The Mental Health Crisis Starts in the Gut with Dr. William Li & Dr. Mark Hyman

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 sixteen-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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I kinda wanna take us down a path of helping us understand food is medicine from the perspective of the mind and mental health. Because we have a serious mental health crisis now. I don't think we have a crisis of mental health because there's somehow a design flaw in human beings.

Dr. William Li
Our software is not failing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was a screwed up operating system that got installed.

Dr. William Li
I wanna talk about a new term called the flavorome. The flavorome. The gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria or disease bacteria can actually text message your brain up the vagus nerve back

Dr. Mark Hyman
to the The irritable bowel causes the irritable brain, not the other way around.

Dr. William Li
It turns out that the graveyard is the garden when it comes to actually the microbiome. Have you heard of amantoflavone?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I haven't.

Dr. William Li
Amantoflavone actually lowers anxiety.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cantaloupe is like a natural value. You can change your brain, you can change your mind, and you can heal both. William Lee is a renowned physician scientist and New York Times bestselling author whose work has transformed how we understand the connection between nutrition, disease, and the body's natural healing systems. Hey, it's Doctor. Hyman.

I'm so excited to share this episode with you today, but before we dive in, I want to get your help. Please take a minute to hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching here on YouTube, or listening on your favorite podcast platform. It truly means the world to me and it helps my team and I bring you this podcast every single week. Plus, I don't want you to miss a thing.

So thanks so much for being part of this community and I'm glad you're here. William, so good to have you back back on the podcast.

Dr. William Li
Always good to be talking to you, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I know. We've done this virtually. We've done this in person. I think this might be the third round. I don't know.

Dr. William Li
I don't know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is it?

Dr. William Li
Yeah. I've lost count.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, you are are one of the pioneers in thinking about how food is medicine, but from a deep science perspective. And, not just, oh, it's food is medicine, that's cool, eat your blueberries, but like really understanding the role of the molecules. And there was an interesting article, I don't know if you saw it in the England Journal of Medicine, about the dark matter of nutrition. It was about the 139,000 different compounds in food that regulate our biology that are from petrochemicals. And I've heard even up to 3,000,000.

I I think that number keeps changing. And it the dark matter of nutrition is is called that because we just thought of food as protein, fats, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and that's pretty much it. You know? And maybe, you know, some nice stuff from polyphenols, but like didn't really have a complex understanding of it. And so there's this whole other world of nutrition that is waiting to be discovered.

And so we're mapping out a whole world of of the way food interacts with our receptors and our metabolic pathways and our microbiome and our immune system and our brain chemistry and ways that have never been really uncovered before. And and you've been deeply thinking about this for a long time, and I I personally learned a lot from you and from your books Eat to Beat Disease and all of your work. And so I kinda wanna take us down a path of helping us understand, you know, food is medicine from the perspective of of the mind and mental health. The brain and the mind are related, and they the mind reflects what's happening in the brain. And and if we don't understand how to create a healthy brain, we can't have a healthy mind.

And so fundamentally, you know, how do you think about using food and nutrition and food as medicine in the realm of mental health? Because we have a serious mental health crisis now. How do you think about it? And and what do you you know, the last few years of you kind of looking at this field, where where's your take on all this?

Dr. William Li
Yeah. I'm glad you actually connected the brain and sort of the mental health aspect, and then we should just dive and connect the head to the gut.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. Right?

Dr. William Li
Yeah. So this is really The

Dr. Mark Hyman
second brain.

Dr. William Li
The second brain that connects to the first brain, which connects to our emotions and really our behavior. So it's all really interconnected. You know, if you take a systems biology approach, which means you don't isolate one thing, you look at how everything is interconnected and think about how the dominoes you hit in one side might affect the dominoes on the other side, you realize we're just at the beginning of a new frontier of understanding our behavior in our brain and as it relates to food. You mentioned biology, and I wanna you've heard about the genome. This is our DNA.

I heard about that. Right? And you've heard about the microbiome, which you've actually alluded to. Yeah. I wanna talk about the food and its many components, the so called dark matter, and bring up a new term called the flavorome.

The flavorome. The flavorome is actually what flavors food, which is what we prefer, which influences our emotions, including pleasure, or a negative reaction, repulsion. And it's connected to the substances in the food, the molecules in the food, which then interact once we eat them, starting from the mouth going all the way down to our lower gut and then ultimately to our gut microbiome in the cecum where the microbiome is located. A lot people don't realize exactly where the microbiome is in the gut. Most of it

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the last part of your large intestine.

Dr. William Li
Okay. Yeah. Let's let's back up a second.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cecum. What is that?

Dr. William Li
Let's let's the last

Dr. Mark Hyman
part of your large intestine.

Dr. William Li
Let's talk cecum. Right? Okay. So you got forty forty feet of intestines starting in the mouth, ending in the anus, and the goes from mouth to esophagus to stomach. After the stomach, it it go then you switch to a different part of the gut below the diaphragm.

Small intestines is a long snaky tube like your

Dr. Mark Hyman
garden hose. 22 feet.

Dr. William Li
Exactly. Then you finally it finally goes to the large intestines, small to large. Okay? Size up. And 12 the feet.

And the connection between the small intestines, a small tube, and the large intestines, a large tube right there, that connection is called the cecum. It's kind of a floppy bag. It's where your appendix actually is. And then if you were to keep on going in the large intestines or the colon, it goes up, takes the elevator up, and then it crosses the building across your gut, and then it goes back down, and then it empties out. Okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I I misspoke. It's the beginning of your large intestine.

Dr. William Li
It's the beginning of the large intestines, and it's a sac, and it's where the intestines is. And that's actually where most of the gut microbiome lives. Not all of it, but most. Right where the appendix lives, and now we're beginning to reconsider whether the appendix is truly a useless organ. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or God, I'm in gods. I'm so dumb. Exactly.

Dr. William Li
Exactly. Nothing nothing is left without some purpose. But back to this idea of the gut microbiome being signaled by the food that we eat, and then the gut microbiome can basically message our brain through nerves that involve the vagus nerve. Right? So you've heard of vagus nerve stimulation and everything else about how to affect our our mood and depression and anxiety.

