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00:00:00
Brad: Hello and welcome to ChooseFI. Today on the show, we have an episode all about health. This originally started when Dr. Bobby Dubois reached out to me and said that he thought it would be really interesting to do a segment on organic foods, and is it really worth it? We recorded that segment, which will be on the backside of this episode, and I was brainstorming what would round this episode out. Of course, we’re gonna touch on a little bit of overarching food principles, and we really touched on this way back in episode seven of ChooseFI. You can always find that, just scroll back, way back in your podcast to episode seven from 2017. It was Tips to Reduce Your Grocery Expenses, or just go to choosefi slash 007. That’ll get you there.
00:00:47
Brad: But I’m also gonna talk a little about my current health journey and what I’m doing in my life. I know a lot of you have reached out to me with some interest over the years when I’ve talked, especially in the last couple of years, about the muscle-building journey that I’ve been on, plus some of the other health things that I’ve sprinkled in here and there. I thought now would be a good time to give an update as we’re closing out 2025. I think this is gonna be a really interesting episode, and with that, welcome to ChooseFI.
00:01:13
Brad: All right, this is a rare solo segment for me. For anyone who is not acquainted with me, I’m Brad Barrett. I’m a CPA in a former life. I’ve been the host of the ChooseFI podcast and co-founder for the last nine years, and I am really on a journey towards living a better life. I think a lot of that starts with our health and wellness. At this point, I am 46 years old, and I am in, by far, the best shape of my life, and it’s not even close. I was a decent athlete growing up. I’ve been a soccer player all my life, but I really have been working hard at this because I wanna live a healthy life into my 70s, 80s, and 90s. I think it starts at the beginning—really, it starts in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s to get you there.
00:02:11
Brad: This has been a long journey, and of course, just like any journey, I’m constantly learning. First, let me say, obviously, I’m not a doctor. I am someone who cares deeply about my health, and I’ve experimented a lot, but this is not medical advice. It’s not even close. I can’t even imagine that you would mistake it for medical advice, but nevertheless, I wanted to give that caveat at the outset.
00:02:33
Brad: So all right, what am I doing? I’ve talked on a couple of episodes where I had my personal trainer, Dean Turner, on—those were episodes 480 and 516. That second one was a master class on muscle building, and I’ve been doing this, quote-unquote, new workout for about three years now, which is hard to believe that I’m at it that long.
00:03:00
Brad: It is just the most incredibly effective workout that I’ve ever seen. I think, frankly, if you listen to the next five minutes and really take this in and implement it in your life and at the gym, you will see better results than 99% of people who go to the gym four or five times a week. Genuinely, even people who hire personal trainers. The incentives are such that when you go to a gym and hire a personal trainer, they want you to leave feeling like you worked out, that you’re all sweaty, and you’re tired, and you feel like this was a great workout.
00:03:36
Brad: And frankly, I think those of us in the FI community, and certainly myself, I’m looking for effectiveness. This workout that Dean turned me onto years ago is just the most brutally effective workout you can imagine. Some principles, and like I said, you’re gonna take this in, you’re hopefully gonna apply it at your gym, and I almost guarantee you you’re gonna see success in some way, shape, or form. Certainly, if you’ve been treading water at the gym for years and you don’t look any different in the mirror, you’re not really progressing, then I guarantee this will be beneficial to you, because it gave me the principles that I didn’t have.
00:04:06
Brad: I was somebody who worked out. I went to CrossFit, I worked out all the time, but I didn’t have the principles that were needed to build long-term success.
00:04:14
Brad: So, here’s basically what I do. I go to my local gym, and it can be anything from a Crunch Fitness, a Gold’s Gym, Planet Fitness, or any other type of gym you have locally. I actually prioritize machines. Not free weights, not barbells, dumbbells somewhat, but really not barbells at all. I’m using the machines. My workouts take me about an hour, and interestingly, I’m only working for about 10 to 12 of those 60 minutes. The rest of the time, I am literally resting.
00:04:48
Brad: This is not something—I don’t think in the last three years I’ve ever walked out of the gym sweaty from this type of workout, but yet I built more muscle than I could possibly imagine, and this is for a guy in his 40s when supposedly biology is taking you the other way. I can tell you this has worked exceptionally well for me.
00:05:09
Brad: It was funny; I was listening to the Mile High Five podcast a couple of weeks ago, and Carl Jensen was on as a guest. He was the former co-host, and Doug was saying to him, “Carl, you look amazing. What is going on? I’ve never seen you like this.” And he’s like, “Well, actually, I had this conversation with Brad Barrett in Breckenridge a year and a half ago, and it basically changed my life.” I mean, Carl just followed this, and I think he’s right around 50, and he looks unbelievable.
00:05:36
Brad: I know this works. I know Brian Feraldi is another past guest who’s been on a bunch of times. He’s been doing this to great success. A lot of people in my personal life, et cetera. So I know this works; just please trust me on this.
00:05:48
Brad: So, you show up to the gym. Let’s say we’re gonna talk about upper body. You’re doing six exercises, that’s it. You’re doing two sets of each exercise. And like I said, you’re prioritizing machines because they isolate those muscles, and they also don’t allow you to do stupid things. If you look at just any normal gym, you see people doing all sorts of wacky things. They’re swinging weights around that they have no business lifting. It’s just ego. They’re not actually doing anything; they’re just moving a weight with their body in some way.
00:06:28
Brad: Is that better than sitting on the couch? Yeah, marginally. It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, it’s better than sitting on the couch, but they’re not gonna see any progress doing that. It’s literally doing essentially nothing. Whereas if you go, you have to go very slow. Tempo is really, really important, and control of the weight is essential.
