#cause how can they function and learn if they can't get their basic needs met?

[savage-rhi]

Magenta.

[thousandyearphantombunker]

I am so tired of high functioning fully verbal non cognitively impaired able to mask autistics being the ones who dictate how we talk about autism- I hear shit like high functioning autism= high masking and low functioning autism= no masking - i get it when you have an invisible disability its like no one ever believes you when your struggling and your told your being lazy or don't qualify for things like disability aids you may need - its a shitty sometimes traumatic experience but low functioning isn't 'low masking' it is needing to be leashed so you don't run into traffic and get hit by a car, its needing to use diapers and take medication to make yourself less violent, it is 'learning sign is impossible for them and an aac device isn't gonna be useful here either' its your parents having to rely on the good will of others and hope they won't be abusive dick bags to your child, it's getting treated like shit by the police because they think your odd behavior means your on drugs, it's being unable to go online and rant about the horrible shit you go through cause your too impaired to even understand it- low functioning autistics have it so much harder and my heart goes out to them- so much ridicule, judgement, abuse and just being so misunderstood is miserable being reliant on others like that is miserable- acting like being low functioning is just being bad at masking and acting like people who are low functioning get treated so well and are taken care of by angels is freaking dumb as fuck- just because your low functioning doesn't mean you get support (and if any of the stuff I listed above is a good indication they need it even more)

Low functioning isn't 'low masking' its your goddamned disability impacting you more severely, and again I get it sometimes your told your super high functioning even though your actually not that high functioning and your approaching burn out and the reason no one notices because you cant stop masking- it's horrible but saying low functioning= not masking, is dumb cause it's so untrue it's being more severely disabled

Also autism burnout isn't just limited to people who can mask/are former gifted children. Masking for too long isn't the only source of Autism burnout- autism burnout can happen to people who can't mask and aren't straight A students. Autism burnout is caused by not having your needs met (having your accomodations ignored, being unable to communicate etc) Autism burnout can happen to anyone with autism and again masking isn't the only thing that causes burn out,

idk I feel bad that you guys couldn't take off your masks, that you couldn't stop repressing your autistic traits, that your needs didn't get met because no one noticed or cared or maybe they straight up bullied you when your needs came up- but why do so many of you think low functioning people are more 'privileged' "oh well they had more money to get a diagnosis and their parents cared about them more to get them a diagnosis and they have more resources!" Okay first of all bold of you to assume any of that shit - lots of low functioning people struggle with poverty, have shitty parents and the idea that they get more resources/better care is laughable second of all even if they have good parents and the resources they get aren't bad or nonexistent and they have more money to get the help they need- so fucking what? Is it really a privilege? Is it really a privilege to be stuck with the IQ of an 8 year old who needs to live in a special home after your parents die having to use sanitary devices and needing others to handle basic tasks for you being carted around by different caretakers, changing case managers, being that helpless? Is it a fucking privilege- i personally think that's kind of scary as shit.

I'm high functioning or low support needs or level one whatever label you like (I think levels have been the closest to working but I used functioning labels for this post cause it was easier to articulate) and I am aware I am not the authority on the autism community as whole- especially the low functioning members of our community but jesus Christ i will call other high functioning people out i usually dont play that misery poker, victim shit but it seems to be the only thing some people listen to

I've known a few low functioning autistic people in my life and I love them and it hurts knowing how they are demonized and abused and how our community shuns them due to shame and thinking that if people see this side of autism they'll take away our rights and I hear them talk about how 'privileged' they are to have such sevre symptoms because getting a diagnosis *definitely means that your super rich because you can afford a diagnosis and care takers, and you get amazing care and have good parents!* (Sarcasm a lot of low functioning people have shit parents, are poor and on top of that being disabled is expensive as shit oh and the idea that people are more understanding and kind toward visibly disabled people is again fucking stupid) And what a blight they are on our community and prevent us from getting full rights... I am so done with that shit. Like the reason we mask is to avoid the danger that comes from being visibly disabled and yet so many of you are jealous of visibly autistic people? And you can't fathom that they get shit treatment a lot of the time? Fucking hell. I wanna hear from more visibly disabled people, people with disabilities that have embarrassing symptoms, people with learning disabilities and low iqs and slower processing, from people who are severely impacted and need people to take care of them, I want to hear about autism from people who aren't burnt out gifted kids or cutesy tik tokers with cute special interests/non violent 'aesthetic' stims (those people should still talk because they are also important) but like so are the intellectually disabled ones? Idk I think we need to hear them to, we need to actively include them in our conversations about autism. we kept screaming at the top of our lungs 'no talking about us without us' yet we don't follow our own advice

[kanna-banana]

Ok, serious talk, I know nobody wants to read this but I'll feel better posting somewhere as opposed to vomiting my feelings all over my friends again, they've had enough, please feel free to ignore this and I'll be back to being silly in no time

Ok so, I know my blog is uncomfortable to read, I understand that my negativity and constant venting is at best annoying and at worst upsetting, i am aware of that but I also know that bottling up is worse to me and i feel like a liar if i just pretend everything is fine and just post silly stuff here.

My friends keep telling me I'm not a horrible person and am pretty funny actually and I think that is because they've know me for years and I was like that but things have not been going well im the last few years.

Yes I am not a bad person and I can be funny sometimes, but all of that gets overshadowed by the numerous mental issues I have and cannot cope with properly.

English is not my first language language so this gets a bit confusing because this nuance is pretty tricky in the language but as you all know is that "i am" can mean either "i am like this at the moment" (example "I'm cold" or "I'm hungry", those are not things that are inherent to you, they are temporary states) or "i am like this PERIOD" (example "I'm human" or "I'm Brazilian", they are permanent states about yourself)

Now

I know I AM (inherent) creative, funny sometimes, alright at drawing, and a bunch of other nice things people say about me when I'm crying, but you have to understand that i also am (temporary) completely fucked up mentally and emotionally, I'm not saying I'm going to be "cured" from being autistic btw, I'm counting not being able to handle my issues "being a bad temporary thing", like, i will never stop having ADHD symptoms (cannot afford a diagnosis so I'll just call them symptoms for now, or signs if you thing the word 'symptom' is a bit tone deaf) but i know i can learn how to live with it and function, even if my functioning looks very different from what's expected from a neurotypical person.

I am, at the moment, NOT DEALING WITH MY SHIT PROPERLY, and THAT is the issue I believe can be fixed. I will never have a good knee again, even after the surgery I just feel less pain, but i can learn how to adapt to my limitations, you know?

So, I am not, inherently, a failure, i know I'm not stupid or ugly or boring, but I'm so full of debuffs that basically I'm a piece of shit right now.

Yes, I did quit my job and tried to become a web developer and it went catastrophically bad, but I can't even count that as a failure because i NEEDED to quit that job either way (it was destroying my mental health) and if you're gonna quit going to live with a friend so dear to you she's basically a sister for a while and learning a skill you always wanted to at least start learning, isn't it worthy?

Yeah I "failed", but the happiness i felt along the way was worth even if it didn't work out in the end.

I know that, my mind knows that, but my feelings are absolute chaos and I sometimes fall into a deep self hatred spiral that makes me believe lies about everything around me, it even makes me believe everyone secretly hates me, which is OBJECTIVELY not true, if there's one thing I am in this world is loved.

