Health and Fitness Update Plus 'Are Organic Foods Worth It?' with Dr. Bobby Dubois | Ep 577

25:33If it's not zero, you need to do some research. Again, I'm not a doctor, but I would start Googling Dr. Peter Atiyah, A-T-T-I-A, and just look that up and figure out with your own doctor what you should do. But if it's not zero, you probably need to consider an intervention. So mine thankfully came back at zero. I also did a carotid artery ultrasound. Unfortunately, the company I use, I cannot recommend. I haven't gotten my results back yet, but I'm hopeful that that's also going to show up in a positive way. So yeah, I mean, that really is what I'm doing. I think realistically, if I can use those blood tests once a year from Superpower for about 200 bucks, probably will consider it.

26:15I won't do that CT scan every year, certainly. It's not the greatest idea to do a CT. So that'll be something I'll probably do every three or four years. The ultrasound is a lot less of an issue. So that might be something I keep on. A DEXA scan, D-E-X-A, is another thing that I might do. So I'm probably looking at, I think many of us in the FI community, if we're curious about our health, you could probably spend$400 or$500 a year and get those blood tests, get a DEXA scan, and maybe get one of those, the carotid artery ultrasound or something like that. That's what I'm doing. And I think that's gonna help me really stay on top of this.

26:53And I'm sure I could talk about a whole host of other things that I'm doing as far as my health goes. And if you have questions, if you have follow-ups, you can always send them into feedback at chooseify.com or really the best way is to get on my newsletter. This is, I think, a really, really helpful weekly newsletter to stay on top of the pulse of the Fi community. just go to chooseofit.com slash subscribe. I personally write that. I try to read every response that comes into me. You can just hit reply to that. And that goes to feedback at chooseofit.com. But also our next guest, as I mentioned, Dr.

27:25Bobby, he was on episode 498, where we talked about the six pillars of health. And I think that's a really important episode. And he's incredible. He's a Harvard grad. He has a medical degree from Johns Hopkins. He has 180 He published academic papers and he's a physician scientist who's focused on what works for patients and what doesn't. Bobby has a podcast that I think is really great. It's called Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby. And yeah, in this segment, which before we get there, I'm going to talk a little bit more about food. But in this segment, we talk about organic food and is it worth it?

27:59And I think it's a really interesting five cost benefit analysis. And while this is not just a short five minute segment on organics, is it worth it or not? I think it's really a thought process. And I love that about Bobby. I think that's what really sets him apart. And I think you're going to find it an exceptionally interesting segment here. But before we get to that, I did want to highlight some of the things from way back in that episode seven, because I think a lot of us, and this really almost certainly deserves its own separate episode, and I will do that in 2026. But saving on food is really important.

28:36Food expense is really one of the big three expenses in our budgets, along with housing and transportation. And for a lot of us, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. No pun intended, obviously, but there's just a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of easy savings. And I think so many of us, we don't plan. And I think that is one of the easiest ways you can save on food, is just planning ahead. think about how many times you've been scrambling at the last minute for food choices. And that means you have to go to fast food, which is not so cheap these days, or go to the local hot bar at your grocery store or Whole Foods or whatever.

29:18And that certainly is not cheap. So it's not cheap in money and it's not cheap in time either. It sounds like, oh, we're just going to go to fast food. Oh, we'll just run to the grocery store. But that's 20 or 30 minutes, almost invariably. And that's if you live close to the stores. So we need to be really efficient. You have so little time in the scheme of things, especially if you're working to waste it because you didn't plan. It just seems really, really silly. So I think planning is essential. I think meal planning and cooking for multiple nights. Again, with being efficient, you can cook at home and you're almost always going to save money.

29:55And that's especially true if you take a recipe and double or triple it. And then you're just embracing leftovers, right? This is part of your week is you make one dinner on Sunday night. That's then going to be good for two or three more nights. You can also freeze things. If for some reason I joked way back when on that episode about like, what are you a king? Like you are a queen. You don't want leftover that you can't deal with leftovers. Like, give me a break. Like if you're someone who says like, oh, I don't eat leftovers, like who the heck are you? Honestly, like that, that's not like, I don't think that's an agile mind.

