Hala Taha: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Yeah, fam, imagine feeling stronger, sharper, and more energized as you age, not the other way around. Well, today's guest is gonna help teach us how to just do that. Dr. Mark Hyman is a leading functional medicine expert and the bestselling author of books like Young Forever and Eat Fat Get Thin. He's gonna share some science backed insights to help you improve your health, extend your lifespan and defy aging.

But first, make sure you follow and subscribe to Young and Profiting Podcast. Whether you are a frequent listener or a brand new listener, make sure you're subscribed to the show. That way you'll never miss an episode packed with Expert insights like this one. Mark. Welcome to Young and Profiting podcast. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, thanks for having me. 

Hala Taha: I'm so excited for this conversation and there's so much to talk about, but I just wanna jump in and get started. So, I was reading your book, I was researching you, and I [00:02:00] found out that you wanna live to be 120 years old. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: If I can do everything I'd love to do, yes.

If I can. No, I'm still riding my bike at 119. I'll keep going. 

Hala Taha: That would be amazing. I also interviewed Dave Osprey a few times and he tells me he wants to live to be 180 years old. So there's this trend of biohackers, like you guys that wanna live to be 120, 180 years old. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I would just say I'm not a bio higer, I'm a functional medicine physician, and so I use deep science.

Some of the tools are similar, but. Social medicine is really the ultimate bio hack. 

Hala Taha: Yes. And we're gonna talk all about functional medicine, and I'm gonna try to help my listeners understand what that is if they're not familiar. But you guys are on a quest to live as long as you can, right? So that's the two things that you guys have in common.

Maybe it's not biohacking, but when I think about that, I think about frail old bedridden. I don't. I really wanna live to be 120 years old, at least by today's standards. So I wanna [00:03:00] understand, when you imagine yourself at 120 years old, what do you actually imagine yourself being capable to do? What does 120 year old and thriving look like?

Dr. Mark Hyman: I 

mean, it means being able to do whatever you'd love to do. If it's sitting and rocking Jeremy a book, it's that if it's hiking up a mountain, it's that if it's making love with your partner, then it's that. So for me, it's really being able to get up in the morning and do what you love to do and not be encumbered by some of the conditions that are mostly preventable that we seem to think of as normal of.

Parts of aging, they're not really, and what's happening on the science is quite exciting. We're seeing a lot of research, for example, as a Washington Post article recently about the AMAC factors, which is basically a scientific discovery that won the Nobel Prize. It allows you to reprogram your genes back to a younger you, it's called epigenetic reprogramming, and it's being researched by the Altos Lab, that Chip Bezos, and also by Sam Alman lab.

So there's a lot of really amazing research going on in this right now in the longevity space. That's gonna be a unlock. For most of us, I think we [00:04:00] can expect to get to our nineties or be a hundred, you know, vigorous and good health if we know what to do to take care of our bodies. And I saw this all over the place.

I mean, I was in Sardinia and I was in Iria and I just saw people who were like really old and really thriving and you know, this woman was like 87 years old and she was like running up and down the side of this mountain. I couldn't keep up with her and she was, you know, tending to her giant. Gardens and farm and animals and trees, and it's quite amazing to see.

So I think if we understand the things that impede our health, we can remove those and we understand the things that enhance our health, we can add those, and it's really not that hard. It's just knowing what to do. 

Hala Taha: So I was listening to your audio book Young Forever.

It was really entertaining and you were talking about how you went to Sardinia and went to the Blue Zones. But talk to us about what actually sparked your interest in longevity. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I've always been interested in the science of optimization in terms of how we function. Whether it's the word functional medicine or the company I [00:05:00] co-founded Function Health, the core value is how do we unlock how to function at your best and how to unlock the keys to optimal biological performance.

And it's really something that we're now only discovering. No one's really asked the question in medicine before. What is the definition of health? It's not the absence of disease, it's something else. And if you go to your doctor, you feel good, say, I wanna feel better, I wanna optimize mouth. They don't know what to do.

Like if you have symptoms, great. If you have a disease, they'll give you a drug. But do they understand the science of creating health? No. That's what I've spent my life studying after medical school. The science of creating health and it's something we now know how to do and that's what's so exciting.

We know the basic biological systems that go awry in the field of longevity. The science is really getting exciting 'cause we're talking about these concepts called the hallmarks of aging. The hallmarks of aging are these fundamental biological things that go wrong or break down as we get older that are.

Underlying all disease. It's like the roots or the trunk and all the [00:06:00] branches and the leaves are all the diseases and all the specialties. So whether it's heart disease or cancer or diabetes or Alzheimer's or whatever it is, autism, depression, they share common roots and there are only really a few things that impede health.

You have to identify what those are. There're toxins, there's allergens, there's microbes, and change your microbiome. Stress be physical or or psychological stress. And, uh, poor diet, which most of us eat. And then there's a few things in our bodies need to thrive. So you need to get rid of the bad stuff and put in the good stuff.

And then there's ways of even accelerating optimization things, for example, like how do you optimize your mitochondria? How do you optimize your microbiome? How do you optimize neurotransmitter function? How do you optimize your immune system? These are things that we now know how to do. If you say to your doctor, I want to optimize my mitochondria and figure out how to optimize my immune system, and they're not gonna know what to do, how do I optimize my microbiome?

Take a probiotic, you know, eat fiber. They're not gonna really understand because it's not what they do. And I've spent the 40 years studying the science of the function of the body. And that's really what we have come to in [00:07:00] terms of understanding how to create these shifts in our biology that create abundant and vibrant health and that don't provide a breeding ground for disease.