Well, it turns out our gut microbiome is actually doing vagal nerve stimulation all the time. And so the vagus nerve coming out of our brain and this is the connection. So out of our brain, in our hindbrain coming out of our cranial nerves, popping out of our the bottom of our brain, and the vagus nerve, which is our tenth cranial nerve courses out. The big thick cables come out, go down our neck, wrap around our esophagus like a fishnet stocking, then penetrate the diaphragm, and then go down into our gut, and it ramifies like a horse's tail.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Dr. William Li
All those nerves go everywhere. And guess what? The gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria, or diseased bacteria can actually text message your brain up the vagus nerve back to the brain. 80 to 90% of those nerves run upwards to the brain, not down just downwards.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That that's fascinating. I remember reading Oregon Jammer years ago where they talked about irritable bowel syndrome, and it was a revolutionary article from my perspective. Because in medical school, we learned that irritable bowel was a psychological problem, that it was because people were anxious and stressed, and that was the cause. But it actually is the reverse.

When the microbiome is altered and there's inflammation, it creates irritation that sends messages back up like you see, like, test messages to the brain that causes an irritable brain. So the irritable bowel causes the irritable brain, not the other way around.

Dr. William Li
Exactly. And then the brain feels it, and then you feel uncomfortable. Yeah. And by the way, you know, do you remember those many hours in med school where all we're supposed to be doing is learning and, like, you know, taking notes or or seeing patients? And, you know, it was more frequent than not, like, something in our gut wasn't doing well and you weren't feeling great, you couldn't show it.

Right? Well, that's actually signals from our gut microbiome communicating our brains. Hey. You know, not so not all is well here. Right.

And we have to hold our behavior in in order to be able to just keep performing. Yeah. But inside, something's going on. And so, again, this whole other issue of what that has to do with brain, mental health, and behavior connected to our gut is all interconnected. So if we ate more healthy think about all the crap we ate in med school.

Yeah. Okay. True. Right? So Well,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I didn't. I was I was a weird weirdo. I brought my own yogurt and granola and fruit in the morning, and I made my miso soup at night.

Dr. William Li
Well, think about all

Dr. Mark Hyman
the things

Dr. William Li
that were brought by

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. William Li
Drug reps

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. That I did.

Dr. William Li
To the lunches. And so the point is that even in medicine, we've actually been not properly trained, at least in the past, to think appropriately about the connection between the gut and the brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not at all. No. And I I remember, you know, I I was just practicing functional medicine and treating patients with all kinds of issues. And and I was often brought kids with behavior problems, or ADD, or other issues. And you know, I I was just sort of learning, or or even adults with sort of autoimmune things, or weird diseases, who had mental health issues like OCD, or behavior anxiety issues, depression.

And, you know, I began to see that there was this big connection, and I would do stool testing, and I would do urine organic acid testing, which looked at metabolites of the microbiome in the urine that you can pick up from bacteria or fungi. And there was this one little girl who was so beautiful, but so violent and aggressive. She was like nine years old, and she would get kicked out of school multiple times a day to be in the hallway. She on the bus, they had to stop the bus like 10 times on the way home. She was, you know, a terror at home with her sister, she would tear up family pictures.

I mean, she was just a nightmare. And I worked her up, and I found she had massive overgrowth of bad bacteria in her gut, and she had massive overgrowth of of fungi in her gut. And I gave her an antibiotic and an antifungal, and overnight, she turned into this beautiful, sweet little girl.

Dr. William Li
You know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was unbelievable. And I was like, holy shit.

Dr. William Li
Well, that well, that's the power Literally. Of understanding the the the gut, and and you intercepted the problem. I But wanna actually bring out one thing that you just said that I think is important for anybody listening to this to consider. You said you intercepted a problem, my microbiome, that was causing behavioral changes and mental, you know, torment with an antibiotic. Right?

So too often, we tend to black and white Yeah. Things in medicine, especially in the health and wellness space. But here's an example of where the judicious selection of the right antibiotic Right. To slightly tip the odds Yeah. Of favoring the good bacteria to overcome the bad bacteria.

It's about balance Yeah. Not about extremes, and got the result that you were hoping for.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You know, there's a whole world that we are just beginning to understand that science is beginning to unpack. And and I think, you know, the whole relation between the gut and the brain and mental health and mood is so important. And when you think about it, and I want you to kind of dive into this, because I kind of learned a lot about this from you. The first time I really heard about polyphenols and the microbiome was from you actually at a at a Milken conference like a decade ago or something.

And you were showing slides, I was like, oh, wow. This is amazing. The the microbiome is fed by what you eat. You're not just eating for you. Right.

You're eating for the trillions of bugs in your gut. Right. So tell us about why that's important, and what we're eating, how that destroys our messes them messes and what we should be feeding them to actually enhance them the right bugs.

Dr. William Li
Yeah. Okay. So first of all

Dr. Mark Hyman
And how this plates back to mental health and brain brain health.

Dr. William Li
The theme of what we've just been talking about is that our brain health and mental health is connected to our gut health, which is fed by food. Right? And here we are thinking of ourselves as individuals, right, with our own cognition, our own emotions, and our own appetites, and our own behaviors. But in fact, when you once you factor in the gut, 39,000,000,000,000 bacteria and counting, you're really talking about a single organism. That's you sitting over there and me sitting over here.

We are single organisms made up of 39 to 40,000,000,000,000 pieces. Yeah. Alright? And so we're not even single organisms. We're more like a coral reef.

Okay. And just like a coral reef with the clownfish and an anem anemone and the barracuda and the octopus, you know, basically, how we how things how we the whole reef performs has to do with how well the fish are fed. If you've got starving fish or you're bleached coral, you're gonna wind up having a very sick ecosystem, and that translates directly to the brain. And as you said, this is a just an emerging area of research, which makes it challenging. I wanna come back to the point of like, how do we test?

How do we know? Because we're beginning to, you know, understand how important the microbiome is. But for somebody listening to this, how do I know my microbiome isn't well? You can't go to your regular doctor to ask for I that kind of know. But let's go back and

Dr. Mark Hyman
to an irregular doctor like me.

Dr. William Li
Or an irregular. Exactly. Or regularly irregular. Right? That's the atrial fibrillation doc.

