This is going to be combating the chronic disease epidemic.
First up, I'm bringing up Dr. Clayton Baker.
Clayton, come on up.
Thank you, sir.
Have a seat right here.
I am a senior fellow internal medicine doctor with public work in JAMA.
I shouldn't have probably mentioned that, sorry.
and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Next up, we have Dr. Michael Turner.
I am a senior fellow.
Hey, Michael.
Hey, come on up.
And in integrative medicine, CEO of his medical practice
in disciplines of COVID, cancer, men's health, sports medicine,
and finally, Christina Carmen.
Dr. Christina Carmen, come on up.
I am a senior fellow in nutritional and holistic health
and author of many IMA guides on health, nutrition, and lifestyle.
And we're going to come straight into this and go on.
So, wow, so we heard about the four big killers and we're trying
to figure out how to connect policy to probably the biggest thing
out there is chronic disease at this point in time.
Kills more people, does more things than measles I've heard, possibly.
Yeah. So, Dr. Baker, why don't we start with you?
How do we begin tackling this monstrous huge thing
of chronic disease?
Well, thanks very much, Chris.
Thanks for having me and everyone for being here.
It's so important.
The first thing I would say is I'm really glad to be
in a very lighthearted panel about chronic disease
and how it's killing everybody after the global,
which terrifies me even more.
So it's nice to be on kind of a, we're on the light side.
I don't know how we follow up that discussion.
But anyway, I would say one thing we could do to follow it up is
if we want to curb the overreach in the United States, there's two acts
that we don't talk enough about that need to be repealed.
And this needs to go through Congress, not through an EO,
is the PREP Act and the Project BioShield Act, which really enables it.
So that's just something to look into and consider.
There's two things.
As an internist, I take care of chronic disease all the time.
And I think that one of the things that is absolutely central to addressing chronic disease
is to have a really, in a sense, a heart-to-heart discussion with the patient and say, what
is going on here?
What is the source of this?
What are the multi-pronged approaches we can take to fixing it?
And we have to have an open mind.
We have to have an open discussion.
As I said a million times, obesity is not an ozempic deficiency.
It's not.
But it is a complicated metabolic process.
And we have to look at it as such.
And I think that I'll just jump into one of the simple clinical approaches I take to one
of the illnesses that I really work on all the time, which is type 2 diabetes, way back
in the day I was taught by a very wise old physician in the 90s that to tell your patients
that there's, think of your diabetic control as a three-legged stool, and the three legs
of that stool that keep it upright are your diet, your exercise, and medications in most
many cases, if they were coming to see us.
This was at the old Jocelyn Diabetes Center in Boston.
We had a ton of type 1 diabetics then, actually.
That's what I cut my teeth on, and of course, they can't survive without insulin.
So there was a three-legged stool, and if you took away any one of those three legs,
what happens to the stool?
It collapses.
It falls over.
And nowadays, the notion is, well, your A1C too often.
Your A1C is 8.1, and we really want it below 7, so it's time to start the Ozempic, or
it's time to change something else.
And instead what we have to do is we have to say this is a multi-pronged, multi-faceted
problem and it has a multi-faceted solution.
And I think that's one of the things that I think is so central to this, so basic to
this.
It sounds simplistic, but it's really a conceptual change for the patient and for doctors that
you have to really emphasize and you have, it's like getting someone to quit smoking.
You have to, you know, Mark Twain said that habit is habit and you have to coax it down
the stairs.
You can't throw it out the window.
And that's what we need to do just at a very practical level.
Yeah.
I'm going to add to that.
Please do.
You guys, whoever knows me, I will always add to that.
So I think a really, really big piece in this that we really need to have some serious conversations
around is the diet piece.
So many of our patients are coming to our doctors and maybe diet is kind of talked about
on a kind of a very low level pace and perhaps this is where the resources and a little bit
more empowerment to our clinicians comes into play because the underpinning of how we're
really going to shift chronic disease is through nutrition and what we're feeding our bodies,
we're moving our bodies, how we're sleeping. You know, six in ten Americans have a chronic
disease and then it increases. Once you have one, there's no stopping anymore really to
manifest. So really, what are we looking at besides just medication? Because if you're
just going to your doctor to treat your chronic disease with medication, we need to have serious
conversations about your clinician. We're not also talking about the nutrition and the
movement aspect of it, and everybody can move, no matter what shape or form they come from.
