The Food System Is Designed to Kill Us, Not Feed Us | Dr. Mark Hyman
episodePreviously titled “Dr. Mark Hyman: How To Reclaim Your Health In A Food System Designed To KILL You” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 13, 2026
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What is the shocking statistic about chronic disease in America?
Six out of ten Americans will have a chronic disease in their lifetime.
Is that correct? No. Six out of ten Americans today have a chronic illness. Six out of ten have it now.
We went from a relatively healthy nation to one of the sickest nations in the world. Do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us? Oh, that's easy.
It's designed to kill us. Physician and wellness expert, Dr. Mark Hyman.
14 New York Times bestsellers, none other than Dr. Mark Hyman.
We're spending more and more money. It's $1 to $5 in our economy. We're pouring more and more drugs on everybody, getting sicker and sicker. Nobody's asking why. I'm sorry. If another country was doing to our kids what we're doing, we'd go to war to protect them.
What would you say are three to five things that could help someone reclaim their health and end chronic illness forever in their family? That's a beautiful question. I mean, I thought a lot about it. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Dr. Mark Hyman in the house. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you, buddy. Welcome back to the show. We've got a crazy stat here. You've got 15 New York Times wrestling books. You've got amazing businesses, podcasts that are helping millions of lives around the world understand their health and understand what's causing them to get sick and unhealthy. That's right. And there's a stat that I saw online that said nearly 90% of the $4.1 trillion spent on healthcare in America each year is attributed to chronic disease. My first question to you is, do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us?
How is the food system designed to affect our health?
100%. It wasn't starting out that way, Louis. I mean, we had, after World War II, a need to feed a hungry growing population around the world. And so the huge push to industrialize agriculture, to produce more calories, more starchy carbohydrate calories that could feed a growing hungry world. And the unintended consequence of that was two things. One, producing massive amounts of sugar and starch. We actually have about 500 calories more per person in America than we did in 1970. Wow. Two, we also increased the amount of starch and sugar. And three, we industrialized agriculture in a way that has destroyed the environment because of the tillage that's destroyed the soil. The soil, yeah. That is now, you know, one third of all the carbon in the atmosphere comes from the loss of soil carbon, which is the life in the soil. We destroyed our rivers and waterways because of the runoff from nitrogen that's caused eutrophication and has dead zones the size of New Jersey and in the Gulf of Mexico. There's 400 around the world of those that feed a half a billion people. What's a dead zone?
Dead zone means when you have too much fertilizer in the water, it makes the algae grow, sucks all the oxygen out of the water, and all the fish die. That's a dead zone.
Dead fish.
There's no fish. Dead fish. And so people are depending on that fish to live. And then, you know, we have the pesticides and the glyphosate, which is destroying this whole microbiome, our microbiome. It causes cancer. And so we have all these downstream consequences, not to mention how horrific factory farming is. So the whole industrial food system from field to fork is completely effed. And I've actually had a nonprofit called Food Fix Campaign that's based on my book Food Fix that was entitled How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, and Our Planet and Our Communities One Bite at a Time. And it was really laying out from peel to fork what's wrong with our food system, with our food policies. And, you know, we really have to address this because it's why we've gone from, you know,
a relatively healthy nation, if you look even back in the 70s, you know, you can't... Pretty healthy, pretty fit. Yeah, I mean, you can't see that many overweight people. Now you can't find a skinny person. You know, like, if you look at the data, we've gone from, you know, about 5% to 10% obesity when I was born to now 42%.
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