Brian Johnson summarizes and endorses Joshua Rosenthal's Integrative Nutrition in this PNTV episode. He frames the book as a broad synthesis of many dietary approaches, highlights alarming health statistics (e.g., high US overweight/obesity rates), and emphasizes simple, sustainable fundamentals: drink more water, eat more leafy greens and whole plant foods, reduce refined foods and animal products, exercise, and apply Rosenthal's "primary foods" model (spirituality, relationships, work, exercise). Practical tactics mentioned include crowding out unhealthy choices, the flexible 90/10 rule (90% healthy, 10% whatever), and starting with easy, momentum-building changes.
Chapters
Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on Integrative Nutrition, a great book by Joshua Rosenthal, who started a program called Integrative Nutrition based out of New York. That my wife. First time I've said that on pntv. Alexandra attended, who you met in the last episode. A little cameo there. We just got married. We just got back from our honeymoon, which we spent at Honeymoon Health Boot Camp, otherwise known as Hippocrates Health Institute. Extraordinary place, all about rebuilding health and vitality through living foods. Learned a lot and are implementing a lot of stuff. And I thought I would do a nutrition one today to celebrate. So the big idea here with Integrative Nutrition is looking at nutrition from an integrative perspective. Now, this book is amazing because it basically synthesizes and looks at all of the dietary practices and habits out there, from macrobiotics to raw to the Atkins diet, even all these different diets, and looks at the pros and the cons of each and comes up with some simple fundamentals that we want to embrace and if we want to live more healthful, blissful, joyful, energetic lives. So we're going to look at a few of them right now. I highly recommend this book, one of my absolute favorites on nutrition. And it rocks. So there you go. And check out integrativenutrition.com as well if you're interested in studying this stuff. Alexandra just is wrapping up her coursework at Integrative Nutrition. If you sign up, put, put in her name, Alexandra Johnson. Give the goddess some love. Let's look at some startling health stats to kick it off. Did you know that in 2004, 66% of Americans were either overweight or obese? 66%. That's 2/3 of Americans. That's unbelievable, really. And it's probably more since 2004. Now, 2010. Shocking. He also talks about the fact that we spend unbelievable amounts of money on medicine, surgeries, and reactive measures to deal with health issues and almost nothing on preventative, holistic, and overall education around these issues. It's completely backwards. I'm going to be spending a lot more time talking about this. It's one of the things that I think is frankly destroying our civilization. And we got to do something about it. So those are just amazing stats. One more for you. There are now more overweight people than malnourished people. There are more overweight people in the world than malnourished people. So we all talk about saving and serving the malnourished people, which is very important. And we've got to talk about the people that are overnourished and overweight, actually undernourished and overweight, because we simply cannot live an extraordinary life if we do not have the energy and feel great when we're getting up out of bed and throughout the day. I mean, our psychology, our emotions are all affected by, let alone how much energy we put into getting ourselves out of disease, into health. We want to move from health to thriving to strength. As I talk about in a couple other notes by a couple of my friends, strength for life and, and thrive, fitness, they say don't aim for health. It's a very low standard. Health is the absence of disease. Aim to thrive. Brendan Brazier says in his book the Thrive Diet, which I have a note on. He's an ironman triathlete, professional ironman triathlete, who lives solely on plant based foods. And then there's Sean Phillips in Strength for Life who says don't aim for health, the lack of disease, aim for strength. And he's one of the most conscious, powerful, strong guys I know who uses his strength training as a spiritual practice and as a way for him to build himself so he can give himself to the world. So big ideas here. We want to move from disease into health, into thriving and having extraordinary energy, vitality, strength. A couple of big ideas we're going to look at. Very simple stuff. He's got 12 steps to the integrative nutrition Plan. A few of my favorite steps. Number one on his list, drink more water. I've got my Klean Kanteen with me nearly all the time. Time for a little sip. Drink more water. It's one of the simplest ways to improve our energy. Most people are dehydrated, they don't know it. Drink at least an ounce, a half an ounce for every pound of weight you have. So if you're 160 pounds, drink 80 ounces a day at least. Go for that. See