The 5 Pillars That Will Transform Your Health In 2026

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you'll ever find in a prescription bottle. It works faster, better, and cheaper food. I don't even think we should call medicine. It's like a miracle cure because it's so powerful.

Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive, for live q and a's exclusive content and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health.

You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. What actually isn't good diet? And I've written a lot about this, wrote food, what type should I eat?

The Pagan diet. There's no guessing what I think, but essentially it's whole real food. Know, I kind of used to do a lot of speaking in churches with the Daniel plan I did. And I used to say, it's really easy to figure out what to eat. And I just asked you to have one question.

Did God make this or did man make this? Did God make an avocado? Yeah. Did God make a Twinkie? No.

Did man make an avocado? No. It's pretty easy. Even a kid in kindergarten could figure out what to eat. So ask yourself next time you go buy something, who made this?

Was it coming from nature and God or was it just coming from a factory somewhere? And and then you, you know, you should you should probably stay away from the stuff that's not, actually made by God or nature. So you wanna eat a whole foods, real food. Lots of plant foods. 80% of your diet should be unprocessed whole plant foods, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds.

Obviously, some grains and beans are good, some aren't. Like gluten is a problem, especially modern wheat. You probably wanna stay away from that. You need to eat foods that have good fats in them, avocados, nuts, olive oil, fatty fish like sardines, mackerel herring. You also wanna eat a lot of fiber, so that's gonna happen naturally as you eat a lot of plant foods.

You wanna make sure you have prebiotic foods like plantains and artichokes and asparagus. I even sometimes add that from a microbiome. You also want polyphenols for your microbiome, things like cranberry and pomegranate and green tea and all these prickly pear and olive leaf extract and all these different things that you can use to actually increase the growth of the good bugs in your gut. Cause that determines so much of health. You're not only feeding yourself, you're feeding all those guys in there.

And then you can also take fermented foods, things like tempeh and sauerkraut and miso and kimchi. These are all foods that are traditionally made in diets because we had to preserve our food in the past, we didn't have refrigerators, so we had a way of preserving all this stuff. And also protein's important. Now, especially as we get older, now you don't want too much protein, but you want enough protein, And you want the right kind of protein. And I've written a lot about this, especially in my book Young Forever.

But there's a there's basically a few the the gruel is a palm size full of pro size amount of protein in most meals. And this can be, you know, plant proteins, but often need a lot more. That's seeds, grains, and beans are okay, but they're lower quality. They don't have all the amino acids you need for or in the right volumes for building muscle, particularly as you get older. So I like grass fed meat, I like pastries chicken, I like pastries eggs, I like small wild fish, I like goat whey.

These are my kind of go to proteins. So that's you wanna think tofu, tempeh are probably the most dense plant based proteins, but you wanna eat the right protein. Now, what should we not be eating? Well, it's stuff that's not food. Obviously, there's other thing is junk food.

There's junk and there's food. So obviously, if you see a label with 45 different ingredients, don't eat it. If you can't pronounce the ingredients, don't eat it. If you don't recognize what the ingredients are, don't eat it. You know, you can shop around the outside of your grocery store.

There's a few key tips that you should just stick to a 100%, never fall off of this, is no high fructose corn syrup every period. Why? Well, one is sugar and two is a special form of sugar that does a lot more damage and and is a lot more likely to cause harm. The next is hydrogenated fats, never eat anything with that. And it's supposed to be, not safe to eat according to the FDA, but it's still everywhere in the grocery stores.

I don't know what how they get away with this, but seven years ago they said it's not safe to eat and it's still in the grocery stores. You go figure. Anyway, I won't get into that. Refined vegetables, wanna stay away from that. Stay away from additives, chemicals, preservatives, pesticides.

I mean, I mean, if you wouldn't sprinkle it on your salad or on your vegetables at night, why would you eat it? I mean, who has butylated hydroxy toluene in their cupboard? But that's the most common preservative found in most processed food. Also artificial sweeteners really bad, they tend to cause bacterial overgrowth in the gut, they actually increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. You don't wanna do that, and they'll wreck your health.

So what's the number one take home philosophy? Just that simple question. Did God make this or did man make this? And ask yourself that next time you pick something up at the grocery store. Okay, so why is food the most important medicine in your medical toolbox?

Why is it the most important thing you could be focused on for your health? And you know, I actually was watching a podcast the other day with Rich Roll, a friend of mine, and there was a guy who was a 100 years old on there. And he's like, the most important thing is diet. And he is right. Now it is the most powerful tool you have to change your health.

What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you'll ever find in a prescription bottle. It works faster, better, and cheaper. It has the power to influence and improve the expression of tens of thousands of genes to optimize tens of thousands of protein networks to balance your hormones, improve your brain chemistry, to upregulate your immune system, and even to enhance your microbiome. And it works, without any side effects except good ones. So this is really a drug.

And I know and I'll I'll give you a quick story. I've told this story before. It's so important to understand how quick and fast this is. I had a patient, this patient illustrates this more than anything. She was part of our program at Cleveland Clinic.

She came to one of our groups called Functioning for Life. She was 66. She had heart failure. She had angina, had multiple stents. She had type two diabetes, on insulin for years, hypertension.

I mean, you name it, she had it. Her kidneys were failing, her livers were failing, her liver was failing. You only have one liver, right? I do remember that from medical school. And she was so sick and she was this big, Her body mass index was forty three, thirty is considered obese, forty is severely obese.

And she just was was enormous. And she took insulin shots every day. She came to see us and she changed her diet. And she did exactly what I'm gonna tell you to do today. And within three days of changing her diet, she was off insulin.

And by the way, she was on a pile of pills that cost $20,000 a year for her copay. In three days she was off insulin. In three months she was off her medications. Her a one c, which is your average blood sugar went from 11, which is like almost hospitalized, to five and a half, which is normal. Her heart failure reversed, her kidneys normalized, her liver normalized.

She got off her blood pressure pills, and she lost a bunch of weight. And after a year, she lost 116 pounds and had none of those conditions, and was off all her medications. There is no drug on the planet that can do that. All those drugs were managing her diseases. Food, I didn't even think we should call it medicine.

It's like a miracle cure because it's so powerful. I've seen this over and over and over in my practice. And I honestly, as a doctor, I've been doing functional medicine for a long time, okay, decades. And I think I was the first one to say, you are not allowed to see a doctor in my practice unless you also see the nutritionist. Because if I'm a doctor and food is medicine, then how am I gonna practice without a nutritionist?

That is fundamental, fundamental to the premise of functional medicine. And there's five nutritionists that work with me in my practice. They're awesome. So anyway, let's get back to it. So what is food?

