 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Well, if you're anything like my patients, you're probably pretty confused about all the nutrition advice out there. And when it comes to diets, forget about it. Should you go vegan? What about the carnivore diet? Oh, maybe you're keto curious. Well, my guest today is the perfect person to help sort all this out. He's Dr. Mark Hyman, multiple New York Times bestselling author, head of strategy and innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and host of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. And he's just written a brand new book called The Pegan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. On today's episode, you're going to discuss the truth about meat, what the food pyramid should really look like, and the shocking shortcomings of the vegan diet. Mark, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I think I'm very excited to be here and be able to talk to you about challenges we face with our confusing diet because everybody's confused and that's really why I wrote The Pegan Diet. It sort of was a joke initially because I was on a panel with a militant vegan cardiologist and a very aggressively paleo doctor, and they were fighting it out and I was sort of getting the middle, I'm like, God, these guys are so extreme. I said, you know, yeah, if you're paleo and you're vegan, I must be Pegan and everybody laughed. I thought it was kind of just a funny joke, but it turned out I was like, wait a minute, they have far more in common with each other than the traditional American diet, which is processed food, which you're so violently against SMI. And the result of thinking about it was that I got, wait a minute, they're identical except for where you get your protein, grains and beans or animal protein. No dairy. There's no processed food, whole foods, lots of vegetables, good fats, nuts and seeds and so forth. And I was like, wait a minute, this is ridiculous. And we should be really focusing on a bigger tent of understanding of one of the basic foundational sound nutritional principles that are based in science that have the ability to include a lot of variety of eating preferences, cultural preferences and sort of get us out of these diet wars. And the other premise of the book is that food is medicine, that it literally influences every main system in our body. And if we don't understand that when we eat something, it's not just calories, it's actually instructions, information, code, or as you'd like to say little text messages to all the different parts of your body, then we're missing an opportunity to upgrade our biological software through improving the quality and the nutrient density and even what we call the phytonutrient density of our diet. So the book really is sort of an attempt to try to deal with a lot of the controversial issues nutrition today, whether it's fasting or whether it's the ketogenic diet or eating for longevity or eating for your gut or eating for hormone balance. It's all in there, even how to personalize your diet and even how to address things like climate change through the way you eat. How do you become a regeneratorian and eat in a way that is good for you and good for the planet? I cover a lot of topics in the book and it's very simple, digestible, easy to access, and I think it's just meant to really be a user's guide and an owner's manual for your body. All right. So a peagand diet, you don't just eat peas, do you? No, no, it's not that kind of peagand, it's PEG, not PEA, and it's not peagand, it's peagand. Yeah, I'm sure you're going to get those jokes all along. So you mentioned eating a phytonutrient rich diet and eating for messages. You write in the book about your own microbiome journey. Can you expand on that? What happened to you and what it taught you? Sure. So, you know, it's interesting, I've spent the last 30 years studying the gut and gut function in the microbiome through functional medicine, treating thousands and thousands of patients by healing their gut. Of course, I always get these things that are much harder to deal with and don't respond to the normal stuff. So I always have to think harder, learn more, and investigate the science of actually what is happening for me so I can heal myself. I don't encourage people to do that for themselves to get sick, to figure out what to do, but it's sort of by what's happened to me. And what's really clear is that the microbiome, as you've written so much about, is critical to our health. But for a long time, I didn't understand the role of a certain class of compounds to repair the gut by feeding the good bugs called polyphenols. So there's 25,000 phytochemicals in plant foods. These are all these powerful medicinal compounds that the plants create for themselves as defenses. But we've heard about them, resveratrol and red wine and catechins and green tea and proanthocyanins and blueberries. These are things that we've heard about in the media. But what's really been striking is that the microbiome also needs these polyphenols. Not only do they need probiotics and prebiotics, but they also need polyphenols. And so in my gut, I had a bad situation where I had a root canal taken out and antibiotic was given to me. I got C. diff, which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills 30,000 people a year. I mean, the only really good treatment is a fecal transplant. And, you know, they use other antibiotics