Because it is the highest-leverage swap available and takes six minutes. Most men over 40 eat a breakfast with almost no protein, a bagel or cereal or just coffee, and the 10 a.m. crash traces straight back to it: blood sugar shoots up and comes down while you sit in a meeting feeling slow. Protein and fat in the first meal flatten that the same day, and eggs are about as filling as food gets, so the 10 a.m. pantry raid does not happen. The slow benefit is muscle: every man over 40 is losing it, eggs are complete protein high in leucine, the amino acid that switches muscle building on, and fixing breakfast adds a signal most men skip. Three eggs is around 18 grams of protein, a picture rather than a prescription.

What about cholesterol in eggs?

For most people dietary cholesterol has far less effect on blood cholesterol than saturated fat and refined carbohydrate do. A minority of men are hyper-responders whose numbers do move, and there is exactly one way to know which man you are: test. Food is the floor and bloodwork tells you if you are the exception.

Why plain cottage cheese at 3 p.m.?

Because it does one job slowly. It is mostly casein, which curdles in the stomach and drains out over hours, covering the 3-to-6 p.m. window where most men lose the day, so dinner becomes a calm decision instead of a pantry raid. A cup is about 25 grams of protein for around 200 calories; the protein bar it replaces is about 15 grams for 250 and is a candy bar with a fitness label. It is also a real source of calcium at an age when bone density is heading the way muscle is. Buy low-sodium if you watch blood pressure, skip it if dairy does not sit well, and buy plain, because the fruit-stirred kind is the sugar problem in a different aisle. Flavored yogurt with granola is the same trap: the label does the thinking and the man stops checking.

What comes off the plate?

Liquid sugar: soda, juice, sweetened coffee drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks with no sport. It is the only thing on the plate not in a slot; it displaces nothing, satisfies nothing, and is hundreds of calories a day that never register as food. It hits all at once because there is no fiber, protein, or fat to slow it. Orange juice stings because it reads as help, but it is sugar with the fiber, the part that mattered, removed. Alcohol is a bigger lever for many men and hits sleep and recovery harder than soda, but it is not the removal here because eliminating it fails the eight-month test: it means renegotiating a social calendar, and telling an executive to quit buys three good weeks. What holds is moving from reactive drinking to deciding before you walk in the door.

The only 7 foods you need to heal your brain, gut and body

Q: Is red meat bad for you?

Two different claims get mashed into one. Processed meat, bacon, deli meat, hot dogs, has a real and fairly consistent link to cancer that Zac does not argue with. Unprocessed red meat is a much weaker, messier, mostly observational picture tangled up with the fact that heavy eaters historically also smoked more, drank more, weighed more, and ate fewer vegetables. That does not make the concern zero, just smaller and less certain than the headline. The line Zac stands behind: the bun, the fries, the volume, and the processing are where the problem lives, and a couple of unprocessed servings a week next to lentils and vegetables is far down a man's real list of problems, near the top of which is ten years of under-eating protein while losing muscle. Two panel lines matter: ferritin, because men have no monthly way to clear iron and a small number carry hemochromatosis without knowing, and LDL if yours runs high, which is a conversation with your doctor, not a reason to fear a steak.

Q: Why salmon if fish oil is in the cabinet too?

A six-ounce portion is about 40 grams of protein and clears the bar on its own, but its place on the list is EPA and DHA. DHA is built into cell membranes, heavily in the brain and eyes; EPA is what the body uses to make molecules that calm inflammation. It also carries vitamin D, hard to get from food, and B12. Everything but the fullness is months out because you are changing the makeup of your cells. Both are true because Zac's panel showed two servings a week did not close his omega-3 gap; fish oil closed it, and he knew that only because he measured. Eat the food for the whole package, supplement the gap the food leaves, and know where the gap is first. Farmed or wild, buy the one you will buy; sardines do the same job for a fraction of the price.

Q: What do lentils and cruciferous vegetables do that a greens powder cannot?

Lentils replace the rice or potato beside the meal you already like. Soluble fiber forms a gel that flattens the blood sugar rise from the same plate and drags bile acids out, so the body has to burn cholesterol to make more, one of the better-established ways food lowers LDL. Insoluble fiber feeds gut bacteria whose output fuels the cells lining the colon, which is the direct answer to the red-meat concern. A cup is about 18 grams of protein plus magnesium, potassium, and iron, for a couple of dollars a bag; ramp up slowly or the gut complains for two weeks. Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, beat the powder for a chemical reason: the enzyme that turns their raw compounds into active ones fires only when fresh plant tissue is chewed or cut and is mostly gone in a dry, shelf-stable powder. The same pathways are involved in clearing estrogen byproducts, which matters for a man over 40 carrying more fat and nudging more testosterone toward estrogen. Extra virgin olive oil, unrefined so the polyphenols survive and reduce LDL oxidation, is what makes those two edible for most men; it should catch the back of your throat and make you cough.