They can move in some way that's sustainable and useful to them.
We have to have those conversations.
And it's not just about, oh, here's a, just, you know, go on a low glycemic diet or go
on a carnivore diet.
What does that actually look like for the patient in their everyday life?
And we have to ask those questions.
Are they cooking?
Are they eating out?
Are they, who's the cooking in the family?
They have lots of other people to cook for and provide for.
Are they eating in the home?
Are there family meals?
Like, these are really important questions that we need to start asking
as the clinicians so that we can really support their long-term health.
It's not just about the medication.
It's about all those other things that can really support long-term shifts.
And that's what we want ultimately because it's not good
at the moment, guys, at all.
Well, no, it's not Dr. Carmen.
So with RFK in there, what's your level of optimism
that we can have the proper dialogue?
I think we definitely have a huge opportunity.
There's a big window here.
I would say that one of the biggest shifts that I would see
as far as generational change when it comes to how we're eating comes
from what we're nourishing and feeding our children.
And I'm really quite passionate about that.
you need to support those young gorgeous bodies that are growing and developing in their microbiomes
and their immune systems is at this such a trivial point and I hear it all the time from
parents that feed their children rubbish and they're like oh well they're just kids that's
okay.
I'm like well no actually this child is going to grow up to that patient that's sitting
in front of me that has type 2 diabetes, that has cardiovascular disease, has all kinds
of issues, it's much more difficult to change the behavior than,
maybe easier than to just give them medication, than it is
to change that behavior.
But if we look at our children and what we're feeding
in our schools, guys, it's awful.
And what we're really, what does the home life look
like in these instances?
You know, the children can influence their parents
in many ways, you know.
They can start asking the questions, be like, hey,
I should be eating this.
I shouldn't be eating this.
Maybe I need to be looking at that.
They have a big voice here.
And that's a real big shift.
And I think, and I'm hoping that this will be something
that we can really kind of push through.
And I think that's our opportunity here with the IMA,
really, to support that in the most positive, healthy way.
Great. Thank you.
Dr. Turner.
Yeah. Well, I've enjoyed being on the panel
with Chronic Disease and working together
over the last several months.
It's been exciting.
I wanted to piggyback on this idea
of our children at our schools.
I'm from California.
As you may know, there's a Michelin star restaurant there
called Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
Have you guys heard of this?
Alice Waters.
Okay. Yeah, so she was a visionary and sort of pioneered farm
to table California cuisine.
Short story, she also got very motivated to reform school lunches
and she started something called the Edible Schoolyard Project.
I encourage you all to look this up.
It's really fascinating.
So what they do is they'll take the kids, they'll grow their food,
cultivate it, harvest it, learn how to prepare it,
communally helping each other out, you know, setting the table,
actually enjoying a meal, they'll learn nutritional facts,
the whole thing, and it's just been tremendous.
And so I think one of the key elements to ending chronic disease is
to think creatively and imaginatively and collaboratively,
such as projects like this, right?
Wouldn't it be amazing, we had Victory Gardens in World War II,
wouldn't it be amazing if we had, you know,
Make America Healthy Again gardens in every school with, you know,
associated horticulture on cooking classes, something like that.
Yeah, so can we bring up that slide real quick?
So I'm just wondering what's the biggest silver bullet for this list
of chronic diseases we have here?
Is it diet?
Is it exercise?
Is it something else?
Is it ozempic?
So yeah, Clayton first, if you had to start somewhere,
what's the biggest bang for the buck that we have here?
So, as I said, it's a three-pronged approach.
And that's, so I wouldn't pick just one.
I would say it's a lifestyle and habit
and outlook kind of approach to it.
It really is a whole health approach.
And I think that when people become more, it's an outlook.
It's outlook.
It's your approach.
That's really the one silver bullet.