00:06:39
Brad: So, every repetition, every time you move the weight, you want it to be fully controlled both on the up—which let’s say push or pull, depending on what you do—where they call that the concentric. It’s basically when you’re doing the work. A bicep curl would be pulling the weight towards you to the top position, or in a bench press, it would be pushing it away from you. The lowering of the weight is known as the eccentric, and you want it exceptionally controlled and slow.
00:07:10
Brad: So, we’re doing six exercises, two sets per exercise. Now, one of the absolute keys is that you want to be in the five to ten rep range in each of those sets. If you can’t get to five, the weight is too heavy, and you have to lower it. If you’re at or over 10, the weight is too light, and then the next set, you just increase the weight.
00:07:40
Brad: I implore you when you start this, do not lift too heavy. The key is perfect form and perfect tempo. So you’re gonna wanna hear the exercises that I tell you about. You’re gonna wanna watch the YouTube videos. Go to your gym, see what the machine is. The chest press machine, see what brand it is, and then just Google that. Let’s say, Techno Gym Chest Press. You just literally watch some videos on how people use this machine, and you do that exactly. Because form is essential.
00:08:09
Brad: The last rep, now this is what makes a set worthwhile and this is what helps you build the muscle, is the last rep or two, it slows down basically against your will. I say slows down involuntarily. What’s happening is, you are just doing a set, and then you will get tired. As long as you can do that last rep or two, again, with perfect form, it will slow down.
00:08:39
Brad: That’s when you know you basically can’t get to that next rep without compromising your form or just failing entirely. That is when you stop the set. When you believe you cannot do one more rep without perfect form and without failing, then this is where an interesting part comes in—you are resting. No joke, I turn the clock, the timer on my phone, I hit start, and I walk around the gym.
00:09:07
Brad: I leave the machine, I leave my stuff there, so it’s obvious that I’m on it, and I just walk around the gym for somewhere between three and five minutes. But three is the absolute bare minimum. You walk around the gym, you’re not doing anything else, you’re not getting on a treadmill and running, you’re not doing leg exercises just for giggles, you are just resting. Because you’re basically resting your central nervous system.
00:09:26
Brad: A lot of people you’ll see at the gym, they’ll do a set, they just stop for no discernible reason; it’s not like it slowed down or got hard. They just pick some random number, and then they pick the weights back up 30 seconds later, and it’s like, “What on earth are you doing?” I promise that’s not doing anything to you; it’s just not.
00:09:41
Brad: To get a successful set, the last rep or two has to slow down, it has to be hard. That means eventually you’re gonna have to lift heavy, but it doesn’t start that way. It starts with a white belt mentality of, “I’m gonna get this form down exactly right.” I went in there three years ago when I started, and I was lifting small amounts of weight. Now, I started increasing really quickly because I got to 10 reps or more and I was still going, but I didn’t try to go in there with an ego. I just started from zero.
00:10:10
Brad: I think that was a great benefit to myself, and it just started working. And then, of course, you’re gonna get to the point…
00:10:18
Brad: Where you’re kind of locked in, all right? I can do eight reps of this weight on the first set. Well, then maybe I get six or seven on the second set with a three to five minute rest. That’s pretty plausible. If you took a 30-second rest, you’d be lucky to do one or two. It just, it doesn’t work that way. You need to literally rest. So that’s absolutely critical. Like I said, you’re not doing anything else. You’re just resting.
00:10:41
Brad: And I think it’s really important to keep track of this. So I have a physical notebook, but I think you can definitely do this on a Google spreadsheet or some other app, but you don’t wanna reinvent the wheel every time. You need to know what you did last time, the exact weight. You need to write down the machine that you used. That should become fairly self-explanatory, but write down if the seat was on click number four and the arms were on, some of them have arm adjustments, were on click number five. Well, just write that down. You don’t wanna have to reinvent the wheel every time. You write down the exact weight you used and the reps you used for set one and set two. So it’s just there.
00:11:22
Brad: And you just try to beat it the next time. So like I said, the first couple of times you’re gonna go in there, you’re not gonna know what weights. Error on the side of being light. And then kind of stop around 15 reps. If you get to more than 15, you’re not doing 70 until you get to the last rep slowing down involuntarily. Just realize, all right, look, I’m kind of done here. I’m gonna raise the weight the next time. You could even do a third set that first time or two just to get you into getting more effective sets. But I think realistically, it’s just about getting this down mentally.
00:11:56
Brad: You show up, you’re doing six exercises. Now for me, and everybody’s different, but for me, my upper body is a chest press. So I have a chest press machine at the gym. Again, you don’t wanna use barbells because realistically, the muscle is built in those last rep or two where it slows down involuntarily. And if you did a barbell bench press, that’s basically just for ego. Because if you think about it, you’re sitting down on a bench press and unless you have a spotter, which most people don’t, you’re doing a fraction of the weight you can use and a fraction of the reps because literally you don’t want to die, right? You don’t want the weight to get stuck on your neck and chest.
00:12:43
Brad: So just by definition, a barbell bench press is really not doing what we think it’s doing. So that’s kind of to illustrate why we’re using machines because you can get that last rep where honestly, it takes me sometimes five to ten seconds to move that weight the last time. And that’s a really effective repetition but also that larger set. So I do a chest press. I’ll do a lat pulldown. Sometimes I’ll do assisted pull-ups. So literally the assisted pull-up machine, obviously I can do pull-ups but the assisted pull-up machine allows you to focus on the part of the pull-up, the muscle building in your back and your lats and such that you actually wanna focus on as opposed to a lot of people will do pull-ups where they just throw themselves up there and you do see all sorts of wacky things.
