Dr. Mark Hyman: How to Use Functional Medicine To Take Back Your Health & Happiness

Hey, it’s Marie Forleo and you are watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business and life you love. And one of the most important components to be able to do that is your health. My guest today is a world renowned expert and fierce advocate in the fight to transform our healthcare and he’s here to show us how to take back control of our energy, our focus, and our lives.

Dr. Mark Hyman believes that we all deserve a life of vitality and that we have the potential to create it for ourselves. That’s why he’s dedicated to tackling the root causes of chronic disease by harnessing the power of functional medicine to transform healthcare. He’s a practicing family physician, a ten time number one New York Times bestselling author, and an internationally recognized leader, educator, and advocate in his field. He’s the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and also the founder and medical director of the Ultra Wellness Center. Mark is the Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Functional Medicine, a medical editor of the Huffington Post, and has been a regular medical contributor on many television shows including CBS This Morning, The Today Show, and CNN. Mark also plays a substantial role in the phenomenal documentary released in 2014 called Fed Up, which addresses childhood obesity.

Mark Hyman, thank you so much. We’re finally doing this.

We are.

We’ve wanted to do it forever.

Great to be here.

So let’s start off with your story because I know 20 years ago you got quite sick and it had a profound impact on who you are and your work. Can you tell us about that?

Well, I think, you know, anybody who sort of had a life changing experience, like, there’s always something that, like, shifts them that changes their life. And I had that. I was vigorous, healthy, riding my bike 100 miles a day, could see 30 patients, remember everybody without any notes, and dictate everything at the end of the day and get it all right. To the next day not being able to walk up the stairs, not knowing where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started, and having… I felt like I had depression, dementia, ADD all at once. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t remember anything, I felt horrible, I couldn’t sleep, my muscles ached, my digestion completely went kaflooey, my whole system broke down. I developed autoimmune issues, I developed rashes, I had sores on my tongue. I literally went from being like a running 5 miles a day, yoga teacher before I was a doctor, to basically having this total body breakdown. And it was through the process of sort of uncovering that that I sort of found that there was a whole new way to think about health and disease that was really about the root causes, about thinking of the body as a whole system, not just a bunch of different organs. And I went to doctor after doctor after doctor, there’s a doctor for every different part of your body. And instead of having a doctor for the whole organism we have doctors for organs. So I needed to really look at that. And I found that I was able to actually understand how the body worked as a whole system, not just the symptoms. And that’s when I discovered functional medicine. And I realized it was a whole way of thinking that was completely different than what I learned in medical school. They put all the pieces together, they connected the dots that helped me figure out, you know, why I was sick and what was going on. And it turned out I had mercury poisoning from living in China and I had picked up some bug in some lake in Maine and my gut kinda went crazy. And those two things completely shifted my whole biology and it got stuck and I couldn’t get unstuck. And it was through understanding how to create health rather than treat disease that I was able to actually fix myself. So functional medicine is essentially the science of creating health and it’s very powerful and it’s the future of healthcare. That’s why I’m at Cleveland Clinic now, because the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, which is one of the number one health care centers in the world, has said, “Oh, this is the future. We should be doing this and we’re gonna invest in this,” and they’re investing big. I mean, we just… we’re building a 6 million dollar brand new 18 thousand square foot center. We’ve got 2 thousand people on the waiting list. We’re growing and growing. And I think we can’t grow fast enough because people get it. People get that the way we are treating disease doesn’t work. We can’t just be covering over symptoms with medications. We have to understand the body is a biological system and ecosystem.

Yes.

And that was really the sort of shift that happened for me and it led to me having to literally unwind my own health, get healthy, and then it’s really compelled me to do everything I’m doing. Because I realize, wait a minute, there’s so many people who are suffering that don’t need to suffer. Like a friend of mine sent me an email of this woman who’s been suffering, it was her neighbor, and she gave me a list of symptoms and her whole story and I looked at it in 3 seconds and I knew what was going on. And it’s not because I’m a genius, it’s because I know the right lens to look at the problem with.

Yes.

You know, it’s like once you understand how to solve a problem, it’s not that hard. Right?

Right.

