter knife. And we made turkey chili. We made it salad from fresh real salad and green onions, not iceberg lettuce. We made olive oil and vinegar dressing. Some pepper, very simple. Not that they're they're dressing they had was full of refined oils and sugar and high fructose corn syrup and thickeners and gums that cause leaky gut and inflammation and got rid of all that. We made roasts of sweet potatoes. We made stir-fried asparagus. They loved it. They were like, this is amazing. I said, listen, I here's my cookbook. Here's this guide. How to eat well for less is called Good Food and a Tight Budget from the Environmental Working Group. I'm the plain back guy bought cutting boards and I bought knives for them. And I had it sent to their house. We collated the mother text, we said we lost 18 pounds of the family. A year later, the mother lost 100 pounds. The father lost 50 pounds. Got a new kid and he was undialysis for diabetes. Type your diabetes at 42 years old. The son lost 50 pounds but then he went to go get a job in a fast food restaurant because it's the only job they had. He gave it to him. It's like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar. You gain back to weight. And then eventually he reached out to me and he said, look, I really want to get sorted. And he lost 132 pounds. He went to college. First person is family. Every go to college. Then after college, he wrote me an email and he says, Mark, would you write me a letter recommendation for medical school. Now he's in medical school and he's a doctor now. So that was a family that never had an education, living in worst food deserts in America, that had done a bunch of a thousand dollars for a family of five a month with food stamps and stability. They were able to do it. So I think the myth that the food industry propagates is that it's difficult. It's time consuming. It's expensive. It's elitist. We're going to make food cheap and convenient and easy and delicious and we're helping you nonsense. It's propaganda. And I think, I think, yeah, nobody's going to be eating a $70 rib eye steak that's regenerally raised on that food stamp budget. But you can still buy real ingredients with real food and get rid of all the crap and stop eating processed food. As someone who's always drawn to wellness products that are simple, effective and actually help you understand your body, which is why I'm so excited to share the Harman Zumer by vibrant wellness. A company I love and trust. It's an advanced at home test that gives you real insight into your energy, mood, and overall balance. That's why trust vibrant. It combines standard of care labs with genetics and innovative biomarkers backed by over 400 researchers and more than 40 peer reviewed studies. I took the Harman Zumer at myself and finally getting clear answers behind signs and symptoms. I'd always blamed on stress or too much travel, which was extremely empowering to me. It measures up to three times the markers of typical hormone panels, including hormones, adrenal and bone health, oxidative stress, and endocrine disruptors and toxins like glyphosate and phallids. Essentially five tests in one. And with vibrant network of over 30,000 trained providers, you get expert interpretation and a plan that makes sense for your body and your needs. If you're ready to understand what your body's been trying to tell you, ask your provider for the Harman Zumer or find a vibrant certified provider at vibrant-wellness.com slash biohacket because understanding your body changes everything. When you go through your life, Mark, and at the end of the day, like let's say, you know, we all have a timeline on this earth, when you look back, what is the one thing you want to be known for? That's a great question. I think, you know, my journey's been very interesting. I got very ill when I was young in my 30s. And I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I didn't know why. My whole system broke down and went from riding my bike a hundred miles a day to not being able to walk up the stairs. I went from seeing 30 patients a day and not making any notes and remembering and charting at the end of the day to not knowing where I was at the end of the sentence. My cognitive function was gone. My gut was a mess. Every bone muscle in my body was aching. I felt like I was walking through my laces. I couldn't sleep. It was excruciating. Imagine not sleeping for three days and feeling like that all the time. And so I had to figure out what to do. And I discovered functional medicine through that process. And I was able to heal myself and start to heal my patients. And I began to understand that there was a whole new way of thinking about how the body worked. And what I'd like to be known for is that someone who helped catalyze the evolution of medicine that helps us understand how to create health, not treat disease. How to apply this new laws of biology that help us understand the body as a system, as a network, to solve the problem of so much suffering. Right. There's so much needless suffering in the world. There's stuff I can control. I can't control natural disasters. I can't control wars. I can't control a lot of things. But this is something that's a solvable problem. It's not like we don't know how to do it anymore. And yet it's not reaching most people. So my hope is that we can and needless suffering for millions of people through the science of functional medicine and understanding the nature of nature and through the power of community and the power of community to help change behavior. That is such a beautiful way to look at life. I was also going to ask you, you've interviewed some of the biggest names in the space, Gavramate, Huberman, Dave Asperger, obviously, the friend of yours who boat live in Austin. Which one of your colleagues or peers you feel has influenced you the most? I mean, it would be Jeffrey Blan. I don't think many people know who he is. But he's really the man who birthed functional medicine. He's a student of Linus