And what I would like people to think, and I've tried
in late years really to push with my patients is that approach, that I have to live healthy,
I have to eat healthy, I have to exercise healthy, I have to sleep healthy, I have to
interact with other people healthy.
And I also tell folks that it really works, your health works to my mind, and if this
seems a little out there, then forgive me, but it really works in concentric circles.
You know, and we can think about concentric circles in two or three different ways.
We can think about them from the subcellular level up to the cell, up to the organ, up
to the whole human being, up to everybody you live with and around you.
Or we can think at the level of myself.
What do I do to keep myself healthy?
But then in order for me to be healthy, we can't have aluminum tubes spraying us with
God knows what all day long like they are.
We can't have, right?
We can't have our governments trying to poison us all the time and we have to, and again
at a more personal level, we have to have good relationships with our family members
and our friends to the fullest extent that we can.
So starting at this sort of core level and working out in a concentric circle kind of
way and looking at it as a whole lifestyle change.
I'll tell you with weight loss, I've had really good anecdotal success with folks saying,
look, really breaking down their diet.
Oh, doc, I'm trying.
Okay, I know you're trying.
When did you last have a donut?
I mean, I've got diabetics who have donuts every morning.
I said, you're not trying.
Forgive me.
I sound like a jerk, but I've been at my practice for 18 years, and they're veterans, so I can
talk frankly with them.
I said, you're not trying if you're having a donut every morning.
diabetic for God's sake and you know you can have this conversation at any level
but when you have that real heart-to-heart level and then it's got to
go ten levels deeper but when you start to have that and they start to think and
you can see the wheels turning then they come back in a few months and they've
lost ten pounds and they're motivated and the snowball starts rolling in the
right direction down the hill. Yeah Dr. Carmen what's your approach? I think
we need to remember in many ways that the role of the doctor is also the
teacher and that's actually what doctor means and I think that's such a huge
part in all this there's so many tests and so many supplements and so many
medications but what we've forgotten is that there's a human being in front of
us and that human being is complex and there's lots of different intricacies
have the candid conversations and guys I know this is difficult in some
allopathic settings you don't have very long with patients I get that you're
trying to get them out as quickly as possible but still we must try to
empower them so that they make better decisions for their health. They make
decisions out of empowerment rather than a position of fear because that's a
really really scary place to be. If you have feel like you have no other choice
that's not going to work and that's not going to work long term. Ask as the
patient you have to ask your doctor is the medication my only option and is
there something else I can do maybe before I take the medication to try and
And if I do need the medication, there isn't an issue with that, because we know this might be the case.
But how long do I need to be on it? And still, what else can I do?
And that is really, really important here. These diseases are all stemming from inflammation.
And when we are looking at inflammation, what's the key component here?
It's the diet, the lifestyle, and all the other sort of beautiful things that we talk about that can really support that and shifting that.
Yes, thank you.
Well, I mean, we just found out in the last few, I found out,
maybe you knew, that my government is actively trying
to poison me, and that was a bit of a shock, right?
But it's in my food, right?
And so now, like, Evie and I were traveling yesterday,
and I was trying to figure out how to eat healthy in an airport,
and it's almost an impossibility.
Everything's got seed oils for starters, right?
So, Dr. Turner, if you take somebody in and you shift their mind
in the practice but they have to go back out into the jungle,
how do you begin to create the critical mass of support I think
that's needed to take those insights and actually make them stick?
Yeah? Well, I guess when I work with someone and I want to bring
about some lasting behavior change in their health, you know,
they need a team.
to be someone on their side, some advocacy, some support, right?
Typically, it's a spouse that's ideal, you know,
maybe a trusted confidant, maybe a lady friend that you walk
in the neighborhood with, you know,
maybe a guy you play racquetball with, something like that.
But I think to your point, we all have a bunch of knowledge
in our mind that's fairly accurate.
We have a bunch of things we know we should do, but, you know,
putting into practice is a lot harder.
This is where some accountability encouragement comes in.
I would also just say, if I had to pick one thing that would,
You know, we have a list in front of us here of chronic diseases,
heart, cancer, you know, obesity, all these things.