to kind of fix it. It's kind of a mess. And it creates so much damage to my gut that I literally had an inflamed gut from my mouth basically almost all the way to my, well, all the way to my butt for sure. And develop post infectious colitis and I developed ulcer of colitis and it was really a struggle. And in order for me to fix it, I had to sort of really, really think about how do I really reset my gut? And so I developed this approach was looking at the microbiome and there was a particular bacteria in there that turned about, turned out to be even more important than I thought called acromansymucinophilia, which is a bacteria that forms amicus coating on the lining of the gut, preventing a leaky gut, which is what you talk so much about. And so if you have a leaky gut, it means your body's constantly giving me inflamed and my body was just totally inflamed the whole time. And I had no zero levels of these acromansy bacteria. I just checked my store. There was an absent. And so I started researching one of the things that can help it and it was cranberry and pomegranate and green tea and all these compounds that actually had powerful effects on the microbiome in addition to pre-improbiotics. And then I even learned more about this bacteria. And this is an example of how food is medicine. If you have a cancer, it turns out that if you have low levels of acromansy and you're trying to get one of these new immunotherapy drugs, these checkpoint inhibitors that help your own immune system fight the cancer and can be really dramatic. And if you have stage four cancer, it can literally cure you if you have the right gut flora. But it turns out that if you don't have the right gut flora, the microbiome is not right. These drugs don't work. So it's on or off like you die. So I think and all you have to do is feed the acromansia with these polyphenols and other prebiotics and port the gut. And you literally can cure cancer with this approach. And I've heard this story many times with patients who had low acromansia, who weren't responding, who got their acromansia fixed and ended up, you know, resolving their cancer. So I think there's so much to learn about how food plays a role. And that's just one example of how food is medicine, right? So if if you think some of the most powerful any cancer drugs don't work, unless you eat certain foods that feed the right bugs, that's mind blowing. And it's important to think about that. Yeah, I think you're right. The in the longevity paradox, my last big book, it's very clear that at least to me, that longevity is actually direct directly related to how intact your gut wall is. And it's kind of like the walls of a castle. If if if they're solid, bad guys can't get in and hurt you. If they start, you know, finding holes and passageways, that's when the Roman Empire falls. And exactly. Yeah. And we've I've had a couple of patients who we wanted to use immunotherapy on their cancer and they weren't responding. And so we, you know, change their diet. They actually paid attention and, lo and behold, we've got a recent guy with stage four lung cancer and it's gone. I mean, it's that's incredibly gone. Yeah, that's metastatic lung cancer. That just doesn't happen in regular medicine, right? So you think so. That's where this beautiful intersection of food and any affects your immune system, it affects your mitochondria, it affects your gut, it affects your hormones, it affects your brain chemistry. It affects really everything, your detoxification system that is determining the quality of your health and your life. So I love in the book, you know, you talk about you are what you eat, you write in the book, do you want to be made of Doritos or grass-fed steak, Coca-Cola or wild blueberries? Yeah, well, you know, it's go ahead. It's such no, it's such an important point. You know, we don't think about the fact that we are building our own biological house with the building blocks from food. You know, you wouldn't you wouldn't build a house with really crappy wood or bricks that we're going to dissolve and fall apart or melt in the rain. And, you know, with wires that had all kinds of crap that didn't make their electrical system work or, you know, pipes with holes. I mean, you just wouldn't do that to build a house. But that's what we do to build our biological house. And that's why we are so sick. That's why six out of ten Americans have a chronic disease and 88 percent of us are metabolically unhealthy and one out of two have diabetes or pre-diabetes. I mean, this is not a rare problem and it's food related. And so food is really the biggest killer on the planet by far. And so it's for me to understand that we can we can actually break out of the old paradigm of using pharmaceuticals and drugs to cure disease and use these foods, it's incredible. So you let's dive right into the meat controversy since we just talked about grass-fed beef. So what's the problem with most nutritional studies on meat consumption? What do you think? This is a great question. And it brings back the point of you are what you eat, right? You are what you eat and you are whatever you are eating has eaten. Yeah, that's exactly right. And on my podcast, the Doctors Pharmacy had this incredible range line scientist, Fred Prevenza, who wrote a book called Nourishment. Talk about the emerging research from Duke University on phytochemicals in grass-finished beef. So if animals are left to forage on