I know it's sad, annoying, or even upsetting to see my posts and I'm not going to pretend they're inevitable, I CAN stop myself and I should have better restraint, I'm failing at that and I apologize for all the negative feelings I might have caused.

I know it's a pretty hard goal considering how my life is a huge mess right now, but my goal in life is to be the trans person i needed to meet when I was in the closet.

I want to be the type of happy, mature and intelligent person that my friends were when I met them 6? 7 years ago?

The people that completely shattered an entire lifetime of prejudice and fear that was forced into my brain since i was a toddler, the type of people that made me look at transphobic posts and go "that's not true, I've met trans people and they're some of the best people i know", the type of people who made me realize living as who you really are is both possible and achievable.

I want to be that person, someone who, just by being themselves, can melt away prejudice or at least be that kink in the armor of an angry reactionary that one day will help shatter the barrier of lies they protect themselves with and help them see that this hate was manufactured to use them as paws in a stupid made up culture war.

I got out of this horrible place with the help of wonderful people i will never be able to thank enough, and my dream is to help others out too.

I'm not saying i want to "trans" others, obviously, just to show that we are not the weird monsters thet so many out there want you to believe we are. To destroy the prejudice with the power of a honest, happy existence.

I want to be the person I needed when I was younger, lost, depressed, considering suicide, and constantly angry at anyone the liars and grifters who I trusted told me to hate.

I want to become the person who would have saved me back them.

I know it's going to take a lot of work, I have many barriers ahead of me, some inside of myself, some external, but neither way I have a LOT of work to do, and if there's one thing i can never do is give up.

I don't even know what "giving up" means at this point, I have to keep going, not only for myself but for those I might help in the future.

I can't change the past. I can't erase the harm my bigoted ignorant words caused, but I can grow into a person who heals as much as i used to hurt.

I know I'm a handful right now, and I am trying to control my words until i have the means to work on myself and improve as a person. Just, please be patient with me. If my posts upset you in the past please for your own sake unfollow/block me, I'm sorry I hurt you while trying to hurt myself, but unfortunately it will probably happen again, and there's nothing wrong with distancing yourself from someone that hurts you, even if they didnt INTEND to hurt you.

I am NOT (inherent) a failure

I am (temporary) failing

But I will get better.

I don't know how, I don't really have a plan, but I will figure it out somehow.

Life is not a game. I am not in a "doomed run", I can and I WILL live and be the best person I can be.

Thank you.

[tales-from-nocturnaliss]

Your girlfriend needs to grasp that, no, you're not making excuses. What you're essentially doing is revealing your true self to her because you trust her. That she can't see it... I can but wonder: is she neurodivergent as well? If not, it'll be difficult to make her understand.

So let me give you someone else's relationship story: my own.

I masked for most of my life - unwittingly. I was born in 1980, and when I got depression back in the '90s from heavy bullying, it wasn't even considered real. Since becoming self-aware, I felt something was off with me. I didn't know what, I only knew I was different. And this difference made everything a living hell - which I unwittingly masked through. I only knew I was weak and fragile and I figured everyone knew better than me what I should do with life, even if I had to put in twice as much affort as everyone else to match the description of 'behaving normal'..

I existed as anxiety incarnate until 2010-ish. Situations made me have to grow self-worth. This is also the year I met my then-boyfriend now-husband. We moved in together after a few months, as I desperately needed to get out of my parents' tiny appartment. I had become a very dominant person, but seeing how fragile he himself was, I learned to curb that. In a way, it helped me that he was so sweet - and crazy patient. We complemented each other well.

Not everything went always well, and I daresay that's mainly because something was still wrong with me - a complex amalgam of things, I suspect, with at its core this unknown autism. I was still anxious, I still struggled through life, but at least I didn't do so on my own anymore. Having him motivated me to struggle. I fell out of my last job on record in 2016. In 2019, after trying to get back into a job, my health broke entirely.

And then covid lockdowns happened in 2020. The husband with me, literally on the other side of the computer table, every day. Every single day. After a month of this, something in my brain completely snapped and I started having meltdowns for the first time in my life, at age 39. I lost self-control - like a safety had sprung in my head. One day, a meltdown caused me to almost stab the husband while we were cooking. It would've been an accident. I still think back on this day with absolute terror, when my hand launched and, in that split second, I had no idea where exactly it was headed.

I understand now that I was in unbearable pain from a lifetime of masking, of trying to be normal, of essentially wearing out my nervous system to a point that it no longer functions properly. Since getting my diagnosis in January, everything has made sense - to me, but also to the husband. Alas, you can't take the pain out of my system. I feel I'm still in burnout since 2019. But knowing what ails me has allowed me to find little tricks to subdue my natural stress and thus, in turn, be a more pleasant person. I understand things are hard for him, dealing with an autistic wife. He didn't know what he was getting into. Neither of us did. But this is no one's fault.

Here's the sad truth for your girlfriend: to some degree, being with you will mean being a caretaker. This means, at the very least, being supportive and allowing you to express yourself, whether she likes what you're saying or not. Having a girlfriend also means you'll have to try and understand her point of view, understand it's difficult to deal with someone whose reactions/thought processes are unlike hers, and try to adapt to her wherever you are able to.

She will have to understand that the way you behaved before is, in fact, part of the autism disorder - that you basically pretended to be normal in order to navigate the world. And that the way you behave now is not pretense, but real. You're being real with her. This 'real' is not 'of the norm' - not as society teaches us.

I would frankly suggest looking at autistic sites with her - reading other people's stories (yes, even mine; it's why I'm sharing it), so she understands that you're not the exception here: you're the norm of autistics who have had to mask for years, decades, and who finally discover that all of their pain has a name and that it's okay to be ourselves.

I hope, for both your sakes, that she can nderstand you're doing none of this on purpose and that your unmasking around her means you care about her a lot. Otherwise, you wouldn't try to be your real you with her. I'll wish you both the best and to be able to reconcile your differences.

I’m slowly learning to unmask after years of hiding myself. I only do it in front of my gf or when I’m alone (yes I would mask even alone because I was conditioned into thinking that I was weird so yeah) but lately we’ve had a lot of fights because she doesn’t understand why im acting the way I do or say things in a certain tone and when I try to explain why (even tho it exhaust/stresses me (out)) she tells me that I never did those things before and therefore it’s not because of my autism. I told her multiple times that when someone unmask/learn they’re autistic their behavior might change but she just doesn’t believe me. She thinks I’m making excuses for my behavior when I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong. I feel inappropriate and I don’t know how to explain it another way than I have before. We’ve had another fight tonight because I told her something and my tone was apparently not appropriate and I told her “ I’m sorry I don’t control it. I didn’t mean it that way.” And she kind of look at me like I was making an excuse when I really wasn’t !! And then she said you’re not doing this with anyOne else but me( well yeah because I thought I could trust you and unmask but apparently i can’t) I didn’t know how to respond so I just didn’t and try to leave and she started getting angry bc to her me not answering meant that I was mad so I told her I don’t know what you want me to say I’m trying to explain to you what’s happening and you don’t believe me and almost gaslighting me into thinking that I’m the problem (I’m not saying she is or that I couldn’t be the problem but here I wasn’t). And then she started to get angry because we were getting in yet another argument and that she couldn’t do or say anything without me getting angry at her. I wasn’t angry I was for sure getting frustrated because the conversation was getting nowhere but I wasn’t angry. So I really don’t know what to do. She doesn’t listen to me anymore and I’ve never felt so lonely.

