transcript
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Episode #548 - Financial Advisor Certifications - What They Mean For You
Roger: The show is a proud member of the retirement podcast network.
Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to really lean in and rock it. My name is Roger Whitney. By day, I'm a practicing retirement planner with over 30 years’ experience, founder of agile retirement management, and for the last 10 years or so, you and I have hung out here, if you've been listening that long, noodling on how you actually do this thing called retirement so you can go create a great life, not a new job.
So today on the show, we're going to answer your questions about advisor certifications. We have some feedback on mortgages in retirement, some good tips from some of our listeners.
In addition to that, we're going to have Dr. Bobby Dubois on in our Rock Life segment to talk about building energy for retirement. and weight loss and how to navigate studies. Man, that's a confusing world out there, just like it is in the retirement space. So much information, some of it good, some of it not, some of it not quite saying what you think it does, and it's important to be a good steward of your life. So, we're going to dive into that with Bobby. Excited to be here with you today.
When you do what I do, you filter everything through how I can use that as a teaching lesson. I was talking with Nichole "Rockstar" Mills, many of you know, she needs to be on the show again. We were talking about watching Alone, which is this survivor type show that doesn't have all the stick. You put like 15 people out in Mongolia. You allow them to take like 12 items and whoever lasts the longest wins essentially and they have to film themselves. It's relatively legit as far as those things go. She was asking me if I watched it and I'm like, yeah, I've watched I haven't watched it in a while, but I recalled one that I did watch where they went to Patagonia and there was a contestant and as you can imagine if you're out in the wilderness with 12 things and you have Winter coming and things like that you have to be good at shelter and fire, hunting and gathering, and fishing to survive. I mean, it's pretty intense stuff and there was a gentleman on there and I was like, we're sharing stories about things that we saw that were interesting on the show. There was a gentleman there. I forget his name and I forget the scene. I just remember it was in Patagonia.
He was really good. He had a great shelter, no problem building fires, and he actually was a very good hunter gatherer. and collector of food. He had fish that he smoked over the fire. He was building up his resources because these people would go 60, 70 days in the wilderness just on their own, a way into this, so he had a lot of food stocks. He was storing the food up in order to survive and win this thing. Well, what happened was with him, they would come in, I think, every week or so and do a health check. They ended up pulling him from the contest or the exercise because his body was shutting down and going into starvation mode, and when you watch it, it's like, wait a second, this guy had like a ton of dried fish, he had berries, he had a lot of food stocks that he had been hoarding. I was sharing this with Nichole and I'm like, wait a second, this is overcoming frugality. This is, I'm a great accumulator, but he couldn't spend it literally to feed himself and he put himself into starvation mode rather than use the resources that he had accumulated because he was worried about the future. This is how my mind works because I think about this stuff all day long. When I think of overcoming frugality, you may not go into starvation mode literally in your body, but you might starve the quality of your life and the experiences that you could create holding on to these resources just to make sure you're okay for tomorrow. So that's how my mind works. I forget what alone season that was but it's an issue. This is a psychological thing The Scarcity Loop, Michael Easter's book. This is a thing that we need to manage. We're not going to be exonerated from it because it's the human condition. It's a good thing to have, worrying about the future. We're not going to eliminate that. We just have to manage it, so we find some balance in our life.
All right with that said let's get on to your questions and we'll get to Dr. Bobby Dubois and talking about health talk
LISTENER QUESTIONS
Now it's time to answer your questions. If you have a question for the show, you can go to askroger.me and type in your question and leave an audio question. Great having Tanya last week. I need to have more people on the show. I enjoy having a fellow practitioner. Give their perspective on these answers, and I think it makes a richer conversation.
I love chatting with really good people So we're going to do that. I need to make that a priority.
UNDERSTANDING THE FINANCIAL ADVISOR ALPHABET SOUP
All right, so the title question for today's show was from Philip. Philip wants to know about the advisor alphabet soup.
"On the last podcast, you answered a question about certification exams for retirement counselors or advisors and flew through just a couple of the certification acronyms, which I tried to catch and realized I didn't even understand what they mean.