30:30I think that's just someone who's really closed minded. And it's like, I just hate those monolithic things. In this instance, I've decreed that I don't eat leftovers. It's just, it's just silly, frankly. And I just, I can't deal with that. So I think embracing leftovers. And again, if you get tired of things, you can just freeze it, have it left over five or six days later. It's the same difference. Ultimately. it's just in your case maybe a little more optimized for whatever works for you in essence so i think another thing is to curate a recipe index and this is so you have go-tos so you're not scrambling we talked about this on the episode with emily and emily recently about having adventure lists of things that you want to do because when you have an afternoon off and you look at each other you're like what should we do and sometimes you just shake your head and say i I have no idea.

31:19And then you have to plan having that list ahead of time is going to make it a whole heck of a lot easier. It's the same with food. Okay. If you have even five or 10 recipes or meals, it doesn't have to be a recipe and just be a meal. Like for us, it's chicken thighs and roasted broccoli. All right. That's something we eat fairly often are hamburgers. This is not some amazing plan. It's just, we have a list of the things that we go to salmon from Trader Joe's, which is a two minute walk for me. That's on the list, even though it should be fairly self-explanatory. It's that in that moment, you don't want to scramble and you want to know what are my options.

31:54Or when you wake up that morning, when you need to take something, we have a whole bunch of ground beef and chicken and pork in the freezer because we buy in bulk. Well, I take it out that morning after we decide what we're going to have. And it's just, it is that easy. Okay. So planning is essential. Having that recipe index is essential. Freezing large quantity of things, buying in bulk, right? You can save a lot of money that way. I think you really need to be intentional about this. And the most obvious one is trying to cut down going out to eat. And now this is not for deprivation purposes or the Ramit Sethi, like, yo, those fire people are just misers.

32:32It's like, it's nothing like that. It's frankly, going out to eat takes up a ton of time. It costs a lot of money and it's really unhealthy. So I try to prioritize going out to eat as few times as possible. Since I've moved into my new place two months ago, I've literally gone out to eat twice and that's it. And it's not like that makes me some admirable person, but I'm eating incredibly well in my place. And I just don't have a hankering for going out and wasting all that time and money and eating something that I just know is not good for me. So I think it's planning and repetition is good. It's not bad.

33:08It can be to your great benefit. And I think just using those principles, I can almost bet that you're going to save a hundred or more dollars a month for even just for yourself. But if you have a family of two, four or five people in your family, whatever it is, you're going to save hundreds of dollars. And as we've discussed, little things are the big things with FI. For every hundred dollars you cut out of your budget every single month, that's$30 ,000 less you need to reach financial independence. okay? Because that's a$1 ,200 a year annual expense multiplied by 25, which is to get to the fine number because you're reducing that out of your fine number.

33:47That's$30 ,000. And not to mention you're investing that$100 every single month. And as I've discussed on previous episodes, that adds up to tens of thousands of dollars. So literally for every$100 you cut from your budget over a 20 to 30 year period, this is a 50 to$100 ,000 swing because you'll have that extra net worth and you won't need that extra$30 ,000 to reach FI. So I think this can be beneficial in a ton of ways and your health is really gonna thank you. Okay, we're on to Dr. Bobby to talk about organic foods. I think you're really gonna enjoy this segment with Dr. Bobby and thanks for listening.

34:29And as I said, send your feedback in and we can almost undoubtedly do another episode on health and fitness. Bobby, thank you for coming back to Choose a Buy. I love having you on the show. Absolutely love it. And I love being here and I love chatting with your audience and it's wonderful again. Yeah, well, again, really appreciate it. We have a community who's interested in living better lives. And I think the umbrella is financial independence. The umbrella is once you have your finances straight, you have a little lower ambient stress and you can focus on what really matters in life, in my estimation, which is your health, your relationships, connections, adding value to the world.

35:08And yeah, again, really appreciate you lending your expertise for health. So this is an episode where we're basically talking about food and how to save on food costs or how to think about food costs. It's not necessarily saving, frankly. And I think something that we talked about offline was about organic food. I think a lot of people don't know what to make of it. I think, frankly, that's even a larger question is people don't know what to make about processed foods. Are they horrible for us? Is it worthwhile to shop at stores like Whole Foods or even more niche places? Like we just simply don't know.

35:45Probably we don't have the expertise. It's so confusing walking into a grocery store. I'll go to Wegmans and I'll see the organic ground beef and the regular ground beef. And I simply don't know what the difference is. I don't know. I'm someone who is the case study for I'm willing to spend money on my health and I simply don't even know where to start. So I'm going to throw it to you and I suspect I'm going to be doing a lot of listening in this the next little bit. So how would you start on the question about organics? Well, food is a critical issue and you're raising a broader topic than just organic versus conventional.