I would say that the key element that's common is the mindset
of the person, that's really where we would have to start.
Because, for example, we all are carrying around behaviors
that are self-limiting or self-sabotaging
as regards our health, right?
Like we know we're supposed to exercise every day, why aren't we?
We're never supposed to go to bed on time
and I have screen time right before, but we stay
of watching Netflix, right?
We know we shouldn't eat M&Ms at work mindlessly, but we do.
They're in our drawer.
So we have to change our mindset.
And I think part of what I love to do as an educator,
as you mentioned, is to bring about a new awareness
and appreciation of your body.
If I could just spark an awareness and appreciation
of your body, it would fall into place.
You'd want to take care of it, right?
To use a guy metaphor, somebody gave you, you know,
Magnum P.I. Red Ferrari.
You know, you had a rich uncle or something.
You're not going to leave it outside
and let the squirrels jump all over the thing, right?
Or for the ladies, if you had some heirloom bone china,
you know, you're not going to let your animals eat off of it
and throw it in the dishwasher.
It's impossible.
Well, what is this frame right here?
Is this heirloom fine china?
Is this better than any Lamborghini
and Magna Purera Ferrari?
You know, it is.
And I use the example of people's heart.
Your heart's amazing.
It's the first organ that gets formed.
It's formed about 32 days after conception.
Now, understand that the egg is the largest cell
in the human body, but it's still small.
the size of a period at the end of a sentence, okay?
So that's the female egg, period at the end of a sentence.
You could fit about two or three sperm in the diameter of that.
From there, in just 32 days, you have a functional beating heart.
You go from a period at the end of a sentence to something that's the size
of an eraser head that has its own self-generating rhythm
and communication.
It's not just a glob of cells, it's a glob of cells that are organized
with the communication, with rhythm, with electrical impulses.
It's extraordinary, and that in turn lays the foundation
for the rest of the development of the baby, obviously.
Your heart beats about 100,000 times a day,
meaning if I gave you a million heartbeats,
that's only going to last you 10 days.
Meaning for the average human lifespan, that's about 2.5 billion
to 3 billion heartbeats.
So from something that you started as a period at the end
of a sentence, you have this self-organizing, communicative,
dynamic pump that is running 365, no days off,
doesn't run out of Wi-Fi, you know, doesn't need you worried
about is it going to keep meeting.
It's just doing its job faithfully 2.5
to 3 billion times.
Like what other machine does that?
You know, that's extraordinary.
That's extraordinary.
So if we understood that, would we do something
to take good care of our heart today?
You know, is that possible?
But, I mean, when you put it that way, Dr. Turner,
you almost make it sound better than Grok, which is, you know,
very, very impressive.
So, yes, that shift of mindset, Dr. Baker,
we have this hopefully a maha movement happening.
That's, how do you begin to connect that to your practice?
Right? So it's going to be good to have a bully pulpit up there,
RFK, obviously looking a lot healthier than any
of our prior so-called health officials.
And communicating that it's important that you take care
of this thing because it's the one thing you have.
Right? So how does that begin to translate into your practice?
How do we begin to support top to bottom, up and down?
That's a great question.
I would say two things.
I would say from the point of view of the doctor,
and again I have a certain amount of,
as I think you guys both do as well.
I have a certain amount of earned, I hope earned luxury
in that I've been where I'm at a very long time
and my patients know me and your patients self-select.
If they can't stand you, they find somebody else.
You don't have quite that same luxury,
but even the folks they have trouble with,
they're still yours.
You know, they're like a problem child, I guess.
But you know, so you have this great relationship
with overwhelming majority of the people that you're with.
And that's a great luxury.
So, but even that being the case,
I think you're absolutely right.
We have to say, look,
there's a movement happening right now after COVID.
And I'm very frank with my patients about COVID.
I said, I tried to,
I protected you as best I could during COVID.
I told people, don't get these things.
Stay away from these things.
And they still would go to Walgreens
and some pharmacist assistant would give them a shot.
But you know, that was wrong.
And I tell them that.
And I think we can't have even a personal reckoning without realizing that it's the
last five years that made most of us wake up, in large part myself included.
