Dr. Mark Hyman: Everything You're Eating Is Toxic, and Big Pharma Likes It That Way

Big companies are poisoning Americans. Dr. Mark Hyman has been saying that for thirty years. He’s finally been vindicated.
Chapters

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6 chapters in this episode
Bobby Kennedy as Trump’s New HHS Director
00:00:00
1. Bobby Kennedy as Trump’s New HHS Director
Obesity and “Ultra Processed Foods”
00:04:04
2. Obesity and “Ultra Processed Foods”
Does Junk Food Cause Cancer and Alzheimer's?
00:20:00
3. Does Junk Food Cause Cancer and Alzheimer's?
Who’s Funding the Chronic Health Disease Epidemic?
00:36:40
4. Who’s Funding the Chronic Health Disease Epidemic?
Vaccines
00:49:10
5. Vaccines
Bobby Kennedy’s Plans
01:06:21
6. Bobby Kennedy’s Plans
Transcript

Tucker [00:00:00] So. Okay. Bobby Kennedy, your longtime friend, looks like he's going to be the HHS secretary. Assess. Did you think that was going to happen?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:00:10] In my lifetime, no, Tucker. We're in this historic moment where, you know, America is waking up to the fact that it's been the frog in boiling water, slowly getting sicker and sicker and sicker, bankrupting our country with almost $5 trillion in health care costs, 1 in 5 dollars of our economy, 80% of it or more is preventable. 99% of Medicare dollars are spent on preventable chronic disease. And never this conversation has happened in the political discourse until now.

Tucker [00:00:40] Which is a little crazy because you hear people talk about health care all the time.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:00:43] I only talk about health care as a way of like limiting entitlements or Medicare for.

Tucker [00:00:46] Exactly. Everybody is upset about health care on some level for some reason. But I haven't heard anybody until recently in the public sphere address like why it's so expensive.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:00:56] So the question I know I'm a functional medicine doctor. Yes. My focus is on why. What's the cause? What's the root cause? The cause? The cause? The cause.

Tucker [00:01:24] Shouldn't that be every doctor?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:01:25] Well, I think ideally, yes. And I'm not going to sit in my office years ago and I had a diabetic patient come in. I realize, you know, I can't cure diabetes in my office is cure on the farm. And the food we grow is cured in that food manufacturing process is cured by what people buy in. The grocery store is cured in the kitchen. And so we really have to look at the root causes of our food system, as it were. Why am I patients eating this food? Well, it's because the food system well, why do we have the food system we have? And that and the way in which it's operating that drives this chronic disease epidemic, which now is the biggest killer on the planet and is caused by food. Food has outpaced smoking as the number one killer in the world because 11 million people a year telling you it's the biggest coming in the states. Why is that happen is because.

Tucker [00:02:12] Our-

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:02:13] Our policies are driven in large part by industry, by the food industry, the egg and tree, chemical and seed companies. And those are the companies that are profiting. This is the biggest food, biggest industry in the world, over $16 trillion when you aggregate all the food companies, the fast food companies, the agricultural, chemical and sea companies. And this is enormous force that's driving our political process. And so a lot of the policies we have either by, you know, just kind of miss mis alignment of of our expectations and incentives or what happened or because of deliberate actions. And the food companies have actually driven a food system that's making us sick. And we have an illness industrial complex. We have a system that's driving disease and everybody is profiting from it. And no one's addressed that before. And this is why we have the system. So we're supporting commodity crops, wheat, corn and soy that get turned into ultra processed food, which is basically chemical science projects that our bodies are not used to, are not technically defined as food, and food is something that, you know, nourish a human being for its life and growth. These things don't. They do the opposite. They cause disease. And so we sort of slowly get in the system where we're we're enormous rise in chronic diseases over the last few years. You know, Tucker, when I graduate medical school, the cost for health care in America was half $1 trillion. Now it's almost ten times that in my lifetime when I graduated medical school, there was not a single state with an obesity rate over 15%. Now there's not one with one under 30 and most are over 40. 42% of Americans are obese. We've seen that in.

Tucker [00:03:42] All 50 states.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:03:43] I have to say. So, yeah. I mean, and you know, the highest diabetes mortality rates are in red states. 14 out of the 15 states with the highest diabetes mortality are red states. So it is affecting everybody in America. Doesn't matter whether you're red or blue or purple. Biology is bipartisan. You know, heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes. They don't know what who you voted for.

Tucker [00:04:04] You know, what radicalized me? What? So when I grew up, I'm a little younger than you, but, you know, roughly the same generation. Yeah, I there were no fat people or I grew up none. Not zero. An affluent area, but still no fat zero fat people. Yeah. And I always thought that it was like a failure of will. It was a kind of. Yeah. And it was. Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:04:22] Yes, 100%.

Tucker [00:04:23] And then I came just for my own experience to realize that if you just go about your life as the way Americans do, you know what's presented you right and you don't make any effort to to fight it. Yeah. If you just thought of all things being equal. Yeah, you're going to be like 70 pounds overweight. I'm going to have that happen to me. I was like, Wow, I'm going to be super fat. Yeah. And if I don't really struggle. Yeah. All the time. Yeah, that's weird.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:04:48] Well, it's it's we make the hard choices, the healthy choices and the easy choices. The unhealthy choices.

Tucker [00:04:54] So that will. That just. It made me think that actually people who are obese are not the the perpetrators, but the victims of this.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:05:03] Is really important. Tucker, you just hit on something that is so critical, which is that we have blame the victim for this problem. I have. It's your fault. You're fat. You're a glutton. You're lazy. Yes. And it's your fault. So just stop eating that crap and get healthy and you'll save America. That's bullshit.

Tucker [00:05:19] Okay, so and it kind of, that's what I usually feel better to hear that. But here's I think that's true.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:05:25] It's absolutely true. The nice and incredible study where they took a group of people and they fed them for two weeks a Whole Foods diet match for protein, fat, carbs, fiber. And they fed them an ultra processed diet and they saw what happened to their biology, the ultra processed food, which is what 60% of our diet is, 67% of kids diet. It's 73% of the food on our grocery store shelves. When you eat that food and this regulates your appetite, you eat 500 calories more a day in a week. That's 3500 calories. 3500 calories equals a pound a week in in a year. That's 52 pounds. So if Americans are eating this food, which is everywhere, which is ubiquitous, which we're marketed to death on, I mean, kids get targeted, $14 billion. The food industry spends on marketing junk food to kids. They see an average of 30,000 ads a year. You could talk to your kid breakfast, lunch and dinner and snacks about healthy food, and you're not going to be marketing. And this to me is criminal. Most countries have banned this, most companies. Don't allow this. And for example, Chili has gotten all the food marketing to kids off between six in the morning and ten at night. They have no more turning the tiger on Frosted Flakes, no more to can on fruit.

