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Among the new hires at CBS announced by Bari Weiss is a doctor who has claimed that he has reduced his biological age by 20 years with therapies including cold plunges; that cod liver oil can treat autism and that conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia can be reversed with the kind of nutritional supplements he also sells on his online store.
Dr Mark Hyman, who has been called a “germ theory denialist” by medical author Harriet Hall, and has been brought on as a contributor in Weiss’s revamping of CBS’s news division. He is perhaps the most prominent exponent of so-called “functional medicine” (FM), an alternative medicine that oncological surgeon David Gorski has described as “pure quackery”.
Like some other moves at CBS, his hiring is likely to win favor with the Donald Trump administration.
Hyman is a longtime collaborator with health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, writing a preface for Kennedy’s 2014 book that argued for the removal of the preservative Thimerosal from vaccines, and appearing alongside Kennedy in an upcoming documentary, Maha Uncensored. Hyman also co-authored a diet book with evangelical pastor Rick Warren.
Hyman is also a beneficiary of some of the same Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have backed Weiss’s previous ventures. Early investors in his company include Andreessen Horwitz, whose co-founders Marc Andreessen and David Horowitz have been outspoken Trump supporters and donors. Andreessen and like-minded investor David Sacks invested in a seed funding round for Weiss-founded outlet, the Free Press, which was acquired by CBS’s parent company Paramount Skydance in the deal that landed Weiss at the network.
Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with McGill University’s Office for Science and Society who has written critically about Hyman and FM, said: “By hiring Mark Hyman, CBS News will be misinforming its large audience on the subject of health. Hyman is the face of functional medicine, a pipeline that moves disenchanted healthcare providers away from evidence-based care and into the arms of a very lucrative wellness industry.”
Jarry predicted: “CBS viewers will be told that true health is about testing for everything – at a cost – and gorging yourself on an array of unproven and unnecessary dietary supplements. This is in keeping with what is happening under Trump: the institutionalization of pseudoscience.”
The Guardian emailed detailed requests for comment on this reporting to Hyman’s publicly listed personal and business addresses, and also to a CBS News spokesperson.
‘Functional medicine’
Hyman has been prominent in mainstream and alternative media as one of the leading lights of FM, promoting it on his own longevity-focused podcast, and has been a guest of other podcasters including wellness influencer Jay Shetty and Weiss herself, who hosted him on her Free Press podcast Honestly last April.
The Institute for Functional Medicine, which counts Hyman as a board member, claims on its website that FM “restores healthy function by treating the root causes of disease”, and “allows clinicians to systematically identify and address the underlying processes and dysfunctions that are causing imbalance and disease in each individual”.
In practice, according to advocates, this involves seeking underlying causes of illness by testing stools, hormones and food sensitivity, and treating them with supplements, nutrition and therapies including yoga and acupuncture.
Illness is often attributed to underlying syndromes like “leaky gut” – which Hyman discusses on his website and in social media – which scientists say “cannot be accurately diagnosed by symptoms, blood work, or stool studies”, and is “not a real diagnosis”.
Scientific critics, however, say that FM is little more than a rebrand of alternative medicine, with the late oncologist Wallace Sampson characterizing it as a collection of “abandoned concepts” undergoing “resurrection under a more modern slogan, ‘Functional Medicine’”.
An editorial from the American Council of Science and Health, a nonprofit that seeks to push back on health disinformation, said that FM is “just a different term for alternative medicine, holistic medicine, [or] integrative medicine”, and accused Hyman, in particular, of promoting “junk science and magical thinking”.
On McGill University’s website, Jarry wrote that his work is marked by “autism pseudoscience” and “flirts heavily with anti-vaccine views”.
RFK Jr alliance
For years, Hyman has been a close ally of Kennedy, with each opposing themselves to the scientific consensus on vaccines, and promoting alternative treatments for a variety of conditions..
Since Kennedy took office, he has delivered policies that match their shared beliefs.
For more than a decade, the pair campaigned for the removal of the preservative Thimerosal from vaccines, which contains a form of mercury, claiming that it produces adverse health effects.
In particular, Kennedy has claimed that Thimerosal is associated with autism. Kennedy’s 2014 book, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, Kennedy baldly states that “increased levels of Thimerosal in vaccines might have greatly contributed to the shocking rise in neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism”.
