The Nutrient Gaps That Could Be Aging You Faster with Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
So, Rhonda, it's so great to have you on The Doctor Hyman Show. Welcome. And I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I think, you know, you're one of the few scientists out there in the public sphere who's actually communicating science and data in ways that have a lot of integrity and that adhere to kind of some common sense principles that, you know, a lot of things out in the blogosphere or the podcast world are often, you know, a little bit, you know, extreme, and you kind of really take a very science based approach. So I'm really thrilled to have you on the podcast.

And the topic I wanna really dive into is micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, maybe some phytochemicals, but you know, there's so much confusion and controversy, and, you know, the medical professions historically said, you know, you don't really need multivitamineral if you're eating a healthy diet. Well, first of all, most of us don't eat a healthy diet. And second of all, you know, the idea that that vitamins and minerals just cause expensive urine doesn't quite make sense. I always say, if you know you so why should you drink water? You're just gonna pee it out.

It's, you know, it's like your body uses what it needs. And I think there's there's a lack of understanding of the widespread insufficiency and often deficiencies of nutrients in in America. You know, we're overfed and undernourished. And so there's a a problem that I think we're facing which is people don't understand the need to actually obtain the right nutrients in the right amounts for not just preventing a deficiency disease, but for optimizing health, preventing the disease of aging, and I wanna sort of dive into that with you. I wanna go through sort of the overall framework of like, you know, where we're at in terms of the nutritional status of the American population, what things we should be worried about, and, you know, kinda like dive into the science of each of the key nutrients and what they do and how they affect us.

You know, one of the things that kinda really got me excited when I was sort of, you know, gonna 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 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 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 the sort of whole idea of the role of micronutrients is in health and, and wellness.

Rhonda Patrick
Well, first of all, Mark, I wanna thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate, what you do as well, and I also appreciate the the kind words. So sorry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Did I make you cry?

Rhonda Patrick
Bruce Ames, passed away a couple months ago, and, he was my mentor and a very good friend of mine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Unbelievable guy. And it 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 PhD at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, while I was there, I really got into health and for just wanting to be, healthy. And also, I had done some previous research before graduate school in an aging lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

Yeah. And so I was already very interested in aging, you know, even though I was in my twenties when I was working in that lab. You know? It was already

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's something people think about when their twenties is living to a hundred. But yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
I was definitely thinking about it. And, and specifically, I was thinking about, like, things that I can do in my diet and lifestyle, because I had done some research on how insulin affects aging and, you know, 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. Yeah. 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 I started a blog at that time. I was, you know, blogging about vitamin d and omega three, and I kind of decided I didn't wanna be a professor necessarily. I didn't necessarily wanna go and write grants and and do this sort of classical pathway that a lot of scientists do when they're doing their training.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And I had told that to my mentor and my mentors, at the time and they were very distraught about that because they were saying that I was a very good scientist and I was completely Destroy

Dr. Mark Hyman
your life away.

Rhonda Patrick
Destroying destroy my scientific career. They begged me to please at least go interview for some postdoctoral, you know

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Positions.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And so I I did. I said, okay. Well, I'll go ahead and interview. And I I went on a few interviews and some very prominent labs, interviewed for very even aging labs.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And, in fact, one of the guys that I interviewed with at Stanford, looked me up and saw that I was blogging and said to me, you can't do this if you're gonna come to my lab. You need to work for me. Yeah. So then I go to Bruce and I meet Bruce. And, he is absolutely just he he blew blew me away with not only, his excitement for science, but his excitement for science communication and what I was doing.

And he was so enthusiastic about it. And he was basically like, oh, you need to continue doing this. It's a very important thing you do. Now remember Bruce, you know, he kinda switches fields every few years or so. He started out, looking at enzymes, and then he developed this test known as the AIMS test that is a very, very simple test for, testing for mutagens, things that can damage your DNA, which is the pre precursor for cancer.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
It's still widely used today. And he had done a lot of, you know, research back in the the late seventies and early eighties. And he found that, you know, chemicals that were in things like women's hair dye, children's pajamas Yeah. Were mutagens and carcinogens. Yeah.

And he published this paper on it and nobody was doing anything about it. And so he was on the phone calling up these companies. Have you seen my paper? It's you know? And he was responsible for getting these chemicals out of women's hair dye, out of children's pajamas.

I mean, he has had an amazing impact on public health, continues to have an impact on public health.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Isn't he one of the most cited scientists of all time?

Rhonda Patrick
He is. Yeah. He is. And then, you know, he he got into you wonder, okay, he's doing this cancer research and then he gets into to 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And, he he got into this field quite, I would say, it was an accident. He had he had a, a guy in his lab doing a sabbatical, doctor MacGregor. And this guy was, a cytobiologist. He he was he was looking at red blood cells and doing a lot of experiments with red blood cells. And it turns out he he used a media that didn't have folate.

And, all of a sudden, he started noticing all these double stranded breaks in DNA.

Dr. Mark Hyman
DNA. So the DNA was, like, damn being damaged.

Rhonda Patrick
Being damaged. And, and so he was like, oh, what's going on? And he, you know, finally traced it down to, oh, we have this media that we've used. It doesn't have folate.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Rhonda Patrick
So then he decided to do some animal work. Well, let's see what happens if we don't if we deprive, you know, rodents of folate. And sure enough, widespread DNA damage just completely, you know, and DNA double stranded breaks in DNA DNA are the precursor to, basically, oncogenic mutations. 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 done some human 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, 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 a thymine. And

Dr. Mark Hyman
Those are like nucleotides

Rhonda Patrick
and DNA that build DNA. Yeah. 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, you know, is is a disease of age for the most part.

There are some childhood leukemias and childhood cancers, but those are mostly linked to genetics. Yeah. Aging in general is is a major driver of cancer. And so Bruce came up with this this theory called the triage theory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And this about that. Yeah. This is a, it's a theory that he came up with that posits that vitamins and minerals that we get from our diet, they get triaged to essential functions in our body that are important for preventing basically acute death. Right? So if you think about blood coagulation, vitamin k one, very important.

Like, you need to have your blood clot. Otherwise, you could have, you know, a pretty severe injury and you could have a hemorrhage and that would be detrimental. Right? So vitamin k is one example and, there's some other examples like selenium that Bruce has published and showed, there are proteins that have a stronger binding to vitamin k one that are important for coagulation. So these are proteins in the liver, versus, for example, other proteins that stay in circulation and are activating proteins that are important for calcium signaling Yeah.

And trafficking, moving calcium out of the bloodstream, moving it to muscle, moving it to, bones. Right? So so he's published a couple of papers showing that so the idea is that your body will triage them to essential functions to prevent, you know, short term death at the expense of these long term sort of health functions. Right? So Your

Dr. Mark Hyman
body hijacks whatever nutrients we have to deal with the immediate needs you have, but then it it kinda misses the boat on what they're doing to protect us long term from the ravages of aging.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. And so magnesium would be another one. Magnesium is essential mineral. It's involved in over 300 different enzymatic, you know, processes, and ATP production and utilization is one of those. And ATP is the energetic currency of our cells.

We need to make energy to survive. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So Wends our cells is energy, everything.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. But it's also essential for DNA repair enzymes. They use it to repair damage to our DNA. Every time we make a new cell, whether that's a skin cell or a liver cell or a blood cell, there's there's damage that occurs even with just the process of cell division. Right?

Let alone the external processes that we're exposed to, UV radiation, unhealthy diet, things like that. So we need to repair that damage, but magnesium is essential for those DNA repair enzymes. And so if you don't get enough magnesium, it's only going to those essential roles of ATP production and not the DNA repair enzymes. And this is important because about fifty percent of The US population does not have adequate levels of magnesium.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Fifty percent?

Rhonda Patrick
Close to fifty percent. Yeah. And, you know, magnesium, as Bruce would say, is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. Chlorophyll give plants their green color.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
So magnesium is very high in dark leafy greens.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
You're supposed to eat your greens. You get your magnesium. Yeah. And so people aren't getting enough of their greens, and they're not getting enough magnesium. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Greens and beans.

Rhonda Patrick
Greens and beans. It's an oats. Nuts. Almonds. Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Aren't typically staples of American diet, which is 60% ultra processed food. Right?

Rhonda Patrick
Right. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, the the magnesium RDA is about three hundred and fifty to four hundred milligrams a day depending on if you're male or female. Males require a little bit more.

And so you're really supposed to be getting the majority of that from your diet. People aren't getting that from their diet. And, you know, just in terms of we talked about triage theory in in cancer. There are a variety of studies that have looked at these are observational studies, so it's always difficult to establish causation, of course, from observational data. But, nonetheless, there are studies that have found a dose dependent effect of low magnesium.

