600+ Questionable Ingredients In Your “Healthy” Packaged Products? Is Beef Tallow Actually Safe (Surprising Answer!) & How To Save Money On Good Groceries, With Thrive Market’s Nick Green.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Nick Green [00:00:05]: The FDA. There are ingredients that the FDA hasn't re-reviewed or hasn't reviewed at all in decades. This is the food dye issue, right, where you've got Red 3, Yellow 5, Blue 1. All of these food dyes, many of them are actually byproducts of petroleum, which is pretty crazy when you start to think about it. They're linked to behavioral issues and like, cognitive developmental issues in kids, like hyperactivity, ADHD, et cetera. Red 3 has specifically been linked to thyroid dysfunction and thyroid cancer in rats since, like the 1980s. These are ingredients that have been banned in Europe for a very long time. Interestingly, actually, Red 3 was banned from cosmetics. So, like, it can't be in lipstick and yet it's still allowed in food.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:49]: Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:54]: I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond. Nick Green, the co-founder and CEO of one of the coolest places to shop for groceries online, Thrive Market. How you doing, dude?

Nick Green [00:01:20]: Doing very well. Thanks for having me.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:21]: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think a lot of people are aware of ordering healthy food online or just food online in general, but I don't think I've ever actually done a podcast about Thrive. However, I know that you have a pretty deep body of knowledge that goes beyond that, including things like, you know, the USDA food standards and maybe a lot of things that are going on right now while we're recording this. I think yesterday it was the banning of food dyes. I'll be very curious to hear your thoughts on that. But how do you describe what you do to people? Like, if I'm sitting next to you on an airplane or we have a really long elevator ride from zero to the 30th floor.

Nick Green [00:02:03]: Yeah, well, I haven't done the elevator pitch in a long time, but basically, you know, for us, it starts with just a really big mission, which is we think healthy, natural, organic, sustainable products should be accessible, affordable, available to anyone. So that's. That's what we get up to do every day. It's why we started the company. And really, like, at a super high level, Thrive Market is aiming to be the platform that makes healthy living accessible to anyone.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:31]: So did you grow up with hippie parents eating granola and sawdust or what got you interested in this?

Nick Green [00:02:38]: No, it's interesting. My co-founder did. So my co-founder, Ganar, grew up on a communal farm in Ojai, California.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:44]: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me, by the way. I think I met him at a yogurt retreat or something like that.

Nick Green [00:02:49]: Exactly. If you know Ganar, it won't surprise you. And he basically grew up. They were doing wholesale buying organic food back in the 70s and 80s for the farm, also growing a lot of their own food. And this is in Ojai, California, where there was this huge organic movement that had been going at that point already for a couple decades. I had kind of a very different experience growing up. Different and the same. So the different part was I was in Minneapolis or outside Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Nick Green [00:03:19]: So think middle class Midwest in the 90s. Processed food, fast food, you know, sugared cereal, all that stuff was like the norm. But I had a mom who was very determined to chart a different path.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:35]: Oh, really?

Nick Green [00:03:35]: Yeah. So we were like the weird house on the block that had, you know, no soda on the table. I mean, we didn't have a soda in the house, let alone on the table at dinner time. You know, we weren't allowed to have sugared cereal. So it was like Cheerios was the fanciest thing that we could have for breakfast. And for her, it went back to. Actually, her family had a lot of obesity.

Nick Green [00:03:58]: Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes was the big thing. Multiple siblings that had diabetes. Her mom had diabetes very early. And so she was making these changes for herself back in the 90s and basically enforced it on the family in a way that we hated at the time, but ultimately ended up being basically breaking a generational cycle.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:17]: You weren't the cool kids.

Nick Green [00:04:19]: We were. Oh, no, we were. I mean, for a variety of reasons, we were not the cool kids, but that certainly was one of them. And, you know, the crazy thing was I just got to see firsthand, like, what it did on the positive. But I also saw how hard it was for her to do it. You know, it's like we didn't have a Whole Foods down the street. If we. If we had, like, we wouldn't have been able to afford the price premiums.

Nick Green [00:04:38]: And so she was doing it on a budget. She was doing it without a lot of access. And then she was also doing it at a time where, like, you know, no. No Internet, no health and wellness influencers. Like, she was, like, researching at the library.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:51]: No food babe cookbooks.

Nick Green [00:04:52]: No, no, no, no, no. But, like, it's pretty incredible. Like, again, she was very ahead of her time, but managed to get the basics right. And honestly, I think my personal philosophy on nutrition still is an 80-20. And she really did it. And so the genesis of Thrive was I had started a company in college, sold that and moved out to LA for the earn out. The acquiring company is based here and basically was kind of blown away getting to SoCal. This is in 2013, 2014, and it's like, wow, there's this health and wellness world.

Nick Green [00:05:28]: And I went deep into it, having remembered, had that experience growing up from my mom. And I was like, this is a movement now. There's millions of people that want this. And I was like, my mom was no longer the weird person. This is the norm now here. And yet the thing that blew my mind and the opportunity and the problem we're trying to solve with Thrive is that despite that movement, it's still really hard to get healthy. Right. And the stats are kind of, kind of mind blowing.

Nick Green [00:05:55]: Like, half of people don't live within driving of a health food store. The price premium on organic is still ridiculous in most cases.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:02]: Yeah, you got the $36 jars of coconut yogurt at Erewhon.

Nick Green [00:06:06]: Totally.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:07]: Yeah.

Nick Green [00:06:07]: And it's like if you're, you know, if you're affluent in a place like LA or New York Reservoir in San Francisco, fine, it's easy. But if you're anywhere else in the country, or frankly, even if you're in LA, New York or San Francisco and you're not making enough money to spend at Erewhon or go to Whole Foods, it's really challenging. And then I think the one thing that's different and kind of interesting in an opposite way is when my mom was doing it, the issue was not enough information. Now you've almost got this information overload where people are hearing all the influencers online saying opposite things. You know, up is down, left is right. Like, protein's good, protein's bad, fat's good, fat's bad. And you can literally find an argument for anything. And I think for a lot of people, the question of just like, where to start, what's right for me, what the heck do I do? It's kind of, you know, a lot of people are just paralyzed.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:59]: Yeah. And you also don't see a lot of flexibility in the influencer scene because it's hard to turn your back on an argument that you've made in the past when your paycheck depends on you being right.