Tucker [00:06:35] Listing for Frosted Flakes or highly processed food.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:06:38] Of course they are not. I mean, I'm a serial killer, but tell the truth. I eat well. I am a cereal. I think cereal is the worst thing I ever did for humanity. It's basically 75% sugar. It's sugar for breakfast. It's dessert for breakfast. That's not what we should be eating. And so what's happened is there are ways in which we are making it so easy for people to make the wrong choice. And when you're exposed to these foods, you're going to gain weight, you're going to be dysregulated, you're going to destroy your microbiome, You can create inflammation. You've got a dry heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, autoimmune diseases. All these things are coming at explosive rates. And, you know, I've looked at the data, and even though we're spending more and more, we'd be fine. If we're spending $5 trillion and America was getting healthy would be five. We're spending $485 billion on drugs if they were working for. Tucker, the drugs that we're using for the disease we have are not the right treatment. The right treatment is changing what we're eating. And if you look at heart, diseases are 50%, cancers up 30%, 60% higher in those under 50. So we're seeing cancer rates rising in the young in rates we've never seen before, even.

Tucker [00:07:38] Though young people don't smoke Cigarets.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:07:40] No, it's the food. Colon cancer is the biggest thing.

Tucker [00:07:42] But it's just a little crazy. Again, this is the benefit of being in your 50s because you sort of remember what the the previous lies were. But like if we get rid of smoking, not endorsing smoking, the cancer is just going to cease to exist.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:07:55] Well, certain cancers like lung cancer and other cancers have have gone down. But when you see cancer rates increasing in children like by 30%, you see autoimmune diseases up 100%. You see mental health issues up 80%. You see autism up 1,000% and up 200%, diabetes up 400%, Alzheimer's up 150%. So we are screwing up here big time by not dealing with the root cause. And we're spending on all those conditions 2 or 300% more on drugs. So we're almost like, you know, we're increasing by 1 or 2 fold these diseases. And the drug use has gone up 2 or 3 fold and we're losing. So if it was working, great, but it's ain't working. And what's happening is that now most people don't realize it, but then one of every dollar of your taxpayer dollars goes to fund our health care costs in America. Of that $4.9 trillion, which was half a trillion when I graduated medical school, that's paid for by the taxpayer. And it's mostly preventable. We're probably adding 2 trillion to our federal deficit every year because of this. And also the the amount of money we're spending is 40% of all health care bill. So if you look at the total health care bill, when you add in everything the government, not just Medicare, but any health service, the military, our federal employees, all the programs that are the government is funding around health care. It's 40% of the total health care bill in America is paid for by the US government. And we have enormous power to change how those dollars are spent and how chronic address this country. And for the first time, take this on and not just try to find the pill for every ill, but to get to the root cause. And it's really from changing our food system from field to fork, and it's addressing the conflicts of interest in government. It's addressing the NIH funding, it's addressing what we pay for with, you know, food stamps is so many areas that we have policy.

Tucker [00:09:37] So before we get to that, let's just define a couple of terms. So when you say ultra processed foods, can you be precise?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:09:42] Yeah, for sure. So there's another classification and there's many different classifications for different kinds of food processing and there's pros and cons with each one. So there's no perfect system. But another classification was developed by scientists in Brazil. It's now their standard of care for their food programs and dietary guidelines. So, you know, non processed food is a tomato, an egg, an apple, you know, an almond. You know what that is? Right. But if you make almond butter, well, that's a little bit of minimally processed food. If you make a can of menos that's minimally processed. There's another level of processing that you use in cooking is a little more sort of processing of things. But it's not it's not made from anything other than real food ingredients. The fourth classification is ultra processed, and this is essentially where they take commodity crops which are funded with our federal dollars supporting farmers who are losing the game.

Tucker [00:10:28] That's corn, soybeans.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:10:29] Corn, soybean and wheat. And by the way, the farmers are suffering so bad. You know, Tucker, there's there's a 350% higher rate of suicide in farmers than there are in the rest of the population. There's $435 billion of farmer debt that they carry to support us. And those and they're stuck between the crop insurance. The government's playing the banks which are providing them, you know, the loans and the agrochemical and seed companies that are providing the fertilizer, the seeds and the chemicals that they're spraying on the farm. And they can't they can't get out of that toxic loop. And there they're struggling. Those real communities are struggling so bad and that can be fixed. And so when you look at. When I lost my train. I was like, so, so, so processed.

Tucker [00:11:11] That's been changed. Yes. Yes. So.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:11:13] So it happens. What happens is they run these commodity crops that the government is busy supporting them. Funding of wheat, corn and soy. But you're not eating wheat berries or whole grain. You're not eating true whole soybeans. You're not eating just corn on the cob. These are deconstructed, in fact, in factories, in science, basically, science labs into their molecular components are torn apart and rebuilt into these chemically extruded food like substances of all colors, sizes and shapes that are not, by definition, food. If you look up the Webster's dictionary definition of food, it's not actually technically food. And so what most Americans are eating is stuff that actually is harmful. It's causing disease and killing people. It's literally, think about it, the equivalent of two Holocausts a year are caused by the food we're eating according to.

Tucker [00:11:58] How Bernoulli studies see it. You said 70% of our grocery store offerings are ultra processed.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:12:03] You know, the labeling food labeling is a big issue, and it's one of our key initiatives. I think if we if we move forward and this administration has to be addressed, people need informed consent. I mean, empower the right information. They need to know what they're eating, whether it's good or bad for them. And now you need to be a scientist to read the nutrition label or read the ingredients to know what it means. So, right.

Tucker [00:12:20] So I avoid the Vanilla wafers. That's I guess, you know.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:12:23] If you look at if you look at the ingredient list, it should be stuff, you know, which is, say, tomatoes or salt.