I wish I never discovered that I was autistic. It was much simpler to mask.

[gingerbreadmonsters]

Possessed Mc and their demon silently crossing out the days until this program is over and they get go home. Together. This place is terrible and in the demon's opinion Diavolo's idea is really stupid. They're certain if they hadn't been with MC down here the human would already be did. What was that idiot lord thinking about kidnapping a magicless human and having them attend demon school?

The brothers might be a little suspicious of MC doing well in the more magical/demon based classes. Of course MC isn't even the one taking them. They had one look at the course work and went, 'Yea mm no. Noo.' and handed control over to their real first demon.

MC's demon is genuinely worried about their human host. It looks like no one actually bothered to do research about the basic needs of a human before bringing one home. They need sunlight or a uv lamp or something! Stress is terrible for humans - it breaks them and they need MC to function.

When MC starts making pacts with the brothers? As much as it bothers their demon parasite they make use of it. So maybe they took (forced) control over MC's body for bit. It was for a good (to both of them) cause. Ordering Mammon to help them get necessities that humans need.

Meeting Belphie doesn't go as planned at all. Immediately the parasite's hackles are raised. They know this demon - know the rumors about him. He hates humans mc! That means them. Pleads for MC not to trust them, they'll force control if they have to. Belphie is cunning, tricky even, maybe he's the first demon to pick up that something isn't quite right with the stupid human. They didn't fall for his tricks and they seem so guarded.

Lilith could attempt to push the issues; get her descendent to help but she didn't expect to be met with resistance. There's cold rage, vile and sickening, that demands she stays back. The human is theirs - they won't let a lost soul use them as a sacrificial lamb. The parasite knows how tired this human truly is, how much they just want everything to stop - to let them rest.

The pain of the brothers if they learn MC is not only possessed, but has reached an agreement with their parasite. In the end the human's body belongs to the parasite - they'll completely claim it, and allow the human to rest where they are wanted, where the belong. It's almost sweet - the human stays with the one being in all three realms that has known them the longest. That never lied, or failed, or threatened them.

Of course this would be a whole shit show with being Lilith's distant relative. Beel and Belphie take it the hardest about MC's possession and their refusal to remove the demon. What right does the youngest have to demand it? Had it not been for the parasite (and Lilith a little.) they would have died.

It's a willing situation - something Diavolo and Barbatos can't do anything about under Devildom law. They hadn't possessed MC while they were a RAD student, it was before even coming to this hellhole.

I do see the parasite flipping Lilith's spirit off in the afterlife, wherever she is. It would be hilarious thought if the parasite was like a pride demon, or a mixture of pride and sloth.

(this is in reference to my three-part series awoken from uneasy dreams, the first part of which can be found here, or via my masterlist)

[adultingautistic]

Sep. 4 Is it possible that I'm still disabled/neurodiverse/whatever the term is even if I was really spoiled growing up? There's a lot of tragic backstory in there too so I'm not sure if my dysfunction is related to trauma or if I've always been this way. I know the best person to ask is a therapist but I can't afford it until I get a job & I'm worried that I won't be taken seriously since I'm both an adult and female. I feel like such a faker.

Is it possible that I'm still disabled/neurodiverse/whatever the term is even if I was really spoiled growing up? Of course!  Having everything you need, even to the point of luxury and excess, is not going to change the type of brain a person was born with!  If having everything you needed was a “cure” for autism or neurodiversity, then there would be an awful lot of articles about how we know the cause of autism and it’s poverty.  That’s just not the case, at all.  

Autism and other forms of neurodiversity are differences in the way your brain has formed and functions.  Outside stimulus, such as having all your needs met, does not change this fundamental fact.  A person who has much stronger emotional support and their physical needs met can be able to cope better, but that doesn’t make them less autistic, it just makes them...healthy.

There's a lot of tragic backstory in there too so I'm not sure if my dysfunction is related to trauma or if I've always been this way. I struggle with this too, because I also had a lot of trauma growing up.  Trying to separate out what were “autistic” symptoms and what were “PTSD/anxiety” symptoms was difficult, and took a lot of work, and time, and patience, and then I didn’t like the answer- which was that in most cases, both were the cause.  Autism gave me certain tendencies, and then the trauma made those much worse in a lot of cases, such as increasing the number of meltdowns I had, because I was at peak emotional stress basically all the time.

I know the best person to ask is a therapist but I can't afford it until I get a job 

I do not know where you live, but if you live in the United States and are unemployed, then you qualify for Medicaid.  Medicaid is free health insurance for United States citizens who are unemployed (or earn an extremely low income, the bar is very, very low).  I emphasize, it’s free, and once you are enrolled, it will cover mental health expenses.  You can’t see just any old therapist, you have to see one that’s on their list that they cover- but free mental health care does exist in the United States, if you are unemployed (or earn an extremely low income).

I'm worried that I won't be taken seriously since I'm both an adult and female. I feel like such a faker. You are not a faker.  You are struggling, and it’s real, and valid, and you have a right to and deserve help.  Most therapists take all of their patients very seriously.  Most therapists are also female, and you can request a female therapist, so that you feel more comfortable that they will take you seriously.  This doesn’t mean they will be trained in autism, or how to diagnose it or treat it, but a good therapist will learn, and while they are learning they can also help you work towards getting tested, if that is your goal. 

My therapist didn’t know two cents about autism when I met her.  I have taught her almost everything she knows about autism (though once we suspected I had it, she also began doing her own learning on it).  She’s still an amazing therapist, and has helped me tremendously, even when she doesn’t understand autism all that well, because she listens.  Which is why I stay with her.  I had 3 or 4 terrible therapists before her, all of which I left after a few sessions, because I didn’t feel they were listening to me, and you have a right to do that.  

So you absolutely can find a therapist that will listen to you, that you trust, who can help you- for free.  And you absolutely deserve a therapist, no matter how mild someone else may judge your problems to be- they are not mild, they’re real, you are not faking, and you are allowed to seek to heal them. 

[system-of-a-feather]

Also also x2

The Riku and XIV brain do chronically - both as a fused whole and as individual parts - have a "this is a negative emotion and its getting in the way of my ability to have an optimistic and healthy vision on how to make it better" and "this is a pathetic emotion and its useless when I can just find the piece of shit - living or not - that caused us to be in this situation and destroy it" relationship that synergizes both extremely well or really poorly depending on how its moderated

The Riku part of the brain doesn't really process negative emotions and rejects them in favor of "practical and productive solutions that is good for the whole" and the ability to "bring a sense of hope and optimism for the future so that we can endure an otherwise shitty present"

The XIV part of the brain doesn't feel vulnerable emotions and / or pain and doesn't ever really take an L ever. If there is an L to be taken, its not a matter of him having "lost" but rather the battle isn't over and for him the battle isn't over until he's "won" and thus, "XIV never looses" because he just doesn't accept it as over until he feels hes on top. So any time theres a vulnerable emotion, its actually the fact that there is something making us feel vulnerable and weak thats causing it and thats an offense and target to take down so that we can go back to living our lives

Both parts end up creating a MEAN and really powerful unstoppable train that honestly can really carve through any shitty situation and so a lot of the time I - as a fused whole - when I feel stuck or lost, really want to bank into that synergy of those two that lets basically any sense of uncertainty or vulnerability get washed away cause like... its honestly REALLY works and hasn't really failed us ever. It got us where we are in our healing

The thing is, vulnerability is a valuable emotion and feeling to learn to deal with and the synergy makes it very hard to ever have time, space, and the mental and emotional presence to actually process or experience vulnerability. And without properly experiencing and processing vulnerability, its very had to obtain the full breath of joy that comes from relationships and life in general.

