Office Hours: How to Choose the Best Diet for Your Body

Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one on one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, and each week, we're gonna pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live one hundred healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at functionhealth.com/mark and use code mark twenty twenty six to get $50 towards your membership. Hi, doctor Hyman. This is Christine from Pennsylvania, and I really wanna start 2026 making better choices with food. But there are so many diets out there. I just don't know which one is right for me. And there's so much conflicting information. Can you just break down what the best diets are and who they're for? Thanks for your question, Christine. Funny enough, a few years ago, I wrote a book called Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? I wanted to call it What the F Should I Eat, but my publisher wouldn't let me. But it's the question that pretty much everybody asks and asks me. What should I eat? What's the best diet? Should I be keto? Should I be paleo? Should I be vegan? Should I eat Mediterranean? What's the truth about food? What's the best diet? Well, the truth is the best diet is the one that works for your biology. We're all different. There isn't one size fits all. And the beautiful thing about functional medicine is it is personalized. It's personalized. It's about you and your unique biology. You're not a homogeneous human, and that's how medicine studies things on homogeneous humans. You're an individual with individual needs, genetics, issues, health concerns, all which need to be taken into account when deciding on what's the best diet for you. So functional medicine helps you understand how food affects your body. It's not based on ideology or belief. It's based on biology. So I would say don't let your ideology run over your biology, which a lot of people do. I see people, for example, be vegan and be really unhealthy and miserable. Other people can thrive on it. So, really, it's important to understand what's going on for you. So we're gonna answer the top questions that we get about diet. We're gonna hopefully provide some clarity for people feeling overwhelmed by all these conflicting advice, and we're gonna get into the foundational principles first of what you should understand about food. What should everybody understand before choosing a diet? Then …