Tucker [00:12:28] Or. So that's the measure.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:12:29] If you see stuff, forget beauty latest hydroxide Halloween, probably not something you want to be eating. And many of these chemicals that we use in America are outlawed in other countries, in Europe and Singapore and many other countries. These compounds that have been validated to show that how harmful they are, human beings have been removed from the marketplace, and we should follow those standards here. So labeling is really key and we're going to work on that. But right now, if you're if you're just trying to figure it out, look at the ingredient list. If there's stuff there that you wouldn't have on your kitchen counter or you wouldn't have in your pantry, don't eat it if it says maltodextrin, where's your mouth? Objection. Jar in your spice jar. Where's your beauty? Lead hydroxy tar you and you sprinkle that on your salad.

Tucker [00:13:08] No, you should. If you don't understand it, don't eat it.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:13:10] Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, things can have a long list of ingredients. You Indian foods. They have lots of spices. That's fine. That's real food. But if it's. If it's something that is is in Latin that you don't understand, can't pronounce, but or it has a health claim on the label, it's probably not good for you. I mean, like Lay's potato chips now says they're gluten free. I mean, that's ridiculous, right? It's gluten free. It's healthy. No, it's not. You know.

Tucker [00:13:31] Gluten free because there's no wheat in that, of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:13:34] But it's Coca-Cola's gluten free. So like my my role as an as a health claim on label, don't eat it.

Tucker [00:13:39] If there's a health claim happens.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:13:40] Is if it's low fat, high fiber, low cholesterol. You know you know if it's no sugar, if it's, you know, gluten free, it's hiding something. They're hiding something. Right. It's just food. I mean, you know, tomato doesn't say gluten free on it. Right? It just a tomato.

Tucker [00:13:57] So that I mean, that limits your options.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:13:59] Well, you know what?

Tucker [00:14:00] You're going to lose weight just from you know, it's interesting.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:14:02] You know, it's amazing. I had this view that it was people's fault. They were fat. And I went down this part of this movie called Fed Up that I did with Katie Couric and Larry David about ten years ago. We went to South Carolina and I went to Easley, South Carolina, one of the one of the poorest areas in America, one of the worst food deserts in America. There's something called the Retail Environment Food Index. How many fast food and junk food and bodegas there are compared to grocery stores? They're like 10 to 1. And this family of five lived in a trailer. They were on disability and food stamps and they wanted to get healthy. And I asked them why they want to get healthy because I'm like, why do you wanna be in this movie? This Well, my dad's 42. He has type two diabetes from the 58. He has kidney failure. He's on dialysis. He's going to die unless he loses 40 pounds. And we can't claim to lose 40 pounds. We don't know what to do. The mother was well over 150 pounds overweight. The son was, you know, 16 years old, almost diabetic, 50% body fat. It should be 10 to 20%. I went, I said, Brad, and give me a lecture about what to do and what to eat. I said, Let's go to Europe. Let's go to your house. Let's go, let's go shopping. Get some simple foods that are inexpensive, that are whole foods that are healthy to eat. So we made turkey chili. This was from good, good food on a tight budget. A guy from the Environmental Working Group, I said, here's turkey chili, here's how to roast sweet potatoes. Your sacrifice for us. Here's how to make a salad from not just iceberg lettuce, but some real what is here's olive oil being addressed.

Tucker [00:15:25] Iceberg is not real lettuce.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:15:26] It's pretty pretty pretty much nutritionally vapid food that we're not really. Yeah I mean I mean it's fine either this is not fully dense with phytochemicals and nutrients, you know, And so, so we basically showed them and I went through their cupboards, everything in their cupboard. They had low fat this and cool what they thought was healthy because they said no trans fats. But the FDA, with inclusion with the food industry, allowed food to say no trans fats and have less than half a gram per serving. So basically they're just duping the American public. And and we need clear transparency and information. So they didn't know what they were eating and everything was frozen or packaged or canned or boxed. They never cooked anything. They didn't have cutting boards. They have knives. They were cooking in their kitchen. And so we made turkey chili. We made this whole meal. We sat down and ate it and it was so delicious. And the same goes, Dr. Hyman, do you like this, your family? Every now and then? Yeah, I do. And it wasn't hard. It wasn't difficult. It didn't take too much time. And I said, listen, you know, I don't know if you can do this, but here, here's this guy to hurry. Well, for less, here's here's my cookbook on on how to actually eat healthy and try it. And I on the plane I sent them cutting boards and knives because they didn't they didn't have anything the mirror cutting like with a butter knife, trying to cut sweet potatoes. It was really glass hard hard, stupid house.

Tucker [00:16:40] They're not utensils.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:16:40] And there's nothing not for cooking. Right. And so the first week the mother texting back to Mark we lost 18 pounds and like amazing and a year they lost over 20 pounds. The family the father was 45 got new kidney. The mother lost 100 plus pounds, the same as 50. But he went to work at Bojangles. Can gain it back. You said it was like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar. And. And then. And then he gained all the way back and that. And then he called me first. He said, Mark, can you help me? I'm saying, yeah. He said, Dr. Hyman. But you know. Yeah. I said, Yeah. And so I coached him and got him last 132 pounds and he's the first kid in his family to go to college. He wrote me a letter. He said, Mark, can you can you, can you write me a letter recommendation for medical school? And now he's a doctor. So and he now he lost all that weight. So so what that taught me was that it's really about about education, about information, about skills. You know, I don't know this story, but. But in the.

Tucker [00:17:30] Paper a whole lot. Holland There's yes, but you can know the right path and not take it. There's a compulsion attached to certain kinds of food, 100%.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:17:39] And this is well documented.

