297. "Lifelong health begins in your 20s" ft. Dr Mark Hyman

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here. Back for another episode, as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today's episode has a little bit less to do with psychology and more so to do with the twenties component. Our health in our twenties is kind of a little bit of a black box. We have a general understanding of how to be healthy and how to be well, but there is kind of a mystical nature to exactly what we should be doing, what we should be eating, what we should be consuming, how much exercise we should be doing, what is the right balance to strike between having fun and taking care of ourselves. And there's a lot of lingering health questions. How are the behaviors that I am performing now going to show up in my health in twenty years? Is that something I should even care about? Simple answer is yes. But if you have ever wanted to just sit down with a doctor and say tell me what to do, tell me where to start, tell me where to go, today is that perfect opportunity. I had the absolute pleasure of getting to interview and talk to a leading medical professional, a leading doctor, doctor Mark Hymen, on all of the best health tips he would personally recommend for people in their twenties without further ado, Doctor Mark Hymen, it's so nice to meet you. Can you introduce yourself to the audience?

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, Hi, everybody, it's doctor Mark Hyman. I'm a physician. I'm a practicing doctor, a sort of advocate and practitioner of functional medicine. I'm an author written fifteen y York Times bestselling books and basically folks on addressing the root causes of disease rather than just treating symptoms. I spent my whole career helping people optimize their health through food, is medicine, lifestyle changes, cutting edge science, and my goal is really to help people live longer, healthier, more vibrant lives and understand how their bodies work and give them the basic manual for their body which they didn't get when they were born, and understand when you understand how it functions and functional medicine, you can make it function better. And that's really the whole goal here.

00:02:09
Speaker 1: I love that they didn't get they didn't get the guidebook when they were born, certainly didn't get it in school. I feel like people are still kind of scrambling for how to look after their bodies. And that's why we all get pulled in different directions by different information. But some things are definitely certain about what's good for our health. Can you give us like a little list of what is like approved, like exercise, sunlight?

00:02:34
Speaker 2: I mean, you know it's it's I always joke that I get paid a lot of money to tell people do the most obvious simple things at work, and I don't know why we don't realize, like we spend millions and actually maybe billions of dollars on pet food that just the perfect food for our dogs or cats, and we understand that we shouldn't feed the McDonald's and a big fries and a coke, but we feed them to our kids. And so we knew the new exercise we take, I mean it takes dodge of the park if you have a pet. And so we have this intuitive sense of what's good, except somehow we think because we're humans, we're exempt from the laws of biology, and we're not. You know, our bodies are biological organisms. We need to treat them with a respect and when you give them the right food, the right kind and quality of exercise, get them enough rest and relaxation of the nervous system. When you get enough sleep, because there are different things on is sort of a nervous system reset and one's actual sleep, which is basically medicine in itself. And you get some basic support from nutrients which are lacking in our diet or our in our food, then that provides the foundation for most of what you need. And the other piece I would say that often isn't including these sort of basic lifestyle concepts around health, is the power of community, the power of connection and belonging and meaning and purpose, which are more kind of squishy. You can't just go I'm going to go do a five mile meaning and purpose run and just snap your fingers and have instant connection and community. I mean, you know, a large percent of the population is very lonely, and the surge in general of the United States recently actually go to report on the epidemic of loneliness. It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes to day. So that is a really important component of longevity and health. And the Blue Zones have talked about this, so it's really It's an important piece of the puzzle. And the problem is most people just don't even know what the pieces of the puzzle are or how to apply them. And they hear so much confusing, conflicting information. They don't know what's going on in their body. They don't know how to assess it. That doctors don't know how to do anything about optimizing health. If you go to your doctors say I want you to help me create health, they're going to be very confused. You know, come back when you have symptoms, you're add a disease. I don't know you're testifying. I can't find anything on your exam, so you must be crazy. Here's some prozac, and come back when there's something really wrong with you and they're missing something. You know, there's a whole syndrome what I call FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap. And most people walk around without knowing they have these subtle imbalances or dysfunctions that we're seeing. Actually with my new company I co found and called functional Health, where we actually can see the level of deficiencies and nutrients and women today she had low biding media. I was talking to her like twenty, which is very low. And I, you know, I was just saying, you know, I can make you tired. I have brain fog. Seasonal depression, can cause muscle aches, can cause even things like it increased to set related cold infections. And she's like shaking her head like yep, yep, that's what I got. And here she was walking around as a thirty something year old thinking she was great and healthy, living in New York City, trying to live a healthy lifestyle. It was a health reporter actually, but just had no clue that she that's so funny. Yeah, but they just just don't know unless you test. You know, you can't get you have to test. And so I think it's really important for people to understand that they need to know what's happening with their bodies. They need to know how it works. And basically, you know, at any point in life, you can hit the reset button and get yourself back to health if you know what to do.