Nick Green [00:07:09]: This is a whole rabbit hole we can go into. And there's like this. It's like the polarization of all dialogue in this country. Right. Whether it's political, ideological, economic and health, it's not conducive to truth.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:24]: I joke sometimes from stage that if you want to make a lot of money in the nutrition industry, one of the ways to do it is to write a book and create a villain in the book that is going to kill everybody. And then if you're really smart towards the latter pages of the book, you design or talk about a supplement you've created to nuke the villain and champion that is the one perfect diet for all of humankind. And it's just, you know, it's a great business model, but it creates a lot of confusion. You know, when there's like 12 books on the market, each with a different villain.

Nick Green [00:07:54]: Yeah. So silver bullets abound. Exactly. It's tough.

Nick Green [00:07:58]: So yeah, Thrive like we approach our business as let's break down each of the barriers to healthy living. So the first one we break down is geography. So we ship anywhere in the lower 48. And the assortment is highly, highly curated. So it's all 100% non-GMO on the food side, 600 plus banned ingredients across all categories. They're even more curated than you find at Whole Foods. We carry across the same number of categories in non-perishable, an order of magnitude fewer SKUs. So the idea is outsource your trust to us. Make it simple.

Nick Green [00:08:33]: Know that everything clears this high bar. And then because we have a smaller assortment, we can actually do a lot of work to tag all the products so people can find the right products for them. And like you may not know what keto is, but you're, if you're interested in that diet, click a filter. It all filters down. If you got a kid with a nut allergy, a spouse that's lactose intolerant, click, click, click. It all filters. And so there we break down this barrier of just like intimidation. Where do I start? How do I read the labels on Thrive? You don't have to.

Nick Green [00:09:01]: And then a big part of it is also on price. So we operate on a membership model. Think like Costco for healthy food, 60 bucks a year, every paid membership sponsors one for a low income family. And then that membership helps us to offer the products at below retail prices. So our like theoretical goal, which we don't always achieve, but we sure get pretty close, is let's get the natural, organic, better for you product at or below a conventional equivalent.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:28]: Yeah, I think I've described it in the past like Costco met Whole Foods and had a baby. Really, really helped. Really help seed oil for baby. So how about AI? Has that changed anything for you in terms of like allowing people to auto populate their carts in a different way or change the filtration mechanisms or anything like that?

Nick Green [00:09:49]: Yes. So, you know, one of the advantages of being online is that we have a lot of data, right? So like when, if you go into the grocery store, the only data your grocery store has is like, what's on the receipt. And like, you may come back. They don't even know that you're the one that you. They're not tracking longitudinally what you purchased. And so we can track that data to drive personalization for people over time, and we've done that for years. So just running big machine learning algorithms to create recommendations of what to buy when based on not only what you've done, but also like aggregating the data across others. Like, you just like to think giant correlation models you can really give people.

Nick Green [00:10:30]: And this isn't just us, right? Amazon does an incredible job of this too, where those product recommendation engines get really good. The difference for us is we're purpose built for healthy living, so everything is focused around these health dynamics. We also have an onboarding experience where people voluntarily share, like, this is what I'm trying to achieve. These are the values I care about. These are the dietary restrictions I have. And then they actually shop using those filters. So we get all of this metadata across the entire assortment and across purchase behavior. What's been really interesting in the last 18 to 24 months, which is the tie into AI, is we've gone one step further in helping members build the cart basically for them.

Nick Green [00:11:14]: So it used to be when you came on Thrive, you would take an onboarding quiz and you would get popped into. We called it my aisle. So I was like, like the way I described it is like, imagine a, you know, a magical store experience where instead of having to walk down every aisle and find the stuff that's relevant for you, it's like all in one place.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:28]: I could just walk in and have the Ben Greenfield aisle, which would be like avocado, dark chocolate, sardine, blueberry. Like literally, like my team, my EA team, when I travel, they have the list that they're supposed to order that is at my hotel room, you know, above the mini fridge. When I get there, that's it.

Nick Green [00:11:47]: Yeah, so that was like the circa 2020 or 2022 version. The flip more recently is we're creating like the Ben Greenfield cart, right? And so like, when you come on Thrive Market, you give us the same data. But now that machine learning algorithm is powerful enough that we can recommend products that are so close to what you actually want to buy. In fact they 15% of the time, approximately they are what you want to buy. And we'll just build the cart for you. So you end up then like the average card on Thrive, first order is like 15 items. If you're building that from scratch, it takes a lot of time. You're going to forget things like etc.

Nick Green [00:12:24]: Etc. Now we're seeing about half of the items, people you'll end up actually checking out with are items that the AI will load into the cart. So it's still early days and honestly there's so much headroom still I think to, to achieve more here. But like the direction that it's going is, you know, you're in a unique position to have EAs that help you to do that when you travel. We want to bring this to like anybody, right?

Ben Greenfield [00:12:47]: People don't have to have some team doing it for them. But I'd still do it once over to make sure it didn't do some like, you know, substitute cashews for macadamia nuts or smoked oysters for sardines, like.

Nick Green [00:12:57]: Right. So this is, this is like really critical and part of, part of like our promise to our members is making sure they're still in control. So I think there's so many e-commerce services and like everyone's had this experience where it's like, you know, you get like force fed into a subscription. All of a sudden you've got like a pile of these products that you didn't remember you'd subscribe to and they like show up and stuff. With Thrive, we really focus on the number having final control. So like we think about that cart build is not set it and forget it. It's like that's an intelligent default. You then edit it and then, you know, a lot of our members actually do go into autoship, but like over 90% of those orders are edited before they go out. So again like to your point, it's like your AI assistant loads the card, helps you get started, but then you do that last 20% to make sure it's what you want when you want it.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:48]: Yeah, what about when it comes to AI? And I have no clue if you even thought about this, but it's something I think would be cool if you could ever roll this out. Like somebody's gotten genetic tests, blood panels, maybe they have their Apple health data or something like that could you, in theory, get to a point where people are able to upload their labs and have something like foods chosen based on their genetic profile or companies like Biome have the list of foods that are supposed to be good for your gut and the foods that are bad for your gut. Do you think you could ever get to a point like that or are there legalities around that that would restrict you from doing that?

