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2011-06-30 John Robbins Healthy Aging and the New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

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KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today. Our mission is simple: To provide you credible usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Be and Stay Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "Healthy Aging and the New Good Life. Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less." Our guest today is John Robbins, environmentalist, social activist, food policy expert, who has written at least six books, two of which have had tremendous impact on my life. "The Food Revolution" and "Healthy at 100." He has recently written a new book called "The New Good Life. Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less."

Welcome, John. Thanks so much for being coming on the show today. And I also want to thank you, almost for your service, because your books always challenge me at my core when I read them, and so I want to thank you for all the good work you've done over the years.

JOHN ROBBINS: Well you're most welcome.

KIRK HAMILTON: I want to jump right in. My - one of my all-time favorite books is "Healthy at 100."And because I'm someone who's very interesting in chronic disease prevention and reversal and healthy aging, not just putting on longer years, that book was one of my absolute favorites. And I was wondering why you decided to write that book in 2007.

JOHN ROBBINS: Well, I wrote it actually a couple of years earlier than that, but the reason I did is I'm getting older myself. I'm in my mid 60s and I - I'm - I've been watching people age and some people as they get older become more beautiful. They become luminous, they become wise, they become - some of them have great senses of humor. They experience their elder hood in a very positive way, vibrant way, creative way, they really enjoy themselves. Yeah, they may have some aches and pains that they didn't have before, you know, or they're not as physically flexible, or they need to rest a bit more. But overall their experience of elder hood is a beautiful one. On the other hand I've seen people who as they get older become bitter and shut down and in some cases physically decrepit, mentally impaired, emotionally rigid, frightened. And the differences are so great, the contrast is so dramatic, and I've really wanted to know - obviously some of what happens to us as we get older is not within our control. If you get hit by a bus, you could have a disease for some unknown reason. But even if you did get hit by a bus, or got some odd disease for some unknown reason for which you had no risk factors, how you respond to that adversity, the resilience, your ability to recover, is very much determined by the choices that you make and the things that are under your control. So I really wanted to know what is in - what is in our control. What can we do as we live our lives such that our ripening, maturing process is as beautiful as it can be.

KIRK HAMILTON: It sounds like then - I was coming from a kind of mechanical perspective in that you know how do we get this population, of especially Western people aging healthfully because we're going to bankrupt our economy if we don't because the boomers are getting there. And what I hear you is that it's not about the numbers per se, it's about the life vibrancy of one certain people you've observed grow into adult aging very well. And the other was people kind of shrink, which is actually separate in part from the physical part. Is that correct? Is that what I'm hearing you say?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well it's separate in part, but also it isn't because when people are suffering a lot physically they have the chronic illnesses, they get arthritis and asthma and heart disease and diabetes and they're overweight and their joints hurt and their bodies become a very difficult experience to them. First of all, you're right economically it's terrible. It's bankrupting families, people, our economy as a whole, it's bankrupting corporations. Warren Buffett once referred to General Motors as a health insurance company that also happens to make cars. Because of the amount of the money that General Motors was paying to - for the health insurance of its employees. Well General Motors went bankrupt. It literally was bankrupted by a bunch of factors of course, but the extent to which - I mean the U.S. spends far higher percentage of its GDP, a far higher amount per capita on what we call healthcare than any other country in the world, and yet, our disease rates are very high, our infant mortality rates are very high, our - and we don't even cover 45 million people. It's amazing actually what poor results we get for the amount that we spend.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let me ask you. In your book you happen to choose as models the Abkhazians, the Vilcabambans, the Hunzas and the Okinawans. And I'm just curious why you picked those groups as I guess you're looking at them as successfully aging groups?

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes, they are known to be examples of peoples who - in which there's a great deal of healthy aging. The Okinawans, for example, have been studied very methodically by the Okinawan Centenarian Study. And have been found to have the highest rates of healthy aging and healthy centenarians. Those are people who have lived to 100 and past, in the world. And so you wonder well is it - and we know it's not genetic by the way because when people emigrate from Okinawa, to for example the United States, and adopt American lifestyles, their aging patterns then come very swiftly to resemble the typical American outcomes. We know it's not genetic. It's something about the way they live, something about their culture, something about their diet, something about - you know you try to understand what might be the factors. I mean you can look at three or four cultures in different parts of the world. You can start to ask, "What do they have in common?" And to try to kind of tease out what might be the central organizing fundamentals for their healthy aging.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's go through some of those basics and I'll work forward to backward. Let's talk about are there any common dietary patterns, let's say, in those groups of individuals?

