Daniel Schmachtenberger is a systems thinker, strategist, and founding voice behind The Consilience Project. His work explores how civilization-level breakdowns in information, incentives, and institutional design contribute to existential risk — and how we might design more coherent, resilient systems in response. His core focus is improving collective intelligence and capacity across sectors including healthcare, governance, media, and technology.
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Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.
He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.
Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Hi, everyone. It's Doctor Mark Hyman, and you're about to hear the full unedited version of my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. The original episode was edited for pacing, but this is the complete three and a half hour discussion, every moment just as it happened. I hope you enjoy the full depth of this important conversation. Before we jump into today's episode, I wanna share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey.
While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhymen.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus.
Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. Alright, Daniel. I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is a long time in coming. We had many conversations which I've tried to keep up with.
Understand how you think because I don't imagine many people heard of you, know about you, or know who you are, but your background and your thinking is so remarkable in its depth and its clarity and its ability to bridge many different disciplines and come up with an overarching understanding of what's wrong in our society and where our existential threats are and how we can fix them. And today we're gonna talk about this. We can talk about a lot of things from AI to the nuclear war to everything that you think and do. But we're gonna focus on on health and health care today because I I think this is an area where we really earn a mess. I'm just gonna be straight.
We're in a really shitty situation where we have more and more health care, quote sick care, and more and more illness. And it's exploding at such a rate that we can't even keep up with it. Just in my forty years of being a doctor, it's gonna be two years of forty years. I've seen just the acceleration of chronic diseases and both in the amount of suffering, the severity, the scope of them, the increase in new diseases. It's just it's remarkable.
And you know, when you look at the kind of history of trajectory of of human experience, you know, we we had pretty good run through most history. And and we say, oh, the, you know, the there was all this, early death and life expectancy was 40. And a lot of it had to do with high rates of infant mortality, overcrowding in cities, urbanization, pollution, sanitation lack, and and they were more sort of infrastructure problems. And and those infrastructure problems of sanitation and basic basic cleanliness and things that were were sort of were solved in the twentieth century led to an increase in life expectancy. But it really kinda misses the point because a lot of a lot of populations looked very old.
I mean, the the the Plains Indians had a highest number of centenarians at the turn of the century of any population. They were hunter gatherers. And so it wasn't like every hunter gatherer died at 40. But the last, you know, hundred years, we've seen this sort of inversion of of of the life expectancy curve. It's kind of got starting to dip down, and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy.
And and I think it has to do with the kind of rise of what you have termed anthropogenic disease, which basically, I want you to define it, but it my understanding is is is is sort of echoes what I I I think Paul Farmer talks about who's one of my heroes who I got to know before he died. What you know, when he saw the horrific conditions in Haiti that were breeding grounds for TB and AIDS and every public health community given up on them, he said it wasn't that we need better medication or surgery. It was that, you know, we had structural problems. He called the structural violence. What are the social economic political conditions that drive disease?
And I would add what are the environmental conditions that drive disease? And and I I kinda like to start out by by sort of having you kinda define what do you mean by this concept of anthropogenic disease.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. First, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I I followed your work for a very long time before we got to know each other through, Institute of Functional Medicine and things like that. And I have huge respect for your work bridging between traditional conventional allopathic medicine and kind of integrative processes and having such a huge data set over forty years with Cleveland Clinic like that to be able to really kind of advance medicine.
You're bridging those worlds in a way I don't know many people who are bridging and also kind of cutting edge science and research with Leroy Hood and systems biology and things like that. And then now starting to actually help policy work at the level that you are. And I know
Dr. Mark Hyman
Can't help myself.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Haven't got to spend a day here with you and your friends and everything coming over. It's so clear that your your friend group and your colleague group spans political ideologies and parties, and that you're almost blind to that. And just like a doctor, I'm here to help people
Dr. Mark Hyman
get better. Right. Everybody works. I've worked
Daniel Schmachtenberger
with any I've worked with any administration, any institution if it helps kids and mothers and elderly people be healthier. And I just have mad respect for that and grateful to be here speaking with you. In prepping for this, I watched your talk on Andrew Huberman and a bunch of them. And one of the things that's so cool is that they were ones on mainstream news and these topics I've never seen on mainstream news, especially kind of long form. But a lot of the things that I would describe first, you have described really well in terms of what are the underlying causes of complex chronic disease, is that they're anthropogenic, meaning things that are not just problems of nature, meaning our biology or nature the way life is, but things that are the results of the way our civilizational system is.
There are agricultural system, our industrial systems that create pollution, our systems that affect human behavior.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I think I just interrupted you. Thing that I think we we have a way of talking about disease in medicine, you you I got cancer. I Yes. Got heart disease. I got diabetes.
I got Alzheimer's. You don't get it. It's like it's not like a bug that you catch or a cold. It's it's a consequence of the environment in which we live, and that's that's sort of what you're talking about.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. So you're saying that you have seen a rise over the forty years that you've been in practice. And obviously, the forty years you've been in practice, that was already after the better living through chemistry boom started and, you know, modern industrial agriculture started. So it would be even a more extreme picture if we went back further. You've obviously studied the history on going back further.
But a lot of people think, oh, well, the rise in diseases is just a result of we're diagnosing more or something like that as opposed to, no, there are ways. Like, we have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism and democracy and whatever, and there there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story. Right? There are areas where some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution or cheaper health care or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect the environment but help affect our bodies.
I really like the framework that you shared about what the upstream causes are. Do you mind recapping that because you do it a lot better than I can?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's complicated. There's a there's a there's a a really important principle in functional medicine which is that you want to look for the root cause. And you want to find the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause. And and keep digging until you find out what's at the root of all of it.
And and most of medicine is not focused on root cause. It's focused on diagnosing based on symptoms and geography. Where is the disease and what are the symptoms? Not mechanism and cause. And medicine is now shifting where we're beginning to actually understand what those root causes are.
And actually, I'm excited about an upcoming commission report from HHS department and the presidential commission on Americans health, looking at what are the causes of chronic disease. And how do we begin to identify those. And rather than just labeling disease and then treating the label with a drug, we call it the name of blame entertainment system. We name the disease and we blame the name for the problem, then we tame it with the drug. So we say, oh, you're hopeless and helpless and sad and depressed and I know what's wrong with you.
You have depression. Well, no. That's just the name we give to people who share those symptoms. It's not the cause of those symptoms. It could be a myriad of things from what you're eating, your microbiome, from nutritional deficiencies like vitamin d or folate or excess of toxins like heavy metals or mercury or gluten that create brain inflammation.
So there's a lot of reasons why you can have any particular disease. And we just we have it all wrong. And I think it's a real shift. It's a real shift in thinking. So medicine, needs to move from this name it and blame it process to what we call thinking and linking where we start the thinking process once we make the diagnosis.
We start to try to create an understanding what are the patterns in the data. What are the story that's being told? How do you take a deeper diagnostic history? How do you do deeper diagnostic laboratory testing and work to kind of see what's at the root root cause of everything? And by peeling back that layer, you can start to see emerge picture of of a chronic disease epidemic that it is rooted in things that are caused by, I would say, man.
And I'm probably mostly say man because it's mostly men who've done it. You know? And I think that's something in a way it's good news because it means we can have agency over it. It's not something that just falls from the sky that hits us on the head that we get struck with some illness. It's it's actually now something we understand what it's about.
Yeah. It's not just better diagnosis. Trust me, like, the autism epidemic is an example. We've went from one in ten thousand when I was born to, you know, one in a hundred and thirty. Even if fifty percent is better diagnostic or seventy five percent is better diagnosed criteria, still something's going on.
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, you're running off a list of things that can be underlying causes and you mentioned vitamin d deficiency and mercury. And I think it's worth just going into this a little bit because vitamin d deficiency in terms of acute causation is rickets. And not many people have rickets, but there's a pretty big level between you have rickets and you have optimal levels. Yeah. And the same is true for vitamin C and scurvy or beriberi or whatever.
So the idea that deficiency means you don't have an acute disease that is killing you in fast way from it, but that as soon as you're above that, we're fine, as opposed to what are optimal levels. Would you speak to that a little bit in terms of also what you find in your practice and what you find when you take someone above rickets. Yeah. And treat them and they get better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think this is just a really important idea that that's sort of medicine is trying to catch up with. You know, we we used to talk about having type two diabetes and then we said, wait wait, there's prediabetes. And then we talked about having hypertension or high blood pressure. Now there's pre hypertension and we say, oh, you have an autoimmune disease. Oh, now there's pre autoimmune disease.
And the reason it's pre anything is because we're understanding there's consequences even at levels we thought were quote normal. And so this idea of disease being an on or off phenomena is wrong. It's a continuum from mild in biochemical imbalances, are barely detectable, which we might be able to now screen for with metabolomic testing and proteomic testing and you know more subtle things that we can measure to sort of pre symptomatic to symptomatic disease symptoms to finally full blown disease and death. And so there's a whole long continuum that can start in utero or even, you know, with your mother's health before she was born that impacts your health through epigenetics and through the, you know, intrauterine experience and through early childhood influences and all those things you you can start to map out if you listen carefully to somebody's story about what's happening early and and pick these things up. And so, you know, the fact that we have these sort of arbitrary cutoffs for, you know, blood sugar, blood pressure, vitamin d, you know, folic acid.
I mean, function health, which is a company we talked to you about that allows people access to comprehensive lab testing and have their own personal health data set. You know, the the reference ranges there are ridiculous for some of the things that they have like homocysteine which is a measure of your b vitamin status very important in methylation and genetic control, neurotransmitter function, detoxification, mood. Mean, a lot of things. Their cutoff level is like I think 15 or 16 or something. Yeah.
And any level over 14 according to the literature increase your risk of dementia by fifty percent. The optimal level should be six to eight. Same thing with insulin. I think we we we see insulin levels being reported as normal anything up to 16 or 18. That's because we're we have a sick population.
And and the the way we determine what's quote normal is basically on a bell curve in a population. So if the bell curve is shifted to the right or the left because people are sick, you're you're picking up what's normal in the population, not what's optimal.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Alright. There's a lot of topics in there to unpack. So the first is obviously absence of acute symptomology does not equal a good definition of health. Because we all know cases where someone went to the doctor for a routine checkup and they find out that they have cancer and not that long to live, and that cancer has been developing for a long time. And as you're mentioning with pre diabetes, a long time before the acute diagnosis of now you have diabetes and you have to take a med for it, you were in metabolic syndrome.
And a long time before the autoimmune disease that produces enough symptomology, you had inflammatory markers that you could see. Like, That's how many years ahead can you see signs
Dr. Mark Hyman
of Decades. Exactly. Decades.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, if you see it decades ahead and you haven't had a humongous amount of tissue damage, you can do stuff about it. By the time you've got to advanced tissue damage, it's a lot harder. Right? You can still do stuff about it, which is amazing and, you know, your clinic will attest to that. But so, I I mean, in med school, there's this stages of disease, which is you start with health is all the homeostatic systems, and homeostasis is kind of a silly term because it's not stasis.
Right? So the homeodynamics. Yeah. So you have all these homeodynamic systems in the body that are responding to various stressors, and the level they're at matters less than their responsive capacity. Right?
You want to be able to respond to hot and cold and to pathogens and whatever well. So you've got homeostasis or homeodynamics. Then you've got deviation from homeodynamics. Something comes that takes you out of range and you don't respond properly. What is that something?
Right? We'll get back to that. If that doesn't come back in range, if it comes back, great, you're still healthy. If it doesn't come back in, then you have pathophysiology. Right?
The physiology is operating differently as a result of that. If you keep operating differently for a long time, you'll start to get pathomorphology. Structures will start to And oftentimes it's not until after that that the symptoms occur. Mhmm. And that's when you go and you get the diagnosis.
And you've been in a very advanced development of illness that whole time. So obviously you don't want to wait till symptoms, and most people are walking around with a lot of symptoms. Yeah. Which means actually pretty advanced disease relative to what good health would be.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so obviously the an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound a cure thing. I think you have two really good pieces of news. One is even once you're in the symptomology stage, a lot of things that we think are untreatable are treatable.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. Yeah. And Even pretty late stage things like heart failure and Alzheimer's and autism and Will you tell a couple two diabetes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Just we can wrap it together. I know you have another place, but tell like a couple stories about that of things that people used to think were totally unreversible and most people still do.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, I I mean, in medical school and then throughout my medical training and even in continuing medical education and postgraduate training where you had to go CME courses. The orthodoxy is pretty rigid about certain beliefs. If you have heart failure, it doesn't go backwards. You can't improve it.
If you have dementia, you can't reverse it. If you have type two diabetes, it's not reversible. You can manage chronic diseases which is great for the medical industrial complex because it provides the ability to have a pharmaceutical driven health care system that makes huge amounts of profit off of long term chronic use of medication. What I've seen is surprisingly, when you apply these principles of creating health, which is what functional medicine is. It's not about treating disease.
It's trying to understand what is health, what are the deviations from health, and how do we measure those dysfunctions and the lack of resilience and balance and function in the body, and kind of tweak things to correct it. You can actually see reversal of these diseases. Complete remission reversal of type two diabetes. That's that's easy. That's an easy one.
And there's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
now But that's a humongous deal because like what is the curve of type two diabetes from when you were born to now? How many upstream diseases does that contribute And how many people how many doctors treat it like a traversal?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean it's it's it's the thing that's causing everything. So the phenomenon of insulin resistance, which underlies type two diabetes, is causing dementia. For example, your risk of dementia is four times higher if you have a type two diabetes. Your risk of heart attacks is dramatically higher.
Risk of cancers, many of the most common cancers, breast, pancreatic, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer. These are diseases of insulin resistance.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And to say all those diseases are largely, not perfectly, but largely preventable with some pretty basic stuff. Yeah. And oftentimes even reversible is a really important thing everybody should know and start to update.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, they're even taking some I mean, I've talked to about this. They're doing studies of stage four pancreatic cancer using ketogenic diets and seeing remissions in some of these patients, which is almost like heresy in medicine. And so I think we're not taught that these things are fixable. But if you understand the underlying root cause model of medicine and understand how to identify the root causes and figure out also how to create a thriving human and provide those conditions, because right now, as you know, you sort of talk about this anthropogenic disease, this really means we've an environment in which disease flourishes.
It's sort of a disease causing culture, society, environment, food environment, toxin environment. When you kind of remove those things as best you can, these diseases can reverse.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Mhmm. I had a
Dr. Mark Hyman
guy who was living in Pittsburgh who was seven years old and he and then I didn't know this but Pittsburgh you know, they they they had the steel plants and they they they use coal to make steel. And they use the coal ash to cover their fields and to when there's snowy icy roads to put them on the snowy icy roads and coal ash is full of lead and mercury. And he was extremely mercury toxic and also had other issues. He had insulin resistance. He had, gut issues his whole life.
So he had a lot of dysbiosis and gut inflammation. He had methylation issues, a b vitamin problems. We had a whole series of things. It wasn't just one thing. But you add all that together Yeah.
Plus his APOE double four status, which puts him at risk. And he was presenting with Alzheimer's. And yet, by a very aggressive detoxification by getting the metals out of his system, by chelation, which is heresy in medicine, by giving him methylating support, optimizing his gut function, fixing his insulin resistance, he reversed his cognitive decline. And he was actually able to improve his mental status and go back to work, which was again something you just never see. I mean, who's who's seen a survivor of Alzheimer's?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Know that you have for a long time known Dale Bredesen and his work in the space. Mhmm. And I think you are friends with someone I'm good friends with, doctor Heather Sanderson, who wrote the book recently Reversing Alzheimer's. And I think that was a number one, you know, New York Times bestseller for a while. And that particular study that she did there was an inpatient using a Bredesen like protocol
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That was reversing the MoCA scores in seventy percent of the people that went in within six months with pretty basic stuff, like largely diet, lifestyle, and a little bit of Yeah. Functional medicine.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And the MoCA score is a sort of a cognitive assessment that's easy to do, and and it's pretty predictive of of where you are in the trajectory of memory loss and dementia.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, this is another one if you look at Alzheimer's historically versus now that is really a disease of modernity. Yeah. Do you wanna say
Dr. Mark Hyman
Alzheimer's did diagnosis way back when in the turn of the century with, you know, this patient he had. But it it the rise in dementia is staggering and it's and it's one of the most costly conditions for humanity, not because of the direct medical care, because of the long term care that they need and because of the loss of the ability to work for their caregivers, their family members. But I've I've seen a dramatic increase in dementia and cognitive decline, and and it's sort of peril the rest of the chronic diseases that we're seeing increasing. And people say, oh, we're we're winning the war on heart disease. I mean, nonsense.
We're seeing less deaths because we have better advanced medical treatments
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like bypasses and stents and trauma last thrombolytics and blood clot dissolvers. But we we we are seeing more and more people getting heart disease. Right. More and more people getting cancer. More and more people getting diabetes.
And more and more people getting dementia. So despite the fact that we're spending trillions of dollars on healthcare, we're we're not getting much for our money. This is kind of This why
Daniel Schmachtenberger
people need to understand statistical warfare as part of information warfare is that you can cherry pick your stats. Yeah. Right? And you can lie with facts. You can mislead with facts.
You can say less people are dying, and what you're alluding to is the issue is getting better as opposed to there was even one case in which the stats were used that less people were dying of gun violence, and they were suggesting in that the gun violence went down, gun violence went up, just emergency care so people didn't die after
Dr. Mark Hyman
being shot. So
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's entirely possible just to speak to the larger political environment, and this is a bipartisan kind of universal marketing driven issue, is people who are pushing a narrative at scale usually have a motive to push the narrative. Political motive, a capital motive, or something. Right? And so you can take the whole story, just take parts of it, and you can have facts that make it through the most rigorous fact checker that are true, but are still misleading. Right?
And so
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, what Mark Twain said, he said there's liars, there's damn liars, and there's statisticians.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. And so as you're mentioning, winning the winning the war on heart disease, what you're actually seeing is the rates of heart disease are increasing. And so this is like this mortality morbidity trade off
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right, which is, oh, no. We're people are living longer. And recently, there's been a downturn in, you know, living longer, but, like, that kinda doesn't matter if the latter part of their life is on is on polypharmacy, is on a huge amount of meds with decreasing quality of life and only being kept alive kind of artificially. Like Mhmm. If someone gets off their meds, they die.
That's kind of like they're on life support
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Exactly.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Which speaks to quality of life. I think a lot of people don't understand the mortality morbidity trade off and that the stats that are cherry picked to say longevity is going up or heart disease is going down, what it's not indicating. Is there more on that you would say?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, think we're we're we're losing the battle on disease. We're we're spending more and more. I mean, we spend twice that of any other nation, often three, four, five times as much. We're 40 life expectancy and going down Our or or all a lot of our statistics are worse than most of
Daniel Schmachtenberger
the countries. That's just it's worth saying again. Forty eighth and life expectancy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think we're going down. It's it's getting worse. And that's crazy.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
With a $5,000,000,000,000 a year health care
Dr. Mark Hyman
budget. Yeah. We're we're, I think, thirtieth among the top developed nations in health care metrics like infant mortality. And and, you know, we're we're spending huge amounts. I think forty percent of people who are 65 take five or more medications a day.
Twenty percent take 10 or more medications. I think Some
Daniel Schmachtenberger
of which are for the side effects of the other meds. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, eighty one percent of Americans are in at least one medication. So is this making us healthier? Yeah. I don't think so. I mean, it's mitigating symptoms sometimes.
Maybe it addresses issues sometimes, but, you know, we know that our health care system itself is, and is the thoroughly cause of death through prescribed drugs given for the right reason at the right dose for the right patient, not mistakes. Medical errors is another huge category, but I mean, the Wait.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Let's put those together because when Ralph Nader was kind of popularizing this topic, some of the issues have gotten better on iatrogenesis. But if you take iatrogenesis to mean diseases that come from interaction with the health care system writ large, the broadest definition. So then it includes, as you mentioned, prescriptions that are rightly given, prescriptions that are wrongly given in allergic reactions to meds and drug interactions and whatever, surgeries, infections you get well in the hospital, etcetera. If you add those up, many people add those up and it's the number one cause Yeah. Of death of Americans in the country.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So basically, we shut down all the doctors and hospitals and got rid of all the drugs, we'd do better.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
We're not saying that because, of course, we don't wanna do statistical warfare because they're also saving lives. Yeah. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
For sure.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But we can say, damn, we should be able to do better on that side. And we can. Right? Like, you have plenty of clinical cases where you're saving more lives and causing much less iatrogenesis, and it actually costs less money when you factor all the matriculated thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you know what to do, and I think this concept of iatrogenic disease, know, we were just chatting earlier before the podcast, and I remember this book I read when I was in college by Ivan Ilitch called Medical Nemesis.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it really influenced me because it talked about the failure of our health care system back then and talked about this idea of iatros, which means physician, and genesis means its origin. So the origin of disease being caused by the physician. And in that that's something that I think is sort of underappreciated by most people. Doctors don't intentionally cause people to be ill. They're not bad people.
They're well intentioned. Trying the right thing, but they're trained in the wrong paradigm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Let's just double score. This is not actually a critique of doctors. It's not even a critique of hospitals. It's a critique of some systemic mistakes Yeah. That affect what the doctors are even allowed to do.
Sometimes the doctors are really upset about it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And it affects how the doctors are trained. And so where the critiques we're giving are systemic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So so let's talk about that. I mean, let's dive into what, you know, we're we're sort of set the stage for the fact that, you know, we we're having increasing rates of these chronic diseases, increasing rents of mental health crisis, increasing rates of neurodevelopmental issues, decreasing life expectancy. I mean, it's it's a grim it's a grim situation, and we're spending more and more and getting less and less. So the question then is, you know, what is this context in which the disease occurring?
Why is this happening? And and what are the anthropogenic reasons for this chronic disease epidemic?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So you were as you're going through the list, you mentioned vitamin d, you mentioned mercury, that's obviously deficiency, toxicity. You mentioned some pathogens. You mentioned stress. So you have a model of, like, what the underlying categories are. And a lot of them are things like everybody knows what acute deficiency is, what acute toxicity.
You just got a bag of chemicals poured on you. You have acute poisoning. You're vomiting. You have to go in for toxicology. But there is something that is called toxicity that is not just a hippie nonsense idea.
It's a real thing. It is not acute poisoning Yeah. That is chronic, that is subclinical or subacute. Same with infections. There's you have acute infection, you're producing symptomology versus kind of subclinical infections, which is in Lyme disease or in, you know, viruses that cause cancers or whatever it is.
Would you outline the model as you see it in your practice of what are the things that cause the deviation from homeostasis or homeodynamics to begin with? What are the kind of categories of things that can be part of a causal landscape of illness?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, know, the question is is important because we we do know a lot of what are are the anthropogenic reasons for disease or or things that may not necessarily be anthropogenic, but are still, issues that that are making us sick. And, you know, the the framework that that we use in functional medicines is really so simple and elegant. I think of it like the e equals m c squared of disease. You know, you you have a a something called the consilience project, which is incredible because there this book I read years ago and I'm I'm wondering if that's where you got the title of this this this project that you're doing was from Ew Wilson's book, The Unity of Knowledge. Yeah.
Is that where you got it from?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, consilience is a great term. He definitely popularized it and he's definitely somebody that I respect.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So I I remember reading that book, which is kinda heady and thick. But it was one section of the of the book where he talked about medicine. And he said, medicine has no theory. Yeah.
It's just a hodgepodge of reactive assumptions that don't necessarily connect to any fundamental principles. Like what are the laws of nature? And we know the laws of physics pretty much, not all of them, but most of them we've kind of sorted out. And we can do great things with that. We can build bridges.
We can build rocket ships. We can do all sorts of stuff, make computers. It's basically physics. And for medicine, there are no laws. You say, well, evolution, that's a kind of a law.
Okay. Well, that's one. But how does that apply to human health? What are the laws of biology when it comes to human health? Medicine really hasn't described those.
And and what what, Pierre Laplace, who was a incredible scientist back in the, I don't know, seventeenth century. So he's a he had, you know, Laplace's law and all that was a law of physics. But he he talked about how you can have a great number of observed phenomena from a small number of general laws. And and medicine has failed to produce those laws. So instead of having, like, a few principles that explain everything, we we we get more and more granular about the diseases we describe.
For example, the diagnostic manual for diseases is called the ICD 10, the International Classification of Disease volume 10 or version 10. There's a 155,000 diseases. You know, it's gone up from 12,000. You used to have things there like visitation from God. We had got rid of those.
You know, it's it's basically descriptive. It's phenomenological. It's based on symptoms, not on our understanding of the disease or the pathogenesis of the disease. And and so functional medicine, I think, is the first attempt to create a set of principles of laws. And and the the equals m c squared that explains the what you're asking, which is what is anthropogenic disease is is are you suffering from exposure too much of something that your body doesn't like?
It doesn't agree with you, or are you lacking certain things that your body needs to thrive and be resilient? And so for me, being a functional medicine doctor is just a detective work for figuring out what's you have too much of or too little of. And it's not just one thing. It's often many things. So you can't just treat one thing, is what we learned in medical school, Occam's razor.
Just single disease, single drug, that's the best practice of medicine. That's your gold standard. That's what you should shoot for. And that's just unfortunately not how the body works. It's a complex dynamic system, and it's it's infinitely unknowable.
But you can you can actually determine from these basic laws and principles how to treat disease even if you've never seen it before. In the fabric of reality by David Deutsch, he talks about this idea that you you know, following these basic principles, you can treat diseases and be successful even if you've never seen them. So often people say, have you treated this? Have you treated that? Have you fixed this or that?
I'm like, maybe not. I've seen that. I never seen it, but I know what to do. I know how to get to the bottom of this problem. And so my job is to go through that list and it's a really short list and maybe you can add to it.
But you know, it's toxins and these can be environmental toxins, the petrochemical based toxins like the forever chemicals or pesticides, phthalates, PCBs, dioxin, flame retardants, the list goes on. It could be elemental toxins like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and they're they're buried in the earth and we've kind of excavated them and industrialized different processes that that, you know, liberate these things like coal burning is a great one. And they can be, you know, biological toxins. Right? If you your liver kidneys aren't working, you're gonna be pretty sick and die pretty quick.
I mean and and then there's there's allergens, which are can be both environmental allergens, food allergens. Toxins can also be things like mycotoxins and mold toxins, which I put in that category, although it can also be an allergen. So so many things cross over. It can be and that allergen category can be sensitivities or imbalance like, you know, things that you might not think as a true allergy like we'll call an IG allergy, which would be a food sensitivity, which is like gluten, for example. And then there's microbes.
So it could be infections that are persistent like COVID or Epstein Barr or CMB, which kind of burden your immune system and lead to all kinds of symptoms or it could be a more subclinical but but debilitating conditions like tick infections or it could be an acute infection. Like, you know, I had an abscess recently in my back that was an acute infection almost killed me. So it can be micro it can be micro microbiome. So imbalances or dysfunction in your microbiome, which is we're all suffering from in modern society as a core driver of disease. And it can be stress as a physical stress, or psychological stress.
And and that creates physiological change in your body or it can be a poor diet. And and and we can get into what that is, but we all eat a pretty crappy diet in in America. And all those influence your gene expression. All those dynamically are interacting and are often in combinations in any individual that may be precipitating a problem. Like I mentioned the Alzheimer's guy, he had you know poor diet, he had gut issues, he had heavy metals, know, he had a lot of these things.
And then there's the too little. Are you not getting enough of the whole nutrient dense food? Are you not getting enough of all the nutrients? Right? So you can have deficiencies in vitamins, minerals which play a role or even in conditionally essential nutrients that are things we don't necessarily think of as necessary.
And I think there's a whole conversation around phytochemicals and are those conditionally essential? Have we co evolved with plants to use their compounds to upregulate our biology? Like, I did a podcast recently with someone who's studying this compound that comes from pomegranates and walnuts and berries called, elligitannins that gets converted in the gut through the microbiome to a common called your lithium a that helps recycle old mitochondria. And there's not very many things to do that. So maybe we've kind of evolved with these plants to help us do our body's work.
And then there's, you know, the right balance of hormones. It can be hormonal deficiency. It can be deficiencies of light and circadian rhythm and clean water and clean air, which are all things we need. And movement, exercise, rest. So it could be like parasympathetic activities like meditation that restores our nervous system's function, sleep, adequate sleep, connection, love, meaning, purpose.
These are all, you know, belonging. These are all things that we need. And if you even something as as obvious as belonging, if you're lonely, you know, you're it's like smoking two pack of cigarettes a day in terms of your risk. So you kinda go through that whole list and you can kinda see where people are. And, and some of those things are just a consequence of our modern world like the increasing isolation, lack of connections, lack of belonging, lack of being part of a tribe.
And it maybe is why we see such an increase in tribalism and divisiveness in society because people are wanting to be part of something even if it's bad, you know, like a gang. Right? Or it could be AA or it can be Weight Watchers. It's all still a club. So I think I think we have this kind of interesting moment where we're starting to kinda map out what these things are that that impair human resilience and function.
And that's really why we call it functional medicine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. I think everything you're saying is kind of intuitive if someone is not excessively indoctrinated in an alternate thought process and makes sense, but I wanna formalize it a little bit. So the first thing is that you're mentioning disease having many causes, and that's in distinction to the idea that it has no cause. It's just whatever. We don't understand
Dr. Mark Hyman
universe. Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Or single cause. Right? In which a single molecule for a single molecular target would make sense.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. You eat saturated fat, you get high LDL cholesterol, you get heart disease. It ain't that simple.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so complex causation versus simple causation is a major part of the story. Right? And simple causation is usually immediate. Right? You're exposed to something, a pathogen, a poison, you're starving, and a disease that correlates to it exactly starts to happen immediately.
Delayed causation, as you mentioned, certain diseases, you can find early signs that we're moving in that direction in utero, or even the predispositions in the mother's body that are going to affect the developmental environment of the baby. So acute versus kind of chronic is a major part that we wanna make a distinction. The other is single cause versus multifactorial because you're mentioning this person's dementia was a whole suite of lead and mercury and whatever, and a whole suite of deficiencies, and a whole suite of maybe subclinical infections, maybe behavioral patterns, and maybe psychological patterns. So it's not one thing is causing one deviation is causing one disease that will be treated with one process. It's each thing is taking the system out of optimal performance.
Yeah. It's causing a deviation from homeodynamics, it's causing pathophysiology. Now that system is more susceptible to the next one, because it's already operating a little bit sub optimally. And so this low grade toxicity that's messing up the liver and kidneys and lymphatic system makes it to where the normal toxins, metabolic waste the body produces, it has a harder time with. Right?
And then this nutrient deficiency that is part of the detox processes compounds on that. So the key is you get a compounding effect of a lot of things that are some of them happened a year ago. The thing that might have caused it, seemed to have caused it, was actually just a trigger. It was the last step of a causal cascade that took somebody Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's draw the camera's back. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. I think these concepts of delayed causation as opposed to immediate causation, multifactorial as opposed to single factor, subacute issues, things that cause no symptomology immediately, but are part of a compounding effect. Also, unique patho ideology. Right? That two people's MS or two people's rheumatoid arthritis are not the same disease.
Same. Yeah. And as a But I would say
Dr. Mark Hyman
you can have one cause that creates many diseases like mercury or gluten, and you can create one disease that has many causes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. So I think just maybe speak to that a tiny bit more in terms of when people think cause and effect, there's a reductionist thing where they think billiard ball, one thing caused one effect immediately. And yet, when you're talking about a complex organizational system where, you know, a a circuit board or a computer or a car, you can take a part out, put another part back in, upgrade it. It didn't grow. It's not self organizing.
It was built. And we apply that methodology from clocks to computers to something that grew and self organized where each there's no such thing as a lung outside of a body or a liver outside of a body. Right? So when you try to separate gastroenterology and oncology and neurology, you get still a bunch of diseases that make no sense.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It is. It's such a failure of imagination and thinking that we have these specialties in medicine, and we divided up the body into these organs and parts, which is still how we teach medical students. And my daughter just finished medical school and it's just so antiquated. And, you know, there's emerging from the scientific community, not not necessarily the medical community, but I'll say the scientific community.
This emerging paradigm of multi causality and multi modal treatments. In other words, there's multifactorial causes, many causes for any condition. And there's multimodal treatments that are needed not just one thing. And and this this the the body is seen to be a network and a web where everything is inextricably tied to everything else and you can't separate all these things out. But you can start to understand how they influence each other and are dynamically acting together to create dysfunction of the body and disease.
And and it's very personalized because because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with that person.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
In the name of the disease, that person might be missing some of the symptoms that usually go. They might be missing some of the biomarkers. They might have other biomarkers. They might have other symptoms. We just said there's enough of a cluster to meet the diagnostic threshold for insurance to cover it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But this person, this unique person who we say has rheumatoid arthritis and this other person we say has rheumatoid arthritis don't have the same presentation. Right. They don't have the same medical history, but they don't have the same presentation. Right? You run enough labs, they have totally different stuff going on in their blood.
They have a toe and they have different symptomology. Right. So what does rheumatoid arthritis mean?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It just it just it's the name we give to a group of people who share certain criteria that have been established that create the diagnosis based on symptoms, morning stiffness, certain joint pattern of of inflammation, certain lab tests. But it doesn't tell you anything about why. It could be a antimicrobial histolytic, a parasite that causes it or it could be gluten that causes it or
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But it's almost never one of those. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. No. It's usually not.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Exactly. It's
Dr. Mark Hyman
usually not. And that's that's that's what's so hard in in in the research paradigm. And I I I'd be very curious to what you think about this because, you know, the the entire medical research paradigm has been set up for drug discovery. It's the randomized double
Daniel Schmachtenberger
blind I wanna go there. I wanna get to reductionist medicine. But before we go there, you just mentioned, you're like, it could be entomobile histolytica. So you already explained kind of subacute toxicity, but subacute infection you didn't get into yet. Most people like dysentery is very obvious.
Yeah. But there are things where there is a chronic GI infection Yeah. That isn't dysentery. No. Will you talk about that for a little bit?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You know, I think I I think we think think of infections as something that, you know, come and go. But the truth is and AIDS, you know, I I grew up in the era of AIDS. I I I went to medical school in that era. I I did residency at UCSF, which was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic with the gay community there, and it was the number one admitting diagnosis to the hospital where I trained in my residency.
And and nobody died of HIV infection. People died of all the other bugs that happened to live in us and on us that get unleashed when your immune system isn't
Daniel Schmachtenberger
working. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So whether it's pneumocystis infection of your lungs or cytomegalovirus, which is a common virus that we all carry, like, you know, people have herpes and they you know, people know this. Right? You have herpes and you get a cold sore when it's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
People know it for oral herpes or genital herpes, they don't know there are more kinds of herpes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. There's a lot of kinds of herpes. CMV is herpes, Epstein Barr is herpes. They're just herpes, the whole family of viruses. But but people know, oh, I have herpes, which means when I'm stressed or when it's cold out or when I'm tired or when I get a cold, I get a cold sore.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That people understand that there's this latent infection in their body. But there's so many of those and there are there are often hidden and they're latent and they're maybe marginally symptomatic or not symptomatic. Even tick infections can cause all sorts of issues and be latent and then they they emerge. Or, you know, even even with COVID, we're now seeing this, you know, when we're seeing replicating COVID viruses in people who've recovered months or years later in in their bodies that are producing ongoing effects that lead to long COVID and persistent disease.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So so just so people have a sense, what percentage of people have CMV? What percentage of people have Epstein Barr? What percentage of people have some strains of HPV that are part of pathogenic predisposition?
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a lot. I mean, I would say everybody's walking around with something. You know, I think probably. If you look, most people have some Epstein Barr that's kinda hang hanging around that can emerge and be problematic. Probably half the population has CMB.
Yeah. You know, it's it's a lot of people.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There was a there was a study I found interesting that was looking at removed prostate cancers that were removed for cancer and that were biopsied and doing viral assessment on it, and found that the combination of EBV and HPV was present in the vast majority of
Dr. Mark Hyman
them.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And so that's not one or the other. It was actually the combination.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And obviously, we know HPV causing cervical cancer, causing throat cancer. That's kinda new though. Right? The people really understand that. And h pylori causing stomach cancer, and obviously, like EBV causing chronic fatigue, but it's pretty reductionist to say EBV causes chronic fatigue.
There are people who have EBV who get other diseases, MS or something. There are people who have EBV who never get chronic fatigue, and there are people who have chronic fatigue who have a load of other viruses or pathogens
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That aren't EBV.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We're talking about like the the the the infections can cause a myriad of problems like herpes can lead to increased risk for Alzheimer's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which, you know, doesn't just call the cold sore, but maybe something more serious. And that doesn't mean all Alzheimer's is caused by
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Bacteria. And but you know, look at Rudy Tanzi's work and there who's a Alzheimer's researcher and he he talks about how there's they do brain biopsies are finding all these bugs in the brain from the microbiome, from viruses, from other bacteria that may be causing an irritation that leads to the deposition of the amyloid plaque that everybody sees on the microscope, but is only a secondary response to some other triggering factor. That if you dealt with that triggering factor, you might not actually get Alzheimer's.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So this is something that Rudy Tansey's work is good at, Bretison's work is good at, is Alzheimer's isn't one disease. Yeah. Right? Some people have described it as type two diabetes of the brain, some people as rheumatoid arthritis of the brain, some people as infection of the brain. These are all true
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Different times, which means different treatments. So if you hear that somebody has rheumatoid arthritis or MS or Alzheimer's, you don't instantly know what you're gonna do.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I don't. I don't. I know I know there's a there's a group of things I'm gonna look at. Yes.
Like, I'm gonna look at things that piss off the immune system. Right? Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet. Right? All the deficiencies of certain things like vitamin d we know is increasing risk for MS because it's important neurologic function and immune function.
So, you know, I think we we we kind of have to come to terms with this framework of multi factorial causes and multimodal treatments. And we just we just have failed to to be imaginative in how we do research.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. I think we're saying you're saying two things at once that are important. One is the disease doesn't have one cause. Mhmm. So but you're saying think about causal stuff, but the disease doesn't have one cause.
So it could seem overwhelming, like what it says, all these things. But there's also a framework that's really simple. Yeah. So the treatment of everyone's gonna be personalized, not based on a disease diagnosis, but based on their actual medical history, their symptomology, their labs, and what's uniquely going on for them. But it's gonna be personalized within a framework that is kinda not that hard.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's right. I mean, the laws of nature are pretty simple. Like Right. What Pierre Laplace said.
They're they're if the laws of biology, when I think we're describing them and I think we're getting toward approximation approximation of what that looks like. And there's, you know, functional medicine is just a heuristic. It's not the end all and be all. It's just a framework that we're continually evolving to understand the complexity of human biology, which is infinitely unknowable. But even though it's so complex, know, a rocket ship is complicated.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's it's but it's knowable. It's a known known.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, there's a blueprint Right. That specifies it completely. Yeah. And DNA is actually not a blueprint.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's a generator function, which can make a new protein that's never made exposed to a new thing. Yeah. Right? And it evolved rather than was designed, which is why it's self repairing. Right?
The the rocket ship doesn't self repair.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Doesn't self evolve.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And so biology is is not mechanics. Right? It's like it's a different unique thing that to have a system that self organizes, wasn't created by it from the outside, that has an immune system. Right?
Like, it'd be dope if our computer had an immune system, but it doesn't or our car. Right? Things that self evolve. And so we're like, okay, what's happening in a system that is building itself, evolving itself, repairing itself is obviously different in type than a system that doesn't repair itself, that doesn't evolve itself. So we have to make sure we're using the right epistemology.
Right? The right kind of scientific framework. And so you were talking about laws of biology. And you mentioned, well, evolution's kind of that. And we're talking about anthropogenic stuff, which is like stuff in the current world that is different than the evolutionary environment even though our genes aren't different.
Yeah. Right? Like, modifying the environment in a way that we are not actually genetically fit Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That mismatch is really why we're sick.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think the the first thing is a lot of people are still suffering from the propaganda of Hobbes and Hobbes' descendants. Right? Man in the state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty, and mean. Right. And as you already mentioned, the average life expectancy was 30, and their life was shit the entire time until they were 30, and, you know, that's nature.
Right? That's just nature. That's human biology. That's nature and our civilizing ourselves. Technology is creating longer lives and everything's getting better and better.
And this is like awesome propaganda if you're colonialists and you wanna kill all the And
Dr. Mark Hyman
We're we're helping them by killing them because they wanted to suffer so much.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, Churchill has a famous quote that says, I'm gonna paraphrase it. Actually, I have a whole list of quotes about Manifest Destiny of Kings. I mean, Manifest Destiny in The US and Divine Right of Kings and like just stuff that when we look back, we say, wow, that was the most dreadful propaganda nonsense. Right. We still do the same kind of thing.
Yeah. But Churchill said something like, you know, I don't hold for one second that our treatment of the red man is a bad thing in any way because evolution selects for higher life forms and a higher species replacing the lower species is good. Right? And you're like, shit. That's a big deal.
So, Nate, North And South America, The Americas before Columbus, etcetera, right, before colonization, was roughly, depending on who you look at, a 140,000,000 people. And within a short period of colonization, both from infections and war and driving them out of viable habitats, the population was decimated by 90%.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if you look at that and you compare it to whatever, 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust. Right? And you're like, 190% of a 140,000,000, which is so many different civilizations that had different languages and songs and art and pharmacologies and just gone. Yeah. Right?
And similarly, so many ecosystems, so many species, like we don't have the giant sloth, we don't have the mammoth. Those were largely, you know, though many of those were early human extinction
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
From over hunting, from destroying habitats. But so there's the story. No. No. Those and and, of course, it makes sense that, like, if the winner writes history, of course, they're the good guy.
Right? The winner's not gonna say, we were the bad guys, but we we're better at weapons than them. Yeah. And they we destroyed them because they were peaceful and lovely. No.
