Health Longevity Secrets

Lies I Taught with Lillie Kane

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 157

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This is a co-broadcast with the great Lillie Kane on her amazing show that reached hundreds of thousands of people with this episode. I urge you to check out her program and her other many amazing guests.  We discuss the myths surrounding a low-fat, grain-heavy diet and expose how meats and fats might not be the villains we've been led to believe they are. We offering listeners a chance to rethink their food choices and the profound impact those choices have on their well being.

Navigating the maze of modern nutrition, our conversation with Lili takes us deeper into the world of inflammation and its clandestine role in heart health. We break down the difference between the inflammation that heals us and the kind that silently harms us, driving home the importance of understanding what goes on beneath the surface of our skin. With clarity, we explore how sugars, seed oils, and grains can fan the flames of chronic inflammation and why it's essential to tailor our diets to our bodies' unique needs. It's a chapter that could change the way you see your plate and your health.

The episode wraps up with a candid dialogue on the snares of junk food addiction and the outer influences that shape our health choices. We offer up strategies for breaking free from the cycle of unhealthy eating and the sense of empowerment that accompanies these lifestyle changes. We close with a critical eye on the minefield of food labels, empowering you to become a more informed consumer. Follow this journey for a deeper dive into how we can all make choices that lead to a more vibrant, disease-resistant life.

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Speaker 1:

I just started a family. I had two young kids and I suddenly was diagnosed with four chronic diseases and I went to my doctors and they gave me prescription medicines for each one that I took, thinking that they were treating the cause of the disease, but really they're only treating the symptoms. Dr Rob Lufkin, a practicing physician, clinical professor of radiology, chief of metabolic imaging, author of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 14 books, lifestyle, and particularly within lifestyle diet, is the single most powerful medicine that most of us will ever use. I mean, I'd heard that junk food was bad, but it didn't really sink in until I was diagnosed with four very serious, potentially fatal diseases that were affecting me and made it real for me. I basically went back to my doctor after changing the lifestyle and they said what did you do? What's going on? We need to repeat these tests. They couldn't believe that everything had returned to normal and they stopped prescribing the drugs. I went off all drugs and now I'm symptom free.

Speaker 1:

If left to my own devices, I would eat junk food all day long. I love baked goods, I love donuts, I love bagels, all those things. It's not like I don't like them, it's just I love my children more and I want to see them grow up and I want to see their grandkids. We get to choose. Every morning, when we wake up, it's a fresh day and I can either eat a bunch of junk food or I can do things that improve my health and longevity food, or I can do things that improve my health and longevity.

Speaker 2:

Dr Lufkin, I feel like we live in backwards world, and what I mean by that is whatever you kind of hear as the common narrative do the opposite. I sometimes live in my own little bubble where I think that most people recognize that meat's not going to kill you and you don't have to avoid eating fat, and so I forget that most people are hearing online eat less fat, avoid cholesterol, eat lots of whole grains, limit your red meat intake. And so I'm wondering for you have you ever personally done a low fat, low cholesterol, limited meat, grain heavy diet, and how is your health as a result?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. To answer those questions, Lily, actually the answer is yes, yes and yes. When I grew up it turned out growing up my mom was a professional dietician. So we religiously followed the public health advice which, at the time and still sadly, public health advice which, at the time and still sadly, is a lot about a food pyramid, or the food pyramid which vilified cholesterol, saturated fat and our family. We wouldn't eat butter because of the fat content. Instead we would substitute low fat margarine, which, of course, is full of trans fats that used to be it still is full of vegetable oils and seed oils that we would, you know, avoid fat in our food. We would eat low fat option for yogurt, which means the fats removed and replaced typically with sugars. So I, for growing up, was on a very low fat kind of standard American diet and in fact the first decade or so of my medical career, where I was teaching in medical school, I also followed that plan and it was only recently that I've switched.

Speaker 2:

And how was your health when you were doing that kind of diet? Because if your health was great, then why would you need to switch?

Speaker 1:

Great question. As it turns out, when I was young everything was fine. It didn't matter. I slept and exercised. Well, everything went fine, in fact, until I hit about 40 or 50 in my years and then I just started a family, I had two young kids and I suddenly was diagnosed with four chronic diseases that at the time I thought were completely separate, and I went to my doctors and they gave me dutifully prescription medicines for each one that I took, thinking that they were treating the cause of the disease, when really they're only treating the symptoms. And that started me on the course to kind of re-examine what I was teaching in medical school at the time and what many teaching in medical school at the time and what many of my colleagues believed at the time and unfortunately still believe about our nutritional choices and our lifestyle.