Hala Taha: So with traditional medicine, really they're focused on a specialty, right? They don't treat the whole body holistically. So can you give us an example of, okay, I go to the doctor and I'm like, Hey, sure. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I'll give you an example. I, I'll just tell you a patient, actual patient I had, I'm not gonna use her name, but she was a business coach about 50 years old.

She was overweight, she had pre-diabetes, she had depression, she had migraines, she had reflux, she had irritable bowel, bloating. She had terrible psoriatic arthritis, which is this horrible condition where you get psoriasis all over your hand and skin and body, and you also get arthritis, which is debilitating.

So she was on a drug for that, that cost $50,000. She was seen by the best doctor, one of the best healthcare centers in the world. She. And she was getting the best GI treatment for her reflux, the best treatment for her bowel, the breast treat for depression. Quote, the best traditional view, the best treatment for migraines, the best treatment for her prediabetes, the best treatment for her pori arthritis.

And she was [00:08:00] seeing a doctor for every inch of her, and no one said, what is linking all these problems together? For her, it was inflammation. She had tremendous amounts of inflammation that were driving all of these conditions. Now we know depression is inflammation, right? We know that if your gut's upset, it's inflammation.

We know that obviously if you have inflamed skin and arthritis, that's inflammation. We know that diabetes is inflammation or pre-diabetes or obesity is inflammation. So I said to myself, well, what are the root cause for her? She was having so many gut issues that I believe those are the cause. She had severe bloating, she had all these.

Now history of taking antibiotics, the steroids for various things like for her autoimmune condition. And I said, why don't we just do something really simple? Rather than taking all these drugs, you can continue to take them. But in the meantime, let's just try you on a Whole Foods low sugar, low starch diet, which removes the common inflammatory triggers.

And for my practice, for people who have autoimmune disease, getting rid of grains and beans, dairy, gluten, which is part of the grains, sugar, processed food, alcohol really makes a difference. So I said, put [00:09:00] it on that diet. Said, let's kind of reset your gut. I gave her an antibiotic and an antifungal to reset her gut, and then I gave her probiotics and things to rebuild her gut, and I gave her a, my, I think, vitamin D and some fish oil, not a lot of stuff.

And six weeks later she comes back. She says, Dr. Hyman, I got off all my drugs. I'm like, wait, I didn't tell you to do that. She said, no, no. I just was feeling so good. I just stopped everything. And she had no more satic, arthritis, skin hair cleared up. She had no more migraines, she had no more depression.

She lost 20 pounds. Her pre-diabetes was gone, her reflux was gone. Her irritable bowel was gone. And so I just treated the root cause, not the symptom of inflammation is a common trigger for most chronic diseases. And for me, after seeing this for 30, 40 years of patients like this, I can see it when they walk in.

I, I know God goes going on and it's not that hard to treat, but she was getting. All these symptom suppression treatments that weren't really working. They were marginally working. They were keeping her functioning sort of, but they didn't really deal with the problem. So functional medicine's about really understanding the body as a network, as a system, as a system of systems that you have [00:10:00] to keep optimized in order to live well.

And they map almost entirely perfectly across the hallmarks of aging the scientists ever discovering. So when your mitochondria don't work, when your detox system doesn't work, when your immune imbalances or hormone imbalances or neurotransmitter imbalances, or your guts off. These are things that we know actually know how to treat.

Your mitochondria aren't working. These are things we know how to treat with functional medicine. 

Hala Taha: And talk to us about how your company function services these types of problems. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: What we've done with function is really create the first health platform that allows people to fully access their own data.

Now people are wearing our rings, wearing Apple watches. They're wearing glucose monitors. That's all great. That's just a few data points. But what if you could unlock all of your biology? What if you could know? All your biomarkers and your meta and your microbiome and your genome imaging, your wearables and your medical history and your EMR, your medical records all gets into a platform that is personalized to you and allows you to identify where the imbalances are, where the dysfunctions are, [00:11:00] and gives you deep insights and content based on machine learning AI to help you actually optimize your health for you.

'cause no two people are alike and everybody's different. And if we try to treat to the mean, we often miss the mark. I. And this is what medicine does. It treats to the meme. There's no average person, right? And everybody's different. Uh, you know, the studies work by something called randomized controlled, no blind trials, which means you basically have two populations that are as identical to each other as possible.

So you wanna be a 70 kilogram white male from Kansas, and you get a hundred of those people and you put 51 group and 50 another group, and you give 'em a drug and you see what happens at the other side. That's how medicine operates. That 70 kilogram white male is not like 90% of us out there. Not you. It's not me.

And so how do we move towards where medicine is going, which is personalization, what we call precision medicine, personalized medicine, whatever you wanna call it. It's where we're going. And so function Health is the first platform that is able to actually do this for you in an amazing way that helps people revolutionize their health.

We [00:12:00] just started, honestly, this is a startup and we didn't realize how much success we were gonna have. And so, you know, we have almost 150,000 members. We have millions, tens of millions of data points on people. We're seeing all kinds of trends in the data. We see that people actually, when they get their first test, and then now we've been going two years, we can see that when they follow up and do the followup testing that their biomarkers get better, their blood sugar gets better, their cholesterol gets better, their inflammation gets better, their vitamin D gets better, whatever's off, and we give them a deep.

Dive into what's going with their biology, not just from a traditional perspective, traditional sort of Western medical perspective, but also this emerging field of systems, network and medicine, which is what functional medicine has been doing. But now the rest of the science is catching up, which is very, very exciting to me. 

