Heroic Interview: Eat to Live with Joel Fuhrman

You're listening to Optimize youe Nutrition, an Optimal living interview with Joel Fuhrman, M.D. and Brian Johnson. Well, I am so excited to have Dr. Joel Fuhrman here on this discussion. Dr. Fuhrman, your work has been so inspiring for me, and I know so many people out there, and I'm excited to chat about some. Some of my favorite big ideas that have really inspired me, and also some personal practices that you use in your life to show up and to create as consistently and powerfully as you do. So thank you so much for taking the time. Excited to chat today.

My pleasure. Looking forward to it.

Right on. Well, let's start off with the idea of nutrient density. The way I describe you often is people who walk into a whole foods, and when they see the ANDI scale, the aggregate nutritional density index, I tell them they have you to thank for it. So can you tell us about that Andy scale? What nutrient density is your health equation and why it matters?

Well, sure. And of course, the health equation is H equals N over C, which means that your healthy life expectancy is dependent on the micronutrient per calorie density of your diet over your lifetime. And let's define the H, the N over C part. Nutrients over calories means. It does mean how much the amount of micronutrients you're getting per calorie, less calories, more micronutrients. But also I'd like it to refer to the broad spectrum of micronutrients we're getting in. In other words, let's try to aim for what I call comprehensive micronutrient adequacy. Not just the height, but the full breadth or the full width. So no peg is missing or no hole is missing from any. No peg is missing from any hole. In other words, we have all the micronutrients we need filled. And that's the secret to having a long, healthy life. And, you know, we have an unprecedented opportunity in human history here. It's that we can understand and analyze what's in foods. And we know, for example, foods that have very powerful effects to prevent cancer and foods that have effects to promote cancer. And we know when we process foods, we lose nature's goodness. We lose the full spectrum of antioxidants and phytochemical chemicals that are so protective against cancer. And we know that there are superfoods that have tremendous power to protect against cancer. And I'm saying, well, let's devise a diet using modern science to give us the opportunity to live longer, live better. Not develop heart attacks, strokes, dementia, not get cancer. To live our life free of fear. Let's construct a diet that will give us the opportunity to live better, have happier, more pleasurable lives. And then we can make it taste great. We can use, you know, use my 25 years of experience cooking this way and the input from chefs from all over the world. And let's have, you know, top chefs and let's see how we can take start as a basis with the highest quality diet, with the highest quality food, and then we're going to make it taste good. And we can marry together. Great pleasure, with great health. You know, why not not have heart attacks? Why not not have to worry about diseases? Why, why not eat this way? To me, it seems pretty ridiculous that people play Russian roulette with their life all for the idea that they think they're going to have a happier, more pleasurable life. To be sickly and to have fear and to have heart attacks and be on medications and have happened to them. What happens to other Americans, which is to live your life on medications, in bad physical shape, aging prematurely and having a horrible. The last 20 years of your life is being sickly and unable to enjoy your children, enjoy your grandchildren, physically fit to enjoy exercise, enjoy sports, to enjoy life, even to see, hear, taste and smell better. Because Americans are just aging rapidly. So I'm making a statement. My H N over C formula is essentially a statement against the standard American diet, because that's the opposite. That's a diet that's very high in calories and deficient in almost all anti cancer micronutrients.

So brilliant. So let's talk about, let's get specific. So what are the most nutrient dense foods that we can start eating today? And what are those foods that are least nutrient dense that are actually creating the cancers and the heart disease and all these other things we don't want. So that. What's the good stuff, what's the bad stuff?

Well, you know, the good stuff is the colorful stuff from nature. The stuff that nature puts colors in. Red, orange, green, black. You know, we're talking about blackberries. And also, of course, mushrooms are very high in nutrients. Talking about green vegetables, tomatoes, eggplants, onions, garlic and bread, beans, black beans. But I made an acronym that makes people memorize this really quickly. It's called G bombs. And I say G bombs for your immune system, special forces. Could you imagine what would happen if Americans ate G bombs every day? Within 30 years or 20, 30 years, we'd halve the rate of cancer in America, within one generation, cancer would drop 80%. In other words, what happen to the cancer? We wouldn't have warned cancer in America if everybody ate G bombs every day. G bombs stands for. G stands for green vegetables, greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. The seeds, like hemp seeds, the seeds like flaxseeds, chia seeds, sesame seeds are very high in Omega 3, are very high in lignins that are protected against prostate cancer, very powerfully protective against cancer. We can talk about some of the studies there that are just fascinating. And walnuts. And walnuts and hemp seeds have more omega 3 fatty acids. Like chia and flax. Like chia and flax does. Sesame seeds are not high in omega 3 fatty acids, but they do have lignans that protect against breast cancer. So there you focus on those. So I'm giving people the information so they can construct their diet style to be maximally protected against cancer in their future life.