Speaker 2:

What were the four diseases, or autoimmune diseases, that you had?

Speaker 1:

One was arthritis. It was a type of arthritis called gout. Another one was hypertension, and half of adult Americans have hypertension, you know. So it's very, very, very common. I also had abnormal blood lipids, sort of dyslipidemia. I had elevated triglycerides, low HDLs and finally I was on the course to diabetes. I was pre-diabetes. So for all of those I was prescribed medicines and the doctors basically told me take the medicines. They gave me some simple lifestyle recommendations, but nothing that was really effective.

Speaker 2:

Did they say you're not doing low fat enough, You're not doing whole grains enough?

Speaker 1:

Well, they said yeah For all of them. They said hey, you need to watch your diet, exercise more, blah, blah, blah for the hypertension, avoid salt and lose weight. The problem was I wasn't really overweight and you can get the diseases we're talking about without obesity, although they're frequently linked to obesity. So that was the canary in the coal mine for me. That started me looking very closely at what was happening to me. It was kind of out of self-interest.

Speaker 2:

So I used to get sick often, just like you know the stuffy nose, watery eyes, sore throat, a cough, just like you know a normal flu and cough. And I used to get sick like that four times a year and I used to think, oh well, you know, it's winter, it's genetics, I was around someone else who was sick and I think often people might think that too, even with just like a basic flu. Nowadays I have changed my position on that and I don't get sick very often at all and if I do get sick it's maybe, you know, I can feel it coming on and so I have maybe liver, or drink some more water, have some more vitamin.

Speaker 1:

D, and I bounce back really quickly.

Speaker 1:

What percentage of people do you think nowadays they're struggling with autoimmune diseases or sickness and it's linked to diet or lifestyle?

Speaker 1:

Wow, I would say that lifestyle, and particularly within lifestyle diet, is the single most powerful medicine that most of us will ever use, and I think of the people who have autoimmune diseases, at least a significant component is diet in 100% of them.

Speaker 1:

There's so many things in our diet that can adversely affect our immune system and drive just generally inflammation. In fact, even if you discard what you're eating just the very act of eating, in other words consuming food within our stomach and then eventually in our bowels and GI tract the natural a body's natural reaction to that is inflammation. So one thing people can do without changing anything that they eat if they want to lower their inflammation is just stop eating all the time. In other words, don't eat around the clock, as my mom, the dietician, taught me that you know you eat three meals a day and then you have a snack every two hours and then many small meals throughout the day. That's the healthy way, when actually I've come to believe that that's actually the unhealthy way, and eating is one thing that drives inflammation. So anyone with autoimmune disease should be aware of that at least.

Speaker 2:

When you say inflammation, I feel like that word is thrown around a lot, so it can be confusing for people to be like so what is inflammation? Because I can hit my elbow on this chair right now and it's going to swell, maybe bruise, and I'll have inflammation and I guess we could say that's like a bad thing. But yeah, what do you mean by inflammation?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, inflammation is. It's really important, it's life-saving. We couldn't exist without inflammation. If I'm stuck with a thorn in my finger, for example, it will turn red around the thorn and inflammation will occur, and it's the body's reaction to things that occur in our environment or our lifestyle. But the trick is, as we've seen in other things like stress as well, that acute inflammation is good, in other words, inflammation that occurs over a short time. You know, I get stuck with a thorn, the inflammation comes, the thorn goes away, the inflammation goes away. The really dangerous type is the type of inflammation that stays on all the time. It's called chronic inflammation. That just a low-grade inflammation, that kind of burns in the background, and that is at the root of most of the major chronic diseases that determine our longevity. All have inflammation that play a major role. So acute inflammation is healthy. Chronic inflammation is unhealthy and what we want to try and avoid.

