Fructose is a very toxic compound when it's free and unattached to fruit, and it's in everything. It's in bread. It's in salad dressing. It's in tomato sauce for your pizza.

If you care about health, these are the foods that I think it's okay to say you should never eat. Now we gotta be careful with the word should because you never wanna judge upon people, but you're giving strong recommendations. So let's jump right in and talk about which one of these foods.

Well, the things that I'm talking about, Drew, are not my opinion. These are scientifically proven to cause disease and death. So there there's no doubt in my mind that these should never cross anyone's lips, and they should be banned. In fact, one of them was recently, by the FDA, was considered something not safe to eat anymore, and yet it's been the food supply for a 100 years. Actually, maybe yeah. A little 101 years since 1911. So when Crisco was developed, and that is trans fat or hydrogenated fat. That should never pass your lips.

That's highly proven to cause heart attacks, many other health issues, diabetes, inflammation, and it's toxic. And it's made from vegetable oil that's converted to a solid fat like margarine or shortening through a process called hydrogenation where they put an extra hydrogen atoms. You should never eat that. So if you look at the words on the ingredient list, you have to not look at the nutrition facts label only. You have to look at the ingredient list. The ingredient list will tell you everything that's in there. And and by the way, the ingredient list in America sucks because in Europe, they put what percentage of things are and so you know exactly how much of which thing you're getting, and I'll get into that in a minute. So never eat anything that says hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated, soybean oil, any kind of fat like that.

And just one little note, we'll expand on it later on. It was banned, but through a little bit of a tricky loophole, you can still find it in certain products.

Well, they gave the food companies a long runway to actually gets get rid of it from the food, but it's all over the supermarket. Even though in 2015, it was ruled not safe to eat. There's something called GRAS or g r a s or generally recognized as safe. So it's the even the FDA finally and by the way, it was only after 50 years of data proving that it wasn't safe that finally a guy who's been working on us for 50 years, he was in his nineties, a doctor, a scientist, sued the FDA. And that is that's why they finally had to succumb to getting up because the food companies didn't want it. They had to swap out all kinds of ingredients in their products. Every single processed food had this in it for decades decades. The second is just about as bad and maybe maybe worse and that's high fructose corn syrup.

Now why is that worse than just sugar? Well, high fructose corn syrup has a number of qualities. 1, it is not like regular sugar which is 50 50 glucose and fructose. It's sometimes 55% fructose even up to 75% fructose. And fructose and we've had podcasts about this. You've had, doctor Richard Johnson on your podcast about this. Fructose is a very toxic compound when it's free and unattached to fruit. Right? Fructose comes in fruit, but if it's just free in the product you're eating, which is in sodas and all kinds of sugary drinks and and it's in everything. It's in bread, it's in salad dressing, it's in tomato sauce for your pizza.

I mean, it's it's terrible. It actually has a very bad effect on your liver, causes fatty liver, high triglycerides, inflammation, insulin resistance, and it it's it's it's really driving so many diseases of aging, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia, etcetera. So you don't wanna eat that. The other reason it's bad is because it seems to take a lot of energy to absorb across the gut. And so glucose gets in and sort of naturally gets in. Fructose requires energy and so if you're having a lot of fructose, free fructose, basically depletes the energy in the gut which is required to keep you from having a leaky gut. So your cells in your intestinal lining are stuck together like Legos, but if those Lego junctions come apart, those tight junctions come apart, you get what we call a leaky gut. And leaky gut leads to a whole host of downstream consequences that drive inflammation, because basically protein and from food and particles that shouldn't be getting in and foreign proteins from that and also poop and bacterial toxins get absorbed and your body's like, ah, the immune system starts reacting and you start getting autoimmune disease and allergies and heart disease and cancer and everything.

It's bad. So you really want to stay away from high fructose corn syrup. The other thing that's interesting is when they process it, they often use something called chlor alkali. And I'll tell you a funny story because this this scientist I knew wanted to study high fructose corn syrup And so she asked the makers of high fructose corn syrup, Cargill and and other big food companies, to get a supply so she could test it. They wouldn't give it to her. But then she kind of changed her name and she pretended to be someone who was making a new soft drink or a new beverage. So I'm using this. I needed to to to make my new beverage.

So they're like, okay. Fine. They sent it to her, and then she analyzed it and found almost all the samples had high levels of mercury because chlor alkali used to extract the high fructose corn syrup from the corn actually, is a mercury dependent process. Mhmm. So you might be eating toxic from mercury too. So for a number of reasons, leaky gut, mercury, you know, fatty liver, inflammation, you should never have high fructose corn syrup. And if you get rid of those two things, high fructose corn syrup and trans fats, you literally eliminate 90% of things in the grocery store. I mean, it's true.

The next thing you should think about are what are the toxins in the food that are inadvertently in there? Now in Europe, they have a legislation called the REACH, which eliminates a lot of of toxins from the food supply. But in America the FDA is not very good at protecting us from harmful chemicals. For example, butylated hydroxy toluene is a known carcinogen and it's otherwise known as BHT. It's a common preservative and it's allowed in our food. And in my book food fix, I detail a lot of the science around which of these additives are in food, which are not in foods in Europe, which are in here, and and what the FDA has done about it. And often there's these huge efforts from the food companies to keep these things in the food supply like dyes and artificial colors and and and flavorings because they are actually good for the food industry, but they're not good for people.

And by the way, 46% of the FDA's budget comes directly from user fees and that accounts from food companies and pharmaceutical companies that are paying directly for the budget. I think we're the only country where that's the case.

It's bad. It's bad. And the next category is ultra processed food. And I'll I'll get to where that is in a minute. Essentially, it's highly pulverized ingredients from industrial food. They usually come from 3 ingredients, wheat, corn, and soy, turned in all manner and size, color, shapes of extruded food like substances that shouldn't really be called food. And and if you you you can often tell it's ultra processed food, but if you look at the label and you you don't read the front of the package, but you look at the ingredient list and if you can't tell what it is and has 45 ingredients and you actually can't tell if it's a corn dog or a a Dorito, then you probably shouldn't eat it. Right? And if it has ingredients you can't pronounce or in Latin, things you wouldn't have in your kitchen cupboard, you probably don't want to be eating that.