36:18You're asking the question about just in general, what foods should I be buying? Another related topic is ultra processed foods. And I, by the time this episode comes out, my episode on ultra processed foods on live long and well with Dr. Bobby will be out and people can learn about that. So the issue of organic foods, there are two key facts. One, organic food costs more money. The costs are real. And that's the beauty of, I think, this topic for your audience is they care about money and they care about life and they care about trade-offs. So the costs are obviously higher for organic food. We'll get into the numbers behind that.

36:55The other piece of the puzzle is what are the benefits of organic versus conventional? And as we get into the data, the benefits aren't so clear. So there's lots of hype, but I'm not quite sure that the data supports the concerns and almost the religious zeal that people have around organic foods. Yeah, it's funny. As you were talking there, I wrote just hype, question mark. And then you literally you said almost the exact words. It's it's hard to discern if it is just hype. And I think something you said in there embedded was was really critical, which is we need to make choices. right? I think we're always making choices with our lives with limited resources.

37:36And I think that's what's so confounding about this, about food in general, is if it was clear cut, then at least you'd be able to make a decision with eyes wide open. But it's not clear cut at all. Again, I simply don't know what I'm getting. Let's explore exactly that. And ultimately, we are going to net out to, it costs thousands of dollars more per family each year for organic. And is that the best use of those dollars? Because ultimately we could use that to have a gym membership or hire a personal trainer or get a better bed to sleep better or get a home heart rate monitor or put that money away and retire earlier, which has got to improve our health as well.

38:21So that's where we're heading. So maybe the beginning point is to help people understand what exactly does organic food mean. Organic doesn't mean safe. Organic food means that there's no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. Doesn't mean there can't be fertilizers and pesticides. They just can't be synthetic. And organic, there are some things that can be used to protect the crops that aren't all that safe. Conversely, conventional, non-organic doesn't mean it's unsafe. And we're going to go through the data on just that. There's a lot of wonderful food from local farmers that isn't labeled organic because to get the USDA label for organic, you got to jump through a whole lot of hoops.

39:12So again, let's start with the assumption organic has some characteristics, but not necessarily that it's that much better for you. And yes, if the costs were the same, yeah, who wants pesticides? Of course, let's not eat food that might have pesticides, but the costs aren't the same. So that's when we're going to get into the trade-offs. Okay. But right. Obviously the costs are not the same. Which is exactly, I think the beginning of this. So the USDA basically has measured that we as Americans spend about a trillion dollars a year on food at home. Now this doesn't include restaurants and eating out, but that's about$3 ,100 a person for food.

39:56So if you're a family of four, it's$1 ,000 a month to$1 ,600 a month. It's a huge part of our expenditures. And lots of studies have shown that organic foods cost about 50 % more. There's some work by LendingTree and Consumer Reports, but over and over and over again, that's what you learn. And about 15 % of all fruits and vegetables in the US, in fact, are organic. So as I always like to do, I like to go to my local market and see what the prices were for me. So when I looked at Fuji apples, they were$1.42 a pound for conventional and$2.70 a pound for organic. All-purpose flour,$3 for conventional, $6 for a five-pound bag for organic.

40:46Grass-fed beef, similarly increased prices when you get the grass-fed versus the conventional for chicken, free range is like$9 a pound versus$5 a pound, and wild-caught versus farm-raised salmon, $8 versus$17 a pound. So the costs are real, And it's been estimated that for a family of four to go organic is about$3 ,000 to$6 ,000 more a year. So it's a real number that you may quibble at$2 ,500, you might quibble at$7 ,000 for a family extra. But it's real because it is about 50 % of the$12 ,000 or more that we spend on food a year as a family. Yeah, that is a massive difference. Right. So that$1 ,000 to$1 ,600 a month is what you said the USDA assumes.

41:42So right, that's$12 ,000 a year to about$19 ,000 a year. So yeah, when you add$3 ,000 to$6 ,000, that is a material difference by any definition, obviously. And yeah, just looking at your items here, it looks like you had six, 50 % to 100 % or more difference just for this label of organic. And it's even worse if you love to go to farmer's markets. I love to go to farmer's markets, support your local people. But it may be triple the price. I mean, I was spending several dollars for one zucchini at a farmer's market. It's just the nature of the beast. Okay. And now going back just quickly to the definition.