All right. So let's talk about polyphenols.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So What is a polyphenol anyway?

Dr. William Li
Okay. Polyphenol is basically mother nature's pharmacy with a f and not a p h. It's thousands of different kinds of molecules. Most of them make the colorful foods, a rainbow. Millions.

What's that? Millions. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

The billions. The the the the colorful the colors you see in the produce market, Many of them are attributed to polyphenols. These are just natural chemicals that are found intrinsically in food. What's very interesting about polyphenols in food is not only what they do for people, which is a good thing. They're anti inflammatory.

They help to our metabolism work better. They can help fight excess body fat and decrease visceral fat, feed the gut microbiome, but as prebiotics. But it turns out that an more interesting question is now being asked, which is why do plants even have polyphenols? Yeah. What did they do for the plant?

Yeah. And, you know They're

Dr. Mark Hyman
not they're not there for us.

Dr. William Li
They're not there for us. Okay? But it turns out that mother nature imbued plants that make foods with polyphenols to fight the disease, to to fight for the health of the plant itself. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the plant's immune and defense system.

Dr. William Li
It's a it's an immune defense system. It's a repair systems. It's a plant's healing system. So if you were to ask me in plain people speak, what is a polyphenol doing in a plant? I would say it's there to heal the plant Yeah.

And keep the plant healthy. Right? So, you know, I'm gonna come to this in a second. Like, how does it affect the choices we make? Turns out that if a plant is growing naturally in as a regenerative an environment as it possibly can, Natural.

Okay? Without artificial chemicals and spiking the soil and doing all kinds of crazy things to it. What do you have in a natural field or forest? You've got little bugs that are nibbling on the stems and the leaves of the plant. That's an injury, and the plant is gonna respond to the injury, the natural injury, by healing itself by creating polyphenols.

So it turns out that more naturally grown food plants actually will have more polyphenols.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The more stress a plant is It's called hormesis. Right? Which is the stress that doesn't kill you to make you stronger. That's why a wild strawberry explodes with flavor, and a giant red strawberry from the grocery store that's industrially produced tastes like cardboard.

Dr. William Li
And we've actually studied strawberries for what's inside it. And, again, there's our hundreds of molecules, but we're just getting to them one by one. Strawberries have ellagic acid as one of their bioactives. It means biologically active. It's not just about the strawberries, how our body responds when we eat the strawberry.

That ellagic acid does a lot of things. It feeds our gut microbiome, healthier gut. It also lowers inflammation all by itself, but it also helps a healthy gut bacteria lower inflammation by releasing short chain fatty acids. So now you got a twofer. Right?

You've got ellagic acid, which is inherently anti inflammatory. How do we know this? Because if you actually grow inflammatory cells in a petri dish, in a tissue culture, and you put ellagic acid in there, they will they will stop having a riot. They'll calm down. If you actually put the short chain fatty acids of the gut microbiome in the same dish, they'll also calm down.

So these are truly a double headed kind of action of of ellagic acid. Now what's interesting is the clinical data also shows that people who eat strawberries, about a cup of strawberries a day over the course of a couple of weeks, will also change mental state. It'll actually lower depression, improve cognition, specifically improve memory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Make sure you eat the organic ones because the strawberries are the most contaminant.

Dr. William Li
And this and this is the point, is that basically, if you want the most potent ellagic acid this was studied by horticulturalists in England. Yeah. You wanna have organic strawberries because they're the ones that have to defend themselves against mother nature just to stay robust. So they actually have the greatest hormetic generation of these polyphenols. So when we eat them, we get the we get a benefit that the plant, you know, plant doesn't eat anymore.

Now we get the benefit from it. Right. And it turns out that the organic strawberries have the most. Now that's the most of the good stuff. You just talked about the least pesticides, and here's the deal with the fruits that are worth getting organic for.

You cannot wash off pesticides from a strawberry because you can't skin a strawberry. You would never skin a strawberry. And there's other fruits that you wanna pay attention to as well that benefit the gut that can improve that can improve your mental state, like apples, for example. You can peel an apple to skin the apple, but actually the the fiber in the skin is really, really beneficial. And so too is the ursolic acid, which improves blood flow Yeah.

Which improves brain blood flow, which improves cognition.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. William Li
Right? So again, when you can think more clearly, you have less brain fog. You actually are less anxious or depressed. You get in a better mood. So again, turns out studies at UMass University of Massachusetts have studied if you take regular pesticides, spray them on an apple like in a conventional farm, basically, the pesticides will penetrate into 20% deep into the skin of the apple.

Wow. Now you try washing that off, it won't happen. So, again, that's another example of where making choosing organic with anything that you're gonna have the skin or you can't or you want the skin or you can't skin it would be actually beneficial.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I always thought, know, like, you you taught me this. Well, I always thought that probiotics and prebiotics were the key to a healthy gut microbiome. But it turns out the third p, polyphenols, is just as important. And that that collection of molecules, those dark matter nutrition, it's a lot of what actually creates a healthy microbiome.

So eating all these various plants I mean, you you taught me, for example, that pomegranate and green tea and cranberry have super beneficial effects on a keystone species called achromancy and eosinophilia that protects the lining of the gut and prevents leaky gut and reduces inflammation, helps metabolic health, and has all these benefits around treatments for cancer.

Dr. William Li
And boosts your immune system for against cancer. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is just one bacteria, there's, know, like you said, 39,000,000,000,000 in there. And maybe a thousand species

Dr. William Li
And you something I'll even more profound that is emerging as a theme in gut health research that is quite important for thinking about brain health. We used to always okay. I used when I was a kid, my grandparents used to take probiotics. I never knew what they were. Really?

Yeah. They they came in from the probiotics were sent from Japan, and they used to arrive at my my parents' house and my grandparents were living with with us. And they would open them up, and I remember they would like some bacillus. I'm like, why would you eat a bacteria? Right?

Wow. Really weird. And and by the way, so this is showing that long before the current trend of probiotics, it has been done in past generations. There's some ancient knowledge. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Ancient All the fermented foods is all probiotic Yeah.

Dr. William Li
I used to wonder if a probiotic bacteria was dried, this has to be dead. And if instead, how could it do something beneficial to you? Right? And and to this day, if you really think about it, live bacteria in your gut makes sense doing all those things we're talking about. You need a live bacteria to text message your brain.