And now ultra processed food is about 60% of our diet. 67% of kids diets. For 10%, every 10% of your diet that's ultra processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Now I'm not good at math, whatever 66 times 14, that's a lot. It's gonna raise your risk by I don't know what if 75% of of death from eating this food. So in the world globally, it's been connected to 11,000,000 deaths conservatively by the global burden of disease study That's been an ongoing study looking at people's food habits and their and their and their risks of a disease. So we really don't want to be eating an ultra processed food. The next thing you should avoid are artificial sweeteners.

Why? Because for a whole host of reasons they they harm your body. 1, they create damage to your microbiome and lead to increase in obesity and diabetes. 2, they seem to trigger your brain in a way that creates a what we call cephalic insulin response. They're a 1000 times sweeter than regular sugar and they'll trigger your brain to think sugars on the way. It's like Pavlov's bell, you know, it rings the bell, the dog salivates even if there's no food, because it gets conditioned. So the body's conditioned to respond and when you when you ring the bell of sugar on the tongue at that level, it sends a message to the brain and it starts producing secondary metabolic effects like increasing insulin, for example. We call it the cephalic phase insulin response, and that drives you to be hungrier, to eat more. So that's why we look at all the studies, people who drink artificial sweeteners are most are more likely to be overweight, more likely to have diabetes.

It seems to be con you know, counterintuitive, but it actually is what the data show. And lastly, if you can, you really should avoid any of the foods and that are in the dirty dozen foods from the environmental working group or ewg.org. These are the foods and basically fruits and vegetables with the highest amount of pesticides. So like strawberries for example, grapes, you don't want to eat those if they're not organic. Now I love strawberries, but I won't eat them if they're not organic. Now you can't always be perfect with that, but you want to really minimize your intake of pesticides and that's the best way. They also have a clean 15 list, which is if your budget isn't really high, you go, okay, well at least clean 15 doesn't really matter if they're, you know, like avocados. Avocado or a banana or whatever, it doesn't matter.

But if you're eating a strawberry or nectarine or certain, you know, celery, for example, I'm putting celery juice like crazy. If it's not organic, it's just a reservoir of toxins. So I wouldn't really be doing that. So those are the foods you really want to avoid at all costs. Then there's the ones you want to kind of limit. Flour. Any kind of flour. Think of it as a drug.

It's it's like sugar, it's tequila, it's wine, it's a drug. And you you can have it, but you wanna make sure, 1, you don't overdo it. And the Americans are eating about a £133 of flour every year. It's a lot of flour. It's almost a little bit, maybe a third of a pound a day per person. We have muffins, bagels, you know bread, pastas, right? I mean it's just we have so much flour and that drives your body to think that there's high levels of sugar because this flour is actually worse than sugar for your blood sugar. So So it spikes your blood sugar more than table sugar, so you really want to eliminate that. The next thing you wanna limit is really sugar.

We eat about a 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and a lot of it's high fructose corn syrup as I mentioned. We don't wanna be drinking liquid sugar calories. Again, think of it sugar as a recreational drug. Do I eat sugar? Of course I do, but I do it in limited amounts. I do it in the context usually a meal. I don't have it on empty stomach. It prevents the spikes of blood sugar. You also want to avoid refined oils.

All the highly processed refined oils. Yes we can use oils like avocado oil, olive oil, those are fine. That is good. But all these highly refined oils that are from cold vegetable oils, I mean they're made through solvents and hexane and high temperatures and they oxidize easily, they're very unstable, and they can be linked to increase inflammation and gut issues and and so forth. So I try to really get rid of those and those are all in the process food. When you go out to eat, they usually use these crappy oils. So you really want to be careful. And the last category is GMO foods.

Why is GMO bad? We can argue that all day long. But here's what we know about GMO foods. 1, there's a lot of glyphosate. 70% of the agricultural chemicals used today in the world is glyphosate. What's glyphosate? It's an herbicide. Herbicide that causes damage to the soil, so kills the microbiome of the soil, which is needed to actually grow healthy plants that are nutrient dense. It also destroys our microbiome and it's been linked to cancer. There's been, I think, 14,000 lawsuits and 1,000,000,000 of dollars in settlements from Monsanto's glyphosate around them.

And and so you want to really avoid that whenever possible and that that's by avoiding GMO foods. Now we we may also potentially have other factors that GMO may cause adverse effects in humans, but you know, I think there's still a lot of debate about that. But we know there's a lot of reasons and if you're eating GMO Foods, you're contributing to the destruction of the planet and the degradation of the environment and the destruction of soil and climate change. So you might as well be driving a Hummer if you're gonna eat GMO Foods.

You heard it here first. Mark, let's dive back into a couple of these top ones that you had. Trans fats and high fructose corn syrup. You know, you said 90% of the grocery stores. So what are some common products or types of products just to make it real for people that would have trans fats in them still to this day.

I mean, anything. I mean, you know, it's shocking to me, Drew. I I I go I go in the grocery store. I'm like, wait a minute. Isn't this 7 years ago that the government said this is gonna kill you and it's still on the shelves? I I don't get it like cool whip or and then they might be swapping it out so I I I can't be a 100% sure because I haven't been like on every product but it's basically in any kind of processed foods. So any kind of baked goods, any I mean it was in been in bread, it's been in in in all kinds of, baked and and cooked goods that people are are buying, whether it's frozen meals or anything pizza. I mean I once I once took my son to the grocery store because he said dad there's nothing to eat when he was a teenager. There's nothing to eat in the house, you know.

There's nothing to eat in the house. There's plenty of food to eat in the house. There was nothing junky. And I said okay, well go to the grocery. I wanna have friends over. I wanna watch a game, but there's nothing to eat. I'm like okay, Let's go to the store and you can buy anything you want. One rule, no trans fat.

Pizza, cookies, whatever you want. Buy whatever you want, no trans fat. He couldn't find anything. Like, there was almost nothing in the grocery store he could find. It was like 10 years ago, but it was like terrible. So I think I think we really we need to really be careful about looking at the labels on that.

