Deficiency Dangers: Why Your Body Can’t Thrive Without Key Nutrients

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Rhonda Patrick
Smokers and nonsmokers and their omega-three index. 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 non smokers with a low omega-three index.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's exclusive content and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health.

You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. I think it's important to know what are the foundational things that are going to protect you long term, you know, for pennies a day that could actually save your life.

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

Dr. Mark Hyman
I guess. And,

Rhonda Patrick
I'll tell you, I'll tell you

Dr. Mark Hyman
what- It was funny that you, I just get introverted. Sorry. I go to these medical conferences and I'm like, I ask, okay, doctors, you know, how many of you recommend supplements to your patients? And then like a few hands will go up, you know, how many of you personally take supplements? Like almost everybody's hand goes up.

Rhonda Patrick
Oh really?

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

Rhonda Patrick
It's a great question.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So there's no evidence, but I take it.

Rhonda Patrick
Here's, here's a big flaw with a lot of those studies that are cited by journals, great journals like JAMA, for example. They're poorly designed. Poorly designed. So, you know, Doctor.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're designed like drugs. Guess that. Exactly. Exactly.

Rhonda Patrick
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. So you don't have to measure anything, right? Because there's nothing to measure until you take the drug.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's no like pre Ozempic level, although actually the way Ozempic is true, you have a GLP-one.

Rhonda Patrick
Maybe- Yeah, bad example, but like statins. So, you know, but when you, when you're doing a- Doctor.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't have a normal blood level of Lipitor, right?

Rhonda Patrick
Doctor. Right, exactly. When you're doing 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 going to 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, that it doesn't really do anything. And so you won't-

Dr. Mark Hyman
Doses wrong. You don't measure who's sufficient. Like, yeah, I mean, like if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything, right? So it's like, if you, if your levels are great at Omega-3s and you add Omega-3s, 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 not. You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well done trials.

In fact, I- Doctor.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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, the smokers show that it can cause cancer, but oxidative stress is managed by a whole team of nutrients. So like I would say, could be, you know, you know, Michael Jordan, but if you're playing one against five on a basketball team, you're going to 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 going to kind of 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 non smokers, it doesn't cause cancer, but smokers are doing so much oxidative damage and they're getting DNA damage that a high dose of something like beta carotene, which can be an antioxidant, may then allow, you know, some of that. It's basically, 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 that may be harmful. And I think that was, do you remember that study? It was about ten years ago. And you know, 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 come

Dr. Mark Hyman
You looked at the actual studies that they made their conclusions from. They do a review and they go, we're going look at all these studies and we're going make a summary, and that's called a meta analysis. 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. What the study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo controlled, right? It, the, the, the multivitamin actually did improve brain aging.

So they had, they were less, people taking the multivitaminer supplement were less likely to experience, cognitive dysfunction, memory loss, and in fact, they experienced an improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. Wow.

Rhonda Patrick
Brand mice control trial. Here we are ten years later.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. 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 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-3s, 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 U. S.

Population does not meet the requirements for omega-three fatty acids. 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, 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
What does the index actually measure?

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

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

Rhonda Patrick
Exactly. So he's published studies using like the Framingham cohort. So these are large, cohort studies, with a lot of people. And he's looked at the omega-three index and correlated with all cause mortality. So dying from 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, 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 U S population is about five percent, pretty close to that four percent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, that's why we actually measure that in the function health labs. So it's great to see when we see that.

Rhonda Patrick
So five year increased life expectancy. If you think about Japan, Japan, who eat, they eat a lot of seafood in Japan. Their omega-three index on average is like 10%. So they're above the high, the 8%.

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

Rhonda Patrick
What's funny. It's funny that you say that Mark. There's been studies like in pregnant women. You probably remember this, that decades ago, women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury. 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, even like, even if so, so high mercury was actually bio marking intelligence. It wasn't actually the mercury high omega-three.

But yes, get, you get

Dr. Mark Hyman
the point. Although in Japan, they eat a lot of seaweed, which see is a chelator for heavy metals. Oh, it? So is green tea, by the way.

Rhonda Patrick
I think garlic, garlic, that beta, beta mercaptans and garlic as well. But back to the omega-three and this study I was talking about from 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 non smokers and their omega-three index. 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 non smokers 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. I don't get any ideas.