Love it. So nutrient dense foods, G bombs for your immune system. Absolutely love it. And then of course, those greens, those leafy greens, are those, in fact, on your andi scale, are those the highest? The romaines, the kales, the collards, the chards, that sort of thing?

Yes. You can tell by looking at the food if it's like a dark green leaf, you know it's going to be way, way up there. All dark green leaves are super high in micronutrients. And what at the end the scale does is it records the level of like 36 different nutrients, the full gamut of nutrients the government tests and records and foods. And by adding them all up and giving each of them one total number, it gives you just a total at a glance, it gives you a tool to just glance at a number and see, wow. It's not that these green vegetables have 10 times more nutrients than a piece of bread or a piece of chicken. They've got 100 times more nutrients than the same amount of calories as a piece of bread or a piece of chicken. And by seeing it's 100 times more nutrient dense, it's a good motivational tool to help direct people that they, oh, I gotta buy some of that broccoli. I gotta get some kale. Collards are dark green watercress. You know, they know that these foods score real high, but you and I could eyeball them and tell by the dark green color they were gonna be that high. You know what I mean?

Yup, yup. That's amazing. And then just to take one, one step more in that direction as well. With the cruciferous vegetables, and you call them cruciferous disease fighters. Can you tell us a little bit about the magnitude of their impact and how, you know, the greens are amazing, and these cruciferous vegetables seem to be even more remarkable in reducing our propensity to all these diseases.

That's correct. And that's correct. And in the dark green crucifix, for example, kale and collards are dark green and mustard greens are dark green, but they're also a crucifix vegetable as well. Spinach is dark green, but it's not a cruciferous vegetable. So even though skin and spinach has anti cancer effects, not quite as powerfully anti cancer effects as would be kale, collards, mustard greens, because it doesn't have the cruciferous features, the cruciferous feature means it contains these bitter glucosinolates in it. So when you mix spinach in a smoothie, it may taste smoother. You don't taste it, but, you know, kale, collards may be a little more. But that little bitter taste in the kale or collards and mustard greens or broccoli rabe, for example, represents the concentration of glucosinolates that the body converts into isothiocyanate. So you shouldn't say the body converts it. It really converts in the mouth as we're chewing it. Or you could convert it in the blender as you're blending it, because as you break the cell wall in the preparation or the chewing of the vegetable, the enzyme in the cell wall called myrosinase, mixes with the carcinolate in the center of the plant cell, forming these ITCs, forming these isothiocyanides that have powerful effects to stimulate and to support immune function. So the point here is that when people eat three or four servings of vegetables a week, they may decrease the risk of cancer somewhat like 20 to. But if you were to eat just two servings of cruciferous, three servings of cruciferous vegetables a week, it would decrease risk of cancer. Double that to like 40%. But of course, I'm not advising people eat two or three servings of cruciferous vegetables a week. I'm advising they eat cruciferous vegetables every single day.

Which leads to your superimmunity. The name of one of your more recent books, just amazing. So we've covered, we talked about what we need to eat more of. What do we need to eat less of? What's the stuff that's creating all this disease that's at the heart of the standard American diet you want to see people get rid of, right?