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes there are. One is they don't eat nearly as much as we do. They eat fewer calories, but far fewer processed foods. We eat a lot of empty calories, calories that don't come packed with nutrition. Their diets are nutrient dense. Every calorie comes loaded with nutrition, with vitamins and minerals and all kinds of phytochemicals. They are also plant strong, plant based in their diets. Their consumption of plant foods is very high proportionally. Their consumption of animal foods is very low proportionally. We've got that reversed here as we do so many things. So they eat less, mostly plants, and they don't eat processed foods. They eat foods that I call ‘original source foods.' Sometimes we refer to them as whole foods. And of course Whole Foods Markets uses that phrase for marketing purposes. But in Whole Foods Markets there are some wonderful foods and there's lots of processed foods, too. Lots of adulterated foods. In these cultures, there aren't any processed and adulterated foods. They would - they might eat potatoes, but they would steam them or bake them. They would never have, you know, shoestring potatoes or the various things that we manage to do with them.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's go to the next phase. So we have unprocessed food. It's kind of a general universal good thing to do. Let's go to physical activity and what these people do, you know. So often we see our elderly in rest homes or sitting at home watching TV.

JOHN ROBBINS: Oh I know. We have a degree of sedentariness in our culture that is historically unprecedented. It is essentially inhuman. Our bodies did not evolve to be sedentary. They evolved to be very active. In these cultures people in their daily lives are very active. They get a lot - by our standards, a lot of exercise. And at the same time they don't do - you don't see marathoners and I'm a marathoner myself. I'm a triathlete. But they don't push, push, push. They're very active and then they relax and they rest. There's a lot of recuperation. They have a lot of play. They have long meals in which they joke and tease and tell stories and get to know each other and get to know themselves and they kind of make arts of relaxation. We call it leisure time and we just use it to distract ourselves. You know, we have all kinds of amusements that we - and entertainments that they - they use their social interactions to cue their body minds into reduced stress states. To relax, to get calm, to enjoy, to be refreshed. And so you don't see the drivenness in their culture. And in our society I see the drivenness even in our exercise, you know. And amongst the marathoners that I've known. A lot of them they're pushing to get their time down and get it down another 20 seconds, or get it you know - run that extra mile or extra 20 miles or whatever it is, depending on your level of fitness. And that can - that's not necessarily healthy. When you‘re pushing that hard, the aggression is so - you know it's kind of like we see people sometimes become obsessed with diet to the point that their relationships with other people suffer. They don't - they're all about what they're eating to the point that they don't pay attention to the feelings and other needs that they might have. We have that tendency in our society to become obsessed. And in these cultures, be it exercise or food, they're not obsessed.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's hang with exercise for a second because we're stuck in a modern urbanized society and the world is urbanizing rapidly. So - and it's not - you know I've studied the Okinawans and there are some people here that I - in fact one of my interviewees was a lady who has lived on the same vineyard and she is now 90 - all her life in the same house. And she works 8 hours a day - but the average American can't do that with their jobs so they have to - they'll have to interject some artificial exercise, I guess that's what I'm saying.

JOHN ROBBINS: That's right. They do. And in - and it's good that we can and I belong to a gym and I encourage it. My point, though, is that it's important to notice if you're exercising is becoming compulsive and obsessive because that's not healthy. And you - I'm speaking from personal experience. Maybe I'm just projecting here out of my own difficulties, but I've done that. I have been a marathon runner and a triathlete and I've done some amazing things that I loved doing, but I'm not sure in the long run if they were really healthy to push it that far.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let me as you - where you said ‘plant strong' and that rings a bell for me because I interviewed Rip Esselstyn.

JOHN ROBBINS: Oh yeah. Rip's a good friend of mine.

