Si comemos esa comida, enfermamos y engordamos.

Pero la comida es el motor para las enfermedades crónicas que afectan a cada una de dos personas actualmente.

Eso es el ochenta y cuatro por ciento de tres coma billones de nuestros costes sanitarios o por enfermedades crónicas.

Un gran problema.

La forma en que los cultivamos, el tipo de alimentos que producimos, la forma en que se comercializan, la distribución y la promoción, literalmente impulsan casi todo lo que está mal con nuestra sociedad.

La gente no entiende cómo se conecta todo.

Más de cuarenta años, catorce libros.

Sí, lo es.

So how can

people get started? Well, it's wherever you are.

If you basically have done nothing, just walking is a big deal.

Going from nothing to something is the biggest thing.

So start with something.

And it can be just walking as fast so you can't sing.

It can be, if you're really unfit, to just do a little bit of walking.

sitting at home on the couch and I turn the TV

Mark, what should I think about these? And that general reaction from classic doctors.

Well, we're entering a whole new era of data-driven healthcare, which we never had before.

Doctors are trained very specifically to the minimum amount necessary to make the diagnosis and then find the drug or the surgery to treat that diagnosis.

It's not about gathering lots of data to really have a deep understanding of human biology.

That's never been possible before.

And so doctors have a very bad bias against testing and against imaging, unless it's for confirmation of what a presumed diagnosis is.

That's how we're trained.

There can't possibly be this many people who are on the spectrum.

[laughs]

And I, I think...

You know, it, it, it makes me angry, honestly, Darshan, because we have the understanding of human biology in a way that we never did.

We understand the microbiome, mitochondria, the immune system, hormonal and cellular communication.

We understand, um, how our bodies detoxify, and we, we know these basic systems.

We understand nutrition and food as medicine.

And, and this, these puzzle pieces are, have been talked about in different aspects of medicine, but no one's sort of synthesized them until, you know, we kind of...

Mm-hmm.

No hot dogs.

You want to tell us what's going on because people don't know what's happening in their bodies.

They don't know they have insulin resistance or prediabetes, which is affecting half of the Americans.

They don't know they have vitamin D deficiency or omega-3 deficiencies.

Inflammation levels are high.

We see that in Function Health, a company I co-founded with over 46% with high inflammation.

So people are inflamed.

So how does a doctor test for

Not that long

... [laughs] to, to now, the change in our chronic disease epidemic is staggering.

The change in autism rates have gone from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30-something kids, depending on where you look at the data.

The, the rate of neurodevelopmental issues has gone, now affecting one in six children.

We have, we have rising rates of autoimmune disease and allergies in kids.

We're seeing obviously obesity in kids, which we never saw before.

[laughs] I mean, when I was in medical school, there was no Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes.

How do they figure out what it means?

And we really need to take agency and responsibility for it.

Thank you, Jim, for that question.

Well, I'm a doctor.

I see patients.

And I've been doing it for 30 years.

And I've learned over time that the most important thing that causes so much of my patients suffering is food.

But it's also the cure.

How can we? support

Mm.

And you also get arthritis, which is debilitating.

So she was on a drug for that that cost $50,000.

She was seen by the best doctors in one of the best healthcare centers in the world.

Uh, and she was getting the best GI treatment for her reflux, the best treatment for irritable bowel, the best treatment for depression, quote, the best meaning the, the best traditional view, uh, the best treatment for migraines, the best treatment for her prediabetes, the best treatment for her psoriatic arthritis, and she was seeing a d- different doctor for every inch of her.

And no one said, "What is linking all these problems together?" For her, it was inflammation.

She had tremendous amounts of inflammation that were driving all these conditions.

If you had a year to transform their health and performance, what are the things that you would change?

Mm

... and sugars.

Uh, and, a- and, and mTOR, uh, is stimulate... and when it's stimulated by leucine, we talked about, uh, leucine, which is important for muscle synthesis, uh, it activates this, this particular pathway that helps you build muscle, which is really important.

On the other hand, if it's always switched on, and if you're always eating all day long and you don't take a break, you can't, you can't quiet down this pathway, this switch, and turn on the other thing you need for longevity, which is cellular cleanup.

We call autophagy.

Self-cannibalism.

You, autophagy.

Yeah.

Yep.

And it's phenomenal for chronic disease.

And, uh, I'm also the head of strategy and innovation for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine.

I've written 12 New York Times bestsellers.

I'm the host of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast, which is a top 200 podcast, and I, uh, and I'm really on a mission to help get the, to the end of ne- un- of needless suffering through addressing chronic disease through functional medicine and fixing the food system because, you know, I've, I've been sitting in my office for 30 years seeing patient after patient who's sick with chronic disease that's caused mostly by food, and it's like being in a boat that's sinking with a bucket trying to bail it, and I finally asked, "Why are we seeing so many people who are sick?" It's food.

And why do we have the food we have? It's the food system.

And why do we have the food system? It's our food policies.

It's interesting.

Food is the number one killer?