We're gonna say they were they were brutish and terrible, and we brought democracy and Christianity and whatever, you know. You can say Christian, you can say Islam, you can say whatever the thing is that is justifying why it won. So there's something where it's like the the dominant narrative of a power system has to justify the power system. And so it's gonna be apologism to the power system. We saw that through the Conversations, through the
Dr. Mark Hyman
dark Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Ages, through the and so history is hard. Right? Because we gotta read this stuff that's written by the winners. Yeah. And you're like, in general, more peaceful cultures got slaughtered by more warring cultures.
It's not like everybody that Genghis Khan slaughtered was a less good civilization. No. They were less good at war, but how many people that knew how to live in more peace got slaughtered in the process? Because they didn't build maximally lethal militaries. And yet we are the descendants of who made it through history.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Was war and weapons and killing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Growing massive populations. Mhmm. Not keeping populations in stable relationship with their environment. Good at technology that can be used in competition and war.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so it's a really interesting selection criteria. So then we tell the story. Oh, they only lived for thirty years and life was terrible. And but you were just saying like, hey, no. Actually, of the Plains Indians were living to a 100.
A lot of them were living to a 100. This is such an important story because I think one of the things that I want to get across in this conversation is there's still this general idea that is a part of the progress narrative, that is a part of just propaganda, let's say. That is that diseases come from nature. Right? Man in a state of nature's life is brutish or nasty and mean.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And the progress comes from science and the application of science and technology brought to the world via the market, blah blah blah. And now look at how long we live and, you know, vaccines solved all these issues and whatever. It's not that there's no truth to it, but it is cherry picking. The stat is pretty heavy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Ninety percent of measles was gone when they've introduced the vaccine because of better sanitation and health.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is pretty important part of the story. And so if you rewind a little bit to say, you know, dark ages Europe, this is not an indigenous culture. And then if the indigenous cultures you're studying post science, which is very recently, are post Trail of Tears after you've already slaughtered most of them, move them to an area where they don't understand the plants or animals and that were like crap areas, and then they're drinking and whatever. You're like you're like, this is not a study of indigenous people. So there's a lot of indigenous scholars that are like, come on.
This is ridiculous. Like, no. We had a lot of people that were 100 years old.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And there's a lot of diseases we just didn't have. And so this idea that like, that diseases just come from nature. Our genome is a bummer. Right? Like, nature's a bummer.
Tech is gonna solve it. As opposed to, like, actually, technological agriculture has really made a lot of people sick. Technological mining and etcetera that has caused ubiquitous pollution made a lot of people sick. So when we say anthropogenic disease, we're not just talking about iatrogenic. Right?
Anthropogenic meaning diseases we have that are a result of our own action as a species. Right? And so if you take mining for instance, right, there's there's 2,000,000,000 tons of municipal waste produced every year. Waste that, you know, like comes from our house. It's a lot.
2,000,000,000 tons, like mind blowing when you think about it. There's about a 190,000,000,000 tons of mining waste produced every year.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a lot.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Because you mine stuff, but that rock isn't it's not all the thing you want. Right? You want a particular metal. All the stuff you don't want is waste, is tailings. That stuff is almost all super toxic, And it gets put in some big dam that eventually breaks and all goes to water.
Mhmm. And this is comprehensively undoing what took the biosphere a billion years to do that made life possible in the first place. This is you had actually mentioned something I I wanna it's a tangent, but I wanna double down on this. Maybe there's aliens. Who knows?
We're not gonna get into that part right now. But when we look out at the universe, we see a lot of planets that are not habitable. And we don't see a lot of places that look habitable. This place is pretty any. Right?
Carl Sagan's pale blue dot is as relevant today as it was back then. Yeah. So this like the fact that it's habitable to life is a big deal. We should want to protect it more than anything.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Not move to Mars?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Obviously, if you deal with radiation and other issues, point four g is a pretty tricky issue to deal with. Right? As you see, the people who go into zero g and they do a lot of resistance training and everything to try to deal with it, bone density goes down, neural density goes down. Neural density drops pretty massively. So, you know, like, obviously, we have all fit to this planet.
We have a planet that supports life. It's rare as can be. Right? It's everything we care about depends on that. And it took a long like, the other planets didn't do that.
At least in the time period that we can see, that's very special. It took a whatever, a billion ish years for geological, hydrological processes to make a space where abiogenesis could start to happen, right, where life could start to emerge. Mhmm. And that was trapping all the super toxic stuff in which life couldn't emerge in rocks in the lithosphere and making a certain temperature range and, you know, whatever that life could emerge in. And then it took, like, a billion years of just single cell creatures Mhmm.
To make a biosphere in which multicellular creatures could emerge, and on and on. And and then you look at the biosphere, a complex biosphere, and you're like, it's pretty much six atoms. Right? Like, there's 92 elements in the periodic table. Yeah.
Oxygen first. Right? Like, 65% of our body by weight is oxygen. Mhmm. Because water.
Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium make up 96% of our weight. Yeah. And you add the few electrolytes in there, it's 99% of our weight. And then you have trace minerals. The trace minerals are important.
They're a tiny bit, but roughly every animal, plant, whatever, has the same distribution of trace minerals, the same building blocks, the same type of molecular bonds. It's a humongous deal to understand. Me and you and a dog and a mouse and a scorpion and a tree and a fungus are made of the same stuff. Same atoms, same molecular bonds. Mhmm.
Which is why any of them can die, go on the soil, turn into soil, turn into new stuff. A tree can fall, Body can fall. An animal can defecate. Rattlesnake poison. Right?
Like super duper poisonous stuff is still the nature of the bonds. It dies, breaks down, doesn't stay as an enduring toxin.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Unlike plutonium, which stays around forever.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. Or PFAS or whatever. Right? Serophone. Because those are either atoms that were not part of the biosphere that we got through mining or molecules that we made up in a chem lab that nothing in nature knows how to break down.
Right? Like your bond. So just to get a sense of, like, part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all made of the same stuff. Mhmm. And we need the same physics.
Right? Obviously, the North Pole to the Equator are different temperatures, so polar bears don't do very well in the Savannah, and cheetahs wouldn't do very well in the Arctic. But the temperature difference from the North Pole to the Equator is almost nothing compared to everywhere else in outer space. Right? Suns are really hot.
Well, some things are very hot, some things are very cold.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But, like, everything here operates with the same pressure, the same physics, the same ionizing radiation, the same chemicals, the same temperature ranges. That's a big deal to get. And the same chemicals and the same molecular bonds, a huge deal, and it's part of why coevolution works, why there can be mutual symbiosis, is we are literally recyclable into each other. Yeah. Right?
Now, if you think about from that perspective, how rare life in the universe is, how rare the biosphere is, how it's all based on basically the same six atoms, same molecular bonds, a little bit of minerals. You think then you start to think about how mind blowingly stupid mining is. Like mining. Just to think about it. You think
Dr. Mark Hyman
of other weird things out of the earth that should be buried in there and
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Things?
Dr. Mark Hyman
That we should be protected from because they don't do well with our biology.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Things that are omnitoxic to all life forms. Right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms. Cadmium is bad for all life forms. Lead is bad for all life forms, etcetera.
So fortunately for us, the Earth has a lot of those, but they're all bound in rock in the lithosphere under the biosphere, not part of the biosphere. We don't have to deal with them. So what do we do? We say those are useful for industrial purposes, so let's actually destroy the biosphere on top to make a mine. Let's pull this rock up.
Let's pull that super toxic thing out through smelting and metallurgy and whatever. And if we just kept it all in a perfect metal and recycled, it'd be one thing. But we burn the coal and put the mercury and lead in the air. We put the lead in the gasoline, you know, and aerosolized it. We and then the also the rest of the part that is toxic tailings also goes out.
So you're like, we have one planet that we know is habitable. It's habitable because of specific chemistry, and we are as fast as possible making omnitoxic shit that chemistry can't deal with.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's a big part of what's making us sick, and it's something that medicine sort of ignored, which is this chronic low level burden of toxins that we're all exposed to. And we're all basically assessable. If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat. You know, the average newborn has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And Wait. Wait.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before they take their first breath.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
We see the same thing in the mother's breast milk. Right? And her blood, like, just people need to have the sink in. Mother breast milk, mother's blood, baby umbilical cord, two to 300 petrochemical and and industrial toxins.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's crazy. I mean
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And you should still level is ridiculous, actually.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mean, I I I I've I've thought of a business of creating a, you know, breast milk filter. I don't know how you do that, but
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, the lymphatic system is a filter. Yeah. But it can only filter like in our evolutionary environment, we were not exposed to organophosphates. No. So what evolutionary process can deal with organophosphates?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Like and so we figured out organophosphates, napalm, awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food.
Right? Glyphosate. Yeah. But to to think about this thing that we invented as a chemical weapon to destroy nature at scale.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Napalm, which is dioxin.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Same molecular class. We figure out, oh, we can kill weeds in agricultural settings, but we're gonna spray it on all the food, and humans are gonna eat trace amounts of all of it. And the pesticides, like, the thing that blows my mind about pesticides, you're like, okay. Nuclear modeling. Nuclear war happens.
Nuclear winter. Almost everything dies. The only things that make it are bugs with exoskeletons. We wanna make something poisonous enough to kill bugs that can make it through a nuclear winter, and we spray it all over our food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then eat it. And just because we're bigger, we it's it's not a lethal amount, but it's a long
Dr. Mark Hyman
accumulates and it it's additive. And over time, it's sort of like that's what I see so many so many of the times that we see. And in many of the disease of aging and chronic diseases we're talking about, including autoimmune diseases, are all the result of this total load phenomenon. It's not just one thing. It's a total load of everything.
And you keep adding and adding and adding.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And it's So when you say low level, it's important to say so we're talking about lead poisoning. Right? There's like, you have acute lead poisoning, you have Mad Hatter syndrome. Mhmm. Okay.
That happens because you're working in a lead mine or some industrial source. Right? But how much was there in an evolutionary environment? None. So what amount is good for you?
None.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. So That's why I laugh when I see the reference range on the lab of, like, the level of mercury that's considered normal is one zero to 10. I'm like, well, there's no biological crime for mercury. Zero is the normal level. Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And yet, that would mess up so much industry that the industry is gonna lobby the EPA to make a number that doesn't mess up the industry too much. Mhmm. And the cost, the externalized cost is your children's health Yeah. And your grandparents' health, and your health, and the cancers that everybody's gonna get.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I see this. I mean, I I I saw this kid in my practice years ago. His mother was just so such a good, attentive, observant mother, and she she saw this kid who went from a normal little kid to being extremely difficult, extremely aggressive, violent, learning difficulties, dysgraphia, dyslexia, just a whole bunch of things, neurodevelopmental things. And, you know, she she said we live North Of Albany in this town where
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yep.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There's a cement plant across the street from the school. This is this is why the history is so important. How many doctors ask your patients if they live near a cement plant or a coal plant? Not nobody asked that. Right?
But it's part of the history that we find really essential. And she said every day after school, the the cars would be coated. Like in Austin here when it's pollen season, like your car is just coated with pollen. Their cars every day were coated with dust from the cement plant. And that duct coat dust was a toxic soup of chemicals.
And when I actually did a chelation challenge test, which again is something we don't do in traditional medicine, but we look at your blood levels and that can tell you if there's an acute exposure. And often there there are levels that are significant. You see kids, for example, high lead from environmental exposure, but it's it often is stored in the tissues. And so we give a drug called the DMSA, which is a FDA approved drug for chelation. That's a Greek word that means to claw, to bind some things or binds the metals.
And then we collect the urine and we saw this kid was just everything was just lit up, you know, arsenic, a
Daniel Schmachtenberger
little one of the things you said is you had to use a different testing method. Yeah. Right? Because, of course, if there's something that's circulating in the blood, it's gonna cross the blood brain barrier, that's gonna go into the kidneys and hurt the nephrons. It's so dangerous to keep in the blood.
The body will excrete it as fast it can. If it can't excrete it fast enough, it wants to get it out of the blood. Yeah. So it goes into a tissue. So you do a blood level.
Blood level's the wrong thing to do. Right? Yeah. If you're not looking at tissue levels, which is what. But tissue biopsies are not a noninvasive thing to do.
No. But this is just important to be like, people could say, oh, this nonsense. I've run the labs and nobody has heavy metal. Well, are you running the right labs? Very important topic.
And again, there's some theory under it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. And one of the one of the, you know, one of the gold standard tests for lead, for example, is looking at in bone levels through various specialized types of imaging that are used in research. And that's what you should be looking at instead of like the joke I always tell that, you know, this guy drops his keys on the street and he's looking for him in his under this light post and his friends like, what are you doing? He said, I'm looking for my keys. He said, where did you drop him?
He's like, can talk him down the street. He said, why are looking here? He said, the light spitter here. And that's what we do in medicine. We tend to do testing that we have available but not the right testing.
And and I even remember an article in the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA. It was one of those who was talking about like mercury and and they said, when we check the blood because that's the easiest thing to do. I'm like, well, that's not where you wanna check, you know, to see what's really going on. And and so this kid these kids who were living at the cement plant were were severely affected by these. And by treating them and getting rid of the metals and decreasing their toxic burden, they were able to actually recover and do well.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So this is important. People will say n equals one nonsense, whereas the RCT randomized control trial and placebo effect could do that. No. Placebo effect couldn't do that.
Placebo effect does some things. It doesn't do other things. It's not gonna increase bone density. Right? It's like, it's not going to reverse in a kid who's not even paying attention really severe Yeah.
Diseases and biomarkers. Yeah. So it's hard to do a randomized control trial on a bespoke process.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And yet, if you're seeing things that placebo does not describe, meaning placebo never does that thing enduringly, that should not be an immediate dismissal. No. And if it's something that there would be no way to set up an RCT easily for and or no one has money to do it, someone should not immediately dismiss based on that. Right? It should be like, well, let's look at the total body of evidence and try to understand it.
Let's try to make sense
Dr. Mark Hyman
of it. Yeah. And I think where medicine is also going is the NIP one studies, which is now understood to be a really valid type of research, which is where you measure your own biology against your own biology with different interventions over time. And, you know, we we also had a whole group of special forces, soldiers at Cleveland Clinic who were coming with all sorts of weird mysterious chronic illnesses. And they were having fatigue and metabolic issues and cognitive issues.
And you know, these guys in special forces are not whiners or complainers. You get through a training there. You're like a tough guy. And and they were being dismissed and we started looking and listening to the stories and they were often guys who were exposed to burn pits or were in blast houses so they were training how to blow up shit. You know, like how to blow up a door, blow up a building.
And they would practice
Daniel Schmachtenberger
TBI's from it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And they would Well, they would get brain injury but they would also
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Chemical exposure.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They would get the release of the metals. And they were very high in lead and mercury and and by getting rid of these in these patients, they did remarkably well. And then it was actually it was in the New York Times where this expert in lead who's I think it was at Albert Einstein who studied the bone lead levels with this fancy test said he'd never seen anything like this where lead levels decreased.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm like, well, you've never seen it because you guys don't practice medicine that actually helps you detoxify these compounds in your body. That that's possible. We know how to do it. Right. But it's again, it's sort of on the fringes of medicine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. I wanna talk about lead for a minute. So everybody or most people know the story of leaded gasoline, tetraethyl lead being added to gasoline. Most people don't know the story well. There's actually a exceptional video on this made by Veritasium, a YouTube channel online that describes the, you know, tetraethyl lead story.
But it was an additive for gasoline in the early phases of internal combustion engines that stopped engine knocking, as in not even absolutely crucial. Heaps of other chemistries that could stop engine knocking as obviously we know because we don't have lead anymore. The early studies that were done on tetraethyl lead, the on toxicity, the people did get sick, including the researcher, and the results were hidden. So it wasn't that we couldn't have possibly known. It was we actually knew, hid it, and brought it out anyways because of the economic interest.
And then to think about, like, what what adding lead to gasoline means, which is you're aerosolizing it. Right? You're not just putting it in the water or the soil. You're literally atomizing one of the most toxic chemicals that exists and putting it into the air at scale. Right?
So, of course, even though it was already known toxic, that was hidden, and then the companies that were producing the tetrathyl lead fought really hard to keep it there and not ban it. And it only finally got banned after the preponderance of how much harm it was causing got proven decades later. The effects when you look back in just America are estimated at a billion points of IQ loss for Americans.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And staggering. I just would like people dumber. Yeah. A billion points of IQ loss for a population that was less than 300,000,000 people Yeah. Is a lot of IQ loss.
Yeah. And then there were also studies on increased violence and aggravation Yeah. That showed that populations that were heavily exposed had something like four x impulse control disorders.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Impulse controls, cool performance, cognitive deficits.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not to mention the bone issues, the osteoporosis, the cancer, everything else. But if we just look at even the psychocognitive elements, because one of the, like, again, one of the bullshit stories that is realpolitik is like, it goes back to the Hobbesian story. It's like humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why we need rule. Right?
Humans are kind of dumb and nasty. Well, empirically, we made humans dumber and nastier with just the aerosolizing lead. And you're like, who would the humans be Yeah. If we weren't if we hadn't done that. So then you say, okay.
Well, that's an old story because we got rid of lead. Well, no. Those effects are enduring.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It should doesn't go away. It's in the soil still. It's in
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's still in most of pipes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's in the pipes. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? It's like we still see it in water.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The whole thing that happened in Flint, Michigan.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But Albany is worse than Flint, Michigan.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Still. Yeah. And but even though we supposedly banned lead and gasoline, it's still used in prop planes. It's still used in certain military and farm equipment and other kinds of things.
So we're still using it. It's supposedly banned around the world, but it's still used because it's not enforced in the third world pretty heavily. But then the lead that comes from mining, specifically mining affluent. There's a study I saw in 2019 that showed children under five lost 780,000,000 IQ points just in 2019 just from lead.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's not just that it affects your cognitive function, affects everything. You know, there there's was a really pioneering study that I I saw in American Journal of Cardiology where they found that anybody with a lead level of over two and by the way, the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over. Yeah.
Then it was 20. Yeah. Then it was 10. Now it's 10.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But that was not based on proving that they weren't. That was based on lobbying from the company from the industries that produced the lead Yeah. That wanted to not have that much restriction.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But still, the lead levels are quote normal is one to zero to 10. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And and this American Journal of Cardiology study, they found that
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Excuse me. I was saying the arguing for being higher was the lobbying side. The proving the toxicity brought it lower, but it's still as you're mentioning, one to 10.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Still one to 10. Yeah. So it's still pretty bad. And and what they found was in terms of kids cognitive function, It was a continuum from zero to 10 still cause a problem.
It wasn't like you had no effect. So that that's been well proven. But what was was really interesting was the American Journal of Cardiology found that that if your level was over two. Not two out of ten, that which is thirty nine percent of the population of adults and kids. It was a bigger risk factor for stroke and heart attack than having abnormal cholesterol.
Yeah. Which nobody talks about. So you go to the cardiologist, they're not checking your lead levels and one of
Daniel Schmachtenberger
the And even if they did, that's only one fifth of the allowable level.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. What's really interesting is that there was this whole movement in the seventies and eighties for chelation therapy, which was thought to be quackery. And the NIH did a $30,000,000 trial called the TAC trial where they use EDTA IV chelation. EDTA specifically removes lead, and they found that it was very actually effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks, and yet it's not part of standard medicine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Okay. So lead increasing heart disease more use it more than cholesterol markers?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And how much do people hear about the safe, quote unquote, safe levels of lead compared to cholesterol when it comes to heart disease from the cardiologist. Right? But and again, we're not just saying within the safe range. We're saying not even close to the top of the range.
Yeah. Like Right? Someone would look at it and they'd like, oh, I'm near the bottom of the range. That's awesome. Yeah.
No. Except the range, you're like in evolutionary levels, it's not even the right scale. Because we're calling one to 10 is actually like one to a million in terms of what should be the right part per billion scale.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, there were moments in human history where there were volcanoes and there was exposures, but not not much. Right? Not much. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
In terms of like the famous topic people like to talk about right now of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire. There's a whole
Dr. Mark Hyman
Lead pipes. Hypothesis about Well,
Daniel Schmachtenberger
lead was added to sugar to make a particular kind of sweetness and lead was actually added as a food Yeah. And to alcohol plus the lead pipes plus the lead pipes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Actually, I love the story. I have a few patients who, you know, were wealthy and, you know, they they get fine crystal where they they have wine out of leaded crystal. I remember buying wine glasses once and I went to the store and I'm like, you know, these are $5 a piece and these are $50 a piece. I'm like, why is this $50 wine glass? She said, well, it's you know, it's leaded crystal.
I'm like, leaded crystal? Why? He says, well, because the lead makes the wine taste sweeter. That's why kid eat paint chips because it tastes sweet. I was like, wow.
And then they have fancy glazed plates, which are from Italy or France, which is the glaze is full of lead. Yeah. So you can get it in lots of different ways.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But okay. So the fact that in 2019, children under five globally had 780,000,000 points of IQ loss. That's like, that should be up there in crimes against humanity. It's like whoever the fuck did this needs like, the whole industry needs to be punished, like because those kids' lives are ruined. Right?
Like, massively ruined forever. The the civilization that those kids run Yeah. With less cognitive power as we're moving into an increasingly complex world.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And the IQ is obviously just one thing. It's increased heart disease, increased cancer, increased osteoporosis, and increased impulse control disorders, aggression. Yeah. Like, there's psychiatric components. So sicker, dumber, and meaner.
And we're just talking about one
Dr. Mark Hyman
and and and you're right. I mean, you know, they looked at at the children of the farm workers in California who were supposed to large amounts of pesticides and herbicides. That that cohort of kids that they studied lost 41,000,000 IQ points just from exposure to pesticides. It was not just lead.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So you add the pesticides up. You add the lead up. You add the mercury up. You add the the there's 350,000 chemicals that are in regular industrial use that are regulated, something like that. There's 280,000,000 chemicals in the database of the American Chemical Society.
And we're talking about like things that were not part of our evolutionary environment, are not part of the makeup.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, DuPont was wrong? It's not Better Living Through Chemistry?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, it's it's just like satire now to say Better Living Through Chemistry because they were advertising DDT. They were advertising, you know, the Better Living Through Chemistry stuff was advertising methamphetamine. Methadrine? Right? You remember the advertisements like makes mom happier and more productive and helps with weight loss for the whole family.
And and they were advertising asbestos and at the same time as prefrontal lobotomies. Right. Right? The propaganda has gotten a little bit more sophisticated now, but it's the same shit.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I think, you know, we were chatting a little about this low level toxicity and the anthropogenic disease. I think I think it's one of the most underappreciated things in medicine. I mean, the microbiome is finally getting its day. You know, diet, nutrition is well-being understood, although it's not being implemented in medical
Daniel Schmachtenberger
clinical deficiency from soil management
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And even which types of plants, hybridized crops and diversity and seasonality, not.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I want I wanna get into that because that's a whole another
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
How we've screwed up our food system. But the what's what's really interesting is that this low level toxicity framework is not accepted at all, and it's not taught in medical schools. Doctors don't know how to assess toxins in the body. They don't know how to treat toxicity.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The ponderance of data of looking at it is clear, like you mentioned, the NIH study, but also the common sense of it's pretty clear.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? It's like I just want people to step back from a moment from like emotional reactions and just think about it. Right? And you're like, yeah. The biosphere is the only one in the whole universe we know.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And everything really is made of the same stuff and stuff that is in high amounts, omnitoxic to it, and that our body didn't evolve to process at all that are totally alien, maybe we shouldn't put everywhere.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I think I think there's some groups like American Cancer Society and others and cancer research groups that have said, look, one of the big drivers of cancer is environmental chemicals. But it doesn't really tell you what to do about them. I'm gonna deal with it.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
WHO said air pollution is number one cause of death worldwide recently.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I think I think food is but I don't know maybe that's strange but
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's Attribution is difficult like it's up there.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's up there. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Because they're looking at third world and they're looking at you know, again like you mentioned the coal burning that causes all the lead etcetera plus.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then detoxification is considered this really fringe lunatic heretical framework of medicine that we shouldn't be thinking about. Your body detoxifies. Your liver's work, your kidneys work, you sweat, know, pee, poo, you know, your hair grows out, your skin falls off, like you're detoxifying, you know.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is true. Support detoxification systems if they have an increased burden.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true. But there are more more interventional ways to actually detoxify, which I've been doing for decades through various treatments whether
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's But you would do those after supporting the organs of elimination.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. You wanna make sure the pathways are open to get rid of that stuff.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Talk about the lymphatic system not having a pump and exercise and evolutionary movement versus this. That's a good one.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, we know a lot of us are very sedentary and the only way your body gets rid of toxins is it dumps all the pollution into your body, into your lymph system, which is a parallel circulatory system that goes along with your veins and your arteries.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Doesn't have a heart.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it doesn't have a heart. Right? And the only way it moves through your body is through exercise, through the pumping action of your muscles.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But exercise is a nonsense concept to an indigenous person.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They're just moving.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're just moving.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Like you gotta climb trees, you gotta run, you gotta
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And the number of moving hours relative to sedentary hours per day for the entire evolutionary history of our genome was a lot of moving hours.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was probably reversed to what we have now. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so the fact that the lymphatic nodes are in the armpits and in the crotch and in the areas that move so they get pumped, They they were the amount that you needed when you had eight hours of movement today or whatever it was. Right. And complex dynamic movement. And so then, if you're not having that movement, but the system evolved that that was the pump. Yeah.
That's a big deal. Yeah. And so you don't even before chelation. Right? Like sedentary means that even if you weren't being exposed to more toxins than normal, just the metabolic toxins, your body couldn't deal with them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So, know, we've got we've got like a few major anthropogenic causes. Environmental toxins and liberating toxins from deep in the earth, whether it's through elemental toxins like heavy metals or petrochemical toxins, you know, is basically how we
Daniel Schmachtenberger
that's not deep in the earth. That's chem lab.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's chem lab but it also it's from plastic petrochemicals. A lot of these things are synthesized like plastics or PCBs or dioxins. So these are these are things that listen so it can be
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Including all the ones in the paint. Yeah. Right. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I tried to get clean paint when I had my house painted. Well, you do but Who knows if it actually is?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The formaldehyde and the other VOCs in paint that cause indoor air pollution to be worse than outdoor air pollution That's right. Environment people spend
Dr. Mark Hyman
we we I was very insistent that when we built our 15,000 square foot center there that we made sure that the the had a very good air filtration system, water filtration system that all the materials used, the paint used, the furniture used was non off gassing, supposed to producing volatile organic compounds that are absorbed in your body and create havoc. So, it it actually was an incredible place to work Mhmm. Because people would walk in and just feel better.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was the healthiest place in the whole something that
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you know, there's this phenomena that when people get drunk or the the part of their mind and brain that can assess drunkenness is also getting drunk. Right? So they can misassess and think they're less drunk than they are. Mhmm. Dunning Kruger is another kind of effect like that.
There are people don't know how bad they feel relative to what they would feel in an evolutionary environment. Yeah. Because like, when you think about the decrease in sperm count, which we haven't talked about ubiquitous fertility issues. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That we're becoming a species that cannot reproduce is a big deal. People should be like, woah, that's not a good sign. We we shouldn't all need IVF to be able to reproduce. The healthier being is, the more reproductive capacity it has. Right?
And but when you look at the decreasing testosterone, decreasing sperm count studies that, you know, sperm count has dropped 50 to 60% in the last sixty plus years, and that testosterone has and other androgens have similarly. You're like, that means that everybody feels so bad in comparison to how they like, that low sperm count environment is also a low vitality environment, but you don't know because you don't have a reference range.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, that's true. I think it's it is often a comment I would hear from my patients when I treat them. They say, doctor Hyman, I didn't know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling so good.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They literally did just thought it was their normal. I it's normal to be achy, to be tired, to have all these weird Brain fog. Symptoms, brain fog. They they don't maybe rise to the level of a disease that's classified as a disease, but it you feel like low vitality. They call it FLC syndrome.
Feel like crap. And it it's real. And, and it's amazing how easy it is to fix that if you know what to do.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But it's also amazing how and heartbreaking how much low grade sickness and IQ loss and psychiatric illness, whatever, is totally normalized, people don't think there's anything wrong.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But then, of course, they crave stuff a lot because they feel bad. Yeah. And they wanna feel better. And then now that's part of an ongoing cascade cycle.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean crave bad food, drugs?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Anything that's gonna give a hit of a hypernormal stimuli. Yeah. Bad food, drugs, news, porn Yeah. Bullshit productivity that is just checking a list so that you have some hit of dopamine.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Mhmm. Yeah. No. It's true.
I think we we we have to sort of stop normalizing feeling bad, and then we have to help people understand what's happening in their biology and to be proactive about doing something about it. Because because despite all this doom and gloom we're talking about and all the the amounts of insults that are a result of our society and industrialization and technology. And some of those things are good. You know, we all benefit from them. But, you know, there are methods to actually help optimize your health, to detoxify, to improve your microbiome, to regulate the the fundamental physiological systems that you need to be working in order for you to be healthy, whether it's your mitochondria or anything.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I don't wanna say doom and gloom because, like, talking about real things is real things. Yeah. And people shouldn't have the bias to be like, I don't want to look at real things. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's better if there's hope on the other end. Say, we're all toxic waste dumps and there's nothing we can do about it and we're all gonna get sick.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I can only do something about it as soon as I know about As soon as I know about of course, you can do something. So one of the other ubiquitous illnesses is learned helplessness. Yeah. This is an ubiquitous psychiatric illness where people go from not knowing about an issue at all to the moment they hear about it feeling helpless. It's like, what the fuck?
What what what about that you heard about it and you study for a little while the issue before jumping straight to helplessness and be like, what do the people who know a lot think we could do? What what and so the the straight to I heard about it and I'm straight into doom and helplessness is total nonsense. Right? Yeah. People need to be able to learn about an issue and know once I understand it, I have some chance of thinking about what might actually be able to improve it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so, you know, if we go to Okinawa, we see a very advanced society that has advanced technology where the rate of people that make it to a 100 is way way higher. So we're not saying everybody has to be cavemen. Right? Like, we're not saying a Luddite thing. We're saying, could you manufacture stuff in a way where you just actually cared about the pollution?
Could you do longer term studies first to make sure something was super toxic? Like, totally. Could you do a better agricultural system? Totally. These are not scientifically hard problems.
Does it make it totally market unviable? No. Look at how huge the margins are in the areas that are externalizing all the costs. The margins don't seem to be that high.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So what you're saying is there are ways to do things better. Obviously. Yeah. And and they don't And necessarily. Right.
I mean, it's it's just sort what we're dealing with lately with the with the food dyes, you know. There there's no need for these things in food. They're designed to make unpalatable food attractive and palatable. And and I think that, you know, there's there's a movement to try to remove a lot of these compounds that are used in ultra processed food that that are used for flavor enhancers or for color enhancement to make it attractive. When you take those things away, those foods are gonna disappear because they're gonna be like I mean, imagine taking like Pringles, which you know, I'm eating Pringles.
They're that bad. But they're all perfectly formed, perfect shape. They fit in the the container perfectly. If you take them out and just crush them, which would take about two seconds, because they're they're not really potato chips or a bunch of cocktails of weird chemicals and some potato, I think. And then you could kind of turn into a powder and you just put on your plate and try to eat it with a spoon, it would be gross.
No one would wanna eat it. Right? And so I think if we remove a lot of these things from foods, it's gonna change the food landscape. But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So I wanna go to the topic of food in our evolutionary environment. Talked about toxicity. We haven't talked about deficiency. Yeah.
I But wanna go back and just kinda underscore something that you said, which was you're like, alright. There are toxins, which means too much of something for optimal health. That's pretty simple. There are some toxins where any amount is too much. It may not be causing immediate acute illness, but, like, less would be better for you.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Lead
Daniel Schmachtenberger
and mercury and organophosphates and BPA and whatever all fit in that category, it's a lot. And there are hundreds in the umbilical cord blood. Right? So it's like it's a lot, and it's a serious thing. There are other toxins that are too much of something that the body actually needs.
It's just too much, and it might be too much in absolute. And so this is where we look at cholesterol, or we look at zinc levels or something, right? Blood sugar, whatever. Blood sugar. Too much of something relative to something else or what it should be.
Those are different categories, but just the idea, and it's important to make the distinction where you wanna bring something down to zero versus you wanna bring it into evolutionary balance. And then there's not enough of some stuff and not so little that, again, you're acutely dying of rickets or beriberi, but you're very far from optimal. And that can be vitamins like that, but it can be trace minerals. And soil can be like a lot of things. And so you're like, okay, well many of those things that there's not enough of, that there's a deficiency, are also parts of the immune and detoxification system that would deal with the toxicity compounding effects.
Yeah. Right? And so deficiency. I think there's a lot of people who are like, hey, most people are obese today. This seems like diseases of excess, not deficiency.
It seems like we have caloric excess. Yeah. So talk to me about deficiency. And obviously, we're gonna be talking about micro versus macronutrients and stuff. And evolutionary environment diet versus this diet.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, you you brought up something really important is that and I remember reading these studies, you're just being flabbergasted that the most obese are the most malnourished.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. Especially why they're hungry all the time.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Kids. Right. And you know, we're looking for love in all the wrong places. And this is phenomena as well described in medicine. Kids for example are iron deficient.
They get something called pica, which is they eat dirt because they're trying to get iron. The body craves the things that it needs. You know, I remember going to, the Amazon, and I was fasting because there was this kind of wall of like minerals. I got kind of exposed along the bank of the river of of dirt. It looked like dirt, but it would just flock with parrots that would come and just eat that dirt because they were trying to get the minerals.
And and when you have a diet that's so nutritionally depleted, it's so high in sugar, starch, and bad fats, and chemicals, but has very little nutrients.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, is important because sugar equals carbohydrate calories equals a macronutrient.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So for people who don't Those makes the versus micronutrients Yeah. Would you break that down real quick?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, know, the macronutrients are protein, fat and carbohydrate, and you can maybe say fiber. There's vitamins and minerals which are micronutrients, and there's, you know, phytochemicals, I think are in different category, but I think they're conditionally essential nutrients. And then there's other things that, you know, you might not necessarily the body can make, but you might not necessarily have enough quantities like co g ten, which you can get from certain foods, but or lipoic acid, but you need to have some of them supplement with those. But I think the the the the the amount of bad macronutrients we have, namely sugar and starch, and the lack of of good macronutrients that we have is like good certain good fats and even protein, that's another conversation.
But there's there's such a depletion of the micronutrients because of the way we farm, because of the soil, because of how plants are bred. They're bred for starch content and for yield and for disease resistance and drought resistance. They're not bred for nutrient density. They're not bred for flavor. Yeah.
And except except now there's a Dan Barber who's been on the podcast created the Stone Barns, which is a sort of his regenerative farm up in Upstate New York. He created row seven seeds. And now you can buy these row seven crops that are in the supermarket. For example, he was said butternut squash is tasteless. And as a chef, I don't wanna cook this.
I want I wanna reverse engineer flavor. And he, you know, re engineered whether it's peppers, tomatoes, you know, winter squash, a whole series of foods that are are more flavorful because they have more nutrients. They're more phytochemically rich, more nutrient dense. He didn't breed it for that, but it's a set of natural consequence. And in in nature, flavor always follows phytochemical richness.
The the the the colorful like if you eat a if you eat a wild strawberry, it's so dense and some of these amazing phytochemicals like phycetin, is great for longevity and killing zombie cells. And a tiny little strawberry will, like, create those flavor explosion in your mouth. But if you have a giant strawberry that looks red and delicious, but it tastes like cardboard, it's grown in an industrial way, you're not gonna get those phytochemicals. But the problem is that so many people who are obese or overweight are nutritionally deficient. And when you look at their levels of nutrients like vitamin d or minerals or vitamins, they're often very low.
And so they're constantly hungry, they're constantly looking for more food, more nutrients, but they're not getting it.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So we know that a lot of the studies of blue zones were flawed. And there's kind of debate about what makes the areas where people make it to a 100 the way they are. But one thing that is pretty commonly known that led to all the caloric restriction studies is that very rarely do overweight people make it to a Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And morbidly obese 100 year old,
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you know. They're they're skinny. And typically, they're what we actually consider malnourished from a just macronutrient caloric perspective.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But their diet is actually micronutrient dense, macronutrient low. Yeah. Which means they're getting protein, fat, and carb, but they're getting a little bit less total calorie, but a lot more mineral, vitamin, phytochemical enzyme per calorie.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This makes a lot of sense. Right? And if you this is where, you know, talking about evolutionary environment food because sapien is depending upon who you ask, 200,000 years old, 300,000 years old, something like that. And hominids are 3,000,000 years old. And obviously, it goes back because we are genetically almost identical to the chimpanzees and other things.
Right? So evolutionary environment, billions of years of life being a particular way. We evolved to that environment. This is actually one of the concepts I think is so important is evolution is a process by which creatures emerge. They are selected for based on fitness to an environment.
Right? The environment is shaping the creature. The environment has leaves up really high, and the mutation that leads to a long neck gets selected for. Right? And you get a giraffe.
You wouldn't get a giraffe if there were not things really high. So it's the environment shaping the creature.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There's a little bit of the niche creation where the creature will try to modify the environment, and of course, like next to humans, the most environment modifying creatures are like beavers.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You know? Maybe a termite. Yeah. But if you look at a beaver, and then you look at Tokyo. Right?
You look at a beaver dam, and you look at, like, Tokyo or New York City or LA, and you look at LA when you're flying in, and you're like, as far as I can see is this orthogonal grid of concrete. There's actually no sign of the natural world left. Right? It's an Anthropocene technosphere that has eaten the biosphere. Then you look at a beaver dam, you're like, we are not like any of the other creatures, like, obviously.
We are like them in terms of made of the same stuff, but our capacity to do tech has really changed stuff profoundly. So we're a creature that started to change our environment rapidly, but change it to something that is not the environment we are genetically adapted to faster than our genes can adapt.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. It's a mismatch. It's a genes environment mismatch.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So the idea that we are not paying attention to the way that our environment continues to shape us as creatures, and we're making an environment we're actually not fit to, is the concept of anthropogenic disease. Right? It's the concept of and this is not romanticizing that in an evolutionary environment, everything was awesome. Like, famine was difficult. There were a lot of things that were difficult, but we still need to pay attention to what did we actually evolve to have fitness in.
And, you know, you've been you've mentioned vitamin d a few times. Actually, you know, that's a good example. We spend 90% of our time indoors. We evolved outdoors. We evolved to have vitamin d synthesis per unit time based on spending most of our time outdoors.
Dr. Mark Hyman
In the sun. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not only does indoor light not do what sunlight does, but energy efficient light is even worse. Yeah. Right? Like, we try to take the UVB out, and then we try to take the warm parts out to make it energy efficient, which the reason you have red light downstairs is because the synthesis of nitric oxide and other things where we actually do photosynthesize some stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? We actually modulate chemistry based on different frequencies of light. And so again, like, there's an externality on health of being indoors, an externality of health of even the attempt to make environmentally friendly lighting. But does supplemental vitamin d do the exact same thing as sunlight?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Not really. No. I mean, it's good, but it's not the same.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. Because you get it's you know, first, are you supplementing calcifediol or calcitriol or some enzymatically processed form or just, you know, just d three. And then the binding proteins, the light plays some role in that. Right? The light plays role in a whole complex of things.
And so supplementing it better than not supplementing it. But, again, this is a it makes sense that if you evolved outdoors moving a lot, that your body would need to move for a lymphatic system. Like, oh, we don't need a pump on this thing because the body's moving all the time, and an extra pump would be metabolically, evolutionarily expensive. And just when you stop moving, you don't automatically get another pump. Right?
And we will synthesize vitamin d from light and nitric oxide and other things based on the amount of light exposure. And so the idea that we can create an environment without realizing it where you do something for a reason. Right? You make a building for reasons, but it's doing other things than the thing it intended. And a lot of the other things were not we optimize for our problems, I e an externalized cost.
And the externalized cost to the environment are also reflected in the externalized cost to our health. Right? If you look at the planetary boundary perspective, the chemical pollution in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the chemical pollution in people's bodies. Yeah. The species extinction in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the species extinction in the microbiome.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And diversity loss. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so, you know, chief Seattle might sound like a hippie saying, we're not the web of life. We're merely a strand, and whatever we do to the web, do to ourselves. But it's like just also straightforward ecological science
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And medicine. Yeah. And so let's talk about food systems a little bit more in terms of in an evolutionary environment, what was different about food and the micronutrients and macronutrients, and, like, what has, first the agricultural revolution plow and stuff, and then kind of the green revolution, Haber Bosch and then pesticides and etcetera done to food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, going back historically, know, and then sort of done analysis of, you know, paleolithic diets. And and there was such a high level of micronutrients in the diet. There was such an incredibly high level of fiber, of omega three fats. There was an inversion of our sodium potassium intake, so we had much higher potassium, lower sodium intake.
And and you kinda look at the amount of sugar and starch. It was almost nonexistent. You know, we might have 22 teaspoons a year. We now have 14,000 times that, which is staggering as human biology
Daniel Schmachtenberger
that's something people really underscore. 14,000 times Yeah. What we evolved to process.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, we got a honey, you know, we found a honey It's amazing. Thing that was great. Or we got some berries, we got some
Daniel Schmachtenberger
also very expensive to try to find honey. Yeah. Evolutionarily. Right? Like the bees were not just giving it up.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. No. Like the Nepalese honey hunters figured out they would climb these trees with burning sticks, like smoke them out. But, yeah, it wasn't so easy. You had to climb a tree with a burning stick every time you want a cookie, it would be a different thing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
As opposed to push button on Amazon and shows up at the door.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. My wife's really good at that. I'm like, what is going on with all this ice cream showing up at the house? So
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, if you have to climb a tree to get honey Mhmm. You're not gonna get diabetes because you just exercise.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Right? Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if you had to like chase game
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? There's a lot of things where also the the reward was following an activity that had evolutionary relevance.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So so we have changed our food system. And then the the phytochemicals in the food has dramatically changed because of our agricultural practices. And so what happened, you know, we mentioned Fritz Haber that basically the ability to extract nitrogen from the air and turn into fertilizer happened, you know, in the, you know, early nineteen twenties. And then we after World War two, we took all the factories that were making nitrogen to make bombs because that was how what was used for.
