Is It More Expensive to Eat Healthily?

The following is a prerecorded program.

So is it too expensive to eat healthily? It's time for the line of fire with your host biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on the line of fire. And now here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Hey friends, Michael Brown here as we continue to encourage you in the month of January. Let's get healthy. We've been looking at scripture about healing. We've been talking about healthy lifestyle, diet, nutrition, etc. We'll spend some time this week also talking about being emotionally healthy and what we can do to contribute to that.

I'm not going to be taking calls today, but I want to talk to you plainly, openly, honestly, as your friend. Yeah, when we talk about being your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity, this ties in healthy lifestyle ties in with moral sanity and spiritual clarity because we have these bodies given to us by God and we are stewards over these bodies and Jesus has bought us with a price. He bought our bodies as well, right? We are not our own. This body belongs to God, not to us. We're stewards over it. I mean, think of that. So someone posted on YouTube a very valid question, very respectfully, and so Dr. Brown, it's very expensive to eat healthily and to do what you're encouraging us to do.

Not all of us can afford to do that. So I want to break it down. It's an honest question. I want to break it down, but how about we start here?

Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you today, probe a little. Let's start here. How about we just start by getting rid of the bad stuff? Anything that in and of itself is not healthy, right?

Let's start getting rid of the bad stuff. For example, do you have unhealthy snacks? You know, be it chips or Doritos or something like that. Do you do what I used to do? Eat chocolate all the time or other sweets, candy bars, things like that, ice cream, whatever the unhealthy snacks are. Do you have those daily, weekly, whatever the schedule is? So let's start by getting rid of them.

They don't help you. They're not going to be nutritious. I heard a little dark chocolate. Forget about a little dark chocolate right now. And the amount we eat is normally not a little anyway. Just get rid of all the unhealthy stuff.

Let's start there and see what happens to your life. Oh, and you can replace it with healthy snacks. Get some fruits, right? You can even get healthy dried fruits. I mean, there's nothing that's done to them except they're dry.

They're not sweetened or anything like that. It's not going to make up for like the bad sweet tooth. But let's start there. Let's start by getting rid. Forget finances.

We're not even talking finances, all right? Get rid of anything bad in your diet. If you're eating, say, burgers and buns with cheese and fried chicken, fried chicken, french fries, none of that's healthy for you. None of that's good for you, right?

None of it. It's not good for you. You can have some lean red meat on occasion, but otherwise, you're getting a burger, cheeseburger, fries, none of that's healthy.

And the bun isn't healthy for you. So let's get rid of all that. And you can just replace that. You can replace that with grilled chicken or you can replace that with salmon or something like that.

Just simple stuff. So let's start with getting rid of the bad. Tell me how that goes for a week, for a month. Do you feel a little bit better doing that? Because that's a step in the right direction. That's a step towards health. And look, I'm anything but a nutrition expert. I have learned from top nutrition experts. Nancy and I have learned to follow the guidelines of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Eat to Live and books like End of Dieting and things like that. So I've lived by that very strictly now for eight and a half years and I've been super blessed because of it. But before we talk about the expense of eating healthily, how about we start with getting rid of anything unhealthy in your diet? Many of you will be like me and realize, wow, I'm addicted.

I'm addicted to these. I've said many, many times it was much easier for me to give up putting the needle in my arm and being a heavy drug user. By God's grace, when I got saved in 71, much easier for me to give that up than to give up bad foods. It took decades before I finally got that right. And then it was three miserable days of withdrawal when I went cold turkey and got rid of the bad foods. So how about we start there?

All right. The second thing is that over the course of years, eating healthily on average will save you massively on medical bills, medical expenses, medical treatments massively will save you on drugs that you have to take massively. How many hospitalizations or multiple series of visits to doctors with tests? How many of those, maybe one or two, will more than balance out years and years and years and years and years if you had to spend more to eat healthily?

That one medical bill that you could avoid will more than make up the difference, let alone the difference in quality of life. You say, look, I'm 20 years old now. What am I thinking about medical bills?

That's like when you're 50, 60. Well, number one, you're making a bad deposit every day. You're draining money.

You're not making a bad deposit. You're draining money from your account, so to say, by eating unhealthily. It does catch up with you. We reap what we sow.

The body's made a certain way. We reap what we sow. So over time, these things will catch up to you. And each day of eating unhealthily now sews into something bad for the future. Do you care about that?

Do you care about being here for your spouse or for your kids or for your parents or for ministry or service or anything else? The second thing is when you make the switch and go from unhealthy eating to really healthy eating, you'll be energized. You will. You'll be energized. And as a result of being energized, you'll do your work better. Your mind will be sharper. Your overall ability to focus and do your job will be better. So you'll probably over the course of time, by eating healthily, you'll have a much better quality of life and probably over the course of time, make more money in your job. How's that work out?

