Interview: Mark Hyman, MD | Food: Unraveling the Confusion

Mark Hyman, M.D.

FOOD: Unraveling the Confusion

April 12, 2018, New York City

Photographs by Bill Miles

Your fork is the most powerful tool to transform your health and change the world.

~ Mark Hyman, M.D.

Kristen:            Thank you for inviting Best Self into your home today. Our paths have crossed many times over the last couple of years, but I’m very excited and honored to be here today and to have the opportunity to celebrate your incredible work in the world.

Mark:               Thank you.

Kristen:            So before I get started, I think I should make a proper introduction to our audience.

Dr. Mark Hyman is a man on a mission with a desire to set the record straight about all things food. Systems, policies, and its connection to the environment, economy, social justice, personal health… and helping us figure out what the heck we should be eating in order to live healthy, vibrant lives.

Doctor Hyman is the director of the Cleveland Center for Functional Medicine, Chairman of the Board for the Institute for Functional Medicine, and Founder and Director of the Ultra Wellness Center.

He is a 10x number one New York Times best-selling author, and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in his field. His latest book Food is truly an ode to demystifying and debunking food myths, discerning complex science, and making sense of it all. Thank God!

So, with no disrespect intended, I have to say this book is really good. Not that I didn’t expect you to write a good book, but I was really surprised to have been captivated by a book about food.

I’d love to start with understanding more about where this journey started for you. Mark Hyman decides to go to medical school, but how does that lead into Functional Medicine? And where does Mark Hyman make the connections to identifying that food really is the key to health and wellness?

Mark:               It’s a great question. It actually started before medical school, when I was in college at Cornell. I moved into a house with a bunch of folks and one of them was a PhD student in nutrition. He was studying the role of fiber in gut flora, which I thought was pretty fascinating. And remember this was four decades ago.

Kristen:            Right, nobody even knew we had gut flora at that time! [laughing]

Mark:               He gave me this book that changed my life, which was called Nutrition Against Disease by a guy named Roger Williams. He was one of the fathers of the notion of biochemical individuality: how we’re all different, and the notion that we can change disease, particularly chronic disease, by what we eat. That book set the framework in my mind of perceiving food as medicine.

At the same time I was also studying systems theory and systems thinking, and the connections between different healing systems and how the body works. That all blended into this predisposition to think differently about the body and health and healing. I actually majored in Chinese and was going to go to China to study Chinese medicine, but decided I didn’t want to spend my 20’s in a fascist dictatorship.

So, instead I decided I’d apply to medical school and see if I got in. At the time I was majoring in Buddhism, which is a revolutionary way of thinking about how our suffering and perceptions work. I studied the Medicine Buddha, which was all about how we actually have to rethink our relationship to our bodies, our health, our world, and ourselves. With that I went to medical school and I got kind of brainwashed for the first bit.

I just decided to suspend all of my previous thinking and take in this system as whole and see what happened. I became fascinated with the body from that perspective. I had a great time in medical school, became a family doctor, and was always focused on nutrition and health and wellness. In my own life, I was a yoga teacher before I was even a doctor — that was like 40 years ago when nobody was even doing yoga. I went to a yoga studio here in New York City. At the time, there was one yoga studio with about 5 people in it. Today, you’re lucky if you can get a spot in a class even if you go an hour beforehand. [laughing]

Kristen:            We’ve come a long way baby!

:               And then when I was 36 years old, I got really sick and ended up having a complete collapse of all