The scientific consensus has for decades pointed to the opposite conclusion. A March 2025 editorial in the journal Autism, which offers a meta-analysis of large, international studies carried out since the early 2000s, says that fears about Thimerosal “have been consistently disproven by rigorous scientific research”. It also said their meta-analysis of studies, which altogether included more than 700,000 children in countries such as Denmark, the US and the UK, finding “no significant relationship with autism”.
The Autism authors reiterate in their conclusion that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus and robust evidence debunking any link between the MMR vaccine and autism”.
In his preface to Kennedy’s book, Hyman positions himself as a contributor to its arguments, writing: “I have been involved in reviewing and contributing ideas and scientific references to this manuscript. I have also been involved in efforts to change regulatory and legislative policy to reduce potential harm from Thimerosal”.
He hedges on the effects claimed by Kennedy, writing: “There may … be debate on the strength of the data and science implicating mercury in this increased prevalence of brain injury in children”, but also that “there is no debate that mercury in any form is toxic” and “there is also no debate about the dramatic increase in prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders, over the last few decades, including learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, and autism”.
He asks readers: “Would you expose the unborn child or infant of a loved one to a vaccine containing mercury, a known neurotoxin, if there were other safer alternatives?”
Last July, despite the lack of evidence of any adverse effects, Kennedy ordered the removal of Thimerosal from vaccines.
Kennedy and Hyman have also been promoters of the use of unapproved peptides to treat a wide range of conditions.
In the wake of the success of GLP-1 peptides in promoting weight loss, other, unregulated and untested peptides have become a “craze” in alternative health and self-optimization circles, despite formal warnings from the FDA about their safety.
On his website, Hyman promotes the use of peptides which are not FDA-approved for specific purposes, including BPC 157 for “healing of tendons, ligaments and muscles”, GHK-Cu for “healthier skin”, and LL 37 for “managing long Covid symptoms”.
Last June, on the podcast of longevity influencer and self-styled “biohacker” Gary Brecker, Kennedy promised to relax FDA scrutiny on various experimental substances, including peptides.
On 22 January, Kennedy told USA Today that he had taken peptides, but appeared to sound a note of caution on their unrestricted availability, saying it was “a complicated issue … some of them have good documentation. Many of them do not. And I don’t know what the health, the adverse effects are or the beneficial effects. And we can’t do that without a clinical trial.”
The Daniel Plan
Hyman co-wrote another book, The Daniel Plan, with evangelical pastor Rick Warren and controversial doctor Daniel Amen, who promotes the use of single-photon emission computed tomography (Spect) brain scans to diagnose psychiatric illnesses (the American Psychiatric Association has cast doubt on the value of neuroimaging techniques like this on diagnosing psychiatric illnesses in individuals).
The book makes a range of bold claims that appear to be at variance with scientific studies, including that MSG consumption “triples your insulin production, leading to storage of belly fat”, “More than 95% of chronic illness is not related to your genes, but to what those genes are exposed to in your lifetime”, and that “sugar is the main cause of disease”.
These claims overlap with a longer list of questionable claims Hyman made in a 2018 documentary series, according to the Science-Based Medicine news website.
It also rehearses a wide range of socially conservative moral claims, often based on Bible passages, which it then applies to human health.
For example, it quotes Corinthians 6:12 – 20 and claims it demonstrates that “My body belongs to God. It is his property, not mine. I don’t own it, God does.” It claims the line from Hebrews 11:35 “There is pleasure in sin for a short time” is a warning against “the addicting taste of junk food, the short-term high from carbohydrates, or the pleasure of loafing around”.
Function Health
Hyman sells supplements which FM practitioners claim address underlying conditions on his own websites. Mostly they are vitamins “stacks” claimed to address issues like prenatal health, autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer’s syndrome.
But another recent venture ties Hyman and Weiss together via a prominent investor.
Hyman is also chief medical officer of Function Health, which offers FM style testing on a subscription model. Function Health’s Series B funding round last November was led by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and it raised $298m, valuing the company at $2.5bn.
Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen has emerged in recent years as a prominent Trump supporter and spokesman for both “effective accelerationism” and the broader tech right.
Andreessen was also an investor in the Weiss venture, the Free Press, but was able to exit last October when Paramount Skydance acquired the publication for a reported $150m, in a deal that appointed Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief.
The CBS announcement described Hyman as one of “19 new contributors”. It was not immediately announced what form his contribution would take, but Weiss reportedly told CBS staff at an all-hands on Tuesday: “These individuals are just the start .. I urge you to use them more.”
