Mark Hyman, M.D.: The impact of the food system on our health and the environment

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark is a family physician, a New York Times bestselling author, and the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. It turns out we're gonna talk about pretty much none of that today. We talk almost exclusively on his new book, which is due out tomorrow called Food Fix, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities and Our Planet One Bite at a Time. And if that sounds like a mouthful, it's because it is a mouthful. This is a kind of staggering topic, and even by the standards of this podcast, it's probably too much for one episode.
Mark basically lays out a thesis that if you fix the food system, you fix a lot of problems. So it's not a one-fur, it's not a two-fur, it's like somewhere between a three-fur and a four-fur. We don't spend a lot of time talking about the health consequences of fixing food, although we open our discussion with that, talking about the health impact of food. We talk a little bit about gut health, but we spend more of our time probably speaking about some of the social consequences and the environmental consequences. And of course it ultimately does come down to health at the individual level. We do get a lot into agriculture, energy usage around food. We talk a lot about the impact on climate. We also talk quite a lot about GMO, the strength of the evidence for and against it. We go through a lot of the policy ideas around how one might fix the food system. And actually we close with a nice anecdote of an explanation that I thought Mark provided that was pretty interesting around the difference between food in Europe and North America. Many people, myself included, have commented on this, which is why is it that when you go to Europe, you seem to be able to eat with impunity, things that in the United States just feel like they're about to kill you?
Anyway, this is a really interesting episode. I learned a lot in kind of preparing for it. And truthfully, I still feel like there's a lot I just don't understand in this system. There's probably a lot I need to go back and get smarter on. There are so many big numbers in this type of a discussion that the scale sort of doesn't make sense at times when you start to think about what it means to feed the world and how making changes in that system can have enormous knock on effects for both good and bad. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Mark Hyman. And we may end up revisiting this topic with other guests should people find this interesting.
Hey Mark, thanks for coming over, man.

**Mark Hyman** (3:29)
No, I'm so happy to be here. It's beautiful. Chickens running around and everything.
Ben is in the freezer, my kind of place.

**Peter Attia** (3:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in keeping with a lot of what we're gonna talk about today. I think, Mark, a lot of people would associate you with other topics that we might get into, functional medicine, the role of toxins in the environment, certainly food, but from the standpoint of health, what to eat.
But what we're talking about today is actually something that when you first mentioned to me, you were working on this book, actually at the time you were putting the finishing touches on it about a year ago, I was like, wow, that's definitely something I want to understand more. So I can't wait to kind of have this discussion with you today. And that is basically how food is made, how food is delivered and how food is consumed and what the impacts of that are. I mean, what made you decide to tackle a problem of this magnitude, which is not just a scientific problem, but it's a political problem.