Rhonda Patrick
Or if you're not getting enough omega three, it's like smoking. Right? Mean, I if you look at the of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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
Doctor. Yes. Yes. And you know, there's also been a whole host of randomized controlled trials looking at omega-3s being protect, cardio protective, right? So they're, they're very important for cardiovascular health, triglycerides.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Doctor. Yeah. There's actually prescription omega-3s, which you can pay much, much more than you would go get a basic omega-three for lowering triglycerides as the therapies. Doctor.

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 many ways, brain aging, you know, cardiovascular aging.

So omega-3s 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. And they're just, they're so well, like, I 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're worked 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 in, know, quick fix, and we're trying to diagnose a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure if 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 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 vitamin C and you're a sailor, you get scurvy. Right.

Or if you don't have enough, big twitch white rice and white flour, which they started doing at the center of century, get beriberi and pellagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies. The thesis you 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 megablastic anemia, but in the long run, it can cause cancer and heart disease and dementia. And same thing with vitamin D, 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.

Rhonda Patrick
And that's also very much in line with, Bruce's triage theory, right? It says 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 vitamin C deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, Oh, I've got scurvy. But like when you're magnesium deficient, like you're not going to 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 deficiencies. Stiffy to loud noises. And so like as, as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at micro nutrient 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 them a pleat and the nutrients they're deficient in, so many things get better.

Rhonda Patrick
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 because of, you know, preventing neural tube defects, pellagra, like all these diseases that were sort of cropping up, like you mentioned in

Dr. Mark Hyman
the 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 a vitamin D response element.

It's so important that it's encoded in our DNA, right? So, to not have enough vitamin D, so seventy percent of The U. S. Population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is about thirty nanograms per mil, seventy percent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which would be, would be then if you add it up to forty five or 50, it's probably like 80 plus 90 Right.

Rhonda Patrick
Yeah. So, and, and so that would be, there have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin D levels. Of course, this is again, observational, lots of meta analyses 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 is a really good place to be 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. You know, everything from immune function, it plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity, brain function. It regulates genes that are important for converting tryptophan into serotonin. Serotonin is 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 the problem is, is that, you know, vitamin D, typically you make it from UVB radiation exposure from the sun, But

Dr. Mark Hyman
we're all told to shield ourselves from the sun and sunblocked. And so we live indoors, work indoors and yeah, it's, it's a problem. I mean, you're all running around 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 somebody said they're higher in vitamin D. Or if you're forging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin D.

So there's ways in which our historical population got it, the paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that.

Rhonda Patrick
Right, exactly. We don't. And so, you know, I do think, so people, 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'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 IUs, one thousand IUs of vitamin D 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
And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose, right? Because they have genes that aren't doing, converting vitamin D3 into 25, which is this circulating form of vitamin D or the steroid hormone one hundred twenty five hydroxy vitamin D, you know, so.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, went on this rabbit hole because I think, you know, there's a paper you just reminded me of the Bruce Ames row that 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 catalyst 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, 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 regimen based on what your own particular genetics and your, your levels are. I think there's this, it was sort of a wake up call for me.

Like, holy cow, 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. Cause it's about how do we optimize function, right?

Rhonda Patrick
It's true. You know, these minerals and vitamins, so you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins, these are, these are co factors 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? So in the case that we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not going 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 nutrients working together. And 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?

Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you say metabolism, like, what do you mean by that? Cause like, it's not like I 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 us on metabolism. Right.

Rhonda Patrick
What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes, you're talking about one third of the protein encoding genome, that are doing enzymatic reactions that have, that are 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, well lungs, everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So every chemical reaction all the time. And I don't know if I heard, I read this somewhere and 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, you know, getting, getting the micronutrients you need from food I guess it's green too. I would say green. Green, green, green. 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, 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, which are a great source of both fermentable and non fermentable fiber. Right?

So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there, right? Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, paleo. And although I do think paleo is the closest thing to, what I'm talking about, 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 purpose of eating. And so that's, that means you don't need ultra processed foods. That means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet, you're going be missing out on a lot of micronutrient.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Doctor. Now I want to talk about the importance of supplementation and why we need to use nutritional supplements to address nutrient deficiencies that are widespread. And as I mentioned before, ninety five percent of Americans are deficient in at least one essential nutrient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease. This is staggering. Not how much do you need for optimal health, but how much do you need just to prevent a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets.

And two billion people, as I mentioned, worldwide have at least one nutrient deficiency. It plays a huge role in infant mortality and chronic illnesses around the world. Now let's talk about the difference between macro and micronutrients. Now macronutrients, you're familiar with carbs, proteins, fats. Now it's very unusual in our model deciding to have a deficiency in any of these nutrients.

