Rich, Fit and Happy Show

55 | Beyond Science Fiction: Cracking the Code of Human Enhancement with James F Jordan

• Crystal O'Connor • Season 2 • Episode 55

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What if there was a way to improve the US healthcare system, which currently occupies 18-19% of our economy and ranks between 13 and 10 in quality? 

Today I'm with James F. Jordan, a healthcare and life sciences expert. He is a Distinguished Service Professor of Health Care and Biotechnology at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, the President of StraTactic, the National Co-Chairman of the BIO Bootcamp, and the Founder of the Healthcare Data Center. He has published numerous articles and books on innovation, startups, intellectual property, and health systems. 

As an active industry expert in healthcare and the life sciences, he researches healthcare’s top challenges to empower patients, improve the quality of care, and provide leaders with the strategic guidance needed to push the industry forward.

Find out more about James: 

Sign up with Ageless Ambition by visiting https://www.AgelessAmbition.com

You can also schedule a call with me or one of my team members at https://www.calendly.com/wealthy-wellness

Health and Wellness practitioners: you can learn more at http://www.WealthyWellnessAcademy.com

Speaker 1:

So yesterday I was talking to a physician about how much time he spends on the administrative part. So instead of spending 100 hours with the customer or patient that he would have done maybe 20, 30 years ago, today that 100 hours turns down to maybe 50, 60, sometimes 40 in a certain week Full-time equivalence of a physician. So I think the promise or the pressure that's going to happen is we're about to also have too many nurse practitioners and physician assistants that sort of merge, at the time when I think the outcome has to be that physicians need to become mentors to these folks and have more support around them.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Rich, fit and Happy podcast. I'm Crystal O'Connor, where we want to take you from drab to fab in this beautiful life. Let's go. Hello and welcome to Rich, fit and Happy. I'm Crystal O'Connor, your host, and today I have a guest that I brought on that has an extensive background in biotechnology. In fact, he's so impressive I'm sitting here wondering where would I even begin to share with you his background, but his name is James F Jordan. James has been a senior executive of 4 to 100 companies. He's participated in lead angel and venture capital investments. He's worked with 493 companies and invested in 93. You served as vice president of Johnson Johnson in marketing. you are vice president of marketing and you have so many noteworthy ventures that I could go on and on. but let's just go ahead and get into what you're doing now, because we could talk forever about some of these things, because there is a healthcare revolution going on, would you agree?

Speaker 1:

I hope so.

Speaker 2:

You hope so. I feel like that there is, but listen. So what is going on with the healthcare system and why is it so complicated and confusing to everybody?

Speaker 1:

So maybe we started the highest of level in terms of the US healthcare system. So we're approaching 18, 19% of our economy, when the rest of the world spends 8 to 12% of their gross domestic product on healthcare. And you'd say, well, we must be number one ranked in quality. Well, we're actually, in any given year, between 13 and 10. So it's complex and we're not getting the bang for our buck.

Speaker 1:

And part of that is the history of healthcare in general, because if you go back 100 years ago, the doctor still came to your house And the only reason that someone went to a hospital was because the family couldn't take care of them And so doctors became I guess you would think of it as the sales rep of the hospital. And so doctors sort of drove everything And for many, many years doctors made the decisions and hospitals would try to get them involved. And in the 1960s we started adding Medicare and Medicaid, which is our first sort of government involvement. And if you look at the trends of healthcare costs, it just went up dramatically when that happened, to the point where, you know, roughly around 2008,. We knew the baby boomers were coming and older people have more complex disease And we just knew this expense was going to get out of control, and so in that we've just cluged together a system, and that lack of one system makes it very, very complex.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so there's this major divide between public health and healthcare delivery, right, yes, they serve two different purposes. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So public health is kind of a national defense, if you think about it right. We're trying to protect ourselves and our citizenry from illnesses. That really public health started in the United States, taking care of marines or Navy that would come in and contaminate the country with disease, and there's a whole sort of history timeline of that that I have on a website that would probably only entertain me. And then, if you think about healthcare in general, the goal of healthcare in general sure it's to keep people healthy, but in an economic perspective, you know, a healthy person actually contributes to the economy, and so I look at that as sort of an economic defense in the broadest of terms, although healthcare is a very personal thing.