42:21So you said organic is grown without synthetic fertilizers and most pesticides, but there can be natural pesticides. So it's not even like you're getting it pesticide-free necessarily. Well, you're not getting pesticide-free, number one. And number two, you're assuming that conventional food has pesticides in it. So now I think we're segueing into what are the benefits of organic and are there enough of them to pay for the extra costs? So if you ask Americans, 85 % will say, pesticides, I hate them. I think that's a problem. But in reality, if you take most fruits and vegetables, they really don't have any pesticide residue still left on them.

43:05Now, it varies. I mean, if you get certain foods from some countries, maybe they have more residue or less residue. So it's not that organic has none and conventional has lots. Most of them don't have pesticide residues. So why do people get scared about all this? Well, there's a couple sources of fear. The one that generally gets touted is studies in rats and mice. And if you feed them high doses of pesticides, bad things seem to happen to the poor mice. But like all mice studies, you're giving them hundredfold, thousandfold more than what most people would get. But that's the first piece of the puzzle.

43:47Okay, you know, the poor mice don't like pesticides. Let's get rid of them for people. And then they say, well, yeah, there are some people exposed to pesticides and they have an increased risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and cancer and fertility issues. And then you ask the question, well, who are those people? Those are farm workers who are spraying crops with pesticides and other things. And it gets on their clothes. They take it home. Their kids might be exposed to it. But again, these are high quantities of the material. So you can be scared of the rodent studies or the farmworker studies, but I don't think that tells us much.

44:28I think what we got to do is look at non-farmworkers, just average people like you and me and your audience. And that's where I think the data start to get interesting and not so clear. All right. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Obviously, sure, it's all well and good to give rodents 100x the normal amount and farmworkers, but ultimately what matters is people like me and you. So let's go into the analysis of that. There's lots of studies. There was a 2023 meta-analysis, which is a summary of studies. And there were 23 observational studies and 27 sort of clinical trial type studies. Okay, so what did we learn from the sort of aggregate of this information?

45:11And let me pause by saying, what I'm sharing is the literature that's available today. Now, it may turn out in a year, five years, 10 years, we'll learn something new. But these are the data that are available today upon which you can make your cost-benefit decisions. Okay. So they took people and randomized them and says, okay, some of you, you get organic tomatoes this week. Some of you get conventional or same with apples. And then we're going to reverse it and we're going to measure your blood and see if there are pesticide levels that are higher when you had conventional. And there were somewhat higher doses of pesticides in the blood.

45:53Does it mean much? I don't know. But yes, there are some pesticides on the food and some of that will get in to you. But does it make a difference in our health? So there have been studies that say people who eat organic food have a lower BMI. Why? Oh my God, I better eat organic because I don't want to be fat. Well, as anyone probably has thought about this is, wait a second, organic people are not the same as conventional. They care about health. They're willing to spend money on their health. They're probably more healthy. They go to the gym. They don't drink a lot of alcohol. They don't smoke.

46:33So observing that people who eat organic do better doesn't tell us that much. Right. That's the epitome of selection bias, right? And confounding all of that. And that's the same stories you get with allergies and reproductive problems and sperm counts. Where I think people get the most scared, and I think let's hit this straight on, is cancer. So by eating conventional, am I at higher risk of cancer? Now, there's been no clinical trial. You're not going to say to these people, okay, for the next 30 years, you're eating organic and this other group, you're eating conventional, we'll see what the rates of cancer.

47:12It would have to be a really big study. It's never been done. I doubt it will ever be done. So these are observational studies. So in one of these large observational studies, they compared people who ate a lot of organic versus not. They looked at 15 types of cancer and one of them showed a relationship with somewhat higher cancer if they ate conventional. But as we may have talked about before in a prior episode, if you do 15 tests, likely one's going to end up abnormal anyways. So I don't make much out of that. But there was another observational study with about 68 ,000 people. And they asked questionnaires about, do you always eat organic sometimes, you know, occasionally?

47:55And they did find a relationship between lower cancer and higher use of organic foods. Now, again, as I said, in this study, the organic people tended to be more likely to be vegetarian, less likely to smoke, younger, thinner, probably exercise more, slept better. So we're not really sure what we're measuring. But what they did find was that the number of cancers, the risk of cancer was 1.9 % in the conventional people and 1.3 % in the people who had a lot of organic. So 0.6%. Now that's if you believe the data. I don't necessarily believe the data. But once you have that number, then you have to ask the question, well, what does that mean?

