Sharper, Stronger, Smarter: Build a Better Brain at Any Age

Mark Hyman, MD

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.

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Full Transcript

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
So fixing your brain starts with fixing your body and optimizing all the inputs into your system and minimizing the bad stuff, the bad inputs, whether it's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, bad bugs, drugs like caffeine, alcohol, sugar, whatever's causing your brain to not work. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to 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 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 doctorhyman.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. Your brain is not just this disembodied organ that is sitting in your skull connected from the rest of what's going on in your body. We learned about the blood brain barrier in medical school, but that's ridiculous. The brain is constantly interacting, communicating with everything going on in your body. Yes.

You have a blood brain barrier, but it's not like it's something that's just inviolable. It's permeable and things go across and impact it. So everything that's happening in your body impacts your brain. In fact, the title of my book, The Ultramind Solution, was how to, you know, how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. Right?

Fixing your body first. And then you can see, well, then maybe I have some issues with my thoughts and my emotions and my feelings and my trauma, whatever. But if you are eating a crappy diet, if you're drinking too much, if you're smoking, if you're not exercising, if have mercury poisoning, if your vitamin D is low, if you're B12 deficient, if your thyroid's not working, your brain's not gonna work. So you just gotta figure out how to get your brain healthy. So fixing your brain starts with fixing your body and optimizing all the inputs into your system and minimizing the bad stuff.

Right? The bad inputs, whether it's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, bad bugs, drugs like caffeine, alcohol, sugar, whatever's causing your brain to not work. The brain is pretty resilient, and it can recover and heal given the right conditions. And I've seen miracles. I've seen people reverse Alzheimer's, reverse autism, reverse ADD, reverse depression, things like bipolar disease, schizophrenia.

I mean, you just wouldn't even imagine how powerful this is. In fact, Christopher Palmer, who's been on the podcast, talked about how to use a ketogenic diet to reverse Alzheimer's and optimize mitochondrial function as a key way to treating mental illness. There's departments of metabolic psychiatry at Stanford, of nutritional psychiatry at Harvard. So we now actually have an understanding that the stuff I was talking about fifteen years ago, by the way, was way ahead of its time and also extremely important to understand if we're gonna fix our brains. About thirty years ago, almost, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and it felt like I had dementia, depression, and ADD all at once.

My brain was broken. I really couldn't focus. I couldn't pay attention. I used to be able to see 30 patients a day, remember all their medical history dictated at the end of the day with no problem. I couldn't, like, remember where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started.

I couldn't read my kids a book out loud and actually understand at the same time my brain really was broken. I couldn't sleep. I was exhausted. And I learned that I had mercury poisoning, and that broke my brain. My brain was just a mess.

I had terrible brain fog. I couldn't focus for much time. I was a physician trying to, like, practice medicine. It was really tough. I couldn't even remember my patient names, and I knew I had to do something different.

And that's when I discovered functional medicine almost thirty years ago. And when I reversed my chronic fatigue, when I detox from mercury, when I fixed all the other systems in my body, my mitochondria, my gut, my immune system, everything that was going wrong, I was able to reverse my chronic fatigue syndrome, and my brain got better. And I've then I've written 18 books in twenty years. My brain is great. I feel good, and I'm sharper, faster, and better than ever.

So what's the worst things we do for our brains? Well, we have too much sugar and fine starch carbs and not enough good fats and not enough intake of the right nutrients. A lot of nutrient deficiencies, omega threes, vitamin D, magnesium, to name a few that are critical for brain health. And may that affects over fifty to ninety percent of the population with deficiencies in those nutrients. Also, we're exposed to all kinds of weird things in our diet.

They are chemicals like artificial sweeteners, like MSG, environmental toxins that actually cause damage to the brain, heavy metals, all these things damage our brain. So a lot of things cause brain damage, not just what I mentioned, but things like lack of sleep, too much stress, not exercising, overuse of certain substances like alcohol or other drugs. Now, I found over the years really fascinating to me. It's really quite amazing that people don't connect how they feel with what they eat or how much they rest or sleep, you know, how much they exercise or how much time they take for friends and community and connection and or how much bad news and media they're exposed to. I had a patient said, jeez, doctor, I'm so tired.

I don't know what to do. I'm always tired. My brain's not working. I said, well, how much do you sleep at night? He goes, well, five, six hours.