Could you spend a few minutes reviewing what all the different certifications mean? C-F-P-C-F-A-R-I-C-P-C-L-U. C H F C, I'm reading his, A P M A, no clue what that one is, C R P C, R I C P, C M A, C P W A, C P A. It's exhausting, most of us are just looking for the right kind of help to facilitate our path forwards to retirement.
Some might be looking for more investment advice, some might be looking for more retirement planning, some might be looking for a coach. These certification letters clearly mean a lot to you, and yes, I get that, and always use my MD in professional setting, but it is hard for clients to research and understand what each type means."
Oh, Lord. This is a great question, Philip. It is very confusing, and there is a laundry list much longer than the ones that you rattled off. I mean, there is a certification almost for anything.
The reason for that is unlike you being a doctor, an actual MD, which has a very stringent curriculum and bars that you have to pass in order to have that as well as maintain that in our industry, it's the Wild West. There are certifications I could literally get in probably 30 minutes. Sign up for it. I could probably take the test right now. Some of the tests are not even really that rigorous. There's just this huge alphabet soup. Some of them are more rigorous and focused. Many of them are faux. They are just for show. And the reason that this came about is one, because it's the Wild West. It's not that related to these. Some firms won't allow you to use certain ones. So, there is a little bit on the firm end of it. But part of the reason it's a Wild West is because this is traditionally a very sales culture, and there's a lot of salespeople, advisors looking for clients, which is the number one issue for the vast majority of advisors is getting clients, so they're trying to make themselves. legitimate and appear legitimate and make sure they're just like they would make their profile picture look kind and friendly and all put together. They want to make sure that on paper they look good too. So, this is a crazy thing to look at.
My recommendation would be to one, discount almost all of them, but focus on some of them that are more rigorous and more difficult to get that have some specialty in some of the ones that you listed are great ones.
Let's start with the Certified Financial Planner designation in order to get the CFP® and I haven't, I have the CFP®. I got it in 2003, there are five. domains that someone has to learn to be eligible to sit for the CFP® exam. So, I would say that is a good table stakes. This person took the time to go learn about a variety of subjects in a rigorous way and pass the certification, acknowledging that they have some level of competency or understanding of these domains. Here I'm showing a little bit of my ignorance because there's actually more principle topics that are divided. There are general principles of financial planning, insurance planning, which goes through all the different types of insurance, and at least exposes them and makes them demonstrate a level of competence, and understanding health insurance, home insurance, life insurance. There's investment planning, there's tax planning, there's retirement planning, and estate planning. Then there's always professional conduct and fiduciary responsibility that usually gets intermixed in there. And then there's another one that was not there when I was certified, which is interpersonal communication.
So going through the CFP®, you take a course through those principles. I used to teach as retirement planning for the CFP® curriculum at University of Texas at Arlington, where students would come in and over six to eight weeks, I would teach the curriculum from the book in order for them to sit for an exam, to show mastery at some level of that particular subject. Once they showed mastery of these particular subjects that made them eligible to sit for the CFP® certification, that's relatively rigorous. So, a CFP® is a good bar of I want somebody that took the journey to at least be exposed and understand some of the dynamics around areas outside their specialty.
I think most financial planners are generalists, and this is a good bar for a generalist, people that don't take the CFP® may be very knowledgeable in one or two areas, but they didn't do it in an organized way necessarily that was demonstrated. All right. So that's the CFP®. I think that's a good bar for a financial planner.
Now the CFA, which stands for the chartered financial analyst designation put out by the CFA Institute. I'm going to make some summaries here, and so I don't want to offend people that have a certain one that may have a more nuanced or in depth understanding, but a CFA is generally a certification that an analyst or a portfolio manager like a mutual fund portfolio manager or an analyst of companies would get because it gets much more in depth into analyzing, well, companies and balance sheets and so forth.
I'm going to go over some of the general ones that we will see. So, the CHFC is roughly equivalent to the CFP®. It just has more of an insurance bent than the CFP®. Generally, that, at least in my experience, that is where insurance focused individuals take a path.
The CLU, which stands for Chartered Life Underwriter, is a designation focused on life insurance and how to use life insurance within estate planning. So that's going to be more of a demonstration. All of the ones that we're talking about today have some level of rigor and certification process behind just, hey, let me get the letters. I've had a couple of those and I've dropped them because it was like, I felt silly. It was, I just had the opportunity to do it. The ones that we're talking about, I think, are legit and serious academic undertakings, at least relative to what's in our industry.