And the truth of the matter is, we already have the sheer focus, vision, optimism, action, and aggression / dedication to overcome our obstacles that both an independently functioning Riku and XIV would bring to the table and we've already used it to make sure that our life moving forward will not be stuck like this. The only thing that would come from doing that (reinstalling the full dissociative-duo to full capacity only possible with dissociative barriers) would be emotional unawareness to the vulnerable feelings that we are having and honestly... that's not healthy with our current recovery goals and where we want to go with our healing and relationship with ourselves / others.

A thing I think about our system is that we don't feel vulnerable ever because we have one another to take care of eachother always, and thats great and awesome and important. But I think lately, I think we are good on our self confidence and sense of self agency and faith and belief in ourselves. I think what we really need to create opportunities to improve is our trust in others, ability to take help from others, and the ability to feel vulnerable even when we know we can do it.

And we honestly can't really practice any of those three when we are having our social and internal support needs met by 100% internal interactions that are only equally fulfilling because of dissociative barriers.

It's not to say that its bad or anything to be reliant on your parts. It's great honestly. It's just I think at the moment we are past that point in our healing journey where its providing as much benefit and rewards as it is getting in the way of growth. And I think thats why - for the past few months - we've been actually just a fused whole for the most part (albeit, at any point anyone could really talk to one part in specific and our fiance does it regularly when a topic is specifically best talked to a specific part). It's currently what we need in our healing and so we rock it like that

Man am I incredibly depressed I think. At least in the spectrum of which our brain is capable of experiencing and doing depression. I think its a lot of build up from how hard the past year or so has been now that my fiance is getting back on his feet but... its a lot and I'm feeling like shit

Actively kinda thinking of seeing if I can just build up an actual dissociative barrier and bring back proper dissociative barriers between the Riku and XIV brains so their extremes can "solve it" but Im pretty sure thats more so me trying to brute force and "solve" an issue that just needs time and processing

[denisalvney]

RHR: What the Heck Should We Eat? With Dr. Mark Hyman

In this episode, we discuss:

Why are people so confused about what to eat?

Food is medicine

Transitioning from vegetarian to meat-eater

“It’s not the cow, it’s the how” and studies that don’t prove cause and effect

The false demonization of meat, saturated fat, and cholesterol

The Paleo template and avoiding strict diet dogma

Cellular and acellular carbohydrates

Show notes:

Mark Hyman’s new book: Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?

Crowdfunding campaign: Kale vs. Cow: The Case for Better Meat

Regenerative agriculture: Kiss the Ground

Research study: “Paleolithic diet healthier for overweight women”

Roger Williams’s book: Nutrition Against Disease

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Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week I’m very excited to welcome back Dr. Mark Hyman to the show. Dr. Hyman is a practicing family physician, a 10-time #1 New York Times best-selling author, and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He’s the Pritzker Foundation Chair in Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and the Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He’s also founder and director of the UltraWellness Center, chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine, medical editor of HuffPost, and a regular medical contributor in the media for CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, CNN, The Dr. Oz Show, and more. I met Mark personally a few years ago; of course, I’ve known about his work for many years. There is really no one else who has done as much to advance Functional Medicine as Dr. Hyman, and over the last couple of years I have gotten to know him personally and really enjoy his balanced, nuanced approach and everything he does as an advocate for Functional Medicine and nutrition in the field. So, I’m really excited to welcome Mark back to talk about his most recent book: Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? It's a great title, and I think a lot of people actually have that question at this point. We’re so overwhelmed with so much conflicting, contradictory information, and I think a lot of people have just thrown up their hands and really don’t know what to eat, so that's what we’re going to talk about in this episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's dive in. Chris Kresser: Mark, it’s such a pleasure to have you back. Thanks for joining us again. Mark Hyman: Of course. It’s always so great to talk to you, Chris. Chris: Before we jump in and start talking about food, which is what we're going to be mostly talking about today, I just want to kind of get some updates from you. It's been a while since we've chatted, and especially with you, there’s never a dull moment. So what's been going on in your world and how are things going at Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and what's new in your world? Mark: So many things. I got married. Chris: Congratulations again. Mark: Thank you. I was super sick and had to use the magic of Functional Medicine to fix myself and learn new things and launch A Broken Brain documentary online, and it's a lot of stuff going on. We’re excited about my new book, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? which is, I guess, what we're talking about today, and it's really been a labor of love, and it's one of my favorite books that I've written out of 14. I think this is my favorite because it just gives people what they need, and it's so difficult for people knowing how to sort through all the confusing, often conflicting, advice about what is healthy nutrition.

Wondering what the heck you should eat and why there are so many conflicting opinions? Dr. Mark Hyman shares his answers in his new book

  Why are people so confused about what to eat?