And I'm like, well, you need an hour's sleep and try to see what happens. So you really don't connect the dots. Now, once you make those connections, you can start to change those simple habits that can have profound effects on your health long term and make a lot of little small changes that can make profound impact. Now, fully focused, fully energized, having great brain health, it requires really following the principles of functional medicine, which is taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff. It's taking out the bad food, toxins, allergies, microbe stress, adding in the good stuff, the right whole foods, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, sleep, relaxation, connection, meaning, love, purpose.

All these things are necessary for our brain to function properly. And most of us don't get enough of the good stuff. We don't get whole real food. We often are deficient in nutrients. We're not exposed to enough natural light.

We don't get enough fresh air. We don't drink clean water because most of it's polluted. We don't have periods of deep rest and relaxation. We don't sleep enough. We don't live in rhythm.

We don't exercise. We're too focused on being busy in our careers and all kinds of stuff to focus on community and meaning and purpose and love. And and so we basically have to optimize those things in order for us to be healthy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what are the things that

Dr. Mark Hyman
I really focus on? Well, food is the number one thing that controls your brain. And we've seen miracles by simply people changing their diet from treating depression to Alzheimer's to everything from ADD to even schizophrenia, as I mentioned. So eating real food is so important. When I say real food, I mean real food, not processed food or ultra processed food, whole, organic, fresh, local, unprocessed food.

Basically, it has a barcode or a label, you might want to get rid of it. If your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it. Does she know what a Lunchable is or a Pop Tart? Probably not. Junk food is just bad.

Fast food is bad. Ultra processed food is bad. Some processed food is okay. A can of sardines is processed. Right?

It's in a can. It's got salt, may oil. A can of tomatoes is processed. It's tomatoes, water, and salt. That's okay.

But if you can't recognize where it came from like a Pop Tart, you probably don't wanna eat it. And some things that seem like real food are really not, like yogurt. Yogurt is often filled with high fructose corn syrup, colors, additives, gums, thickeners. All these things are pretty, pretty nasty for us. Also, you wanna eat a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables.

I know you hear me say this all the time, but these are full of phytochemicals. These impact the brain. The deep dark reds, yellows, oranges, greens, blues are so important because the color is where the phytochemicals are, it's where the medicine is. These are anti inflammatory compounds, they're detoxifying compounds, antioxidants, they're mitochondrial boosting energy producing compounds, brain powering molecules. We need to eat that.

So get lots of cultural plant foods, blueberries, dark green leafy vegetables. Also go for the slow carbs, not the fast carbs. Right? I'm not saying carbs. I mean, basically broccoli is a carb.

Right? But it's quite different than white bread or from sugar. Cauliflower and ice cream are all carbs. Right? But you know cauliflower is good for you, but an ice cream sundae is probably not, right?

So eating whole plant foods also with lots of fiber helps to reduce the surges of sugar that cause some of the problems. In fact, call now Alzheimer's type three diabetes. It's like diabetes of the brain from too much sugar. So eating lots of fiber helps slow the surge of sugar, nuts, seeds, lots of veggies, whole grains, beans, really can be very helpful. And it also keeps your gut healthy.

And by the way, your gut and your brain are connected. You need to maintain your healthy microbiome to actually protect your brain health and prevent Alzheimer's. Also fat. The brain is made up of 60% omega-three fat. It's mostly fat in your brain.

So you need to be a fat head and going on low fat diets are pretty bad for the brain. In my book Eat Fat Get Thin, I talk about fats a lot and when the good fats are the bad fats and how to get the omega-three fats from your diet, from algae or fish. Brain worked pretty good before, but I actually have gotten on a better fat diet and including some things like MCTOL, which is really powerful for the brain. And my focus and my clarity is just down through the roof. Now, also you wanna optimize protein.

We need protein because if you lose muscle, because you don't eat enough protein, it leads to this cascade of problems with low muscle mass. That fatty deposits in your muscle leads to prediabetes, lowers your testosterone, which you need for brain function, lowers growth hormone, which you need for brain repair, increases cortisol, which causes brain damage, literally causes the shrinking of your hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. So you wanna make sure that you're having enough protein, ideally animal protein, which is better able to build muscle. And when you age faster, your brain takes a hit, it shrinks. So you can keep your brain good by eating good fats and the right amounts of protein, omega-three eggs, protein shakes.

I like regeneratively based goat whey for a protein shake in the morning, nut butters, fish for breakfast, all that is great. Also stop poisoning your brain. Get rid of all the bad stuff. Sugar, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, food additives, preservatives, environmental chemicals, all of which really are a problem. Supplements also very important for the brain.