Right? Wrong. It turns out that even dead bacteria, the shell of the bacteria, the carcass of the bacteria, is biologically active. And this is why pasteurized bacteria are now being shown to also be bioactive. I'll tell you an experiment that was done that was really amazing.

So there's a professor named Susan Erdman, who's a colleague of mine at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying bacteria, a gut bacteria called lactobacillus reuteri. Yeah. This is a fascinating bacteria that actually is often found in mother's milk, healthy mother's milk, injected into the baby to colonize the bacteria. It's a lactobacillus. Alright?

Lactobacillus reuteri actually helps the wounds heal, so we were helps wound healing. So we actually did a research study where we were actually looking at whether or not feeding lactobacillus reuteri as a probiotic would speed up in wound healing, and indeed, it doubled the rate of wound healing, and it did it from the gut by increasing the gene expression, turning on the gene genetic machinery for a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor just to prompt new blood vessels to grow VEGF just to be able to heal the wound. That's pretty amazing. Right? Gut, skin, axis.

Now what about the brain? Turns out lactobacillus reuteri also text messages your brain and tells your brain to produce oxytocin. Yeah. Social hormone. Right.

I'm not getting to the I haven't gotten to the the punch line yet. The punch line is, can we destroy this is the experiment. Can we destroy the bacteria's effect by pulverizing it? So in a lab, you can actually take an ultrasound, not the kind you would actually do in a pregnant mom to look at the baby, but there's like a destructive ultrasound. So think about like a naval weapon, the sound sound weapon, and you can beam it at the lactobacillus reu and then pulverize it into gajillion pieces.

Alright? You feed it to an experimental system to animals just by putting it in drinking water. And guess what? The dead pulverized bacteria will also make the brain release oxytocin. Totally not.

No no chance it's alive. It is completely pulverized.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The dead stuff has signaling molecules there?

Dr. William Li
Signaling molecules, like, you know, like the, you know, like so I was I I sort of think about it as the graveyard of the microbiome is also a garden that's actually active. It's still able to do things. This is just Oh, like compost

Dr. Mark Hyman
or something.

Dr. William Li
You know? Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, more powerful than we thought.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, one patient of mine said, you know, doctor Haiman, I took this probiotic, and I was just looking it up, and and there was a a specific strain, Bifidobacterium longum seventeen fourteen, improves the quality of deep sleep. Think about a probiotic that actually improves your sleep. So everything is connected here.

Dr. William Li
Makes total sense. Right? I mean, I I I think that we here's the thing. You know, when we as communicators and also medical experts talk about the microbiome and mental health and brain health, you know, we make it seem very logical and common sense. I think it's important to say that, you know, what we're talking about is this really kind of a realization, and we're taking whatever pieces of evidence that currently exist and trying to help people understand the connections and the importance of having they've got good brain health and good mental health.

You really need to have good gut health at the same time, and that's a connection on food. But we don't really have all the answers yet. Yeah. That's the key thing. We there's you know, before anybody runs out after hearing this and just goes and buys whatever bacteria there is, recognize that there's a there's a long way to go before we actually have mastered how to actually map out that to to get to the results that we need.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But in the meantime, we can eat prebiotic foods, probiotic foods, fermented foods

Dr. William Li
In the

Dr. Mark Hyman
meantime polyphenols. We can kinda hack hack the game a little bit by having a a broad array of these different types of foods that are microbiome enhancing foods without worrying too much about which probiotic to take. Exactly. Exactly. Because you know what?

Foods actually are wrapped up with if you take fermented foods, it's already got some polyphenols.

Dr. William Li
It's got some dietary fibers. It's got the prebiotics, and it's got the bacteria. And, you know, have you ever asked, like, okay. Do all the healthy bacteria, are they alive in fermented foods, in sauerkraut or in yogurt? Some of them are probably dead.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. William Li
Okay? And that's okay. It turns out that the graveyard is the garden when it comes to actually the microbiome.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I wanna double click on something you said because you, like, said it, and we whizzed over it. And I think it's so important, and it's called the flavorome. Like, I never heard that term before, but, you know, it reminded me of of a gentleman who's been on the podcast a few times, Fred Prevenza, who's a rangeland ecologist from Utah, and the Utah State for most of his life. He's retired now. He wrote a book called Nourishment, essentially about what we can learn from animals about how to eat.

And he studied the behavior of rangeland animals out west, looking at what plants they ate and what they did. You know, were some general food and props for calories, but then they ate and sampled many, many different plants for their phytochemical benefits and their medicinal benefits. And they would only eat a certain amount of them, because at certain levels they could be toxic. Or it was like they knew what to eat. And they had this natural intelligence based on the flavor.

And what always what always sort of blew my mind is that when you think about the taste of food, the flavor of food, it always comes from the phytochemical richness of the food. That's what brings the flavor. Dan Barber figured this out. He probably didn't think about this, but he created something called row seven c's, essentially to reverse engineer flavor back into foods that have had that flavor engineered out of them. Like, butternut squash is tasteless, but he created honey nut squash, which is basically a phyto chemically richer food that makes it taste sweeter, better naturally.

So we put all these flavorings on foods, instead of actually eating the foods that have the flavor naturally. So the explosion of a wild strawberry is a different flavor than a store bought strawberry. It's not organic, or even the organic is not as good as the wild one. And so it's people don't understand that if you seek out foods that have a natural richness of flavor, if you go to your garden, and anybody's at a garden, I I I've had gardens most of my life, and you you get an asparagus that you kinda crack off the stem and you eat it. It's like Is there a substitute?

It's unbelievable. Or you take broccoli and you eat it, or you take a tomato off the cherry tomato that's ripened in an August sun on the plant, and it's it's a totally different set of flavors that comes from these phytochemicals, and that's where the medicine is. That's where the dark matter nutrition is. And we essentially bred our plants that we eat to not have these anymore.

Dr. William Li
You know, I I was I know Dan Barber very well. We're doing a collaboration. I went out to visit his regenerative farm Yeah. In New York, and he gave me a pitchfork. Mhmm.

And we went out there, and I dug up potatoes Yeah. Which I've always considered to be the most tasteless Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Not necessarily.