And just for reference, because we have everybody here, you know, you were in a documentary fed up. Yeah. And a big part of that was how sugar is driving all sorts of downstream effects that are impacting people's health. We say sugar, but that sugar could show up in high fructose corn syrup. You know, you talked about it here, but it could show up under a lot of other names that are there. What are some other names that high fructose corn syrup could be disguised as,

in terms of corn syrup is usually high fructose corn syrup, but the thing is with sugar, it's fascinating. In Europe, it it and it said you have to say the percent of everything on the label. In America, you just have to put what's the most abundant ingredient first in order of so you could have, know, 5 ingredients, but, you know, you could have like 1 per the last ingredient would be 1% and the first ingredient could be 95%. So you don't really know the amount. So what they've done is food companies have come up with 5 or 6 different kinds of sugars that they'll put in a particular food like a cereal or a cookie so they don't have to have the first ingredient be sugar. Because it's like it's barley malt and it's, you know, maltodextrin and it's, you know, it's, you know, all kinds of weird names that people use for sugar that that are actually just the same thing, that are made a little bit different, but then the food companies put them all in this food that makes it look like sugar is not the main ingredient. But like cereal is a great example. There might be 4 or 5 different kinds of sugar, corn syrup and cane sugar and you know whatever, high fructose corn syrup and like and and you and you get the cereal at 75% sugar.

So you really have to be careful to look at all the different head names of sugar and there's like 50 different names. I can't remember them all now, but if you Google 50 different names for sugar, you'll see all the different names for sugar.

One of the things you've talked about is in Europe also. Again, you know, just looking at what other countries have done, ways that they're trying, it's not perfect, but to better protect their, population and encourage literacy for nutritional facts is they have a red light, green light, yellow light system, kinda like the traffic lights. Right? And another thing that they do is for sugar, they also say what percentage of the daily value it is. We're the only country that doesn't have a daily recommended value when it comes to sugar. So people often don't even know how much sugar, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or something else, how much sugar they're actually consuming in their day.

Yeah. I mean, the the the, US dietary guidelines say we should have less than, you know, 5% of our diet is sugar and yet it's not on the label. In fact, it was a huge fight, under Obama because Michelle Obama wanted to change the food labels and put the amount of added sugar on the label, but the food companies didn't want that because they didn't want people to know how much sugar they were adding. Because it could say carbohydrates 30 grams and it could be, you know, a lot of fiber, could be good stuff, but but when they actually have to put in added sugars, it actually shows how much they add to the food. So the problem is all these foods in order to taste good because they're just made from garbage, they have to add a ton of sugar or a ton of salt or a ton of fat. And that's basically what makes people sick and overweight. So, Mark, one

of the things that the food industry will often say, and I'd love your take on it because it's part of the problem in the mess that we're in, is they'll say, well, if we didn't make this hyper salty, hyper sugary item, somebody else would go make it instead. So we just have to give the people what they want.

Yeah. I I I love when they say that. You know, the food industry is very good at controlling the memes and the mantras that are culturally pretty much out there for people. 1 is, in order to lose weight, you have to eat less and exercise more. Eat less, exercise more. It's all about calories in calories out, and the implication that is it's your fault you're fat. Like, you're just a lazy glutton and if you stop eating so much and start exercising off the couch, move your butt, you lose weight. That's just a big fat lie and the science doesn't support that in any way.

The food is information, calories information, and and eating a 1,000 calories of broccoli or a 1,000 calories of high fructose corn syrup profoundly different in the way they affect your biology. Everybody can understand that. The second is that they they say we're just giving people what they want. Well, guess what? If I stood on the corner and handed out cocaine, everybody'd want that. If I was selling $2.99 bags of cocaine in McDonald's, you think that would sell out like that? Of course, it would. Oh, we're just giving our customers what they want. They want a little heroin. They want a little cocaine, but that's ridiculous.

These are highly addictive foods, and the food industry is so smart about designing foods to hook us. Now, there's a book by Michael Moss, New York Times reporter called Salt, Sugar, and Fat. It was actually my first podcast, and he describes the ways in which the food industry has created taste institutes where they hire quote craving experts to create what they call the bliss point of food in order to create heavy users. They literally use this terminology heavy users like a heavy drug user, right? And and so they they design foods for the right mouthfeel, the right crunch, the right flavor, the right the right stimulation of the dopamine in the brain which is the addiction center. And so these foods are highly addictive and you crave them, you want more of them the more you eat. I mean nobody nobody is going to eat 25 avocados, but very often people can eat 25 Chips of Hawaii cookies. Right? So that's because of how it affects our brain. And I think I think if we we really look at the science of this, we have to sort of start holding these companies accountable to the foods they're producing.

We we we limited smoking, we had taxes. We had I mean, we have alcohol. We have alcohol taxes. We have restrictions and so far that won't be okay and can't do. These are biologically deadly substances that are rampant in our culture that that the majority of people are addicted to. It's some way or another. Some very very much so and some less so.

And I think the important part of that, and that goes back to the title of this episode, which can seem a little bit click baity again, but we did it to get people's attention to listen to this conversation. It's actually harder in my opinion, and I've seen you treat a bunch of patients and know many of them. Even my mom is actually is a patient of the Ultra Wellness Center. She had a great experience there. It's so because these foods are so highly addictive, if you try to practice moderation around them I'm talking about the ones in the first category, High fructose corn syrup, trans fats, and especially the artificial sweeteners and the ultra processed fruits. If you try to do and practice what's called the moderation approach of, okay, I'm gonna just have a little bit. First of all, a little bit means different to every person, but secondly, you're gambling a little you're gambling because you don't know how these foods are gonna play with your own level of addiction. And it's actually kinda hard to stop eating them, that whole, Chips Ahoy or Pringles commercial, once you start, you can't stop.

It's kinda true.

They may be bruised. I ate the whole thing. That was the Lay's potato chips. I can't believe I ate the whole thing.

You eat a little bit. These foods are addictive, and they just keep on pulling you back back in.

Yeah. It's so true. And I think, you know, the science of this is really compelling. I'll just sort of break it down a little bit, but, you know, my friend David Ludwig who's at Harvard is one of the most brilliant scientists clinical trialists in the world, has done a number of really elegant studies looking at this. One was he a group of overweight guys and he fed them what seemed to be identical milkshakes on different days. So they were the same in protein, fat, and carbohydrate. Same percentages, same amount of fiber. Exactly the same, except for one difference.