But I think you don't dwell on that.
Then you take it a step further and say, okay, what are we going to do about it at the macro
level and going down those concentric circles?
What are we going to do at the micro, at the individual level?
What are we going to do, you and I, working together to try and promote your health?
And I think you find out what is meaningful to the patient at a personal level.
You know, the notion that your body is a temple, whether it's a temple of the Holy Spirit or
whether it's just a temple, you know, if someone has any spirituality, if they have any religiosity,
I actually feel I can ask about that.
What does that mean to you?
Your life really is a miracle.
I mean, life is a miracle.
And that's really something you have to tell your patients.
Your life is a miracle.
It's a miracle that you're here, and we have to recognize it as such.
And then the second thing, and this goes back to that notion of fear and instilling fear.
Someone said to me just yesterday, it was yesterday, he said, Doc, I don't want to die.
And I said, look, you're 75, and even if you were 15, you're going to die.
And again, my patients, I can get away with this stuff.
You can't always on the first visit.
It may not be for 25 years, but you're going to die.
So let's just take that off the table.
What are we going to do with the time you have left?
There's a great article from 1980 in the New England Journal by a guy named James Fries,
and it's called The Compression of Morbidity.
I encourage everyone to read this.
This is a masterpiece by one guy, didn't get any NIH funding, then I know of to write it.
And what he said was, and this is back in 1980,
the human expectancy is now at, I guess he said at the time, 73 years.
It's gone up from about 50 years at the beginning of the century,
but the ultimate human lifespan is still about 120 years at most.
What we need to concentrate on now is bumping
up that 73 years a little further, but making sure that those,
however many it is, whether it's 73 or 85 or 90, are good years.
Compress the morbidity.
And I think that that is just such a key concept to promote in people.
And it's never too late.
I have a guy who almost drank himself to death.
He quit drinking in November.
He's getting paracenteses, he.
But he came in and I thought, well, he looks about the same.
He said, Doc, I feel great.
And I said, why?
And he said, in November, you told me you will die
within a year if you don't stop drinking.
He said, I stopped drinking.
And to have a moment like that is, it's a blessing.
It's a miracle to be a doctor through doing those things well.
But his life is a miracle, even as problematic as it is.
And I just can't stress that enough.
Anyways, I'll turn it over to you guys.
Yeah. No, thank you for that.
Yeah.
So, not only is life a miracle, but this was a big important realization for me.
I realized that I'd bought the pharma marketing at some point, which was that in order to
be healthy, I was in some unhealthy state, and I would have to go to the gym, I would
have to take supplements, or these things I would do, that if I really worked hard at
it, I could achieve health.
And I realized I had the wrong frame, that in fact, flip it, health is baseline.
Not being healthy is off baseline.
And our whole culture is somehow bought into just not being,
you know, we're off baseline so we need Ozempic and we need things.
Dr. Carmen, is that in a, what about the flip?
Do you have a comment on that?
I don't think we realize how much better we could feel.
And it can be really small shifts.
And I'm not saying stop being drinking is a small shift,
but the fact that he's saying that he's feeling better.
And I think we get really caught up in our heads
and we have patients with really complex problems.
And you know, you try to put these things in place
and then they come back and they're like,
well, you know, I did this and this and this
but I'm still not this.
You have to ask them, but is,
are you feeling better from there?
And listen to them say what, what, you know,
how they're really feeling because actually
those small shifts that they're making
can make really huge impacts in their health.
It doesn't have to be complicated.
Even getting someone to drink a bit more water.
I mean, those who know me will know
I will talk about hydration because cellularly
we are dehydrated massively.
and we need this for our immune function,
we need to be in a really balanced state.
So small shifts, you know, a little bit more sleep,
a little bit more movement, a little bit more of something
that you're layering into your diet,
a little bit less of something that you were eating before.
Like, what are you not eating now
that's actually helping you feel better?
Ask these questions, and I think we, even as clinicians,
need to ask ourselves, like, are there things
that we can do for our own health
so that we can be these beautiful advocates
for our patients?
That's such an important thing to look at, I think.
