Mark Hyman Quotes

“Calories from protein affect your brain, your appetite control center, so you are more satiated and satisfied.”

“Children with obesity and diabetes live harder poorer lives, they often don't finish school and earn much less than their healthy counterparts.”

“Creating a healthier world is a revolutionary act, one you can start right now.”

“Don't get me wrong, I admire elegance and have an appreciation of the finer things in life. But to me, beauty lies in simplicity.”

“I don't need the fillers, additives, excessive amounts of sugars, fats, salts and other measures taken to taint the natural goodness of real food.”

“I have experienced some amazing food! Yet when I think about the most luxurious and exquisite meals I have had, visions of simple food made from a few natural ingredients are what most excite me.”

“If you must take an antibiotic, supplement it with acidophilus.”

“If you want to get healthy, you just might not want to go to a doctor. You might instead, go to church.”

“In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.”

“It is just physics – who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?”

“It seems that for many the cure to acne is at the end of their fork, not in a prescription pad.”

“Just eat less and exercise more.”

“Lifestyle change and changes in diet work faster, better and more cheaply than any medication and are as effective or more effective than gastric bypass without any side effects or long-term complications.”

“Most schools have only a microwave or deep fryer, hardly the tools needed to feed our children real, fresh food.”

“Nutrients are not drugs and they can't be studied as drugs. They are part of a biological system where all nutrients work as a team to support your biochemical processes.”

“One in four kids have either pre-diabetes or diabetes – what I like to call diabesity. How did this happen?”

“Our typical Western diet is full of inflammatory fats - saturated fats, trans fats, too many omega-6, inflammatory, processed vegetable oils like soy and corn oils. These increase IGF-1 and stimulate pimple follicles.”

“Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

“Part of my training was learning how to refer patients to cardiologists for heart problems, gastroenterologists for stomach issues, and rheumatologists for joint pain. Given that most physicians were trained this way, it's no wonder that the average Medicare patient has six doctors and is on five different medications.”

“Placing too much emphasis on a yes/no diagnosis, meaning you either have a disease or you don't, can lead even the most well-meaning physicians to miss underlying causes and early warning signs of illness.”

“Recommending gastric bypass as a national solution for our diabetes epidemic is bad medicine and bad economics.”

“Seems you can't outsmart Mother Nature.”

“Shrinking someone's stomach to the size of a walnut with surgery is one way to battle obesity and diabetes and may be lifesaving for a few, but it doesn't address the underlying causes.”

“Stay away from milk. It is nature's perfect food – but only if you are a calf.”

“The best advice is to avoid foods with health claims on the label, or better yet avoid foods with labels in the first place.”

“The body maintains balance in only a handful of ways. At the end of the day, disease occurs when these basic systems are out of whack.”

“The food industry profits from providing poor quality foods with poor nutritional value that people eat a lot of.”

“The power of community to create health is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital.”

“The very fact that we are having a national conversation about what we should eat, that we are struggling with the question about what the best diet is, is symptomatic of how far we have strayed from the natural conditions that gave rise to our species, from the simple act of eating real, whole, fresh food.”

“The way most doctors practice medicine right now isn't working.”

“There are ways to cut cravings by naturally balancing your blood sugar.”

“Through my work and travels I have been lucky enough to have been exposed to various eclectic cuisine running the gamut from small local cafes to iconic five-star restaurants.”

“Today there are not even enough fruits and vegetables in this country to allow all Americans to follow the government guidelines to eat five to nine servings a day.”

“Tricking your brain into thinking you are getting something sweet plays dirty tricks on your metabolism.”

“We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.”

“We need a grassroots movement and government policies and programs to change the food landscape and the built environment to give our children a chance to have happy, healthy successful lives.”

“We need community action and policies to support healthy communities.”

“When it becomes a revolutionary act to eat real food, we are in trouble.”

“While pimples are not as simple as too much milk or sugar in your diet, both have a significant impact. Nutritional deficiencies as well as excesses can worsen acne.”

“While weight loss is important, what's more important is the quality of food you put in your body - food is information that quickly changes your metabolism and genes.”

“You are more likely to be overweight if your friend's friend is overweight than if your parents are overweight.”

“You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet.”

“You cannot control the primitive urges and hormones that drive your eating behavior.”

“Your social networks may matter more than your genetic networks. But if your friends have healthy habits you are more likely to as well. So get healthy friends.”

“Your zip code is a bigger determinant of your health outcomes than your genetic code.”

“First, when you try to restrict calories and exercise more, your body is hardwired to perceive a starvation situation. That makes you tired (so you move less and conserve energy) and hungry (so you eat more), and it slows down your metabolism (so you don’t die!). This 'eat less, exercise more' formula is not too successful for most people. It can work for a short time, certainly, but less than 10 percent of people lose weight and keep it off for a year; you will almost always rebound and gain back the weight.

Second, when you eat carbs and sugar, insulin spikes and your blood sugar drops. The insulin drives most of the available fuel in your bloodstream into fat cells, especially the fat cells around your middle, otherwise known as belly fat. So your body is starved of fuel, and this stimulates your brain to make you eat more.

You could have a year’s worth of stored energy in your fat tissue and yet feel like you are starving. The only thing that can stop this vicious cycle is eating a lot of fat and cutting out the refined carbs and sugar. A high-fat, low-carb diet leads to a faster metabolism and sustained weight loss.”

“It is a veritable revolving door of jobs between the USDA and Big Ag and Big Food. Americans should insist on the establishment of a new Department of Food run through the Department of Health and Human Services, which is paying for the consequences of harmful dietary recommendations through Medicare and Medicaid.”

“Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup has been linked to cancer. The World Health Organization released a statement that glyphosate (Roundup) is a 'probable carcinogen' in humans.”