Hala Taha: So my first question to you, I mentioned biohacking and you got like a little offended when I tried to compare what you were doing with biohacking, but when I hear you [00:13:00] talking about it and you're talking about personalization and figuring out your biological age, to me that's, you know, I've been doing this podcast for six years and had a lot of people on the show and it sounds a lot like biohacking.

So what's the difference? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I think biohacking tends to be around things like hot and cold, plunges, hyperbaric chambers, red light therapy. All these devices and tools and things optimize your health, which are fine. They work and they're mediated by biological proses, and I use those. However, if someone comes in like that woman that I just described to you, no biohacker in the world is gonna fix her because they don't understand the science around functional medicine.

Now, if they're a trained practitioner, fine, they'll figure it out, or hopefully they'll figure it out. But. When you just use these modalities without trying to understand what the underlying root cause is, it's another symptomatic treatment. You might feel better for a little bit. You go on Asana, you go cold fund, you feel good.

But then what? You know, you still have your arthritis, you still have your autoimmune disease, you still have your migraines, you still have whatever you got, and no one's telling you how to figure out the root of that. [00:14:00] So I'm not opposed to it. And Dave's a good friend and I, I love Dave Osprey and we.

Hang out and talk all the time, and I learn from him. And there's all kinds of great tools that I personally use and have. I'm just saying that that functional medicine is sort of the OG biohacking in a sense because it's really about understanding much deeper level what's going on biologically, biochemically, genetically, you know, in your microbiome and ways that I think most people just, it's a lot to take in.

And the problem is, you know, there's 37 billion, billion chemical reactions in your body every second. Nobody can understand all that. And you have tens of thousand of metabolites in your blood and chemicals. We do 19 on a regular panel, but functional health we do 4 99, which is $15,000 for the test for less than 500 bucks, and you get over 110 biomarkers.

And you can add on other things as well to go deeper dives into whether you're exposed to chemicals, whether you're at Alzheimer's risk, whether you're have immune issues. I mean, so whether you have Lyme disease, we, we provide you a really deep, robust. Platform where, where you get to be driving the bus.

You don't have to go to a doctor. You don't have to ask for permission. You don't have to beg for the requisition. You don't have to go to the, try to [00:15:00] find a lab that will order. You have to get your insurance to pay for it. Not for, I mean, I, I have insurance. I go to the lab and my doctor ordered some stuff that I wanted to do and it was outside of function and she's like, well, it'll pay for this test, but not this test and this test on this test.

You know, I'd be charged for that and you'd be charged. I'm like. You know, it's like that's what function solves all of that. And you have this beautiful integrated dashboard where you have your data forever and you track it over time. You get an app, which helps give you direct feedback and is a very integrated experience into your life.

Hala Taha: I feel like it's really needed because to your point, the rest of the medical world is kind of stuck in this traditional process that just really isn't working. And the other thing is that's not working is actually treating aging's symptoms and not the root cause. And one of the other big principles that you talk about is treating aging like an actual disease.

So why is that important? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I think, you know, we come to sort of accept that as you get older, you have cancer, you get heart disease, you get diabetes, you lose muscle, your brain function declines, you lose your ability to do things. These are not normal [00:16:00] consequence of aging. Frailty is not a normal consequence of aging.

It's a consequence of phenomena that happens as we get older if we don't do something about it. And all of us have seen those, you know, 90-year-old ladies doing like gymnastics and a hundred, like the a hundred year old people running the a hundred yard dash. You know, it's kind of crazy stuff like that.

Right. And what is it about those people? Well, they have understood by accident or by studying, that there are certain behaviors that foster optimal health. It's eating whole foods, unprocessed diet. It's low sugar and low starch and full of phytochemicals and fiber and, and, and adequate amounts of protein, especially more animal proteins.

You get older 'cause it's harder to assimilate. Build. You need to make sure you exercise and do strength training and, and you need flexibility. You need cardiovascular training and stability training. They understand you need good sleep. They understand they have managed their stress and their own emotional regulation, and they also have deep social connections and relationships that foster a sense of belonging, which all are ingredients for optimal health.

And when you look at [00:17:00] people like in the Blue Zones, that's basically what they have. It's not that they were vegans or not vegan, it was that they had these other factors and that they were. Profoundly impacted just by default by these situations that they found themselves born into, which we totally in the west don't have.

We're the opposite. We have dysregulated sleep schedules. We have tremendous amounts of stress. We eat crappy food. You know, we don't exercise enough. My R ring told me I didn't exercise enough yesterday. I was busy days. So, you know, there's all these things that we're doing to impede our ability to actually live a vibrant, long, healthy life.

Hala Taha: Well, you seem to be doing a good job because your biological age is 43, but you're in your sixties. Is that right? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Well, I got my biological age done when I was 62 and I was 43. Then I implemented more of the things that I learned and some other strategies. I've got two years older at 64 and I redid, my biological agent was 39, even though I got two years older.

Chronologically, I got four years younger biologically. So [00:18:00] that's the. Power. We have epigenetic reprogramming. Now, I mentioned earlier the amaka factors and so forth. These are. Sort of pie in the sky. Things that have to be tested in humans and make sure they're safe and effective. But right now, even with what we know, by optimizing and tweaking, you can actually still reverse your epigenetic biological age at any point in your life.

It can go backwards or forwards. If you kind of go on a bender or whatever, you don't sleep, you party and you eat crap free food, you'll get older biologically, and then you can change that and reprogram and go back. 

Hala Taha: So give us concrete things. What did you do to reverse your age 20 years? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, I've been doing this my whole life, so it, it wasn't like I was 64 biologically and then I, in five years I reversed that to 40.

