The Dr. Hyman Show
Are You Nutrient Deficient? The Hidden Factors of Accelerated Aging | Rhonda Patrick
Wed, 02 Apr 2025
We’re overfed, but undernourished. Despite having access to more food than ever, most people are walking around with nutrient deficiencies that could be accelerating aging, increasing disease risk, and depleting energy levels. That’s why I sat down with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a leading expert in nutritional science and aging, to break down what we’re missing—and why it matters. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, we explore: Why nearly 70% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D and what that means for longevity. The overlooked role of magnesium in metabolism, blood sugar, and brain function. Why our food system leaves us malnourished—even if we eat a “healthy” diet. The best way to assess and correct micronutrient imbalances for optimal health. Your body can’t function properly without the right nutrients. This episode will show you how to fill the gaps and take control of your health. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Seed, BON CHARGE, Pique, Perfect Amino, and AirDoctor. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Go to boncharge.com and use code DRMARK to save 15% on your PEMF mat today. Head to piquelife.com/hyman to get 20% off + a free beaker and frother today. Get pure essential amino acids today. Go to bodyhealth.com and use HYMAN20 to get 20% off your first order. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at airdoctorpro.com/drhyman.
Chapter 1: Who are the experts featured in this episode?
What the study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo controlled, right? The multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they were less, people taking the multivitamin mineral supplement were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction, memory loss. And in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.
Wow. Okay. randomized control trial. Here we are 10 years later.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of micronutrients in aging and health?
And, you know, one of the things that kind of really got me excited when I was sort of you know, that I have you on was that you studied with a scientist named Bruce Ames, who is someone I've, you know, really admired, has been someone who inspired me, and a lot of my work and thinking has come out of a lot of his work, which was really looking at how do we really understand the nature
of aging and micronutrients and, and how do we get a metabolic tune up? You know, he wrote these incredible papers that were, I think, landmark papers. And, you know, you, you had the privilege of actually working with him, studying with him.
So maybe kind of, you can share with us how you sort of got into this with Bruce and what, you know, what you've learned from him and what sort of whole idea of the role of micronutrients is in health and wellness.
Well, first of all, Mark, I want to thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate what you do as well, and I also appreciate the kind words. So, sorry. Did I make you cry? Bruce Ames passed away a couple months ago, and he was my mentor and a very good friend of mine. Unbelievable guy. And it kind of a funny story about how I ended up in his lab.
You know, I was when I was wrapping up my graduate research, my Ph.D. at St. George Children's Research Hospital. While I was there, I really got into health and for just wanting to be healthy and also healthy. I had done some previous research before graduate school in an aging lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
And so I was already very interested in aging, even though I was in my 20s when I was working in that lab.
The last thing people think about when they're in their 20s is living to 100, but yeah.
I was definitely thinking about it. And specifically, I was thinking about things that I can do in my diet and lifestyle because I had done some research on how insulin affects aging and glucose metabolism. And so it was very real to me that there's a very strong connection between our diet and lifestyle and the way we age.
And so that led me to reading a lot of Bruce's studies on mitochondrial health, on micronutrients. And I continued reading him throughout grad school. And I started a blog at that time. I was blogging about vitamin D and omega-3. And I kind of decided I didn't want to be a professor necessarily.
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Chapter 3: How did Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s mentorship with Bruce Ames influence her research?
Isn't he one of the most cited scientists of all time?
He is. He is. And then, you know, he got into you wonder what he's doing this cancer research. And then he gets into micronutrients. So, you know, these are about 30 or 40. essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids that we need to get from our diet. We need them to survive. But as Bruce would argue, we also need them to age optimally. And he got into this field quite quickly.
I would say it was an accident. He had a guy in his lab doing a sabbatical, Dr. McGregor. And this guy was a cytobiologist. He was looking at red blood cells and doing a lot of experiments with red blood cells. And it turns out he used a media that didn't have folate. And all of a sudden, he started noticing all these double-stranded breaks in DNA.
The DNA was like being damaged.
Being damaged. And so he was like, oh, what's going on? And he finally traced it down to, oh, we have this media that we've used that doesn't have folate. So then he decided to do some animal work. Well, let's see what happens if we deprive rodents of folate.