48:42So that means six fewer cancers per thousand people who ate organic. Okay? It's not doubling the risk. It's not raising the risk by 50%. It's six fewer cancers per thousand people who ate organic. And what people who are listening are probably thinking, so I had to feed 1 ,000 people an extra$3 ,000 to$6 ,000 more expensive food to prevent a small number of cancers. Now, I didn't say death from cancer. I just said cancers. So if you do the math, basically, you have to give 160 people organic food to reduce the risk of cancer by one. or if you do the math again, because we know how much organic food costs, it's about$300 ,000 to avoid one case of cancer.

49:34So that kind of begins to bring the data together on the risk side and the benefit side. And I'm sure we'll get into kind of the key wrinkle here that I think undoes most of this. Wow. And that is$300 ,000 to avoid one case, not a death, but just one case. One case. Okay. And that's your money. That's not the government's money. That's you spending it year in, year out for your family on the hopes that there would be one less cancer. Wow. Yeah, that is really interesting. I'd love once you finish here, obviously, you kind of alluded to at the beginning saying, all right, what are the other things that I could spend?

50:17If I was willing to spend$3 ,000 to$6 ,000 a year, what could I spend it on? I'd love to plant that seed. So maybe we come back to that in five or 10 minutes. Absolutely come back to that. So, okay, I have financial means. You have financial means. Most of the audience has financial means. But when I go to the market and my dear wife says, can you buy me some organic blueberries? And for me, they're$9 for a container versus, you know, three or$4 for a conventional. I'll buy her a thing of blueberries for$9. I might even buy her two, but I'm not buying her three, four, five. I'm not spending$40 on blueberries and I can afford it.

50:59So what does this mean? It means that people who buy organic may be buying less fruits and vegetables because they are so expensive. And so here's the kicker study. And that analysis looked at people who ate five servings a day of fruits and vegetables versus two. Now, this had nothing to do with organic. It's just people who had a lot of fruits and vegetables versus very few. And there was a reduction in cancer, not by 0.6%, but by 35%, merely by having more fruits and vegetables. And there was a 13 % reduction in mortality. So the benefit is eat more fruits and vegetables, forget about whether they're organic or not.

51:44Now, of course, this was an observational study. So the same problem applies that people who eat lots of fruits and veggies are probably healthier in general. But I think there's a real signal here, which is eating a lot of fruits and veggies is a great way to go. And guess what? 80 % of Americans don't get enough fruits and veggies. So the low-hanging fruit isn't to buy organic. The low-hanging fruit is just use some of that$6 ,000 to buy more fruits and veggies. I love that. Yeah, I love... obvious answers that aren't obvious, right? Until you actually get into the data. I think this is one of the hallmarks of the Phi community is we try to look at a problem a little bit differently.

52:26And yeah, the reflexive answer is biorganic, biorganic. But as you're deducing here, if the goal is really to reduce cancer and it's this tiny reduction out of a thousand people at a cost of$300 ,000 in total, and you can, if 80 % of people aren't getting enough fruits and veggies and you can reduce your likelihood of cancer by 35 % by eating more. That seems like the epitome of low-hanging fruit and pun intended. Absolutely. And there was a study that says, okay, what if we're not going to get everybody to eat five or seven fruits and veggies a day, but what if we got them to eat one more per day?

53:01They modeled that for the US. If half the US did this, there'd be 20 ,000 fewer cancer cases. And that's just eating more fruits and vegetables. That has nothing to do with organic. So we can make a lot of progress if we allocate some of that saved money to buy a few more fruits and veggies. I love that, Bobby. So as an aside, is this a monolithic fruits and veggies or are there particular ones that you would recommend just generally speaking? Are there some that have proven to be better for reducing cancer or is it just simply to say like, okay, let's not get bogged down. This is an 80-20 analysis.

53:38Just eat more fruits and veggies generally. way. Well, I think eat more fruits and veggies in general is a slam dunk. Everyone should think about that. But there are some people are like, yeah, Dr. Bobby, I buy the concept, but God, I really want to maybe have some organic foods. So there's been the environmental working group. It's an advocacy pro-organic group. But I think actually their categorization makes sense. And they've said there's the dirty dozen foods and there's the clean 15. So the dirty dozen are things that don't have a peel or a shell, spinach and strawberries and kale and grapes and blackberries.