So, yeah. For Einstein to figure out E=MC squared, that was a lot of figuring. But once you have it figured out, it’s easy. Right? So I think that’s… that’s the whole beauty of functional medicine. It’s sort of like the, you know, what are the laws of biology. Right? How is the human organism constructed? It’s like, how are we this amazing, magical system and how does it actually work? Like, what are the laws of nature? And in medicine, we don’t really have any theories. We just have a bunch of concepts of disease based on organs and symptoms, not based on causes and mechanisms. Sort of like by geography, where is it, and by symptom, what’s the symptom? Instead of like by the cause and underlying mechanism. So functional medicine is that. It’s like medicine by cause, not by symptom. And it’s so powerful and I see, you know, so many people who actually don’t get the solutions that they actually can get when… when they don’t understand this model.

It’s so frustrating and inspiring at the same time. I mean, your work has impacted me personally, I’ve gone through so many of your books, I’ve changed how I eat thanks to you and thanks to some other friends, our mutual friend Kris Carr.

Yeah.

And it’s so exciting because I feel like we have an opportunity to just transform not only healthcare but how people live on a day to day basis and our longevity and how we feel and how we perform. I know there was another big pivotal shift in your life that came from a trip to Haiti.

Yeah.

Tell us about that.

So, you know, I spent almost 20 years studying biological networks, like genetics, biochemistry, physiology, like how our molecules work. Right? And… and it was amazing. It’s like an amazing magical mystery tour. And I was treating people one on one and focused on doing that and then Haiti happened. The earthquake in January 2010. And just before the earthquake happened I was given a book by a friend of mine… I’m sorry, I was given a book by a patient who was referred by a friend of mine who was a shaman. And he’s like you have to read this, and I’m like ok. So I took a vacation, I was actually in Machu Picchu and I read this book, it profoundly impacted me. It’s called Mountains Beyond Mountains about Paul Farmer who went to Haiti after medical school and showed that you could cure TB and AIDS in the poorest country in the world. I mean, in the western hemisphere. One of the poorest countries in the world. Not by better drugs or surgery, but by using the power of each other. He called it accompaniment. The people accompany each other to health. So he got community health workers trained who are their neighbors basically to help their friends, their family members, their neighbors to get healthy by taking their medication on time, by getting clean water. Just basic stuff. And he talked about this idea of structural violence. You know, what are the social, economic, and political conditions that drive disease? That these are social problems, they’re not medical problems so much. Right? And I began to sort of reflect and I… and I began to… so then I began to reflect on this and I was like, well, I really want to meet Paul Farmer. And then, of course, the earthquake happened and a set of circumstances happened where I was like, well, I’m a doctor and I was married to a doctor at the time who was a surgeon, orthopedic surgeon. And I’m like, well, we need to go. But we have no way to get there. So one of my patients who owns a jet texted me and says, “Do you want to go to Haiti?” And I’m like yeah, actually, we were just talking about that. So we got a whole team together and I got ahold of Paul Farmer and I said, “Do you want to come with us?” because nobody could get down there. So he jumped on the plane with us and I got to know him and it all kind of unfolded. And we got there, it was the worst thing you can imagine, Marie. I mean, it was the worst disaster I think that you can… 300 thousand people dead. 300 thousand people injured. And they were just everywhere. And we got to the hospital and it’s just… it was a disaster zone. And we got to work, rolled up our sleeves. And then I got to know Paul during that process and I got to see what was going on and I asked the head of the hospital after the first week, we were sitting down to eat some chicken. It was like this really skinny chickens in Haiti, they don’t have these big hormone pumped chickens. And I said, “So before the earthquake, like, what was the most common admitting diagnosis here?” And he was like… I thought he was gonna say TB or AIDS, malaria. He’s like it was heart disease, diabetes, hypertension. I’m like wow. And I realized that, you know, chronic disease is everywhere. And then it was that moment I had the insight that chronic disease is also a social disease. They call it non-communicable disease, but it’s actually communicable. And it then began to kind of occur to me that the social drivers are not just affecting things like TB and AIDS, but obesity and heart disease and diabetes and cancer because of our food system, because of the environmental toxins we have, because of the social disintegration and all the issues that drive bad behavior. I mean, you can’t find a grocery store in your town that sells vegetables and there’s only bodegas on every corner that sell processed food, well, how are you gonna eat healthy? So there’s really structural issues in our food policies and our environmental systems, in our agricultural systems that are driving so much disease. And I was like we have to deal with this. And then I began to look at research when I got back, you know, about like Christakis from Harvard talked about how you’re more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family is overweight. Like you’re I think 170% more likely to be overweight if your best friend is overweight, but only like 40% more if your parents are overweight.

