Michael Greger, M.D. On How Not To Die

A graduate of Cornell and Tufts University School of Medicine, Dr. Greger has published in a litany of scientific journals, testified before Congress and lectured at countless symposiums and institutions, including the Conference on World Affairs and the National Institutes of Health. He was even an expert witness in the infamous Oprah Winfrey meat defamation lawsuit and has appeared all over television on shows like Dr. Oz and The Colbert Report. By day, Michael Greger, MD, FACLM can be found crafting high level policy initiatives as Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture for the Humane Society of the U. S. But more often than not he's traipsing the globe, hopping from podium to podium to deliver one of the hundreds of lectures he serves up annually. By night, Dr. Greger scours thousands of medical journals in search of the world's best, most objective nutrition research to bring you free videos and articles every single day as chief wizard behind NutritionFacts.org– the world's most authoritative, non-profit online destination for all things nutrition, health and disease prevention. If you've never before visited this site, I highly suggest you check it out immediately. A comprehensive clearinghouse that inspects every imaginable facet of nutrition and health, NutritionFacts.org features hundreds of impeccably researched, easily understandable and straight to the point videos — always my first stop when I want to get to the bottom of any question I have about food, diet and disease. Apparently Dr. Greger doesn't sleep. Because amidst all of this, he still found time to write a new book that hits booksellers everywhere this week. But How Not To Die* isn't just any book — it's a straight up game changing must read. Clocking in at over 600 pages, it's an exhaustive, heavily researched, encyclopedic examination of how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can help prevent and even reverse the 15 top causes of premature death in America. Not only has Dr. Greger delivered a ground-breaking tome for the ages, 100% of fees and proceeds he receives from speaking and book sales are donated to charity. Quite a powerful testament to this man's level of selfless service to humanity. If you are a long-time listener, you know Dr. G and I go way back. He was one of my very first guests on the RRP. Now he’s back to talk more about his life, his research, and How Not To Die – a subject I think we can all get behind. Specifics covered include: * the core idea behind How Not To Die * the daily dozen foods to focus on * the fifteen leading causes of death * confirmation bias in nutritional research * conflicts of interest in scientific studies * independent studies & objective criticism * reconciling reductionism with holistic analysis * auto-immune disorders * organic vs. non-organic foods Enjoy! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:04Michael Greger?

  There's no reimbursement mechanism for a doctor keeping people healthy and talking to them about things they can do to prevent illness. Because doctors are reimbursed by procedure, right? Pills and procedures. That's what they get money for. That's what sends their kids through college, not how healthy their patients were.

• 1:21Rich Roll?

  That's the great Dr. Michael Greger, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. Thanks for dropping by.

• 1:36Michael Greger?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:40Rich Roll?

  Hey, you guys. My name is Rich Roll. Welcome to my show, the show where I do my best. I try, I really do try, to have the most meaningful conversations I can possibly have about things that matter with the best and the brightest, the most forward-thinking minds across all categories of health, wellness, fitness, entrepreneurship, environmentalism, mindfulness, spirituality, and consciousness. And in the case of today's guest, health, nutrition, and medicine, the name of the game, to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves and, along the way, hopefully create a positive footprint for a better world. Anyway, thanks for tuning in today.

• 2:21Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you subscribing to the show on iTunes for taking a moment to leave us a review there as well. And of course, for always using the Amazon banner ad for all your Amazon purchases. The holiday season, it is now upon us. You might find yourself on Amazon trying to pick up a gift for somebody. Well, it would mean a lot to us if you could first take that extra microsecond, click through our banner ad. Doesn't cost you a cent extra on any of your purchases. It just shakes loose a little bit of loose Amazon commission change from their voluminous coffers up there at Amazon HQ. And that really helps us keep the bandwidth flowing. So I really appreciate everybody who has made a habit of that. Okay, so, a lot of anticipation about today's guest. I'm really excited.

• 3:05Rich Roll?

  He is truly one of my favorite people, the wizard behind nutritionfacts.org, which is my favorite online destination for all things nutrition, health, and disease prevention. My good friend, the one and only Dr. Michael Greger himself. And I've got a bunch more I want to say about him before we get into the interview. But first, shall we take care of a little business? All right, lots of excitement and anticipation about today's guest, one of my very, very favorite people. A graduate of Cornell and Tufts University School of Medicine, Dr. Michael Greger is a physician, he's an author, and an internationally recognized professional

• 3:49Rich Roll?

  speaker on a wide array of important public health issues. When he's not traveling relentlessly to lecture, this guy's on the road constantly. By day, he serves as Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the U.S. Humane Society. By night, because he doesn't sleep, he scours the world's best, most objective, and ironclad nutrition research to bring you free videos and articles every single day. A new video every single day. Amazing. On his incredibly informative nonprofit website called nutritionfacts.org. If you have not been to this site, I suggest that you hit pause immediately and go check it out right now. It's always my first stop when I want to get to the bottom of any question I have about food, diet, health, or disease.

• 4:33Rich Roll?

  And I cannot overstate just what an incredible resource it is. A robust, unbelievably comprehensive clearinghouse, essentially, on every imaginable facet of nutrition and health. Each of his hundreds of short videos are impeccably researched, easily understandable, and maybe most importantly, straight to the point. Dr. Greger has published in many scientific journals, he's testified before Congress, lectured at countless symposiums and institutions everywhere from the Conference on World Affairs to the National Institutes of Health. He was an expert witness in the infamous Oprah Winfrey meat defamation lawsuit, and he's appeared all over TV on shows like Dr. Oz and even The Colbert Report, which

• 5:15Rich Roll?

  we discussed in the podcast. Most exciting is that he has a new book coming out this week, December 8th. It's called How to Not Die. Wait a minute. No, that's not right. It's called How Not to Die. I always do that. I'm always screwing this up. How Not to Die. Discover the foods scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of the book, and I think it's fair to say that it is like a game changer. It's an absolute beast of a book that examines the top 15 causes of premature death in America and explains in great detail how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can help prevent and often reverse them. I cannot recommend the book

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  more highly. It is an absolute must read. And because he's super cool, all his speaking fees and proceeds that he receives from the sale of his books and DVDs are donated to charity. That is unbelievable. This is the kind of service-oriented amazing person that he is, so it's just another good reason to not only pick up the book, but feel good about your purchase. If you're a longtime listener to the show, then you know that Dr. Greger was one of my very first guests on the RRP all the way back at episode seven, when I had no idea what I was doing, not that I do now. And I'm delighted that now he's back to talk a little bit more about his life, his research, and how not to die.

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  How not to die. Yeah, that's right. How not to die, which is a subject I think we can all get behind.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  You ready to rock?

• 6:51Michael Greger?

  Let's rock it.

• 6:53Rich Roll?

  By the way, I've done zero preparation, so you're gonna take the lead here.

• 6:57Michael Greger?

  Anything you want. You know, I can talk.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  But here's one thing.

• 7:00Michael Greger?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Rich Roll?

  I promise you that this time, I'm not gonna lose the recording. Do you remember that?

• 7:05Michael Greger?

  I do remember that.

• 7:06Rich Roll?

  That felt terrible.

• 7:07Michael Greger?

  It was a good, I think it was really well.

• 7:09Rich Roll?

  It was good.

• 7:10Michael Greger?

  I have no idea what we said, but...

• 7:12Rich Roll?

  I can't remember exactly what happened. Somewhere, the digital audio file got corrupted, or I broke the recorder, something. Oh, I think I was recording directly into GarageBand, and it like crashed on me. I don't know what happened, but my sincere apologies.

• 7:25Michael Greger?

  It's okay, this time, this time it's gonna be better.

• 7:28Rich Roll?

  I got a sermon just for me on that one.

• 7:32Rich Roll?

  But, uh, yeah, man, you were one of the OG, man. The original guest, I think it was episode seven.

• 7:39Michael Greger?

  That's awesome.

• 7:40Rich Roll?

  By Skype, but this time, we're gonna really make some magic.

• 7:43Michael Greger?

  Yeah, wow, now we have real microphones, man.

• 7:46Rich Roll?

  I know, it's exciting, right? So, um, so many things to talk about, but my first question for you is this.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  How to not die, or how to, or how not to die?

• 7:59Rich Roll?

  Tell me about, there must have been some behind the scenes conversations about that, right?

• 8:04Michael Greger?

  Yes.

• 8:04Rich Roll?

  Breaking out like English language dictionary.

• 8:07Michael Greger?

  Get some grammar nerds in here, quick! Yeah, yeah, yes. Yes, how not to die prematurely in pain after a long disabling illness? You know, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:20Rich Roll?

  How not to die.

• 8:21Michael Greger?

  How not to die, that's not the way we wanna go. And the good news is that we have tremendous power over our health destiny.

• 8:31Rich Roll?

  Who knew, man?

• 8:32Michael Greger?

  I know, and so the power is in our hands.

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  It's crazy. So, I got an advanced copy of this book, and it's like, it's a book, man. What is it, like 550 pages?

• 8:44Michael Greger?

  600, yeah, it came about 600, about 150 though, it was just citations.

• 8:48Rich Roll?

  150 pages of note, of citations.

• 8:50Michael Greger?

  You know, they actually wanted to put it online, like they wanted to dump the citations on it just to save cost printing the book.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 8:55Michael Greger?

  I was like, no way, man.

• 8:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's gotta go in there. Cause you gotta be able to prove it up.

• 9:00Michael Greger?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what it's for. Yeah, I'm hoping it'll be, I mean, kind of the reference book. It's a, it's kinda like two books in one, the first half, right? It's really just... Kind of everything I've done on the website, you know, the thousand videos condensed into you just got all the most compelling stuff. Uh, and then, you know, chapter by chapter, 15 leading to death. But then the second half, um, is really what I'm most proud of because, I mean, not that anyone wants to sit through a, a, a, a Gregor marathon of a thousand videos, but.

• 9:30Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I think there's a lot of people out there that just might do that.

• 9:32Michael Greger?

  But, uh, I mean, that's what I thought. I went into it thinking that that's what the book would be. It would just be like another format to, to put the same message out, the same material, but it'll just be in book form.

• 9:44Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:44Michael Greger?

  Um, but then I realized, you know, one thing I can't do on the site is, I mean, I'm, I really try to keep my opinion out of it. All right. I mean, it's, it's not always easy and it slips through, but it's like, this is the science, right? Here it is. You can make up your own mind just as much as I do. People ask me all these questions. I'm like, well, look, I mean, you know, okay, well then what should I do? Okay. You just said that, you know, eating, you know, a half teaspoon of turmeric does this. Okay. So what do I do? And I'm like, well, you just saw the science. I just laid out the, I don't know any more than you did. Like here it is.

• 10:18Rich Roll?

  But you're the answer guy. You're supposed to know all like.

• 10:21Michael Greger?

  Well, so, but I mean, see, I don't want, I don't want it to be the Dr. Gregor diet, right? I want it to be the best available balance of evidence diet.

• 10:29Rich Roll?

  Was there, was there, was there pressure from the publisher to make it the Gregor diet? It has to be a diet book. It has to say diet in the title.

• 10:36Michael Greger?

  Recipe fluff, that kind of stuff. That I really pushed back on. But what the book allowed me to do is be like, all right, well, what do I do? Kind of in my own, how do I synthesize all this information for my own kind of day to day practice? Um, and so that's the, that's the kind of free rein I had. And it would change kind of week by week. I'd go to the library. I'd come home. My family'd be like, why does everything have parsley in it all of a sudden, right? Or, or, oh, what can't we eat this week? You know, that kind of, you know.

• 11:12Rich Roll?

  Here comes the bummer man.

• 11:13Michael Greger?

  Oh no. What did he read about this? Uh, but, uh, but slowly, but surely I'd be like, oh wait, all right. We gotta get onions in our diet somehow. You know, we gotta get this in our diet. And so I started kind of this checklist of like, oh, did I eat beans? Did I eat any freaking legumes today? Oh, I can't believe it. You know? Day goes by so quick. So I just started making this like little whiteboard checklist and that kind of. Morphed into this kinda daily dozen concept that the, you know, that I take on the book. And not that I have a checklist anymore, but it just, it was like a helpful reminder at the beginning to be like, oh, I gotta fit all this stuff in. Um, and so that's how I kinda lay it out, kinda for kinda helpful meal planning and stuff.