Well, while we're on that topic, we have two questions on the board
about micronutrients and supplements.
But are people actively missing these things,
and should they test for those?
Yes, so that's a fabulous question.
Should we promote making tests essential for micronutrients widely available
to enable rationally and safely achieving immunosufficiency?
So, excellent question, and yes, we should.
because the micronutrient deficiencies
that we have are enormous.
We don't have deficiencies in protein, guys.
We have deficiencies in micronutrients
and it's affecting our immune resiliency
and it's affecting our microbiome.
It's affecting our mental health.
I mean, how many kids now we're seeing
with huge mental health problems,
it's coming from what we're nourishing our bodies with.
But we need to look at this,
the micronutrients that we're getting from the foods.
And I know we have bigger problems here
because our food quality is challenged,
but we still have to find ways to really incorporate this
into our diet and our lifestyle in a way that's sustainable.
Yeah, and Dr. Turner, what's your view on that?
I'm a big fan of testing, metabolically speaking,
or from a micronutrient perspective.
We know that the most common mineral deficiency is magnesium.
Magnesium has a tremendous role in cardiovascular health,
brain health, nervous system health in general.
Vitamin D deficiency, fairly widespread, right?
We don't go outside, or if we do, we're wearing sunscreen,
or if we do, we're at a northern latitude
where we don't get much overhead sun anyway,
or it's winter, et cetera,
or darker skinned individuals have a tougher time
because the same rays that cause a tan
cause vitamin D synthesis, right?
So everyone should be having their vitamin D level check.
Everyone should, you know, look to get that 60, 70, 80.
We know what it does for COVID, other viral diseases.
We know what it does for cancer nowadays.
interesting enough, it's on the IMA monographs.
So that's a big deal.
And yeah, I'm a big fan of supplements, actually.
I mean, I'm a big fan of eating healthy, absolutely.
But there's things that you need to supplement
from an ideal biochemical perspective in your body
to get you at top level,
especially with immune health, as the question mentioned.
Yeah, fascinating.
So question, how do you shift
from treating acute conditions to prevention?
Clayton, most important steps.
The first thing is, and someone spoke in an earlier panel here, you've got to start young.
You've got to start young with the medical students and the nursing students and all
the healthcare provider students, but you've got to start young with your patients.
And you've got to also start wherever you find your patients.
So if your patients are, you know, 50 years old and they're pre-diabetic by A1C measurement,
And you've got to say, look, the horse isn't out of the barn yet, but it's going to be
soon.
And we really need to do all of these same things that we'd recommend for someone who
has full-blown diabetes, with the hopeful exception of excluding drugs.
We need to go after the diet and the nutrition.
And diet and nutrition aren't the same thing, which is another important point.
But we probably don't have time for that.
But the diet and the exercise and just the whole holistic look approach to your life.
And I think if you get people who are pretty healthy eating well, being properly nourished,
exercising and sleeping well, I mean, you're going to be a long ways from preventing chronic
disease.
I really believe that.
Yep, I just wanted to add, the question talked about
shifting from treating acute conditions to prevention,
which you very capably mentioned
as regards to the individual and the doctor.
I think also as regards our institutions,
we need a shift, right?
We need a shift from acute conditions to prevention
at the institutional level.
And again, I think the key ideas here are like
creativity, imagination, collaboration.
I'll give an example, I have a friend from medical school,
he's a family practice doctor out in California,
works kind of in a low income area,
And he came up with the idea of a pharmacy, F-A-R-M.
And they work with local organic farms.
And in the basement or in the lobby level
of their community health center, there's the pharmacy,
which is some farmer there with like boxes and crates of,
you know, fresh agricultural goods.
And the doctors can write a prescription and vouchers
to go to the pharmacy.
Yes. And they head right down to the lobby.
Isn't that cool?
Yeah. So, there's so much groundswell support
for regenerative organic agriculture,
for knowing, you know, sourcing of our food and all this.
This can be married to health,
and this should be institutionalized with some incentives
as they've done very capably in that example.
But I'm gonna add as well,
we also need to teach how to prepare these foods
because it's not just about getting the turnip.