Wow.

So… and if your friend’s friend friend who you don’t even know is overweight, you’re more likely to be overweight because of these social connections that are mapped out.

I mean, it makes sense because I know this just anecdotally. Right? You go out with your friends, you go to a party, one person orders something naughty, quote-unquote, and then all of a sudden it is a chain reaction. Like the drinking takes over, this takes over, and then it’s a couple of days and you’re in.

Exactly. It happens to me all the time. I go out to dinner with people they’re like, oh, we’re having dinner with Mark Hyman like… and then they like, dessert menu comes, like nobody orders dessert. And I don’t care if people have dessert. They can have dessert. I don’t care. I’m not, like, the food police. But people have this internal process of like the peer pressure.

Yeah.

So the peer pressure can work for bad or it can work for good. So all this was happening and I began to think, like, how do I do this?

Ok, so you’ve got functional medicine. Right? You’re aware of that. You’re aware of all of these issues. And so what happens next that allows you to then start to take these insights and deploy them?

Yeah, so I was sort of chewing on all this and stewing in it and realizing that, you know, we need to use our social threads and connections, our social networks, to heal us by changing our behavior. And I was like this is the future of healthcare. And I’m like how am I gonna do this? I’m just a single doctor doing this. So I…

I’m just Mark Hyman.

Well… and I was sitting in my office one day and Rick Warren walked into my office, who’s a pastor at Saddleback Church in southern California and he wrote this book called The Purpose Driven Life, which…

Mega.

More books than anything except the Bible nonfiction.

Amazing.

And he’s like I wanna get healthy. I’m like ok. So we did his checkup and I’m working with him and I said why don’t we have dinner after? So he’s like ok. So we had dinner at this little restaurant in town and I said tell me about your church because I don’t know much about what you do. So he said, “Well, I have 30 thousand people in the church.” I’m like, wow, that’s a big church. He’s like, “Yeah, we have 5 thousand small groups that meet every week.” And I’m like, wow, this is not a mega church, it’s thousands of mini churches. And he said, “Yeah, we meet to help each other live better lives.” I’m like ah. It was like a lightbulb moment. I was like why don’t we, Rick, take a healthy living program and put it through the small groups in your church. He’s like, “Great idea. Because I was baptizing my church last week and I realized, we’re a fat church. And I’m fat and we’ve gotta do something about it.”

Yeah.

So we launched this thing, we thought a few hundred people would show up. And we created a 6 week program called the Daniel Plan after Daniel from the Bible who resisted the King’s temptation of rich food and 15 thousand people signed up the first week. We had 15 thousand people show up. We had to turn 2 thousand people turn away. It was the biggest thing they’d ever had at the church, more than the 9/11 service, Obama/McCain debates, it was like huge. And people were just hungry. And these people were eating Big Gulps and having ice cream socials and pancake breakfasts. The men would have rib breakfasts to have the men to the church. I mean, it was bad. And you know, it’s like I said, you guys are trying to get your people to heaven early here with all this food. So I… we launch this program, we thought, you know, we didn’t know what was gonna happen and people were into it. And they helped each other, they supported each other, they held each other accountable, they shopped together, they exercised together, they cooked together, they learned together. And it was a secret sauce. Like friend power not willpower, right?

That is awesome.

Friend power is so much more powerful than willpower. And…

Amen to that.

Rick says everybody needs a buddy. Right? You know, and then I kind of in the process of it I realized that getting healthy is a team sport. We can’t just do it on our own. And you try… you can if you’re super strong willed and you want to do it, but it’s very hard. So in the first 10 months the congregation lost 250 thousand pounds. People reversed all sorts of diseases. It was written up in Time magazine and, you know, we ended up writing a book called The Daniel Plan. I wanted to call it The Jewish Doctor’s Guide for Christian Wellness, but that didn’t work out.

I love it. He’s like, “No, no, no, no. It’s the Daniel plan.”

And then we ended up winning the Christian book of the year award.

That is awesome.

Which is amazing. I’m the only Jew, I think, to ever win the Christian book of the year award. There was that one other guy, I don’t know. You know.

Well done. Well done. That’s incredible. So did that bolster you? Were you like this works.

Yeah, so this is like… this is like, oh, this is it. So I realized that to get healthy bodies we need to use the power of functional medicine to optimize biological networks. And we use the power of social networks to change behavior and the environment because so much of our health is environmentally determined.