KIRK HAMILTON: Yeah, well, Rip - I don't know who stole it from who, but Rip is the first time I ever heard ‘plant strong' when we're talking about plant-based diets and so, did you steal it from him or did he steal it from you?

JOHN ROBBINS: Oh I don't know. It's in the ether. But he has used it a lot and in a beautiful way and Rip is a fabulous athlete by the way.

KIRK HAMILTON: Oh he's a great guy.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yeah.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let's move on to the third phase of these healthy aging cultures and in Nagoya they call it ‘plan de vida,' a sense of purpose in life. And if I say this right the Okinawan one is ‘Ikagi.' It's I-K-A-G-I. And it has to do with a sense of purpose. And I know you've written a lot about - you have your extended family with you - living with you I believe - and the social structure of those societies, that daily purpose when you wake up in the morning for healthy aging. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes. You know we don't live for ourselves alone and there's something about our society that breathes a hyper-individualism. We become very competitive, I would say selfish and greedy. We lose our ability to cooperate to an extent and I - what I notice about these other cultures is sure they have some competition but it's in harmony with their cooperation. And they live for each other. They live to add beauty to the lives of others, to contribute, to support, to nurture, to befriend, to care for each other. And in our society those aspirations, those needs, often get blocked. We don't have ways of expressing them. And then we start to live for ourselves alone and when that happens I think we get cut off from a part of ourselves that we need to be fully healthy and strong. I really do believe our relationships with one another, our relationships to nature, our relationships to the greater earth community, our relationships even to our spiritual selves depend on expanding in our lives and connecting and expressing in our lives, from who we are, in ways that matter to other people.

KIRK HAMILTON: We are talking to John Robbins, author of many books, "Healthy at 100" and the other one is "The New Good Life. Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less," and I think I'm gonna combine these topics. This is your more recent book in 2010, and "The New Good Life." So are we living an old bad life, or was our vision of good life for Americans not all it was cracked up to be, or where did that come from?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well the old good life, you know we know what it was. It was ‘shop til the planet drops.'

KIRK HAMILTON: (Laughter.)

JOHN ROBBINS: You know and we're experiencing now an economic contraction. I personally don't think the economy's ever going back to where it was. I think - and this is creating a lot of hardship for many people. And it may be an environmental requirement because we have been shopping til the planet drops. We have been measuring our self worth by our net worth, by our ability to consume resources. And we've lost touch with our sense of ourselves as part of the earth community. We've become consumers more than citizens and that's a tremendous loss. And so the new good life is about finding our prosperity, our sense of thriving, our sense of fruitfulness, our sense of success without damaging and being predatory to the earth and to other people as well.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I've heard your story you know a ‘million times,' about the heir to Baskin-Robbins, and I'm always hesitant asking you because you've probably been asked a million times and you know it probably gets old. But, how did that experience, turning down taking over the big business, shape you and the new good life?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well I was offered in effect, because of who my father was, an opportunity to live the old good life at a remarkable level. The amount of money that was involved with Baskin-Robbins was tremendous. And I did walk away from that in order to live a different kind of life. Live by different values, live by a different compass frankly, than the one - the monetary compass that always directs us towards you know higher income. When we say in our society - if you say somebody's a success, isn't it that you mean that person's made a lot of money or somehow come into a lot of money? We measure success monetarily. We think - it's a material way of measuring it and I think that when we do that and I think it's very common in our society to use success that way, we impoverish ourselves. And I didn't want to do that with my life. So I made a choice for integrity and my whole life has been an outcome from this signal I've sent to my body and mind and spirit when I did that. That we don't need to bury our souls in order to make it in this world. And in fact I think we need to recover our souls in order to make it worthwhile to be in this world.