00:13:30
Brad: And it’s like, what on earth are you doing? What do you think that is doing to yourself? Other than just proving some random number that you can do, it does nothing. So chest press, lat pulldown, then I find a shoulder press machine and then a row, but I like the chest-supported row. In every instance where you can, you want to support all the other body parts and don’t allow them to move and then just focus on the muscle groups that you’re actually working. So that’s again why we use machines.
00:13:52
Brad: Then I’ll use a tricep machine. So it usually looks like it might be called a triceps machine or tricep dip machine or something like that. Alternately, I do this cable press down. That’s a little bit harder and outside the scope of this but triceps machine is great. Most commercial gyms have one of those. And then I do some type of bicep exercise. Now, this is the one time where I actually will do a dumbbell. Sometimes I’ll do a dumbbell hammer curl or just a dumbbell curl and I would just Google a bunch of different exercises like this and see what comes up.
00:14:39
Brad: And just, again, if you use those principles of you are isolating a muscle, you’re going slowly and you’re using tempo, it’s pretty hard to screw that up. So I would definitely Google and YouTube or your friends there. So that’s it. I’m doing six exercises, two sets per exercise. I’m resting three minutes or more between sets and I’m just walking around the gym. That’s it.
00:14:56
Brad: And keep track of everything in a notebook. And realistically, you’re gonna walk out of there an hour later and you’re gonna know you worked hard but you’re not gonna be sweating. You’re gonna be able to go about your day and I almost guarantee you that this is going to be, over three to 12 months, the most incredible transformation you’ve seen with your body. If I’m of any indication, if Carl Jensen’s any indication, if a bunch of people in my life, it just works.
00:15:18
Brad: The other, just slightly outside the scope thing but it’s important, is you have to eat protein to build muscle. I shoot for one gram of protein per pound of body weight. So I’m actually going for like 180 grams of protein a day which is a lot. But Oikos Triple Zero Greek yogurt is a great option. I eat a lot of chicken thighs. I do eat some protein bars. I use Quest protein bars, but those are just the ones I like for taste. I’m trying to not eat a ton of, try to get the most effective protein I can.
00:15:50
Brad: Obviously, you could eat peanut butter but that’s not, while people think that’s a protein-laden food, it’s a lot of calories. So you could wind up eating three, four, 5,000 calories a day just to get some protein from peanut butter as much as I love it. But eating protein is really important and resting. So like I said, the three to five minutes between sets but also you wanna take two full calendar days off between upper body workouts. So if you worked out on a Monday, the next day would be a Thursday that you could work out upper body.
00:16:20
Brad: And then lower body, same deal. I’d take two days off between. I didn’t mention the exercises I do for that but I would start out with the leg extension machine for quads. I would do the leg curl for hamstrings. So leg curl machine, you can either do the lying one or I like the one where I’m seated. Then something else for quads. So a leg press machine would be good. Hack squat would be best if your gym has it. Or even something like weighted lunges, weighted walking lunges.
00:17:05
Brad: And then you probably wanna do a second hamstring. So maybe, if you know the form, this is real tough, like a deadlift or a Romanian deadlift would be good. 45 degree extension machine if you Google this and learn how to use it would be another option. If none of these work, you can skip that second hamstring. And then I actually do a calf exercise and then the adductor machine which is the one where you sit.
00:17:17
Brad: Maybe it looks like the old Thighmaster thing but this is another one that Dean Turner loves. So I would be remiss if I didn’t say that Dean was on, again, episodes 480 and 516. He has a website at deanturnertraining.com and he has a lot of training programs. He also has a monthly group coaching that’s only $25 a month now as we record this on November 20th and he’s amazing.
00:17:30
Brad: So I would highly recommend, just like anything I’m gonna mention in this episode, I have no relationship with him or any of the things that I mention in this episode so I make zero dollars, let’s be entirely clear but Dean is remarkable. So that is what I’m doing as far as weights.
00:17:52
Brad: As far as cardio and such goes, I try to walk as much as I can. So I’m taking multiple walks a day. I am shooting for 10,000 steps, not because I think it’s a magic number but just because it really denotes to me that I’m getting up and moving because you have to make a really concerted effort to walk 10,000 steps in a day. You have to take probably one to two dedicated walks in a day to get anywhere near 10,000. So I think it’s important just not to be sedentary.
00:18:20
Brad: Another thing that I’m doing that’s brand new is I’m trying to do zone two cardio training. Now if anybody follows Peter Attia or Andrew Huberman which both have really popular health podcasts, you’ve heard about zone two and it’s basically a cardio where you’re kind of at your all-day pace which is you can really do this probably for hours but you’re at a heart rate where you can talk, you could probably have a conversation but you really wouldn’t want to.
00:19:00
Brad: That’s really the most effective way to know if you’re in or around zone two and it doesn’t have to be that precise. It’s just most walks you’re not even close to that. Your heart rate’s in the probably around 100 to 110. For me as zone two, I’m actually getting on the treadmill and not that it’s any better than others. If I was able to go on a Concept2 rower or a stationary bike for that long, I would probably do those but I put my treadmill on like a 12 to 15 incline and I just walk slowly.
00:19:30
Brad: I walk at like three to 3.5 miles per hour and I’ll just do that for 40 plus minutes, 40 to 60 minutes, and I’m doing that about three times a week now. I just put my headphones in, I listen to some podcasts or some music and I just walk and I have a whoop band which is a trackable for some health metrics and sleep and such so I’m able to see what my heart rate is. My zone two is probably in the 130s or thereabouts.
00:19:55
Brad: So I just, yeah, really just try to keep it in that range and the nice thing about zone two is you’re ultimately trying to get that all-day pace where it’s more efficient. So for the runners out there, this would be, again, a white belt mentality of starting over and saying, all right, look, I can probably run a seven-minute mile for five miles, but I’m kind of gassed at the end of it. Well, zone two training in theory is to widen that base. So ultimately, your peak is better, but that’s something different. That would be like a zone five training.