Protein is a common deficiency in the developing world, and you see kids with severe protein malnutrition. But it's really important to get a protein. But although we might not have a deficiency, we still may not be optimal. And I've done podcasts on that, but that's another topic. Now, micronutrient deficiencies like vitamins and minerals, are far more common.

And I want to explain just for a minute why nutrients are so important, just so you understand the context here. When you look at your DNA, one third of your entire DNA codes for enzymes. Now what are enzymes? Enzymes are catalysts. They're basically a enzyme or a catalyst that converts one compound or one molecule to another molecule in your body.

They're basically the facilitators of all your biochemical reactions, and you've got 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions happening every second in your body. Now, just digest that for a second. Right? 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions every second. And every single one of those reactions requires an enzyme.

And those enzymes require a cofactor or coenzyme. And guess what, folks? What are the cofactors and coenzymes? They're vitamins and minerals. Now drugs, they affect a single pathway to create a single outcome.

For example, if you have a blood pressure pill, it's a calcium channel blocker. It does that one thing. However, vitamins and minerals, they might have the effect on hundreds and hundreds of different enzymes. So magnesium or folate or other other nutrients may have the ability to affect the function of literally hundreds and hundreds different chemical reactions. That's why they create such widespread spread problems.

So just to understand that that this is a super important thing. And based on these genetic differences we have, you know, I said one third of our DNA codes for enzymes, based on these genetic variations, different people may need different amounts of nutrients and may need different forms of nutrients. For example, if you have a gene that is called MTHFR, it means you can't convert the folate from your food very well into the folate that's active in your body, five methylfolate. So you need to take the preformed version as a supplement, for example. Or let's say you are somebody who has vitamin D receptor issues and can't absorb vitamin D.

Well, you might need not a thousand units of vitamin D a day. You might need ten thousand. So there are a lot of variations in the population. That's why it's important to test, not guess. And again, that's why I created with my colleagues and friends and cofounders functionhealth.com to allow you to get all these nutrients we're talking about today tested and many more.

Go to functionhealth.com/mark and you can find out what's actually going on. Okay, so let's get started. What are the most common micronutrient deficiencies? Well, iron. Iron is the most common nutrient deficient globally, affecting about twenty five percent of the global population.

Now the consequences include short term problems like anemia, particularly in preschoolers where nearly fifty percent are deficient if they're not getting iron fortified foods, right? So the at risk groups particularly are vegans. Almost all the vegans I know in tests are iron deficient. Vegetarians sell, menstruating in pregnant women because they use up a lot of blood in either menstruating or you know, creating extra blood for the baby. Vitamin D deficiency also extremely common.

And it may have, depending on how you look and define it, insufficiency or deficiency may affect between eighty to ninety five percent of the population. And we're going to put all the references in here. I'm not making this stuff up. You should have to look at the show notes to get the scientific papers that are reflecting what I'm talking about here. Now, while frank deficiency symptoms like rickets are not common today, although they are sometimes in the developing world, suboptimal levels have significant health impacts.

As I mentioned, suppressed immune system, muscle weakness, fibromyalgia, fatigue, depression, immune dysfunction, and even cardiovascular risk, cancer risk. I mean, all these things are related to low levels or insufficient levels of vitamin D. The next big one is magnesium deficiency. Now this affects about twenty percent of the population based on the minimum amount to prevent a deficiency disease. That's twenty percent who have overt magnesium deficiency.

That's quite serious. Subclinical deficiency could affect up to eighty percent of the population, which is very important because why? Magnesium is crucial for over 600 enzyme reactions affecting every single biological system, affecting overall health and risk of chronic disease. Literally everything from your mental health to your immune health, to metabolic health, diabetes control, muscle function, everything, pretty much everything. Vitamin B12 deficiency is also really common.

About eighty to ninety percent of vegans and vegetarians may be deficient in vitamin b twelve because there's not any vegetable food, basically. That's how it is. Just back to life. Now over twenty percent of adults may be deficient in not the vegans, because only about two percent of the population is vegan. But basically even the rest of the population can be deficient in vitamin B12.

Part of it has to do with our drugs we're taking, like acid blockers, part of it has to do with our digestive function and like absorption in some cases or just lack of intake, right, because people aren't eating B12 rich foods. Now, what about calcium deficiency? Not not that common because the body regulates calcium pretty well from the bones. But what happens is basically if you don't have calcium because your blood levels have to be controlled really tightly, it just sucks it all out of your bones and you get So but a survey in The United States found that about fifty percent of teenage girls, and about ten percent of women 50 and about less than twenty two percent of teenage boys and men 50 meet the recommended calcium intake. So a lot of people don't meet it.

