This is Dr. Mark Heimann. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy, a place for conversations that

matter. Today's guest is Dr. David Heber, who is an extraordinary physician, an inspiration

of mine who has been teaching at the Institute of Functional Medicine conferences for years

and has really pioneered the idea of food as medicine. He was the OG in this space. He has

done some amazing work in the fields of nutrition, metabolism, obesity, and internness in

the chronologist, but he's so much more than that. He's published really essential

seminal research articles on the cause of obesity, weight loss strategies, and how obesity is connected

to heart disease and cancer and much more. He's the founding director of the UCLA Center for Human

Nutrition at the University of California. So stay tuned that conversation is coming up next on the

doctor's pharmacy. So Dr. Heber, you are an unusual character in medicine. You're an internist,

you're an endocrinologist, you're a scientist, and yet somehow you're focused on food which

almost no other doctors are. How did that actually happen? Wow, that's a really good question. So I

was a medical student at Harvard and my advisor was a late George K. Hill at the Jocelyn Diabetes

Center. And he wrote an article, a review article, on the physiology of starvation in the 1970,

the New England Journal of Medicine. And I was a chemistry major at UCLA as an undergraduate,

worked on space science and the lower atmosphere of Venus of all things. And so I came to Harvard

Medical School with a pretty strong scientific background. And I couldn't understand medical jargon.

I used to read through the medical cases in the New England Journal of Medicine, try to teach

myself the language. But what I did understand was nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and there was a

book called The Body Cell Mass by a famous surgeon called Francis Moore at the Peter Wrengrig

Hospital, great book, and said, how much nitrogen there is in the body, how much carbon. And I was

always into the metabolic things, the biochemistry. And so when I read this physiology of starvation,

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