Nick Green [00:14:26]: There's not legalities as long as people are voluntarily sharing the information. Right. And right now our members already share a lot of information about themselves. That, of course, is something that we keep completely anonymized. So there's no, like, people will share. Here's the diet I'm on. Here are my health goals. Here's what's going on in my family.

Nick Green [00:14:45]: You know, that's something that it only informs the model from an anonymized standpoint. But it is really powerful already. The way it functions today is it's like self-reported and then it's self-selected. So like someone knows that they have, you know, high LDL cholesterol or they have high apob or some other risk factors for heart disease, they can choose. Like we literally have a heart healthy filter that, you know, and there's debate obviously on what is heart healthy. But like, if you want to be on a low saturated fat diet, like here's items that could be, could be good for you.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:19]: Right. Depends whether you ask the American Heart Association or someone who might not be in the pockets of, I don't know, the grain or the oil industry.

Nick Green [00:15:26]: It starts to get really complicated because the link between biomarkers and nutrition, or rather nutrition to biomarkers, you know, these are debated issues, but in theory, absolutely. And I think one of the things that's super exciting, you know, like I was an early investor in function health. Like there are now more and more platforms going direct to consumer where people are tracking their biomarkers and they're already in their own lives seeing how their health habits, whether it's nutrition or exercise or sleep, affect them. So I think more than likely we already have members that are basically buying in that way. And absolutely, over time we can use AI to basically turbocharge that.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:10]: Yeah. This came up when I was interviewing Brandon Dawson from 10X. He was describing to me how they were trying to create QR code that you could scan when you get to the grocery store and the QR code is linked to your genetic and blood data and then it would kind of auto populate your cart based on that. I don't know how far into that process they are, but I thought, gosh, that would be just so cool to be able to have something customized based on your biomarkers or your genetics.

Nick Green [00:16:37]: Yeah, I think it's really exciting and I think it will happen for sure. When you mentioned that, it made me think about one feature we've got on our app is it's a barcode scanner where you can literally take like scan any item you know if you're at the grocery store and either find out if we carry it at a better price at Thrive, which we often do, or if it's an unhealthy item, find it healthier, better for you alternative and then you think about putting AI on top of that and you can then help people build a car with that as the seed for it. So there's, there's so much, there's so much that's going to happen over the next few years and as everyone knows, the space is moving super, super fast.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:20]: Yeah. Playing devil's advocate. Another thing I'll sometimes say when I'm talking to people about nutrition or giving a talk is you shouldn't be relying on these scanning food apps too much because if you're scanning everything that you are eating, by the nature of that, you're eating out of packages. So I tell people, and this is like an old adage, this is my idea, but shop around the perimeter of the grocery store where you're going to find the meat and the veg and the produce and the eggs and the dairy, et cetera. How do you tackle that with Thrive, where people probably perceive that it's just a lot of stuff in boxes and bags. And don't get me wrong, dark chocolate-covered sea salt almonds are incredible. But you also have to tackle this idea of eating as close to the earth as possible. So how do you think about that?

Nick Green [00:18:12]: Totally. I mean, first, you know, whether something is perishable or non-perishable, you know, that's just, does it go in a refrigerator or freezer or not? And there are, you can have ultra processed foods in both of those categories and you can have, you know, whole foods in both of those categories. Now often the packaging is part of the like processing that, you know. So there is a tendency, and it's not a bad heuristic to say middle of the grocery store is going to be more likely to be unhealthy stuff. But we actually see that as then more value that we can add because that's the place that people normally make the most mistakes where they're usually if you go around the perimeter, for the most part, most things are not going to be horrible for your health. You go in the center, it's almost flipped. Most products in a typical grocery store now are ultra processed. And so we're basically taking that part, which is more than 50% of what people buy at the grocery store and saying, all right, here's better for your alternatives.

Nick Green [00:19:09]: Here's a price that's better for you. Here's a convenience model that's better for you. Oh, and by the way, if you can save money on that half of your grocery basket, now you can spend a little more to get organic or get cleaner products as you go around the perimeter. We also have started to get to the perimeter. So like frozen, for example, today is our fastest growing category. So we were doing that with a third party logistics provider before because we didn't have the frozen cake capability in our fulfillment centers. But last year we actually in house that because we were seeing such strong demand and now like, you know, many of the things that people could buy fresh, like meat, seafood for example, or veg, we sell frozen. And there's an argument that I find pretty compelling that the nutritional quality on those products is actually better.

Nick Green [00:19:57]: Like if you think from a supply chain standpoint you flash freeze at the point of pick. Yeah, like for, like if you look at the decay curve on nutrient.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:05]: Oh, so, so, so they're so they're literally kind of like. I do, I do. It's one company I work with Sea Topia. Like I get flash frozen fish and it seems like it doesn't change the texture of the fish much. It's something about that flash freezing process. But walk me through how you guys are tackling the frozen piece.

Nick Green [00:20:21]: Yeah, so, so with, with meat and seafood there's really no difference in, in nutrient quality. You can, as most people know, you can leave it in the freezer for a long time. With where it's really impactful in a positive way is flash freezing the pointed pig for any fruit or veg, particularly like leafy greens, which have like a precipitous decay curve over a matter of weeks. Like to the point that when you're buying, you know, lettuce, broccoli, et cetera at the grocery store, they, it may have lost anywhere from 40 to 80 or 90% of its nutrient value, micronutrient value by the time you are consuming it. And so the argument is, and I think the evidence shows that properly frozen veg and fruit and you know look, there's, there's veg and fruit that you're not going to freeze. So it doesn't apply to every subcategory but in the ones you do, it's actually got better nutrient density. And then I think for the, for the meat and seafood side, the advantage is being able to source, you know, from supply chains that you know, you might not be able to do fresh. So and like hopefully in the future you're going to have more domestic produced meat and seafood that is also high quality.