And it depends on your age and your sex and so forth. But we need to make sure we have adequate calcium. But ideally, you want to get it from food. Calcium rich foods are really common. Greens, often seeds.

Sesame seeds are great. Chia seeds are great. So there's a lot of ways to get calcium. You can get it from bones, from a can of sardines, which I like. But anyway, probably don't like that.

I like to eat that. Can of salmon with the bones in. Again, that's how people lived on islands used to get calcium. Anyway, you can take a little calcium, but I don't think you want to overdo on calcium because of problems with calcium affecting the heart and creating other issues. So I'd be careful about that.

Anyway, omega-three fats, the next one. This is a big one. We don't eat the foods we used to eat as hunter gatherers, which are wild foods or a lot of sea based foods for coastal people. Those are very rich in omega threes. But our modern industrial diet and our lack of intake of wild fish has really dropped.

And so ninety percent of Americans are not meeting the recommendations for omega-three intake, which is one serving of fatty fish at least two times a week. I think that's a bare minimum, right? And I'm talking about like sardines, herring, mackerel, maybe some wild salmon, anchovies, you know, small fatty fish. Now there's a lot of other deficiencies, and this is from a large national study. It's called the NHANES or National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

It's a big mumbo jumbo. It's a government, ongoing government study that's been going on for a long, long time that tracks people over decades, tracks their blood work, their health issues. And basically they found that forty five percent of the population is deficient in vitamin A, forty six percent in vitamin C, eighty four percent in vitamin E. Why? Because it comes from whole grains and nobody eats those.

Fifteen percent are deficient in zinc. And why this matters is that these subclinical deficiencies or just frank deficiencies can lead to really serious health consequences. And they may not have initially obvious symptoms, but they will ultimately. So what's the truth about supplements? Well, getting enough vitamins and minerals is not just about preventing deficiency diseases.

Well, that's part of it. They're also essential nutrients that power every aspect of our biology, as I said. Right? Vitamins and minerals and amino acids play key roles in a whole set of biochemical reactions in the body. As I mentioned, they act as cofactors.

I'm just saying this again because it's so important to understand. They literally are the grease that lubricates the wheels of our massive metabolic and biochemical machinery. They power metabolism, detox systems, our energy production, our antioxidant systems, which are important for overall health. Mean, your antioxidants need nutrients to work. For example, you need zinc and copper to activate and manganese, one of the most important intracellular antioxidants called superoxide dismutase.

So nutrients are key for everything, right? For example, you can't make ATP for energy for yourselves without magnesium. If you want to turn tryptophan from your turkey into serotonin, which is good for your mood, you need B6 for that chemical reaction and you need magnesium and you need folate. So if you are low in those and they're really common to be low in, of course, you're going be depressed. You want to make thyroid hormones, right?

To make thyroid hormone T4, you need iodine. And then to make T3, you need selenium and zinc and vitamin A and vitamin D to make the thyroid hormone work at the cellular level. So without optimal levels of these essential nutrients, our biochemistry just can't function properly. And that leads to these low level functional imbalances. And they manifest as just feeling crappy right now, like we call it feel like crap syndrome or FLC.

Or worse, they can lead to these long latency deficiency diseases, accelerated aging, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, depression and worse. And also they lead to immune dysfunction. That's why the elderly often having higher risk of illness infection because they tend to have poor diets. They tend to have trouble absorbing nutrients in their stomach as they get older. And so they tend to have more deficiencies.

Now a new study published in the European Journal of Nutrition studied blood levels of magnesium, really important, my favorite mineral, and homocysteine, which is a measure of B12 folate and B6 function in the body. And they looked at these levels in about one hundred and seventy two healthy middle aged people from Australia, and they found that low levels of magnesium and high homocysteine were linked to an increase in DNA damage. Now what is the minimum RDA for magnesium? It's about four hundred milligrams, which is fine. That's a pretty good good amount.

But here's the deal. In order to get that much magnesium, you'd have to eat a 115 almonds, seven avocados, and 12 and a half bananas to meet that amount, magnesium. And that's why supplementing is so important in today's modern world. The question is, you know, do Americans need supplements? Do people in general need nutritional supplements?

Because if you listen to most doctors, you don't.

Steve Martocci
I mean, I think that is the thing that is so hard as a consumer in this space is just the wildly different opinions. And like, it's the doctor gap of people who say expensive urine to the ones who are like, this is exactly what to do for this. It's also like the explosion on social media. There's this whole of N equals one world right now where people are raving about this supplement is just changing my life. It makes me see in four ks.