It's that Americans are eating almost their whole diet out of foods that supply them with high caloric concentration, but no micronutrients and antioxidants. Let's go through that, okay, for a minute. Because obviously 62% of the American diet is processed foods like pasta, bread, salad oil, mayonnaise, donuts, cookies, crackers, rice drinks, rice cakes, soft drinks, breakfast bars, chips, corn. Just stuff that's just calories. You might as well just eat the cardboard box. And people don't recognize that oil is concentrated calories too. With no significant micronutrient load, they're just pouring calories down their throat and that is aging them. It doesn't have to even have something bad in it, even like olive oil, just a high concentrated calories. It keeps you fat. You're pouring so many calories in at once and you're eating more calories and they burn. And when you eat excess calories, it ages us. The second thing is, of course 26% of the American diet is animal products. Now let's just think about this for a minute. Because excess calories leads to excess body weight and excess fat on your body and fat on the body makes the body produce angiogenesis promoters and pro inflammatory mediators and things with more cancer. So being overweight is cancer promoting. And we know that eating animal products is linked to being overweight and producing more fat in your body. And so processed foods, we know all that. But here there's something different going on here because we also know that these foods are both animal products and processed foods have no phytochemicals and antioxidants. So they don't just make you gain weight and make you. But they also don't contain any micronutrient load. There's not any compensatory benefits to those calories because they're not containing all those protective nutrients. But there's another issue going on. There's a third aspect here, and that is when we eat pasta and white bread and sugar, we're pushing up high levels of insulin. White rice, white potato, we're pushing up high levels of insulin and insulin is a fat storage hormone. And excessive circulating insulin promotes cancer and it promotes angiogenesis, which means the growth of blood vessels to fuel cancer cells. When we eat animal products, especially excessively, we also promote a hormone called insulin like growth factor 1, IGF1. And insulin like growth factor 1 promotes ages of body, promotes breast cancer, promotes colon cancer, promotes the growth of Tumors and cancers in your body, as are some other factors in high animal protein foods that allow cancers to proliferate and grow into. So here's what. So I'm saying not only are animal products rather than a piece of chicken like a bagel, because it doesn't have a significant micronutrient load in it, but a pizza, not only is a chicken, a piece of chicken like a bagel because it's high in calories per nutrient level, but it's also a piece of chicken like a bagel because they both promote hormones. The bagel promotes insulin and the chicken promotes IGF1. They both promote hormones that promote breast cancer. And if you want to have the breast cancer sandwich, you want to promote the hormones together. That's when they're most dangerous. So having a chicken sandwich or having a burger, we have the white bread and the meat together. That's the greatest way we can cause cancer, is by promoting insulin and IGF1, especially when we do it simultaneously.

Yeah. You look at how we can crowd that out of our lives. And starting with one of the ideas I remember from Eat to live was put a sign in the refrigerator that says salad is the main dish. And to start with that and to have that as kind of the center point, the other stuff kind of comes in. Can you speak to that for a second?

Yeah. I have like five simple rules that I want people to do. And one of those rules is at least one meal of the day, have a big salad as the main dish. That's the rule. I mean, everybody does that. Boy, that would be great if everybody had a big. We're talking about like a whole head of romaine, a whole box of. The whole four ounce box of mixed baby greens, the whole thing. Tomatoes, shredded red onion, you know, some broccoli, whatever it is, shredded cabbage on top, some cherry tomatoes. You know, a delicious dressing may be one of my favorite dressings is to m almonds and garlicky tomato sauce, maybe with some soaked dried tomatoes in there, maybe a little splash of fig vinegar, balsamic vinegar. You know, make a healthy dressing, pour it on the salad, mix in a little dehydrated, you know, make a delicious tasting salad and have that salad. Can you imagine if the whole population had a big salad, big chop salad every day? How we would. We'd sell our health. We'd solve the health care crisis in America. We'd solve the, you know, our economic crisis. It's all dependent on how much money we're spending on healthcare. Companies can't afford to stay in business we have health care costs have, you know, tripled in the last. It's just. Anyway, the point is that the second thing is I like people to do is make a big pot of vegetable bean soup on the weekend. Juice some tomatoes, carrots, celery, throw in beans and peas, shove in some dill and oregano and basil, put in mushrooms and split peas and black and lentils and zookee beans. Make this delicious tasting. Put spices and herbs in there. Make a giant pot of soup. On the weekend, I make a giant pot. You could put a whole 25 pound turkey in there. I put a whole giant pot of soup and I'll put that whole big pot right in the refrigerator. I'll have soup hot that night and I'll put the whole pot in the refrigerator. Next morning it's all cold and cooled down. I'll put it out into like 10 or 10 different containers. So we all just can grab a thing of soup and offer to work with us. We have it made for our lunch with a little salad. So it's all made. It almost has made for the week. We're not cooking soup every night. We're just making one big pot for the week. That's the second thing is make a big pot of soup because you want to have some beans every day. And if you're not having some, so you can put the beans on your salad, you can have a bean for bean mushroom, you know, bean mushroom, oatmeal burger. There's all kinds of ways you can do it. But I like to. I just make the soup and I have a, you know, bowl of soup for lunch most often.