KIRK HAMILTON: Here's a - you know I've thought a lot about how to motivate people. I mean to me the X's and O's of being healthy are pretty simple. But it's very hard to motivate individuals. And this comes down to, you know the free enterprise model. Do you try and control people? Like does the government try and control, like you can't have no foods with you know fats and oils and sugars in them, or do you give people freedom of choice and capitalism on the one hand just driving to sell, like I have a quote from your book about ‘one ice cream cone' never killed anybody. Well the fact is you're trying to sell as many ice cream cones as you can and you're not going to tell somebody to stop after one or two. So capitalism in its purest form has a sell, sell, sell, and it doesn't matter what the product is. But to get out of this mess, is it government control that's gonna do it, or do you create economic incentives that produce green products. That is kind of the whole food model, you know what I'm saying?
JOHN ROBBINS: Well, I - yeah, it's gonna take both in a way. I mean there's a role for government. I think it's overstated often. I think we often look to government to solve our problems because we don't know how to do it ourselves and we look for you know parental figures or institutions to help. But I think we can use - for example, government requires income. We have taxes and so forth. What if for example, just to give a simple example, we taxed white bread and use the revenue to subsidize the sale of whole wheat bread. That would lower the price to the consumer of whole wheat bread and raise the price to the consumer of white bread. What if we taxed pesticides and used the income from those taxes to subsidize the sale of organically grown food. That would raise slightly the cost of pesticide based food and lower the price of organic food. I'm talking about tilting the playing field a little bit in the direction we want it to go. And I do want people to eat whole grains, not white bread. I do want people to eat more organic food and less pest - and our agriculture less dependent on poison. We have cleaner water, we have healthier people, we have a healthier ecosystem that way. There are - these are little examples. But there are so many of them that we can do. We can tax junk food and then use the revenue to lower the cost to subsidize the sale of fresh fruits and vegetables in the inner cities.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well you know - let me stop you here for a second. Because in theory that's a nice thing to do. And if it can be done efficiently, not waste the money and it goes right where it is, I'm with you. But I've thought deeply about this and hard about this. You know I see patients every day. How do you motivate them to change? And I remember listening to Joel Fuhrman one time and he said the worst thing that we have for type 2 diabetics is that they can go get a prescription for medicine. And I - if we didn't pay for chronic diseases - in other words if your health insurance wouldn't cover heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, things that are absolutely reversible, scientifically proven to be reversible with a strict you know Caldwell Esselstyn diet, Dean Ornish diet. I mean, people - I don't see people changing unless the pain is great enough or there's some huge economic incentive. But as long as we keep paying for a medicine, I don't care if it's national healthcare coverage, I don't care if it's private. I mean I have friends on both sides of the aisle. Hard-core businessmen who are paying their employees - these covered type 2 diabetic employees, and they're paying these huge premiums. Well we all pay the premiums. And the government you know has to pay them. So I guess my point is, is that if we cover these diseases, we cover the diseases under a disease care model. These chronic diseases, they're just gonna keep happening because people don't have any incentive to change.

JOHN ROBBINS: Well you're right. I don't know why - what incentives it's gonna take because the levels of obesity, the suffering, the diabetes in our kids. I mean - how far do we have to take this? And how much damage is going to happen in the mean time. You mentioned Caldwell Esselstyn and he's a friend of mine. And along with him I'm on the Whole Foods Board, Medical and Scientific Advisory Board. And Whole Foods has done something fascinating, is doing something fascinating. Rip Esselstyn's also involved in it. As is Joel Fuhrman by the way. People you've mentioned in this call. Basically, Whole Foods is a very large company that spends something like 250 million dollars a year on health coverage for its employees. And as is always the case, maybe the least healthy 20% of those employees represent 80% of the costs. That's often how it is. And Whole Foods does not, cannot discriminate in its hiring practice on the health of the employees. So they have just as many obese people, just as many diabetics as employees of General Motors or Geico or whatever. But what Whole Foods is doing that is innovative is that they are offering programs, and the Esselstyns are very involved in this, as is Joel Fuhrman, as am I, in teaching their least healthy employees how to and encouraging and supporting them in eating a much more healthy diet. And then so Whole Foods is investing tremendous amount of money in this program to support their least healthy employees in becoming far more healthy.

KIRK HAMILTON: What is the incentive for that employee? Are they getting - what is it?

JOHN ROBBINS: They get - they get a lot of this given to them so if they have a desire to be healthier they're getting a lot of support from their employer to do that. There's incentives built in. All Whole Foods employees get a discount on foods purchased in the store. They get higher discounts as they get healthier.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well that seems - now we're talking some sense.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yea. So as their blood pressure comes down, as their weight comes down, as their - there's a various markers. They get higher discounts. And it's kind of a game. You know, they get different colored cards in gold or platinum or whatever. And it's just a way to incentivize health. And it's working. And if Whole Foods can do it, any corporation can do it. Because as I said, their products are healthier but their employees aren't necessarily.