00:20:30
Brad: But zone two is, let’s say for runners out there, you would just start over and you’d start, okay, I’m gonna do a 10 or 11-minute pace where I can do this all day. I can talk, but it’s a little uncomfortable.
00:20:31
Brad: Okay, well now a week later, can you do 9.50? Can you do 9.40 per mile? Can you do nine minutes, three months from now? And then you eventually get to the point where that pace, that all-day pace is just much more efficient.
00:20:43
Brad: Maybe you’re back down at the seven minutes per mile, and then your actual peak in a race might be 5.30 or something like that. So it’s a long-term thing, but frankly, those of us in the FI community, we think long-term. This is what we do, this is what we’re good at. So this is gonna take you a couple years, but it’s really, really worth it.
00:21:05
Brad: So that is the majority of what I’m doing as far as working out goes. I probably, I’m looking to add in some high-intensity interval, like that zone five. I’ve been doing the air assault bike a little bit, but that’s pretty darn hard to do all out for more than about 30 seconds.
00:21:18
Brad: So I’m probably gonna do some kind of rowing where I’ll do like a four minutes on, four minutes off, and repeat that. They call that the Norwegian four by four, I think is what it’s called. So that might be worth Googling.
00:21:29
Brad: But yeah, I’d like to do something maybe once a week that does that. I’m also adding some swimming in. This new gym that I go to has a pool, so you can reserve a swim lane. And I’m trying to add that into my weekly repertoire as well.
00:21:49
Brad: So yeah, that really is the big part for fitness. This gym also has a sauna and a hot tub. So I’m trying to go there, maybe sauna three times a week. I listened to this amazing Tim Ferriss episode with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, which was episode 819.
00:22:05
Brad: And she talked about a lot of the benefits, both cardiovascular and really risk reduction of all-cause mortality, as they call it, so death, basically. Really amazing benefits from going in sauna or even hot tubs a couple times a week. So definitely adding that in.
00:22:24
Brad: Another big thing that I’m doing is just taking walks after meals. I think this is, interestingly, one of the best ways we can control our blood sugar spikes. And there’s a continuous glucose monitor company called Levels.
00:22:35
Brad: And this was one of their biggest tips years ago. And I’ve really internalized it. They basically said, when they aggregate across all their clients, one of the best things you can possibly do to control your blood sugar, which is important for all of us, let’s be frank, not just for people with diabetes, is just to take a simple walk.
00:22:54
Brad: It can be as short as just a handful of minutes after you eat, and it’s gonna avoid a lot of those spikes and the crashes. So if you wanna talk about a low-friction way to just make your life a lot better, that’s it. That’s a really cool thing.
00:23:07
Brad: I personally have been going towards a much lower-carbohydrate diet, bordering on keto, because we have family diabetes, and I also have been taking some blood tests.
00:23:21
Brad: So again, no relation to any of these companies, but Function Health is one that I used for a couple years. And now I’m using a company called Superpower. They charge, it’s $199 when I signed up for 100-plus biomarkers, which is really awesome.
00:23:37
Brad: And I noticed that some of my cardiovascular risk and coronary artery disease markers are potentially a little bit on the higher side. The genetic one is called LP little a, and then there’s another one called APOB, A-P-O-B, and mine are just a little higher than I’d like them to be.
00:23:58
Brad: So I’m really trying to do all I can to not have coronary artery disease, basically, as I get older. I wound up taking, and I think I mentioned this in the Bobby segment at the end of this episode, I wound up signing up for two tests that assess basically what’s going on in your arteries.
00:24:19
Brad: So there’s one called the coronary artery calcium CT, and this actually cost me only $129 out of pocket. It’s cash only, which in almost all health systems that I’ve heard people talk about this, it’s cash only.
00:24:40
Brad: So I called up my local hospital imaging center, asked about, it’s a CAC, coronary artery calcium CT scan, and they got me in two days later for $129 out of pocket. And that basically tells you, do you have some, regardless of what your genetics imply, or if your cholesterol’s high, or APOB, which a lot of doctors think this is a better marker of what’s going on with cholesterol, are there actual issues?
00:25:01
Brad: So for most of us on that CAC, you want it to show up as zero. If it’s not zero, you need to do some research. Again, I’m not a doctor, but I would start Googling Dr. Peter Attia, A-T-T-I-A, and just look that up and figure out with your own doctor what you should do.
00:25:20
Brad: But if it’s not zero, you probably need to consider an intervention. So mine thankfully came back as zero. I also did a carotid artery ultrasound. Unfortunately, the company I used, I cannot recommend.
00:25:36
Brad: I haven’t gotten my results back yet, but I’m hopeful that that’s also gonna 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, I won’t do that CT scan every year, certainly.
00:25:56
Brad: 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.
00:26:06
Brad: 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 four or $500 a year and get those blood tests, get a DEXA scan, and maybe get one of those carotid artery ultrasound or something like that. That’s what I’m doing.
00:26:22
Brad: And I think that’s gonna help me really stay on top of this. And I’m sure I could talk about a whole host of other things that I’m doing as far as my health goes. If you have questions, if you have follow-ups, you can always send them in to feedback at choosefi.com or really the best way is to get on my newsletter.
00:26:39
Brad: This is, I think, a really, really helpful weekly newsletter to stay on top of the pulse of the FI community. Just go to choosefi.com/subscribe. I personally write that. I try to read every response that comes in to me. You can just hit reply to that, and that goes to feedback at choosefi.com.
00:26:55
Brad: But also, our next guest, as I mentioned, Dr. Bobby, he was on episode 498, where we talked about the six pillars of health. 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.