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, it's so dense. I mean, it really is a bible and a reference manual. It's sort of like the be all, end all, ultimate authority. If you're interested in plant-based at all or not, or just not wanting to die. You can like crack this thing open and you don't necessarily have to read it end to end, but you can find what applies to you or what you're interested in. And it's very dense in its science, you know? So I think it's easy, it would be easy without that second section to just get lost in the science and then go, well, I don't know what to do. Like, you know, tell me, tell me what the protocol is to just avoid these things and make it simple.

• 12:27Michael Greger?

  Right. So it ends up, okay, whole food, plant-based, but what does that mean? Like, what do I mean by whole food? What do I mean by processed? What is plant-based, right? Well, so processed for me is nothing bad added, nothing good, take it away. Right? So there are some quote unquote processed foods that I don't consider processed under that definition. So for example, cocoa powder, right? That's processed. Did you see cocoa powder growing on any trees? No. But in that case, they actually removed the cocoa butter, the fat, the, which is, you know, which is saturated. Can raise your, raise your cholesterol a bit. Um, and so there, they actually improved on the food, right?

• 13:09Michael Greger?

  So they took this natural, one of the few kind of rare tropical fats with a lot of saturated, you know, so that's palm oil, palm kernel oil, coconut oil and cocoa butter. Um, and so they actually took something out. So I, so, so that doesn't fit under the processed definition, even though of course it's highly processed. Uh, but because nothing bad was added, nothing good was taken away.

• 13:31Rich Roll?

  Gotcha. So let's break it down. I mean, this, basically the premise or the kind of spine of this whole thing is taking a look at the 15 leading causes of death, right?

• 13:40Michael Greger?

  Right.

• 13:41Rich Roll?

  Do you have them memorized?

• 13:42Michael Greger?

  Well, so, I mean, what I, this is actually different. So I, my, how this came out was from my original operating leading causes of death, um, kind of annual review back in, oh, years ago, where I put it together, where I list the top fifteen, but like, you know, killer number two was cancer, like all cancer. And so you have to give a real broad overview. But here, what I did is I split it all up. And so there is a chapter on breast cancer, a chapter on prostate cancer, a chapter, then specifically liver cancer, specifically esophageal cancer, digestive cancers. And so there's like a chapter on each because it's, you know, there are, there are kind of important differences, things you can really target. So that's how I was able to kind of splay it out. So it still actually goes

• 14:23Michael Greger?

  one through fifteen, but it's just kind of a little more in-depth, a little more, you know, because now all of a sudden I had time, you know, in the videos, like I tried to hit the four-minute mark, right? Videos under four minutes.

• 14:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:34Michael Greger?

  Um, because that's about the, the kind of time span that, I don't know, that people are on my side, actually. I mean, you know, it's about four minutes, you lose them.

• 14:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:42Michael Greger?

  Um, and so, you know, what can you do in four minutes, right? You can hit all the major, you know, the, the most interesting points.

• 14:48Rich Roll?

  If you put a couple of cats in there, you might be able to squeeze another minute out of it.

• 14:52Michael Greger?

  There we go. Right? See? Right? That's what I gotta do. Right? Um, so, but here, I was like, wow, I can go deep, right? And so I actually ended up doing a lot more research that, you know, actually I'm gonna turn into videos kind of later on, just because I don't want to lose this stuff. Um, but, you know, because there were, you know, because I wanted to really kind of do a deep dive through all these. Um, and so it was actually, I mean, it was, it was actually a lot of fun. I had time to do it.

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  You had time.

• 15:22Michael Greger?

  I had time to do it.

• 15:23Rich Roll?

  Because I feel like this could, this could easily, uh, we could go into the weeds and this could become a productivity podcast, because you're one of the most productive humans that I've ever seen. I mean, you, the level of commitment is insane. I mean, you're on the road constantly. Every conference I go to, you're there, uh, like sixty keynotes a year on average, basically.

• 15:42Michael Greger?

  God, well, no, I mean, my, with my book tour, I'm doing sixty cities in five countries in three months.

• 15:49Rich Roll?

  Wow. Starting in December?

• 15:51Michael Greger?

  Uh, yeah, well, it's kind of the first half of December till the holidays, but then starting hardcore in January.

• 15:58Rich Roll?

  And then above and beyond that, a new video, you're still on one new one every single day?

• 16:03Michael Greger?

  Weekdays, new video or articles. So new videos Monday, Wednesday, Friday, new articles Tuesday, Thursday.

• 16:09Rich Roll?

  And then on top of that, you have a full-time job at HSUS.

• 16:12Michael Greger?

  And then there's the whole full-time job thing.

• 16:14Rich Roll?

  How does that work?

• 16:17Michael Greger?

  Well, I mean, they, you know, they each kind of fuel me in different ways. So like, you know, so during the day at HSUS, I'm doing kind of infectious disease work, you know, bird flu, mad cow, you know, swine flu, that kind of stuff. In fact, and then at night is when I, then I do the chronic disease, you know, when I do the, you know.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  But how do you have time to pour through all of the research material?

• 16:37Michael Greger?

  That's been, that's tough. So now we're up to about 24,000 articles published every year in the English language on nutrition. Right? So that's like 70 articles a day. So like you fit that, it's like, how, I mean, even if you were up 24 hours, you couldn't read that many.

• 16:54Rich Roll?

  Right. So please tell me you have a team of at least interns who pour through that.

• 16:58Michael Greger?

  So now, we got 14 staff now.

• 17:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:01Michael Greger?

  I mean, so we have a, we have a big staff.

• 17:02Rich Roll?

  Are they all in DC?

• 17:04Michael Greger?

  No. In fact, none are, the last one is actually leaving me going to, to Colorado. But that's the nice thing about this work. You can do it anywhere.

• 17:12Rich Roll?

  Anywhere.

• 17:13Michael Greger?

  In fact, I bet there's folks, I don't even know where they're.

• 17:15Rich Roll?

  You've never met them in person?

• 17:17Michael Greger?

  I'm looking, I'm looking at their Skype background going, what, is it snowing up there? What's going on? And, but, I mean, that's the wonderful thing about this kind of work. I mean, you can do it anywhere. And so, yeah, so it's, and so it's about a dozen researchers and then a couple of people just doing logistics, get everything up on the site.

• 17:33Rich Roll?

  So they pour through it. I mean, do you say, look, this is a subject that I'm interested in? Or do they just pour through the research and come up with, here's 10 articles that I think are relevant to your subject matter?

• 17:42Michael Greger?

  Mostly, no, it's more, a little more directed than that. It's mostly kind of this iterative citation searching. So let's say I find a really awesome article. Then you go two directions. You look at every single article that ever cited that article using something called web of science, where, I mean, you want to know, what did everyone else think of this article when it came out in 1977? Right? Everyone citing that article in the next few decades. Maybe it was totally thrown out, maybe it was like, you know, accused of fraud or attracted or, you know, you have no idea. And then you want to go through every article that that article cited to see if they actually put it together the way they say they put it together, right? If there actually is a foundation.

• 18:23Michael Greger?

  And so you see that cone, one study cites 20 studies that cite 20 other studies, you go two levels down and you are in the, you know, I mean, you're just, you know.

• 18:32Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 18:33Michael Greger?

  You're just drowning. And so that's what I do is I send people off, you know, you know, here's this article, just go through all the citations and, you know, pull all the articles that they cite and just, you know, want to make sure we're on level. And, you know, too often, and this is what scares me, like, I'll have the video almost like totally wrapped up, and then I'll come across an article and it changes my entire outlook. I mean, and so my conclusion is completely different. And I'm like, had I not seen that article, I, you know, it would have had a completely different, and that freaks me out. And so that, so when I was doing this all alone, um, you know, that was a real, but so now I can be like, okay, does this article rep, really kind of represent the kind of

• 19:17Michael Greger?

  best available, best available balance of evidence? Like, is this like an outlier? Should I be looking at this askew? Or is this really kind of representative of what's going on in science? And you can't do that by looking at one article. That's why you need a team to really.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Right. Interesting. So that brings up a kind of interesting question, which is, you know, you're trying to be as objective as possible. The site is called nutritionfacts.org. Uh, it is a nonprofit organization, uh, but clearly you are, you know, you're a longtime whole food, plant-based guy. That's your perspective on the world. So how do you prevent that from, you know, coloring how you review these studies? I mean, what happens if you come across a study that contravenes, uh, you know, sort of your basic philosophy? Or if you ever do? And how do you kind of reconcile that or make sure that you really are approaching everything completely as objectively as possible?

• 20:07Michael Greger?

  Yeah, that's critical. Right? So there's this concept called confirmation bias, where we naturally, it's kind of inborn in our brains, must have some kind of evolutionary advantage, to kind of see the world through our Particular perspective and we seek out facts and figures and science that supports our position. And then just somehow either right disregard or unconsciously or consciously. You know, we just don't take it as seriously.

• 20:34Michael Greger?

  And and so that's a real death. So that's like that. That's the death knell for a scientist. Right? I mean, they really have to approach it with this kind of beginner's mind and come in and be totally ready to throw out everything they've always believed in if the science turns out to be different. Now, for nutritional science, I mean, there's just been this remarkable consistency for decades. I mean, the bottom line has really been the same, you know, fruits and vegetables were good for you. They continue to be good for you. They're probably, you know. But but certainly there are things that come up that really like, you know, question not just mechanisms, how we thought something was happening before, but you know, you know, scary.

• 21:18Michael Greger?

  I was just one of the latest things that actually changed my own kind of day to day diet recently was they just did all this testing for lead levels in tea coming out of China. Turns out China didn't get rid of leaded gas until 2000. And so you actually see, you could actually measure the lead levels exponentially dropping off from the road. Like in the tea plantations, like you can see how much lead, how far it is away from the road. Right? And it's actually not a problem for people that brew tea because the lead doesn't go from the leaf into the water. But I've been telling people to put it in the smoothies, right? To grind it up or use matcha tea, ground, you know, green tea leaves. Because I figure it's like, I mean, throwing away tea leaves, that's like boiling collard greens, throwing out the collards and drinking the water.

• 22:00Michael Greger?

  You'll get some nutrition, but why not eat the leaves? Like, it seemed like such a waste. So I was like, yeah, throw the tea leaves in. Right. Okay, if they're from Japan, right? But but no longer. And, you know, all the cheapest tea is from China. And so that was bad advice. Of course, it wasn't bad advice until, I mean, it was good advice at the time or so I thought. But something like that, where it's kind of a fundamental recommendation gets changed. And then it's like, how do I get everyone who saw that original video, you know, on the on the new plan? And so I'm like. You gotta subscribe because I could totally-

• 22:34Rich Roll?

  Did you pull down earlier videos where you recommended putting tea leaves in?

• 22:38Michael Greger?

  What I did is I have a war- I have a like, I have a doc- what it's called, the doctor's note right below the video. That gives kind of context or changes or whatever. Um, and so eventually I'll get around to actually just re-recording the video or dumping it entirely. But I have a thing saying, "Make sure you check out this other video where I talk about the lead contamination because it's a serious issue. And then for pregnant women, this is how much you can have of each different type of tea in each different kind of country. If you're a kid, this is how you do it. If you're drinking it, if it's black tea, if it's, you know, so I go through, I've got charts, I, you know. But, I mean, it's like that kind of thing. It's like, you just feel this weight of responsibility. You tell one thing, right? Because you found a really good paper on something.

• 23:20Michael Greger?

  And then, who knows? You know, if you didn't do a good thorough search, you know, you could find out the next day and you've already kind of, you know, corrupted people's, you know.

• 23:29Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and you have, I mean, 1.5 million subscribers, right? People that are consistently watching your videos.

• 23:36Michael Greger?

  Well, we, we, at one point, well, we have 1.8 million hits a month. Um, but, and only about half of that is old, people coming back. Half about it is new traffic.

• 23:48Rich Roll?

  And what, how many view, views does a typical video get?

• 23:52Michael Greger?

  Um, that's a good question. I don't know video by video. So I just kind of know day by day. Um, and-

• 23:59Rich Roll?

  So an average day?