So for every one hundred milligram dose, but less one hundred, milligrams less, intake per day was associated with a twenty four percent increase in pancreatic cancer incidence.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Rhonda Patrick
So instead Of magnesium. Of of magnesium. So, essentially, and that's dose dependent. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
So let's back up a little bit. Because, like, years ago, I had 20 god, it was more than twenty 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 in that article was that, you know, micronutrients are really kinda miraculous because back in the turn of the century, we didn't really know about them, the nineteen hundreds, not not two thousands, but we still kinda don't know all that much about them from the consumer and and medical point of view, for sure. And the, the the the amount of serious deficiency diseases like pellagra and beriberi and rickets and, you know, xerophthalma, which is 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. You know, when you take a drug, it usually has one target, like one receptor and one action. But nutrients have, are 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, methylmalic acid, you know, the B vitamins we're talking about, like folic acid, or the vitamin D, or omega-3s, and 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 undiagnosed. I mean, and what we're seeing, I don't I'm just we have one hundred and 10 thousand people in our cohort. Sixty seven percent 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 own dives done.

Sixty seven percent have a nutrient deficiency, iron, omega threes, 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 like if, you know, we probably would think vitamin d should be over 45 or 50, but their level's 30. Or ferritin, you know, they think their level 16, which is your iron stores, probably I think it should be a 45 or more, you know, for optimal health. So they're we're talking about sixty seven percent being deficient at, like, a level that I think is already pretty low.

So what about the general population? And maybe you could talk about the degree of nutrient deficiencies, and and then talk about, like, how how these things actually do their magic and why they're not just causing expensive urine. And then I wanna sort of get into, you know, what what should people be taking? Because that's how I think we're gonna get into at the end because I think it's important to know what are the foundational things that are gonna protect you long term, you know, for pennies a day that could actually save your life.

Rhonda Patrick
Well, I wanna start out with the, multivitamins, and vitamins don't do anything in their expensive urine, which you also mentioned earlier because this is a pet peeve of mine,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I guess. Me too.

Rhonda Patrick
And, I'll tell you I'll tell you By the way,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it was funny that you I just gonna introvert it. Sorry. I I I go to these medical conferences and I'm like I ask, you know, okay, doctors, you know, how many of you recommend supplements to your patients? And, you know, like, a few hands will go up, you know? I said, how many of you personally take supplements?

And, like, almost everybody's hand goes up.

Rhonda Patrick
Oh, really?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's very funny.

Rhonda Patrick
That's a great question. Yeah. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's no evidence, but I take it.

Rhonda Patrick
But I take it. Here's here's a big flaw with a lot of those studies that are cited by journals. Yeah. Great journals like JAMA, for example. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're poorly designed.

Rhonda Patrick
They're they're poorly designed. So, you know

Dr. Mark Hyman
Design like drugs. Like

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So the problem is when you when you have a drug trial, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.

Right? You have a drug and then you have a placebo. But the thing is is that with a drug, everybody has zero levels of that drug in the start of the trial. That's right. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Rhonda Patrick
So you don't have to measure anything. Right? Because there's nothing to measure until you take

Dr. Mark Hyman
the drug. Right. There's no, like, pre ozempic level. Although, they actually, with ozempic is true, you have a GLP one.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. Bad bad example. But, like, statins. So, you know, but when you when you're doing a You don't

Dr. Mark Hyman
have a normal blood level of Lipitor. Right?

Rhonda Patrick
Right. Exactly. When you're doing a a study on vitamin d or omega three 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 fifty nanograms per milliliter level vitamin d, and so you give them a vitamin d supplement, and it's not gonna do anything because they're already sufficient. Right? Or the converse is they're so deficient and you give them a supplement that's four hundred IUs or eight hundred IUs, which doesn't raise their blood levels hardly at all Right. That it doesn't really do anything.

And so you won't measure who's

Dr. Mark Hyman
deficient. Like, yeah. I mean, like, if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything. Right? So it's like if you if your levels are great of omega threes and you add omega threes, you won't see a change in your health.

Right?

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So so that's the, the fundamental flaw of clinical trials in nutrition. That right there is that that the the MDs that are running these trials are running them like they're drug trials and they're

Dr. Mark Hyman
not. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well done trials. And in fact, I remember

Dr. Mark Hyman
Just to interrupt. The other thing 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 in smokers show that it can cause cancer, but oxidative stress is managed by a whole team of nutrients. So like I always say, you could be, you know, 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 of of these nutrients, particularly in terms of oxidative stress cascade, to actually modulate free radicals.

And if you give a high dose of one nutrient, you're gonna kinda screw up the whole chain.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. That is possible. Not to mention the fact that smokers I mean, if you give beta carotene to nonsmokers, 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, you know, some of that. It it's basically, it's it's allowing some of the cells that would otherwise die from the oxidative stress, you know, not to die.

Right? And so it's yeah. It's a very complicated thing when you're doing things like that. But it it you know, I think, like, it was about ten years ago, there was a huge study in the Annals of Internal Medicine and it was called Enough is Enough. Vitamins and mineral supplements not only don't do anything, they may be harmful.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I

Rhonda Patrick
think that was do you remember that study? Yeah. It was about ten years ago.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And, you know, I I I was I just dug in, and it was a meta analysis, and I went and looked at all those studies, and I found that all these flaws, again, coming back

Dr. Mark Hyman
the actual studies that they made their conclusions from. So they do a review, and they go, we're gonna look at all these these studies, and we're gonna make a it's a summary, and that's called a meta analysis. And then from that, you didn't just take their conclusions. You actually went and looked at the data itself from the original studies.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Yeah. And, I put out a video about it, like, years and years ago. And it it again, all these flaws that we just talked about were there. And, here we are ten years later and the COSMOS trials was just published.

Right? So this is another meta analysis of a couple randomized controlled trials where older adults were given a multivitamin. They had about 20 or so essential vitamins, essential minerals, omega three fatty acids, vitamin d, right, magnesium. This was all present in this multivitamin, and they were given it for two years.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And what this study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo controlled. Right? It the the the multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Rhonda Patrick
Wow.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Randomized controlled trial. Here we are ten years later.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
So I think I think

Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's many, many other studies that show the value of nutrients in many, many different conditions. Right?

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Yeah. I you know, I think that it it comes down to, yes, you should try to get your micronutrients from diet. However, taking, you know, a multivitamin supplement, taking vitamin d, taking omega threes, like, these are insurance. Right?

This is insurance to make sure you're getting your optimum levels. So you asked about deficiencies and what are some of the common ones. Well, omega three. Okay. So about eighty percent of the world's population and ninety percent of The US population does not meet the requirements for omega three fatty acids.

Yeah. That's a lot.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is basically what your body's made of. You know, the cell membranes, your brain, you know, nervous tissue.

Rhonda Patrick
It's it's

Dr. Mark Hyman
Runs regulatory inflammation. I mean, it's it's it's critical to everything.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. And there's been a lot of work by, doctor Bill Harris. So I'm 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 three. And, he's published just an array of studies that are quite convincing. So looking at the omega three index, so this is the omega three levels in red blood cells, which is sort of like a long term marker for omega three because they take about whatever

Dr. Mark Hyman
index actually measure?

Rhonda Patrick
It it measures the EPA and DHA levels along with a bunch of other fatty acids if if you're interested in that. But it's really the EPA and DHA level in the red blood cell membrane, which

Dr. Mark Hyman
It gives you the index and you want a certain number.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Right. 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 three index and correlate it with all cause mortality, so dying from a a variety of different, causes.

And what he's found is that people that have what is defined as a high omega three index, so this would be eight percent or more

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay.

Rhonda Patrick
Have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people that have a four percent omega three index, which is low. And, actually, the average omega three index of The US population is about five percent, pretty close to that four percent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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.

Rhonda Patrick
Five year increase life expectancy. If you think about Japan, Japan who eat they eat a lot of seafood in Japan. Yeah. Their omega three index on average is, like, 10%. So they're above the high, the eight percent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And their mercury levels are probably also very high.

Rhonda Patrick
What's funny what's funny that you say that, Mark, there's been studies, like, in pregnant women

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
You know, if you you probably remember this decades ago, pregnant women were advised to stop eating fish because of the mercury.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Rhonda Patrick
Okay. So you probably remember this that decades ago, women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And, that actually had a detrimental sort of effect because omega three fatty acids, as you mentioned, they're so important for the brain, very important for, neurodevelopment. And there have now been a whole host of studies that have come out showing that omega three fatty acids actually protect from any potential mercury toxicity in the developing fetus. And in fact, there's been studies looking at children that were born to mothers that had a high level of omega three and high mercury, those children had scored higher on intelligence tests, so IQ scores.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Interesting.

Rhonda Patrick
Even, like, even if so so high mercury was actually biomarking intelligence. It wasn't actually the mercury. It was high omega three.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's crazy.

Rhonda Patrick
But, yes, you get you get the point.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Although in in Japan, they eat a lot of seaweed, which, seaweed is a chelator for heavy metals.

Rhonda Patrick
So Oh, is it?

Dr. Mark Hyman
So is green tea, by the way.

Rhonda Patrick
I think garlic. Garlic. The beta beta Yeah. Beta mercaptans and garlic as well. But back to the omega three and this study I was talking about from Yeah.

Bill Harris is so interesting because he also this is a huge cohort of people, the Framingham. There's people that have all sorts of lifestyles, including smoking. And so he did a sub analysis looking at smokers and nonsmokers and their omega three index. Mhmm. And what Bill and his associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega three, so they had a high omega three index of eight percent, they had the same mortality as nonsmokers with a low omega three index.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. Everybody, this does not mean you can smoke and take your own fish oil pills. Or ideas.

Rhonda Patrick
Or if you're not getting enough omega three, it's like smoking. Right? I mean, if you look That's the

Dr. Mark Hyman
only way to look at it. Right?

Rhonda Patrick
If you look at the graph of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Perfect. Fascinating.

Rhonda Patrick
So having a low omega three index had the same mortality risk as smoking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. So we're talking about ninety percent of the American population is in that category.

Rhonda Patrick
Yes. Yes. And, you know, there's also been a whole host of randomized controlled trials looking at omega threes being protect cardio protective. Right? So they're they're very important for cardiovascular health, triglycerides.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. There's actually prescription omega threes, which you can pay much, much more than you would if you go get a basic omega three for lowering triglycerides as a therapy. So

Rhonda Patrick
Right. Yeah. And you mentioned inflammation. You know? So this is another thing.

They do they play a major role in lowering inflammation. And so that's, a driver of aging in in many ways, brain aging, you know, cardiovascular aging. So omega threes are, I would say, one of the most profound lifestyle factors that can play a role in, in negating inflammation aside from exercise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. They're just they're so well, like like the word I use is pleomorphic, but it's a big medical word. But essentially it means it does a million things, right? It's not just one thing. It's great for your skin, for your hair, for your nails, for your brain health, for preventing dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer.

I mean, it it's it's a it regulates inflammation. So these are these are nutrients that do so many things in the body, then they work differently than drugs, and they're they're essential, they're called essential because they are essential.

Rhonda Patrick
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And, you know, one of the challenges is that we're looking for that, you know, quick fix, and we're trying to diagnose a a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure you're familiar with Robert Heaney, who was a vitamin d researcher, and he wrote this beautiful paper years ago called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. And the basic thesis was that in the short term, if you're a nutrient deficient at a severe level, like we used to see, you know, in the 1900s, if your vitamin D is super low, you'll get rickets. Or if you don't have enough vitamin C and you're a sailor, you get scurvy, right? Or if you don't have enough, too much white rice and white flour, which they started doing at the third century, you get beriberi and pellagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies.

And so the thesis he had essentially is that you can correct those vitamin deficiencies in the short term to fix those deficiency diseases, like if you're low in folate in the short term, it'll cause anemia, a form of anemia we call, which is big cells, called mygaloblastic anemia. But in the long run, it could cause cancer and heart disease and dementia, and same thing with vitamin D. You know, in the short run, you'll get rickets. In the long run, you'll get osteoporosis and cancer and die sooner. And so medicine hasn't really gotten that concept.

It's like, yeah, if you're deficient, take a vitamin. But otherwise, you don't need them. Right?

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. That's also very much in line with, Bruce's triage theory. Right? So these these these micronutrients are running our metabolism, which runs everything from our heart pumping blood to neurotransmitter function to repairing DNA. So there's a lot of you know, you can look in the mirror, and if you're you're vitamin c deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, oh, I've I've got scurvy.

Right? Scurvy. Right. But, like, when you're magnesium deficient, like, you're not gonna see DNA damage happening.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you might feel muscle cramps, and you might have anxiety. You might have constipation. You might have muscle twitching or headaches or a million other things that are symptoms of magnesium deficiency. Right. To loud noises.

And so, like, as as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at microneutral deficiency symptoms that are not necessarily pure true deficiency, but more like insufficiency. And I think I think people sort of don't make that distinction. And I think when you treat people, it's often a miracle. When you when you get their complete and the nutrients they're deficient, so many things get better.

Rhonda Patrick
I I like it is insufficiency because most most people are not deficient. We do have a lot of fortification even in our ultra processed foods Yeah. Because of, you know, preventing neural tube defects, preventing pellagra, like, all these diseases that were sort of cropping up, like you mentioned in the early

Dr. Mark Hyman
Fortified. But it's like junk fortified.

Rhonda Patrick
It is. It is. But it seems to stop some of those deficiencies. Right? But it's the insufficiency.

And with vitamin d, it's a really big one because it is converted into a steroid hormone. So this is something that is going into the nucleus of our cell and binding and interacting with DNA. It has a little sequence of DNA called d response element. It's so important there it's encoded in our DNA. Right?

So, to not have enough vitamin d so seventy percent of The US population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin d, which is about thirty nanograms per mil. Seventy percent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Thirty. Which would would be And if we add it up to 45 or 50, it's probably, like, eighty plus

Rhonda Patrick
ninety percent. Yeah. So and and so that would be, there there have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin d levels. Of course, this is again observational. Lots of meta analysis out there even dating back for, like, thirty years.

And it seems as though having at least forty nanograms per mil seems to be a sweet spot. You know, 40 to 60 Yeah. Is a really good place to be Yeah. Where you're having a good level vitamin d. But, again, it's a steroid hormone.

It's not it's it's regulating over 5% of the protein encoding human genome. That's like thousands of genes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
You know, everything from immune function, it plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Brain function, it regulates genes that are important for converting tryptophan into serotonin.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Serotonin's an important neurotransmitter that regulates mood, cognitive function, impulse control. You know, so vitamin d

Dr. Mark Hyman
Maybe I need more of that then.

Rhonda Patrick
Well, and and the problem is is that, you know, vitamin d, typically, you make it from UVB radiation exposure from the sun. Yeah. But We're

Dr. Mark Hyman
all told to shield ourselves from the sun and sunblock. And so we live indoors, work indoors, and yeah, it's it's a problem. And when we're all running our half naked hunting and gathering, we got a lot of vitamin d. And we ate, and we're coastal areas and we ate, you know, fish, small fish like herring and so they said they're higher in vitamin d or if you're foraging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin d. So there's ways in which our historical population got it, the, you know, paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that.

Rhonda Patrick
Right. Exactly. We don't. And so, you know, I do think so people will the simple solution is a vitamin d supplement. Right?

And so about four thousand IUs a day will generally get someone from a deficient range, which is twenty nanograms per mil up to a sufficient range.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. But you you're just talking about 10 times what's normally in a multivitamin or what doctors will recommend.

Rhonda Patrick
I am. I am. Because you yeah. You really do. It's about a thousand I it's a one thousand IUs of vitamin d will will raise blood levels between five to ten nanograms per mil.

But it all we have genes. We have different variations of our genes that are able to do this. And this again comes down to these clinical studies showing that, you know, nothing happens.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We're all different.

Rhonda Patrick
We're all different. And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose. Right? Because they have genes that aren't doing converting vitamin d three into twenty five hydroxyvitamin d, which is this circulating form of vitamin d or the steroid hormone, one twenty five hydroxyvitamin d. You know?

So

Dr. Mark Hyman
Let's go down this rabbit hole because I I I think, you know, 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. And an enzyme is a catalyst that converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts or the co enzymes 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 four hundred micrograms of folate, some people might need four thousand 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 measurement based on what your own particular genetics and your levels are. And so I think there's this, it was sort of like 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 a 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 that's why we call it functional medicine, because it's about how do we optimize function.

Rhonda Patrick
Right? It's true. You know, these minerals and vitamins, so you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, b vitamins, like, these are these are cofactors for these enzymes to make these enzymes run properly. And if you have if you don't have, you know, sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally. Right?

Yeah. So in the case that we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not gonna 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's involved in vitamin d production.

Right? You were talking about, you know, nutrients working together.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And it's it's very true. So I think a really great way to think about eating diet is what do I need to run my metabolism? Yeah. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you say metabolism, like, what do you mean by that? Because, like, it's not like my weight. You're talking about metabolism as sort of a bigger concept in medicine.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. Yeah. I guess when people hear the word metabolism, they think about weight loss.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I got a cell metabolism.

Rhonda Patrick
Right. Right. Right. What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes. You're talking about, you know, one third of the protein encoding genome that are doing enzymatic reactions that have they're making proteins function.

So they are producing energy. They are, you know, running neurotransmitter synthesis. They are causing, you know, your your liver to function properly, your heart to function, lungs, everything. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
So every chemical reaction all the time.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. I don't

Dr. Mark Hyman
know if I heard I read this somewhere and I I I can't find the original citation, but that there's 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions in the body every second. It's just like an insane amount of activity is going on chemically and biochemically and converting one molecule to another. And if you if you don't have enough of these nutrients, that whole 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions may not work optimally.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So I I you know, getting getting the micronutrients you need from food and and nature sort of color coded them in a way. Right? I mentioned, you know, chlorophyll, that's magnesium. You have vitamin k, also the the carotenoids.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What color is vitamin k?

Rhonda Patrick
I I guess it's green too. I would say green. Green. Green. Yeah.

Vitamin k one.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And then the orange ones.

Rhonda Patrick
The orange. Right? And then you've got, like, the phytochemicals. Right? So that would be the purples.

But, you know, you really do need to get a lot of vegetables and, and fruits, and then you need your protein, right, and fiber. When you're when you're getting your micronutrients, you're also getting the fiber because a lot of the micronutrients are coming from plants

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Which are a great source of both fermentable and nonfermentable fiber. Right? So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there. Right?

Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, paleo. Yeah. And although I do think paleo is the closest thing to, what I'm talking about. Yeah. But what I'm talking about is even simpler.

Because what it really means is that you understand what it why you need food. What's the purpose of food? Right? The purpose of food is to provide you with these essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids like omega three and protein and fiber to improve gut health. That's the purpose of eating.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And fuel.

Rhonda Patrick
Right. And so that's was that means you don't need ultra processed foods. That that means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet, you're gonna be missing out on a lot of micronutrients. It's gonna be very hard.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I have a theory, which is is, like, I have many theories. One theory I have is that is that, you know, we're so, depleted in these nutrients, and it disregulates our appetite. And so when you're eating ultra processed food, there's no nutrients in there. And and so when a kid is iron deficient, it'll eat dirt. It's called pica and to try to get some iron from the dirt.

And I think so many people in this country are so nutrient deficient that they're just eating more and more of the ultra processed food. It's like they're looking for love in all the wrong places.

Rhonda Patrick
Have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
So it's kind of the same thing where, you know, your your body needs a certain amount of protein to to run optimally. And if you're eating there's been a couple of randomized controlled trials on this. I think it's like Steven Simpson is one of the the proponents of it. It was like two thousands or something. And, that essentially, if you're eating ultra processed foods, which are high in, you know, a lot of refined carbohydrates, low in protein, that you overeat to sort of try to Yeah.

Get enough protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly.

Rhonda Patrick
So it it does make sense if your your body is looking for more of micronutrients, more vitamins, more minerals, more protein that you start to overeat and have are you familiar with Kevin Hall's study that he published a couple of years ago?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean the ultra processed food? They had 500 calories more.

Rhonda Patrick
They had 500 yeah. So for people listening, I mean Ultra

Dr. Mark Hyman
processed food. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. They're they had, you know, two diets. They had a whole foods diet, which was essentially mostly they were getting salads, and they were getting poultry and lean meats and, some fish, oatmeal. And then there was the ultra processed foods diet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they were trying to match them for macronutrients.

Rhonda Patrick
So they were yeah. So they were matched for calories. They were matched for, total sugar. Although the refined the added sugar and the ultra processed foods group, was it was like a huge difference. I mean, it was like something like 70 or 80% versus 1%.

So the the sugars in the whole foods diet were coming from fruit, which has a fiber matrix. Right? So they were matched for that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Aligning it.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So the added sugar was not matched, although total sugar was. Right? Yeah. And then protein was somewhat matched.

The whole foods had a little bit more protein. It was, like, something like, 14 15.6% in whole foods diet versus 14% in the ultra processed foods diet. And they were given so a lot of a lot of things were matched. And they were given these foods, you know, in a sort of metabolic ward where they came in and eat, and they had sixty minutes to eat the meal ad libitum. Right?

So they could eat as much or as little as they wanted. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you got you got a big as much, like, giant buffet, eat as much as you want. Like, you got sixty minutes.

Rhonda Patrick
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And then they did it, and then the group that eat the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day. And I just do the math on that, 500 calories times seven is 3,500 calories. That's one pound of weight gain. So you add that up, that's 52 pounds of weight gain in a year. The winner of America is overweight.

Rhonda Patrick
Right? I didn't do that math. I know that I just read the results, which was two pound they gained two pounds in two weeks, whereas the Whole Foods diet lost two pounds in two weeks. Well, that's right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Two pounds. Right? Two weeks? Twenty Yeah. It's like the you do the math.

It's like but you add that up over a year, and then you add that up year over year. It's like that's why we're seeing this sort of incredible level of severe obesity and diabetes and I mean it's just, you know, at the latest data I saw was sort of shocking was that thirty eight percent of teenagers have pre diabetes.

Rhonda Patrick
Wow.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was like, what? I mean, it didn't even exist when I graduated. I'm old, but I didn't it's just when I graduated from medical school. Like, we didn't have it. We just saw a kid.

Rhonda Patrick
There's been studies that have looked at, like, healthy individuals, and they've given them they're actually young men. They give they gave them a 20 ounce sugar sweetened beverage sort of akin to, like, a soda, Coke or something. And they did this for three weeks. And after that three week mark, their c reactor protein biomarker for inflammation went up a %. They are, small dense LDL, so this is these are lipoproteins that are transporting yeah.

They're transiting

Dr. Mark Hyman
causing more heart disease.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Causing more atherosclerosis. They went up as well. This was just after three weeks, you know, and The

Dr. Mark Hyman
beating of the processor.

Rhonda Patrick
Of of a sugar sweetened beverage, which is the ultimate. Right? That's the ultimate

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's the ultimate process.

Rhonda Patrick
But but the reality is is that But

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's gluten free.

Rhonda Patrick
It's gluten free. Yes. But it's definitely it's causing inflammation, massive inflammation at the level of the gut. And so you you can take healthy people and dramatically change their profile within a matter of weeks of of having, you know, this ultra processed foods, these sugar sweetened beverages, you know, which again, like

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they complete 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 the metabolic pathways to actually metabolize the food. So you're kind of, you know, getting it from both sides. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Like a two hit. 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 Yeah.

Fruits and vegetables, which have the micronutrients and fiber. Right? And nuts

Dr. Mark Hyman
and seeds.

Rhonda Patrick
And nuts and seeds. Yeah. And oats. And then and then avoiding ultra processed foods. I think 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. Yeah. Like, that's like, there's 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 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. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
How do you measure your cardiovascular fitness?

Rhonda Patrick
Well, cardiovascular fitness is, something typically you can measure, if you go into, like, a a lab that measures them and they put that, like, a mask.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Max. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
It's a v o two max. So it's measuring your maximal oxygen uptake under maximal exercise. Yeah. They put a mask on you. And that's that's really how you empirically quantify it.

However, if you, you know, if you have, like, a smartwatch, Apple watches do sort of measure it. It's not really entirely accurate.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I like my Garmin because it says I'm 45, but I don't I don't believe it.

Rhonda Patrick
Well, you can actually do it. You can do what's called the Cooper test. Yeah. And so that's basically you do a twelve minute run on a flat surface like a track. If you have hills, it's harder to run hills and so you can't you're trying to run as fast as you can maintain for that twelve minutes.

So it's like a it's a maintainable twelve minute pace. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And and that is and there's a calculation. You can look it up, the Cooper test, and you can sort of get a good estimate of your VO two max. Yeah. Yeah. But essentially, you know, having a

Dr. Mark Hyman
low assuming you could run for twelve minutes, which most Americans can't.

Rhonda Patrick
You know, there is there's an argument to be made for exercise snacks. Mhmm. You know? So these are short bursts of, you know, physical activity where you're getting your heart rate above, you know, 70, percent max heart rate. So you're getting to more into the vigorous exercise, you know, range.