00:06:01
Speaker 1: This really, listening to you say that is just it's a incredibly powerful b I love that you talk about community because obviously this is a podcast with people in their twenties and we talk about it a lot. But see you can't just start focusing on your health the moment you're diagnosed with cancer or the moment you're diagnosed with some life threatening thing. And I remember like having something similar kind of happened where I had this huge health scare, and I was like, why is it only a priority now when I could have done so many things that were preventative exactly that could have stopped me from getting here.

00:06:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the truth is, you know that the of the disease starts early on, even in childhood. So whether it's bone loss or cardiovasc disease, or dementia or diabetes, which now unfortunately is one in fourteenagers have pre diabetes or technical ABETI yeah, it's pretty it's pretty scary what you just call adult onset diabetes when I was in medical school, and then they choose the name to juvenile diabetes, and from juvenile diabetes and adult onset to type one and two, which you know, basically because type two is occurring in little children, as that was to your So you know, these things start early and and there are functions that then don't become let's say, a disease until like let's say you're low invitement to your whole life. You might have a little low energy, you might be a little depressed, you might have a little muscle sornish, but you know, it's just some cognitive issues, brain fog. But it's not the thing you think would be like a disease. But then at some point, you know, if you go long enough with low vitamin D like that, you end up with ostriprocess and you break a hip, and that's, you know, a serious problem, because half the people who break a hip when they're older don't make it out the rest of the year. Mortality rates about fifty percent. It's worse than cancer. So this is something you could have prevented if you knew when you were twenty, But if you wait till you're fifty or sixty, it's a problem. We're even seeing, you know, cancers in the young people now. We're seeing thirty year olds and even twenty worlds for getting colon cancer and things that we never saw before because the change in our diet and the antibodic use and the toxins in our environment and the change our microbiome. So you know, it's never too early to start paying attention to your health. Because when you're twenty, you feel like you're invincible, you know, and you can just do whatever you want. You can eat whatever you want, you just tap all night and party. You can drink, you can smoke, you can vape, you can take drugs, and a certain degree you have some resilience when you're younger, but you're basically borrowing off your future self. And at some point your bank account's going to be empty. So you know, like if you just have a certain amount of money in the bank and you keep spending it, eventually you'll run out as opposed to keep making deposits and your health bank account on a regular basis, you'll have plenty of health equity left in there, you know.

00:08:44
Speaker 1: Hm. You know what the perfect example of this I always think about is my parents. And my parents are like my mom's like sixty and the woman still has a six pack, Like she is so fit. My dad just said a pabe on his marathon time, also like sixty. And I look at them in a like how and I think I compare them to you know, other people in that age. And all the things that I that my parents have now that make me not have to worry about them started when they were in their twenties and they implemented such a holistic lifestyle, and back then that was really difficult, like to eat organically thirty forty years ago, really hard to avoid alcohol. And they're from Australia. You know, everyone's striking down here, everyone's smoking. Like it was really difficult. But it is such a long term payoff and it's such a perfect segue into this huge question I want to ask, which is during a period where a lot of us take our health for granted, and I used to be someone that was included in that. What do you think is one thing that people in their twenties really need to start doing early to see the most you know, successful long term results.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: Well, I think one. I think you know, all the behaviors around what you eat, exercise, sleep, stress management are critical. I think one of the things that people do when they're younger is they tend to cut back on sleep. They want to party, they want to sleep all night, they want to you know, just not sleep because they can get more done or they're more functional or can be more productive. But at the end of the day, they're borrowing off their future self and that causes low grade inflammation. Immuneis regulation can increase your risk of cardi master diseases, cancers, and memory loss. So I would say, don't skimp on sleep. You'll be more productive, you'll be happier, you'll be healthier, you'll less likely crave carbs and sugar, alcohol and be have addiction issues. So really important to make sure you get plenty of good quality sleep. And you know, you don't to sleep ten hours a night, but you can sleep seven to eight as opposed to like sometimes people going as a badge of honor, all I'm only sleeping four hours a night, and that's like a value proposition and for them somehow, but unfortunately it's not. The other thing is, you know, understand the harm of sugar and starch, and these are just two things that unfortunately are just ubiquitous in our society, whether you're in Australia, in America or any western developed nation. Even developing nations are now more and more exposed to the American food supply. And what's happened is that, you know, that's led to an epidemic of obe city. Globally, there's over two billion people who are overweight. It's more than more than twice as many people who are hungry every night. Yeah, I mean, think about it. There's more than twice as many people who go to bed obese or overweight then who go to bed hungry every night, which is still a lot people. Yes, it's like, you know, it's like what.

