The One You Feed - Congressman Tim Ryan

Episode Date: December 23, 2014

(Photo For The Dispatch by Pete Marovich) This week we talk to Tim Ryan about mindfulness in everyday lifeTim Ryan is the U.S. Representative for Ohio's 13th congressional district, serving since 2003. He is the author of  A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit and The Real Food Revolution: Healthy Eating, Green Groceries, and the Return of the American Family Farm. In This Interview Tim and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.How we can't know what wolf we are feeding without awareness.The importance of time for contemplation.How meditation can increase the space between stimulus and response.His path to mindfulness.What mindfulness means to him.The regret of missing our lives by being distracted.Trying to remain mindful in Congress.Bringing mindfulness education to the Youngstown School System.Teaching kids to pay attention.Mindfulness doesn't make you soft, it makes you tough.Mindfulness = mental toughness.Mindfulness gives us the ability to get back up when we have been knocked down.How Mindfulness has been shown to accelerate the healing process.The main objections he hears to mindfulness practice.How this is the first generation in American history that has a shorter life expectancy than their parents.Tim Ryan LinksTim Ryan HomepageTim Ryan Congressional Home Tim Ryan on FacebookTim Ryan on Twitter   Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We weigh 20 more pounds than we did in the 1960s and we've only grown an inch taller on average. And this is going to be the first generation of Americans that won't live as long of a life as their parents. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. Our guest today is Tim Ryan, the U.S. Representative for Ohio's 13th Congressional District, serving since 2003. Tim is the author of A Mindful Nation, How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit. Tim also has a new book called The Real Food Revolution, Healthy Eating, Green Groceries, and the Return of the American Family Farm. Before we get to the interview, I did want to mention that The One You Feed podcast was recently included in iTunes Best Podcasts of 2014. Eric and I would like to thank our

listeners for all the support and the dedication. So keep coming back. Hi, Congressman Ryan. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I am really excited that we were able to get you on for a variety of reasons. One is you're an Ohioan like us. We're based in Columbus. Two is you're a congressman, which is great. And three, you are really into mindfulness, which is a big part of what we talk about on the show a lot. So I'm really glad that we were able to find a time to meet up. Yeah, I'm excited too.

And I'm glad you're pushing out the message in Ohio, because I think it's a great place for us to really transform the state with some of these ideas and practices. Yep. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops for a second and he thinks about it and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you in your work and in your work and in your life? Well, I think, you know, attention and awareness practices like mindfulness help you to see what is going on inside of you and helps you to see those emotions as they arise in you and help you cultivate awareness so that you can see what you're thinking about. And so a lot of times you don't know which one you're feeding.

You may have some delusionary idea that you're feeding one and you're actually feeding the other. one and you're actually feeding the other and without I think taking time in your day or in your life to have some contemplation have some present moment awareness see and spend time with the tv off and the radio off and the in the technology put down so that you can actually see what's going on inside yourself so that you can properly feed the ones that you want. And I think the work that I do with trying to get these awareness and attention practices in the schools, into the health care to help with veterans who are coming back with post-traumatic stress, is really the first step to knowing

which wolf you're going to feed. And so I think it's fundamental to living a good life and living with an intention of, you know, what you want to do and be in your own life. Yeah, I agree 100%. That awareness is such a key thing. And one of the things that I think meditation has brought to me is the way I describe it is there's an old line, I think it was from Viktor Frankl about, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a space. And I found that by practicing meditation and mindfulness, that space is just a little bit more space in there for me to sort of think about what's happening before I either react in a certain way or habitually start to sort of think about it in a certain way. Right. And your anger will arise in that space. And then if you've got enough space in there,

then you will realize that you don't have to hold on to it. You know, you don't have to, you know, take the bait and then run with the anger or run with the fear. Give it enough space and it'll pass. And that's what the awareness practice does for you. Yep. So you wrote a book called A Mindful Nation, how a simple practice can help us reduce stress, improve performance, and recapture the American spirit. What eventually or what originally brought you to mindfulness or meditation? Where was your initial introduction to that? Well, I trace it back really to growing up Catholic.

You know, I went to Catholic school for, you know, 12 or 13 years. school for 12 or 13 years. I had a lot of people in my life that made it a point to take time to pray the rosary, to meditate, to say their prayers. And that kind of contemplative aspect of life was always valued growing up. And so I trace it back to that kind of culture that I grew up in with my grandparents praying the rosary, my mom, my football coaches, I would see duck into the chapel at school to say their prayers and meditate and all that stuff. So and then on and off throughout my life, like most people did it for two days and thought, wow, this is great. I can focus more, I can concentrate better, kinder. And then I don't do it for like a year, you know, and then you do it for three days and then you don't do it for six months. And that went on for, you know, really probably a decade or more.