So I have been eating whole Foods my whole life. I've been not eating processed foods. I don't remember the last time I had a soda. I mean, I probably was a kid. I exercised my entire life for the last 50 years I have. Make sure I prioritize community connection, [00:19:00] sleep and manage stress and all those things play a role.

And then I've done things to optimize my microbiome, my mitochondria, my immune system, and those will all really help. So all those things kind of nudge you back into healthcare state. I. There's some supplements and things that I've taken that I think have made a difference that I've taken. Uli a, I take amino acids that should help be assimilated.

I also take something that's called NMN, which is a precursor of NAD that helps also revitalize your cells. I do a number of different things that I think are important from a supplement perspective, but I think most of it's like the 10%, the rest of it is the 80 to 90%, 

Hala Taha: and that's what if we were to. Use function, the platform, it would help us figure out, okay, what's our biological age and like, these are the things you need to do related to functional medicine to help.

That's what it does. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Yeah. We do a calculation based on your biomarkers of what your biological age is based on scientific data that shows. Certain blood biomarkers correlate with your epigenetic biological age, and you can see it go backwards or forwards. [00:20:00] Now, if you do different tests, you're gonna get different numbers, right?

Some tests will be like five years younger or 10 years younger. You may not be able to compare apples to apples by switching tests, but if you stay with the same test consistently, you'll see the changes. 

Hala Taha: so I wanna get really nerdy because I'm sure people have been listening and they're like, I have no idea what epigenetics is.

And so there's two terms I want you to break down. Epigenomes and exposome. So one is about how our genes are expressed. One is our environmental exposure, so break those now. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: So basically there's a concept that I think is really important called the Exposome. We all have been taught that our genes control who we are.

They, they're our destiny. What? Whatever we got, we got, we can't change it. You know, our parents got diabetes, our parents got cancer, our parents got whatever heart disease it is just in our future, your genes are not your destiny. They may provide you with a roadmap of what your predispositions are, but not your destiny.

So what controls your destiny is something called the expo that is a sum total of everything. That you're exposed to. Throughout your [00:21:00] life, it washes over your biology, including your genes and reprograms them based on what you're doing. If reading like me, if you had a Whole Foods diet, if you exercise, you did all these things for 50 years, you're gonna be biological younger.

Your epigenetics are going to track as if you're younger. I. I'll talk about what epigenetics are. So the exposome is what you eat. It's your exercise, your nutrient levels. It's stress management, it's community, it's sleep. It's all the things we've just talked about. Light, air, water, all those things. I went out in bright sunlight this morning for 20 minutes.

All those things matter. That influences how your biology is regulated. We're biological organisms and we're controlled in the same way by our external factors. So the exposome is literally everything from toxins to your gut microbiome to your diet to sleep, everything that your body's exposed to, that's why we call it the exposome.

Your FE genome is how the exposome regulates your biology. Now, what is the epigenome? Epi means above, so you've got your genes, you've got about 20,000 genes, your epi. [00:22:00] The thing about like the keyboards on a piano, right? You got 88 keys. They ain't changing. You know, I got 20,000 genes. They ain't changing unless I do gene editing or splicing or some other weird thing that's coming around the corner.

They're not changing. What can change is how those genes are expressed, how they're turned on or off, whether they're upregulated or downregulated, whether they're driving inflammation or stop inflammation, whether they're accelerating aging or slow aging. And they are basically the control mechanisms to turn on or off genes.

So like think of 'em like switches or knobs and you can dial 'em up or down based on what you're doing. And that's how almost all of the impacts of. A lot of the practices we talked about have their effect. That's how the expose regulates your health and longevity and your biology and your risk of disease is through your epigenome, then translates into the expression of genes and proteins and biological functions, and you want to have a healthy epigenome.

It was a great example. For example, a brand new journal who discovered this phenomena was these mice that are bred to be. [00:23:00] Obese, so they're yellow. They're fats, basically yellow fat mice. He gave a series of the females who are pregnant certain nutrients called methylating nutrients that regulate the epigenome.

It's a little complicated, but there's something called methylation, which is a chemical process that regulates your genes. It involves B six folate and B12. So vitamins and minerals are extremely important. They run everything in your body. Every biochemical reaction needs a. Vitamin or mineral, and if you don't have 'em or they're insufficient, you're gonna have gummed up biochemistry and gummed up.

Biochemistry translates into disease, so he basically gave these pregnant mice, some B vitamins and a few other amino acids and things to help to support this process. The offspring. Were perfect. They were thin, they were healthy, they were gray. They were not yellow fat mice, even though genetically they were bred to be yellow fat mice.

And this was a massive discovery. And I think this is what really has led to our understanding of this whole process of how we can modify [00:24:00] our epigenome and the outcomes. So when your mother's eating, when she's pregnant with you, you know the stresses you experience. In utero that your mother might have experienced or all your early childhood experiences, all those imprint on your epigenome and can affect you toxins you're exposed to.

So this is why we have to sort of pay attention to how we live. Because if we wanna feel good and do good and engage in life and do the work we want to do and be successful in our work and have great relationships and enjoy life and be happy, if you feel like crap, it's not that much fun. Right? 

Hala Taha: So true.

And so from what I read. 90% of disease and aging risks has to do with our environment, our exposome, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the earlier that we start, the better is what you were just saying. Right? We can even start from in the womb if our mothers are smart enough. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. You know, I've seen women wanting to be get pregnant.

I measure their toxin load. I'm like, whoa, we gotta do something about this. We gotta reduce your exposures, the toxins. You've gotta get these heavy metals down 'cause you wanna have a healthy baby. And [00:25:00] so we were able to proactively do preconception work, and I, I had a whole podcast about that on the doctor's pharmacy, and now it's called the Dr.