Speaker 2:

And many people call it sick care. now, have you heard this trending?

Speaker 1:

Yes, because we're very acute oriented, and even though healthcare reform is talking about preventative medicine and putting some money towards it, i mean, truth be told, there is some money that has gone towards it and we've made some progress, but we're still very acute focused, and so that's the sick comment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so what can be done to actually improve the business of health care? So that was the problem when it started, when it became like a business. It kind of sounds like that's when it.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's always been a business. My wife and I have this debate all the time because the word patient is sort of passive and not an exchange of information. We say should it be customer? We came down to client because the client is a little more personal relationship And so the relationship historically had been between the doctor and his or her patient And that was a very personal relationship. And so they were entrepreneurs, these doctors. They were in private practice and they could make their own decisions And they really were focused on the patient. But at the time we paid by event as opposed to paid by overall. How much per year? And so, as doctors get paid for everything that they did and it sort of worked out And they had a customer intimacy that is today missing for sure in many cases.

Speaker 2:

We have a shortage of physicians that is going to only get worse, right? Yes, we've got a lot of physicians that are unhappy. They feel overworked. Do you want to touch on that?

Speaker 1:

Sure, and I think there's two aspects of that. So I had done some research, because there's two organizations that control the demand of the physicians And I thought why didn't you see these baby boomers coming? Why aren't you making more physicians? But when I went down and I did the math, i realized that a physician works for 40 years and this pig in the Python bolus is only really a 25 year event And we'd actually have created a system that's going to 30, 40 years now just create way too many physicians And that would be equally a problem.

Speaker 1:

So you may have noticed recently that they have upped it a little bit, but even the minute I upped it, it takes me 15 years to get someone there because they have so much education that they have to go through. So we do have a shortage of physicians and I think it's even perturbed more by the administrative burden we've put on them. So yesterday I was talking to a physician about how much time he spends on the administrative part. So instead of spending 100 hours with the customer or patient that he would have done maybe 20, 30 years ago, today that 100 hours turns down to maybe 50, 60, sometimes 40 in a certain week. And so in that move of putting the administrative burden, we've even made our numbers smaller, right? Because if you had 100 physicians but you now are cutting the 40, you really have 40 full time equivalents of a physician. So I think the promise or the pressure that's going to happen is we're about to also have too many nurse practitioners and physician assistants, that sort of merge, at the time when. So I think the outcome has to be that physicians need to become mentors to these folks and have more support around them.

Speaker 1:

And then I think the other piece is yesterday I'm talking to a physician. I said it's time. In MBA school there's this thing called product life cycle management. It's sort of like when new products come out, it goes through a period of time, and so when you look at the electronic health record, i'm not sure we could engage that technology without involving physicians early on. But now it's been 20 years and it's time for administration to take that burden off, because the physicians have shared with you everything that needs to be shared. And I look at we should be managing our physicians sort of like the movie star of a movie. You don't ask Tom Cruise to go in and edit the script or enter the lunch menu for the day. You make sure that he's out there doing what he's doing and he's spending his energy in this case for a physician educating themselves and getting smarter, and not doing paperwork.

Speaker 2:

So what are some of your predictions? Having said some of what you've said and shared, what are some of the predictions for the future in healthcare?

Speaker 1:

So I think we're starting at what I would call the dog bone. So, in the extreme end, i think there's a lot of administrative waste in the system. So when I teach a health systems course, i'll hold up my American Express card and my Visa card And I said why won't some people take this American Express card? because it's, you know, 25 to 50 basis points half a percentage more than this other card. And yet when we did healthcare reform, we allowed the assurance companies by law to keep up to 20 cents on the dollar. Now today they're around 14 or 15 cents. So they're improving.