Speaker 2:

So how would people know if they have chronic inflammation? There's probably a lot of things, but then what can they do to reduce that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean there are a few tests you can take that doctors can prescribe or today, you know, increasingly you can order these tests yourself from at-home kits that do that. I do a finger stick once a month and I get like 20 blood values and I just mail it in. But the types of things you can do to identify inflammation there's certain tests like C reactive protein, which is a commonly accepted marker for inflammation. Cortisol is a hormone that is elevated with stress and usually with inflammation as well. You know erythritate sedimentation rates. So there's some tests that you can do that identify inflammation. But it can be difficult to detect. You know it can hide in the background and drive these autoimmune diseases and these other diseases that we may not be aware of it because it's just sort of sitting there and increasing slowly like that with us.

Speaker 1:

Inflammation is driven by our environment and our lifestyle. We have some genetic predisposition to all our conditions, but fortunately our lifestyle can really play the biggest role in these. So what drives inflammation? First of all, number one, nutrition. So eating itself drives inflammation. That's a normal, healthy response. But you don't want to eat all the time, so just avoid between meal snacks. That's the first thing, and then the other thing is particular foods drive inflammation. So if you want to avoid inflammation, try and minimize these foods.

Speaker 1:

And there are three that I try and remove from my diet. One is sugars. Everybody knows what sugar is. The second thing is something called seed oils, which are things like. They have a healthy sounding name like vegetable oil, but they have nothing to do with vegetables. They're made from industrial process seeds and they drive inflammation. So we want to avoid, I want to avoid those. And the last one is grains. Now, everybody knows about grains and gluten, you know, and celiac disease, and you definitely you have to avoid grains if you have celiac disease and you don't tolerate gluten. But there's an increasing evidence in the autoimmune community and just in the wellness community that many people, maybe as high as 50% of people, have an inflammatory reaction to grains. Some of the proteins it may be gluten, it may be other proteins on the grains. For this reason I avoid grains. One other factor in the US grains are typically washed in glyphosate, which is a herbicide that many authorities feel is linked to cancer. So those are the three things I avoid as far as that for diet.

Speaker 2:

Those are my same ones too. I guess you well, maybe you have pushback on what I'm going to say. But, like I would avoid grains, mainly because in the US grocery stores they are, like you know, saying eat grains. Because on the MyPlate that you were mentioning the food pyramid on healthgov they've listed healthy grains as popcorn, cereal and Pop-Tarts. And it's like how are people supposed to know which cereal you're referring to when you say you can have grains?

Speaker 2:

So I think that there can be three healthy grains, one being organic white rice, but again, like you mentioned, wanting it to be organic because we don't want to have glyphosate or any of that. Two being a homemade fermented sourdough bread. Who's doing that? Nobody, but to make bread traditionally like if you go to Europe, the bread in Europe is going to be way different than the bread in the US, but the grocery store bread in the US it's a sourdough made sour through citric acid or through vinegar, so it's not actually going through the true fermentation process and breaking down that gluten.

Speaker 2:

And then the third one being soaked and sprouted oats, being, again, you know, it needs to be properly prepared. That does not mean all oatmeal in the grocery store. And if my goal was to put on weight and to bodybuild, then maybe I'd have grains. It's just like empty calories that don't really provide much but also don't fill you up. They don't have any protein, so they're not going to keep you full. So if your goal is weight loss and you don't want to feel hungry, then I would avoid the grains.

Speaker 1:

That's my path. Great points, and a key thing to emphasize is that we're all different and some of us will tolerate grains more than others. I'm all for milk and cheese, but some people have a dairy allergy and those people should avoid milk and cheese. So we all have to look at our own particular body, our own diseases and all.

Speaker 2:

So I'm thinking for the average person watching. They might be confused. Now You're like wait, so if I'm not getting the healthy vegetable oils healthy because they say the word vegetable and I'm not eating the whole grains which is promoted, you want to eat whole grains, you want to limit your fats? So then what am I left to eat? Because it sounds like I'm left to eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy fruits and veggies, but then meat's bad for you too, right? What's clogging our arteries?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a great question. I was taught by my mom to limit meat because meat contains saturated fats. Limit eggs because they contain cholesterol. I think today it's pretty clear, it's definitely accepted that dietary cholesterol, in other words, what we eat, doesn't affect our serum cholesterol. So, in other words, eat as many eggs as you want. Eggs are probably one of the healthiest things we can eat. If you think about it, eggs are very, very healthy.