It wasn't for agriculture initially. Turned them into fertilizer, which now, you know, are these huge companies that actually to make the fertilizer takes up 2% of the world's global energy supplies. And then, of course, it has all these downstream consequences when we put it on the soil. So the nitrogen causes the release of nitric oxide, which has adverse climate impacts that that that runs into the rivers and streams causing eutrophication, essentially, fertilizing all the plant life, sucking out the oxygen from river streams and Dead zones. And estuaries and create dead zones.
There's 400 around the world and feed half a million people. That's just the fertilizer. Then we turned the bioweapons factories, which were neurotoxins. So the the gas in World War one were all nerve toxins.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're chemical
Dr. Mark Hyman
weapons. Right? Those got turned into pesticides. Then we developed herbicides. And then we started hybridizing plants to breed for different traits.
Not GMO, but just plain old Everything. Breeding, plant breeding. And the traits we bred for were increased yield, increased starch content, increased drought resistance, pest resistance. So we basically
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But when we hybridized for that, the plants got less good at other things.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So then you had less protein. There's increasing protein deficiency in the world because there's less protein in these foods. There's less vitamins and minerals. There's certainly less phytochemicals.
There's more sugar. So you kind of created this disaster. I mean, gluten is a great example where, you know, I remember being in Sardinia and they had this incredible wheat they used to make that this flat kind of crackers that would get rehydrated that the shepherds would use. They'd go out and hike and spend days and weeks out in the middle of nowhere raising their animals and they would have these, you know, large amounts of this granocappelli wheat that they made into these crackers that they would rehydrate and take with them. Very different than dwarf wheat, which was made by Norman Borlaug.
It was won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this hybridization process. But basically, then I met I actually met his daughter. I don't know why. I got invited to this food conference and I I it was an agriculture conference. I gave a talk on food as a medicine and I was sitting next to this guy, Mr.
Cargill, and meeting this. Was like it was like I was in a stranger. And I said to this the guy was like, so what do you do? Said, I do plant medicine. I'm like, really?
Plant medicine? What's that? He said, you know, pesticides. I'm like, wow. So it was really funny.
But I digress. And so when we hybridize the wheat, when we breed plants, we we combine the genetics of the plants. It's not like humans where you get half of your genetics from your mom and half from your dad. You don't get half from one strain of wheat and half from the other strain of wheat. You add them.
So like 46 chromosomes instead would be 92. And what genes do is they make proteins. So all of sudden, you've got this wheat that's making all these extra proteins, and what are those proteins they're making? They're extra gluten proteins, gliadin proteins, and they're way more inflammatory. And then they they create in the amount of starch you created was a super starch called amylopectin a, which is much more starchy, higher glycemic load and creates, you know, diabetes basically.
So you have all these benefits of drought resistant, hardy, short, stubby wheat Yeah. That's replaced the old amber leaves of grain that I think is in our national anthem, you know, which is tall fields of wheat. But there many harmful consequences of that breeding. That's just one example. And and so we're we're seeing increasing levels of nutritional deficiencies of protein and zinc and minerals be because of this.
And then we destroy the soil with the chemicals we put on with the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and the tillage and the industrial farming methods that deplete the soil organic matter in order to actually get the nutrients out of the plants. You've gotta have a living soil with bacteria that act in symbiosis with the mycorrhizal fungi to extract the nutrients for the plant. So you might have a soil that's full of minerals, but it can't get to the plant. So you created this cascading set of effects that have ended up with a diet that is highly industrialized, highly processed, scalable, shelf stable. You know, when was that show that I've I forget what they found.
The guy found a hamburger in his pocket. It was twenty years later or something, a Big Mac, and it was still perfectly preserved. No. It doesn't break down. I mean, there's that joke you should only eat food that rots, you know?
So we we've we've gotten so far away from that. So it's no wonder our diet's killing us.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So you you were mentioning the way Ivan Elich's book influenced you. One of the ones that I read early was Bernard Jensen's work, one of the kind of founders of naturopathic medicine. Yeah. He wrote chemistry of man, which was looking at what all the different trace minerals do in the body and what the trace mineral deficiency does.
But then he wrote a great book, and there are many like this. It's just the first one I read called empty harvest that was about correlating deficiency of trace minerals in the soil with specific kind of trace mineral deficiency diseases. And he was showing, like, when agricultural soils in The US and the USGS surveys started showing almost no selenium levels and then heart disease becoming rampant. And, of course, heart disease is multifactorial. It was from sugars, from a lot of things, but, like, that was a thing.
And where chromium and vanadium started to become lower, type two diabetes also got higher, which play roles in insulin
Dr. Mark Hyman
Regulation. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so if you think about again, and from the evolutionary perspective, that everything in the biosphere is made of the same stuff. So then it makes sense that if you're eating stuff, your body can break down that form and make it into the stuff that you're made of because it's made of the same stuff. But as soon as you start engineering food that is not actually that is made of the same evolutionary stuff and you start changing the soil, that's gonna change a lot. Right? So even before you deep fry the stuff Yeah.
Like the plants you're talking about are already just not food. Yeah. Even when they're taken from the ground because, again, you in a forest, there's no such thing as waste. Right? Everything that falls on the soil turns into soil, turns into plants, turns into animals.
And so it's important to get in the ecosystem all the loops are closed. Right? All all of the old stuff turns into new stuff, and there's no such thing as unrenewable resource extraction. Right? Yeah.
The forest is not doing mining unrenewably stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Dust, ash, to ashes. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's what we now call cradle to cradle as if it's a fancy thing. Yeah. But obviously, closed loop cycling, it's how nature works. We start extracting stuff from nature faster than it can replenish, leading to deficiency issues on one side of the ecosystem and then turning it into trash and pollution on the other side faster than it can be processed. That's ecological overshoot.
Right? Mhmm. But in our food systems, right, like, what is the fertilizer in a forest? Everything that came out of the forest goes back into the forest. Nothing's removed.
Nothing's extracted from the forest. So if we clear cut a forest and then we turn it into cropland and then we grow a single kind of crop, it's gonna pull out of that good soil all kinds of nutrients. We're gonna take all of that out, then we're gonna spray with NPK. Right? So we've got nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and that's it.
Maybe some calcium or something depending. But what about the whole rest of the 72 critical trace minerals and what and that NPK is gonna kill the living matter, which as you mentioned, the living matter not only helps the plants uptake the nutrients, but also modulates its genetic expression, all those things. Once you do that a few times, there's just nothing left in the soil, which is why you get desertification. And then you can keep it alive artificially. It's not alive.
It's just like some weird growing substrate. Yeah. And then because it's minerally deficient, the plants are sick. Yeah. Right?
They don't have good immune system. They can't produce volatile oils, so now they're much more susceptible to pathogens. And because they're monocropped. Right? Because in a natural environment, you'd have a little bit of one plant that a that a bug might eat, but you'd have plants that produce something that that bug doesn't like right next to it that grow in symbiotic guilt.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it's so important what you said. Plants have their own defenses. They have an immune system. Of course. The the way that they keep away pests and and diseases and things is through these phytochemicals Yes.
That they make. And we've essentially created a food system that's bred phytochemicals or engineered phytochemicals out of the food.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Both by removing everything from the soil then by hybridizing the crop. Yeah. So if you think about hybridizing, like, we started learning this with animal husbandry, call it ten thousand years ago. Right? Six to twelve thousand, whatever.
And as we and before that with dogs. Right? Like, well before we started to do with goats and then cows and stuff, the the wolf part. But we didn't want to keep them like wolves. Right?
So we started to breed them. And we've got chihuahuas and we've got Saint Bernards, and they're both wolves.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And you're like, damn, these are really different creatures. This is not synthetic biology and genetic engineering. This is literally just selective breeding.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Dog breeding.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But we learned that. We started being like, man, we can do that to plants. We can do it to all kinds of things.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There's unintended consequences. We have a we have a hybridized dog. It's a Yes. Bernadoodle.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And we just found out it has allergies because these these dogs have more allergies, so they're not
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so you don't get
Dr. Mark Hyman
very sweet.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Upside. Right? Yeah. You get upside and you get downside from that. So then we start hybridizing all the animals.
And if you look at a what used to be what we call a chicken, this beautiful, colorful, small bird that lives in trees in Southeast Asia, It's a gorgeous bird. It doesn't have much meat on it. Right? In a natural environment, it'd be very gamey. And you look at the hybridizing of that to this and and that's even before you shoot it full of estrogen and steroids and antibiotics and give it a super toxic feed.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Full arsenic. But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you're like, okay, so these are not the same genetics at all. And in the same way that those animals now are gonna have hip dysplasia and allergies and whatever, when you eat them, that a lot of those effects translate. Right? Yeah. And now because the plants don't have the volatile chemicals, they and because you didn't plant them in guilds, you monocrop them, you're gonna get locusts.
Right? You're gonna get pesticides issues. I mean, you're gonna get pest issues. So now you gotta spray them in pesticides that, again, like we said, are toxic enough to kill a thing that makes it to the nuclear blast on the food. And then we don't want any other crops because we're designing for tractors.
So then we spray the herbicides, which and so you're like, okay. We we took all the nutrients out of the soil. We just put back the nutrients to make the thing look like a thing, but there's no actual micronutrient in it. Right? It looks like a tomato, but the nutrient deficiency is pretty radical.
The genetics are hybridized to be, like an an heirloom citrus. It's got a lot of seeds in it. Yeah. Like, what does it mean to make a seedless thing when it's growing for reproduction?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? You're growing this weird sterile thing. Like, obviously, the thing that can't reproduce is not healthy. And so in the process of getting it seedless or making it huge or whatever, you also breed all these nutrients out. And like you mentioned, you might breed types of proteins in the gliadin or whatever that are hard to digest, cause inflammatory issues.
And then then you spray it with pesticides and herbicides, and then that would be what you put in your salad if you're trying to eat, like, raw or fresh stuff. Yeah. Now then it gets even worse because you're like, you go to the grocery store to buy an apple, and it's about to be apple season. You're like, wait. It's about to be apple season.
Where was this thing? Maybe it was a greenhouse somewhere else that got shipped here. Usually, even worse condition soil. Maybe it was actually stored.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And most apples are stored for about a year before they're
Daniel Schmachtenberger
eating Exactly. So they're stored in a in a nitrogen environment, so it doesn't oxidize in a fridge. And so the thing that even if you're trying to do fresh stuff, you're like, this is hybridized, demineralized, poisoned, and a year old.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so, you know, you were mentioning what does it mean in another podcast to eat not ultra hybridized. What what's the term? Ultra process for
Dr. Mark Hyman
you. The
Daniel Schmachtenberger
one of the people who I got to study with when I was young that influenced me the most was doctor Evertz Loomis, healing for everyone. I don't
Dr. Mark Hyman
know if
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you ever Mhmm. Came across. He was one the other early naturopaths
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Doctor Christopher and those guys.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And my family had actually had some quote unquote incurable illnesses that got help through alternative processes that kinda got us in that path. And we actually gotta go live with that guy, doctor Loomis, on his healing clinic when I was a kid.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And I got to see people coming in in wheelchairs and leaving not in wheelchairs, just having really radical kind of change. It was very old school. It was kinda Ann Wigmore like stuff. And but it was real interesting to hear. He was also a medical doctor, but, like, he was 85 by the time I met him, and he had boiled it down to a very simple thing.
And he's like, number one principle of nutrition is eat as close to that living ecosystem as you can. Number two is pay subtle attention to how the foods feel in your body. Everything else, whatever. And, like, nightshades and ratios of macronutrients and Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I agree.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So he had these gardens, these kind of huge gardens and orchards, and he told people, go pick the food you feel called to and eat it right there. Don't even like, just stand outside with your feet in the dirt and eat it. And that and that's it. That's your diet while you're here. It's an inpatient thing.
And it was amazing how much people got better if the only food they could eat was standing by the tree or the plant that they picked it off of while they ate it. And of course, he emphasized heirloom species and good soil and no pesticides or pesticides.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, know, there's there's a guy who kinda looks like you a little bit with the beard. His name's Fred Provenza. Do you know him? Oh, God. You would love him.
You guys would just jam. He's a someone I got to know recently who's a professor for years at Utah State University and studied rangeland ecology and the relationship between plants and the soil and animals and humans. And basically, he wrote a book called nourishment, what animals can teach us about rediscovering our nutritional wisdom. And, you know, he he he basically said that that animals intuitively know what to eat when to keep themselves healthy.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So they forage on some major food crops, but then they'll forage if they're left their own devices and there's enough variety of wild plants around on different plants that have different medicinal properties or different nutrients. And in the book, he talked about this study that was done, think, the twenties in an orphanage in Canada, where they took kids who really hadn't been exposed to a lot of whatever junk food or American diet. And they they gave them, like, weird stuff like brain and organs and all kinds of weird food that we wouldn't think would be things that we wanna eat or the kids would wanna eat. And these kids actually were eating completely in harmony with what their bodies needed and seeking out those foods and nutrients in the food that they needed and were far healthier than kids were control group that were fed a regular diet.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I was like, that's fascinating that humans have lost their ability to understand their sort of nutritional wisdom and and to understand how things affect us.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If people pay attention like, okay, I'm eating this food. Do I feel sleepy afterwards? Do I feel very heavy and lethargic? Does my belly hurt? Am I still craving stuff?
Do I have stronger craving? Like, most people just don't notice. Right? Mhmm. And if you this is why his second principle is kind of pay detailed attention how your body feels, which doesn't mean just, you know, what food sounds good to your mind.
It's when I eat this thing, how do I actually feel? And he's like, if you eat close to the living ecosystem, as close as possible, and you pay attention to how you feel, you're gonna do pretty well. And it's true. Like, there there are some other things you could add to that, but you should start with that as the foundation. I remember one study from an indigenous scholar that said the pharmacopeia of plants that the native Americans considered edible plants, when obviously there are many native American groups, but there were some pharmacopeia they were referencing, that had their list of edible plants as about 5,000 plants in North America.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And you go to the grocery store and you're like, there are not 5,000
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Foods in the produce section. And even of the ones in the produce section, I don't get the bok choy or whatever all that often. And you're like, how many different plants? So the plants I'm getting, one probably were grown a long time ago and stored. Right?
Because they're not seasonal. Two, they're hybridized. Three, they're grown in crap soil and sprayed with stuff. And I'm eating very few, and each one has different phytochemicals and different things that modulate genetic expression. So again, evolutionary environment, you don't have very much of any one plant before you start row cropping.
Yeah. You have a very little bit. I mean They're seasonal and the whole ecosystem has shared needs.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, I think 60% of our diet is corn, wheat, soy, and depending where you are in the world, rice. And then the rest of the 40% is another 12p like carrots and onions and potatoes and And those iceberg lettuce, you know.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And those four you mentioned were how much of a hunter gatherer diet? Zero. Zero? I mean, it's a significant thing because we're not trying to like do some romantic savage myth. We're like but we are saying we evolved to be fit to a particular thing.
Yeah. And our genes haven't changed when we have changed what we've exposed us to so radically.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, the the the whole idea of the in in in, like, intuitive eating, it's it's really what animals do, and we've lost the ability to do that. And knowing that, but we've the foods we produce have hijacked our normal regulatory pathways and dysregulate our appetite, dysregulate hunger, have immune effects on our body that create inflammation.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So people don't crave what's good for them most of time anymore. Right? Because the system has become addicted to hypernormal stimuli.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I crave I crave chopped liver.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, if you're pretty healthy, you crave what's good for you. Yeah. But if you're pretty unhealthy, you typically crave what will make you feel better instantly because it's Yeah. Providing some dopaminergic hit.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's interesting because I I I had a surgery and I lost half my blood volume four months ago. And I've gotten most of it back but my my iron stores are low because I basically sucked up all my iron reserves like all the money in my bank account. I got used up to pay for what I needed to run my body. And I noticed myself like craving things like liver. I'm like, I want some liver.
And my wife's like, what are you doing?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But talk about the craving in supersize me. Yeah. Because that's different. Right? And people find that they're dealing with cravings for things that are totally not good for them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that and it's different than than, like, your instinctual wisdom. It's really hijacking of the brain through its effects on dopamine and the way these Zafus are designed to create a dopamine hit that creates sort of short term pleasure and long term pain. And then these are highly addictive. And the the shocking stat, and this is sort of amazing to me. And I I I obviously had many patients who I knew had food issues and were craving the wrong things.
But according to the Yealot food addiction scale, which is a validated metric for looking at not just like, oh, I crave ice cream, but like actual people who are truly addicted and who go through withdrawal, whose life is occupied by food, who can't think of anything else, who who's have their lives destroyed by food. Just like the the criteria for being an alcoholic or any other addict, your life kinda degrades dramatically. It's fourteen percent of the world's population including fourteen percent of kids, which is pretty frightening when you think about it. I mean, it's like one in five or one zero one and I'm not good at math. One in seven, I think, people have have a food addiction that's that's controlling your lives.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But on the not quite that bad gradient there is like almost everybody. Yeah. Which is pretty important. Because if you define addiction in the broadest sense of just a compulsive behavior for something you know isn't good for you, but you can't really stop. Mhmm.
Most people's relationship with food would be described that way. Yeah. And meaning they know they do not eat what they know the best diet for themselves would be. Not because of money and not because of time.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I mean, it it it's like the body snatchers. The food industry has understood how to design foods that are hyper palatable, that hijack your brain chemistry, your microbiome, your metabolism, your immune system in ways that and your hormones in ways that never happened before in human evolution. And they I mean, nobody wakes up and goes, I wanna be overweight. Nobody wakes up and goes, I wanna be become diabetic.
I wanna be three, four, five hundred pounds. It is is is not something that people willfully choose. I was
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I was very overweight as a young teenager and, you know, my my family just didn't know better about that particular thing of like which they should have having met doctor Loomis, but but it was like all pizzas and And that kind of I remember feeling really bad about being overweight, really wanting not to eat, and just having such a hard time, especially because my environment was everyone else was eating around. Right? And then I remember when I started to learn more, kinda early teenager, about it and switched to, like, sturdy eat salads where it wasn't iceberg lettuce. It was, like, a a bunch of deep dark kinds of greens with a bunch of fresh seeds and nuts and seaweeds and like whatever a lot. You couldn't eat that much.
Like a very rich thing that is very fibrous and makes a lot of chewing. And yet with the other thing, after you're already in pain because you're full, you wanna keep eating.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true. Right? I mean, I think that's what I say. You know, nobody binges on a bag of avocados or ten ten, you know, rib eye steaks.
Right? They just can't. But you could easily eat, you know, two quarts of ice cream or a giant bag of cookies on your own.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And what the cookies and the ice cream have in common is it is the combinatorics of salt, fat, and sugar with palatability. Mhmm. Right? Which is like, this is the interesting thing of like, okay. So we need some macronutrients, we need a lot of micronutrients is what we're made of.
Right? Is we're it's enzymes that catalyze stuff. We're obviously made of proteins, but we're we're also made of minerals that make up bones and all the stuff. And so in an evolutionary environment, as you mentioned, you got very little sugar. Right?
You got little bits of sugar that were naturally in fruit, but that fruit, again, the orange before it was hybridized or the perries, there was just there were not that many of them. They were only around a certain time of year. Other animals were competing for them. So because though their people could die of famine, anyone who could fill up on something that could create some caloric storage, there was an evolutionary incentive for that. Right?
So you get a dopamine hit when there is sugar because there's almost
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And so we're designed to gain weight. That's what we're designed to do in the face of
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Famine.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Excess food or calories will store it for later.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if there's a there's very little fat in the evolutionary environment that you can get super easy, the the wild game is gamey. Right? Not
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Hunter gatherers would would when they would kill an animal and then the Hadza are like this, we visited them in Africa, they would break the bones Yeah. And suck the marrow to get the fat because that was the most prized part.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So there's not a heap of fat. There's not a heap of sugar. Salt's hard to come by. So those things in an evolutionary environment, you get a dopamine hit for because they're important. Right?
There's a lot of green vegetables. Right? Like leafy things. There's a lot of plants. And so that you don't need a dopamine hit for those because those are the things you're gonna have to do most of your Yeah.
Eating on. So then we figure out how to produce excessive amounts of food, extract the sugar, fat, salt, and recombine it into shakes and donuts and hamburgers and whatever. But it's basically least amount of chewing. Right? Like, palatability or easy chewing, salt, fat, sugar combos that have almost no real nutrients but are maximally dopaminergic.
And that process of make something that is a hypernormal stimuli, but it was a stimuli because it was evolutionarily relevant because, one, it was rare. It's not rare anymore. Two, you had to go do exercise to get it. And, it was bound with trace minerals and phytochemicals and other things. So when you separate, you don't have to do that evolutionary work to get it.
It's not rare. We have way too much of it Yeah. And it's devoid of all the nutrients, yet your genetics still have a dopamine response. Mhmm. And so from a supply side, economically, this is awesome.
Yeah. Right? Because if I'm just a businessman thinking about I I actually have a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. Like, I can literally be in committing a crime of fiduciary responsibility if I do not maximize shareholder profit. How am I gonna maximize shareholder profit?
Well, I want the most customers I can have, so how do I max my total addressable market? And I want the most revenue, but lifetime revenue. For lifetime revenue, addiction's awesome. Yeah. Especially addiction starts in childhood.
And if it's food, total addressable market's everybody. So from a business point of view, like that's just almost
Dr. Mark Hyman
share. I call it stomach share. And it's it's interesting. We know there's an extra 500 calories a day created in our agricultural system per person in this country that people are eating. You know, the calorie consumption has gone up historically from the seventies.
Although there's been an interesting decrease in calorie consumption with an increase in obesity, which is a very interesting conversation. It's a separate conversation really about how all calories are not the same and certain calories are Yeah. More problematic that that cause the body to store the calories, which is this fuel partitioning theory of obesity, which is different than the energy balance theory, which has to do with just too many calories and not enough exercise.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if you look at calories multiplied by the type of calories, right, glycemic index, whatever, kind of subtracted or divided by the trace mineral micronutrient density and exercise needed to get the food. That ratio looks pretty bad. Mhmm. Right? It's not just 500 more calories.
It's that whole ratio of thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then there's a deconstruction of the food. That's even worse. The the sort of industrial chemical separation of all the components of food like corn or wheat or soy into different things that are not found in nature. And the chemical structure has been altered and the properties have been altered, and that seems to have this unique effect on us. And this is why we're seeing such an increase in the research that's showing the ultra processed food, which, you know, still needs to be defined more carefully.
But, you know, we kinda intuitively understand what is a Cheeto is an ultra processed food. It's like, what is that? You know, like there's no Cheeto tree out there. And that that has a really unique effect on our biology and it's driving so many chronic illnesses and it's causing such food addiction. So you know, Daniel, we've kind of covered a lot.
We've covered the load of environmental toxins that we're all exposed to and that none of us is exempt from and this is sort of evidenced by you know, the umbilical cord studies or fat biopsy studies they've done in humans where everybody's pre polluted. We've talked about the problems with our diet and the both the depletion of our food supply through the hybridization and the soil damage as well as the growth of ultra processed food and the reduction of variety of foods we eat. But there's other ubiquitous things that are causing us to be ill. And one, you know, one of the things I think you talked about is the fact that there really are no healthy humans left.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, there are people that are healthier than others, but how many times do you see someone who is an athlete who is still shows markers of diseases on their way?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. A lot.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And, of course, those athletes then later in life will get diseases where you trace back and, like, they were already in pathoideology. Right? And so the idea of disease as this individual thing is different than disease that is a result of systemic factors everybody's swimming in. And that's kind of one of the things we wanna talk about is there's like, there's ubiquitous pathology that is not necessary.
It's not obligated. It's stuff that we could change.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So we're swimming in a disease causing soup, essentially.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And disease meaning lots of things. Right? Like, if we think back about an evolutionary environment, the unit of selection was not the individual. Such is such an important topic. Mhmm.
An individual It group. Is a group. Right? Like, there are animals that are pretty solo animals, and there are animals that are social animals, and they have different selection processes. But a solo sapien in the Serengeti is dead.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Bad news. Yeah. Still a leopard. They'll get by. Exactly.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Cats are more solitary in most interactions. Mine's a bit of an exception, but humans are a social primate. And so it was groups of humans coordinating together that were what was selected for. So things that make humans physiology unhealthy, things that make their psychology unhealthy, things that make the social relationships break down are all breaking down the evolutionary substrate.
It's really important. Right? And so if we think about ubiquitous psychopathology for a moment. So in the same way, you've got, like, okay. Your vitamin c solo, you got scurvy.
Or your vitamin d solo, you got rickets. Well, above vitamin d solo, you got rickets. You've got way increased likelihood for immune disorders and osteoporosis and stuff. With the DSM and mental illness, you have this person has major depressive disorder. But below that is this person's depressed.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This person has diagnosable generalized anxiety disorder. We're gonna put him on benzos. Well, that's actually a lot of people. It's actually really sad, and benzos are a horrifying drug from a side effect and addiction point of view. And a society responding to its problems is pretty hard when a lot of people are on benzos and SSRIs and opiates.
It does not make a
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm free of sugar. That's a Yeah. It doesn't make really the opiate of the masses.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But opiates are also the opiate of the masses. Right? More people died of fentanyl last year in The US than all the soldiers in the Vietnam war over eleven years by two x. Yeah. Right?
That's a That's lot. That's a lot. And when you look back at the, like, opioid crisis Sackler family thing, that case got prosecuted. This there are a lot of cases like that that don't get prosecuted. Right?
The perverse incentive is really fun profound. So iatrogenic disease, disease that is caused by some aspect of the health care or medical system, is a subset of anthropogenic disease. Right? Mining is causing diseases. Agriculture is causing diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then we have to medical Right. Needs are more drug
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, we said earlier that from a business point of view, lifetime revenue of a customer minus costs to do business, multiplied by total addressable market, and then the penetration of total addressable market is kind of the equation.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? Yeah. Well For profit.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, all of that equals total profitability. Yeah. Right? And so if I think about it, I want addiction is really good for lifetime revenue, but so is upsell and cross sell. And so if there is a medicine, the side effect of which is another medicine I also own, and whether it's the company or whether it's the financial institutes that invest across the companies, if there is food that you make a lot of money on that causes diseases that then medical system you make money on, you're like, okay.
Just if if one was just following their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit, they would do it that way. This does not equal making healthy humans at scale. And then you can say, well, caveat emptor with the market, you know, like, buyer beware. And, no, this is total nonsense. If you think about it's it's really important to understand how much our core social systems, when you're reading Adam Smith of the founding fathers, were a different world in seventeen hundreds or, you know so when you look at free speech in 1776, there wasn't much classified stuff.
There there didn't have to be much classified stuff because and nobody's talking about free speech absolutism is saying, let's declassify all the classified military stuff. Now when you had the whole continent, because nobody was here that had militaries to defend themselves at the same scale. There were a lot of people here, but they could all be kind of destroyed. You got the whole continent, and the fastest way to if you share information with the population, your enemies, they would literally have to take a boat, a very slow moving sailing ship to get somewhere, and then they would have to take a boat back. It's very different than when they can send a signal message and then send a missile or a cyber attack.
Dr. Mark Hyman
In, like, seconds. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So now so as soon as you start getting a world where if the if the citizens know, the enemy knows. And more and more things in systemic warfare are an aspect of national security. Do you want them to know where the big aquifers are, and do you want them to know where the fertilizer supplies are because it's weapons and food from phosphorus and blah blah blah. So you get more and more things that the public couldn't know about because they're classified because they're national security because if the public knows, the Chinese know, the Russians know. You're like, okay.
The founding fathers did not have to deal with that issue. No. There were no cyber attacks. There were no you gotta, like, rethink through it and say, well, how should we do it today? Right?
We want as much open society as possible. Thinking through national security seems reasonable. We've got kinda gotta redo it. Founding kind of market theory. Founding market theory, if you think about, like, we're going to a market, and I'm gonna sell some stuff, and you're gonna buy some stuff.
I'm gonna sell some stuff, me and a couple people. Right? There is a symmetry between the supply side and the demand side where you can literally go to all the people making shoes, and you can see what is the best product. I can feel them move around. What's the best product at the best price?
And you can do that, which creates an incentive for the suppliers to make the best product at the best price. Okay. That seems cool. But as soon as you're dealing with the supply is getting larger and larger, and the demand in aggregate is, but the consumer is still the consumer. Mhmm.
So now you got multibillion dollar multinational corporation employing massive amounts of psychologists, split testing, whatever, to be able to manufacture demand. Yeah. And the individual person who can't begin to compete with the information warfare of that. Mhmm. Now to say, well, demand is driving supply.
Demand is obviously not driving supply. People are
Dr. Mark Hyman
buying That's the line I hear from these big CEOs of food companies. Well, we're just giving your customers what they want.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Every And
Dr. Mark Hyman
so we even
Daniel Schmachtenberger
give Every drug pusher says that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you if you that rationale, you say, well, they sell $2 bags of cocaine, they could say, we're just giving our customers what we want.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, and you give them the first hit for free, and then you say, I'm just giving them what they want. That's the plausible deniability Mhmm. To be driving addiction. Now, if you have that much power relative to this and you're starting with kids, what the mark like, what buyer beware, no. That's absolute nonsense.
Right? And so this is asymmetric information war on people. And then you didn't have the like, humans were small then relative you think about time of Adam Smith, there's a half a billion people in the world. We don't have an industrial revolution at scale. Couple hundred years go by, you 16 x the population.
You a 100 x the resource consumption per capita. Yeah. How big we are relative to the planet changed. Externalities are a much bigger deal. You can't just think of nature as a place you can pollute and put trash and steal from for free forever.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so now, not pricing in the externalities is a really big deal because my margin goes up if I don't pay my externalities. The pollution that I don't have to pay to process is better margin.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They're they're not really externalities. They're just I I they call these side effects of drugs. They're not side effects. They're just effects we don't like.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When we say externality, what it means is it's externalized from the cost equation.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? This is a financial term, which means so my Like,
Dr. Mark Hyman
the the the guy who makes soda is not paying for the diabetes care. They're not paying for the
Daniel Schmachtenberger
damage for the diabetes care.
Dr. Mark Hyman
For the damage to the soil to grow the corn syrup that they're putting in their soda. They're not
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So those are real costs that people are gonna have to pay. The environment pays. They're gonna but they're not paying. So they are socializing the cost And privatizing. And privatizing the game.
Right? At this scale, that is a totally catastrophic thing. This shit has to be rethought.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Because we that leads to a disease creating economy, which is what we have.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Of course. So when people are sick and need to buy more medicine, GDP goes up.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if maybe even total GDP long term will go down because of productivity issues, that business's GDP that is up being optimized for is still going up. And so, like so think about think about it this way for a moment. So you mentioned there were people that lived to be 100 years old. Now when we're looking at diseases, we have a complex of an IP structure, an intellectual property structure, a regulatory apparatus, and a set of financial incentives, and a reductionist epistemology that all cluster together into a clusterfuck. And I wanna just kind of describe this.
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Unpack that.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The to be able to say this is going to treat a disease, you have to go through a phase three clinical trial. And we like that. We say that's the government protecting us because you're testing that it's safe and effective. You know, phase two clinical trials are not cheap. No.
Almost somebody can afford them. Right? They're getting a little bit cheaper, but they're still most of a billion dollars. Mhmm. And when you factor all the ones the company does that fail in phase one or two or whatever and you amortize those, it's like it's most of a billion dollars Yeah.
To get a drug for approval. That's a lot of pre revenue money for a company. Yeah. If you think about it from the point of view of almost any other company, hey, we're gonna spend years and a billion dollars before we make a penny. The lean Yeah.
Startup model well, it is a good business model if you can make enough back, and making enough back is going to be
Dr. Mark Hyman
drugs. You need chronic drugs.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I need chronic drugs for large populations. I have to make enough money to pay for the class action lawsuit and to pay for the legal firms to try to make class action lawsuits illegal.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Like, that's all part of it. And but to to pay that most of a billion dollars for the phase three clinical trial, to ever make that money back, I have got a patent on that thing. So I'm the only one that can sell it. Because if I was studying a vitamin or an herb or an endogenous chemical the body produces, and once I put the billion dollars in, anybody else could produce it at the same cost as me, then I my business model wouldn't work.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, why isn't NIH paying for that? It's a good question.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They should. But research is.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
As a result, I can't patent vitamins. I can't patent minerals, nutrients, and or parts of the human physiology. So I'm only gonna study novel synthetic chemicals that were never part of any healthy human or any evolutionary environment. And to just think about how batshit absurd it is to say, the only things we will study to treat illness are synthetic chemicals talk to any healthy human or any evolutionary environment.
Dr. Mark Hyman
To nature molecules. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You're like, yeah, it's weird. It's weird that the only things we would study are those things. Yeah. And what about like the things that healthy people have more of naturally than unhealthy people and that when you were young, you had more of. Right?
So you start looking at peptides that your thymus gland produces or whatever and you're like, maybe that stuff is used, but the patent structure makes that difficult. And you kinda don't want people to own a patent on something the body produces. So maybe the funding structure has to become different. Right? But then again, if, like okay.
So the $5,000,000,000 a year $5,000,000,000,000 a year budget in The US for health care. It's a lot of money. Right? Which roughly half the government is subsidizing. You look at the desire to cut trillions from the government spend right now, and you say
Dr. Mark Hyman
Nobody's talking about this.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Talk about it. You you talk about it for a minute. This is This is absurd. What make America healthy again should do, and this is totally nonpartisan. It's just straightforward science and economics.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, considering our federal deficits exploding and that, you know, our economic system is now shaky that, you know, the the trust in the dollar is is world currency is kinda crumbling. I mean, we're we're kind of in due to and a lot of it has to do with the incredible amount of health care costs that the government covers. And most people don't know this.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But I wanna say this was all true during Biden and it was true during Obama and Oh,
Dr. Mark Hyman
for whatever.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is like this not new stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. It's not new Yes. For a long So so of of the total tax revenue collected by The United States, one third of it is used for health care. And of the total health care bill, which is almost $5,000,000,000,000 on the whole country, about 40% of it's paid for by the government in various health programs. Not just Medicare and Medicaid, but the Indian Health Service, Children's Health Insurance Program, the VA, the Department of Defense, federal employees, the list goes on.
Wait.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Wait. I just want I just wanna make sure everyone hears that this is a t not a b. Right? 5,000,000,000,000.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. 5,000,000,000,000. Yeah. 5,000,000,000,000. So the government pays like upwards of $2,000,000,000,000.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And how much money are we hearing right now we wanna try to cut from the government?
Dr. Mark Hyman
$2,000,000,000,000. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Or or like a Yeah. Isn't it something like a half of all the Medicare costs would go away if you just fix food?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you fix food. Yeah. And it's tough to get people to understand this because
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Please break this down because it's like cutting okay. But sure. If there are some government services that are lame and we need to redo them, but we need less government services of lame type, but we need more of certain other types. Yeah. Whatever.
But if if half if the if if we spend more money on health care than we do on war or anything else.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. By far.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If more than half of it, you just change food and goes away Yeah. Simultaneously now, people's fertility goes up, their depression goes down, their health goes up, the DOD can have fighting guys again because right now they're all obese and there's no like, it's kind of omnibetter for everyone. GDP will go up because there's not as many sick days and people work longer. Like, outside win of win for everybody. Outside of maybe some pharma companies and some food companies, this is omnibetter for everyone.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. That's right. And there's not that I mean, there's not that many food companies. Like, think 10 big, you know, processed food companies. There's, you know, a handful of ag companies that make fertilizer, probably four big ones.
There's probably five or four or five seed companies.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There should not be four or five seed companies.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There should not. But there used to be hundreds of seed companies, and now there's just a few. One of the big ones in China, you know, Monsanto and a bunch of other big ones out there.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There should not be terminated. No.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But, you know, when you think right now, we're talking to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is a innovation hub of Medicare and of the CMS. And and they they're looking at, you know, diabetes reversal. Imagine if we could find a treatment for obesity and diabetes that wasn't Ozempic. And and it not only just managed the problem, but actually got rid of it and didn't come with a whole bunch of side effects.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
How much diabetes was there in 1950?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Almost none. Mean, there was just so little. Back back a hundred and fifty years ago, there was pretty much none. If you go back and look at the hospital records of Mass General back in the eighteen hundreds, it just was not And the pictures.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Even the fucking photographs. Yeah. Right? The obesity rate was not the same thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. He was I mean, he's looking at pictures from the seventies like a Woodstock. I mean, there's no no chubby kids there or look at the beach pictures or I mean, I I remember seeing Amazing Grace which was a movie made, in 1970, that Aretha Franklin, you was in Oakland and she was giving this concert in this church. And it was incredible. And there was not a single overweight black person in that church.
And in the sixties, they were healthier than whites, and now there's obesity rates are higher than the rest of population.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're important. We're not talking about figuring out how to do some new super hard unprecedented shit. Mhmm. We're actually talking about reversing a completely new unnecessary retarded phenomenon.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's just amazing to me, Daniel, that that the physicians and the NIH doesn't go, wait a minute. Where were all these diseases sixty years ago and like what happened? And maybe we should study that and maybe we should design this healthcare system that reimburses for doing the right thing.
Does our NIH pay for
Daniel Schmachtenberger
all the nutrition studies? No. No. Who pays for
Dr. Mark Hyman
them? The food industry is 12 times as many nutrition studies as the government funds and and they spend about $12,000,000,000 a year. And and they find that that there's when they look at government, versus, industry funded studies, the industry funded studies find a positive benefit for their product eight to 50 times more than a independently or government funded study.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So for everybody who wants to take all of the studies, put them in AI to know what's going on. Most of the studies are shit. Yeah. This is important. Don't, like, crap in, crap out.
Most of the studies are propaganda. Yep. And, like, I love science. Science is rad. We don't have much science in the world.
No. Science is, as Eddington defined it, the earnest endeavor to put into order the facts of our experience. Yeah. Earnest endeavor. Yeah.
Not the motivated endeavor to prove something in particular that we have an incentive to try to prove. And can you lie with facts? Yes. Can you manipulate science? Totally.
So everybody is paying attention to the replicability crisis. Yes. There's a huge replication crisis. People are paying attention to p hacking. There's a huge issue with p hacking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
P hacking means is the p value of a study is how how accurate is that and more likely it is to predict that the certain outcome was not the result of chance, but the result of whatever intervention or thing you did.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then the study can say, yes. It improved that one molecule. That's true. It did a lot of other stuff too. So that doesn't mean the fact that it passed the phase three clinical trial doesn't mean it was awesome, like Vioxx passed.
Yeah. Premarin passed.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then they had to get pulled from the market because they killed too many people. Mhmm. And so what about the long term when we realize there's not only acute causation, there's long term causation? What about the long term studies on new chemicals?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't exist.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's ridiculous. If you're saying, let's enter something. Let's enter something into the human body or into the biosphere the human body will take in
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That never existed before, that has molecules in it that nothing has ever interacted with before, that is designed to be biologically active. Let's we understand that someone gets diagnosed with you only have six weeks left to live with cancer, but that cancer is growing for twenty years or whatever. Right? We understand that there is long term issues. Yeah.
And we test the drug for a very tiny amount of acute safety issues over a couple years and then put it out. What the fuck?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or a couple of months.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. A couple years being generous. Yeah. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, from the point of view of, like, I gotta make all that money back that was in the phase three clinical trial before the patent life ends. Because once the patent
Dr. Mark Hyman
life ends Farmers do not come in spend more on marketing than they do on r and d. People don't know that. But they always have to price the drug so high because of all the r and d nonsense. And, you know, most of their costs in pharmaceutical companies are marketing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I consider most of the science kind of like the r and d arm of capitalism because there are like, science costs money. Who's gonna pay the money? Well, some pool of capital is gonna go to it. That pool of capital came from capital accumulation. It's not gonna put it in to lose it.
It's gonna put it in because it sees ROI on that investment.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If we say, hey, here's a thing that we could study that would make people healthy on their own and they don't need to buy anything, who's gonna fund that thing?
Dr. Mark Hyman
It has to be the government.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And now, everybody right now might be concerned about how much we'd ask the government to do. Yes, the government
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or philanthropists.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And philanthropists have weird agendas. So
Dr. Mark Hyman
Sometimes they're not bad. Mean, there's a group called the Bizinski Group that's funding a lot of studies on psychiatry that have never been done before. They're at dietary interventions Mayo at Clinic, but they're spending millions and millions of dollars, which I think is good.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Oh, yes. There's good philanthropy, and we want that. But, like, whether you're looking at kind of the Coke philanthropy on the right driving the dark money thing or the Gates philanthropy on the left or like, there's a lot of people dubious of philanthropy right now. Fair. Right?
So Mhmm. And there's lot of people dubious of government. Mhmm. Fair. Now, does that mean you don't have them, or does it mean you fix them?
You have to fix them. Right? You can't like, the the the market incentives alone here is the most powerful organization seeing people as extractively as they see the environment. That doesn't work. So you need something that can serve a protective role.
It is not currently an adequately integris trustworthy system. The answer is it must be made better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So that's the question. How do we redesign civilization for health rather than what we have now, which is some by design, but I think most inadvertently by just ignorance or lack of paying attention, you know, has been a civilization designed for disease.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, I mean, okay. I wanna how much is like, when we were mentioning the tetraethyl lead, they actually knew tetraethyl lead was toxic. Put it out anyways. Not a mistake. Right.