A good quality multi magnesium is important for the brain, calms the brain. It reduces the stimulation of the NDMA receptors, which is actually producing Alzheimer's risk. Vitamin D is important for the brain. Omega-three fats, probiotics, all the B vitamins, folate, B6, B12 are critical for your brain and your neurotransmitter function. And you can find all these versions, the best versions, the cleanest versions at my online store at store.drheimen.com, along with other brain boosting supplements.

So you need to design a plan for your life that includes your overall health, but you ought to incorporate some of these important practices for your brain. But the good news is what prevents brain problems, prevents heart disease, prevents cancer, prevents diabetes, and everything else. So now I can do a million different things, but these principles are really important for brain health.

Dr. Daniel Amen
Happiness is a brain function. So that's number one. When your brain is unhealthy, you're likely to be unhappy. And so, you know, it's like, why did I write this book? It's like Americans are the unhappiest they have been since the Great Depression.

So given the pandemic, the political divide, the societal unrest, social media, and the national media controlling the dialogue. And they go after fear because that activates the limbic structures in the brain that gets people to pay attention. So we're more is

Dr. Mark Hyman
like fear, fight or flight. It's the reptile. So they appeal to your reptile. They

Dr. Daniel Amen
they do. And a lot of people wake up with negativity and sadness because that's been planted in our brain through evolution. Because thousands of years ago, you had to wake up and be afraid because that was a survival mechanism. So that is why the brain pays attention to negativity faster than to positive messages. And I'm like, okay.

We're so unhappy that I wanna spend a year thinking about, studying, writing about happiness. And so I got 500 consecutive patients, Damon Clinics, and we gave them the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire. And then we looked at their brains, and what we found, the unhappier you were, the lower activity in the front part of the brain you had. And the lower activity in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which has the nucleus accumbens, which is the part of your brain that responds to dopamine. And so things like head trauma or toxic exposure.

And so much of it I learned from you. I mean, I don't know if I I know I've told you, but you've just been a huge mentor of mine that I buy your books for all of my doctors. We have almost 70 doctors now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Thank you. I know. You're right. Getting so many royalties. Thank you.

Alright.

Dr. Daniel Amen
And I love, looking at at the brain. You know? That's sort of my thing, what I do. And it was just so clear if your brain wasn't healthy, you were not likely to be happy. So the first strategy that nobody knows about is get your brain right and your mind will follow.

And there are a whole bunch of strategies on how to do that. The second one,

Alberto Villoldo
which I think

Dr. Mark Hyman
right there. Could I I just have a that is such an important statement you just said. I don't wanna go over it so quickly. Your brain is your brain, which is this putty like structure in your skull. And your mind is who you are.

It's your thoughts, it's your feelings, it's your perceptions. Your mind function is determined by your brain function. And yes, you can overpower your brain function if you're really strong willed in many ways. But it's really important insight to understand that your brain and the quality of health of your brain determines the quality of your mind. That's a big insight that most people don't realize.

Your brain creates

Dr. Daniel Amen
your mind.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. If you look sad and depressed, I'm anxious, they go, oh, it's it's it's like a sore ankle. It's like a like a like a like stomachache, but your brain can't have a stomachache or a sore ankle, so it has a mood change. Right?

Dr. Daniel Amen
So you and I have been blessed to see some really cool people. And I was in Justin Bieber's docuseries in 2020 called seasons, and he came to me at a really low point. And like many of these young superstars, they'll show up or not. They'll do what you say or not. And when he got really low, he showed up, and he said, I think I get what you're trying to tell me.

My brain is an organ like my heart is an organ. And if you told me I had heart problems, I'd do everything you said. He said, so I'm gonna do everything you say. Changed his diet, did hyperbaric oxygen, IV therapy. And he's better now than ever.

He was just nominated for a bunch of Grammys, and I'm so proud of him. But if you don't get your brain right, Yeah. It's really hard.

Alberto Villoldo
So, you

Dr. Daniel Amen
know, if you think of it like hardware and software, gotta optimize the physical function of your brain, and then you can program it. And we have faulty programming. We'll talk about that. But you first have to get

Dr. Mark Hyman
the hardware right. Exactly. So to go keep going on the seven things. See, I stopped you after the first one.

Dr. Daniel Amen
So the second one is happiness is geared to your brain type. One of the big lessons I learned from imaging early on is that all psychiatric illnesses, all of them, are not single or simple disorders. They all have multiple types. Giving someone the diagnosis of depression is exactly like giving them the diagnosis of chest pain. And nobody thinks about it like that, but it's absolutely true that, you know, nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain.