Mm.

Eleven million people a year, and I think that's a way underestimate, 'cause seventy-five percent of the deaths globally are from chronic disease, and most of those are from lifestyle modifiable factors.

And those are-- like, smoking is a big one, obviously, but take out smoking.

Obesity and food-related causes are the biggest drivers of chronic illness.

And then I began to say: Well, why are we eating this food? And then I was like: Well, it's our food system, 'cause it's producing all this high-starch, high-sugar, ultra-processed foods that everybody's consuming, which is now sixty percent of the diet in America.

It's sixty-seven percent of kids' diet.

Have things been getting better since that first version?

Mm

... and missing the boat, uh, on, on what really is going on.

I mean, Eat Fat, Get Thin I wrote, like, over 10 years ago before anybody was talking about keto or anything else, and now we're seeing, you know, people doing keto diets to reverse diabetes, obesity, I mean, having as good or m- better effects than, than GLP-1 drugs.

So I think, I think this is, you know, now becoming kind of more...

Now, that doesn't mean that all fat is good for everybody all the time 'cause everybody's different.

But I think that, um, you know, we really got down the wrong track for so many decades.

Uh, especially with the, with the McGovern report, the, the, the sort of efforts to, by certain aspects of scientific community to vilify fat and to blame it for heart disease and blame it for cholesterol, and that led to this whole high carb diet which created the hockey stick of obesity, diabetes, metabolic dysfunction in our biology, which is crippling our country.

Yeah, it's a major problem.

Mm-hmm.

It's not about counting calories.

It's not about existing with macros.

It's not about biohacking yourself to death.

It's just stop eating stuff that ain't food.

And- and when we look at the diet of Americans, 60% of it isn't food.

67% of kids' stuff that they're eating isn't food.

GLPs, Ozempic.

... and what are the highly inflammatory foods that are-

Yeah.

So the, the highly inflammatory foods are obviously all the ultra-processed food, which is 60% of our diet.

You know, we have a whole food system that's designed to produce commodity crops that's turned into ultra-processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts.

73% of what's on the grocery store shelves, it's hard to get away from it.

And it's, it's, you know, stuff that, you know, you wouldn't have in your kitchen.

You wouldn't have butylated hydroxytoluene to sprinkle on your vegetables or mono and diglycerides in a bottle to put on your salad dressing, right? It...

Yeah.

... and what are the highly inflammatory foods that are-

Yeah.

So the, the highly inflammatory foods are obviously all the ultra-processed food, which is 60% of our diet.

You know, we have a whole food system that's designed to produce commodity crops that's turned into ultra-processed food that we're consuming in massive amounts.

73% of what's on the grocery store shelves, it's hard to get away from it.

And it's, it's, you know, stuff that, you know, you wouldn't have in your kitchen.

You wouldn't have butylated hydroxytoluene to sprinkle on your vegetables or mono and diglycerides in a bottle to put on your salad dressing, right? It...

Yeah.

Hmm.

... changes your biology with every single bite.

So everything you eat affects your microbiome, affects your gene expression, affects your epigenome, which is the, the, the sort of meta, sort of control system for your genes.

It affects your immune system.

It affects your brain chemistry.

It affects your metabolism.

Everything is affected in real time by the informational quality of the food.

And the idea that we need to, like, personally go out and fix the air in our homes and the water coming out of our tap does seem insane to me.

Okay.

That was it.

Uh, and I studied Buddhism in college, but I also studied systems thinking and systems theory and Gregory Bateson and, you know, the nature of the network effect of life and biology and everything else.

And so I kind of went through medical school, but when I came out, I was a pretty straight traditional medicine doctor.

But then I got sick, and it turned out I had gone to China to live there for a year and work as a doctor to help start expatriate medical clinics 'cause there were no Western medical clinics in China, and people were terrified, there were 60,000 expatriates, to go to the Chinese hospital.

So I spoke Chinese 'cause I studied Asian studies, I went there, but what I, inadvertently had happened was I got exposed to huge amounts of mercury from the air, 'cause they burn coal, and coal expels lead and mercury and lots of other toxins, and they... there's 10 million people in Beijing in the city at the time, and they all heated their homes with raw coal, and I had an air filter that I would clean out every day, and breathe the black soot in, so I got like a whopping dose of mercury.

And it took a couple of years for it to kind of cause this problem, but from one day to the next, I went from being great to not being great, and my gut broke down, I had diarrhea for years, my cognitive function completely went south, it was like I had dementia, ADD, and depression all at once.

Do you, are you a fan of statins?

Not that long.

(laughs) To, to now, the change in our chronic disease epidemic is staggering.

The change in autism rates have gone from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30-something kids, depending on where you look at the data.

The, the rate of neurodevelopmental issues is go- now affecting 1 in 6 children.

We have, we have rising rates of autoimmune disease and allergies in kids.

We're seeing obviously obesity in kids, which we never saw before.

(laughs) I mean, when I was in medical school, there was no Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes.

Yeah.