Pauling. He's almost 80 now. He basically has a mind unlike any I've ever seen. Ever since I've known him, he had a stack of scientific papers, you know, two feet thick that he would carry around with him like an abitur. And he would read every word of those papers. He read across disciplines, across specialties, across scientific domains. So he was able to see decades before anyone else, the patterns in the data. So he was the first one that taught us about the microbiome in the gut. He was the first one that taught us about insulin resistance. He was the first one that taught us about inflammation and disease. He was the first one that taught us about mitochondrial health and that function. He was the first one that helped us understand the role of toxins and detoxification health. So he's not well known, but he is one of the giants in this space. And he, if it wasn't for him, I probably would be in a nursing home or dead right now. And how did you come across the P.K. protocol? I know we discussed it on the panel, talking about how that also influenced and helped you a lot with all the healing that you were going through. Yeah, so as luck would have it, I pretty much had every disease that you could have. I mean, that's not a lifestyle disease. I had mercury poisoning, I had lime disease, I had bbc, I had moltaxis daily, then 1825 old post office house in Massachusetts. It was full of mold. 125 year old barn. It was full of mold. And I had, I got mold, I got mold sickness, which is horrible. And, and, you know, had a catastrophic disease with, with a loss of 30 pounds and was in bed for five months and I almost died. And, and the P.K. protocol is one of the tools that can be used to rebuild your health through essentially giving you an oil change. P.K. is the answer Patricia Cain, the woman who helped develop this. But it's using phosphatotololine, which is a fat that your body is made of. Every cell membrane is made of. You've got 30 plus trillion cells. Every cell has a fatty membrane. Every membrane is made of large part phosphatololine. And so where are toxins stored? They're stored in the membranes. And when you have mold toxicity, the membrane fats, the cell membranes are made inside your cell and something called the peroxosomes. And they get poisoned by mold. So you end up making very funky fats and weirdly weird fats, odd chain fats. And so when you do the P.K. protocol essentially washes out all that and replaces the cell membranes, removes the toxins and helps revitalize your mitochondria and your cell membranes. And also helps revitalize your cells in a way that helps remove a lot of the heavy load of toxins we're all exposed to. So this protocol, we were just talking about it before we started filming. I did the protocol as well. And it was incredibly beneficial. And body bio, who's a company that basically the grandparents Patricia Cain and her husband started. I've been representing them for about four years. And it was body bio that really got means to help them on the space. They taught me so much and inspired so much of my personal journey about building brands and how to communicate and how to make health accessible to people in a way that they could do it at home. They could start healing themselves through chronic disease, through families who had kids with autism, where there was no reversal and then there were offered solutions through lipid replacement therapy. Yeah, it's pretty powerful for things like ALS, for Parkinson's, for dementia, for chronic fatigue, for mold toxicity, for all sorts of things. If you are taking protein powder, you definitely need to hear this. The Clean Label Project tested 160 different proteins from different vendors and brands across the US. And you're going to be shocked at the discovery that they made. Nearly half of the top selling proteins in the US tested high for lead. And if you're somebody who consumes protein powders daily, this is something you have to be concerned about. And to make matters worse, most brands do not value transparency and will not reveal their test data online. 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So if you want something clean, delicious, and bioavailable with transparency go now to get this amazing discount. puri.com slash biohacket. Switch over to PURY's PW1 protein and you can thank me later. Hearing you speak I know you've had a lot of personal health issues and they have always been the ones that kind of helped you find solutions for other people. Yeah, basically. I wouldn't recommend it as a way to learn about stuff. I wish I learned about it in a different way. I've got a scientific paper or textbook but I learned about it in a cellular level and I literally had to reverse engineer my way back to health by understanding every time. I'm going to sell your level what's going on in my body and I didn't just academically learn that I physiologically learned. Physically I had to learn it. I always believe that your soul chooses the journey it's supposed to come on and it's your soul is meant to experience things in a certain way to get the answers. And you had a really unique way of doing it. You got sick and healing yourself is how you've healed millions of other people. Yeah. Yeah. It was there ever a moment in that process that it really got to you and you said I can't continue to do this. This is like I've hit rock bottom. I can't come out of this. This is like I mean it was it was in my 30s when I I had two kids. I was a single father. I didn't quite know it was wrong with me yet. I hadn't quite figured out that I had enormous levels of mercury in my system. And I just was like I don't know if I can do this anymore. I just can't get through another day. I can't take care of my kids and work and push through this fatigue and try to function. I remember working at Kenya Ranch. Thank God I got that job. I got that job just before I got sick. And it was a nine to four job three days a week and I was able to go during lunchtime down and get a massage or do