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I’ve been making YouTube videos and writing articles about pseudoscientific grifters for 15 years now, and it seems like each year, more and more of the same characters keep showing up, often in new and surprising ways, making more and more connections with each other. They say misery loves company, but I say, not as much as scam artists do.
Today I want to talk about Mark Hyman. While I have actually never talked about him in depth on this channel, one of my writers at Skepchick did almost a decade ago: Kavin Senapathy covered his presence at the online Microbiome Medicine Summit in early 2016, where he joined fellow dangerous health grifters like Joseph Mercola and Deepak Chopra to peddle some bullshit: Hyman claimed that the supplements he sold, which now include one month’s supply of tiny packets for $199, would “optimize customers’ microbiomes,” despite the fact that these supplements are not now nor were they then regulated by any government agency for safety or efficacy. Even before Trump took office and obliterated the Food and Drug Administration, the most the agency could really do was fine companies after their supplements were found to actually endanger people’s lives.
Hyman was never really on my radar, but this month he just keeps turning up like a bad penny. First, I heard that Sweetgreen, a fast food place that specializes in, um, salads, has collaborated with Hyman and his company Function Health, which provides blood and urine testing for $400 a year. Together, they have developed a very special menu that “celebrates the chemistry between real food and your body,” which I think means that every time you eat a piece of spinach a mariachi band strikes up. They called the campaign “A MENU DESIGNED TO LOVE YOU BACK” which is hilarious and so very disrespectful because I guarantee you that the cow that lived a horrible short life only to be slaughtered and processed into an $18 salad you eat at your desk does not love you back. That cow fucking hates your guts.
Anyway, as if that wasn’t a sweet enough paycheck for Hyman, I then learned on Tuesday that the Trump-regime-mouthpiece Bari Weiss, who last year was tapped to completely destroy CBS News, has chosen Hyman to be one of the podcasters replacing the real journalists who Weiss has alienated and will quit or be fired.
This isn’t just a problem because of Hyman’s penchant for using every opportunity to shill his useless and overpriced supplements (and now, salads I guess). Hold on to your monocles, everyone, because here’s the big reveal: Hyman is also a best buddy of Robert F. Kennedy, Junior, the noted anti-vax worm-brained legendary fail-son who is currently running the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
In 2015, RFK wrote a pissy letter to the New York Times to defend his anti-vaxx book, “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak,” which posits that thimerosal, a form of mercury, is the cause of autism, despite the fact that the ingredient has never been included in most vaccines like the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and was removed from ALL childhood vaccines several decades ago just in case. There was no actual evidence that it was unsafe, but people like RFK did so much fearmongering that it was easier to remove the preservative.
Despite these completely inarguable facts, RFK says that he and Mark Hyman “identified hundreds of peer-reviewed studies by government and university scientists showing that thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative, is a devastating toxin linked to neurological disorders now epidemic in American children. Among these were 39 studies strongly suggesting that thimerosal causes autism.” None of that is true, but the New York Times published the letter anyway because they’re the New York Times and he is, technically, a Kennedy.
According to a New York Times profile of Hyman from 2024, his anti-vaxx bona fides went back further: “Years earlier, Dr. Hyman had published an article in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, where he served as editor in chief, describing a 2-year-old who was diagnosed with autism shortly after receiving the standard suite of childhood vaccines. Dr. Hyman said that the boy also had high levels of mercury in his body.”
Again: no mercury was in childhood vaccines at the time, and the idea that mercury caused autism had been thoroughly debunked by that point.
In the 2010s, a lot of otherwise respected medical facilities started cashing in on the growing popularity of “holistic” grifters like Hyman. And so, in 2014, the Cleveland Clinic became the first to offer a “Center for Functional Medicine,” and they tapped Hyman as the founding director, which he credited with establishing his “credibility to study the effects of heavy metals and toxins” and “raise awareness about toxic exposures,” which also boosted RFK’s anti-vaxx organization Children’s Health Defense. Cool, great job Cleveland Clinic.
Doctors at the clinic would refer patients to Hyman’s bullshit factory for useless testing and, naturally, a prescription for supplements: “(One patient’s) doctor at the clinic gave her a referral code to order vitamins from Dr. Hyman’s company, which shared a percentage of its sales revenue with the hospital. The doctor also recommended Gregorian chanting and forest bathing.”
Incredible stuff.
Hyman met RFK thanks to his lectures on this bullshit, with the New York Times reporting that RFK’s wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, was in the audience at one such lecture in 2009. Three years later, after reading RFK’s diary full of his accounts of cheating on her with dozens of women, and after he completely cut her off financially to the point where she asked other mothers for $20 to cover gas for the kids’ school drop-offs, Mary would hang herself in their barn. That doesn’t have anything to do with Mark Hyman, per se, I just thought it was worth mentioning in case anyone didn’t know.
In the following 15 years, the New York Times profile makes it clear that Hyman and his fellow crooks identified RFK as a soft target and a potential boost to their grift. He convinced RFK that insurance should cover nonsensical diagnostic scams like Function Health, and that the FDA should stop focusing on pharmaceutical drugs that actually work and instead promote special diets, like, I don’t know, maybe the PEGAN DIET?? Yes, Mark Hyman has his own diet and he called it the PEGAN DIET and somehow he has not been bullied mercilessly for this. It’s a combo of “paleo” and “vegan” but instead of going with, say, “vegaleo” or at least “palegan” he chose the portmanteau that makes it sound like all you eat is tofu and piss. As if he was really into “water sports” but felt he needed an excuse to bring it up with partners. “Hey, can you do me a favor and piss in my mouth? Oh, no, it’s not some weird fetish, it’s just that I’m on the very healthy PEGAN DIET and my doctor insists upon it. Look, I have a prescription from the Cleveland Clinic.”
Anyway, a lot of people were surprised that a supposed “lefty” like RFK, with his supposed “lefty” anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, was so fully embraced by the very rightwing authoritarian MAGA movement. But all of this is why: it’s a grift. MAGA is a grift. Anti-vaxx is a grift. Supplements are a grift. And the way to sell supplements and other sham “treatments” is to decrease people’s trust in the medical establishment, and to decrease trust in the government’s ability to provide safe and effective medical treatment. In a place where universal healthcare is guaranteed, where people are able to easily access preventative care and science-based treatment and aren’t scared to get that spot checked because they might go bankrupt, grifts like Mark Hyman’s have a much harder time catching on and making money. As I’ve been saying for years now, Project 2025 explicitly wanted to destroy the FDA and Health and Human Services, so of course grifters like Hyman would join in. After all, when he’s made billions from the poor saps who think they can salad and supplement their way to good health, he can afford all the real medicine he wants.
So, yeah, that’s Mark Hyman. And no, I didn’t even get around to making fun of his name because I knew you guys would want to have a go at that in the comments. Have fun. And if you needed yet another reason to avoid eating at Sweetgreen and watching CBS News now that Bari Weiss is in charge, well, there you go.