Then they also have their supplement store right behind it. So it's an extremely difficult space

Dr. Mark Hyman
to navigate. Mean, there's a lot of snake oil sales by

Steve Martocci
the There might be people who are having actual real great experiences, but they're not aggregating that data in a way that allows anyone to make sense of it. It's just their individual story. And I think we're going through such a big battle right now in America around the individual and the institution. Like who to trust in this and that trust is really eroded. Institutional trust is continuing to go down.

51% of Americans say that they have bought a health or wellness product from a social media influencer.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Something they

Steve Martocci
saw on social media.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I buy these shorts and shoes. I see. Kind of dive a little bit deeper for us into what is Subco and how it works and why it's so important. We like to

Steve Martocci
say that we're helping users make sense of supplements through our website and app. We're helping you figure out what supplements are right for your health, what products and brands you can trust, how you can save the most money and get results. To do this we've cataloged over 200,000 supplement products that you can search in our app or by scanning the barcode. And we've built an in-depth trust score rating from 29 different attributes that let you understand the manufacturing standards and quality of your supplements. For those looking to figure out what they want to take, have 80 expert protocols that you can go in to find guidance on different health topics like brain fog or heart health and women's hormones.

To get started, it's pretty easy. You enter a little bit of information, start scanning your supplements to kind of catalog what you're already taking. We give you an analysis of your stack so that you can kind of get a score that's easy to understand how you can improve quality, how you can improve trust and make changes to kind of improve that. You also then can share your stack with your doctor, your friends, kind of get feedback from different people, create a conversation around it. That helps you understand if you've taken too much or too little of something, which happens to a lot of people.

And then we have a smart scheduler that lets you make sure you're taking your products correctly. Are you taking them with food? Are you taking them at the right time? Which will then also start tracking to see whether or not you're getting results. We launched a beta in early October.

The response been amazing. We're getting like a nearly 1,000 users a day right now. October 24. October 24. Yeah, and we're getting 1,000 users a day without even having your protocols are excited to get your protocols and stack on the platform soon.

And you know, I think what's for us people to know right now everything on sup goes free. And we'll launch a premium membership later this year which will have some premium features and eventually help people save money on their supplements as well we don't sell any of your data there's no advertisement on CEFCO either. Yeah, we want people to come in and be aligned with them. So that we're just as excited when they stop taking something that doesn't work as when they start taking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're

Steve Martocci
not selling supplements. We're not selling supplements. And if we do, we will never profit from them. We're guiding people on how to

Dr. Mark Hyman
take the best products for them that are the cleanest, that are actually matching their goals and needs, and you're just providing this incredible service, which I think is such an important gap in the marketplace that you're filling. So what is the problem of nutritional deficiencies today in America? What do we know about the level of insufficiency or deficiency of nutrients? Is it widespread?

Steve Martocci
Is it rare? I mean, look, I think this is your world. I think this is the one that you particularly would talk best about. I know my own individual struggles, but honestly, you've got this data. This is your world.

I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
the data is so impressive. When you look at the, and I'll just sort of share a little bit to kind of set the stage, but NHANES is called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and it's conducted by the government. And every year they drive around, they get blood on a whole bunch of people, they test their levels, they see what's going on, all sorts of and nutrient levels. And what they found is ninety plus percent of Americans are efficient in one or more nutrient at the minimum level to prevent deficiency. And this is really an important concept for nutrients because if you look at, for example, vitamin D, you need maybe thirty units so you don't get rickets.

But you might need three thousand units so you don't get osteoporosis or cancer or dementia or heart disease or autoimmune diseases or a whole bunch of things that we call long latency deficiency diseases. There's a guy named Robert Heeney who's a professor and brilliant scientist who wrote a paper called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases.

Steve Martocci
And what

Dr. Mark Hyman
it said she was talking about was like, yeah, there's nobody walking around really in America with rickets anymore, or scurvy, or beriberi, or pellagra, or xerophthalmia. These are these severe deficiencies that we actually found in the turn of the century when we started refining our diet and taking white flour and white rice. That's actually how they found it was in prisoners. They gave them white rice. They all became deficient and had these horrible diseases that were cured in a second, essentially with minuscule amounts of nutrients.