Speaker 1:

But what is it that they're doing when I have a hospital that's operating on a 4% margin and have physician offices that are, you know, merging with other people because they're bankrupt? So I think step one is apply artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to removing some of the economic burden of the administration. So I think that's going to be probably the majority of our productivity over the next decade. But, as I mentioned to you earlier, we have this interoperability, cyber security. Each policy on their own is a very smart policy, but you put them together and there's a little conflict between them. So I think we're going to stay inside the hospital systems.

Speaker 1:

In the short term, the goal to me is we need to be able to connect to our Apple watches and all these other devices that give us early warning signs that physicians don't have this information. But I think that's a bit off. And then, on the far right in not politically sense but in the sense of inside the hospital, i think we have medical robotics and precision medicine in different pieces like that that when physicians do go to work, it makes them more productive and it makes them get better outcomes. So I think we have safety staying inside the hospital system with these artificial intelligence because, from a cybersecurity perspective, every time I expand I create an opportunity for someone to break in right. So the precision medicine models and all that will stay inside the hospital. And then we'll take a little more risk in the administrative ones, because even if it's tragic when a record is stolen, it still has less risk than actually working on a patient live.

Speaker 2:

What are some of the most exciting. I was reading an article from Insider and it described how chat GPT, a doctor, actually wrote a book And in that book he used an example of a diagnosis. It was a baby, but it was a previous patient of his, but he came up with the diagnosis, so he used that as an example and chat GPT was able to diagnose what took him many, many years to learn how to do.

Speaker 2:

in the end, chat GP did that in seconds. So that is just one example then it sounds like James of how it's going to alleviate some of the burdens.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so it won't sort of play out like that because we do have FDA having very strict regulations, and so when you look at sort of the sci-fi movies, you hear people having a dialogue with artificial intelligence And if you really look at what they're doing there, it's the human being having an interaction of data so that they can be more creative. Right, that's what they're doing. But in the movie the assumption that we don't talk about is those AI databases are validated, biased is removed, they've been tested and we're just not there yet. So I think at best it will be what they call decision support, which is letting a doctor get a little bit of insight.

Speaker 1:

Yes, but I think these models will play out in a precision medicine model. So this is great model that we invested in as an investment company. It's called aerial therapeutics and it's around pancreatitis, and if you have pancreatitis long enough, you're probably going to get pancreatic cancer. And so the question is how can I stop it? And so they created this big scientific study and they found these points call it one to 10, where if a patient presents a primary care physician with one of these 10 things, maybe for you and I it's innocuous and the doctor wouldn't think anything of it. But if I'm in that category, i want to be able to tag that doctor and say, you know, tap on the shoulder, hey, this is a situation with this patient where, if you take this protocol, you can either delay or stop this progression. And so I think to your point with the example you gave. that's a real life example of the kind of interaction we can have. But I can tell you that that company has, you know, tens of millions into it and it's very validated.

Speaker 2:

Good. I think a lot of people are fearful and they're scared, But I hope and it's going to happen, no matter what it's coming, And I think that they have this idea or notion those that aren't as familiar with it as you they have this notion or this idea of it as being harmful. So I hope that this gave some insight and clarity to the fact that it's actually going to be helpful and alleviate some of the issues that we've got right.

Speaker 1:

You feel like it is Yeah, and that's the last thing I would say on that topic is, at the end of the day, it's a physician that approves the therapeutic or the operation or whatever. So regardless of how they get their information, it's still going to go through their big brain and their training to make sure it's appropriate.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Well, i'm kind of excited to ask this question, so I want to ask about what are some of the coolest, or can you share What's the coolest thing in terms of advancement in AI that's going on right now that you see?