Tucker [00:17:41] It is well-done.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:17:42] Well documented studies are published. There was a large study published that reviewing all the literature on food addiction, and there's something called the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is questions you can you can look it up online. You just ask to answer the questions. And it tells you if you're a food addict, just the way you can do a questionnaire to tell if you're an alcoholic is 14% of the adult population are alcoholics. 14% of people are food addicted and 12% of children are food addicted. By by the scientific definition of food addiction, not not just, yeah, this is addictive, but actually biologically addictive. Measuring, measuring the things you need to measure to determine addiction. And so if that's true, you know, you say compulsion, but it's really a hijack of our biochemistry. So the food industry is designed foods to hijack their biology. There's a book written by Michael Moss called Salt Sugar, in fact, where he interviewed 300 food industry executives and whistleblowers and scientists. And basically they said, look, we have taste institutes where we hire craving experts. These are on their own terms to create the bliss point of food, which is the maximum lighting up of your brain. And and then we go for targeting marketing to heavy users. So they're not going to get me to drink a can of coke, but they're going to get someone who's already having coke to try to drink a two liter bottle and they know how to do that. And so so the the the the facts of these foods are so harmful on us. And they know they know what they're doing and they actually design them to be this way. I mean, the tobacco companies bought a lot of the food companies back in the 70s, RJR Nabisco, Philip Morris, Kraft, and they they built they built this whole industry of ultra processed food. There's now 600,000 ultra processed food products. 80% of them are full of sugar. And they're the things that are driving most of the things that are wrong with America. If you look at food, it's the nexus for everything. One, we see chronic disease, all the things we mention heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's are immune diseases. I mean, just digestive disease, all the things depression, mental health that was linked to ultra processed food. There's really well-documented science on this that these foods cause depression, anxiety. So we have all these these these foods that are being causing disease. Then we have the economic burden, which we talked about, have almost $5 trillion. We have the effect on national security because 77% of military recruits are rejected because they're unfit to fight. So we have a national security crisis and 72% more evacuations or for obesity compared to it for injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think about that. You know, in a war, more more soldiers were evacuated because of obesity than because of war entries. Academic performance were 30th. Something in the world in math and reading. We are we are we're kids are suffering. Our kids are are on A.D.D. medication.

Tucker [00:20:17] So food makes you dumber. Certain kinds of.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:20:19] Hundred percent makes you cognitive impaired behavioral issues. I mean, there was one study, Tucker, where they where they took.

Tucker [00:20:24] That as true.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:20:25] Kids in juvenile detention centers and they gave them healthy food, swapped it out for the junk food, 97% reduction in behavioral issues and violence, 75% reduction in restraints and 100% reduction in suicides, which is the third leading cause of death in teenage boys. This is this is documented science. This is not something I'm making up. And it's I wrote in my book Food Fix, which is really how to save our health, our economy, our communities and our planet, one bite at a time. And it talks about the nexus of all these issues. And then we and then we have the effect on on our on our soil. We've lost so much soil. Carbon, soil has to be healthy to grow a healthy plant. And healthy plant is what creates healthy humans. And the nutrients in plants have gone down by 50%. So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's less as precious than it was 50 years ago.

Tucker [00:21:08] She got it twice as much, right? Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:21:11] Yeah, you do that. I mean, it's so and then, you know, we have also the effect on biodiversity because of all the chemicals are using, we have 75% less pollinators. No pollinators. You know, it's hard to hard to have agriculture. We have a 50% loss in bird species from we're growing food. We have destruction of our waterways because we use fertilizer that runs off into the rivers and lakes and streams and causes beautification, which basically grows the algae because of their extra fertilizer. And then it sucks all the oxygen out of the water and all fish die. There's dead zones the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico. There's 400 around the planet that feed half a billion people. So this is often the fertilizers, which one uses actually 2% of the world's global energy to make fertilizer. But you don't need to do that if you use regenerative agriculture, which is what actually one of the things that I think this new administration should focus on, which is how. How do you fix the farming? Because you've got to start at the field to fix food. And, you know, I think Wendell Berry said it beautifully. He's a poet and a and a farmer's man. Amazing man, He said he said, we have a health system that pays no attention to food and a food system that pays no attention to health. We need to fix that.

Tucker [00:22:12] So you've referred a couple of times to the connection between what we eat and cancer rates. Can you be a lot more?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:22:19] Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. So the data is really clear.

Tucker [00:22:21] To scare people into eating better is a good way to do.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:22:24] What you know, cancer is on the rise. And, you know, we got.

Tucker [00:22:28] Can't get over that. I thought we're going to defeat it with our war on cancer.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:22:30] Well, that was Nixon. He wanted to. But the problem is we're we're barking up the wrong tree. If you look that there's there's there's a real clear data on on two drivers of cancer. One is food and particularly sugar and starch into two is environmental toxins. It's carcinogens which are ubiquitous. We are exposed to toxins everywhere. And we can reduce those. But. The food part is really interesting because when you look at the growth of cancer cells, they feed on sugar. There's a whole metabolic theory of cancer where if you use a ketogenic diet and this is work being done in Columbia, I said Mukherjee and others ketogenic diet as a treatment for cancer to actually shut down the cancer cells because they can only feed on sugar. We are like a hybrid engine. We can go electric or we can go gas, we can go carbs, we can go fat cancer only go sugar. So you start the sugar and you kill the cancer. So the amount of sugar and fiber eating is about 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and 133 pounds flour. That's a lot. That's almost three quarters of a day of sugar and flour for every American. And what that does is it fuels the cancer cells. And so pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer, prostate cancer, even some lung cancers and this is documented, go up with some resistance, go up with obesity and go up with diabetes and metabolic dysfunction. 93% of Americans, Tucker, are metabolically broken. This is this is extraordinary from the American Journal of Cardiology. And what this means is that we're somewhere on the degree what I call diabetes city obesity is pre-diabetes to type two diabetes. And if we cut off it pre-diabetes. But that's, you know, 1 in 2 Americans has pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. That's bad enough. 38% of teenage boys. I mean, when I graduate medical school, there was no type two diabetes. There was no type one diabetes. It was juvenile diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease ground on to diabetes, which is a food borne disease. And so now we've changed the names to protect the guilty. And so now we see kids. Really? Yeah.

Tucker [00:24:30] Three the kid, the names are changed. I mean, four to ask the cause of type. I mean. Yeah, I mean.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:24:35] Because kids are getting it. So how do we call juvenile diabetes if kids are getting type two diabetes as young as 2 or 3 years old, it's not their fault they're being fed, you know, soda. And I once was working in an urgent care in California in an underserved community. And this woman comes in with back pain. She's got a baby in a baby carriage. He's drinking this brown liquid. And I'm like, what does a seven months old man? What is that? Says Coca Cola. I'm like, Why, baby? Go, go. So he likes it. I mean, this is what's happening. And so we're turning our whole society into this metabolically broken society. And and this is the driver of all the disease we're seeing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. They're calling Alzheimer's Type three diabetes because of how it's connected to sugar and it's resistance. You know, I co-founded a company called Function Health, which allows people to get insights into their own biology. And what we're finding, Tucker, is that is that 96% of the people we're testing have metabolic dysfunction.