We mentioned the sacklers in the opioid crisis. New. Not a mistake. When When
Dr. Mark Hyman
tobacco companies initially didn't think tobacco was bad, but then they
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They started covering stuff up?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Then they started covering stuff up. Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So there's more of that. So PFAS is a very famous one. Right? Like, when we're talking about ubiquitous pollution
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
PFAS as in p f o s, the whole category of molecules. Capsuleon. Yeah. But it's about 10,000 molecules
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. In the
Daniel Schmachtenberger
fluorinated surfactants. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm a little nervous. I just had my PFAS levels checked in my Quest in my new function labs through Quest, and I'm excited to see what that's gonna be.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But nobody can check all 10,000 of them. No. Right? You're gonna check some tiny subset.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But this is really important, is right now, some studies that came out last year showed that every RAIN sample in the world has PFAS in it. Every single rain sample in the Amazon, in the Himalayas, in the Arctic snowfall has PFAS in it because the molecules are so small that they evaporate and then come down the rain, which means also the water surface area in lakes and oceans and whatever all has PFAS affecting the gas fluid exchange, which is really fundamental to how life continues to exist here. Yeah. And that means it's, of course, in the blood and in in people. And why we call them forever chemicals is because nature does not do these polyfluorinated things, so there is no natural process.
No bacteria, no anything to break it down. And so this is like, you can't be a prepper and move off grid if it's in the rainwater everywhere and get away from this. You have to actually lean in to helping change the civilizational system. We should not be putting PFAS into the atmosphere at the scale. Could we solve that?
Yeah. We never used it before. Are there other solutions that can be surfactants? Yeah. Totally.
But you just have to be motivated enough to do the thing. So the reason I bring this up is I don't remember right now if it was DuPont or Dow. It was one of the two, or three m. Actually, was one of the three that originally developed Teflon, p f a s. And then they sold it to the other one, and there was a court case that was just won this last year where they had to pay out, 10,000,000,000 in damages from the fact that they knew it was toxic, covered it up, and put it out anyways.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Called Dark Water about this.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They did a they did studies where they laced tobacco with all the people who got respiratory illnesses. They gave it to mice. The mice got cancers and stuff. Then they hid all that, did everything they could do, suppress it in the scientific literature, whatever, get it out. Now it's in the rainwater everywhere.
This was not a mistake. Right? Now there were so they had to pay 10,000,000,000 in damages. There was a study done, by a group of environmental scientists on what it would take to remove the PFAS from the environment because we don't know how to break it down, so you have to absorb it, absorb it, particularly. Current technological processes to remove the existing PFAS will cost a $160,000,000,000,000.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yikes. That's a lot of money. It's more in the global GDP.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. So the even the idea externality is nonsense. Right? Like, it's not like you externalize a little bit of the It's that you externalize almost all the cost. The only thing you externalize, like, what is the cost of wood or a tree?
It's literally the cost for me to cut it down. Just the cost of extraction. Yeah. Cost of oil, cost of extraction. Would it cost nature to make it?
Not relevant. What would it what are the harms? Not relevant. So literally, the only thing we internalize is the cost of extraction Yeah. Right, or production, and nothing else.
And so you're like, a 160,000,000,000,000 to fix that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's That's problem.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's not including the health care effects of it. Yeah. Or the permanent modification of the soil organisms. So we have been optimizing for narrow short term goals in ways that affect lots of other things, that cause some really serious problems. There is a comprehensive thing that has to be effect addressed.
So, like, in functional medicine, you find, hey, there's a lot of people that are told they have a incurable disease, And you find they're not all incurable.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You find that a lot of those people, if you know how to do the approach, or a personalized approach, they can get a lot better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep. You know how to think about it. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, what you have to look for is do they have mercury, do they have lead, do they cadmium? Do they have mycotoxins? Do they have glyphosate? Are they nutrient deficient in these things? Do they have these subclinical infections?
Blah blah blah. But all of those issues shouldn't exist for anybody. Those are all ubiquitous. So what percentage of people do you find has one or more heavy metal elevate elevated?
Dr. Mark Hyman
If the most people. If if they're eating fish, almost all people have mercury in their in their blood. If people have fillings and fish, it's more in their systems. The only people I've seen when I'll do a chelation challenge is who don't have heavy metals or mercury are are people who are don't eat fish and don't have never had any fillings.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And this is not looking at if they have lead from the pipes in the water system.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, know, lead is out there. And so some people have more or less lead. And I mean, I'm sort of shocked at how many people have really high lead levels
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And how many horrible diseases it causes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And again, what what percentage of people do you see have more mycotoxins or gliotoxins or biotoxins than how is healthy, ideally?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, a lot. I mean, a lot of people have mold these mold toxins, that's what you're talking about. And they're probably half of all buildings are water damaged and a lot of people absorb these mycotoxins that No. Don't get out of their bodies and recirculate and cause havoc and inflammation.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So you said something earlier that's important, is you were talking about gluten. There's a lot of people that are like, man, very few people have celiac. Everything else is some kind of psychogenic nonsense. This is not true. When you're talking about gluten intolerance, you're not talking about full blown celiac disease.
You are talking about
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, that's gone up four hundred percent. Yeah. Because of these increase in these proteins and how damaging they are to the gut.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if you're talking about an evolutionary wheat plant that had like a few berries on it, and then hybridizing it to something that has a gazillion berries that where you changed the chemical structure, then you spray osate on it, and it's grown in demineralized soil. Like, it kind of makes sense, and you eat a humongous amount of it. Kind of makes sense that maybe it would not respond as well for a lot of people. Now so this is not saying everyone evolutionarily had a bad time with a native grain.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
To say that gluten toxicity is kind of ubiquitous. Yeah. I mean, gluten intolerance. So the same way with mold. Because people be like mold forever.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Every tree breaks down with mold. We weren't all dying. What's the issue? So would you say a little bit about why mold is a way bigger deal today than it was and that this this is not psychogenic nonsense?
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I mean, think, you know, there's a lot more sort of mold damage and water damaged buildings. There's also the sort of preexisting kind of dysregulation of your biology that makes you susceptible. So it's the total load phenomenon. Like mold in and of itself may not be an issue, but if you've got a load of environmental toxins, if your diet's crap, your microbiome's crap, if you're nutrient deficient, then you get hit with mold, it's gonna be a bigger issue.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So partly the issue is because a person who's inside getting the indoor air poisoning is also not moving. So the lymphatic system is not flushing it out. They are not sweating, so their sweat system is not flushing it out. Just that alone would make a huge difference. Now they're also missing key nutrients that are needed for how the detoxification works.
They have other toxins that are messing up the pathways. The indoor air not moving can allow concentrations to build up beyond what outdoor air has. Yeah. It's a big deal. Yeah.
The indoor
Dr. Mark Hyman
air also outside has most of the time. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The indoor air also has the VOCs and stuff. The outside environment, those funguses were balanced with microbiome of the soil and heaps of other things that made it to where you didn't get species overgrowth in the same way. But also, we started adding fungicides to all the paints. Right? So as to not get mildew inside.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And just like using antibiotics didn't give you no bacteria, you got MRSAs. Yeah. And now the MRSAs are super More
Dr. Mark Hyman
more molds. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The we have fun fungicide resistant molds that produce more dangerous megatoxies. And and then building wise, like drywall is a lame thing to build with. Yeah. And and fast growing cheap soft woods, right, is really not the same as stone or hardwood or things. So, like, you you basically build with a mold substrate.
Yeah. Like, if you wanted to say what would a perfect mold substrate be, we build with a perfect mold substrate. You make it to where the air doesn't move through the place. You put fungicides in the paint to make fungicide resistance. You make susceptible people.
Like, of course, you're gonna have a mold Yeah. Epidemic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's a big deal. And it's, again, it's one of those areas in medicine. It's kind of a black box. Nobody looks at it.
Nobody thinks about it.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if somebody's living in a house that has mold, are they and you take them to a kind of traditional medicine where you're just gonna put them on meds. Are they really gonna get better?
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. They don't even know how to diagnose it. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know to look for it. They don't know the biomarkers that go off.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They might end up calling it an autoimmune disease and putting them on biologics and steroids and stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or say you're you're tall in your head and you're piercing Prozac, more likely.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then you'll get an iatrogenic cascade Mhmm. From that. Mhmm. But then also, even if someone goes to like a functional medicine doctor, a naturopath, can you get rid of the mold if you're still in the moldy environment?
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. You have to get out of it. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so if you start now we're talking about, like, there's one transition from medicine that is only thinking about synthetic like, giving a drug or a surgery as the solution or radiation. Right? Like some toxic thing. Every one of those is like toxic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Our toolkit is pretty narrow. And the the toolkit in functional medicine is pretty broad. And that's the difference.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So the functional medicine thing is let's deal with the upstream causes in the body. Yeah. But then the next thing, the systemic In the environment. Health care thing is nobody should be having elevated mercury and lead and mycotoxins in the first place. You could build Yeah.
You could do industry differently.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then So how do we have all the things we want? In the society we want, The things we like, like our computers, which are full of toxic metals, our iPhones, and and have a a different environment. How do we redesign for health? Because this we've kind of unpacked a lot of the disease issues and the risks and the problems. Because I think I think, you know, we need to rethink food.
We need to rethink industrial processes. How how do you envision a future that where where we can actually create a a better
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, let's just say some super basic things. First, you said we're number 50 in health. A lot of those other countries have laptops.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Japan has laptops.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? And and Okinawa does. So food is
Dr. Mark Hyman
a big difference too.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Are nowhere near as healthy as absolute optimum would be because they're dealing with some of these same systemic issues, but they're not dealing with all the same ones because they've done a better job of certain parts of the health care system or the environment management system. And so the you know, an average life expectancy of 76 or whatever here while on a dozen meds and shitty quality of life for the last long time and maintained with surgeries and stuff versus a 100 autonomous for most of the time, still have laptops. Mhmm. So just empirically, we can do better. Yeah.
Right? Now, could we do better than them? Totally.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, what are some of the obvious things? Should we only study alien synthetic chemicals for health? Nothing else gets to make it through phase three clinical trials because there's no way to fund it. We don't study anything that was in an evolutionary environment, a young body or a healthy body. That seems batshit crazy.
How about figure out how to fund the study of the things that make people healthy that decrease with age that correspond to more diseases that you just couldn't say, let's do more of those things?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Like peptides or hormones or
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And those things make a huge difference or vitamins, minerals, and herbs. Right? Like when people say, oh, vitamins, don't work, whereas it's basically clinical trials. Who's gonna pay for it? Mhmm.
Like, who
Dr. Mark Hyman
And when they do them, they're fatally flawed in their design because they're treating the nutrients like drugs in terms of how they do the study design.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I got so upset It's so frustrating. COVID when some some agencies reached out to me for help. I was trying to help them and early on, we're like, okay, let's do studies on all the small molecules that have antiviral effects that already exist, particularly the old ones. So ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, but, you know, valacyclovir, cyclovir, whatever, all the things. Yep.
Why do you wanna use old ones? Because you already know the long term safety profile.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
What about a new one? Well, okay. So we're making a remdesivir or what we don't know the long term safety profile. How about let's start with ones where you already know long term safety profile, so all you gotta study is efficacy? It just makes fucking sense.
But where's the money in it? There's no money in it because they're they're already past patent.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I'm like, NIH should be funding studies on just efficacy. They don't have to be long term on things where we already know the long term safety. We already know the drug interactions. We already know that shit on these old antivirals. Did that happen?
No. No. And yet we saw things like synthetic like, drug vitamin d, calciphity, all people got better. And, like, even a combination of an h one blocker and an h two blocker, and people got better. And then, you know, like, mirabaric and hydrocortisone together and from long COVID.
Like, there were a lot of things. Right? And let alone, I'm not even gonna talk about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or those things because it's so politicized. You know, like, this should not be a political topic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is just an empirical topic. So I remember saying doctors should have, in the very beginning, emergency authorization to prescribe the things that have antiviral effects based on patient presentation. And I won't say who, but someone put very, very strong pushback and said, no. No. We have to do randomized control trials first.
I'm like, If you're gonna do the randomized control trials, do it for pre or post exposure prophylaxis. Don't do it once people are already in the ICU because what antivirals work late stage? Like, valacyclovir really works for herpes, but only in the first twenty four or forty eight hours. It doesn't work once you have a full blown outbreak. So if the whole pharmacopeia of antivirals only works at the beginning and so they said, okay, yeah, we'll do that.
And then they funded the study, it was in the ICU when people were already sick of shit. And then it said they don't work. And I'm like, what antiviral would work in that
Dr. Mark Hyman
Intentionally designed to create a negative outcome.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is information war based on financial incentive. This was not just innocent. Like, I I know this was not just innocent because the people who were funding that ended up being, I won't say the rest of it, invested in other things that happened.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That shit has to go. Right? So So what are
Dr. Mark Hyman
the kinds of these are all perverse incentives that make us do the wrong thing and not actually study the right things or do the right kinds of research or create products and services that actually promote health issues. Research nutrition? Yeah. Well, the NIH should, think.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not food companies. No. Food companies research should be suspect. Mhmm. Duh.
Particularly if it says their food is good for you and you should eat lots of
Dr. Mark Hyman
it. Yeah. Just look at the funding. Duh.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So how about, like, one of the things government science does is nutrition. Mhmm. Duh. How about we study old drugs again for new purposes, like the redo project for cancer or whatever? We actually put real money into that because we already know the long term safety profile, and we just have to look at efficacy.
Mhmm. How much money does that get? This is not hard.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's so it's hard for the average layperson. I mean, there was this sort of there's this big going on about the kind of calories we eat and whether some are different than others. In other words, are sugar and starch calories worse for you than
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not a hard topic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I mean, it's not
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If look at the science.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Science really But there there are debates published in major journals. Back before they just read one
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Funded by who?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well well, it depends who who was who was the the person who was the researcher. And And one of them was this guy doctor Anstrip who's I think a Belgian physicist who, you know, got funded by Coca Cola, McDonald's, and who works for Novo Nordisk now. And like trying to find ways to sort of bypass the mechanisms with food design. And and he's debating and saying, you know, look, yeah, Coca Cola calories are the same as any other calories. Doesn't matter where you get them as long as you don't exceed your calorie needs for the day.
You're gonna be fine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No thinking person
Dr. Mark Hyman
It doesn't even make sense logically. Right? But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
because it's absurd. Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? Well, but It's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
empirically wrong and it's absurd.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, then the argument as well, it's just thermodynamics. You know,
Daniel Schmachtenberger
who are you who are
Dr. Mark Hyman
you to argue with physics? I'm like, yeah. But if you understand the law of thermodynamics, energy is conserved. Yes. But the the final part of that sense is in a closed system.
And and the body is not a closed system. Wait.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When like, that argument is so dumb.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I agree.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Can energy's energy. Sure. Can I just plug me into the wall and run on it? No. I need different forms of energy.
Can I run my DC computer on AC without running through the transformer? No. Energy is not energy. AC and DC are different. If I put AC into my computer without a transformer, it's gonna blow the computer up.
Can I feed my computer hydrocarbons? No. It doesn't know how to do that. Can I put can I put gasoline into a diesel engine? No.
No. Gasoline and diesel are more similar to each other than evolutionary food to the shit we eat now Yeah. By a lot. The fact that we are so metabolically flexible is amazing. It is.
But it doesn't you pay for it. Yeah. And like, can can I make one mineral out of another mineral? No. No amount of potassium gives me any amount of phosphorus.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so it's all thermodynamic. What the fuck? That is
Dr. Mark Hyman
just That's right. Stupid. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's just trying to say science y sounding shit to make people stop thinking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's it's a lot of there's a lot of money to to kind of declare that all calories are the same and weight loss
Daniel Schmachtenberger
atoms are different.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
All amino acids are different. All enzymes are different. They are not interchangeable. They're not all fungible.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. But yeah. I agree. But if you look at the medical literature, it's so full of this nonsense.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And Paid for Yeah. By fucked up interest. So it's it's bad epistemology, but it's also fucked up interests.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So these perverse incentives instead of malalignment of of, you know, of our institutions, our research infrastructure, our health care system, the payment systems, reimbursement systems. How do we get out of this mess? Because if we have anthropogenic disease, how do we create the opposite, anthropogenic health? Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So kind of the idea of ontological design is like most creatures are being designed are being designed by their environment. They're evolving to fit environmental niches. That's what they're being selected for. Right? We're changing our environment.
In turn, the environment's changing us back. We should think about how we wanna change the environment that makes the kind of people we wanna be. And rather than just like this provide something you want and like the consumer's demanding it. Yeah. The consumer's demanding it after you made it requisite to operate and manufacture demand.
Right? So like someone you'd be, oh, just don't use Facebook. Well, your company cannot competitive compete in marketing if you don't have Facebook because they have a monopoly on attention. So you say, don't use it. Fuck off.
That's not true.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? And if there is a patent on a drug that's the only drug that does a thing, that sounds a lot like a monopoly. And so we have to think about, let's make stuff. Like, are the other ways of doing the thing? And what are the total set of effects?
And is this making healthier, happier, better people or not? And could we do it a better way? And if we're already getting worse outcomes in an area than we used to get, we for sure can do it a better way. Just reverse it. Right?
Of course, we can innovate new better stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Bottle that easily. I mean, we can't all of a sudden turn in a dime and change our agricultural system or get rid of 70% of the foods in the grocery store. And I mean, we can eventually do it, but
Daniel Schmachtenberger
How much money subsidizes conventional agriculture?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Depending on the year. I mean, it's $1,314,000,000,000, and then you've got the extra payments that just got made, like 30,000,000,000 or know?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. So you look at the direct subsidies, the tax credits, the research credits, the blah blah blah, and you got like a $100,000,000,000 that goes to subsidizing the super toxic stuff. Mhmm. And the argument is, well, we need food security, and without that, the food system wouldn't work, and only these big companies are the ones that can produce enough for food security. Hogwash, that's not why.
It's because only the big companies lobby well. Little bitty farmers don't know how to lobby, so they're not gonna get subsidies. And revolving doors, the person who's running the regulatory agency that used to work at the company that does the interest of the company, like so one of the things, fix revolving doors.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Corporate capture is a big deal.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Duh. Like, you should not be allowed to be the regulator of an industry that you have owned stocks in and all of your friends own
Dr. Mark Hyman
stocks Yeah. I mean, it's just amazing to me that Vilsack, who's the secretary of agriculture and is sort of supervising the dietary guidelines, tells to drink three glasses of milk a day as adults and two as kids for which there is no scientific justification, was on the board of the dairy council in between his two stints as ag secretary. I mean, that's just crazy
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Just to start to look at everybody in government regulatory positions and look at what they did in commerce before and then what they do in commerce afterwards. Right? Because it's also after. Because someone can just say like, hey, you don't make that much work in government. You're gonna leave public sector, go to private sector.
I'm gonna bring you here and pay you a lot of money, but not if you hurt my business by regulating against its interests.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's a little disturbing to me that the chief of staff for the secretary of agriculture now was a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association, the Corn Refinance of America, and, you know
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I am going to avoid mentioning names, but I'm gonna say look up all the names. Yeah. Look up everybody in USDA. Look up everybody in HHS and just say what industry connections, and then look at the policies they make. And just look at how often the policies they make are aligned with industries they have been connected to or that they go work in afterwards.
And Jesus Christ, it's obvious.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So fix the the revolving door.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's really quick.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Fix in the incentives. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, the government
Dr. Mark Hyman
Do we do we do we try to build in the externalities
Daniel Schmachtenberger
in terms of cost price? We we just said, NIH doesn't study food, but it subsidizes the toxic food. Well, but we don't have the money to study shut up. Like, why a 100,000,000,000? So if you just didn't put the 100,000,000,000 to the toxic food in the market that's not even a market.
Right? Let the market just compete. The regenerative agriculture actually beats it in many areas. Now the trillion dollars of capital markets start to flow to the other thing. We are literally making something that is less profitable and that makes everybody sicker win because of government subsidies from taxpayer money.
Nobody got to vote
Dr. Mark Hyman
on for the farmers. It's more profitable for the seed makers and the fertilizer makers.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Especially when they get subsidies.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. I mean, even advertising. I think, you know, the food industry spends about $14,000,000,000 a year on ads, all of which is a tax deduction.
And the average kid sees about a thousand ads for junk a year.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Buyer beware when it's a kid going against a multi billion dollar company that employs childhood psychologists to split test what ad makes the kids cry the most when they don't get the food until they
Dr. Mark Hyman
get it. And not only not even just psychologists, but these neurologists to look at functional MRI imaging Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
To see
Dr. Mark Hyman
which foods are the most attractive.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Like, this this is not just mistakes. Mm-mm. This is worse than mistakes. Are a cover story. Yeah.
There are mistakes. Yeah. But even the mistakes are because there was no incentive to try to figure it out.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So how about, like, before you come up with a new drug, study all the old drugs?
Dr. Mark Hyman
How about know, this is saying that RFK junior is saying we should study vaccines against placebo, and it's getting so much pushback because most vaccines are not studied against placebo. Duh. I mean, imagine if you were studying
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But also cumulative effects. Mhmm. Commentator on cumulative effects. Yeah. So how many drugs are there that by themselves are fine, but combined the wrong way kill you?
A lot. Right? Don't do your opiates, your benzos, and your alcohol together. And so you want to study not just the individual effects, but the effects in combination with other things. We we know that that's included.
So, of course, every new vaccine is studied in combinatorial effect with all the other vaccines. Right? No. For long term safety.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Why? When you mandate them altogether?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's what they talk about evidence based medicine. It makes me a little crazy. You know? Where's the evidence that taking five drugs all independently studied together is effective or safe? Where the studies say that, you know, one vaccine may be safe in itself, but when you combine them with 10 other vaccines or 20 other vaccines, are they safe?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I wanna talk
Dr. Mark Hyman
about We don't know the answers to those questions.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I wanna talk about a few things. Small molecule drugs versus vaccines and kind of biologics Mhmm. In general. A small molecule drug that is going to have been flushed out of your system in seventy two hours, if you're taking it for a short period like an antiviral, the likelihood that it produces long term negative effects is smaller than something that's intended to permanently or long term affect your immune system. Like, just duh.
If something is intended to produce lasting effects versus only effects while it's there and it clears. So what should get longer term studies? The thing intended to have long term effects? Like, of course, it should. So in general, I'm gonna default to small molecules over long term endogenous modifiers every time.
Mhmm. Only if all the small molecules can't do it would I look at the other thing. And then next is I'm gonna default to old ones over new ones where you already have long term studies. There's no money in either of those things. So but then the net result is sicker people that then mess up long term GDP in terms of productivity and whatever.
So just we could change that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, we have we have a, you know, a system that that's driven off of business and business innovation, but the incentives are wrong there. And and either we have to fix it There's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
nothing not innovative or scientific about studying a drug for a different purpose that already exists. There's just a financial incentive issue.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. That's what I mean. So it's it it there's But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's still science and it's still innovation, if you wanna tell that story.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's not right. It's innovation, but it's not gonna create a profit. And so that that's where the government has to come in. But, you know, think about the how much of our tax dollars should we be spending toward this? I mean, yes, we'd have a trillion extra dollars if we fix the food problem in this country.
We'd have, you know, a lot of extra money.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if you just don't like, think about this. Just don't pay the subsidies on food that is toxic for everybody. Just don't don't like, let the market be a market. Just don't artificially farmers
Dr. Mark Hyman
are the ones that are suffering, and they're the ones that are caught in this grip of the banks and the bank loans, the crop insurance slash subsidies and the seed and chem and fertilizer companies. And they're just kind of spinning around in the middle and everybody else is winning
Daniel Schmachtenberger
except But the smaller farmers do better when you they move to a system that is not based on
Dr. Mark Hyman
They do. Do. But if there's no incentives to do that, that they can't get out of it, have
Daniel Schmachtenberger
already incentive for them because the larger guys are better at lobbying. But now if we and and then doing revolving doors. But if you just look at don't subsidize the toxic thing. Maybe if anything subsidize the better thing. Invest in nutrition research so you see what's actually new good.
Make companies pay for some of the externalized cost if it is causing diabetes or whatever, and maybe make some regulation around what can you advertise to children.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Because buyer beware for children does not work with asymmetric information warfare. Right? Like, this is just reasonable governance. And then all of a sudden, if you just don't we're not saying a more expensive government thing.
Don't put a 100,000,000,000 into that stuff. Then you start having the market naturally start to favor what we call regenerative agriculture, which is just how agriculture was.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And as a result, your you cut a trillion dollars off the medical spend right away and actually towards because it's 5,000,000,000,000 and it's gonna do half. It's more like 2 and a half trillion gets cut, which is all deficit kind of money, and then productivity goes up. So the debt to GDP ratio gets better, and you have to spend less to make it happen up front.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Sounds like a good winning deal.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not super duper hard.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Well, it's hard if you have people who are running things who are incentivized to not do that. So I mean, like, I I just, you know, working on a a project where we're we're sort of looking at root causes and environmental chemicals and toxins, their effect on health. And there was a letter that was written by Senator Grassley and others in Senate and Congress basically calling out the fact that the pesticides and agricultural chemicals were not harmful, that the data was clear that they were safe and that we should continue to use them and we should not heed to a bunch of hippies who say that we shouldn't be using them. And I was like, wow.
And then you do a little homework on them and you see they're all funded by the the big ag and seed and chem companies.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So like, what are some things we can do? Stop revolving doors. Really make some laws that regulate revolving doors. That should be super duper obvious. You should not be regulating industry to protect the people, but actually in the benefit of industry because you have a perverse incentive as the regulator.
Like, I don't know anyone who thinks that's a good idea. Have things that their companies have an incentive to research badly. Get government and nonprofit funding for that and get enough oversight that you can trust it. Okay. Company funded stuff company funded research that did not have replication that says their stuff is awesome should be suspect to non vested interest verification.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Should have a warning label on it. Yeah. This study was not replicated, and it was funded by industry.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then I heard Bobby Kennedy talk about something that is a very common sense good thing, which is he's like, look, I I believe in the market, but you should actually have to pay the costs. So if the cost is, you know, your coal company put a bunch of mercury in the environment and made a bunch of people sick, they have to pay medical costs and their life is fucked, you don't have to pay it. That's not the market. That's stealing. Right?
You're stealing from those people's lives. And if it's really a market, it's just revenue minus cost, but it should be your whole costs. And so only the things that are actually profitable and you pay all the costs, those things happen, and the other things don't happen. So he's like, I just want to identify empirically where the externalities causing harm, what it would currently cost to fix it, and just force those companies to have to do that thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But then they these whole businesses have gone out business. Right? I mean, if if the food companies had to pay for the cost of chronic disease
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But but think about how nonsensical it is to say, in the whole history of humanity, humanity always fed itself, and that right now there is no economically viable way to feed ourselves. We're just saying go back to a previous system. Yeah. Is it So like
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, the argument is all we can't feed a growing hungry population. We need to feed this the world, and that's But, what America's you know
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not an earnest conversation, though. Right? Because the healthier food is not necessarily more expensive. And when you take the amortized health care costs and the loss of productivity, it's way more expensive the way we're currently doing it. So if you had a little bit of long term thoughtfulness, which is why the health care outcomes in Finland and Japan and certain other places are better, is because they actually make some choices slightly better by looking longer term.
They're like, this actually doesn't even make sense for our own country's well-being. Yeah. So another example, you know, DDT, better living through chemistry, and you spray it over the kids while they're all all the nonsense. Right? And then, oh, by the unfortunately, DDT is super lethal, and the fact the thing that kills the bugs kills people too.
Yeah. Okay. So then we get rid of it, but what do we do? We sell it to Mexico for them to use on the food and we buy the food back. And then we replace it with malathion.
Then we say, that's bad.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Then we
Daniel Schmachtenberger
replace it with parathion. Come on.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
How about there's a lot of toxic things you can come up with. We put the toxic thing out there before studying toxicity, and then only regulate it after so many people have died. How about no. No. You have to do longer term studies to show safety before you put a new thing in the environment.
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not ridiculous.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. It just makes it's common sense. But again, Mark Twain, who's my favorite author to quote, he says, the problem with common sense is it's not too common.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When you have no other planets in the foreseeable universe that are hospitable to life, the to life has to do with the chemical makeup of the biosphere. Maybe don't completely fuck the chemistry of the biosphere for super super short term interests.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. That's what
Daniel Schmachtenberger
we're doing. That seems pretty reasonable.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's a hopeful note we can leave on? Because we we unpacked a lot of what's wrong. And I I think, you know, we the the things you're talking about in terms of incentivizing the right things and revolving door changes and pricing and externalities all make sense.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And there's a lot more we we didn't get into. I mean, I wanna add one thing and then we'll do good notes to leave on. You know what a racket is. Right? Like a protection racket.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Racketeer. Yeah. So
Daniel Schmachtenberger
let's say I've got a protection racket where I'm the mob and you're doing business in my turf. So I have some guys go rough you up, and then you're scared of those guys. And there's not enough law enforcement here. Then I have some other guys say, hey, we can protect you, but you're gonna have to pay us a certain amount every week. Right?
But they're from the same group. Yeah. That's that's a racket. Yeah. Right?
Which is you're manufacturing the demand and then offering the supply.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So if you make a food system that creates addiction so the people need to keep getting more of it, but then it also makes them need medicine that they wouldn't need otherwise that is profitable, where the side effects of the medicine make them need other medicines. That's a systemic racket.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It is a racket. It's for sure.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's a systemic racket. It's a distributed systemic racket. But if
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like it's like Bayer. They they they bought Monsanto, which makes glyphosate, which causes lymphoma, and then they make the drugs to treat the lymphoma. That's a racket.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So that's a direct racket if it's the same company. If they're separate companies that are just all owned by the major private equity or whatever, it's a it's a systemic racket.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But think about just from a logical perspective, I'm trying to solve a problem. I got a problem. First thing I wanna ask is, did we always have that problem? No. No.
No. It's a new problem. Oh, when we didn't have it, what was happening then? Let's reverse something. The first thing should be, if it's a new problem Mhmm.
That was caused by something, reverse the cause. How often in medicine do we do that? That should be the first thing you do before you try to come up with totally new novel shit. Say like, wait, this is new disease that has a cause. Let's reverse the cause.
Mhmm. And then only and then you say, okay, well, if we can't if their history is not good enough, is there anywhere else that doesn't have it? What are they doing? Yeah. And then only if you can't reverse the causes and there's no good existent prototype, then you look at research, but then you should look at technologies we already have, if any of them could be reapplied that we already know a lot about.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Redo on existing drugs and stuff. Right? So for instance, like, you've probably followed project redo on oncology Mhmm. Where you've got drugs that people are getting for other purposes. But while they were taking them, their cancers went away, and so they're starting to look at them.
And it's like mebendazole and albendazole, like old anti worming things that reverse bowel cancers that are super cheap, that are actually quite safe. What the fuck? People should be researching that. Right? Like, people should really be researching that.
And so figure out the financing for that. So anything that looks like a racket should be investigated. Anything that looks like, oh, there's a problem. Let's not look at what the root causes were. Let's not look at when we didn't have it.
Let's just let's say that we got this problem forever now and we can't possibly not have it when we didn't have it for most of human history. Then let's come up with a new thing that we can make money on that will then itself cause new problems that we will also cause a new solution for will cause new problems. That is a systemic exponentially escalating bracket. Yeah. This is not a good method of problem solving.
This is solving problems in a way that doesn't solve the cause, that symptomatically addresses it, makes worse problems in the process. Let's start actually trying to solve problems. What is the cause? How do we undo the cause? Earnestly.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And how do we get people incentivized to do that? Because right now, everything
Daniel Schmachtenberger
is Everyone is actually incentivized if they pay attention to we're talking about your own health.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, like, the guy who's, you know, running Coca Cola or Bear is not Okay. Necessarily thinking about these things.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Coca Cola is not a food company. Right? Because it's not food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Beverage. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They call it beverage, but like, I remember talking to someone who's the CEO of Pepsi once, and they said they were thinking about categorizing it as an entertainment company because they're like, we know this is not food. This is something people do for fun. And it was like, Jesus. You so what good does this thing do? Well, it causes diabetes and increases likelihood for Alzheimer's and everybody.
But what real good does it do? Well, it cause addiction. The world would be better if that company didn't exist. Any company where the world would be better if it didn't exist, we should figure out how to have it not exist.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not try to retrofit some fucking weird corporate sustainable responsibility or something on it. It's just if the world would be better, if it didn't exist, we should do that. Yeah. The number of companies that fit in that category are high.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's a problem. And
Daniel Schmachtenberger
just from the average citizen point of view, You have some say in your government. You have way more say than you think. Right? You have way more say if you really wanted to be engaged. Now I wanna speak to a problem.
We talk about ubiquitous pathology. Right? Almost everybody that is gonna get Alzheimer's or autoimmune disease or cancer, endocrine disruption, they're already infertile or decreasing fertility or whatever. That's a bunch of subclinical disease. Yeah.
Ubiquitous. It's not their fault. No. Right? It's systemic stuff.
There is subclinical mental illness we were talking about. How many people have low grade anxiety, low grade depression, and anhedonia, meaninglessness, loneliness, addictive, compulsive tendencies?
Dr. Mark Hyman
A lot.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
A lot. Right? Like, pretty much everybody. Now, derealization. Derealization is this very serious thing that happens when someone goes through a severe trauma where, like, nothing feels real.
I would say almost everybody I know is in some degree
Dr. Mark Hyman
of Feels like that.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Derealization because and here's how I can tell. If I tell somebody something about it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's about health care or whether it's about the increasing likelihood towards World War three or AI or whatever, it doesn't matter what it is, the environment. Their tomorrow will be identical. They cannot be moved by real information about the real world they're
Dr. Mark Hyman
in. Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They are derealized. The real world does not matter to them. And they're like, no new information could change my life. Yeah. Well, you're being a doomer.
Wait. No. The Mongols are coming. If the Mongols are coming, do you want to know? No.
I'm doing no. You fucking want to know. You wanna do something about it. Oh, I can't do anything. Did you try?
Like, did you think about it for one whole day Yeah. What you could do before you said I can't do anything?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Most people don't. They're just so
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I wanna just say, let's break the fuck out of ubiquitous derealization and learned helplessness, and say problems that didn't used to exist that we caused, we can't solve. Yeah. And your own health and your parents and your children are an incentive. Yeah. And if you think about it for a little bit, if you talk to the people who thought about it their whole life, they probably know stuff and you could do stuff.
But you just have to act like reality is real, and reality matters, and your life matters. As opposed to the nihilism of like, I can't do anything. I've already given up on my life mattering. I can't possibly make sense of it. You've already given up on your life mattering.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's hard. And the and the problem is that so many of people are not just do you realize because of the trauma, psychological trauma of our society, but also the the the way in which our diet and lifestyle environment affects our function and brain and mood. So it's sort of a double problem because you're sort of stuck.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If you look at the American Revolution and the condition of the people who were involved in the American Revolution or Civil War, whatever it was historically. One, they were doing labor jobs, and using a pitchfork all day translates to a much heartier body that can do rebellion and whatever. But also, they weren't obese. They weren't on opiates and benzos, and they didn't doomscroll. Now I have found that I don't care how outraged someone is or how horrified or how depressed, that emotion will not make it through fifteen minutes of doomscrolling.
Because they will actually forget they ever heard the thing. They'll forget all the emotion. Because in that fifteen minutes, I see something that makes me excited, and something that makes me feel left out, and something that makes me feel belonging, and something that makes me horny, and something that makes me scared, and something that makes me outraged, and then something that's kinda funny. And I just flushed my entire system of continuity. Yeah.
Now I can go back to my life exactly the way it was. And a small number of people ensure that they don't do that, so they can actually work on controlling things at scale. Yeah. And everybody else lets them. Yeah.
But you don't have to.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, how do we have more agency? That's it. That's what you're talking about is is creating a society where their people feel agency and that their actions, that their thoughts, that their voice matters.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So find all the things that damage your agency and get them out of
Dr. Mark Hyman
your life.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. If you if you reflect on, like
Dr. Mark Hyman
Social media, bad food.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Yeah. So You know? Take the social media apps off your phone. Even if you're gonna still have it, have to do it on the computer.
Don't have a don't have it in your goddamn pocket all the time. Just take them off your phone. Simple. Yeah. If you're on psych meds, go to a Cleveland Clinic.
Go to an integrative doc who can see if maybe there's a better solution for
Dr. Mark Hyman
you.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. I'm not telling people get off their psych meds. I'm saying go talk to a doctor,
Dr. Mark Hyman
but talk to someone who
Daniel Schmachtenberger
knows other possibilities because you're not going to be self regulating or think well or whatever while you're intentionally altering your neurochemistry that way. Right? And so and then if you're taking in any information streams that make you feel helpless, stop. Now, I will say, I know people high up in most of major news companies. They are not news.
Not on the right, not on the left.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not news.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. It's not news.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Propaganda?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. It is information war. Right? Bannon at least admitted in an interview with Megan Kelly recently. He's like, I'm not a journalist.
I'm into information war. But he's just admitting, like, I just make shit up. That's compelling because I have a reason. He's admitting it. I can criticize the most erudite journals because, well, they'll lie with facts, but they cherry pick their facts.
They lay off frame them in a particular way. Right? So you either call it an illegal alien or an undocumented migrant. It means the exact same thing, but you have a totally different emotional valence. You cherry pick your facts and you say this thing is getting better when it's actually getting worse, you're treating the symptoms or whatever it is.
So who puts narratives out there? Again, it takes a lot of money to fund research. It takes a lot of money to put a narrative out there. Typically, capital streams associated with goals that support those capital streams or the political institutions and and that support capital streams put out narratives that support what they do. So you should understand whenever you're watching a piece of news or reading something, what you should be thinking about is this tells me what some people want other people to believe.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Not what's actually true.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So every time you read Breitbart, you should also read Mother Jones on the same topic. Every time you read Al Jazeera, you should also read Jerusalem Post on the same topic. Every time you watch Fox, you should watch MSNBC. Every time you and if you do that, and every time you scroll x, also go scroll Blue Sky. Do both.
And you will realize that there is not real news. There is information warrior is fighting for your mind.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Someone gave me a link to a website. I forget what it's called, which basically had the same news item, but reported from the right Yeah. And the left, and then the middle. And it was totally different stories.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Yeah. And there really isn't a middle currently. So to just realize, you cannot let someone speed feed you your narrative on what is true. Cannot.
No one has the right incentive here. So you have to work at it a little bit. But you can't have a meaningful life devoid from what it understanding what's real. Because you to make meaningful choices,
Dr. Mark Hyman
they have
Daniel Schmachtenberger
to be in relationship to reality.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I think what you said was really important is take away the things from your life that interrupt your ability to have agency. And then Yes. Whether it's the food you're eating, the news you're watching, the social media you're scrolling, the friends you're hanging out with, the things you care about. Like, you know, we need this to sort of have more agency. And I think that that's part of why I created Function Health, co founded Function Health was to give people agency over their health because the health care system wasn't doing it.
And I think that's what you're doing, lot the work you're doing. We didn't get into a of the things you're you're about. So people can can check out your work at
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. I wanna see Function Health have tremendous success because I think it can help a lot of things. But I also want to see that whole business not be needed because we're not causing all those issues in the first place.
Dr. Mark Hyman
This is true.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Which is why I'm also super happy that you're engaging with policy. Yeah. Now, right now, functional medicine is the most amazing thing because it says you can actually take some control over your health and have way better outcomes and your mom doesn't have to go through the completely ignoble horrible process of dying of Alzheimer's when she was a smart person and whatever and like, and your kids don't have to have diabetes, and like, you can do something. That's amazing. But then it's like, damn.
How about we just make industries and environments environments that make people healthy? Yeah. Or at least that don't make them sick. We could do that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So We have to. Otherwise, we're gonna go extinct sooner than later.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. So when you have a population that is becoming ubiquitously infertile, that is an extinction process. Mhmm. Yeah. When a population where nobody lives like everyone's life depends upon a complex medical system with a five six continent supply chain Mhmm.
This is not healthy people. That is a process of extinction.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, there's a book you might have heard or read about called Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn who sort of like the Rachel Carson of her day essentially talking about how these environmental toxins and chemicals are causing infertility and sexual dysfunction and hermaphroditis and knows if it's affecting this gender and kinda crisis we're having now. I mean, it's sort of striking.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When you when you see the radical drops in fertility and even someone who's fertile but the sperm count is really low, are the kids as healthy? I mean, just just just think about it. Right? Just think about it. If someone's sperm count is 2% of what it was, a lot of thing like, is the motility affected?
Is the morphology affected? Is the, like, this is not as healthy a person. They're not going to have as healthy a children. It's not. Right?
This matters.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It does matter.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This matters. And so that person whose fertility is decreasing, even if they're quote unquote fertile, they're radically less fertile
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're also radically less healthy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're also radically less happy. They're also radically less capable of solving the problems of the world today. And as you see in your clinic every day, it's all changeable. Yeah. And it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take.
It's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Thank you. That is that's a good point to end on. We each can do it for ourselves, and we have to do it systemically. And I think I'm working on both ends of the problem, so are you. So thank you
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You are. For
Dr. Mark Hyman
everything you're doing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I yeah. I really hope that function can bring a lot of these concepts and tools to everybody. That's very niche
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
and the they shouldn't be. And I love that you're making it not only medicine for the rich, but, like, medicine that everybody can afford. It's super important.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then I hope the policy work can really gain some success and gain success that can keep working across administrations because science has nothing to do with political parity.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And That's the plan. That's the plan.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Stoked on
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the plan. And for those who wanna learn more about Daniel's work, look at the Consilience Project. It's consilienceproject.org. We'll put links in the show notes. We'll put links to love references we talked about today.
This has been an incredible conversation and I I feel like we could talk for another ten hours and still keep going. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Likewise. Thank you, my friend.