You know, okay, it's protein, it's fat, it's calories, it's carbohydrates, it's fiber, it's vitamins, minerals, but it's so, so much more. In every bite of food, there's only thousands of informational molecules like code that can upgrade or downgrade your biological software with every single bite. Literally you change your biological software, you change your genetic expression, you change the way your hormones work, the way your immune system works. You change which bugs you're growing in your gut, depending on which foods you eat, literally in real time, not over decades or days, but literally within minutes. So it's so powerful and we have the ability to speak to our genes through food.

And I think this is why it's so important to understand how to use food as medicine. But by the way, okay, by the way, it's not suffering here. I'm not talking about, you know, wheatgrass shots and a bunch of, you know, oat bran or something like I'm talking about yummy, delicious, tasty, amazing, gorgeous food. I had a party for my office staff last night and we had the most unbelievable array of vegetables and foods and dishes and flavors. I mean, went away going, Oh, this was healthy food.

They didn't, they're not thinking, Oh, this is healthy food. Because it just tastes so good. So if it doesn't taste good, no one's gonna eat it. Right? But actually food tastes good.

And by the way, and then you might not know this, but flavor in food, and the reason why the food industry puts so many chemicals and additives and colorings and flavorings and sugar and salt, in food is to make it taste good. How do you take processed ingredients and make them taste edible? You have to add all this crap, But if you eat real food, inside the food are the molecules that give food its flavor. So think about this, if you ever grew a garden or you had a fresh tomato grown in your organic garden and you went like a cherry tomato or something, you went out the end of summer in August and stuck in your mouth. It's like an explosion of flavor.

Whereas if you take a tomato that was like grown in some hot house and shipped across the country and it was designed to be fit in a box in a certain size and square and not squish. I mean, it looks like a tomato, but it doesn't taste very good. And the reason for the difference in taste, the reason is the phytochemicals, these plant compounds that produce the flavor. But guess what? Those phytochemicals that produce the flavor are also the medicines in food.

So flavor and medicine in food go together, not the flavor that you add with all kinds of crap, but the actual flavor of the food, right? Think of a ripe peach at the end of the summer that melts in your mouth and squishy and juicy. I'm drooling already. Okay, so basically it is in the summer, it's peach season. So you wanna just understand that you wanna seek out flavor.

And Dan Barber actually did a company called Row Seven Seeds, he created a company to improve the flavor of foods by breeding them to produce more flavor. But as a side effect, the way they get the flavor is through the phytochemicals. So I want to sort of help you really understand this is so important. Now, the next question I want to answer is what is this whole field of nutrigenomics? You might've heard about personalized nutrition, or nutrigenetics, nutrigenomics.

This is the science of how food regulates your gene expression and your epigenetics. When you eat, it's literally sending messages to turn genes on or off. I'm going turn on the antioxidant genes, I'm going to turn on the anti inflammatory genes, or I'm going to turn on the genes that cause cancer, or I'm going to turn off the genes that cause heart disease, or turn off the genes that cause heart disease. So we really think of them as like the food as the little signals and the code that is regulating your biological software. And you want a new operating system, that's an operating system of health and well-being.

Well, you have to put in the right code and the right code is the right food. So, I mean, messages are you sending to your biology when you eat a double cheeseburger, fries and a Coke? Right? What messages are you sending to your body if you're eating like we had last night, this watercress salad. We had this incredible watermelon gazpacho with mint.

We had Oh, oh my God. So many different things. Eggplant with all kinds of spices and sauces on It was so delicious. And spices also are full of these phytochemical flavor things. So there's so many ways that we should be thinking about how we regulate our body.

What if you had, you know, fresh wild salmon and, and wild berries, maybe wild strawberries, every taste of wild strawberries is bursting with flavor and fresh wild greens like they had in Ichoriya where they lived to be a 100 years old. And that's a very different set of molecules that you're putting in your body that regulate what's going on. So this is really about personalized nutrition, it's about understanding how genes are affected by what you eat. And that, and then also we have to think about how each of us are different. So, but as a whole framework, the power of food is medicine is huge.

So we know that poor sleep makes us less productive and makes us tired, hard to focus. Basically, having sleep deprivation is basically equivalent of being drunk. In terms of your performance, you know, I read a study once where they were snipers who were, you know, excellent shots, and that they had eight hour sleep, they were like a 100% accurate. If they seven hour sleep, they were like 95% accurate. If they had six hours sleep, they were like 70% accurate.

And if they were like less than six hours sleep, they were basically like 50%. It's like almost, hit and miss. So not good. Even when you're an expert in something, can't function when you're tired. So next to sort of nutrition, exercise, and maybe even before it, some would argue, sleep may be the fundamental foundation of health and disease prevention and even weight control.

So why why is this so important? How do how do the sleep dysfunction lead to change as well? There's a very important hormone called cortisol, which is your stress hormone. And and it helps, when it's in balance to go up in the morning to get you energetic and focused and do the things you need to do for the day. And at night, it's supposed to go down, and you're supposed to calm down and relax.

And a lot of people have an inversion where their cortisol is low in the morning, they can't get out of bed, and at night they're tired and wired. Sound familiar? I bet you've some big experience that I certainly have at different moments in my life. When you late get down in bed, you're exhausted, but you can't fall asleep because you're just wired. It has to do with your adrenal glands.

And they they're designed to keep things in balance to regulate your weight, to moderate your stress response, to control blood sugar, regulate inflammation, and regulate sleep and wake cycles. So when we're constantly in a state of stress, we're we're actually often struggling with sleep because of of the way in which it affects our sleep. So when you're when you're thinking about it, when your cortisol is high, you're running from a tiger, you're in danger. You don't want to be sleeping. You want to be alert.

And that's the problem. So if your cortisol levels are balanced and they're high in the morning and then low at night, and your blood sugar stays even. We'll talk about why that's important. Because fluctuations in blood sugar often will cause midnight or mid middle of the night awakening. But when your cortisol's and your body's stress response is balanced, then your pineal gland produces something called melatonin that pulses really strong in the afternoon and the evening, which gets you ready for sleep and lets your cortisol drop off.

And then you can feel calm and go to sleep at night and feel sleepy. And if you're healthy and balanced in your circadian rhythms and your cortisol melatonin cycles, you'll be fine. But if your cortisol is high in the afternoon or high in the evening, you might feel tired and wired. You wanna sleep, but you can't. Or you might fall asleep because you're really tired.

And then you wake up in the middle of the night, like between one and four. And and that happens when you sort of go, go, go, go, go do your email, you're working, working, working and busy, and then you go to bed and you're like, and then you fall asleep, you're exhausted. But you end up waking up because your body is still in a stress state. There's still high levels of cortisol. So how does how does stress affect your sleep wake cycles?

Well, it works in a lot of different ways. Psychological stress, can be a big factor. Right? Worries about family, work, money. Physical stresses, lack of exercise is a stress, believe it or not.

Too much screen time, junk food, toxic lifestyles, hormonal imbalances, you know, environmental toxins. All these drive increased inflammation, increased brain inflammation, and and also increased cortisol. Because by the way, do you know this? That when you eat sugar or starch, your body responds by jerking up the adrenaline and cortisol levels. So literally eating sugar is a stressful experience to your body.

Even if you're getting pleasure and you don't think it's stressful and you're meditating while you're eating sugar, you're still gonna have high cortisol and high adrenaline. So what are the what are the things that are the two most common things that are are screwing up your sleep wake cycles? It's probably blood sugar imbalances and spikes and crashes in blood sugar and chronic stress. So what should you do to optimize nutrition so you can regulate your stress hormones through food and lifestyle? And how do you deal with actually regulating sleep throughout the whole night and get high quality sleep?

So first thing is our bodies, whether we like it or not, are biological organisms. And they run-in circadian rhythms, and they need to be balanced. So you have to live in rhythm. And I I experienced the the dangers of not being in rhythm when I worked in the emergency room. I would sometimes work a seven in the morning till five at night shift.

Then I'd work at two in the afternoon till the two in the morning shift. Then I'd work an 11:00 at night to a seven in the morning shift. Then I'd work an eight in the morning to an eight in the morning shift, twenty four hour shift. I was all over the place. And my whole system became dysregulated.

And ultimately, it led to chronic fatigue syndrome and a bunch of other stuff. My system just kinda collapsed because I was pushing through all these circadian rhythms, which have to be in balance for you to be healthy. And whether we like it or not, you know, we tend to do a lot better from our health perspective if we go to bed at the same time, if we wake at the same time, if we eat at the same time. Our bodies are designed like that. So you you wanna make sure that you actually don't eat before bed because that's the worst thing you can do.

But you need to make sure you're having meals during a regular time space. So don't eat three hours before bed. Don't eat a heavy meal before bed because I guarantee that'll screw up your sleep. Also, carbohydrates, I think if you wanna actually eat some starchy things like sweet potatoes or some more starchy foods and you can handle it metabolically, make sure you do it at night because the, serotonin levels go up and it helps with sleep when you have your carbohydrates. But still don't eat white flour, sugar, all that processed food.

Also, not eating enough is stressful. If your body's not getting enough food, it's also considered a stress. Now you can do time restricted eating and you can sort of narrow the window in which you eat for longevity purposes and so on. But you also want to make sure you're getting enough food and not actually starving because that will increase cortisol, and you'll wake in the middle of the night. Now if you want to lose weight, you can use what I think is probably the most effective treatment I ever found, which is the ten day detox diet.

It help people lose a 120, a 130, 200 pounds. It's like a gastric bypass without the pain of surgery, vomiting, malnutrition. Another thing you can do is is is get stuff out of your head. Write your worries down at night. So get a little, you know, piece of paper or journal or maybe in your phone.

Write down all your worries, what you have to do. Your days should be organized the next day. Free up your mind so you can actually let go of things and go into a deep breathless sleep. Next, you can try a number of supplements and things that I found very helpful. Magnesium is super important.

It's the relaxation mineral. It helps regulate the stress response, helps you regulate cortisol, helps relax your muscles. I recommend two to four hundred even more of magnesium glycinate before bed. Glycine also helps with sleep. So you can use glycine.

And you can use that to help relax the nervous system and your and your muscles. Next, try some melatonin. Mellow out with little melatonin. You can use half to up to two to three milligrams of melatonin at night, and that can often help you reset your circadian rhythms, particularly with travel. Also, Ashwagandha is an Ayurvedic herb that can be really powerful for resetting cortisol.

I use a product called cortisol manager, which helps at night to reduce the stress response and improve sleep quality. Also, make sure, as I said, to get in rhythm, you know, or you can sleep at the same time. Try to go to sleep before ten. That's the best sleep you can have is before midnight, believe it or not. So get in bed by ten, try to be asleep shortly thereafter, eleven at the latest, and try to wake up at the same time every day.

Also, make your bedroom completely sleep supportive. For example, make sure you have eye shades or blackout shades on your windows or eye shades on your eyes, earplugs if it's noisy. Make sure you you really take care of creating a carefully controlled environment. Next is caffeine. You know, some us tolerate okay and metabolize it, others don't.

So I encourage you to sort of maybe stop after breakfast coffee. Don't have coffee throughout the day. That's particularly important. If you're still struggling, I would probably just stop coffee and caffeine altogether. Alcohol definitely screws up sleep.

So if you wanna sleep well and you're not sleeping well, quit alcohol. Just get off it. It can interrupt sleep. It creates poor sleep quality. Also, sunlight is a big great basic great medicine.

You know what I mean? In sunlight, I'm gonna go to sleep. No. But twenty minutes of sunlight in the morning without sunglasses on outdoors, not behind a window, has a big effect on your circadian rhythm. So we are a photobiomodulating organisms.

The light affects us, it regulates our biology. And it's important to make sure you have a good twenty minutes of light exposure in the morning. Chronic stress is deadly. It kills us. Literally kills us from heart disease, cancer, dementia.

I mean, just literally being stressed and having high stress levels chronically will shrink the memory center of your brain called the hippocampus. It also makes you gain weight, and it causes you to be diabetic, and it causes a whole host of other things including depression and infertility and sexual dysfunction. Mean, you name it, stress is a killer. So we now understand how stress impacts our biology in a real practical way. It is in fact the biggest thing that's driving so many of the dysfunctions we see around chronic illness, and it either makes worse or causes most of the things we see every day in medical practice.

How well stress jacks up your cortisol levels, which then causes your muscles to waste away, your blood pressure to go up, your blood sugar to go up, increases belly fat, causes your memory to go down. And you see this phenomenon of weight gain, insulin resistance, and diabetes, ultimately even type three diabetes, which we now refer to as dementia. So when you're when you also are stressed, you produce adrenaline. And adrenaline also makes you feel hyper, irritable, gets your heart rate up, your blood pressure up, causes your blood to clot more likely, damage your brain memory center, and just causes a lot of bad problems. So if you're, you know, thinking about your daily life when you are going about your day, if you start off the wrong way, you're gonna be in trouble.

And then one of the things we don't realize is that stress is also controlled by what we eat. Our diet plays an enormous role in our stress response. And so when we eat certain foods, it literally jacks up adrenaline and cortisol. What foods are those? Sugar and starch.

Basically anything that turns to sugar in your body is seen as a biological stress. Even if you think you're happy and relaxed while you're eating it, the consequences in your body are just like those of when you're attacked, by a mugger or you're being chased by a tiger. The the real physiologic responses that happen in relation to our daily lives are are no different depending on what the stress is. So whether you're running from a tiger or being, you know, being upset with your spouse or you imagine somebody mad at you and they're really not, the stress response is the same. In fact, stress is defined as the real or imagined threat to your body or your ego.