What this episode says

Every food had to clear two bars: matter nutritionally, and still be something you are eating eight months from now. A diet quit in three weeks does nothing.
Eggs replace the bagel, the cereal, and the coffee-only breakfast. The 10 a.m. crash traces back to a protein-free first meal; three eggs flatten it the same day and remove the 10 a.m. pantry raid. The muscle benefit, a leucine signal at the meal most men skip, is months out.
Plain cottage cheese owns the 3 p.m. slot: casein digests over hours and covers the 3-to-6 window, about 25 grams of protein for 200 calories against a protein bar's 15 for 250. Plain, because the fruit-stirred version is the sugar problem in a different aisle, and so is flavored yogurt with granola.
Lean red meat two or three dinners a week because it is the protein-dense food a man will eat because he wants to, plus B12, zinc, heme iron, and a little creatine. Processed meat carries the real cancer evidence; unprocessed steak is a weaker, messier, mostly observational picture. The bun, the fries, the volume, and the processing are where the problem lives. Hemochromatosis and LDL are lines on a panel, not reasons to fear a steak.
Salmon twice a week for EPA and DHA that get built into cell membranes and calm inflammation; a slow item you will not feel that week. Zac's panel showed two servings did not close his omega-3 gap, which is why fish oil stayed. Sardines do the job for a fraction of the cost.
Lentils replace the rice or potato: soluble fiber flattens the glucose rise and pulls bile acids out so the body burns cholesterol to replace them; the other fiber feeds the gut bacteria whose output the colon runs on, which directly answers the red-meat concern. Cheapest item on the list with better evidence than half the cabinet. Cruciferous vegetables beat the greens powder for a specific chemical reason: the enzyme that makes the active compounds fires only when fresh plant tissue is cut or chewed and is mostly gone in a dry powder. Extra virgin olive oil, which should catch the back of your throat, is what makes the lentils and broccoli survivable.
The one removal is liquid sugar: soda, juice, sweet coffee drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks with no sport. It fills no slot, displaces nothing, and hits all at once because there is no fiber, protein, or fat. Alcohol is a bigger number and a different conversation, because eliminating it fails the eight-month test.

Four out of seven on a travel week beats seven out of seven at home and zero on the road.

The two bars

Every week there is a new list: twenty superfoods on Monday, fifteen swaps by Friday, a podcast saying the opposite. Zac’s list is seven foods, each of which had to clear two bars. It had to matter nutritionally, and you had to be willing to still be eating it eight months from now. Men treat a diet as something to white-knuckle, and a diet quit in three weeks does nothing. This is not the perfect list. It is the one you keep.

Every item goes into a slot that is already full. Breakfast is already happening, the 3 p.m. crash is already happening, dinner is already happening. The only decision is what those slots are made of.

1. Eggs

The highest-leverage swap you have, six minutes to make, replacing the cereal, the bagel, the pastry, and I don’t do breakfast, just coffee. Most men over 40 eat a first meal with no protein and then fall off a cliff at 10 a.m., because the bagel at 6:30 shot blood sugar up and it came down while they sat in a meeting feeling slow. Protein and fat in the first meal flatten it the same day, and eggs are about as filling as food gets, so the 10 a.m. pantry raid and a lot of the afternoon grazing get removed at breakfast. The part you will not feel is the one that matters most: every man over 40 is losing muscle whether he trains or not, and what slows it is hitting protein meal by meal. Eggs are complete protein and high in leucine, the signal that switches muscle building on, and most men fire that signal once a day at dinner when they could fire it three times. The yolk is one of the best fats you can eat and feeds the brain over the long game. The crash and the hunger are day one; the muscle is months out and only if training and the rest of the eating are there. On cholesterol: for most people dietary cholesterol has far less effect on blood cholesterol than saturated fat and refined carbs, a minority of men are hyper-responders, and the only way to know which you are is to test. Three eggs is around 18 grams of protein, a picture, not a prescription.