• 24:00Michael Greger?

  So, and so average day, so, you know, 60,000 a day, something like that.

• 24:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:06Michael Greger?

  Um, and, uh, and, you know, it's slowly going up. See, we've never spent any, like, money on advertising, promotion, never did ads, never did whatever. It's all just kind of word of mouth. I just have a feeling there's so many people out there that if they had, if they knew about the site, they'd be interested in it, but they've just never, you know, they don't know.

• 24:23Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, the book is gonna change that.

• 24:24Michael Greger?

  That's what I'm hoping. I mean, I think it'll really give me-

• 24:26Rich Roll?

  You're well overdue for this book.

• 24:28Michael Greger?

  That would, I mean, right, no, no. I mean, if it, if it interests some major media, it's got on some morning show or something, they really kind of take it to the next level. And the information, I just keep- Telling myself, "Look, it's there, it'll always be there, it's on the..." Right? So eventually, when people figure it out, they'll go back and they can look at all the stuff that I've poured my, you know, blood, sweat and tears into.

• 24:49Rich Roll?

  Right, and, and, and back to, you know, the process of compiling these videos and going through the research and all of that, I think it, it, it warrants like at least a brief discussion about how nutrition science works in the research arena, in the sense that, you know, "Look, all these studies have to be funded by somebody," right? And so, of course, you have to parse through, "Well, who's behind this and, you know, who stands to gain from this?" And with more and more corporate dollars kind of pouring into this field, you know, how does that impact how you look at these studies and evaluate them and either discard them or, or, you know, give them weight or, you know, sort of, you know, slide that, that scale of value?

• 25:31Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, so much of science is now follow the money. And so, what do you do with, you know, an Egg Board funded study or the, you know, Calhoun's Beef Association? You don't know. The problem with conflicts of interest is, these financial conflicts of interest, is that you don't know what to do with them. Because, I mean, basically, the, the, the big controversy is, "Did they or did they not divulge their conflicts of interest?" Right? I mean, that's kind of the big, you know, you know, "Oh, did they get money? Was it, did it meet a certain level?" A lot of journals be like, "If you can get $5,000, but if you get $5,001, all of a sudden

• 26:14Michael Greger?

  you have to list that you got the funding for those sorts of..." But that's not, for me, that's not the issue. The issue isn't-

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  Does the science hold up?

• 26:21Michael Greger?

  The fact that there's this money in science in the first place. I mean, the fact that there's a, the conflict of interest is there, not whether it's disclosed or not. And it's because you get a study, you get a study that show nuts is great and it's done by the Walnut Commission. And you're saying, "Okay." Is it, I mean, did they make stuff up? Did they just design a study to give a certain point? Or is it totally a great study and they just, it wouldn't have gone done? And we should be thanking the Walnut Commission? Because otherwise, we wouldn't know about the wonders of walnuts, right?

• 26:56Michael Greger?

  And so basically, it just gives you, makes you think again, makes you really dive into the, you know, materials and methods and be like, okay, did they put this study together in a way to get some kind of desired result?

• 27:11Rich Roll?

  And how often, when you look at such a study, do you come to the conclusion like, oh, no, it actually, it holds up. I understand there is this conflict of interest built into it. But nonetheless, I can still see the value of this. Or is it almost invariably a situation where you're discarding it?

• 27:28Michael Greger?

  Well, it's, you know, often, rather than discarding it, I actually, you know, do a video about it and show exactly what they did. Like, this is how, you know, the, the bold study, this beef study, they talk around how you can add, you know, lean beef to a diet and your cholesterol gets better. And what'd they do? They added lean beef to a diet in which they cut out cheese and chicken so much. So you actually drop saturated fat below the adding, so you added beef to the diet, but you cut out so much cheese and chicken that you actually have less saturated fat and the cholesterol went down. Surprise, surprise. I mean, it's just such kind of blatant stuff that anyone, even taking a second look at it, would, I mean, would just pop right up as like, kind of just this outrageous manipulation.

• 28:12Michael Greger?

  But, you know, it gets tons of press.

• 28:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, people don't, nobody, nobody gives it a second look, other than people like yourself. And, and certainly, you know, unless you have a really kind of, you know, sort of unusual journalist who's willing to kind of do that kind of work, it ends up in the media. So there's this enmeshed kind of media relationship that translates into, you know, butter is back on the cover of Time Magazine and, you know, all this sort of stuff that, that occurs. Or just a sort of dismissal of the latest World Health Organization recommendations on, on red meat and, and processed meats, right? Which we can talk about a little bit, I suppose.

• 28:50Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, one more, you know, one other thing with the conflicts that makes it even more difficult is that beyond the financial conflicts, there are kind of like ideological conflicts. Or, so for example, there's this amazing research on the spice saffron, right? That and it's all independently funded, but there are all these Iranian scientists. And saffron is like this major export out of, I mean, that's like the number one producer in the world. They have this great national pride over this stuff. Is it possible they're tweaking results? I mean, it would be nice to just get some independent, even though they're not getting money from the saffron industry, right? Or if you have all these New Zealand kiwi fruits are great studies, you're just like, okay.

• 29:31Michael Greger?

  But I would love to see a, you know, a Scottish kiwi fruit study showing how great, you know, I mean, come on.

• 29:38Rich Roll?

  But is there such thing as an independent study? I mean, somebody's got to pay for this stuff, right? So how does that work?

• 29:44Michael Greger?

  It should be publicly funded, right? I mean, so that's what we have the National Institutes of Health for. I mean, you know, that this is a public good. And so we should have public funding. Otherwise, we run into all these problems.

• 29:56Rich Roll?

  But what does that look like? I mean, how many of these studies really are publicly funded? There certainly can't be adequate amount of funding to really do the extent of nutritional research that I would imagine you would prefer.

• 30:07Michael Greger?

  And that's why we, and that's why we have these problems. I mean, so, you know, there's, you know, you get some, you know, there's these, you know, great folks out there like David Katz at Yale, who's accepted egg board money to run these egg studies. And, you know, you talk to him about it and he's like, where do you get money? Like, if you don't accept money from, you know, corporations these days, how are you going to fund your? I mean, you just can't fund a research team. Where are you going to pay your grad students from? I mean, it's just like, you know, I mean, it's a real issue. And so the answer.

• 30:39Rich Roll?

  And David Katz is one of the good guys.

• 30:41Michael Greger?

  Absolutely. No, no, tremendous respect for him, right? But it's like, you gotta deal with reality. You gotta deal with, you know, the, you know, and so it's all nice for us to say, oh, we should be all independent. But it's like, okay, well, you gotta get the money from somewhere. It's interesting, some of these studies were like literally out of scientists' own pocket. Like they thought they had this really great idea. They wanted, you know, to see if it worked. And so they did it themselves, you know? But with no corporate budget driving its promotion, it just gets buried in some dusty stacks of some, you know, library basement and never sees the light of day. And so I saw it as my kind of role in the world. Is to take all that amazing science that was done, even if it gets past the funding

• 31:25Michael Greger?

  stage, but then just got lost to the world. Because, you know, for the same reason you don't see ads on TV for sweet potatoes, there's just no kind of profit motive to get it out to the world.

• 31:36Rich Roll?

  Right. So, so what's your reaction when you see something in the media that you feel is, you know, not an accurate representation of what's going on? Like, right now, you know, let's just talk about the low carb craze. Everybody's all about low carb, ketosis is the greatest thing ever, you know, like all this sort of stuff, right? And that's very, very popular right now. And there's a lot of people who are espousing the benefits of this, not just for weight loss, but for health. And, you know, to the extent that it makes it on the cover of Time Magazine.

• 32:06Michael Greger?

  Amen.

• 32:07Rich Roll?

  Saturated fat.

• 32:08Michael Greger?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  All this sort of thing.

• 32:10Michael Greger?

  Yeah. I try to stay as much away, as much as possible, from the lay media, just because...

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  But you're, you're a, I mean, you're a voice piece for the layperson, right? It's almost your mantle to translate this stuff.

• 32:23Michael Greger?

  Right. No, so sometimes I'm kind of forced into it. I'm so like the saturated fat study, just like, I always am hoping someone else will take it on, because I just want to, you know, cover the, cover the science and not kind of go back and fight back against, you know. But, you know, I wait, I wait, no one's gonna do it. Okay, fine, I'll do it. Right? Like, no one did a really good thing against Atkins, so finally, I, you know, wrote the book on Atkins, and then, you know. And so, I mean, I usually get kind of dragged into it later on, hoping that someone else will kind of take the mantle and do that kind of piece, and let me just stick to the science and, you know, rather than kind of, because otherwise, you just get caught in these kind of endless...

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like a vicious cycle of he said, she said, kind of thing, right?

• 33:11Michael Greger?

  The, but you know, the, the, the WHO story about processed meat, that was a real breakthrough.

• 33:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it made a lot of media and there was a lot of internet chatter, of course, back and forth, but I think, you know, it's really making people question, you know, their, their dietary choices when it comes to that stuff.

• 33:28Michael Greger?

  You know what's interesting, though, which seems to be kind of burying the lead here, but, you know, so processed meat, so you read a good, you know, kind of in-depth story about, they talk about this 34,000 number where they looked at the burden of disease studies, the biggest study looking at risk factors and death and mortality in the world funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank. This is the study to find out how many people soda kills, how many people processed meat kills, how many lives you could save if people ate whole grains or fruits or more vegetables. I mean, this was the study that put it all together and found the 34,000 cancer deaths a year linked to, um, to processed meat consumption. But that same study that's been quoted in all these things found that 840,000 people

• 34:12Michael Greger?

  overall die from processed meat because it contributes to high blood pressure, kidney disease, all these other things. And so, okay, there's that, you know, but what about the other 800,000? There's like a meat-borne epidemic every year of people dying from processed meat. I, I, maybe cancer is just scary.

• 34:32Rich Roll?

  So cancer was almost like the footnote to a bigger...

• 34:34Michael Greger?

  To the massive amount, right. I mean, in fact, I mean, there's these studies, you know, you know, estimating that, you know, if, uh, you know, if, if everyone who ate processed meat cut down their processed meat consumption, like a half strip of bacon a day from whatever they were eating before, like, how much we could, how many lives we could save on a population level, like a certain percentage of mortality overall for the entire population could be prevented. I mean, that's just amazing stats. Um, and...

• 35:01Rich Roll?

  Right, because all the attention was on cancer and it was like, if you broke down the numbers and the percentages, it still really would only impact like a relatively few number of people.

• 35:11Michael Greger?

  Right, no, right. So raising, right, so raising your, you know, risk of colon cancer a few percent. I mean, you know, and so colon cancer is now the third leading cancer killer. What about heart disease? What about, I mean, there's so, I don't, I mean, the, the risks associated with these products. But that's maybe part of the kind of reductionism where, you know, we used to talk about individual nutrients. Now we're talking about individual foods as they pertain to particular diseases. But, I mean, you have to look at the impact. I mean, so like the good impact of, you know, this one, you know, broccoli, not only, you know, I talk about, you know, I have the little broccoli chapter even and say, as I mentioned in chapters one, three, five, seven, you know, and liver cancer and the stroke and the, just

• 35:56Michael Greger?

  like whole plant foods can benefit multiple body systems. You can see some of these foods that are adversely impacted can adversely impact the entire organism. Right. And so you really need to look at it overall. And so when someone says, so let's say there was a study that came out that said, you know, bacon was good for preventing cataracts or something. They would never do that because it's an oxidation thing. But it's like, even if it was good, here's this body of evidence showing bacon does all these other horrible things to your body. So it's like, you still wouldn't eat it. You know, it's like, some people say to me, well, aren't you cherry picking? Here, I have a study that's like independent that shows that, you know, the opposite of what you said. And you know, that, that's, that was actually a tobacco industry tactic.

• 36:41Michael Greger?

  They, they criticized the American Lung Association. They actually have a stack of a hundred papers showing that smoking is good for you, not neutral, not, not bad, but actually good for you. And they criticized the American Lung Association for never mentioning this body of evidence showing how good smoking is for you. For example, smoking protects against ulcerative colitis. Smoking protects against Parkinson's disease. Very strong protection against Parkinson's disease.

• 37:09Michael Greger?