So it could be a real threat to your body like a tiger chasing you or it could be an imagined threat to your ego. Maybe you think your boss is mad at you and is gonna fire you, but actually doesn't think that at all and wants to give you a raise. You have the thought, the thought creates a stress response. So our thoughts create our biology and we have to learn how to manage our minds in order to manage our biology. And and so, wait, let's talk sort of a little bit about about diet again.

Because what what we found from the studies is that, you know, when you eat food, it's not all the same. Food is information, it's not just calories. And the information in processed food and starch and sugar increase our stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. And I remember one study they looked at overweight kids, I think boys, and they teenage boys, and they gave them three different breakfasts, an omelet, steel cut outs and regular oats. What was interesting is that they're all identical in calories.

So the calories are the same. And what they do is they do these kids, why don't you go and sit in this room and hang out, read, play games, whatever you want to do. But when you're hungry, just hit this button, we'll bring you food. And so what they found out was when the kids had the oatmeal, they ate 81% more food than the omelet, even though it was the same calories over the course of the day. And with the steel cutouts, it was still 51% more food.

But what was interesting was that they also had a catheter in their blood vessels and they drew their blood every every little bit. And they found that when the kids ate the oatmeal, it was like a stress response in the body there. Not only their insulin and blood sugar went up, but their adrenaline and their cortisol went up. So when we eat, refined foods, they are hugely damaging. So just in the same way, you can eat foods that actually help reduce your cortisol level.

You can actually balance your insulin levels. You can actually reduce adrenaline by eating foods that help you calm your nervous system, which are whole real foods. Good healthy fats like olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, high quality protein, regeneratively raised animal foods, eggs, chicken, fish, regenerated meats. You know, whole beans and whole grains can be very calming and helpful. Although if you eat too much starch and your insulin resistance, it can still be a problem.

And then of course, all the plant foods, vegetables, they just are super full of phytochemicals, anti inflammatory compounds, stress reducing compounds, and they're really powerful. So when you shift your diet, you're literally gonna change your stress response and change your biology. So what can you do, other than looking at your mindset? Because a lot of a lot of the stress we respond to is the creation of our mind. You know, Gabor Mate, who's written a lot about trauma, which is real trauma, he says, trauma is not what happens to you, it's the meaning you make from what happens to you.

So two people can experience the same event and have very different responses and it can be registered very different in their biology. So it's important to understand that you have to get your mind straight. And that's not as easy as it sounds because we are kind of conditioned to believe our thoughts and, you know, my friend Daniel Amon says, know, we should stop the ants in our head, the automatic negative thoughts. Easier said than done, but it's an important practice to start witnessing and looking at your mind. Some of the practices I'm gonna share with you now are very effective in helping us reset our minds as well as our bodies.

The first is a deal with the root causes of stress. Right? So there can be physical stresses like a disease. I mean, I had mercury poisoning, Lyme disease, mold toxicity. These create a stress in the body.

So you have to deal with whatever true physical stressors there are and get rid of them. Gluten, nutritional deficiencies, all the things that are really driving so much disease. And we we see this in functional medicine and it really is is looking at the whole scope of what creates balance or imbalance in the body and dealing with that. But once you've done that, and there are no sort of objective external stresses, how do you start to reset? Well, you you have to learn to actively relax.

It's something we don't get taught, don't have to sleep and eat and exercise, but most of us don't understand that we have to actively relax. It's not just sitting on a couch watching TV, it's it's actually helping your body get into what we call a parasympathetic state. And and this is not as easy as it sounds. You can do it through meditation, you can do it through a breath work, you can do it through massage, you can do it through prayer, chanting, through yoga, through various kinds of things that help your body reset your nervous system from an overactive, stressed sympathetic response to what we call the relaxation response. Meditation is a very powerful tool, it's available to all of us, it's and it's free.

You can learn how to do it online, there's courses and programs, can read a book about it, it's not that hard to do. It's basically just sitting and watching your thoughts and not getting caught up in them, but letting them pass using your breath as a as an anchor or a mantra. There's a lot of different techniques out there. Exercise also is a powerful stress reducer. Think about it.

When you're running from a tiger, you know, you're producing huge amounts of stress hormones, and then you run and you burn them off. That's what happens, in a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ultras by Robert Sapolsky, who studied, baboons and stress response actually, and and the hierarchy of baboons societies. And I highly recommend his book, A Primates Memoir, which describes his research. But he wrote another book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, which is based oh, no. Think that was written by John Kabat Zinn.

Sorry. No. I can't remember. Anyway, one of those guys. And and and the book basically said, know, the zebras out there eating his grass and hanging out, there's all other zebras, and the lion comes and starts chasing them, they all run like crazy, highly stressed.

And then the lion catches one of them, and then the lion eats the zebra he caught. And then the other zebras just go back to eating the grass, even though the lion's still standing there. So they discharge the stress. We don't. We continue to accumulate the stress.

So exercise is a great way to reduce depression, anxiety, improve mood, to reduce stress response in the body, and that's why you often feel relaxed and calm after after exercising. Other techniques are really good, breath work techniques, saunas, cold plunges, a lot of things that now are being used to help with longevity and biohacking also help to reduce the stress response. My favorite is a a hot steam and a a cold dip, and, and that really just kinda cuts all the stress for me. A hot bath with Epsom salt, very easy to do. There's also some supplements you can take.

We use a lot of nutrients when we're stressed, vitamin C, the B complex vitamins, vitamin B five, zinc, and magnesium. Magnesium is so important, it's the relaxation mineral. So I highly recommend that people take magnesium regularly to calm their nervous system. Herbs can be very helpful, adaptogenic herbs can help you manage stress. The astronauts were using it, the Russian astronauts often took these compounds like rhodiola, Siberian ginseng, cordyceps, ginseng, ashwagandha.

These are what we call adaptogenic herbs that help modulate the stress response. Also adaptogenic mushrooms, shaga, and reishi, and many many others are very effective for helping modulate the nervous system. Now look at your mind, find a way to look at your beliefs, attitudes, how you respond, think about the choices you have. Know, think Victor Frankl, who was Auschwitz survivor said, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a pause and in that pause lies a choice, and that choice lies your freedom. And I think all of us have just kind of collapsed that stimulus response, or just reactive instead of slowing down and looking at our beliefs or our thoughts.

And he he and in the concentration camp chose not to be angry or mad at his Nazi captors. I remember when I was a young medical student, I went to Nepal, and I met with a Tibetan doctor who'd been in a Chinese gulag for twenty two years. And I said to him, I said, what was the hardest part about being a prisoner in this Chinese gulag? And he said, well, there were a few times when I thought I would lose my compassion for my Chinese jailers. And I thought, wow.

This guy was in jail for twenty two years in a gulag, and, that was his biggest stress was was was thinking that he could lose his compassion for his Chinese jailers. So that just shows you the power of the mind to relate to your environment in quite a different way. So let's talk about what are the biological systems that are improved by exercise. It has to be the right type of exercise, the right dose, right frequency. And we'll talk about what that is.