a sauna and a cold plunge so I could kind of function a little bit more in the afternoon. It would give me you know a few hours of functioning. It's really tough. So I there was a moment there where I was like I don't know if I can do this. And would you have to experience that with other people and your family who suffered from severe chronic disease and then kind of coached them out of it? Yeah I mean you know my mother she's incredible was incredible woman. She died in 2017. She didn't really take care of herself that well. Her motto was if she had the urge to exercise she'd lie down till it went away. And she would not really eat well. She loved a lot of sugar and bread and was her favorite thing. And she ended up with kind of diabetes and heart failure and she was a smoke early on so she had lung issues and she ended up one time in the hospital because she had heart failure and was not doing very well. And she was on oxygen and they sent her home but she couldn't really live at home so I moodering with me and I held her prisoner. So she couldn't drive. She couldn't go shopping. You'd make all her meals for her. There was no delivery where I lived. There was no Uber Eats. So I cooked for her. I forced her to eat what I wanted to eat. I bought a stationary bike and I sat with her while she was on oxygen and made her go on the bike with her. And after a few months she lost 30 pounds. She reversed her heart failure. She didn't no longer need oxygen and she was able to go back and live on her own for many years. So I saw that happen. I wish I could do that with most of my patients. Just lock them up and take care of them. Because it's true for them. The truth is that we do have the science and the understanding of how to create health. It's just most people don't apply it to themselves. You also always talk about how health has tied to the quality of your relationships. The people closest to you and you talk about them. Social use book about it today on the panel. And can we spend a little bit more about what that really means? Well, you know, it's interesting when you look at the data on this. Christakis from Harvard published a very famous study in the New England Journal of Medicine where he looked at the Framing Ham data, which is a large data set that's from Framing Ham Institute system going on for decades. And he when he found was that when he looked at the patterns, for example, the obesity, that people were more likely to be overweight if their friends were overweight than if their family was overweight. If your brother's sister was overweight, you're maybe 40% likely to be overweight. If your friends were overweight, you were 171% more likely to be overweight. Your friends that have nothing to do with you genetic. Nothing to do with you. It turns out that your social connections are more important than your genetics. And if you think about it, you're basically as healthy as your five closest friends. If all your friends are drinking beer and eating McDonald's and sitting on the couch or playing video games, that's probably not going to be great for you. But if all your friends are, into hiking and yoga and drinking green juices, you're probably going to be healthier. And so I had this insight after I went to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, as the first medical team on the ground in Porter Prince at the General Hospital. And I got to meet Paul Farmer, who was one of my heroes, incredible man, who basically single-handedly helped transform public health in many of the worst areas of the world by using the power of community. And these areas in Haiti were the severe rates of TB and AIDS, and they were intractable. The drug regeduments are complicated, and they don't have watches, they don't clean water, they don't know what to do. Everybody gave up on them. And so he said, look, it's not a medical problem, it's a social problem. These are social diseases, and they need a social cure. And so he basically created thousands of community health workers, neighbors helping neighbors. And that was what turned the whole thing around. This spread across the world. He did it in Peru, he did it in Russia, he did it in Burwanda, all over the world. And the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, uses his model. But he was using it for infectious disease. And it occurred to me, well, even though we call chronic illness non-communicable diseases, that's wrong. They're not infectious, but they're contagious. And I realized if we could use that model of community health workers or social support for chronic disease, maybe that would work. And so I did some research, and there was some models of it. And then I met Rick Warren, who's a pastor of one of the largest church in America, 30,000 people in this church. He wrote the Purpose-Triven Life, a incredible guy. And he gave me a see me as a patient. And I said, hey, let me let me get to know you. And we had dinner afterwards. I said, I'm Jewish. I don't really know much about churches. Tell me about your church. He's like, yeah, we have 30,000 people. I'm like, wow, that's a mega church. He says, yeah, but we have 5,000 small groups that meet every week to support each other to live better lives. I said, wow, this isn't a mega church. It's thousands of mini churches. And I said, Rick, why don't we put a healthy living program in your church to see how, and I just had this light moment. He's a great, because last week I was baptizing my church. You know, and he realized, I'm fat, and they're all fat, and we need to do something about this. And so we created the Daniel Planet Faith Baseball in this program, which was based on principles of the Bible. The example of Daniel from the Bible chose not to eat the rich food that the king offered him, and ended up being much healthier for it. And we built this faith-based curriculum based on the five F's, faith, food, friends, fitness, and focus, which is your mindset. And 15,000 people signed up the first week. We had the largest event