hundreds of varieties of plants, they're literally eating the medicines in all of those plants all the time and they're seeking out different plants for different properties in terms of medicine or in terms of the the nutrient density or the vitamins and minerals. And so it turns out that you find in the meat of some of these high quality grass-fed meats or goat or whatever milk that there are as high levels of phytochemicals in there as you find in plants. For example, goats who are eating certain shrubs and left to forage around in the wild will have as high levels of catechins, which are in green tea as green tea, which is really remarkable, like to think about, wow. So I think back to the question of what about meat and the studies about meat? Most of the studies on meat were done on, obviously, feedlot beef, not grass-finished beef or wild beef, right? And there's a great study on kangaroo meat in Australia where they fed people the exact amount of kangaroo meat versus feedlot beef. And they found that with the feedlot beef inflammation, their body went up with the kangaroo meat, it went down. And it's because it's it's a different quality of the information in the food. And so most of the studies on meat are really done on large populations. They're called observational studies. They don't prove cause and effect. They look for correlations. And, you know, when you look at the studies on meat, the big studies that were done with a million people, half a million people, you know, this was done in the era one when meat was considered bad to eat. You know, as we were told, don't eat meat. It's got saturated fat. It's bad for you. So people who are health conscious, they need it. That's called the healthy user effect, meaning, you know, people aren't doing bad stuff themselves. So it's not the meat that's the problem is that they're not smoking. They're not drinking alcohol. They're not there. They're they're exercising. They're eating whole foods. And that's why they don't have less heart disease. May not be the fact that they're not eating meat. And on the other hand, when you look at people who did eat meat in those studies, they had really bad habits. They didn't care about their health. So they were far more overweight. They ate 800 calories more a day. They smoked more. They drank more. They ate less fruits and vegetables. They eat more processed food and junk food. So, you know, of course, they had more disease. And the one study that I love was when they looked at two groups of people, meat eaters and vegetarians who shopped at health food stores. Their death rate went down in half for both groups because they were eating meat in the context of a whole foods diet. That meat shouldn't be the staple in your diet, but it should be a side dish in the in the face of a lot of good quality plant foods that help you to deal with the need you have for phytochemicals. So, so what do you think about the carnivore diet? Well, I think it's problematic. I mean, a lot of people are trying it, and I think people get rid of all the bad stuff in their diet, and that can often help. So if you go from eating a traditional American diet with processed food, 60 percent starch and sugar and processed calories to eating only meat, you're cutting out all the gluten and the dairy and the sugar and the processed food. So that's going to make you feel better over a longer time. I think it could be problematic because it's it's devoid of certain phytochemicals and nutrients and it can affect that microbiome in ways that I don't think are that healthy. So, you know, we are not, you know, lions, you know, we are we are humans and have evolved on an omnivore diet. So I think I believe that phytochemicals are really important for human health and I don't see how you get those just on a carnivore diet. Although it has helped people without immune disease, like I said, because you're cutting other stuff out. Yeah, you know, I have I have no problem with it as a the ultimate elimination diet. In fact, some people have actually accused me of being the father of the carnivore diet because you're eliminating leptins out of your diet. No, I don't want to be the father of the carnivore diet. But anyhow. So what about fish and poultry? Same rules apply. Well, in every in every area and every category of food, I think the key is to focus on quality and understand the source of what you're doing. So if you're eating, for example, fish, you know, a lot of fish we have now is contaminated with mercury, microplastics, and it's challenging. And there's farm-raised fish, but there's problems with those. So there are sort of organically sustainably raised farm fish. And you can source those. And there's a great resource called cleanfish.com where you can go and look at what those fish might be. The second and there's and there's great sources, for example, like Vital Choice Seafood and other companies that provide, you know, well-sourced seafood. The second is poultry, you know, poultry is a mess because, you know, we have so many natives, organic, grass-fed. I mean, there's pasture-raised, there's cage-free, there's free range, there's whatever. And it's all a bunch of nonsense. The key is you want animals that are truly pasture-raised, that have been out in pasture, that aren't in cages, that run around, they eat all the grubs and the worms and the whatever stuff they find around a farm. Those are the ones you want to eat because they have