Chris: Yes. Most people on the street now, I think, are feeling pretty overwhelmed at this point, and they don't really know who to trust or what to believe. For many years it was like eggs—I think there are some jokes about this, like “eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad,” back and forth, and I think with enough of that it's kind of, people do start to tune out and they don't really believe anything, and it is left to their own devices. So what's the deal? What's your take on why this has been so confusing and conflicted? Mark: Well, it's a sort of a whole conspiracy of actions from a whole different set of sectors. It makes the consumer wonder what the heck they should eat and why there are so many conflicting opinions. One is science and nutrition are challenging because it's hard to study what people eat. In a typical research, you give someone a drug and another group you would not give the drug and you follow them along for a year and you see what happens and you control everything else. That's impossible with food unless you only feed them certain foods and another group you only feed other foods and you do that for 10, 20, or 30 years. Then you're going to get useful information, but no one’s going to do that. So you have to sort of try to understand what studies show and what they don't show. A study can prove cause and effect and one study can't— Chris: And people are notoriously inaccurate when they report their food intake. That’s another problem. Mark: There's also the bias. I mean, we'll talk about it, but meat is a great example. Meat was deemed to be bad because it contains saturated fat. Saturated fat was thought to be bad. Saturated fat in your diet was bad, so hence meat was bad, but there is no evidence that meat was bad. There were no studies showing it was bad. It was built by association based on some pretty bad studies, and so people are confused about it. During the time that the study showed that meat was bad, it was because the people who were eating meat didn't care about their health because everybody said meat was bad, so if you ate meat, you really weren't concerned about your health, and you ate more calories, you weighed more, you smoked more, you drank more, you didn’t eat any fruits and vegetables, you didn't exercise. The people who didn't eat meat in those studies exercised, ate healthy food, fruits and vegetables, didn't smoke, didn't drink too much, took their vitamins. They were healthy. It wasn't because they didn't eat meat that they were healthier. It was because they had all these other healthy habits, and I think the reason people who ate meat got sick was because they had all these unhealthy habits. So you have to look at the context of the study. Nutrition research is notoriously bad and there’s money in the whole problem, which is science is funded by different vehicles, one is industry and one is the government, and there's philanthropy. Philanthropy hasn't done a whole lot in the field of nutrition research, although that's changing. The government funds only certain kinds of studies, which aren’t that helpful, and the food industry is funding studies that prove their products are healthy. If you look at the data, for example, on artificial sweeteners, almost 100 percent of the studies done by the food industry on their products find out they're safe, whereas almost 100 percent of studies done by independent researchers find that they're harmful. So you have to look at where the money is coming from, and then the third reason is the government is not producing guidelines that match the science. If you look recently, the Congress mandated the National Academy of Sciences, which is the nation's highest independent science group, to look at how we come up with their dietary guidelines, and they published a massive report in November, I think, October 2017, where they outlined how corrupt the process was and how unduly influenced it was by industry and how the people and the Guidelines Committee worked for the Dairy Council and other industry trade groups, and there are huge amounts of data, for example, or unsaturated fat, which really has exonerated saturated fat, but still the government recommends to not eat saturated fat. So yes, it made some progress, it said we don't have to worry about fat anymore, yes it said we don’t have to worry about cholesterol or eggs anymore. But there's still a lot of corruption in the guidelines, which inform all of our policies and recommendations. Then of course there are the public health and professional associations like the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and their funding in large part comes from the pharma and the food industries. Forty percent of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics funding comes from junk food industry companies. Chris: Yes. I'll never forget a registered dietitian that we work with told me what was served at those conferences. It was all vastly sugar. Basically, the entire table was sugar, and it was low-fat, so-called “healthy” because it's low fat, but it's all processed and refined sugar, basically. Mark: Exactly. I mean I also read a big meeting in California of The Nutrition Society. There was a mandatory lunch, and the lunch was provided by McDonald's. Chris: Oh my God. That's just crazy. So we’ve got these three problems— Mark: And then there's one more, which is the media. [Crosstalk] Mark: —headlines and does a disservice to the consumer by latching onto various means that actually are incorrect, like the recent coconut oil. You can see where the American Heart Association said that that coconut oil was bad, and by the way, there's not a single study that shows that. It was again built by association, which is it's got saturated fats, saturated fats are bad, so don’t eat it. And the USA Today headline “Coconut Oil Is Not Healthy, Never Was Healthy,” and so everybody just went into a tizzy and got so confused. I know you wrote about it. I certainly wrote about it. I mean, people are confused. I did a Facebook, like there were over a million views because people are just so desperate to know what to think. All these reasons lead to a confused eater. Chris: Yes, and that's a big deal because food—one of the fundamental tenets of Functional Medicine is that food is medicine, and that's how it's different than conventional medicine, which is you go in, you have a chronic condition, generally you're going to walk out with a prescription for a drug, maybe some vague advice about eating healthier. But in Functional Medicine, of course, we approach it differently, so I imagine that was a big impetus behind you writing this book at this time too.

Food is medicine

Mark: Absolutely. Food is medicine, and I was so heartened to hear that one of my friends and colleagues and you know well, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, who is the dean of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, recently was in Washington holding a hearing on food as medicine and how we need to influence policy, or this new understanding of the role of food and health and chronic disease, so I think that's moving forward. In the meantime, people are wondering, what the heck should I eat? And then of course there are other issues besides whether it's healthy or not. How is it affecting the environment? How is it affecting our soils, water, air, and climate change? And how do we treat animals? And all these issues are so confusing for people. So should you eat GMO or should you not? Does it matter if you eat organic or not? What about food additives? Are they very safe? Are they bad? What about processed foods? Are there any ones that you can eat? These are very confusing to people. So I've taken my 30 years of—well, actually probably, God it’s embarrassing to say now, 40 years of studying nutrition, oh my God, I'm old— Chris: Fantastic. Mark: I started in Cornell in 1979 or ’78, and it’s almost 2019, holy cow. All right. Anyway, moving on, I've been studying nutrition that long, and the first book I read was Nutrition Against Disease, by Roger Williams, of how food can be used to actually heal chronic illness. In that time I really swung back and forth from being vegetarian and vegan to being low fat to being high fat to being Paleo, all the way in between, experimenting, and I've done that with my patients. I've probably read, like you, probably over 10,000 papers on nutrition and I've treated over 10,000 patients over 30 years, and I've seen the results of people doing different diets in real life looking at all their biochemistry and hormonal regulation, their metabolism, their other health conditions, and so this isn't just a theoretical book. This isn't just based on some scanning of literature and trying to put something into something that makes sense. This is a combination of my own experimentation, my work with patients, reviewing literature, studying nutrition for 40 years and coming up with just common sense, not extreme, in a way to eat that actually follows the guidelines of most of the sort of trends out there. In other words, you’ve got vegan, you’ve got Paleo, you got raw food, you got keto, you got high fat, low fat, high carb, low carb, it's pretty crazy for a consumer, what should they do. So I've taken all that and tried to synthesize it in really practical ways. It's not about individual nutrients, and you and I both write about those things. What about omega-6 fats? What about zinc? But at the end of the day, people eat food. They eat meat, they eat vegetables, they eat chicken, really, and so in my book I go through each major food category, meat, poultry and eggs, dairy, nuts, seeds, beans, grains, vegetables, fruit, drinks, beverages, sweeteners, and come up with what do we know, what do we don't know, and combined with sort of common sense and evolutionary biology, which is what you call ancestral nutrition, what makes sense. So that's really where I sort of came up with this idea of the book is, how do we sift through all that and give people a guide? It's sort of like a user's guide to eating. Chris: Yes, absolutely. It's so needed and it's something that shouldn't be that complicated, but as you've pointed out, has gotten really complicated. It has, I think, also taken people away from their own intuitive sense of what's right for them, which is a whole other topic. But I want to talk a little bit more about meat because that's obviously, if we were to think of one thing that maybe causes more conflict and sometimes even violent conflicts from people who think we should eat it versus we shouldn't eat it. I know this is an area where you've now changed, as you said, you've shifted. Both of us have been vegan in the past. I was a macrobiotic vegan at one point and then a vegetarian, and both of us now eat meat. What led you to make that transition yourself, and then what should we be looking at from your perspective now in terms of meat consumption?

Transitioning from vegetarian to meat-eater

Mark: It is the big rallying point for controversy, and I want live to be 120. I have a young wife, maybe 140 if I can get there, and I don't want to do anything that's going to jeopardize that. Just a human being, I want to know, and a scientist and doctor, I have the ability to figure that out, and I lock myself in a room with a stack of the best papers on meat and research on meat that were about three feet high for a week in a hotel room so I wouldn’t be distracted, and I just read it all. Then I synthesized it and I realized there are really three main issues around meat. One is moral, and I have patients who are Buddhist monks, and if they don't want to eat animals, that's okay. We can work around that part. Then there's more around how we treat our animals, and that's a fair concern around how we humanely can raise animals, and I want to talk about that. Then there's the environmental issue, which is very real, and our CAFO system of agriculture, confined feeding operations, these are factory farms using a lot of industrial inputs from oil through fossil fuels, through fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides to grow the food; enormous amounts of water through irrigation that depletes our aquifers; the runoff from the fertilizers damages the waterways, it causes dead zones and kills all the marine life; to the effect of climate change from the methane in the way we produce and grow food; and the depletion of our soils, which leads to the inability of the soils to sequester carbon; to our depletion of our aquifers from irrigation for the water, which leads to droughts, which is why we have this whole problem. So those are all real issues, and yet it's not about meat or no meat, it’s how we raise the meat. There’s a movement of regenerative agriculture, which is fascinating, which is using animals to help build soil, which then sequesters carbon, retains water, and raises animals that have much higher-quality meat and don't contribute to climate change and actually help reverse climate change. They're humanely raised and actually are a part of the natural agricultural cycle. Even organic agriculture, feeding a ton of plants that are grown with conventional tilling, organic agriculture, you're doing a little bit better avoiding pesticides, but you're not actually helping the soil, and you're contributing to climate change, and by the way, most plants are not vegetarians. Most plants are carnivores because organic food is fertilized with bone meal and where else would that come from?