Nick Green [00:21:34]: But like for example, in the US today, beef, even grass fed beef and this is, I think a lot of your listeners probably know this, but even grass fed beef is often grain finished. And so if you look at the like fat profile for example of those animals, they're not that different than a grain fed animal.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:52]: I know those bastards, they can get away with it though. People like grass fed and you know, I think, I think more and more people are becoming aware of this. But yeah, grass fed isn't grass fed totally.

Nick Green [00:22:01]: It's like if grass fed, if it tastes like grain fed, it's probably because it probably has a nutrient profile that's more like grain fed.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:07]: Yeah. And I, I won't lie, like I do like, like if I go to a steakhouse and I'm getting a full on fed from birth oodles, you know, metric crap, tons of grain cow, it tastes better. But the problem is I know enough about what that does to the body to where I don't even enjoy the experience as much just because I know it's kind of like once you know how bad a Big Mac is for you, it no longer melts in your mouth with luscious goodness. It's more like crap in my heart now.

Nick Green [00:22:34]: Yeah, ignorance is bliss. Right. But yeah, so like meat and seafood is one of our fastest growing categories. Frozen we think is a huge opportunity for innovation. And yeah, like over time. Today we're still largely non-perishable food, but we've got so much opportunity to, to keep growing across some of these perishable categories and then also getting in outside of food.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:55]: Yeah. With, with the packaging. Obviously microplastics is a big issue now and you still see a lot of healthy foods that are shipped in plastic. Are you guys starting to think about that or have you thought about that?

Nick Green [00:23:09]: Thinking about a lot. I mean it's the, the like you start testing product and seeing the presence of microplastics and PFA s. It's like you just can't get away from it and I know people are now some, you know, more proactive folks, myself included are doing like do microplastic testing on as a, as an individual to see the level exposure and like nobody's escaping that.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:33]: Yeah. And by the way more prevalent than a lot of like yesterday I was researching toasters. They actually line the toasters. You know the little cage where the toast is, the bread slips out more easily. That's lined with essentially like metals and pfas that can leach into your toast. So you, so you start to look into this, you're like crap, it's all over.

Nick Green [00:23:51]: Yeah, well you have like a paper cup and it has a plastic liner. You have a can, a metal, you know, an aluminum can and that has you know, potentially a plastic liner as well.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:01]: Plastic versus silicone spatula. And it's solvable. Fortunately there are companies like one that comes to mind is from our place, right. They're starting to do really good cookware, air fryers, toasters, et cetera. But yeah, with food, what do you do as far as the packaging?

Nick Green [00:24:16]: So I mean we've reduced like plastic packaging is something we've been at war with since the very beginning of the business. And you know unfortunately in, in some categories there just aren't great alternatives. But like we, we, we reduced about 98% of plastic packaging in our orders. So like we're not wrapping and putting additional plastic on things on the private label side. So like the Thrive Market brand, it's only 10% of our assortment but it's like 25% of our sales. So a lot of our most innovative products are actually things that we're developing ourselves working with co-packers and there we have a lot more control over the packaging. Indirectly, like we have with our just standards and admission onto the platform with brands, we also push them to move away from plastic packaging. Obviously BPA-free is a non-negotiable but now the microplastics issue is becoming one that we're focusing in on.

Nick Green [00:25:10]: And one of the cool things actually as a retailer is we can do like we work with a lot of innovative brands that are still young and they're not necessarily at big scale and so things that could be really expensive for them if we come together and as a platform, open source kind of what we're doing. Like we did this for example with plastic, with plastic neutral credits. We actually worked with an organization, open it up to the brands and then they work on plastic reduction but then also had better costing on the plastic offsets. So there's I mean, it is not a problem that's solved.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:51]: So there's like the equivalent of carbon offset for plastics.

Nick Green [00:25:55]: There's the equivalent of carbon. I mean, the challenge with that is it's mostly focused on the environmental issue of like plastic waste disposal. I think the part that just being perfectly candid, you know, we haven't solved and no one has solved is presence of plastic packaging, you know, as a substrate on food. And I think we've done better than anyone else. Like, if you just look at the percentage of products that are out of plastic packaging, you know, everything, BPA free, et cetera, we're very good. But like the truth, it's like relatively good, but nobody's good. And I think that will change over the next five to 10 years. And like, one of the things that we've seen is as these like issues come into the zeitgeist, you know, regulators are always very slow to react, but consumers are not.

Nick Green [00:26:41]: And so, you know, a platform like ours where consumers are savvy, like, we can start like actually leaning out into new innovation, get credit for it. And it's like a good business decision, but it also is like it's creating scale in these supply chains for better products or better packaging when it comes.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:00]: To USDA food standards. Because I think a little while ago you mentioned 600 different things that you guys banned from being allowed in the products that you would sell at Thrive Market. I don't think I've ever really talked on the podcast before about how those standards got or are developed, you know, in terms of actual USDA food standards and how that's created such a pervasive issue in our grocery shopping environment. Do you know much about the USDA food standard system and how that's set up?

Nick Green [00:27:33]: I know too much, too much for.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:36]: My own sense of that. Fill us in.

Nick Green [00:27:39]: Yeah. And just like, as backstory we like, our entry to engaging with the USDA was petitioning the USDA back in 2015 to start accepting food stamps online. Like, we just thought it was crazy that you could go to the corner store and buy soda with with food stamps, but you couldn't buy healthy food online. And that was a 10-year process.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:59]: I was going to say 10 years. That one. That must have been pretty recent. People can use Snap at Thrive.

Nick Green [00:28:04]: You can use Snap at Thrive. You can use Snap at Thrive. We were the first pure play e-commerce retailer to be accepted. About three or four years ago, they started to finally bring brick and mortar in that had an online presence. You could use your Food stamps on like Walmart.com or something like that. But we were the first pure play e-commerce retailer. And yeah, so we like saw firsthand how hard it was to get things done with the USDA. And yeah, it's not nothing against the USDA per se, but just these agencies are big.