That's great. Well, now you got me excited. So we've got the two rules. What are your other three rules to round out those five rules?

Well, the other two rules is how.

To veggie soup too. That sounds good.

Oh, great. Yeah. Well, yeah. So simple. You have a big salad, a big soup. It's not that complicated. Three fresh fruits a day, some berries and kiwis mixed in. This is the other rule. Have some fresh fruit. I wake up in the morning and I have some fresh fruit before I wake up. And if I'm hungry, if I'm like not hungry, I had a big dinner or something I don't have. I'll go to the gym in the morning with a glass of water if I ate earlier. If I'm particularly hungry or wanted to go to the gym later, I'll have some fruit in the morning, maybe with a little slice of avocado. Maybe with some oatmeal or a piece of whole, whole grain or something like the mana bread stuff, which is really good. But in any case, I'll have something in the morning and I'll do my exercise, come back, have my salad and soup for lunch. So we're saying here, and the fourth rule is nuts and seeds. We talked about the amazing power seeds have to protect against cancer. So maybe I'll make a salad dressing on Wednesday night and I'll make another salad dressing on Saturday or Sunday night. Just take me five minutes to make that soup. May take me a couple hours once a week for the salad. Just takes five minutes. Let's say I'll throw some cashews and sesame seeds in a blender with a couple peeled maple oranges and some blood orange vinegar, a squeeze of lemon, make it delicious orange dressing. Now I got the lignans with oil. Or I'll throw little flax seeds or chia seeds in there. I'll make a dressing which I just talked about, the tomato based dressing, which I'll put almonds and a few sunflower seeds or hemp seeds in there. In other words, the fourth rule of course is having some nuts and seeds every day. So the nuts and seeds, you have it mostly as a salad dressing because we want to decrease the amount of oil in the diet or remove that because oil is absorbed so rapidly that it promotes fat storage on your body. It goes right, and your body can't oxidize it as rapidly it's being absorbed, it can't burn it. So it stores it as fat really quickly. Whereas when you eat nuts and seeds, you increase stool fat. Part of the fat passes through you unabsorbed. It fed into the bloodstream more slowly and the body can burn it for energy and oxidize. It doesn't cause weight gain like the oil does. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, the nuts and seeds protect against cancer and the oil does not. So we're trying to switch out the salad dressing recipes and use nuts and seeds in the salad dressing instead of oil in the salad dressings. And the last thing is that we mentioned, the fifth rule is have a big portion of some green vegetables every day, not in the salad. In addition to what's in the salad. That's not enough. Also have a big serving of cooked broccoli or artichokes or asparagus or brussels sprouts or some of the lightly steamed or stewed vegetables. So that's the fifth rule. The last rule is number five, have a big Portion as part of your main dish at dinner a big serving of green vegetables or vegetable bean stew or something like that as well.

That's fantastic. So really quick recap. One, salad make it huge at least once a day. Two, veggie bean soup, make a huge one once a week. Three, fresh fruit every day. Four, nuts and seeds every day, especially in the salad dressing, dressing, remove those oils and the caloric heavy, nutrient poor salad dressings. And number five, big portion of green veggies every day. And you said something that we could talk about all of this for a weekend or a week, but you mentioned the idea of, look, if we want to solve our healthcare crisis, we've got to go at the root. And you've got a great way of describing that where you say it's kind of like taking your car if you have symptoms that you don't like experiencing. It's like taking your car in when it's got the oil light flashing and rather than actually dealing with the source of the problem, having the mechanic just cut the wire and call that solved. And can you comment on that as it relates to dealing with symptoms versus root causes? And I'd love to hear your reference on that.