And then I did a five day retreat, uh, that really kind of expanded my practice or developed a practice into a daily session that I do most every day. But it goes back to just these points throughout my life where adults were reinforcing that kind of approach. And so what does, you know, mindfulness is a pretty vague term. I think people interpret it differently. What does mindfulness mean to you? Being aware is, I think, most fundamental.

I do like, you know, Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition of paying attention on purpose to the present moment without judging it. And I think that's a pretty concise definition of what mindfulness is to me. But I think that the short would be, the shortest version would be being aware. It's awareness, mindfulness, being aware of what's going on outside of you, being aware of what goes on inside of you. And the more you can cultivate that awareness, the more aware you are. But I think the better decisions you can be and I think the less stress you have because you notice that things are impermanent and always in transition. Those emotions, you sit down in a quiet room and it's just you and your emotions and your mind. You see that fear can come in for 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, five minutes, whatever. Then it passes and something else comes up and then something else comes up.

It's depending on what you're thinking about or what's going on in your life. But you start to really become aware of all of that internal dialogue that's happening. So the short answer is awareness. I assume you have a daily meditation practice that you do sort of a formal period that you think then helps you to be more aware during the rest of the day. Is that how you approach it? Yeah. You know, I had one in the morning for the longest time, you know, years. And then I got married and had a couple of stepkids. And then about six months ago, I have a newborn baby and the baby did not get the memo on my meditation practice. So it's been a little on and off in the last six months, but yeah, daily practice, the last six months. But yeah, daily practice normally, quiet time, either on a cushion or sitting in a chair. The breath practice, you know, your mind goes past future, you come back to your

breath. I try to do a lot of body work where I just try to ground my mind into my body to, you know, keep it grounded. I mean, you've got a couple of really solid anchors for your mind. That's your breath, which is relatively important to your life, and then your body, which is always with you as well. So if you want to be in the present moment, you can really start practicing being grounded in those things that are always in the present moment,

not your body and your breath. In your book, you talk a little bit about a moment in your life where you realized that you always had some story going on in your head that you never shared with anybody else. And you weren't entirely conscious of, but it had so much to do with always doing things perfectly. And all the time and energy you spent trying to uphold that story in your mind that you sort of conscious of, but it had so much to do with always doing things perfectly. And, you know, all the time and energy you spent trying to uphold that story in your mind that you sort of missed your life. Well, I think that's it. I mean, once you have the awareness that you are daydreaming a lot and not present, uh, you, there's a little bit of regret there to think, you know, I was 35 when I went on that retreat.

I still have plenty of moments of being distracted and whatnot. But, yeah, you realize you're missing your life. You get in a car to drive to work and you arrive at work and you realize how the hell did I get here because you were daydreaming the entire time. Or you're with your kids and your mind's at work. Or you're with your grandparents who, you know, are near the end of their life and you are thinking about work or something else. You know, you're not there with them. Right.

And to me, that's, you know, those are the things you regret. And then you forgive yourself because you didn't know any better. But, you know, ultimately, yeah, I had that feeling of, you know, why didn't somebody teach me this when I was a kid? try and bring some mindfulness to Congress or at least certain members of Congress, which strikes me as an overwhelmingly large task and quite a place to remain mindful in. Do you have any stories or anecdotes about how that's been going for you? Well, it's slow but sure. The more kind of publicity and stuff that I get, the more people are hearing about it. And I have a lot of spouses of members who come and ask me my wife wants to meet you for lunch. And I said, are you going to be there? You know, but was into meditation and yoga and wanted to meet me because she read about me in a couple articles. So therefore, the husband is, you know, three, four term congressman, you know, saw my book I was reading,

you know, in the house gym and said, hey, you know, I'm, you know, we've talked about this. I see that book you're reading. I really want a book that can help introduce this to me. So over time, it's been working. We do a session once a week with members of Congress in the House Chapel. And then we do a session a week where we have teachers come in and teach the staff here. So people who are doing meditations with veterans or in hospitals and schools and, you know, in the Marines, for example, we have them come and lead a 30-minute, you knowminute basically guided meditation for the staff here once a week just to help educate them on how kind of pervasive this is within society now in all these different areas. So we're trying to push it out that way too. But it's slow but sure, and we're just trying to create a little space and a little bit of awareness. Your book is interesting in a lot of ways, but one of them is that you really walk through the ways that mindfulness, I mean, the title was, you know, it's a simple practice.

Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the

past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse

to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The ways that mindfulness can help

in schools, with our emergency responders, with our veterans, with our health system. And so one of the things that you've done as a result of that is you've brought mindfulness education into some of the schools back in your home district in Youngstown. Can you maybe give an update on how that's going? Yeah, it's going great. I mean, the teachers are really starting to see the difference, the change in the students, the incidence of misbehavior are down significantly. In fact, one school had no behavioral incidents going into like October of the school year this year. You know, the parents are noticing a difference. I've had, you know, Republican teachers come up to me and said, you know, you're always going to have my vote because, you know, I'm a Democrat. You're always going to have my vote because I'm a Democrat. You're always going to have my vote because of what you've done to this school. And it's a city school in Warren, Ohio, and mid-sized city,

multicultural district, a lot of economic inequality, bad neighborhoods, the whole nine yards. And we went right in there and they're starting to see a real difference with what we're doing. And so I'm super excited about it. And, you know, trying to use this as an example of how we can really, you know, shift policy and let others in the state and local communities see how fundamental it is. I mean, if you're trying to teach a kid and they're not paying attention, what's the use? And so we yell at kids to pay attention. And what these practices are, are teaching the kid how to pay attention

instead of just yelling at them to pay attention. And I don't know a parent in America that doesn't want their child to have a higher ability to mobilize their attention span, to have a higher level of focus, to have mental discipline, to have resiliency, a mental resiliency and toughness and the kind of grittiness that leads to success. I mean, these are the kind of things that ultimately are going to be the tools that the kid's going to need when they go out into the real world. And so there's not a better, more fundamental skill set that we can give these kids. And that's why you're seeing

this in corporate America. I mean, you're seeing it in the Marine Corps, you're seeing it at Google, you're seeing it at Target, you're seeing it in other corporations. A lot of the Silicon Valley folks are now having and embedding into their newer companies mindfulness type practices and meditation practices because it gives them the replenishment, the focus, the attention cultivation, the awareness cultivation, the ability to really sit and listen and not be jittery and agitated, but sit down and, you know, with certain amount of relaxation and solve these problems. It doesn't mean you're soft. It means you're, you're tough. You know, it means you're disciplined. You've got mental discipline. And that's why I say in places like Ohio, I can't

imagine, you know, a Republican couple in Delaware County in Ohio or a Democratic, you know, couple in, you know, Northeast Ohio somewhere, both want the same thing for their kids. And I don't know any parent that wouldn't want the school system to start teaching these kids some of these basic skills that are really hurting or not. They're not hurting. These skills are not being developed because of the technology, because of the TV, because of the iPhone and the iPad and the constant stimulus that they get from all of these things. We've got to push back and we better come up with some strategies that are going to

allow our kids to develop their attention span, cultivate that awareness, and be functioning adults. I mean, a lot of times you look at kids, they don't even look in the eye. You know, they don't look at you because they're looking at their phone. And they're losing the ability to have face-to-face conversations with people. And to me, that is not the direction that we want to go in as a country. And so these practices, to me, if it's good enough for the Marine Corps, good enough for the Seattle Seahawks, good enough for the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks, it's good enough for our kids. And every kid should have the opportunity to learn it. You said that part about not being soft. We had Dan Harris on the show who wrote a book about mindfulness, the ABC News anchor, and he talks very much about not losing your edge. And you use some terms in there around grittiness and toughness. what you think or how you think, because I think that the main thing that meditation has, you know, Dan says meditation has a bad PR problem, right? Which is that it's thought of as this soft thing.

And the terms that you're using are really not soft at all. Nor should they be. I mean, I think we all respect people who have mental toughness, who can get knocked down and get back up. And who can do that? Well, someone who can keep their eye on the ball, have a goal and go after that goal with all your heart and all your mind. And then you get knocked off track. Inevitably in life, you're going to get knocked off track. Do you have the ability to stay focused and be resilient enough to stay on track and to get back on track and then keep going? I mean, these are the qualities that we really admire in people. You know, the redemption, you know, the person who gets knocked down and gets back up and stays in the game.