Dr. Mar
Dr. Mark Hyman
Hi, everyone. It's Doctor Mark Hyman, and you're about to hear the full unedited version of my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. The original episode was edited for pacing, but this is the complete three and a half hour discussion, every moment just as it happened. I hope you enjoy the full depth of this important conversation. Before we jump into today's episode, I wanna share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey.
While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhymen.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus.
Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. Alright, Daniel. I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is a long time in coming. We had many conversations which I've tried to keep up with.
Understand how you think because I don't imagine many people heard of you, know about you, or know who you are, but your background and your thinking is so remarkable in its depth and its clarity and its ability to bridge many different disciplines and come up with an overarching understanding of what's wrong in our society and where our existential threats are and how we can fix them. And today we're gonna talk about this. We can talk about a lot of things from AI to the nuclear war to everything that you think and do. But we're gonna focus on on health and health care today because I I think this is an area where we really earn a mess. I'm just gonna be straight.
We're in a really shitty situation where we have more and more health care, quote sick care, and more and more illness. And it's exploding at such a rate that we can't even keep up with it. Just in my forty years of being a doctor, it's gonna be two years of forty years. I've seen just the acceleration of chronic diseases and both in the amount of suffering, the severity, the scope of them, the increase in new diseases. It's just it's remarkable.
And you know, when you look at the kind of history of trajectory of of human experience, you know, we we had pretty good run through most history. And and we say, oh, the, you know, the there was all this, early death and life expectancy was 40. And a lot of it had to do with high rates of infant mortality, overcrowding in cities, urbanization, pollution, sanitation lack, and and they were more sort of infrastructure problems. And and those infrastructure problems of sanitation and basic basic cleanliness and things that were were sort of were solved in the twentieth century led to an increase in life expectancy. But it really kinda misses the point because a lot of a lot of populations looked very old.
I mean, the the the Plains Indians had a highest number of centenarians at the turn of the century of any population. They were hunter gatherers. And so it wasn't like every hunter gatherer died at 40. But the last, you know, hundred years, we've seen this sort of inversion of of of the life expectancy curve. It's kind of got starting to dip down, and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy.
And and I think it has to do with the kind of rise of what you have termed anthropogenic disease, which basically, I want you to define it, but it my understanding is is is is sort of echoes what I I I think Paul Farmer talks about who's one of my heroes who I got to know before he died. What you know, when he saw the horrific conditions in Haiti that were breeding grounds for TB and AIDS and every public health community given up on them, he said it wasn't that we need better medication or surgery. It was that, you know, we had structural problems. He called the structural violence. What are the social economic political conditions that drive disease?
And I would add what are the environmental conditions that drive disease? And and I I kinda like to start out by by sort of having you kinda define what do you mean by this concept of anthropogenic disease.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. First, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I I followed your work for a very long time before we got to know each other through, Institute of Functional Medicine and things like that. And I have huge respect for your work bridging between traditional conventional allopathic medicine and kind of integrative processes and having such a huge data set over forty years with Cleveland Clinic like that to be able to really kind of advance medicine.
You're bridging those worlds in a way I don't know many people who are bridging and also kind of cutting edge science and research with Leroy Hood and systems biology and things like that. And then now starting to actually help policy work at the level that you are. And I know
Dr. Mark Hyman
Can't help myself.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Haven't got to spend a day here with you and your friends and everything coming over. It's so clear that your your friend group and your colleague group spans political ideologies and parties, and that you're almost blind to that. And just like a doctor, I'm here to help people
Dr. Mark Hyman
get better. Right. Everybody works. I've worked
Daniel Schmachtenberger
with any I've worked with any administration, any institution if it helps kids and mothers and elderly people be healthier. And I just have mad respect for that and grateful to be here speaking with you. In prepping for this, I watched your talk on Andrew Huberman and a bunch of them. And one of the things that's so cool is that they were ones on mainstream news and these topics I've never seen on mainstream news, especially kind of long form. But a lot of the things that I would describe first, you have described really well in terms of what are the underlying causes of complex chronic disease, is that they're anthropogenic, meaning things that are not just problems of nature, meaning our biology or nature the way life is, but things that are the results of the way our civilizational system is.
There are agricultural system, our industrial systems that create pollution, our systems that affect human behavior.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, I think I just interrupted you. Thing that I think we we have a way of talking about disease in medicine, you you I got cancer. I Yes. Got heart disease. I got diabetes.
I got Alzheimer's. You don't get it. It's like it's not like a bug that you catch or a cold. It's it's a consequence of the environment in which we live, and that's that's sort of what you're talking about.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. So you're saying that you have seen a rise over the forty years that you've been in practice. And obviously, the forty years you've been in practice, that was already after the better living through chemistry boom started and, you know, modern industrial agriculture started. So it would be even a more extreme picture if we went back further. You've obviously studied the history on going back further.
But a lot of people think, oh, well, the rise in diseases is just a result of we're diagnosing more or something like that as opposed to, no, there are ways. Like, we have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism and democracy and whatever, and there there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story. Right? There are areas where some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution or cheaper health care or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect the environment but help affect our bodies.
I really like the framework that you shared about what the upstream causes are. Do you mind recapping that because you do it a lot better than I can?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's complicated. There's a there's a there's a a really important principle in functional medicine which is that you want to look for the root cause. And you want to find the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause. And and keep digging until you find out what's at the root of all of it.
And and most of medicine is not focused on root cause. It's focused on diagnosing based on symptoms and geography. Where is the disease and what are the symptoms? Not mechanism and cause. And medicine is now shifting where we're beginning to actually understand what those root causes are.
And actually, I'm excited about an upcoming commission report from HHS department and the presidential commission on Americans health, looking at what are the causes of chronic disease. And how do we begin to identify those. And rather than just labeling disease and then treating the label with a drug, we call it the name of blame entertainment system. We name the disease and we blame the name for the problem, then we tame it with the drug. So we say, oh, you're hopeless and helpless and sad and depressed and I know what's wrong with you.
You have depression. Well, no. That's just the name we give to people who share those symptoms. It's not the cause of those symptoms. It could be a myriad of things from what you're eating, your microbiome, from nutritional deficiencies like vitamin d or folate or excess of toxins like heavy metals or mercury or gluten that create brain inflammation.
So there's a lot of reasons why you can have any particular disease. And we just we have it all wrong. And I think it's a real shift. It's a real shift in thinking. So medicine, needs to move from this name it and blame it process to what we call thinking and linking where we start the thinking process once we make the diagnosis.
We start to try to create an understanding what are the patterns in the data. What are the story that's being told? How do you take a deeper diagnostic history? How do you do deeper diagnostic laboratory testing and work to kind of see what's at the root root cause of everything? And by peeling back that layer, you can start to see emerge picture of of a chronic disease epidemic that it is rooted in things that are caused by, I would say, man.
And I'm probably mostly say man because it's mostly men who've done it. You know? And I think that's something in a way it's good news because it means we can have agency over it. It's not something that just falls from the sky that hits us on the head that we get struck with some illness. It's it's actually now something we understand what it's about.
Yeah. It's not just better diagnosis. Trust me, like, the autism epidemic is an example. We've went from one in ten thousand when I was born to, you know, one in a hundred and thirty. Even if fifty percent is better diagnostic or seventy five percent is better diagnosed criteria, still something's going on.
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, you're running off a list of things that can be underlying causes and you mentioned vitamin d deficiency and mercury. And I think it's worth just going into this a little bit because vitamin d deficiency in terms of acute causation is rickets. And not many people have rickets, but there's a pretty big level between you have rickets and you have optimal levels. Yeah. And the same is true for vitamin C and scurvy or beriberi or whatever.
So the idea that deficiency means you don't have an acute disease that is killing you in fast way from it, but that as soon as you're above that, we're fine, as opposed to what are optimal levels. Would you speak to that a little bit in terms of also what you find in your practice and what you find when you take someone above rickets. Yeah. And treat them and they get better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think this is just a really important idea that that's sort of medicine is trying to catch up with. You know, we we used to talk about having type two diabetes and then we said, wait wait, there's prediabetes. And then we talked about having hypertension or high blood pressure. Now there's pre hypertension and we say, oh, you have an autoimmune disease. Oh, now there's pre autoimmune disease.
And the reason it's pre anything is because we're understanding there's consequences even at levels we thought were quote normal. And so this idea of disease being an on or off phenomena is wrong. It's a continuum from mild in biochemical imbalances, are barely detectable, which we might be able to now screen for with metabolomic testing and proteomic testing and you know more subtle things that we can measure to sort of pre symptomatic to symptomatic disease symptoms to finally full blown disease and death. And so there's a whole long continuum that can start in utero or even, you know, with your mother's health before she was born that impacts your health through epigenetics and through the, you know, intrauterine experience and through early childhood influences and all those things you you can start to map out if you listen carefully to somebody's story about what's happening early and and pick these things up. And so, you know, the fact that we have these sort of arbitrary cutoffs for, you know, blood sugar, blood pressure, vitamin d, you know, folic acid.
I mean, function health, which is a company we talked to you about that allows people access to comprehensive lab testing and have their own personal health data set. You know, the the reference ranges there are ridiculous for some of the things that they have like homocysteine which is a measure of your b vitamin status very important in methylation and genetic control, neurotransmitter function, detoxification, mood. Mean, a lot of things. Their cutoff level is like I think 15 or 16 or something. Yeah.
And any level over 14 according to the literature increase your risk of dementia by fifty percent. The optimal level should be six to eight. Same thing with insulin. I think we we we see insulin levels being reported as normal anything up to 16 or 18. That's because we're we have a sick population.
And and the the way we determine what's quote normal is basically on a bell curve in a population. So if the bell curve is shifted to the right or the left because people are sick, you're you're picking up what's normal in the population, not what's optimal.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Alright. There's a lot of topics in there to unpack. So the first is obviously absence of acute symptomology does not equal a good definition of health. Because we all know cases where someone went to the doctor for a routine checkup and they find out that they have cancer and not that long to live, and that cancer has been developing for a long time. And as you're mentioning with pre diabetes, a long time before the acute diagnosis of now you have diabetes and you have to take a med for it, you were in metabolic syndrome.
And a long time before the autoimmune disease that produces enough symptomology, you had inflammatory markers that you could see. Like, That's how many years ahead can you see signs
Dr. Mark Hyman
of Decades. Exactly. Decades.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, if you see it decades ahead and you haven't had a humongous amount of tissue damage, you can do stuff about it. By the time you've got to advanced tissue damage, it's a lot harder. Right? You can still do stuff about it, which is amazing and, you know, your clinic will attest to that. But so, I I mean, in med school, there's this stages of disease, which is you start with health is all the homeostatic systems, and homeostasis is kind of a silly term because it's not stasis.
Right? So the homeodynamics. Yeah. So you have all these homeodynamic systems in the body that are responding to various stressors, and the level they're at matters less than their responsive capacity. Right?
You want to be able to respond to hot and cold and to pathogens and whatever well. So you've got homeostasis or homeodynamics. Then you've got deviation from homeodynamics. Something comes that takes you out of range and you don't respond properly. What is that something?
Right? We'll get back to that. If that doesn't come back in range, if it comes back, great, you're still healthy. If it doesn't come back in, then you have pathophysiology. Right?
The physiology is operating differently as a result of that. If you keep operating differently for a long time, you'll start to get pathomorphology. Structures will start to And oftentimes it's not until after that that the symptoms occur. Mhmm. And that's when you go and you get the diagnosis.
And you've been in a very advanced development of illness that whole time. So obviously you don't want to wait till symptoms, and most people are walking around with a lot of symptoms. Yeah. Which means actually pretty advanced disease relative to what good health would be.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so obviously the an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound a cure thing. I think you have two really good pieces of news. One is even once you're in the symptomology stage, a lot of things that we think are untreatable are treatable.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. Yeah. And Even pretty late stage things like heart failure and Alzheimer's and autism and Will you tell a couple two diabetes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Just we can wrap it together. I know you have another place, but tell like a couple stories about that of things that people used to think were totally unreversible and most people still do.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, I I mean, in medical school and then throughout my medical training and even in continuing medical education and postgraduate training where you had to go CME courses. The orthodoxy is pretty rigid about certain beliefs. If you have heart failure, it doesn't go backwards. You can't improve it.
If you have dementia, you can't reverse it. If you have type two diabetes, it's not reversible. You can manage chronic diseases which is great for the medical industrial complex because it provides the ability to have a pharmaceutical driven health care system that makes huge amounts of profit off of long term chronic use of medication. What I've seen is surprisingly, when you apply these principles of creating health, which is what functional medicine is. It's not about treating disease.
It's trying to understand what is health, what are the deviations from health, and how do we measure those dysfunctions and the lack of resilience and balance and function in the body, and kind of tweak things to correct it. You can actually see reversal of these diseases. Complete remission reversal of type two diabetes. That's that's easy. That's an easy one.
And there's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
now But that's a humongous deal because like what is the curve of type two diabetes from when you were born to now? How many upstream diseases does that contribute And how many people how many doctors treat it like a traversal?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean it's it's it's the thing that's causing everything. So the phenomenon of insulin resistance, which underlies type two diabetes, is causing dementia. For example, your risk of dementia is four times higher if you have a type two diabetes. Your risk of heart attacks is dramatically higher.
Risk of cancers, many of the most common cancers, breast, pancreatic, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer. These are diseases of insulin resistance.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And to say all those diseases are largely, not perfectly, but largely preventable with some pretty basic stuff. Yeah. And oftentimes even reversible is a really important thing everybody should know and start to update.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, they're even taking some I mean, I've talked to about this. They're doing studies of stage four pancreatic cancer using ketogenic diets and seeing remissions in some of these patients, which is almost like heresy in medicine. And so I think we're not taught that these things are fixable. But if you understand the underlying root cause model of medicine and understand how to identify the root causes and figure out also how to create a thriving human and provide those conditions, because right now, as you know, you sort of talk about this anthropogenic disease, this really means we've an environment in which disease flourishes.
It's sort of a disease causing culture, society, environment, food environment, toxin environment. When you kind of remove those things as best you can, these diseases can reverse.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Mhmm. I had a
Dr. Mark Hyman
guy who was living in Pittsburgh who was seven years old and he and then I didn't know this but Pittsburgh you know, they they they had the steel plants and they they they use coal to make steel. And they use the coal ash to cover their fields and to when there's snowy icy roads to put them on the snowy icy roads and coal ash is full of lead and mercury. And he was extremely mercury toxic and also had other issues. He had insulin resistance. He had, gut issues his whole life.
So he had a lot of dysbiosis and gut inflammation. He had methylation issues, a b vitamin problems. We had a whole series of things. It wasn't just one thing. But you add all that together Yeah.
Plus his APOE double four status, which puts him at risk. And he was presenting with Alzheimer's. And yet, by a very aggressive detoxification by getting the metals out of his system, by chelation, which is heresy in medicine, by giving him methylating support, optimizing his gut function, fixing his insulin resistance, he reversed his cognitive decline. And he was actually able to improve his mental status and go back to work, which was again something you just never see. I mean, who's who's seen a survivor of Alzheimer's?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Know that you have for a long time known Dale Bredesen and his work in the space. Mhmm. And I think you are friends with someone I'm good friends with, doctor Heather Sanderson, who wrote the book recently Reversing Alzheimer's. And I think that was a number one, you know, New York Times bestseller for a while. And that particular study that she did there was an inpatient using a Bredesen like protocol
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That was reversing the MoCA scores in seventy percent of the people that went in within six months with pretty basic stuff, like largely diet, lifestyle, and a little bit of Yeah. Functional medicine.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And the MoCA score is a sort of a cognitive assessment that's easy to do, and and it's pretty predictive of of where you are in the trajectory of memory loss and dementia.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, this is another one if you look at Alzheimer's historically versus now that is really a disease of modernity. Yeah. Do you wanna say
Dr. Mark Hyman
Alzheimer's did diagnosis way back when in the turn of the century with, you know, this patient he had. But it it the rise in dementia is staggering and it's and it's one of the most costly conditions for humanity, not because of the direct medical care, because of the long term care that they need and because of the loss of the ability to work for their caregivers, their family members. But I've I've seen a dramatic increase in dementia and cognitive decline, and and it's sort of peril the rest of the chronic diseases that we're seeing increasing. And people say, oh, we're we're winning the war on heart disease. I mean, nonsense.
We're seeing less deaths because we have better advanced medical treatments
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like bypasses and stents and trauma last thrombolytics and blood clot dissolvers. But we we we are seeing more and more people getting heart disease. Right. More and more people getting cancer. More and more people getting diabetes.
And more and more people getting dementia. So despite the fact that we're spending trillions of dollars on healthcare, we're we're not getting much for our money. This is kind of This why
Daniel Schmachtenberger
people need to understand statistical warfare as part of information warfare is that you can cherry pick your stats. Yeah. Right? And you can lie with facts. You can mislead with facts.
You can say less people are dying, and what you're alluding to is the issue is getting better as opposed to there was even one case in which the stats were used that less people were dying of gun violence, and they were suggesting in that the gun violence went down, gun violence went up, just emergency care so people didn't die after
Dr. Mark Hyman
being shot. So
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's entirely possible just to speak to the larger political environment, and this is a bipartisan kind of universal marketing driven issue, is people who are pushing a narrative at scale usually have a motive to push the narrative. Political motive, a capital motive, or something. Right? And so you can take the whole story, just take parts of it, and you can have facts that make it through the most rigorous fact checker that are true, but are still misleading. Right?
And so
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, what Mark Twain said, he said there's liars, there's damn liars, and there's statisticians.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. And so as you're mentioning, winning the winning the war on heart disease, what you're actually seeing is the rates of heart disease are increasing. And so this is like this mortality morbidity trade off
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right, which is, oh, no. We're people are living longer. And recently, there's been a downturn in, you know, living longer, but, like, that kinda doesn't matter if the latter part of their life is on is on polypharmacy, is on a huge amount of meds with decreasing quality of life and only being kept alive kind of artificially. Like Mhmm. If someone gets off their meds, they die.
That's kind of like they're on life support
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Exactly.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Which speaks to quality of life. I think a lot of people don't understand the mortality morbidity trade off and that the stats that are cherry picked to say longevity is going up or heart disease is going down, what it's not indicating. Is there more on that you would say?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, think we're we're we're losing the battle on disease. We're we're spending more and more. I mean, we spend twice that of any other nation, often three, four, five times as much. We're 40 life expectancy and going down Our or or all a lot of our statistics are worse than most of
Daniel Schmachtenberger
the countries. That's just it's worth saying again. Forty eighth and life expectancy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think we're going down. It's it's getting worse. And that's crazy.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
With a $5,000,000,000,000 a year health care
Dr. Mark Hyman
budget. Yeah. We're we're, I think, thirtieth among the top developed nations in health care metrics like infant mortality. And and, you know, we're we're spending huge amounts. I think forty percent of people who are 65 take five or more medications a day.
Twenty percent take 10 or more medications. I think Some
Daniel Schmachtenberger
of which are for the side effects of the other meds. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, eighty one percent of Americans are in at least one medication. So is this making us healthier? Yeah. I don't think so. I mean, it's mitigating symptoms sometimes.
Maybe it addresses issues sometimes, but, you know, we know that our health care system itself is, and is the thoroughly cause of death through prescribed drugs given for the right reason at the right dose for the right patient, not mistakes. Medical errors is another huge category, but I mean, the Wait.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Let's put those together because when Ralph Nader was kind of popularizing this topic, some of the issues have gotten better on iatrogenesis. But if you take iatrogenesis to mean diseases that come from interaction with the health care system writ large, the broadest definition. So then it includes, as you mentioned, prescriptions that are rightly given, prescriptions that are wrongly given in allergic reactions to meds and drug interactions and whatever, surgeries, infections you get well in the hospital, etcetera. If you add those up, many people add those up and it's the number one cause Yeah. Of death of Americans in the country.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So basically, we shut down all the doctors and hospitals and got rid of all the drugs, we'd do better.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
We're not saying that because, of course, we don't wanna do statistical warfare because they're also saving lives. Yeah. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
For sure.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But we can say, damn, we should be able to do better on that side. And we can. Right? Like, you have plenty of clinical cases where you're saving more lives and causing much less iatrogenesis, and it actually costs less money when you factor all the matriculated thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you know what to do, and I think this concept of iatrogenic disease, know, we were just chatting earlier before the podcast, and I remember this book I read when I was in college by Ivan Ilitch called Medical Nemesis.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it really influenced me because it talked about the failure of our health care system back then and talked about this idea of iatros, which means physician, and genesis means its origin. So the origin of disease being caused by the physician. And in that that's something that I think is sort of underappreciated by most people. Doctors don't intentionally cause people to be ill. They're not bad people.
They're well intentioned. Trying the right thing, but they're trained in the wrong paradigm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Let's just double score. This is not actually a critique of doctors. It's not even a critique of hospitals. It's a critique of some systemic mistakes Yeah. That affect what the doctors are even allowed to do.
Sometimes the doctors are really upset about it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And it affects how the doctors are trained. And so where the critiques we're giving are systemic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So so let's talk about that. I mean, let's dive into what, you know, we're we're sort of set the stage for the fact that, you know, we we're having increasing rates of these chronic diseases, increasing rents of mental health crisis, increasing rates of neurodevelopmental issues, decreasing life expectancy. I mean, it's it's a grim it's a grim situation, and we're spending more and more and getting less and less. So the question then is, you know, what is this context in which the disease occurring?
Why is this happening? And and what are the anthropogenic reasons for this chronic disease epidemic?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So you were as you're going through the list, you mentioned vitamin d, you mentioned mercury, that's obviously deficiency, toxicity. You mentioned some pathogens. You mentioned stress. So you have a model of, like, what the underlying categories are. And a lot of them are things like everybody knows what acute deficiency is, what acute toxicity.
You just got a bag of chemicals poured on you. You have acute poisoning. You're vomiting. You have to go in for toxicology. But there is something that is called toxicity that is not just a hippie nonsense idea.
It's a real thing. It is not acute poisoning Yeah. That is chronic, that is subclinical or subacute. Same with infections. There's you have acute infection, you're producing symptomology versus kind of subclinical infections, which is in Lyme disease or in, you know, viruses that cause cancers or whatever it is.
Would you outline the model as you see it in your practice of what are the things that cause the deviation from homeostasis or homeodynamics to begin with? What are the kind of categories of things that can be part of a causal landscape of illness?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, know, the question is is important because we we do know a lot of what are are the anthropogenic reasons for disease or or things that may not necessarily be anthropogenic, but are still, issues that that are making us sick. And, you know, the the framework that that we use in functional medicines is really so simple and elegant. I think of it like the e equals m c squared of disease. You know, you you have a a something called the consilience project, which is incredible because there this book I read years ago and I'm I'm wondering if that's where you got the title of this this this project that you're doing was from Ew Wilson's book, The Unity of Knowledge. Yeah.
Is that where you got it from?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, consilience is a great term. He definitely popularized it and he's definitely somebody that I respect.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So I I remember reading that book, which is kinda heady and thick. But it was one section of the of the book where he talked about medicine. And he said, medicine has no theory. Yeah.
It's just a hodgepodge of reactive assumptions that don't necessarily connect to any fundamental principles. Like what are the laws of nature? And we know the laws of physics pretty much, not all of them, but most of them we've kind of sorted out. And we can do great things with that. We can build bridges.
We can build rocket ships. We can do all sorts of stuff, make computers. It's basically physics. And for medicine, there are no laws. You say, well, evolution, that's a kind of a law.
Okay. Well, that's one. But how does that apply to human health? What are the laws of biology when it comes to human health? Medicine really hasn't described those.
And and what what, Pierre Laplace, who was a incredible scientist back in the, I don't know, seventeenth century. So he's a he had, you know, Laplace's law and all that was a law of physics. But he he talked about how you can have a great number of observed phenomena from a small number of general laws. And and medicine has failed to produce those laws. So instead of having, like, a few principles that explain everything, we we we get more and more granular about the diseases we describe.
For example, the diagnostic manual for diseases is called the ICD 10, the International Classification of Disease volume 10 or version 10. There's a 155,000 diseases. You know, it's gone up from 12,000. You used to have things there like visitation from God. We had got rid of those.
You know, it's it's basically descriptive. It's phenomenological. It's based on symptoms, not on our understanding of the disease or the pathogenesis of the disease. And and so functional medicine, I think, is the first attempt to create a set of principles of laws. And and the the equals m c squared that explains the what you're asking, which is what is anthropogenic disease is is are you suffering from exposure too much of something that your body doesn't like?
It doesn't agree with you, or are you lacking certain things that your body needs to thrive and be resilient? And so for me, being a functional medicine doctor is just a detective work for figuring out what's you have too much of or too little of. And it's not just one thing. It's often many things. So you can't just treat one thing, is what we learned in medical school, Occam's razor.
Just single disease, single drug, that's the best practice of medicine. That's your gold standard. That's what you should shoot for. And that's just unfortunately not how the body works. It's a complex dynamic system, and it's it's infinitely unknowable.
But you can you can actually determine from these basic laws and principles how to treat disease even if you've never seen it before. In the fabric of reality by David Deutsch, he talks about this idea that you you know, following these basic principles, you can treat diseases and be successful even if you've never seen them. So often people say, have you treated this? Have you treated that? Have you fixed this or that?
I'm like, maybe not. I've seen that. I never seen it, but I know what to do. I know how to get to the bottom of this problem. And so my job is to go through that list and it's a really short list and maybe you can add to it.
But you know, it's toxins and these can be environmental toxins, the petrochemical based toxins like the forever chemicals or pesticides, phthalates, PCBs, dioxin, flame retardants, the list goes on. It could be elemental toxins like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and they're they're buried in the earth and we've kind of excavated them and industrialized different processes that that, you know, liberate these things like coal burning is a great one. And they can be, you know, biological toxins. Right? If you your liver kidneys aren't working, you're gonna be pretty sick and die pretty quick.
I mean and and then there's there's allergens, which are can be both environmental allergens, food allergens. Toxins can also be things like mycotoxins and mold toxins, which I put in that category, although it can also be an allergen. So so many things cross over. It can be and that allergen category can be sensitivities or imbalance like, you know, things that you might not think as a true allergy like we'll call an IG allergy, which would be a food sensitivity, which is like gluten, for example. And then there's microbes.
So it could be infections that are persistent like COVID or Epstein Barr or CMB, which kind of burden your immune system and lead to all kinds of symptoms or it could be a more subclinical but but debilitating conditions like tick infections or it could be an acute infection. Like, you know, I had an abscess recently in my back that was an acute infection almost killed me. So it can be micro it can be micro microbiome. So imbalances or dysfunction in your microbiome, which is we're all suffering from in modern society as a core driver of disease. And it can be stress as a physical stress, or psychological stress.
And and that creates physiological change in your body or it can be a poor diet. And and and we can get into what that is, but we all eat a pretty crappy diet in in America. And all those influence your gene expression. All those dynamically are interacting and are often in combinations in any individual that may be precipitating a problem. Like I mentioned the Alzheimer's guy, he had you know poor diet, he had gut issues, he had heavy metals, know, he had a lot of these things.
And then there's the too little. Are you not getting enough of the whole nutrient dense food? Are you not getting enough of all the nutrients? Right? So you can have deficiencies in vitamins, minerals which play a role or even in conditionally essential nutrients that are things we don't necessarily think of as necessary.
And I think there's a whole conversation around phytochemicals and are those conditionally essential? Have we co evolved with plants to use their compounds to upregulate our biology? Like, I did a podcast recently with someone who's studying this compound that comes from pomegranates and walnuts and berries called, elligitannins that gets converted in the gut through the microbiome to a common called your lithium a that helps recycle old mitochondria. And there's not very many things to do that. So maybe we've kind of evolved with these plants to help us do our body's work.
And then there's, you know, the right balance of hormones. It can be hormonal deficiency. It can be deficiencies of light and circadian rhythm and clean water and clean air, which are all things we need. And movement, exercise, rest. So it could be like parasympathetic activities like meditation that restores our nervous system's function, sleep, adequate sleep, connection, love, meaning, purpose.
These are all, you know, belonging. These are all things that we need. And if you even something as as obvious as belonging, if you're lonely, you know, you're it's like smoking two pack of cigarettes a day in terms of your risk. So you kinda go through that whole list and you can kinda see where people are. And, and some of those things are just a consequence of our modern world like the increasing isolation, lack of connections, lack of belonging, lack of being part of a tribe.
And it maybe is why we see such an increase in tribalism and divisiveness in society because people are wanting to be part of something even if it's bad, you know, like a gang. Right? Or it could be AA or it can be Weight Watchers. It's all still a club. So I think I think we have this kind of interesting moment where we're starting to kinda map out what these things are that that impair human resilience and function.
And that's really why we call it functional medicine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. I think everything you're saying is kind of intuitive if someone is not excessively indoctrinated in an alternate thought process and makes sense, but I wanna formalize it a little bit. So the first thing is that you're mentioning disease having many causes, and that's in distinction to the idea that it has no cause. It's just whatever. We don't understand
Dr. Mark Hyman
universe. Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Or single cause. Right? In which a single molecule for a single molecular target would make sense.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. You eat saturated fat, you get high LDL cholesterol, you get heart disease. It ain't that simple.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so complex causation versus simple causation is a major part of the story. Right? And simple causation is usually immediate. Right? You're exposed to something, a pathogen, a poison, you're starving, and a disease that correlates to it exactly starts to happen immediately.
Delayed causation, as you mentioned, certain diseases, you can find early signs that we're moving in that direction in utero, or even the predispositions in the mother's body that are going to affect the developmental environment of the baby. So acute versus kind of chronic is a major part that we wanna make a distinction. The other is single cause versus multifactorial because you're mentioning this person's dementia was a whole suite of lead and mercury and whatever, and a whole suite of deficiencies, and a whole suite of maybe subclinical infections, maybe behavioral patterns, and maybe psychological patterns. So it's not one thing is causing one deviation is causing one disease that will be treated with one process. It's each thing is taking the system out of optimal performance.
Yeah. It's causing a deviation from homeodynamics, it's causing pathophysiology. Now that system is more susceptible to the next one, because it's already operating a little bit sub optimally. And so this low grade toxicity that's messing up the liver and kidneys and lymphatic system makes it to where the normal toxins, metabolic waste the body produces, it has a harder time with. Right?
And then this nutrient deficiency that is part of the detox processes compounds on that. So the key is you get a compounding effect of a lot of things that are some of them happened a year ago. The thing that might have caused it, seemed to have caused it, was actually just a trigger. It was the last step of a causal cascade that took somebody Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's draw the camera's back. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. I think these concepts of delayed causation as opposed to immediate causation, multifactorial as opposed to single factor, subacute issues, things that cause no symptomology immediately, but are part of a compounding effect. Also, unique patho ideology. Right? That two people's MS or two people's rheumatoid arthritis are not the same disease.
Same. Yeah. And as a But I would say
Dr. Mark Hyman
you can have one cause that creates many diseases like mercury or gluten, and you can create one disease that has many causes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. So I think just maybe speak to that a tiny bit more in terms of when people think cause and effect, there's a reductionist thing where they think billiard ball, one thing caused one effect immediately. And yet, when you're talking about a complex organizational system where, you know, a a circuit board or a computer or a car, you can take a part out, put another part back in, upgrade it. It didn't grow. It's not self organizing.
It was built. And we apply that methodology from clocks to computers to something that grew and self organized where each there's no such thing as a lung outside of a body or a liver outside of a body. Right? So when you try to separate gastroenterology and oncology and neurology, you get still a bunch of diseases that make no sense.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It is. It's such a failure of imagination and thinking that we have these specialties in medicine, and we divided up the body into these organs and parts, which is still how we teach medical students. And my daughter just finished medical school and it's just so antiquated. And, you know, there's emerging from the scientific community, not not necessarily the medical community, but I'll say the scientific community.
This emerging paradigm of multi causality and multi modal treatments. In other words, there's multifactorial causes, many causes for any condition. And there's multimodal treatments that are needed not just one thing. And and this this the the body is seen to be a network and a web where everything is inextricably tied to everything else and you can't separate all these things out. But you can start to understand how they influence each other and are dynamically acting together to create dysfunction of the body and disease.
And and it's very personalized because because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with that person.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
In the name of the disease, that person might be missing some of the symptoms that usually go. They might be missing some of the biomarkers. They might have other biomarkers. They might have other symptoms. We just said there's enough of a cluster to meet the diagnostic threshold for insurance to cover it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But this person, this unique person who we say has rheumatoid arthritis and this other person we say has rheumatoid arthritis don't have the same presentation. Right. They don't have the same medical history, but they don't have the same presentation. Right? You run enough labs, they have totally different stuff going on in their blood.
They have a toe and they have different symptomology. Right. So what does rheumatoid arthritis mean?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It just it just it's the name we give to a group of people who share certain criteria that have been established that create the diagnosis based on symptoms, morning stiffness, certain joint pattern of of inflammation, certain lab tests. But it doesn't tell you anything about why. It could be a antimicrobial histolytic, a parasite that causes it or it could be gluten that causes it or
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But it's almost never one of those. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. No. It's usually not.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Exactly. It's
Dr. Mark Hyman
usually not. And that's that's that's what's so hard in in in the research paradigm. And I I I'd be very curious to what you think about this because, you know, the the entire medical research paradigm has been set up for drug discovery. It's the randomized double
Daniel Schmachtenberger
blind I wanna go there. I wanna get to reductionist medicine. But before we go there, you just mentioned, you're like, it could be entomobile histolytica. So you already explained kind of subacute toxicity, but subacute infection you didn't get into yet. Most people like dysentery is very obvious.
Yeah. But there are things where there is a chronic GI infection Yeah. That isn't dysentery. No. Will you talk about that for a little bit?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You know, I think I I think we think think of infections as something that, you know, come and go. But the truth is and AIDS, you know, I I grew up in the era of AIDS. I I I went to medical school in that era. I I did residency at UCSF, which was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic with the gay community there, and it was the number one admitting diagnosis to the hospital where I trained in my residency.
And and nobody died of HIV infection. People died of all the other bugs that happened to live in us and on us that get unleashed when your immune system isn't
Daniel Schmachtenberger
working. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So whether it's pneumocystis infection of your lungs or cytomegalovirus, which is a common virus that we all carry, like, you know, people have herpes and they you know, people know this. Right? You have herpes and you get a cold sore when it's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
People know it for oral herpes or genital herpes, they don't know there are more kinds of herpes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. There's a lot of kinds of herpes. CMV is herpes, Epstein Barr is herpes. They're just herpes, the whole family of viruses. But but people know, oh, I have herpes, which means when I'm stressed or when it's cold out or when I'm tired or when I get a cold, I get a cold sore.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That people understand that there's this latent infection in their body. But there's so many of those and there are there are often hidden and they're latent and they're maybe marginally symptomatic or not symptomatic. Even tick infections can cause all sorts of issues and be latent and then they they emerge. Or, you know, even even with COVID, we're now seeing this, you know, when we're seeing replicating COVID viruses in people who've recovered months or years later in in their bodies that are producing ongoing effects that lead to long COVID and persistent disease.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So so just so people have a sense, what percentage of people have CMV? What percentage of people have Epstein Barr? What percentage of people have some strains of HPV that are part of pathogenic predisposition?
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a lot. I mean, I would say everybody's walking around with something. You know, I think probably. If you look, most people have some Epstein Barr that's kinda hang hanging around that can emerge and be problematic. Probably half the population has CMB.
Yeah. You know, it's it's a lot of people.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There was a there was a study I found interesting that was looking at removed prostate cancers that were removed for cancer and that were biopsied and doing viral assessment on it, and found that the combination of EBV and HPV was present in the vast majority of
Dr. Mark Hyman
them.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And so that's not one or the other. It was actually the combination.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And obviously, we know HPV causing cervical cancer, causing throat cancer. That's kinda new though. Right? The people really understand that. And h pylori causing stomach cancer, and obviously, like EBV causing chronic fatigue, but it's pretty reductionist to say EBV causes chronic fatigue.
There are people who have EBV who get other diseases, MS or something. There are people who have EBV who never get chronic fatigue, and there are people who have chronic fatigue who have a load of other viruses or pathogens
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That aren't EBV.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We're talking about like the the the the infections can cause a myriad of problems like herpes can lead to increased risk for Alzheimer's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which, you know, doesn't just call the cold sore, but maybe something more serious. And that doesn't mean all Alzheimer's is caused by
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Bacteria. And but you know, look at Rudy Tanzi's work and there who's a Alzheimer's researcher and he he talks about how there's they do brain biopsies are finding all these bugs in the brain from the microbiome, from viruses, from other bacteria that may be causing an irritation that leads to the deposition of the amyloid plaque that everybody sees on the microscope, but is only a secondary response to some other triggering factor. That if you dealt with that triggering factor, you might not actually get Alzheimer's.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So this is something that Rudy Tansey's work is good at, Bretison's work is good at, is Alzheimer's isn't one disease. Yeah. Right? Some people have described it as type two diabetes of the brain, some people as rheumatoid arthritis of the brain, some people as infection of the brain. These are all true
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Different times, which means different treatments. So if you hear that somebody has rheumatoid arthritis or MS or Alzheimer's, you don't instantly know what you're gonna do.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I don't. I don't. I know I know there's a there's a group of things I'm gonna look at. Yes.
Like, I'm gonna look at things that piss off the immune system. Right? Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet. Right? All the deficiencies of certain things like vitamin d we know is increasing risk for MS because it's important neurologic function and immune function.
So, you know, I think we we we kind of have to come to terms with this framework of multi factorial causes and multimodal treatments. And we just we just have failed to to be imaginative in how we do research.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. I think we're saying you're saying two things at once that are important. One is the disease doesn't have one cause. Mhmm. So but you're saying think about causal stuff, but the disease doesn't have one cause.
So it could seem overwhelming, like what it says, all these things. But there's also a framework that's really simple. Yeah. So the treatment of everyone's gonna be personalized, not based on a disease diagnosis, but based on their actual medical history, their symptomology, their labs, and what's uniquely going on for them. But it's gonna be personalized within a framework that is kinda not that hard.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's right. I mean, the laws of nature are pretty simple. Like Right. What Pierre Laplace said.
They're they're if the laws of biology, when I think we're describing them and I think we're getting toward approximation approximation of what that looks like. And there's, you know, functional medicine is just a heuristic. It's not the end all and be all. It's just a framework that we're continually evolving to understand the complexity of human biology, which is infinitely unknowable. But even though it's so complex, know, a rocket ship is complicated.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's it's but it's knowable. It's a known known.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, there's a blueprint Right. That specifies it completely. Yeah. And DNA is actually not a blueprint.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's a generator function, which can make a new protein that's never made exposed to a new thing. Yeah. Right? And it evolved rather than was designed, which is why it's self repairing. Right?
The the rocket ship doesn't self repair.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Doesn't self evolve.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And so biology is is not mechanics. Right? It's like it's a different unique thing that to have a system that self organizes, wasn't created by it from the outside, that has an immune system. Right?
Like, it'd be dope if our computer had an immune system, but it doesn't or our car. Right? Things that self evolve. And so we're like, okay, what's happening in a system that is building itself, evolving itself, repairing itself is obviously different in type than a system that doesn't repair itself, that doesn't evolve itself. So we have to make sure we're using the right epistemology.
Right? The right kind of scientific framework. And so you were talking about laws of biology. And you mentioned, well, evolution's kind of that. And we're talking about anthropogenic stuff, which is like stuff in the current world that is different than the evolutionary environment even though our genes aren't different.
Yeah. Right? Like, modifying the environment in a way that we are not actually genetically fit Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That mismatch is really why we're sick.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think the the first thing is a lot of people are still suffering from the propaganda of Hobbes and Hobbes' descendants. Right? Man in the state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty, and mean. Right. And as you already mentioned, the average life expectancy was 30, and their life was shit the entire time until they were 30, and, you know, that's nature.
Right? That's just nature. That's human biology. That's nature and our civilizing ourselves. Technology is creating longer lives and everything's getting better and better.
And this is like awesome propaganda if you're colonialists and you wanna kill all the And
Dr. Mark Hyman
We're we're helping them by killing them because they wanted to suffer so much.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, Churchill has a famous quote that says, I'm gonna paraphrase it. Actually, I have a whole list of quotes about Manifest Destiny of Kings. I mean, Manifest Destiny in The US and Divine Right of Kings and like just stuff that when we look back, we say, wow, that was the most dreadful propaganda nonsense. Right. We still do the same kind of thing.
Yeah. But Churchill said something like, you know, I don't hold for one second that our treatment of the red man is a bad thing in any way because evolution selects for higher life forms and a higher species replacing the lower species is good. Right? And you're like, shit. That's a big deal.
So, Nate, North And South America, The Americas before Columbus, etcetera, right, before colonization, was roughly, depending on who you look at, a 140,000,000 people. And within a short period of colonization, both from infections and war and driving them out of viable habitats, the population was decimated by 90%.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if you look at that and you compare it to whatever, 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust. Right? And you're like, 190% of a 140,000,000, which is so many different civilizations that had different languages and songs and art and pharmacologies and just gone. Yeah. Right?
And similarly, so many ecosystems, so many species, like we don't have the giant sloth, we don't have the mammoth. Those were largely, you know, though many of those were early human extinction
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
From over hunting, from destroying habitats. But so there's the story. No. No. Those and and, of course, it makes sense that, like, if the winner writes history, of course, they're the good guy.
Right? The winner's not gonna say, we were the bad guys, but we we're better at weapons than them. Yeah. And they we destroyed them because they were peaceful and lovely. No.
We're gonna say they were they were brutish and terrible, and we brought democracy and Christianity and whatever, you know. You can say Christian, you can say Islam, you can say whatever the thing is that is justifying why it won. So there's something where it's like the the dominant narrative of a power system has to justify the power system. And so it's gonna be apologism to the power system. We saw that through the Conversations, through the
Dr. Mark Hyman
dark Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Ages, through the and so history is hard. Right? Because we gotta read this stuff that's written by the winners. Yeah. And you're like, in general, more peaceful cultures got slaughtered by more warring cultures.