2. Plain cottage cheese

The 3 p.m. slot, replacing the protein bar, the flavored yogurt, and the fistful of whatever is in the pantry. It does one job slowly: mostly casein, which curdles in the stomach and drains out over hours, covering the 3-to-6 window where most men lose the day, so dinner becomes a calm decision. A cup is about 25 grams of protein for 200 calories; the bar it replaces is about 15 for 250, a candy bar with a fitness label. It is also real calcium at an age when bone density is heading the way muscle is and nobody checks until something breaks. Low-sodium if you watch blood pressure; skip it if dairy does not sit well. And plain, because the second you buy the fruit-stirred kind you are back in the sugar problem. The trap next to it on the shelf is flavored yogurt with granola: the man dumps both in a bowl and stops thinking, the same move as the greens powder. Zac will not call it candy, because the granola has real fiber and nuts and some of the yogurt’s sugar is lactose that was always there; but flavored yogurt carries far more added sugar than the man pouring it guesses, granola is among the most calorie-dense things in the store and almost nobody weighs a serving, and the bowl carries a fraction of the protein of the plain cottage cheese beside it.

3. Lean red meat, two or three dinners a week

The one that takes the most heat. What it does that nothing else on the list does: it is the most protein-dense food a man will eat because he wants to, so he hits his target on a random Tuesday without thinking, where the man choking down a fourth chicken breast is out by Thursday. Around the protein: B12, which only shows up in animal foods and which you absorb worse with age; zinc, which most men run a little low on; heme iron, absorbed far better than plant iron; and a little creatine. The honest part is that two claims get mashed together. Processed meat has a real and consistent link to cancer, and Zac does not argue with it. Unprocessed red meat is a weaker, messier, mostly observational picture tangled up with heavy eaters who also smoked, drank, weighed more, and ate fewer vegetables; not zero, but smaller and less certain than the headline. The line he stands behind: the bun, the fries, the volume, and the processing are where the problem lives, and a couple of unprocessed servings beside lentils and vegetables is far down a man’s real problems, near the top of which is a decade of under-eating protein while losing muscle. Two panel lines matter. Ferritin, because men do not menstruate and have no monthly way to clear iron, and a small number carry hemochromatosis without knowing, for whom more iron is the wrong direction. And LDL, if yours runs high, which is a number to watch with your doctor, not a reason to fear a steak.

4. Salmon, twice a week

The packaged item. About 40 grams of protein in six ounces clears the bar alone, but the place on the list is earned by EPA and DHA: DHA is physically built into cell membranes, heavily in the brain and eyes, and EPA is what the body uses to build the molecules that calm inflammation. Vitamin D, hard to get from food, and B12 come with it. This one is slow; the fullness is immediate and everything else is months out because you are changing the makeup of your cells. Eat it anyway. And the fair question from the supplement episode, why fish oil stayed in the cabinet: two servings a week did not close Zac’s omega-3 gap, his panel showed that, and the fish oil closed it. Eat the food for the package, supplement the gap the food leaves, and know where the gap is first. Farmed or wild, the best one is the one you will buy; the fish runs low on mercury; and if price is the objection, sardines do the same job for a fraction.

5. Lentils

The fiber one, and the one you do not want, replacing the rice or potato beside the dinner you already like. Soluble fiber forms a gel that slows everything down, flattening the blood sugar rise off the same plate, and drags bile acids out so the body has to burn cholesterol to make more, one of the better-established ways food lowers LDL. The other fiber feeds the gut bacteria whose output fuels the cells lining the colon, which is the direct answer to the red-meat concern conceded at number three; it was on the list the whole time. About 18 grams of protein a cup plus magnesium, potassium, and iron. Most men treat fiber as a bathroom thing, which is the least important thing it does; it is a metabolic and cardiovascular input. Ramp up slowly or the gut complains for two weeks while the bacteria catch up. And it is the cheapest item on the list by a distance, a couple of dollars for a week of sides, with better evidence than half the cabinet Zac spent real money on. Black beans do a similar job.

6. Cruciferous vegetables

Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, replacing the greens powder for a specific chemical reason. When you chew or cut these, an enzyme in the plant converts raw compounds into active ones that turn up the dial on the body’s own clearance machinery; not detox in the wellness sense, nothing is flushed, the system you already own runs a little harder. That enzyme fires only when fresh plant tissue is damaged and is mostly gone in a dry, shelf-stable powder, so even setting the dosing question aside, the scoop physically cannot do what the vegetable does. The men’s-health reason: the same pathways are involved in clearing estrogen byproducts, and a man over 40 carrying more fat nudges more testosterone toward estrogen. The food is well established; the capsule sold on the same pathways is the oversold version. Add fiber, vitamin K, folate, and volume for almost no calories, so a big pile at dinner makes you eat less of everything else without trying. The thyroid concern applies at extreme raw intakes in already-deficient people, not a plate of cooked broccoli.