And sure enough, widespread DNA damage, just completely, you know, double-stranded breaks in DNA are the precursor to basically oncogenic mutations. The answer. Exactly. Cancer. So Bruce, of course, was like, wow, this is amazing. Not having a important micronutrient can potentially cause cancer. And that's kind of what it was doing in the rodent studies.
And then he had found some humans that were low in folate and did some experiments as well. Found a similar thing, gave them back the folate, DNA double-stranded breaks, went away. He worked out the mechanism, which was folate is a precursor for making DNA. And so if you don't have that there, your body will put something there from RNA, a uracil, instead of a thymine.
Those are like nucleotides from the DNA.
Right. And so it basically causes these double-stranded breaks. So long story short, that's how Bruce got into micronutrients. And he started to really dive into understanding how these vitamins and minerals are affecting the way we age because cancer is a disease of age for the most part. There are some childhood leukemias and childhood cancers, but those are mostly linked to genetics.
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Chapter 4: What is the triage theory and how does it relate to nutrient prioritization?
So let's back up a little bit. Because years ago, 20, God, more than 20 years ago, I wrote an article called Paradigm Shift, really about the sort of end of normal science, which is this sort of our current view of how things are in medicine and how the body works and shifting more toward a systems view and understanding the body as a network, as a sort of
an integrated organism that requires basic raw materials to function optimally. And what I wrote about in that article was that, you know, micronutrients are really kind of miraculous because back in the turn of the century, we didn't really know about them, the 1900s, not 2000s, but we still kind of don't know much about them. from the consumer and medical point of view, for sure.
The amount of serious deficiency diseases like pellagra and beriberi and rickets and, you know, xerophthalma, which was like a vitamin A deficiency and causes blindness, just widespread, you know, zinc deficiencies. And these cause really significant, serious diseases that could literally be cured almost in minutes with infinitesimally small amounts, you know, milligram amounts of nutrients.
There's no drug that can do that. And you were talking about magnesium having 300 different enzymatic reactions. When you take a drug, it usually has one target, like one receptor and one action. But nutrients have our pleomorphic, which means they can do many, many, many things. And they do many things.
And each nutrient literally can have hundreds of different reactions in different systems of the body that regulate almost everything we can think of.
And what's really frightening to me as a physician, and we do testing of this, I co-founded a company called Function Health, and we do a lot of micronutrient testing as part of that, which is not typically done, whether it's, you know, methylation testing for homocysteine, methylmolic acid, you know, the B vitamins we're talking about, like folic acid, or...
The, you know, vitamin D or the omega-3s and, you know, zinc and the selenium and the list goes on. And we see iodine, the tremendous amount of deficiencies that exist in red blood cell magnesium, you know, that exist within the population that are being unmet. diagnosed.
I mean, and we're seeing, I don't know, we have 110,000 people in our cohort, 67%, last time we looked at the data of the cohort, which is, I think, a more health-forward cohort who would be like proactive about their health, going to function health, getting their jobs done, 67% have a nutrient deficiency, iron, omega-3s, vitamin D, homocysteine, whatever,
At the level that the lab reference range says, not at what you or I would think would be optimal, right? So we probably would think vitamin D should be over 45 or 50, but they're levels 30. Or ferritin, I think they're level 16, which is your iron stores. Probably I think it should be a 45 or more for optimal health.
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Chapter 5: Why is magnesium crucial for metabolism and DNA repair?
Yeah, bad example, like statins. So, you know, but when you're doing a... You don't have a normal blood level of Lipitor, right? Right, exactly. When you're doing a study on vitamin D or... omega-3 or fill-in-the-blank vitamin mineral, everybody has varying levels of these micronutrients in their body. And so you have to measure things. You have to measure things at the start of the trial.
You might have someone that's already got sufficient levels of vitamin D. They may have 50 nanograms per milliliter level vitamin D. And so you give them a vitamin D supplement and it's not going to do anything because they're already sufficient, right? Yeah.
Or the converse is they're so deficient and you give them a supplement that's 400 IUs or 800 IUs, which doesn't raise their blood levels hardly at all. that it doesn't really do anything.
And so you won't- Dose is wrong. You don't measure who's sufficient. Like, yeah, I mean, like if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything, right? So it's like if your levels are great at omega-3s and you add omega-3s, you won't see a change in your health, right?
Exactly. So that's the fundamental flaw of clinical trials in nutrition. that right there, is that the MDs that are running these trials are running them like they're drug trials, and they're not. You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well-done trials.