These are things that we really appreciate. And in these practices, you know, it's hard to sit still. It's not easy. You know, it's easy to daydream. And I think that some daydreaming is appropriate at times. But, you know, it's not easy to stay focused on your breath, stay in your body, your mind goes to the past. Your mind, and come back, and keep coming back, and keep coming back. That builds a mental toughness, a tenacity that is needed for you to go out into the world. That's not a soft skill. That's an essential skill that you need, which is why you know the marine corps uh is interested in this stuff and why

athletes are starting to really gravitate towards it and it's not just being able to stay on track but also having the awareness of okay when do i need to adjust you know i'm not putting on a helmet and running into a brick wall with my head just because the wall's in the way. You also have to have some awareness of, okay, I know what the goal is. I know I want to go north, but there's a swamp in front of me. I need to figure out how to navigate that stuff. So you need to be adaptable, but yet keep your eye on the ball or your eye on the goal. And these are the kind of things and qualities and traits that you cultivate while you're doing this that are essential for success in life and success,

however you determine it, whatever you want your goals and dreams to be. And, you know, I just feel like in a lot of ways, you know, I'm in the hopes and dreams of business, you know, I mean, like, how do I help young people? How do I help people who are sick, get into a mindset to be successful to do extraordinary things. And I think this practice is really fundamental to doing that, to cultivating that grittiness that you need to succeed. Yeah, I think that's a fundamental, there's a fundamental misunderstanding about mindfulness or meditation. And it was one that's a fundamental, there's a fundamental misunderstanding about mindfulness or meditation. And it was one that plagued me for a long time. It's that I think I was too focused on what was happening while I was meditating, what my experience was, like,

oh, I should be really relaxed, or I should be really happy or, and realizing that it didn't really have anything to do with that. What it had to do with was how it improved the way my mind worked the other 23 and a half hours of the day. And it didn't have to do with being blissed out in that moment. Cause I rarely am. Um, it had to do with, with what happened when I got back up and went into my day. Right, right. Exactly. And that's it. You know, it Exactly. And that's it. It's taken it off the cushion. It's taken it off the chair. You go to practice during the week for the game. You practice and practice and practice. I mean, the sports analogies to this for me are unbelievably connected. And you practice, and that's why they call it, you know, a meditation practice so that,

you know, that's not it. It's about when you get up and go into the world, do you have a little bit more awareness, a little bit more focus, a little bit more kindness in your heart, a little more softness, you know, off the edge, but still maintaining that kind of grittiness, you know, and it's all right there. There's a lot of scientific data out there on meditation. You cover a fair amount of it in your book. There's been, you know, it continues to just. You cover a fair amount of it in your book. There's been, you know, it continues to just come out. Do you have a favorite study or two maybe you could share with us about that gives some scientific basis to the benefits of meditation?

Well, I like the one that I write about for psoriasis patients, which was really interesting. they took a group of people who have psoriasis and they separated them into two groups. One of the treatments for psoriasis is you go into a light box. They put both groups into a light box, but the one group they put into a light box. While they were in the light box, but the one group they put into a light box and while they were in the light box, they practiced mindfulness. They came back and the study said that they needed four times less the treatments than the original group that just went into the light box. So it was so significant, they thought they screwed the study up. So they went back and they did it again and they got the exact same results, four times less in treatments than the other group. I love that because it makes a couple of points.

The first point is that your body naturally wants to heal itself. You have a problem, it wants to heal itself. If you remove heavy levels of stress, you know, diet's very important as well. But if you remove levels of stress, your body will function properly and try to heal itself. So the stress is what prevents your body from really healing itself in the way that it needs to. And I think that's really important. And the other piece is from the public policy side, which, you know, people's eyes tend to glaze over. But we do have a national discussion about health care costs and, you know, the national debt, which is driven by two health care programs in our country, Medicaid, which serves the poor, and Medicare, which serves the elderly.

These are the two main drivers of our national debt. So if I'm a policymaker and I look at that study and I say, wow, this person practices mindfulness and go in the light box and needs four times less treatments, how many people have psoriasis and how much is each treatment? And so you take those numbers and you say, multiply them and you say, OK, we're going to need four times less. You start doing the math on this and do the same thing for high blood pressure. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love.

All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And ulcers and ADD and ADHD and all of these things that I think could be diminished by a mindfulness practice, you start saving real money. And I think it's important for conservatives and liberals to say, well, wait a minute. We want a higher quality of life and we want to spend less on health care. Well, here's a practice that's very low cost.