Nick Green [00:28:34]: The USDA has been around since like literally 1862. Like it was started under Lincoln. Um, so they have like, they are huge. They have a lot of different kind of convoluted and bureaucratic layers. There's a lot of parts of it that them that may be kind of vestigial from prior eras.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:51]: Right. Stuff. Stuff that possibly even Elon Musk might not be able to make a dent in.

Nick Green [00:28:55]: I think it's going to be really tough. We'll see. It's going to be really tough. And again, it's not like the USDA ultimately, like it took 10 years, but they did make this change. So change is possible. There's good people working in these agencies. They are aware of some of or many of the problems. And I think reform is possible.

Nick Green [00:29:15]: It's just really hard. And if you look at the usda, the structural challenge that they have is that they, their original mandate was not around food standards or food safety. It was around the promotion of the agriculture industry. So it is literally like for supporting farmers. And so it was only later that it evolved to encompass food safety, dietary guidelines, food labeling. Which is food labeling is interesting because that's like there's overlap with the FDA there. So you've got this like there's an issue with agencies that are siloed and then there's also an issue with agencies kind of stepping on each other's toes. But the fundamental challenge that the USDA has is the inherent conflict of interest between being an agency that is there to promote commodity crops like corn, soy and wheat on behalf of farmers, and then setting safety standards and nutritional guidelines.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:15]: You mean that there could be financial interest, in say, taking some kind of a byproduct of corn growth and I don't know, elephant in the room, high fructose corn syrup and having incentives to put that into the food supply?

Nick Green [00:30:31]: Yeah, and I think this is like beyond debate at this point. Right. When you look at the number of things that have to take your example of high fructose corn syrup or just corn byproducts in general, it's like just sort of ludicrous. And that is because of, you know, like the USDA is there to serve, among other like agricultural sub-industries, corn and Then you have the direct incentives that come from lobbying. Right. Where there are huge industry lobbies that have, that are well funded and they carry a lot of sway that are like for, had been for decades and actually more than a century influencing agencies like the usda. So it's not quite the inmates running the asylum, but it is way too close for comfort. And I would say if you look at the kind of twin mandate of the USDA around food standard or, sorry, food safety and food like nutritional guidelines or food standards, they've done pretty, pretty well on food safety.

Nick Green [00:31:29]: Like if you look at the US compared to any other country, you know, pathogen rejection, you know, safe handling procedures, cooking, temperatures, testing, like this stuff is like actually very good in the US and you know, we should be very grateful for that.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:44]: Right. And then to clarify, you're not talking about like the ingredients that are actually allowed in food, you're talking about more about the contaminants that are.

Nick Green [00:31:54]: Yeah, so like, like the, the. And this is again where you have to understand the difference between the USDA and the FDA. So the FDA actually does a lot is a lot broader in terms of categories. Like USDA is really focused on meat, poultry, certain egg products and then nutritional guidelines. But like it's food safety mandate is quite narrow. But it's like, you know, eggs and poultry, meat are like places where there could be real food safety issues and we shouldn't take that for granted that like that the USDA has done a terrific job and that you can eat raw eggs in the US you should like not everyone does this, but you can and you're not going to get sick for the most part. We have very, very good clean supply chains that are well-regulated and well-controlled from the safety standpoint. Where we've had, I think a total failure is on the nutritional standards and guidelines.

Nick Green [00:32:48]: And so this is like now, I think wide out in the open. But the food pyramid that you and I grew up on in the 1990s with refined carbohydrates as the base, with this idea that the cause of heart disease was fats, where different types of fats weren't distinguished between at all, where sort of carbohydrates were universally good. The idea of glycemic load just wasn't even in the picture.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:18]: Yeah, which unlike you, by the way, that's what I was raised like I was raised on really not even the food pyramid. It was more like take and baked pizzas, 29 cent hamburger, 39 cent cheeseburger day you know, gallons and gallons of, you know, fat-free milk even. We had a lot of milk powder.

Nick Green [00:33:37]: I mean, some of what you're saying there was very compatible, right, with the food pyramid. Right, like low fat milk, for example.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:43]: Yeah, yeah. It's kind of, kind of like my parents like accidentally followed the food pyramid because we were just buying what was cheap and what could feed me and my four siblings, you know.

Nick Green [00:33:51]: And like, the problem with the food pyramid was both what it said, but then also what it didn't say. So like, I think probably the biggest failure of the, of the overarching paradigm was like the absolute lack of attention to food quality and food processing. Like at the end of the day at least my perspective is like you can have a diet that has very different macros and still be healthy.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:15]: Oh yeah, absolutely. You could technically. Yeah, you're right. You could hit rewind. You could follow the food pyramid and if your dairy is maybe some really good fermented yogurt and kefir and your grains are good whole grains without synthetic folic acid additives and your meat is from goods, you can technically follow something close to the food pyramid. And this is based on what's the actual biochemical law? I'm blanking on it right now. But it's an equation that dictates that if you're consuming a higher percentage of carbohydrates, your body becomes efficient at glucose oxidation, same for fat with fat oxidation. And that the human body is pretty plastic, not microplastic, but yeah, has a great deal of plasticity in terms of what we can actually metabolize.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:07]: So you see many populations thriving on a high fat, low carb diet, others on a high carb, low fat diet.

Nick Green [00:35:13]: Yeah, this is the Weston A. Price insight, right?

Ben Greenfield [00:35:16]: Exactly. It's the quality that trumps everything.

Nick Green [00:35:18]: That's exactly right. So yeah, I do think that the pyramid itself has problems. But the biggest thing is that but not identifying processing and particularly ultra processed foods as the, as the problem, as the culprit was a major miss. And that is not a coincidence. Right. Like the reason for the push towards ultra processing is it benefits businesses and suppliers and manufacturers and the agriculture industry. Because it's cheap.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:48]: It's cheap and you sell more of it because it's highly palatable and addictive.

Nick Green [00:35:51]: It's. Yeah, it's exactly, it's cheap, it's appealing, it's a better economic model in the short term, but it's got all of these externalities that are being produced in terms of health and downstream consequences that Just weren't taken into account. So what I will say is there's, you know, there has been progress. So if you look at like the 2020 through 2025 nutritional standards and guidelines, like there's more of an emphasis on whole grains, like distinguishing between ultra processed and refined grains versus whole grains, but like they still don't distinguish between different fat types. Right. It's still completely focused on macros versus quality. And I think another thing, which may just be the nature of the beast, but it assumes one size fits all. Right.