But it improves the health of your immune system. It boosts the number of your mitochondria, the powerhouse of your cells. It balances your blood sugar and your insulin, your adrenal glands, your thyroid, your sex hormones. It helps you improve detoxification, your circulation, your lymphatic flow, and even optimizes your microbiome. That's right, your gut bacteria.

It also does some amazing things about the hallmarks of aging. Now in my new book, Young Forever, here it is everybody, super excited about it. It's out February 21. And in the book, talk about something called the hallmarks of aging. We've covered it on the podcast a little bit.

These are the things that go wrong as we age that underlie all disease. If we cured all cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, we might extend life by five to seven years. But if we address the hallmarks of aging and the causes of the hallmarks of aging, we might get thirty or forty years of life extension. And you know what the deal is about exercise? It addresses many of these hallmarks.

For example, it increases telomere length. It reduces inflammation. It improves your mitochondrial health. It impacts your nutrient sensing pathways, like insulin signaling and mTOR and APK and sirtuins, things we've talked about. It also improves your epigenome and reverses your biological age.

Now you might be going, oh, what do have to do? Run a marathon every day? No, you don't. It doesn't take a lot of exercise. Even starting with something as simple as ten minutes a day can add a significant benefit to your health.

And if you do more, more vigorous exercise, interval training, strength training, you can extend your health span by leaps and bounds literally. You can stay fit and strong and functioning well into your eighties, nineties, hundreds. I just read something pretty interesting that right now there's about half a million centenarians around the world. And pretty soon, by I think 2050, there'll be about three and a half million people living over a hundred years old, which is pretty amazing. There's two of the oldest people now around about 115 years old.

So many of us will be able to reach that age. So if you, if you look at, what you need to do, you know, combined with diet, exercise is really the most powerful tool for staying healthy and extending your life. My mom used to say whenever she had the urge to exercise, she would lie down till it went away, which I think she got from any young man or some comedian. But, she followed that advice unfortunately, and she didn't exercise, despite my hounding her. Of course, parents never listen to their kids.

I mean, kids, whatever, something like that. Parents never listen to their kids. And she ended up being pretty frail and disabled the last decade of her life and not too functioning. So when you start thinking about how to take this approach of incorporating movement and exercise in your life, you can get really amazing benefits. I'm just gonna kinda go through them because they're just so profound.

It it it actually unlocks the body's longevity switches. The regeneratively regenerative and reparative systems that are built into our biology. It activates all the longevity switches that I talk about in the book, particularly the four that have to do with nutrient sensing pathways that are sort of meta to everything else. Insulin signaling, mTOR, which is really important in terms of autophagy and cleaning up your cells. Sirtuins, are important in DNA repair, and also NPK, which helps regulate blood sugar, insulin sensitivity, inflammation, and many other things.

So it's pretty, pretty darn exciting. It also activates the body's antioxidant systems. It improves your cognitive function and your mood. It supports I mean, found that just walking helps prevent dementia, which is pretty cool. It supports your microbiome.

It reduces inflammation. It helps you produce more mitochondria and help them work better and be more efficient and and have better function because mitochondria is where you make energy. And as you get older, you lose energy, so you wanna boost that. It also keeps you strong and functional. You know, I just came back from skiing out out in Switzerland, and I had a really great time.

It was the privilege to be able to go there. And I was amazed. Like, I was just skiing along like I was when I was 30 or 40, and I I was probably going a little too fast, but, you know, I like to do that. And and, you know, I felt strong and able to do it, and it keeping up with people half my age. So I think the body has the capacity at need each to do this.

It also makes you happier and improves your mood, and even improves your sex life, believe it or not. So what does the research say? And let's talk about some of the the nitty gritty about how it works. If you really, you know, maybe you wanna know about the science, maybe that'll motivate you. Probably don't motivate most people, but it kinda gets me all excited.

I kinda like that. I'm a little weird. But it it really the research is just it's just unbelievable about exercise. When I started to dig into know, obviously you can look at exercise and anything and search on PubMed and learn about it. But I started to look at exercise and longevity and what it does.

So we covered a little bit of this, but I want to sort of expand on it. It improves your telomeres, which are little caps at the end of your chromosomes that start to shorten as you get older and shorten your life. It actually lengthens your telomeres by exercising. It protects your telomeres. It optimizes all these longevity switches like AMPK, which regulates blood sugar.

People say, I'm gonna take metformin for longevity. Well, exercise is way better than metformin for regulating AMPK. It also activates sirtuins, which help DNA repair, reduce inflammation, and improve your blood sugar control, which are really important. It also improves your cardiovascular and heart health, we all know. It reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes and improves your brain function and cognitive function.

It also helps certain types of cancer, as I said. You know, we see the the regulation of our our biology through exercise being needed through all these mechanisms have to with immunity and cancer prevention. So it's super great. And of course, it extends your health span and your lifespan. I remember being in Sardinia and I mentioned this guy, think before, but his name was Pietro, 95 years old.

And he was like a shepherd and he was just running up and down the mountains all day, five miles a day in this really rugged terrain. And he was bolt upright, you know, booming voice, clear eyes, you know, strong and mentally sharp. And I was like, wow, this guy's 95 years old. You know, most people 95 in America barely can kinda walk across the street or get from their bedroom to the bathroom. And here he is, you know, running up the mountain.

So we have the ability to do that. He exercised every day as a shepherd, not quote exercise, but he just that was his life. It also it's incredible for diabetes, for blood sugar control. I mean, just walking after dinner is a great way to keep your blood sugar down, helps you become more insulin sensitive. And very importantly, it helps you build muscle mass and function.

Because as you get older, you lose muscle, it's called sarcopenia, and that leads to all these hormonal and metabolic changes that accelerate aging and lower testosterone, high cortisol, the stress hormone, higher blood sugar, worsening cholesterol. I mean, just lower growth hormone and increased cortisol. Like I said, it's just it's really bad news. So building muscle is really important, and that's clearly only done by exercise. So hopefully, listening all this, you realize you can't afford not to move.

My basically philosophy is if you don't move, you won't. Literally. You'll be dead. So how can you actually incorporate more movement? What can you do without having to drag yourself to the gym?

Now I go to the gym sometimes, but I'd rather play. And I I think there's a lot of options, and you can just do simple things like start with simple things, even five minutes a day. And if you don't have five minutes a day to do something, there's something wrong with your life. So you better look at that. So, you know, for example, I I I figured out I couldn't do 10 push ups when I was 50.

So I I started I'm gonna do push ups. So I take a shower most days. So I basically would wait for the shower heat up because it was it's I live in a barn and it's really tall and takes a while for hot water to get upstairs. And I would do push ups. And I went from being able not to do 10 to be able to do almost a 100 push ups without stopping.

So we we can train our bodies and it's really simple. Or maybe while your coffee's brewing, maybe do some stretching and yoga. Walk or bike instead of driving. In many many countries, they do this. I I just met this guy who was the CEO of a big company, and he lived in Switzerland.