A CPA is certified public accountant, and that obviously is one that is focused on tax planning and finance. So, they're going to have more of a tax understanding than, say, a CFP® who maybe just got an audit of that area.
I'll talk about the ones that I have, and I want to talk about ones that are retirement specific because the whole point here is what you said, you're just trying to find somebody that has some competency in what you're looking for.
So, let's talk about the retirement specific ones first. I have the Retirement Management Advisor, which is put out by the Investment and Wealth Institute. Full disclosure there, I am on the curriculum committee for that certification, so I am participating and have participated in updating the curriculum and helping guide the direction of that certification. So, I'm involved in that one.
The second retirement focused certification for advisors is the RICP, which stands for Retirement Income Certified Professional. Those are the two retirement focused certifications. Now, I do not have the RICP. I'm very familiar with it. I am Friends with some of the people that actually teach it and built it. It is by far the more prevalent one than the RMA. If I were to distinguish between the two of them, the RICP teaches more from an academic perspective and income security perspective, and the RMA teaches a process and more for a practitioner than an academic perspective. How do you actually do this first? Here's all the things. that you could do.
I think they're both wonderful certifications. They're not super easy to get. You have to put in the time and the work to qualify, to sit for the exam, to pass the exam, so I think they're both very legit.
Then the other two that I have that are not retirement related is the CIMA, which is the Certified Investment Management Analyst. This is a certification that specializes in the institutional asset allocation process. How do you build an asset allocation? How do you optimize a portfolio? How do you rebalance? How do you do manager selection, et cetera? It was very rigorous. A lot of these are associated with institutions like Wharton, et cetera. Very rigorous one, and I've had that one for a while, and CPWA, which is one that I have, stands for Certified Private Wealth Advisor, which focuses on the intricacies of advising high net worth individuals, so it's much more advanced from a tactical standpoint than some of the others.
I think the certification list that we went through, and Phillip, you listed these, this is a good list. I want to add one other. You mentioned retirement coaching, which is an emerging industry. There is the CRPC, which is Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor, and this is a coaching certification, not a professional certification in the sense of retirement planning, it is coaching, which means they're not going to act as a fiduciary. They're not going to manage assets. There are some rules. They're not regulated by the SEC, but they are focused on coaching people through life transitions within retirement, so it's life coaching for retirees. This and the CRC is something actually Kevin Lyles has. He has both of these certifications because he actively coaches for retirement, and he's been involved in some of that process and he's wicked smart guy, and so he might speak better to this.
So, Kevin, as an example, is a retirement coach, but he does not manage or advise on assets. He's not regulated from the SEC standpoint from that fiduciary obligation, but he does have conversations around that, but not directly making recommendations. That is a very Wild West area, but Kevin could speak better to that. Maybe we'll have him on the show to do that.
But to your point, what is the intent in understanding these things? I think if you stick with the ones that we've talked about, that's enough and discount all the rest of them. Now they have ones on divorce and business transition. Some of those are very niche and I don't know how. detailed they are, but the intent of the exercise, I think, Philip, is how do I find somebody that fits with me?
Part of it is going to be seeing these certifications, and I think the ones that I listed are good filters. Do they have the CFP®? Let's equate that to an MD. I know that's a big stretch for you doctors out there, but at least a professional did the work to understand and do some rotations in different subjects, and they chose to do that proactively. Nobody has to do this. So, CFP® is a good first filter, because at least they're a generalist that has some knowledge of different areas.
Next is, Okay, what specialty do I have? I just got referred to a physical therapist. and to a dermatologist, right? So, I went to my generalist. The generalist isn't going to do the body exam for all the potential cancerous whatever. They're going to send me to a specialist. That makes sense. So, if you are in the retirement space, I think someone that has the RMA or the RICP at least should have or has demonstrated a better understanding of the issues related to decumulation than a CFP®. You say decumulation or retirement income strategies to a CFP®, some of them may just look at you. I don't know what you're talking about. I think those are the specialty designations, or if you're trying to build an individual portfolio and you want somebody to really analyze equities to build that portfolio, then a CFA is going to be that subspecialty that you might want to go to.