Right? So that's another thing to factor in. And then as for the actual expenses, many of us eat out a lot. Nancy and I, especially with kids out of the house, well, sometimes with kids in the house, quick to run out and get a meal. But Nancy and I ate out a lot before we made lifestyle changes years ago. And when we made the radical lifestyle change and we're trying to buy everything organic so it's a little bit more expensive, Nancy computed the bills because we're using the same credit card going to the restaurant as going to the store and saw that our food bills actually dropped, right? So even if it was more money, we'd pay it gladly because of the health benefits, because of the glorious, wonderful, thank you, Lord benefits, okay?

Absolutely. But for us, our food bill went down. And I don't mean eating out at fancy steak restaurants all the time, just your average restaurant eating out a lot, right? It was cheaper for us to eat at home.

That's the next thing. Also, even if you don't think organic initially, it's still a whole lot better to have an apple or a handful of blackberries or blueberries or some other fruit or something else like that. It's a whole lot healthier to have that than a candy bar, right? So even if you're not thinking organic initially, I bet an apple's cheaper than a candy bar. But what if you want to get the best products of everything? Talking to some of my team members yesterday, if you will plan and cook certain ways and freeze things, you'll find that's an amazing savings as well.

Nancy will make these mega soups, one she calls the kitchen sink. Sometimes I'll just go to the store on my own to get stuff, but a lot of times we'll go together because there's so many specific vegetables. She's got this, this, this, this, and she just wants to make sure she's picking the best stuff and so on. So it's an ordeal to go and get all the stuff that's needed, right? It's one trip to the store, an ordeal. I mean, it's a grocery trip, okay?

It's just a trip to the store. Then she's going to chop everything up and put, you know, get everything ready and then cook, I mean, fills this giant pot that she has. And then when she's done, I think it makes like 20 portions of soup. Each one of them is a meal. Each one is a meal. And let me say this, if your average meal for the main part of your meal, let's just say it was five dollars, okay? I can assure you that there's not a hundred plus dollars of contents in that soup.

In other words, what we're paying is pennies on that. So if you plan and then you freeze it, and then you freeze it, I've even traveled with that as far as India. Take a container with me with an ice pack in it and then get to India, put it in the refrigerator or the freezer.

So you can have that. You can have varieties of things, freeze them, and have them for days to come. So there are plenty of creative ways as well.

So your daily salads and fruits, those have to be fresh. But there are other things you can do and you will be amazed at the differences. So number one, you're glorifying God with your body.

Get rid of the things that are destructive to the temple that God gave you. Is it easier said than done? Yeah, it's much easier said than done. Otherwise, probably all do it. That's why I don't judge. I don't condemn.

I don't criticize because I know how challenging it can be. And we need food to live, right? You don't need drugs to live. You don't need drink to live. You don't need other things to live that we were addicted to before we were saved during the world. But you need food.

You got to eat food every day. And sometimes, hey, I'm in a hurry. My life's good. I'm running. I'm on the run.

I'm on the run. Say, Dr. Brown, what do you do at airports? Either bring my own food, right, flying out. So bring a big salad from home and eat it at the airport before I fly out or on the plane. Or look around for some fruit or don't eat.

It's not required that you eat at an airport. Oh, so anyway, my encouragement is get rid of the bad stuff. Recognize this is God's temple that he's given us to steward. Second thing to do is to then look at, okay, simple things I can do. Replace the replace the bad with good. You realize as you start doing this, you're going to feel better. You really, really will. And then do some planning and then think long term.

Your quality of life will be so much better. A fellow works at a CrossFit regularly gave me a workout to do on the road last week. And it's pretty rigorous, pretty challenging. I'd never done it. So it was new for me. So, you know, muscle memory, getting used to things.

It was new. But I did four rounds. I was supposed to go through this. I did four rounds in slightly over 18 minutes. He worked out with another fellow active maybe 25 years younger than me, plays basketball, you know, works out regularly.

Not a workout fanatic, works out regularly. He gave the same workout to this fellow yesterday and he barely got through two rounds in 15 minutes. I completed four in 18. He had to quit before he finished two.

That took him 15 minutes. The vast majority of how I'm able to do that is healthy eating. And that's why at the age of 67, I feel like I'm just getting started. So I'm jealous for your well-being. Why am I talking to you about this? What's my motivation? How does it help me? I'm here to help you thrive in health and wellness on every level. And yeah, we're going to pour into you spiritually every day, every day, every day, every day. But this month we're talking about some other issues. Oh, I know it gets really personal. Remember the book Nancy and I wrote, Breaking the Strongholds of Food. Yeah. Some supplements too.

They're great. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back friends to the Line of Fire on this special month emphasis of let's get healthy. I'm your cheerleader.

I'm your life coach here. Look, normally we're preaching the gospel. We're getting into scripture. We're debating theology. We're talking about culture wars.

We're talking about Israel and the Jewish people. And of course, we'll keep doing that day and night. But this month, we just really felt to start the year with a special encouragement to you to look at your health, to look at your wellbeing. Let me say again, I understand that some of you have fragile health and it's not due to your lifestyle. You have some condition. You were in a bad accident.