7. Extra virgin olive oil

The words extra virgin are the item. Refined oil has had the good part stripped out; extra virgin is unrefined, so the polyphenols survive, and polyphenols reduce the oxidation of LDL, and oxidized LDL is much closer to what damages arteries than the plain LDL number. Monounsaturated fat and vitamin E come along. The quality test: good extra virgin catches at the back of the throat and makes you cough; if your bottle never has, you bought refined oil with a nice label. Dark bottle, harvest date. It replaces the sugared bottled dressing and the butter or margarine on the vegetables. You will feel nothing from it, ever; it is the purest long-game item. It makes the list because it asks you to change nothing but the bottle, and because it is what makes numbers five and six survivable. Lentils and broccoli lose most men on taste because nobody taught them to cook a vegetable in a little fat.

The one removal

Liquid sugar: soda, juice, sweetened coffee drinks, energy drinks, the sports drink with no sport. It is the only thing on the plate not in a slot. It displaces nothing, satisfies nothing, and is hundreds of calories a day that never register as food, hitting all at once because there is no fiber, protein, or fat to slow it. Everything else on the list is slow on purpose. Orange juice stings because it sits where the greens powder did: it reads as help, but it is sugar with the fiber removed, and the fiber was the part that mattered. Alcohol is the bigger lever for many men and hits sleep and recovery harder than soda ever will, but Zac keeps it out of this slot because the list lives or dies on what you are still doing in eight months, and quitting drinking fails that test; it means renegotiating a social calendar, and telling an executive to eliminate it buys three good weeks. What he has watched hold is moving a man from reactive drinking, where the night decides, to deciding before he walks in the door.

The travel week

This does not work only on a perfect week. A hard travel week, unknown schedule, client dinners, everything working against you, is the test, and seven foods you can aim at specific points of the day turn it from coming home dead, inflamed, and heavier into something manageable. Four out of seven on the road, seven at home. The man who runs a perfect seven at home and falls apart the second he travels does worse over a year than the man who holds four.

The greens powder, the protein bar, the granola, the orange juice: four items, one trick. Something dressed up to sound like the thing it replaced, so you feel you handled it and stop looking. These seven are not a correction you might need. They are the floor. Build the protein floor with the first four, the fiber and vegetables with the next two, let the olive oil carry the two you would otherwise quit, and take the liquid sugar off the table. If a man only ever does number one, the eggs, he still came out ahead. Food is the floor; the panel tells you what you are short on before you buy anything.

Transcript

Full text, timestamped

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly formatted. Each timestamp links to that moment in the video.

0:00 The problem with diets is that every week there’s a new list. 20 superfoods on Monday, 15 swaps by Friday, or some podcast telling you the complete opposite. So, what are men over 40 supposed to do? Just freeze and do nothing? I’m not guessing here. I work with high performing men in their 40s and 50s. And I spent my own money figuring out which of these shortcuts actually do nothing. So, this is just a short list that actually held up. Seven foods. And at the end, the one thing I take off your plate first, and I’ll walk through what each one actually does at a body your age. and what it’s replacing on your plate. Before I start, one thing. Every food on here had to clear two bars. It had to matter nutritionally, but you also had to be willing to still be eating it in 8 months from now. Guys, treat a diet like it’s a weakness, right? Like it’s something you were supposed to white knuckle with enough discipline to get through anything. But it’s not, right? A diet you quit in just 3 weeks does nothing for you. So, I’m not handing you the perfect list. What I’m trying to do is hand you one that’s you actually stick with. Number one, eggs, right? And eggs go first because it’s the highest

1:01 Lever swap that you’ve actually got. And it takes you all about what, six minutes to make. This one’s replacing the cereal, the bagel, the pastry, or this I don’t really do breakfast. I just grab a coffee. Because most men over 40 eat a breakfast with basically no protein in it. And then they wonder why they fall off a cliff at 10:00 in the morning. And that 10:00 a.m. crash is traces straight back to your breakfast. Okay, you ate at a bagel at what, let’s say, 6:30. your blood sugar is going to shoot up and then it came crashing back down and now you’re sitting in a meeting feeling slow and stupid for no reason. And that’s not a willpower thing. Protein and fat in that first meal flattened that whole thing out. Three eggs at breakfast and that crash is just not going to show up the same way and you’ll feel that the same day. And that’s what I like about starting here. You get a win that you can actually feel. And the second thing about this same morning eggs are about as filling as a food gets. So the guy who eats them at 7:00 isn’t digging through the pantry at 10:00. A lot of that afternoon grazing gets set up way back because of the breakfast intake. Now, the part that matters most is the part that you are not actually gonna