00:11:43
Speaker 1: We got the math wrong in that, like, yeah, we could have expussed that a little bit, but yes, I'm sorry.

00:11:49
Speaker 2: No, it's true. And so I think I think just understanding that your your health is like your bank account and if you want to, for example, have a plenty of money when you're older. I do this for my kids when they were little, put money in a retirement account for them when they were like you know, babies, and you know, in elementary school and junior high school and high school and even stopping when they left home. Even then, it's grown to an astounding amount of money just by the power of compounding interest and investment over time. And so you know, you put little deposits in early and you get big dividends on the back end. And so I'm sixty five, and you know, when I was young, I don't know exactly why, maybe because my sister was in college and I looked up to her and she took me to the veggie room and Amherst College in Massachusetts, and they had peanut butter, crunchy peanut butter and holy bread and honey, and I'm like, oh, this is good. I'm gonna be a health nut, you know, I get. So I think I basically started eating healthier. I started eating whole more whole foods. Although my mother did do a lot of that because she missed the fifties in America. She lived in Europe for the whole time, and so she didn't really get the whole ultra process food thing that got happening in America. And it was just a garden. We had a garden and fruit trees in our backyard in the suburbs when I grew up, literally in the suburbs.

00:13:05
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:13:06
Speaker 2: And so I kind of grew up with that. But then you know, I started running, I did yoga. I made sure I didn't abuse my body with excess alcohol or drugs, and and so I ended up you know, having you know, those those investments when I was young payoff now in terms of the level of my health. A lack of any chronic diseases like I have blood pressure or heart disease, cancer, diabetes, you know, I mean, most people my age are on like two three four medications and have you know, forty percent have more than two chronic diseases over probably more over sixty five. That's the average of the population. So I think it's like eighty three percent of people who are on medicare have some type of chronic disease. You know, that's a lot of people who are who have these issues and I don't because I just put in these health deposits.

00:13:58
Speaker 1: I think it's so valuable because when you are at that age, you know, we're in our twenties now, I'm assuming most people listening to this you're in your twenties. Of course you're gonna feel most of us are baseline level of like stamina and an ability to bounce back and all the good things. And then when you're sixty, you're still like, you're going to be very present at that age, wishing that you had done things earlier. And it's this weird thing I do sometimes in my head where I'm like, would I rather have fun for longer or have really intense fun times now that might not even feel that great, you know, like abusing alcohol, Like, really, how how fun is it to be blackout drunk. You know how fun is it actually to feel disgusting the next morning? Like it's actually not that fun. And I want to talk about alcohol consumption because obviously it's such a huge drug, and I have to remind people of this, like alcohol is a drug, and I still drink. I love a little glass of wine, I love a martini. But what what should we be wary about in terms of alcohol consumption in our twenties.

00:15:04
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's one of those things that we thought was fine and maybe it prevented heart issues and was good for your heart health, and we had an all story about it, but that was based on population data. But when you start really looking at the science, and there's been reviews of the science, and again the Surgeon General, they'll kind of head doctor of America. But I report on the linkage between alcohol and cancer, which is increasingly clear that there is some link among many common cancers. I mean, just for women alone, if you have one glass of wine a day, which is not excessive, just one glass of wine a day increased your risk of getting breast cancer forty percent. And I can't tell you how many young women. I mean, in my practice in Massachusetts and Lenox, Massachusetts. You know the doctor who I've been working with there for twenty five years, she's my medical director. She was thirty years old. She got breast cancer. You know, so this happens and younger and younger women. And I'm not saying she was heavy drinker. I'm just saying, you know, it happens because the environmental toxin, it's got the sugar or dot or got microbiome because of the level of alcohols consumed. And when you when you consume alcof you're a woman, you're gonna increase your estrogen. You're going to create more stimulation of your breast issue and overall estrogen issues. You might affect your periods, It might affect fertility issues, certainly, It affects fertility for men and women's. If you're younger and you're drinking, you want to have kids, you know, just be aware that it can affect certainly affect fertility. And you know, obviously aside from all the normal issues of like you know, driving and drinking and things like that which people tay to do when they have poor judgment. I mean, there's a reason you can't rent a car until you're twenty five. The insurance companies know that you're not mentally and I'll till you're twenty five years old, and you're going to make poor judgment and have poor decision making, which is going to get your risk of having a car accident. So they don't want to have that.