1 of them and they tasted the same. 1 of them had a very quickly absorbed carbohydrate that spiked blood sugar and the other one didn't. It was much more a slow carb. Let's call it a slowly absorbed carbohydrate. And they then they fed the same guys different milkshakes on different days. And then they tracked their blood and they looked at functional MRI imaging. And when they look at their blood, the guys who had the high sugar spiky carb, their insulin went up, their sugar went up, their cholesterol went up, their triglycerides went up, their cortisol went up, their adrenaline went up, it was like a stress response. When you eat sugar it literally creates a stress response.

So when you eat a lot of sugar, it's like being chased by a tiger. Your body doesn't know the difference and so cortisol causes all sorts of problems, causes diabetes, causes you to have dementia, it causes you to gain weight, it causes you to lose muscle. It's really bad, causes your bones to dissolve. And this is what happens when we eat sugar. So then he took these guys and put them in these MRI machine and looked at their brains before and after the high sugar milkshake. And they found that the ones who had the high spiky sugar milkshake, the area of their brain that's the addiction center called the nucleus accumbens, lit up like a Christmas tree. Essentially, it's the addiction center that gets stimulated by cocaine or heroin or anything else that is addictive. And so it it proved that from a biological perspective it's addictive.

And there's studies in animal, I wrote the 10 day detox diet which I catalog a lot of the research but that was like 10 years ago almost 8 years ago I wrote that book. And they found for you know with animals, if the if a rat was connected to an IV cocaine and they could hit the lever and give themselves IV cocaine, they would literally always switch over to sugar if given the chance. And they would work 8 times harder to get the sugar than the cocaine. And they would another experiment was kind of a terrible experiment, but they put them in this, cage with an electric shock floor. And whenever they ate the sugar, they gave them electric shock. And they kept eating the sugar despite the fact they were getting shocked over and over. It's like getting electric shock therapy while you're eating sugar, and it's think about it. I mean, how does someone get to £500? Not in one day.

It's slow, and they keep eating the stuff even though it's making them sick, even though it's making them incapacitated. They can't stop themselves.

Their whole system, including their brain, has been hijacked. Yeah. And they're more likely to be depressed, which also makes them feel like there's no hope, and one thing leads to to the next. Alright, Mark. Let's pivot a little bit to this category, which is the highly minimized. If we can avoid it, amazing. It's tough sometimes, and it takes a little bit of education, but it's really worth it. And one of those things that you mentioned previously, one of those topics is these gums and emulsifiers.

So first of all, what are they and what are they used for when it comes to processed foods?

So they're these are basically thickeners. Right? They they they thicken stuff. They're used in milks. All the nut milks have them often. There's ones that don't, so you have to really be conscious like carrageenan and xanthem gum and and what's turns out that these thickeners seem to have a really bad effect on the gut, and they damage the gut and cause what we call leaky gut. And they've been linked to allergy and autoimmunity and all kinds of other issues, digestive problems. So I'm very cautious about these various emulsifiers and thickeners. And I read an article in a medical journal not that long ago, which is like, holy cow.

These are these are really a problem. There's one, and this is not on the label, which is almost in most processed food, which is kinda weird that they don't put on the label, but it's called it's called microbial transglutaminase. Wow. And and this is a compound that sounds like a big fancy name, but transglutaminase is from gluten. Transglutaminase. So it comes from gluten and it it literally manufacturing gluten, which makes things stick together. Remember make bread and use a flour and it gets sticky? That stickiness is gluten. That's what they call it glue because it's glue.

It's like glue. Right? They use these on envelopes to actually when you lick envelopes to seal the envelope, they would use gluten to actually make the envelope stick. Right? So it's sticky. And and so they take bacteria and they kind of genetically modify them to produce this microbial transglutaminase, but it's not on the labels. So it's in a lot of processed food and it's basically like concentrated gluten you're eating. If you're gluten sensitive, it's a problem. Even if you're not, if you eat a lot of this stuff, it damages your gut. Even healthy people, a little bit gluten they can handle.

You get a little leaky gut whenever your body handles it. But for the most part, like, gluten is just not good for your gut.

You know, the thing about these and why education is so key is I can remember, let's say, like, 15 years ago, 12 years ago, they're starting to become commercially available, almond milk and nut milks that were out on the market. You can go to most grocery stores and pick them up. Yeah. At that time, anyone that you looked at, they all had carrageen. I can't I can't think of anyone except if somebody made it themselves at, like, a store or, like, a small batch or raw almond milk or the ones that you make at home, but all of them had it. Now through all this education and the fact that companies are listening. Right? We're you say, like, we're voting with our dollars. Companies are listening.

I counted in my, Los Angeles Whole Foods store. There's now 3 or 4 commercially available, almond milks and nut milks that are available in, like, the refrigerated section that have no emulsifiers and no fillers. Yeah. And so this is why it's so important because we, as the population that's eating all these foods, we learn about these things and we speak up and we share the knowledge, the companies will change and they'll start making products that we actually care about and want

to consume. Absolutely. I mean, we have to be conscious of what we're eating. We have to be discerning. And and and when you start to to take the meta framework, which is the framework I take of functional medicine which basically has reframed food not just as calories but as information, as code, as instructions that upgrades or downgrades your biology with every bite. So if you're eating information in processed food or other bad ingredients that's doing harm to your body, why would you do that? And it doesn't necessarily cause harm over decades. It could cause harm immediately. Like food is the most important chemical signal that's instructing our body what to do every minute, instructing every cell.

So eating food that's causing inflammation, damaging your microbiome, impairing your detox system, causing problems your circulation, causing hormonal dysregulation, causing problems making energy in your cells. Why would you do that? So once you begin once you begin to understand what food is, you only want to eat the right information. I mean you wouldn't go to go to your take your nice car and put in crappy gasoline, it's watered down or got junk in it. Your car is not gonna run. Why would we put junk in our bodies?