00:27:10
Brad: He has 180 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.
00:27:23
Brad: And yeah, in this segment, which before we get there, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about food. But in this segment, we talk about organic food and is it worth it? And I think it’s a really interesting FI cost-benefit analysis.
00:27:34
Brad: 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.
00:27:45
Brad: And I think you’re gonna find it an exceptionally interesting segment here. But before we get to that, I did wanna 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.
00:28:09
Brad: Food 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.
00:28:23
Brad: 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, Whole Foods or whatever, and that certainly is not cheap.
00:28:45
Brad: So it’s not cheap in money, and it’s not cheap in time either. It sounds like, oh, we’re just gonna go to fast food, or 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.
00:29:03
Brad: 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.
00:29:15
Brad: 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. And that’s especially true if you take a recipe and double or triple it.
00:29:34
Brad: And then you’re just embracing leftovers. This is part of your week, is you make one dinner on Sunday night that’s then gonna 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 what are you, a king or a queen? You don’t want leftovers? You can’t deal with leftovers? Give me a break.
00:30:02
Brad: If you’re someone who says, oh, I don’t eat leftovers, who the heck are you, honestly? That’s not, I don’t think that’s an agile mind. I think that’s just someone who’s really closed-minded and it’s like, I just hate those monolithic things.
00:30:14
Brad: In this instance, I’ve decreed that I don’t eat leftovers. It’s just silly, frankly, and I just 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 leftover five or six days later. It’s the same difference, ultimately.
00:30:29
Brad: 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.
00:30:37
Brad: We talked about this on the episode with Emily recently, about having adventure lists of things that you wanna do, because when you have an afternoon off and you look at each other and you’re like, what should we do? And sometimes you just shake your head and say, I have no idea, and then you have to plan.
00:30:54
Brad: 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, it can just be a meal. Like for us, it’s chicken thighs and roasted broccoli. That’s something we eat fairly often.
00:31:09
Brad: 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 from me. That’s on the list, even though it should be fairly self-explanatory. In that moment, you don’t wanna scramble, and you wanna know, what are my options? Or 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. I take it out that morning after we decide what we’re gonna have, and it’s just that easy, okay?
00:31:41
Brad: So planning is essential. Having that recipe index is essential. Freezing large quantities 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. This is not for deprivation purposes, or the Ramit Sethi type, like, “Yo, those FI people are just misers.” It’s nothing like that. Going out to eat takes up a ton of time, it costs a lot of money, and it’s really unhealthy. I try to prioritize going out to eat as few times as possible.
00:32:06
Brad: Since I’ve moved into my new place two months ago, I’ve literally gone out to eat twice, and that’s it. 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.
00:32:35
Brad: So I think it’s planning, and repetition is good. It’s not bad. It can be to your great benefit. Using those principles, I can almost bet that you’re gonna save 100 or more dollars a month, even just for yourself. If you have a family of two, four, or five people, you’re gonna save hundreds of dollars. As we’ve discussed, little things are the big things with FI.
00:33:02
Brad: For every $100 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 FI number. That’s $30,000. 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.
00:33:47
Brad: 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. 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.
00:34:08
Brad: And as I said, send your feedback in and we can almost undoubtedly do another episode on health and fitness.
00:34:10
Brad: Bobby, thank you for coming back to ChooseFI. I love having you on the show. Absolutely love it.
00:34:13
Dr. Bobby: And I love being here and I love chatting with your audience.
00:34:19
Brad: Yeah, well, again, really appreciate it. We have a community who’s interested in living better lives. The umbrella is financial independence. 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.
00:34:41
Brad: So, really appreciate you lending your expertise for health. 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. I think something that we talked about offline was about organic food. A lot of people don’t know what to make of it.
00:35:02
Dr. Bobby: There’s a broader topic than just organic versus conventional, you’re asking the question about just in general what foods should I be buying? Another related topic is ultra-processed foods. 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.
00:35:31
Dr. Bobby: The issue of organic foods has two key facts. One, organic food costs more money. The costs are real. 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, and we’ll get into the numbers behind that.
00:35:49
Dr. Bobby: The other piece of the puzzle is what are the benefits of organic versus conventional? As we get into the data, the benefits aren’t so clear. 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.
00:36:07
Brad: It’s hard to discern if it is just hype. We need to make choices with limited resources. If it were clear-cut, you’d be able to make a decision with eyes wide open, but it’s not clear-cut at all.
00:36:19
Dr. Bobby: Ultimately, we are gonna 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 we could use that to have a gym membership or hire a personal trainer or get a better bed to sleep better or even put that money away and retire earlier, which has to improve our health as well.
00:36:44
Dr. Bobby: The beginning point is to help people understand what exactly does organic food mean? Organic doesn’t mean safe. Organic food means that there are no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be fertilizers and pesticides; they just can’t be synthetic. 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. We’re gonna go through the data on just that.
00:37:20
Dr. Bobby: There’s a lot of wonderful food from local farmers that isn’t labeled organic because to get the USDA label for organic, you gotta jump through a whole lot of hoops. So let’s assume organic has some characteristics, but it’s not necessarily that it’s that much better for you. If the costs were the same, of course, let’s not eat food that might have pesticides, but the costs aren’t the same.
00:37:44
Brad: Right, obviously the costs are not the same. The USDA basically has measured that we as Americans spend about a trillion dollars a year on food at home. This doesn’t include restaurants and eating out, but that’s about $3,100 a person for food.
00:38:04
Brad: So if you’re a family of four, it’s $1,000 to $1,600 a month. 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 again, that’s what you learn. About 15% of all fruits and vegetables in the US in fact are organic.