Dr. William Li
Plucked it out of the ground, brought it to the kitchen. He cooked it for me. Yeah. And it tasted amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Tasted amazing.

Dr. William Li
Yeah. I mean, it was sort of like a different food altogether. And let's talk about flavor for a second because flavor is what draws us to our favorite foods. Right? And flavor, by the way, is connected to the brain, not only through our taste buds, but also through our nose.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Kind of our natural homing system that we've then had hijacked away from us by the food industry.

Dr. William Li
Yeah. And and also the flavor industry. Think about the candles grow you know, burning in your home or in the hotel or the scents or the car smell. We have been inundated with industrialization of our senses. Yeah.

Right? Our taste buds by the food industry, our our our our olfactory nerves, our nose from, you know, the people who wanna make things smell nice, like the laundry detergent or their dish soap. And the reality is that we, you we I I think what we're learning is that by going back to nature and appreciating the intensity that can be packed into food, we will naturally gravitate towards the foods that we individually so this is personalized nutrition. We all have our own preferences of flavor profile. Some people are super tasters.

Some oh, man. It's way too hot for me, or I don't prefer this kind of sour food. I can't take it. Other people go, man. I really like that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I like better food.

Dr. William Li
And so I think that, you know, by recognizing our the part of the flavor, flavor is linked to preferences, which is part of our individualization, which is part of our humanity. Yeah. Right? And then think about the diversity of foods out there. Okay.

If you could eat a food that you preferred, that you love the flavor on, it's gonna make you happier. And so that's also hardwiring above the gut. So we're not talking about the gut microbiome here. You haven't even put it in your mouth. You've just smelled it.

You see it. Our eyes are basically radar dishes that connect right to our brain. We can even feel happy seeing foods. Yeah. Right?

So, again, talking about mental health, brain health, mood, emotion, you know, our how our emotions are, it is so complicated because it's not only our gut, it's our eyes, it's our nose, it's our taste buds that all work in concert.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true. You know, I think what I've learned, William, is that your body will naturally gravitate towards things that support its health if you remove the things that are interfering with those signals. So if you're for example having artificial sweeteners, which are a thousand times sweeter than regular sugar. Or you're having a lot of sugar, and you have some blueberry, it's gonna taste bland. But if you don't eat sugar, and I do this, I take people on these retreats, and I I get them off all the sugar, and the starch, and all the crap for like a week.

And then I give them a treat at the end, which is like blueberries. And they're like, wow, this is like so sweet. And it's because we've we've had our our natural instincts hijacked by the food industry. And so we're not attracted to those foods which are good for us. We're attracted to those foods that are bad for us.

And we've had our senses almost homogenized and removed from what naturally is good for us. And I think we need to learn how to get back to that and hit the reset button. That's why I I created the ten day detox site. You can to 10daydetox.com and learn about it. But essentially, it's it's a full reset of your system so that you can then start to go, okay.

What do I like? What do I want? I mean, I walk by, you know, like, I'll walk by a store or like a a restaurants, like, where they have, like, muffins or bagels or whatever. I don't wanna eat it. It doesn't it looks like a rock to me.

Like, it doesn't attract me because my body's naturally seeking those things that that support its health because I've trained it to and I've let it kind of uncovered from all the crap.

Dr. William Li
I don't know if you saw the research that looked at chimpanzees knowing inherently when they're injured, that they'll pick specific plants to chew on them that will give them the bioactives of polyphenols from certain plants in order to be able to heal their wounds.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. That's what I'm talking about. Animals have this natural intelligence. We've lost it.

Dr. William Li
We've lost touch of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's and it's part of what's caused our our mental health to be screwed up, because we're eating a diet that is so damaging to our mental health. All the starch and the sugar and the refined foods and the ultra processed foods and all the additives and chemicals, it has such an adverse effect, not just in our microbiome, on our metabolic function and our health. And you know, at the Harvard, there's now departments of metabolic psychiatry. I mean, there's nutritional psychiatry. This is because there's there's an understanding that there's this relationship between the the the the amount of sugar and starch and processing of our diet and our mental health.

Right. And it's causing an epidemic of mental health issues. I don't think we have a crisis of mental health because there's somehow a design flaw in human beings. It's like, yeah, there was always a few maybe crazy people in the tribe, but, like, basically, most people were pretty stable and good.

Dr. William Li
Our software is not failing. Right? I mean, basically, every

Dr. Mark Hyman
We have a screwed up operating system that got installed, though.

Dr. William Li
We're spilling coffee on the on the keyboard kind

Dr. Mark Hyman
of thing.

Dr. William Li
Right? Here's something interesting to think about when it comes to mental health. What are there's obviously a lot of things that if we introduce it to our system that are gonna cause inflammation. So regardless of what mental health condition that you're talking about, everything from schizophrenia to autism to to major depression, bipolar disorder, you know, so far, what's been looked at as a common denominator of these syndromes is actually inflammation in the brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's right. That's right. I think that's so important. Let's let's double click on that because inflammation is what's behind a lot of the mental health crises.

Dr. William Li
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, even read a study that they're showing they were interested in using t n f alpha blockers for depression, which is a stupid idea, which is like an autoimmune drug. But

Dr. William Li
Or or it's a brilliant idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's a brilliant idea in the sense that it's, oh, it's inflammation, but it's a bad idea because there's better ways to reduce inflammation without all the side effects.

Dr. William Li
So but, you know, if we're really trying to address this root cause of mental illness or or let's not call it mental illness. Let's call it kind of deviating from our own mental health. You've got this, like, smokescreen that's put up by inflammation. And and although there are underlying things that might make something depression versus anxiety disorder versus OCD versus, you know, schizophrenia, the the reality is if you if you can strip away the inflammatory layer, that's actually an important thing that people are empowered to do. We can do that ourselves.

You don't need a psychiatrist to lower brain body inflammation and hence brain inflammation. And so removing the bad stuff to actually lower inflammation is actually it's, you know, it's it's a it's low hanging fruit literally and figuratively. Right? I mean, all of those polyphenols and fruits that that and vegetables that you would eat can actually lower inflammation. So you can get a head start on anything that you're doing for mental health by low by eating foods that lower inflammation.