And in fact, I remember... You just interrupted. The other flaw is that
they they will use a single dose of a nutrient that usually works as a team like and that can actually make things worse like the beta carotene trials the smokers show that it can cause cancer but oxidative stress is managed by a whole team of nutrients so like i would say you could be you know uh you know michael jordan but if you're playing one against five on a basketball team you're gonna lose every time right even if he's the best player in the world so
You need a team of these nutrients, particularly in terms of the oxidative stress cascade, to actually modulate free radicals. And if you give a high dose of one nutrient, you're going to kind of screw up the whole chain.
Yeah, that is possible, not to mention the fact that smokers – I mean, if you give beta-carotene to non-smokers, it doesn't cause cancer. But smokers are doing so much oxidative damage and they're getting DNA damage that a high dose of something like beta-carotene, which can be an antioxidant, may then allow some of that. It's basically –
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Chapter 6: What are the flaws in clinical trials studying vitamin and mineral supplements?
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And there's been a lot of work by Dr. Bill Harris. So I'm an associate professor at the Fatty Acid Research Institute with Bill Harris. And so I'm involved in a lot of research on omega-3. And he's published just an array of studies that are quite convincing.
So looking at the omega-3 index, so this is the omega-3 levels in red blood cells, which is sort of like a long-term marker for omega-3 because they take about... What does the index actually measure? It measures the EPA and DHA levels along with a bunch of other fatty acids if you're interested in that. But it's really the EPA and DHA level in the red blood cell membrane.
Which gives you the index and you want a certain number.
Exactly. So he's published studies using like the Framingham cohort. So these are large cohort studies with a lot of people. And he's looked at the omega-3 index and correlated it with all-cause mortality. So dying from a variety of different diseases.
And what he's found is that people that have what is defined as a high omega-3 index, so this would be 8% or more, have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people that have a 4% omega-3 index, which is low. And actually, the average omega-3 index of the U.S. population is about 5%, pretty close to that 4%. Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's why we actually measure that in the Function Health Labs. Yeah. It's great to see when we see that.
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Chapter 7: How do omega-3 fatty acids affect longevity and mortality risk?
We're all different.
We're all different. And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose, right? Because they have genes that aren't converting vitamin D3 into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the circulating form of vitamin D or the steroid hormone, 125-hydroxyvitamin D. Well, let's go down this rabbit hole because I think there's a paper you just reminded me of that Bruce Ames wrote.
It was published in, I think, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition years ago about how one-third of all of our DNA codes for enzymes, right? And an enzyme is a catalyst that converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts or the coenzymes or the helpers are micronutrients.
And so what he said in that paper was that there's a huge variation in the population's need for different nutrients. So some people might need 400 micrograms of folate. Some people might need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so it's really about personalized nutrition. It's about testing, not guessing. It's about figuring out what your body needs, what your genetics are.
And it gets really fascinating that you can actually start to customize your own diet and your own supplement management based on what your own particular genetics and your levels are.
And so I think there's this, it was sort of a wake-up call for me, like, holy cow, when you think of our DNA and everything it does, if one third of it is coding for enzymes and all those enzymes require vitamins and minerals, if we don't have enough of those nutrients, it's like... It's like an assembly line in a factory. If you don't have one station, the thing can't get made, right?
So you gum up the whole works of your metabolic machinery if you don't have the right levels of nutrients to optimize the function of your body. And that's why we call it functional medicine because it's about how do we optimize function, right?
It's true. These minerals and vitamins – so you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins. These are cofactors for these enzymes to make these enzymes run properly. And if you don't have – you know, sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally, right?
So in the case that we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not going to be repairing damage as well. Zinc is also involved in DNA repair as well. You know, so B vitamins are involved in serotonin production. Magnesium is involved in vitamin D production, right? You were talking about, you know, nutrients working together. And it's very true.
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Chapter 8: Why is vitamin D deficiency widespread and what are its long-term effects?
And so you can take healthy people and dramatically change their profile within a matter of weeks of having... you know, this ultra processed foods, these sugar sweetened beverages, you know, which again, like.
And they deplete nutrients because I think people don't realize that one, you're not getting them, but two, you actually need nutrients to actually run your biochemistry. And so you're trying to burn these calories and burn the food, but you're actually depleted in the very nutrients required to run them metabolic pathways to actually metabolize the food.