Why? Because it doesn't tell you what's causing it, and it doesn't tell you what to do for it. I mean, you're not gonna give everybody nitroglycerin. I mean, that would be stupid. Right?

But now we think of depression. Oh, you're depressed. Take Lexapro. Or you're depressed. Take Luvox.

It's really interesting. We may talk about that in the pandemic. But

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It turned out it's a good group for COVID.

Dr. Daniel Amen
Yeah. It's really interesting, and I think I know why. But, ADD is not one thing. It's seven different things. One of my best selling books of all time, Healing ADD, I talk about seven different types.

And then when I was thinking about happiness, I'm like, the thing that makes spontaneous people happy, like scary movies and having an affair or jumping out of an airplane, the persistent person would actually those things would make him or her miserable. And so it's really important to know your type. There are five primary types who you balance. That means, you know, most any reasonable thing will make you happy. Spontaneous, you need novelty or you're not happy.

Persistent, you need routine or you are not happy. Sensitive, you need connection. They were damaged most in the pandemic with the isolation. And the cautious people, they need peace to make them happy. And so know your type.

I have a online quiz called our brain health assessment, brainhealthassessment.com. You'll see which of the 16 types you have. And then, well, what are the things more likely to make you happy? And all of these strategies have questions. And for get your brain right, the question, the little tiny habit I don't know if you know BJ Fogg, but I worked with him

Dr. Mark Hyman
for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen
Six months on tiny habits, so we have 50 tiny brain habits. But the mother of all tiny habits for the brain is for strategy one, is this good for my brain or bad for it? So when you go to do something, you just ask yourself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? So when we were at Saddleback, our first fight with pastor Warren was you gotta get rid of the donuts. Or it's good for your brain or bad for it.

I mean, obviously, it's bad for it. I don't know if you remember that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But I do. And the soda, the pancake, breakfast, and the mischief, facials. Yeah. The whole thing. We're we had our worst set off.

They did good, though. I would say they I I was impressed that that the scale change that they did so quickly. It was very impressive.

Dr. Daniel Amen
It is amazing. And then the question for the second strategy, am I doing something today that makes me uniquely happy? So it's really diving into happiness is not the same thing for everybody. So don't say it's novelty and gratitude, appreciation and fun and comedy because it's different based on your type. Three, you'll appreciate, is supplement your brain.

We live in a society of deficiencies. And if you're nutrient deficient, especially serotonin, you know, most people don't know that birth control pills deplete serotonin. And I've seen this over and over in teenage girls. They go on birth control pills, and now they're anxious or they're depressed. And no one's thinking it's changing their neurotransmitters.

And my favorite happy supplement is saffron. I've been following the science of saffron for twenty years. 24 randomized controlled trials against Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Imipramine, Effexor, equally effective. But rather than being antisexual, you know, put someone on an SSRI and they have trouble having an orgasm or their libido goes down, saffron is prosexual. And it makes them more interested.

And there are studies showing that saffron helps with memory, even in people with mild cognitive impairment. So when the pandemic started, I just released a product I love called Happy Saffron. Saffron's that can curcumins. And I'm like, right at the beginning of the pandemic, my dad died. I had to close our Manhattan clinic.

I mean, it was a disaster. I'm like, I'm taking this. So this is the supplement. I take many of them, but that's my favorite one. And so I I think we might agree probably everybody should take a really good multiple vitamin.

Yeah. Everybody should take an omega three fatty acid. You should optimize your vitamin d level, test it, odds are it's low, and then work to get it high normal because we're in a pandemic. And then it depends on your brain type. So our spontaneous people do better with stimulating supplements like rhodiola.

Our persistent people do better with serotonin boosting supplements like five HTP. The sensitive people do better with saffron or SAMI, and the cautious people do better with GABA, theanine, magnesium. I'm just a huge fan. And too often, you see this, is people go to their family doctor, their nurse practitioner, and they ends up on a benzo. And it's like, no.

No. No. That's like twentieth on the list. Let's do meditation, diaphragmatic breathing. Let's try GABA and magnesium.

Please don't do that because why would you start something? Whatever. Yeah. Somebody can't stop. And I I see them creating so many problems with with inappropriate medication use.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, they don't even work that well. That's the thing. Mean, if if you took Prozac and you're cured and you're happy, life was good, wonderful. But it just no better than a placebo for mild or moderate to depression. So, you know Correct.