Yes.

And the social networks, I mean, I read a study where if you take people from a very low income neighborhood to a slightly better neighborhood, just change the zip code, they lose weight. Their diabetes gets better. Without doing anything else. So that social context is the biggest driver. Now, in Cleveland we’re launching this in about a dozen churches. We’re doing this in hundreds of churches around the world and it’s become a model for how we do this. We need to do it in a secular basis, and that’s some of the things we’re doing at Cleveland Clinic, which is so exciting. We’re working on changing healthcare because the incentives are changing now. So instead of getting paid for peace work, like in other words, the more colonoscopies or surgeries you do the more money you make, now healthcare systems are getting paid for results, which is how healthy are your people and if you can design a system to create health you will actually make more money, which is not how it is now.

Absolutely not how it is now.

So we’re… so it’s like the perfect storm of functional medicine, this insight around social networks, with Cleveland Clinic in the changing healthcare face where everything is coming together and we’re innovating in ways that no one’s ever imagined. So it’s pretty exciting.

It’s super exciting stuff. And, you know, I get frustrated so often, you know, even trying to deal with my own insurance and trying to get tests and cholesterol and we’ve talked about that. And I am just so thankful for the work that you’re doing. You know, one thing that you’ve shared is you said that we need to reimagine food as information. What exactly does that mean?

So, you know, we talked about functional medicine and this concept of systems and biological networks and the biggest single input that you have every day into your health, by far, is what you eat. And it’s not because food is just calories. Food is far more than calories, it’s information. It’s literally instructions that with every bite changes your biology. So it alters your gene expression. 20 thousand, 30 thousand genes are all transformed good or bad depending on what you eat. Can turn on the fat genes or skinny genes. You’re gonna turn on the healthy genes or the disease genes. Right? It controls your immune system. Turns on inflammation, turns off inflammation depending on what you eat. We eat trans fat it turns on inflammation, if you eat omega 3 fats it turns off inflammation. Calorie for calorie is actually acting very differently in your body. If you eat calories that are high in sugar and starch you’re going to slow your metabolism. If you eat calories that are high in fat you’re going to speed up your metabolism, independent of the calories. So I think it’s really important to understand that food is not just calories, it’s information. And it affects your hormones like your insulin, your thyroid, your blood sugar, your sex hormones, your adrenal hormones. All those things are regulated by what you’re eating. And even your gut, we’re talking about the microbiome as a whole sea of bacteria that live in your gut. There’s like 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells, there’s 100 times as much bacterial DNA as your own DNA. We have about 20 thousand genes, about 2 million bacterial genes and they’re all doing stuff. And you’re controlling that population with literally every bite of food you take. It doesn’t change over time, it changes literally minute by minute. So by transforming food, you can upgrade your biological software literally within days.

This is what I wanted to get into because I feel like for so many people who are struggling right now with their health or they feel overweight or they just don’t even feel healthy, they’re lethargic, they’re tired, they’re having skin issues, they’re having an inability to focus and concentrate.

You know what I call that?

What.

I call it FLC Syndrome.

What does that mean?

When you Feel Like Crap.

Yes. And, I mean, I have been, you know, over the past couple of years I’ve been paying more and more attention to being aware of how I feel after… immediately after I eat certain things. And I’m Italian, so this kind of kills me, but I realized that having a lot of dairy, like, it’s not good for Mama at all. And it’s just so exciting. But one of the things I love that you say is that most people don’t realize how close they are to good health. I feel like… tell us about that.

I know, I always say people don’t realize how close they are to health and happiness. They don’t. And, I mean, so many of my patients said, “God, doctor, I didn’t realize I was feeling so bad until I started feeling so good. And it didn’t take that long.” So, I mean, I’ve written a lot of books, but one of the ones I wrote, they’re all based on functional medicine principles. They’re not, like, something I just invented out of the air that I concocted to try to sell a book. They’re really to tell the story of how to empower yourself with the tools you need to take back your health. Because a lot of the stuff I’m saying can be done without a doctor. When we were at Saddleback Church there was me and Dr. Ayman and, like, Dr. Oz helped a little bit, but basically it was a couple of doctors to 15 thousand people.

Yes.