And, there there have been some studies. They're called the VILPA studies. Are you familiar with these? These are vigorous intermittent lifestyle activity studies. And, Martin Gabala, who, he's a, you know, expert on high intensity interval training.

I've had him on my podcast. He's involved in a lot of this research.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Down and then 10 burpees and then go back to work?

Rhonda Patrick
Sort of. Yeah. People are wearing these, you know, wearable devices that they can measure their heart rate, and so scientists can see when they're getting these burst of, high intensity exercise. So so this type of exercise is actually not structured. What you're talking about would be structured.

Right? Where you, like, get up and do burpees or air squats or high knees or jumping jacks. This is where people sort of take advantage of everyday situation. So they sprint up the stairs. Right?

And run, you know, they're running to some some place rather than walking. So they're really using their everyday lifestyle to kind of get their heart rate up.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Well, people that do that do anywhere between, three to nine minutes a day, have a 40% reduction in cancer mortality, a fifty percent reduction in cardiovascular related mortality, all cause mortality. So this is beneficial for people. And this is even in people that identify as non exercisers.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
So just getting, like, some sort of exercise does have benefits for people, in in general.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean I mean, you look at the the data on mortality and longevity, one of the biomarkers that's the most correlated with longevity is VO two max, is your level of cardiovascular and respiratory fitness, which is basically how fast your metabolism can run because it's basically an indirect measure of how much calories you can burn per minute and how much oxygen you can burn per minute because they're very correlated. And your metabolism being having a slower fast metabolism is really about your VO two max because if you have a high VO two max, you can burn a lot of oxygen and then you can burn a lot of calories because you need both to actually combust in your mitochondria, the energy factories to actually produce ATP, which is the source of energy for runs everything in your body. So it's like you you actually, you actually have this incredible system, but but we don't really, take advantage of it and we don't maximize our fitness, which is so correlated. And I think the other number that's sort of a little easier to get is your waist to hip ratio, which you need a tape measure.

And that, again, is the the bigger your waist, the shorter your life, basically.

Rhonda Patrick
Is that also for visceral fat, measuring visceral fat?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's it's a I mean, your waist to hip ratio is a crude measure of visceral fat. I mean, but, yeah, if you did a DEXA scan or an MRI, you could look at body composition for sure. It's like the it's that belly fat. But again, that's all relates to insulin resistance and prediabetes and inflammation, which again, I wanna getting back to the micronutrients, all those things actually accelerate your risk of of, of many of these.

Like, for example, magnesium is very involved in blood sugar regulation. Right? So if you're talking about forty five percent of Americans being deficient and or fifty percent being deficient in magnesium, that affects blood sugar. We have an epidemic of diabetes and prediabetes in this country.

Rhonda Patrick
Are you familiar with some of the there's some, gene variations in the transporter that transports magnesium into cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Rhonda Patrick
And people with a gene variation that obscures the trans transport, so basically, they're not getting as much magnesium into their cells, are much more likely to have type two diabetes. So there's really some, I would say, more causal evidence there. Right? Because Yeah. One would argue, well, people that are low in magnesium are also eating refined sugar diet, and they're not exercising, and all these other potential unhealthy lifestyle factors that could be contributing.

But when you look at the genetics, right, I mean, it doesn't lie. So you're you're you're looking at someone that's not getting enough magnesium. They are, you know, insufficient and deficient in some cases. And their risk for type two diabetes just skyrockets. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean I mean, I think this is so important that, you know, we we are walking around with a population that is got such treatable, cheap solutions for so many issues and that and we're looking for sort of drugs to treat this and drugs to treat. I'm not against drugs at all, but they're it's like we're missing the boat because, yeah, somebody doesn't have scurvy or rickets, but they're still insufficient and they're gonna need these nutrients and actually to optimize their health. And you kinda start to unpack the degrees of different nutrient deficiencies and, you know, as you're going through the list, you're going through the things that are the most common deficient in our country. Omega threes, vitamin D, magnesium, and there's others, right?

So there's other there, you need every essential vitamin and mineral, right? You need all those for sure, but the ones that are really causing havoc are, you know, deficiencies in, you know, the methylation nutrients like the B vitamins, folate, B6, B12, deficiencies in iron, deficiencies in zinc. Potassium. Potassium, these are like, yeah, because we we we had a diet this very plant poor and that's where you get your, you know, potassium which is from, you know, plants. And and, and you need to actually not get as much sodium which is what we're eating on multiple processed foods.

So not like salt is bad, we need salt. It's just it's all the salt added by corporations to your food to make you palatable because otherwise it'd taste like cardboard. They add sugar and salt and fat and it makes you addicted to it. So we leave out all the key nutrients that are needed to regulate everything in our body. And so maybe you can kinda take us down that list a little deeper.

So we've got we've gotta get omega threes, we've gotta get vitamin d, we've gotta get magnesium, and literally we could spend a podcast on each nutrient and probably 10 podcasts on each nutrient but we're just gonna go through so people understand like these are the things that are non negotiables that you've gotta have and that you gotta test, you gotta measure and figure out whether your levels are okay because the average physician or a practitioner isn't gonna do it and they don't know how to do it and they don't get taught this in medical school and I'm working on trying to change that in Washington but it's it's it's a it's kind of a it's kind of a travesty because it's it's it's like a staring us in the face that we have this epidemic of micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies, and they're not being addressed. And often worse, we're being told not to fix them.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. So the vitamin d, magnesium, omega three, we talked about. Right? You know, believe it or not, a lot of people I don't remember the exact percentage, but quite a bit of people are not getting enough vitamin c. Something like thirty or forty forty percent forty percent or something like that are not getting enough vitamin c.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Again I heard the ten percent are deficient at the level that would cause scurvy in America.

Rhonda Patrick
That's unbelievable. Just not eating any any vegetables or or fruits because vitamin c is also in vegetables, not just in fruits. Calcium is another one. So, I mean, these are things that can be tested for and measured. Another one is vitamin e.

People are are not getting enough vitamin e. Again, that's also found in things like avocados and nuts, whole grains. And then, potassium is a big one because 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 ninety six percent of The US population doesn't meet the adequate intake for potassium. Yeah. It's essentially everyone.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And And our potassium intake is as hunter gatherer should be 10 to one potassium to sodium. Now it's the other way around.

Rhonda Patrick
It's the other way around. Exactly. And so there's there's, you know, all sorts of problems with blood pressure and, you know, gosh. It's like even, like, thirty percent of, like, individuals age 20 to 39 have hypertension.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You

Rhonda Patrick
know, these are young adults with hypertension. And 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
You know, it's it's it's it's important because you have to get blood flow to your your brain. And, you know, you've got all these tiny like, 90% of the of the brain vascular vasculature surrounding the brain is made of these tiny, tiny blood vessels that are, like, the 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

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And and sort of fall fall off.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you can get mini strokes and

Rhonda Patrick
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, you know, I'm I'm talking about potassium here because potassium does play an important role in Weight

Dr. Mark Hyman
weighting your blood pressure. Yeah. So does magnesium too.

Rhonda Patrick
So does magnesium. So does magnesium.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So relaxation And

Rhonda Patrick
then exercise, of course, is one of the best things that you can do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But I mean, and and and I mean, as a doctor, when a patient comes in with preeclampsia, which is a problem of high blood pressure in pregnancy or has preeclamptic seizures where they can get seizures, the treatment is intravenous magnesium.

Rhonda Patrick
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? So think about it. And so, like, this is something with, like, with uncontrollable high blood pressure, what do we do? We give them intravenous magnesium because all the drugs don't work.

Rhonda Patrick
I think I think there's some, evidence also I've seen that vitamin d plays a role in preventing that as well. Yeah. And it was it's funny. Like, when I was pregnant, I asked my OB GYN for a vitamin d test. Do you wanna know what his answer was?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You don't need it.

Rhonda Patrick
Why it's gonna be low?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Why is it gonna be low?

Rhonda Patrick
Why? It's gonna be you're gonna it's gonna be low anyway. Like, I was like vitamins

Dr. Mark Hyman
and just take it anyway.

Rhonda Patrick
Are you kidding me?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Rhonda Patrick
Like, you're you're telling me why do I need a test that's just gonna be low? And, you know, and I'm like, well, I wanna test. And I yes. I'm gonna be supplementing, but I wanna know with how how much I'm gonna be, you know, should be supplementing with. But it was just really astonishing to me that mentality, you know.

And actually, just recently, I went in for, I didn't go to my normal doc. I went into, it was like a, you know, a a sort of ER kinda urgent care doc. And I wanted to get my vitamin d levels measured. And he goes, you know, that's falling out of vogue now. And I just I just gave him this long lecture.

