Ep. 111: Changing the World Through Food with Dr. Mark Hyman- Physician, Author and UltraWellness Center Founder

We are delighted to share another presentation from our Co-Mindfulness 2020 Virtual Summit on this episode of Health Gig! We are joined by Dr. Mark Hyman to help us navigate the huge impact food has on our health and the planet’s health. Dr. Hyman is a physician, and a New York Times bestselling author, including his recent book, "Food Fix”. He is also the Head of Strategy and Innovation of Cleveland Clinic's Center for Functional Medicine and the founder of the UltraWellness Center, which brings innovative and collaborative solutions for optimal health to all communities. He also has his own podcast and web series, The Doctor’s Farmacy, to bring wellness and activism to the forefront of policy.

FOLLOW HEALTH GIG:

Learn more about BB&R and Achieving Optimal Health Conference by visiting BBRconsulting.us

Show Notes

[1:58] We don't treat diseases specifically, we enhance health.
[2:08] We are increasingly a sick society, and chronic disease affects over six out of 10 of us in America, four out of 10 out have basically two or more diseases, 75% are overweight, 42% are obese.
[3:24] 88% of us are metabolically unhealthy. That means in English that we all have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and are overweight on some level. And when you have this process in your body going on, particularly in the belly fat, it's very serious because it suppresses your immune system.
[4:53] If you are low in Vitamin D, your risk of getting COVID-19 goes up by 77%. I mean, that is a quick fix that just costs pennies a day to take your Vitamin D pill.
[6:28] Food is medicine, not just calories or energy. It's actually instructions. It communicates to your body, and that's the main thing we use to regulate and create health in the body.
[6:58] Learning how to create health is a far better approach to treating disease than actually treating it directly.
[7:44] Functional medicine is personalized medicine.
[8:13] Disease really occurs as a result of your environment, your lifestyle choices and toxins and other stresses interacting with your genes and your predisposing factors to regulate these basic functions in the body.
[9:01] You may have a predisposition to a disease, but you might not be predestined to it if you actually change the environment in which you're living.
[10:06] What you put into your fork is more powerful than any drug you'll ever find in a prescription bottle.
[11:39] Basically you want to eat food that rots. If it doesn't rot, you probably don't want to eat it.
[13:46] Flour is worse than sugar for your blood sugar.
[15:26] But we want to eat animals that have been raised regenitively, that restore soil, provide humane conditions for the animals and provide higher quality food and grass fed.
[19:13] It used to be 5% of the federal budget for health care in 1970. It's now 30% and is on track to be 100% as our population gets older and sicker and fatter.
[19:57] I realized I couldn't cure diabetes in my office, I had to cure it on the farm, in the grocery store, in the kitchen and the restaurants, that's where diabetes is cured.
[20:18] If we solve food, we solve chronic disease, we solve the causes of the biggest drain and the cause of the biggest amount of our federal deficit, which is the chronic illness burden.
[21:33] Lawmakers are well intentioned, they're trying to do a good job. They're focused on trying to solve problems, but they're not hearing from people like me or other scientists and academics because they're getting enormous amounts of, quote, education and policies written up and regulations written up by the food industry that they provide for them.
[25:23] There's tremendous advances in medicine right now in psychiatry where we used to think these were emotional and psychological problems. We now realize they're often nutritional or metabolic issues. And Harvard has a new Department of Nutritional Psychiatry. Stanford has a department of Metabolic Psychiatry.
[25:50] This is considered a healthy lunch at school. You've got ketchup, which is a vegetable. You've got potatoes which are vegetable, deep-Fried tater tots. You've got deep fried chicken nuggets. You've got milk, which is often low fat or fat free milk, which actually has been shown to actually make kids more hungry and gain weight. And you've got cookies with more sugar. So this is what kids are eating.
[27:39] Over 70% of the evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan were not for war injuries. They were for obesity related complications.
[30:53] If there was a foreign country doing what we're doing to our kids, we'd probably go to war to protect them.
[31:33] Eliminating the marketing was four times as effective as a soda tax and reducing consumption.
[33:54] The entire food system as a whole, is the number one cause of climate change, including deforestation, food waste, the processing, packaging, transportation, the industrial farming, soil erosion.
[35:42] It's not the cow, it's the how.
[36:58] This company called Vanguard Renewables partnered with local dairy farmers who were losing money, built these anaerobic digesters and they throw in the food and they throw in the poop from the cows and it digests it and produces electricity for 1,500 homes.
[37:52] You're always making a choice, right? Eating is a political choice. It's an agricultural choice. It's a health choice.
Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“What you put onto your fork is more powerful than any drug you'll ever find in a prescription bottle.” - Dr. Mark Hyman
“I realized I couldn't cure diabetes in my office, I had to cure it on the farm, in the grocery store, in the kitchen and the restaurants, that's where diabetes is cured.” - Dr. Mark Hyman
“You may have a predisposition to a disease, but you might not be predestined to it if you actually change the environment in which you're living.” - Dr. Mark Hyman

Keywords

#DrHyman #DrMarkHyman #Food #FoodLiteracy #FoodIsMedicine #Health #Wellness #HealthGig #Pandemic #COVID19 #TriciaReillyKoch #DoroBushKoch #MentalHealth #Physical Health #UltraWellnessCenter #FoodFix #HealthyEating #Diet #Exercise #Wellbeing #Innovation #InnovativeMedicine #CoMindfulnessSummit