Hyman Show. Even Dove deep into what you need to know, preparing for a baby, what happens when you're pregnant, how do you take care of yourself? What are the things that are matter scientifically to optimize the chance of having a healthy baby? 

Hala Taha: On the flip side, is there any time that's too late to get started on this?

Dr. Mark Hyman: Oh God, no. What's really amazing is one of the animal studies they've given 'em rapamycin, which is something that is a drug discovered in rap that inhibits this pathway called one of the longevity switches. I call longevity switches that that control so much. So mTOR is one of these. mTOR essentially is a pathway that is going to help you build muscle, but also when it's activated and when it's inactivated or inhibited in some way, it's going to allow the cells to replenish repair through this process called autophagy, which basically means you're eating your old cells and you reusing the parts.

It's recycling, so it's cleaning up the mess that we make all the time in our bodies. Where does that [00:26:00] garbage go? Right, it. Somebody has to fix it. So rapamycin inhibits that and accelerates the autophagy process and didn't give it in the right ways. It extends life and extends health in animal models consistently and reliably.

And so there are interesting ways that we can sort of activate these longevity switches and pathways. And I talk about that a lot in my book, young Forever. And how do we understand how these work, what we can do? And it's not complicated. There's a few simple practices, sometimes a few supplements that can really help modulate some of these pathways that activate the longevity switches.

Hala Taha: Okay, so one more really nerdy question and that's about mitochondria. So you say the difference between a three-year-old and a 90-year-old is a number in the state of their mitochondria. So help us understand what mitochondrial dysfunction has to do with aging. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: So this is one of the hallmarks of aging is mitochondrial dysfunction.

It's key to so many diseases. Your mitochondria, I think of 'em as like the powerhouse of your cell. Little energy factories. They take food and oxygen turn into energy that your body uses. And we use gasoline or carb. It combust and [00:27:00] creates energy will be run on a something called a TP. It's just a molecule produced from food and oxygen.

And the waste products are carbon dioxide, which we breathe out, and water, which we pee out, and some free radicals, which we have antioxidant mechanisms to control. And what happens is they're your energy, right? So if you have poor functioning mitochondria, you're gonna have low energy, you're gonna be weaker, you're gonna have lower muscle mass.

So the key to longevity is keeping your mitochondria healthy and keeping them strong and actually help having better, more mitochondria. So the way to do that is by exercise. So resistance training, Bess muscle and mitochondria sprint training or pit training. Does that as well. Exercise with ox oxygen therapy, hypoxia training does that a lot of ways to do it.

There's supplements like um, uh, ULI A, which is caused MI gene and mitochondria renewal. Their mitochondrial support supplements sometimes that you need. So there are a lot of ways to optimize your mitochondria, but they're injured by too much food, too much sugar and starch, too many, many environmental toxins.

Uh, all those things from the microbiome that are bad, all those things can damage your mitochondria. So [00:28:00] learning about your mitochondria, how to take care of them is really important. And again, it's one of the things we can look at as we start to test things and see what's going on in our bodies. 

 Hala Taha: I wanna talk about your drive of wanting to live so long. 'cause one of the factors that you mentioned is having a purpose and feeling like you've got a way to contribute to the world. So why do you actually wanna live so long? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I love life and I, as long as I can enjoy life and be with my friends and do the things I love and ride my bike and hike and enjoy what I'm doing and have meaning and purpose and contributes to the world and add value, uh, you know, I'm 65.

I, I kind of, I. Figured a few things out by now and you know, wisdom always doesn't come with age, but I've had a bunch of hard knocks and that's really taught me a lot. And so I kind of feel happy and content and satisfied and like I want to keep going. I mean, I don't really care if I get to 120 or a [00:29:00] hundred or 99 or 95 or 90.

I just wanna feel good and do good. 

Hala Taha: I'm really excited for this generation of 60 year olds because I just feel like in the past, in your sixties, it's all about retirement and I feel like a lot of people right now are actually like taking on second careers and realizing that they really have a lot more time to live and people are taking advantage of that.

So like what are your thoughts in terms of people around your age who like wanna take on a new career? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. 

Hala Taha: Tell me about that. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I'm 65 and two years ago I co-founded a company that's a big startup company right now, so who does startups in their sixties. Most people are like looking at golf courses and not startups.

I mean, I want to contribute to the world. I wanna do things. I get excited. We're building, we're creating, we're dreaming. We're imagining a different future for healthcare and medicine. We're adding value to people's lives is something to get up for every morning and to be excited about and take all the things that I know.

Are almost [00:30:00] impossible for any single doctor to synthesize and to sort through and make sense of, and provide each individual with a personalized approach to their health that's gonna actually optimize how they feel. And that that's really the key here, is to end needless suffering. And for me, that's my purpose and that's my mission.

And plus having fun enjoying my life and my wife and everybody around me. 

Hala Taha: it's hard for me to imagine. At the same time, I see people living older, but it's also hard for me to imagine, especially in the West, because I feel like things are more unhealthy than ever. The food in the grocery store is terrible.

Everything comes in a cardboard box. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Our water supply is really scary and it feels like there's no good water. It's either like you're getting plastic or you're drinking from a dirty. Faucet, right? And so for me it just feels almost impossible to navigate food, which you say is medicine. So talk to us about how we should try to navigate our diets and what changes need to happen in America for us to actually live healthier [00:31:00] lives and longer lives?