Right? And we didn’t treat each one individually, but their migraines went away, their asthma went away, their irritable bowel went away, they had improvement in their autoimmune conditions, their diabetes went away, they got off insulin. I mean, just all these things happen as a result of having the right inputs, taking out the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And so, you know, when you understand how the body works and you take out the bad stuff and you put in the good stuff, and most of that stuff we have control over. It’s not something you need a doctor for. You can transform your health so fast and that’s why I wrote the 10 day detox diet because it’s… in 10 days people can get a hit of actually their baseline, of what their new baseline is.

Yes.

Now, if they have something serious like Lyme disease or mercury poisoning or, I mean, I eat turkey and brown rice and, like, broccoli for months and I never got better because I had mercury poisoning. Right? So there are things you need a doctor for, but most of the people walking around suffering from things are related to leaky gut to inflammation to food sensitivities to all sorts of sugar in the diet and processed foods and chemicals. And when you take all that out, the body just wants to be healthy.

Yeah.

It’s powerful.

We’ll talk more about 10 day detox because I did that one at the end. But I want to go now to I loved you and everyone in Fed Up. That documentary was so powerful. And I know that one of the biggest resistant points that people have to changing how they eat is they feel like one of the things it’s so expensive. So can you talk to us about that family that you were able to work with in South Carolina?

Well, Fed Up was an amazing movie on so many levels because it really addressed the issue of sugar and sugar addiction. So I was an adviser in the movie and that’s actually why I wrote the 10 day detox was to address this issue of the addictive power of sugar and starch. And it’s not just like like an addictive substance. It actually is biologically addictive, well proven by science. It lights up the areas of the brain that cocaine or heroin does and it’s serious. So in this movie we tried to highlight that and we saw so many people struggling with losing weight because they were biologically addicted to food. So it was like trying to sort of swim upstream without actually knowing why you weren’t getting anywhere. Right? And one of the families was Brady and his mom Tina and I went down and worked with them in South Carolina, in Easley, South Carolina. And, you know, I think I had a judgment that I didn’t realize I had about why people didn’t change. I thought, well, they knew. Like, they just know what to do, they’re just not doing it. Right? There may be social pressures, there may be… but it’s not a knowledge problem. Like, people know that soda is not good for you. Like, people know that, you know, Cool Whip isn’t good for you.

Right.

People know that. And I realized that, you know, when I went down there and talked to them I said, well… because, you know, the father was on dialysis at 42, the son was, like, 16 and practically diabetic, the mother was well over 100 plus pounds overweight and had all sorts of medical issues. They lived in a trailer, there was 5 of them, they had disability and food stamps and, you know, they were struggling with their health. And I said, “Why do you want to change?” and they all started crying. Because the father had to lose 40 pounds in order to get a kidney transplant and he couldn’t do it and he didn’t know what to do. And they were desperate to do the right thing and that’s why they were part of the movie and they were trying to figure it out. And Brady wanted to go to medical school and, you know, they just wanted to figure it out. And so rather than, like, just tell them what to do, I said why don’t we cook a meal together? So we went and got groceries, I went and got groceries, and I got this little guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which is how to eat food that’s good for you, good for the planet, and good for your wallet, which is from the Environmental Working Group where I’m on the board. And I… and I said why don’t we just cook together. Like, let’s just make it fun. And when we got in there I realized let’s look in your kitchen first and see what’s there. They had no food. Like, they had food-like substances. You know, there were pop tarts and there was Cool Whip and there was, you know, low fat salad dressing and there was… I mean, you know, if you covered the front of the box and you looked at the ingredient list, you couldn’t tell what it was. Like there were 47 different ingredients and everything had the same ingredients: flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, all kinds of weird corn byproducts like maltodextrin, trans fats, I mean, msg. These are, like, the staples of processed foods and they all cause addiction, they cause brain dysfunction, they cause fatigue, they cause cravings. I mean, they are designed to do that. The food industry designs these foods on purpose to do that. Michael Moss wrote about it in his book Salt, Sugar, and Fat, it’s very powerful. And so I said you know that Cool Whip is mostly trans fat. And they’re like no, because it says zero trans fat on the nutrition facts label. And I’m like, yeah, that’s right. Because the FDA is in cahoots with the food industry and the food industry got them to say it as less than half a gram per serving, they can say zero on the label. So it’s all… it’s basically all trans fat and high fructose corn syrup and water. And we went over everything and they were just sort of shocked. And I said, well, let’s cook a meal. And they didn’t have a cutting board, they didn’t have knives. We’re trying to, like, cut sweet potatoes to roast them and we had to use, like, a butter knife on a plate. I mean, they had never stir fried a vegetable. They’d never eaten vegetables except for canned string beans and, you know, they had iceberg lettuce with store bought salad dressing that was mostly sugar and soy bean oil, which is very inflammatory. And I said it’s so simple. Here’s how you cut up vegetables. Here’s how you stir fry. Here’s how you make turkey chili, we made a salad, we made olive oil and vinegar dressing, salt, pepper, nothing fancy, cheap. Really from this guide. And they were like this is so good. And they, like, loved it. And then Brady, the son, was like, “Can you… do you eat like this with your family every night?” And I’m like yeah, every night. And it’s fun, you do it together, it’s delicious, it’s enjoyable. And, you know, they lived on a thousand dollars a month for food for all of them with food stamps and that was it, and disability. And they would go out to eat at Denny’s and all these places a lot of times and eat this horrible food. And they were able to do this on food stamps and disability because they were… realized that what the food industry was telling us was wrong. It’s not inconvenient, it’s actually probably more easy and convenient to cook stuff yourself. It doesn’t take that long. It’s not more expensive, you can do it for less. Yeah, you don’t have to have like 70 dollar grass fed prime rib, you know, but you can get, you know, cheaper cuts of meats, cheaper vegetables, cheaper fruits. You can do it. It’s possible, eating real food. And, you know, this whole idea that it’s just inconvenient, expensive, and difficult is the food industry’s way of sort of hijacking the kitchen. So the food industry has essentially hijacked the American kitchen and there’s all these subtle messages. You deserve a break today, you know, leave the cooking to us. Right? It’s like this whole…