People often underestimate how much processed foods they're eat they're eating. So are there any tips or tricks or hacks that you have? And and one of the main reasons why, and I bring this up, is that you talk to most people. Most people think that they, a lot of studies and surveys have shown this is that most people tend to

I think

they're healthy. That they're the average. Right? So if you say the average American is eating a £128 of sugar every year, most people think that they're better than the average. Right? But most people can't be better than the average because that would make the average true. So what are some questions that people can be asking themselves to get a real good sense of how much of this process and ultra processed food is in their diet?

I mean, I I kinda joke because I speak a lot at churches and I said it's really simple to figure out what to eat. Ask yourself, did God make this or did man make this? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did God make an avocado? Yes. It's pretty simple. So what you're eating should be food that you can recognize on the label. Now it could be packaged or processed, but you should actually recognize all the ingredients. If it says tomatoes, water, and salt, then the can of tomatoes, fine. If it says sardines and olive oil and salt, you know what all those things are.

But if it's got 45 ingredients, I mean, I I tell this to you off when I was in Haiti during the earthquake in 2010, and for the 1st few days, we had no food and we were just I bought a few CLIF bars and racing CLIF bars and starving and working, you know, 20 hours a day. And finally, the military showed up the 82nd airborne and I'm like, hey, guys, you know, you can't eat food because we're starving. All the doctors came barely work because we haven't eaten. And like, yeah, yeah, we'll get to the MREs. And so I went with one of the soldiers to the back of their truck and I look into the different ones, and I was like, oh, I I needed something kind of comforting because it was very stressful. You can imagine. It was like 300,000 people dead, 300,000 people wounded, and it was we were in the epicenter of all that. And I saw this meal, it's a chicken and dumplings, and I'm like, oh, that sounds good dumplings.

That's something comforting. I'm gonna eat that. So I brought it back to the back of the, OR where we fixed, you know, how to sort of makeshift OR and it it it it's kind of cool because they have these thermogenic systems in there which it kind of heats by itself just like with the chemical reaction. And so as I'm waiting for it to heat up, I'm like looking at the package and I'm reading a label and I'm really like there's like literally like a 100 ingredients. It's like I I'm not even exaggerating and I couldn't find chicken. It was a chicken like substance. So you don't wanna be eating that.

This is the part of the podcast where we answer some of the questions from the community, the folks who listen and follow you on social media, and And you can go to doctor hymen.com and send in your question that we potentially could answer in a future episode. So the first question is, how quickly do unhealthy foods start to have a negative impact on our bodies, And how long does that impact remain?

Well, it depends on the food. It depends on what you're eating. But most people don't realize that, oh, they go up by junk over many years. It's gonna cause problems. I'll gain weight. I'll get diabetes, but, you know, it's not an immediate issue really. The truth is it is. Literally, with every single bite of food you eat, it's code, it's messages.

And what does it do? It changes your gene expression literally in real time, in seconds to second time, it changes which genes are turned on or off. You can turn on the disease genes or the health genes. It controls inflammation. So you literally can see inflammation go up or down. Literally, depending what you're eating with every bite. Your microbiome changes in real time. Bacteria multiply like this, zillions of times a second, and they're changing what you're feeding them affects which ones grow and which ones don't grow. You can be growing a whole crop of bad bugs in your gut that causes disease or you could be growing a crop of of good bugs that helps you stay healthy.

It regulates your hormones in real time, your brain chemistry in real time, your all of your mitochondrial function, your energy production, all of it is regulated by what you're eating not over decades, but literally over seconds. So you have the power to change how you feel by changing what you eat and as a doctor, Drew, you know, I've had a very you know blessed career and I I'm very lucky to have seen a lot of people who are very self aware and who are very you know, well-to-do and they they they really do want to take care of themselves and eat well. And and it's shocking to me how few of those people have ever connected the dots between what they eat and how they feel. So they might have runny nose, they might have bloating, they might have a headache, they might have skin issues, they might have this, they might have that. And they have no idea that it's connected to what they're eating even though if they paid attention, they would notice, oh, when I eat this, I feel this. When I eat that, I feel this. So people just disconnected from their food and health connection, and and I think that's one of the most important things to recognize. I mean, I literally I literally got a text from a friend of mine who is like 65 years old and she's like, you know, I'm basically healthy but I've got a little this, I've got a little that, I got a little achy, a little tired, a little energy, a little extra weight on me.

And I said look, so I wanna come see you, go to work. I'm like, save your money. I said, here's the 10 day detox. Just do this for 10 days. Just get rid of all the bad stuff, put in all the good stuff. Just eat your whole food, get rid of the junk and processed food, all these things we're talking about. She texts me back. You're right.

You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. I was like she's like, I think I might do this for my rest of my life. Because she had such a quantum jump in her well-being by simply changing what she ate.

And it does sometimes take that dedicated plan that somebody does because we don't know often how good we can feel until we have a contrast.

Exactly.

So having that contrast and doing something like following the book, you know, peak and diet, I think there's a plan inside of there. Yes. 10 day detox, your book.

Yes.

There's a plan inside of there. You do a plan like that, you increase your body's interception. Right? Seeing the difference between living one way and being another way. It's kinda like sometimes I'll hop in an Uber and they'll be, like, 15 air fresheners inside.

Ugh.

And you get hit with this sort of wave of artificial smells and fragrances, and you're like, oh my gosh. Like, I get a headache. I don't feel good. My nose starts getting a little stuffy, maybe runny. And I get out, and I breathe fresh air, and I'm like, I feel so much better. Yeah. Right. You need that contrast sometimes, and doing something like a 10 day reset, 10 day detox is a good way to do that.

Well, you know, doc the the the comment I often get from my patients is doctor Hyman, I didn't know I was feeling so bad until I started feeling so good.

That's key.

And I think I think it's like the frog in the boiling water. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it'll jump right out. But if you put him in cold water and you slowly turn up the heat, it'll boil to death. Right? That's what we are like. We literally slowly boil to death by doing the things we do without paying attention to actually how it's affecting us.

Alright, Mark. The next one comes from our doctor Hyman Plus community, which is your members access community. And, actually, we have a few members here, Alan, Paul, and Judy, that are watching and, on FaceTime, on the computer that's right next to us. And, Paul, one of the members asked, what is the relationship between ultra processed foods and farm bill subsidies?