Tucker [00:25:27] 96.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:25:27] 96. Yeah.

Tucker [00:25:28] So how do you get insight into your own biology? What is so.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:25:31] So basically, you know, the health care system is broken. And I believe that, you know, I could work for another 50 years and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe with this new administration will leapfrog and things will change, which I'm very hopeful for. But I created a company with a number of other co-founders called Function Health that allows you easy access to your own blood test. It is simple five minutes, a sign that 50 minutes to go into a quest lab to get your labs and you get over 110 biomarkers or lab tests. It gives you insight into everything that's going on in your body that you're not being checked for at your regular doctor's office. You get five times more diagnostics. You look at your hormones, your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, your nutritional health, I mean your immune health. We've seen we've seen 46% of Americans have some degree of autoimmunity, which is crazy. It's one of the biggest cost drivers, whether it's thyroid autoimmunity or other autoimmune or your immunity. We're seeing 67% have nutritional deficiencies. And these are the lab reference ranges that are. Quest These are not these are not what I would think are the optimal. So vitamin D, for example, should be over 50, 45, 50. The reference range is 30. But still, we've got a huge amount of people deficient at that level. And when you're under 30, your risk of getting sick and dying of Covid is 70% higher. If your vitamin D is over 50, your risk of death is zero compared to looking at.

Tucker [00:26:44] A dumb question.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:26:45] No dumb question.

Tucker [00:26:46] So a basic question. So you get blood. Your company does this. Yeah, maybe others do it, but you get a blood test. Yeah. You get all these markers, all these measurements of what's in your blood. How do you know what they mean? Well, that's.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:26:58] A great question. So we really, you know, use the technology to help us build a database of the most up to date scientific information informed by all the scientific literature. And you have a clear description of what every biomarker means. So if you're insulin or blood sugar or your cholesterol particles are abnormal or you have positive autoimmune antibodies, we tell you what it means, why it happens, what the root causes are not necessary, just what traditional medicine thinks, but what the new science thinks around root causes. We give you all the self-care things you can do yourself to optimize your health so you can upgrade your biology with the insights from scientific literature, from knowledge experts. We've brought in the top scientists and doctors to help inform the content. So it's like having a thousand doctors in your pocket. Remember, the iPod was a thousand songs in your pocket is a thousand doctors in your pocket and it gives you the ability to do self-care. And like I said, diabetes isn't cured in the doctor's office. Here in the kitchen. And that's really what most chronic diseases can be fixed. And I see this over and over. I've been doing it for 30 years. I've written almost 20 books. And what I see is when people follow the guidance without having to go to a health care system, they can correct these things and they can fix these things. Really? Yes. It's quite amazing, Tucker.

Tucker [00:28:09] And by these things, diabetes, diabetes.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:28:11] Reversible heart disease, reversible Alzheimer's. Now, Richard Isaacson has done amazing work showing how we can reverse Alzheimer's using aggressive lifestyle interventions. But what. Yes, this is this is incredible data.

Tucker [00:28:24] Well, I just want to speak up as a non doctor. We know for a fact that Alzheimer's is incurable. Nothing can make it better.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:28:29] Well, that's actually not true.

Tucker [00:28:31] I know, but I've been told that a lot. Of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:28:33] Of course. Because, you know, we've spent this is a great example. We've spent about $2 billion in over 400 studies trying to find drugs for Alzheimer's, and nothing has worked. The drugs that are approved are extremely expensive, have marginal benefit, a lot of side effects and cost a huge amount of money and may delay your entry into a nursing home by 2 or 3 months. That's a win. That's not very good. Now, there's a couple of trials that have been done. The finger trial out in Europe and the pointer trial, which is merging the sure aggressive lifestyle intervention, diet, exercise, managing stress, sleep, optimizing all your risk factors was able to not just slow the progression of Alzheimer's and dementia, but to reverse it. This is published data. This is not my opinion. Richard Isaacson also has published this data.

Tucker [00:29:15] And so by.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:29:16] Now, using biomarkers and we can actually test with function suitably adding biomarkers for Alzheimer's. So now there's blood tests for for for Alzheimer's. So you have to wait until you forget your keys. And also for cancer, you're asking about cancer. We do a multi cancer rate.

Tucker [00:29:29] At what age is Alzheimer's detectable in blood?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:29:32] That's a great question. So on imaging, which is very expensive and difficult in.

Tucker [00:29:36] Brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:29:37] Imaging, brain imaging, you can see the changes up to 30 years before you get Alzheimer's as a symptom. With blood tests, it's not as as far as that. We're still figuring out, you know, what what those times are. But you can see start these proteins start to develop in the blood that that indicate there's something happening and you can then intervene early. And the thing about Alzheimer's is, is that if you intervene early, you can have an incredible benefit to help slow the progression and delay it and actually reverse it. And I've seen this in my patients. I wrote a book about this, The ultra My Solution 15 years ago. The British has written a book called The World's End of Alzheimer's. And documenting that we had to get to the root causes.

Tucker [00:30:11] And age on this.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:30:13] No, they're not. And this is what drives me.

Tucker [00:30:15] I don't know.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:30:15] So I'm so I'm saying we spent so much money. We've gotten really no results.

Tucker [00:30:19] I don't think you're a crackpot. But if I mean, here you are sitting on camera saying, Alzheimer's is reversible. Yeah. That talk about a headline. Why isn't that in The New York Times?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:30:28] Good freaking question.

Tucker [00:30:29] I'm serious, though.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:30:30] Frickin question.