KIRK HAMILTON: Alright, so let's take a different corporation that doesn't have food in it. I mean that's an easy one. Let's go to Detroit, making a car.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yeah.

KIRK HAMILTON: How're you gonna give them more incentive?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well, that's gonna have - the company's gonna have to figure out a way to do that. Maybe it's more vacation time. But whatever they do, they can do it because as their employees get healthier, their health costs -their healthcare costs go down. The company has a tremendous financial incentive itself to support its employees becoming healthier. And when that incentive is recognized at the corporate level and programs that are - that work are and an are effective and can be put into place, to bring down those costs, that saves the company a lot of money. Some of that money can be used to create incentives for the employees to undertake the programs.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let's say no one gets - let's make the assumption that all of a sudden Whole Foods employees are all healthy and yet will their premium go down?

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes.

KIRK HAMILTON: Alright. So that's the key.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes. The premiums are based on the anticipated costs. And that's a product of what the costs have been, and when you show that they're coming down, then the premiums come down. You can - when you're a large company, you build in - you create policies that do that.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. There has to be a greater incentive. I mean I see patients every day and we - and I work in an integrative medicine practice and I have - and they pay out of pocket, you know a lot of it. And I have people make choices of a lot - versus going on a very strict diet, I'll have patients to choose to pay for a therapy that's a lot more expensive. Even if I - they just will.

JOHN ROBBINS: I know. People are lazy and we've been - we've bought in to the pill for every ill mentality and a lot of people think well I'll just do what I do. I'll do what I like and then if I get sick the doctor will fix it. It's as though M.D. stood for medical deity. You know we think the doctors have - but doctors can't fix. It's nature that does. And if you work against nature you don't give your body the nutrients it needs you give it empty calories. You put things in it that it doesn't want, you create nutritional stress in the body. The body's gonna break down. We know it. It's predictable. It's statistically proven and then it's - one of the fascinating things. You've mentioned people like Joel Fuhrman and Caldwell Esselstyn and Dean Ornish, these are M.D.s who have shown through very carefully controlled studies that when you eat a plant-strong diet that's nutrient dense, that is in fact the diets eaten by the world's healthiest and longest lived healthy people, you reverse these diseases.

I just was very involved in a program in Sacramento. It was a 30-day program that was done through the Sacramento Food bank. We worked with 20 families, about 60 people, who are clients of the Sacramento Food Bank. These are very low income people who depend for their food on the food bank and generally the food bank's food. If they're in the begging business they go out and get week-old donuts or whatever and give it to these people. It's terrible and it's perpetuating disease. So these people are already having financial hardship, now have the hardship because their health deteriorates. We went in and we worked with the food bank and Earth Save, a nonprofit I founded, and by the way Rip Esselstyn was part of it along with me. And we worked with these people for a month and nobody dropped out. The average person lost 25 pounds which they needed to lose. They got off their blood pressure meds, their diabetic meds, their cholesterol meds, the meds they were taking for migraines and fibromyalgia, tremendous reduction in their use - need for medications. That saves a lot of money. It also - these people are feeling so much better. They're feeling so great. It shows you the power of a truly healthy diet. It doesn't depend on socioeconomic status, it doesn't depend on the color of somebody's skin, but they do have to have the support and the availability of those foods. Right now, in our inner cities if you - it's easier to find a pack of cigarettes or a Hershey bar than it is to find an apple or an orange. Certainly - it's almost impossible to find fresh organic vegetables.

KIRK HAMILTON: So here - let me - hold on a bit. I agree with you totally. But here's a point. If our disease cure model only reimburses for treating disease, and does absolutely ‘diddly-squat' for paying for any type of prevention like - then that's where it gets driven to. You build a house and you fill it up.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yep.