  Right, okay, now, and why don't they ever mention it's like this anti-smoking conspiracy? It's like they want to, right? And so, but, okay, fine, tobacco protects against Parkinson's. But even if you just forget lung cancer, forget if you just cared about your brain, you still wouldn't smoke because it so increases your stroke risk. I like, I mean, so, like, so you understand how the American Lung Association is sticking with the overall balance of evidence and trying to represent what the body of evidence shows. The body of evidence shows that smoking is bad. And so that's why the studies that they promote and have on their website reflect what's

• 37:54Michael Greger?

  in the overall body of evidence. I mean, and people just seem to, you know, miss that point.

• 37:59Rich Roll?

  Right, well, it's, you have to reconcile the scientific method, which by its very nature is reductionist, right? And your videos, you know, they're, they're reductionist in following that scientific method and looking at specific things and their sort of direct impact on other things, right? But how do you reconcile that with stepping outside of that reductionist method and understanding that, you know, we need a more holistic approach, that, you know, broccoli does many things, it doesn't just do one thing, and trying to kind of convey that message and get that across, right? It's almost like these two worlds are at odds with each other. You need the reductionist science in order to discover how these mechanisms operate, but you also have to keep in mind this holistic approach.

• 38:42Michael Greger?

  Yeah, so that's why that you'll see the kind of the whole scope through some of my videos, you know, I talk about the one enzyme affected by, because I, you know, I just find it so fascinating. We finally figured out why, you know, you know, eating plant-based boost your metabolism or something, oh, it's this cartoon pomatoral transfer race, that's so cool, and this is how it works, and you know.

• 39:01Rich Roll?

  You're such a geek.

• 39:03Michael Greger?

  But, but then, no, but then, but you say, okay, but let's look at the big population level, what are the populations that are free of these chronic western diseases? What are they eating? And then you just kind of build the evidence, you know, up and down. You know, when people say like, what's the one study that I want to like give to my doctor, whatever? It's like, well, it's a whole body of evidence, you know, I can, you give me a disease, give me, you know, and I can say, all right, well, this is the best paper. But it's really this overwhelming body of evidence from both epidemiological studies, infetro studies, all the way up to these randomized controlled trials. And you put the, you know, body of science together. It's just this really powerful argument. And beyond that, you know, this, this kind of, this kind of cherry picking accusation. A lot of times, there's just one cherry.

• 39:48Michael Greger?

  So for example, there's only one diet ever been shown to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients. Only one, plant-based diet, right? If that's all a plant-based diet could do, reverse our number one killer, uh, shouldn't that be the default diet until proven otherwise? And then the fact that it can also, you know, prevent, treat and reverse type two diabetes and hypertension, all these other leading killers, it seems to make the case overwhelming. But it's like, it's hard to cherry pick when there's only one cherry. There's no other diet that has been shown that. So it's like, bring it on. This just doesn't exist.

• 40:21Rich Roll?

  So do you get, do you, do you get frustrated when you feel like people aren't getting this? I mean, you're shouting from the mountaintops and have been for some time, along with some other people. And certainly, plant-based diet is picking up steam as becoming, you know, much more prevalent in mainstream consciousness, but I'm not so sure we're quite there yet, right? Like when you read the headlines.

• 40:42Michael Greger?

  Right, no, no, no. But, you know, but my faith comes from this democratization of knowledge, right? It used to be where if you wanted to get information about health, you know, kind of the, that's what a physician did. They held this kind of monopoly. And so the drug companies, if they had the physician in their pocket, they had everything in their pocket, right? Because that was like the official mediator between you and any kind of information, right? And so there was, there's science back to the 30s showing lung cancer and smoking, right? Landmark 1958 article, you know, the Adventist study, 90% less lung cancer in non-smokers. But of course, you never heard about it, right? Because you could just never get to the general public.

• 41:23Rich Roll?

  Right, unless it's in the Washington Post, or your doctor is going to tell you, who's going to go to the basement of some library and start going through microfiche?

• 41:31Michael Greger?

  And Washington Post isn't going to run it because they're running cigarette ads, right? So. But now, things have changed, right? Now, we have access. We no longer have to have this mediator you know, between us and, you know, the body of science out there. And so I find that tremendously exciting.

• 41:50Rich Roll?

  It's profound. Never in the history of humankind have we had this kind of access to information.

• 41:55Michael Greger?

  So we don't have to wait for a doctor to tell us to quit smoking, right? When it comes to safe, simple, side effect free solutions, we can take our, you know, our own health destiny and our family's health into our own hands and improve it. We don't have to wait till society.

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  Not only do we not have to wait, we shouldn't wait.

• 42:10Michael Greger?

  Because it's a matter of life.

• 42:12Rich Roll?

  They weren't taught it in medical school, anyway.

• 42:14Michael Greger?

  Absolutely. So, but so that, okay. Now, along with that, millions of voices and that democratization of knowledge, of course, there's all this garbage out there. But eventually, you have this sense that the truth will kind of float to the surface.

• 42:27Rich Roll?

  You're optimistic about that? Because I feel like there's a war on the internet. Who can be loudest wins the day. And when you have a lot of resources to pepper the internet with all kinds of crazy articles, you can easily obfuscate the truth or just, at a minimum, confuse people. And when people are confused, then they're going to default to their, you know, their basic habits.

• 42:48Michael Greger?

  I know, absolutely. That, in fact, that, I mean, that's an explicit strategy among, you know, big tobacco, all the way through big food. There's this famous tobacco industry memo, "Doubt is our product," right? This is a PR firm hired by the tobacco industry. You know, we don't have to convince people smoking is good for you. All we have to do is introduce, oh, there's two sides. Yeah, some scientists say smoking is good, some say smoking is bad. It's all you had to do. Doubt is our product. And then people just throw their hands up in the air, do whatever the heck they want, right?

• 43:15Rich Roll?

  Right. And I feel like, you know, sort of television news or television sort of talk show, you know, structures are set up where you have all these talking heads and everybody's given equal credibility. You know, sort of this seemingly democratization of ideas when in reality, somebody could be a complete expert and somebody else could be an absolute knucklehead and they're given kind of equal air, right? And so the consumer is left with thinking, well, there's two sides to something, when, no, there's the truth and then there's something that's not the truth.

• 43:47Michael Greger?

  And so, it's all about going back to the science. What does the science show? I mean, none of us were born with this knowledge. So when someone says something out of their mouth, you say, "Okay, well, where did you find that? I mean, where did you, how did you come to that conclusion? I mean, where did you deduce that?" And they say, "Oh, well, here's my body of evidence that supports this." And who has the time to go through the, look through the... I have the time. And I've made it my, you know, I mean, that's what, you know...

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  You're the guy.

• 44:12Michael Greger?

  I've made it my mission to take this information. Look, Ornish was, Ornish proved reverse heart disease in a randomized controlled trial, 1990, July 1990 in the Lancet. That, everything should have changed the next day. And the fact that it didn't is a real wake-up call. It was a real make-up call for me politically. It's like, wait a second. There's more than just science going on in medicine, right? There's more than just, there's reimbursement, there's, I mean, there's this whole kind of structure set up to kind of go at odds with these, you know, kind of lifestyle decisions.

• 44:45Rich Roll?

  Right, there's been this weird kind of reductionist opinion about Ornish's work. And you see him sort of getting thrown under the bus in the media, like, "Oh, well, yeah, it didn't really have to do with diet. It had to do with the lifestyle recommendations that he was making." And he's sort of been seemingly dismissed, when in reality, you know, he was sort of speaking the truth all along.

• 45:06Michael Greger?

  Right, and been an absolute pioneer. And then, of course, others have taken his work, like Usain, and said, "Okay, let's cut out the stress management, the touchy-feelyness, the exercise, everything." And just what do dietary changes show? In fact, in cases, don't even put people on statins and just see purely, can this diet reverse heart disease? And saw these extraordinary results. And then it's like, well, not that we shouldn't be managing our stress and exercising everything else, but, I mean, it shows that, you know, the proof is in the vegan pudding.

• 45:36Rich Roll?

  Right, just to remove all the other variables.

• 45:38Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, we can need that, right?

• 45:48Rich Roll?

  What are some of the other sort of crazy tobacco industry tactics that you've come across in some of the research?

• 45:54Michael Greger?

  Unbelievable. No, so I mean, it's really, I mean, it's almost, those are some of the funnest studies because, I mean, you're like, wow. Like, before I even read the study, I'm like, okay, if I was an egg researcher and I wanted to prove this, how would I do it, knowing what I know, right? And so, you know, let's, how do I prove that cholesterol, that the eggs don't raise your cholesterol, right? Hmm, well, there's this plateau effect where after a certain amount of cholesterol, your kind of cholesterol receptors get all clogged down and saturated such that you need more cholesterol, your body's not going to accept it anymore, right? You're kind of topped off. All right, so let's pay, let's have people eat, you know, compare 10 eggs a day to 20 eggs a day.

• 46:38Michael Greger?

  You compare 10 to 100, you're not going to get any more, but that's not the, I mean, but that's how you would design a study. You look at the study, that's how they designed the study. I mean, it's just like, that's, you know, I mean, and sometimes, sometimes it takes you a while to figure out, you know, kind of, but.

• 46:54Rich Roll?

  Is that the idea behind, I think I've seen on the internet, a lot of people saying that dietary cholesterol does not raise serum cholesterol, that there's no relationship between those two.

• 47:06Michael Greger?

  Oh, and that's, that's, that's completely false. In fact, we have these meta-analyses, and it was based, I mean, look, this is, I mean, this was coming from, you know, the Dietary Guidelines Committee came out and said, removing dietary cholesterol as a kind of nutrient of concern, and they did that in part based on the AHAC guidelines, the American Academy, the, the American Heart Association, American Academy of Cardiology, who said in their latest review of the literature.

• 47:36Michael Greger?

  That we see no, that there's, that there's no, there's no link between the kind of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol, but that was within their parameters, which was the last 20 years, because every 20 years they do a review. And so this is like, okay, nothing new. There hasn't been any studies on dietary cholesterol and serum, because it's a, it's a research question that was definitively answered decades ago. In fact, so I think they looked at the last 20 years. If you go back like 22 years and 23 years, there's two big meta-analyses of the last 30 years of data with, you know, dozens of these metabolic ward studies where you take people, you lock them in a room, and so you have total control of their diet, you feed them exactly whatever you want to feed them, and you measure their

• 48:19Michael Greger?

  blood and what happens. And there's, in fact, there's an equation that, you know, you give somebody this much cholesterol, and then their, you know, blood cholesterol goes up. I mean, and so, but, but, so, I mean, so it's kind of this misunderstanding, misuse of the literature.

• 48:35Rich Roll?

  What is, what is behind that misunderstanding? Why is it that so many people are misinformed or confused by that? Is that because there's, you know, some conspiracy by big food to create that confusion? Or is it that people just like hearing, you know, good news about their bad habits? Like, I feel like the truth has such a difficult time rising to the surface.

• 48:56Michael Greger?

  Yeah, no, I think all those really play, I mean, we, you know, we, we were comforted by the fact, you know, when someone says you're, what you're doing is right, you're a good person, you're, you know, not, not feeding your kids something that's going to give them diabetes. You know, that's a nice message to hear. And all these, you know, kind of nanny state naysayers who are trying to make you eat flavorless food or something, is, you know, so don't worry about them, eat your Fruit Loops, and you'll be, and you'll be healthy because they're fortified, you know. I mean, that's, that's the message that everybody wants to hear. They don't want to hear Um, oh, uh, you know, salt's still bad for me. Really?

• 49:41Michael Greger?

  I mean, I'd much rather hear the study, the dissenting scientist funded by the Salt Institute that says, oh, no, eat all the salts you want, kind of thing.

• 49:50Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. What's the most surprising thing that you've come across in the last couple of years through all the research that you've done? Something that really you didn't, you didn't really fully appreciate or understand or kind of change your mind about?

• 50:02Michael Greger?

  You know, the, all the microbiome stuff is just blowing my mind.

• 50:07Rich Roll?

  It's crazy, right?

• 50:08Michael Greger?