54:19Okay, so if you want to spend some money on organic, maybe buy that organic. But then there are things that are they call the clean 15. Well, if you buy a pineapple, it's got a very thick skin and corn has a husk and avocado has a strong peel and a banana, you can take it out of the banana peel, et cetera, et cetera. So those you might be like, huh, I'm not buying organic because they're generally going to be safe regardless. So I tend not to do a lot of organic food buying. Gail likes some. So I, of course, buy it for her. but you know if i care then i will actually focus on avoiding the conventional for some of that dirty dozen okay that is good information so right we can all just very easily google dirty dozen and clean 15 and those lists show up pretty instantly so that's a great place to start i like that bob well we should come back to your question you raised a few minutes ago so how should we spend that money?

55:20So I'm making the argument that organic food,$6 ,000 a year more, isn't the best use of your money. And I've spent maybe$500 of that$6 ,000 on suggesting you buy more fruits and vegetables in general. So now you've got$5 ,500 to spend or save. So yes, if you're not a member of a gym and you're like, God, I don't want to spend the$1 ,000 a year, you've got your fun money bank account, you know, spend a thousand on that. Or if you're like me and you don't get your strength training and I have a trainer, so I'm spending some of that money for my trainer. There's many things in the health arena you can spend it on that I think have a higher ROI.

56:04And then I know it's funny to say this, but I think it's real. So if you put away$6 ,000 a year, starting at age 35, how much earlier can you retire? I haven't done the present value math, but I suspect it's real amount of time. It might be a year earlier, might be six months, might be two years earlier. Of course, it depends on your spending level. But 30 years times 6 ,000 a year with compounding of interest, that's real money that I believe could be something to consider. It's like, I'm consciously not going to buy organic. I'm consciously going to put this money in my IRA, and this will allow me to retire early.

56:52It sounds humorous, but it's something to think about because the money's real and it's your money. You're not spending somebody else's money. This is yours. Yeah, Bobby, while you were saying that, I just quickly called up a compound interest calculator and basically said, I'm making a$6 ,000 annual contribution at a rough 8 % annual return over 30 years. At the end of those 30 years, you have$718 ,000. That is not insignificant by any measure. Most people at the end of their lifetimes don't have that kind of money, period. Not less. This is just the difference between making one decision. It's extraordinary.

57:30And that amount of money would allow you to retire sooner. And that's got to have some impact on your health. When you retire early, you can focus on health more. And knowing that you're retiring earlier because of this wonderful thing you're doing might make you happier for all those years. It's just something to think about. Yeah, I love that. So, okay, let's actually dive a little bit more into the better ROI. So obviously you are not anyone's doctor here on this podcast. myself or any of the listeners, nobody's expecting this is not advice from you by any means, but just things that I am even thinking about.

58:10Okay. If I was talking about$6 ,000, that's a massive thing. Like I can get blood tests. I know just in general, not even for cancer, but just generally speaking, I know there's function health. There's a company called superpower that I just signed up for. It's only like$199 a year and you get a hundred plus blood markers. Like that seems pretty good. Like you said, a better bed or some kind of sleep is so critical. Like get an aura ring or whoop band or something and track what actually makes a difference for your sleep. Something I just signed up for, I told you it was a coronary artery calcium test.

58:43That was like$129 at the local hospital because those don't go through. It's so interesting by me. Like most CT scans that you get are a couple of thousand dollars when it goes through insurance. For some bizarre reason that CAC test in any hospital system I've ever seen doesn't go through insurance. So it's cash pay only. And it's shockingly inexpensive. It was$129. So that's something. And then these are a little bit outside of the scope, obviously, but we talked about there's a test. I think the company is Grail. It's the gallery test. It's like$800 to$1 ,000 for cancer. We're not advocating that, but that would be interesting.

59:19Whole body MRI I've even seen. Again, I'm not putting words in your mouth, Bobby, by any means, but like those are a couple thousand dollars. Like is there potentially more value in doing that than eating organic? Maybe, maybe not. And I'm sure you're chomping at the bit to talk here, but there are lots of things we can do. I think the critical part is a all of us doing our research, right? So just because I'm flippantly mentioning a couple of things on a podcast, please don't go out and do this, obviously. But B, there are finite resources and we have to make decisions based on those finite resources and looking in totality.