The last thing I'm here to do is criticize or point fingers. Even if you're morbidly obese, I'm not pointing fingers because many times it's difficult. You go through massive life trauma. You go through deep depression. Food is your comfort.

The more you eat, the worse you feel about your weight, which makes you eat even more. And now it's like, now what? I've got no energy. I can't go anywhere. I can't do anything.

You eat more because you're more depressed. I'm not condemning. I'm not critical. What's the matter? Where's your self-control?

No, no. It's very, very difficult in ourselves. And that's why on a regular basis, I make the confession, God, you're a strength out of my weakness. You're a strength out of my weakness. Even as I'm going to preach, sometimes if there are steps to go up to the pulpit, I believe Charles Spurgeon used to say, every step, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Spirit. Many times I'll confess strength out of weakness, strength out of weakness, strength out of weakness. So say, God, demonstrate your strength and power in me. All right. So what about the role of supplements?

What role do they play in my life? Well, they're supplements, not substitutes, right? In other words, you can't substitute for unhealthy eating. You can't eat. And I used to try to do that.

Trust me, I do. I tried. If there's like a magic energy pill, I tried it. I even tried the most embarrassing of all, but it's in the book.

It's in Breaking the Stronghold of Food. So I'm talking to you candidly. I tried an anti-fat cream. I was flying and looking through the airline magazine and there is this ad and you rub this stuff, this cream on your fat and it helped melt the fat. Not only what is, it was the smelliest, stickiest, ugliest stuff. So you put it on, they put it on my fat legs and then you put your pajamas on, next thing you've got to wash the pajamas. It's like, okay, I didn't even use this.

I remember I hid it in place right in our bathroom cabinet hoping Nancy wouldn't see it because I was too embarrassed that I bought the stuff, you know, too embarrassed to tell her. We laughed about it, of course, ultimately, but I tried this magic pill, energy this, energy that. There's not a substitute for healthy eating and then exercise is important too. That's important. That's secondary, right, to healthy eating, but exercise is important and in the book you get free when you order from TriVita, Michael Ellison's 10 Habits of Wellness. You'll see he starts with sleep.

You'll see he's got chapters on forgiveness. So we understand wellness is holistic in the right sense of the word, spirit, soul, and body, but supplements can really help and wherever you are, they can help move you forward, right? So the first week is we've partnered together with TriVita. We talked about nitric oxide and better blood flow, oxygen. I will actually have my nitric oxide before I come into the radio because I find myself energized as I do. That's what I was taking as I flew to India and back 40 hours round trip, both ways, rigorous travel, 10 and a half hours of time differential, and both sides for the first time in my life, I experienced no jet lag and the only difference in my life was this nitric oxide supplement. So I found that really benefits. Sometimes I'll take it, say a weekend, maybe a half hour, hour before working out.

So there's three that I'm taking up from TriVita. There's nitric oxide and then what we talked about last week, nopalaya. So nopalaya deals with inflammation issues, deals with range of movement issues.

It helps just overall quality of life, supports immune system. So I've been taking that and one of our staff members you've heard from, Cindy, director of our ministry here, we've known Cindy, our husband Gary, for almost 40 years, worked together through much of it and she started taking nopalaya because of some major inflammation issues and she's taken other things over the years. She was amazed by the results.

She came and said it's actually working because TriVita wanted to send us a sampling of products to say you sample these, see how these work, and if you're not convinced don't share them with your listeners. And then what we're introducing this week is myo health. This helps with muscle buildup. This, everyone that works out, you want to check this out, all right? So this helps with muscle buildup. This helps with overall endurance. You'll feel stronger, better balance.

So I'll use that sometimes before my workout or after the workout. And I'm telling you, I have not felt this good in as long as I can remember. This is with all my healthy eating and everything. I have literally not, I can't remember consistently feeling this good. And even with joints, you know, with heavy workouts and it can hit your knees and things like that, I've been finding more positive results with nopalaya.

So these supplements really work. In fact, I just want you to hear this, myo health, check this out. Have you had a setback from an injury, accident, or surgery that left you feeling weaker and a loss of strength?

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Build lean muscle, improve balance and build stronger bones with myo health. And when you call, TriVita will give a substantial portion of your order to help support the line of fire radio broadcast. Go to trivita.com and use promo code BROWN40 in the shopping cart or call 800-811-9628. That's 800-811-9628. All right, so again, if you missed that, if you missed that, so the special offer when you call 800-811-9628. That's 800-811-9628. Use the promo code BROWN40. If you go online, trivita.com.

It's the easy way. So check out the nitric oxide, the nopalaya and now myo health. These are the three that Michael Ellison from TriVita really wanted me to check out for myself, experience for myself before we even talk to any of you on the air about any of this. So it's 1-800-811-9628 or go to trivita.com and use the code BROWN40. All right, and what I'm seeking to do now at this...