Nick Green [00:36:37]: And the reality is, depending on one zone. And this goes back to your point around shopping by biomarkers. Right. But different people respond to different things, different macro nutrients, differently.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:50]: Right, exactly. Like if you're Sub-Saharan African or Southeast Asian genetics, you're going to metabolize carbs, high amounts of fructose, et cetera, more efficiently than a northern European.

Nick Green [00:37:00]: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, when you look at the district, back to how the standards are set, like the USDA reviews them in theory every five years. You've got. So that's probably not enough frequency given how fast like knowledge is, is changing. You've got heavily, heavily heavy influence from these industry groups and lobbies, and not surprise. And then you have years and years or decades and decades, a century plus of accumulated kind of morass in the, in this, in the standards and the agency.

Nick Green [00:37:37]: And not surprisingly, it's pretty, you know, pretty tough to get. Get things to the right place.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:42]: Yeah, yeah. People say it's different in Europe. I mean, I travel to Europe, I look at labels, there's still a lot of crap. And you know, it seems like dyes of preservatives, etc. in Europe. But is that true? Is it a myth? Like, what's the whole USA versus Europe thing?

Nick Green [00:37:59]: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because that anecdotally you'll hear people be like, I went to Europe and like, I ate like pasta all day and I felt great. Right. I went to. And like you ask, you wonder, like, well, was that. Is that what you were eating? Was it that you were active all day? Because you're walking around?

Ben Greenfield [00:38:14]: By the way, I will throw this in that I would say that the lower amounts of herbicides used on wheat crops in a country like Italy could, in my opinion, potentially cause someone to have less digestive distress when consuming a bowl of pasta in Italy versus America. But I think there's considerations that go beyond just herbicides.

Nick Green [00:38:34]: Right? Yeah, no, I. So to be clear, there absolutely are differences. Like when you look at ban. So this is FDA and USDA stuff. But like, the FDA is responsible for like, the banning of ingredients. If you look at the European standard, they basically take a. They use like what's called the precautionary principle, where it is an ingredient has to be proven safe before it is allowed to be added to the food supply. So it's like a guilty until proven innocent.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:05]: And what would safe be considered?

Nick Green [00:39:08]: So it means there have to actually be studies that show over time, no deleterious consequences to health, no toxicity. And if there are studies that show the opposite, you know that like, it's not going in.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:21]: Yeah, but how's that any different than like grass in the USA generally recognized as safe?

Nick Green [00:39:25]: Grass is literally the opposite. Right. Generally recognized as safe is a loophole that allows companies to put what they want in until it is shown definitively to be unsafe. So the burden is actually on consumer groups, or on the FDA itself to prove that an ingredient shouldn't be there. So like, you know, those two approaches, like opt in, opt out kind of thing, are just radically different in what the effect is over time.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:53]: So if I understand properly, what you're saying is safe in Europe means that there's been robust human research demonstrating whether or not something has adverse effects on the human body. Generally recognized as safe in the US means there's really not any or not much research that's been done on this, but proceed at your own risk, it appears to be okay.

Nick Green [00:40:13]: Yeah, generally recognize it safe as proceed at your own risk, because we don't know. And if we don't know, then the ingredient is allowed to be in the food supply. So like, just to be really clear, there too, like the FDA, there are ingredients that the FDA hasn't re-reviewed or hasn't reviewed at all in decades. Right? So, like, this is the food dye issue, right, where you've got red three. Like Red 3, Yellow 5, Blue 1. You know, there's like all of these food dyes, many of them are actually byproducts of petroleum, which is pretty crazy when you start to think about it. But like, those three, the three I just named, for example, are, you know, they're linked to behavioral issues and like cognitive developmental issues in kids. So like hyperactivity, ADHD, et cetera.

Nick Green [00:40:55]: Red 3 has specifically been linked to thyroid dysfunction and thyroid cancer in rats since like the 1980s. You know, these are ingredients that have been banned in the, in the, in Europe for a very long time. And like, Interestingly, actually there, Red 3 was banned from cosmetics. So, like, it can't be in lipstick in the early 1990s, I think in 1990, and yet it's still allowed in food.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:24]: Can't smear it on your lips, but you could eat it.

Nick Green [00:41:25]: But you can invest it. And they. So the really bad thing there is like, you know, kids aren't putting lipstick on, but they are eating Fruit Loops and Skittles. And these dyes are most common in items that are being consumed by children. In part because children like bright colors and in part because they are used basically to mask the unhealthiness of ultra processed foods. One of the effects of ultra processed food, they make it taste really good, but ends up looking really bad. You know, there's like no natural coloring that's going to be left in that thing. So you just put a bunch of artificial coloring in, which cost cents per ton.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:06]: I heard that like a lot of stuff like these cereals due to the ultra processing would be like gray.

Nick Green [00:42:11]: Exactly. Yeah. Of course. It's like any industrial byproduct. Right.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:15]: Who's going to eat gray Cheerios?

Nick Green [00:42:17]: Now, like, the kids want color and. But it's like, it's almost like this. Not to get like conspiracy theory, but it's like, it's like a sleight of hand. Right. It's like a magician doing a trick on our children where it's like we're going to take something that if you looked at that would not be at all appealing because there is no nutrient value. Right. Like, color is a proxy. In nature.

Nick Green [00:42:37]: Color is a proxy for health.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:38]: It's the equivalent of beer goggles for kids.

Nick Green [00:42:41]: Yeah, it's like, now we're going to take this like, industrial byproduct. We're going to put color in it. So it triggers the, you know, kind of pleasure sensors of children. And they're gonna, you know, and then we're also gonna put a bunch of sugar in it or high fructose corn syrup. So like, the taste and the look signals to us health, when in fact it's anything but.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:01]: Right. And back to the beer goggles analogy. You wake up 40 years later with diabetes and roll over and ask, gosh, what the hell did I just sleep with?

Nick Green [00:43:08]: What happened?