There's no side effects. And what's the harm if you don't think it works? Nothing. So why not give it a try? Sometimes in Washington we think, boy, you know, we got this really complicated problem. And if we have a more complicated solution, maybe we can fix it. When the reality is we need to get back to the fundamentals and start simplifying. And, you know, there's nothing more simple than, you know, trying to relax by following

your breath. What are some of the main objections that you come across from, for lack of a better word, I'll just call it mainstream society, to these ideas of mindfulness? I think there's a general unawareness, really, of what it is and what it does or even knowing about it. You know, a lot of people don't even know what the hell it is. You know, I mean, it never, it has never crossed their mind. You know, they don't know a whole lot about it. And that's changing a lot more now. You see Dr. Oz talking about it. You see some of these other TV shows are doing, you know, stories about it. You see some of these other TV shows are doing stories about it. Even one of the sports

radio and TV shows, when Phil Jackson went to the Knicks, they were talking about it, what he's doing with that organization. A lot of it is people don't know about it, or they have a misunderstanding of what it actually is. Then you have a small group that is convinced that it's some religious conspiracy coming from somebody. Then you have the group that knows about it and tries to promote it. I think there needs to be more of an education campaign. I think the more people learn about it, see about it, hear about it, the more open we'll be. And the real criticism, I think, comes from people who aren't aware.

And they say, well, this is some religion. This is Buddhism or something like that. And the reality is this is about awareness. And awareness is a human capability, a human quality to be aware as a human being. And so to cultivate that awareness, it doesn't matter what religion you are. I'm Catholic. I was Catholic before I started doing this. I'm Catholic after I, you know, I'm afterwards.

I haven't changed at all. And many people feel like it deepens their religious practice because they're more present. They're in the present moment experiencing what, you know, God's creation and all the rest. So the religion thing, I think, is the most that you hear about most, but it's also the most kind of misunderstood. You know, I feel like those folks are, don't understand actually what it is. One of the things I'm always, I'm always skeptical, and I think people tend to be skeptical of things that sound too good to be true. And sometimes some of this, this stuff sounds like that. And you had a line in your book that I thought was really good, because it was very, very practical, and sort of explained meditation or mindfulness here.

And I'm going to read it to you. It says, Mindfulness won't eliminate the responsibilities and pressures that cause us to become so scattered, but it can help us deal with them in a more effective way. Yeah. You know, you got a bad back. You know, you go to therapy and you do some exercises, you do some calisthenics, you do whatever. You still got a bad back, but it's different now because you have strengthened some muscles around it or you relate to it differently. You are better able to kind of deal with it. I think it's the same thing. You know, you still have moments where you're really scattered.

You still have fears and anger and joy and everything you attributed to the two different wolves. You still have that. You don't make that go away. You know, people say sometimes I sit and meditate and I just, the thoughts still keep coming. And it's like, yeah, I mean, they're probably not going to stop for a while. You know, you just got to relate to them differently and recognize that you are not your thoughts and, you know, you can let them pass. And so I think that is, you know, what I meant, you know, really when I wrote that, it's about having a different relationship with whatever it is that you're dealing with and not getting caught up and really making matters worse.

I mean we see this a lot when you hurt yourself. You sometimes say, oh, I got a pain in my back. Oh my god, I've had this pain in my back for a couple hours now. My dad has cancer. Maybe it's cancer. You know, you go from A to Z and you create an entire story as opposed to saying, well, I got something in my back. I'm just going to see what it is and ride it out. And, of course, you're going to think the worst.

Let that go. It's okay. You know, we build these stories up and then you stress out about it and it makes matters worse. Um, instead of having some clarity with what's really happening, which may, which may be nothing, you know, maybe you got a kink in your back, you know? Exactly. So you wrote another book that maybe we could just spend a couple minutes on before we wrap up here called the real food revolution, healthy eating, green groceries, and the return of the American family farm. Can you give us a little overview of the book and what, what you're trying to impart there? Well, our country is sick. We have a sick country. We have in the next few years,

half the country is going to have either diabetes or prediabetes. We have one in four teenagers that have either diabetes or prediabetes. We weigh 20 more pounds than we did in the 1960s, and we've only grown an inch taller on average. And this is going to be the first generation of Americans that won't live as healthy or as long of a life as their parents. First generation. Wow. So we're a sick country right now. And if we want to be competitive economically, we need to be a healthy country. And the system that is currently in place makes really highly processed, bad, fake food, what Dr. Mark Hyman calls food-like substances, really cheap and affordable. So all the people who aren't making the money they were making and struggling to make ends