00:38:26
Dr. Bobby: Those figures reflect the significant price difference. For instance, 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. Grass-fed beef similarly increased prices when you get the grass-fed versus the conventional.
00:39:12
Brad: For chicken, free range is like $9 a pound versus $5 a pound. Wild-caught versus farm-raised salmon is $8 versus $17 a pound. 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.
00:39:35
Dr. Bobby: It’s a real number that you might quibble it’s $2,500 or you might quibble it’s $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.
00:39:55
Brad: Right, so that $1,000 to $1,600 a month is what you said the USDA assumes. So 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.
00:40:13
Dr. Bobby: It looks like you had 50 to 100% or more difference just for this label of organic. It’s even worse if you love to go to farmer’s markets. I love to go to farmer’s markets, you know, 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.
00:40:38
Brad: So going back just quickly to the definition, you said organic is grown without synthetic fertilizers and most pesticides, but there can be natural pesticides; it’s not even like you’re getting pesticide-free necessarily.
00:40:55
Dr. Bobby: You’re not getting pesticide-free, number one. Number two, you’re assuming that conventional food has pesticides in it. Now, I think we’re segueing into what are the benefits of organic and are there enough of them to pay for that extra cost? If you ask Americans, 85% will say pesticides.
00:42:28
Dr. Bobby: 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. Now 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.
00:42:59
Dr. Bobby: 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. 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. 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 farm worker studies, but I don’t think that tells us much. I think what we gotta do is look at non-farm workers, 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.
00:44:14
Dr. Bobby: 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 farm workers, 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? And 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.
00:45:02
Dr. Bobby: Okay, so they took people and randomized them and said, okay, some of you get organic tomatoes this week. Some of you get conventional or the same with apples, and then we’re gonna reverse it and we’re gonna 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. Does 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?
00:45:37
Dr. Bobby: So there’ve been studies that say people who eat organic food have a lower BMI. Oh my God, I better eat organic because I don’t wanna 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. So observing that people who eat organic do better doesn’t tell us that much. That’s the epitome of selection bias, right? And confounding, all of that.
00:46:16
Dr. Bobby: 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 gonna 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. It would have to be a really big study. It’s never been done. I doubt it will ever be done.
00:46:49
Dr. Bobby: 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 ones are gonna end up abnormal anyways. So I don’t make much out of that.
00:47:18
Dr. Bobby: But there was another observational study with about 68,000 people, and they asked questionnaires about do you always eat organic, sometimes, occasionally. And 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 were measured.
00:47:48
Dr. Bobby: 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? So that means six fewer cancers per 1,000 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 1,000 people who ate organic.
00:48:30
Dr. Bobby: And what people who are listening are probably thinking is, 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.
00:49:06
Dr. Bobby: So 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. Not one death, 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.
00:49:39
Brad: 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? If 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. Maybe we come back to that in five or 10 minutes.
00:50:07
Dr. Bobby: Absolutely come back to that.
00:50:00
Dr. Bobby: 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 or four, I’m not spending $40 on blueberries and I can afford it.
00:50:31
Dr. Bobby: So 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. 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.
00:51:11
Dr. Bobby: So the benefit is eat more fruits and vegetables, forget about whether they’re organic or not. Now, 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 to use some of that $6,000 to buy more fruits and veggies.
00:51:47
Brad: 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 FI community is we try to look at a problem a little bit differently. And yeah, the reflexive answer is buy organic, buy organic. 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, pun intended.
00:52:23
Dr. Bobby: 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? They modeled that for the U.S. If half the U.S. 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.
00:52:43
Dr. Bobby: So we can make a lot of progress if we allocate some of that saved money to buy a few more fruits and veggies.
00:52:51
Brad: 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, just eat more fruits and veggies generally?
00:53:13
Dr. Bobby: Well, I think eat more fruits and veggies in general is a slam dunk. Everyone should think about that. But there are some people who 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.
00:53:43
Dr. Bobby: So the dirty dozen are things that don’t have a peel or a shell, spinach and strawberries and kale and grapes and blackberries. Okay, so if you want to spend some money on organic, maybe buy that organic. But then there are things that they call the clean 15. Well, if you buy a pineapple, it’s got a very thick skin, and corn has a husk, and an 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, I’m not buying organic because they’re generally going to be safe regardless.
00:54:14
Dr. Bobby: So I tend not to do a lot of organic food buying. Gail likes some, so I, of course, buy it for her. But if I care, then I will actually focus on avoiding the conventional for some of that dirty dozen.
00:54:35
Dr. Bobby: 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.
00:54:45
Brad: I like that, Bobby.
00:54:46
Dr. Bobby: Well, we should come back to your question you raised a few minutes ago. So how should we spend that money? I’m making the argument that organic food, $6,000 a year more, isn’t the best use of your money. I’ve spent maybe $500 of that $6,000 on suggesting you buy more fruits and vegetables in general. So now you got $5,500 to spend or save. Yes, if you’re not a member of a gym and you’re like, “God, I don’t want to spend the thousand dollars 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, I’m spending some of that money for my trainer. There are many things in the health arena you can spend it on that I think have a higher ROI.
00:55:32
Dr. Bobby: It’s funny to say this, but I think it’s real. If you put away $6,000 a year, starting at age 35, how much earlier can you retire? I mean, I haven’t done the present value math, but I suspect it’s a 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 interest, that’s real money. I believe you should consider it. 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.
00:56:30
Brad: Yeah, while you were saying that, I just quickly called up a compound interest calculator. If I make 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. This is just the difference between making one decision. It’s extraordinary. That amount of money would allow you to retire sooner. That’s got to have some impact on your health. When you retire early, you can focus on health more. Knowing that you’re retiring earlier because of this wonderful thing you’re doing might make you happier for all those years.