2:02 Fill. Every man over 40 is losing muscle whether he trains or not. And the thing that slows it down is hitting your protein target over and over, meal by meal. Eggs are complete protein and they’re high in lucine. Lucysine is a signal that switches muscle building on. Most men eat almost nothing at breakfast. A little at lunch, then a big pile of it at dinner. So in that one signal a day when you could have had three. Fixing breakfast does not just add protein. It adds a trigger that you were skipping, right? And there’s one more thing about eggs. The yolk is the one of the best sources of fat that you can get. The fat in it actually feeds your brain. You won’t feel that one this week either. That’s the one for the long game. So here’s a timeline. The crash and the hunger, that’s day one and you’re going to feel it fast. The muscle stuff is months out and only if your training and the rest of your eating is there too. And it’s always going to give you both ends of it, right? Because if I tell you something is a fast win, and it actually is, then you’re going to believe me a little more, right? And when I tell you about the slow stuff, you can’t feel it. And I already know the first comment. What about cholesterol? It always comes with eggs,

3:03 Right? Look, for most people, the cholesterol you eat has a lot less to do with your blood cholesterol than you would actually think. Saturated fat and refined carbs do a lot more of that. But there’s a minority of men who are hyper respponders, and their numbers do move on cholesterol they eat. And there’s exactly one way to find that out which guy you are. You test it. Food is the floor and your blood work is what’s going to tell you if you are the exception. And by the way, three eggs is somewhere around 18 grams of protein. I’m not prescribing that number. It’s just an easy way to picture what hitting that target looks like. Number two, cottage cheese. Just plain cottage cheese. And I’m going to come back to that word plain because it’s the part guys get wrong. This one’s for that 3 p.m. slot. It’s replacing the protein bar, the flavored yogurt, the fistful of whatever is in the pantry when the afternoon hits you. And it does one job and it does it slowly. Cottage cheese is mostly a casein protein and casein curdles up in your stomach and drains out slow over hours. A protein bar fills you for what 15 or 20 minutes. This covers the whole 3 to 6:00 p.m. window where most men over 40 start losing the

4:03 Day. Do it once and you’ll fill it that afternoon. The grazing just doesn’t happen. You get to dinner not starving. So dinner is a calm decision instead of a pantry rate. And honestly, that part matters more than most snacking does. And the math here is just in your favor just as much. A cup runs about 25 grams of protein and around 200 calories. That bar you’re replacing is about 15 grams of protein for every 250 calories. And it’s a candy bar with the fitness label on it. So you’re getting more protein, fewer calories, and hours of coverage. The bar gives you a spike and a crash, and that’s it. And there’s a second reason to keep it around. It’s an actual real source of calcium. And your bone density after 40 is heading the same way your muscle is. And nobody’s checking on it until something breaks. Couple of notes here. Cottage cheese is high in sodium. So, if you’re watching your blood pressure, buy the low sodium version as it’s a non-issue. And if dairy doesn’t sit well with you, don’t force it. Put another low protein in that slot and move on. All right, let’s get back to the plain part. Cottage cheese has an image problem for men our age, right? And I know it does because

5:04 It’s the stuff our moms ate off a canned peach what back in 1985. And that’s just a memory talking to you. It has nothing to do with the nutrition. And the fix is in one word, plain. Because the second you start buying the kind with the fruit stirred in, you’re right back in the exact sugar problem that I’m about to show you. But now, before we get to number three, I want to stop you on that yogurt aisle and have you stay with me for a second because there’s a trap sitting right next to that cottage cheese. Flavored yogurt and granola. A man dumps both into his bowls and what happens in his head is he’s handled breakfast. He doesn’t count it. He doesn’t question it. He just stops thinking about it. Same move as the green powders I told you to stop buying. The label did the thinking for him. So he quit checking. Now I’m not going to sit here and call it candy because that’s an exciting version and isn’t quite true. Granola’s got real fiber in it, real nut, right? No debate there. Some of the sugar in it is the flavored yogurt is just lactose that was always in there. If I told you it was poison, you’d go read one label, see I was exaggeration and and click off and that would be fair. And the honest version says plenty on its own. Flavored yogurt carries way more added sugar than the

6:04 Guy pouring it in would ever guess. Granola is one of the most calorie dense things in the whole store and almost nobody’s ever weighed out the real serving of it. So, a bowl of man swears is light and is carrying a lot more than he would ever think and it’s got a fraction of the protein that plain cottage cheese sitting on the shelf over wood. So, I’m not calling it bad food. It’s just the same trick, just a different aisle. Something dressed up to sound like it’s the thing that it’s replacing. And that’s the trap. You let the label do the thinking for you. And that’s the same one the whole supplement aisle runs on. It’s why guessing costs a man over 40 so much more money over the years. You get out of it by knowing your exact numbers. That is why there’s an actual physician belt into what I do. So, if you want this built around your real panel in your real week, that’s the work we do together. And the leak is down in the description. Everyone else stay with me. The next four is where the floor really gets built. Number three, lean red meat two to three times a week at dinner. Now, this is the one that takes the most heat every time. So, I’m going to give it to you in the straight

