The U.S. healthcare system prioritizes profit from chronic illness, leading to widespread health issues. Shifting focus to prevention and nutrition can improve health outcomes.
Highlights
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth. com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.
J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really want to get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And we are live, it's Dr. J in the house with Rob Edwards from HeritageHealth.
life. Today we're going to be talking about why are people in the United States so sick. We're going to talk about the sick care versus healthcare system, food supply, food quality and what you can do to avoid the sickness care trap, if you will. So Rob, welcome to today's podcast. How you doing, man?
Rob Edwards: Another good topic to talk about. It's been a couple of weeks and I'm glad to be here again. And put some of this information out there to help people that are sick and tired of, like you said, is going down the sick care system and see if there's some other options for you guys, as you're trying to figure out your health and maybe even your family self.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Yeah, absolutely. Now people, look at healthcare and if they have a capitalistic mindset, they would say sick people, healthy people should be where the profits made, right? If I'm healthy and I'm taking care of myself and I'm still paying my premiums, but not using the system, like insurance should actually make more profit, right?
I'm sorry. I should make less profit. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Make more profits. I'm not using the system, right? I'm paying in not using it. Therefore the profit should be made off of me. Therefore, insurance should be incentivized to get more people healthy and avoid this chronic sickness type of mill, right?
That's the thinking. It's actually 100 percent wrong. All the money is made on sick people. Premiums go up. Essentially, the Obamacare bill that passed about a decade ago says you can't, these healthcare industries cannot have more than 15 percent profit on their premiums, but there's no set price on what their premiums can be.
And so you can go look at premiums over the last decade and a half that they've gone from. Three to five hundred dollars a family with, a five to ten thousand dollar deductible all the way up to one, one thousand a month, a fifteen hundred a month with ten thousand dollar deductible.
So you have premiums going up across the board. And so what starts to happen is, you the sick person, you the healthy person that's making a lot of these good changes are still paying for the premiums of the sick person. And because that profit is capped at fifteen percent, it's the sick people that are actually where all the profit is being made.
And so because of that, there's no true incentive. to actually get people to actually do more preventative things with their health. It's if you have a boat insurance company, right? Let's say you're Lords of London and you have a boat insurance company and only one boat gets shipwrecked a year, right?
Do you make more money on your insurance with one boat going shipwrecked and it paying out one claim or a hundred boats going shipwrecked? Now, if you're thinking, you're like yeah, I'm gonna have more, essentially, more claims to pay out. So actually, you would think one boat going shipwreck actually makes sense, more profit.
No, because with more boats going shipwreck, there's more justification to increase the premiums, right? More premiums equals more profit. So what I'm trying to say here is the average sick person is actually very profitable. And when you look at a disease such as like diabetes, for instance, that disease, conventional medicine does not actually fix that disease.
That's a disease of high blood sugar. right? 126 mg per dl or the prediabetes is at 110 per mg per dl of blood sugar, right? Guess what? Conventional medicine just tries to manage that tries to lower that down either with so far, urea, older medications maybe metformin, maybe some of the new GLP 1 medications.
They're not actually changing how that blood sugar is getting in there via their diet. They're just trying to use the medication to control potentially the symptoms and eventually getting them on insulin because you're gonna burn out your pancreas. So the key metric is there. The average person. With diabetes, they're not actually making diet or lifestyle changes, number one, that are really fixing anything.
The American Diabetic Association has no true diet recommendations. Hey, if you have a disease of high blood sugar, why don't we get sugar out of our diet? Common sense things like that aren't even there. And then if we add in the element that the average diabetic has for other diseases. So the more sicker you get, then you end up getting spread out to all these other clinicians.
You go to an endocrinologist, now you're at the rheumatoid doctor because you're in chronic joint pain. Now you're at the kidney doctor because the number one cause of kidney transplants and kidney disease is high blood sugar. And then now you're at the your primary care because your immune system starts to go, you have more upper respiratory tract infections, and now you're having more let's just say we talked about gut issues, right?
Chronic gut. Now you have IBS. And you can see how all these conditions, now you're on acid reflux medications, and then now you're starting to get depressed because your health stinks and your energy stinks. Now you're on SSRIs. And you should see how the medications just keep on going. We have side effects of the medications, and one disease can sprout out to four or five other conditions.
And you're just trying to manage it, right? You're not really ever fixing the underlying cause. And that's the average person in our country here.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. And that's like lifetime value, right? So if you're the more sick you are for the longer period of time, you have a greater lifetime value than if you have just a short term, you get sick, you get better and that's it.
Yeah, I mean it always comes down to following, are there, there are always good people within the systems. It's just trying to understand the system as a whole. And that's what we're pointing out. Is that, to get off of this wheel, you have to start to thinking, start thinking about how did I get here in the first place?
How did I get sick in the first place? Cause that's what Justin's point is with like diabetes, for example. We already know what it is. We already know the problem. So if we can remove the problem or that what's, which is causing the issue. which would be one root cause element, right?
Then you're going to get better over time. Might not be overnight, but most answers aren't overnight answers. And that's the problem with with longterm medication, right? They're not answers to the problem. Their answers to you feeling better. And that's about it, right? They might stay off something, but they're not going to heal anything.
They're not going to move in the right direction. It doesn't give your body an opportunity to do that. Yeah that's well said, Justin.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: So out of the gate, just to connect the dots, there isn't an incentive for insurance companies to get people healthy because sick people are actually more profitable.
And how the system is, every doctor is their own specialist in their area of the body. And so I can't tell you how many times I see patients with gut issues. that have hormonal issues that have chronic brain issues, migraines, brain fog, chronic joint pain that would then take four different doctors prescribing four different medications and none of the doctors are worried about how the gut issue is connecting into the brain fog or into the migraines or how that's impacting the hormones and how the hormones are impacting the brain fog and the joints and everything is intimately connected.
So All these doctors are looking at their own individual symptoms, prescribing their own individual drugs and are not looking at the interplay.
