Mike: I’m Mike Proctor with Leading Edge Financial Planning, and today I'm here with Dr. Ron. He's a Chief Medical Officer of 32 years at the Riordan Clinic. And today we're having him on just to talk a little bit about how health and wealth are very connected. So, Dr. Ron, over time, you see patients that come in, maybe they have problems, maybe they don't. But what's the connection between taking care of yourself, your nutrition and how that pays off for somebody long term?

Dr. Ron: I think it's mostly awareness—if people were aware of how big a difference their investment and taking care of themselves really made in terms of their life. Because when we're young, we're so busy and we don't have much time, we don't have much money. But if people would even do the little things like reading up on nutrition, taking a multivitamin, having your nutrient levels checked to see if you're okay…so what we've done at the Rear and clinic is that we have used nutritional testing as a foundation.

I think there's something in management that says if you don't measure, you can't manage. So Dr. Riordan found early on that just to talk to people about nutrition, [they’ll say] “Yeah, I do good nutrition. I try to eat better.” And then he actually started measuring nutrient levels and markers for good nutrition. And if he found that those were off, that information was the biggest motivation for people to start learning more about how to take better care of themselves.

Mike: Nice. Okay. Yeah. I guess I have a little bit of background as far as just my own personal experience, because I didn't realize I had a gluten intolerance. Is that something you guys would have picked up on?

Dr. Ron: Well, people would come to us with symptoms like, “I've got indigestion,” or, “I've got an autoimmune disease.” Autoimmune diseases are a little bit further down the road. But if you don't take care of your gluten intolerance, you'll get what's called leaky gut. And if you don't treat the leaky gut, then what happens is certain bacteria from your gut will get into your bloodstream and the immune system will cross react, and then it'll start attacking your joints. And now you've got rheumatoid arthritis. Gluten intolerance is something really good to know, because then you can make changes in your diet in favor of gluten free foods.

And oftentimes when people go on a gluten free diet, their diet actually improves because a lot of the snack foods, cereals, the breakfast bars and all those things, they are full of gluten, and they're full of glyphosate, which is another poison that gets into all of our food these days. And that causes leaky gut. So by making that one change and eating more fresh fruits, lots of colorful vegetables, lean meat, you can greatly improve your health and lose some weight and reduce your risk for diabetes.

Mike: Awesome. Diabetes is expensive one, too. But really, I wanted to talk a little bit more on just a long term payoff, because if we start investing in a young age, that compound interest really turns into some huge benefits on the back end. But likewise, if we don't take care of ourselves, the negative compound effects can really stack up expense-wise in retirement. Now, some people are more genetically predisposed to dementia and Alzheimer's and those sorts of things, but I was curious, what have you observed as far as Alzheimer's patients, memory care patients, and maybe what led up to that? Does nutrition play a role in your mental health leader on in life? And how does that affect someone financially?

Dr. Ron: Most of your conventional doctors will say, “Well, we don't know what causes it.” Well, what causes it is little things over a long period of time adding up: deficiencies adding up, gastrointestinal, digestive problems. It's a little bit at a time, but over time it shows up as more and more cognitive problems. And there are people out there that have written books about using nutrition to correct it. But it's almost like what we were talking about earlier when you get to retirement. If you haven't invested all along the way, it's really hard to make up time in that you can't force nutrition.

You can't suddenly fix nutrition, much like if your garden or your lawn is out of shape, you can't just suddenly sow some seeds and say, “Okay, now I want to green healthy lawn or a robust garden.” You have to kind of do a little bit at a time along the way. Once again, by measuring it gives you markers that you can start to work with because there's a lot of different nutrients out there. There's a lot of different diets. And so I think it has to be individualized based upon what we find when we measure people. We do even genetic testing now to find out what foods work best for you genetically.

Mike: So is there a way to reduce how much time someone may experience Alzheimer's if they're going to have that type of disease? Or maybe cut down on how long they would need to be an extended care towards the end of life? Because that can get really expensive.

Dr. Ron: Again, what we find is that it happens slowly. But as you get closer to older years, it'll start to crescendo on you. So I encourage people to look at the early signs, something like gastritis or something like diabetes. We now know that diabetes leads into something called metabolic syndrome and metabolic syndrome leads into heart disease and vascular disease. And it's also causing something called type three diabetes, where your insulin and your blood sugar can't cross the blood brain barrier. And it's all due to blood sugar problems, which, if a person would have learned to eat whole foods earlier, colorful whole foods clean foods and measure their nutrient levels, they can take action early on and avoid these kinds of problems.

Mike: Right. So even maybe if they cut off a year, that may cut off $90,000 expense.

Dr. Ron: Yeah. Dr. Riordan, the founder of the Riordan Clinic. He made that point many times because people would say, “Well, gosh, this is more expensive than getting my car tuned up. But I need my car.” And so the fact is, we need our health probably more than anything. I mean, you can replace a car, but you can't replace bad health. So taking better care of yourself all along the way is probably one of the best investments you can make, both in terms of your life and your happiness.

But also in terms of your wealth. Health is wealth, and many people, they may actually save money and they actually are wealthy. But if their health is gone, it doesn't serve them as well.

Mike: It's hard to enjoy [wealth] when your quality of life is low from your health, right. How many times do you meet someone that comes in as a patient or they have symptoms and they're used to a low quality of medical health, but through treatment, through going through your program, which maybe hopefully you can talk about in just a moment, your testing—how often do they improve quality of life so that they can experience life to the fullest?

Dr. Ron: Well, it's probably very similar to what you do. You don't just have someone come in and say, “Well, I don't make enough money,” and you give them a couple of tips. You probably do a more complete financial analysis looking at their assets and their liabilities. And in many ways, we also spend 90 minutes with a new patient going through what sort of symptoms they do have, what their family history is, what their lifestyle is, how they eat. And then we do a very robust laboratory testing of all the essential nutrients, the vitamins, the minerals, the fatty acids, the amino acids.

And we look at things like hormones, thyroid hormone. We look at things like methylation factors, which is a whole new area. People who are under methylated, they are more prone to Alzheimer's. And so there's some key markers like homocysteine and some key nutrients like B12 and B6 that generally don't get measured in a standard office visit. So we're looking deeper than just the, you know, the superficial evaluation of a person's finances. The deeper you go, the more you find, the better you can intervene and then we see them hopefully regularly. We try to see them every year, maybe every six months, early on and do some follow up testing to make sure that they're on track with whatever plan we put together with them.

Mike: Alright.

Dr. Ron: Sound like what you do?

Mike: Yeah, definitely.

Dr. Ron: It’s the same idea: if you want to get healthy, you have to plan for it. Instead of just hoping that you are healthy when you get older, right?

Mike: You got to measure it. So can you tell us how to get in touch with you? What resources are out there and how we can stay in touch and learn more?

Dr. Ron: Sure. Our website is riordanclinic.org. We’re a not-for-profit, and so we have a lot of good material on our website. Recently we have launched the Real Health podcast, it’s been really popular. You can access 30 years of our newsletter—Health Hunters—where we encourage people to be hunting for better health. And these are short articles with very timely topics and they relate to nutrition, hormonal health, better sleep, better diet, exercise, toxicity, all the various things that can destroy your health if you’re not looking out for it. So it’s loaded with good information for the average consumer.

Mike: Thank you, Dr. Ron, for coming on and sharing with us how we can invest in ourselves and our nutrition for a higher quality of life and a better return on life.