59:50And I think if people get nothing else from this segment of this podcast, then just think a little bit differently. I think that's what Bobby has done so beautifully here is look at the overall effect. Like, yeah, you hear this word organic, but does it actually produce results based on the actual real money you are spending? That is real money that is leaving your bank account and your net worth every single year. Are you getting the results from it? And I think, Bobby, that's an interesting operating thesis for how to make decisions just in life generally. Absolutely. You know, I said at the outset that the costs are real.

1:00:27Anybody can verify them for themselves when they go to the market. And the benefits are not so real. And so when you have a lot of costs and not so clear benefits, you really have an opportunity to say, what is the best use of the money? So I totally agree. If your sleep is a problem, buy a better mattress, buy an Oura ring, really work on your sleep. It's what I call the unsung hero. I have an episode on sleep and please listen to it and Dr. Bobby live long and well. I think things like a heart rate monitor, if you don't have a heart rate monitor for exercise, that adds a lot of information. We were chatting earlier about how often even people who think they're pretty darn healthy, their blood sugar may be a little higher than they would like.

1:01:12you can now do continuous glucose monitors. Yes, you can get it from your doctor to order it for you, but you can also get it over the counter. Maybe it's a hundred bucks a month. You do it for a month or two just to learn about your own blood and how does ice cream make a difference? For me, when I have a glucose monitor, when I have ice cream, it doesn't make any difference to my blood sugar. When I have pizza, it doesn't make any difference. When I had popcorn and orange juice that went through the roof. So knowing what might affect your blood sugar, that could be a use for your money. And that's a whole nother discussion.

1:01:47Does it matter when your blood sugar shoots up with your popcorn? But that's something you might do. So I think I'm very wary of doing screening tests. Look, you have a headache and it's bad and the doctor says, oh, you might have a brain tumor. By all means, you need a CT or an MRI scan. But to do a whole body MRI, to do these large panels of blood tests. I worry about that because, and again, I have a whole episode called to test or not to test. You're going to end up with a lot of false positives. You're going to chase after things that scare you and may turn out to be nothing. And you may end up with a whole bunch of kind of invasive tests to figure that out.

1:02:27And I wouldn't feel obligated to spend the money. So putting that away is a really, really good thing. Yeah, of course, you can use that money for a trip. You know, maybe you do a yoga retreat or something with the money. But I think there's some inexpensive things that are definitely worth considering. Yeah. And just real quick, and I love how you mentioned that about the testing, and I certainly was not advocating that. It's just these things exist. And if you're talking about spending in this crazy amount of money that you're locked in, which you are not locked in, which you so beautifully said, you can just save this money.

1:03:02You're not required to spend this on your health by any means. And to Bobby's point, if you're going to reach five X number of years earlier, because there's not insignificant amount of money you've just deposited into your net worth and hopefully into your brokerage account, you're probably going to have significantly more time to spend on your health. You're going to have significantly more time to take walks. You're going to have significantly more time to go to the gym and to relax and do other things that are going to be beneficial long-term for your health. And yeah, Bobby, this is outside the scope of talking about CGMs necessarily.

1:03:32But yeah, it's interesting, just the little things you notice. And I signed up. So the two over-the-counter ones now, if people are interested in Googling this, Dexcom has one called Stelo, S-T-E-L-O. And Abbott just came out with one called Lingo. But I learned the hard way that it is iOS only. So if you have an Android phone, please do not buy it. You will get these in the mail and you will be very disappointed that it does not work on your phone. So please don't make the same stupid mistake that I did. But I noticed something, and by following the company Levels, which also has a CGM, they talked for years about something simple like taking a walk after your meals.

1:04:10Like they aggregated all the data across millions and millions and millions of data points. And like one of the most effective things that people could do for their blood sugar to blunt some of the blood sugar spikes was just simply taking a three to 10 minute walk after meals. And Bobby, it was really, that's what's fun about a CGM is you can actually see this in real time and you can, one day you can eat the same meal, not walk. And the next day you can eat the meal and walk. And of course there are additional factors. Let's be clear, right? We're, we're complex systems, but nevertheless, it's pretty cool to see this and make some type of hypothesis and test it in real time.

1:04:47Right. And what you're talking about is the end of one approach to testing things in yourself. and I have a podcast episode on this too, but basically there are things that you can test. Does salt affect my blood pressure? Because some people it does, some people it doesn't. Does eating a lot of saturated fat affect my cholesterol levels? Or does taking a walk reduce the spikes after I eat? Now, these are all theoretical. You can go to literature and say, does this happen? And what you'll get is a bunch of averages that may confuse you. but test it in yourself. The beauty of all these things is you can get an answer quickly.