Oh, boy. Well, good news. I wrote a book on it. It's called food fix. How to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time. And the truth is our agricultural policies foster all the wrong foods. They support the production of commodities, corn, wheat, and soy, in industrial ways that destroy the soil, then destroy the ecosystem, cause biodiversity loss, climate change, and and obviously the use of pesticides, herbicides, which you know cause all kinds of downstream consequences to the environment, lots of fertilizer, which runs off into rivers and streams and creates dead zones, killing 100 of thousands of metrics, tons of fish in the Gulf of Mexico, and there's 400 of those around the world. It's just it's a disaster.

So our policies basically promote growing all the wrong stuff and not the right stuff. Thank God, you know, I've started a nonprofit called Food Fix and it's a Food Fix campaign to change policymakers ideas about what's good and what's bad because they're only hearing from the food industry. They're only hearing from big ag. They're not hearing from scientists and doctors and people who really understand these issues. And we literally just got a $1,000,000,000 which sounds like a lot, but we need like probably 300 times that. A $1,000,000,000 allocated to climate smart agriculture. So now we're gonna be paying farmers to do the right thing. So the farm bill, as it is right now, is a disaster, but it's starting to actually be slowly massaged and changed to actually incorporate strategies to help farmers do the right thing.

In other words, cover crops. If a farmer was getting subsidies from the government or crop insurance, whatever they get, if they want to cover their land with crops during the off season so their soil wouldn't blow away and cause soil loss, and by the way, we've lost a third of our topsoil since the industrial revolution, and a third of all carbon in the atmosphere, right? Of the you know trillion tons of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere, 300,000,000,000 of that is from loss of soil and the organic matter in soil. So it's a big deal. They so the the farmer can't even plant cover crops just to protect the soil because he'd be penalized by our current agricultural farm bill. So the good news is that's starting to change. We're working hard to change it. If anybody hears this and they wanna get behind this and wanna help us, please help us. We need we need donations.

We need support. You can go to foodfix.org and and learn more about what we're doing.

Alright. The next question, also from a member of our Doctor. Hymer Plus community, is from Judy. And she asks, how do we drive consumer change when organic is expensive and the food manufacturers are so powerful?

Yeah. Well, it's really the Rockefeller Foundation did a wonderful report called the true cost of food. And they basically estimated that for everything you buy in the grocery store, it costs 3 times that in terms of its impact on our society. In terms of chronic disease, in terms of this fact impact on education, learning, on on national security because of military being unfit to fight because they're so unhealthy from the food they're eating. It affects climate, the environment, and obviously the economy, And also social justice issues, there's all these layers of issues that are are downstream secondary consequences of the artificially low prices of our food. So if you go buy a soda, it shouldn't be a dollar, it should be a $100. And how do we let's take take corn for example. Corn is in everything.

It's the most ubiquitous product in America and it's in every processed food. We pay for it I think 4 times. 1st, we pay in terms of crop insurance and we sort of pay for farmers to to grow the food. 2nd, we pay for the environmental damage in society, loss of biodiversity, climate change, the destruction of fish populations, nitrogen fertilizer, all that. Then we then we we turn all that junk into processed food, the food companies do that, but then the government buys the processed food for the poor. There's 46,000,000 people on snap or food stamps and 75% of that is processed food and most has from corn. So we're we're literally doling out money to buy this junk and then we paid for it on the back end through Medicare Medicaid when people get diabetes and obesity and food related illnesses. So you know, yes, organic is more expensive now, but if we actually had an accounting and a reckoning of the true cost of food, it would be much cheaper.

And so what we're working to do is trying to align the cost with the real cost of the food And so we'll I think we'll see over time regenerative, food come down, organic food come down, and and start to sort of see a little bit of a balance in what's happening. And, you know, there's a hierarchy. Right? If you if you can't eat organic, I understand it's a budget issue. You have to realize that if you just switch to real food and get off of processed food, that's a huge step. That's like 90% of the way there. And then if you really, you know, don't want to be poisoned by pesticides, stay away from the dirty dozen foods or if you're gonna buy them just buy those organic that we talked about earlier. So really, you know, we we can do it. People can do it and and and the data is very clear on this.

If you look at at studies have been done on whether it costs more to eat healthy, The answer was not really. Some studies show it's the same, some studies show it's, you know, maybe 50¢ more a day. And I work with a family. I've told this story many times in South Carolina as part of the movie fed up. They lived on food stamps and disability, $1,000 a month, family of 5 lived in a trailer, never ate a real food in their life, literally. I mean everything was processed, packaged, boxed, frozen, canned. I showed them how to cook a meal, simple meal, they live in one of the worst food deserts in America. Within a year, they've lost £200 as a family because they were able to figure out how to eat real food and I gave them a guide called good food on a tight budget, which is food that's good for you, good for your wallet and good for the planet from the environmental working group.

It's available. So what cuts of meat are the cheapest? What vegetables are the cheapest? What nuts and seeds are the cheapest? What beans are the cheapest? Eat real food. It's not that expensive. Mark Mark Bittman, who wrote for the New York Times and has written a lot about food and he's a great chef. He he did a great article in New York Times years ago, where he talked about how if you wanna take your family and feed them a home cooked meal, live a roast chicken and vegetables and a salad and potato baked potato. It's cheaper than taking your family to go to McDonald's.

When you have the education to know how to cook. And that's a big part of what you've also been advocating for. And you guys have done a little bit at Cleveland clinic is doing pilots of actually having our medical system be a little bit more involved in the education of especially disenfranchised communities who maybe haven't had a a few generations of individuals who showed them how to cook in the first place.

They've been they've been completely completely, culturally appropriated, and their food sovereignty has been usurped by the food industry and even by the government and the government pro food programs, which are often well meaning but ill doing. So like food stamps is a well meaning program. We don't want people to be hungry and starving, but meanwhile we're feeding all this food that's killing them.

Right. I think you've said it before like the number one purchased food on food stamps is soda.

Soda. It's 10%. 7 I think it's what is it? I think it's 7 billion servings a year. No. No. I think it's 30,000,000,000 servings a year of soda for the poor the government pays for. The number one revenue in America for Coca Cola, for soda is from the government, from food stamps.