less, less of the bad stuff, more of the good stuff. They're not grain-fed, which is their omega-6 levels are lower. They have, you know, more nutrient density. If you take a chicken and look at the eggs from a chicken that's running around in the wild, like eating pasture, it's like the eggs are like dark, dark yellow. If you look at one of those, you know, factory-farmed eggs, it's like pale yellow color. I mean, it's almost like a bright orange sunset. If you look at the real eggs that are like that. So I think we want to always focus on quality. I think pasture-raised is ideal for eggs and poultry. And of course, organic is sort of the next best. But even that may be problematic. So I think we have to just do our best to find the best quality and not be fanatical about it, but understand that, you know, it's a hierarchy of means. Getting off a processed food is key. And eating more plant foods is key. And the rest just sort of kind of can look at the fine print of how do we navigate? What is the best source of fish? What is the best source of meat? What is the best source of poultry? And I go through all that in the peak and diet and explain that in great detail. I know you're down on dairy in general, but you do like grass-fed butter. How come? Well, I think ghee is my favorite in terms of that. I think, you know, we can tolerate saturated fat for most of us. I think, again, it's another one of those big topics. It's gotten a lot of bad press, but it's actually the science doesn't support it being universally bad for everybody. And I think there are some people who respond badly as saturated fats, but it's an individual thing. You have to just check your lipids. But for most of us, a little bit of ghee or grass-fed butter can be fine. And grass-fed butter, while it does still contain some of the casein and whey that's in milk, very, very little. And if you don't want that, you can get ghee. But the grass-fed butter has higher levels of vitamins and, for example, vitamin A and carotenoids. And it's much darker, yellow. And also it contains something called CLA, which is a conjugated linoleic acid, which is a powerful anti-cancer compound and metabolism booster. And you don't get that in regular butter. Yeah, there's also a nice amount of vitamin K2. And I agree with you. If people are going to use grass-fed butter and they should be aware of casein A1 and use grass-fed ghee, that's really the best choice. That's what I, that's pretty much what I do. Yeah. All right. Now there's a lot you admire about the vegan diet. So what are the shortcomings that you note in the book? Well, you know, it's interesting. I just, I just had a patient which sort of brought it forefront for me again, because if you're not really smart about it, if you don't design it very well, it can be really problematic. And this one patient I saw was a young 26-year-old woman who was feeling tired and had a lot of inflammation in her body and lots of pimples and acne. And I think she was relatively thin, but just struggling with her well-being and health. And we did, you know, a sense of nutritional testing. She was significantly protein deficient, really depleted in amino acids and protein. She was massively B12 deficient, vitamin D deficient. She was finally devoid of any omega-3 fats. She never ate fish. And these are not, you know, kind of insignificant nutrients. These are significant things that affect the quality you're helping your life and every system in your body. So if you are smart about it, you can be accommodating by making sure you're designing your diet in a way that maximizes protein, for example. But you're not going to, I don't think you're going to get as a vegan unless you jack up protein shakes. So there's a shake that I just saw in the health center over here, which is a garden of life sport shake. But it's very interesting because they jacked up the amino acids that you need for protein synthesis. They jacked up the amount of protein. You need more protein if you have vegan protein. So, you know, where a four or six ounce piece of chicken or fish will be equivalent to two or three cups of beans. Like one, it's hard to eat that many beans. And two, you're also getting like a hundred plus grams of carbs in there. I mean, you're just getting fiber, you're getting minerals and, you know, there's other issues around lectins. But I think that the the issue is how do you how do you actually get the right the right amount of high quality nutrients, protein, zinc, iron, vitamin D, B12, omega three fats. These are the common deficiencies we see in vegans. So you have to take supplements with it or you have to really sort of design your diet. And the other thing is that, you know, people should not be focused on dogma. That's the whole point of the book. The dogma gets people into trouble. Now I'm going to be a vegan because I believe in it and it's good for me and it's good for the planet. Well, one, it may not be good for you. If your health declines and you feel depleted in your woman and your menstrual cycle stops, you have infertility or LeVita goes down or you're tired or you have all these other issues. You may not be the right diet for you where somebody else might thrive in a guy like Rich Rollick and run an Ironman triathlon and vegan diet. He's great, you know, like, but that doesn't mean it's good for everybody. In the same way, eating meat is not great for everybody and it makes them feel bad and it has