How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman is a medical doctor and an internationally recognized leader in the field of functional medicine. He is a practicing physician and the head of strategy and innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. Today we discuss what is functional medicine, how the different systems of the body interact to improve or degrade our health, the science of mitochondria and metabolic health, nutrition, inflammation, and how you can leverage these factors to improve your physical and mental health and cognitive performance at any age. We also talk about how to confront any health challenges you might face by taking a systems level approach. Dr. Hyman's work is unique in that it integrates conventional medicine because, after all, he is an MD with what he calls good medicine, which is an amalgamation of the best practices from both traditional and alternative approaches. During today's discussion, you'll see that Dr. Hyman's expertise on a diverse range of topics really comes through. For instance, we talk about food, both sourcing, micronutrients, macronutrients, timing. We talk about exercise and we talk a lot about supplementation and which supplements can provide tremendous benefit for certain people in particular. Dr. Hyman grounds all that knowledge in the latest discoveries in human biology to provide you with actionable tools that you can apply in any case and at any age. By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that everybody will glean at least one and very likely several important protocol updates that they can incorporate to improve their general health. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman. Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome.

**Mark Hyman** (1:50)
Thanks, Andrew. So good to be here.

**Andrew Huberman** (1:51)
Great to see you. We go back a few years.

**Mark Hyman** (1:54)
Yeah, like almost 10

**Andrew Huberman** (1:56)
Yeah. It's been awesome to see your arc and you were at it long before I met you. I think to kick things off, probably best if you explain to people what functional medicine is and what your orientation towards health and medicine is. Because I think there are a few misconceptions out there both about functional health and you, but I think also you provide a very unique perspective. You've been at this vista that no one else has had where you know people who are deans of medical schools, you know people who are biohackers, you know the general public, you've treated and treat patients and you also are an experimentalist with yourself to the extent that you find and can make suggestions about things that can help people. So yeah, tell us how you parachuted into this whole thing and how you look at this whole thing that we call health and medicine.

**Mark Hyman** (2:49)
Yeah, thank you, Andrew. And you know, I would say that I didn't choose what I'm doing. It chose me. I was super healthy, fit, you know, riding my bike 100 miles a day. I was 36 years old and then wham, I got really sick. And I went from being able to memorize 30 patients in a day and dictate their notes and ride my bike 100 miles to not knowing where I was at the end of a sentence and not being able to barely walk up the stairs. And I got hit with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. And I tried to figure out what it was. I went to, you know, doctors at Harvard, at Columbia, here, everywhere. And they're all, you're depressed, take some Prozac, this and that. And I realized that I, you know, traditional medicine wasn't having the answers. And even though I sort of came from the perspective of like a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, you know, I studied Buddhism. Were you? Yeah.

**Andrew Huberman** (3:39)
You were a yoga teacher?

**Mark Hyman** (3:40)
I was. It was back in the 80s.

**Andrew Huberman** (3:41)
You're a tall guy, long mat.

**Mark Hyman** (3:43)
They didn't have yoga mats when I was doing yoga. He put a towel on the ground. There was no Lululemon. It was like on top of like the East West bookstore in New York City, there was like one yoga class in the early 80s.

**Andrew Huberman** (3:54)
Okay.

**Mark Hyman** (3:55)
That was it. And I studied Buddhism in college, but I also studied systems thinking and systems theory and Gregory Bateson and, you know, the nature of the network effect of life and biology and everything else. And so I kind of went through medical school, but when I came out, I was a pretty straight traditional medicine doctor. But then I got sick. And it turned out that I had gone to China to live there for a year and work as a doctor to help start expatriate medical clinics because there were no Western medical clinics in China. And people were terrified who were 60,000 expatriates to go to the Chinese hospital. So I spoke Chinese because I studied Asian studies. I went there. But what I inadvertently had happened was I got exposed to huge amounts of mercury from the air because they burned coal. And coal expels lead and mercury and lots of other toxins. And there's 10 million people in Beijing and the city at the time. And they all heated their homes with raw coal. And I had an air filter that I would clean out every day and breathe the black soot in. So I got like a whopping dose of mercury. And it took a couple of years for it to kind of cause this problem. But from one day to the next, I went from being great to not being great. My gut broke down. I had diarrhea for years. My cognitive function completely went south. It was like I had dementia, ADD, and depression all at once. I ended up having autoimmune stuff going on and just rashes and sores. And I couldn't think. I literally almost had to go into disability.