Dr. Mark Hyman: This is something I've been working on for a long time and I wrote a book called Food Fix, which lays out from field to fork. What's wrong with our food system? And if there's one thing that's killing us, aside from environmental toxin stress and our sleep schedule, it's probably 80% food. And it's something that we can control and do something about, and unless we actually take it seriously.

Fix our food system, work with a mess. And so right now there's a resurgence of interest in health around the country. There's the Make America Healthy again movement. And so there's that energy happening. And in Washington working on policies that bring those changes to the average American. For example, West Virginia, they got rid of red dives and other dyes.

In California, they're the same thing. These are great steps to start to push the food system to produce healthier food for all of us. 

Hala Taha: And something that's really hot right now is LPs. Right. I have mixed feelings about them. I'm not a doctor. Right. But I think it's good if you have a real problem, but I see normal people who might just need to lose 10, 20 [00:32:00] pounds, take glp.

So what are your thoughts around that? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: for most people, and I literally just got a text from somebody this morning saying, my cousin read your book. They lost a hundred pounds. My. Person was working with me in Washington around food policy. She lost 112 pounds in the last few years working with me and without taking these trucks.

Now some people are really stuck. And if you're stuck and you need help and you're, you have not really addressed the underlying reasons why you, sometimes it's not what you're eating, but eating you, you gotta figure that out. I think it's really important to do that. And I think when people do that, they don't necessarily have to take these drugs, which are, are helpful.

They can be extremely helpful. But they also come with side effects, muscle loss, weight gain. If you stop, they can have other issues, you know, like pancreatic issues and pancreatitis, and they can cause bowel obstruction if taken for a long time. So they can be a good tool, but they're just a tool. They're not a panacea.

And I think they've held a lot of people. I'm not against them. I think they're used in ways that sometimes don't make sense to [00:33:00] me. Why give a 6-year-old an ozempic shot for the rest of his life? It's not his fault he's overweight, it's the environment he's in, and I. So that can actually get really fixed.

So. I think it's important for people to understand that they have power in it. The food industry is basically hijacked our brain chemistry, our metabolism, our desires for different foods, and these are things that can actually be changed. You can literally change your. Brain chemistry and have an incredibly powerful shift in your cravings and your desire for foods.

You know, for example, people go on keto, they don't really need ozempic because naturally the way they're eating will shut off that craving. And the food addiction is a real thing about a. 14% of adults and kids are addicted to food, biologically addicted. This is really based on good evidence from the Yale Food Addictions Scale and deep science around the world.

We looked at this. This is just horribly sad and horribly unfortunate because we, we really [00:34:00] don't. Need to do that. We can fix our food supply, we can fix this problem, and it has to be done at grassroots level. It has to be done a state level, it has to be done a federal level. It's gonna save time. But we're working with the FDA, working with the USDA, with HHS and the Fed Administration as best we can to try to push changes through my nonprofit.

Hala Taha: I've also heard that there's food companies already trying to figure out how to circumvent GLP so that people still crave their food, right? So this is. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: That's even crazy when you think of it like, wow, they're really just gonna go there. They're literally gonna just kind of circumvent ozempic by making food even more addictive.

Hala Taha: That's the state of the world that we're in. So we've gotta take control. So let's talk about our ancestors, because when I was listening to your book, I was surprised. 'cause we are always thinking about how we live so long now. And when you think about the past, you might think people died at 30, 40, but there's actually cases in history where people have lived to be a very old age.

So talk to us about [00:35:00] how our ancestors ate and maybe some examples of people who lived really long back in the day. I 

Dr. Mark Hyman: think, you know, when you're looking, for example, at the Native Americans, one of the longest populations in the world, that alternative, the 19 hundreds, was the Plains Indians. They had most of their diet from bison, and then they had berries, and they had other probably wild stuff they gathered, but predominantly their diet was.

And they lived to be well over a hundred and highly functional and and active. And these populations around the world where you see people like I was in Turkey and they know it's not a technical blue zone, but man, they were a lot of really old people who are doing great, were in their eighties and nineties, still working, still thriving, still make part of their community.

And I think it's when you stop, you stop. Like I think retirement is the worst idea ever rented. I don't really get it. But people don't retire. They just shift and change what they're doing. And I think. These communities, and when you see these people living to be very old, it's because they found meaning, purpose.

They've learned [00:36:00] how to not sort of internalize the stresses of life. They've learned how to modulate their own diet and lifestyle to optimize your health, and they just figure it out. 

Hala Taha: Let's stick on community a bit because you say it's also a factor in longevity. You say you're only as healthy as your five closest friends.

Tell us about that. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, think about it. If all your friends are gonna McDonald's and drinking beer and. Soda day, uh, and watching TV all the time. That's what you're gonna be probably like. And if you are, have friends who are healthy and go to yoga and drink green juices and exercise and eat whole foods and get together and share these things.

You're more likely gonna be healthy. It's just so clear. Chris from Harvard did a lot of work on this, wrote a book called Connected, but he published research in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that, for example, from the Framingham data, which is a large study of one of the largest studies, long going studies in the world in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking their population.

He found that those people who actually. When they looked at the patterns around obesity, that you were [00:37:00] about 40% likely to be overweight if your parents or siblings were overweight, but you were 171% more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight. So your social connections matter and your relationships matter.

If your somebody who just stays up all night playing video games and you're living in in America, your friends are playing video games in, in Australia, I mean, you're asleep. Wake cycle, your security rhythm, everything's gonna be off. So the people in the communities that you have to surround yourself with, make sure that people who are leaning in towards wellness and health as opposed to not that, 

Hala Taha: that's so interesting.