  Um, so, I mean, the, you know, the, only about one out of 10 cells in our bodies actually human, right? So 90% of us are bacteria by DNA, by, you know, cell number. And has tremendous power over everything from our mental status to our immune system. I mean, when I, you know, when I think, when I, in medical school, we learned about fiber, right? Fiber, yeah, the sense is just kind of like, just like mass kind of scrubbing down the colon walls and just kind of kept things moving and heading up. But no, fi, you know, like, it's the indigestible part of the food, right? Doesn't really do anything for you.

• 50:53Michael Greger?

  But no, we don't digest it, but we actually do digest, our bacteria digest it. That's what our bacteria eat.

• 50:58Rich Roll?

  Prebiotic.

• 50:59Michael Greger?

  It is the, it is the prebiotic.

• 51:02Rich Roll?

  Do you know, uh, Dr. Robin Shutkan in DC? Oh, you gotta connect with her, man. She is, she's the bomb when it comes to the microbiome.

• 51:10Michael Greger?

  Oh, sweet.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  I just had her on the podcast. She's amazing. Yeah, she's got a couple of books out. Um, her latest one is called The Microbiome Solution. She's amazing.

• 51:18Michael Greger?

  Me, me, me.

• 51:19Rich Roll?

  And she's just, she has a really amazing talent at being able to communicate what the microbiome is all about to a layperson so they can understand it. But it's, yeah, I mean, it's mind blowing. The stuff that really gets me is the cravings part. About how when you change your microbiome, it actually can impact the foods that you crave because that, that population, that ecology starts to desire that kind of food that seeded it in the first place in order to survive. It's crazy.

• 51:53Michael Greger?

  Yeah, I was just, I just did a, uh, put a video up recently about something called diversion colitis, where if for some kind of surgical procedure, you actually have to divert the fecal stream, like through, you know, ileosomy or something, out from the abdominal wall, instead of going through the gut, you get something, and up to 100% of cases, is something called this diversion colitis, where all of a sudden, your colon starts dying, it starts bleeding, dying, why? And they wonder, what is going on? Like, why all of a sudden did, you know, we need this fecal stream, otherwise the cell died? And it turns out that the, that the lining of the colon literally lives off, not of our blood supply, it lives off what the bacteria feed it, right?

• 52:35Michael Greger?

  These byproducts from fiber and other prebiotics, like resistant starch. And so if we don't have the good bacteria to feed that, um, uh, and, and so, and so basically, the body uses that, that signal of lack of, you know, butyrate, these wonderful byproducts of fiber, as a signal that we have bad bacteria, we have a dysbiotic gut, and starts attacking, um, the bacteria in the gut to kind of repopulate with the good guys. But we can replicate that same scenario by just not eating fiber. We don't eat fiber, then all of a sudden, the colon isn't getting, uh, the lining of the colon isn't getting nutrients, and thinks there must be these dysbiotic fiber-hating bacteria,

• 53:18Michael Greger?

  because we're obviously, what else does the, our evolutionary, evolutionarily does our body know? But just massive quantities of fiber all day long. And so thinks, oh, we must have some wacky gut, wacky gut bacteria, let's kill them all off. And you get all these kind of inflammatory, um, and you're

• 53:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the definition of an autoimmune disorder, right?

• 53:37Michael Greger?

  Absolutely, starts attacking.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  I mean, from a layperson's point of view, it seems to me, it feels like there is this explosion of autoimmune disorders and food allergies that's happening right now. Like, suddenly, there's so many people that seem to be suffering from, everything, from ulcerative colitis to, you know, all these kind of digestive disorders. You know, people are allergic to all kinds of foods, all of a sudden, that I don't remember when I was a kid being a thing. Um, is that related to?

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  The microbiome, the health of the microbiome, or what do you think that's about? Or am I just wrong?

• 54:11Michael Greger?

  No, no, so certainly the biggest, so the best study we have was involved a million children around the world that looked at so-called atopic diseases like asthma, allergies, eczema, and found indeed this dramatic rise, and it's tied most closely to the lack of whole plant food consumption. As people start dropping, moving from their traditional diets to more kind of westernized diet, and dropping their whole food consumption, then you start seeing this increase in, you know, a physician diagnoses asthma, for example. And the question is, why? And microbiome would certainly fit right into that, but, you know, we've yet to kind of tie those kind of ends of the chain together.

• 54:54Michael Greger?

  But that could certainly play a role. And so, look, we feed them, they feed us back. And so, it's a really powerful argument, since of course, the only source of fiber is from, is from plant foods, and the only source of, good source of fiber is from whole plant foods.

• 55:13Rich Roll?

  Right. Have you done any looking into the differences between organic versus non-organic, either in terms of nutritional content or density, or the impact of, you know, pesticides on the foods that we're eating?

• 55:27Michael Greger?

  Sure, yeah, so I have a series of videos, both on the safety aspects and the nutrition aspects. And so, for traditional nutrients, like vitamins and minerals, there's actually no benefit from organic versus conventional across the board, on average. However, for the kind of non-traditional nutrients, like the phenolics and some of these phytonutrients, they do have significantly more in the organic versus conventional, but we're talking like 20% more, and organic food may be 20% or more expensive. So you get the same amount per dollar, conventional versus, versus organic.

• 56:07Michael Greger?

  But people aren't necessarily buying organic for the nutrients, but for the safety aspects. And indeed, what I was surprised to learn is not just the pesticides, and so certainly there's a big pesticide issue, but actually they have metals. So for example, was it cadmium? I think the cadmium from the... Phosphate fertilizers. So these artificial phosphate fertilizers have, just naturally have a lot of cadmium, this toxic cadmium metal, along with mercury and lead. And so that's why conventional produce has a lot more cadmium than organic produce. So actually go through, and so the, so basically the kind of the bottom line that comes out

• 56:48Michael Greger?

  of this is that choose organic whenever you can, but we should never let fear of pesticides, for example, limit our consumption of, of as many fruits and vegetables as we can possibly step in our face.

• 57:00Rich Roll?

  It's not an argument to not eat fruits and vegetables.

• 57:01Michael Greger?

  Absolutely. Even if you just had the most contaminated, Chilean imported grapes and bell peppers.

• 57:07Rich Roll?

  Bathed in glyphosate?

• 57:08Michael Greger?

  And, and, and it would still benefit your health. So in fact, so there was a study, there's this kind of, it was kind of a computer modeling study in food and chemical toxicology a few years ago, that suggested that if just half the population ate a single more serving of fruits and vegetables a day, it would prevent every year 20,000 cancer deaths. Not 20,000 cases of cancer, but 20,000 cancer deaths if just half the population, one more serving of fruits and vegetables. But because the modeling was on conventional fruits and vegetables, that added pesticide load in the American population would cause 10 cancer deaths. So overall, if we did this, it would just prevent 19,990 cancer deaths, right?

• 57:52Michael Greger?

  So we get this huge benefit, but also this tiny bump in risk. But the huge benefit far outweighs the risk, but hey, why accept any risk at all when you can get all benefit, no risk by choosing organic? And so certainly I encourage people to do so, but we should be stuffing our face with as many fruits and vegetables as possible, regardless of the source.

• 58:12Rich Roll?

  Right. So have you looked at GMO at all? And glyphosate, you know, the World Health Organization classified it as a possible carcinogen? Probable? I can't remember exactly.

• 58:24Michael Greger?

  And that's really the issue when it comes to GMOs, is the excess pesticides, right? Because, you know.

• 58:31Rich Roll?

  They're pesticide resistant, which allows them to bathe them in this pesticide.

• 58:35Michael Greger?

  So normally, so you know, conventional soybean growers, they still use the same pesticide, but they use it between crops. Obviously, you can't use it during the crop because it'd kill your plants. So but between the crops, and so there's lots of pesticide in the soil. So you grow the soybeans, you still get a little pesticide in them versus organic, where it's not allowed to use it at all. But, right, that's, we can now dump it straight on the plants. And so the thought was that you'd have elevated levels. And it wasn't until recently, the last few years, we actually were able to measure actual market levels, not in the fields, but actually what makes it to market and show that compared to both

• 59:16Michael Greger?

  conventional and organic soy, which had very little, that the levels of glyphosate were just off the chart. In fact, so high, you know, Monsanto pressured countries to actually raise the safety limit. So all of a sudden, it didn't exceed the safety limit anymore, but that's only because they pushed it up.

• 59:34Rich Roll?

  Right. And that gets back to the politics that are inherent in all of this. You see that in what's happening with organic certification, too. Like, what qualifies as organic isn't what it was, you know, 10 years ago. It's been, in some respects, co-opted. It's easier to get that organic certification. I think it still costs a bunch of money or whatever. But there's more things that can be qualified as organic because there's money to be made there, right? They can charge more for it.

• 1:00:02Michael Greger?

  Right. Yes. I mean, the billions in organics are not because they're selling lots of carrots, right? They're selling organic gummy bears and, you know, I mean, but, you know, you can understand, you know, the purists who want organic to maintain, you know, this little niche. I mean, we also want a lot of people to have access to it. How do we have a lot of people have access to it? You know, in this society, an entity makes a lot of money off of it, right? I mean, so, so, for example, you know, I have this, these, it's an interesting series of articles about patenting turmeric. So, for example, there's actually a group that did actually patent turmeric, the spiced or-

• 1:00:39Rich Roll?

  Not a genetically modified turmeric?

• 1:00:41Michael Greger?

  No, no, just like actual turmeric, because it has these, all these medicinal effects. And so they were sued by this group of Indian turkeys, saying, wait a second, we've been using turmeric for like, you know, for, you know, an antibiotic medicine forever. You can't do this. And they, and the patent was pulled and, and, and, and all was right with the world. And so it seemed like this great fight against these evil corporations trying to get to, okay, but- If PepsiCo owned Turmeric, oh my god, we would have to, you know, we would have it every.

• 1:01:11Rich Roll?

  It would be in everything. It would be in Pepsi.

• 1:01:14Michael Greger?

  It would be. And so, I mean, and so on one hand, it's like, great, now it can remain pennies a dose and make nobody any money, so therefore, we're not gonna have any research for it. We're not gonna have any promotional budget to get it. No one's ever gonna hear about it, right? And so, there's this interesting like.

• 1:01:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not as easy as you think.

• 1:01:34Michael Greger?

  Right. I mean, if, right, if, you know, Monsanto really did own broccoli, which they're trying to patent a strain of broccoli, then our kids would be eating a lot more broccoli.

• 1:01:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, I never thought of it from that perspective. It's tricky, right?

• 1:01:48Michael Greger?

  It's tricky.

• 1:01:49Rich Roll?

  What do you think about the food plate and the food pyramid and what's going on there and how that's sort of evolved over time?

• 1:01:56Michael Greger?

  Yeah, well, I think it's, I like the, obviously, the food plate is much better. It gives people a better way to kind of visualize. The food pyramid came out, was gutted, pulled back by, you know, meat industry pressures. But food plate's nice, so food plate, right, basically, half fruits and vegetables. A quarter, quote-unquote, protein, which includes legumes. And so, actually, legumes, you know, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils actually are the only food that actually goes over both. It's considered both a protein and a vegetable. It's kind of a two-for-one. And, and then, you know, whole grains. So, it's like this great, you know, I mean.

• 1:02:34Rich Roll?

  It's moving in the right direction.

• 1:02:35Michael Greger?

  That is absolutely moving in the right direction.

• 1:02:37Rich Roll?

  What happened with that lawsuit that PCRM filed over that?

• 1:02:41Michael Greger?

  Over, that was like, hey, that looks awful familiar. We put out that power plate years ago.

• 1:02:48Rich Roll?

  Or, yeah, I can't remember exactly what it was. I'm trying to remember, but I think it had something to do with sort of the public being misled in terms of, you know, the recommendations.

• 1:03:00Michael Greger?

  Well, there were certainly conflicts.

• 1:03:01Rich Roll?

  And it's not being sort of true to the science and the conflicts.

• 1:03:02Michael Greger?

  Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, the, I mean, the, probably the greatest lawsuit they've ever won was divulging the conflicts of interest of who was on the board, right? So, these are the Dietary Guidelines for Americas, for Americans, you know. USDA and the DHHS come together to put them together over five years since 1980. And, you know, they, it's not just recommendations. This is what, you know, federal school lunch program is where we feed people in prisons.