“It’s not the cow, it’s the how” and studies that don’t prove cause and effect

Chris: And a lot of animals are killed in that style of agriculture too. They are smaller animals, but then you start getting into the question of, is the life a rodent any worth less than a life of an herbivore? There’s a film that I'm supporting, a friend and colleague of mine is making, called Kale vs. Cow: The Case for Better Meat. She sent me a t-shirt that I love with the tagline, “It's not the cow, it's the how.” Mark: That’s right, that’s right. That’s exactly what I'm talking about. Chris: That sums it up. It’s not the cow, it’s the how, Mark: There’s a book coming out, it just came out, called Kiss the Ground, and a movie, a documentary, coming out as well, which talks about this whole movement of regenerative agriculture. So the whole issue of environmental issues can be addressed. We have 60 million bison that were in this continent that we're raising and they built literally tens of feet of topsoil over a millennia, who knows how long they were here, and we have 60 million. It’s not the fact that we have so many cows, it's how they were raised and what they do. The bison actually were contributing to climate change because of the way that they were roaming and grazing and restoring soils. So that's a whole issue, so I think environmental issues are right. I don’t think anybody should eat CAFO meat, both for their health and for the environment. So then the third issue other than moral, environmental, is health. And then the question becomes what does the data show about the effect of meat on our health? And when I began to look at that, it was all over the place. There were large studies that showed it was harmful, studies have shown it’s helpful. If we look at the studies that showed the population studies, these are what we call observation or population studies. They don't prove cause and effect, what they do is they give people a food questionnaire every year and they ask them what they ate and see who died from what, and then they correlate these things, but correlation isn’t causation. I wake up every morning and the sun comes up. I had nothing to do with the sun coming up, right? Chris: Don’t be modest. Mark: I could do a study of women over 55 who have sex and I would conclude 100 percent of the time that sex never leads to pregnancy. It's wrong but it's right as far as the study goes, so I think we have to understand that. Now when you look at the data that, you find that, gosh, the meat eaters in those studies, which were done in a time when meat was evil, didn't give a crap about their health. Like I said, they ate more calories per day, they smoked more, they drank more, they didn’t exercise, they didn’t eat fruits and vegetables, so their results are confounded and the people who didn't eat meat were trying to be healthy. It wasn't that the meat was the problem, and of course they're eating CAFO meat. And then there are studies that look at vegetarians and meat eaters who shop at health food stores who would presumably have a healthy diet, so eating meat in the context of a healthy diet is a very good thing. For example, today I had a big salad with arugula, pumpkin seeds, avocados, fennel, and cherry tomatoes, and I had a few slices of grass-fed beef with it. That's what I call a “Pegan” diet, which is kind of a joke between Paleo and vegan, but it's essentially eating meat in the context of an otherwise healthy diet. The risk was reduced at half for both of those groups. And then you look at interventional studies, which is a more reliable type of study, where you actually give people, let’s say, a Paleo diet. I just saw an article published today about women who eat Paleo who are overweight have much more weight reduction and health benefits than those who don't, and so you have to look at the interventional studies. Typically, the Paleo diet is a little bit higher in fat, but there was another study published just recently where they looked at a free, unlimited-calorie diet that's high in fat and low in carbs and starch versus a diet that was a restricted, low-calorie diet that's high in carbs and low in fat. After a year, the people who could eat as much as they want and includes lots of fat lost far more weight. This article was just published, I think, today. It was called “Paleolithic diet healthier for overweight women,” looking at the risk factors for diabetes and heart disease. It was done in Sweden, and they found that it made a huge, huge benefit through a low-glycemic diet. That was just published, I think, yesterday. Chris: Yes, and there are many others like it for blood sugar issues and metabolic problems, weight loss, changes in waist circumference, etc. Mark: I’ve seen an interesting study where it looked at—there was a study of wagyu beef, which is like feedlot beef, versus kangaroo meat. In the wagyu beef, they looked at biomarkers and people who eat them, and they found there were a lot of inflammatory biomarkers, gene inflammations linked to every known chronic disease, and the people who ate the kangaroo lowered their inflammatory biomarkers. So it's not only meat, it's the quality of the meat that you eat and what it contains. Grass-fed meat has much higher levels of omega-3 fats; higher levels of antioxidants like catalase, glutathione; and it has much higher levels of minerals and vitamins. So it's a very different food than you're feeding a feedlot beef. If you don't have enough money and you can't eat a grass-fed cow, even sort of regular meat, I think, is a better option than eating a ton of carbs. We vilified meat because of the saturated fat. I think that was really a mistake and I can go deeply into that, but that was another reason why we thought meat was bad. I've talked about a lot of this on your show, but saturated fat isn’t the bogeyman we thought it was. In fact, the saturated fat in meat doesn’t even raise your cholesterol. It’s stearic acid. So it's not even the one that's a bad one. And the last issue is cancer. What about meat and cancer? I think we heard a lot of headlines last year about the WHO saying that meat causes cancer, processed meat in particular. It was true they found a correlation, not causation, correlation by 20 percent increase in the risk of colon cancer for people who ate a lot of processed meat like deli meats, hot dogs, and things. But when you look at the data, given the statistics can be manipulated … so Roger Williams says, “There’s liars, there’s damn liars, and there’s statisticians.” When you look at the statistics, a 20 percent increase in colon cancer sounds terrible. What they really found was that was a relative increase. The risk went from a background of the population of 5 percent chance of getting colon cancer to 6 percent. That's a one percent absolute increase and that's only if you ate four pieces of bacon every day your whole life, and I'm not going to do that, only if you're eating a ton of processed meats, but they can be part of our diet, especially if they're raised sustainably and humanely and so forth. So I think that the whole issue around cancer is kind of a little bit overblown. Chris: Yes. I would agree with you, and I've looked into that in more depth than I ever thought I would just because I know it's such a rabbit hole, and it's not easy to draw conclusions by just scanning a few studies. You really have to dig in. You have to look at the data and the tables and not even pay attention to the researcher’s own conclusions, which are sometimes in conflict with their data. Mark: It’s true. Chris: It’s deep. You really have to look at it. Mark: It's true. I read a study in JAMA once where they actually analyzed the abstracts and compared it to the data published in the study, and 50 percent of the time the abstract conclusions didn't match the study results. Chris: Right. Mark: That was like, oh my God.