00:16:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so absolutely true. And I always like to tell people about this stuff. So I'm sure you remember back in the day when they were like one glass of wine, the antioxidants, it actually makes people healthier. And they talked about this. Yeah, and they talked about their study of like we compared ten thousand people who don't drink and ten thousand people who do drink, and the people who do drink, they're healthier, they're happier, they're living longer. You should drink alcohol. Firstly, that study was funded by an alcohol love being body, so let's get that out of the way. And secondly, the other huge thing to know the people in the non drinking category. Have a thought, just a quick ponder why people would not be drinking at all. Either they don't like alcohol the abstinent, maybe for religious reasons, or they've previously really abused alcohol and now they have to go back to zero, and so they didn't actually limit their sample to remove these individuals, so they were basically I don't want to say spoiling, but but yeah, it's just use, for lack of a better word, spoiling that second that first group and pulling down the average health of that first group. So it looked like the non drinkers were less healthy, but it was actually because some of the people in that group had been abusing alcohol for so long and now it's such a It's this study that is like huge, you know, you hear it even referenced in pop culture, Like there's an episode of the Office where they talk about it. There's an episode of Parks and Recreation. It's one of those studies, you know how every now and again a study will just like enter the psychobabble and like enter our collective dialogue and we're being like, oh, have you heard about this? But I think when I really started looking at that study, I was like, oh, so alcohol is this like huge thing that no one's telling me about. And it's so funny because it links so much with community oftentimes out it's like social right, social drinking. What advice would you have there? You know? For twenty somethings. So much of about socializing revolves around booze.

00:19:04
Speaker 2: It's interesting to say that because you know, you know, I think there's a there's a growing movement, and I don't know if it's occurring in Australia, but it's certainly the United States of a psychedelic renaissance, which is drugs that have very low toxicity or no toxicity, you know, like you basically can't kill yourself on them. Although you know, a friend of mine literally just sadly told me that his wife, his ex wife, well soon to be his ex wife, just drank herself to death, literally just poisoned to herself with alcohol. You can't do that with psychedelics, whether it's LSD or a psilocybin or MDMA. There's a lot of renaissance in terms of both research and the application of these compounds, both in a therapeutic setting but also in a social setting. I'm seeing more and more people who are moving away from alcohol and more towards these substances which are in theogen's there connecting drugs. They're not things that are kind of get into a depressive stupor. I mean, alcohol is a depressant, it become stupid and you become depressed, as opposed to these other categories of drugs, which which are fun and you can enjoy a great time and you can alsoe some therapeutic reasons for post traumatic stress sort of depression. I mean psilocybin. Major papers published in major journals like the New England Journal or the Journal of the American Medical Association, other key journals showing that this is a better therapy for resistant treatment problems like PTSD or depression than any drug ever discovered or studied by orders of magnitude, not just by like ten percent, but like two or three times better. You know, when we see a big effect, go oh, it's a twenty percent improvement of this, or a twenty percent risk of that, that's fine. But like when you talk about a two or three hundred percent increase benefit, then that's something real. So I think I think we have to sort of rethink how to have fun and alcohol is. I mean, I was lucky because when I was eighteen, I went out west in Canada to work on an oil rig kind of exploration company, and and you know, I was young, I was eighteen, and I never really drank much at all, and had a few times in high school. But and these guys were sort of egging me on the bar in the middle of nowhere and the Bloody and the reservation in Alberta, and they were egging me on to just drink more and more beer. And they're some kind of stupid game they were playing. And I just did it, and I got so ill that I was vomiting blood. I was vomiting all night. I had the worst hangover the next day. And I literally didn't drink a single thing from eighteen to in my mid thirties when I had to start having a little wine because I was just like, I don't That was like the most powerful deterrent. So I think, you know, I think everybody has to say, find what that sweet spiders for them. Yeah, occasionally, if you want to have a drink and you're otherwise healthy, if you have a tequila or glass of red wine, you know, every few weeks. I don't think it's an issue. It's the consistent, steady use over time that's the problem.

00:22:13
Speaker 1: And you feel it, like when I was in college, I felt it like I feel healthier now than I did at eighteen because I don't drink as much. I just think there are other ways, healthier ways of achieving that, even like new tropics like as well also amazing, even just like this is going to sound, just have a diet coke. I know, we don't want all that process junk, but a diet coke versus binge drinking, or like a coke versus binge drinking. If you want to pick your evils, you know, and you still want to feel.

00:22:48
Speaker 2: Like we do that too often either, but yeah.

00:22:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe you know.

