Your body is the best doctor.
You can follow any dietary voices you want, but pay attention to how you feel — your body will tell you.
If you become vegan and you stop having your period, lose muscle, feel tired, develop deficiencies, feel awful, develop autoimmune issues, or gain weight, then maybe it’s not for you. Vegans are often deficient in Omega-3s, vitamin D, have low B vitamins, extremely low zinc and selenium, and you may notice that when you eliminate gluten and dairy you feel better.
So I begin by detoxifying all the junk — we remove sugary foods, processed foods — and then I introduce real, whole foods free of gluten, and dairy except for some exceptions (e.g., yogurts, butter, full-fat goat or sheep milk cheeses — not low-fat). I also remove grains and beans to see how you feel, and if you don’t feel well, then step back. You will feel amazing: autoimmune issues disappear, digestive problems clear up, brain fog goes away, migraines disappear — and that is a sign that your body likes this way of eating.
We have theories of physics, we have laws of physics — we can build a bridge or a spacecraft based on these laws, and they work. Now, what are the natural laws of biology? There are natural laws. In medicine we haven’t really thought about them. Something hurts, we fix it — for example, a knee problem. But the knee problem may actually be related to your gut.
Functional (Holistic) Medicine attempts to describe one of these natural laws — what the basic elements are. So when I look at Nutritional Medicine, there are 155,000 diseases in the diagnostic codebook, which is ridiculous — it used to be 12,000 and then they just subdivided them. For example, being told you have depression is simply the name of the disease; it doesn’t tell you the cause. Functional Medicine looks at the natural causes behind the symptoms — a few natural laws that explain a huge number of phenomena, just like in physics.
The same applies to biology. In Functional Medicine, there is an attempt to codify these natural laws — how the body works, how it is actually interconnected as a system, and what the basic causes of disease are — and there aren’t many: stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, microbes. And the things we need to build a healthy human being is a very short list.
Proper nutrition with essential nutrients, hormonal balance, clean air, clean water, love, connection, meaning and purpose. These are the things we need to thrive. And simply by removing the bad and adding the good, miracles happen.
And because no one is going to come and save us, we must take care of ourselves. We must understand that our food system generates most of the problems we see in the world. Chronic diseases, which also burden our (U.S.) economy with 22 trillion dollars of debt — much of which has to do with the food we eat and how it causes chronic illness that strains the government, contributes to climate change, environmental degradation, violence, poverty, injustice, malnutrition — and the cycle continues.
With Functional Medicine, you see how everything is connected and not isolated. You fix one thing and everything gets better. The one thing I would recommend, if you had only one choice to make to change and improve your health, is this very simple one: eat real, whole food. And it’s funny — I laugh when I remember that I’ve been paid a lot of money to tell people to eat real food, when it’s the obvious truth.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Excerpts from the video file ‘”What to Eat for Health and Longevity.”