Speaker 1:

So actually it tends to be in the operating room and the coolest one I've seen is one on a spinal fusion procedure. So the whole category of orthopedics in general. it's mind boggling that they've been so successful over the years because they make a plan and the minute you get in there and you start moving the bones around, the plan is moved right. Someone hits a patient on the table, so there's several companies that take your CT scan When you get on the table. they put some markers on your bones and it's imaging as the procedure goes along. So as you move the patient around and the bones move, the plan readjusts and the doctor can do his drilling or his scaffolds that he needs to do with perfect precision. And they not only have that, they actually know by the time the patient leaves the table that everything worked out exactly as planned. And so I think those are some of the exciting things. I think the precision medicine things that we talked about earlier are equally as exciting.

Speaker 2:

They're not as active, you can't see it as active as robotic surgery, for example. Well, it's interesting that with the spinal fusion example you said that the physician or the doctor surgeon walks away knowing immediately that everything was done, whereas before he wasn't sure and had to kind of wait. Is that right? Well, he did his procedure.

Speaker 1:

He had no documented evidence that the plan was followed and executed. Because it had to be somewhat flexible, right? Because he didn't have that constant feedback. So as the bones would move, he or she would make the best drilling and filling that they could, And obviously that's why they're so seasoned and there's been so much success over the years. But now they actually know how to plan executed, the plan documented, that the plan was executed. And so that's really interesting because if you think about a manufacturing process, any manufacturing process that we think of, you have a fixed input, a fixed process and a fixed output, And in healthcare in general you have variable patient coming in. Therefore you need to create a variable plan to get a fixed output, And these systems allow these doctors to be able to do that.

Speaker 2:

So I would think that would help in the area of malpractice insurance.

Speaker 1:

Hugely, hugely, yeah, hugely. So to your point, exactly to your point, i guess, talking to one of these spinal fusion doctors, one of their biggest challenges is patients misbehaving, not following what they're supposed to follow when they leave, and so it may not always result in a malpractice, but if we result in a do-over and from a reimbursement perspective, you don't get paid for do-over within so many days, and so now doctors have listen, you left the table, you're perfectly healthy and something happened along the way, and I don't think you follow protocol. And if they have to do a redo, they now have documentation for reimbursement authorities. So it doesn't always necessarily go to the malpractice then, but it certainly helps in the reimbursement and it is a protective thing from a malpractice for sure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, do you see cybersecurity issues hampering the promise of AI medicine?

Speaker 1:

Yes, I do So. If you think of the healthcare system as an old-fashioned donut right, 18% in the middle and the rest of the companies are outside the healthcare system, I think it's in the long run we want to be able to connect. They say 68 to 70% of all actionable preventative data is outside of the hospital system and outside of the physician office, And so physicians need to get this information, but the standards of what's coming in are so variable. If you're a chief technology officer, an innovation officer of these hospital systems, you're going to be very reluctant to connect, And in the short term, there's so much improvement to be made inside the hospital system As you're debating with the government on how far you can go on policy, there's so much opportunity inside the donut right now that we're not going to push outside the donut, And so from that perspective, I think there's going to be a slowing progression versus opening it up.

Speaker 2:

So you have this event coming up in Boston, you said, where you meet with people that are looking for your angel, investing capital and support.

Speaker 1:

So what people don't know is that the US government invests, in any given year, three to 5% of its economy into technology and R&D, and there's a big hunk of that. That's from particularly the NIH, but the DOD and the National Science Foundation will also invest these monies, and they will start out with basic and applied research inside of a university. And so there's a law called the Bidol Act which says if you're going to take our money, you have to demonstrate that you're trying to commercialize it. And so when these companies come out of the universities, the angel and the venture capital call it the valley of death. So the pre-seed and seed stage, if they're not in life sciences, until they get to revenue. If they're life sciences, they need clinical evidence or some other first in human data. That makes it more conservative for an angel or VC to invest.