That's another problem.

Dr. Daniel Amen
Well, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want to be in the order business. I mean, they consciously made the decision to be in the reorder business. That once you start something for a lot of psychiatric medications, they change your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal. So many people are just wickedly afraid of going off antidepressants because of the withdrawal from them. And I'm not opposed to medication.

I'm just opposed to that's like the first and only thing you do without getting someone's diet right, without getting their habits right. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's so true. I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
you also talk about in the book, this whole idea of four circles of happiness as an exercise to make you happy. How what what is that?

Dr. Daniel Amen
Well, when I was in medical school, actually, the first week, our dean came in the classroom and he said, never think of patients as their diagnosis. Always think of them in four big circles. And it's just stuck with me. He went to the board and he drew the first circle, which is the biological circle. So, you know, as a doctor, you need to know all about their biology.

As a psychiatrist, for me, you know, our primary organ is the brain. So brain health, as we talked about. The second circle is the psychological circle, which involves development and how they think. And secret number five is master your mind and gain psychological distance from the noise in your head, which we'll talk about. It's a super fun circle, but it's basically the psychological circle.

Well, one of the things you

Dr. Mark Hyman
said is, never don't believe every stupid thought you have. And

Dr. Daniel Amen
and I didn't learn that till I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And I don't know. My eyes got really big because I've struggled with anxiety. And I'm like, why didn't they teach me that in third grade? Right?

Just because I have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true, whether or not it's helpful, whether or not I should attach to. And it's not the thoughts you have that make you suffer. It's the thoughts you attach to that make you suffer. And then he drew the third circle, which is the social circle. He said, and in the social circle, it's how are your how are your patients' relationships, and what's their social situation?

And, you know, two years into this pandemic, the social situation for so many people has just been a disaster from the societal unrest, the political divide. At Christmas, I had never seen family division like I have seen. And I'm saddened by it. And I kept telling my patients over and over and over again, without connection, you have no influence. So you're a vaxxer, you're an anti vaxxer, whatever.

You know, people were, like, not getting together and angry at each other. And I'm like, if you don't stay connected, you have no influence on the other person. And then the last circle, which I just love so much, is the spiritual circle. It's why do you care? You know?

What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose, your relationship with God, with the planet, with the past, with the future, and really talking about that with my patients. And I have to tell you, Mark, nine out of ten patients, when I ask them what their goals are and why they think they're on the planet, They haven't thought about it. And I'm like, you know, a business is not going to go unless it has a mission statement and a purpose and a strategic plan. And so that's actually number seven of the happiness secrets is live each day based on clearly defined values, purpose and goals. And purposeful people are happier.

But if you don't know, and there's a great exercise in the book on how to find your purpose that I love. One of my favorite patients that came out last year that I've been her doctor for about eleven years is Miley Cyrus. And I love her so much. And she has just grown up so much in the last couple of years, and she's very purposeful. She knows what she's about and what she wants to accomplish, and her bad habits, didn't fit.

And ultimately, that's the question to ask for secret number seven is does it fit? Does my behavior fit the goals I have for my life?

Alberto Villoldo
You know, especially when you look at the statistics, if you get to be 75, one out of two people will have diagnosable Alzheimer's. If you get to be 80, I'm sorry, one out of three, if you get to be eighty, one out of two people. Yeah. This didn't exist one hundred years ago, Doctor. Alzheimer's got to put his name on this illness he identified.

In the Amazon, the thing that amazed me is that the incidence of dementia is one out of one hundred people. There's very little heart disease.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's one percent there and twenty percent here.

Alberto Villoldo
Twenty percent here. It's crazy, and it's, of course, related to our lifestyle.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So learning how to grow a new brain is a pretty important topic.

Alberto Villoldo
It's really important. And remember, the brain is fat, so you've got to give it the good fats. You cannot turn on the higher brain until you go first on a ketogenic diet and it doesn't need to be, you know, eating meat three times a day, but you've got to go into autophagy, you've got to go into start recycling cellular waste and eliminating, And we know how to do that now. The beauty of it is not only do we have the diagnostics, we know how to reverse this stuff. We know how to create a new brain.