KIRK HAMILTON: And that's the problem. So in real healthcare reform, not just covering - because if you cover people with an inefficient system that treats disease care, we're in the same boat but worse.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes, that's true. I think you can expand to the - the numbers of people that received disease care is what you're talking - is what that does. But with Dean Ornish's program, it's covered by Medicare now. It's taken a great deal to do that. We need some vision, so we start to create a healthcare system. We don't have a healthcare system, we have a disease care system.

KIRK HAMILTON: That's correct.

JOHN ROBBINS: You know it's all about diagnosing illness and then treating it primarily with drugs and surgery. We don't - the things that truly build health and support health and prevent disease in the first place, we don't pay for that. We don't recognize its value, we don't honor it, we don't support it. We just have a system that comes in once somebody is already sick and that's a very, very costly way to go about things and it's bankrupting the country.

KIRK HAMILTON: Yes. It's doomed to failure with the boomers and right behind you at 54. But I, you know I listened to Ken Dychtwald about four or five months ago. He has a talk called the Age Wave, just following the boomers through the planet and it's remarkable.

Let's get back to your book a little bit because I want to do it some justice. I got off on my pet topic which is healthcare reform and chronic disease prevention and reversal, but I wanted to ask a few things about your book. You have a chapter title called "Getting to Know Your Money Type." What does that mean?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well, you know, we have different money personalities. And I name some of them. And if you know what your money type is, your money personality, you can learn what your tendencies are. You can learn what your Achilles heel is. And different people have different ones. Some of us are givers. We want to take care of other people with money, we want to help others. Some of us are more savers, you know we feel better when we're watching our bank accounts get stronger. Some of us are more hedonistic. I call them sensualists. We want to spend money to get immediate gratification. Pleasurable experiences, you know, nice restaurants and spa treatments and vacations. And others of us are more performers. We want to you know buy clothes and things to make us look good and cars that people will see us in and status. I mean all of us have all of those things. But ah, and some of us are what I call innocents. We just really would rather not deal with money. We'd rather it just kind of take care of itself and we sometimes don't balance our checkbooks or keep track of our receipts. And so when it comes to April 15th we're not really prepared and we make mistakes and we don't pay our bills on time and things get cut off and it ends up biting us in the butt. There's just different ways that different people approach money and fall on their faces with money. And in the "New Good Life," I delineate these money types so that people can get to know themselves better and their money experience and money story better. And also those of people close to them. A lot of times marriages falter not as much on sex as on money. And sometimes it's because the two partners have different styles, different approaches, different ways of thinking about money, and it's sometimes hard to really get to the center of that in your conversations. And I wrote this part of the "New Good Life" to help people work with those differences in a constructive way.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know I should have put it in the context. Your book is in two sections. Healing your relationship with money and the other is living the New Good Life and this was part of healing your relationship with money, which I assume you think is a problem we have with not - we can't experience the good life until we heal our relationship with money, is that correct?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well it's true. I think that's true because when we make money too important, you know, and we do in this culture, we just make it so important. We forget about other things that are also important. I mean you need enough to - you definitely need - your basic human needs need to be met and - but I've - you know in my background I came from a very wealthy family and I knew some very, very wealthy people. They were not very, very happy people. Honestly, I haven't seen much correlation in my life, between the degree of people's financial success and their degree of happiness.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's go forward a little bit and tell us then cuz this is a time where we have economic woes and worries. What are the four steps of financial freedom that you would say on your money talk show, so to speak?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well, you know I go into that in the "New Good Life" but I do want to just complete the thought that people who are - when I say that there's not a strong correlation between happiness and wealth, financial wealth, that assumes a certain sufficiency. When people are in poverty, they - it's very difficult for a human being to be happy when their basic human needs aren't being met or when their loved ones are suffering. So we do need to reach that level of sufficiency before that statement that I made, that there's little correlation, becomes true. I just wanted to make that clear.

KIRK HAMILTON: I got it. The four steps to financial freedom that -

JOHN ROBBINS: Well yes. I delineate those in the "New Good Life" and those are four steps that enable you to track your finances. To know where you stand. To have a clear and accurate picture of your income and your outflow, what you need, where it's going, how you're making your money - what's costing you to make your income. Sometimes there's a lot of hidden costs that we don't realize and this is the way to make them clear and to make them apparent so that you can make clearer choices.