Speaker 1:

But what clogs the arteries? It used to be thought, and many people still believe, that it's related to things like LDL cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease. It's still a risk factor, but it's a much lower risk factor. I think that people appreciated. In fact, lowering your cholesterol with drugs like statins, depending on the situation, can actually have a negative effect. There are many side effects with statins that are not for everyone. You need to look closely at that.

Speaker 1:

There are a number of things that cause heart attacks and strokes and it's important that we're focusing on this because this is the number one cause of death. It's the number one thing that determines our longevity. The studies, the things that link most closely with heart disease. I mean they can be things like air pollution or smoking cigarettes or different things like that. But the biggest one is metabolic disease, diabetes or prediabetes. These metabolic symptoms, this insulin resistance and metabolic disease, is the disease that's caused by high sugar and inflammation and seed oils, the inflammation from seed oils, all those things. And what's the biggest risk factor for heart attack? It's not your blood cholesterol level, but it's your blood triglyceride level.

Speaker 1:

Saturated fats in meats, I believe, are very healthy. So I don't limit the amount of saturated fats I eat at all. In fact, I substitute I consciously substitute typically saturated fats for those seed oils that I used to eat. So I eat butter now instead of margarine. I'll eat the high fat yogurt instead of low fat yogurt if I'm going to do that. So a good question is what's more likely to clog my arteries, a piece of steak, a piece of meat or a donut? And in my opinion it's the donut because of the metabolic disease, the sugar, the seed oils, the junk food. Junk food is what drives heart disease, in my opinion.

Speaker 1:

And just one point about carnivore versus vegan. I mean, I love vegans, I love carnivore people also. They're all my friends. I used to be vegan for 10 years myself and I've been carnivore for a while as well. So I think personally I think it's possible to be healthy eating either dietary type, and it's also possible to be unhealthy. There's vegan junk food and a lot of it that I used to eat that made me unhealthy, but there's also carnivore junk food not as much, actually, but it's available there too. So I think that the key point is not to politicize, you know, carnivore foods that are junk foods like not that I would say like a hot dog.

Speaker 2:

If it's a hundred percent beef, hot dog is a junk food. But um, if someone's trying to be healthy and feel their best, if they're eating only hot dogs, they probably aren't going to feel as great because they're going to be lacking certain vitamins and minerals and nutrients that they need. And so you can be telling me oh lily, I'm doing a carnivore diet and it's not working. And I'm like well, what are you eating? Because you could be eating just chicken breast, and if you just eat chicken breast you're not going to feel good. You can just eat bacon, and if you just eat bacon, you're going to be low in certain vitamins and minerals. So I think having a spectrum of different foods can help you hit your vitamins and minerals more.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it even gets more nuanced than that, because I have someone who's eating a carnivore diet, but the type of meat they eat is raised on, basically, soybeans, corn, and it's raised the way most cattle is, on foods that contain high linoleic acid or high omega-6. So basically those animals are fed vegetable oils and seed oils to fatten them up and the compounds in those seed oils actually stay in the meat. So you can eat meat and say, hey, I'm healthy, I'm eating carnivore, but if you're only eating this type of meat that's raised that way, there may be issues as well. That's why sometimes people look for grass fed, grass, finished or they look at the way the animal was raised, because those nutrients, just like they stay in our bodies, they also stay in the animal bodies as well.

Speaker 2:

I recognize there's many people who say there's no difference or it's a small difference between grass finished and grain finished. Even if it's small, small things compound. So if we took two twins and we told twin A, you're going to walk five minutes a day and otherwise they're going to live the same exact life, eat the same exact foods. Well, over the course of years this twin is going to be healthier because they just got five minutes compounded for years. So it's a small thing but it adds up.

Speaker 2:

And I recognize that grain finished meat is way more affordable for people and I think any first step of getting rid of junk food. So if you're like cool, I'm gonna stop eating junk food, eat any kind of meat first, that would be a better option, but then, if you really want to fine-tune, I also agree that grass-finished meat that's what I, that's the only kind of meat I eat, unless I were to go out to eat, which is very rare. Like you said, it's gonna have a different nutrient profile, not only more vitamins and minerals, less of the bad kind of fats, and it's going to have more polyphenols even too. So I've seen people that go to the extreme and say, like grain fed beef is like going to kill you kind of thing, and I don't. I don't know if I'd go to that extreme, but I can see how they are not the same kind of meat.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and there's a similar decision that our vegan vegan brothers and sisters also face when they choose the vegetable. In other words, are you going to get an organic vegetable that's been raised differently than that? And the organic vegetables, sadly, are more expensive. They're smaller and for organic vegetables you can decide certain vegetables have a higher risk of contaminants in them. But, yeah, it's a lot of different choices.