Speaker 1:

And so there's an incubator system in this country, an accelerator system that tries to help these companies be organized and get together and be able to be successful and get through that valley of death. So when I wrote my first book on startups if you've ever written a book, which was my first one you end up in a place that you never thought and the summary of it is that you have a simultaneous equation of satisfying a customer and investor and getting a liquidity event for your investors, which is either an IPO or a merger. And so these scientists come at these companies just focused on the customers. They should be being completely naive on the investor and other parts of it, and so we helped them and trained them on how to pull all these pieces together and keep that equation going.

Speaker 2:

Any promising ones that you know that are going to be there, that you're kind of excited about, or No, they always just show up and we never quite know.

Speaker 1:

So that's part of the fun of it, right? Is seeing what's there.

Speaker 2:

Like Christmas morning.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

So you've worked with so many startups. You've helped support and get some of these things going. Do you want to share maybe one of your favorites that you really helped with capital and direction?

Speaker 1:

So I mentioned aerial therapeutics, which is a precision medicine one, and why we're particularly proud of that is they were ahead of their time. So one of the hardest things to do is get investment before a business model is proven to the investment community. And the other thing that's special is a woman CEO is Vibria Thing, i think, it's less than 2.5%, and Jessica Gibson is her name and she is just a powerhouse And she's persistent and she's brilliant And she's the CEO of that company And she's at the point now where she's worked with the bio bootcamp that we do every year now that she's actually going to be a panelist this year, and last year she was actually interviewed by Maragana National Public Radio and she's won all sorts of awards.

Speaker 2:

So tell me about the bio bootcamp.

Speaker 1:

So the bio bootcamp is a two day event. It's part of the bio international meeting. We pull together about 20 instructors. That moves around every year. So this year it's in Boston, and so there's a gentleman myself.

Speaker 2:

And I don't mean to interrupt, but is the bio bootcamp what I already mentioned? Yes, or is it an event? Yeah, no, that's it. It's the one I mentioned in Boston, okay.

Speaker 1:

So the bio bootcampbio instead ofcombio, and they can see the agenda. And if they're quick about it, i usually close it to the public, but right now I have it open because I'm redoing the websites. You can actually see some of the past presentations in there. But we'll go over capitalization of your venture. You know what's a term sheet, how do you file a patent, what's intellectual property? What's market positioning, what's making a joint venture or a licensing agreement If you're a pharmaceutical company. We go through it all.

Speaker 2:

And it's a two day event, and tell me about your book, because I didn't mention the name of your book in your bio. Your bio was so long because and I know people didn't want to hear me go on and on, but your bio was so long because you have such impressive, extensive, you know, knowledge and experience, but you have more than one book, right.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, or all sort of related. So I have two books on innovation, commercialization, startup and life sciences, which walks you through the process, and it includes some of the university stuff in there. Then I have a book on intellectual property, and I called it at the time intellectual property pyramid. Now I'm calling it my IP shield, and that's teaching people.

Speaker 1:

You know, when you give a lawyer a patent, they do the paperwork and they say, yes, you can practice this, but that doesn't mean there's a market for it And that doesn't mean that you haven't told someone else there's a market for it And they can come in and reverse engineer you, and so this book shows you how to really think about this before you release it to the public, so that you're, you know, really well protected, that you have a sizable market, and this is what venture capitalists and angel people want to invest in. They call it the unfair advantage, and the reason they want it is you know, if I'm going to go up, how am I going to go up against J&J? Right, i don't have the financial resources either, do they? So they want to make sure you're doing something that's unique and protectable that J&J can't do, and they're going to be envious and want you later, and that's the whole intention of a good patent strategy.

Speaker 2:

Did you? I'm sure you weren't involved, but I don't know that for sure. I watched a really great Netflix series on the gal. Her name isn't coming to my head, but the infamous story of the gal that fudged a little on her what her product could do for diabetics.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're talking about the thermo.