00:57:23
Dr. Bobby: I love that. Okay, let’s actually dive a little bit more into the better ROI. Obviously, you are not anyone’s doctor here on this podcast. Myself or any of the listeners, nobody’s expecting this. This is not advice from you by any means, but just things that I am even thinking about. Okay, if I was talking about $6,000, that’s a massive thing. I can get blood tests 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 $199 a year. You get 100-plus blood markers. That seems pretty good. Like you said, a better bed or some kind of sleep is so critical. Get an Oura Ring or Wootband or something and track what actually makes a difference for your sleep.
00:58:09
Brad: Something I just signed up for, I told you, it was a coronary artery calcium test. That was like $129 at the local hospital because those don’t go through insurance. It’s interesting, Bobby. Most CT scans that you get are a couple of thousand dollars when they go 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. It was shockingly inexpensive.
00:58:35
Dr. Bobby: That’s something. Then these are a little bit outside of the scope, 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. Whole body MRI I’ve even seen. Again, I’m not putting words in your mouth, Bobby, by any means, but those are a couple thousand dollars. Is there potentially more value in doing that than eating organic? Maybe, maybe not. 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 that all of us are doing our research. Just because I’m flippantly mentioning a couple of things on a podcast, please don’t go out and do this.
00:59:21
Brad: There are finite resources and we have to make decisions based on those finite resources looking at totality. I think if people get nothing else from this segment of this podcast, then just think a little bit differently. Bobby has done so beautifully here, looking at the overall effect. 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? I think that’s an interesting operating thesis for how to make decisions just in life generally.
01:00:03
Dr. Bobby: Absolutely. The costs are real. Anyone can verify them for themselves when they go to the market. The benefits are not so clear. When you have a lot of costs and not so clear benefits, you really have an opportunity to ask, “What is the best use of the money?”
01:00:14
Dr. Bobby: 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 on Dr. Bobby Live Long and Well. I think things like a heart rate monitor, if you don’t have one 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. You 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.
01:01:15
Dr. Bobby: 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, it 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.
01:01:43
Dr. Bobby: I’m very wary of doing screening tests. If you have a headache and it’s bad and the doctor says, “Ooh, 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’ll end up with a lot of false positives. You’re gonna chase after things that scare you and may turn out to be nothing, and you may end up with a whole bunch of invasive tests to figure that out. I wouldn’t feel obligated to spend the money. So putting that away is a really, really good thing.
01:02:37
Brad: Yeah, of course, you can use that money for a trip. Maybe you do a yoga retreat or something with the money. I think there are some inexpensive things that are definitely worth considering.
01:02:50
Dr. Bobby: Just real quick, I love how you mentioned that about the testing, and I certainly was not advocating that. It’s just these things exist. If you’re talking about spending 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. You’re not required to spend this on your health by any means. To your point, if you’re gonna reach FI X number of years earlier because of this not insignificant amount of money you’ve just deposited into your net worth and hopefully into your brokerage account, you’re probably gonna have significantly more time to spend on your health.
01:03:32
Brad: You’re gonna have time to take walks, to go to the gym, and to relax and do other things that are gonna be beneficial long-term for your health. This is outside the scope of talking about CGMs necessarily, but it’s interesting just the little things you notice. I signed up for two over-the-counter ones now, if people are interested in Googling this. Dexcom has one called Stelo, S-T-E-L-O. Abbott just came out with one called Lingo. I learned the hard way that it is iOS only. 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. Please don’t make the same mistake that I did.
01:04:17
Dr. Bobby: It’s pretty cool to see this and make some type of hypothesis and test it in real time. What you’re talking about is the end of one approach to testing things in yourself. I have a podcast episode on this too. There are things 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? What you’ll get is a bunch of averages that may confuse you, but test it in yourself. The beauty of these things is you can get an answer quickly.
01:05:07
Dr. Bobby: Okay, I’m gonna 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. The various ways to measure your sleep could be the Oura Ring, or could be a questionnaire like the Pittsburgh Sleep Questionnaire, and then you figure it out. You have your CGM. “Okay, well let me try eating and then walking. Okay, now I’m gonna try eating and not walking, then I’m gonna try eating and walking again.” You do it on, off, on, off, and you get real answers.
01:05:27
Dr. Bobby: So I think the money is not that much to buy some of these…
00:54:35
Dr. Bobby: 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.
00:54:45
Brad: I like that, Bobby.
00:54:46
Dr. Bobby: Well, we should come back to your question you raised a few minutes ago. So how should we spend that money? I’m making the argument that organic food, $6,000 a year more, isn’t the best use of your money. I’ve spent maybe $500 of that $6,000 on suggesting you buy more fruits and vegetables in general. So now you got $5,500 to spend or save. Yes, if you’re not a member of a gym and you’re like, “God, I don’t want to spend the thousand dollars 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, I’m spending some of that money for my trainer. There are many things in the health arena you can spend it on that I think have a higher ROI.
00:55:32
Dr. Bobby: It’s funny to say this, but I think it’s real. If you put away $6,000 a year, starting at age 35, how much earlier can you retire? I mean, I haven’t done the present value math, but I suspect it’s a 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 interest, that’s real money. I believe you should consider it. 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.
00:56:30
Brad: Yeah, while you were saying that, I just quickly called up a compound interest calculator. If I make 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. This is just the difference between making one decision. It’s extraordinary. That amount of money would allow you to retire sooner. That’s got to have some impact on your health. When you retire early, you can focus on health more. Knowing that you’re retiring earlier because of this wonderful thing you’re doing might make you happier for all those years.