It's not like everybody that Genghis Khan slaughtered was a less good civilization. No. They were less good at war, but how many people that knew how to live in more peace got slaughtered in the process? Because they didn't build maximally lethal militaries. And yet we are the descendants of who made it through history.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Was war and weapons and killing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Growing massive populations. Mhmm. Not keeping populations in stable relationship with their environment. Good at technology that can be used in competition and war.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so it's a really interesting selection criteria. So then we tell the story. Oh, they only lived for thirty years and life was terrible. And but you were just saying like, hey, no. Actually, of the Plains Indians were living to a 100.
A lot of them were living to a 100. This is such an important story because I think one of the things that I want to get across in this conversation is there's still this general idea that is a part of the progress narrative, that is a part of just propaganda, let's say. That is that diseases come from nature. Right? Man in a state of nature's life is brutish or nasty and mean.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And the progress comes from science and the application of science and technology brought to the world via the market, blah blah blah. And now look at how long we live and, you know, vaccines solved all these issues and whatever. It's not that there's no truth to it, but it is cherry picking. The stat is pretty heavy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Ninety percent of measles was gone when they've introduced the vaccine because of better sanitation and health.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is pretty important part of the story. And so if you rewind a little bit to say, you know, dark ages Europe, this is not an indigenous culture. And then if the indigenous cultures you're studying post science, which is very recently, are post Trail of Tears after you've already slaughtered most of them, move them to an area where they don't understand the plants or animals and that were like crap areas, and then they're drinking and whatever. You're like you're like, this is not a study of indigenous people. So there's a lot of indigenous scholars that are like, come on.
This is ridiculous. Like, no. We had a lot of people that were 100 years old.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And there's a lot of diseases we just didn't have. And so this idea that like, that diseases just come from nature. Our genome is a bummer. Right? Like, nature's a bummer.
Tech is gonna solve it. As opposed to, like, actually, technological agriculture has really made a lot of people sick. Technological mining and etcetera that has caused ubiquitous pollution made a lot of people sick. So when we say anthropogenic disease, we're not just talking about iatrogenic. Right?
Anthropogenic meaning diseases we have that are a result of our own action as a species. Right? And so if you take mining for instance, right, there's there's 2,000,000,000 tons of municipal waste produced every year. Waste that, you know, like comes from our house. It's a lot.
2,000,000,000 tons, like mind blowing when you think about it. There's about a 190,000,000,000 tons of mining waste produced every year.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a lot.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Because you mine stuff, but that rock isn't it's not all the thing you want. Right? You want a particular metal. All the stuff you don't want is waste, is tailings. That stuff is almost all super toxic, And it gets put in some big dam that eventually breaks and all goes to water.
Mhmm. And this is comprehensively undoing what took the biosphere a billion years to do that made life possible in the first place. This is you had actually mentioned something I I wanna it's a tangent, but I wanna double down on this. Maybe there's aliens. Who knows?
We're not gonna get into that part right now. But when we look out at the universe, we see a lot of planets that are not habitable. And we don't see a lot of places that look habitable. This place is pretty any. Right?
Carl Sagan's pale blue dot is as relevant today as it was back then. Yeah. So this like the fact that it's habitable to life is a big deal. We should want to protect it more than anything.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Not move to Mars?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Obviously, if you deal with radiation and other issues, point four g is a pretty tricky issue to deal with. Right? As you see, the people who go into zero g and they do a lot of resistance training and everything to try to deal with it, bone density goes down, neural density goes down. Neural density drops pretty massively. So, you know, like, obviously, we have all fit to this planet.
We have a planet that supports life. It's rare as can be. Right? It's everything we care about depends on that. And it took a long like, the other planets didn't do that.
At least in the time period that we can see, that's very special. It took a whatever, a billion ish years for geological, hydrological processes to make a space where abiogenesis could start to happen, right, where life could start to emerge. Mhmm. And that was trapping all the super toxic stuff in which life couldn't emerge in rocks in the lithosphere and making a certain temperature range and, you know, whatever that life could emerge in. And then it took, like, a billion years of just single cell creatures Mhmm.
To make a biosphere in which multicellular creatures could emerge, and on and on. And and then you look at the biosphere, a complex biosphere, and you're like, it's pretty much six atoms. Right? Like, there's 92 elements in the periodic table. Yeah.
Oxygen first. Right? Like, 65% of our body by weight is oxygen. Mhmm. Because water.
Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium make up 96% of our weight. Yeah. And you add the few electrolytes in there, it's 99% of our weight. And then you have trace minerals. The trace minerals are important.
They're a tiny bit, but roughly every animal, plant, whatever, has the same distribution of trace minerals, the same building blocks, the same type of molecular bonds. It's a humongous deal to understand. Me and you and a dog and a mouse and a scorpion and a tree and a fungus are made of the same stuff. Same atoms, same molecular bonds. Mhmm.
Which is why any of them can die, go on the soil, turn into soil, turn into new stuff. A tree can fall, Body can fall. An animal can defecate. Rattlesnake poison. Right?
Like super duper poisonous stuff is still the nature of the bonds. It dies, breaks down, doesn't stay as an enduring toxin.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Unlike plutonium, which stays around forever.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. Or PFAS or whatever. Right? Serophone. Because those are either atoms that were not part of the biosphere that we got through mining or molecules that we made up in a chem lab that nothing in nature knows how to break down.
Right? Like your bond. So just to get a sense of, like, part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all made of the same stuff. Mhmm. And we need the same physics.
Right? Obviously, the North Pole to the Equator are different temperatures, so polar bears don't do very well in the Savannah, and cheetahs wouldn't do very well in the Arctic. But the temperature difference from the North Pole to the Equator is almost nothing compared to everywhere else in outer space. Right? Suns are really hot.
Well, some things are very hot, some things are very cold.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But, like, everything here operates with the same pressure, the same physics, the same ionizing radiation, the same chemicals, the same temperature ranges. That's a big deal to get. And the same chemicals and the same molecular bonds, a huge deal, and it's part of why coevolution works, why there can be mutual symbiosis, is we are literally recyclable into each other. Yeah. Right?
Now, if you think about from that perspective, how rare life in the universe is, how rare the biosphere is, how it's all based on basically the same six atoms, same molecular bonds, a little bit of minerals. You think then you start to think about how mind blowingly stupid mining is. Like mining. Just to think about it. You think
Dr. Mark Hyman
of other weird things out of the earth that should be buried in there and
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Things?
Dr. Mark Hyman
That we should be protected from because they don't do well with our biology.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Things that are omnitoxic to all life forms. Right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms. Cadmium is bad for all life forms. Lead is bad for all life forms, etcetera.
So fortunately for us, the Earth has a lot of those, but they're all bound in rock in the lithosphere under the biosphere, not part of the biosphere. We don't have to deal with them. So what do we do? We say those are useful for industrial purposes, so let's actually destroy the biosphere on top to make a mine. Let's pull this rock up.
Let's pull that super toxic thing out through smelting and metallurgy and whatever. And if we just kept it all in a perfect metal and recycled, it'd be one thing. But we burn the coal and put the mercury and lead in the air. We put the lead in the gasoline, you know, and aerosolized it. We and then the also the rest of the part that is toxic tailings also goes out.
So you're like, we have one planet that we know is habitable. It's habitable because of specific chemistry, and we are as fast as possible making omnitoxic shit that chemistry can't deal with.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's a big part of what's making us sick, and it's something that medicine sort of ignored, which is this chronic low level burden of toxins that we're all exposed to. And we're all basically assessable. If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat. You know, the average newborn has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And Wait. Wait.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before they take their first breath.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
We see the same thing in the mother's breast milk. Right? And her blood, like, just people need to have the sink in. Mother breast milk, mother's blood, baby umbilical cord, two to 300 petrochemical and and industrial toxins.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's crazy. I mean
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And you should still level is ridiculous, actually.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mean, I I I I've I've thought of a business of creating a, you know, breast milk filter. I don't know how you do that, but
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, the lymphatic system is a filter. Yeah. But it can only filter like in our evolutionary environment, we were not exposed to organophosphates. No. So what evolutionary process can deal with organophosphates?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Like and so we figured out organophosphates, napalm, awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food.
Right? Glyphosate. Yeah. But to to think about this thing that we invented as a chemical weapon to destroy nature at scale.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Napalm, which is dioxin.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Same molecular class. We figure out, oh, we can kill weeds in agricultural settings, but we're gonna spray it on all the food, and humans are gonna eat trace amounts of all of it. And the pesticides, like, the thing that blows my mind about pesticides, you're like, okay. Nuclear modeling. Nuclear war happens.
Nuclear winter. Almost everything dies. The only things that make it are bugs with exoskeletons. We wanna make something poisonous enough to kill bugs that can make it through a nuclear winter, and we spray it all over our food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then eat it. And just because we're bigger, we it's it's not a lethal amount, but it's a long
Dr. Mark Hyman
accumulates and it it's additive. And over time, it's sort of like that's what I see so many so many of the times that we see. And in many of the disease of aging and chronic diseases we're talking about, including autoimmune diseases, are all the result of this total load phenomenon. It's not just one thing. It's a total load of everything.
And you keep adding and adding and adding.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And it's So when you say low level, it's important to say so we're talking about lead poisoning. Right? There's like, you have acute lead poisoning, you have Mad Hatter syndrome. Mhmm. Okay.
That happens because you're working in a lead mine or some industrial source. Right? But how much was there in an evolutionary environment? None. So what amount is good for you?
None.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. So That's why I laugh when I see the reference range on the lab of, like, the level of mercury that's considered normal is one zero to 10. I'm like, well, there's no biological crime for mercury. Zero is the normal level. Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And yet, that would mess up so much industry that the industry is gonna lobby the EPA to make a number that doesn't mess up the industry too much. Mhmm. And the cost, the externalized cost is your children's health Yeah. And your grandparents' health, and your health, and the cancers that everybody's gonna get.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I see this. I mean, I I I saw this kid in my practice years ago. His mother was just so such a good, attentive, observant mother, and she she saw this kid who went from a normal little kid to being extremely difficult, extremely aggressive, violent, learning difficulties, dysgraphia, dyslexia, just a whole bunch of things, neurodevelopmental things. And, you know, she she said we live North Of Albany in this town where
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yep.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There's a cement plant across the street from the school. This is this is why the history is so important. How many doctors ask your patients if they live near a cement plant or a coal plant? Not nobody asked that. Right?
But it's part of the history that we find really essential. And she said every day after school, the the cars would be coated. Like in Austin here when it's pollen season, like your car is just coated with pollen. Their cars every day were coated with dust from the cement plant. And that duct coat dust was a toxic soup of chemicals.
And when I actually did a chelation challenge test, which again is something we don't do in traditional medicine, but we look at your blood levels and that can tell you if there's an acute exposure. And often there there are levels that are significant. You see kids, for example, high lead from environmental exposure, but it's it often is stored in the tissues. And so we give a drug called the DMSA, which is a FDA approved drug for chelation. That's a Greek word that means to claw, to bind some things or binds the metals.
And then we collect the urine and we saw this kid was just everything was just lit up, you know, arsenic, a
Daniel Schmachtenberger
little one of the things you said is you had to use a different testing method. Yeah. Right? Because, of course, if there's something that's circulating in the blood, it's gonna cross the blood brain barrier, that's gonna go into the kidneys and hurt the nephrons. It's so dangerous to keep in the blood.
The body will excrete it as fast it can. If it can't excrete it fast enough, it wants to get it out of the blood. Yeah. So it goes into a tissue. So you do a blood level.
Blood level's the wrong thing to do. Right? Yeah. If you're not looking at tissue levels, which is what. But tissue biopsies are not a noninvasive thing to do.
No. But this is just important to be like, people could say, oh, this nonsense. I've run the labs and nobody has heavy metal. Well, are you running the right labs? Very important topic.
And again, there's some theory under it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. And one of the one of the, you know, one of the gold standard tests for lead, for example, is looking at in bone levels through various specialized types of imaging that are used in research. And that's what you should be looking at instead of like the joke I always tell that, you know, this guy drops his keys on the street and he's looking for him in his under this light post and his friends like, what are you doing? He said, I'm looking for my keys. He said, where did you drop him?
He's like, can talk him down the street. He said, why are looking here? He said, the light spitter here. And that's what we do in medicine. We tend to do testing that we have available but not the right testing.
And and I even remember an article in the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA. It was one of those who was talking about like mercury and and they said, when we check the blood because that's the easiest thing to do. I'm like, well, that's not where you wanna check, you know, to see what's really going on. And and so this kid these kids who were living at the cement plant were were severely affected by these. And by treating them and getting rid of the metals and decreasing their toxic burden, they were able to actually recover and do well.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So this is important. People will say n equals one nonsense, whereas the RCT randomized control trial and placebo effect could do that. No. Placebo effect couldn't do that.
Placebo effect does some things. It doesn't do other things. It's not gonna increase bone density. Right? It's like, it's not going to reverse in a kid who's not even paying attention really severe Yeah.
Diseases and biomarkers. Yeah. So it's hard to do a randomized control trial on a bespoke process.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And yet, if you're seeing things that placebo does not describe, meaning placebo never does that thing enduringly, that should not be an immediate dismissal. No. And if it's something that there would be no way to set up an RCT easily for and or no one has money to do it, someone should not immediately dismiss based on that. Right? It should be like, well, let's look at the total body of evidence and try to understand it.
Let's try to make sense
Dr. Mark Hyman
of it. Yeah. And I think where medicine is also going is the NIP one studies, which is now understood to be a really valid type of research, which is where you measure your own biology against your own biology with different interventions over time. And, you know, we we also had a whole group of special forces, soldiers at Cleveland Clinic who were coming with all sorts of weird mysterious chronic illnesses. And they were having fatigue and metabolic issues and cognitive issues.
And you know, these guys in special forces are not whiners or complainers. You get through a training there. You're like a tough guy. And and they were being dismissed and we started looking and listening to the stories and they were often guys who were exposed to burn pits or were in blast houses so they were training how to blow up shit. You know, like how to blow up a door, blow up a building.
And they would practice
Daniel Schmachtenberger
TBI's from it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And they would Well, they would get brain injury but they would also
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Chemical exposure.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They would get the release of the metals. And they were very high in lead and mercury and and by getting rid of these in these patients, they did remarkably well. And then it was actually it was in the New York Times where this expert in lead who's I think it was at Albert Einstein who studied the bone lead levels with this fancy test said he'd never seen anything like this where lead levels decreased.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm like, well, you've never seen it because you guys don't practice medicine that actually helps you detoxify these compounds in your body. That that's possible. We know how to do it. Right. But it's again, it's sort of on the fringes of medicine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. I wanna talk about lead for a minute. So everybody or most people know the story of leaded gasoline, tetraethyl lead being added to gasoline. Most people don't know the story well. There's actually a exceptional video on this made by Veritasium, a YouTube channel online that describes the, you know, tetraethyl lead story.
But it was an additive for gasoline in the early phases of internal combustion engines that stopped engine knocking, as in not even absolutely crucial. Heaps of other chemistries that could stop engine knocking as obviously we know because we don't have lead anymore. The early studies that were done on tetraethyl lead, the on toxicity, the people did get sick, including the researcher, and the results were hidden. So it wasn't that we couldn't have possibly known. It was we actually knew, hid it, and brought it out anyways because of the economic interest.
And then to think about, like, what what adding lead to gasoline means, which is you're aerosolizing it. Right? You're not just putting it in the water or the soil. You're literally atomizing one of the most toxic chemicals that exists and putting it into the air at scale. Right?
So, of course, even though it was already known toxic, that was hidden, and then the companies that were producing the tetrathyl lead fought really hard to keep it there and not ban it. And it only finally got banned after the preponderance of how much harm it was causing got proven decades later. The effects when you look back in just America are estimated at a billion points of IQ loss for Americans.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And staggering. I just would like people dumber. Yeah. A billion points of IQ loss for a population that was less than 300,000,000 people Yeah. Is a lot of IQ loss.
Yeah. And then there were also studies on increased violence and aggravation Yeah. That showed that populations that were heavily exposed had something like four x impulse control disorders.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Impulse controls, cool performance, cognitive deficits.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not to mention the bone issues, the osteoporosis, the cancer, everything else. But if we just look at even the psychocognitive elements, because one of the, like, again, one of the bullshit stories that is realpolitik is like, it goes back to the Hobbesian story. It's like humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why we need rule. Right?
Humans are kind of dumb and nasty. Well, empirically, we made humans dumber and nastier with just the aerosolizing lead. And you're like, who would the humans be Yeah. If we weren't if we hadn't done that. So then you say, okay.
Well, that's an old story because we got rid of lead. Well, no. Those effects are enduring.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It should doesn't go away. It's in the soil still. It's in
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's still in most of pipes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's in the pipes. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? It's like we still see it in water.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The whole thing that happened in Flint, Michigan.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But Albany is worse than Flint, Michigan.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Still. Yeah. And but even though we supposedly banned lead and gasoline, it's still used in prop planes. It's still used in certain military and farm equipment and other kinds of things.
So we're still using it. It's supposedly banned around the world, but it's still used because it's not enforced in the third world pretty heavily. But then the lead that comes from mining, specifically mining affluent. There's a study I saw in 2019 that showed children under five lost 780,000,000 IQ points just in 2019 just from lead.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's not just that it affects your cognitive function, affects everything. You know, there there's was a really pioneering study that I I saw in American Journal of Cardiology where they found that anybody with a lead level of over two and by the way, the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over. Yeah.
Then it was 20. Yeah. Then it was 10. Now it's 10.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But that was not based on proving that they weren't. That was based on lobbying from the company from the industries that produced the lead Yeah. That wanted to not have that much restriction.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But still, the lead levels are quote normal is one to zero to 10. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And and this American Journal of Cardiology study, they found that
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Excuse me. I was saying the arguing for being higher was the lobbying side. The proving the toxicity brought it lower, but it's still as you're mentioning, one to 10.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Still one to 10. Yeah. So it's still pretty bad. And and what they found was in terms of kids cognitive function, It was a continuum from zero to 10 still cause a problem.
It wasn't like you had no effect. So that that's been well proven. But what was was really interesting was the American Journal of Cardiology found that that if your level was over two. Not two out of ten, that which is thirty nine percent of the population of adults and kids. It was a bigger risk factor for stroke and heart attack than having abnormal cholesterol.
Yeah. Which nobody talks about. So you go to the cardiologist, they're not checking your lead levels and one of
Daniel Schmachtenberger
the And even if they did, that's only one fifth of the allowable level.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. What's really interesting is that there was this whole movement in the seventies and eighties for chelation therapy, which was thought to be quackery. And the NIH did a $30,000,000 trial called the TAC trial where they use EDTA IV chelation. EDTA specifically removes lead, and they found that it was very actually effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks, and yet it's not part of standard medicine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Okay. So lead increasing heart disease more use it more than cholesterol markers?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And how much do people hear about the safe, quote unquote, safe levels of lead compared to cholesterol when it comes to heart disease from the cardiologist. Right? But and again, we're not just saying within the safe range. We're saying not even close to the top of the range.
Yeah. Like Right? Someone would look at it and they'd like, oh, I'm near the bottom of the range. That's awesome. Yeah.
No. Except the range, you're like in evolutionary levels, it's not even the right scale. Because we're calling one to 10 is actually like one to a million in terms of what should be the right part per billion scale.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, there were moments in human history where there were volcanoes and there was exposures, but not not much. Right? Not much. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
In terms of like the famous topic people like to talk about right now of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire. There's a whole
Dr. Mark Hyman
Lead pipes. Hypothesis about Well,
Daniel Schmachtenberger
lead was added to sugar to make a particular kind of sweetness and lead was actually added as a food Yeah. And to alcohol plus the lead pipes plus the lead pipes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Actually, I love the story. I have a few patients who, you know, were wealthy and, you know, they they get fine crystal where they they have wine out of leaded crystal. I remember buying wine glasses once and I went to the store and I'm like, you know, these are $5 a piece and these are $50 a piece. I'm like, why is this $50 wine glass? She said, well, it's you know, it's leaded crystal.
I'm like, leaded crystal? Why? He says, well, because the lead makes the wine taste sweeter. That's why kid eat paint chips because it tastes sweet. I was like, wow.
And then they have fancy glazed plates, which are from Italy or France, which is the glaze is full of lead. Yeah. So you can get it in lots of different ways.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But okay. So the fact that in 2019, children under five globally had 780,000,000 points of IQ loss. That's like, that should be up there in crimes against humanity. It's like whoever the fuck did this needs like, the whole industry needs to be punished, like because those kids' lives are ruined. Right?
Like, massively ruined forever. The the civilization that those kids run Yeah. With less cognitive power as we're moving into an increasingly complex world.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And the IQ is obviously just one thing. It's increased heart disease, increased cancer, increased osteoporosis, and increased impulse control disorders, aggression. Yeah. Like, there's psychiatric components. So sicker, dumber, and meaner.
And we're just talking about one
Dr. Mark Hyman
and and and you're right. I mean, you know, they looked at at the children of the farm workers in California who were supposed to large amounts of pesticides and herbicides. That that cohort of kids that they studied lost 41,000,000 IQ points just from exposure to pesticides. It was not just lead.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So you add the pesticides up. You add the lead up. You add the mercury up. You add the the there's 350,000 chemicals that are in regular industrial use that are regulated, something like that. There's 280,000,000 chemicals in the database of the American Chemical Society.
And we're talking about like things that were not part of our evolutionary environment, are not part of the makeup.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, DuPont was wrong? It's not Better Living Through Chemistry?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, it's it's just like satire now to say Better Living Through Chemistry because they were advertising DDT. They were advertising, you know, the Better Living Through Chemistry stuff was advertising methamphetamine. Methadrine? Right? You remember the advertisements like makes mom happier and more productive and helps with weight loss for the whole family.
And and they were advertising asbestos and at the same time as prefrontal lobotomies. Right. Right? The propaganda has gotten a little bit more sophisticated now, but it's the same shit.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I think, you know, we were chatting a little about this low level toxicity and the anthropogenic disease. I think I think it's one of the most underappreciated things in medicine. I mean, the microbiome is finally getting its day. You know, diet, nutrition is well-being understood, although it's not being implemented in medical
Daniel Schmachtenberger
clinical deficiency from soil management
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And even which types of plants, hybridized crops and diversity and seasonality, not.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I want I wanna get into that because that's a whole another
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
How we've screwed up our food system. But the what's what's really interesting is that this low level toxicity framework is not accepted at all, and it's not taught in medical schools. Doctors don't know how to assess toxins in the body. They don't know how to treat toxicity.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The ponderance of data of looking at it is clear, like you mentioned, the NIH study, but also the common sense of it's pretty clear.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? It's like I just want people to step back from a moment from like emotional reactions and just think about it. Right? And you're like, yeah. The biosphere is the only one in the whole universe we know.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And everything really is made of the same stuff and stuff that is in high amounts, omnitoxic to it, and that our body didn't evolve to process at all that are totally alien, maybe we shouldn't put everywhere.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I think I think there's some groups like American Cancer Society and others and cancer research groups that have said, look, one of the big drivers of cancer is environmental chemicals. But it doesn't really tell you what to do about them. I'm gonna deal with it.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
WHO said air pollution is number one cause of death worldwide recently.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I think I think food is but I don't know maybe that's strange but
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's Attribution is difficult like it's up there.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's up there. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Because they're looking at third world and they're looking at you know, again like you mentioned the coal burning that causes all the lead etcetera plus.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then detoxification is considered this really fringe lunatic heretical framework of medicine that we shouldn't be thinking about. Your body detoxifies. Your liver's work, your kidneys work, you sweat, know, pee, poo, you know, your hair grows out, your skin falls off, like you're detoxifying, you know.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is true. Support detoxification systems if they have an increased burden.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true. But there are more more interventional ways to actually detoxify, which I've been doing for decades through various treatments whether
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's But you would do those after supporting the organs of elimination.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. You wanna make sure the pathways are open to get rid of that stuff.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Talk about the lymphatic system not having a pump and exercise and evolutionary movement versus this. That's a good one.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, we know a lot of us are very sedentary and the only way your body gets rid of toxins is it dumps all the pollution into your body, into your lymph system, which is a parallel circulatory system that goes along with your veins and your arteries.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Doesn't have a heart.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it doesn't have a heart. Right? And the only way it moves through your body is through exercise, through the pumping action of your muscles.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But exercise is a nonsense concept to an indigenous person.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They're just moving.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're just moving.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Like you gotta climb trees, you gotta run, you gotta
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And the number of moving hours relative to sedentary hours per day for the entire evolutionary history of our genome was a lot of moving hours.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was probably reversed to what we have now. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so the fact that the lymphatic nodes are in the armpits and in the crotch and in the areas that move so they get pumped, They they were the amount that you needed when you had eight hours of movement today or whatever it was. Right. And complex dynamic movement. And so then, if you're not having that movement, but the system evolved that that was the pump. Yeah.
That's a big deal. Yeah. And so you don't even before chelation. Right? Like sedentary means that even if you weren't being exposed to more toxins than normal, just the metabolic toxins, your body couldn't deal with them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So, know, we've got we've got like a few major anthropogenic causes. Environmental toxins and liberating toxins from deep in the earth, whether it's through elemental toxins like heavy metals or petrochemical toxins, you know, is basically how we
Daniel Schmachtenberger
that's not deep in the earth. That's chem lab.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's chem lab but it also it's from plastic petrochemicals. A lot of these things are synthesized like plastics or PCBs or dioxins. So these are these are things that listen so it can be
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Including all the ones in the paint. Yeah. Right. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I tried to get clean paint when I had my house painted. Well, you do but Who knows if it actually is?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The formaldehyde and the other VOCs in paint that cause indoor air pollution to be worse than outdoor air pollution That's right. Environment people spend
Dr. Mark Hyman
we we I was very insistent that when we built our 15,000 square foot center there that we made sure that the the had a very good air filtration system, water filtration system that all the materials used, the paint used, the furniture used was non off gassing, supposed to producing volatile organic compounds that are absorbed in your body and create havoc. So, it it actually was an incredible place to work Mhmm. Because people would walk in and just feel better.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was the healthiest place in the whole something that
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you know, there's this phenomena that when people get drunk or the the part of their mind and brain that can assess drunkenness is also getting drunk. Right? So they can misassess and think they're less drunk than they are. Mhmm. Dunning Kruger is another kind of effect like that.
There are people don't know how bad they feel relative to what they would feel in an evolutionary environment. Yeah. Because like, when you think about the decrease in sperm count, which we haven't talked about ubiquitous fertility issues. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That we're becoming a species that cannot reproduce is a big deal. People should be like, woah, that's not a good sign. We we shouldn't all need IVF to be able to reproduce. The healthier being is, the more reproductive capacity it has. Right?
And but when you look at the decreasing testosterone, decreasing sperm count studies that, you know, sperm count has dropped 50 to 60% in the last sixty plus years, and that testosterone has and other androgens have similarly. You're like, that means that everybody feels so bad in comparison to how they like, that low sperm count environment is also a low vitality environment, but you don't know because you don't have a reference range.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, that's true. I think it's it is often a comment I would hear from my patients when I treat them. They say, doctor Hyman, I didn't know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling so good.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They literally did just thought it was their normal. I it's normal to be achy, to be tired, to have all these weird Brain fog. Symptoms, brain fog. They they don't maybe rise to the level of a disease that's classified as a disease, but it you feel like low vitality. They call it FLC syndrome.
Feel like crap. And it it's real. And, and it's amazing how easy it is to fix that if you know what to do.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But it's also amazing how and heartbreaking how much low grade sickness and IQ loss and psychiatric illness, whatever, is totally normalized, people don't think there's anything wrong.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But then, of course, they crave stuff a lot because they feel bad. Yeah. And they wanna feel better. And then now that's part of an ongoing cascade cycle.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean crave bad food, drugs?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Anything that's gonna give a hit of a hypernormal stimuli. Yeah. Bad food, drugs, news, porn Yeah. Bullshit productivity that is just checking a list so that you have some hit of dopamine.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Mhmm. Yeah. No. It's true.
I think we we we have to sort of stop normalizing feeling bad, and then we have to help people understand what's happening in their biology and to be proactive about doing something about it. Because because despite all this doom and gloom we're talking about and all the the amounts of insults that are a result of our society and industrialization and technology. And some of those things are good. You know, we all benefit from them. But, you know, there are methods to actually help optimize your health, to detoxify, to improve your microbiome, to regulate the the fundamental physiological systems that you need to be working in order for you to be healthy, whether it's your mitochondria or anything.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I don't wanna say doom and gloom because, like, talking about real things is real things. Yeah. And people shouldn't have the bias to be like, I don't want to look at real things. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's better if there's hope on the other end. Say, we're all toxic waste dumps and there's nothing we can do about it and we're all gonna get sick.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I can only do something about it as soon as I know about As soon as I know about of course, you can do something. So one of the other ubiquitous illnesses is learned helplessness. Yeah. This is an ubiquitous psychiatric illness where people go from not knowing about an issue at all to the moment they hear about it feeling helpless. It's like, what the fuck?
What what what about that you heard about it and you study for a little while the issue before jumping straight to helplessness and be like, what do the people who know a lot think we could do? What what and so the the straight to I heard about it and I'm straight into doom and helplessness is total nonsense. Right? Yeah. People need to be able to learn about an issue and know once I understand it, I have some chance of thinking about what might actually be able to improve it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so, you know, if we go to Okinawa, we see a very advanced society that has advanced technology where the rate of people that make it to a 100 is way way higher. So we're not saying everybody has to be cavemen. Right? Like, we're not saying a Luddite thing. We're saying, could you manufacture stuff in a way where you just actually cared about the pollution?
Could you do longer term studies first to make sure something was super toxic? Like, totally. Could you do a better agricultural system? Totally. These are not scientifically hard problems.
Does it make it totally market unviable? No. Look at how huge the margins are in the areas that are externalizing all the costs. The margins don't seem to be that high.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So what you're saying is there are ways to do things better. Obviously. Yeah. And and they don't And necessarily. Right.
I mean, it's it's just sort what we're dealing with lately with the with the food dyes, you know. There there's no need for these things in food. They're designed to make unpalatable food attractive and palatable. And and I think that, you know, there's there's a movement to try to remove a lot of these compounds that are used in ultra processed food that that are used for flavor enhancers or for color enhancement to make it attractive. When you take those things away, those foods are gonna disappear because they're gonna be like I mean, imagine taking like Pringles, which you know, I'm eating Pringles.
They're that bad. But they're all perfectly formed, perfect shape. They fit in the the container perfectly. If you take them out and just crush them, which would take about two seconds, because they're they're not really potato chips or a bunch of cocktails of weird chemicals and some potato, I think. And then you could kind of turn into a powder and you just put on your plate and try to eat it with a spoon, it would be gross.
No one would wanna eat it. Right? And so I think if we remove a lot of these things from foods, it's gonna change the food landscape. But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So I wanna go to the topic of food in our evolutionary environment. Talked about toxicity. We haven't talked about deficiency. Yeah.
I But wanna go back and just kinda underscore something that you said, which was you're like, alright. There are toxins, which means too much of something for optimal health. That's pretty simple. There are some toxins where any amount is too much. It may not be causing immediate acute illness, but, like, less would be better for you.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Lead
Daniel Schmachtenberger
and mercury and organophosphates and BPA and whatever all fit in that category, it's a lot. And there are hundreds in the umbilical cord blood. Right? So it's like it's a lot, and it's a serious thing. There are other toxins that are too much of something that the body actually needs.
It's just too much, and it might be too much in absolute. And so this is where we look at cholesterol, or we look at zinc levels or something, right? Blood sugar, whatever. Blood sugar. Too much of something relative to something else or what it should be.
Those are different categories, but just the idea, and it's important to make the distinction where you wanna bring something down to zero versus you wanna bring it into evolutionary balance. And then there's not enough of some stuff and not so little that, again, you're acutely dying of rickets or beriberi, but you're very far from optimal. And that can be vitamins like that, but it can be trace minerals. And soil can be like a lot of things. And so you're like, okay, well many of those things that there's not enough of, that there's a deficiency, are also parts of the immune and detoxification system that would deal with the toxicity compounding effects.
Yeah. Right? And so deficiency. I think there's a lot of people who are like, hey, most people are obese today. This seems like diseases of excess, not deficiency.
It seems like we have caloric excess. Yeah. So talk to me about deficiency. And obviously, we're gonna be talking about micro versus macronutrients and stuff. And evolutionary environment diet versus this diet.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, you you brought up something really important is that and I remember reading these studies, you're just being flabbergasted that the most obese are the most malnourished.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. Especially why they're hungry all the time.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Kids. Right. And you know, we're looking for love in all the wrong places. And this is phenomena as well described in medicine. Kids for example are iron deficient.
They get something called pica, which is they eat dirt because they're trying to get iron. The body craves the things that it needs. You know, I remember going to, the Amazon, and I was fasting because there was this kind of wall of like minerals. I got kind of exposed along the bank of the river of of dirt. It looked like dirt, but it would just flock with parrots that would come and just eat that dirt because they were trying to get the minerals.
And and when you have a diet that's so nutritionally depleted, it's so high in sugar, starch, and bad fats, and chemicals, but has very little nutrients.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, is important because sugar equals carbohydrate calories equals a macronutrient.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So for people who don't Those makes the versus micronutrients Yeah. Would you break that down real quick?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, know, the macronutrients are protein, fat and carbohydrate, and you can maybe say fiber. There's vitamins and minerals which are micronutrients, and there's, you know, phytochemicals, I think are in different category, but I think they're conditionally essential nutrients. And then there's other things that, you know, you might not necessarily the body can make, but you might not necessarily have enough quantities like co g ten, which you can get from certain foods, but or lipoic acid, but you need to have some of them supplement with those. But I think the the the the the amount of bad macronutrients we have, namely sugar and starch, and the lack of of good macronutrients that we have is like good certain good fats and even protein, that's another conversation.
But there's there's such a depletion of the micronutrients because of the way we farm, because of the soil, because of how plants are bred. They're bred for starch content and for yield and for disease resistance and drought resistance. They're not bred for nutrient density. They're not bred for flavor. Yeah.
And except except now there's a Dan Barber who's been on the podcast created the Stone Barns, which is a sort of his regenerative farm up in Upstate New York. He created row seven seeds. And now you can buy these row seven crops that are in the supermarket. For example, he was said butternut squash is tasteless. And as a chef, I don't wanna cook this.
I want I wanna reverse engineer flavor. And he, you know, re engineered whether it's peppers, tomatoes, you know, winter squash, a whole series of foods that are are more flavorful because they have more nutrients. They're more phytochemically rich, more nutrient dense. He didn't breed it for that, but it's a set of natural consequence. And in in nature, flavor always follows phytochemical richness.
The the the the colorful like if you eat a if you eat a wild strawberry, it's so dense and some of these amazing phytochemicals like phycetin, is great for longevity and killing zombie cells. And a tiny little strawberry will, like, create those flavor explosion in your mouth. But if you have a giant strawberry that looks red and delicious, but it tastes like cardboard, it's grown in an industrial way, you're not gonna get those phytochemicals. But the problem is that so many people who are obese or overweight are nutritionally deficient. And when you look at their levels of nutrients like vitamin d or minerals or vitamins, they're often very low.
And so they're constantly hungry, they're constantly looking for more food, more nutrients, but they're not getting it.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So we know that a lot of the studies of blue zones were flawed. And there's kind of debate about what makes the areas where people make it to a 100 the way they are. But one thing that is pretty commonly known that led to all the caloric restriction studies is that very rarely do overweight people make it to a Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And morbidly obese 100 year old,
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you know. They're they're skinny. And typically, they're what we actually consider malnourished from a just macronutrient caloric perspective.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But their diet is actually micronutrient dense, macronutrient low. Yeah. Which means they're getting protein, fat, and carb, but they're getting a little bit less total calorie, but a lot more mineral, vitamin, phytochemical enzyme per calorie.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This makes a lot of sense. Right? And if you this is where, you know, talking about evolutionary environment food because sapien is depending upon who you ask, 200,000 years old, 300,000 years old, something like that. And hominids are 3,000,000 years old. And obviously, it goes back because we are genetically almost identical to the chimpanzees and other things.
Right? So evolutionary environment, billions of years of life being a particular way. We evolved to that environment. This is actually one of the concepts I think is so important is evolution is a process by which creatures emerge. They are selected for based on fitness to an environment.
Right? The environment is shaping the creature. The environment has leaves up really high, and the mutation that leads to a long neck gets selected for. Right? And you get a giraffe.
You wouldn't get a giraffe if there were not things really high. So it's the environment shaping the creature.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There's a little bit of the niche creation where the creature will try to modify the environment, and of course, like next to humans, the most environment modifying creatures are like beavers.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You know? Maybe a termite. Yeah. But if you look at a beaver, and then you look at Tokyo. Right?
You look at a beaver dam, and you look at, like, Tokyo or New York City or LA, and you look at LA when you're flying in, and you're like, as far as I can see is this orthogonal grid of concrete. There's actually no sign of the natural world left. Right? It's an Anthropocene technosphere that has eaten the biosphere. Then you look at a beaver dam, you're like, we are not like any of the other creatures, like, obviously.
We are like them in terms of made of the same stuff, but our capacity to do tech has really changed stuff profoundly. So we're a creature that started to change our environment rapidly, but change it to something that is not the environment we are genetically adapted to faster than our genes can adapt.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. It's a mismatch. It's a genes environment mismatch.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So the idea that we are not paying attention to the way that our environment continues to shape us as creatures, and we're making an environment we're actually not fit to, is the concept of anthropogenic disease. Right? It's the concept of and this is not romanticizing that in an evolutionary environment, everything was awesome. Like, famine was difficult. There were a lot of things that were difficult, but we still need to pay attention to what did we actually evolve to have fitness in.
And, you know, you've been you've mentioned vitamin d a few times. Actually, you know, that's a good example. We spend 90% of our time indoors. We evolved outdoors. We evolved to have vitamin d synthesis per unit time based on spending most of our time outdoors.
Dr. Mark Hyman
In the sun. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not only does indoor light not do what sunlight does, but energy efficient light is even worse. Yeah. Right? Like, we try to take the UVB out, and then we try to take the warm parts out to make it energy efficient, which the reason you have red light downstairs is because the synthesis of nitric oxide and other things where we actually do photosynthesize some stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? We actually modulate chemistry based on different frequencies of light. And so again, like, there's an externality on health of being indoors, an externality of health of even the attempt to make environmentally friendly lighting. But does supplemental vitamin d do the exact same thing as sunlight?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Not really. No. I mean, it's good, but it's not the same.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. Because you get it's you know, first, are you supplementing calcifediol or calcitriol or some enzymatically processed form or just, you know, just d three. And then the binding proteins, the light plays some role in that. Right? The light plays role in a whole complex of things.
And so supplementing it better than not supplementing it. But, again, this is a it makes sense that if you evolved outdoors moving a lot, that your body would need to move for a lymphatic system. Like, oh, we don't need a pump on this thing because the body's moving all the time, and an extra pump would be metabolically, evolutionarily expensive. And just when you stop moving, you don't automatically get another pump. Right?
And we will synthesize vitamin d from light and nitric oxide and other things based on the amount of light exposure. And so the idea that we can create an environment without realizing it where you do something for a reason. Right? You make a building for reasons, but it's doing other things than the thing it intended. And a lot of the other things were not we optimize for our problems, I e an externalized cost.
And the externalized cost to the environment are also reflected in the externalized cost to our health. Right? If you look at the planetary boundary perspective, the chemical pollution in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the chemical pollution in people's bodies. Yeah. The species extinction in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the species extinction in the microbiome.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And diversity loss. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so, you know, chief Seattle might sound like a hippie saying, we're not the web of life. We're merely a strand, and whatever we do to the web, do to ourselves. But it's like just also straightforward ecological science
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And medicine. Yeah. And so let's talk about food systems a little bit more in terms of in an evolutionary environment, what was different about food and the micronutrients and macronutrients, and, like, what has, first the agricultural revolution plow and stuff, and then kind of the green revolution, Haber Bosch and then pesticides and etcetera done to food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, going back historically, know, and then sort of done analysis of, you know, paleolithic diets. And and there was such a high level of micronutrients in the diet. There was such an incredibly high level of fiber, of omega three fats. There was an inversion of our sodium potassium intake, so we had much higher potassium, lower sodium intake.
And and you kinda look at the amount of sugar and starch. It was almost nonexistent. You know, we might have 22 teaspoons a year. We now have 14,000 times that, which is staggering as human biology
Daniel Schmachtenberger
that's something people really underscore. 14,000 times Yeah. What we evolved to process.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, we got a honey, you know, we found a honey It's amazing. Thing that was great. Or we got some berries, we got some
Daniel Schmachtenberger
also very expensive to try to find honey. Yeah. Evolutionarily. Right? Like the bees were not just giving it up.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. No. Like the Nepalese honey hunters figured out they would climb these trees with burning sticks, like smoke them out. But, yeah, it wasn't so easy. You had to climb a tree with a burning stick every time you want a cookie, it would be a different thing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
As opposed to push button on Amazon and shows up at the door.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. My wife's really good at that. I'm like, what is going on with all this ice cream showing up at the house? So
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, if you have to climb a tree to get honey Mhmm. You're not gonna get diabetes because you just exercise.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Right? Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if you had to like chase game
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? There's a lot of things where also the the reward was following an activity that had evolutionary relevance.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So so we have changed our food system. And then the the phytochemicals in the food has dramatically changed because of our agricultural practices. And so what happened, you know, we mentioned Fritz Haber that basically the ability to extract nitrogen from the air and turn into fertilizer happened, you know, in the, you know, early nineteen twenties. And then we after World War two, we took all the factories that were making nitrogen to make bombs because that was how what was used for.