Rob Edwards: And
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: because we make the assumption that they're a medical doctor, they have to know what's best. They have virtually no education in nutrition. They only understand that their system, their specialty, and nothing else.
And essentially, it incentivized doctors in the industry in how medicine is Let's say how doctors are educated with residencies and fellowships to specialize and get more and more specialized because they get paid more and more. But the more specialized they are, the further away they are from how everything is connected.
So you may be seeing someone with a. very specific, let's say, gastro doctor, but they're not even looking at how the food that's coming in because they don't really look at how food's connected, they don't look at how hormones interplay, they don't look at how stress and the sympathetic nervous system impacts motility and digestion, they're not really looking at food quality, do you know glyphosate is a registered antibiotic and can negatively impact your microbiome, are you worried about the kind of food you're eating, do you know about gluten sensitivity outside of just celiac disease, right?
Because all they know is about pathological issues, not more functional metabolic issues, right? And you really need doctors that are on the functional medicine path that are the ultimate GPs. Because today's GPs, they mostly, they don't have any understanding in functional medicine. Their job is to be the gatekeeper of the referral network.
Oh, okay, you have this issue, I'll write you a prescription if it's still lingering, let me get you out a referral to that doctor, that gastro, that neurologist. But I can give you the first line drug therapy, but that's it. When you see someone on the functional medicine side, we're gonna actually work on giving you and looking at the root cause of the physiology and start to address the root cause of that physiology.
There may be needs for referrals or people that have more chronic issues that need more symptom stabilization, but you still want to be working on getting to the root cause. Big picture, right? I'll throw a couple stats at you guys. We have total inadequate education in conventional medicine. Dr.
Justin Marchegiani No nutrition, no physiology and biochemistry from a root cause perspective. Everything is disease oriented. Hey, these, this thing with the physiology is not going well. What symptom? What drug? Versus, hey, why do I have acid reflux? Okay, what does that mean? What could be causing that? And don't just look to omniprazole or metapro whatever the acid blocker is, nexium, antihistamine, H2 blocker, whatever.
Don't look just to the drug. Why is that physiologically happening? And how do we actually fix the underlying cause of why this symptom is happening versus just go to the band aid? We have A sick care system that is focused on the individual systems and not how everything's connected. We're not, they're totally undereducated in nutrition and not looking at physiologically, physiology from the top down.
So if we have really crummy diets, really crummy stress, really crummy sleep, how does that then in fact affect the body systems, gut hormones, detox, nutrients, mitochondria? And if those systems are out of whack, then all these symptoms happen downstream. And if you have symptoms in the brain area, migraines or depression, psychiatrists, neurologists, if you have symptoms in the gut area, gastro, if you have symptoms in the joint area, you Rheumatoid, right?
And a lot of this starts because when 74 percent of American adults are overweight and obese, that means chronic inflammation, that means lots of hormonal issues, aromatization, estrogen if you're a guy, lots of processed food, lots of nutrients deficiencies. Dr. Justin Marchegiani 50 percent of children are overweight, 50 percent of children are overweight, and 77 percent of young adults are unfit for military service today.
And the average child's diet today. Can consume majority of 70% ultra processed food. So the first thing any good doctor nutritionist has to look at, they have to look at the food. 'cause the general trend is we are moving more in the ultra processed state. Dr. Justin Marchegiani more ultra processed foods, and we have more cancer and more chronic disease.
But we also have more drugs being thrown at these conditions. Now you think if the drugs are truly working, you would say more drugs for heart disease, more drugs for cancer, we should have a lower incidence of cancer and heart disease. Why is that not happening? It's not. It's like the exact opposite.
Anytime we throw more drugs at something, so now we're gonna be starting to throw GLP 1 drugs at it, right? The the glucagon peptide one. These are the Ozempic, right? The Mujaro. It just got approved in the last week for, I think, children, I think as young as three, to be put on these GLP 1 medications.
The problem is if, Dr. Justin Marchegiani If the average child's diet is 70 percent ultra processed foods, how does prescribing Ozempic fix that? It doesn't. And do you think the amount of diabetics will go up as more Ozempics prescribed or down? Dave Korsunsky
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Dr.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Justin Marchegiani It's probably gonna go up, right?
Because you're not fixing the underlying issue with diet, inflammation, nutrient density. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And then we can add maybe one element is toxicity. We have excess pesticides, organochlorines glyphosate. We decrease nutrients, we have less B vitamins, less fat soluble vitamin A, D, and K. We have less high quality amino acids.
We have more toxicity. And then, we, of course, we have lower electrolytes. So all those things are gonna put us on this negative track. But it's going to just be bouncing around the sick care industry. And none of the doctors look at the root cause. And here we are prescribing more drugs and we know more drugs prescribed at a certain area does not lessen disease because really more drugs just means we're managing symptoms.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. You can tell that you could tell that Justin's passionate about this, but yeah, it's, it's, this is an issue, right? So there's a couple of things to that. So one is conditioning, right? Is we're conditioned. As Americans to think that we should get things right away as soon as we want to like quick fixes.
So if you were to ask most doctors, like what is your plan for me getting off this drug? Most people are going to say there is no plan. And that's just, all we're going to do is throw a Zempik at something. Then how are we going to get you off of the Ozempik or is that going to be a lifelong thing?
You have to look at the underlying root causes, like what's going on in the gut, what's going on in the hormones, the immune system, the detox systems, the digestive systems, the. endocrine system, right? Looking at a full picture in terms of what are the possibilities that are making this happen and starting to address those like peeling back an onion, right?
Because that's the whole role of medication was always meant to be temporary. And now it's not temporary anymore because there's no way a child is going to get better longterm on Ozempic because it's not correcting anything. It's just filling in a gap. That's all it's doing.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: 100%. And when you look at the big regulatory agencies, whether it's the FDA or the USDA, when you look at them all for FDA, for instance, Over 50 percent of the funding for FDA to keep the lights on comes from big pharma or 50 percent of the funding.
I think it's up to 60 or 70 for the USDA, United States Department of Agriculture. This is food isn't to come from big Agra, right? And so of course, this is the fox guarding the hen house. Of course, if most of your money is dependent upon from agencies that you are hyper regulating and these agencies are putting foods in our body that are making us sicker.
that are making us depending more on drugs. And I get it. If people are like, Hey, it's great that we have access to more drugs. I understand the logic in that. That's great, right? But until you look at more drugs being prescribed does not mean less disease in a certain area. That is the problem that I have.
And part of it is because drugs, for the most part, do not fix the underlying cause. You don't have a statin deficiency and why you have chronic cardiovascular inflammation. You don't have an SSR SSRI deficiency while you have chronic brain fog and mood issues. Now it may have a short term palliative symptomatic relief.
kind of window for it. But in the end, if you don't address the underlying root cause, over time, things tend to get worse. Think of the last time you had a leak in your pipe in your home where let's just say you said, okay, let's trick, let's fix the symptom, right? The symptomatic way, the allopathic way of fixing the leak in your pike is putting a bucket underneath it.
You're fixing the symptom of the water coming out. You're at least gathering the water. It's not gathering mold, at least initially. Does that fix the problem? And does that pipe leak tend to get worse or better over time? right? Always worse. And so that's conventional medicine. So when you understand that it has a place if you and your wife come home and your pipes leaking, yeah, put that bucket underneath it.
Absolutely. That makes sense. But in the long run, does that bucket stay there? No, it should not stay there. So my goal is that he will look at things and just say, Hey, Where is conventional medicine great at? Where is it not great at? Where is the deficiency? Deficiency one is specialties are trained in only that spot of the body, that area of the body, and they don't understand the interplay.
Number two, they only have two major tools in their tool bucket. They have drugs, which for the most part, do nothing to fix most underlying issues. With the exception of maybe if I have a certain infection antibiotics would be a root cause thing, right? Or if I have a certain, inflammatory issue, maybe a steroid may have a acute benefit, right?
But most of the medications that are out there, the mechanisms are up basically inhibiting or blocking different enzymatic pathways. There's nothing root cause about that ACE inhibitor proton pump inhibitor, right? You look at the calcium urinase inhibitor, right? SNRI inhibitor, right? There's all they don't really do much to actually fix or up regulate physiology
Rob Edwards: again And the proof is in the name right inhibitor So like you want to Gabriella my daughter whenever she had a beta blocker,
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: right?
Right ACE inhibitor
Rob Edwards: there They're there are angio tensin
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: sepsis a blocker Yeah.
Rob Edwards: So when my daughter, she presents the inflammation when she eats gluten, right? And it comes out in their skin. And so originally we can put a steroid cream there. Maybe that'll help. The problem is what are we doing?
We're just blocking it. But what's happening to the inflammation? Is that going away? Did it just disappear? No, we just, we damned it up in one area. It has to still go somewhere else. And that's the problem is that we're changing physiological things in the body. What I do like about supplementation or whole food.
Or, those types of supplementation is whenever you're eating whole foods or you're eating certain foods or even supplementation that are derived from that, there are things inside of those that do multiple things. They're more adapted, adaptogenic versus harsh in one direction, if that makes sense.
So they're doing multiple things instead of just one thing. When we cut out one thing from our body, there's always going to be a downstream effect because it's supposed to work that way. So if you take a proton pump inhibitor, for example, or if you take Tums because you get an acid. Over time, you're going to ruin your acid, right?
And your ass is not going to digest the proteins as they're coming inside of your body and you're going to have protein issues, you're gonna have absorption issues, and you're probably going to have a dysbiotic gut. You might get leaky gut, and then you're going to have that stuff going through into your bloodstreams.
You might have. skin issues, brain fog, joint pain, right? All these other things that we tend to see that happen within the gut, but the biggest a lot of people are these long term, PPI antacid, kind of those types of people because their guts are destroyed after doing that for 20 years.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani 100%. And so we talked about the medication stuff. Medication makes sense acutely. Now where medicine thrives is medicine thrives where the root cause is the medicine. There is no, let's just say the underlying cause is not perpetually happening day in day out.
Rob Edwards: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Not chronic.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: It's not chronic. So i. e. I get a car, I get in a car accident. I break my leg, right? I'm not getting in a car accident every day. Therefore, the underlying cause is now stopped. The loop is closed on it. It's no longer happening. That's where conventional medicine makes sense the best because you don't have to worry about the root cause.
You're doing damage control, right? And so now let's say we have a disease. It's like a mini car accident happening every day under the skin at a biochemical. cellular level. And so now if you treated, put a drug in there to try to fix the symptom, whether it's high blood sugar or whether it's inflammation or whether it's fatigue, you're still not fixing the underlying cause because that cause is perpetually emotion.
It's like this happening at a cellular level. And so that's where conventional medicine does not work well. But the problem is 85 to 90 percent of all of diseases and health issues and healthcare costs come from that come from the chronic disease state. And when you have one disease, The average diabetic eventually has four diseases, and then you spread out in the allopathic specialized kind of medicine mill where each doctor is treating each symptom, none of them talk, none of them connect, none of them are working on the root causal infection.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, and even if you're like,
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: there's a
Rob Edwards: lot of subclinical things going on too with autoimmune, right? So diabetes type two is classified underneath that now and we're adding more and more in terms of the autoimmune component But you know a lot of people will get one autoimmune diagnosis and the reality is you probably have subclinical you probably have some clinical autoimmune in other areas of your body.
You just don't know where yet. And for you to figure that out, you'd have to go to specialists and specialists. And by the time you figured out your body, you'll have spent years and seen tons and tons of doctors and it still isn't going to get to the root cause. And that's the biggest issue.
But just to Justin's point to just simplify what he was just saying is like what the kind of damage that our body gets Is physical chemical or emotional right? The physical is like the car wreck. It just happens You're done your body heals it and then it's done inflammation goes away when it's chronic it stays in that loop But it also is chronically damaged It can't ever get back to homeostasis the way that it needs to And then it's chronically inflamed and that's what starts to create longer term issues and eventually You know, your cells can make the decisions that they want to make.
And that's where dysfunction, disease, and all those other things come from is eventually you're, you start expressing different genes or different dysfunctions because there's damage at the DNA site. So that's more like oxidative stress kind of things that are happening, but but yeah, so physical, chemical emotional is just that we know long term sympathetic.
You, you touched on that earlier. Justin is being chronically in a sympathetic state. It's going to be sympathetic. It's going to be. chronic level inflammation. Your gut is going to stop digesting properly. You're going to stop making your hormones properly, right? And we're going to start to see downrange issues with that.
And to your point earlier, you said a statin. If you take a statin and we remove cholesterol cholesterol is what all of your hormones at least all of your sex hormones are made out of. So we're going to start to have issues there too.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. And then statin, that's an HMG CoA reductase inhibitor.
right? Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, S selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, beta blocker, proton pump inhibitor, right? A angiotensin receptor inhibitor, angiotensin receptor site blocker, beta blocker, right? You can just go through all the medications. There's not really an upregulation in physiology, improving physiology.
Dr.
Rob Edwards: Justin Marchegiani We're
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: reducing inflammation in a way. Or if we reduce inflammation, like an NSAID now we're impacting the cells that help build up our gut lining and liver and heart, and then we can increase risk of stroke or gut hemorrhaging, right? So it's, okay, you can do this, but you're still robbing Peter to pay Paul even when it's used.
So we don't want to use it all the time.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. And I think a really good example of that too is just to look at cholesterol. Cholesterol is not an enemy. And I this, I know a lot of people talk about this, the real question is why do you have cholesterol buildup in the first place? Like why is it there? And then you start getting better. Exactly. And then you start getting better answers, right? So if we start to get damaged, when does cholesterol show up in the body?
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: And what kind
Rob Edwards: of situation inflammation, damage, that's how it shows up even the scabs that you get on your fingers, your hand, there's cholesterol in that because that's what happens when you get damaged, cholesterol is going to come in and it's going to do its job to help to heal you.
So if you have chronic level and cholesterol in your in your arteries, in your veins, it's that's going to be the reason why. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah,
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: 100%. So a couple of big things here. How do we get to where we're at? So first off, our healthcare system is not focused. It's focused on health.
It's focused on profit. And yes, sick people are more profitable. That runs counterintuitive to anyone who's have a capitalistic mindset. Capitalism is good, right? I provide a good service. I sell it to you. And ideally, if you're healthier the mindset should be that you should be using less of this service.
Therefore, you're more profitable. I'm getting premiums, but you're not using the service, right? That's not how it works because the more people do this thing that makes them sick, the more essential, let's say the more the more premiums go up. But also people don't realize big pharmaca or should I say big insurance companies, guess what?
A lot of big insurance companies own, they own a lot of pharmacies. And so then if you're on more drugs and then they own the pharmacies that they're getting the prescriptions fill that and they have massive markup on the drugs, then they're making more of their profit back on the medication side as well.
Does that make sense? So we have this kind of unholy, so we have the insurance companies having, owning a lot of the big, let's say pharmacy company. So they're owning a lot of the prescription drugs as they're getting filled up at the pharmacy. And then you have the premium hikes just going up like crazy as well.
And we need a structure, we need a system that incentivize more people to be healthy. So then essentially, so we have to essentially take our health back in our hands. And so what I recommend for that is. People should get an HSA, a Health Savings Account, that allows you to control with your money where your health money is going, so now I can use supplements, I can use it for my gym membership now, my doctor writes me, I can use it on my food, if my doctor says I need this kind of diet for my health, I can use it on my food, I can use it on supplementation, I can use it on biohacking modalities, a cold plunge, an infrared sauna, red light, so I can use it on those things, and then also, I have a high deductible, so now my premium cost is lower.
And I have a 10, 000 deductible with my family and I use a Christian based MediShare. Now you don't have to be religious to use it, but these are awesome things that are out there. And my deductible for my family for 10, 000, for 10, 000 is at 300 a month. Not too bad. Now you can adjust the deductible if you need it, but that's where my HSA comes in.
So I have more control over these. let's say, preventative cost supplements, food, nutrients, diet, so that I'm not gonna use the the higher medical services, and if I do it's probably gonna be a car accident, it's probably gonna be something like that and it's good to have those for those situations.
So we have the healthcare system 66 people are more profitable, we have the fact that doctors overly specialize and they have no connection to the root underlying cause. Food industry produces more processed food, most of our agriculture produces more that's funded and subsidized by the USDA is going to what?
It's going to corn. It's going to soy. It's going to grains. These are all ultra processed. And then you get all the flowers and grains and sugars that come from that. And that's spread out through big food. And so we have to understand that and start to not invest in foods connected to the big food industry.
So stay away from the soy, the gluten, the grains, the high fructose corn syrup, which comes from more grains as well. And then again, doctors totally total inadequate medical education, no nutrition, right? No supplementation. Nothing from a root cause perspective. Doctors are really good when it comes to physiology and biochemistry related to disease.
not health, right? So when I look at disease, Hey, what drug, what enzyme, what uptake port can I block that will help control that symptom to the patient could feel better. That's fine. That's good to have those things in the short run. But in the long run, you're not essentially dealing with a Celebrex deficiency or a Vioxx deficiency or a, Ibuprofen deficiency, whatever the pain or anti inflammatory is.
Some of those are old medications, I know. And then, of course, we have the fact that have a lot of legislation and special interests and lobbyists that are making it hard for, let's just say, the right decisions to be made. When our congressional candidates are making decisions for legislation guess what?
There's a lot of special interests that are essentially influencing. More of the big pharma, more of the big food, more of the processed stuff. And it's not gonna be coming from the top down from our legislation. So it's gonna be us really voting with our dollars, getting educated, and passing that education along to our kids.