00:57:23
Dr. Bobby: I love that. Okay, let’s actually dive a little bit more into the better ROI. Obviously, you are not anyone’s doctor here on this podcast. Myself or any of the listeners, nobody’s expecting this. This is not advice from you by any means, but just things that I am even thinking about. Okay, if I was talking about $6,000, that’s a massive thing. I can get blood tests 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 $199 a year. You get 100-plus blood markers. That seems pretty good. Like you said, a better bed or some kind of sleep is so critical. Get an Oura Ring or Wootband or something and track what actually makes a difference for your sleep.
00:58:09
Brad: Something I just signed up for, I told you, it was a coronary artery calcium test. That was like $129 at the local hospital because those don’t go through insurance. It’s interesting, Bobby. Most CT scans that you get are a couple of thousand dollars when they go 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. It was shockingly inexpensive.
00:58:35
Dr. Bobby: That’s something. Then these are a little bit outside of the scope, 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. Whole body MRI I’ve even seen. Again, I’m not putting words in your mouth, Bobby, by any means, but those are a couple thousand dollars. Is there potentially more value in doing that than eating organic? Maybe, maybe not. 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 that all of us are doing our research. Just because I’m flippantly mentioning a couple of things on a podcast, please don’t go out and do this.
00:59:21
Brad: There are finite resources and we have to make decisions based on those finite resources looking at totality. I think if people get nothing else from this segment of this podcast, then just think a little bit differently. Bobby has done so beautifully here, looking at the overall effect. 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? I think that’s an interesting operating thesis for how to make decisions just in life generally.
01:00:03
Dr. Bobby: Absolutely. The costs are real. Anyone can verify them for themselves when they go to the market. The benefits are not so clear. When you have a lot of costs and not so clear benefits, you really have an opportunity to ask, “What is the best use of the money?”
01:00:14
Dr. Bobby: 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 on Dr. Bobby Live Long and Well. I think things like a heart rate monitor, if you don’t have one 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. You 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.
01:01:15
Dr. Bobby: 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, it 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.
01:01:43
Dr. Bobby: I’m very wary of doing screening tests. If you have a headache and it’s bad and the doctor says, “Ooh, 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’ll end up with a lot of false positives. You’re gonna chase after things that scare you and may turn out to be nothing, and you may end up with a whole bunch of invasive tests to figure that out. I wouldn’t feel obligated to spend the money. So putting that away is a really, really good thing.
01:02:37
Brad: Yeah, of course, you can use that money for a trip. Maybe you do a yoga retreat or something with the money. I think there are some inexpensive things that are definitely worth considering.
01:02:50
Dr. Bobby: Just real quick, I love how you mentioned that about the testing, and I certainly was not advocating that. It’s just these things exist. If you’re talking about spending 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. You’re not required to spend this on your health by any means. To your point, if you’re gonna reach FI X number of years earlier because of this not insignificant amount of money you’ve just deposited into your net worth and hopefully into your brokerage account, you’re probably gonna have significantly more time to spend on your health.
01:03:32
Brad: You’re gonna have time to take walks, to go to the gym, and to relax and do other things that are gonna be beneficial long-term for your health. This is outside the scope of talking about CGMs necessarily, but it’s interesting just the little things you notice. I signed up for two over-the-counter ones now, if people are interested in Googling this. Dexcom has one called Stelo, S-T-E-L-O. Abbott just came out with one called Lingo. I learned the hard way that it is iOS only. 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. Please don’t make the same mistake that I did.
01:04:17
Dr. Bobby: It’s pretty cool to see this and make some type of hypothesis and test it in real time. What you’re talking about is the end of one approach to testing things in yourself. I have a podcast episode on this too. There are things 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? What you’ll get is a bunch of averages that may confuse you, but test it in yourself. The beauty of these things is you can get an answer quickly.
01:05:07
Dr. Bobby: Okay, I’m gonna 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. The various ways to measure your sleep could be the Oura Ring, or could be a questionnaire like the Pittsburgh Sleep Questionnaire, and then you figure it out. You have your CGM. “Okay, well let me try eating and then walking. Okay, now I’m gonna try eating and not walking, then I’m gonna try eating and walking again.” You do it on, off, on, off, and you get real answers.
01:05:27
Dr. Bobby: So I think the money is not that much to buy some of these, but the mindset is so powerful because we all wanna take control of our health. We wanna 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.
01:07:18
Brad: Love it. All right, Bobby, so 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.
01:07:41
Dr. Bobby: Ultimately, my question to you is going back to the entire episode here, you’ve mentioned you don’t especially put a lot of stock in organics for yourself. I know you mentioned gal a couple of times is a little more into it. And you also mentioned farmers markets. How 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. When you go to the grocery store, how do you think about it?
01:08:07
Dr. Bobby: 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, 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. There are chickens that 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 gonna obviously cook differently. Some of them are dairy free and are not allergic. So I gotta 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. That’s kind of how I net it out.
01:08:18
Dr. Bobby: And of course, money amounts to people. If they’re gonna 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, Chick-fil-A Doritos, or Stouffer’s lasagna. I mean, that’s not part of the menu.
01:08:37
Brad: 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.
01:08:49
Dr. Bobby: Come play with the kangaroos and the alpacas and everything else. It’s a lot of fun. We love it.
01:08:54
Brad: That sounds great. So as you mentioned a couple 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. You get the information you need. So this is a health podcast that I personally listen to and highly recommend.
01:09:20
Dr. Bobby: No, they can go to my website, drbobbylivelongandwell.com or just anywhere, just type in Dr. Bobby, 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.
01:09:44
Brad: Yeah, well, I appreciate you. And until next time, thanks for being here.
01:09:48
Podcast Extro: You’ve been listening to ChooseFI Podcast, where we help middle-class America build wealth one life hack at a time.