they'd ever had of the church, bigger than the 9-11 service, bigger than the Obama McCain debate. And in one year, they lost a quarter million pounds together. They changed the environment. They changed their refinery and the cafeterias. They were no more pancake. Socials and ice cream socials. And they would have rebreckless for the guys in the morning. They had jogging for Jesus. They had all the thing going on. And it was in credible model. And we scaled as the churches around the world. It was sold millions of copies in the book. And in fact, we won the Christian Book of the Year award, which was quite amazing. I mean, only Jewish Guide ever won the Christian Book of the Year award. There's that other guy, about 2,000 years ago, but we won't count him. And so we had this incredible success. And then I scaled this in a secular way to Cleveland Clinic where we built these small groups where we helped people live better lives by having education and support and coaching. And we found when we did the research, was that there were with the same doctor, during the same conditions, in the same clinic. If it was done in a group, the outcomes were three times better. And the cost was a fraction of the cost. So I think there's a model here. And I actually have a plan in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East to reverse diabetes using this group model to help scale this across the country. Because right here in the Middle East, diabetes is bad in America. It's one in nine or ten people. Here it's one in four. We were talking about that earlier because everything is linked for them for sugar. Yeah. And when you look at this population, you know, 100 years ago or 75 years ago, they were basically roaming around the deserts with their camels. And they were eating dates and food and camel meat and milk. And that was their diet. And now they're eating industrial process food. They're eating tons of starch and sugar. They're moving less. They're, they're, they're meta. It's getting rhythm is off because they, you know, sleep in and, you know, stay up to late. Yeah. So everything is kind of driven their biology in the wrong way. And it's the highest prevalence in the world of diabetes. And yet they have more resources than anywhere else in the world. So it's kind of a mismatch. And I think it's happened so fast and they've incorporated all the the worst parts of Western society, particularly the food. And, and that needs to be fixed. And I think, I think there's a model from the Quran that I've been working on this actually with Matt Princess Remem, we were talking about this. And how do we create a faith-based wellness program in the Middle East or in Saudi Arabia where we actually use the Quran, which is actually has a lot of principles around health within it. It's quite amazing. And, and actually use that as a, as a justification and a rationale to help people understand it. How, how do we go? I say, if you, if you want to serve God, how do you do it when you feel like crap? Right? Right? And I say, if you believe God lives in you, why are you feeding him crap? You know, Mohammed, the dinner. What would you feed him? Exactly. You wouldn't give McDonald's sugar. Looking back and talking about, we talked about the quality of relationships, what was, which relationship, whether positive or negative doesn't always have to be positive, was the biggest catalyst of change for you in your own personal evolution as becoming Mark Hyman today. You mean in my personal evolution as a human being or in my professional? In your personal evolution as a human being, because who you are personally impacts who you've become professionally. It could be good or bad. I would say it's not a living person. Okay. But I would say, there's two huge influences in the way I've really developed and thought about my life. One was Henry Thoreau reading Walden, which really was influenced a lot by the traditional Eastern philosophy of the Veda Zupana Shazam Buddhism. And the second would be Buddha. That was my major in college, was studying Buddhism and understanding that loving compassion is an incredible, important value. Loving kindness is an incredibly important value that service is important. And that our minds are conditioned by what we've gone through in our lives. And that our thoughts are often a byproduct of that that causes suffering. And that our perceptions cause us suffering. And when you look at the word stress, what is stress? Stress is defined as a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego. So for example, if your Woody Allen and someone sticks a gun to your head, you're going to freak out. If you're a James Bond and someone sticks a gun to your head, cool as a cucumber, same insult, different response. So it's really about your mind and your perception and learning how to understand your mind in a way that it doesn't cause you suffering, and how to understand your perceptions in a way that doesn't do that. So there's many practices that help with that meditation and other things. But I think it's really important to understand that most of our suffering is caused by our beliefs and our perceptions and our condition minds and that we can be free of those in order to actually live a life that's fulfilled and connected and full of love. And the reason I asked you that and thank you for sharing that was because so much of your life's work is about freeing people from systems and what people have thrown onto them when it comes to food. So you're talking about liberating your mind and freeing yourself at the same time you're helping liberate so many people from archaic systems that are keeping them sick and trapped. Yeah, someone like Bob Marley said, none but ourselves can free our mind. Exactly. That's it. I have really love setting down with you Mark. Thank you so much for coming into Biohacket and for allowing me and my audience to get to know you on a more personal level. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you for the great questions.