And he he I mean, this is he runs a $6,000,000,000 company. And he and he rides his bike straight up the hill or the mountains, say the mountain to work 2,000 feet elevation every day. And he's in incredible shape. He's 53 years old, and his v o two max, which is a measure of fitness, is that of a elite athlete and someone who's like half of a half his age. So it's it's very impressive.

You don't have to sort of, you know, do something like that. But just, you know, parking further away in the parking lot, taking the stairs instead of the elevator or the escalator. Just simple things to start moving. Also try a standing desk or a stability ball. If you're, you know, in a at at a desk, you sit on a ball, it kinda helps you move and move your body and increase your core strength.

I have a friend, Mike Royson, who was at Cleveland Clinic with me, he used to have a treadmill desk. Literally, he was on calls and working and working on his computer and walking all day long, which is impressive. Make your leisure time active time. So if you're watching TV or movie, maybe put a stationary bike in your house. I remember I worked in Idaho as a family doc, and there was this patient that came in, and she lost like a 100 pounds.

I'm like, what happened to you? And she's like, well, I decided instead of sitting in front of the TV and eating all day, I would get a stationary bike and just ride the bike all day instead of eating. And she did, and she lost a 100 pounds. So it's pretty impressive. Maybe also you can, you know, listen to podcasts and and, an audiobook or do something like that when you're when you're exercising or taking a walk and just makes it more fun and motivating.

And also do it with somebody else. As my friend Rick Warren said, everybody needs a buddy. So it's important that if you maybe are having some trouble getting out there and doing stuff, find somebody else to do it with. I it's much more fun for me to play tennis with somebody else or play basketball or go on a bike with somebody else and do it by myself. So I try to do it with friends and it it's way more fun.

Maybe pickleball is the latest craze, join a pickleball league and and go outside and just do fun stuff. So doing the ten day detox, you're basically taking out the bad stuff and putting it the good stuff. You're taking all the foods that cause inflammation, that are are toxic, to your system, that are inflammatory, invest with your gut, and you're putting in foods that actually help reset your system. And it's pretty much a very simple approach. It's lots of veggies.

So mostly veggies, lots of good fat, lots of fiber, lots of good clean protein. And what does that look like? It's tons of nonstarchy veggies like broccoli, any kind of veggie you think of that's not a basic potato. You know, sometimes sweet potatoes are okay for people. Avocado is good shots of avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds, lots of good protein, grass fed, organic, regenerative meats, fish, chicken.

Sometimes we you know, for vegetarians, we can or vegans, we can use plant based proteins like, tempeh or or non GMO organic soy, tofu. Those are the most dense sources of protein, but you do need protein as you detoxify. So for the ten days, you're gonna be getting rid of all the other junk. Right? Processed food, other carbs, sugar, dairy, coffee, gluten, alcohol, pretty much actually all grains and beans.

And the reason we get rid of the grain, they're necessarily all bad, is a lot of people have issues. A lot of people have issues with their gut. A lot of people have issues with inflammation. A lot of people have issues with gluten. A lot of people have issues with insulin resistance and prediabetes and obesity, and they can be problematic for these people.

So basically, off all the bad stuff. Now it's not calorie counting. You can eat as much as you want. We're not like crazy with how much macronutrients and percent of this and percent of that. No.

It's just pick the right foods and we focus on what to eat. You don't have to focus on how much to eat. Right? So when you look at your plate, it should basically look like this. Three quarters of it should be non starchy veggies.

And I usually often will put two or three veggies in my dinner. I'll make mushrooms. I'll have a a, you know, broccoli. I'll make some maybe a salad. So I'll lots of veggies, and and I'll have a a portion of protein that's essentially the size of my pump.

Four to six ounces, usually 30 to 40 grams of protein. Now that's a good amount of protein, but you don't need that much if you're having animal protein. It should be very generally raised, should be pasture raised chicken, wild caught fish, should be low mercury, obviously, all that. And we'll put all that show notes, lots of good fats with dinner, like avocados, nuts and seeds, olive oil in your veggies. You can even use, for example, ghee, which is a, kind of a butter, but it actually has the the inflammatory proteins removed casein and whey.

It basically has just the the fat. It's called clarified butter. Very common. You can get my book, 10 detox diet. You can get the ten day detox diet cookbook, whatever you want.

I'll put all the show notes and links together. I do call it the ten day detox diet, but sometimes you need to do it longer, like two weeks, three weeks, ten months, maybe even ten years, depending on the situation. But we're gonna talk about the ten days and how powerful that can be to transform your health. Now, I find that most people have never connected the dots between how they feel and what they eat. They walk around with what I call FLC syndrome.

That's when you feel like crap. And that is a big problem for people. What do I mean by that? Well, you might be tired, sluggish, you might have brain fog, maybe you have digestive issues, reflux, heartburn, irritable bowel, maybe you have nasal congestion, sinus issues, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, insomnia, Should I go on rashes, acne? I mean, it goes on and on and on.

And and many of these things are caused by food. And the only way to know is to do a total body reset. Like hitting the reset button on your commuter when all the systems are jammed. It's a complete reboot. So how do you do a reboot?

It's very powerful, and most people have never experienced this. And this is why I love to do it with people. And I actually run programs all around the world where people can come and actually experience this. We we do programs where we have people do this just in five days, not even ten days. People have a 70 reduction in all symptoms from all diseases.

Now I'm gonna put in the show notes the medical symptom questionnaire that I use in my practice, which essentially gives you a score based on the degree and frequency and severity of symptoms. So if you have a headache, is it zero meaning never before I get it all the time, really bad, or some version in between. And then you get a score at the end and, you know, people have a score of sixty, seventy, a 100. It should be less than 10, maybe even zero ideally. I I mean, should have the symptoms.

It's not normal for human beings to suffer this much. And that's really why I created this this book and the program, the ten day detox side, because I was doing this with my patients and seeing such incredible results. So, I do this personally, regularly. I do it at least two or three times a year, four times a year to really reset my system, to kinda get my body back on track, to get rid of all the bad stuff, put in all the good stuff. Now, I'm gonna walk you through how to do this.

I'm gonna teach you how to hit the reset button, reboot your system, and to optimize your biology to help your gut, to help your detox system, to help your immune system, to help reset your nervous system, and it's powerful. So, if you wanna really see how your body can feel and get rid of what we call FLC syndrome, I would do this. Most people are like, the frog that's in cold water where you turn the heat up slowly and it starts to boil to death. We just kinda get used to it and think it's normal. These symptoms are not normal.

I I wanna do this with a junior high school once and the teachers are like, well, I we might have to get permission from the parents to see if it's safe. You know, maybe they don't want their children doing this. I'm like, what, is it safe to eat fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and protein and cut out sugar and starch and processed food? I mean, they should get a note that it's permission to eat the junk food that they have in school. It's probably the opposite.