7:04 Version first. what it does that nothing else on the list does well. Red meat is the most protein dense food a man actually will eat because he wants to. And that’s where the part of that matters probably the most. Cuz when you want to eat something, you’re way more likely to do it because a guy who is eating steak is going to hit his protein target on a random Tuesday without ever thinking about it. And the guy that’s like choking down his fourth chicken breast by the end of the week is out of it by Thursday, right? And around that protein also, you’re getting a B12 that only shows up in animal foods which you absorb worse as you get older. and zinc, which most men wear run a little low on, is going to help as well as your iron does because your body absorbs it way better than the iron you would through plant. Plus, you also get a little creatin. That’s a package that’s generally hard to put together anywhere else in one meal. Now, the honest part, because there are two different claims about red meat, and the public argument mashes them into one. So, let’s talk about it. Processed meat, that’s your bacon, your deli meat, uh your hot dogs, the stuff that has a real and pretty consistent link to, you know, cancer. And that’s a stronger evidence that I’m not going to sit here and stand here and

8:04 Try to argue with you on it because it’s right. I can see that one. But unprocessed red meat, an actual steak, that’s a much weaker and messier picture. It’s mostly observational and it’s all tangled up in this fact that people who historically ate a ton of it and smoked more, uh, drank more, carried more weight, and ate fewer vegetables. That doesn’t make the concern zero. It just makes it smaller and a lot less certain than the headline you got handed. So, here’s the line I’ll stand behind. the bun, the fries, the sheer volume, and the processing. That’s where the actual problem lives. Okay, a couple of unprocessed servings a week sitting right next to the lentils and the vegetables that are also on this list is way down on a man’s real problems. Near the top of that list is 10 years of undereating protein while he slowly loses muscle. That’s what actually is costing him. And there’s one more thing with red meat. Men don’t minstrate. Well, at least the biological ones, right? So, men don’t have a monthly way to clear out iron. And there’s a small number of men out there who are walking around with a condition called hemocromotasis and have no idea. And for those specific men, more iron is

9:04 Generally the wrong direction. For Tillin, it’s one in line on a basic panel. So, this is a great food for most men. And there’s a subset of men that that it’s not going to be great for. And the only way to find out which one is for you is to measure it. Same as everything else I tell you. Measure it and then you know. and on the saturated fat in your let’s say LDL. I’m not going to sit here and relitigate a whole contested science fight on camera. If yours runs high, that’s a number to keep an eye on with your panel in a conversation with your actual doctor. It’s not a reason to be scared of a steak. Number four, salmon twice a week. And this one’s the packaged item. It’s on the list even though nothing it does is completely unique to it. You’ve got about 40 g of protein in a 6 play. So, it clears the protein bar on its own. But what earns its spot on this list is the omega-3s. the EPA and the DHA. And these are actual belting materials. DHA gets physically built into your cell membranes heavily in your brain and your eyes. EPA is what your body uses to build molecules that calm inflammation down. And on top of that, you get vitamin D, which is hard to get from

10:05 Food at all, plus B12. Now, this one’s a slow one. The fullness at the mill, sure, you’ll get that. But everything else is months out because you’re changing the actual makeup of your cells, and that takes time to show up. The eggs paid off the same day. I’m telling you right now, salmon will not give you the same feel that week. And I’m telling you that upfront. You need to eat it anyway, though. And if you watched my supplement video, you probably got a fair question right now because I kept fish oil in the cabinet. Here’s why both are true. Two servings of salmon a week does not move the needle for me. And my panel is what actually showed me that gap. The fish oil is what closed it. And I only know that because I actually measured it. So eat the food for everything else in the package. And then supplement the gap that the food is leaving. But you need to know where the actual gap is before you do that. Two things people always ask me, farmed or wild. The best one is the one that actually you buy because both are good sources of EPA and DHA. The fish runs low on mercury. So that’s not the thing to worry about here. And if the price is your real objection, sardines, there’s your answer cuz it does the same job for a fraction of the