00:22:54
Speaker 2: It is an issue. I mean, you know, I think the advent of the wearables and things like your r ring, I think it helped people see how alcoholic harms are sleep. And I think from my friends and colleagues, it's something I've heard a lot, like, Oh, I noticed that when I got my wearaball, it really affected the quality of my sleep, my deep sleep, my rem sleep, my my heart ivor ability, my nervous system was adversely affected by this. And then you know, when you when you do that over and over again, you end up with really damaged sleep architecture. That lack of sleep leads to, you know, things like cancer and dementia and heart disease and diabetes and and and just is bad for your brain. Yeah, I think it accelerates aging when you drink it can increase risk of liver disease, got damage that microbiome get is affected. So it's not It's not something I encourage people to do much explore some of these other things, they're not some of them are legal, some of them are not. But I'm not going to recommend anybody do anything illegal. But I think people people can sort of choose what they want, and that's that's really important to understand that there's a renaissance happening.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I love that people can choose what they want. Like it is still at the end of the day, your body, your health, your choices.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: Just know what you're doing.

00:24:08
Speaker 1: I know what you're doing.

00:24:10
Speaker 2: Do I have ice cream sometimes? Sure? Do I know it's got a lot of sugar and stuff. Yeah? And am I willing to do that because life with the ice cream just seems so sad? Yeah? Of course. But do I have ice cream every night? No? I mean do I have it maybe once a month or every couple of months or twice a year. Yeah, I mean I don't really worry about it. If it's in the context of overall healthy life.

00:24:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, the eighty twenty rule. We're going to take a short break here, but we will be back very shortly with doctor Mark Kymen. So the question everyone always asks me when it comes to the health in the twenties is about nicotine. We've talked about alcohol, Let's talk about vaping. Now this might be let's just get your general thoughts on vaping, because I I know, at least in Australia, it was kind of promoted as this way to stop smoking.

00:25:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I mean it's not a cigarette, so it doesn't have some of the harmful things that are in the burning of tobacco, and it's marketed sort of a healthy alternative smoking, but it's not safe at all. The chemicals and bapes cause all sorts of issues, lung damage. You get serious numinitis and people have ended up in the hospital and you know, had severe permanent lung damage from this. It leads to systemic inflammation your body, cardiovascar risk. Plus nicotine itself is highly addictive. It disrupts your brain chemistry, It leads to more anxiety and dependencies. You become addicted to it and you only feel good when you're taking it. You know, like a friend said he had a nicotine spray or a nicotine pack that he put in his mouth for you know, being alert for something he had to do. That's fine once in a while, but baping is not safe. And it also gives us quick dopamine spike in the brain, which creates a cycle of craving and reward. And they're kind of easy, they're socially acceptable, they've been constantly throughout the day. It actually makes you probably smoke quote smoke more, which makes the addiction worse. And so it's it's pretty it's a pretty toxic habit. And the key is really you know, looking at how to how do you get over that? How do you kind of stop a vaping addiction or even use of vaping. Well, you got to support your brain chemistry. You know, you've got to get to bake the habit, so get rid of the triggers. If your vapist in your pocket, you're going to reach for it. Don't believe it there. You know, you can replace the habit with other habits right, things like deep breathing or going for a run or chewing gum uh. And then also you want to make sure you support your brain chemistry. You can take things like tyrosine, which is an amino acid. You can you know, you support your brain chemistry with healthy fats, amino acids from protein be Vitamins often very helpful in repleating lot of things that get damaged during the use of nicotine. Sometimes behavioral therapy helps, or nicotine replacements like patches can to help you sort of transition off. Those aren't permanent, though, you don't want to keep doing that. But it's definitely not safe. It's definitely not safe, and it's not just I would say it's not even not safe. It's harmful. It's very harmful. And I've seen many people on patience with serious issues as a consequence of vaping on a regular basis.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: And that's the things that you don't really see as much in the media. Rights it's scary, but it's not something that's like coming to the surface. I was speaking to someone the other day who was also an empty also doctor, and I asked him, I was like, oh, you know, what do you think is going to be the thing that we look back and go that was such a terrible idea, the same way that we look at spoky, and he was like, well, it's vaping, and I have friends who are so addicted to it. I had one friend and she has now quit, but she was telling me this compelling story, compelling slash scary, however you see it of how she would wake up in the morning and the first thought she would have was to find her vape and the first breath of air she would have in the morning was and she would fall asleep and the same thing. So she and she was just like it was just every every single day. I was so addicted to it, and to the point where she even said when she knew she needed to quit, was she would wake up in the middle of the night sweating and feeling like I craving nicotine because her body literally couldn't even do the seven eight hour withdrawal of sleep. And that's just the thing. It's so addictive, and it tastes great. They smell delicious, it's fruity. It's like, what's not to love?

00:28:47
Speaker 2: And that's not like a smelly old cigarette and an ash tree, right, It's.

00:28:51
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, And I've even seen this, this strange trend of people going back to smoking to get rid of their vaping addictions.

00:29:04
Speaker 2: Not sure that's a good idea, I know.

00:29:07
Speaker 1: So doctor Malkhymen's advice I'm going to paraphrase you is stop with the vapes. There's no they're not a healthier They're not a They're not a healthy option, full stop.