No. No. Yes. It's very safe. Anybody could do this.

And some people, by the way, you know, need more of certain things or other things, but but basically, this is a very universal approach to resetting your system. A second pillar aside from what you eat, the the food is really important. And and by the need approach in the morning, you need to make sure you get rid of sugar and starch in the morning. Super important. And then people start their diet, their day with carbs, which is the worst thing you can do with sugar sweetened coffee, steves, cereals, muffins, bagels, breads, diet.

Pillar are your daily habit. Essentially involves a pattern of eating and living that puts your body back in rhythm. It helps you reset your nervous system. And and there are two really important habits as part of the ten day detox. One is when you eat and also when you sleep.

So let's talk about when you eat. Now when you eat might be as important as what you eat. So many of us don't eat in the right pattern. We tend to, you know, eat all day long. We tend to snack.

We tend to eat before bed. We snack late at night. It's kinda bad. So, basically, when you eat is very important. Research shows that doing that can really be bad for your health, if you eat at night.

So the first is make sure you give yourself at least twelve to fourteen hours between dinner and breakfast. So dinner at six, breakfast at eight, that's a fourteen hour fat. Okay? If you eat at six and then you keep snacking all night, that doesn't count. Right?

And it's the most simple form of what we call time restricted eating, and it's basically getting our body a rep and getting the body to reset. And I wrote a lot about this in my book, The Young Forever, but but basically, there's all the process at night that happens called autophagy and cleanup and repair. You wanna give your body the ability to do that. The next is food. Now you can do a breakfast if you're eating, you know, for example, dinner at six and breakfast at eight or so.

That's a fourteen hour fast. Really important to have protein in the morning and not carbs and sugar. Also, not eating three hours before bed. It's really important. So most people eat and snack after dinner.

Don't do that. Have at least three hours of the time you eat and you go to sleep. That way you will lose weight. Your body can repair and heal instead of trying to digest and store the food. What about sleep?

Sleep is one of the most underrated pillars of health. It's probably even before exercise, meditation, maybe even before nutrition. But when you don't sleep well, you're gonna eat tons of sugar and carbs. You're gonna crave more. So you wanna focus on sleep and restorative rest.

We know that getting in a routine of waking and sleeping can help with a deeper, more restful sleep. So try to take the same bedtime every night, try to get off your screens for an hour or two before bed, keep your room or use blue blocker glasses, keep your room dark and cold, 65 to 68, really important because your body does much better with sleep at night. Try to relax at night with meditation, do a guided imagery, do breath work, stretching, journaling, gratitude practice, whatever you like, but do something, very important. So your evening routine should be like, set a bedtime and secure within ten days, turn your phone off and get it out of your bedroom, turn the TV off for at least an hour or two before you go to bed, and then use the time at night to read, to journal, to meditate, to connect with people you love, and just kinda wind down. The third pillar is extra support we need on the journey.

Right? Now, we all need nutrients. They they're called vitamins because they were vital amines, vital to life. Right? And and so we've seen a dramatic reduction in the nutrient density of our food, our organic matters gone out of our soil, nutrients can't be extracted, foods travel long distances, we have commodity crops that you're bred to actually breed out the nutrients and in the starch and and, and you know, yield.

And so foods aren't as nutritious as they once were and probably ninety percent of Americans according to the government owned surveys are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency. So how much vitamin D or you need to not get rickets? Not very much, like thirty units. How much you need for optimal health? Probably three to 5,000.

So we need to really probably focus on nutrients and even with a perfect diet, you know, because none of us are hunter gatherers anymore or, you know, tons of food that we never ate and I'm a nutrient depleted. We need we need the basic supplements. So we need a basic set of supplements. A multivitamin mineral foundational. Magnesium, a lot of us are deficient, probably forty five percent or low or deficient magnesium.

The involvement 300 different enzymatic reactions. Helps relax your nervous system at night, help you calm down. Also, people get constipated sometimes when they change their diet, so taking magnesium citrate can help. And lastly, D. There's also fish oil, but vitamin D is really important.

Vitamin D over eighty percent is lower, deficient in vitamin D. It's involved in so many different things in the body. So really important and it helps your mood, helps your muscle function, helps your brain, helps your energy, helps inflammation, autoimmunity, it's just super important and most of us are low. Fish oil is also important, and I I often recommend fish oil to people or omega three fats. So what are the program steps in a ten day detox?

What should be the and then we're gonna go through this. The first step is to eat from the 10 detox approved list for ten days. So eat what I'm telling you. Whole foods, you can get a whole food based shake in the morning. You can add, you know, protein powder, grass fed protein if you want.

I have a grass fed protein called super simple protein, but you really need to make sure you have a good breakfast. Second is commit to daily habits. Right? Take your designated eating window. Right?

You want a twelve to fourteen overnight fast, which means eating within a ten or twelve hour window. Don't snack before bed, try to have the same bedtime, get off your technology an hour or two before, practice some active relaxation, huge impact on your health. Step three is adding the supplements. Now you don't have to do this, but I really encourage you to have a multivitamin, magnesium, vitamin d, and potentially fish oil. And we're gonna list which products you should take in the show notes so you have it all listed there.

Also, what you should eat and what you should avoid during your ten eighty cal. Let's go through that. So here's a full food list. You can you know, we're gonna have it in the show notes. You can take it with you in the store.

It's in the book, the ten eighty talk. It's in the ten eighty talks cookbook. But essentially, here's what you should eat and what you should actually get rid of. What you should eat is protein. You need the right protein.

Right? So grass fed or regionally raised meats is great. You can have a path to raise lamb, beef, bison, venison, elk, grass fed beef, pastry is chicken, turkey, duck. All that's fine. What you should avoid is conventionally raised chicken and poultry and and eggs and so forth.

And by the can also have eggs if they're pastry as eggs. Meat, get rid of all processed meats, deli meats, all conventionally raised, feedlot meats, get rid of all that stuff. What about fish and seafood? Lots of small fish are good, big fish are bad. Right?

Big fish like swordfish, tuna, seabass, halibut, most farm raised fish are pretty bad for you. What you should be consuming are things like the I call this smashed fish, small wild salmon, sardines, anchovies, herring, mackerel, you can have black cod, shrimp, scallop, trout, all those are fine. Eggs, as I said, pasture eggs are fine. Nonorganic regular eggs are not fine. What about nuts and seeds?

Very important. Almonds, brazil nuts, cashew nuts, hazelnuts, macadamia, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios, walnuts. All that's great. You can even kept the cow nibs, chocolate, not actually chocolate, but where chocolate comes from. Seeds are great.

Chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, all great. Nut butters also great. So unsweetened nut butters, so almond, cashew, pecan, macadamia, I love macadamia. Walnut, all that's great. You can also eat beans if they're if you're a vegan and you wanna do this, you can use GMO free or non GMO tofu or tempeh as your protein.