When you look at the amount of deficiencies, whether it's ninety plus percent deficient omega-three, eighty plus insufficient or deficient in vitamin D, and some people say even more, magnesium is about 45%, zinc is about 40%, iron. We have a lot of deficiencies. And with Function, we now have 150,000 members of Function Health. And now, by the way, there's no waiting list, you can just join. Go to functionhealth.com/mark.

You can get in and go ahead and check your levels. But we found that in looking at all the data, almost seventy percent of our members have a deficiency in a nutrient that is at the minimum reference range of the lab. So in other words, for iron, this is an example, your ferritin level, which is your iron source, should be 45 or more to feel good, to not have fatigue, to not have hair loss, to not have insomnia. There's a whole bunch of things that come with low iron. The reference range goes 16 or lower, but it should be 45.

Or homocysteine is just like levels 14, which should be more six to eight, which detects B vitamin deficiencies. Or vitamin D should be probably 45 to 60, not 30 or 20, which some lab reference changes are. And at the minimum level, which is how much you need to not get rickets or scurvy or any diseases, this is what the RDA is. It's not the amount you should be taking. It's the minimum amount you need to be taking so you don't get some of these horrible diseases.

We're seeing almost seventy percent of people are deficient in these nutrients in a cohort of one hundred and fifty thousand people, which is a massive amount of data that we've collected at Functional Health, and we're learning about the kinds of things we're seeing in the population. So it's a real issue where people are not getting the nutrients they need, and they don't know why they feel bad. They don't know why they have these low grade symptoms. I had one patient, she came in, she was a radiation oncology resident at Mayo, and she had the most severe migraines. She was on narcotics, she was on major anti vomiting medication, and she could barely function.

And she came in and she said, Oh, I have terrible migraines. And I started taking her history. Said, Oh, you have other symptoms like constipation or do you have muscle spasms?

Rhonda Patrick
Or do

Dr. Mark Hyman
you have anxiety or irritability or palpitations or constipation? And she's like, Yeah, I got all those things. I'm like, Well, that's a magnesium deficiency. And it was so easy. She needed like a thousand or more milligrams of magnesium to get her going and to clear everything out, and that cured her migraines.

And you hear someone who was at Mayo Clinic, saw their best migraine doctors, did everything she could, they couldn't even diagnose a deficiency. And by the way, magnesium deficiency, test magnesium with function and we get your red cell magnesium, which is a better indicator. But to do a real magnesium loading test where you give people IV magnesium and you see what they keep and what they dump out is the best way to actually really tell. But even so, by history, I could tell. After doing functional medicine for thirty years, I can tell you without a doubt, and doing nutrition testing on tens of thousands of people and deep analysis of minerals and vitamins and antioxidant levels and oxidative stress and CoQ10, all the things that people normally don't look at.

It's so widespread. Nutrient deficiency is so widespread in America. So that kind of then leads to the question of, well, if that's true, then why is that true?

Steve Martocci
By the way, what's shocking about that is seventy five percent of Americans take a dietary supplement, fifty five percent are regular users, yet seventy percent are still getting those lab results from you. So they're definitely taking the wrong things or not enough of the right things. So I think that just speaks to a lot of the stuff we're trying to sort out. Subco is giving people the ability to actually know what they're putting in their body. One of the big features of being able to enter everything that you're currently taking is you'll actually see your nutrient totals across all the different products.

Vitamin D is coming from six of the products I take. And actually having a conversation with your doctor about what's actually going in your body doesn't really happen. I remember talking to a nutritionist in the beginning. Was very good. She said, Yeah, I would spend four hours actually going over the nutrients that people were getting from the products they told me.

But most people don't ever do that. I don't know who has a conversation with their doctor who knows actually what they're putting in their body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think this is really important. So SEBCO is your company that you started to help solve this problem of what to take quality, how can you trust your Are you heading out outcomes, yeah. What's the total amount of nutrients you're taking? So people might be taking 10 different supplements and like you say, they all might have selenium in them, and then you're getting toxic dose of selenium. 100%.

And you don't know that because you're not adding it all up, you're not putting a spreadsheet, you're not doing the math, and you create a product that does this. Now I believe in this so much because it's what I tried to solve when I started my own sort of store for my patients, was essentially trying to curate a small group of products that I personally had investigated, I visited the factories, I did the analysis, that I looked at the third party testing. I mean, I curated basically 300, 400 products for functional medicine applications, for basically helping people with cardiometabolic issues, for hormonal issues, for gut issues, and so on and so forth. So that was a lot of work. And I've been confident that I can recommend these things to my patients or people who follow me, but I don't think it really solves a bigger problem of like, how do you figure out everything altogether?

