Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show.
What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you'll ever find in a prescription bottle.
Chapter 2: How can food act as medicine for better health?
It works faster, better, and cheaper. Food, I don't even think we should call it medicine. It's like a miracle cure because it's so powerful.
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What actually isn't a good diet? And I've written a lot about this. I wrote food, what should I eat? The pecan diet. There's no guessing what I think, but essentially it's whole real food. You 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?
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Chapter 3: What role does sleep play in overall health?
You also want to eat a lot of fiber. So that's going to happen naturally as you eat a lot of plant foods. You want to make sure you have prebiotic foods like plantains and artichokes and asparagus. And I even sometimes add that from a microbiome. You also want polyphenols for your microbiome, things like cranberry and pomegranate and
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 because that determines so much. 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 is 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 basically a few... The gruel is a palm-sized amount of protein in most meals. And this can be plant proteins, but often you need a lot more. 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 pasture-raised chicken. I like pasture-raised eggs. I like small wild fish. I like goat whey. These are my kind of go-to proteins. So that's what you want to think.
Tofu, tempeh are probably the most dense plant-based proteins, but you want to eat the right protein. Now, what should we not be eating? Well, it's stuff that's not food, right? Obviously, there's another 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 100%, never fall off of this. There's 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 is a lot more likely to cause harm.
The next is hydrogenated fats.
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Chapter 4: How does chronic stress affect our health?
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 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, if you wouldn't sprinkle it on your salad or on your vegetables at night, well, why would you eat it? I mean, who has butylated hydroxy toluene in their cupboard? But that's a common preservative found in most processed food. Also, artificial sweeteners are 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 Rolls, a friend of mine. And there was a guy who was 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'll just 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, and 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 2 diabetes, 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 43. 30 is considered obese. 40 is severely obese. And she just 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 going to 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 A1C, which is your average blood sugar going 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.
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Chapter 5: What types of daily movement are essential for aging well?
It makes us tired, hard to focus. Basically, having sleep deprivation is basically equivalent to being drunk in terms of your performance. You know, I read a study once where there were snipers who were, you know, excellent shots and that they had eight hours sleep. They were like 100% accurate. If they had seven hours sleep, they were like 95% accurate.
If they had six hours sleep, they were like 95%. 70% accurate. And if they were like less than six hours sleep, they were basically like 50%. It's like almost a hit and miss. So not good. Even when you're an expert in something, you can't function when you're tired.
So next to sort of nutrition exercise, and maybe even before it's somewhat argue sleep, maybe the fundamental foundation of health and disease prevention and even weight control. So why, why is it so important? How to, how to,
the sleep dysfunction lead to change as well is a very important hormone called cortisol which is your stress hormone and and it helps um when it's imbalanced 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 now 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 have some big experience that I certainly have at different moments in my life. When you get down into bed, you're exhausted, but you can't fall asleep because you're just wired. That has to do with your adrenal glands.
And 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 actually often struggling with sleep because of the way in which it affects our sleep.
So 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.
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Chapter 6: How can periodic detox resets improve health?
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 middle-of-the-night wakening.
But when your cortisol and your body stress response are imbalanced, 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 and 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 want to 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 1 and 4.
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 then you fall asleep because 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, uh, can be a big factor, right? Worries about family, work, money, uh, physical stresses, lack of exercise is a stress, believe it or not. Too much screen time, junk food, uh,
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Chapter 7: What are the five pillars of health for 2026?
toxic lifestyles, hormonal imbalances, you know, environmental toxins, all these drive increased inflammation, increased brain inflammation, 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 going to have high cortisol and high adrenaline. So what are the things that are the two most common things that 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 experienced the dangers of not being in rhythm when I worked in the emergency room. I would sometimes work a 7 in the morning till 5 at night shift. Then I'd work a 2 in the afternoon till a 2 in the morning shift. Then I'd work an 11 o'clock at night till a 7 in the morning shift. Then I'd work an 8 in the morning till an 8 in the morning shift, 24-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 kind of 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 want to 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 in a regular time space. So don't eat three hours before bed. Don't eat a heavy meal before bed because I guarantee you that'll screw up your sleep.
Also carbohydrates, I think if you want to 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, processed, 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,
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Chapter 8: What are the steps to effectively implement a 10-day detox diet?
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 where you can sleep at the same time try to go to sleep before 10 that's the best sleep you can have is before midnight
believe it or not, so get in bed by 10, try to be asleep shortly thereafter, 11 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 really take care of creating a carefully controlled environment. Next is caffeine. Some is tolerated okay and metabolized, 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 want to 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 basically great medicine. You know what I mean? Sunlight. I'm going to go to sleep. No, but 20 minutes of sunlight in the morning without sunglasses on.
outdoors, not behind a window, has a big effect on your circadian rhythms. So we are photobiomodulating organisms. The light affects us. It regulates our biology. And it's important to make sure you have a good 20 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. I 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.
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 3 diabetes, which we now refer to as dementia.
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