I mean, I was like, I went in deep. And he looked at me and he goes, is this your area area of expertise? And I was like, yes. It is. I've done research on it.

I've published studies on it. And he kinda was like, okay. Alright.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's not their fault. I mean, I I'm a physician and, you know, I don't fault them. And, you know, my daughter's graduated from medical school this year and, like, zero nutrition.

Rhonda Patrick
It is. It is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, it's even micronutrients, like, I don't even think they covered any of that. And and it to me, it's like this is the center of our biology. And if we don't we don't understand how our bodies work and how to work with them and how to facilitate normal function, and it's not like the micronutrients are the only thing, but they're a very key foundational part of being healthy. And when you go through the litany of things that we're deficient in, you know, it's it's a lot of things and or insufficient and and and there's different degrees of insufficiency in the population for different nutrients. But, you know, we're widespread deficient, you know, iron, zinc, selenium, a lot of things that iodine, I mean, it just I see this all the time in our testing with function health and I'm like kind of shocked.

And I've done testing for, you know, a lot of patients who've come to see me over the decades, but this is like a 10,000 people. It's not like I can see 10,000 people or 20,000 in my lifetime, but like this is a huge amount of people, and it's sort of shocking to me. And yet it's not really being talked about, as a as a sort of critical step in helping address our chronic disease epidemic. And what you're saying is that, yes, you can get deficiency diseases like scurvy, but what's really the issue is how these contribute to our long latency deficiency diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and diabetes and osteoporosis and all the muscle aging and all the things that we don't want. Right?

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. I mean, so, you know, one of the last papers that Bruce published is his second to last paper, was called Longevity Vitamins. And Yeah. And it, you know, it was about these vitamins, like vitamin d and magnesium and omega three, taurine or some other, like, essential

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amino acids.

Rhonda Patrick
Amino acids that play a role in the way we age and and slowing age related decline. Yeah. And, you know, there was just a recent study that came out on vitamin d, sufficient levels of vitamin d. People that supplemented with vitamin d were forty percent less likely to have dementia.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You

Rhonda Patrick
know, so the the reality is is that

Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean vitamins don't just create expensive urine?

Rhonda Patrick
They they don't. They don't. They're you know, these micronutrients are running everything in our body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And when you have insufficient levels of them, you're not gonna necessarily see it, although you probably feel it, you know, like

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you might have symptoms, but you don't attach it to that. Right.

Rhonda Patrick
You don't attach it to that. But it's causing this insidious damage. Right? This insidious DNA damage. A little bit of oxidative stress.

A little bit of inflammation. Or just

Dr. Mark Hyman
I get sick all the time because my vitamin d is low.

Rhonda Patrick
Right. Or or you're getting sick

Dr. Mark Hyman
all the time. My muscles ache, you know, because I'm vitamin d is low. Or, you know, I'm muscle cramps because my magnesium is low. Right? So or I have depression because my, you know, methylation vitamins are low.

Like, people have symptoms. They just don't correlate it with nutrient deficiencies.

Rhonda Patrick
Depression is interesting. There's, 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 back back of a bacterial outer cell membrane. It's present in our, in our colon because we have about, I don't know, how many trillions of bacteria, like, so many bacteria in there. Right?

A lot

Dr. Mark Hyman
of 50,000,000,000,000.

Rhonda Patrick
Okay. 40 or 50,000,000,000,000. There's about a gram of lipopolysaccharide in our gut because those bacteria do die off.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And these are bacterial toxins. This is They are. This pisses off your immune system to know it.

Rhonda Patrick
It does. And when we have gut permeability, lots of things that cause that, it releases right. It also known as leaky gut, it leeches 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And it caused depressive symptoms in these individuals. K. One, that links inflammation to depression.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Hundred percent. Hundred percent.

Rhonda Patrick
Two, if those individuals were given EPA, so this is one of the omega three fatty acids, it does play a major role in dampening inflammation through a variety of mechanisms like resolvins and maricins and the, SPMs, these are all molecules that are resolving inflammation very quickly, they did not experience those depressive symptoms

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
If they were injected with the LPS.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If they got omega threes.

Rhonda Patrick
If they have the omega threes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
So it it it comes down to, like, again, you know

Dr. Mark Hyman
And omega threes have been shown to actually help with depression

Rhonda Patrick
They have.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And ADD. They

Rhonda Patrick
have. Yeah. Yeah. But depression, specifically, EPA seems to be very important for depression, and I think that's because there's a really big inflammatory component to depression Yeah. Where, you know, there's there's now studies showing that people that don't respond to classical SSRI SSRIs, so serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, like a like Prozac?

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. People that don't respond to that, they typically have very, very high levels of c reactive protein inflammation. So there's, like, a subset of people. Some people respond and it helps them. Yeah.

Yeah. But there's a subset, a quite large subset of people that have very high inflammatory biomarkers and do not respond to SSRIs. And so logically, the next question would be, should we lower their inflammation?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
How can we lower their inflammation?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I read some paper that was, like, hypothesizing that we should use TNF alpha blockers, the biologics for depression. In other words, these are drugs that massively suppress inflammation in the body, use for serious autoimmune diseases, and they're talking about using it for depression. I'm like, wait a minute. Like, how about we find out why there's inflammation in the first place and get to the root cause of it, which is really what we do in functional medicine. I think what you're kinda hitting on, just sort of peripherally, and I wanna sort of tie the tie the dots together, is that when you don't have enough of the right nutrients and you don't have a proper functioning metabolism, there's a lot of downstream consequences.

You get inflammation, you get active stress, and you get damaged mitochondria, and you get DNA damage, and you you when you look at these processes, these are the fundamental things that have to be working for you to be healthy across every organ, across every disease state, and it's what we're now calling hallmarks of aging are including many of these things, and what you're talking about is, and Bruce Ames figured this out even before there was a word, hallmarks of aging, he figured out that these nutrients are critical in these pathways that degrade and and become problematic as we age, but that we can offset that and actually take longevity nutrients and get a quote metabolic tune up. And he's even talking about things that I think are we don't think of typically as essential nutrients that are we call conditionally essential nutrients and whether it's carnitine or taurine or things that may not be kind of a typical deficiency disease vitamin or mineral, but that are still really important for our biological function and we're still low on them. You know, So I have this theory I wanna I wanna come back to in a minute about that I that I kinda made up called symbiotic phyto adaptation, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means that we've co evolved with plants to borrow their phytochemicals to regulate key pathways in our body so we can stay healthy.

And without them, we don't get a deficiency disease. Like, we don't get, like, you know, like broccoli deficiency. But but actually, we kinda do because the the the phytochemicals like sulforaphane or the glucosinolates or isothionates, These are these are molecules that regulate key pathways in our body. For example, liver detoxification or removing heavy metals or whatever, controlling oxidative stress. They work to actually facilitate these these pathways.

And so I kind of have this theory that it's more than just, like, essential vitamins and minerals. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's essential if you wanna be really healthy.

Rhonda Patrick
I completely a % agree. I think that

Dr. Mark Hyman
I just made this up.

Rhonda Patrick
But So I I I think that humans evolve we evolved to eat of plants and meat and things like that, but plants because of the phytochemicals. Yeah. You know, there are so you mentioned sulforaphane. Right? So sulforaphane is present in a variety of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli.

It's much more it's not present. I'm sorry. The precursor to it, glucocaraphanin is present in it, and it gets converted into sulforaphane when the plant matter is broken, chewed, because it activates an enzyme called myrosinase, which converts glucocaraphanin into sulforaphane.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Big mouthful of words, but essentially, when you chew your broccoli, you get cool chemicals that help your body.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. And if you go even further and take eat and chew the young plant, the broccoli sprouts, there's about a hundred times more glucoraphanin in it. Damn.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I gotta I I I'm trying to grow broccoli sprouts and I keep trying to forget, and then I'm like, I gotta get back on that.

Rhonda Patrick
Yes. Broccoli sprouts are really, really high in, in glucoraphanin. I also take a supplement that's, been used in a lot of clinical studies called Avmacol. I don't have any affiliation with them, but they're, they've got a really great, method of of stabilizing the myrosinase enzyme, which is very unstable. It's also very heat sensitive.

But before I get before I get sidetracked, sulforaphane is the most potent dietary activator of a, what's called, transcription factor in our body. It's n r f two.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And this is

Dr. Mark Hyman
NERF two.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. It's a master regulator of, as you mentioned, detoxification enzymes. So they're called phase two detoxification enzymes. Also, phase one biotransformation enzymes. So those are enzymes that will convert pro carcinogens into carcinogens.