And I know personally that I don't have enough time to do this for myself even. Totally. You know, I I'm buying different things or using things. Right. They're like, how do I how do I know?

So that that's really why I become an adviser Yeah. To SEPCO and I'm sort of helping you because I think this is such an important gap in the marketplace and it's such a need. When you look at the landscape today, tell us some of the problems in the supplement industry. Why is this needed? Because people are just buying stuff and they don't know where it's coming from, where they get it.

They can buy it on Amazon, and often this stuff is sitting on a pallet for a long time or it's like it's some sort of rip off product that doesn't have the nutrients in it. So tell us sort of unpack the real issues with the supplement industry as it is today.

Steve Martocci
As I said, we've got about 200,000 products. There's like 195 already done and then a big queue of ones that have been submitted to us that we're going through. And that's up from 4,000 products in 1994. That's all there was. It's been a In 1994, there's 4,000 supplement products on the market and now there's over 200.

And so we've gone in and taken each one of the supplements, taken the supplement facts labels and taken the data so that you can get an aggregate view of what you're actually putting your body. So that helps you understand what you're taking. But in addition to that, we've gone out and scored the top there's 8,000 brands which is insane too if you think about it. We've taken the top 500 which covers a big percentage of it and kind of expanding down the long tail now and we've given them a trust score. And so we basically have gone in and done what you were doing kind of manually and doing all these individual reviews.

We built a 29 system that goes in and checks what certifications, what kind of testing they're doing, and kind of breaks it down and gives them a score. Feature alone, can scan any supplement for its barcode.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Basically you just take the bottle, you put your Yeah, phone on can do it here while we're talking to you. Yeah, it's a pretty cool thing. And you don't have to like manually enter it. Just scan your code and it

Steve Martocci
pops up right away. And get the trust score and all the information about the product. It's super fast, it's super easy and the hit rate is really high. And if we don't have something, you immediately can submit it. You can AI scan the label and it'll put it in the system.

And the queue is insane. Like the long tail here, there are 20,000 products in the system that only one person is taking. There's a long tail here that is absolutely insane. That's Even those unique products that are kind of not commonly taken. Yeah, one person's taking it.

Don't know how they found it. I don't know if that's a trusted brand. You've seen an explosion on Amazon of these kinds of brands that are just quickly coming to market because there's no real thing stopping you from bringing a supplement to market. There's a big difference in the FDA around the federal code between pharmaceuticals and supplements. Supplements are covered under federal code 21CFR111.

And that's basically that for pharmaceuticals, there's a whole process that they have to get pre approved following CGMP standards and all these different things. That's good manufacturing standards. Yeah, current good manufacturing process. With supplements, it's not something that gets done upfront. You can be held to this standard retroactively like if something comes up but it's kind of up to you to just say yourself.

Can get retroactively someone can say they're having a negative experience reported with the FDA then come after you for not following the practice but no one's checking upfront.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, the amount of attention that the FDA pays this is very, very little unless there's some serious adverse effect or somebody has this problem with it. Right.

Steve Martocci
And those latent things you're talking about the like ones that might be heavy metal exposure that take a long time to ever show up or you don't know the source of it. There's there's no guideline there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mean, a friend of mine was a researcher and he actually analyzed Ayurvedic supplements and found extremely high levels of heavy metals in them. Totally. So you're like, you're taking some Ayurvedic herb, which is some natural product and it hasn't been tested properly and when they actually tested it, it was full of heavy metals.

Steve Martocci
And even if you follow CGMP, you're supposed to occasionally test your lots, think it's like once a year. And then even then they don't provide the guidance on heavy metals. It's like kind of up to you to be like, well, for this type of product, Prop 65 helps a little bit in terms of making sure you don't have to put the label on there if you exceed those numbers. But it's a pretty wild west to be perfectly honest. Are systems now that can say, come up with an idea and a brand and get a supplement and market in weeks.

So that's why you're seeing the explosion. So we've gone in and we've taken 29 different points and we've built a scoring system.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is your trust score.

Steve Martocci
This is our trust score.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically you're taking 29 different attributes,

Steve Martocci
toxic, whether clot testing, CGMP. The biggest one that makes a difference is whether or not you're getting a third party to certify your CGMP practices. That's kind of like the fundamental. So instead of you just saying, Yeah, I'm good. I'm gonna self certify that I'm following these practices.

There's NSF and UL, these two big firms that'll come in and do what you are doing, go tour the facilities, make sure you're actually following, give you a certification. That's like a fundamental big one. And there's a surprising number of brands that

Dr. Mark Hyman
don't follow-up. And that means that the manufacturing plant is clean, way they get sourcing ingredients.