• 1:03:27Rich Roll?

  It's in every school, every public institution.

• 1:03:29Michael Greger?

  I'm right. This is a, it's very important what these, and so of course, huge amount of pressure from lobbyists and money pours in. And so, but yet, they were not even divulging where, who was paying these, and so we find, and so thanks to the physician's committee for responsible medicine, they came in and she divulged who these people were on the committee who were making up these guidelines. And it's just absolutely amazing. So they were paid for the likes of everything from, you know, they were on, you know, Coca-Cola's beverage, you know, health institute and then McDonald's, you know, living whatever. And then the sugar institute and the sugar association, the salt institute. My favorite was Joanna Dwyer, who's this scientist up at Tufts, who used to be the

• 1:04:13Michael Greger?

  Duncan Hines brand girl, before she was like the Crisco brain girl, like, you know, and then she went on to write the, you know, dietary guidelines for all Americans. And so like candy bar, Mars bar, candy bar companies. And we wonder how screwed up these guidelines are. And so, now that has changed, it was getting much better. So this current committee has less financial ties than any other. So we're pushing things in the right direction and then, and that's all good for people that, you know, want a healthy populace, because that's where the evidence lies.

• 1:04:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. Do you know Andy Bellotti?

• 1:04:50Michael Greger?

  Oh.

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  Nutritionist. He's great. You gotta meet this guy. But him and a few others, he's a nutritionist, dietitian, but he'll go to these conferences and he'll tweet photos of, you know, these banners that are hanging from these big food brands.

• 1:05:03Michael Greger?

  Oh, right. That's crazy.

• 1:05:05Rich Roll?

  You know, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, McDonald's Institute. Yeah, yeah, he's a big Michelle Simon person.

• 1:05:11Michael Greger?

  Awesome, awesome.

• 1:05:12Rich Roll?

  It's so glaring and in your face that you can't even believe it's real. It's like a scene out of Idiocracy. You're like, are you kidding? And everyone's just sort of going along with it.

• 1:05:20Michael Greger?

  Right, right. It's interesting. So Coca-Cola just pulled sponsorship from the American Academy of Dietetics Nutrition. And it's interesting though, the ADA, the former ADA, you know, now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. You know, they didn't stop their sponsor Coca-Cola pulled back from them. Um, thanks to pressure from big New York Times piece showing how much money they were pouring into everyone's coffers. Um, but you know, these are all good signs. I mean, the less money we have influencing, the more transparency there is. Um, the more will the real science will come out.

• 1:05:54Rich Roll?

  Right. So you're optimistic.

• 1:05:55Michael Greger?

  I am totally optimistic.

• 1:05:57Rich Roll?

  That's good to hear.

• 1:05:58Michael Greger?

  Oh, absolutely. The more research is getting done, the research is getting out there, it's having an impact. I mean, you go back, you know, uh, you know, uh, in my kind of latest annual review, I talk about, you know, what was like, I kind of parallel the situation now with being a smoker in the 50s. So if you're a smoker in the 50s, you have the American Medical Association saying smoking on balance is good for you. That's the AMA saying that, right?

• 1:06:24Rich Roll?

  That's so amazing.

• 1:06:25Michael Greger?

  And of course, they got, you know, and they refused to endorse the Surgeon General's report when it came out in the 60s, after they had gotten that $10 million check from the tobacco industry. I mean, absolutely, I mean, it's CD. But, okay, so you go back in time, but okay, so you can see why the AMA was in bed with tobacco industry. But why weren't individual doctors speaking out? The majority of physicians smoked. In fact, the average per capita cigarette consumption of Americans was a 2,000, it was 2,000. So it was, it would, comes out to a half pack a day for every, um, every adult. And so the average American smoked a half pack a day.

• 1:07:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:00Michael Greger?

  Okay, so it was in the media, right? It was in the movies. It was, you know, ads on TV, doctor, the government. Everyone was telling you so on one side, right? And on the other side, all you had was the science. If you knew what was going on and none of that science broke through. So you had these studies done by these remarkable folks, you know, titans in the research field in the 30s, 40s, 50s. None of it made out in the mainstream because. Your, you know, your doctor was gonna tell you to quit smoking between puffs. I mean, that's, I mean, but it was, it was normal. It was what all, it was just what you did. You know, medical meetings, one big haze of smoke, right? I, you know, they're debating lung cancer in these congressional committees and through this fog of smoke.

• 1:07:43Michael Greger?

  Um, and so when it's normal, right? You know, you, you can't wait for society to catch up to the science because by the time it does, you could be dead by then or have cancer. Like, I mean, there's a matter of life and death. And so I, I see this kind of real parallel between then and now. It's like, okay, the science is clear. The science has been clear, but that's not what everybody does. I mean, what your doctor, your doctor, the most of the smoke, most of the doctors smoked back then. Most of the doctors today continue to eat foods that contribute to our epidemic of dietary diseases. So you have this kind of inherent bias, this cognitive dissonance of them telling people to eat healthier than they're already eating or to exercise if they're sitting on their butt themselves.

• 1:08:28Michael Greger?

  And so, you know, I mean, I think, I, I think that's a good parallel where you have this, where you can have simultaneously this tremendous body of unassailable evidence, yet that's not what the government, the medical community and society is saying. In fact, by the time the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964, 7,000 studies, there were 7,000, it took 7,000 studies linking smoking with lung cancer before Surgeon General came out. I mean, you think after the first 6,000, they could have given a little heads up or something, right? I mean, but that just shows, and so I don't know what thousand we're at, right? But, I mean, how much?

• 1:09:06Rich Roll?

  But I think with our demand for transparency, that has to be accelerated, right? But at the same time, you're also, you're also asking, you're, first of all, you're asking people to embark on behavioral change, which is not fun or comfortable and not something people want to hear about. Um, but on top of that, you're also, uh, asking the medical community to have this paradigm shift away from, uh, diagnose and prescribe, because it's, we're just prescription nutty right now. And Put on the preventive medicine hat, right? And our system, the current medical sort of doctor setup, it isn't really designed to function that way economically.

• 1:09:47Michael Greger?

  And that's the word. It's really economically. There's really no route for doctors to get reimbursed. There's some kind of creative ways doctors are doing it now with group visits and things for diabetics on Medicare. And, you know, the Ornish program, the Prudential program have both been accepted by Medicare. So there's a few ways you can get in. But in general, there's no reimbursement mechanism for a doctor telling people to keeping people healthy and talking to them about things they can do to prevent illness. Because doctors are reimbursed by procedure, right? Pills and procedures. That's what they get money for. That's what sends their kids to college, not how healthy their patients were. If we actually had metrics, and there are some in the Affordable Care Act, if we had

• 1:10:28Michael Greger?

  metrics that actually rewarded doctors for actually keeping people healthy, then we could see the system change.

• 1:10:35Rich Roll?

  Right. That's crazy talk.

• 1:10:37Michael Greger?

  That's just crazy talk.

• 1:10:38Rich Roll?

  I think, I think the, the, the approach should really be through corporate wellness programs because you're dealing with these big corporations who are just getting bled because of their insurance premiums, their healthcare insurance premiums. And they're ready and willing to listen if it's going to positively impact their bottom line. So to implement really, you know, really in a real way, wellness programs that aren't just, hey, we're going to run a 5K, but like really tending to the food that their employees are eating and having, you know, sort of accountability programs and, and really, you know, infusing a culture that promotes wellness, which will of course positively impact, you

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  know, their insurance premiums and their, their ultimate profitability, but also, you know, provide people with the tools to be able to be healthy and that will trickle down from there.

• 1:11:29Michael Greger?

  You know, that's the, that's the grand irony is that, you know, the food industry has this kind of historical anti-corporate bias, right? It's big, it's big tobacco, it's big food, coming in as these evil corporations like PepsiCo and Kentucky Fried Chicken. And so like corporations are the enemy when ironically they may be our salvation. They're the ones that are, you know, if they're self-insuring their populations, they are the ones to stand to gain the most by reducing healthcare costs. I mean, you prevent a few cases of diabetes, you've saved enormous amounts of money, not to mention increases in productivity and well-being. You know, the, you know, PCRM did this great series of studies at 10 GEICO sites recently published.

• 1:12:14Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:12:15Michael Greger?

  It showed tremendous, you know, improvement in fatigue, mental health.

• 1:12:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if I was CEO of a Fortune 500 company and came across that, I'd, I'd say, "Sign me up. When do we, let's do this right now."

• 1:12:24Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's change the cafeteria.

• 1:12:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it's, it, you know, but it's, it's really the politics that swirl around these big corporations, you know, just take, take school lunch, you know. Why is that such an incredible clusterfuck to unravel and repair? It's very, very difficult just to get healthy food options for kids because there's so much money being made and there's so much politics going into, you know, these providers that are gaining, you know, that are basically profiting from the food that's being provided. These, they're huge contracts, right?

• 1:12:54Michael Greger?

  Right, right. Yeah, they're unloading these cheap commodities. I mean, the problem is, is that healthy food doesn't have a, doesn't, you can't mark up healthy food. I mean, I mean, the, the, the profit margin is so razor-thin for, you know, broccoli, sweet potatoes, that kind of thing. You just can't charge a premium because there's no like, you know, Smith brand, you're not gonna pay more because you have some kind of branded broccoli. Whereas, these processed food companies can take the dirt-cheapest of ingredients like, you know, sugar, and spin it and color it and flavor it, all sorts of, and they're, and, you know, so like, the can of Coke is one of the greatest profit margins. So like, a can of Coke and basically tobacco are the two kind of most profitable in terms of how

• 1:13:38Michael Greger?

  much money they make, given the raw materials that go into it. And so there's this, you know, it's not that Coke sits around and says, "How can we make the children of America obese?"

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 1:13:49Michael Greger?

  Right? They're like, "How can we make money?" Right? And it just turns out, the sweet potatoes don't make you as much money. Right? I mean, so it's not like, but...

• 1:13:57Rich Roll?

  But there's subsidies involved in that, of course.

• 1:13:59Michael Greger?

  Right. And so why is sugar so cheap? Because we subsidize it, right? I mean, so why is corn and soy so cheap? Because we feed it to the animals. And subsidize the meat industry that way. And so, right, so if we subsidized good food, fruits and vegetables, things, and so Europe, they're actually starting this. So for example, a number of Scandinavian countries have done this free fruit programs. So every day, every kid gets free fruit. And they found, and oh, oh, so I have this video coming out about this, these programs. Absolutely amazing. And they kind of made the calculations that to make it, oh, make it cost effective.

• 1:14:43Michael Greger?

  It was just some absolutely wild calculation that you, you save so much on healthcare costs doing that one simple thing, giving people fruit that, um, you know, it pays for itself over and over and over again. Right, just, right, if, but, you know, the, the watermelon promotion board, their budget pales in comparison.

• 1:15:07Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:15:14Rich Roll?

  So how do we deal with this problem, or at least this mentality or idea that eating plant-based is, is for the elite, right? Like, how can we trickle down this, this protocol to make it more accessible for the underprivileged who, look, you know, they're, they're, they're feeding their families off subsidized foods, the cheapest, most nutritionally poor foods available, but they don't have, you know, sort of the, the, the luxury of being able to go to Whole Foods.

• 1:15:45Michael Greger?

  Well, some of the healthiest foods, I mean, you think about the grocery bill. I mean, some of the most expensive foods are some of the least healthy foods, particularly by nutrient, right? And so if you want calories per dollar, okay, fine, junk food wins out, right? But, and, you know, that's how we used to measure food value 200 years ago, when you're a New England bricklayer burning 14,000 calories a day, you just needed calories. And so a pound of sugar, which was five cents, costs as much as a pound of beans, which just costs five cents. And so USDA said sugar is healthier because it has more calories per that five cents. And you have to keep your bricklayers bricklaying. But they can be excused because vitamins hadn't been like discovered yet. I mean, we had no idea.

• 1:16:29Michael Greger?

  There was just this kind of energy value of food. But now that's changed. Now we know, oh, there's actually nutrients in food that do things for you. And so on a dollar per nutrient basis, then good foods win out across the board. And so, you know, some of the healthiest foods like, you know, beans, you know, beans and rice, that kind of thing. The amount of nutrition you get for per dollar is huge. Purple cabbage, right? You can purple fifty cents a pound. You can get a cabbage.