Of course, yeah. It's like the oil lights flash on the dashboard, you can slip, stick with the wires, you don't see it flashing. It's the same thing that you go to your doctor for anything that's wrong with you. Or he takes a blood test, he says, oh, you have high blood pressure, you have pre diabetes, you have diabetes, you have high cholesterol. So he gives you, let's say you have high blood pressure, so he gives you a medication to lower your blood pressure. Well, that just gives you the subconscious permission to keep eating the same way that caused the problem to begin with. It's like continuing to drive your car without oil and covering up. But it's worse than that because it lowers your diet because one blood pressure medication is usually not enough and you keep blood pressure getting worse and worse. And he has to give you two medications or three medications whose side effects interact with each other and cause undiscoverable or never studied potential risks, including increasing risk of cancer even. And when you lower and to get the systolic number down, to get the first number down to a favorable range, you have to push the diastolic number to an unfavorable low range. It gets too low and a low diastolic means you don't have increased return. But there's no squeezing, there's no pressure on the blood vessel wall, getting blood to return to the heart in the resting or refilling stage. And that's when the body gets the oxygen through the coronary vessels in the refilling stage. And that causes irregular heartbeat, like atrial fibrillation from the blood pressure medications from pushing it up. Then they've got to give you a medication that's in the blood, and then you're going to bleed from that. Of course, then they give you a medication for that because that's going to cause irritation in your esophageal. Instead of putting a proton pump inhibitor, and that's going to cause you to lose bones, it puts you on a. A drug for your osteoporosis. And that's going to cause you to cause another problem. In other words, it's just insane. It's insanity. Instead of telling the person to get, you know, to lose weight, stop eating salt, exercise, and eat right, it starts with drugs giving you a constellation of damaging health effects that you stay on a medical cripple for the rest of your life. And this way of treating this is to accelerate your death. Almost every disease, the drug gives you the opportunity to cause some side effects and treat those side effects with more medication. It's. And more medications and you have more, and it's just going to. It leads to a cornucopia of medical difficulties and medical dependency.

Yeah. And your approach as an MD is to approach it from this nutrition vantage point and solve it at the root and let's quit treating all those symptoms and just go straight to the root. Another point that you make throughout your work is that this is hard work and that too often we want to just get the quick solution and, and we just ignore the fact that we just snip that light that's telling us the oil's low. And you have this great line. You say that you can't try, you've got to commit. And you liken it to when one gets married that the minister doesn't say or the officiant doesn't say. Do you swear to give this person a try, a good try? There's a commitment here, so I'd love to hear you talk about. This is a big part of my work. And optimal living 101 is that concept of commitment. So tell us about commitment and how this plays into this whole conversation.

Absolutely. A person says, I'll give it a try, then you know they're going to fail. Actually, that's the key to knowing, boy, this person doesn't want to not do this never. Food is. Addiction is very addicting. Like American diet. All those processed foods, high sugar, high salt, high oil, greasy, high fat foods stimulate pleasure sensations, dopamine sensations in the brain. They get pain. They got to make, they got to know that there's going to be a weak transition. We're not going to feel that great. And the first, you know, if you get married and the person says you're going to give this a try, of course not. The first sign your wife is sick, you run away, look for somebody else, or your person has the first argument. You know, you're making a commitment to work things out and to be, to be a person dependent on each other. You know, this is going to take some, it's going to take some effort at the beginning. You know, anything in life that has really worthwhile and has tremendous benefits for your life long term takes effort. You don't get something for nothing. A few people can win the lottery, but most people have to be, you know, have to work very hard. Most, you know, it takes an effort to get a college education. It takes an effort to get to the Olympic Games. It takes an effort to. But the point I'm making is that things that have a lot of value take some effort. But in this case it's called a no brainer. Because what you get out of this, you know, 20, 30 years of pleasurable life, no medical dependency, maintaining youthful vigor until your later years and the higher sense of, and better quality of just your body not hurting and also being able to taste and see and smell and hear better and not lose your physical capacities for aging. The point here is the payback is so powerful and so beneficial that any person to not do this is foolish. Any person to not become a nutritarian. I say it's like a person is not a nutritarian then either. Then most likely they just haven't learned enough yet, not educated enough. You know, because I have these people come into my getaways where people stay and stay with me in a hotel for the week. And sometimes, you know, a wife will bring their husband or husband, their wife and they'll say to me, you know, my husband's not going to eat this way and he doesn't want to change his life. He's just coming along to keep me company, to get away. And you, you know, so that's great, but bring along, I'll have a lot of fun, you know, and by the end of the week when they hear all the information, they change and they start and they become staunch Nutritarians, because they didn't want to do it, they weren't planning on it. But the information is so compelling that intelligent people, if they really learn this stuff, they're going to change.