adverse consequences. So I think we have to really, you know, off the dogmas and that was really the purpose of the title, which is kind of a joke, you know, the vegan diet kind of poking fun at these diet extremes. You know, that brings up a good point. Like in my paradox books, I have a food pyramid and you have a food pyramid in this book. Can you talk about what that looks like? How do you build your food pyramid? Well, it's pretty simple. You know, the bottom of it should be predominantly plants. I mean, we should be eating plants, a plant we call plant forward or plant rich diet. I don't think the term plant-based is the best for most people because it means it's only plants and I think there are needs for certain nutrients that we're only really getting from animal foods. But the idea is to eat a lot of plants. And then second would be, you know, getting a lot of your protein and fat from good quality food. So the nuts and seeds, it would be good oils like olive oil, it would be avocados, it would be, you know, nuts like macadamia nuts, which I love are sort of like the olive oil nuts. And then of course, you know, high quality protein, chicken, fish, meat, lamb, whatever, then it's sourced properly. And then so we move up the pyramid and sort of include a little more things like nuts and seeds and grains and beans. But in a very specific way, I'm very careful about which grains and which beans you want to be eating. I don't think we should all be eating gluten because even if you're healthy, it does cause a leaky gut, even microscopically. So even if you don't have gluten sensitivity or celiac, it's still causing a little havoc down there. And there may be grains that are great like that. There's a new discovery of a grain called Himalayan tardary buckwheat, which is actually very ancient grain that was sort of been rediscovered and is grown by a friend of ours, Jeff Land, up in upstate New York, because they just got the first batch. I got my, I flower here, I'm gonna make my buckwheat pancake. But they are probably the most powerful phytonutrient rich superfood on the planet with over 150 phytochemicals, some which are found in other plants. It's got probably two or three times the protein content of most other grains. It's got the special fibers that are incredibly good for the microbiome. So that's a very different thing than eating some dwarf wheat that's sprayed with glyphosate that's preserved with calcium propionate that has extra glide molecules that are more likely to trigger autoimmunity and have an amylopectin A, which is a super starch that's worse than sugar. So like that's a very different brain. I make my pancakes from one or the other. I have very different effects on my body. So it's really about which, which of these things we should be eating. And then of course in the top, there's like recreational things, like a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of sugar, but very like limited. Can you have it every day? I mean, could you have a square chocolate every day if you're metabolically healthy? Yeah, if I, you know, ride my bike 20 miles and I work out for an hour with my trainer and I, you know, like eat healthy. I'm not worried about a little bit of, you know, chocolate or some sugar. I think it's the amount we're eating. And I always say, sugar is a recreational drug. It's like tequila. I love it, but I wouldn't have it every night. And you know, I wouldn't have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is basically what we're doing in America. We eat sugar for breakfast, lunch and dinner either in the form of flour or directly sugar. No, you're right. So what was, I love to ask this, what was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned researching and writing the Pigen diet? Well, it really has to do with this idea that when we eat well for us, it's also connected to how we grow the food. So there's a chapter in there called How to Be a Regenitarian, How to Eat Like a Regenitarian. And what that means is how do you eat in a way that regenerates human health and regenerates the soil health and the health of the ecosystems on the farms? And it turns out they're intimately connected. You know, you talk a lot about the microbiome, but there's a microbiome in the soil, which we've talked about through glyphosane and through overtillage and through lack of cover crops and crop rotations and monocrop fields. And that's destroyed the soil, which has led to food that is highly nutrient depleted because there's no nutrients in the soil. And it's led to a set of farming practices that really destroys the climate and the environment and our water resources. I mean, we literally put end to end our food system. It's the number one cause of climate change. You know, we've lost a third of our top soil by tillage and everything else, which has actually put all this carbon in the atmosphere. So a third of all the carbon right now in the atmosphere, not from fossil fuels, it's from loss of carbon in the soil and that we can actually regenerate all that soil and we can use less chemicals or no chemicals, limit our water resource use because the soil that's got organic matter can hold 27,000 gallons per acre of water. And we need to stop destroying the waterways by the runoff of nitrogen fertilizer stuff, causing all the chemical damage to endocrine systems from the pesticides and herbicides and the glyphosane. I mean, it's just gonna go on and on. So it's