Steve Martocci
They're testing each lot, and there's a lot to that to figure it out.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true. When I started in this field in functional medicine thirty years ago, there were a handful of professional brands that were only marketed and sold through professionals, doctors, nutritionists, so forth, chiropractors, and you couldn't get them otherwise. Interesting. You couldn't get like Metagenics or Thorne or Pure Encapsulations. Only distributed professionals because they were higher level, higher grade, a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for.

So for example, Pure Encapsulations, they actually test every single product, every lot, and we do it before they make the stuff with the ingredients and they do it after. And if it says, it's supposed to say four hundred milligrams of, let's say, magnesium on the label, If it's three fifty, they throw it out.

Steve Martocci
Metagenics, who you brought up, is our 10 out of 10. They're our highest scoring brand on the platform. They do like one thing that is rare, but we give some points to it, they make every batch test COA publicly available. So you can like look at your bottle, look at the lot number, go online, pull it up and see the results from the test. That's like a gold standard for us.

Pure ranks very highly and but then there's a big spectrum.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the stuff that you get in the grocery store or Walmart or the drugstore is generally crap. They texted me screenshot of Centrum, which is this massive advertising. It's really a big product out there. Everything's Centrum, it's high quality. I mean, but why do you take a blue pill or a red pill or have titanium dioxide or have dyes and chemicals?

Steve Martocci
That was a super interesting thing about that Centrum pill in particular is that like the Centrum brand ranking is pretty high, we just started exposing the excipients, the inactive ingredients. And it had titanium dioxide, red 40, red five, like these things that I'm sorry yellow five these things that are that are not good I mean titanium dioxide is not it's banned in Europe you know like it causes DNA damage and they don't need to be in your in your supplements so that's another thing we just rolled out was not just the manufacturing standards but now we're going down to the product level and actually going in. Have like a, forget how many, it's a couple thousand of these excipients that get added and ranking them out by how cautious you should be about.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff in them that often are not known. There could be gluten or dairy, lactose or other things that are in these, in addition to all the other of excipients, fillers, additives, colors, chemicals, things that make it look good or stick together. You don't want that crap. You want the nutrients.

Steve Martocci
And I think it's going be interesting. We're starting to send out different supplements for our own independent testing to do what you were saying. Just kind of verify that even if they're highly rated, is it actually in there what they say it is? So the precision of the nutrients that they're claiming are in there. It's a complicated market and I think that what we've done though by just making a simple score, making it out of 10, it makes it really easy for people to understand.

The simple red, yellow, green, like you can go deep and you can go look at each of the 20 Your nine trust score is one to 10.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like this is a nine,

Steve Martocci
this is a two. That has been helpful for people to just like simply take a glance. Because some, the user base we have, one thing I like doing in general when designing software is it's gotta be easy enough for grandma to use, but powerful enough for the most hardcore user in the space to go deep on.

Rhonda Patrick
I did that

Steve Martocci
with Splice, making sure that 40% of top 40 music using it to create music, they're like the hardcore guys and the brand new music creators. So we're doing this in supplements. There's a way to dive way deep into what those 29 points are in each one of the excipients and all that. Or you can simply look at the score at the top and be like, okay, that feels good. Because some people We got to meet the consumers where they are.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because nobody's really doing that. There company was called Consumer Labs that I used to of use to reference stuff where they would go and test products, and I would rely on their independent analysis. But they weren't able to do the 200,000 products, so you basically, just with a simple scan of the barcode, the technology behind it, the use of AI, it's quite amazing now. You can literally see what is the problem or how good a product is and whether or not it actually says what it is on the label.

Steve Martocci
Yeah. And like, I think the big thing too is like, we're not out here to, we just want to kind of arc the industry in the right direction. Like some of our trust scores, if you find a negative one, we're not all doing the big gotcha story on it. We're having conversations. A lot of the brands have reached out to us.

First, the top end brands are like, thank you. Right? Thank you for simplifying and raising to the attention how much work we are putting into testing this. So like super appreciative. You know, sometimes they'll clarify a piece of data that we might not have right because we've collected it through our teams, you know, reaching out to them and they might provide something, which is great.

And then we've had brands also reaching out one, they want their trust score because the consumers are starting to care about this. And then how do we make it better? Right? And that's our big dream. If we can just help the industry move in the right direction on this with the scores, think we've done, you know, something really great.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Doctor Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions.

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