1:05:28Okay, I'm going to try not eating after 6 p.m. and see if my sleep is better rather than eating at 9 p.m. It doesn't take a year to figure that out. You try it, you measure something, there's various ways to measure your sleep, could be the oral ring, could be a questionnaire like the Pittsburgh Sleep Questionnaire, and then you figure it out. So you have your CGM. Okay, then walking. Okay. Now I'm going to try eating and not walking. Then I'm going to try eating and walking again. And you do it on, off, on, off, and you get real answers. So I think the money is not that much to buy some of these, but the mindset is so powerful because we all want to take control of our health.

1:06:11We want to have agency and to have those numbers in front of us. I learned, you know what? I can have all the salt I want. It doesn't budge my blood pressure. And I can have all the gelato I want, well, I might get fat, but it's not going to affect particularly my blood sugar. Why people might ask, because it has a lot of sugar, is it's full of fat. And when you eat gelato and you have sugar and fat, the fat dulls how quickly your body takes up the sugar. So for me, and this may not be true for everybody, it doesn't affect it. And I can enjoy my gelato without worry. Love it. All right, Bobby.

1:06:46So just in closing here, I know you have a ranch called the Madrone Springs Ranch, where people can actually stay. So you can check it out, just Google that. And one of your pages here is embark on a culinary journey with chef, Dr. Bobby. And you have this lovely picture of you here serving food. So I know cooking is a significant passion of yours. And ultimately, my question to you is going back to this, the entire episode here, you've mentioned, you don't especially put a lot of stock in organics for yourself. I know you mentioned Gail a couple of times is a little more into it. And you also mentioned farmer's markets.

1:07:24How do you personally think about buying food for yourself and your guests? Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding kind of deal for your own situation. Like when you go to the grocery store, how do you think about it? So I think you're asking whether I'm buying for myself or I'm buying for guests at the ranch. So at the ranch, my six pillars of exercise and sleep and nutrition and exposure to heat and cold and social relationships and mind-body harmony, we've tried to build that into the experience. So food and nutrition is one of them. I have a garden. So if it's the right time of year, stuff comes out of the garden and there are no pesticides.

1:08:02Our chickens lay lots of eggs and those are free range chickens and they're eating all the bugs they can find. So to some extent, it's a non-issue because it comes from the land. But when I go to the market, I mean, part of it is I'm sensitive to my guests. Some of them are gluten-free, so I'm going to obviously cook differently. Some of them are dairy-free and are not allergic, so I got to be worried about that. And they may share with me that organic is a big deal, in which case I will do what matters to them. But in general, I don't worry about it a lot. I think that the healthy homemade, because everything that we eat here is all homemade, way outweighs any tiny, tiny organic risk.

1:08:44That's kind of how I net it out. And of course, money amounts to people. If they're going to have to pay a lot more for a meal, they might be like, nah, okay, I'll go with the conventional version. But I'm not serving Twinkies, Chips Ahoy Doritos, or Stouffer's lasagna. I mean, that's not part of the thing. Oh, man. Okay. That is great. Absolutely love that answer. Bobby, as always, Thank you so much for coming on. Like I mentioned to you, I would love to make it to your ranch one of these days. It looks just like an absolutely beautiful place and incredible experience. Come play with the kangaroos and the alpacas and everything else.

1:09:19It's a lot of fun. We love it. That sounds great. So as you mentioned a couple of times, Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby is the podcast. I've said repeatedly here on the show, I've mentioned you in the newsletter a number of times. It's a phenomenal podcast. It's really a great way. Usually the episodes are fairly short. They're about 30 minutes, plus or minus. and they're action-packed and you get the information you need. So this is a health podcast that I personally listen to and highly recommend. So Bobby, is there anywhere else you wanna send people or where people can find you? No, they can go to my website, drbobbylivelongandwell.com or just anywhere, just type in Dr.

1:09:58Bobby, you'll probably find me. And reach out if you have any questions or listen to the podcast, my podcast, if you wanna learn a lot, there's about 50 some odd episodes now. So lots of topics you might find fun. Thanks for having me on. It's always a great pleasure and delight. Yeah, well, I appreciate you. And until next time, thanks for being here.