02/01/2021
I've been telling people this for years. Maybe if you hear it from a doctor...
Hi Scott,
The SAD (Standard American Diet) is over 60 percent ultra-processed food mostly from commodity crops—wheat, corn, and soy turned into hundreds of thousands of food-like products that bear little resemblance to our evolutionary diet. Those who eat the most of these addictive foods are the fattest and sickest among us. This nutrient-depleted diet not only makes us obese and sick but drives us to consume more and more “food-like substances,” looking for the missing nutrients.
Only 11 percent of our diet is nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. Only 3 percent of our cropland is used to grow fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Destructive agricultural techniques have destroyed our soil—where plants get their nutrients. Your broccoli today has 50 percent less nutrients than it did 50 years ago.
Today our vegetables have been bred for yield, starch content, disease resistance, drought, shape, shelf stability, and hardiness for transport; not for flavor, nutrient density, or phytochemical richness. Ever taste a store-bought cardboard-like, perfect-looking tomato in the middle of winter, then try an organic, heirloom tomato picked from the vine in late August? You will know exactly what I mean.
There are about 6,000 cultivated edible plant species, yet nearly all crop production comes from just nine species (sugar cane, maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava). Most of those foods are the raw materials for the food industry to produce highly-processed, disease-promoting foods and are not eaten in their original form.
Food, it turns out, is the biggest driver of imbalances in your biological networks, and the biggest lever for rapid change, reversal of disease, and creation of health. While most doctors have not seen the power of food (mostly because they were not trained in how to use food as medicine), I have seen miracles over decades. And so have thousands of my Functional Medicine colleagues. Except they are not miracles.
They are the result of applying the latest advances in understanding how our bodies actually work, not how we were trained in medical school. Autoimmune diseases disappear, depression vanishes, migraines evaporate, psoriasis and eczema clear up, Alzheimer’s patients improve their memory, type 2 diabetes is gone in a few weeks. These are not anomalies or spontaneous remissions, but reproducible results based on applying food as medicine with the model of Functional Medicine.
How does food work to change disease and to create health?
There is no other activity you do every day that has more power to change our biology than what you eat. You literally ingest pounds of foreign material into your body daily. If all calories were the same, it would not matter what you eat. But they are not. Food carries information molecules, instructions, code that programs your biology with every bite for better or worse. Industrial food drives inflammation, oxidative stress, imbalances in hormone and brain chemistry, overloads your detoxification system, depletes your energy, damages your microbiome, and changes your gene expression to turn on disease-causing genes.
Real whole nutrient and phytonutrient-rich food does the opposite—turns off inflammation, increases antioxidant systems, balances hormones and brain chemistry, boosts detoxification, increases energy, optimizes your microbiome, and turns on disease-preventing, health-promoting genes.
I choose real, whole food every day. I want the same for you, which is why I wrote my new book The Pegan Diet.
Eating well should not be ridiculously hard and expensive. It should be manageable, accessible, and affordable. Over the years, I’ve gained the tools to make healthy eating easy, and now I want to share them with you.
In The Pegan Diet, I’ll walk you through 21 simple, digestible principles to understand the foundation of Functional Medicine and how to use food to prevent chronic disease. You’ll learn more about the following:
• How to eat for longevity
• How to eat to boost mood
• How to design your plate for blood sugar balance
• How to prevent insulin resistance
• How to feed your family
• How to make healthy eating affordable
• How to choose the best meat
• How to make a plant-based diet work for you (this one is for all of the vegetarians and vegans)
• And you’ll get access to 30 of my favorite Pegan-friendly recipes designed by me and my team to nourish you and your loved ones
This is a simple roadmap. In fact, it’s my most straightforward, no-nonsense guide yet. It’s all about what you can do right now, steps you can take at home to take charge of your health.
I’m so excited to get this book into your hands. Pre-order The Pegan Diet today for a healthier tomorrow.
Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD
