--:-- Daisy Wolf: When it comes to longevity, Mark Hyman says it's not the heroic interventions that matter most. It's the small things you do every day. In this episode, a16z partner Daisy Wolf sits down with Mark, co-founder of Function Health, to walk through what he actually does for his own health. We get into strength training, protein, supplements, sleep, meditation, sauna, cold plunges, and why Mark believes muscle is the currency of longevity. We also discuss how testing and AI could change preventative medicine by helping us understand what's happening in our bodies long before it becomes disease.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: Mark, today we are going to dive into what you do for your own health. I'm very curious — we're going to be honest because I think we all look to people like you and think, are we doing enough? I'm very curious what a good day and a bad day looks like for you as it pertains to food, exercise, supplements, sleep, tracking, diagnostics. Let's talk about an average day. What time do you wake up? Do you do it with an alarm? Do you do it naturally?
--:-- Mark Hyman: I usually don't wake up with an alarm. I usually wake up naturally around 6:37. And if I say what is my typical ideal day, what would I be doing? It's not about getting it perfect. It's about the little tiny things you do every day, the little investments in your health bank account that add up and pay massive dividends. You don't have to get everything right, but if you stack the deck in your favor, it's going to end up helping you to have energy, to feel good, to sleep well, to prevent disease. It's not the giant heroic things like a seven-day water fast that's going to really make the difference. It's the little investments every day. So if you only have 10 minutes to meditate, just do it for 10 minutes.
--:-- Mark Hyman: This morning I had something to do, so I did a 10-minute meditation instead of a 20. That's the first thing I do — I never turn on my phone before I turn the lights on. It helps me ground for the day. I do a little gratitude practice, naming three things I'm really grateful for. It's a great way to start the day with a positive mindset. Then I'll typically work out. I'll do a pretty hard 45-minute strength training session at my gym. If it's a nice day, I'll take my bike and go for a 45-minute bike ride — lots of hills here in Austin.
--:-- Mark Hyman: Then I usually have what I call my longevity shake. That's how I start the day. It has whey protein. Whey is really important for building muscle, and muscle is the currency of longevity. If you don't have muscle, you will become frail and dysfunctional, and that's what ends up killing people. I make sure I have a good load — about 40 grams of protein after my strength training, with creatine, five or 10 grams. Ten is more good for the brain, five is good for the muscles. I put a lot of other things in there: prebiotic fibers, probiotics, polyphenols for the microbiome, Urolithin A — a mitochondrial booster and longevity compound — and sometimes a little extra fatty acids. I add some strawberries and cashew or almond milk, blend it up, and that's my breakfast.
--:-- Mark Hyman: Sometimes if I'm on a peptide kick, I'll do peptides like BPC-157 and TB-500 for tissue repair. This is advanced lifestyle stuff. You don't want to get into all this unless you've already got the basics. If you're not eating well, exercising, sleeping, or if you're under constant stress, it doesn't matter how many vitamins or peptides you take. Peptides are essentially mini proteins — less than 20 amino acids. Ozempic is the peptide of the day. Insulin is another peptide. The body has tens of thousands of these peptides, and they control everything: hormones, immune system, tissue repair, healing, inflammation. I use them to improve my health. It's a little diabetic syringe — I'm a doctor, so it's not a big deal — but it's a bit invasive. If I've had injuries from working out, I can inject it and in a couple of days it's dramatically improved. I'm a big fan of peptides.
--:-- Mark Hyman: By the time I get all that done, it's probably 8:30 or 9:00. Sometimes I'll do a workout later at 9:00 and my shake at 10:00. I might do a 12 to 16-hour fast depending on what I'm doing from the night before.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: Is intermittent fasting good or bad for women? People have mixed opinions on that.
--:-- Mark Hyman: It depends on your overall health. If you're skinny, it's probably not a great idea. If you're underweight or going through hormonal shifts, it can be challenging. If you're trying to get pregnant or dealing with hormonal issues, it can be challenging. You have to listen to your body and do what feels good. The minimum people should do is 12 hours. Most people don't even do a 12-hour overnight fast. If you eat dinner at 6 PM, you can eat at 6 AM. If you eat dinner at 6 PM, you can eat breakfast at 8 AM — that's a 14-hour fast. Most people can do that.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: What's an average lunch for you?
--:-- Mark Hyman: An average lunch would be, for example, this afternoon I had my jar of mackerel — canned mackerel — with seed crackers that I love, made from flax, sesame, and sunflower seeds. It's quick and easy. I get a lot of omega-3 fats, protein, fiber, and minerals. Or I might make a fat salad with arugula, cherry tomatoes, avocado, olives, toasted pumpkin seeds, maybe some goat cheese, and a can of sardines, mackerel, or salmon with lots of olive oil. You get omega-3s from the salmon, fats from the nuts and seeds, olive oil, and avocado. You get a lot of vegetables and a lot of fat, which makes you satisfied and not crave sugar.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: Snacks?
--:-- Mark Hyman: I'm not a big snacker. I think snacking was a modern invention. Humans never really did it. There weren't snack foods when we were hunters and gatherers. Even in agrarian societies, people just ate meals. The promotion of a snacking culture has been a huge problem for America, contributing to the massive rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes. I'm not a fan of snacking. That said, if I'm hungry while traveling, I have a whole snack pack. My wife raided it the other night at a hotel because she was hungry, so I need to replenish it. I have salmon jerky sticks — Patagonia or Epic bars. Salmon sticks, venison sticks, or bison sticks — kind of dried meat. I put nuts in my bag — cashews, almonds. I also have nut butter packets, like cashew butter, that keep for a long time in my backpack. I never get into a food emergency.
--:-- Mark Hyman: If you get into a food emergency, you'll eat whatever is there. I was once traveling, had a conference at 6 AM, my flight was delayed until 3 AM. I felt sorry for myself, I was tired, and there was a Cinnabon at the airport. I went for it. That was a real moment for me — probably 20 years ago. I haven't had one since. You don't want to be in that situation, so always have food on you. I always have food on me. But if people are hungry, having a piece of fruit or some nuts is a perfectly good snack.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: You heard it here first — Mark Hyman, one Cinnabon 20 years ago in an airport.
--:-- Mark Hyman: I had the one with nuts because my rationale was it had more protein and fiber, so it wasn't so bad.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: Do you have any indulgences from time to time? What's the worst?
--:-- Mark Hyman: I do like chocolate — I'll have dark chocolate — but my kryptonite is ice cream. I love ice cream. If it were up to me, I'd have a pint every night. But it's not up to me, it's up to my higher self. I don't want the consequences. Every six months or so, I'll have Chunky Monkey or pistachio from Jeni's. I love that, but it's not a regular thing.
--:-- Mark Hyman: I believe flavor always follows the quality of the food. When I was in Sardinia writing my book *Young Forever* about longevity, I met this guy who served us a nose-to-tail pig meal. He said, "We flavor the animal before we kill it." They feed them carob, acorns — they're literally flavoring the animal. Shepherds know that if their goats and sheep eat certain things at certain times of year, the milk or cheese will taste better. That's about the medicinal properties of the food. I always like to eat really good quality, simple food. Last night I had a Japanese sweet potato — a purple sweet potato from Okinawa, one of their longevity foods. The purple is full of phytochemicals. I used ghee and salt on it, and that was it. I also ordered lamb chops. I usually have stir-fried mushrooms or broccolini — two or three vegetables and a piece of protein. I try to avoid sugar or too many starches. I don't eat much pasta, noodles, rice, or grains.
--:-- Mark Hyman: I'm 65 and my body composition is about 10% body fat. Visceral fat is the killer — that belly fat you get as you get older. Almost everybody in America has it, and it's driving diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Keeping your sugar and starch low is one of the best things you can do for your health.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: It sounds like you're not explicitly gluten-free, but you do largely avoid it.
--:-- Mark Hyman: It's important to know what your biology is. Testing is critical. Most people don't know where they fall on the spectrum of gluten sensitivity. Through Function Health, we test for celiac antibodies with a much more extensive panel than traditional doctors — five different tests instead of one. You shouldn't have any antibodies to gluten. If you do, it indicates your body is reacting to the protein, which means you have a leaky gut. The range goes from zero to 19, or zero to five for another test. If it's three or four, or even one or 10, your body is creating a response. It's always worth a three-week trial of removing gluten to see what happens. Most people have no clue how food affects their body — how it can make them feel bad or good.
--:-- Mark Hyman: Gluten is one of the most problematic foods in our food supply right now. It's hybridized — not GMO, but hybridized in a way that creates more gluten proteins that are more inflammatory. It contains amylopectin A, a super starch that's worse than sugar for your blood glucose. It's sprayed with glyphosate before harvest to desiccate it. It's in everything. It also contains calcium propionate as a preservative, which has been linked to issues in animal studies. There are a lot of problems with modern wheat. Probably 20% of people are gluten sensitive, which is a lot.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: We're in a protein craze right now. Do you try to have 100-something grams of protein?
--:-- Mark Hyman: When you're younger, you have a lot of trophic hormones like estrogen and testosterone that help maintain muscle. For women in menopause and men in andropause — a slower, continuous decline — hormone levels drop. We see this a lot with Function Health. As you get older, you have to preserve, maintain, and even build muscle. I had a health issue this year, lost weight, and gained back 25 pounds of muscle because I knew what to do with training and protein. According to the Protein Age Group — an international group of protein experts — after age 60, you need between 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram. That's about a gram per pound of ideal body weight. If you're 180 pounds, you need 120 to 180 grams of protein a day. That's not easy, but it's really important, especially if you're strength training.
--:-- Mark Hyman: Quality matters. Animal protein is a much better catalyst for muscle synthesis than plant protein, which has lower levels of leucine — an amino acid important for stimulating muscle growth. Whey is one of the best sources. Whey and creatine are a great combo for protein synthesis, but it doesn't work without strength training. What's happening now with GLP-1 drugs is terribly frightening. People take these drugs, aren't hungry, don't eat much, don't get enough protein, don't strength train, and lose significant amounts of muscle. That means a slower metabolism, and they'll eat less food even at the same weight they were before. It's important to eat enough protein and strength train while on GLP-1s.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: It feels like that's a key contributor to rapid weight increase when people stop GLP-1s — they've lost a lot of muscle.
--:-- Mark Hyman: People get "Ozempic face" because the muscle comes out of their face.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: What supplements are you taking right now? When do you take them? What are you taking them for?
--:-- Mark Hyman: What's interesting is that through Function Health, we see staggering rates of nutritional deficiencies in the population. Even among people who are more health-forward, 70% are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level — not what you need for healthy bones with vitamin D, but the level to avoid rickets. That's 30 milligrams per deciliter, but it should probably be 50. We have a nutrient-poor diet. I don't have those deficiencies because I make sure I take supplements.
--:-- Mark Hyman: A good multivitamin is important. A good omega-3 fatty acid is important — we're one of the few places that checks your omega-3 levels, and 90% of people are deficient at some level. Vitamin D3 with K2 is a staple. I take a probiotic — Seeds is my favorite — for gut health. Then I take what I call a longevity stack: things that help my mitochondria and the aging process with good research behind them. I mentioned Urolithin A — from Mitopure — a pomegranate derivative that, when metabolized by a healthy gut microbiome, turns into a postbiotic that reduces inflammation, improves mitochondrial health, cleans up old mitochondria, and makes new ones. I put that in my shake.
--:-- Mark Hyman: I use creatine to boost muscle mass. I take NMN or NR — there's good research on that for the mechanisms of aging. I take Fatty15, a newly discovered essential fatty acid that's anti-inflammatory. I take a little CoQ10 and support for my detox system with N-acetylcysteine. I try to help my gut, microbiome, mitochondria, and immune system. I also take Himalayan tartary buckwheat — an ancient grain in capsule or powder form — which has immune-rejuvenating properties. I look for products with good data, and there aren't many. I'm very selective.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: People often ask, "I'm doing Function — what add-on tests should I get? What imaging should I do?" Can you walk us through two examples? One for people who want to make sure they're catching severe issues that could kill them early, and one for people who are truly trying to optimize their health.
--:-- Mark Hyman: The basic membership includes over 110 biomarkers that look at almost every system in your body — heart, immune system, hormones, autoimmunity, toxins, metabolic health, nutritional status. Depending on where you are in life, you may want different things. If you're older and have Alzheimer's in your family, there's a robust brain health panel with newer biomarkers — almost like a blood test for Alzheimer's that can detect it decades earlier. We also look at cancer screening. If you're 20, you probably won't do this, but as you get older, there's the Galleri test — a multi-cancer detection test for over 50 cancers. It's not perfect, but it's better than most screening tools.
--:-- Mark Hyman: If you're concerned about toxin exposure, you can do a deeper dive on PFAS, forever chemicals, and BPA. If you have chronic fatigue, you can do a viral panel with your immune system. For cardiovascular health, you can look at subsets of different cholesterol molecules. For hormones, everyone gets a basic panel, but you can add extended hormone panels. The beautiful thing is you can choose your testing and add on things. If you want to look at zinc or an extended mineral panel for selenium, molybdenum, iodide, CoQ10, or chromium, you can do that. If you want to go all in, you can get an Ezra scan — a full-body MRI that gives you a sense of risk for hundreds of diseases. We've saved so many lives. I just got a text from a friend who did the Function panel, saw a bad cardiovascular risk profile he didn't know about, got checked out, and needed a bypass immediately. People have found cancer they didn't know they had, and it saved their life.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: Talk to me about your environment. How much are you thinking about microplastics, toxins, household products, skincare products?
--:-- Mark Hyman: I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group, a research and lobbying organization that identifies removable sources of toxins in our environment. At EWG.org, there are free resources. They have a Dirty Dozen list — foods you never want to eat unless they're organic, like strawberries. And a Clean 15 list — foods with very low pesticides, like bananas or avocados. You don't have to shop only organic.
--:-- Mark Hyman: They have guides on choosing fish low in mercury and meat that's safest for you and the planet. They have a Skin Deep database with an app where you can scan any skincare product — lotions, creams, shampoos, makeup — for toxins. They also cover household cleaning products. If a product has a skull and crossbones and needs to be locked away from kids, you probably don't want to use it in your house. I'm strict about household cleaners and detergents. I build these into my automatic habits — I only buy clean brands, so I don't have to worry. I have a reverse osmosis filter in my kitchen for drinking water and an air filter in my bedroom and key rooms. That's how I minimize exposure.
--:-- Mark Hyman: You can't do it 100%. My joke is that if humans were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat because we're so full of environmental toxins. We're at the top of the food chain. But you can minimize your exposures and reduce your risks. Microplastics are another big one. Drink from a steel bottle, not plastic.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: You've always been on the cutting edge. How do you decide where to draw the line between what's clinically proven, what's emerging, and what your gut tells you is right — for what you're doing, less so advice for others?
--:-- Mark Hyman: I might be more adventurous, but there has to be some scientific rationale or evidence. It has to have a safety profile and no serious downsides or side effects. Price is also a factor. For example, I find the work on plasmapheresis interesting. A lot of science labs funded by Silicon Valley billionaires are looking at interventions to reduce aging or clean out old damaged proteins. Plasmapheresis is blood cleaning — a medical technique used for decades in hospitals, now being applied to remove inflammatory damaged proteins and toxins from the blood. I'll do that. It's on the edge, but the data is there, so I'm willing to try it.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: What's one thing that gives you hope about this current moment, where we're seeing more focus on personal health than ever before? And what's one thing that gives you pause or concern?
--:-- Mark Hyman: We're at a radically historic moment in medicine right now. Most healthcare, medicine, and government have no clue it's happening. It's the intersection of a number of radically big trends and innovations. One is reimagining biology from a systems perspective — how everything is connected, how the body is a network system.
--:-- Mark Hyman: Even though we have specialists in organs and diseases, it's not actually how the body's organized. When scientists started funding and researching the hallmarks of aging—the underlying mechanisms of aging—they realized that if you treat those, you can extend life by 30 or 40 years. But if you just got rid of cancer and heart disease, you'd only extend life by five to seven years.
--:-- So we're looking at the underlying biology. What are the laws of nature? What are the laws of biology? That's where we are now. It's like 1905, with Einstein writing the theory of relativity. It's that big of a frame shift in our understanding—between physics and quantum physics, between old medicine and new medicine.
--:-- The second thing happening is the amount of data we can get. You can get terabytes of data on your human biology—from lab testing to genomics to imaging. The amount of data is insane. We've never had the capacity to look at your body in such a comprehensive way, and at such a low cost. You can get your whole genome sequenced for $300 now. It used to be a billion dollars. A billion with a B. That's radical.
--:-- An MRI? I went and got my knee done and it was $2,500. Now I can get my whole body done for $499. And then we have the AI revolution, which is the only thing that's going to allow us to understand the massive data sets we can now accumulate on individuals.
--:-- The idea for Function, in my view, is to create a system that democratizes healthcare—that gives access to low-cost, affordable, preventive, and health optimization care for billions of people.
--:-- What concerns me is that this process is happening too slow. So many people are suffering, and the system is so hard to change. Machiavelli said it's very hard to change ideas. People who are invested in this are not going to want it to change. You've got a whole medical industrial complex that profits off of people being sick. The food industry doesn't want to change. MAHA, whether you like it or not, is out there happening, and it's driving a lot of pressure on the food system. The food companies don't like it. They're pushing back pretty hard, doing all kinds of nefarious things to undermine any change.
--:-- But I think change is inevitable. Whether it was slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, women's rights, or gay rights—these are all things that happened over long periods of time. They were cultural moments that allowed everybody to shift to the next frame of how we navigate the world as human beings.
--:-- Daisy Wolf: Amazing. Thank you, Mark, for all you are doing, all you've done over the length of your career. We are really grateful.
--:-- Mark Hyman: Thanks, Daisy.
--:-- Host: Thanks for listening to this episode of the a16z Podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X @a16z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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