Speaker 2:

No, we're both there, thermos. Yes, thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that's a perfect example of someone with zero healthcare experience coming into the healthcare world. I think that these events remind the world that you need to have some skill, you need to have some awareness of the market, you need to understand, you know science and validation and the rules of the road, and clearly she did not follow those And I think she was very good at the promise, right, everyone wanted to be able to. You know, it was sort of following on the. We did the human genome project. We had 23andMe telling us some cool stuff And then we were still going to quest and lab core and getting our blood tests and not really having, you know, a simple feedback system, and so there was some desire for the market to get there, and so I think desire and matching with someone who was very talented at manipulating. But I think it just reminds all of us that healthcare is a really specialized system And I think we can see legitimate companies even struggling with it.

Speaker 1:

If you look at what Oracle did with Cerner right, they bought Cerner and they thought, okay, we're going to take our oracle-ness and not really keep connected with the experience that Cerner has with us And we're going to try to put a new product into the Veterans Administration and it failed. And lucky, they got a second bite in the apple and even a third bite, because last week or two weeks ago they announced again they had another major failure. So I think it reminds us that it's important to have the skill now. Obviously, oracle has a ton of integrity compared to this other person, but it's a wake-up call.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think the latest I read was that she was supposed to go serve time. And her attorney put a stop to that for now, anyway, it'll be interesting to see if it actually happens and if they prevent it from happening again.

Speaker 1:

Well, i mean, i'm also a former accountant And so when you audit someone, you're looking for irregularities and for things that don't make sense, but you can't look for fraud, because fraud takes a couple of people working together And that entire company. You had a CEO, you had a bunch of people working together. Unfortunately, you had some whistleblowers down below that finally kind of opened it up, but it's very hard to detect fraud because it's got a bunch of people colluding and lying And so if you're fudging the records, yeah, you're not going to see it.

Speaker 2:

Wow, so interesting. Okay, so you've got the boot camp coming up, the bio boot camp, and then you mentioned was it Jessica Johnson?

Speaker 1:

Jessica Gibson.

Speaker 2:

Gibson, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1:

Okay, b-i-b-s-o-n.

Speaker 2:

If anyone wants to check out what she's doing, where do they go?

Speaker 1:

Well, first of all, if you look up her name, she's won all sorts of awards for being a powerhouse person that she is. But also her company's called Arial Therapeutics, a-r-i-e-l Therapeutics, and you'll find her on the web, okay, Okay, very cool.

Speaker 2:

And you know the whole idea of Theranos, i think there was a lot of well, there was a huge need, right, and I'm going to start with, there's a need for it and a desire for it to really work, because diabetics having to, you know, draw blood all day long, you know, i hope that something happens soon. Do you see that something like what she had in mind is actually going to play out and work in that area?

Speaker 1:

So what she was trying to do is take the regular, what I would call the day-to-day diagnostic world and make it not need to draw blood. So she really wasn't doing anything terribly exciting with diabetes. I think what we see today going on with diabetes is we see the patches on the arms and the things tying to the phone and giving a lot of intelligence. I think that's some huge progress. And I also think in cancer we have this topic called the wood biopsy, which is looking for cancer markers in the body for early detection, but also working for maybe late after you've been treated, maybe looking for detection to see if there's any, you know, metastases, and so those kinds of things, i think making progress. but the ability to take one drop of blood at this point in time and scientifically get it to you know, solve hundreds of tests, is not something that's practical at this point.

Speaker 2:

No, okay, do you want to add anything, as we've finished up?

Speaker 1:

So I think when we're talking about progress and cool things, it's hard to talk about it because it's sort of a pharmaceutical.