Yeah, brilliant. And again, I just love you're scientifically grounded, you're so passionate and it's grounded in science. And you know, you make the claim too in the statement that most of us should be able to extend our lifespan to surpass 95 good years of age. So for you to bring this wisdom to bear and to paint that picture of we can live with this vitality now and for such a long time is deeply inspiring. And I want to chat about. These ideas are just extraordinary and any one of which we implement in our lives will have profound impacts. I want to hit on exercise really quickly and then I want to hear some of your fundamentals and how you stay so plugged in, how you're so on purpose. But first tell us about quickly the research on exercise. And you know that I remember you talking about that five times per week. We basically reduce our number of colds by almost 50%. Can you just comment on that and why that's so powerful?

Well, exercise revs up the body's ability to reduce free radicals and keeps our immune system intact. And I think the bottom line here is that walking is a great exercise, but walking is not sufficient. If you want optimal, we can talk about a good diet or we can talk about an optimal diet. My niche is to give people what's optimal. They can always change it to good if they want to, but I want to. If you give people good, they won't ever know what optimal is, you know what I mean? And then you could be selling somebody out who really needed optimal from a serious condition or something, or had a shot. But nevertheless. So saying walking is not optimal, we need to do more vigorous exercise. We need to elevate our pulse more. We need to strengthen our lower body back up in our hips. So when we get to be 85 or 95 years old, we're not going to have weak and weak bones or sarcopenia strengthening of our muscles. We want to stay fit. And also the way exercise is fun, it's an exciting part of a life to be fit and to play tennis and to go skiing and to play volleyball and to do running on the beach and to do things and climbing mountains. It's fun to be doing things with your body and have the health to be able to continue to do things to body as you get older too. But in Any case, the other side of the coin is that being a triathlete and running marathons and 20 mile swimming race and 20 miles, 5 miles swimming and 20 mile bike ride and 150 mile, that you can exercise too much. And that's not great for your health either. I don't think it's really great for your health. One of my nutritarians guys is about 83 years old. His name's Augie, but he runs like a marathon every month he runs marathons in Florida heat. And he's a great testament to show that the snitch terrian way of running enable an 83 year old to be able to run a marathon in a Florida heat. It shows that he's in great shape and how healthy he is. But I wouldn't advise that for people's health running marathons at that age because it seems like it's too much exercise, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, so we're talking optimal here and just showing up, getting our heart rates up and profound benefits both physiologically, immunologically, psychologically, etc. Well, let's talk about your fundamentals.

Sure. Well, I was on the world figure skating team back in the 1970s and I, you know, I love sports and I like to play tennis, I like to go skiing, I like to go jogging, I like to go mountain biking, I like to play volleyball, I like to do anything, you know, I like, oh, just give me something. I just like to do stuff, you know what I mean? Physical stuff. So for me, exercise is just fun. Part of my life, you know. And I do try to do something every day, you know, or I'll try to either, you know, maybe one day I'm playing tennis, one day I'm going for a bike ride in the woods, going to the gym and you know, I'm stretching and doing some exercise in the gym, you know. So I pretty much just see it as part of life, like eating, like going to the bathroom. I tell people, you know, you go to bed and take a shower, you brush your teeth, you know, instead of toilet. It's part of just doing something you do. It is part of your life. Just make it part of your life. Yeah, and I have a, you know what I do? I structure my work life around the things that are necessary. It's necessary you eat right, you have some time, you put in your schedule to eat, you know, you, or you, you put some scum into your schedule to take a shower or go to the bathroom or brush your teeth. Well, I put, I just These are necessities. I have to put some time in my life and that's part of it. I do, as you know, I work a lot, but I also make sure I exercise and I work, as you know, I can do as much as I can, but as long as I get enough sleep. And you're going to sleep right, you're not going to cut your sleep down. So you're not going to cut your exercise down. You're going to sleep, you're going to eat, you're going to exercise and whatever you want to work, you get it done, you got it. You got to do your eating, your sleeping, your exercise.