The false demonization of meat, saturated fat and cholesterol

Chris: Do you remember that paper in The New England Journal of Medicine that suggested that a Mediterranean diet was better than the normal diet, and the implication was that red meat was bad, but when you looked at the tables you saw that the Mediterranean diet people ate just as much red meat as the control group. That stuff happens all the time, and unless you're really diving in and looking at that level of detail, if you're just, if you're just reading abstracts, or even worse, the media summary of the study, you're not going to get the real story. Speaking of the real story, meat has caused a lot of confusion, but I think cholesterol has got to be right up there. I mean, that's how I got my start. My blog was The Healthy Skeptic. I started writing about the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease many, many years ago now, and I think most people who are above the age of 35 or 40 have grown up with that just absolutely drilled into their head that cholesterol is bad. If you eat cholesterol, it’s going to clog your arteries. It's kind of the junk in the pipe metaphor. Cholesterol is junk or gunk, and you eat it and it clogs your arteries and you get a heart attack. Why then did the US, for the first time ever, remove the restriction on cholesterol in the diet? Mark: Yes, it’s sort of sloppy thinking. We have conclusions from insufficient evidence or no evidence, it's just based on some theory. It’s just like we thought, oh, you eat fat, calories, carbs, and protein so it's going to make you fatter, so to lose weight you eat low fat because that makes you fat, and it seems like a logical conclusion. It looks the same on your body. It's got the same name, it seems logical. Just like cholesterol, you've got cholesterol deposits in your arteries so the cholesterol is going to cause a problem. It turns out neither of those things is true. Heart disease is actually hormonal and an immune problem, not so much a plumbing problem, and our hormones that go awry are insulin, which drives bad types of cholesterol. Eating carbs and sugar actually causes far more harm than eating fat. In fact, that may actually protect your cholesterol in many ways. And so, we kind of got the whole story wrong, and so the government finally said, “Oops, we really didn’t look at the data. We just sort of assumed that it was bad and then when we kind of looked at the data; it really wasn’t bad, so we’re sorry.” Thirty-five years of egg-white omelets— Chris: Sorry you had to suffer through those. Mark: Oops, oops. The way they did it was so funny. They were like, “It’s no longer a nutritive concern.” And I thought that was hysterical, instead of like really owning up to the fact that they were wrong. Chris: Right. And even talking about the benefits of foods like egg yolks and how nutrient dense they are and that they are a rich source of choline, which is hard to find elsewhere in the diet. I think that they wanted to save face, and so if they made a big splashy announcement, people would be like, “Oh, man, we're not going to listen to you.” Mark: Yes. I think the whole cholesterol issue is much more complicated around fat, diet, and carbs, and it turns out for most people … and there's a lot of genetic diversity in how people handle different food, whether it's carbohydrates or fats, and there are different responses that you can have with the same diet in different people, and I've seen this as a clinician, so it's humbling. It’s not like, “Oh, we’ll just eat this way.” You're a practicing physician, I'm a practicing physician, you get humbled by saying, “Oh shoot. I thought this was going to be good, but it actually made this person worse. I don't understand what's going on here.” We're learning more about the genetic diversity around how we respond to different things. But for the most part, Americans, 70 percent of us are overweight, and for most of those people, it's insulin resistance, and insulin resistance is actually made better by fat and improves the quality of cholesterol. I just saw someone today. I looked at their lipids. I was blown away. Their HDL went from 36 to 60 by switching them from a high-carb to a high-fat diet and saturated fat. I'm like, “Whoa. This is impressive.” And their triglycerides plummeted and their LDL went up a little bit, but the ratio improved. The quality and the size improved. They went from having a lot of small particles to having none. I was like, “Okay, this is interesting.” I think you and I have a unique perspective because a lot of people talking about this aren't actually doing it. I think it changes how you think about it because you go, “I think this is the truth,” and you try, and it doesn't work, and you go, “Oh—” [Crosstalk] Chris: Yes. What happens when someone goes on a keto diet and their LDL particle number goes up to 3,500? Is that necessarily a good thing? Maybe they lose weight and their blood sugar improves, but their LDL-P goes above 3,000, then that person's going to require a more nuanced approach. It's not just simple heuristics that we can rely on in those cases. I agree. I mean, that's what you get when you're a clinician and you're working on the front lines. You actually see that, and so it becomes a lot more difficult to stick to a certain belief system when you see evidence to the contrary every day. Mark: I think you just said something really important, which is that a lot of people who are giving advice have belief systems, and this is not about your beliefs. This is about what the data show and what patients actually manifest in response to different things. Here are a lot of people who built their careers on a certain dogma, whether it's low fat or vegan. I had a very close friend who's built a career on being a vegan, and she said, “Mark, don't tell anybody this, but I had started animal protein because I was not feeling well and I was unhealthy. I can't say it in public.” I'm like, “Listen, I'm going to change my mind.” If you look at my books from 10 to 15 years ago, I was recommending low-saturated-fat diets because that's what I thought the data showed, and I think as I have evolved, I've learned more and more, I think the data has improved, I changed my mind, because I want to know what the truth is. I'm not stuck to a particular belief or dogma.

The Paleo template and avoiding strict diet dogma

Chris: Yes. And I think that's so important. It's the way that we can serve our patients and just the community at large by being willing to admit we're wrong. I mean, that's a core part of science, is proceeding from the assumption that we are wrong. We’re going to create some hope, some ideas, and then we're going to test them out and see if they work. I mean, this is probably a good segue to talk about grains and beans and dairy. For me, that was something where I kind of diverged from the Paleo community very early on, and for folks who've read my first book, I called it more of a Paleo template because when I looked at the research on grains, beans, and dairy, I saw, kind of like fat, it was complicated. There are some situations where I think people should be avoiding beans, dairy, and grains pretty strictly, and there are other situations where if those are consumed in moderate amounts in the context of a low-nutrient-dense diet with meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables, that it's fine. I know you addressed this in your book as well. So I'm curious to know where you've come down on this issue. Mark: Yes. You call it Paleo template, I call it Pegan. It was total spoof. It’s just a joke I made up when I was at a conference. Chris: It’s a great term. Mark: I was on a panel with Joel Kahn, who is kind of a milk and vegan cardiologist, low fat, and Frank Lipman, who is a Paleo functional doc— Chris: Was that the Mind, Body— Mark: Yes. It was Mind, Body— [Crosstalk] Mark: You were there. Chris: I remember that. Yes, yes. I was there for the genesis. Mark: You were. It’s true. It was a total joke. I'm like, you were Paleo, you were vegan, I was Pegan, and then I went home, I started thinking about there’s more in common than there are differences. I think setting up these extreme, hard-and-fast rules is a problem. Some people can't tolerate dairy, but the question is, which dairy? Is it factory farm, hybridized cows which have high levels of hormones and high levels of A1 casein, which is inflammatory, is it goat milk, some milk in cow or grass-fed meat? This is a lot of— [Crosstalk] Mark: Right. So I think you're right and I think that's in the book Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? This is sort of where I take the middle ground and go, okay, of all the foods, we’re highly adaptable beings. We can be all sorts of different diets. But you and I know if you're eating a healthy diet, you're including a lot of variety of foods; as long as you're choosing high-quality foods, many people can tolerate a lot of diversity. But you and I treat very sick people, and they might need to be more aggressive with restricting things like dairy, gluten, different grains, or beans, and I think that's really looking at within each category what should we be eating. Let's take grains, for example. Your grains are relatively new from an evolution point of view. We’ve been able to eat them and to survive, but there's evidence that our body has shrunk, and our health is not as good once we started eating grains, from an agricultural point of view, but the grains now that we eat are problematic. Most of the grains that are out there are wheat, corn, and rice. Wheat has been hybridized, so it's not the wheat of our ancestors. It's got much higher levels or something called amylopectin A, which is a very starchy, high superstarch, so it raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. It’s bred in a way to make it resistant to drought and different things, and it's called dwarf wheat, and the guy who invented it won a Nobel prize, but there are problems with it. When you breed plants, you combine genes. Unlike humans, where you get one copy from your mom, one copy from your dad, you get 46 chromosomes, you get 23 from each, you get 46 yourself, in plants, you get like 46 plus 46 that’s 92. And when you have genes, you make proteins, and those proteins in the wheat are gliadin proteins, some of them. They are the ones in dwarf wheat which are much more likely to cause inflammation, leaky gut, which is why we're seeing so much more gluten sensitivity. If you're going to eat wheat, maybe you want to eat heirloom wheat like einkorn. If you're going to eat grains, maybe you want to eat kind of non-grain grains like buckwheat, quinoa, or things like teff that are a little bit different but may also be better tolerated and they're less likely to be GMO or hybridized. So I think we have to be smart about what we’re eating. It’s not a categorical no or yes, but it depends on what's going on. Chris: Absolutely. And, I mean, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, the biggest difference in terms of how we're eating grains versus even our agricultural ancestors is most people are eating them in the form of grain-based desserts. They have a lot of sugar. I mean, the top six foods in the American diet are grain-based desserts, bread, pizza, alcohol, chicken dishes, primarily fried chicken dishes, and I might be missing one here, I'm spacing out. But if you look at what the grains are in those, we're not talking about someone eating a bowl of quinoa with their salad. We're talking about someone eating highly processed and refined grains that have sugar added to them in most cases, so that's a totally, totally different thing.