kind of a win, win, win where you connect the dots between really where does healthy eating start? It starts on the farm. And how do we regenerate human health and how do we regenerate planetary health and ecosystems and climate change? That's really what's sort of shocking to me to really learn how connected those things are. Okay, so what can the listener do starting today to put your book into play and to do regenerative eating? Well, that's not that hard. I think we actually can start with upgrading the quality of our diet through the things we've just talked about. But then you can start to begin to think about where you source your food. So try to source your food from places like farmers markets, communities for the agriculture places, and even maybe regenerative farms. And in the book, I talked about how you find these regenerative farms. And I think there are many online like Mariposa Ranch, there's Belcampo Ranch. There's a lot of resources in there to explain how do you begin to find ways to start to source foods that support the movement. And I think right now it's small, but I think the Biden administration, for example, has recently put forth the suggestions of how we start to support regenerative agriculture and how do we start to do that in a way of addressing climate change? So eating like a regenerator is really, really important. And it'll help us solve a lot of our issues, not just our own health, but it'll help us address climate change and environmental pollution. And I think if you focus on your choices that you have something to do about it, you can actually make a big difference. So shop local or organic when you can, join your community-sport agriculture program. Look for the new regenerative organic certification label, which is being done. Stop food waste, which is, I mean, food waste is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases. After US and China, it's the third largest emitter, which is you're revealing your vegan, you're good, good. But if you throw out all your vegetable scraps in the compost or the rotten vegetables from your fridge, I mean, in the garbage, those end up in the landfill and off gas, because three times as much methane, three times as much methane as cows. So that's a very important thing to think about. And also you can eat real whole foods, like I said, avoid packaging processed foods and essentially try to source from regenerative farms when you can. So this is a start, I think, but people are gonna become more and more aware of this issue. There's a great movie called Kiss the Ground, which I was in, which talks about regenerative agriculture and so how to get involved. So I encourage you all to check that out. It's on Netflix, just called Kiss the Ground. So you're gonna kiss the ground. I'm gonna kiss my dog and... And we're both gonna accomplish the same purpose. That's right. That's right. Well, Dr. Iman, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. And I'm looking forward to being on yours to talk about the energy paradox. All right, so where can listeners follow you in your work and where can they pick up a copy of your new book and hold it up again so everybody can see it? There it is. It's you on the cover, very nice. It's me, it's me. 21 practical principles for reclaiming your health in a nutrition-confusing world. You can get it on Amazon. You go to peagandiet.com. There's bonuses you can find there. Lots of great resources and lots of great food you'll get. You'll be able to watch a trailer about the book and order the book from there. You can go to Amazon or your local bookstore if they wanna follow me. Dr. Mark Hyman, that's just DR Mark Hyman and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And of course, my podcast is Drs. Pharmacy as well. So I encourage you all to check out the information and I think we've seen as you have with patients and there's dramatic changes in their health. So excited to be able to present a book that really talks about how food is medicine and how to use food as medicine in your own life. So thank you so much Dr. Gundry for having me on your podcast. And I should point out that the Drs. Pharmacy is spelled with an F. So make sure- That's right, that's right. Thank you for reminding me. Yes, Drs. Pharmacy with an F. Make sure you find that. Okay, I want you to stick around because we've got an audience question and we've been talking about autoimmune disease. So Ivona Alonzo on YouTube asks, Hi Dr. Gundry, my husband, a healthy 50-year-old man, and I started two weeks ago on the Plant Paradox Diet. I already got two of your books on the hope that is progressive, rare, and autoimmune disorder that has no cure called inclusion body myositis, IBM, could somehow heal. By the way, for those of you who don't know what that is, there is no known treatment for inclusion body myositis, including no autoimmune drug treatment. So keep that in mind. We have also started to take vitamin D, 1,000 internationally in today, and fish oil supplements. Question, is there something else he could be doing to get better? Is it okay to exercise? Are there any other supplements he should be taking? Now, before Dr. Hyman answers this and I answer this, just remember we can't give specific medical advice without you being a patient, but we both can give general recommendations about supplementation when you have an autoimmune disease. So, Mark, any thoughts? Absolutely, and I just have a patient with