It's mind blowing and really it brings up that this is kind of like when you shift and make this sort of a political conversation, it's a bipartisan issue. Right? Because you have two elements of this. You have the personal accountability, which is often what traditionally, like, conservatives are really interested in. And personal accountability is a huge part of it. We have to realize that we're a part of the problem. So that means that we're part of the solution. And the other side, let's say it's the progressive side, liberal side, is often talking about, well, if we don't do something to help people who are in these disenfranchised places to actually learn more or get better access or more education, it's hard for them to, quote, unquote, lift themselves up from their bootstraps. And it's the combination of both of those.

It's a combination of both of those that actually truly makes a difference, and that's where compassion and empathy and also the understanding of of a functional medicine approach to changing our food system.

You know, I had a really interesting dinner once in, Brooklyn with the medical director of Bedford Stuyvesant Health Center, which is a very underserved area, disenfranchised as you mentioned, mostly African American. And there's an African American doctor, woman who'd been working there all life. And she said, Mark, what is the biggest predictor of, you know, disease and obesity? And I was like, well, you know, I don't know. Maybe it's just it's just access or error. And she said it's education. It's education. If you take people who are who have come from nothing and had no education on food and made a lot of wealth, they're still health their health really is still very bad because they haven't figured out what to eat. They're still eating based on what they were programmed to eat as kids.

And so the the food industry knows this. They hook these kids early. Why why are they in all the schools? Why is, you know, why is probably 70% of schools have, you know, processed food from big food companies in the in the cafeteria for these kids. Shouldn't be allowed. There's like McDonald's Monday and Taco Bell Tuesday and Wendy's Wednesday, and it's like it's Pizza Hut Thursday. I don't know. It's like crazy. But that's what's in their schools today.

That's what kids are eating.

I had Robert doctor Robert Lustig, who's a contemporary of yours and also in the movie Fed Up, on my podcast yesterday. And one of the things that he was saying is that, because the history of school lunches was that the government basically said to schools, like, this cannot be something that you just lose money on. You actually have to use it as a way to cover your own budget. So these schools all started going these school districts started going to the big food companies like Cisco and, you know, the different ones that are out there and said, well, you know, do you think that you can help us? And they came in and they said, absolutely. We can totally help you. We'll lower the budget. You'll actually make money from it. And by the way, you'll get all this extra cafeteria space to then use that for classroom space.

Okay. Maybe good intention, maybe nefarious, but let's say that's what happened.

Yeah.

Then a lot of these schools are now trying to make their own food and trying to take control back of their cafeteria. But they actually don't even have the space anymore because they've reconverted all that kitchen space and food prep space. So they're beholden to the food industry.

It's completely true, Drew. I mean, most schools have deep fryers and microwaves. That's it. And that's they get highly processed food, they just can be deep fried or microwaved and there's no kitchens, they don't cook. And the food industry has really designed that so that basically the kids are we have today are growing up on food that's destroying their brains, destroying their health, why we see, I I think, 40% of kids overweight. 40%. 4 out of 10 kids are overweight. I mean, there was that one overweight kid in my class.

That was it. Everybody else was skinny. Now it's not like that, and now we're seeing diabetes in little kids because of this. And the truth is that there are people working to change these school systems, and one of them is a good friend of mine, Jill Shaw, who started something called MyWay Cafe in Boston, where she saw how these underserved communities in Boston in inner city were eating horrible food. These kids were just not doing well. They had ADD, behavioral issues, health issues. Actually, you know what? We can fix this. And so she said, I'm gonna do a pilot.

I'm going to pay for a kitchen, and I'm gonna train the staff in the kitchen, and I'm gonna hire top chefs to make the yummiest meals and foods and recipes for these kids, and we're gonna see if this works. And so she she did it. And the the amazing thing is she did it within the school lunch budget, which is not very much. And she did it within the government's dietary guidelines for what school lunch has to be. And it was so successful that the kids ate all the food, there was no waste, they loved it, and then she formed a partnership with the mayor of Boston and has scaled this through dozens of schools within Boston, and this is really something that can be scaled across the country. And they can form a private, you know, public partnership where they're able to get these kitchens converted and the staff trained, and the staff was so much happier. They were felt like they were doing something meaningful and useful rather than just deep frying and microwaving stuff. So it's really amazing when people look at these problems and think about solutions that there really are solutions out there.

Absolutely. There's another team that you're part of called the Eat Real, is the name of the group, the nonprofit eat real dot org, and they're doing a similar thing in the Bay Area. So that's another thing that we'll link in the show notes. If you wanna support any of these programs, those are 2 great organizations to do exactly that. Alright, Mark. We got a couple more questions, and then we'll don't go into our recap. So one of the questions that we have here is that are vegetable oils really that bad? What is the primary impact that they have on the body?

Well, I you know, one of my good friends and someone I deeply respect, well, he was one of the leading nutrition scientists in the world, doctor Daresh Mazafar, and he's the dean of Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy. And we agree on, like, 99% of everything, except for this. And he he basically says that the science shows that people who consume more of these vegetable oils do better. They have less heart disease, they live longer, less chronic illness. The problem with these studies is that there are large population studies, which show correlation but not causation. So we can't prove that they work. Now there are mechanistic studies, there are interventional studies, and they're kind of all over the board. Some of them show they cause a lot of oxidation and inflammation in the body.

Some show they cause a lot of microbiome and gut issues. Some show they cause, you know, other harmful effects. But I think I take a more of an evolutionary approach to this. You know, how how was our biology designed? What works for us? Why are we now facing this pandemic of diabetes and obesity? I mean, when I when I graduated from medical school, there was not a single state that had an obesity rate over 20%. Now there isn't one that has one under and most are 40. 40% is the average now almost. And when I was born, there was 5% obesity. Now there's 42% obesity, soon it's gonna be 50% obesity.

Not just overweight, 75% overweight. It's just a disaster. So the question is from an evolutionary perspective, you know, what should we be eating? We should be eating food as close to what our bodies evolved to eat, which is whole real unprocessed food. Now we did eat olive oil. We had butter for centuries. We've had olive oil for 1000 of years. I mean, these are these are ancient foods that are minimally processed. Olive oil, you know, they crush the olives and the olive comes out and the olive oil comes out.