• 1:16:59Michael Greger?

  Last practically forever. You slice off shreds, put in any meal that you're eating, right? Tremendous. One of the most antioxidant packed food per dollar anywhere in the world. You can buy it so cheap, right? Apples are cheap. I mean, these are, you know, I mean, you know, compare a pound of breakfast cereal to a pound of apples at any store, right? And you'll be amazed in terms of how much food you actually get. You know, and you can buy, you know, most of these foods anywhere.

• 1:17:26Rich Roll?

  Right. So how do we, how do we get that message out better than we have been?

• 1:17:29Michael Greger?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:29Rich Roll?

  I guess it becomes about education.

• 1:17:31Michael Greger?

  Yeah. So I've done a bunch of videos about it, all sorts of cool graphs that, you know, come from the USDA. They actually go through and chart prices of all the commodities and, and, and really kind of neat, colorful, pretty graphs that show exactly, you know, how much more nutrition you can get per dollar and, you know, whether you're. So anyway.

• 1:17:50Rich Roll?

  Got it.

• 1:17:50Michael Greger?

  So, yeah, the answer basically, nutritionfacts.org is the.

• 1:17:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is. What, what, what is your most popular video?

• 1:17:59Michael Greger?

  Um. You know, I periodically, you know, like every year, and so it's coming up to be that time. My kind of new year's, what are the top 10 videos of the year?

• 1:18:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:10Michael Greger?

  And I actually go back, go to the Google Analytics and see, oh, what was the? And I'm often surprised, you know, a lot of them is because it's organic search results. It's like common questions. So what are the, so there's like, um, so is coconut oil healthy? Or something like that. I mean, that will. I mean, that'll be because people just Google it and then it comes up. And so they, so people go to this, discover the site based on that kind of thing.

• 1:18:35Rich Roll?

  I wrote, I don't, I don't write blog posts that often on my site, but I did write a blog post after you posted your, your coconut oil video. And I embedded it in my blog post. It was called like, you know, health food or pan, you know, health panacea or, you know, what, I can't remember what I titled it. And when I look at my Google analytics, it's, I think it's the, by far and away, like the most red thing that I've ever put on my website. People are obsessed with coconut oil.

• 1:19:02Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:04Rich Roll?

  It's funny. Um, so that, so basically, yeah, cause it's not, oh, it's, it's really people organically searching on Google. They're not necessarily already on nutrition facts, like, you know, going through.

• 1:19:14Michael Greger?

  Right, right. And so the most impactful, the most important videos, right? I mean, if it doesn't have a title that works well on a search engine, you know, no one may ever see it.

• 1:19:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:23Michael Greger?

  You know, and, and I learned that only, you know, relatively recently. And so like one of the most powerful videos is this whole IGF one story and cancer. And the name of that video is ex vivo cancer bio assay or something like that. And it's this really cool way you can, you know, take, you, you can drip blood from people on different diets onto cancer cells and see what it does. And how good your blood is at suppressing and killing cancer compared to someone else's blood or your blood two weeks later after eating a plant-based diet. I mean, all these really cool, so it's just fascinating, but with that kind of title, I mean, nobody will ever see it.

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  You gotta embed like keywords in there like Kim Kardashian, you know, like, and see how that influences your viewership.

• 1:20:06Michael Greger?

  Right, right. No, it's so true. So yeah, so I've learned to make things much more kind of, you know, like.

• 1:20:11Rich Roll?

  You'll never believe what, what happened next was amazing.

• 1:20:16Michael Greger?

  Right, right, right. Treating high blood pressure with diet or something. So my title's actually kind of, kind of very bland and boring. And like, I want it to be all twisty and, and quirky and punny, but no.

• 1:20:30Rich Roll?

  You need an intern to just study the headlines on BuzzFeed.

• 1:20:33Michael Greger?

  Oh, right.

• 1:20:34Rich Roll?

  See what works. That's so funny. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about the book. I mean, what, what are, what is your aspiration for this book?

• 1:20:42Michael Greger?

  Yeah, well, I mean, this, I mean, I think it's gonna do just a tremendous amount of good in the world, just kind of as it is. I mean, originally, it was really just a vehicle to kind of send traffic to the site. Because I feel that's like my primary body of work, that's where all the science is, that's where they can see it. So this is just a way to kind of inform people about and send people that way. But then it turned into kind of a, this really project on its own, kind of self, you know, contained, and offering its own kind of value. In fact, a lot of stuff that isn't on the site, right? Because it's more like, well, this is my opinion based on my kind of professional opinion, even though I can't really back it up, this is based kind of, you know, this is my intuition based on what I, what the science we do know. Which I would never want to put on the site, but, you know, it's like dosing, right? How much dose?

• 1:21:28Michael Greger?

  So we have 20 studies, some use this massive dose, some use this tiny dose. Okay, well, what do you eat every, if you think turmeric is good for you, how much do you actually eat every day? So I came up with a quarter teaspoon a day, so that's my recommendation. Everyone should eat a quarter teaspoon of turmeric a day. Okay, where do you get that? There's no study that actually compared a quarter to an eighth, to a sixteenth, to a, right? And so, but there's, you know, you go through, there's studies that have side effects at too high a dose, they have studies that show no effect at too low a dose. And then you look at populations, how much turmeric they've been eating for a long time with a good safety record. So you put all this stuff together and say, okay, that's kind of my best guess. It's not, it would never go on the site, on the website. Because that's, like, if I can't have a paper and a quote showing you quarter teaspoon according to the Institute of Medicine,

• 1:22:13Michael Greger?

  Yeah, it's not making in the video. It's not gonna, it's not making in the video. But people want to know, I mean, people have a legitimate, you know, interest. And so I can be like, all right, well, this is my best guess at, you know, and, and so that's what the book could be for me, is to be like, all right, what do I eat? How do I translate this body of information into actual, like, you know, day to day, you know, what do I eat for breakfast kind of stuff? Um, and so it'll help, so I think a lot of that kind of practical aspect that I think people really, really enjoy. And then It'll just get kind of greater exposure for the movement and for the work we've all been, you know, kind of hard at doing. I think it's good timing and I hope it'll just, you know, knock it out of the park.

• 1:22:55Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that it's a really important book. You know, I feel like it has the potential to really reach a wide audience because in many ways, it really is the definitive manual on what's healthy, how you can prevent disease. And it's so detailed. It's really bulletproof. I mean, your research is impeccable. I mean, this is like, this is a serious work. You know what I mean? It really, really is. And you should be really proud. And I just think, like, it's something that I could give somebody and say, this will answer all your questions. And you don't have to read it from cover to cover, but you can pick a section, you can look into it, you know, take that as it will and go off and do your

• 1:23:37Rich Roll?

  own research or whatever you need to do. But I really feel like, you know, you, I mean, it's clear that you put everything that you have into it. You really did. You know what I mean? And I'm sure that's why it took so long to get it to this point. I mean, I don't know how many hours you must have put into this book, but, you know, it's an extraordinary work, man. And I'm excited for you. What was it like working with Gene Stone?

• 1:24:00Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it was, you know, he's a writer, not a scientist. And I think that was, that was kind of some of the initial friction is trying to figure out our various roles. So I brought him on board thinking it would save this huge amount of time. Like, here, here's my scripts from all the kind of, you know, you know, and that's what you do. You're a writer. You have all these bestsellers behind you. And he'd take it and I'd come back and be like, well, wait a second. You can't say that. That's not true. He said, but it sounds so good. Yeah, I know it sounds great. No, it really sounds great. And it's much clearer and much more, but it, but it's not like that doesn't represent what actually happens in reality, right? And I mean, that's not his, I mean, science isn't his background.

• 1:24:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:44Michael Greger?

  Can't expect it to be. And so it was just finding a way to, you know, have his strengths be his strengths and my strengths. So I actually felt I, so I actually had to be much more involved than I originally thought I was going to be. But that turned out great. I mean, so it really turned out, I'm glad that I got much more because I started to love the project more and more and really started kind of pouring my soul into it, particularly towards the end. And so he's able to, you know, really kind of work the narrative because, you know, all my videos are very disjointed. And so he's able to kind of weave them together. And so it turned out in the end to be kind of a good marriage.

• 1:25:22Michael Greger?

  But, but, you know, I, I take so much for granted that like, well, everybody knows that, you know, the central dogma of biology with RNA, DNA, you know, and that, but it's so easy to get it wrong.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  You need that person who doesn't know that, who says, I don't get it. You know, you need to like, explain, yeah, walk me through it and let's create something that is going to be accessible.

• 1:25:46Michael Greger?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm, so I'm really hoping that his contribution will open it up to wider. Because even my website is at a pretty high level. Like it really, it requires some kind of substantial background, kind of knowledge.

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  But what I appreciate is that you don't pander to the audience. You're saying, no, I trust that you're smart enough, like rise to my level. Watch this, I believe that you can understand what I'm trying to convey to you. And, you know, because it's, it's mature in that regard.

• 1:26:13Michael Greger?

  Even if they can't get it all, like I always, I try to have everything, like something for every level within the same video. It's like, if you're really, really high level, like if you're the researcher who's, who's paper, I'm literally covering in that video, I want you to be like, oh, yeah. I see how you made those interesting connections with these researchers that I didn't even know about. Like that high, all the way down to, I didn't know, all those long words you used, I had no idea what he was talking about. But I kind of get the gist that the, that animal protein and acid in the kidney, bad kidney function is not good for my kidneys. Like that's all, you know, like that's all I need to kind of take away from it.

• 1:26:52Rich Roll?

  Like a really good Bugs Bunny cartoon. You know what I mean? That's why they were so awesome.

• 1:26:59Michael Greger?

  Right, right.

• 1:26:59Rich Roll?

  You could be an adult, or you could be, you know, a toddler, and you can both enjoy it.

• 1:27:03Michael Greger?

  And you could get the, right, you can get the subtleties that are totally lost, wasted on those kids. But, right, right, right.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  Or the Shakespearean reference.

• 1:27:11Michael Greger?

  Right, right.

• 1:27:12Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:27:13Michael Greger?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:14Rich Roll?

  All right, so, so, you know, what is, if somebody's listening to this, they're flirting with the idea of a plant-based diet, um, you know, they're interested in what you have to say, you know, what are, what are some kind of just fundamental takeaways that you could impart to kind of kickstart somebody into embracing this way of living?

• 1:27:33Michael Greger?

  Um, well, you know, so, it's, I think it depends on if someone's coming from kind of a disease reversal standpoint, or if someone who's, you know, feel, looks healthy and just wants to kind of maintain that health.

• 1:27:47Rich Roll?

  Well, let's bifurcate it.

• 1:27:48Michael Greger?

  Um, so, um, so for somebody that's ill, right, somebody with chronic disease, diabetes, hypertension, these are the kind of people I want to go all in, right, because I want to see, you know, when, uh, uh, you know, they say, well, you know, what about moderation? Well, like, how moderate do you want your heart disease, right?

• 1:28:08Rich Roll?

  Well, what is moderation, anyway? It's a sliding scale and the most subjective thing ever.

• 1:28:13Michael Greger?

  Moderate, you can have, you know, you can end up with, as a diabetic, moderate blindness and moderate kidney failure, moderate amputations, maybe just a couple toes or something, you know, I mean, that's, but that's, you know, moderation in all things is not necessarily a good thing. Um, and so for those people, and they have to, of course, work with their doctor because they have to drop their blood pressure medications, drop their diabetes medications very rapidly, within two weeks, they may be off all, you know, insulin and, uh, diabetes medications, otherwise their pressures and sugars would drop way too low on this kind of healthy diet because you're actually treating the cause. For those people, I really want to see them really kind of go all in because then they can really see these dramatic effects within their own bodies, and that'll be the motivation for them to continue that lifestyle for the rest of their life.

• 1:28:58Michael Greger?