We know how to help people grow a healthy brain that's not only going to prevent the dementia, it's going to let them step into this place of gnosis, of wisdom.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's interesting, you know, we've had Chris Palmer on the podcast, I'll probably have him back again, who's a Harvard psychiatrist talking about mitochondria as the core dysfunctional unit that is causing most mental illness, everything from autism to schizophrenia to depression and bipolar And then we have to treat the mitochondria. But you're also saying that in terms of the aging brain and not that but also just having a healthy brain, we really have to focus on You got it. So how does that come up in your book,

Alberto Villoldo
You know, the mitochondria, it's a big section on mitochondria, and how do we restore mitochondria? There are fuel factories inside every cell, and your brain and your heart have the highest concentration of these fuel energy factories in mitochondria, but they're not only producing energy, they are actually in charge of the death clock. And whoever runs the death clock runs the show. They tell cells when they need to die so new ones can be born, so regeneration can take place. But mitochondria have, they're actually, they don't belong to us.

They are actually bacteria that join our cells, they form the eukaryotic cell millions of years ago, so that cut a deal with these multicellular organisms saying, Hey, I'm going give you energy. You keep me protected, keep me warm, keep me safe. And that's what they do. But what they do is they turn, basically, they store energy in the form of sunlight. Yeah.

Of ATP, of a molecule called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. This is like the little sparklers that kids And when they're depleted, that energy becomes, goes from being ATP to ADP, adenosine, mono AMP, adenosine monophosphate, your fuel tank is empty. Yeah. And so this process of storing energy, of processing energy, of protecting the mitochondria who have 38 genes in a ring that are unprotected. That's nice.

Because our DNA is 24,000 genes in a double human your

Dr. Mark Hyman
brain cells have more mitochondria than any other cell in your body, per And

Alberto Villoldo
they are the feminine life force.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like 20,000, 50,000.

Alberto Villoldo
Per neurons.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Per cell.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. And we only get the mitochondria from our mothers. So they're what the I heard the Amazon shaman saying, You know, your people, their feminine life force is very weak. And then David Perlmutter said to me, Of course, it's mitochondria.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Alberto Villoldo
That's right. Because we get it from the mother. So how do we protect, repair? And here's where we get into zombie cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Thoughts about zombie cells. These are the zombies like

Alberto Villoldo
Like the ones in Haiti.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Haiti, the spirituals. No, you're not talking about that.

Alberto Villoldo
We kind of, because zombie cells. These cells are neither living nor dead, and they're actually a cancer protection mechanism that every cell has. So if a cell is not able to copy its DNA, its information accurately to a daughter cell, mother cell, they're mother cells and daughter cells. They're no daddy cells. If it doesn't copy correctly, it will neuter that cell so it cannot replicate.

Because we call that metastases. So it will neuter it, but it won't kill it. So these cells are not able to reproduce, they're neither living nor dead, but they're mitochondria. They become fat and swollen and are starting to produce chemical signals, chemokines, cytokines, that are pro inflammatory and they're very toxic. It's a cancer protection mechanism.

But when you have too many of these, remember the problem here is the copying. If the copying is not accurate, they get neutered. And what interferes with the copying is the signal to noise ratio of all the toxins we're exposed to. These cells begin to build and we end up with cancers. These senescent cells, they're called, and they were discovered by James Kirkland at Mayo Clinic, who did a beautiful gerontologist who said, I'm tired of prescribing walkers and wheelchairs, how do we begin to deal with the causes of aging?

And, he found that there were senolytic agents that actually switched on, the kill switch turned it back on in these cells. And you could get rid of them. You could do away

Dr. Mark Hyman
with kill the zombie cells, which are also called senescent cells. Senescence. Senescence is aging, and senolytic means to, like, kill aging. Yeah. Kill the aging cells.

Alberto Villoldo
Kill the aging cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so how does that work? How do you do that?

Alberto Villoldo
Well, you we don't know exactly. At least I don't know how they work, but they seem to switch back on the kill switch in mitochondria.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And what are the the therapies they're using?

Alberto Villoldo
And those therapies are combining things like quercetin and fisetin. Fisetin is made from strawberries. Yeah. And quercetin is polyphenol, it's made from onion skins, it's a variety of products, natural products, and it's a hit and run intervention. Four or five days, and I have a cenolytic protocol that we use in our retreat center in Chile that you've been to.

And in four or five days, you do away. It's a one and done treatment that you need to repeat. We're finding out three or four times a year because we've got forty years or fifty years of senescent cells in us. That what that does is to basically reset the system. You don't have this burden of zombie cells that you need to that you're that you're functioning with.

It cleans you out.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true. Also, there's a great study out in Israel where they looked at it. I talked about in my book Young Forever. These hyperbaric oxygen over 60 sessions.