Speaker 1:

But I think we've got these adaptive therapies coming And so there's a lot of cool things going on in immunotherapy and cancer, but always the mechanical things were a little easier, and so one of the cool technologies is adaptive radiation treatment planning, and most of us have had a relative that have had radiation treatment for cancer And you notice that they get thinner, right. And the whole cool thing about radiation treatment planning is the beam is very precise in where it's going. You don't want to kill a healthy tissue, you want to kill the appropriate tissue, and so as you get thinner, the plans change, just like that operating room procedure, right? So if I say I'm going to shoot two inches into your stomach and now your stomach is three inches thinner, i'm going in the wrong place, and so that's a new emerging area that's very exciting where I can make the plan And as your body changes, the plan will change with you during your radiation treatment, which I think is is really exciting.

Speaker 2:

That actually is amazing. I actually I know personally three women that died, not from the cancer but the radiation, so their heart just gave out, and you know that's so well. It takes that to another level, in my opinion. One of the things that I heard recently on a really great podcast is this guy claims and I can't remember what, he's obviously in biotech, but he claims that we will and he's convinced that we will be able to live a lot longer, and he mentioned two over 200 years. Now what in the world would he be talking about?

Speaker 1:

Yes, I think I've seen him too. So I think he's talking about what our bodies are capable of and that we pollute it every day and do different things, And so I think one of the things that he talks about is measuring. I think it's called the telomeres on your DNA, I believe. I think my biologist friends are going to spank me for that. I'm probably off a little bit, But the telomeres are when you cell replicates. when they shrink, they run out of replication capability, And so the goal in your life is, if you can keep those tails long, that every time you replicate you're not going to have cancer, you're not going to have all these other diseases.

Speaker 2:

Is that kind of like a topical In a?

Speaker 1:

way it's related, right, It's absolutely related. So he's a big person on fast and getting to have your cells be repaired. That's really about that. The foods we eat and the things we drink are sometimes they're nutritious and sometimes they're not. And then there's a whole conversation we can have on the US food system compared to the European foods.

Speaker 2:

Is it sad the? standard American sign Or do you want to have that conversation or not?

Speaker 1:

Well, I mean it's a long one, But at the end of the day, I think that we have a lot of chemicals and plastics and things in our food that do not exist in the rest of the world, And it you know, like, like well, i mean, you know, if you go back into the Eisenhower administration, they were going after fats and the fat industry decided that they were going to go after the sugar industry.

Speaker 1:

And so you know, we saw all those sucrose and sucrose and all those that you can track it to the increase in diabetes, because a sugar cell is much bigger and our body says enough. And these other artificial sweeteners your body doesn't say enough, so you keep going. It's just little things like that, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I found this old, old life magazine And it was when we had landed on the moon, supposedly. And on the back of this great big life magazine was a big advertisement for sugar And it talks about how great sugar was and you should eat it all day. And my son was reading it saying, is this for real? I'm like, yeah, it's not a spoof, It's not a meme.

Speaker 1:

If you look at what's going on in Mexico right now with Coca-Cola, the diabetes rate is huge And they've somehow convinced a good portion of the population to replace. You know milk at the dinner table is even. If you go on YouTube, you can actually see baby bottles filled with Coca-Cola versus.

Speaker 2:

I actually I witnessed that. Now, what country did you say? Mexico I witnessed that And I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And she must have been maybe one or two and she had a baby bottle And that was in the 90s. That was in the late 90s And I've never forgotten that. I just couldn't believe.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, this is a plan that's been. I owned the stock in the 90s And I remember seeing something about the goal of being able to replace milk at the table or something, And I sold the stock and I never went back. But you know, as the US has done its thing, you know they've moved around the world Now, having said that, at least Mexican Coke has sugar in it And the US Coke doesn't, and you know theoretically that I think the sugar should tell you to stop a little bit more, but it's an issue. But even just the polymers or the dyes that are in our food here there's so many creative category of lists that in Europe are just not able to get into the food system. Again, not that they're perfect, but it just our health and our food matches.