Tucker [00:30:31] So either you're crazy or they're dishonest.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:30:33] Yeah, I think I think it's it's it's a it's a medical paradigm shift. You I think as most most doctors are in a world is flat world. They don't understand that the world is round. We've shifted a paradigm scientifically from a disease based diagnostic system to understanding the body as an integrated ecosystem. And so the work of people like Leroy Hood from the Institute for Systems Biology, his final project is mapping out how our understanding of disease is completely wrong. It's based on labeling people according to symptoms and where it is in their body rather than on mechanisms and causes. So I wrote a book called Young Forever, which is about longevity. We talked about, I think last time I was on your show and and in the book I talk about the scientists who come up with this model of what are the root causes of aging, because we think aging is just it's going to happen inevitable. We're going to get sick, we're going to get older, are going to get frail. We're going to get weak. And they've identified the underlying biology behind that. So if we cured heart disease and cancer from the face of planet, we might extend life 5 to 7 years. You can get the same thing with meaning and purpose or playing tennis. But if you actually dealt with the hallmarks of aging, the things that really go wrong, inflammation, mitochondrial injury and nutrition, you can act and your microbiome, all the things that underlie disease, you could extend life by 30 or 40 years, which means living to 120, which is a crazy notion, right? So we now understand biology in a very different way than we did before, and it hasn't translated into the clinic. And so why why I co-founded Function Health with my co-founders was to help accelerate this gap to kind of leapfrog over this ossified system. But we need to change.

Tucker [00:32:09] It's just kind of crazy what you're say if you take three steps back, events like the whole point in medicine, I presumed, was to extend and improve life. Yes, right. To keep you from. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:32:19] Doctors are.

Tucker [00:32:19] Healthier. You happier. And so if there is science that shows that that's possible and everyone's ignoring it, then I'm trying not to use profanity. But like, what is that?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:32:30] Yeah, well, it's a good question because we have a we have a illness medical industrial food complex that profits off of people being sick.

Tucker [00:32:38] So you write a book saying or someone else, several doctors write books saying, I can show that Alzheimer's is reversible. And what is every other doctor in America? They just don't read the book. They haven't heard of it like. What they.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:32:51] Just it's.

Tucker [00:32:51] Like that's kind of a provocative thesis because I think of Alzheimer's is like Aids in 1986, like it's the worst, it's big, and there's nothing you can do about.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:32:58] No, If you.

Tucker [00:32:59] Remember that with.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:33:00] Aids 100%, it's scary as hell and the.

Tucker [00:33:02] Scary.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:33:02] As hell. Yeah. And and I can tell you that is is is is is not my opinion. You know, as a Cleveland clinic, I work with Marlon Sabar. When he was there, he was the head of the Dementia Research Center. He understood this. He understood these mechanisms, these biology. The science is there, but there's no funding for it because what are we talking about? Tucker? We're talking about providing lifestyle interventions that they're intensive, that people need support. They need to change their diet. They need to exercise, they need to optimize their sleep. They need to manage stress. Then you take the right nutritional supplements. They need to modify their risk factors aggressively. This requires a very different reimbursement system. We don't have evidence based medicine, Tucker. We have reimbursement based medicine. Doctors do what they get paid to do, not what the right thing is. The right treatment for diabetes is not are drugs or ozempic The right treatment is diet. You know.

Tucker [00:33:49] So it sounds like doctors aren't really in control.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:33:51] I mean, they're doing the best they can, you know, but they're.

Tucker [00:33:54] Responding to forces bigger than themselves. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:33:57] Medical education is a great example. Like, you know, doctors graduating, you know, in their 50s or 40s. We're dealing with infectious disease in acute care medicine and we have the best acute care medicine system in the world bar none if we have an acute infection, if you have Sepsis Avenue, ICU, you're in a car crash. Your car crash, damn right I'm going to hospital. But that system doesn't work for chronic illness and that's what we're facing now. And so the 80% of the conditions that doctors are seeing are chronic diseases for which drugs are not the right therapy. Most of the time they can be helpful as adjuncts. But the fundamental drivers of our chronic disease epidemic is the food we're eating and also environmental toxins that are adding to that. And when you add those two things together, it explains most of the chronic disease epidemic.

Tucker [00:34:40] It's just I mean, a lot of smart people, you included, you're definitely one of the earliest but are saying varieties of what you're saying now. So I mean, it was, you know, 30 years ago or so that the Congress hauled the heads of the tobacco companies, Reynolds and Philip Morris and Lorillard and all. It humiliated them on camera. And like you knew you were hurting people. You did it anyway, right? Is that going to happen in Biscoe anytime soon? I mean.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:35:03] There are there are class action lawsuits that are being now raised around these companies to look at calling them accountable for what they're doing. And they know and there's been FOIA requests and information requested. I actually wrote about in my book that show their nefarious behavior, for example, targeting minorities and targeting poor income and lower income people to focus on buying more junk food.

Tucker [00:35:25] Well, the food stamp program is a perfect example of that.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:35:28] Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy talking when you think about it. You know, when the American taxpayer is paying through the nose for everything all the way along, the companies are privatizing profits and we're socializing the costs. So so we basically fund the growth of commodity crops with $20 billion of subsidies in crop insurance for corn, wheat and soy for the farmers, which puts them in a really tight bind because they can't change their system without support changing to a more region of system that they're going to make more money, they're going to grow better food, they're going to have, you know, better resuscitation of their rural economies, you know, and not conflict with suicide of the rate they're doing. We pay for that and then we pay for those foods for our SNAP programs. So we have about 125 billion in SNAP, which is our food stamp program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. But there's no end in there. There's just food security, which means calories. So they break when you when you get your e, b t benefits in the beginning of the month that these food companies don't advertise in the bodegas. They get your two liter bottle of Coke with your EBA and they put these giant ads in there and they know exactly when they're getting their cards. So we we specially fund. So you.

Tucker [00:36:30] Can buy Coca.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:36:31] Cola. 75% of the food bought on SNAP is is junk food, 10% is soda. So you think about $12 billion and soda, the Americans paying.

Tucker [00:36:40] Why would soda be federal? Why would if we're giving out nutritional assistance to the poor, why would we pay for soda?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:36:47] What what an obvious question, Tucker.

Tucker [00:36:50] Yeah, well, that's just crazy.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:36:51] It's crazy. It's crazy.