Actually am doing it right now. I just came from it because of my back surgery to heal the But the, the beauty of the the hyperbaric is that it it it actually creates a stress, but it kill also kills the zombie cells.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. Yeah. And this is, I think, essential, absolutely essential. Our protocol is not only fisetin quercetin, which is commonly used for this, because this will kill the zombie cells, but how do you get rid of them? So you've got to work on the transport system and support the liver in eliminating them.

So we're combining it with alpha lipoic acid and with liver support, including glutathione or glutathione to help to transport and eliminate them out of the body so they're not just sitting there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is amazing. We're talking about mitochondria, zombie cells, the microbiome, serotonin, know But see, this is a Trauma.

Alberto Villoldo
This is plant based.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is

Alberto Villoldo
working with and the reason you're going to hear a lot more about senescent cells because we're getting to molecular solutions, to pharmaceutical solutions. Yeah. But this is available today. Fisetin strawberries. You'd have to eat 30 pounds

Dr. Mark Hyman
of to

Alberto Villoldo
get the same effect.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you can take it as a supplement.

Alberto Villoldo
But it's an amazing supplement, four or five day intervention that lowers your burden of these toxic cells that are pro inflammatory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
One of the things that you know, it's so fascinating is that we can start to embed these practices into our daily life. And you and you you've written this book, Growing a New Brain, which is not just talking about the theory. You talk about case stories. You talk about

Alberto Villoldo
And how to do it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And how to do it. Yeah. So can you maybe share some stories about how this would be applied? What are the kinds of things people are doing? How does it work?

Alberto Villoldo
First let me share a story about how I kind of got into on this track. Because I was running a small lab at San Francisco State. We were looking at can we create psychosomatic health? What are the mechanisms? And I got frustrated at one point, shut the lab down, and went to the Amazon to see what they did, people that had no technology, but they had the plants, the natural world, the plant world.

And the mind, the power of the mind to create, you know, we know the placebo effect is the most tested medication in the world. Yeah. Because every pharmaceutical is tested against placebo. Yeah. And we know it's extraordinarily effective.

I mean, it's 68% as effective as morphine in the case of gunshot wounds. Amazing. So I began looking at what's placebo effect. We don't know what the mechanism is, but we know it works. We know it works even when the person you're giving the sugar pill to knows that it's a placebo.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.

Alberto Villoldo
It's extraordinary. A lot of the shamanic healing is based on mobilizing this resource that we have to create health, that dismiss derogatively as a placebo. That's just a sugar pill. Most of what you're getting in your pills that you take

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're activating your psychopharmacology, because I always say the best pharmacy is the one between your ears.

Alberto Villoldo
The one between your ears, yeah. So this is what I became interested in. And so how do we do that for ourselves? Well, meditation seems to be one of those things. Practicing inner peace, breathing practices that begin, because that's the interface between your, that can allow you to self regulate your physiology and your nervous system.

So I think we have to discover what works for us. We have to provide the brain with the neuronutrients, the support. Get the serotonin. We're serotonin depleted right now. And this is things that we can do immediately and then turn your kitchen into your laboratory.

And then take part in what this number of people are calling the experiment of n is equal to one. Yeah. Where you have, you know, in medicine if you have a research project, you want n the number of participants to be as big as possible. But here the experiment is n is equal one. My experiment is called Alberto.

Yeah. And yours is called Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I love experimenting on Mark.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah, me too. And the problem, the thing is that if you don't do the experiment, you get to be in the control group. And the control group is deadly. It's statistics.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
You want to be an outlier in that bell curve, so we need to take control of our brain today, not outsource it to our digital devices like we've done. You know, our memory functions are all outsourced to our digital devices. I was writing one of our blogs today and it said, This thing popped up. Do you want help with writing this blog? It was Chad GPT asking me if he wanted me to do it.

Soon, we're only going to be here to clean the machines. So we need to really up grade our brain, take the next step in human evolution because the one interest a couple interesting details. There are 40,000,000 species in this planet, more or less, and only three of those don't have a death program in their DNA. And they're humans, dolphins and whales. Every other species in nature has a death program.

There are no grandmothers in nature. There's, they're eliminated. Whereas we have not only grandmothers, but we can live thirty, forty years after menopause. There's no menopause in nature. It doesn't exist.