meet have access to this cheap food, and we subsidize that with taxpayer money. And this, of course, is making us sick, like I said earlier, with the Medicare program, the Medicaid program. pay for health care for people who are sick because they're eating cheap food that's highly subsidized and made cheap by the subsidies that the farmers get to grow these kind of crops. It's insane. So a real food revolution is about how do we shift those subsidies into creating more access to fresh fruits and vegetables, real food, and therefore driving down our healthcare costs and how we can do that in urban areas, how we can do that in all kinds of farming land in places like Ohio to really reform our food system and our agriculture system. It is kind of stunning when you dig into the data and learn more about that stuff. I've typically just, until really the last year, not cared too

much about diet. I mean, enough to stay relatively healthy, but not paid too much attention to what's really going on. And when you get into some of that stuff, the numbers of the diabetes, the pre-diabetes, the obesity, it's staggering. And you look at, to your point, the subsidies and the type of food that's widely available. And it's another one of those that reminds me of what you're saying with mindfulness, that there are some really easy, low-cost solutions out there. low-cost solutions out there that is, of course, sometimes why I think that they're not more widely pursued because there's no real way to make money on them. If you're, you know, the government can save money, but there's no way to make money on them in as much in the private sphere, which I think sometimes stops them from getting the momentum they could otherwise.

Yeah, well, that's why, you know, I say we need a revolution. You know, we need an organic, growing, you know, people-powered movement in the country by those very same soccer moms in Delaware County in Ohio or other suburban areas in America that are really concerned that their kids aren't going to be healthy. You know, what are these kids eating in school? And I know people say, you know, what's the cost of changing the system? What's the cost of not saving the system or changing the system? The cost is your kid is not going to live as long as you did for the first time in the history of our country. I mean, that is amazing. And so, you know, we're going to know the cost of anything or the cost of everything and the value of

nothing. And, you know, if we value our kids' health, if we want to be competitive, I mean, here's the thing. We only have 313 million people in America. Our kids that graduate from our high schools and our colleges and our community colleges are competing with China, 1.3 or 4 billion people, or India, 1.3 or 4 billion people. We only have 313 million. We better be ready to kick some butt and we better be healthy and have a focus and concentration, mental discipline, physical discipline, creativity, awareness of what's going on and changes in the economy. We better be innovative. You can't do that if you're sick. You can't do that with diabetes, with everybody having

type 2 diabetes. You just can't do it. You can't do it with a sick workforce. You can't do it with a sick country. And the reality of it is we better fix this and we better fix it fast or we're going to continue to fall behind in our healthcare system. It's going to collapse on its own weight because there's no way if half the country has diabetes, we're going to spend our entire federal budget on taking care of people that are sick with these things that come from eating highly processed food and these food-like substances that they just add sugar and fat and salt to them, where if you didn't add it, it would be cardboard. You can't have it. The levels of sugar in some of these products are unbelievable. We just sent a letter to the FDA saying that they should change.

If you look on the back of a product, it'll say grams of sugar in there. Well, nobody knows what the hell a gram of sugar is. I don't. I don't think anybody else does. So we said convert that to teaspoons. So for every four grams is one teaspoon. Now you go and you try to even get yogurt and there'll be the 22 grams of sugar in there, which is like five teaspoons of sugar. So would you give your kid five teaspoons of sugar, you know, and say,

this is healthy. So we've got to help the consumer to try to understand this. And I'm just saying, like, we can't, we've got to do something. I'm not a prude. The first story in my book is that I'm addicted to chicken wings and ice cream. I mean, I love it. You know, I love to watch football and eat chicken wings and have a glass of beer and every now and again, have some ice cream. I'm just saying you can't do that every single day, and you can't eat and drink gallons of pop and expect to be healthy. And what's happening now is we're sick, and we've got to change it. We've got to change it now. I agree 100%. Well, I think that brings us to the end of our time, Tim, but thanks so much for being

on the show. I am very proud to be in Ohio and have you as one of our time, Tim, but thanks so much for being on the show. I am very proud to be in Ohio and have you as one of our congressmen. Well, thank you so much. It's great to be with you. And, you know, I think there's a lot of people in Ohio and across the country that are interested in these issues. And I look forward to hopefully we can, you know, build an army across the country that can help change the policies in Washington and in our state capitals across the country that can help change the policies in Washington and in our state capitals across the country to bring about some real change for the sake of our kids. Well, thank you so much. We'll talk again soon. Bye. Thank you.

you can learn more about this podcast and tim ryan at one you feed.net slash tim ryan