Because our kids aren't gonna get that in school. The school system, there's It's, essentially full of a lot of processed food as well. And so they're not gonna get it there. And so it's gonna be top down from all the parents, from everyone else out there. Really making better decisions with themselves, having good family dinners, sitting down and educating their kids through example.
So showing them how they eat, take care of themselves, that's gonna be the key.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. And I think some of this comes down to the philosophy, right? We've been so coached or trained into thinking that we actually can't step up for our own health, that you can't do that. I'll tell you that with my kids, with Gabriella, the chronic the chronic rash that she had, somebody told us, the doctor told us to have her go in a bleach black bleach bath twice a week. And I said, no, that's not going to happen. So we started doing some of our own research. Of course, you have another daughter of mine that has Lyme. Okay.
Emily's had some hormonal issues and really at the end of the day, if you start studying this stuff first and foremost, you have to decide to start thinking differently. Take responsibility for your own health, right? Take responsibility for your children's health. Take responsibility for your family's health.
That's number one. Number two, appoint yourself a CEO over your body. Like I'm going to be able to make decisions here, right? Because a lot of this stuff, like Justin was saying is going to be common sense. You'll be able to figure it out. There's so much information out there.
There are some things that you need support with because you're just deficient in something. Or, you have too much overload or toxicities inside of your body, or you're really sensitive to things and you just can't figure it out. And that's where you need somebody like with what me and Justin do, they can walk you through that, or you need somebody like that, but essentially You know, your body's going to be the best doctor. Your body does know how to heal itself. And it has, if it has all of the right things that it needs and it's not overloaded with toxicities and stressors, it's going to start to rebuild itself.
And guess what? It takes time. So what Justin is saying is you might go for palliative care. You might go for temporary care to relieve some kind of a symptom. And that's fine. Cause if you're in a lot of pain or if you're in some kind of a situation where you need that relief, that's great. But we need to start getting the body back into position where it can heal itself.
And that's what functional medicine, that's what natural medicine is really trying to accomplish for people. One is to educate them. Two is to empower them. And three is to give them insights in terms of like, how do we actually get you back to healthy again? Not just reliant on some kind of a, pharmaceutical or bandaid or some kind of temporary solution that's never going to fix your situation.
Dr. Justin
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Marchegiani 100%. And really look at things for me. Functional medicine philosophy, right? When we have patients come in, we look at things holistically. I coined the approach, the SSS approach. That's the stressors, underlying stressors. We look at that first. That's our physical, chemical and emotional stressors.
Physical could be pain in the body, exercising too hard or too little, chronic pain from an old injury, emotional stress, right? You know what that is. Work, family stress, money stress. And then of course we have the chemical stressors. And this is what I call the hidden inflammation. This is where functional medicine does great.
Because we're looking at the nutrient density. We're looking at food allergens. Is there gut permeability? Is there, let's just say gluten sensitivity? Is there toxicity issues, heavy metals, pesticides? Is there a low stomach acid, low enzymes, right? So we're looking at all of these parasites, bugs, dysbiosis, H.
pylori. So are there other chemical stressors that are in the system that we're not aware about? Then that essentially puts stress on our body's systems. The systems being the hormones, the gut, the detoxification, nutrients, mitochondria, immune. And when these systems start to dysfunction not, it's not disease from a pathological standpoint, but this hyphen ease or this hyphen function, they're not functioning optimally, right?
Then we have symptoms that occur downstream. And this is where doctors do a really good job at looking at a symptom and saying, Oh, you have this symptom. I'm going to prescribe this drug, depression, SSRI. pain, anti inflammatory, right? Skin issue, topical antibiotic. And we don't really ever get to the root underlying cause.
And so you know that when we're just managing symptoms, we know more drugs being used. Does not equal less of an issue like I told Rob, we're having a little pregame chat. It's really fascinating because if I went to you and said, Hey, I'm going to give you access to an unlimited amount of drugs, unlimited amount of pharmaceutical drugs, and even surgical intervention.
Okay. Do you think you were healthier at the end of the year? with unlimited access to those things. I would say probably not, especially if you're taking a lot of those medications, there's going to be a lot of side effects. And also if you already have good health, there's no reason to take more of those things because you're just going to have more side effects, right?
But if I said, okay, now I'm going to give you access to unlimited amounts of high quality organic food. I'm going to give you unlimited amounts to high quality supplementation in potential biohacking modalities. Infrared sauna, red light, cold therapy, right? Are you healthier at the end of the year?
Exponentially more healthy, right? Why? If this thing is so good and I give you more of it, why aren't you healthy? But if I give you more of this thing, you're healthier. Why? And we know that because more drugs, More diagnosis, more drugs, we just see the diagnosis still go up. It's because behind the scenes, the root cause, the dietary issues, the stress issues, the toxicity issues, never get addressed.
And so if the root cause goes unaddressed, you can put lipstick on a pig, you can put paint over the rusty spot in your car, it's gonna come back and get worse over time. That's the reason why. And so because doctors don't see the connection and don't have education and nutrition and supplementation and lifestyle stressors.
The average doctor lives 10 years less than the average patient, right? We're talking doctor from a allopathic standpoint. So if they're living 10 years less, then they obviously, it's not something that they know and they're just not sharing it with you. They don't know it either, or they'd be practicing it in their life and that average doctor would be living 10 years longer than the average patient, but it's not that way.
So I don't think it's some grand conspiracy. I just think they're missing information, they're missing tools, and this is the result we have. And so it takes you now, the patient, to empower yourself and your family so that you can be in the driver's seat in making better decisions for you and your family.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, and I think there are like a couple different things on that. When you look at more of the functional approach, functional is really just the way that your body functions, right? That's basically what we're getting after. So essentially we're, we don't care about what the diagnosis is, right?
At the end of the day, we're not here to do that. We're not worried about what that is for the most part. What we're looking at is what does your body need in order for it to heal itself?
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Yes.