Now, I don't want everybody tuning into like become fat phobic, you know, like, but at the same time, you've gotta pay attention to, it's the same thing. If people are like doing drugs around you, you're more likely to do drugs. So food can also be as bad as a drug. We've gotta think of it that way. So if there was one thing that you could remove from the grocery stores, what would it be?

Dr. Mark Hyman: It would be high [00:38:00] fructose corn syrup like that you'd cut out most of the, in the grocery store. And I think, you know, trans fats have been removed for the most part, which is great. But. You wanna make sure you're getting rid of those two things, trans fats and aose corn syrup. Just getting rid of that alone will make a huge difference.

Or just even reading the ingredient list, if there's an ingredient on there that you don't have at home that you wouldn't use in your kitchen, like butylated, hydroxy, toluene, or maltodextrin, or monoglycerides, you probably shouldn't eat it. 

Hala Taha: I heard something once, if you can't kill it or grow it, you shouldn't eat it.

And I always think about that when I'm eating food. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, totally right, totally right. 

Hala Taha: So a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs. They have very busy schedules. Sometimes it can get really overwhelming trying to follow different nutrition advice. So in the simplest terms, what should we be eating? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: You know, I've written so many books about this food.

What thing should [00:39:00] I eat? The Pegan Diet, which is sort of a condensed version and with some kind of fun stuff in it. What we agree on is more than what we disagree on, you can get on the margins about vegan or pale or a keto or this or that, but the truth is. We all agree we should be eating process, ultra process food.

We all agree we should be reducing starch and sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diet. We shouldn't be eating things that aren't food technically, like you know, malt dextrin or butylated Hydroxy toluene or red dye. Number three, we should be eating foods that are high in phytochemicals that we think of as food, as medicine, where it changed everything in our biology in real time.

We should be thinking about having good quality fats from nuts and seeds and avocados and wild fish, small fish, and even, you know, for several people tolerate animal fats very well, especially if it's generally raised. They have very different qualities of fats, so there's a lot of really good things you can do that are available.

From the diet that you can get even anywhere. I mean, I've worked with people in the worst food deserts in America, and they've actually been able to make a huge impact and change [00:40:00] their diet if they actually do the right things, and they will, they'll actually have a huge shift in their diet by actually doing this.

So I'm pretty thrilled by how simple it is, but when people understand how to do it, then it, everything changes. 

Hala Taha: Talk to us about exercise. I feel like there's a lot of mixed advice when it comes to exercise. What's your take on the right amount? Too much exercise. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Exercise is critical. Your body needs to move.

There's no doubt about it. We were designed to be moving organisms all the time, and that's how we evolve. Now. Most of us don't do enough, and that's unfortunate. I think 8% get the optimal amount. 23%, we get some moderate amount, but the key is to actually understand what's good for you and at different, at different times of your life.

But I think you need at least 30 minutes of good cardio, four or five times a week. Three times a week is strength training, probably a week or a day or two of flexibility and training and stability training. That's kind of bare minimum. If you [00:41:00] can do that, you're gonna maintain your health and be good for a long time.

Hala Taha: You've said in the past that strength training is the best anti-aging medicine. What's so good about it? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: Because what you're doing is you're building muscle, you're building mitochondria, you are increasing muscle mass, and what really kills people is frailty. When you get older, you get frail. You're not able to get up out of a chair, you're not able to do things you love to do.

Your mobility's decreased, your function's decreased. That's all totally preventable by strength training. And you have to work harder as you get older because the body, unfortunately, it doesn't work as well. So you have to do a little more effort to get the same benefit. And I think that's something PL have to do, but it's, it's not optional.

Like exercise is just not optional. 

Hala Taha: Okay, last question for you and then we're gonna, gonna close out this interview. So the average listener's age on my podcast is 35 years old, and they're typically an entrepreneur. So let's say I gave you a 30 5-year-old, they're stressed, exhausted, running on coffee.

If you had a year to transform their health and [00:42:00] performance, what are the things that you would change? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: I would immediately have them get on a Whole Foods diet that I just talked about it and have 'em just follow the principles of eat real food, eat low sugar, starch, good fats, adequate protein for where you're in your life phase and varies depending on where you are.

Uh, lots of phytochemicals, lots of fiber, and just start there. And if you're really having any health issues, I'd probably do my 10 day detox program, which is essentially a reset. You just 10 day detox.com with a 10 day detox. And what really is amazing about it is that people get a reset. It's like putting your body back to its original factory settings and you can see where food is impacting you.

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, my rash was caused by food, or I didn't know that my migraines were caused by what I was eating, where I didn't know that my joint pain was caused by everything, or my sleep problem was caused by eating. So you get a really quick reset and then you can start to add foods back in.

So that would be number one, is get your food straight. And that's, you know, timing, planning, organizing. It's really important the amount of time you spend on your business that you spend on your health. You'll get a lot of dividends [00:43:00] from that. Getting a regular exercise routine, not that hard. Just even if you just wanna walk 30 minutes, if you walking phone calls, that's good.

Better than nothing. Uh, as gonna have a walking treadmill. You can do fun, more fun things. I like to bike. I like to, you know, do more mountain biking and road biking and tennis and other things that kind of are fun for me. I like to make exercise fun, uh, strength training. I've, I've gotten into more and more and it's, it's been profound in terms of effect on my body, even as I'm older.

I think learning how to regulate your nervous system is important. Self-soothing. It's not something we learn how to do. We get activated reactive. But learning how to practice, whether it's breath work or meditation or some practice where you're resetting your nervous system. 'cause we're all in parasympathetic deficit.

We need to be relaxing more. And then I think build community. 'cause you know, as you're. Building something and going through stuff, you know, when getting isolated is the worst thing you can do for a human being. And so I think having that ability to work with your friends, to build a a fun community experience is really important.