And you wanna get, you know, extra virgin olive oil, which really is a these kind of first pressing of the olive oil. The problem is most of these oils are made from grain like corn oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, canola oil, and they're they're made in a highly processed way using heat and solvents to extract the oils which causes them to oxidize and and can potentially cause a lot of harmful effects. So I I don't think we should be consuming the volume we are. We are consuming literally a 1000 times more soybean oil than we did a 100 years ago, which we've had in when we eat soybeans, you'd get soybean oil. If you're gonna eat plant based oils, eat the plant, eat the nuts, eat the seeds, eat the corn, eat the soybeans. Stay away from all this other stuff.

And I think it's also it's it's a fun thing to do that if you were somebody who's consuming a lot of these, vegetable oils that are there, try doing 30 days without them. Clean up your diet. Do something like a whole 30 program or a 10 day detox and see how you feel. When I eat at a restaurant or a place and I start getting a little bit of a headache or I don't feel that good and I go and talk to I'm like, what do you guys use in the kitchen? Just curious. Like, oh, we cook with canola oil.

Yeah.

Right? I'm like, that's why I feel like I have a headache. I don't that's why I feel like my nose is stuffy. That's why I feel like, you know, things are Yeah.

And then a lot of them are GMO and then, you know, a lot of the toxins are fat soluble. And so so often these they're they're they're highly concentrated sources of of environmental chemicals too.

Right. And it tends to be that the people that advocate that the vegetable oils are not that bad tend to be individuals who come from more of a traditional plant based world or vegan world because they don't want people eating as much of the butter and the saturated fats that are there. Now there could be an argument that's, you know, having some less of those foods. But it's one of those things that until we have the the bigger studies that show causation, try doing a little bit of n of 1, research on yourself, and try going it without them and see if you feel better. Alright, Mark. So the last question that we have here is, would you recommend conventional meat and poultry when you can't access organic, grass fed, or regenerative meats? Thoughts on conventional meats.

It's tricky. I mean, I think do I ever eat out and eat some meat that I don't know where it came from? Yeah. I do. Do I want to? No. And I I don't wanna contribute to the problem. So most of the time I try to source from places that I know how they grow the food. And and that usually is from regenerative farms, from grass fed meats, organic chicken, you know, certain types of fish farms are okay, certain wild fish is okay. But I I'm very cautious about it because one, in terms of your health, how much worse is it than regenerative meat? We're still figuring that out.

Out. Right? We we know for from some studies for example if you eat kangaroo meat like in Australia they did the study versus feedlot meat, inflammation levels go up with the feedlot meat and they go down with the kangaroo meat gram for gram of protein. So because food is information, what is the information in that food? If you're eating regenerative meat, you're getting better profile of fatty acids and omega threes, you're getting more antioxidants, you're getting more minerals. And what's really surprising is we're now finding plant medicinal compounds called phytonutrients in the meat of Virginia Malay's meat because we're eating all these plants, these wild plants that have all these medicinal properties. So, you know, when you're eating a feedlot meat, you're maybe not getting all these beneficial things. You're getting protein, you're getting a lot of nutrition, you're getting nutrients, but you're also contributing to a system that is really destroying the planet. So, Michael Mark Bittman talks about the cow being and factory farms being the new atom bomb. And and and I think it was an exaggeration, but the truth is that if we look at how most animals are raised in this country, it's a disaster.

It's a disaster for them from, you know, humane point of view. It's a disaster from the environment in terms of the environmental degradation, climate change, pollution, pesticides, chemicals, all the hormones used in it, pesticides. I you know, it's it's a disaster. So I I feel like if in in terms of your health, is eating, you know, a steak from a feedlot steak or regenerative steak, is it it's marginally better? Is it 10% better? 50% better? I don't know. I don't think we know. But I I do think we know the damage to the earth and the other downstream consequences. So if you're if you can't afford grass fed meat or whatever, okay, you know, you wanna get some protein, fine. But I think I think you need to be as as kind of adherent to the philosophy of eating food that's not gonna hurt you or the planet and whatever you get, basically.

Yeah. And you do your best. And the good thing is, just like I was talking about in the almond milk example or other examples that we've seen, the more people that start purchasing and seeking these out, the more that the price comes down

for these items.

And, you know, big companies and corporations, they get so much shade thrown at them. But honestly, Costco and Walmart, not that I'm the biggest fans of any big corporations out there, We have to give them credit where credit is due because Costco in particular, they have lowered the price of so many of the traditional health foods

Yeah.

And that that are out there. And they made it a lot more affordable, like wild frozen blueberries, you know, organic this, organic that. They're trying to do their part because the consumers are asking them

for it.

So I think that's one other hack is, you know, buying some of these things in bulk and seeking out some of these stores or letting your big box store know about some of the, you know, foods that you'd like to start purchasing there.

You know, it's true, Drew. Walmart is the number one organic grocery store in the world.

They're the biggest purchaser of organic cotton. Right? That doesn't mean that there aren't problems that are there. I don't know too much about Walmart and the things that are going on, but we need to work in partnership with these companies because that's the only way that we're gonna make it accessible to everyone. Alright, Mark. It's a good opportunity to do a recap of some of the top foods. We went all sorts of different directions in this podcast, but give us a little bit of a recap of some of the top foods we should, quote unquote, be avoiding and minimizing.

The top foods we should avoid, as we discussed, are high fructose corn syrup, trans fat, artificial sweeteners, and GMO foods. Those are the top. They should just never cross your lips. And as far as the limit foods go, we should get rid of as much sugar and flour from our diet as possible, liquid sugar calories, and refined oils as much as possible.

Great. And as always, we're trying to do our best because nothing is worse for your health than stress. If you stress out about what you're eating 247, that's not a good thing. So this is information that's steering you in the right direction, and then you have to personalize it for where you and your family are at. But we can leave the stress, and we can leave the shame behind. Just continue to make

Do your best.

Positives Do your best. Changes in the right direction.

No. Do I try to do my best every day? Yes. If you loved that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. We have to sort of expand our idea of food from just being fuel and energy to being information that regulates everything in our biology that determines healthy disease, whether you're gonna live a long time or die quickly. And that's really the power of food.

Mark, let's talk about the