  And I think for a younger, a younger, healthier crowd, this is kind of... Kind of prevent the ravages, then they can be a little more experimental. They go to whatever speed they want because they may not necessarily, I mean, their body isn't necessarily at that kind of breaking point where they necessarily, you know, feel the difference whether you're actually, you know, eating some dark green leafy vegetables or not. But for someone with heart failure, I mean, you know, whether or not you had spinach and got that extra nitrate load to actually facilitate, um, you know, uh, blood flow and oxygen, you know, kind of efficiency. I mean, you can actually feel the difference from these foods. You know, a young person eats some arugula and cut a few seconds off their 5K time, but, you know, they're not necessarily going to feel any different. Um, and for them, you know,

• 1:29:42Michael Greger?

  just take it at whatever speed. And one resource I really like is PCRM's 21 Day Kickstart Program. Starts every month, hundreds of thousands of people have gone through it, multiple languages. It's totally free, a nice community of people to go through it together and share tips and cooking and recipes. And, um, it's, it's been a really great program. Certainly for any practitioners out there, people have plant-based practices who are trying to work within the model. It's easy to give somebody a website, get somebody started, no matter how short your office visits are, and get people on the right track.

• 1:30:12Rich Roll?

  Right. I'll, I'll put a link up in the show notes to that 21 Day Kickstart Program. Yeah, because it is great. And if there's, if there's one habit or one sort of dietary, you know, sort of, um, preference that you would say is the number one thing that you gotta let go of?

• 1:30:29Michael Greger?

  Oh, let go of. Well, so add would be dark green leafies. I mean, we just need to eat greens all day, every day. I mean, it's just, nothing better than greens. Okay. So greens on everything, under everything, better greens for everything. Okay. Um, and cutting out, I mean, the worst food is, uh, is, uh, trans fats are pretty much gone at this point, but so hydrogenated vegetable oil like Crisco, probably the worst thing, but you can't even, I don't think you can even find trans fat Crisco anymore. Um, and then, uh, processed meat would be the highest. Right? So all those, so ham bacon, hot dogs, uh, chicken McDoggets, lunch meats, deli slices, that kind of thing. I mean, there's just no room for those in a healthy diet.

• 1:31:07Rich Roll?

  And, and here's the thing with your book. It's 600 pages long. You have, you know, voluminous chapters on all of these, you know, 15 leading causes of death and how to avoid them. Uh, you've got 150 pages of footnotes. Uh, the final chapter, I think is the final chapter, is supplements. And I think it's three pages.

• 1:31:31Michael Greger?

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:31:33Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Which I found, I just, I laughed when I saw that. I go, that's perfect.

• 1:31:37Michael Greger?

  Well, when you have healthy diet, right?

• 1:31:40Rich Roll?

  So, Michael Greger, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:41Michael Greger?

  When you're getting mountains of nutrition. Sheesh, what do you need?

• 1:31:44Rich Roll?

  Right, so, because that's the thing I'd always say, what are the supplement, you know, that the solution resides in these supplements, right? And by kind of, you know, just putting three pages in, you could say that you've checked the box and addressed it, but you're also saying, listen, that's not where your focus needs to be, right? So, vitamin B12, an algae-based DHA, right? Correct? And perhaps vitamin D for certain people? And was there another one? Or that's pretty much it, right?

• 1:32:10Michael Greger?

  Iodine for pregnant women.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, right. Simple, nothing else?

• 1:32:15Michael Greger?

  Yeah, and, you know, and those are all a consequence of just how we live. We're no longer running around naked, neck to neck Africa all day and getting baked in the sun. We're not, you know, hopefully we're getting less feces in our drinking water, you know, which is, you know, not getting a lot of B12 anymore, not getting a lot of cholera either. It's as good, I'll, I'll take that deal any day.

• 1:32:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:35Michael Greger?

  And so it's just, you know, this, this way, in terms of iodine, you don't know what, you know, there's iodine in depleted soils, don't know where your vegetables are coming from, and it has such serious consequences during pregnancy.

• 1:32:45Rich Roll?

  Other than that, we're good?

• 1:32:48Michael Greger?

  We're good.

• 1:32:50Rich Roll?

  Final question. You were on Colbert Report?

• 1:32:54Michael Greger?

  Huh? Yes, oh my god.

• 1:32:56Rich Roll?

  I came across on the internet, I was like, how did I miss that? Is that on the internet? I gotta find that.

• 1:33:02Michael Greger?

  No, it totally is. Uh, and it's, right, what was I, what was, what was the, not Groundhog, what was, what the, what was I talking about?

• 1:33:10Rich Roll?

  I don't know, I didn't see it. I just saw that, no, I just came across something that said that you had been on the Colbert Report, and I was like...

• 1:33:16Michael Greger?

  It's so funny.

• 1:33:16Rich Roll?

  What?

• 1:33:17Michael Greger?

  No, no, I was on as a, what is it, they're like little porcupine creatures. What are those little spiny?

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  Armadillo?

• 1:33:23Michael Greger?

  No, it wasn't armadillo, not spiny. Right, right, no, no, uh...

• 1:33:26Rich Roll?

  Sea urchin?

• 1:33:27Michael Greger?

  Funny, here I am, and I was like the expert. No, I was like the expert in this. No, so they wanted somebody on zoonotic diseases, these animal to human diseases. You know, I wrote the book on bird flu and all these things. And so they're doing this segment, was it plague? Yeah, something like that. I don't know whether they're eating these creatures or something. But they're like, we need an expert on this. And so they brought me up. And it was hilarious. And yeah, it's really fun. And of course, they took like hours of footage and you know, it comes down to like three minutes or whatever.

• 1:33:59Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:34:00Michael Greger?

  But, um, but yeah, and there's actually some hours of embarrassing footage and stuff. They wanted me to do all sorts of crazy stuff, like, like drinking out of beakers and steaming test tubes and stuff. I'm like.

• 1:34:14Rich Roll?

  I can see you being game for that.

• 1:34:16Michael Greger?

  And so I was, I was totally doing all this stuff, but then afterwards I'm like, oh my God, there goes my career. Like I think how they could make me look so crazy. But I was just wanting to release, anything we want. But it turns out it came up with really kind of, yeah, and played me very kind of serious. And, uh, and so I talked about how you shouldn't eat this weird little mammalian pet. Or something like that.

• 1:34:41Rich Roll?

  Because otherwise you would.

• 1:34:44Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 1:34:45Michael Greger?

  Yeah, no, see, I was.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  All right, well, now I gotta find that.

• 1:34:47Michael Greger?

  Yeah, no, no, it's on there somewhere. Yeah, that's funny. Find it, put a link on it. That's hilarious.

• 1:34:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I will, for sure. All right, man, I think we did it.

• 1:34:54Michael Greger?

  Oh, sweet. Thanks so much.

• 1:34:56Rich Roll?

  Anything else you want to say?

• 1:34:57Michael Greger?

  No, this is great. I'm so psyched.

• 1:34:59Rich Roll?

  You feel good?

• 1:34:59Michael Greger?

  To read the book and, uh, and yeah, check out my work and, uh, cool.

• 1:35:04Rich Roll?

  The book is called How Not to Die, not How to Not Die.

• 1:35:09Michael Greger?

  Although with all these technologies these days, you extend your life long enough and we figure out how to extend life further. We just have to extend human life one year, every year, right?

• 1:35:19Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, that'll be the next book.

• 1:35:20Michael Greger?

  And so, right.

• 1:35:21Rich Roll?

  How to Not Die Ever.

• 1:35:22Michael Greger?

  How to Not Die Ever. That's the sequel, right?

• 1:35:26Rich Roll?

  Excellent, man.

• 1:35:26Michael Greger?

  Right, really, add a couple of decades. Maybe we'll reach a point where we can upload ourselves or something.

• 1:35:31Rich Roll?

  Right, AI, man, to the mainframe. So, the website is nutritionfacts.org. It's really just, I talk about it on the podcast all the time. It really is your one-stop-shop to learn everything you ever wanted to know about nutrition. How many videos do you have up now?

• 1:35:50Michael Greger?

  Over a thousand now.

• 1:35:51Rich Roll?

  A thousand, right? And you have this index. I mean, it's by, you can search any nutrient, any disease, basically anything. I can almost guarantee that you've got a video up on that. It really is extraordinary work that you're doing. And above and beyond all of that, what's really amazing and interesting is that, correct me if I'm wrong, but all the proceeds from the new book are being given to the 501(c)(3).

• 1:36:14Michael Greger?

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I don't give a penny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, yeah, no, I wouldn't sign a contract unless it all went there. Yeah, no, it's great. It's just kind of like the Wikipedia model of, you know, like, it just goes because one in a thousand people kicks in a few bucks, and there's just so many millions of people on the site that it just pays for itself. And we have all this big staff, and the whole thing goes just because, you know, everything's free, no ads, anything. But, you know, people just value the content and are able to keep the whole thing going. So, it's just like labor of love that I'd be doing anyway. But the fact that I can do it completely without taking a penny, and that's just, I like keeping that kind of, you know, the de-commercialism, taking commercialism out of nutritional science, which is, you know, a critical piece.

• 1:36:59Rich Roll?

  You're a beautiful man.

• 1:37:01Michael Greger?

  Oh.

• 1:37:01Rich Roll?

  Thanks for everything you do, man. I really appreciate it. Book comes out December 8.

• 1:37:05Michael Greger?

  You know it.

• 1:37:06Rich Roll?

  And you're gonna be everywhere at the same time.

• 1:37:08Michael Greger?

  A little too everywhere.

• 1:37:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very cool, man. I'm really excited for you. I'm proud of you, and I'm really, I'm so impressed by the work that you do and by this book. And I think it's gonna really help a lot of people, so thanks.

• 1:37:24Michael Greger?

  I'll keep up the work as long as I can.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  Right on, man.

• 1:37:27Michael Greger?

  Peace.

• 1:37:28Rich Roll?

  Peace. Plants.

• 1:37:36Rich Roll?

  All right, so that was awesome. Make sure to check out Dr. Gregor's new book, How Not to Die, not to be confused with How to Not Die. I wonder if there is a book called How to Not Die. I bet you there is. I can almost guarantee you that there is. Anyway, the book that you want is called How Not to Die, and you're going to pick it up on Amazon by using the Amazon banner at richroll.com, of course. Thank you very much. We all win. Don't forget to check out this week's comprehensive show notes at richroll.com. Lots of stuff to delve into there to take your edification and your infotainment beyond the earbuds. And while you're at it, make a point to subscribe to my newsletter. No spam, just good stuff. If you want access to the entire RRP catalog beyond the most recent 50 episodes

• 1:38:21Rich Roll?

  on iTunes, well, I've got an app for that, and it's free. Just search Rich Roll in the App Store, it'll pop up, or you can click that banner on my website. For all your plant-powered and RRP schwag and merch, visit richroll.com. You can get signed copies of our cookbook, The Plant Power Way, also my memoir, Finding Ultra. We've got Julie's Guided Meditation Program. We've got nutrition products. We've got all kinds of cool t-shirts and plant-powered tech tees. We've got sticker packs, temporary tattoos. We have beautiful, limited-edition art prints, which make for a great gift, both framed and unframed. Anyway, all kinds of awesome to take your health and your life to the next level. Keep sending in your questions

• 1:39:02Rich Roll?

  for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. We're going to be doing another episode of that midweek this week to celebrate three years of doing this podcast and episode 200, if you can believe that. I cannot believe it. It's amazing, and I want to thank you guys. If you want more than that, I've already given you so much stuff, but you want more? Okay. I've got two courses, online courses at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose, which is all about goal-setting, and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, which is all about getting more plant-powered. As we're heading into the holiday season and you're starting to think about your New Year's resolutions, well, both of these courses kind of fit the bill in terms of cleaning up your diet and also setting goals, doing

• 1:39:47Rich Roll?

  the interior work to make sure that you're... Moving forward on a proper life trajectory for yourself. Really proud of the courses, both multiple hours of streaming video content, very affordably priced, and you can learn more at mindbodygreen.com. Just click on video courses there and I'll tell you all about it. Thank you so much for supporting the show, for telling your friends, you guys, for sharing it on social media. All of that means so much to me. I can't believe that I have all you guys as my audience. You've been amazing and I greatly, greatly appreciate all of you. I'll see you guys back here in a couple of days with our Ask Me Anything episode. And until then, try to enjoy yourselves. Try to be good to yourselves and be good to other people. Peace. Plants.