That's what you do with it.
And I think that's, people get really intimidated.
You know, you know how to just throw on something
on the barbecue and slap some cheese on it
and put bun and job done,
But that's actually not very nutritionally balanced.
The vegetables, the farm produce that we might be getting,
how are we going to prepare that?
So let's start chopping vegetables.
Let's glorify and glamorize that again.
The part of preparing our food and cooking for ourselves
and sitting down to eat and chewing our food.
Guys, it's so important.
Like so much of our digestive enzyme production actually begins
in our mouths and we're just swallowing really palatable food.
So we need to really look at that piece as well.
So it's not just about the vegetables and here's the farm stuff,
but what am I going to do with it?
So that's huge.
I will also add to this, guys, you can get me started and I'm going
to keep going now and I only have two minutes.
And I was so nervous before I was telling Tanya how nervous I was.
Anyways, when we're looking at functional testing and we're testing
for micronutrients and nutrient deficiencies,
the other thing that we should really be looking
at is what is considered normal range and what is actually optimum range.
And when we start to look at prevention,
this is a really important point, okay?
You can be in a normal range,
but actually you may be feeling some symptoms
and your body's already starting to tell you those messages.
Now this is obviously where a little bit of patient
sort of autonomy and sort of understanding
body awareness comes in,
and that's a beautiful kind of piece
and maybe a conversation for another day
that we need to start exploring as well.
But let's look at what is considered normal
versus what is optimal.
And you can test for magnesium levels
and it will come back as within normal range.
But actually most people are suboptimal
in their magnesium levels.
And I would argue that with a lot of our micronutrients.
So we really need to kind of almost shift that as well.
Also, we need to look at what our nutrient status is.
What is set by the RDA or the FDA is considered, you know,
before like low deficient, you know, to prevent deficiency
and to prevent serious illnesses.
we need to far exceed that for so many of our nutrients.
And we need to have conversations around medications
that we're prescribing and the nutrients
that they're also depleting
because that's a huge issue and it will.
I'm a big proponent on using maybe metformin
in the case of diabetes,
but let's have a conversation on B12 and magnesium
because those will be depleted.
And so what is their nutrient status
coming into this place already?
So very, very, it's complex, I understand,
but sometimes it's simple shifts on looking at it
from like a bigger lens, particularly if you do lab testing,
you know, we need to look at those ranges.
And if I may piggyback you up, please.
This is a policy area that could be fixed readily
in the CDC, in the FDA, and it really should,
and I know we've touched on this here.
Currently, in my practice, a normal vitamin D level
is listed between 21 and 50 nanograms per milliliter.
I don't want anyone under 60.
OK, 21 is high enough so that you don't get rickets,
and that's about it.
OK, that's wrong.
So much of the stuff, and I have to say it's deliberate
because the people aren't stupid enough to really not know that.
And so these things really need to be magnesium levels.
What's the truly appropriate magnesium,
serum magnesium level for people?
What's the truly appropriate vitamin D level, vitamin B12 level?
And I think that really needs to be looked at.
And I'll tell you as a practicing physician,
I don't care who's running the CDC, I don't care who's running the FDA.
If you just change the levels, the doctors will follow.
If you make it 50 to 100, they'll just start giving the stuff out.
I hate to say it, but it's true.
And we can improve health at a significant level just
by getting those levels where they need to be
on the recommended normal levels.
I agree. I was, when I was looking for a silver bullet,
it was either the food we eat or vitamin D. There's some things we can do there.
Well, as we just heard in the earlier panel, a couple things.
One was that I was glad to hear that RFK sat down with Rollins from USDA
because what we're talking about here is you can buy the best organic produce,
but it may be deficient in magnesium
because our soils have been stripped out.
It's a complex topic.
Robert and Kat and I will be talking about farming,
like where you source your food from, very important.
I'm glad to hear about the pharmacy because get to know your farmer.
It's all about the soil.
That's really where this begins in many respects.
So a complicated story, but thank you everybody here
for making it enjoyable, fun, and easy to get to.
So big hand for the panel.
Thank you.