KIRK HAMILTON: In the second part that's Living the Good Life, this chapter made me double take a little bit in thinking what it really meant. "Where You Live is Your Temple - If You Treat It Like One," and the first thing you think about is well you know people say your body's your temple. And then knowing you, I would have to say - knowing you, but knowing about you - that temple could be the environment we live in, in our planet Earth, correct?

JOHN ROBBINS: It could be. Also the home that you live in. We sometimes think you have to have bigger houses and more rooms and more furnishings and more furniture and all of this to be happy. But that's the - kind of the old American dream. It's become a nightmare. You know you are what you own. And it's made us into obsessive consumers. And people talk about retail therapy, they talk about going to mall to feel better and honestly when you buy into that, you buy into your own impoverishment.

KIRK HAMILTON: I can't stand the mall just because it drives me insane, all the freneticness, but -

JOHN ROBBINS: Yeah, yeah. It's a crazy place. And you know I really feel for people who have to work there. It's not a place I would want to work although if - it would preferable to not having any job. You know we need to have a society where we - where we take care of ourselves better than that. And shoddy merchandise, buying lots of junk, filling up our houses with junk and needing bigger houses because we have more junk, that's fairly common - has been very common and it's a road to loss and disappointment and frustration.

KIRK HAMILTON: Let's keep going. I want to cover a few more things in the time we have left. What does "life is too short for traffic" mean?

JOHN ROBBINS: You know in the "New Good Life" I talk about living simply so others may simply live and eating simply so others may simply eat. And one of the pieces of a simple and good life is that you're not spending a tremendous amount of time in commuting in traffic jams. That costs a tremendous amount. I mean, there's financial costs in terms of gasoline waste and time costs, but it's just draining to the spirit. And we've created a transportation system in this culture that more or less puts a lot of us behind the wheel for long hours of the day and too many hours. So I think that the direction that I certainly want to go and want to encourage people to go is to somehow create a life in which you spend as little time as possible driving, because we're driving ourselves crazy.

KIRK HAMILTON: I want to get back to food for a second here because this is something that comes up all the time. That healthy food costs more. Hear that all the time. And in one of the - I wrote a little blurb on this in my book but there was some research that showed what we subsidized the industries, the sugar and fat industry, the oil industry, the meat industry and I believe it was the processed grain industry back in the 80's and that's why in part fast food was cheaper now, but we didn't do that for vegetables and fruit. And I'm wondering if you can comment on that maybe, and then also is healthy food more expensive?

JOHN ROBBINS: Well, it sometimes is, if you don't know how to negotiate your sales, which I will speak to in a second. But we have subsidized in particular corn. And this has given us cheap high fructose corn syrup. Which then makes foods that contain that ingredient cheaper. And we've subsidized corn which is fed to livestock which has made meat cheaper. This is the way that we've tilted the playing field in the wrong direction. We are in effect subsidizing those foods and encouraging people therefore to eat those foods that are least healthy. That's why I spoke earlier we need to reverse that. I actually don't even want to see the playing field leveled, although that would be a start. I want to see it tilted in the right direction. I think we should have farm policies and food policies that support people in eating healthier foods. Let's make - let's find a way to incentivize it so that fresh greens and fresh vegetables are widely available and less expensive. We can do that. Right now the foods that are most widely available and less expensive are fast foods. And that's the product of policies. We can change those policies and we should. Right now, yeah, if you go to Whole Foods it's gonna be expensive. But if you - here's a couple of keys to eating healthfully while inexpensively. First of all, eat more whole grains and legumes. Split peas, lentils, beans are wonderful sources of both protein and fiber and they're very inexpensive. Secondly, keep away from the processed foods. All the foods that have come in - that are highly packaged and just eat foods - original source foods. You don't pay that way for the processing and the packaging and the adulteration and the fancy stuff that they add. You're eating closer to nature and it will save money. The other thing to do is eat in season. Locally grown food, because shipping - the shipping of food costs a great deal of money and also it takes a lot of energy and there's an environmental component to that. Very often, eating simpler plant-strong diets, locally based, more organic, it's obviously better for the environment. Your body will thank you for the rest of your life. It doesn't depend on the factory farming of animals, which is a cruelty to these other creatures that is abominable. There's so many advantages in eating a healthy plant-strong diet that's locally based. It's amazing that we haven't, more of a, seen the light on it and moved that way in our life. Some of us are. There's a tremendous growth right now in the sales of organic foods. There's a tremendous growth right now in the rising of local farmer's markets and that's another thing. If you can buy direct from the grower instead of through a middle man such as a supermarket, you're gonna save money because that middle person take a cut. Usually a very big cut as a matter of fact.