Dark side of marketing and advertising.

You know, the amount of money spent on eating out is far exceeding that from grocery stores. So it was a powerful insight for me to realize that, you know, people can do it and people didn’t have the information, it’s not difficult, that they were able to once they knew some basic instructions. I mean, Americans spend more time cooking… watching cooking on television than actually cooking. Right? I mean, we… we don’t… we sort of made cooking a bad thing. Right? But it actually is what we need to do to retake back our kitchens.

I think for anyone watching, if you have not seen Fed Up the movie you have got, got, got, got to see it. It’s incredible. Mark, before I let you go, you’re a 10 times New York Times bestselling author. So for anyone who’s like, “Oh my goodness, I’m excited,” they want to get started, which of your books would you suggest if they’re interested to get started with?

Depends on what’s going on with you. There’s two that I think are powerful that sort of lay out the framework of functional medicine and there’s one that’s sort of like a quick start. So the 10 day detox if you just don’t want to get all the sciencey stuff.

That’s what I did.

And you just want to, like, have a plan, if you follow it you’ll see what happens. I mean, it’s 10 days. Right? People can do anything for 10 days. If it doesn’t work, you know, you spent your time doing something that didn’t work. If it did work, it’ll change your life.

Yes.

So that’s a good place to start. If people really want to get into the science of functional medicine, the two books I recommend are the Ultramind Solution, which is about how our body affects our brain. So you can meditate all you want, but if you’re mercury poisoned, your brain is not going to be working properly. Right? If your thyroid is not working or your gut flora is off. So it talks about how the body is connected to the brain. It’s really a download around functional medicine. And things like depression, ADD, dementia, all those mood, focus, and cognitive disorders are profoundly affected by what’s going on in our body. Because our brain’s just not a stick there on top of our head. And then The Blood Sugar Solution is really about this phenomenon of insulin resistance, pre diabetes, which affects one out of every two people. Like, why are we overweight in this country? There’s a reason for it and it has to do with this phenomenon we call insulin resistance, which is like pre diabetes where when you eat sugar or starch it raises insulin, that’s a fat fertilizer. Stores belly fat, makes you hungry, slows your metabolism. So it’s how do we deal with that and how do we deal with all the drivers of that? So those two books I think are good.

Awesome. Mark, thank you so much. Congratulations on everything that you’re doing. You’re honestly one of my heroes and I’m so honored to have you on the show.

Thank you, Marie. Thank you for having me.

Now Mark and I would love to hear from you. What’s the single biggest insight that you’re taking away from this conversation today? Let us know in the comments below.

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People don’t realize how close they are to health and happiness. They don’t. And, I mean, so many of my patients said, “God, doctor, I didn’t realize I was feeling so bad until I started feeling so good. And it didn’t take that long.”

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