Speaker 1:

I mean, we have a construction project going on in our neighborhood right now with the streets and this gentleman that you know standing at the end of the streets with flags. And there's a young gentleman that I'm walking a dog at eight in the morning and he's eating, you know bag of Doritos. And he's been there for a week And I've noticed that, you know, everything he's been eating has been junk food in the morning. That's just no way to start your day Now. He's young and healthy, but you do that for 30 years, you're not going to be in a good place.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, wow, yeah. I used to watch my son and I would never bring it into the house, but he would find ways. Of course, you know that's what teens do, but he loved Mountain Dew And I so hope he's not doing that. But he's in the Air Force now and I bet he still sneaks it, don't you?

Speaker 1:

I sneak an occasional do myself. I have to You do. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2:

I'll never forget the time when I used to have a thing for Diet Dr Pepper and I'll never forget my car not starting and I called a girlfriend that lived nearby. She's like could you come and give me a jumpstart? and we looked at it and she goes oh, go, grab a Dr Pepper or some pop. So my battery had been corroded. Is what the problem? which I had never seen before? Fix that problem. And I thought, okay, i'm done.

Speaker 1:

I don't want to drink anything that could do that to a person. I will have maybe one every six weeks and I'll enjoy it for the moment, and then I'll feel terrible after it. Well, it's about healthy eating.

Speaker 2:

You know, we as we age, but, just like you said, you feel it, Whereas when you're younger you don't feel it.

Speaker 1:

That's true.

Speaker 2:

You start to notice as we age, just because you know, our bodies changes in all these many different ways. But I think we also become even more, over time, depleted of vitamins and minerals. We don't realize sometimes, that's, you know, that's what it is.

Speaker 1:

But even having you know, a second drink in a weekend now is just like not worth it. That's certainly an age thing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, And isn't it interesting how you experience heartburn for the first time in your 40s and 50s? It's like what is this feeling?

Speaker 1:

Well, I'll do a commercial on that. So Bragg's apple cider vinegar Are you familiar with that, with the mother in it? Yes, so one of the big issues in the pharmaceutical industry is we're putting down an antacid into your stomach, and your stomach actually is an acid environment to break down the food, and so it's fine to take that periodically, but people start taking this very frequently, so I have gotten probably 20 people off of their meds by just taking a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar.

Speaker 1:

It's not regular vinegar, It's with the mothers in it. So I just literally I have a friend who's the president of a sports network who we went out to dinner with, and he's swallowing these things. I'm like what are you doing? And I sent him a case of it after dinner.

Speaker 2:

It is amazing stuff, isn't it? It helps with a lot of things, but I've told people that as well to use that. I don't have it anymore because I changed my diet.

Speaker 1:

So it's not happening.

Speaker 2:

But another is baking soda And I know there are some experts that actually say to drink baking soda, just put a little bit in your water bottle and drink it all day.

Speaker 1:

And I was like yeah, i haven't done that one, yeah, I haven't tried that one.

Speaker 2:

Interesting stuff. Okay, thank you so much. Do you want to end with anything? You're so full of kids.

Speaker 1:

Sure. So people can find me at JFJordancom and I have a healthcare nonprofit data site. It's called healthcaredatacenter, so instead ofcom it's center, c-e-n-t-r, and again, healthcare data. That's a Boston accent, so there's no Rs in data And you can find information in there on physicians You're talking about physicians, the US reimbursement system, what companies do, what Blockchain, artificial intelligence it's all in there. It's all free of the public.

Speaker 2:

Very cool And, listeners, if you go down to the show notes, it's all there. All the links will take you directly to where he's telling you, in case you're driving and you can't write down what he just said. Thank you so much, james. It's been an honor having you seriously on my podcast. You are amazing, you're doing amazing things And you're just right there on the cutting edge of what we're looking at for the future Not just the future for us, but for our kids and grandkids. I'm a grandmother now.

Speaker 1:

My first is coming July 17th.

Speaker 2:

Oh wow, That's awesome Congratulations.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Okay, bye-bye.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

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