Speaker 2:

I think about how people 100 years ago they didn't even have the option for grass-finished or grain-fed, they didn't have the option for organic or non-organic, everything just was. You didn't get raw milk or pasteurized, you all got raw milk. And nowadays it's so confusing and overwhelming and people have to look at the label and they don't know how to look at it and then it just gets overwhelming. Forget it, I'm just going to eat junk food.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a great quote that I often repeat, but I don't know who said it first, but it's that if we all switch to eating only foods that were only available 150 years ago, most of us would have improved health. And what does that say about the state of our food system today?

Speaker 2:

So how do you navigate that conversation with patients, or even just like with your own personal health, and going into the grocery store? How do you make it realistic for people? Because again it does add up and it does cost some money, but then also it just can be complicated Like wait, what do I buy? How do I buy it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's the key question. I must admit, my thinking has changed about it. I used to think that, oh, people eat junk food and make other bad food decisions just because they don't know how harmful it is, you know, or, yeah, they don't understand the damage that they're doing to their bodies and I think, oh, all I have to do is get on social media or talk to people about it and once they know, they will change.

Speaker 2:

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Speaker 1:

I think with junk food there's an addiction component to it. In other words, I have a friend who's very smart, professional, works in a medical school and he was putting sugar in his coffee all the time and we sat down, had a long conversation about sugar and how it drives heart disease and he he has a type of heart disease and everything, and so he totally got it. I mean, he followed the logic and everything. He totally got it. I saw him the other day, later again, and he's putting sugar in his coffee. I'd say, wow, you know what happened and it's.

Speaker 1:

I realized that you know there are other forces driving our choices and addiction is a powerful one, especially when it comes to junk food. They're engineered a certain way. They tap into certain pathways in our brain. I, I should know I'm a recovering junk food addict myself. If left to my own devices, I would eat junk food all day long and be happy as a clam and be dead. I love baked goods, I love donuts, I love bagels, all those things. It's not like I don't like them, it's just I love my children more and I want to see them grow up and I want to see their grandkids. And you know, it's a simple choice for me, but it's that's why some people they're doing addiction drugs like low dose naltrexone, which is used to get people off other addictive behaviors and substances. They're actually using it for sugar and for for junk food addiction. So you know, we shouldn't underestimate how powerful these tools are, especially when you know we're bombarded with advertising every time we go into a store.

Speaker 1:

You know, you've probably talked about this, but the tobacco industry in the 1980s was feeling increasing pressure from people who weren't smoking anymore. You know they were figuring out that smoking was bad. So what did they do? Like any good business, they pivoted and they bought the major junk food companies and they're now owned by the tobacco companies. And the tobacco companies already had a playbook. They owned the 7-Eleven space for the tobacco products. So they immediately pivoted and put the junk food in there. They knew how to advertise with bright colors and, unlike tobacco, there was no guardrails up, no prohibitions against advertising to children. So you know, we're now seeing, you know, sugar, cereals, everything, all the junk food. They can advertise it to nursing mothers if they want and they do, you know and all the kids. So we're up against. It's not easy giving up junk food.

Speaker 2:

So what did you personally do to give up junk food? If you were somebody who just loved it so much? Because I also was in the same boat, loving junk food, and I was very, very lucky that my environment changed, if I was around friends and people all the time who had that in the house or who were asking me to go out to ice cream, it'd be a different story. But my husband was like no junk food since I met him, and so it made me reflect on myself and say, well, why don't you need to have the cookie dough while we watch the movie? Well, why don't you need to have the uh, the pop tart for breakfast? And so it made me question and reflect on myself, and so, by being in an environment, it forced me to grow and to be better. But for other people they might live in a family or in a household where not everybody's on that same page. So what did you personally do?

