Quotes from Mark Hyman

In a dramatic study in the journal Circulation, researchers attributed 184,000 deaths each year to the effects of drinking these sugary concoctions. These drinks have been proven to cause obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

That's why weight and metabolism are not math problems. The quality of the food you eat matters much more than the quantity.

Food is not just a source of energy or calories. Food is information. It contains instructions that affect every biological function of your body. It is the stuff that controls everything. Food affects the expression of your genes (determining which ones get triggered to cause or prevent disease) and influences your hormones, brain chemistry, immune system, gut flora, and metabolism at every level. It works fast, in real time with every bite. This is the groundbreaking science of nutrigenomics.

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 brain5 to make you eat more.6 You could have a year's worth of stored energy in your fat tissue and yet feel like you are starving.

carb diet leads to a faster metabolism and sustained weight loss.

Here's where things get interesting. 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.

When we combine foods that are high in nutrients, we naturally eat less, even with hungry fat cells. The key here is that nutrient-dense foods (real whole foods) are satisfying, while processed empty foods (nutrient-poor foods) are less satisfying, even though they may contain more calories! This

if you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. This seems perfectly logical. The problem? It's not true.

The lessons are clear. Live close to nature. Love deeply. Eat simple food raised sustainably (ideally by your own hands). Move naturally. Laugh and rest. Actually live. (And live longer, as it turns out.)

In a vacuum they both drop at the same rate.

The risk-averse are rarely emboldened by data.

Even after Dr. Barry Marshall, a gastroenterologist from Australia, proved he could cure ulcers with antibiotics to kill the bacteria (called Helicobacter pylori), his theory was still dismissed for more than a decade. It was only after he drank a beaker full of bacteria, caused an ulcer in himself, and cured it with antibiotics that his theory was accepted. Dr. Marshall won the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

And food is the biggest "environmental" regulator of that complex system we call our bodies.

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?

This is also known as patient-centered health care, rather than disease-focused medicine, and it is a fundamental underpinning of functional medicine—a revolutionary new way to understand the underlying causes of disease and how our genes, our environment, and our lifestyle interact to determine health or disease.

We know that if a study is funded by a food company, it is eight times more likely to turn up positive findings for that food company's product.

poop pills from healthy donors to reboot our gut. Early studies show that fecal microbiota transplantation can reverse obesity, type 2 diabetes, autism, autoimmune diseases, and more.

ASIAN-FLAVORED CHICKEN SKEWERS Serves: 4   Prep time: 35 to 60 minutes   Cook time: 10 minutes MARINADE: ½ cup low-sodium, gluten-free tamari 1 teaspoon grated fresh gingerroot 3 cloves garlic, crushed 2 tablespoons sesame oil 1½ teaspoons five-spice powder

Essentially, each scientist (or even each person reading the research) with a point of view adheres to his or her position with near religious fervor.

Between the health care that we have now and the health care that we could have lies not just a gap, but a chasm. —Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, Institute of Medicine, 2001 We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. —Albert Einstein

For instance, the first study linking saturated fats to heart disease, by Ancel Keys (on which 50 years of dietary policy to eat low-fat was based), looked at only about thirty men from Crete and their previous day's diet, and linked that to the fact that they had fewer heart attacks than people from countries where more saturated fat was consumed.

In other words, it is not how much you eat but what you eat that controls the metabolic switches.

Again, carbs shift your body toward fat storage (anabolism),3 while fats shift your body toward fat burning (catabolism).

Even if you consume less food and fewer calories, when you eat excess carbs or sugar, you trigger insulin, which turns on a fat-production factory in the liver and your fat-storage system, and you gain