Tucker [00:36:52] And we know we want it to hurt the poor. You do that. I mean, we.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:36:55] Know beyond a doubt. And, you know, we can talk about ultra processed food is argument system that way in this way. But the food industry will say, it's we're going to take away people's choice. We're going to take away convenience, we're going to take away affordability, we're going to make food less safe. And we don't know ultra processed food. These are their talking points. It's not all it's all about calories and not moderation. So you can have, you know, soda as part of your diet. As long as you don't exceed your calories, it's basically your fault that you're fat. So you fix it. That's the messaging, right? It's the messaging from every food industry. Get a message from every professional association, message from the medical sort of.

Tucker [00:37:27] But that doesn't something that we have to pay for it. Well, okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:37:30] Well, that's it. So we pay it. We pay for probably 30 billion or more servings of soda for the poor every year. And then we pay.

Tucker [00:37:37] For most payers are sending all this money. Coca Cola.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:37:40] The biggest profit center in America for Coca-Cola, is 20% of their profits is SAP food stamps. Walmart gets. I don't know. So tell me like. 40 billion of that a food stamp bill. I mean, it's crazy. And and we pay we pay.

Tucker [00:37:56] I mean those numbers real.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:37:58] Yeah. I can get you I can get to the Wal mart numbers but yeah, it's it's really high. And then we and then we we have.

Tucker [00:38:04] That's shocking.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:38:05] To pay for Medicare Medicaid and the back end when people get sick from those foods and then we pay all the other.

Tucker [00:38:11] For the Coca Cola and the SMP.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:38:13] Yeah I mean listen the price we pay, the chop.

Tucker [00:38:14] Tarts and the insulin.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:38:15] I mean, that's the price you pay at the checkout counter is not the true cost of food, the true cost of food. The Rockefeller Foundation report is for every dollar spent on food, there's three of dollars in collateral damage. Yeah. To health.

Tucker [00:38:29] Pay for the crack and the rehab.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:38:30] Yeah, exactly. It's totally not.

Tucker [00:38:32] For the hookers. And we can fix this.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:38:34] You know, we could fix that. We could fix this. And you're Andy Harris. You know who's. Who's a congressman. Wanted to do a simple pilot study. Just a pilot study to see what would happen if we eliminated soda from food stamp benefits in a couple of locations. Just to just to monitor the impact on the health of those people. And and he couldn't get it through as a as a pilot not to change the entire U.S. policy just as a pilot study. So imagine how anti-science this is. Is this this is truly anti-science.

Tucker [00:39:03] It's just I really believe in naming and shaming. It works. Yeah. Just call people out, you know, bring some sunlight in and let them defend it.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:39:10] Exactly.

Tucker [00:39:10] So I'd love to know who's behind that. And by the way, I'm not saying you should be allowed to buy Coca-Cola. I'm saying I don't want to pay for it. Right. Yeah. That's fair, isn't it?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:39:18] 100%. I mean, the government of the United States should not be funding the the chronic disease epidemic, which they currently are. They are. They are. They're either by policies they were put in, you know, that were innocent or by malice.

Tucker [00:39:32] But it's so perfect. It's like when I learned that we were funding ISIS in Syria, I was like, that's kind of perfect, actually. Like, both sides are taking American money.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:39:42] Yeah, yeah, it's kind of crazy. But we have the ability to change that. For example, which which is women, Infants and Children's Food Program is based on only allowing people to buy food that's going to be healthy for the mother and child. Why not apply that to Wick? You know, why not school standards being changed so that actually kids can have healthy food?

Tucker [00:40:00] I know that that I think Wick is like the center of profit for the formula makers, isn't it?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:40:05] Yeah, well that's true. That's another problem. But yeah, for example Chili, the allied formula marketing for kids, they allowed that advertising to kids. They got rid of all the junk food in school they put in front of back.

Tucker [00:40:15] Why would the federal tax payers, me included, you included, be paying for baby formula? Why would we be encouraging formula over breast milk?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:40:22] Well, it's a huge industry. I mean, it's all it's really it's you know, there's a group from the W.H.O. has has put together some initial papers and it's coming out the report next year about the commercial determinants of health, which is how multinational and transnational corporations in food and egg and alcohol, tobacco are essentially driving across this epidemic and they're privatizing the profits, subverting public health and socializing the costs. And the governments are the ones who are struggling with this. And so so there are many other kinds of.

Tucker [00:40:51] Governments are paying for it.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:40:52] Their governments are paying for it. And and you look at the healthiest countries, they're the ones like Japan and Singapore and Spain and Italy. They actually have policies that are protecting their citizens, that are educated about food, that are not allowing the same.

Tucker [00:41:02] How about just don't pay for it? I mean, let's we could start there in it does raise like some pretty interesting questions. The smartest thing I've heard this year I think it's a common phrase now is that the point of the system is its outcome. So if you're wondering about motive, look at what the system produces. And that describes the motive. Yeah, right. We don't have to guess like so if governments are making their citizens more unhealthy. Yeah, I, I think we can assume that they want that outcome.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:41:30] No they don't. They don't they. This has been the frog in boiling water slowly that's hit them so fast because. yeah, bring, bring all these fast food companies, bring all these American companies in to help us with our food nutrition. Let's get fast food everywhere. It's kind of like kind of the Americanization of the world, right? We basically created the worst that in the planet and exported to every country in the world.

Tucker [00:41:51] I have no.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:41:51] And we see now, even in the developing world, there's what they call the double the they call the double burden of disease, chronic disease and infectious disease. So they're dying of diabetes and tuberculosis and dying of diabetes and malaria.

Tucker [00:42:03] I hate to say it, but I've traveled to a lot of countries this year, and the best food I had in any country was in a country under such severe U.S. sanctions that no U.S. companies go you go stuff, right? I'm not going to name the country, but they're.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:42:14] Saying.

Tucker [00:42:14] Yeah, don't be too controversial. Yeah. And it makes me controversial. Tucker Well, it makes me sick. I mean, I'm you.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:42:20] Always call her in.

Tucker [00:42:20] The line. I think of myself as as a truly a loyal American. I'm calling on America. I'm never leaving. But to go to a country whose food is amazing, best I've ever had in my whole life.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:42:29] Yeah, yeah.

