18: Top Chef Seamus Mullen On His Crippling Autoimmune Disease & How He Used Food To Finally Heal

Seamus Mullen is a world-class chef, a James Beard award semifinalist, the owner of two popular NYC restaurants, and a regular on the Food Network. Today, his life looks happy, healthy, and thriving. But it was just six years ago that he was suffering from a maelstrom of maladies, from rheumatoid arthritis to injuries from a motorcycle accident to a deep-vein thrombosis incident that nearly killed him. After his cocktail of prescription medicines caused him to have a grand mal seizure in Thailand, he knew something had to change.

He began seeing Dr. Frank Lipman, a functional medicine expert (and a huge part of the mbg family!), who helped him realize how the food he was eating affected his body (laying the groundwork for Seamus' new cookbook, Real Food Heals). Seamus' recovery wasn't instant—he talks in the podcast about how it took a good six months for him to begin feeling different—but it was nearly complete, and, as he says in our chat, he hasn't taken a single step backward in his health since then. In this episode, we talk about the lifestyle habits that were hurting Seamus and the ones that were vital to his recovery. He shares why he believes health is more contagious than disease and what he thinks the future of food is.

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