It wasn't for agriculture initially. Turned them into fertilizer, which now, you know, are these huge companies that actually to make the fertilizer takes up 2% of the world's global energy supplies. And then, of course, it has all these downstream consequences when we put it on the soil. So the nitrogen causes the release of nitric oxide, which has adverse climate impacts that that that runs into the rivers and streams causing eutrophication, essentially, fertilizing all the plant life, sucking out the oxygen from river streams and Dead zones. And estuaries and create dead zones.
There's 400 around the world and feed half a million people. That's just the fertilizer. Then we turned the bioweapons factories, which were neurotoxins. So the the gas in World War one were all nerve toxins.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're chemical
Dr. Mark Hyman
weapons. Right? Those got turned into pesticides. Then we developed herbicides. And then we started hybridizing plants to breed for different traits.
Not GMO, but just plain old Everything. Breeding, plant breeding. And the traits we bred for were increased yield, increased starch content, increased drought resistance, pest resistance. So we basically
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But when we hybridized for that, the plants got less good at other things.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So then you had less protein. There's increasing protein deficiency in the world because there's less protein in these foods. There's less vitamins and minerals. There's certainly less phytochemicals.
There's more sugar. So you kind of created this disaster. I mean, gluten is a great example where, you know, I remember being in Sardinia and they had this incredible wheat they used to make that this flat kind of crackers that would get rehydrated that the shepherds would use. They'd go out and hike and spend days and weeks out in the middle of nowhere raising their animals and they would have these, you know, large amounts of this granocappelli wheat that they made into these crackers that they would rehydrate and take with them. Very different than dwarf wheat, which was made by Norman Borlaug.
It was won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this hybridization process. But basically, then I met I actually met his daughter. I don't know why. I got invited to this food conference and I I it was an agriculture conference. I gave a talk on food as a medicine and I was sitting next to this guy, Mr.
Cargill, and meeting this. Was like it was like I was in a stranger. And I said to this the guy was like, so what do you do? Said, I do plant medicine. I'm like, really?
Plant medicine? What's that? He said, you know, pesticides. I'm like, wow. So it was really funny.
But I digress. And so when we hybridize the wheat, when we breed plants, we we combine the genetics of the plants. It's not like humans where you get half of your genetics from your mom and half from your dad. You don't get half from one strain of wheat and half from the other strain of wheat. You add them.
So like 46 chromosomes instead would be 92. And what genes do is they make proteins. So all of sudden, you've got this wheat that's making all these extra proteins, and what are those proteins they're making? They're extra gluten proteins, gliadin proteins, and they're way more inflammatory. And then they they create in the amount of starch you created was a super starch called amylopectin a, which is much more starchy, higher glycemic load and creates, you know, diabetes basically.
So you have all these benefits of drought resistant, hardy, short, stubby wheat Yeah. That's replaced the old amber leaves of grain that I think is in our national anthem, you know, which is tall fields of wheat. But there many harmful consequences of that breeding. That's just one example. And and so we're we're seeing increasing levels of nutritional deficiencies of protein and zinc and minerals be because of this.
And then we destroy the soil with the chemicals we put on with the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and the tillage and the industrial farming methods that deplete the soil organic matter in order to actually get the nutrients out of the plants. You've gotta have a living soil with bacteria that act in symbiosis with the mycorrhizal fungi to extract the nutrients for the plant. So you might have a soil that's full of minerals, but it can't get to the plant. So you created this cascading set of effects that have ended up with a diet that is highly industrialized, highly processed, scalable, shelf stable. You know, when was that show that I've I forget what they found.
The guy found a hamburger in his pocket. It was twenty years later or something, a Big Mac, and it was still perfectly preserved. No. It doesn't break down. I mean, there's that joke you should only eat food that rots, you know?
So we we've we've gotten so far away from that. So it's no wonder our diet's killing us.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So you you were mentioning the way Ivan Elich's book influenced you. One of the ones that I read early was Bernard Jensen's work, one of the kind of founders of naturopathic medicine. Yeah. He wrote chemistry of man, which was looking at what all the different trace minerals do in the body and what the trace mineral deficiency does.
But then he wrote a great book, and there are many like this. It's just the first one I read called empty harvest that was about correlating deficiency of trace minerals in the soil with specific kind of trace mineral deficiency diseases. And he was showing, like, when agricultural soils in The US and the USGS surveys started showing almost no selenium levels and then heart disease becoming rampant. And, of course, heart disease is multifactorial. It was from sugars, from a lot of things, but, like, that was a thing.
And where chromium and vanadium started to become lower, type two diabetes also got higher, which play roles in insulin
Dr. Mark Hyman
Regulation. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so if you think about again, and from the evolutionary perspective, that everything in the biosphere is made of the same stuff. So then it makes sense that if you're eating stuff, your body can break down that form and make it into the stuff that you're made of because it's made of the same stuff. But as soon as you start engineering food that is not actually that is made of the same evolutionary stuff and you start changing the soil, that's gonna change a lot. Right? So even before you deep fry the stuff Yeah.
Like the plants you're talking about are already just not food. Yeah. Even when they're taken from the ground because, again, you in a forest, there's no such thing as waste. Right? Everything that falls on the soil turns into soil, turns into plants, turns into animals.
And so it's important to get in the ecosystem all the loops are closed. Right? All all of the old stuff turns into new stuff, and there's no such thing as unrenewable resource extraction. Right? Yeah.
The forest is not doing mining unrenewably stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Dust, ash, to ashes. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's what we now call cradle to cradle as if it's a fancy thing. Yeah. But obviously, closed loop cycling, it's how nature works. We start extracting stuff from nature faster than it can replenish, leading to deficiency issues on one side of the ecosystem and then turning it into trash and pollution on the other side faster than it can be processed. That's ecological overshoot.
Right? Mhmm. But in our food systems, right, like, what is the fertilizer in a forest? Everything that came out of the forest goes back into the forest. Nothing's removed.
Nothing's extracted from the forest. So if we clear cut a forest and then we turn it into cropland and then we grow a single kind of crop, it's gonna pull out of that good soil all kinds of nutrients. We're gonna take all of that out, then we're gonna spray with NPK. Right? So we've got nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and that's it.
Maybe some calcium or something depending. But what about the whole rest of the 72 critical trace minerals and what and that NPK is gonna kill the living matter, which as you mentioned, the living matter not only helps the plants uptake the nutrients, but also modulates its genetic expression, all those things. Once you do that a few times, there's just nothing left in the soil, which is why you get desertification. And then you can keep it alive artificially. It's not alive.
It's just like some weird growing substrate. Yeah. And then because it's minerally deficient, the plants are sick. Yeah. Right?
They don't have good immune system. They can't produce volatile oils, so now they're much more susceptible to pathogens. And because they're monocropped. Right? Because in a natural environment, you'd have a little bit of one plant that a that a bug might eat, but you'd have plants that produce something that that bug doesn't like right next to it that grow in symbiotic guilt.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it's so important what you said. Plants have their own defenses. They have an immune system. Of course. The the way that they keep away pests and and diseases and things is through these phytochemicals Yes.
That they make. And we've essentially created a food system that's bred phytochemicals or engineered phytochemicals out of the food.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Both by removing everything from the soil then by hybridizing the crop. Yeah. So if you think about hybridizing, like, we started learning this with animal husbandry, call it ten thousand years ago. Right? Six to twelve thousand, whatever.
And as we and before that with dogs. Right? Like, well before we started to do with goats and then cows and stuff, the the wolf part. But we didn't want to keep them like wolves. Right?
So we started to breed them. And we've got chihuahuas and we've got Saint Bernards, and they're both wolves.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And you're like, damn, these are really different creatures. This is not synthetic biology and genetic engineering. This is literally just selective breeding.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Dog breeding.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But we learned that. We started being like, man, we can do that to plants. We can do it to all kinds of things.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There's unintended consequences. We have a we have a hybridized dog. It's a Yes. Bernadoodle.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And we just found out it has allergies because these these dogs have more allergies, so they're not
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so you don't get
Dr. Mark Hyman
very sweet.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Upside. Right? Yeah. You get upside and you get downside from that. So then we start hybridizing all the animals.
And if you look at a what used to be what we call a chicken, this beautiful, colorful, small bird that lives in trees in Southeast Asia, It's a gorgeous bird. It doesn't have much meat on it. Right? In a natural environment, it'd be very gamey. And you look at the hybridizing of that to this and and that's even before you shoot it full of estrogen and steroids and antibiotics and give it a super toxic feed.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Full arsenic. But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you're like, okay, so these are not the same genetics at all. And in the same way that those animals now are gonna have hip dysplasia and allergies and whatever, when you eat them, that a lot of those effects translate. Right? Yeah. And now because the plants don't have the volatile chemicals, they and because you didn't plant them in guilds, you monocrop them, you're gonna get locusts.
Right? You're gonna get pesticides issues. I mean, you're gonna get pest issues. So now you gotta spray them in pesticides that, again, like we said, are toxic enough to kill a thing that makes it to the nuclear blast on the food. And then we don't want any other crops because we're designing for tractors.
So then we spray the herbicides, which and so you're like, okay. We we took all the nutrients out of the soil. We just put back the nutrients to make the thing look like a thing, but there's no actual micronutrient in it. Right? It looks like a tomato, but the nutrient deficiency is pretty radical.
The genetics are hybridized to be, like an an heirloom citrus. It's got a lot of seeds in it. Yeah. Like, what does it mean to make a seedless thing when it's growing for reproduction?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? You're growing this weird sterile thing. Like, obviously, the thing that can't reproduce is not healthy. And so in the process of getting it seedless or making it huge or whatever, you also breed all these nutrients out. And like you mentioned, you might breed types of proteins in the gliadin or whatever that are hard to digest, cause inflammatory issues.
And then then you spray it with pesticides and herbicides, and then that would be what you put in your salad if you're trying to eat, like, raw or fresh stuff. Yeah. Now then it gets even worse because you're like, you go to the grocery store to buy an apple, and it's about to be apple season. You're like, wait. It's about to be apple season.
Where was this thing? Maybe it was a greenhouse somewhere else that got shipped here. Usually, even worse condition soil. Maybe it was actually stored.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And most apples are stored for about a year before they're
Daniel Schmachtenberger
eating Exactly. So they're stored in a in a nitrogen environment, so it doesn't oxidize in a fridge. And so the thing that even if you're trying to do fresh stuff, you're like, this is hybridized, demineralized, poisoned, and a year old.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so, you know, you were mentioning what does it mean in another podcast to eat not ultra hybridized. What what's the term? Ultra process for
Dr. Mark Hyman
you. The
Daniel Schmachtenberger
one of the people who I got to study with when I was young that influenced me the most was doctor Evertz Loomis, healing for everyone. I don't
Dr. Mark Hyman
know if
Daniel Schmachtenberger
you ever Mhmm. Came across. He was one the other early naturopaths
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Doctor Christopher and those guys.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And my family had actually had some quote unquote incurable illnesses that got help through alternative processes that kinda got us in that path. And we actually gotta go live with that guy, doctor Loomis, on his healing clinic when I was a kid.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And I got to see people coming in in wheelchairs and leaving not in wheelchairs, just having really radical kind of change. It was very old school. It was kinda Ann Wigmore like stuff. And but it was real interesting to hear. He was also a medical doctor, but, like, he was 85 by the time I met him, and he had boiled it down to a very simple thing.
And he's like, number one principle of nutrition is eat as close to that living ecosystem as you can. Number two is pay subtle attention to how the foods feel in your body. Everything else, whatever. And, like, nightshades and ratios of macronutrients and Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I agree.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So he had these gardens, these kind of huge gardens and orchards, and he told people, go pick the food you feel called to and eat it right there. Don't even like, just stand outside with your feet in the dirt and eat it. And that and that's it. That's your diet while you're here. It's an inpatient thing.
And it was amazing how much people got better if the only food they could eat was standing by the tree or the plant that they picked it off of while they ate it. And of course, he emphasized heirloom species and good soil and no pesticides or pesticides.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, know, there's there's a guy who kinda looks like you a little bit with the beard. His name's Fred Provenza. Do you know him? Oh, God. You would love him.
You guys would just jam. He's a someone I got to know recently who's a professor for years at Utah State University and studied rangeland ecology and the relationship between plants and the soil and animals and humans. And basically, he wrote a book called nourishment, what animals can teach us about rediscovering our nutritional wisdom. And, you know, he he he basically said that that animals intuitively know what to eat when to keep themselves healthy.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So they forage on some major food crops, but then they'll forage if they're left their own devices and there's enough variety of wild plants around on different plants that have different medicinal properties or different nutrients. And in the book, he talked about this study that was done, think, the twenties in an orphanage in Canada, where they took kids who really hadn't been exposed to a lot of whatever junk food or American diet. And they they gave them, like, weird stuff like brain and organs and all kinds of weird food that we wouldn't think would be things that we wanna eat or the kids would wanna eat. And these kids actually were eating completely in harmony with what their bodies needed and seeking out those foods and nutrients in the food that they needed and were far healthier than kids were control group that were fed a regular diet.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I was like, that's fascinating that humans have lost their ability to understand their sort of nutritional wisdom and and to understand how things affect us.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If people pay attention like, okay, I'm eating this food. Do I feel sleepy afterwards? Do I feel very heavy and lethargic? Does my belly hurt? Am I still craving stuff?
Do I have stronger craving? Like, most people just don't notice. Right? Mhmm. And if you this is why his second principle is kind of pay detailed attention how your body feels, which doesn't mean just, you know, what food sounds good to your mind.
It's when I eat this thing, how do I actually feel? And he's like, if you eat close to the living ecosystem, as close as possible, and you pay attention to how you feel, you're gonna do pretty well. And it's true. Like, there there are some other things you could add to that, but you should start with that as the foundation. I remember one study from an indigenous scholar that said the pharmacopeia of plants that the native Americans considered edible plants, when obviously there are many native American groups, but there were some pharmacopeia they were referencing, that had their list of edible plants as about 5,000 plants in North America.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And you go to the grocery store and you're like, there are not 5,000
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Foods in the produce section. And even of the ones in the produce section, I don't get the bok choy or whatever all that often. And you're like, how many different plants? So the plants I'm getting, one probably were grown a long time ago and stored. Right?
Because they're not seasonal. Two, they're hybridized. Three, they're grown in crap soil and sprayed with stuff. And I'm eating very few, and each one has different phytochemicals and different things that modulate genetic expression. So again, evolutionary environment, you don't have very much of any one plant before you start row cropping.
Yeah. You have a very little bit. I mean They're seasonal and the whole ecosystem has shared needs.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, I think 60% of our diet is corn, wheat, soy, and depending where you are in the world, rice. And then the rest of the 40% is another 12p like carrots and onions and potatoes and And those iceberg lettuce, you know.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And those four you mentioned were how much of a hunter gatherer diet? Zero. Zero? I mean, it's a significant thing because we're not trying to like do some romantic savage myth. We're like but we are saying we evolved to be fit to a particular thing.
Yeah. And our genes haven't changed when we have changed what we've exposed us to so radically.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, the the the whole idea of the in in in, like, intuitive eating, it's it's really what animals do, and we've lost the ability to do that. And knowing that, but we've the foods we produce have hijacked our normal regulatory pathways and dysregulate our appetite, dysregulate hunger, have immune effects on our body that create inflammation.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So people don't crave what's good for them most of time anymore. Right? Because the system has become addicted to hypernormal stimuli.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I crave I crave chopped liver.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, if you're pretty healthy, you crave what's good for you. Yeah. But if you're pretty unhealthy, you typically crave what will make you feel better instantly because it's Yeah. Providing some dopaminergic hit.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's interesting because I I I had a surgery and I lost half my blood volume four months ago. And I've gotten most of it back but my my iron stores are low because I basically sucked up all my iron reserves like all the money in my bank account. I got used up to pay for what I needed to run my body. And I noticed myself like craving things like liver. I'm like, I want some liver.
And my wife's like, what are you doing?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But talk about the craving in supersize me. Yeah. Because that's different. Right? And people find that they're dealing with cravings for things that are totally not good for them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that and it's different than than, like, your instinctual wisdom. It's really hijacking of the brain through its effects on dopamine and the way these Zafus are designed to create a dopamine hit that creates sort of short term pleasure and long term pain. And then these are highly addictive. And the the shocking stat, and this is sort of amazing to me. And I I I obviously had many patients who I knew had food issues and were craving the wrong things.
But according to the Yealot food addiction scale, which is a validated metric for looking at not just like, oh, I crave ice cream, but like actual people who are truly addicted and who go through withdrawal, whose life is occupied by food, who can't think of anything else, who who's have their lives destroyed by food. Just like the the criteria for being an alcoholic or any other addict, your life kinda degrades dramatically. It's fourteen percent of the world's population including fourteen percent of kids, which is pretty frightening when you think about it. I mean, it's like one in five or one zero one and I'm not good at math. One in seven, I think, people have have a food addiction that's that's controlling your lives.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But on the not quite that bad gradient there is like almost everybody. Yeah. Which is pretty important. Because if you define addiction in the broadest sense of just a compulsive behavior for something you know isn't good for you, but you can't really stop. Mhmm.
Most people's relationship with food would be described that way. Yeah. And meaning they know they do not eat what they know the best diet for themselves would be. Not because of money and not because of time.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I mean, it it it's like the body snatchers. The food industry has understood how to design foods that are hyper palatable, that hijack your brain chemistry, your microbiome, your metabolism, your immune system in ways that and your hormones in ways that never happened before in human evolution. And they I mean, nobody wakes up and goes, I wanna be overweight. Nobody wakes up and goes, I wanna be become diabetic.
I wanna be three, four, five hundred pounds. It is is is not something that people willfully choose. I was
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I was very overweight as a young teenager and, you know, my my family just didn't know better about that particular thing of like which they should have having met doctor Loomis, but but it was like all pizzas and And that kind of I remember feeling really bad about being overweight, really wanting not to eat, and just having such a hard time, especially because my environment was everyone else was eating around. Right? And then I remember when I started to learn more, kinda early teenager, about it and switched to, like, sturdy eat salads where it wasn't iceberg lettuce. It was, like, a a bunch of deep dark kinds of greens with a bunch of fresh seeds and nuts and seaweeds and like whatever a lot. You couldn't eat that much.
Like a very rich thing that is very fibrous and makes a lot of chewing. And yet with the other thing, after you're already in pain because you're full, you wanna keep eating.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true. Right? I mean, I think that's what I say. You know, nobody binges on a bag of avocados or ten ten, you know, rib eye steaks.
Right? They just can't. But you could easily eat, you know, two quarts of ice cream or a giant bag of cookies on your own.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And what the cookies and the ice cream have in common is it is the combinatorics of salt, fat, and sugar with palatability. Mhmm. Right? Which is like, this is the interesting thing of like, okay. So we need some macronutrients, we need a lot of micronutrients is what we're made of.
Right? Is we're it's enzymes that catalyze stuff. We're obviously made of proteins, but we're we're also made of minerals that make up bones and all the stuff. And so in an evolutionary environment, as you mentioned, you got very little sugar. Right?
You got little bits of sugar that were naturally in fruit, but that fruit, again, the orange before it was hybridized or the perries, there was just there were not that many of them. They were only around a certain time of year. Other animals were competing for them. So because though their people could die of famine, anyone who could fill up on something that could create some caloric storage, there was an evolutionary incentive for that. Right?
So you get a dopamine hit when there is sugar because there's almost
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And so we're designed to gain weight. That's what we're designed to do in the face of
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Famine.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Excess food or calories will store it for later.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if there's a there's very little fat in the evolutionary environment that you can get super easy, the the wild game is gamey. Right? Not
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Hunter gatherers would would when they would kill an animal and then the Hadza are like this, we visited them in Africa, they would break the bones Yeah. And suck the marrow to get the fat because that was the most prized part.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So there's not a heap of fat. There's not a heap of sugar. Salt's hard to come by. So those things in an evolutionary environment, you get a dopamine hit for because they're important. Right?
There's a lot of green vegetables. Right? Like leafy things. There's a lot of plants. And so that you don't need a dopamine hit for those because those are the things you're gonna have to do most of your Yeah.
Eating on. So then we figure out how to produce excessive amounts of food, extract the sugar, fat, salt, and recombine it into shakes and donuts and hamburgers and whatever. But it's basically least amount of chewing. Right? Like, palatability or easy chewing, salt, fat, sugar combos that have almost no real nutrients but are maximally dopaminergic.
And that process of make something that is a hypernormal stimuli, but it was a stimuli because it was evolutionarily relevant because, one, it was rare. It's not rare anymore. Two, you had to go do exercise to get it. And, it was bound with trace minerals and phytochemicals and other things. So when you separate, you don't have to do that evolutionary work to get it.
It's not rare. We have way too much of it Yeah. And it's devoid of all the nutrients, yet your genetics still have a dopamine response. Mhmm. And so from a supply side, economically, this is awesome.
Yeah. Right? Because if I'm just a businessman thinking about I I actually have a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. Like, I can literally be in committing a crime of fiduciary responsibility if I do not maximize shareholder profit. How am I gonna maximize shareholder profit?
Well, I want the most customers I can have, so how do I max my total addressable market? And I want the most revenue, but lifetime revenue. For lifetime revenue, addiction's awesome. Yeah. Especially addiction starts in childhood.
And if it's food, total addressable market's everybody. So from a business point of view, like that's just almost
Dr. Mark Hyman
share. I call it stomach share. And it's it's interesting. We know there's an extra 500 calories a day created in our agricultural system per person in this country that people are eating. You know, the calorie consumption has gone up historically from the seventies.
Although there's been an interesting decrease in calorie consumption with an increase in obesity, which is a very interesting conversation. It's a separate conversation really about how all calories are not the same and certain calories are Yeah. More problematic that that cause the body to store the calories, which is this fuel partitioning theory of obesity, which is different than the energy balance theory, which has to do with just too many calories and not enough exercise.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if you look at calories multiplied by the type of calories, right, glycemic index, whatever, kind of subtracted or divided by the trace mineral micronutrient density and exercise needed to get the food. That ratio looks pretty bad. Mhmm. Right? It's not just 500 more calories.
It's that whole ratio of thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then there's a deconstruction of the food. That's even worse. The the sort of industrial chemical separation of all the components of food like corn or wheat or soy into different things that are not found in nature. And the chemical structure has been altered and the properties have been altered, and that seems to have this unique effect on us. And this is why we're seeing such an increase in the research that's showing the ultra processed food, which, you know, still needs to be defined more carefully.
But, you know, we kinda intuitively understand what is a Cheeto is an ultra processed food. It's like, what is that? You know, like there's no Cheeto tree out there. And that that has a really unique effect on our biology and it's driving so many chronic illnesses and it's causing such food addiction. So you know, Daniel, we've kind of covered a lot.
We've covered the load of environmental toxins that we're all exposed to and that none of us is exempt from and this is sort of evidenced by you know, the umbilical cord studies or fat biopsy studies they've done in humans where everybody's pre polluted. We've talked about the problems with our diet and the both the depletion of our food supply through the hybridization and the soil damage as well as the growth of ultra processed food and the reduction of variety of foods we eat. But there's other ubiquitous things that are causing us to be ill. And one, you know, one of the things I think you talked about is the fact that there really are no healthy humans left.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I mean, there are people that are healthier than others, but how many times do you see someone who is an athlete who is still shows markers of diseases on their way?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. A lot.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. And, of course, those athletes then later in life will get diseases where you trace back and, like, they were already in pathoideology. Right? And so the idea of disease as this individual thing is different than disease that is a result of systemic factors everybody's swimming in. And that's kind of one of the things we wanna talk about is there's like, there's ubiquitous pathology that is not necessary.
It's not obligated. It's stuff that we could change.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So we're swimming in a disease causing soup, essentially.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And disease meaning lots of things. Right? Like, if we think back about an evolutionary environment, the unit of selection was not the individual. Such is such an important topic. Mhmm.
An individual It group. Is a group. Right? Like, there are animals that are pretty solo animals, and there are animals that are social animals, and they have different selection processes. But a solo sapien in the Serengeti is dead.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Bad news. Yeah. Still a leopard. They'll get by. Exactly.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Cats are more solitary in most interactions. Mine's a bit of an exception, but humans are a social primate. And so it was groups of humans coordinating together that were what was selected for. So things that make humans physiology unhealthy, things that make their psychology unhealthy, things that make the social relationships break down are all breaking down the evolutionary substrate.
It's really important. Right? And so if we think about ubiquitous psychopathology for a moment. So in the same way, you've got, like, okay. Your vitamin c solo, you got scurvy.
Or your vitamin d solo, you got rickets. Well, above vitamin d solo, you got rickets. You've got way increased likelihood for immune disorders and osteoporosis and stuff. With the DSM and mental illness, you have this person has major depressive disorder. But below that is this person's depressed.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This person has diagnosable generalized anxiety disorder. We're gonna put him on benzos. Well, that's actually a lot of people. It's actually really sad, and benzos are a horrifying drug from a side effect and addiction point of view. And a society responding to its problems is pretty hard when a lot of people are on benzos and SSRIs and opiates.
It does not make a
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm free of sugar. That's a Yeah. It doesn't make really the opiate of the masses.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But opiates are also the opiate of the masses. Right? More people died of fentanyl last year in The US than all the soldiers in the Vietnam war over eleven years by two x. Yeah. Right?
That's a That's lot. That's a lot. And when you look back at the, like, opioid crisis Sackler family thing, that case got prosecuted. This there are a lot of cases like that that don't get prosecuted. Right?
The perverse incentive is really fun profound. So iatrogenic disease, disease that is caused by some aspect of the health care or medical system, is a subset of anthropogenic disease. Right? Mining is causing diseases. Agriculture is causing diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then we have to medical Right. Needs are more drug
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, we said earlier that from a business point of view, lifetime revenue of a customer minus costs to do business, multiplied by total addressable market, and then the penetration of total addressable market is kind of the equation.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? Yeah. Well For profit.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, all of that equals total profitability. Yeah. Right? And so if I think about it, I want addiction is really good for lifetime revenue, but so is upsell and cross sell. And so if there is a medicine, the side effect of which is another medicine I also own, and whether it's the company or whether it's the financial institutes that invest across the companies, if there is food that you make a lot of money on that causes diseases that then medical system you make money on, you're like, okay.
Just if if one was just following their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit, they would do it that way. This does not equal making healthy humans at scale. And then you can say, well, caveat emptor with the market, you know, like, buyer beware. And, no, this is total nonsense. If you think about it's it's really important to understand how much our core social systems, when you're reading Adam Smith of the founding fathers, were a different world in seventeen hundreds or, you know so when you look at free speech in 1776, there wasn't much classified stuff.
There there didn't have to be much classified stuff because and nobody's talking about free speech absolutism is saying, let's declassify all the classified military stuff. Now when you had the whole continent, because nobody was here that had militaries to defend themselves at the same scale. There were a lot of people here, but they could all be kind of destroyed. You got the whole continent, and the fastest way to if you share information with the population, your enemies, they would literally have to take a boat, a very slow moving sailing ship to get somewhere, and then they would have to take a boat back. It's very different than when they can send a signal message and then send a missile or a cyber attack.
Dr. Mark Hyman
In, like, seconds. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So now so as soon as you start getting a world where if the if the citizens know, the enemy knows. And more and more things in systemic warfare are an aspect of national security. Do you want them to know where the big aquifers are, and do you want them to know where the fertilizer supplies are because it's weapons and food from phosphorus and blah blah blah. So you get more and more things that the public couldn't know about because they're classified because they're national security because if the public knows, the Chinese know, the Russians know. You're like, okay.
The founding fathers did not have to deal with that issue. No. There were no cyber attacks. There were no you gotta, like, rethink through it and say, well, how should we do it today? Right?
We want as much open society as possible. Thinking through national security seems reasonable. We've got kinda gotta redo it. Founding kind of market theory. Founding market theory, if you think about, like, we're going to a market, and I'm gonna sell some stuff, and you're gonna buy some stuff.
I'm gonna sell some stuff, me and a couple people. Right? There is a symmetry between the supply side and the demand side where you can literally go to all the people making shoes, and you can see what is the best product. I can feel them move around. What's the best product at the best price?
And you can do that, which creates an incentive for the suppliers to make the best product at the best price. Okay. That seems cool. But as soon as you're dealing with the supply is getting larger and larger, and the demand in aggregate is, but the consumer is still the consumer. Mhmm.
So now you got multibillion dollar multinational corporation employing massive amounts of psychologists, split testing, whatever, to be able to manufacture demand. Yeah. And the individual person who can't begin to compete with the information warfare of that. Mhmm. Now to say, well, demand is driving supply.
Demand is obviously not driving supply. People are
Dr. Mark Hyman
buying That's the line I hear from these big CEOs of food companies. Well, we're just giving your customers what they want.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Every And
Dr. Mark Hyman
so we even
Daniel Schmachtenberger
give Every drug pusher says that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you if you that rationale, you say, well, they sell $2 bags of cocaine, they could say, we're just giving our customers what we want.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, and you give them the first hit for free, and then you say, I'm just giving them what they want. That's the plausible deniability Mhmm. To be driving addiction. Now, if you have that much power relative to this and you're starting with kids, what the mark like, what buyer beware, no. That's absolute nonsense.
Right? And so this is asymmetric information war on people. And then you didn't have the like, humans were small then relative you think about time of Adam Smith, there's a half a billion people in the world. We don't have an industrial revolution at scale. Couple hundred years go by, you 16 x the population.
You a 100 x the resource consumption per capita. Yeah. How big we are relative to the planet changed. Externalities are a much bigger deal. You can't just think of nature as a place you can pollute and put trash and steal from for free forever.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so now, not pricing in the externalities is a really big deal because my margin goes up if I don't pay my externalities. The pollution that I don't have to pay to process is better margin.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They're they're not really externalities. They're just I I they call these side effects of drugs. They're not side effects. They're just effects we don't like.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When we say externality, what it means is it's externalized from the cost equation.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? This is a financial term, which means so my Like,
Dr. Mark Hyman
the the the guy who makes soda is not paying for the diabetes care. They're not paying for the
Daniel Schmachtenberger
damage for the diabetes care.
Dr. Mark Hyman
For the damage to the soil to grow the corn syrup that they're putting in their soda. They're not
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So those are real costs that people are gonna have to pay. The environment pays. They're gonna but they're not paying. So they are socializing the cost And privatizing. And privatizing the game.
Right? At this scale, that is a totally catastrophic thing. This shit has to be rethought.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Because we that leads to a disease creating economy, which is what we have.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Of course. So when people are sick and need to buy more medicine, GDP goes up.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And if maybe even total GDP long term will go down because of productivity issues, that business's GDP that is up being optimized for is still going up. And so, like so think about think about it this way for a moment. So you mentioned there were people that lived to be 100 years old. Now when we're looking at diseases, we have a complex of an IP structure, an intellectual property structure, a regulatory apparatus, and a set of financial incentives, and a reductionist epistemology that all cluster together into a clusterfuck. And I wanna just kind of describe this.
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Unpack that.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The to be able to say this is going to treat a disease, you have to go through a phase three clinical trial. And we like that. We say that's the government protecting us because you're testing that it's safe and effective. You know, phase two clinical trials are not cheap. No.
Almost somebody can afford them. Right? They're getting a little bit cheaper, but they're still most of a billion dollars. Mhmm. And when you factor all the ones the company does that fail in phase one or two or whatever and you amortize those, it's like it's most of a billion dollars Yeah.
To get a drug for approval. That's a lot of pre revenue money for a company. Yeah. If you think about it from the point of view of almost any other company, hey, we're gonna spend years and a billion dollars before we make a penny. The lean Yeah.
Startup model well, it is a good business model if you can make enough back, and making enough back is going to be
Dr. Mark Hyman
drugs. You need chronic drugs.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I need chronic drugs for large populations. I have to make enough money to pay for the class action lawsuit and to pay for the legal firms to try to make class action lawsuits illegal.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Like, that's all part of it. And but to to pay that most of a billion dollars for the phase three clinical trial, to ever make that money back, I have got a patent on that thing. So I'm the only one that can sell it. Because if I was studying a vitamin or an herb or an endogenous chemical the body produces, and once I put the billion dollars in, anybody else could produce it at the same cost as me, then I my business model wouldn't work.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, why isn't NIH paying for that? It's a good question.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They should. But research is.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
As a result, I can't patent vitamins. I can't patent minerals, nutrients, and or parts of the human physiology. So I'm only gonna study novel synthetic chemicals that were never part of any healthy human or any evolutionary environment. And to just think about how batshit absurd it is to say, the only things we will study to treat illness are synthetic chemicals talk to any healthy human or any evolutionary environment.
Dr. Mark Hyman
To nature molecules. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You're like, yeah, it's weird. It's weird that the only things we would study are those things. Yeah. And what about like the things that healthy people have more of naturally than unhealthy people and that when you were young, you had more of. Right?
So you start looking at peptides that your thymus gland produces or whatever and you're like, maybe that stuff is used, but the patent structure makes that difficult. And you kinda don't want people to own a patent on something the body produces. So maybe the funding structure has to become different. Right? But then again, if, like okay.
So the $5,000,000,000 a year $5,000,000,000,000 a year budget in The US for health care. It's a lot of money. Right? Which roughly half the government is subsidizing. You look at the desire to cut trillions from the government spend right now, and you say
Dr. Mark Hyman
Nobody's talking about this.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Talk about it. You you talk about it for a minute. This is This is absurd. What make America healthy again should do, and this is totally nonpartisan. It's just straightforward science and economics.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, considering our federal deficits exploding and that, you know, our economic system is now shaky that, you know, the the trust in the dollar is is world currency is kinda crumbling. I mean, we're we're kind of in due to and a lot of it has to do with the incredible amount of health care costs that the government covers. And most people don't know this.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But I wanna say this was all true during Biden and it was true during Obama and Oh,
Dr. Mark Hyman
for whatever.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is like this not new stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. It's not new Yes. For a long So so of of the total tax revenue collected by The United States, one third of it is used for health care. And of the total health care bill, which is almost $5,000,000,000,000 on the whole country, about 40% of it's paid for by the government in various health programs. Not just Medicare and Medicaid, but the Indian Health Service, Children's Health Insurance Program, the VA, the Department of Defense, federal employees, the list goes on.
Wait.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Wait. I just want I just wanna make sure everyone hears that this is a t not a b. Right? 5,000,000,000,000.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. 5,000,000,000,000. Yeah. 5,000,000,000,000. So the government pays like upwards of $2,000,000,000,000.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And how much money are we hearing right now we wanna try to cut from the government?
Dr. Mark Hyman
$2,000,000,000,000. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Or or like a Yeah. Isn't it something like a half of all the Medicare costs would go away if you just fix food?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you fix food. Yeah. And it's tough to get people to understand this because
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Please break this down because it's like cutting okay. But sure. If there are some government services that are lame and we need to redo them, but we need less government services of lame type, but we need more of certain other types. Yeah. Whatever.
But if if half if the if if we spend more money on health care than we do on war or anything else.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. By far.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If more than half of it, you just change food and goes away Yeah. Simultaneously now, people's fertility goes up, their depression goes down, their health goes up, the DOD can have fighting guys again because right now they're all obese and there's no like, it's kind of omnibetter for everyone. GDP will go up because there's not as many sick days and people work longer. Like, outside win of win for everybody. Outside of maybe some pharma companies and some food companies, this is omnibetter for everyone.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. That's right. And there's not that I mean, there's not that many food companies. Like, think 10 big, you know, processed food companies. There's, you know, a handful of ag companies that make fertilizer, probably four big ones.
There's probably five or four or five seed companies.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There should not be four or five seed companies.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There should not. But there used to be hundreds of seed companies, and now there's just a few. One of the big ones in China, you know, Monsanto and a bunch of other big ones out there.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
There should not be terminated. No.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But, you know, when you think right now, we're talking to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is a innovation hub of Medicare and of the CMS. And and they they're looking at, you know, diabetes reversal. Imagine if we could find a treatment for obesity and diabetes that wasn't Ozempic. And and it not only just managed the problem, but actually got rid of it and didn't come with a whole bunch of side effects.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
How much diabetes was there in 1950?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Almost none. Mean, there was just so little. Back back a hundred and fifty years ago, there was pretty much none. If you go back and look at the hospital records of Mass General back in the eighteen hundreds, it just was not And the pictures.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Even the fucking photographs. Yeah. Right? The obesity rate was not the same thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. He was I mean, he's looking at pictures from the seventies like a Woodstock. I mean, there's no no chubby kids there or look at the beach pictures or I mean, I I remember seeing Amazing Grace which was a movie made, in 1970, that Aretha Franklin, you was in Oakland and she was giving this concert in this church. And it was incredible. And there was not a single overweight black person in that church.
And in the sixties, they were healthier than whites, and now there's obesity rates are higher than the rest of population.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're important. We're not talking about figuring out how to do some new super hard unprecedented shit. Mhmm. We're actually talking about reversing a completely new unnecessary retarded phenomenon.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's just amazing to me, Daniel, that that the physicians and the NIH doesn't go, wait a minute. Where were all these diseases sixty years ago and like what happened? And maybe we should study that and maybe we should design this healthcare system that reimburses for doing the right thing.
Does our NIH pay for
Daniel Schmachtenberger
all the nutrition studies? No. No. Who pays for
Dr. Mark Hyman
them? The food industry is 12 times as many nutrition studies as the government funds and and they spend about $12,000,000,000 a year. And and they find that that there's when they look at government, versus, industry funded studies, the industry funded studies find a positive benefit for their product eight to 50 times more than a independently or government funded study.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So for everybody who wants to take all of the studies, put them in AI to know what's going on. Most of the studies are shit. Yeah. This is important. Don't, like, crap in, crap out.
Most of the studies are propaganda. Yep. And, like, I love science. Science is rad. We don't have much science in the world.
No. Science is, as Eddington defined it, the earnest endeavor to put into order the facts of our experience. Yeah. Earnest endeavor. Yeah.
Not the motivated endeavor to prove something in particular that we have an incentive to try to prove. And can you lie with facts? Yes. Can you manipulate science? Totally.
So everybody is paying attention to the replicability crisis. Yes. There's a huge replication crisis. People are paying attention to p hacking. There's a huge issue with p hacking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
P hacking means is the p value of a study is how how accurate is that and more likely it is to predict that the certain outcome was not the result of chance, but the result of whatever intervention or thing you did.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then the study can say, yes. It improved that one molecule. That's true. It did a lot of other stuff too. So that doesn't mean the fact that it passed the phase three clinical trial doesn't mean it was awesome, like Vioxx passed.
Yeah. Premarin passed.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then they had to get pulled from the market because they killed too many people. Mhmm. And so what about the long term when we realize there's not only acute causation, there's long term causation? What about the long term studies on new chemicals?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't exist.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's ridiculous. If you're saying, let's enter something. Let's enter something into the human body or into the biosphere the human body will take in
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That never existed before, that has molecules in it that nothing has ever interacted with before, that is designed to be biologically active. Let's we understand that someone gets diagnosed with you only have six weeks left to live with cancer, but that cancer is growing for twenty years or whatever. Right? We understand that there is long term issues. Yeah.
And we test the drug for a very tiny amount of acute safety issues over a couple years and then put it out. What the fuck?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or a couple of months.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. A couple years being generous. Yeah. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, from the point of view of, like, I gotta make all that money back that was in the phase three clinical trial before the patent life ends. Because once the patent
Dr. Mark Hyman
life ends Farmers do not come in spend more on marketing than they do on r and d. People don't know that. But they always have to price the drug so high because of all the r and d nonsense. And, you know, most of their costs in pharmaceutical companies are marketing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I consider most of the science kind of like the r and d arm of capitalism because there are like, science costs money. Who's gonna pay the money? Well, some pool of capital is gonna go to it. That pool of capital came from capital accumulation. It's not gonna put it in to lose it.
It's gonna put it in because it sees ROI on that investment.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If we say, hey, here's a thing that we could study that would make people healthy on their own and they don't need to buy anything, who's gonna fund that thing?
Dr. Mark Hyman
It has to be the government.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And now, everybody right now might be concerned about how much we'd ask the government to do. Yes, the government
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or philanthropists.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And philanthropists have weird agendas. So
Dr. Mark Hyman
Sometimes they're not bad. Mean, there's a group called the Bizinski Group that's funding a lot of studies on psychiatry that have never been done before. They're at dietary interventions Mayo at Clinic, but they're spending millions and millions of dollars, which I think is good.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Oh, yes. There's good philanthropy, and we want that. But, like, whether you're looking at kind of the Coke philanthropy on the right driving the dark money thing or the Gates philanthropy on the left or like, there's a lot of people dubious of philanthropy right now. Fair. Right?
So Mhmm. And there's lot of people dubious of government. Mhmm. Fair. Now, does that mean you don't have them, or does it mean you fix them?
You have to fix them. Right? You can't like, the the the market incentives alone here is the most powerful organization seeing people as extractively as they see the environment. That doesn't work. So you need something that can serve a protective role.
It is not currently an adequately integris trustworthy system. The answer is it must be made better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So that's the question. How do we redesign civilization for health rather than what we have now, which is some by design, but I think most inadvertently by just ignorance or lack of paying attention, you know, has been a civilization designed for disease.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, I mean, okay. I wanna how much is like, when we were mentioning the tetraethyl lead, they actually knew tetraethyl lead was toxic. Put it out anyways. Not a mistake. Right.