Tucker [00:42:30] Yeah. And it also happens that country has no American food of any kind because it's not allowed. Yeah, maybe there's a connection.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:42:37] Maybe there's a connection. Yeah. So. Exactly. And so. So these, these, these countries that have been unwittingly participating in what they thought was growth in economic development. But what it's done is sick in their populations. And so now they're. All of these countries are standing up like the UK just banned advertising of junk food. France has clear labeling on their front of package to make it really clear what you're eating. You know, Chile and South America, you go there and there's been just warning signs on the front of labels. They've done all these policies that have actually been studied and worked. So we have we have cover in the United States. Why should we be allowing things in the United States so we don't these other countries have determined our currency.

Tucker [00:43:12] Is paying for. Let's just stop paying for it. You know, people are into some weird self-destructive behavior. I'm not interested in rooting it out or showing up at your house, making sure you absolutely.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:43:21] No, no, no.

Tucker [00:43:22] People should definitely don't want to pay for it. We should I have to pay people to be.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:43:25] Informed and we should be not having to pay for it. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, government procurement, $166 billion the government spends on food for a military, for correctional facility, for schools, for everything. When you look at the fat belt, you know how much that could change the food system. If we we said based on these set of nutritional principles, which are, I think, well-accepted in the nutritional science community of being what is food. If we just followed that and didn't pay for all the junk food and the ultra processed food, we just took it out. It would change the food system in America because the industry would change. If you take $166 billion out of the food economy and say we're only buying healthy food from farmers to produce healthy food, it's going to change everything from field to fork. These are simple things that the government can do That's easy.

Tucker [00:44:09] And because they control it. So people I know I've known a lot of people go to prison more now than ever and they get fat in prison. A lot of them.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:44:17] Yeah.

Tucker [00:44:17] Is that I assume that's because the food is.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:44:19] Of course. I mean, in prisons. They did another study I mentioned about the juvenile detention centers. They swapped out prisoners food for healthy food, and they found there was a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons and an 80% reduction if they added a multivitamin. So, there's so much nutritional deficiencies. And in countries like Japan, they put people on a super healthy diet in prison and all their violent behavior goes down. Pretty amazing. Really. Yeah. It's really interesting how their diet totally different from like a macrobiotic, like very kind of like healthy diet that gets them completely reset. And we know we know the mental health crisis also.

Tucker [00:44:50] Why don't we do that since it's a captive population?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:44:53] We should we can. I mean, the problem is this is a very I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I'm telling you, there is a very loose organization of industries that are working together to keep the system status quo. They don't want changes in our agricultural subsidies. They don't want changes in farming practices. They don't want changes in how we fund SNAP. They don't want changes in how we reimburse health care. They don't want any changes in our food labeling. They don't want changes in ingredients that are in our food. This you know, this is this is stuff that's so entrenched. It's it's essential for their for their profits and their success. I mean.

Tucker [00:45:28] We resistance, if you think about it, have been used as because it is captive the population of a prison. They've been used as you know, testing populations for celebrities and music scenes and LCD and all kinds of horrible shit. And you feel so sorry for the many who had to endure that. Why not use prison?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:45:45] I'm not sure the LSD was bad for them, but.

Tucker [00:45:49] The Whitey Bulger was. That was at Alcatraz when Bulger, the head of the Winter Hill gang in Boston, a mass murderer. And he got dosed really hard with LSD at Alcatraz in the early 60s. Yeah. And wound up effectively a serial killer. And his brother didn't wound up the most powerful politician in Massachusetts.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:08] That's incredible.

Tucker [00:46:09] So I'm just sick of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:10] You know, maybe. Wait, maybe forget them.

Tucker [00:46:12] But anyway, here's the point. Why not use prisons as a kind of federal prisons as a national test? Yeah. For the outcome of the diet.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:21] You're suggesting you could do that? I mean, you could. I mean, there were studies that were done in mental institutions years ago, but there's ethics. And so the information yeah, not.

Tucker [00:46:29] Feeding people Oreos is an ethical like.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think you're right, Tucker. I mean the adult considerations are really around informed consent medicine.

Tucker [00:46:39] We gave them syphilis.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:41] It's okay now there's rules about that.

Tucker [00:46:43] And I'm just saying, like.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:45] But we could, we could we could have get informed consent.

Tucker [00:46:47] We could pay them $0.15 an hour to work. I mean, they're prisoners. They can vote. They can own firearms. They can't.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:52] Yeah, yeah.

Tucker [00:46:53] No, see, their wives, like, everything about it is horrible. Why? Why wouldn't you use the opportunity to improve their health?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:46:58] I agree. And I think we need to add every sector of society where the government has a hand. School lunches, the military, all our federal food programs. These are easy interventions. But. But the food industry blocks it by huge lobbying efforts in Washington. You know, in my nonprofit Food Fix campaign, which is really about educating and advocating for policy change to really improve the health of Americans. We met with over 150 senators and congressmen, both sides of the aisle, and everybody seems to get this issue and they're not hearing about it, and they're starting to hear about it because people like me are talking about it. But I'm just one guy of a little nonprofit. I'm not funded by industry. I don't have any, like conflicts of interest. And I'm just trying to, you know.

Tucker [00:47:36] What are the big lobbies? Everyone says the big food lobby. What companies?

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:47:40] I mean, you've got the American Beverage Association, you've got, you know, all the, you know, the pharmaceutical lobby groups, you've got all the agg lobby groups. I mean, collectively, they're the biggest group of lobbyists in Washington. And exceeding all the other lobbying. And they're very powerful. And they control a lot of what happens in Washington. I detailed a lot of this in my book, Food Fix for Seniors. How, Congressman, you are funded by Coca-Cola or these become the only fund. Both sides, they fund everybody.

Tucker [00:48:04] Of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:48:05] They you know, and so they've got a lot of it locked up. And they're they're mis educating. It's the misinformation and miseducation of our policymakers and government officials because they're only hearing one side of the story. They come in with their briefing books, with their scientific papers, with their justification, with the regulations written with the legislature, and they live a little leery. Give it to them. I've been in congressmen, senators. I've said, this is amazing. Mark, could you write the legislation for me? I'm like, Well, I don't know how to do that. I have people on my team if you do that. But it's like it was sort of a it was sort of a startling kind of revelation that the people in Congress need help and they need guidance with the direction and.

Tucker [00:48:44] They're overwhelmed.

Dr. Mark Hyman [00:48:44] And they're overwhelmed and they're good people and they want to do the right thing and they'r

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