Ben Greenfield [00:43:08]: Yeah, yeah.

Nick Green [00:43:09]: So it's, I mean, the, it's pretty crazy. Like, the food diet issue is obviously now coming to the four. And like, in the case of Red 3, California banned it in 2023. Finally. So, like, you had this like state patchwork thing that's happening where some states are being more proactive. And then the FDA, actually, two months ago in February, did come out and say, we are banning it. But then this is like, it's just nuts. They gave manufacturers two years to come into compliance.

Nick Green [00:43:41]: So, like, they've acknowledged that this is a, you know, it's a toxin. It shouldn't be in the food supply. They, you know, I think implicitly have acknowledged that they're decades late in making this happen. But then they said, we're going to give people or going to give manufacturers another two years to actually do it.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:58]: Wow. Okay, so back to Thrive. Let's say me and my wife Jessa, we come to you and we're like, hey, we want to get in the Thrive Market. We have these beautiful Ben and Jessup sweet potato popsicles that we've been making in our kitchen. We want to go big time. Company comes to you. What do you look at, what do you analyze? And to decide whether or not it's going to be allowed in Thrive Market?

Nick Green [00:44:23]: Basically, what we're trying to do is pick up where the FDA has maybe dropped the ball and then go and informed by higher standard areas like the EU, but actually going even further. So, like, you know, we have 600 plus banned ingredients. No artificial colors, no preservatives, no artificial sweeteners. You know, we're not like, no hydrogenated oils, no high fructose corn syrup. Like, all of the obvious bad stuff is just off.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:52]: But there's some. There's some gray areas there. Sorry, I don't want to derail you. But like artificial sweeteners, let's say, like, I don't know, erythritol or sugar alcohol, is that allowed? Is it not? Like, is it artificial, natural? How do you approach stuff like that?

Nick Green [00:45:06]: Yeah, so. And the truth is, we try to follow the evidence. So, like, we do have stevia is a common ingredient. And a sugar alternative can sometimes be better than a sugar or arguably is better than a sugar.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:20]: Like allulose, for example, it's actually good for glycemic variability and insulin sensitivity. It's technically different than sugar. Kind of looks like a chemical on the label, but it's actually super healthy.

Nick Green [00:45:32]: Yeah. So we like allulose, Monk fruit sweetener are on Thrive Market. So the sweeteners question is a little bit is a subtle one. One of the big things that we look to avoid is added sugar. And that, again, is not one that we can draw an absolutely hard line on, because there are cases where the nature of the product, you'd basically have to eliminate a whole category if you're not going to have any added sugar. So we try. I mean the balancing act that we have to play is meeting people where they are, like having the categories that people want, but also doing it in a way that, you know, like plants our flag on the things that matter. So like, no, high fructose corn syrup is just a commitment we've made because like if you want sweet, there's ways to sweeten it that don't have high fructose corn syrup.

Nick Green [00:46:23]: And it's also like a good proxy because if something has high fructose corn syrup, there's probably a lot of other bad stuff happening. You know, we're entirely non-GMO on food. That's not because we're against genetic engineering, but because most of the genetic engineering in the U.S. in U.S. agriculture is to be pesticide and herbicide resistant. So like, you know, a super majority of people test positive for glyphosate in their urine.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:49]: To clarify, what you're saying is if you're buying a GMO product, it's likely that it has been sprayed with pesticide or herbicide?

Nick Green [00:46:56]: That's right, that's right. Because the whole point of genetically modifying that, that commodity or that crop in the first place was to enable heavier spraying of pesticides. So like, you know, we're non-GMO on the food side, I'd say 98% is certified organic. The 2% that's not certified organic is going to be organic. In practice, you know, on the, on the meat side, focusing on grass-fed, pasture-raised, looking at sustainability of harvesting practices, we also try to audit the like sort of brand practices. So like the looking at the cleanness of their supply chain. From an animal cruelty standpoint, from a, from a kind of ethical employer standpoint, this stuff can be burdensome for some brands. So we're not like looking for like, you know, you got to collect a bazillion certifications but being common sense on that stuff.

Nick Green [00:47:54]: And then to your point, your question earlier, like packaging is a big deal and that's one that we work, we try to work collaboratively with the brands because it's hard. But reducing plastic packaging and then focusing on compostable and recyclable materials where possible. But the biggest thing by far is just starting from. All right, here's hundreds of ingredients that you're going to find all over the grocery store that are demonstrably bad for human health. And just like take those out.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:18]: Now the part about sustainability or you know, animal welfare kind of makes me think about something I've been wondering about beef tallow. Because someone commented to me, this is a couple of weeks ago, that oh, there's, there's tons of beef tallow to go around to replace seed oils. Look at all these huge cattle operations. They're basically not using their beef tallow. We can just use that to replace seed oils. At the back of my mind I'm thinking, but isn't that kind of like indirectly keeping large scale cattle operations that are doing a poor job with animal welfare or what they're feeding the cattle and the beef that gets produced from that kind of in business? Right. Doesn't it create like an altogether different problem?

Nick Green [00:49:00]: Yeah, not only that, but it also like the health profile of the fats.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:05]: Right? Exactly. Yeah. Fats are where a lot of animals, you know, pigs especially, but cows also concentrate a lot of the toxins. So what are your thoughts on that?

Nick Green [00:49:14]: Well, I'm glad you actually brought up seed oils because that's, you know, it's a hot button issue as well and actually a very good example of the, you know, the failure of the food pyramid. I think like drop ball on the part of the USDA where like seed oils, like they just like completely missed the issue. Right. And not only that, but actually perpetuated or instigated it by, because they were, you know, embed with all these industry lobbyists and groups. So like soybean, canola, sunflower oil, like these have like risen up just insanely, massively over the last several decades because it made sense from an agriculture lobby standpoint and they didn't think anything about the health side. And like on the health side it conformed to this narrative of like, you know, animal fats are bad and that the seed oils would be better. The problem is seed oils are by definition ultra processed foods. Right.