Nature is doing a biology experiment with humans, dolphins and whales in longevity. And to take part in that experiment we need to be proactive in it. We need to attenuate the systems that create psychosomatic disease, the amygdala, the production of cortisol and adrenaline, and switch on the production of the psychedelics that the brain produces to awaken the higher brain. It requires the psychedelics.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, let's talk about that. I was going to close with this because I think this is really an important framework because historically we thought of psychedelics as causing psychological effects. But but now we know they're causing biological effects and literally structural and functional changes to the brain. Incredible. By increasing BDNF and other brain trophic nutrients, things that are helping the brain grow, repair, heal, reduce inflammation and things like, you know, DMT from Ayahuasca, from, you know, Bufo from the Sonoran Desert Toad, the, you know, psilocybin medicines, MDMA which is synthetic chemical, LSD synthetic chemical, or but that comes from implant ergot.

All these are are things that have been around for hundreds of thousands

Alberto Villoldo
they all act in serotonin receptors.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they act in the serotonin receptors. But what we're now learning about them is that that they can really create profound lasting changes in the brain. In a way, grow a new brain. What can you tell Tell us how you

Dr. Mark Hyman
think about that.

Alberto Villoldo
It's amazing. If you've seen the brain on drugs, on psychedelics, you find that they're 20 to 30 times the amount of neural networks.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not the Richard Nixon brain on drugs with the fried eggs.

Alberto Villoldo
Not that one. Not the one with the fried yeah. And the problem is that many so we're doing this experimenting without a traditional sacred structure. So every culture that works with psychedelics knows that you need a diet to prepare for it, a diet that's rich in serotonin, for example, and some of the MAO inhibitors.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
And you need to prepare a sacred space, a safe space, not just drop some acid or give somebody some ketamine. But even then, tremendous healing happens. So that's the chemical effect is what we're looking at. Other societies looked at the sacred. What was the environment?

How do you create a safe space? How do you are able to commune with the divine in whatever form you encounter it? And that's part of what we're looking for that we don't have the answer for.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That that's true. I think it's true. But I think what's what's sort of exciting to me is this sort of is this sort of revolution in brain science and the revolution in trauma healing, the revolution in psychedelic medicine, the revolution in nursing the body as a system and network, all these things are coming together. I think it's gonna change everything we think about the brain, the mind, our lives.

Alberto Villoldo
Totally. It's gonna open up the door to explore the mind.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what does the future look like? Tell us about how you see the future.

Alberto Villoldo
I am very optimistic. I see the future as tremendously exciting. I think that there have been five extinction events in the planet before. We're living in this in the fifth one right now. It started about fifteen, twenty years ago.

More species are dying than the previous one. That's when a gigantic meteorite struck the earth and wiped out 90% of life forms. Wow. During extinction events, nature seems to take the foot off of the brake and step on the accelerator, evolutionary accelerator. So it's not only evolution in between generations, but now within generations, that we can become a new human and many And this called epigenetic reprogramming.

Epigenetic reprogramming to become a new human being that can have long life, long health, and can become a keeper, an earth keeper, a steward of the earth, and can experience her and his divine nature.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So beautiful, Alberto. I mean, think about it a little scientifically too, which is that this concept that's emerging from our scientific discovery, in a way, we talk about shamanic healing, we talk about energy medicine, we talk about kind of healing from trauma. This fundamental concept of epigenetics which is relatively new, it's the idea that there's a control system regulating our genes. That our genes are fixed but which ones are turned on or off is regulated by this sort of master coder and the coder is the epigenome and that gets programmed generationally. Trauma can be transmitted generationally.

The impact of toxins or crappy food is transmitted generationally. And those impacts are found downstream two or three generations down. So if your grandmother was exposed to glyphosate, you're at risk for all sorts of cancers and deformities, right? If your great grandmother had a trauma, then that might be embedded in your DNA like the Holocaust survivors.

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely. The

Dr. Mark Hyman
children and their children and grandchildren.

Alberto Villoldo
And have very low levels of cortisol that's been happening for generations.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's exciting is what you're talking about essentially is using this latest science to reprogram the epigenome Nice. Breaking it so you can evolve within one generation. So there was this debate between Darwin and Lamarck. Darwin was like species evolved through natural sex selection over time. Mark was like species come fixed as they are.

They're both right in a way, right? And so these traits and he was like traits can evolve even in a generation. I think I Very rapidly. Yeah, very rapidly.

Alberto Villoldo
Not only that but we inherit not only the toxic legacy of our ancestors, both biological, chemical, emotional, but also the gifts, the extraordinary gifts of resilience, of courage, of endurance of brightness, you know, and we have to begin to tap into that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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