11:05 Cost. Number five, lentils. This is the fiber one and it’s the one you don’t want. I know that. So I’m going to make you care about the problem they fix, okay? because that’s how we get past this. The lentils just is the cheapest tool for it. You’re replacing the rice or the potato sitting next to your dinner. You keep the meal you actually like. You’re just swapping out the most boring thing on the plate, right? And fiber is doing two different jobs here, okay? The the soluble kind for it’s going to form a gel in your gut and it’s going to slow everything down. That’s going to flatten the blood sugar rise off the same plate of food and it drags bile acids out. So, your body has to burn cholesterol to make more of them. And that’s one of the better established ways for food to lower your LDL. The other kind feeds the bacteria down in your gut and they turn into the fuel that cells lining your colon runaround. And that’s the direct answer that red meat I was just talking about. That concern I conceded back to number three is the food that pushes it back on it and it was sitting the on this list the whole damn time. You also get about 18 g of protein in a cup plus magnesium, potassium, and iron. Couple caveats

12:05 Here. Most men aren’t eat anywhere near close to the fiber that they should. And the ones who do think about it treat it as it’s a bathroom thing, which is probably the least important thing it does. It’s a metabolic input. It’s a cardiovascular input. Treat it like it matters for your heart because it does. And if you jump from zero straight to a cup a day, your gut’s going to complain for a couple weeks while the bacteria catches up. So ramp up a little slow. But the part that really lands for this audience is the price. Lentils are the cheapest item on the whole list. And it’s really not close. A couple dollars a bag. That’s a week a sides. And I just got done admitting I threw real money at supplements that did nothing for me. So the cheapest thing on the list having better evidence behind it than half the cabinet did. That should feel good. And if you really won’t do lentils, black beans does a similar job. Number six, kisserous vegetables. So So that’s broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage. This one’s replacing that green powder. And there’s an actual mechanical reason the vegetable does something that scoop just can never do. So, when you chew these up or you you cut them, an enzyme inside the plant is going to turn

13:05 Into raw compounds into actually active ones. And you’ve probably heard some of these. And these, what they’re going to do is they’re going to turn your body into its own detox machinery. Now, I don’t mean it’s going to detox like in the wellness sense. Nothing is getting flushed out of you. You already own a whole system for clearing out all the stuff that needs to be cleared out. And these compounds just turn up the dial on it a little bit. And the reason the powder can’t pull all that off comes down to one enzyme. And that enzyme that makes the active compound only fires when the fresh plant tissue gets damaged. In a dry shelf stable powder, it’s mostly gone already. So even if you set the whole dosing questionable aside, the scoop physically can’t do what the vegetable does. And this isn’t a whole food snobbery type thing. This is a specific chemical reason the scoop fails. And then there’s a reason that’s specific to men our age. The same pathways these vegetables support are involved in how your body clears out estrogen byproducts. So, a man who’s like over 40 is usually going to tend to carry a little bit more fat and that nudges a bit more testosterone over towards the estrogen range. So, supporting the pathway that clears these

14:06 Byproducts is a real men’s health reason to eat them. Beyond the usual eat your vegetable stuff your mom probably told you, this is exactly the spot where the supplement industry turns around and sells you these capsules to promise you evidence that’s not clearly backed up at this point. The food is well established. The pill is the version that gets oversold. Then you got the ordinary stuff that still counts fiber. So, it’s doing its part just like the lenol did for you. Vitamin K, folate, and a lot of volume for almost no calories. So, what you’re doing is you’re being able to fill up on something that basically cost you nothing. You won’t fill it any of this, by the way. It’s a long game item. The only thing you’ll notice soon is that a big pile of vegetables at dinner just makes you eat less of everything else without even trying. And one note, if you’ve heard this whole thyroid thing that matters at extreme raw intakes and if you’re already, you know, deficient on some of these items, it does not matter at a normal plate of cooked broccoli. Number seven, extra virgin olive oil. And that word extra virgin is the whole item because the plain refined stuff has had the good part stripped right out of it and that’s a fat and that’s it. Extra virgin is unrefined and

15:07 That means polyphenols survive in it. And the polyphenols are the active part. What they do is that they can actually stand behind and reduce the oxidation of your LDL. And oxidized LDL is a lot closer to the thing that actually damages your arteries than the plain LDL number by itself. You also get the monounsaturated fat and some vitamin E along with it. And there’s a great little way to check you bought the right thing. Good extra version catches at the back of your throat and makes you cough a little. That’s because there’s a compound in there and it works as a rough quality test. And if your bottle has never once done that to you, you probably bought refined oil with a nice looking label. Buy it in the dark bottle with a harvest date on it because the cheap stuff gets cut down with other oils. It’s replacing that bottled dressing with sugar in it and the butter or margin you put on your vegetables. You’ll feel nothing from this one ever. And I mean that. It’s the purest long game item on the list. So, why does something this small even make the cut? Two reasons. One, it’s the only item on here that ask you to change nothing. You