Speaker 1:

That's key. I mean, yeah, I remember sitting down after dinner with a thing of ice cream, watching a movie on TV or something and all sorts of bad habits. I felt like I mean, I'd heard that junk food was bad, but it didn't really sink in until I was diagnosed with four very serious, potentially fatal diseases that were affecting me and made it real for me. At that point it got my attention, I began to look closely at it and look closely at the research and sort of relearn and discover things that I wasn't aware of, things that I did. Fortunately, my wife's on board with this, so she's very supportive. Like an alcoholic, you don't keep bottles of liquor in the closet. We don't keep a lot of junk food around. Unfortunately, I have a teenage daughter and a younger daughter, so that's challenging. They have their own food choices. But having my wife and family being supportive for it and then, and seeing the immediate effect on my diseases, I basically went back to my doctor after changing the lifestyle and they and they said what did you do? What's going on? You know we need to repeat these tests and and so they couldn't believe that everything had returned to normal and they stopped prescribing the drugs. I went off all drugs and now I'm symptom free with that. So it was a combination of factors.

Speaker 1:

I saw results, things happened and I got my family to buy in on it and partly I continually engage. I'm continually reading the literature. I'm talking to more people like yourself that are interested in it, that have knowledge about it, and it's just kind of reinforcing every day as I go along, but it's every day. You've got to think about it and that's the wonderful thing about lifestyle choices that it's something that we get to choose. Every morning when we wake up it's a fresh day and I can either eat a bunch of junk food or I can do things that are going to make me improve my health and longevity. And it's a wonderful power we have.

Speaker 1:

And the lifestyle choices I believe I've been able to make and others can make are more powerful than the medicines that we get. Because, at least for the diseases I had and for many of the chronic diseases that we face, the medicines that we get because at least for the diseases I had and for many of the chronic diseases that we face, the prescription drugs we get, while they're important and you shouldn't not take them if your doctor tells you to. You need to remember that for many of the diseases, they don't treat the underlying cause. They just treat the symptoms. So the underlying disease will continue to progress. So you need to think about that as well. Unfortunately, there is no pill that's going to treat the underlying causes, because the underlying causes are lifestyle. But on the other hand, like I said, we get to choose.

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the things that you said that I really liked was when you said that every morning we get to wake up and choose, and I think that sometimes for people it's intimidating to think that I have to eat this way for the rest of my life. But if you just say, I just want to eat healthy today, I'm just gonna wake up and do it today, tomorrow I can go back to whatever. But then when tomorrow comes around, you wake up and say actually, I'm going to choose to eat healthy today, and it makes it easier on your mind. But then when you start building that habit, then you don't even think about the option of wanting to have the junk foods because you're already like no, I love my breakfast in the morning.

Speaker 2:

I loved having eggs and bacon, I love having a chicken salad or whatever. The thing is that you choose. And so I think that when we try to make it so enormous in our minds got to eat healthy forever and never eat junk food ever again, it sounds very intimidating. And if we just break it up into small pieces and then know that the habit forms and it just becomes natural, where now, when you go out to eat, I'm sure you're not even as tempted to order dessert when that used to be part of your normal routine.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, and if we go on a diet, if we consider it a diet, it's probably not going to work. I've chosen to be on a very ketogenic diet that follows the things that I mentioned and I embrace it, I look forward to it, and maybe I don't eat bagels and donuts anymore, but I get to eat things like butter and avocado and meat and steaks and, you know, things with coconut in them and fats that I didn't eat before.

Speaker 2:

So it's something to celebrate and, taking that approach, it's a win-win perfect for people if they need an action step like, do this today to start getting healthier. Do you have like one or two things that you think are a good first step for people if they have no idea where to start on their health journey?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, think about what you're eating. Think about when you're eating. If you can just brush your teeth right after you have dinner that way, I started doing that. That was my first step because I'm basically lazy, I knew if I ate something else and I have to brush my teeth again, so it got me to stop. But, yeah, try and cut out between meal snacks and then think about what you're eating as you're eating it. If it's got a food label on it, be careful. That's a sign of junk food in many cases. The longer the ingredient list.

Speaker 2:

Even if it's healthy. Whole grain crackers with the words heart, healthy and organic, even crackers. They got that laundry list of things. Usually there's a one or two or five ingredients in there that I wouldn't.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, companies can buy that heart healthy label from the American Heart Association for paying a fee. That's why Froot Loops says heart healthy on it and different things, so that may not be trustworthy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, little tricksters. Well, it's been so nice chatting with you. Where can people follow you on social media?

Speaker 1:

Sure, my website is robertlufkinmdcom and social media is just robertlufkinmd.