Nick Green [00:50:14]: They're extracted using chemical solvents, things like hexane. They are rich in omega 6 fats. And what we're now finding, which I'm sure many of your listeners know, is that they're one of the primary drivers of chronic inflammation, which is heart disease, autoimmune conditions, metabolic dysfunction. I mean these are like really, really bad things. So I do think that moving away from seed oil towards, I mean there are good oils like vegetable oils, like avocado oil, or olive oil. I think for cooking beef tallow can be great. But I agree with you that like taking factory farmed animals and using the like fat byproduct to create beef tallow, like that's going to be, have a high toxin load it's going to be poor omega profiles.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:04]: Right. When I see companies like what's the like the shake, the shake fast food chain. They just switched the Steak N Shake.

Nick Green [00:51:11]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:12]: Like I just wonder, I'm like well if they're getting all their beef towel from CAFO food laws we're just creating altogether different.

Nick Green [00:51:17]: Totally. It's a different problem. You can argue whether it's better or worse than seed oils. Probably from a health standpoint it's a little bit better but not much. And from a environmental standpoint and an animal welfare standpoint for sure not better. So yeah, it's tough right. When industry has put its thumb on the scale or governments put its thumb on the scale. We have now a seed oil industrial complex that is massive.

Nick Green [00:51:48]: It's going to be very hard to unwind given the way those supply chains are built. You've got alternatives like tallow which are still like in terms of an ethical supply chain there and a healthy supply chain like you know we work with white oak pastures that does regenerative. Oh yeah, they're great, they're amazing. But like there is only a handful of farms really doing that and like they just aren't at scale. So it's going to be years if not decade plus for those supply chains to grow. What gives me confidence though they will that it will happen is like the conversations are happening and consumers are smart and I think the role that we see Thrive Market having is being that platform to expose the issues, reward the brands that are doing the right thing and sort of allow our members consumers to vote with their dollars and kind of brands and platforms get credit for good work.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:40]: Yeah, well I don't want to end on the note of the depression of potential toxicity and beef tallow. So fun question you guys do have, back to my comment about the the dark chocolate covered sea salt sprinkled almonds. Certain food products that do kind of taste like crack. And again, I know you get this Nick and I don't want to diss Thrive Market but a lot of your packaged foods are hyper palatable and high in calories. I would caution people just because it's healthy you don't have to eat the whole bag. But that all being said, are there any particular products, maybe two or three that are just flying off the shelves because they're freaking crack there?

Nick Green [00:53:20]: The point that you're bringing up is actually really, it's a really important one which is like healthier versus actually healthy and, as I said, part of the fine line we have to walk is where are we going to plant our flag and really take a stand? And then where are we going to meet members where they are and offer them better alternatives? And so subbing out high fructose corn syrup and getting in something like allulose, that's a big win. Even if that product ends up being still processed. So allulose sweetened chocolate has been. It's awesome. It's really good.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:55]: Does not give you bloat like that. What is it? I don't throw them under the bus, but I think lilies. My wife and I used to mow through those. We're like, why do we have so much gas? And we realized just a crap ton of sugar alcohols in it. So I did not know you guys had allulose chocolate. But that. Okay, so that's a plus.

Nick Green [00:54:15]: You know, to like put like. Chocolate's a little addictive. So is. So is coffee. Our chocolate club covered espresso beans. Like just because you said the word crack, that's the first thing that comes to my mind. I mean they are very, very good. And you know, pack a double punch and like a very clean product.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:34]: I'm assuming like mycotoxin mold, free bean, single estate farm, you know, things like that.

Nick Green [00:54:39]: Yeah. And so like a big thing that we're doing now is more, more like independent third party testing ourselves particularly on the own brand side for. We didn't even get into this but like heavy metals is one that's. That's like it's becoming a bigger thing and people are again testing themselves and finding like high levels of heavy, heavy metals, even if they're not consuming a lot of large fish. So yeah, we're, we're all on that and we're actually like stepping up all over it. I mean for me personally, just looking at my kind of stuff, like I eat a lot of like just nuts and seeds. I'll put hemp seeds on everything, right. And it's just like, it's great texture like pumpkin seeds.

Nick Green [00:55:19]: Like if I'm so for me, like I'm a, I'm a skinny guy. Like I actually have trouble getting weight, keeping weight on like kind of maintaining muscle mass. So like I try to make sure I get enough calories. Like walnuts. That's like the go to snack for me. Just have a handful.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:35]: I'm big on the cacao nibs and the unsweetened coconut flakes are probably my two prior because that's the meat of everything I put on top of my smoothies is cacao nibs and coconut flakes just makes any smoothie incredible. So I'll throw those two into the mix.

Nick Green [00:55:51]: I'll put cacao nibs in a smoothie. So I mean, this was my smoothie this morning and there's probably still cacao nibs at the bottom. I will also eat cacao nibs straight. I'll chew them as just kind of a. It's like a little stimulating, it's a little caloric, it's a little bitter.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:07]: You get your anandamide, you get your dopamine. Yeah, nature's feel-good drug. Well, Nick, I'm sure people's mouths are watering. We don't want to make anybody drive off the road or quit lifting weights to the gym so they can go hunt down some cacao nibs to munch on. So probably going to bring this to a close.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:25]: But you guys, I'm not kidding. Thrive Market is actually just like a fun website to shop on. They really have created an incredible user experience. And now with this ability to auto-populate your cart and you know, the filtration mechanisms way beyond what you're going to be able to filter for it, let's say, you know, shopping for foods on Amazon or something like that because they're looking at the health, right? Like keto, paleo, low carb, et cetera. So. BenGreenfieldLife.com/NickGreen. N-I-C-K Green is where you can access the show notes. We got fat discount codes for Thrive Market. I'll put links to other podcasts I've done on things like the seed oil issue, food dye issue, et cetera.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:08]: And Nick, it's a pleasure. This one's been a long time coming because as you know, I've been a customer. I even invested in you guys when you know, early on, close to when you launched. And I've just been a fan for the longest time, so I'm glad we were able to finally have a chat.

Nick Green [00:57:24]: I super grateful for your support through the years and this was fun.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:28]: All right folks, well, BenGreenfieldLife.com/NickGreen, have fun grocery shopping. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com. To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks, facts and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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Ben Greenfield [00:58:56]: So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.