Rob Edwards: There's an innate understanding that clinicians have that practice functional medicine, that your body does know how to heal itself.
Okay. And either there's a toxicity or there's an interference or something like that's going on, or you're missing something that's not able to get in. So in other words, you don't have it in your diet or you don't have it coming into your body. And then we look at sensitivities and infections and stuff like that too.
But essentially that's what we're looking at. When you look at traditional medicine, typically what they're looking to give your body relief. And the problem with that is that if you're taking something that's just giving you a temporary relief, but the metabolic pathway is there.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Bingo. And
Rob Edwards: Justin's point is it's going to keep pressing and pressing until eventually you've got to take more medication, right? Because the dam has gone further, right? There's more pressure. And then it keeps pressing and pressing and then you've got to take more meds. And eventually, guess what?
There's nowhere to go.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Dr. Justin
Rob Edwards: Marchegiani We didn't have metabolic dysfunction. So we have to deal with the metabolic dysfunction, even if it takes you six months, even if it takes you a year. But if we can get the normal metabolic function happening inside of your body, guess what? You start to get healthy again.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Yep. I'll give you guys a couple stats here. 50 percent of American children are dealing with chronic disease and health issues. And that's up from 1 percent 50 years ago. That's a 50 time increase. 74 percent of American adults are overweight. 50 percent of children are overweight and obese, 77 percent of young adults unfit for military, I mentioned that earlier, 50 percent of Americans have pre diabetes and type 2 diabetes.
And again, the average diabetic, guess what the cost of care, lifetime care for the average diabetic is? It's somewhere between 3 to 5 million dollars. And you're not fixing the underlying issue. Yeah. Now, cancer, young adults, cancer rates are up 79%. 25% of American women are on antidepressants.
25%. That's insane. 40% of 18 year olds have a mental health diagnosis. 15% of all high school kids are on an SSRI. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. Autism rates are 1 in 36 nationally, up from 1 in 1, 500 to 2, 000, okay? 18 percent of teens have fatty liver disease, historically seen in late stage alcoholics. And again, like I mentioned earlier, a child's diet in the U.
trillion. Okay. So that we're talking about literally out of all tax revenue. We're talking about 60 to 70 percent of all tax revenue going towards ozempic for obese individuals, right? None of that fixes the underlying cause. Now there may be a small role for ozempic in people that are massively morbid obese that literally cannot feel full and have no satiation mechanism, but
Rob Edwards: you can do
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: that but you still have to fix the ultra processed food thing.
You can't give them that and say, okay, now, E delta processed food, plus there's other issues with sarcopenia and other potential metabolic issues that could still be caused with ozempic. Still has not fixed the underlying issue, there may be a small place for that, but you still can't ignore the root cause which is the 79 percent or the 70 what do I say here 70%, 70 percent ultra processed food, you have to fix that component.
Rob Edwards: That's insane when you think about it, 70%, right? So 70 percent of the time, most of the time that your child puts something in their mouth Here's your
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: plate. This, in your plate, is all crap, okay? That's insane.
Rob Edwards: It's endocrine disruptors, it's, problems with the immune system Red 40. Red
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: 40, which screws up hormones.
My kid, the other day, they were giving out like popsicles at the park, and my son, Aiden, is oh, dad, that's good, red 40. I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm like, I got you programmed the right way. So he's at least thinking about things.
Rob Edwards: And you have to understand too these are not whole foods.
They're not nutrient dense, right? So here's another little part here because I do also empathize with people that want to do the right thing. They're a little bit confused. Cause I talk to people all the time just like you do on a weekly basis and they get confused in terms of what they should do.
Like how do I eat healthier? How do I do things right? There's a couple of simple things that I share with people is number one, it's whole food and number two, it's nutrient dense. And number three, it's properly prepared. Like those three things are a good go by to go with. And then properly sourced.
So those four things. So just think about, again, don't go in the middle aisles of the store. And are there some things that are, that might be good for you? Maybe, but just shop the outside of the store as you start to learn more and more. And Apple, organic is preferable. Like Justin, you were talking about before this, you'd like to share good, better, best, right?
You can talk on that if you want to, but good, better, best is a good practice.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Now, people may be thinking it's easy for you to say, it's so expensive to eat healthy and I get that, right? Now there's a great book, I think it was Michelle Simon, it was called Appetite for Profit. She was at UC Berkeley.
The book came out maybe, I want to say 2008, 2009. I read it when I was in doctoral school and basically she was just talking about that the reason why junk food is so cheap is because it is subsidized by the United States government to the tune of 20 billion plus. When you subsidize junk food.
That's wheat, corn, and soy. That's what's processed to make all the junky proteins, all the junky sugars, right? Essentially wheat, your flour, that's in all the processed foods. Your high fructose corn syrup, that's from corn, right? High fructose corn, right? And so all the junk food that you see is artificially processed.
cheap. It's artificially cheap. And when you look at the nutrient density in it, the nutrition is just absolute junk. It's absolutely terrible in there, right? So when you look at the foods, I get the problem, but the issue is it's really an issue that's created by our government that's we really artificially made.
Junk food cheap. And that's a problem. Now, what can you do? I was a very poor college student for four to five years of my life, at a doctoral level where I think in California I was in the Bay Area living and I think I had my financial aid, I think, added up to 15 to 18, 000 a year, which in my area I would have qualified for welfare easily in the Bay Area.
I think it's like a family of all. Yeah. Dr. Justin Marchegiani what I did was, I just got like chicken thighs with skin on, those were always cheaper. I got the ground beef, I would shop now there's Costco which has some really good stuff in bulk, pretty good stuff. There's the local farmer's market, I used to do this thing called Eat Wild, so every week I'd have a bag of produce that's organic dropped off at my house.
And that was great. And that was like 20 or 30 bucks a week. And so I just prioritize. I just made a major priority shift. And I just try to get food in bulk. I'd always go to Whole Foods and get the family pack. I would stay away from steaks. I didn't have money for steaks. So I just got ground beef and chicken thighs and maybe some ground turkey.