We mentioned the sacklers in the opioid crisis. New. Not a mistake. When When
Dr. Mark Hyman
tobacco companies initially didn't think tobacco was bad, but then they
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They started covering stuff up?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Then they started covering stuff up. Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So there's more of that. So PFAS is a very famous one. Right? Like, when we're talking about ubiquitous pollution
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
PFAS as in p f o s, the whole category of molecules. Capsuleon. Yeah. But it's about 10,000 molecules
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. In the
Daniel Schmachtenberger
fluorinated surfactants. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm a little nervous. I just had my PFAS levels checked in my Quest in my new function labs through Quest, and I'm excited to see what that's gonna be.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But nobody can check all 10,000 of them. No. Right? You're gonna check some tiny subset.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But this is really important, is right now, some studies that came out last year showed that every RAIN sample in the world has PFAS in it. Every single rain sample in the Amazon, in the Himalayas, in the Arctic snowfall has PFAS in it because the molecules are so small that they evaporate and then come down the rain, which means also the water surface area in lakes and oceans and whatever all has PFAS affecting the gas fluid exchange, which is really fundamental to how life continues to exist here. Yeah. And that means it's, of course, in the blood and in in people. And why we call them forever chemicals is because nature does not do these polyfluorinated things, so there is no natural process.
No bacteria, no anything to break it down. And so this is like, you can't be a prepper and move off grid if it's in the rainwater everywhere and get away from this. You have to actually lean in to helping change the civilizational system. We should not be putting PFAS into the atmosphere at the scale. Could we solve that?
Yeah. We never used it before. Are there other solutions that can be surfactants? Yeah. Totally.
But you just have to be motivated enough to do the thing. So the reason I bring this up is I don't remember right now if it was DuPont or Dow. It was one of the two, or three m. Actually, was one of the three that originally developed Teflon, p f a s. And then they sold it to the other one, and there was a court case that was just won this last year where they had to pay out, 10,000,000,000 in damages from the fact that they knew it was toxic, covered it up, and put it out anyways.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Called Dark Water about this.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They did a they did studies where they laced tobacco with all the people who got respiratory illnesses. They gave it to mice. The mice got cancers and stuff. Then they hid all that, did everything they could do, suppress it in the scientific literature, whatever, get it out. Now it's in the rainwater everywhere.
This was not a mistake. Right? Now there were so they had to pay 10,000,000,000 in damages. There was a study done, by a group of environmental scientists on what it would take to remove the PFAS from the environment because we don't know how to break it down, so you have to absorb it, absorb it, particularly. Current technological processes to remove the existing PFAS will cost a $160,000,000,000,000.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yikes. That's a lot of money. It's more in the global GDP.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. So the even the idea externality is nonsense. Right? Like, it's not like you externalize a little bit of the It's that you externalize almost all the cost. The only thing you externalize, like, what is the cost of wood or a tree?
It's literally the cost for me to cut it down. Just the cost of extraction. Yeah. Cost of oil, cost of extraction. Would it cost nature to make it?
Not relevant. What would it what are the harms? Not relevant. So literally, the only thing we internalize is the cost of extraction Yeah. Right, or production, and nothing else.
And so you're like, a 160,000,000,000,000 to fix that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's That's problem.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's not including the health care effects of it. Yeah. Or the permanent modification of the soil organisms. So we have been optimizing for narrow short term goals in ways that affect lots of other things, that cause some really serious problems. There is a comprehensive thing that has to be effect addressed.
So, like, in functional medicine, you find, hey, there's a lot of people that are told they have a incurable disease, And you find they're not all incurable.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You find that a lot of those people, if you know how to do the approach, or a personalized approach, they can get a lot better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep. You know how to think about it. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, what you have to look for is do they have mercury, do they have lead, do they cadmium? Do they have mycotoxins? Do they have glyphosate? Are they nutrient deficient in these things? Do they have these subclinical infections?
Blah blah blah. But all of those issues shouldn't exist for anybody. Those are all ubiquitous. So what percentage of people do you find has one or more heavy metal elevate elevated?
Dr. Mark Hyman
If the most people. If if they're eating fish, almost all people have mercury in their in their blood. If people have fillings and fish, it's more in their systems. The only people I've seen when I'll do a chelation challenge is who don't have heavy metals or mercury are are people who are don't eat fish and don't have never had any fillings.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And this is not looking at if they have lead from the pipes in the water system.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, know, lead is out there. And so some people have more or less lead. And I mean, I'm sort of shocked at how many people have really high lead levels
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And how many horrible diseases it causes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And again, what what percentage of people do you see have more mycotoxins or gliotoxins or biotoxins than how is healthy, ideally?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, a lot. I mean, a lot of people have mold these mold toxins, that's what you're talking about. And they're probably half of all buildings are water damaged and a lot of people absorb these mycotoxins that No. Don't get out of their bodies and recirculate and cause havoc and inflammation.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So you said something earlier that's important, is you were talking about gluten. There's a lot of people that are like, man, very few people have celiac. Everything else is some kind of psychogenic nonsense. This is not true. When you're talking about gluten intolerance, you're not talking about full blown celiac disease.
You are talking about
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, that's gone up four hundred percent. Yeah. Because of these increase in these proteins and how damaging they are to the gut.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if you're talking about an evolutionary wheat plant that had like a few berries on it, and then hybridizing it to something that has a gazillion berries that where you changed the chemical structure, then you spray osate on it, and it's grown in demineralized soil. Like, it kind of makes sense, and you eat a humongous amount of it. Kind of makes sense that maybe it would not respond as well for a lot of people. Now so this is not saying everyone evolutionarily had a bad time with a native grain.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
To say that gluten toxicity is kind of ubiquitous. Yeah. I mean, gluten intolerance. So the same way with mold. Because people be like mold forever.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Every tree breaks down with mold. We weren't all dying. What's the issue? So would you say a little bit about why mold is a way bigger deal today than it was and that this this is not psychogenic nonsense?
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I mean, think, you know, there's a lot more sort of mold damage and water damaged buildings. There's also the sort of preexisting kind of dysregulation of your biology that makes you susceptible. So it's the total load phenomenon. Like mold in and of itself may not be an issue, but if you've got a load of environmental toxins, if your diet's crap, your microbiome's crap, if you're nutrient deficient, then you get hit with mold, it's gonna be a bigger issue.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So partly the issue is because a person who's inside getting the indoor air poisoning is also not moving. So the lymphatic system is not flushing it out. They are not sweating, so their sweat system is not flushing it out. Just that alone would make a huge difference. Now they're also missing key nutrients that are needed for how the detoxification works.
They have other toxins that are messing up the pathways. The indoor air not moving can allow concentrations to build up beyond what outdoor air has. Yeah. It's a big deal. Yeah.
The indoor
Dr. Mark Hyman
air also outside has most of the time. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The indoor air also has the VOCs and stuff. The outside environment, those funguses were balanced with microbiome of the soil and heaps of other things that made it to where you didn't get species overgrowth in the same way. But also, we started adding fungicides to all the paints. Right? So as to not get mildew inside.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And just like using antibiotics didn't give you no bacteria, you got MRSAs. Yeah. And now the MRSAs are super More
Dr. Mark Hyman
more molds. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The we have fun fungicide resistant molds that produce more dangerous megatoxies. And and then building wise, like drywall is a lame thing to build with. Yeah. And and fast growing cheap soft woods, right, is really not the same as stone or hardwood or things. So, like, you you basically build with a mold substrate.
Yeah. Like, if you wanted to say what would a perfect mold substrate be, we build with a perfect mold substrate. You make it to where the air doesn't move through the place. You put fungicides in the paint to make fungicide resistance. You make susceptible people.
Like, of course, you're gonna have a mold Yeah. Epidemic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's a big deal. And it's, again, it's one of those areas in medicine. It's kind of a black box. Nobody looks at it.
Nobody thinks about it.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if somebody's living in a house that has mold, are they and you take them to a kind of traditional medicine where you're just gonna put them on meds. Are they really gonna get better?
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. They don't even know how to diagnose it. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know to look for it. They don't know the biomarkers that go off.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They might end up calling it an autoimmune disease and putting them on biologics and steroids and stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or say you're you're tall in your head and you're piercing Prozac, more likely.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then you'll get an iatrogenic cascade Mhmm. From that. Mhmm. But then also, even if someone goes to like a functional medicine doctor, a naturopath, can you get rid of the mold if you're still in the moldy environment?
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. You have to get out of it. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so if you start now we're talking about, like, there's one transition from medicine that is only thinking about synthetic like, giving a drug or a surgery as the solution or radiation. Right? Like some toxic thing. Every one of those is like toxic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Our toolkit is pretty narrow. And the the toolkit in functional medicine is pretty broad. And that's the difference.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So the functional medicine thing is let's deal with the upstream causes in the body. Yeah. But then the next thing, the systemic In the environment. Health care thing is nobody should be having elevated mercury and lead and mycotoxins in the first place. You could build Yeah.
You could do industry differently.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then So how do we have all the things we want? In the society we want, The things we like, like our computers, which are full of toxic metals, our iPhones, and and have a a different environment. How do we redesign for health? Because this we've kind of unpacked a lot of the disease issues and the risks and the problems. Because I think I think, you know, we need to rethink food.
We need to rethink industrial processes. How how do you envision a future that where where we can actually create a a better
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Well, let's just say some super basic things. First, you said we're number 50 in health. A lot of those other countries have laptops.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Japan has laptops.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? And and Okinawa does. So food is
Dr. Mark Hyman
a big difference too.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Are nowhere near as healthy as absolute optimum would be because they're dealing with some of these same systemic issues, but they're not dealing with all the same ones because they've done a better job of certain parts of the health care system or the environment management system. And so the you know, an average life expectancy of 76 or whatever here while on a dozen meds and shitty quality of life for the last long time and maintained with surgeries and stuff versus a 100 autonomous for most of the time, still have laptops. Mhmm. So just empirically, we can do better. Yeah.
Right? Now, could we do better than them? Totally.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, what are some of the obvious things? Should we only study alien synthetic chemicals for health? Nothing else gets to make it through phase three clinical trials because there's no way to fund it. We don't study anything that was in an evolutionary environment, a young body or a healthy body. That seems batshit crazy.
How about figure out how to fund the study of the things that make people healthy that decrease with age that correspond to more diseases that you just couldn't say, let's do more of those things?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Like peptides or hormones or
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And those things make a huge difference or vitamins, minerals, and herbs. Right? Like when people say, oh, vitamins, don't work, whereas it's basically clinical trials. Who's gonna pay for it? Mhmm.
Like, who
Dr. Mark Hyman
And when they do them, they're fatally flawed in their design because they're treating the nutrients like drugs in terms of how they do the study design.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I got so upset It's so frustrating. COVID when some some agencies reached out to me for help. I was trying to help them and early on, we're like, okay, let's do studies on all the small molecules that have antiviral effects that already exist, particularly the old ones. So ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, but, you know, valacyclovir, cyclovir, whatever, all the things. Yep.
Why do you wanna use old ones? Because you already know the long term safety profile.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
What about a new one? Well, okay. So we're making a remdesivir or what we don't know the long term safety profile. How about let's start with ones where you already know long term safety profile, so all you gotta study is efficacy? It just makes fucking sense.
But where's the money in it? There's no money in it because they're they're already past patent.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I'm like, NIH should be funding studies on just efficacy. They don't have to be long term on things where we already know the long term safety. We already know the drug interactions. We already know that shit on these old antivirals. Did that happen?
No. No. And yet we saw things like synthetic like, drug vitamin d, calciphity, all people got better. And, like, even a combination of an h one blocker and an h two blocker, and people got better. And then, you know, like, mirabaric and hydrocortisone together and from long COVID.
Like, there were a lot of things. Right? And let alone, I'm not even gonna talk about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or those things because it's so politicized. You know, like, this should not be a political topic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is just an empirical topic. So I remember saying doctors should have, in the very beginning, emergency authorization to prescribe the things that have antiviral effects based on patient presentation. And I won't say who, but someone put very, very strong pushback and said, no. No. We have to do randomized control trials first.
I'm like, If you're gonna do the randomized control trials, do it for pre or post exposure prophylaxis. Don't do it once people are already in the ICU because what antivirals work late stage? Like, valacyclovir really works for herpes, but only in the first twenty four or forty eight hours. It doesn't work once you have a full blown outbreak. So if the whole pharmacopeia of antivirals only works at the beginning and so they said, okay, yeah, we'll do that.
And then they funded the study, it was in the ICU when people were already sick of shit. And then it said they don't work. And I'm like, what antiviral would work in that
Dr. Mark Hyman
Intentionally designed to create a negative outcome.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is information war based on financial incentive. This was not just innocent. Like, I I know this was not just innocent because the people who were funding that ended up being, I won't say the rest of it, invested in other things that happened.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That shit has to go. Right? So So what are
Dr. Mark Hyman
the kinds of these are all perverse incentives that make us do the wrong thing and not actually study the right things or do the right kinds of research or create products and services that actually promote health issues. Research nutrition? Yeah. Well, the NIH should, think.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not food companies. No. Food companies research should be suspect. Mhmm. Duh.
Particularly if it says their food is good for you and you should eat lots of
Dr. Mark Hyman
it. Yeah. Just look at the funding. Duh.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So how about, like, one of the things government science does is nutrition. Mhmm. Duh. How about we study old drugs again for new purposes, like the redo project for cancer or whatever? We actually put real money into that because we already know the long term safety profile, and we just have to look at efficacy.
Mhmm. How much money does that get? This is not hard.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's so it's hard for the average layperson. I mean, there was this sort of there's this big going on about the kind of calories we eat and whether some are different than others. In other words, are sugar and starch calories worse for you than
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not a hard topic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I mean, it's not
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If look at the science.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Science really But there there are debates published in major journals. Back before they just read one
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Funded by who?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well well, it depends who who was who was the the person who was the researcher. And And one of them was this guy doctor Anstrip who's I think a Belgian physicist who, you know, got funded by Coca Cola, McDonald's, and who works for Novo Nordisk now. And like trying to find ways to sort of bypass the mechanisms with food design. And and he's debating and saying, you know, look, yeah, Coca Cola calories are the same as any other calories. Doesn't matter where you get them as long as you don't exceed your calorie needs for the day.
You're gonna be fine.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No thinking person
Dr. Mark Hyman
It doesn't even make sense logically. Right? But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
because it's absurd. Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? Well, but It's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
empirically wrong and it's absurd.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, then the argument as well, it's just thermodynamics. You know,
Daniel Schmachtenberger
who are you who are
Dr. Mark Hyman
you to argue with physics? I'm like, yeah. But if you understand the law of thermodynamics, energy is conserved. Yes. But the the final part of that sense is in a closed system.
And and the body is not a closed system. Wait.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When like, that argument is so dumb.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I agree.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Can energy's energy. Sure. Can I just plug me into the wall and run on it? No. I need different forms of energy.
Can I run my DC computer on AC without running through the transformer? No. Energy is not energy. AC and DC are different. If I put AC into my computer without a transformer, it's gonna blow the computer up.
Can I feed my computer hydrocarbons? No. It doesn't know how to do that. Can I put can I put gasoline into a diesel engine? No.
No. Gasoline and diesel are more similar to each other than evolutionary food to the shit we eat now Yeah. By a lot. The fact that we are so metabolically flexible is amazing. It is.
But it doesn't you pay for it. Yeah. And like, can can I make one mineral out of another mineral? No. No amount of potassium gives me any amount of phosphorus.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And so it's all thermodynamic. What the fuck? That is
Dr. Mark Hyman
just That's right. Stupid. Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's just trying to say science y sounding shit to make people stop thinking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's it's a lot of there's a lot of money to to kind of declare that all calories are the same and weight loss
Daniel Schmachtenberger
atoms are different.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
All amino acids are different. All enzymes are different. They are not interchangeable. They're not all fungible.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. But yeah. I agree. But if you look at the medical literature, it's so full of this nonsense.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And Paid for Yeah. By fucked up interest. So it's it's bad epistemology, but it's also fucked up interests.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So these perverse incentives instead of malalignment of of, you know, of our institutions, our research infrastructure, our health care system, the payment systems, reimbursement systems. How do we get out of this mess? Because if we have anthropogenic disease, how do we create the opposite, anthropogenic health? Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So kind of the idea of ontological design is like most creatures are being designed are being designed by their environment. They're evolving to fit environmental niches. That's what they're being selected for. Right? We're changing our environment.
In turn, the environment's changing us back. We should think about how we wanna change the environment that makes the kind of people we wanna be. And rather than just like this provide something you want and like the consumer's demanding it. Yeah. The consumer's demanding it after you made it requisite to operate and manufacture demand.
Right? So like someone you'd be, oh, just don't use Facebook. Well, your company cannot competitive compete in marketing if you don't have Facebook because they have a monopoly on attention. So you say, don't use it. Fuck off.
That's not true.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? And if there is a patent on a drug that's the only drug that does a thing, that sounds a lot like a monopoly. And so we have to think about, let's make stuff. Like, are the other ways of doing the thing? And what are the total set of effects?
And is this making healthier, happier, better people or not? And could we do it a better way? And if we're already getting worse outcomes in an area than we used to get, we for sure can do it a better way. Just reverse it. Right?
Of course, we can innovate new better stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Bottle that easily. I mean, we can't all of a sudden turn in a dime and change our agricultural system or get rid of 70% of the foods in the grocery store. And I mean, we can eventually do it, but
Daniel Schmachtenberger
How much money subsidizes conventional agriculture?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Depending on the year. I mean, it's $1,314,000,000,000, and then you've got the extra payments that just got made, like 30,000,000,000 or know?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. So you look at the direct subsidies, the tax credits, the research credits, the blah blah blah, and you got like a $100,000,000,000 that goes to subsidizing the super toxic stuff. Mhmm. And the argument is, well, we need food security, and without that, the food system wouldn't work, and only these big companies are the ones that can produce enough for food security. Hogwash, that's not why.
It's because only the big companies lobby well. Little bitty farmers don't know how to lobby, so they're not gonna get subsidies. And revolving doors, the person who's running the regulatory agency that used to work at the company that does the interest of the company, like so one of the things, fix revolving doors.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Corporate capture is a big deal.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Duh. Like, you should not be allowed to be the regulator of an industry that you have owned stocks in and all of your friends own
Dr. Mark Hyman
stocks Yeah. I mean, it's just amazing to me that Vilsack, who's the secretary of agriculture and is sort of supervising the dietary guidelines, tells to drink three glasses of milk a day as adults and two as kids for which there is no scientific justification, was on the board of the dairy council in between his two stints as ag secretary. I mean, that's just crazy
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Just to start to look at everybody in government regulatory positions and look at what they did in commerce before and then what they do in commerce afterwards. Right? Because it's also after. Because someone can just say like, hey, you don't make that much work in government. You're gonna leave public sector, go to private sector.
I'm gonna bring you here and pay you a lot of money, but not if you hurt my business by regulating against its interests.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's a little disturbing to me that the chief of staff for the secretary of agriculture now was a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association, the Corn Refinance of America, and, you know
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I am going to avoid mentioning names, but I'm gonna say look up all the names. Yeah. Look up everybody in USDA. Look up everybody in HHS and just say what industry connections, and then look at the policies they make. And just look at how often the policies they make are aligned with industries they have been connected to or that they go work in afterwards.
And Jesus Christ, it's obvious.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So fix the the revolving door.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
That's really quick.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Fix in the incentives. Right?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Now, the government
Dr. Mark Hyman
Do we do we do we try to build in the externalities
Daniel Schmachtenberger
in terms of cost price? We we just said, NIH doesn't study food, but it subsidizes the toxic food. Well, but we don't have the money to study shut up. Like, why a 100,000,000,000? So if you just didn't put the 100,000,000,000 to the toxic food in the market that's not even a market.
Right? Let the market just compete. The regenerative agriculture actually beats it in many areas. Now the trillion dollars of capital markets start to flow to the other thing. We are literally making something that is less profitable and that makes everybody sicker win because of government subsidies from taxpayer money.
Nobody got to vote
Dr. Mark Hyman
on for the farmers. It's more profitable for the seed makers and the fertilizer makers.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Especially when they get subsidies.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. I mean, even advertising. I think, you know, the food industry spends about $14,000,000,000 a year on ads, all of which is a tax deduction.
And the average kid sees about a thousand ads for junk a year.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Buyer beware when it's a kid going against a multi billion dollar company that employs childhood psychologists to split test what ad makes the kids cry the most when they don't get the food until they
Dr. Mark Hyman
get it. And not only not even just psychologists, but these neurologists to look at functional MRI imaging Yes.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
To see
Dr. Mark Hyman
which foods are the most attractive.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Like, this this is not just mistakes. Mm-mm. This is worse than mistakes. Are a cover story. Yeah.
There are mistakes. Yeah. But even the mistakes are because there was no incentive to try to figure it out.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So how about, like, before you come up with a new drug, study all the old drugs?
Dr. Mark Hyman
How about know, this is saying that RFK junior is saying we should study vaccines against placebo, and it's getting so much pushback because most vaccines are not studied against placebo. Duh. I mean, imagine if you were studying
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But also cumulative effects. Mhmm. Commentator on cumulative effects. Yeah. So how many drugs are there that by themselves are fine, but combined the wrong way kill you?
A lot. Right? Don't do your opiates, your benzos, and your alcohol together. And so you want to study not just the individual effects, but the effects in combination with other things. We we know that that's included.
So, of course, every new vaccine is studied in combinatorial effect with all the other vaccines. Right? No. For long term safety.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Why? When you mandate them altogether?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's what they talk about evidence based medicine. It makes me a little crazy. You know? Where's the evidence that taking five drugs all independently studied together is effective or safe? Where the studies say that, you know, one vaccine may be safe in itself, but when you combine them with 10 other vaccines or 20 other vaccines, are they safe?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I wanna talk
Dr. Mark Hyman
about We don't know the answers to those questions.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I wanna talk about a few things. Small molecule drugs versus vaccines and kind of biologics Mhmm. In general. A small molecule drug that is going to have been flushed out of your system in seventy two hours, if you're taking it for a short period like an antiviral, the likelihood that it produces long term negative effects is smaller than something that's intended to permanently or long term affect your immune system. Like, just duh.
If something is intended to produce lasting effects versus only effects while it's there and it clears. So what should get longer term studies? The thing intended to have long term effects? Like, of course, it should. So in general, I'm gonna default to small molecules over long term endogenous modifiers every time.
Mhmm. Only if all the small molecules can't do it would I look at the other thing. And then next is I'm gonna default to old ones over new ones where you already have long term studies. There's no money in either of those things. So but then the net result is sicker people that then mess up long term GDP in terms of productivity and whatever.
So just we could change that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, we have we have a, you know, a system that that's driven off of business and business innovation, but the incentives are wrong there. And and either we have to fix it There's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
nothing not innovative or scientific about studying a drug for a different purpose that already exists. There's just a financial incentive issue.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. That's what I mean. So it's it it there's But
Daniel Schmachtenberger
it's still science and it's still innovation, if you wanna tell that story.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's not right. It's innovation, but it's not gonna create a profit. And so that that's where the government has to come in. But, you know, think about the how much of our tax dollars should we be spending toward this? I mean, yes, we'd have a trillion extra dollars if we fix the food problem in this country.
We'd have, you know, a lot of extra money.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So if you just don't like, think about this. Just don't pay the subsidies on food that is toxic for everybody. Just don't don't like, let the market be a market. Just don't artificially farmers
Dr. Mark Hyman
are the ones that are suffering, and they're the ones that are caught in this grip of the banks and the bank loans, the crop insurance slash subsidies and the seed and chem and fertilizer companies. And they're just kind of spinning around in the middle and everybody else is winning
Daniel Schmachtenberger
except But the smaller farmers do better when you they move to a system that is not based on
Dr. Mark Hyman
They do. Do. But if there's no incentives to do that, that they can't get out of it, have
Daniel Schmachtenberger
already incentive for them because the larger guys are better at lobbying. But now if we and and then doing revolving doors. But if you just look at don't subsidize the toxic thing. Maybe if anything subsidize the better thing. Invest in nutrition research so you see what's actually new good.
Make companies pay for some of the externalized cost if it is causing diabetes or whatever, and maybe make some regulation around what can you advertise to children.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Right? Because buyer beware for children does not work with asymmetric information warfare. Right? Like, this is just reasonable governance. And then all of a sudden, if you just don't we're not saying a more expensive government thing.
Don't put a 100,000,000,000 into that stuff. Then you start having the market naturally start to favor what we call regenerative agriculture, which is just how agriculture was.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And as a result, your you cut a trillion dollars off the medical spend right away and actually towards because it's 5,000,000,000,000 and it's gonna do half. It's more like 2 and a half trillion gets cut, which is all deficit kind of money, and then productivity goes up. So the debt to GDP ratio gets better, and you have to spend less to make it happen up front.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Sounds like a good winning deal.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not super duper hard.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Well, it's hard if you have people who are running things who are incentivized to not do that. So I mean, like, I I just, you know, working on a a project where we're we're sort of looking at root causes and environmental chemicals and toxins, their effect on health. And there was a letter that was written by Senator Grassley and others in Senate and Congress basically calling out the fact that the pesticides and agricultural chemicals were not harmful, that the data was clear that they were safe and that we should continue to use them and we should not heed to a bunch of hippies who say that we shouldn't be using them. And I was like, wow.
And then you do a little homework on them and you see they're all funded by the the big ag and seed and chem companies.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So like, what are some things we can do? Stop revolving doors. Really make some laws that regulate revolving doors. That should be super duper obvious. You should not be regulating industry to protect the people, but actually in the benefit of industry because you have a perverse incentive as the regulator.
Like, I don't know anyone who thinks that's a good idea. Have things that their companies have an incentive to research badly. Get government and nonprofit funding for that and get enough oversight that you can trust it. Okay. Company funded stuff company funded research that did not have replication that says their stuff is awesome should be suspect to non vested interest verification.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Should have a warning label on it. Yeah. This study was not replicated, and it was funded by industry.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then I heard Bobby Kennedy talk about something that is a very common sense good thing, which is he's like, look, I I believe in the market, but you should actually have to pay the costs. So if the cost is, you know, your coal company put a bunch of mercury in the environment and made a bunch of people sick, they have to pay medical costs and their life is fucked, you don't have to pay it. That's not the market. That's stealing. Right?
You're stealing from those people's lives. And if it's really a market, it's just revenue minus cost, but it should be your whole costs. And so only the things that are actually profitable and you pay all the costs, those things happen, and the other things don't happen. So he's like, I just want to identify empirically where the externalities causing harm, what it would currently cost to fix it, and just force those companies to have to do that thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But then they these whole businesses have gone out business. Right? I mean, if if the food companies had to pay for the cost of chronic disease
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But but think about how nonsensical it is to say, in the whole history of humanity, humanity always fed itself, and that right now there is no economically viable way to feed ourselves. We're just saying go back to a previous system. Yeah. Is it So like
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, the argument is all we can't feed a growing hungry population. We need to feed this the world, and that's But, what America's you know
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not an earnest conversation, though. Right? Because the healthier food is not necessarily more expensive. And when you take the amortized health care costs and the loss of productivity, it's way more expensive the way we're currently doing it. So if you had a little bit of long term thoughtfulness, which is why the health care outcomes in Finland and Japan and certain other places are better, is because they actually make some choices slightly better by looking longer term.
They're like, this actually doesn't even make sense for our own country's well-being. Yeah. So another example, you know, DDT, better living through chemistry, and you spray it over the kids while they're all all the nonsense. Right? And then, oh, by the unfortunately, DDT is super lethal, and the fact the thing that kills the bugs kills people too.
Yeah. Okay. So then we get rid of it, but what do we do? We sell it to Mexico for them to use on the food and we buy the food back. And then we replace it with malathion.
Then we say, that's bad.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Then we
Daniel Schmachtenberger
replace it with parathion. Come on.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
How about there's a lot of toxic things you can come up with. We put the toxic thing out there before studying toxicity, and then only regulate it after so many people have died. How about no. No. You have to do longer term studies to show safety before you put a new thing in the environment.
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is not ridiculous.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. It just makes it's common sense. But again, Mark Twain, who's my favorite author to quote, he says, the problem with common sense is it's not too common.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When you have no other planets in the foreseeable universe that are hospitable to life, the to life has to do with the chemical makeup of the biosphere. Maybe don't completely fuck the chemistry of the biosphere for super super short term interests.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. That's what
Daniel Schmachtenberger
we're doing. That seems pretty reasonable.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's a hopeful note we can leave on? Because we we unpacked a lot of what's wrong. And I I think, you know, we the the things you're talking about in terms of incentivizing the right things and revolving door changes and pricing and externalities all make sense.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And there's a lot more we we didn't get into. I mean, I wanna add one thing and then we'll do good notes to leave on. You know what a racket is. Right? Like a protection racket.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Racketeer. Yeah. So
Daniel Schmachtenberger
let's say I've got a protection racket where I'm the mob and you're doing business in my turf. So I have some guys go rough you up, and then you're scared of those guys. And there's not enough law enforcement here. Then I have some other guys say, hey, we can protect you, but you're gonna have to pay us a certain amount every week. Right?
But they're from the same group. Yeah. That's that's a racket. Yeah. Right?
Which is you're manufacturing the demand and then offering the supply.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Okay. So if you make a food system that creates addiction so the people need to keep getting more of it, but then it also makes them need medicine that they wouldn't need otherwise that is profitable, where the side effects of the medicine make them need other medicines. That's a systemic racket.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It is a racket. It's for sure.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It's a systemic racket. It's a distributed systemic racket. But if
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like it's like Bayer. They they they bought Monsanto, which makes glyphosate, which causes lymphoma, and then they make the drugs to treat the lymphoma. That's a racket.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So that's a direct racket if it's the same company. If they're separate companies that are just all owned by the major private equity or whatever, it's a it's a systemic racket.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
But think about just from a logical perspective, I'm trying to solve a problem. I got a problem. First thing I wanna ask is, did we always have that problem? No. No.
No. It's a new problem. Oh, when we didn't have it, what was happening then? Let's reverse something. The first thing should be, if it's a new problem Mhmm.
That was caused by something, reverse the cause. How often in medicine do we do that? That should be the first thing you do before you try to come up with totally new novel shit. Say like, wait, this is new disease that has a cause. Let's reverse the cause.
Mhmm. And then only and then you say, okay, well, if we can't if their history is not good enough, is there anywhere else that doesn't have it? What are they doing? Yeah. And then only if you can't reverse the causes and there's no good existent prototype, then you look at research, but then you should look at technologies we already have, if any of them could be reapplied that we already know a lot about.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Redo on existing drugs and stuff. Right? So for instance, like, you've probably followed project redo on oncology Mhmm. Where you've got drugs that people are getting for other purposes. But while they were taking them, their cancers went away, and so they're starting to look at them.
And it's like mebendazole and albendazole, like old anti worming things that reverse bowel cancers that are super cheap, that are actually quite safe. What the fuck? People should be researching that. Right? Like, people should really be researching that.
And so figure out the financing for that. So anything that looks like a racket should be investigated. Anything that looks like, oh, there's a problem. Let's not look at what the root causes were. Let's not look at when we didn't have it.
Let's just let's say that we got this problem forever now and we can't possibly not have it when we didn't have it for most of human history. Then let's come up with a new thing that we can make money on that will then itself cause new problems that we will also cause a new solution for will cause new problems. That is a systemic exponentially escalating bracket. Yeah. This is not a good method of problem solving.
This is solving problems in a way that doesn't solve the cause, that symptomatically addresses it, makes worse problems in the process. Let's start actually trying to solve problems. What is the cause? How do we undo the cause? Earnestly.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And how do we get people incentivized to do that? Because right now, everything
Daniel Schmachtenberger
is Everyone is actually incentivized if they pay attention to we're talking about your own health.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, like, the guy who's, you know, running Coca Cola or Bear is not Okay. Necessarily thinking about these things.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Coca Cola is not a food company. Right? Because it's not food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Beverage. Right.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They call it beverage, but like, I remember talking to someone who's the CEO of Pepsi once, and they said they were thinking about categorizing it as an entertainment company because they're like, we know this is not food. This is something people do for fun. And it was like, Jesus. You so what good does this thing do? Well, it causes diabetes and increases likelihood for Alzheimer's and everybody.
But what real good does it do? Well, it cause addiction. The world would be better if that company didn't exist. Any company where the world would be better if it didn't exist, we should figure out how to have it not exist.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Not try to retrofit some fucking weird corporate sustainable responsibility or something on it. It's just if the world would be better, if it didn't exist, we should do that. Yeah. The number of companies that fit in that category are high.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's a problem. And
Daniel Schmachtenberger
just from the average citizen point of view, You have some say in your government. You have way more say than you think. Right? You have way more say if you really wanted to be engaged. Now I wanna speak to a problem.
We talk about ubiquitous pathology. Right? Almost everybody that is gonna get Alzheimer's or autoimmune disease or cancer, endocrine disruption, they're already infertile or decreasing fertility or whatever. That's a bunch of subclinical disease. Yeah.
Ubiquitous. It's not their fault. No. Right? It's systemic stuff.
There is subclinical mental illness we were talking about. How many people have low grade anxiety, low grade depression, and anhedonia, meaninglessness, loneliness, addictive, compulsive tendencies?
Dr. Mark Hyman
A lot.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
A lot. Right? Like, pretty much everybody. Now, derealization. Derealization is this very serious thing that happens when someone goes through a severe trauma where, like, nothing feels real.
I would say almost everybody I know is in some degree
Dr. Mark Hyman
of Feels like that.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Derealization because and here's how I can tell. If I tell somebody something about it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's about health care or whether it's about the increasing likelihood towards World War three or AI or whatever, it doesn't matter what it is, the environment. Their tomorrow will be identical. They cannot be moved by real information about the real world they're
Dr. Mark Hyman
in. Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They are derealized. The real world does not matter to them. And they're like, no new information could change my life. Yeah. Well, you're being a doomer.
Wait. No. The Mongols are coming. If the Mongols are coming, do you want to know? No.
I'm doing no. You fucking want to know. You wanna do something about it. Oh, I can't do anything. Did you try?
Like, did you think about it for one whole day Yeah. What you could do before you said I can't do anything?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Most people don't. They're just so
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So I wanna just say, let's break the fuck out of ubiquitous derealization and learned helplessness, and say problems that didn't used to exist that we caused, we can't solve. Yeah. And your own health and your parents and your children are an incentive. Yeah. And if you think about it for a little bit, if you talk to the people who thought about it their whole life, they probably know stuff and you could do stuff.
But you just have to act like reality is real, and reality matters, and your life matters. As opposed to the nihilism of like, I can't do anything. I've already given up on my life mattering. I can't possibly make sense of it. You've already given up on your life mattering.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's hard. And the and the problem is that so many of people are not just do you realize because of the trauma, psychological trauma of our society, but also the the the way in which our diet and lifestyle environment affects our function and brain and mood. So it's sort of a double problem because you're sort of stuck.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
If you look at the American Revolution and the condition of the people who were involved in the American Revolution or Civil War, whatever it was historically. One, they were doing labor jobs, and using a pitchfork all day translates to a much heartier body that can do rebellion and whatever. But also, they weren't obese. They weren't on opiates and benzos, and they didn't doomscroll. Now I have found that I don't care how outraged someone is or how horrified or how depressed, that emotion will not make it through fifteen minutes of doomscrolling.
Because they will actually forget they ever heard the thing. They'll forget all the emotion. Because in that fifteen minutes, I see something that makes me excited, and something that makes me feel left out, and something that makes me feel belonging, and something that makes me horny, and something that makes me scared, and something that makes me outraged, and then something that's kinda funny. And I just flushed my entire system of continuity. Yeah.
Now I can go back to my life exactly the way it was. And a small number of people ensure that they don't do that, so they can actually work on controlling things at scale. Yeah. And everybody else lets them. Yeah.
But you don't have to.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, how do we have more agency? That's it. That's what you're talking about is is creating a society where their people feel agency and that their actions, that their thoughts, that their voice matters.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So find all the things that damage your agency and get them out of
Dr. Mark Hyman
your life.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. If you if you reflect on, like
Dr. Mark Hyman
Social media, bad food.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Yeah. So You know? Take the social media apps off your phone. Even if you're gonna still have it, have to do it on the computer.
Don't have a don't have it in your goddamn pocket all the time. Just take them off your phone. Simple. Yeah. If you're on psych meds, go to a Cleveland Clinic.
Go to an integrative doc who can see if maybe there's a better solution for
Dr. Mark Hyman
you.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. I'm not telling people get off their psych meds. I'm saying go talk to a doctor,
Dr. Mark Hyman
but talk to someone who
Daniel Schmachtenberger
knows other possibilities because you're not going to be self regulating or think well or whatever while you're intentionally altering your neurochemistry that way. Right? And so and then if you're taking in any information streams that make you feel helpless, stop. Now, I will say, I know people high up in most of major news companies. They are not news.
Not on the right, not on the left.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not news.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. It's not news.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Propaganda?
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yes. It is information war. Right? Bannon at least admitted in an interview with Megan Kelly recently. He's like, I'm not a journalist.
I'm into information war. But he's just admitting, like, I just make shit up. That's compelling because I have a reason. He's admitting it. I can criticize the most erudite journals because, well, they'll lie with facts, but they cherry pick their facts.
They lay off frame them in a particular way. Right? So you either call it an illegal alien or an undocumented migrant. It means the exact same thing, but you have a totally different emotional valence. You cherry pick your facts and you say this thing is getting better when it's actually getting worse, you're treating the symptoms or whatever it is.
So who puts narratives out there? Again, it takes a lot of money to fund research. It takes a lot of money to put a narrative out there. Typically, capital streams associated with goals that support those capital streams or the political institutions and and that support capital streams put out narratives that support what they do. So you should understand whenever you're watching a piece of news or reading something, what you should be thinking about is this tells me what some people want other people to believe.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Not what's actually true.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
So every time you read Breitbart, you should also read Mother Jones on the same topic. Every time you read Al Jazeera, you should also read Jerusalem Post on the same topic. Every time you watch Fox, you should watch MSNBC. Every time you and if you do that, and every time you scroll x, also go scroll Blue Sky. Do both.
And you will realize that there is not real news. There is information warrior is fighting for your mind.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Someone gave me a link to a website. I forget what it's called, which basically had the same news item, but reported from the right Yeah. And the left, and then the middle. And it was totally different stories.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. Yeah. And there really isn't a middle currently. So to just realize, you cannot let someone speed feed you your narrative on what is true. Cannot.
No one has the right incentive here. So you have to work at it a little bit. But you can't have a meaningful life devoid from what it understanding what's real. Because you to make meaningful choices,
Dr. Mark Hyman
they have
Daniel Schmachtenberger
to be in relationship to reality.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I think what you said was really important is take away the things from your life that interrupt your ability to have agency. And then Yes. Whether it's the food you're eating, the news you're watching, the social media you're scrolling, the friends you're hanging out with, the things you care about. Like, you know, we need this to sort of have more agency. And I think that that's part of why I created Function Health, co founded Function Health was to give people agency over their health because the health care system wasn't doing it.
And I think that's what you're doing, lot the work you're doing. We didn't get into a of the things you're you're about. So people can can check out your work at
Daniel Schmachtenberger
No. I wanna see Function Health have tremendous success because I think it can help a lot of things. But I also want to see that whole business not be needed because we're not causing all those issues in the first place.
Dr. Mark Hyman
This is true.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Which is why I'm also super happy that you're engaging with policy. Yeah. Now, right now, functional medicine is the most amazing thing because it says you can actually take some control over your health and have way better outcomes and your mom doesn't have to go through the completely ignoble horrible process of dying of Alzheimer's when she was a smart person and whatever and like, and your kids don't have to have diabetes, and like, you can do something. That's amazing. But then it's like, damn.
How about we just make industries and environments environments that make people healthy? Yeah. Or at least that don't make them sick. We could do that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So We have to. Otherwise, we're gonna go extinct sooner than later.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Yeah. So when you have a population that is becoming ubiquitously infertile, that is an extinction process. Mhmm. Yeah. When a population where nobody lives like everyone's life depends upon a complex medical system with a five six continent supply chain Mhmm.
This is not healthy people. That is a process of extinction.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, there's a book you might have heard or read about called Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn who sort of like the Rachel Carson of her day essentially talking about how these environmental toxins and chemicals are causing infertility and sexual dysfunction and hermaphroditis and knows if it's affecting this gender and kinda crisis we're having now. I mean, it's sort of striking.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
When you when you see the radical drops in fertility and even someone who's fertile but the sperm count is really low, are the kids as healthy? I mean, just just just think about it. Right? Just think about it. If someone's sperm count is 2% of what it was, a lot of thing like, is the motility affected?
Is the morphology affected? Is the, like, this is not as healthy a person. They're not going to have as healthy a children. It's not. Right?
This matters.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It does matter.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
This matters. And so that person whose fertility is decreasing, even if they're quote unquote fertile, they're radically less fertile
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're also radically less healthy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
They're also radically less happy. They're also radically less capable of solving the problems of the world today. And as you see in your clinic every day, it's all changeable. Yeah. And it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take.
It's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Thank you. That is that's a good point to end on. We each can do it for ourselves, and we have to do it systemically. And I think I'm working on both ends of the problem, so are you. So thank you
Daniel Schmachtenberger
You are. For
Dr. Mark Hyman
everything you're doing.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
I yeah. I really hope that function can bring a lot of these concepts and tools to everybody. That's very niche
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's
Daniel Schmachtenberger
and the they shouldn't be. And I love that you're making it not only medicine for the rich, but, like, medicine that everybody can afford. It's super important.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
And then I hope the policy work can really gain some success and gain success that can keep working across administrations because science has nothing to do with political parity.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And That's the plan. That's the plan.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Stoked on
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the plan. And for those who wanna learn more about Daniel's work, look at the Consilience Project. It's consilienceproject.org. We'll put links in the show notes. We'll put links to love references we talked about today.
This has been an incredible conversation and I I feel like we could talk for another ten hours and still keep going. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Likewise. Thank you, my friend.
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more.
Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Doctor Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more.
Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Doctor Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
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