if you're meeting that standard. If you're not, increase it. Your water intake is going to help you energetically, dramatically, I can promise you. Increase leafy green vegetables. That's an obvious one. Eat less meat, dairy, sugar and chemicalized artificial junk foods. Consume less coffee, alcohol and tobacco. That's an obvious one. He also says find work you love or a way to love the work you do. That's one of his 12 Fundamentals for Integrative nutrition. Now that's kind of funny. Work falls into nutrition. Yeah, in his model it does. He's got an awesome food pyramid, right? So you know the food pyramid. Whole other conversation about how that was created, meat and dairy industries, et cetera. But what he does is he remodels that and then he draws a circle around it and inside the circle is water, then there's a circle. And he says, look, it doesn't matter how well you eat or if you drink enough water. If your spirituality isn't strong, if your career isn't something that you love, if your relationships are suffering and if you aren't exercising and moving. The four primary foods, as he calls them, if your primary foods of spirituality, relationships, professional, creative work and exercise, if those aren't feeding your soul, your mind, body, spirit, then it really doesn't matter what you eat, you're still going to be unhealthy. So we want to pay attention to our primary foods. I talk about that more in the note. He talks about it a lot in the book. Really cool stuff. What nutrition book talks about that awesome stuff. So we've got to nourish ourselves with our primary foods of spirituality, exercise, relationships and creativity, which is what we talk about throughout the philosopher's notes. He talks about the fact that the basics are simple. Don't get caught up in all the fads. And try this and try that. Focus on the fundamentals, which is another thing we talk about here all the time. What are the simple fundamentals? The fundamentals are eat less refined foods. Eat less animal products in the form of meat, chicken and fish. Doesn't mean you need to get rid of all of them. If you have serious disease, I'd highly recommend you do, but reduce them. Everyone says eat less of that stuff. We're going to talk about this a lot more. Less refined foods, less animal products. Eat more green vegetables and whole plant based foods. That's not complicated. And exercise, those aren't complicated things. Go with those fundamentals and rock them. And he says too start with what's easy for you. Don't go to the hardest thing and try to do that first. Start with what's easy. What really inspires you and what's going to happen is you're going to build momentum that will make the harder stuff easier. He has a great idea called crowding out. Rather than try to eliminate all the stuff you shouldn't be doing, try crowding it out. Drink more water. That will help suppress your appetite a bit. Eat more leafy greens. That will make you feel more full. And in the process you're going to crowd out certain things that don't belong in your diet. It's a really cool way to find the ideal. Another big idea he has is 90 10. He calls his diet the 9010 diet. He's not a fan of rules. He thinks we all need to figure out what works for us. But if he has one rule, and he says even this one is flexible, it would be this. Eat healthfully 90% of the time. And 10% of the time, eat whatever you want, 90 10. But make sure you get close to 90 on the healthy, right? 90% healthy, 10%, whatever you want, 9010 diet. Really cool idea. Give yourself some freedom and allow yourself to grow. I know that I kind of spiral where When I started 10 years ago, I was eating McDonald's all the time. All that was like kukaroo or, I don't know, some place like that was healthy food for me. I rarely exercise, but each year, each day I got a little bit better each month each year. And I'd kind of go backwards a little bit. Then I'd go up and I'd spiral up where now I'm doing things that I couldn't have dreamt of a decade ago that are just part of my nature now. And I'm finding a new edge and going with what's easy now at that new edge while pushing myself and knowing that over the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years, I'm going to be even more consistently practicing these things that I believe in and experiencing the radiant health that comes from that. So go with what's easy. Have fun, do the fundamentals. Find some things that you just know you need to be doing. I've got a lot more big ideas here, but let's go ahead and sum it up on that. What's one thing that you could be doing right now for your nutrition that would most serve you? Could be a primary food, or it could be an actual thing like drinking water, eating more green leafy greens. Green leafy greens. There you go. What is it? Pick one, go out and rock it. And here's to your health. Let's create extraordinary vitality as we give ourselves the world. Hope you dug it. Book's awesome. Talk. Talk to you soon. See you.