16:07 Buy a different bottle one time and you keep doing the exactly what you were doing already. And two, it’s the thing that makes numbers five and six survivable. Lentils and broccoli lose most men on taste flat out. And the reason is nobody ever taught them how to cook a vegetable in a little fat. Olive oil is what turns the two items you don’t want into two things that you’re actually going to keep eating. So, it barely counts as its own food. It’s really just what makes the other two before it worth eating. So, those are the seven. Now, before I give you the one thing to actually take off your plate, look at what every one of them had in common. They all went into a slot that was already full. Breakfast was already happening. The 3 p.m. crash was already happening. Dinner already happening. All you did was decide that those slots and what they’re made of. The one thing I remove is different because it’s the only thing on your plate that isn’t in a slot at all. Liquid sugar. So that’s soda, juice, the sweet and coffee drinks, the energy drink, the sports drink you’re having while you’re not actually playing a sport. And it earns the removal for one reason. It’s pure addiction. It displaces nothing. It satisfies nothing. And there is one thing you can take away

17:08 Without deciding what goes into its place. It’s hundreds of calories a day that never once registrated to you as a food. And the reason it works is dead simple. There’s no fiber. There’s no protein. no fat and there’s no slowing it down. So, it’s all hits at once. Everything else on this list is slow on purpose. The cottage cheese, the lentils, all of it. This one just hits and that’s it. And that’s the one thing that’s going to sting a few of you is the orange juice because it sits in the same spot in your head that the green powders did. It reads as help, but it’s sugar with the fiber taken out. And the fiber was the one part that actually mattered. Now, I’ll be straight with you because somebody’s already typing probably in the comments right now. For a lot of men watching this, the biggest lever of all is alcohol. Three or four drinks a week is totally different conversation than three or four at night. And the alcohol hits you at your sleep. It hits you in your recovery a lot harder than the soda ever will, but I’m still not putting it into this slot. And the reason is simple. The whole list lives or dies on what you’re actually still doing in 8 months from now. And quitting drinking just doesn’t fit that test. Cutting it out means renegotiating your whole social calendar, which is

18:08 Completely different beast than swapping one food for another. What I’ve actually watched work is moving a man off reactive drinking where the night just decides it for him over to deciding before he ever walks in the door. And that one holds, right? Telling some executive to eliminate it completely buys you about three good weeks and then nothing. Right? Alcohol is a bigger number, but that’s in a different video. One more thing before I wrap up. I don’t want you walking away thinking this one works on a perfect week. It doesn’t have to because a week that actually tests the system like this is a bad one. A travel week, a slam week, the kind where everything is just working against you. This is what a hard travel week looks like. You leave, you might not know what your schedule is. You might have client dinners. And so, there’s a lot of unknown variables to it. But when you have some of these variables like seven foods that you can concentrate on at certain points of the day or when you’re at the table and you concentrate on those, you’re making small changes in your life. And that work week travel turns into something where you’re coming home dead, tired, you know, inflamed or just haven’t gained weight into something that’s more manageable. And that’s it. In one week, four out of seven on a travel week and then back to normal when you’re home. That’s the

19:08 System that’s going to actually survive life. That’s unpredictable. The guy who runs a perfect seven out of seven at home and then completely falls apart the second he travel is doing worse over a full year than the guy who just holds four. So, let’s step back and look at the whole picture here. The green powder, the protein bar, the granola, the orange juice. Those are four items. The same trick showed up. Something dressed up to sound like a healthy thing get replaced so you feel like you handled it when you really didn’t. And that’s most of what the food industry is selling you. A reason to stop looking. These seven foods aren’t some correction you might need and might not. They’re the floor. You’re going to eat breakfast. You’re going to eat dinner. You can’t opt out of any of it. The only thing you get to decide is what it’s all made of. So, decide on it on purpose. Build your protein floor with the first four. Build your fiber and your vegetables with the next two. Let the olive oil carry the two you’d otherwise quit on. And take the liquid sugar off the table completely because it’s never really a slot that you should have had to begin with. You do that and you’ve built the floor. And listen, if a man ever only does number one, just the eggs and nothing else, he still came out

20:09 Ahead because he’s got one more real protein meal in him today than he had this morning. You just need a floor and you need to still be standing on it from 8 months from now. Food is the floor. And once the floor solid, the next question is which supplements are worth your money and which ones aren’t. And I spent a whole lot of my own money finding that out. That’s the video sitting on your screen right now and that’s the one I want you to watch next because the fastest way to waste money after 40 is to start buying stuff before you even know what you’re short on. And that’s the only thing that ever tells you that is your own numbers. And I’ll see you over there.