What you should avoid are nuts that are with sugar, they're cooked in oils, that are with basic candied stuff. A lot of nut butters have sugar, hydrogenated fats. Peanut butter, peanuts can be okay, but I would say mostly avoid peanuts because they're have aflatoxin in them. They often are rancid, and so you wanna be careful with that. What about oils and fats?

Well, the ones you wanna use are organic avocado oil. You can use organic coconut oil for cooking, grass fed ghee. If you wanna use tallow, lard, duck fat, chicken fat, that's okay as long as they're they're path to raise or regenerate. For salads, you can use different kinds of oils like almond oil, flax oil, hemp oil, macadamia oil, and convert to olive oil. And you can cook with olive oil, but only like tomato sauces and things like that.

Things that are not high heat. Sesame oil, tahini is great as well. Great fat. Sesame seed kind of paste, walnut oil. Those are flavorful oils.

They're not main oils. But you wanna avoid the traditional oils, all the seed oils, like canola oil, partially hydrogenated oils, margarine, peanut oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, saprolol, trans fats, vegetable oil, vegetable shortening, all that stuff's bad. What about veggies? What should you eat? Well, you wanna stick with lots of non starchy veggies.

So or artichokes, organic if you can. I use the dirty dozen guide from the environmental working group, ewg.org. Tell you which are the clean 15, meaning you can eat them when not not organic or the dirty dozen, which you definitely not eat if they're not organic. But I love asparagus, artichokes, avocado, bean sprouts, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cucumber, eggplant, garlic, ginger, hearts of palm, kohlrabi, leafy greens, mushrooms of all kinds, onions, peppers, radicchio radish, rutabagas, all that kind of stuff. Steaweed is great.

Lots of minerals, shallots, summer squash, tomatoes, turnip, zucchini, list goes on. We have all in there. You can have some things like sweet potatoes. I like the Japanese purple sweet potatoes, winter squash, carrots, pumpkin. All that's fine.

I mean, carrots are fine because unless you're doing carrot juice or that that's a problem. Basically, try to limit to, like, one serving, which is, half a cup a day. What you should be avoiding is corn and white potatoes mostly. Little you know, some of the little dingaling potatoes or the Peruvian potatoes, purple potatoes, those are can be fine. What about dairy?

You can eat pasteurized butter or ghee, but I encourage you to get all dairy, including sheep and goat, which are mostly fine for people, but I encourage you to just get up all other dairy. And if you're having we encourage you to have make sure it's grass grass fed or regionally raised. What about beans? Well, you can have green beans. You can have green peas.

You can have a non GMO or organic soy, just tofu or tempeh. You can have snap beans. You can have snow peas. But otherwise, definitely no no beans. What about grains?

No grains at all. So even healthy grains, quinoa, buckwheat, things like that. I agree with you off off all of that. Why? Because it just shuts down the insulin response, helps you lose weight, reduce inflammation.

Not that these are necessarily all bad, but eventually, you add them back. But basically, get rid of all all the other all grains, wheat, barley, rye, rice, amaranth, milleteph, oats, everything. Get rid of it. Fruit. Fruit can be okay, but small amounts of non hypoglycemic fruit.

So organic blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, kiwi, lemons, limes, raspberries, all that's fine. Not too much. Right? You know what I mean? Like, you know, two pounds of blueberries, but you can have a cup half a cup a day.

Wanna get rid of all the other fruit, all the high glycemic fruit, like bananas, pineapple, melons, cherries, grapes is the worst. Even foods that fruits that you think, you know, maybe good for you are actually good for you. Right? Whether it's, you know, peaches, pears, nectarines, cherries, for example, but you don't wanna eat them while you're on the ten day detox. You wanna really shut down the blood sugar and some response.

What about sugar sweeteners? Sorry. None. You can sometimes have a little monk fruit or stevia. You have them in the shake.

We have but generally, you tend to avoid all that stuff. Also, just get rid all the other artificial sweeteners, all the sugar, all that stuff. If you have to ask, the answer is no, basically. Right? Then, what should you be drinking?

Well, lots of water, herbal tea, green tea, all this kind of caffeine. That's okay. A little green tea is fine. You know, if you get off coffee, sparkling water, mineral water, all that's fine. What you should avoid?

Alcohol, coffee, bottled water, some pot fix, soda, obviously sugary beverages. Basically, that's the program. So if you eat that way for ten days, if you use simple habits, your body's gonna totally transform and you're gonna see just how food is impacting your health, which is something most people don't have a clue about. And that's why I love this so much. Now after the program, it's really important that you do it for ten days or twenty one days or ten weeks or ten months, you have to be smart about getting off it where you can get into big trouble.

Because when you go off of foods that are inflammatory, foods you're allergic to, and then you reintroduce them, you can get a lot worse symptoms. Let's say you had migraines before and they're gone. Wow. You're gonna get a doozy of a migraine. Or let's say you had gut issues before, you didn't have a problem.

Unless you had sinus congestion from eating dairy and then you eat it, again, you might get a sinus infection. So you really have to be smart. So if you're feeling great and you wanna continue and you let's say you have a lot of weight to lose, let's say you have an autoimmune disease, let's say you just want you're feeling great, wanna continue, no problem. You continue it, Continue to do it. You can do it for another ten days.

You can do it for another ten months. It's fine. It's totally safe to eat. And it's pretty much how I eat most of the time with the Cajun grains and beans. Also, prioritize sleep and, obviously, your fasting window, not eating before bed.

And then eventually, people can transition slowly to the pagan diet, which incorporates a lot of the principles of the ten day detox diet, but it gets you more flexibility in your diet. You can add some gluten free grains. You can add some grass fed dairy or sheep or goat. Maybe you wanna do it most of the time, but, you know, occasionally, I've got the wine or dessert occasion, all that's fine. Remember, when you're adding things back, you wanna do it smartly.

And I and the Tending You Talk book, we'll put in the show notes, you have to add one thing at a time. So if you're adding back gluten, just do that for three days. Don't have a pizza which has gluten and dairy. Right? You won't know what's affecting you if you feel bad.

You wanna know. So give yourself three days and then pick the next food. So start with gluten, then dairy, then grains, other grains, whatever. And you'll see slowly add foods back and you'll see how you feel. And that's your best barometer.

The smartest doctor in the room is your own body. And that's what you want to focus on. So congratulations. Hopefully you're, you, you, you're going to do this. Think congratulations in advance.

You're gonna take the first steps towards optimal health. Kind of hard sometimes to kind of know what to think or feel, but I always say, don't listen to me. Listen to your body. It's the smartest doctor in the room. Try this.

See what happens. If it doesn't work, ten days, who cares, right? If it works, you have the answer and the key to unlock some of your health. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Doctor Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Doctor Hyman Show.

This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services.

If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible.

Thanks so much again for listening.