And that's something [00:44:00] that, you know, it's been really important to me, especially as I've gotten older. It's just invest in your friendships. Because when everything else goes, that's what will be left. 

Hala Taha: Yeah. So that was great advice on an individual level and a lot of the people tuning in are entrepreneurs and we help move society forward, and we have this big shift from traditional to functional medicine.

We're trying to combat the food industries. Can you talk to us about some of the opportunities that you see for entrepreneurs to capitalize on all these changes? 

Dr. Mark Hyman: The health and wellness market is a trillion dollar market, and you know, there's a lot of ways people are entering that, but. If you can figure out, you know, what you love and the intersection of what you love, and you know what people need, often businesses are started from people's own.

Like I needed to fix my own health. So I, as a physician, I got very sick when I was in my thirties. I got chronic fatigue syndrome from heavy metals, and I was struggling a lot and I had to figure it out. I had to actually figure it out. And that forced me to learn about what I learned about it forced me [00:45:00] to study the way I studied, to actually find this field of functional medicine, to use it in myself to heal and repair.

And so that's. What I encourage people to do is, is figure out that intersection of what, what you love. That's just driven me. 'cause it's not like a choice. I don't have a choice. It's not like I'm, you know, making widgets or something that it's fine to make widgets. We all need widgets. But, you know, I think the key is really to kind of figure out how you can do this in a way that syncs with what you love.

'cause otherwise you won't really do it. 

Hala Taha: Great advice. Okay, so I end my show with two questions. I ask all my guests. It could be totally different from what we talked about today. Just answer from your heart. So what is one actionable thing our young and profits can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Dr. Mark Hyman: What? Your success is really determined by the quality of how you feel. So if you're able to function at a high level and do the things you wanna do and not be held back by illness or struggles, you are going to be able to function at a much higher level and do whatever you wanna do. Whether it's just buzz off and [00:46:00] go kind of get early retirement, or whether it's you wanna build a company or whatever you wanna do, you know, you have to capacity to, to be highly functional when you feel better.

And, and so investing in your health is such an important thing for, from my perspective. You know, I see a lot of people who have great. Businesses and companies and they build these things and they're rich, they have all this stuff, and they're lonely, they're isolated, they're unhealthy, they're sick, they don't feel good.

I mean, that is the last thing you want. Right? 

Hala Taha: Totally. And your book, young Forever really is a blueprint for how to do that. What would you say your secret to profiting in life is? And this can go beyond business. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: The secret of profiting in life again is, is to focus on the things you love and to do what you're passionate about.

Because. If you try to force something in your life, you know, the best things that happen are often serendipitous. They're often come to their ideas, their people, their experiences. I, I feel like there's sort of an underlying current where we can kind of jump into it. And if we're present, well, we're able to see actually [00:47:00] what pulls us in.

When we do that, you become more profitable. I've never sought to make money in my life. I've never tried to make money. I've never said, I'm gonna do a business to make money. I'm gonna do this to make money. I'm doing what I'm doing because I feel like it's critical for myself and for the people who I care about and for the population at large.

It's like I, I just can't help myself. So I think when you do that and you have a mission and you're driven, then it's not about the money. 

Hala Taha: Mark, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? I know you're so easily found, but where do you wanna appoint people 

Dr. Mark Hyman: to? Yeah. Well, you can go to dr hyman.com if you wanna try the 10 day detox.

You can go to Dr. Hyman time, you'll find it there. But just go to 10 Day Detox Diet. I'm on social media, Dr. Mark Hyman, and I have a podcast, the Dr. Hyman Show, top 200 podcast out there. So it's doing well. 

Hala Taha: Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. 

Dr. Mark Hyman: My pleasure. 

Hala Taha: Well guys, that's a wrap on my [00:48:00] conversation with Dr. Mark Hyman. What stood out for me today is that longevity isn't just about adding years to your life. It's also about adding life to your years. And as corny as that may sound, if you want to be as strong and as vibrant at 60 as you are at 30. Then it won't simply be because of genetic luck or new technologies, but rather because of your intentional living.

There's so many exciting developments in the health and longevity space from epigenetic reprogramming to AI informed personalized medicine. advances that will no doubt inform and accelerate our lifespans in the years ahead.  But like Mark reminds us, we already have the tools and knowledge at our fingertips that we need to optimize our health right now.

What it really comes down to is simply getting rid of the bad stuff and adding in the good stuff by improving our diet, exercising more, getting enough sleep and avoiding stress, you have it within your own power to age more [00:49:00] slowly and even turn back the physiological clock. Aging is not a simple decline.

In many ways. It's a choice, even a skill. Look at those people living in the blue zones like Sardinia, aging slowly and gracefully because they've created a healthy environment in which their bodies can completely thrive. It's a lot easier said than done, but believe me, I know, like Mark said, it's also never too late to get started at leading your best and hopefully longest life.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If this episode resonated with you, share it with somebody who wants to feel better, live longer, and thrive at any age. And if you enjoyed today's episode and found something valuable in it, we'd love it if you'd left us a five star review on Apple, Spotify, castbox, wherever you listen to the show, it means the world to us. I read your reviews every single day. I love to get your feedback,

It's one of the best ways to help us grow and reach more listeners. Prefer to watch your conversations [00:50:00] than head over to YouTube and search young and profiting to catch the full episodes on there. You can also connect with me directly on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for Hala Taha and as always, I get a shout out my incredible YAP team.

I have such an amazing team at Yap Media. I couldn't do this without you guys. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA, the podcast princess signing off.