So nRF two activation will blunt that. It'll stop that from happening. So think things like nitrites being converted into nitrosamines. Nitrites are present in a lot of processed meats and so nRF two activation, typically, it's like it gets activated every 80 minutes or so inside of our cells. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets sorry.

It gets activated every 30 minutes. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets activated, like, every 80 minutes. Something like that, where it's like you're getting, like, a 60% increase in the activation of this important transcription factor, which is regulating just hundreds of different genes that are antioxidant involved in antioxidant function, anti inflammation. Clinical studies showing that if you give someone broccoli sprout extract or sulforaphane or glucoraphanin plus the enzyme myrosinase, it increases glutathione in plasma and in the brain by fMRI. I mean, this is unbelievable.

Glutathione, as you know, it's one of the major, major antioxidants that our body has. It's very important for the brain. Other studies in China where there's a lot of air pollution show that people that take about forty micromoles of sulforaphane, they get they get, they start to excrete some of the chemicals that are in air pollution like benzene, which is a carcinogen. They excrete it by 60% after twenty four hours. Again, because the activation of the phase two detoxification enzymes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm thinking about the people in LA right now.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. It's very so I've been telling all of my friends in LA to get

Dr. Mark Hyman
get released into the air, dioxin and all of all organic compounds and heavy metals and

Rhonda Patrick
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, plastics. I mean, it's just it's pretty frightening. So I think people can protect themselves to some degree by up regulating these pathways and and taking the right foods and the right supplements.

Rhonda Patrick
I I think the the phytochemicals again, I I'm I'm 100% with you. I think we were we were supposed we're supposed to eat these. These are these are pathways in our body that are activated by a little bit of stress. They're stress response pathways, And the phytochemicals provide that tiny bit of stress that activates them in a way that's powerful enough to not only deal with a little bit of stress, but to, like, deal with the the stress of aging. Yeah.

And anthocyanins from blueberries. I mean, this is another one. We've got so many randomized controlled trials now on giving people blueberry extract powder with actual anthocyanins versus like the, you know, just taste of it. So it's placebo. It improves cognitive function across the lifespan.

Kids, adolescents, older adults, it lowers damage to DNA. It improves blood flow to the brain. You know, this this is equivalent to like a cup of blueberries a

Dr. Mark Hyman
day. Mhmm.

Rhonda Patrick
So it's so important to get these phytochemicals. It's not only important to eat the fruits and the vegetables because of the micronutrients, but the phytochemicals as well. And Bruce would argue that. Like, these some of these phytochemicals, they're longevity vitamins. Yeah.

We need them. Yeah. It's And he argues that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, that that that's sort of striking to me as I started dug into this, you know, twenty five, thirty years ago. It was like, wait a minute. Like, how how do these molecules know what to do and how do they know to bind to this receptor? And it's just from a plant. Like, so why is it working in my body and how is it regulating all these different enzymes or pathways that regulate, you know, immune function and your microbiome?

I mean, it's just it's the list goes on and on. And I and I and so it occurred to me that, you know, we we we grew, through evolution consuming over 800 different plant species, And now I think we have three are the main staples, you know, corn, wheat, and, soy, and rice depending on where you live. And then another 12 make up the total amount of vegetables. And plants we typically eat like onions and cabbage and whatever, carrots and tomatoes. I mean, but, like, when you look at the full array of of of of plants out there, we we ate all these plants and those molecules are not there for us.

Like, those plants didn't say, oh, gee, I'm gonna I'm gonna make this like sulforaphane so I can help my little human friend over there. They're the plant's defense mechanisms. So they're they're actually there to help the plants protect themselves against damage, predators, UV radiation from the sun. Like pretty much they're their immune system. And so they're they are a little kinda can be a little toxic, right?

But that's that's what you're saying. It's a little kinda tiny stress, the xenohormesis kinda concept where you're taking some form thing and stressing your body with like a sauna or a cold plunge or being up at altitude or being, you know, under the sea level or hyperbaric chamber. These are all stresses on the body that activate our body's own innate healing response. And so that's kinda how I see these phytochemicals.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Exactly. They're the, antioxidant response element. You were talking about DNA having there's a sequence in our d in genes in our DNA called antioxidant response elements that respond to this n r f two acts of activation. Right?

So it is. We we it's it's evolved into our DNA, and there's ways to do it. Xeno hormesis, you're talking about plants and phytochemicals, exercise, all these different, like, you know, ways that we're meant to to basically stress ourselves a little bit. Right? And not just sit and be sedentary and have all the calories we want and, you know, consume all the ultra processed foods.

I mean, it's it's

Dr. Mark Hyman
the Instacart. Oh, my god. Terrible. I mean I mean, it's crazy. You don't actually have to leave your house with Amazon, Instacart, you know, like Uber Eats or whatever.

Like, you don't need to go anywhere.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. And and we really do need to to move. I mean, that it it's it's not an add on. It has to be something that's part of your hygiene that you do every day, like brushing your teeth. You have to do it.

Like, it's not like, even if it's just ten minutes of exercise, like, you have to do it. It makes a difference. Yeah. And our bodies need it. Like, you're depriving your body of it if you don't.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. So so let's kinda back up a little bit. We we were talking about all these incredible things and, yes, exercise, %, but, that's another podcast. This one is about micronutrients, the the widespread deficiency we have in the population that's undiagnosed, that's not tested for, that people walk around with, that's fixable for pennies a day at levels that are relatively influentestinally small. Like when you, for example, eat a piece of chicken breast, it's four ounces, that's 30 grams.

We're talking about milligrams or sometimes microgram doses, like tiny little bits of stuff in micronutrients can have profound effects on our well-being and our health, on our mental health, our risk for chronic diseases, and and yet most of us are walking around in this invisible cloud of insufficiency or deficiency and and have no clue. So, I know you're not a doctor and a practitioner, but you're like a PhD doctor, not like an MD doctor. What do you recommend and does it have to be difficult and onerous and expensive? How how do you sort of stack the deck so you're, like, getting the basic things you need and and not running into this trouble?

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. I do have some of the basic things that I think well, that I take, but also that I think that would help a majority of people that are insufficient in a lot of these micronutrients. And, first and foremost, vitamin d supplement. And, again, I think generally speaking

Dr. Mark Hyman
vitamin d?

Rhonda Patrick
Vitamin d. Four thousand IUs a day. Pretty pretty for the most part, gets people to a sufficient ish level. You have to do a blood test to really know for certain. You may have to take a little more, you know, but starting at four thousand IUs a day, which is the upper tolerable intake, is safe.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And this is this is actually by the National Academy of Sciences saying this is a safe level.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. Yeah. Number two, omega three fatty acids. And, you know, this is something where, Bill Harris has published studies published studies looking at how do you get someone who is low omega three index of four percent, omega three index up to eight percent. Takes turns out it takes close to about two grams a day.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So Two grams of

Rhonda Patrick
Of EPA and DHA.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so when you get just for clarification purposes, if you get a pill and it says a gram of fish oil, it might not have a gram of EPA and DHA. It

Rhonda Patrick
might be

Dr. Mark Hyman
like three hundred or two hundred milligrams. So you have to look at the concentration of EPA and DHA in the milligram amounts on the label, otherwise, you know, it might take one pill or it could take five pills.

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So that, I think, is a pretty simple solution. And then

Dr. Mark Hyman
So one to two grams?

Rhonda Patrick
One point five to two grams. You get get most people that are in a 4% low range to an 8% carb.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Balance of EP and DHA, does it matter?

Rhonda Patrick
Not really.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a fifty fifty?

Rhonda Patrick
Usually usually, it's like a two to one ratio The EPA and DHA. Yeah. Yeah. For the most part, something close to that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay.

Rhonda Patrick
But I wouldn't sweat the small stuff. Like, number three and number four kinda tie, but I think I think a multivitamin is a really good insurance because, you know, there's selenium Boron. You know, boron. Yeah. There's, you know, the the b vitamins.

The you know, you're getting there's vitamin a. There's so many different micronutrients, and it really covers a lot of the bases. So I think a pretty high quality multivitamin is good along with magnesium. So magnesium, because such a large percentage of people are not getting enough magnesium, it is so important for a variety of, you know, processes, DNA damage, brain function, muscle function. You know, people that are physically active, they sweat out magnesium, so you might need anywhere between 10 to 20% more than the RDA.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And stress and coffee also

Rhonda Patrick
Stress depletes it. Exactly. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
you're like, what is the American life? Stress, coffee, and alcohol. Exactly. That's why we're all deficient. We're literally peeing out.

