Dr. Mark Hyman ON: How The Healthiest People Make Smart Choices About Their Food, Wellbeing And Medicine

6 out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. 75% of us are overweight. 42% are obese. 88% are metabolically unhealthy. Take that in for a minute; 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy—that means 88% are not, and these people are more at risk for COVID-19 and other chronic diseases.

Depression, it turns out, is an inflammatory disease ... It's like a sore throat, but it's in your brain. And your brain doesn't hurt, but it can be depressed or feel sad or be anxious or have OCD or ADD or whatever, and so it has different ways of expressing that inflammation.

When you look at the science of these foods—these ultra-processed pulverized foods that are high in starch and sugar—they're really designed to hijack our brain chemistry, our hormones, and our metabolism in a very specific way.

We have certain populations in this country that are so disproportionately affected by chronic disease and by poor health—African American communities, the Hispanic community, and Native American communities. And when you look at COVID-19, it is, far and away, hurting these populations more than anybody else. For example, in Louisiana and Chicago, African Americans are 30% of the population but 70% of the deaths. Native Americans are experiencing the same thing.

In Chicago, there's something called the Chicago loop. If you live outside the loop, your life expectancy is 16 years less. If you take a subway from Midtown Manhattan to the Bronx—which is a very poor African American community—your life expectancy goes down 6 months for every subway stop.

If we actually solve the problem of food, we solve the problems of chronic disease, of the stress in our economy, of the disintegration of our communities, of racism, of environmental destruction, climate change, mass security, kids' education—all of this is connected to food.

Food waste is a huge problem. 40% of our food is wasted, and it's one of the biggest drivers of climate change. It's a bigger contributor of methane than cows.

Every bite of food you take regulates your entire biology. It changes your gene expression, it changes your hormones, your brain chemistry, you immune system your microbiome, everything—literally with every bite.

Facebook, for example, last year, had 500 billion ads for junk food.

We can't resurrect our communities unless we resurrect our health; and we can't resurrect our health unless we resurrect our food; and we can't resurrect our food until we fix the food system, and fix agriculture, and pull that thread that connects everything together.

The way we define disease is completely wrong. So, our normal conception of disease is completely flawed because it's not based on causes; it's based on symptoms. So, I think people just don't understand that, and so if you focus on causes, not symptoms, and treat that—the root cause, people get better.

There are a lot of unintended consequences that have led to our current food system that were born out of good intentions.