And I got some skipjack can of tuna. I try to use like my coconut oil, buy it in bulk, get a big gallon of it. Do some of the cold press olive oil. I didn't do organic. I would just try to get at least. Eat from the clean 15, which is the environmental working groups, less pesticide residue or the avoid the dirty doesn't.
So I try to do that. I would do some of my fruit more on the frozen side and do smoothies instead of like fresh berries. And that's how I did it was a priority shift. And if you go look at Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. What he talked about in that book was fascinating. He looked at how much money we spent on food based on our income.
A hundred, I think it was back in the 1950s. It was 18 percent of our income was spent on food. Current day, it's nine. So we are allocating 50 percent less, 50 percent less of our income towards food. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And it's a wonder why we have more disease. Even though junk foods and certain foods are cheaper, the nutritional density is lower, the inflammation capacity due to all the rancid processed fats and seed oils and dyes and colors and sugar is up, which is causing us more inflammation.
And it's gonna just come down to a priority shift. And just be smart, try to choose the family packs, choose the ground beef, choose the clean 15, avoid the dirty dozen, do frozen if you have to. Just make those simple changes, right? The easiest, cheapest calories, amount of calories per your dollar is gonna be fats and proteins.
They're the most calorically dense. And so start with that and then go outward. I did it. My My wife and I, when she was, we were dating at the time, I would have this spreadsheet everything budgeted out of what I could do because I had so little money to live on at the time, due to, being a student and having financial aid, and I wasn't supported by my parents at all, and so I had to like, really do it, and so I know where it's at, and so when I say it, I don't say it from oh, from this I'm just a doctor, I'm in a different place of life, now you can do it.
It's no, I was there, and I know it's tough, but you can do it. And part of it is just really educating yourself. And if you go out to eat, and you have to go to, McDonald's, whatever, you get, get the burger, or go to Five Guys, or go to In N Out where there's a better quality meat, get the burger, get it boneless, or he's got a chipotle get a bowl, get the extra scoop of avocado.
Try to make simple choices like that. It's possible. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Rob Edwards: Yeah, and that gets into the good, better, best conversation, right? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yes. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And you don't need to get obsessed with best. I think best honestly stresses people out, right? It makes it more difficult for them to make a decision.
And then they end up just not continuing. So this is a process of which look, if all you can afford is good, then do good. If you can afford better, do better. If you can afford best do the best. So that's what we're getting at here. So like stewardship is the main thing, stewarding your body.
There's another part of the conversation, which is volume control. We eat a lot of food as Americans. A lot of people think they need a lot of food, right? And we Dr. Justin Marchegiani But the question
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: is, why though? Why are they eating a lot of food?
Rob Edwards: Dr. Some of it's because, right? We're not satiated because we're, all of the processed, the stuff that we're eating, right?
Also, our body gets used to, again, the metabolic pathways of desiring or wanting these processed foods, right? Your gut microbiome. You can send these particular six signals out where you're going to want those things. You don't feel satiated unless you get something that's processed. There is a bit of a detox that goes on whenever you start to change your diet and you got to be patient with yourself to go through that, as you're making these changes.
But even the
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Processed food. But
Rob Edwards: even one other piece here, which is it really isn't in a many ways, more expensive to eat healthy, because if I want to have lunch, I can go to sprouts and I can get an apple for about, a buck 20 and I can get a beef stick for probably buck 79, two bucks, right?
That's what is that? A total of three, something
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: like,
Rob Edwards: where am I going to go? If I go to McDonald's, I'm probably going to spend three or four bucks there too. So like you said, it's a priority shift. Is it more difficult? Yeah. There's no drive through at sprouts, right? There's no, like it's just a priority shift and it's thinking about different.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Oh yeah. I would just, I would change everything, right? Anyone on, snap or food assistance, I would just give them the food. Hey, based on your height and weight, this is what you need nutritionally. Here is the dozen eggs for the week. Here's the two, three pounds of meat here. I would just say, here it is in the bag.
Eat this. Because if you're using that money and you're buying processed food, that's only going to add more cost, right? So we can easily just take, so we can fix that element by just providing whole foods to people that are in need, number one. And my thought experiment is good, better, best.
Here's my example. I can get the Let's say the good, let's say eggs that are like 2. 99 a dozen, but then there's like the organic that are like 99. Then there's the free range, pasture range, Vital Farms, Alfresco Farms, that's like 7. 99. It's okay, so that's 3 to 7. And if I'm doing, let's say on average, 4 eggs per serving, that's 25 30 grams of protein.
And that's, if I do the 3 one, now I'm at, my meal literally for my protein and fat there is 1. If I use a little bit of ghee or butter, now I'm at like 1. $1 and 5 cents, right? Yeah. So there's a good meal right there. And I can go buy a big jar of sauerkraut in bulk, right? Have a scoop of that. Good options are, you go to Costco now you can get lots of things in bulk.
So that's like a one to $2 meal there, or like an easy thing would be like. Skipjack tuna, like one to two cans of tuna. I can get that for three to four bucks max Maybe some avocado oil and maybe some cut up some shredded kale and throw it in there and mix it in and stir it up that's an easy thing out of the gate you can do
Rob Edwards: Yeah, and that's these are all like just you know, part of this is prioritization I remember like whenever you played football, right Justin, so I remember this shit just an analogy, right?
Like anytime you do something new it takes time and every season that we get into the season we have two days You And they were paying, but it was to get you used to it. You had to get into the mode. You had to get into the rhythm so that you had to change your life again. And so it's the same kind of thing with this for some people that haven't really approached making these changes or prioritizing like Justin's talking about, it's going to take a little bit of work. I think it was it a Anthony Robbins when he has people write their name? Do you remember that?
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: Yeah.
Rob Edwards: Get people write their names with every other letter. And gave them like, I don't know, you timed it and nobody could do it. And then they did it a second time and they got faster. They do it a third time, they get faster. And that's where we all begin at. We all begin somewhere. Maybe you're used to going to McDonald's every single day.