this who's done remarkably well. She almost couldn't walk at all because all her muscles were weak, and it basically means you get an autoimmune disease like your muscles with muscle pain, fatigue, weakness. And from a provunctional medicine perspective, it's the same approach to pretty much all disease and all autoimmune diseases, take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. What are the things that are potentially triggering the inflammation? Not just, there's inflammation, let's take steroids to shut it down, and you can use steroids with this condition, but it's not a very fun drug to be on a long time. And we investigate carefully, is it a toxin, is it an allergen, is it the microbes, is it a microbiome problem, is it stress, poor diet? What is it that's triggering the immune system? What are the body needs that it's not getting to actually optimize muscle function and mitochondrial health and immune system function and just your general health? So we have to take out the bad things and put in the good things. And this patient had, for her, it was not, and this is the thing with functional medicine. You could have 10 people with the same disease and you'd have 10 different treatments, right? So in her case, she turned out she had very high levels of heavy metals, mercury and lead, extremely high. And so we had to dress those and get her metal levels down in order to help her. And we also had to fix her microbiome, which it's a problem. And we had to then optimize her mitochondria with, it's not only to be, you know, we helped her diet and got rid of all the inflammatory foods and very much similar to your approach. We also jacked up all the mitochondrial support so her muscles could function better. So we gave her lipoic acid and carnitine and ribose and it's NAC and a CoQ-10 and a lot of the key nutrients that are needed for mitochondrial optimization, which is how you produce energy. So it's very individual approach, but I think it's often good to think that there may be other causes and you have to keep digging, whether it's tick infections, which can cause autoimmune disease, whether it's heavy metals, whether it's things like gluten, a leaky gut, you have to think about all these things and address these. And that's really the job of a good functional medicine practitioner is to be a medical detective and dive down deep into the story. No, you're exactly right. I view myself as a detective. That's all I think of myself as. And Hippocrates literally said this 2,500 years ago that the body has an innate ability to heal itself as long as you act like a detective and take away the external forces or the forces that you're swallowing that are keeping your natural healing ability, which he called vereditas, from expressing itself. It basically green life force energy is the translation. So yeah, I think you're right. I use a lot of food sensitivity testing that I used to never give the time of day to, but now the newer food sensitivity testing based on IgG and IgA and IgM has just opened up a world for me. And many times some of the most innocuous foods may actually be one of the biggest triggers that starts all this. I have a number of patients that almond flour turned out to be one of their biggest triggers and they were almond flour fanatics, almond flour bread, almond flour cookies. And we took it away. So Dr. Hyman's suggestions are absolutely spot on and you have to do a real deep dive into this but I agree with you Mark that what seems to be incurable oftentimes, we just, I mean, things that I would have never believed we could fix, you see people turn things around. I mean, it's just remarkable. So, and that's why I get up every day and see patients six days a week just because I'm like, oh wow, I do. You and I have talked about this. You said you idiot, why do you do that? Well, I mean, I still see patients but that's a lot. I see them on the weekends. I got a full clinic this weekend. Okay, that's another story. Yeah, I'm a kid in the candy store. All right, so thank you for your answer. Look forward to seeing you in person one of these years, months, whatever. Yeah, thank you so much Stephen and look forward to seeing you again soon too. All right, take care. Now it's time for the review of the week. This week's review of the week comes from Rachel on Apple Podcasts who left us a five star review and wrote, I have listened to every podcast episode and read all your books. Well, thank you, Rachel. I always look forward to the new episodes. I've learned so much from you and the people you have interviewed. I really appreciate how you stay updated on research and continuously provide new information and recommendations. As a home gardener and blogger interested in personal and environmental health and sustainability, I especially enjoyed your interviews with Charles Mulkey and Dan Walter, farmer Dan for those of you who listen. Please keep sharing your knowledge and passion. Well, wow, thank you so much, Rachel. You know, your reviews, Rachel and everyone else's are so important in helping us grow our audience so that we can help more people live healthier, longer and happier lives. So if you haven't yet, please rate and review us on iTunes. It's a huge help. And if you want to give me a bad rating, I'll read it and I'll make some changes because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you and what you think. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.