So you're kind of, you know, getting it from both sides.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, it's, it comes down to, I think, you know, thinking about why you need to eat is so important because then it's like, I need to get micronutrients. I need to get my, my fiber. I need to get protein. When I say fiber, carbohydrates, right? But it needs to be carbohydrates in the form of fruits and vegetables, which have the micronutrients and the fiber, right?
And nuts and seeds, yeah, and oats. And then avoiding ultra-processed foods. I think if people were to do that and think about eating that way, and then you have to move, right? You have to be physically active. Being sedentary is a disease, right? Like there's data out there that show people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness.
So this is a marker of, you know, I mean, it's a marker of how physically active you are, essentially. That's an oversimplification. But people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness have the same disease risk as people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, smokers.
How do you measure your cardiovascular fitness?
Well, cardiorespiratory fitness is something typically you can measure if you go into like a lab that measures them and they put that like a mask. It's a VO2 max. So it's measuring your maximal oxygen uptake under maximal exercise. They put a mask on you. And that's really how you empirically quantify it. However, if you have like a smartwatch, Apple watches do sort of measure it.
It's not really entirely accurate.
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Chapter 9: How does nutrient insufficiency differ from deficiency and what are common symptoms?
It's so important for the sodium-potassium pump, which plays a role in blood pressure. And so when you're talking about too much sodium and not enough potassium, it's really exacerbating that not getting enough potassium aspect, right? Because that ratio is so important. And so not only are – I think it's something like 96% of the U.S. population doesn't meet the adequate intake for potassium.
It's essentially everyone. Right.
And our potassium intake as Hunter gathered should be 10 to 1 potassium to sodium. Now it's the other way around.
It's the other way around. Exactly. And so there's, you know, all sorts of problems with blood pressure and, you know, gosh, it's like even like 30% of like individuals age 20 to 39 have hypertension. Yeah. These are young adults with hypertension. Yeah. We now know that hypertension isn't just a risk for cardiovascular disease.
It's a risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, particularly if you start earlier, right? If you're like a younger person, so like it's cumulative exposure to hypertension. You know, it's important because you have to get blood flowed to your brain, right?
And, you know, you've got all these tiny, like 90% of the brain vasculature surrounding the brain is made of these tiny, tiny blood vessels that are like this smaller than the size of a hair in terms of diameter. And they have to get blood flow to them. So exercise helps that. But hypertension exacerbates the lack of blood flow going to those blood vessels.
And what happens is they're so tiny, they start to sort of constrict and sort of fall off automatically.
And you can get mini strokes.
Mini strokes, but also neurons don't get the nutrients and the oxygen they need. And so then you start to lose neurons, right? And you get brain atrophy. And so there's this connection between hypertension and dementia. And I'm talking about potassium here because potassium does play an important role in-
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Chapter 10: How does diet, including ultra-processed foods, impact nutrient intake and health?
Right. Or you're getting sick all the time.
Or my muscles ache, you know, because vitamin D is low. Or, you know, I have muscle cramps because my magnesium is low, right? Or I have depression because my, you know, methylation vitamins are low. Like people have symptoms. They just don't correlate it with the nutrient deficiencies. Right.
Depression is interesting. There's a pretty classic study that no one ever talks about where healthy individuals were injected with lipopolysaccharide. So for those listening, this is a component of your bacterial outer cell membranes. It's present in our colon because we have about I don't know how many trillions of bacteria, like so many bacteria in there, right?
40, 50 trillion.
Okay. 40 or 50 trillion. There's about a gram of lipopolysaccharide in our gut because those bacteria do die off.
And these are bacterial toxins. This is what pisses off your immune system to no end.
It does. And when we have gut permeability, lots of things that cause that, it releases it. Right. Also known as leaky gut. It leaches the LPS into our bloodstream. Well, this study took healthy individuals and injected them with an amount of LPS that would be equivalent to something that you could get from intestinal permeability. And it caused depressive symptoms in these individuals.
Okay, one, that links inflammation to depression, right? 100%. Two, if those individuals were given EPA, so this is one of the omega-3 fatty acids, it does play a major role in dampening inflammation through a variety of mechanisms like resolvins and mericins and the SPMs. These are all molecules that are resolving inflammation very quickly.
They did not experience those depressive symptoms if they were injected with the LPS.
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