00:29:18
Speaker 2: They're like a healthy version of smoking. They're healthy version. It's just creating even different issues, you know, I think you know, long term, we don't know, but for sure in the short term. You know, usually people have to smoke for decades to get permanent lung damage, but vaping, it can happen very quickly, and it causes this inflammatory response in the lungs that puts people in the ICU on ventilators. So you don't hear that, but I hear that because I'm a doctor. But it's it's quite a concerning habit, and I would recommend if you're all care about your health and wellbeing, there's lots of ways to have fun. There's lots of ways to get dopamine. You know. First, my favorite dope mean addiction is exercise. You know. It's like I love to be outside riding my bike, think Dennis and working hard, sweating. I mean, that just makes me, like, feel great and you know you can get high without having to do a bunch of drugs.

00:30:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, fantastic advice. Let's sake, breath work is breathwork. Let me just say this, breathwork the first time you do it in particular, will will make you feel high, drunk, whatever. Like it's actually it's so insane. I remember the first time I did it, and now it's quite a regular part of my routine. I was at this yoga event and they brought in this practitioner who does it, and I remember coming out of it and being like, ooh, I actually feel so like weal yeah, and I'm so alive, and I was like, wow, like this, look at my skin, look at my hands. I was like, when was the last time I intentionally breathed? And it's so funny. You're saying you get paid a lot of money to just tell people really simple things, and what is more simple to being a human than breath I want to take a quick pivot.

00:31:06
Speaker 2: The first thing we do, and it's the last thing we do, take a breath.

00:31:10
Speaker 1: There we go. That's going to be the quote of the day. I think quick pivot. Let's talk about mental health for a second, how do you think our mental health and our physical health intersect in our twenties? What's important about that relationship?

00:31:26
Speaker 2: It's so huge, and I think there's so many people that struggle with mental illness, whether it's depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, or OCD. I mean, the list goes on eating disorders. And you know, our understanding of mental health has really changed. I just maybe take a minute to dive in here because I think it's such an important topic. But you know, classically in psychiatry, we diagnose people based on their symptoms, not the causes. So if you're sad and help listen, help us, and have no interest in normal activities and can't sleep and don't have sex, don't want to eat, or you eat too much, whatever, we go. I know what's wrong with you. You have depression. But depression is not the cause of those symptoms. It's the name we give to groups of people who share those symptoms. And the cause of depression can be many things. That can because your mother just died, or because your boyfriend you know, left you, or because something horrible happened. We kind of taken a completely twisted view of mental health over the last, you know, one hundred years, and now it needs to change to not sort of blame the person. I mean, if you have an inflammation of your joint, we see a arthritis, We don't. It's not some kind of moral stain on you. But if we say you're mentally ill, there's a stigma to it. There's sort of a moral or sort of you know, judgmental view of this. It's something wrong with you, right, but as opposed to wow, this is something that yeah there's something wrong, but it's not in your head. It might be in your body.

00:32:58
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:32:58
Speaker 2: That more and more we can start to tease out these things through lab testing and through medical history. And that's really why I love hormones playing a big role. I mean, you can have women know this if they're going through their menstrual cycles. When women have pre menstrual syndrome, you know, it's not you, what is it, right, it's you know, you get depressed, you get anxious, you can't sleep, your irritable, I mean, and then you know you have your period and everything goes back to normal. Clearly, there's a link between your biology and your psychology, right, Yeah, and we've missed is that link? And then that's what I spent a lot of my work doing is helping to advance both you know, treatments of the physical body, but also the brain and mental health by really addressing these underlying causes. So your gut health, your diet, sleep, exercise is so important in any inflammation from any source, whether it's environmental toxin, and sometimes it's not your faultimes it's like you know, you just you know, you're living in the place where there's no sun, you don't get vity in d or you're some doctor recommended you take an acid, you have locking drug because you have heartburn, and then you don't have bitamin B twelve where you don't like fish and you love omega threes, or maybe you love fish and eat tuna all the time and you have burkery poisoning. All those things cause depression, right, and so you kind of have to individualize treatment based on the root cause. And that's really what we do at Function Health, That's what I do have been doing for thirty years with my patients with functional medicine. So it's a really important moment where our whole psychiatric shift has happened and just completely flip people upside down. I mean, you know, right now at Stanford University, it's a whole department of metabolic psychiatry. Chris Palmer at Harvard has you know, done a lot of work on this. Wrote a book called Brain Energy, very much similar to the book that that I wrote Ultra Mind Solution years ago about that was a little bit more in depth around all the various factors to not just metabolic or mitochondril health. And so you know, there's a real understanding now in these major academic centers that there's a problem with our psychiatric paradigm and then we need to challenge it. Mayo Clinic just got three point three million dollars as a donation to study the effect of ketogenic diets on mental health include including things like schizophrenia and bipolar disease and even you know, more more mild what's I called mild mild if you have it, but like you know, not as serious mental health issues like just depression. So the body has this amazing way of repairing and healing if you allow it to, and I think unfortunately we get in the way with drugs. And Chris Palmer actually did a you know, tells the story about how we had a patient with schizophrenia, who we think is one of the most intractable problems we see and there's no cure for it, and nobody really quite understands it. And yet, and yet, we really have this incredible understanding that that the brain is a metabolic organ and that when he said to this patient of who is schizophrenic, who took drugs that make them get diabetic and obese, he the patient was like, I want to lose weight. I don't like being fat. And he's like, well, just I don't. And he wasn't going to see anybody else. He wasn't a nutritionist on the doctor. He wouldn't go anywhere, and he'd only see this one doctor. It was a psychiatrist. I don't really know, but I've kind of heard that, you know, skeithy Genic's ice might be helpful, and he recommended him for weight loss. And then you know, it was like the guy came back and all his voices were gone in his head, all his schizophrenia symptoms were gone. Yeah, it was pretty It was pretty remarkable.