KIRK HAMILTON: In wrapping this up, there's two areas that I just wanted you to comment on quickly if you can. And one of them was you're (chapter 8) "Safe, Clean and Natural." And I'm assuming that means your home environment starting there and working outwards.

JOHN ROBBINS: Yes.

KIRK HAMILTON: But there was - I always bring this up and I want to ask you this. Bruce Ames, who the, you know, the professor of biochemistry at University of California Berkeley who came up with the Ames Cancer Test - he's always says this and I always like people like you to respond. That organic foods - he just says that's not worth anything. Because the amount of pesticide that's on the food is not anymore carcinogenic than the natural pesticides that are within the plant that protect it. And so he just kind of, poo-poo's, that as something, if you consumed it would hurt you.

JOHN ROBBINS: Well I disagree with Dr. Ames on several scores. One, it's - there's no way you could say that they're the same for the farm workers.

KIRK HAMILTON: Correct.

JOHN ROBBINS: There's no way you can say they're the same for the soil. And we need trace nutrients. When organic agriculture - well let's put it this way. Chemically based agriculture not only uses pesticides which Ames is referring to, it also depends on synthetic chemical fertilizers. Primarily nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. You can make the plants grow big and pretty with those three minerals. But you - if you don't supply the trace minerals, and chemically based agriculture does not, the food value, the nutritional value of that food is limited and lacking. Our bodies need all the other minerals. We don't just need phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen. We need the rest of it. And agrochemical based agriculture depletes the soil over time, burns the soil, harms the soil, harms the living fabric of life in ways that then show up in our bodies. It's not just the pesticide residues in agrochemical based food that make organic foods preferable. I think Dr. Ames is underestimating that, but let him - I'll grant his point even. There's still so many other advantages to organic agriculture. I support it, I believe in it, I don't think it's the answer to all of our problems. I think there's a place for integrative pest management practices. There are times in which a judicious use of an herbicide or insecticide or adenocide is appropriate and needed. I'm not a purist, but we need to move away from depending on synthetic chemicals to grow our food and particularly away from depending on poisons to handle pests. There are other ways to do it and when we use those other ways first and foremost, we can grow much healthier food in a way that's far more sustainable.
KIRK HAMILTON: Let me close by this - this is one of my last questions I always (ask) more of my health oriented brothers and sisters that choose to eat free range animals. And I always ask them where are you going to feed 7 billion people on the planet free range animals. Even if they were - if that type of food was more healthy. And I ask you that question if somebody you know they sell free range animals at Whole Foods and everybody seems to think that's a reasonable option. And I wonder if you can comment on that.

JOHN ROBBINS: I think it's a step in the right direction in that it's recognizing that the treatment of animals is an important thing and that the factory farming of animals and confinement of livestock is a cruel and terrible thing. So it's a step in the right direction but it's a small step. And I agree entirely with you that we cannot feed ourselves, the numbers of us that there are an animal-based diet, and I don't think we should be trying because the health consequences - the data is so convincing now that the higher percentage of our nutrients that we get from original source plant-based foods that the healthier we will be.

KIRK HAMILTON: We are talking to John Robbins, author of "Healthy at 100" and "The New Good Life." And so how can - you have a John Robbins website? Is that where people - you want them to go to, to check you out?

JOHN ROBBINS: Yeah. If people want more information about me and my work there is a website which is johnrobbins.info. www.johnrobbins.info.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. So thank you John very much for taking time to be on the show today. I greatly appreciate it. It was a lot of fun for me.

JOHN ROBBINS: Thank you Kirk.

KIRK HAMILTON: And I want to thank you, the audience, for listening to this edition of Staying Health Today Radio. And until next time, Stay and Be Well.

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