Yep. Yeah. That's fantastic. I love how playful you make it look. It's just what we do. We don't need to think about it too hard. Just do it, make time and do it. And that's the way that we actually have the energy to do everything that we do. And I know you're so busy and you're traveling all the time to maintain this level of optimal health is remarkable. You're obviously super passionate and purpose driven. I'd love to hear you describe how you see your purpose and any tips you might have for people to discover their purpose and to really align with what they feel is their mission in life. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Not too, you know, not a lot of thoughts, but I think that it's great to, you know, it's great for your life to be passionate about something. And I think that, you know, because that passion feels that you're doing things every day that you really enjoy doing, that your work is part of your enjoyment. You're not working because you, you know, so you. And it doesn't have to be your work though, because some people, they don't really enjoy their work and they should be good that they could see something to enjoy in it, but if they can't, they got to find something else. They enjoy that. But in any case, it's good to have be passionate about some things in your life. And to me, you know, the world is a beautiful place and you can look around you and see, you know, beauty all over the place and things you can be, you know. So the point is whether it's nature, whether it's painting, whether it's another, whether it's the beauty in another person and the goodness in people, you know, having goodwill for other people and striving to. And I get a lot of personal reward, just to give you an example from giving people information that may benefit thousands of people. But a person could benefit one person and get the same reward. They could say, you know what, I'm going to help my neighbor today. But the point is the same feeling of goodness and reward that I might feel because I have this unique blessing opportunity to be able to have a voice, to be able to help a lot of people maybe with their health and that's great and I get a lot of personal satisfaction from that. But everybody can get that same thing and that's the same feeling. And they get that from, number one, taking good care of your own health because you know, we respects what you say or can be influenced positively by you. If you're not going to be an example of good health yourself, you have to. And whether you're teaching about anything, you have to follow, you have to do the right thing. And the second thing is of course is striving to do some good in the world. And even if in the world is to help a youngster to help one person, you know, it doesn't have to be a health, you know, it doesn't be something on the grand dill scheme of things.

Yeah, of course. That's great. So then a couple more questions. Just would love to know as you look back on your life and your kind of the wisdom that you've gained and the lessons that you've learned, is there anything that you know now that you wish you knew at the beginning of your journey when you're first getting going, you just kind of wish. God, I wish I knew this from day one. Does anything come to mind on that front?

I'm sure I could think of something that would run on the spot. I'm not thinking. I can't think of it right now. I'm sure that this is a good answer to that question.

I'll give you an advanced warning.

I don't have it right now.

That's awesome. Well, let's wrap it up with again, my whole approach is let's take action now, let's get out of theory and let's get into practice. We've talked about a lot of things, but if you had to boil it down into the number one tip for people, wherever they are in their life right now, nutrition wise, etc. What's the number one tip you would recommend that they pay attention to and integrate into their life starting today?

Stop giving excuses. Stop looking for reasons why you shouldn't do something, just do it. You know, the Nikes say just do it. You know, excuses are a person who is an addiction and doing the wrong thing has a reason for maintaining their addiction. And any kind of addiction you maintain with an excuse always makes your life worse. Like, I'm smoking. I can't quit smoking because my son smashed the car and my husband might be fired. It's not the right time to quit right now. But, you know, the smoking complicates your life. It makes every stress worse. The same thing with eating, you know, it ruins your mental attitude. It ruins your ability to concentrate. It ruins your focus. It ruins the ability to solve the stress in your life. In other words, do it now. Don't put it off. And remember that an excuse is not an excuse. Right? There's no excuses. Just do the right thing and do it right now. And you live your life that way, your life becomes much happier. You're not looking for. You're looking for. You live your life looking for solutions, not looking for excuses that interfere with your life.

Amen to that. Well, that's a perfect way to conclude. Dr. Furman, I really appreciate you taking the time and your passion is so apparent in your wisdom. And, yeah, thank you for all your work. And I look forward to continuing this conversation. The future.

Okay, Brian. Me too.

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