00:36:46
Speaker 1: I feel like that's going to be the new wave of psychology and mental health. But I'm conscious we are we only have a few more minutes. I want to ask you two final questions. Yeah, that's a big one. You can keep it short and simple, you can elaborate.

00:37:00
Speaker 2: That's my favorite flavor of ice cream.

00:37:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, actually yeah, we'll leave it at the end. Mine's boys and Berry. What do you think is the biggest risk to our health currently as a population, but specifically for twenty somethings, specifically for a younger age demographic.

00:37:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think, you know, we've come sort of accept our food supply is safe as something that you know, has been approved by the government, as something that we shouldn't really worry too much about. But the truth is, the biggest threat to our species, aside from you know, the changing climate and nuclear war, is the obese and diabetes epidemic that's the result of the amount of ultra processed food that is in the market now in America's sixty percent of Americans diet, at sixty seven percent of kids diet. And essentially, think of this food as a bucket of food that you wouldn't make in your kitchen, right, You wouldn't make a pop tart or a lunch able, or you wouldn't make doritos. Or you know, like our Coca cola. Yeah, I mean maybe I don't gonna make I think if you can listen to make French fries, make them at home, you know, like if you want to eat something like that. And so we basically have a food system that is designed to create very cheap calories because they're subsidized both on the front end with subsidization of the agriculture and on the back end by paying for the consequences of people eating that food with healthcare dollars. But it's it's an ultra processed food. Essentially is a vehicle for a massive amounts of refined sugar and refined starch, and it's also the repository of inflammatory oils, also the repository of additives and chemicals, things like emulsifiers which wouldn't think about that are almost all processive and they basically make food a little bit like, you know, kind of creamy and that thickness that they'll put in even things like almond milk. You go, that's healthy. But if you look at the label and there's a multifiers like gum s guar gum and you know, carriagene and and these these things that seem like they even come from natural products. They're harmful. They caused the key gut, they damage your microbiome, They cause inflammation the body, They lead to pre diabetes, they spike insland, they make you hungry, they cause depression, they cause inflammation. And so you think, oh, it doesn't matter if I mean drunk food, whatever, I'm just my weight's okay, it doesn't matter. It does matter, you know, like you know a lot of times it will cause you to gain weight and create obesity, but for some people won't. But it, you know, and of itself, it's probably one of the biggest threats to humanity.

00:39:47
Speaker 1: M I love that answer, Thank you so much.

00:39:50
Speaker 2: And when you when you and when you eat when you're twentyes, like I can eat anything, like it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, Like I would have grape nuts and ice cream for breakfast in college.

00:39:58
Speaker 1: You know, I don't even know what a grape nut is.

00:40:00
Speaker 2: It's it's kind of like a healthy ish cereal. It's like but it's kind of like a you know, it's a refined grain. Sense. Yeah, And so I think I think we needed to understand that we're setting the ground for our future selves. And you don't want your future self to regret what happened in the past. You want to set up yourself for success, and that means success at every level. If you feel like crap. Hard to be successful in school, it's hard to be successful at work and pay attention and focus or something called presenteism, which is being at the job and not on the job. It's hard to have a good quality relationships because.

00:40:36
Speaker 1: You're just regularly feel gross all the time.