You know? And by the way, the other thing that's interesting about inflammation, which most of us are walking around with, even those of us who take care of ourselves, you know, life is tough. Stress causes inflammation. Yeah. Most of us are have a little bit of more stress than we want in our lives, and and so we're always a little bit inflamed, which is why, you know, we need to actually have that fire extinguisher to regularly put things out three times a day whenever we're actually making a choice.

Make that choice to lower inflammation in your bodies is good for brain health, good for mental health as a practice. I think as just a matter of actually how you choose your your your foods, your your meals. Now the other thing is staying away from things that can cause inflammation as well, and this is really the the other part of the dark matter in manufactured foods and ultra processed foods.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And by the the dark matter is a good thing and not bad. The dark matter is all the things we haven't seen that are good in food. But there's also a dark Darker matter. There's a darker matter, which is a shitty food we're

Dr. William Li
eating. Right. Right. That's that's the that's the dark side of the force. Yeah.

Right? Okay. So then you actually put all those chemicals that are that our body tries to process, tries to detox. Our liver, our kidneys, all these organs try to kind of remove, have to has to do extra work, has to has to consume energy. Part of the energy that we would normally have for enjoying life, for brain function, if we have to divert that energy to detoxing the the chemicals that we find in our foods, you know, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, artificial preservatives, you name it, the fillers, all these kind of transformed additives that are actually found in our foods, not only does it steal from our life energy and our life force, but it actually directly trigger inflammation as well.

And by then triggering inflammation, just and I'll think about the dietary pattern. You eat less foods with polyphenols, more junk food with all these chemicals. You're tilting these scales towards inflammation.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the most inflammatory thing is sugar and starch. That's what's the majority of Americans' diet, And that that's creating insulin resistance, which creates belly fat deposition. Those cells in your belly are not just holding up your pants. They're they're little factories of inflammation, creating adipose cytokines, which are inflammatory molecules from the fat cells that go to your brain and affect everything.

Dr. William Li
And the food industry that makes foods with sugar and starch tend to add to those foods a lot of other additives. Yeah. Right? So you're talking about sort of, you know, something that can be damaging. You get the double whammy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So I think I think you're right. I mean, the inflammatory issue is huge. So all these polyphenols tend to be anti inflammatory, whereas all the foods we're eating tend to be inflammatory. In a very basic level, you know, to simplify things, you know, when your brain's inflamed, your mood's inflamed.

You're depressed, you're anxious, you're irritable, you're you're bipolar disease, you have schizophrenia, you have autism, these are all brain disease. Even Alzheimer's is brain inflammation.

Dr. William Li
Or you actually have and you have and or brain fog. Yeah. And that actually steals from your quality of life. You know? This is not where I leave my keys.

This is like, I I can't focus on anything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. William Li
Right? And so this is when you kind of when anybody who's in that situation feels like, you know, they really, really need to have some kind of reset to be able to get back to clear thinking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I don't mean to push it, but I'm telling you the ten day detox is literally like reset. And that's one of the things that people say most often when they do it, that their brain fog will

Dr. William Li
What are the what are the steps? Basic steps.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Getting rid of all the crap is adding in the good stuff, taking out the bad stuff. So it's lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, good quality protein, lots of good fats, olive oil, eggs. You're taking out gluten Yep. Dairy, grains, and beans. Not that they're wholesale bad, but for a temporary period because they tend to be more starchy and cause some gut issues for people.

Dairy, which our modern dairy is terrible, and I I do like yogurt, and I like particularly cheaper goat yogurt. But but just for a short period of time, these tend to be the very inflammatory foods that people are sick from. Yeah. And and when you do that for and you obviously take out all the ultra processed foods and all the

Dr. William Li
And the sodas.

Dr. Mark Hyman
All the sugar, all the starch, all the additives, all the chemicals, all that goes away. Yeah. All the alcohol, all the caffeine, all that goes out. And you do it for ten days. I mean, anybody can do anything for ten days.

And when you do that, we see across the board, I've done this with thousands of people online and in person, there's a seventy percent reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in ten days based on a symptom questionnaire that we do, or we grade your symptoms like headaches zero to one, two, three, four, know, irritable bowel, you know,

Dr. William Li
zero to four. And there certainly must be improvement in gut health too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. A hundred percent irritable bowel, reflux, all this stuff. I mean, one person came up to me at Cleveland Clinic and said, Doctor. Hyman, I did this, and my rheumatoid arthritis went away. Is that possible?

I'm like, yeah. It's possible because you it went away. You know, another woman was like, I've been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I've been on so many psychiatric meds. I've never really felt good, and I feel completely normal.

Dr. William Li
So so that's a baseline approach that anybody can do Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's basically free.

Dr. William Li
Removing the bad, adding the good, and trying to get to your own personal reset.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's like I put I just wanna say this is like hitting the factory reset button. Yeah. It's like, how do you go back to the original factory settings on your phone so you don't get like, it up. That's that's what most of us have no clue how to do, and I've just come upon this through practicing functional medicine and learning the science of food as medicine and all the things we were talking about, But it's it's not that complicated.

And so if anybody's suffering from anything out there, it's worth a try. There are more extreme versions, like a ketogenic diet, which is now being explored for schizophrenia, and bipolar disease, and OCD,

Dr. William Li
and And cancer.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cancer and severe depression and diabetes. I mean, it's like it's kind of like this weird thing where you kind of re change the way your metabolic function works, and it has broad reaching effects across so many disease categories. So whether it's diabetes or cancer or Alzheimer's or autism. Okay. So one of

Dr. William Li
the things that I think so we we you know, one of things we just talked about is lowering inflammation, avoiding by eating better things that good for gut, and polyphenols are lower inflammation, and then staying away from some of the lowering the harmful intake, adding more polyphenols to your diet. But, you know, the latest research also begins to identify specific polyphenols and plant based substances that can make your brain healthier

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. William Li
Which then makes your mental state more optimized Yeah. In any event. So for example, have you heard of amantoflavone?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I haven't.

Dr. William Li
Amantoflavone actually is a natural polyphenol substance that's found in cantaloupe Oh. Breakfast food. Okay? And that actually lowers anxiety. So a mentholflav has been shown to lower the state of anxiety.