Rhonda Patrick
Yes. And so you wanna make sure you're getting an organic salt. So that would be something like magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium, glycinate.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And Citrate if you're constipated.

Rhonda Patrick
Right. So so those so those are the organic salts which are more bioavailable.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Funny story. I just sorry. I was in the hospital recently for a back surgery, and I wanted to get magnesium. And I talked to the hospitalist, and he gave me magnesium oxide. And I'm like, that's not bioavailable.

And I sort of went through this with him, like you did with that. It wasn't as confrontational as that, but but, you know, he's like, oh, you're right. I look it up and actually, no. True. I'm like, yep.

So but that's the main nutrient, form of magnesium that you get in in a lot of the supplements that you buy over the counter because it's the cheapest form. So magnesium oxide, if you see that on the label, just skip over.

Rhonda Patrick
Right. So that would be another one. And then I add to my essentials the sulforaphane. I used to sprout, and I no longer do that because

Dr. Mark Hyman
Life is busy.

Rhonda Patrick
My excuses. Yeah. I'm I'm you know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
So, because telling the world how to eat better and be healthy.

Rhonda Patrick
It's like the worst thing you can do for your health. But, I I I I I trust the the science that I've read looking at, the supplement that I take, which, again, it's it's a really good supplement, Avmacol, and they have about the advanced formula is what I take. I take about two to four day depending on that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we'll put the link in the show notes for that.

Rhonda Patrick
They're great. And they're, like, published studies on them, improving autism. So it's affecting the brain. So it's improved autism spectrum disorder in kids with autism, adolescents with autism. But it's a very strong activator of glutathione.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
Right? So NRF two pathway. So that's my my phytochemical.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I actually wrote a blog about glutathione years ago. If anybody wants to sort of find out more about glutathione, go to hymen and glutathione and you'll find it. And it it's kind of the master detox fire, the master antioxidant, the master immune regulator. It's like it's it's so critical and you get it through some of these plant foods. You get it by sulfur containing amino acids, you know, which are found often in animal foods or in whey protein.

It's a great source.

Rhonda Patrick
It is. Yeah. So it's it's it's a major, major antioxidant in in the body. So, I think those are really some of the bare

Dr. Mark Hyman
Vitamin d, fish oil, vitamin d four thousand, fish oil, one or two grams of the actual ePDHA, a multivitamin, and

Rhonda Patrick
High quality.

Dr. Mark Hyman
High quality, meaning it shouldn't be blue or purple or green or yellow or

Rhonda Patrick
Centrum silver.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Dyes and should be

Rhonda Patrick
just, you

Dr. Mark Hyman
know, the right and and the the bioavailability, the form of the nutrient matters. I mean, I I think you and I both done a lot of work on this and people can dig around, but it's it's not just like go to get your, you know, Walgreens or CVS multivitamin.

Rhonda Patrick
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A little bit more judicious. And then magnesium. And how much magnesium?

Rhonda Patrick
You know, it depends. So some people get a laxative effect and they want that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's with citrate.

Rhonda Patrick
Even with even with higher doses of of other forms, they can. But, yeah. So, I mean, I think it depends on your diet. Like, if you're not eating a lot of plants, shame on you, you need to increase that. But, you know, you about three two hundred and 50, three hundred milligrams, you know, is a good is a good range.

Now if you're trying to to treat, like, migraines and stuff, you might have to go higher. Like, some studies show, like, six hundred milligrams. Yeah. And then there's the form of magnesium, magnesium threonate that's thought to cross the blood brain barrier more effectively

Dr. Mark Hyman
For brain.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. For brain health because magnesium doesn't cross the blood brain barrier very well. But magnesium threonate isn't essentially isn't it's not necessarily gonna, do the DNA damage repair aspect of magnesium. So make sure you're getting both if you're doing

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep. Yep.

Rhonda Patrick
Doing that. Yeah. So, like, for me, I take, like, about two hundred and fifty milligrams, maybe three hundred milligrams.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It depends on you. I remember I remember I had a a big magnesium when I had a patient, you know, decades ago who was a radiology resident. So a radiation oncology resident at Mayo Clinic, and she had debilitating migraines. Like, I mean, she saw the best doctors at Mayo Clinic.

She was sick to everybody. She tried every drug. She'd done everything. And she came to see me, and we we took a history. Amazing thing to do in medicine these days is to take an in-depth medical history, but it's like critical.

I'm being facetious, but they don't, doctors don't Get

Rhonda Patrick
to the root cause.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean I have a 32 page questionnaire, so I was like, oh, you're constipated. Oh, you have muscle twitches and muscle cramps and you have headaches and you have anxiety and you have insomnia and you have palpitations. This sounds like pretty severe magnesium deficiency, so why don't we load you up? And so we gave her, like, 1,200 of magnesium, like, migraines just went away and she was fine and everything else kinda corrected.

And so she had all these, quote, different problems. Right? Everything from constipation to insomnia to palpitations which you don't think are related, but they're all connected. It's the body's one system and that's what I'm talking about. These nutrients have so many different functions and they're so critical.

So anybody listening to you, you know, you can't really get away from the fact that we live in a nutritionally depleted world no matter how hard you try. Even the foods if you're eating organic may not have the nutrients that they did fifty years ago. And, you know, most of us, you know, should test and that's why I created Functional Health with my cofounders to allow people access to this data because they weren't getting it. Like you said, doctors like, oh, you don't need vitamin d, you know, why bother testing? You know, that's what people are facing.

And then, you know, just take a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin d, magnesium, and then, you know, maybe a broccoli pill.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. Then there's a bunch of other things you could add to that list as as you're going through. That's like

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a dollar or 2 a day, you know, and and that's not an insignificant amount of money. But, you know, given the the benefits, you know, the the the risk benefit cost benefit ratio is pretty good on this.

Rhonda Patrick
It is. It's amazing. I mean, I I think I think it's a it as Bruce would say, you know, it's a really, it's it's affordable. It's it's easily correctable for pretty cheap, and it will have a huge difference in the way you age.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. This is amazing. So we're gonna link to a lot of these studies from Bruce Ames, from your work. I I want people to follow you, to learn about what you're doing, to listen to your rate podcast, Family Fitness. You've got a great website.

Tell us all the places that we can find you and learn more about your work and keep up with your science.

Rhonda Patrick
Okay. Great. Thank you. So I have a podcast. It's called Found My Fitness.

I'm on, you know, YouTube.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which I hope to be on someday. Yeah. That's great. I'm on a mass per person.

Rhonda Patrick
Let me know when you're in San Diego.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. Alright.

Rhonda Patrick
So Found My Fitness. It's on YouTube. It's on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. I have a website, foundmyfitness.com. And, I also am on, you know, social media, Instagram x as found my fitness, or you can look up Rhonda Patrick.

I have some, free guys out there. I have one on omega three. We we talked a lot about it. So how to choose a good omega three supplement. So I I kinda have a guide on that in terms of, like and I talked about some of the science of omega three.

So you can find that at omega3guide.com. Mhmm. And then I have

Dr. Mark Hyman
free guides on how to do this and go into more detail and have the scientific papers and yeah.

Rhonda Patrick
And then I have another free guide on, on improving brain health through brain derived neurotrophic factor and a variety of exercise protocols and polyphenol protocols, that have been published to improve brain health. And that's bdnfprotocols.com. You can find that there. Yeah. It's And then I have a new guide out, how to train from all the exports that I've that I've had on the podcast.

Oh, I wanna

Dr. Mark Hyman
see that one.

Rhonda Patrick
It's a good one. It's how to train. So it's like to improve VO two max, we talked about that. How to train to improve muscle mass, strength, function, and it's according to all the incredible experts that I've had on my podcast, and that is the howtotrainguide.com. So those are all just free information that people can get, by going and and, downloading the guide.

So Amazing. Thank you so much, Mark, for having me on the podcast. Very interesting discussion. We share a lot of common passions with, nutrition and micronutrients. Totally.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Totally. I mean, you know, we didn't cover a thousand topics from protein to exercise to hermesis. So I think I can see three or four more podcasts. I'd love to have you back to talk about these things. Awesome.

Because there's so many people out there who are quote health influencers, who don't have a degree, who, you know, maybe educated, some better than others. I'm not saying you need a degree to be smart or to have an opinion, but, there's a lot of noise out there. And if people want signal and they want the kinda juicy truth, go to Rhonda.

Rhonda Patrick
Appreciate it. Thank you, Mark.