“Saturated fat seems to promote inflammation only in the presence of too many carbs or too little fiber, or there is no connection at all.”

“If we accepted the recommendation of the American Heart Association that we eat less than 5 percent of our calories as saturated fat, we would have to ban breast milk. (It contains a whopping 25 percent of its calories as saturated fat.)”

“Read ingredients lists and don’t eat anything with the word 'hydrogenated' on the label.”

“Soda companies spent $30 million to oppose soda taxes in just four states in 2016. They also regularly take legal action to oppose warning labels, taxes, and more.”

“The average American child has consumed 7½ pounds of chemicals by the age of five.”

“The conversation has changed now that science has proven that processed foods — and especially sugar — are addictive.”

“A 2009 study by Dr. Serge H. Ahmed, 'Is Sugar as Addictive as Cocaine?', published in the journal Food and Addiction, proved that sugar was eight times as addictive as cocaine.”

“A serving of Prego tomato sauce has two teaspoons of sugar, more than two Oreo cookies.”

“How we eat, how much we exercise, how we manage stress, our exposure to environmental and food-based toxins, and the structural violence or 'obesogenic environment' that influences these factors are what is truly driving our diabesity epidemic.”

“In addition to single-gene genetic disorders, there are just five causes of all disease: poor diet, chronic stress, microbes, toxins, and allergens, all of which wash over our DNA causing changes in our gene expression, and turning off or on different genes and messages that affect our metabolism.”

“Insulin resistance and the diabesity associated with it are often accompanied by increasing belly fat, fatigue after meals, sugar cravings, blood sugar swings or hypoglycemia, high triglycerides, low HDL, high blood pressure, low sex drive, problems with blood clotting, and increased inflammation. These clues can often be picked up long before you ever get diabetes, and may help you prevent diabetes entirely. If you have a family history of obesity (especially around the belly), diabetes, early heart disease, or even dementia or cancer, you are even more prone to this problem.”

“My advice is to give up stevia, aspartame, sucralose, sugar alcohols like xylitol and malitol, and all of the other heavily-used and marketed sweeteners unless you want to slow down your metabolism, gain weight, and become an addict.m/authors/mark-hyman-quotes”

“My goal in medicine is to help provide a way to navigate and sort through health information based on an entirely new way of thinking about health and disease. I want to find the right treatment for each person, regardless of what that treatment might be. If a medicine is the best treatment, I will choose that; if a change in diet, supplements, herbs, or lifestyle works best, then I will choose that.”

“Negative lifestyle choices and high job stress led me down a path of alcohol and nicotine abuse, and eventually open heart surgery.”

“Our bread is not what it used to be. It is more of a Frankenfood, a by-product of industrial agriculture or 'super-starch and super-gluten'. Combine that with the damage our guts have suffered from our diet, environment, lifestyle, and overuse of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories, and you have the perfect storm for gluten intolerance.”

“Ponder this: From 1983 to 2008, the number of people in the world with diabetes increased sevenfold, from 35 to 240 million. In just three years, from 2008 to 2011, we added another 110 million diabetics to our global population. Shouldn’t the main question we ask be why is this happening? instead of what new drug can we find to treat it?”

“The key is to use a healthy, sustainable strategy for weight loss that balances your hormones and brain chemistry and doesn’t put you in a starvation response.”

“The way modern medicine operates is like trying to diagnose what’s wrong with your car by listening to the noises it makes instead of looking under the hood.”

“There are just a few 'ingredients' needed to make a healthy human – real, whole, fresh food, nutrients (vitamins and minerals), light, water, air, sleep, movement, rhythm, love, connection, meaning, and purpose.”

“Thinking the way you’ve always thought and doing things you’ve always done will only lead to more of the same. You need to be disruptive!”

“Today, two slices of whole-wheat bread can raise your blood sugar more than two tablespoons of table sugar can.”

“We must learn to treat the person, not the disease; the system, not just the symptoms. This is personalized medicine, the medicine of the future.”

“We now know – because it has been scientifically proven — that sugar is more powerfully addictive than alcohol, cocaine, or even heroin (and if you’re thinking about going for diet soda instead, take note: Artificial sweeteners may be more addictive than regular sugar).”

“When our government policies and agricultural subsidies have supported the flood of an extra 700 calories per person per day into the food system since 1970 (mostly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup from corn and trans fats), we have a problem.”

“Certain foods have high levels, including artichokes, asparagus, plantains, seaweed, and more. All fiber-rich foods will help keep your inner garden healthy—vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and beans.”

“Every time you take a bite of food, consider that you are programming your biology for health or disease. When you eat healthy food, you are, in fact, eating medicine.”

“If you learn to view food as instructions that influence every aspect of your biology, and learn to combine that knowledge with the joy of cooking, there will be only pleasure and healing.”

“Depression is not a psychiatric illness, but a systemic disease.”

“These drugs can lead to serious side effects. Besides acting like a chemical straitjacket and making people dull, slow, and stupid, they increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, stroke, blood clots, and more serious conditions known as neuroleptic malignant syndrome (where your body literally burns up with fever and your muscles are destroyed) and tardive dyskinesia (uncontrolled repetitive, involuntary, and purposeless movements such as lip smacking, rapid eye blinking, grimacing, and spasms in the legs). Have we suddenly all gone crazy?”

“These people are stuck in the one-disease, one-drug model of thinking. It is an example of reductionistic thinking that misses the whole point of how systems work — of how the body works.”

“We all have different needs for food, vitamins, rest, exercise, stress tolerance, or ability to handle toxins.”

“Calories are important. But it isn’t the amount of calories as much as the type of calories you consume that makes a difference in terms of how much you weigh and how healthy you are.”

“If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. This seems perfectly logical. The problem? It’s not true.”