So we're, again, part of this flavor room. Like, everybody knows that characteristic scent or flavor of a cantaloupe, like a really ripe cantaloupe. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's got a very strong flavor.

Dr. William Li
Exactly. A mentholflavone. Amentoflavone. Actually can lower it's an anxiolytic. It actually lowers anxiety.

Okay? So that's a

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cantaloupe is like a natural Valium.

Dr. William Li
Of sorts. What about anandamide? Do you know have you heard of anandamide? Alright.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So Tell me.

Dr. William Li
I'm I'm throwing something.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is great. All this new stuff for me. I love it.

Dr. William Li
Right. Anandamides are actually found in foods that many people like, like dark chocolate. Right? Now chocolate is a candy is a confection, but dark chocolate is made with more of the plant based substance, cacao. And cacao has these all these polyphenols in it like proanthocyanidin and others, including anandamide.

Alright? And what do anandomides do when you eat them? They not only lower inflammation, but they stimulate the endocannabinoid system in your brain. So an endocannabinoid system is basically what marijuana, THC, stimulates. You feel better.

You you get more relaxed. You know, you kind of zone a little bit. You feel happier in general. Dark chocolate, you know, that that happy feeling people have, anandamide activating the that receptor system, which is related to the opioid system. Okay?

The endocannabinoid system.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's why I like chocolate.

Dr. William Li
Another another another food that people consider to alter your state of being towards happiness for people that like it are truffles.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Truffles like like like oh, not like truffle chocolate.

Dr. William Li
No. I'm switching out

Dr. Mark Hyman
the floor for

Dr. William Li
Mushrooms. Mushrooms. Well, it's it's a it's a it's a it's not exactly a mushroom, but it's it's more related to a like a fungus. But truffles, which are, you know, prized in the Mediterranean at certain seasons. Right?

I think you and I had a meal once where we had some truffles. And the the fact of the matter is that it it has this it has this incredible aroma. Yeah. And some people really love truffles, and it makes them feel good. Yeah.

Anandamide in truffles and chocolate. So, again, this whole idea of, like, elevating our mood, we're not always treating depression. Sometimes you're elevating your mood

Dr. Mark Hyman
as enhancement. It's like an An enhancement. There's a whole word called nootropics, which means compounds that actually help increase your cognitive function and mood that are not, you know, actually treating a disease. They're just causing an or an.

Dr. William Li
And that's the point I'm trying to get at, which is that we're not only trying to take a sledgehammer against inflammation. We're not only trying to, you know, remove harmful substances from your plate, but we're also thinking about for happiness and joy, elevating our own mood. And that's also connected to the to the gut and the food that we choose.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, lion's mane is another mushroom that I I it looks like a brain, actually. And it has incredible effects on the brain in terms of connectivity, brain repair, healing. I I use it a lot with people who have traumatic brain injury.

It's it's quite interesting. Can can you tell us more about that?

Dr. William Li
Well, lion's mane is belongs to a whole family of medicinal mushrooms, which include reishi, turcotail. You know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
And Chinese medicine. Horticense. Part of

Dr. William Li
the Yep. Therapy. And sort of in in Asian medicine traditions, you have all these medicinal mushrooms. And by the way, it's distinguished from a culture perspective from culinary mushrooms where you get the portobello and the porcini and the white button mushrooms. And but there are overlaps.

Yeah. So two overlaps are shiitake mushroom and maitake mushrooms. They're both medicinal and culinary. And increasingly, people are now interested in looking at these medicinal mushrooms and incorporating them into their food. And that's another example of sort of a modern way of looking at food as medicine or medical foods Yeah.

Into into regular foods to see if we can actually elevate our mental state. And, again, there's anti inflammatory effects. There are in there is no question that there are brain effects that are beneficial as well with some of these medicinal mushrooms.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's pretty it's pretty amazing. And I think, you know, speaking of mushrooms, I mean, psilocybin's undergoing a lot of research now for things like depression, anxiety, for PTSD. And it's kind of fascinating how it works, and I don't think it just works through its ability to reduce your anxiety through lowering the function of certain areas like your default mode network, is your ego and your anxiety or amygdala. But I think it has other effects, and and it somehow has these neurotropic effects using activation of things like BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor, which increases the connectivity in the neurogenesis in the brain.

It's like miracle growth for the brain. Neurogenesis.

Dr. William Li
You you said a word that we haven't talked about yet. That's right. Basically, as we get older, our nerves kind of start to get a little weaker, maybe not as vibrant as they once were. And importantly, our nerves actually which regenerate are capable of regenerating don't regenerate quite as quickly as they once did. And so this whole idea about foods that can stimulate regeneration is a really interesting one.

So how does regeneration occur? Well, there are signals in the body that foods that you eat can trigger and release that will draw out stem cells that are naturally found in our body to help us regenerate silently. So, you know, most people think about stem cells on a from, like, a therapeutic perspective. You go someplace to get your stem cells. Well, actually, mother nature already packed the suitcases inside our body.

Yeah. We already have our own stem cells. And so one of the interesting things are foods that might help to stimulate neurogenesis. And this is where my field of angio or blood vessel growth connects to nerve growth because blood vessels and nerves go hand in hand. And nerves that grow out need blood vessels to support them because they're really, really metabolically active.

And so foods that stimulate angiogenesis can be beneficial. And I we'd already talked about dark chocolate as being beneficial. Barley can also be beneficial. Barley has beta d glucan, which is also found in mushrooms, culinary mushrooms as well as medicinal mushrooms. It's a kind of dietary fiber.

They grow blood vessels, and it can stimulate nerve growth as well. Yeah. So this is a whole other dimension of brain health and mental health is, you know, we're you're we're not stuck with what we were born with. No. We can tend the garden by encouraging neurogenesis as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's interesting you say that because I I I did a podcast this summer with Nolan Williams about Ibogaine, is a Stanford researcher who sadly died this summer. But he he talked a lot about Ibogaine. And Rick Perry, who was the former governor of Texas for fifteen years, heard the podcast, and invited me to this dinner at this group called Americans for Ibogaine. And at that dinner, I spent a couple hours talking to him about his experience. And he went down there, and he you know, he's 75, and he went down there to address, you know, his own brain health because there's data that improves brain health in the veterans who've had brain drama I mean, brain drama.

Brain trauma, traumatic brain injury, and brain drama. Actually, PTSD actually show that their brains repair looking at functional MRIs or quantitative MRIs. I was like, wow. And he said, yeah, his brain grew significantly over the course of the months and and weeks and months after he took the ibogaine. Rick Perry took it.

And I was like, holy crap. So I went down and did it. And I did a quantitative brain MRI before. Okay. I have a functional MRI, and I'm gonna repeat it a week in a week from now.

And is your brain growing? I don't know. I gotta repeat it. I did only I only did this, like, less than a week ago. So I'm gonna repeat it next week, and I'm gonna repeat it again in a few months.

And I'm gonna report back on the podcast. Everybody gotta stay tuned to the podcast because I'm gonna report back and share the data. Because if if if if there's a plant compound that can do that, it's it's kind of revolutionary because you think you're aging, your brain shrinks, and it decreases connectivity, but if you can actually reverse your brain aging, and I I and and and through Ezra, the company that is part of Function Health, it's an imaging company. So you can go to functionhealth.com. You can get your brain scan.

You can do what I did. You don't have to go through a doctor. I just went because, you know, I I'm cofounder of the company. I can go do the brain scan, and anybody can do it. And I measured my brain quantitative analysis, and I'm gonna continue

Dr. William Li
When you to say quantitative analysis, you're talking about amount of brain, or the activity of the brain, the

Dr. Mark Hyman
blood flow in the It's not the blood flow. It's actually like, they can measure through very sophisticated MRI through testing machines the the size of each area of your brain. Like, how big is your hippocampus? How thick is your cortical matter? How big are different structures and things in your brain very precisely, and then you can repeat it and see if that changes over time.

So to me, you know, when you're talking and we're talking not about a drug. We're talking about a phytochemical, essentially, plant compounds that are in this bark of this root that is from West Africa So and some other plants.

Dr. William Li
The method of analysis you're talking about, getting functional brain scans

Dr. Mark Hyman
Functional brain scans and

Dr. William Li
quantitative quantitative actually is sort of setting the stage for the future of us understanding what we can actually do to improve our brain. Yeah. You know, I mean, you're you're obviously describing something that you personally experienced that, you know, gave you a reason to believe that there are significant changes occurring in how you feel. Now you're gonna measure it. Yeah.

And then the other interesting things is where do you take it from there? How do you actually look at other plant based substances that could actually achieve Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's amazing. There was a guy there who had crippling anxiety, went and got treatment while I was there. Came out, he says, my anxiety is completely gone. I've never experienced this. There was a woman there who spent nine months a year in her bedroom because of crippling depression, and would go out and work, she was a musician, and would record, and then she would go back and hide in her bedroom.

She came there, had a treatment, and was completely transformed. So we are it's we're like almost like, you know, looking up at the sky with our kind of naked eye, looking at the stars trying to imagine what's going on, and seeing things. We're just starting to actually understand this field. And I I think we're gonna be in the next five to ten years in a in a revolutionary period of understanding of the brain, the mind, how how to repair the brain, how to heal the brain, how to deal with mood disorders, trauma, PTSD, brain injury, depression, anxiety. I mean, this whether you talk about, you know, plant medicines and psychedelics, or nutritional metabolic psychiatry, or upregulating just mood through using all the things you mentioned, like from, you know, truffles.

I'm like, it's a little expensive way to get

Dr. William Li
in your mood. Yeah. You can afford a cantaloupe. Yeah. Can afford a cantaloupe.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's quite amazing. We're in

Dr. William Li
Well, it's also not just about the substance, it's also about how our body responds to it. And so this idea about discovering, like, new frontiers of discovery. Like, we didn't really think about when we were in medical school. In fact, we were encouraged to conclude that the brain can't regenerate. No.

Right? Like, basically, once you had a stroke, that's it. Nothing nothing's gonna fix that, and we were taught that. So that way, if you actually wiped out a big portion of your brain with a stroke, like, oh, it's too bad. You know, might take a year to recover, but that's about it.

That's all you're gonna get. Turns out that's not really true. We can actually reverse some of these diseases or conditions or the consequences of disease by encouraging our body's own capability of regeneration. I wrote about this in in my book, He did the Disease. You did.

I remember that. And the whole idea is that we are hardwired to repair ourselves from the inside out. The mental health aspect and the brain health aspect is I think one of the most exciting frontiers. Yeah. By the way, more recently, researchers are now beginning to focus on the eyes as a window into the brain and the status quo of the brain.

Right? So think about it. When you go to the eye doctor, what do do? You get your you know, you look at the the eye chart. Can you what's the smallest lines that you can actually read?

But, actually, the the imaging has become so much more sophisticated. AI. And the AI connected to the imaging. Right? So anybody who's actually had a real serious back of the eye exam, what do you do?

You put your chin on rest. They flash these lights into you, and they are looking at your brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. William Li
And then with the images that are capturing, you can see the thickness of the retina. You can see the optic nerve, the connection between the layer of nerves at a carpet on the back of your eye that connect it to the big cable that goes straight into your brain. We can see our brain, which is pretty amazing. And they

Dr. Mark Hyman
can tell Alzheimer's Quite long. They can look

Dr. William Li
at the retina.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Kidney function. I mean, it's crazy the stuff that they're able to detect. And something an ophthalmologist wouldn't be able to detect because the AI can start to see these things.

Dr. William Li
And now they're beginning to think about it and then use AI to their advantage. So I was just sort of building on the brain scans, the functional scans you're doing. I think you should take a look at your retina. Yeah. And the optic nerve as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's an amazing amazing conversation. As always, Doctor. Lee, you are just a delight, and I I'm always amazed how your brain works and the depth of knowledge you have around food and medicine, and food is medicine. I can't wait to see what you have for next. You have another book coming out?

Dr. William Li
Working on it. It involves the brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Really? Okay. Well, we'll have to have you back on the podcast for that. Thanks for being here again. Thanks, everybody.

I think the take home here is that you can change your brain, you can change your mind, and you can heal both by optimizing your health through food as medicine and helping your gut microbiome through all the things we talked about. So thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you again. Thanks for having me. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.