Maybe you're used to like just flying by the seat of your pants. That's why you eat the way that you do, but you start prioritizing, make things differently. It'll start to be more natural. in your life, like how you're doing these things. It creates a rhythm over time. So
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: A hundred percent now just to highlight the appetite thing.
So I did one meal with you. That's a buck. You can do the tuna fish thing. That's three, four bucks. You can get a nice rotisserie chicken. That's 10 bucks at Whole Foods, and that'll be at least 3 4 meals, right? You can get some of the organic greens that are already pre shredded at Costco, there's some good options there.
So it's doable. It just takes some planning. And yeah, you probably have to buy a little bit more in bulk, you have to look at the proteins and fats first and that's a good option. But regarding you said about the appetite thing when you're eating processed The more processed they are, the more they're gonna be, let's say, palatably enhanced by our wonderful food scientists.
And so these foods are gonna hit the taste buds in a way, and it's gonna be really hard to feel satiated and full off of it. And again, the satiation signals in the brain don't really work well with just processed carbs. That's why the Pringles of the commercial, the Pringles commercials of the 90s were like, hey, why don't you pop?
You don't. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, stop. Yeah. Or just think about your experience when you're hungry, everyone has an experience where they just like literally went house on a whole pizza. It's good luck. If that was a steak, if that was a 30 or 40 ounce steak, you wouldn't be able to do that.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. It purposely isn't it's purposely not tripping your garden and your left and right, which are the things that are there to make you feel full. And so it is interesting, like how many times have you sat down and ate like. three apples in a row, or like you wanted to eat three bananas in a row, right?
Like that just, that doesn't happen. And to Justin's point, like these are all hyper palliative foods. They're made in a specific way. They're made on purpose that way so that you can eat and eat and eat and not feel satiated. Cause it's not going to trigger those hormones, right? In fact, some of those are hormone.
disruptors. That's part of what plays into that. But if you're eating good protein, a good carbohydrate, good fat inside of each of your meals, you're going to feel satiated. First, you might you know, when people make the change at first, if it's all these healthy things, right? You might not feel full at first, but eventually you will, like eventually it'll start working properly.
Cause again, these are metabolic pathways that you've got to create inside of your body. And that takes time to do a couple of days, three, four days.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: And when you're making choices, shop the outside of the Dr. Justin Marchegiani The grocery store, that's where the freezers and the fridges are. So you're not in boxes, right?
It can actually go bad. So the outside perimeter where things have to be kept in refrigeration, and don't worry about organic out of the gate. Now, if you can do things that are more natural, quote unquote, doesn't mean much, but sometimes you can see things that are hormone free, antibiotic free for meats, that's better.
That's one step up. Evan Brand And then you can go So, let's say maybe it's like a step two where it's more organic but maybe not grass finished and then you can go to like the pasture fed and more local. And so those are your big options. And sometimes it's even cheaper to just go look nearby.
Maybe there's a good farm nearby where you can buy a quarter of a cow and if you have a, good size freezer, you can put a hundred pounds of it in there. cryovacs and then you could, you can lean on that and then the price is down to three to four dollars a pound. So there's definitely options to make it work there.
But good, better, best, use the clean 15, do some of the frozen if you need. I tell patients a conventional produce that's fresh is always better than an organic that's on its last leg. So if you need to go conventional, look at the clean 15 and then just, wash your produce with a grapefruit or hydrogen peroxide spray that kind of get any of the pesticides and things off of it.
Let's start there. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And then again, look at the whole healthcare system, understand where we're in, understand how everyone is hyper specialized and doctors, by your conventional allopathy, doctors do not have a really education in nutrition or root cause physiology. They're really good at pathophysiology, not root cause physiology, not looking at optimizing function, they're looking at treating disease, right?
So totally different things. If you understand that, you can get the big picture here and understand the dire state of. Circumstances that we're in, right? The sad state of affairs with our youth and our general population with all these disease rates happening and then just say, what can you do about it?
So hopefully we gave you some good ideas of what you can do today. Anything else, Rob, you wanna?
Rob Edwards: I just think in terms of a hope, like this can be reversed. This is a mindset. The reason we got to these stats is because of our mindset and we can change our mindset. And you put these things into practice with your kids.
70 percent of you guys listening today, depending on who you are, 70 percent of you guys probably have this issue with your very own kids. So start to change your mindset, start to take control, start to take a responsibility over these things in terms of your own health and also your children's health and start making a plan.
That's what you do. If you guys have any kind of issues beyond that, I mean it can be helpful obviously to go through and understand what nutrient deficiency you actually have with an organic acids test. I maybe understand that there's some kind of a underlying causes in terms of toxicity, toxicities with parasites or, like Justin was saying, bacteria, yeast, all these other kinds of things.
So you can, we can check those out too. But ultimately guys, it's just, Giving you guys hope we can change these statistics or at least you can change them in your own home and in your own life. So you know, wish you guys well in doing that.
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: And a lot of the stats that I gave everyone, those are all governmental stats, right?
Governmental peer reviewed stats, whether it's CDC et cetera, right? Or USDA based studies. So this is, it's in our face. And you, you don't, you can't change unless you don't know the circumstances and where we're at. And hopefully that gives people some motivation to, to make some good changes.
And if you guys want to dive in deeper, if you want someone in your corner on the functional medicine side that, that understands what we're talking about here, feel free to reach out to Rob. Heritagehealth. life, L I F E link down below, and drj at justinhealth. com. We work with patients worldwide, so if you want to get the insight in on the root cause of what's happening with you, diet, lifestyle, deeper functional medicine, lab testing that looks at symptoms, not just disease we will be there to help you out.
And if you enjoy it, just share with one family member, one friend, it'll help them, and put your comments down below. Love to see you guys. All right, take care. Dr. Justin
Rob Edwards: Marchegiani
Dr. Justin Marcheiani: All right, bye.
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