Cellular and acellular carbohydrates

Mark: And even whole-grain flours like brown rice flour or quinoa flour, those can be problematic because you're increasing the surface area of the food and you're increasing its ability to raise your blood sugar. It is very different than if you eat the whole grain. Chris: This is a concept of cellular and acellular carbohydrates. When all of that surface area is exposed, that can really feed the bad bacteria in your gut, whereas when the cells are still intact, that's more of a traditional way of eating them, and it's better for the good bugs in our gut. We're learning so much. The good news is it's a lot simpler, and that's what I love about your book Food: What the Heck What Should I Eat? It’s really simplifying things that have been made to be too complicated, but at the same time it's not oversimplifying because as we pointed out throughout the conversation, it's not black or white in every different situation. Mark: Exactly, exactly. And I think that the way I have designed the book is really very practical. It's like, what we know, what we don't know, and what does the science say, and I wanted … like, 10 things you need to know about grains. One, we don't need to eat them at all because we didn't evolve in them, and we can live happily without them. Flour equals sugar. If you are eating flour, and whether it’s whole grain or not, it’s just like having sugar. Gluten is a problem, and I explain why and why the grains we're eating now aren't the grains our grandparents ate, then why gluten-free food isn’t necessarily good for you and why you should be a “cereal-killer”, why oatmeal is not healthy, what’s wrong with corn, and why your rice may not be so good, and what grains are okay. And then I go through exactly where you are regarding the healthy grains. What are they? How much should you eat? I mean, there are some people advocating that we eat two cups of grains a day and two cups of beans, and that might be a problem. I talk about minimizing these things and even meat, not having a 16-ounce steak but having four ounces or six ounces. I think that that's a very different kind of diet than we’re typically eating. Chris: Yes. Well, I'm excited about this book. I think it's been a long time coming, and I don't know how you find the time to write these 14 books with everything else that you're doing, but I'm grateful that you do because I think it's going to help a lot of people, especially this one. I think it's just a perfect topic. It's the perfect time for it because, especially with social media, blogs, and summits, people are kind of overloaded with information. It's not a lack of information, it's too much, and just not being able to make sense of it, so I think this book is perfectly timed. Mark: Thank you, Chris. I try to make it really simple to use, common sense, accessible, and people can just pick up and read any chapter. If they want to know about grains, they can read that. If they want to know about dairy, they can read about that, or meat. And then they can know what to do, and there are really great resources in there. If you're going to eat meat, where should you find it? How do you get it for cheaper? What are the things you look for? Each category—what about vegetables? There are vegetables we shouldn't be really eating that much of. For example, raw button mushrooms or alfalfa sprouts may have toxins and cancer-causing things in them. So how do you know in each category what you should and shouldn’t eat? And I also included the environmental considerations and even the political considerations. We think avocados are awesome, but Mexico, if you're trying to live a life that doesn't support harming people or nature, they have huge amounts of land and a lot of the avocado farms are actually controlled by drug cartels, the workers are mistreated, and it’s a mess. So these are what we call blood avocados, like they're blood diamonds, they're blood avocados, so maybe you should get them in California instead. That's really the way I try to make it all clear and allow people to sort of choose for themselves what makes sense. Chris: And that's what it's about. So this comes out … I've heard a couple different things, the 28th or 27th? Mark: The 27th. Chris: Okay, the 27th.  Okay, I think this podcast will be coming out either just before that or maybe even on that same day, so you can either preorder on Amazon or order it  if it’s the 27th when this comes out, and it's going to be available in all bookstores, everywhere books are sold. Anything else you want to let us know about? Mark: Yes. You can go to FoodTheBook.com, and I'm giving away free chapters. I've got free cooking videos on there, “The Four Big Lies and Myths That We've Been Exposed To” video there, so I have a lot of free content if you are looking to get familiar with what the book’s about and also getting a lot of value without actually having to buy the book, but of course I want you to buy the book, so it’s FoodTheBook.com. It’s one of those things that should be on everybody’s coffee table, in everybody’s bathroom, in everybody’s kitchen so they know what to do, take it with them shopping. There is even a great shopping guide of … here's—because at the end of each chapter I go, eat this, don’t eat that. If you're going to eat grains, here are the grains to eat, don’t eat these. If you're going to eat meat, here’s the meat to eat, don’t eat these. It’s really really simple and clear. Chris: It’s a really good book to gift to people too, like friends or family members who are maybe just totally overwhelmed, which is a lot of people that I come across at this point, and it's such a good kind of summary and overview of all of these topics that we've been talking about, which are really the most important ones when it comes down to just sitting down and like, what am I going to eat? What should I buy when I go to the store? It really does boil down to that. Thanks for writing this book, Mark, and getting it out there and for coming back to talk to us, and we look forward to the next time. Mark: Yes, it’s great. I'm looking forward to it. The book in the UK is being called WTF Should I Eat? And it’s got a different cover. They thought “What the heck” was too mild. Chris: Those are the people across the pond. It's always interesting to see how those differences shake out. So those of you, I have actually a pretty big audience in the UK, so it’s WTF Should I Eat? Mark: Food: WTF Should I Eat? Chris: Yes. Cool. All right. Well, thanks again, Mark. Mark: All right, Chris. Thank you. Chris: We’ll have you back soon, take care.   RHR: What the Heck Should We Eat? With Dr. Mark Hyman published first on https://chriskresser.com