00:40:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's an immediate dividend. It's not like you're just doing this for your sixty or seven year old self. You're doing it for yourself now, so you can feel good now and not walk around with what I call FLC syndrome that's when you feel like crap, or a more serious version it's called FLS that's when you feel like shit. So, you know, and those are real things, and it's important for people to sort of try. And you know, we created the ten Day Detox diet, which is really great, and you can go to ten daydtos dot com just to the number ten day Detox and it guides you through a program that is just remarkable. Just read the testimonials. I've done this with tens of thousands of people over twenty years and essentially takes it all the bats, that puts in all the good stuff, and then you see, like, how do you set your body back to its original factory settings. Do you have rashes all of your body? Do you have migraine headaches, you have your told ballot syndrome, you can't sleep, you're depressed, whatever the symptom is. There's been a seventy percent reduction of all symptoms from all diseases when people do this for ten days. Now, Sometimes people don't get all the way better because you know, they might its serious, like they might have lime disease, or they might have mold, or they might have mercury in their system or some more significant thing they need to treat. But for most people, it's like boom, hit the factory reset, and when your computer's not working, you just restart it and it works right. Or an appliance isn't working, you unplug it and plug it back in, and so sort of like that, and then you can decide, oh, this is how I could feel. I could feel really great. I could cure my FLC syndrome or FLS syndrome, and you know I really like ice cream, so I'm gonna I've noticed a dairy causes me to have issues, but I don't really care because if I get pimples and the Russni nose and my stomach's upset, it's worth the trade off for a once or twice a month or something, so then you can be educated about how this stuff's affecting, because most people have no idea the connection between what they eat and how they feel, and I think it's so important for you to make that connection. So that's why I recommend that. And I also recommend for people to start to learn about their bodies early on and track it over time.

00:42:43
Speaker 1: We've got one more question. This is the question I ask all of my guests, what is your biggest piece of advice for people in the twenties That has nothing to do with what we talked about today, so nothing to do with physical health, just advice in general.

00:42:57
Speaker 2: You know, in my house today, my best friend came and we met on top of a mountain when we were eighteen years old, and it's been my best friend for almost fifty years. And we invest in our friendship, we invest in time together, we stay current, and I do this with many people because I think our social relationships and connections are so important. And I don't mean like on social media or by text. I mean in person, deeply connected experiences where you put your phone away and you show up and you're present in the moment with people and get the true experience of what it is to be in connection and community, because that's medicine. And I worry that the younger generation is just like stuck on their phone like this, or on TikTok or Instagram or you know, chatting with their friends and don't even know how to pick up the phone to make a phone call. I mean, you can FaceTime someone that's okay, that's better than you know not, but actually in person time that you invest in is going to pay off so much in the future. And I see so much loneliness, so much isolation. So many people have prioritized their careers and their work over their friends and their family. And at the end of the day that you know, in your deathbed, you're like, you're not going to go, well, I'm glad I emptied out my inbox, you know, or you know, I'm glad I did that extra whatever was at work. You're going to remember those special moments with people. And you know, I think life is really about creating happy memories and so investing in creating those memories with your friends in your community.

00:44:31
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm in a hundred percent agreement. I've got to ask what's your favorite ice cream flavor for the paper?

00:44:39
Speaker 2: It depends, it depends. I had one and now I got a new one. So my previous one was Chunky Monkey Ben and Jerry's. I love Chunky Monkey because I love the banana and the chocolate. I love chunking monkey. Yeah, this is a version of ice cream and to hear America called dan Lewin's and it's kind of a premium ice cream. But they have a Sicilian pistachio, which I really like.

00:45:01
Speaker 1: So that's so crucial.

00:45:03
Speaker 2: Those are my guilty pleasures.

00:45:04
Speaker 1: I'll have to try that next time I'm in the US. But Chunky Monkey is my favorite Ben and Jerry's flavor. And it's not the same as Bnoffi Pie. It's not the same like the Bnuffi Pie flavor. Well, if you made it that, if you've made it this far, drop a comment of an ice cream emoji below so that we know that you know the fun fact of the day. And I just want to thank you again Dr Mark Hymen for coming on the show and for giving us such invaluable advice for free, which is just crazy.

00:45:30
Speaker 2: My pleasure, my pleasure.

00:45:32
Speaker 1: I'll link everything below your podcast, and I really recommend following doctor Mark on Instagram if you just want some like really great facts on your feed for how to take better care of yourself. It's remarkable and health hacks. Are you still doing health hacks or is it.

00:45:52
Speaker 2: The dark Drymon's show? And we outcraated the hymen Hive, which is a community where people can actually support each other and change your behavior to you and learn together, and so it's called the Hymen Hive.

00:46:03
Speaker 1: There's something for everyone. I honestly, I promise you that. But I'll make sure that's all down below, and lovely listeners, make sure that you leave a five star review, follow along, follow us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast And until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very soon.