I think those are good filters. Same thing with if you're very high net worth and you want more advanced strategies, a CPWA is a subspecialty of general financial planning. So, they're going to have at least more awareness or demonstrated awareness of topics related to high net worth planning. That said, those are good filters because you have this big playing field of everybody wanting to work with you because everybody's in the marketing business as advisors or planners, well, almost everybody, but those are good filters. Then it's going to come down to obvious personality match, their philosophy, their process, because getting these certifications, as you know, as a doctor is very different than being a good doctor or a good specialist. There are whack jobs in medicine. There are whack jobs in our industry who, yeah, they got the certifications and they were able to pass the test, but they're not really on a mastery journey of trying to hone their craft. They're on to some other priorities. So, these are good filters, but they're not the end of the day.
We have a checklist for interviewing planners, and I think it would work well with interviewing retirement coaches as well. And that's why I think you should vet. And you should, and they should vet you, honestly in retirement planning space.
What are the dangers here, Philip? So, we talked about these being filters, but then you still have to do your due diligence on what is their process. What is their philosophy? How do they actually do things? Obviously, what do they charge, etc. That's easier to do in my field if you're a good consumer than it is for me to do it with a doctor. Honestly. You still have to do that due diligence, and own your plan, own the collaboration.
Things to watch out for, you know, we can argue being a fiduciary, someone that doesn't have a vested interest in what your decisions are, in terms of commissions, et cetera. That is a good filter. Michael Kitsis and I had a good conversation about this some months ago on the podcast. Another good filter is to decide whether you are looking for a collaborator or someone to tell you what to do. That's very different. Like in our world, in my practice, we collaborate with clients and we're happy if they come up with great solutions and we collaborate with the professionals in their life when appropriate, or are you just looking for somebody to tell you what to do? So, there's a lot of that personality style.
I think the ones that we went over, Philip, to my knowledge, are the legitimate ones. Some of them that you shared, the AP, MA, etc. Some of these I don't know. But I am very, I was going to say snooty, but they got to be important ones. I got to be rigorous and there's a lot of BS stuff out there. So hopefully this gives you some framework to think through this.
DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO PAY OFF THE MORTGAGE
Next, I want to share a couple of feedback on getting a mortgage in retirement. We had Hal, on paying off the mortgage and we had Mark Trotman one of my favorite people. He has a great podcast by the way Mark's Money Mind, you should definitely check that out If you recall he's been on the show sharing a lot of his stories one of those nicest people I know and smartest.
So first we'll go to Hal, on getting a mortgage in retirement.
Hal: Hey Roger, appreciate all you do and you're a great educator, and very articulate, knowledgeable and we appreciate everything you do for us out here.
Got a question regarding pay off of the mortgage. We took out a 200, 000 mortgage about four years ago, at 2. 375 percent. Right now, the four years in the interest and about the same as the principal. The question is About paying off the mortgage, I understand that paying it off doesn't make overall financial sense if the interest rate is so low, but I'm wondering, is it more of a timing thing? Because early on in the mortgage payoff period, the interest is so much higher, the average rate is high as opposed to the very end where the interest amount is very, very low. If it's going to be done is really a timing thing, if you're going to pay it off early, but if you get to the very end, just leave it if it's that much because of the interest amount?
It's not an issue for us financially because we have the monies to pay it off. It’s more so just trying to understand the logic behind if we wanted to do it make sense. Is it a timing issue?
Thanks. Thanks for all you do.”
Roger: Hal had a question related to paying off a mortgage, not a recommendation on securing a mortgage in retirement. Mark Trotman definitely has a recommendation, so we'll get to that but let's answer Hal's question first
So, Hal has a two hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage 2. 735 percent interest rate. Let's use an OODA loop to think through this in an organized way, that way you can get to a judgment call that you just feel comfortable with.
Okay, so first O of OODA is observe. Observe what are you paying in interest verse principle. You did that with where you're at in the amortization schedule. You've observed that you have the money to pay it off if you need to. You also want to observe what your net worth looks like from a tax category standpoint of pretax, after tax, tax free. You want to observe what guaranteed income sources you have coming in so you know what kind of gap. You better have a plan of record in place. You better have, no, you should have a plan of record in place that will give you a dashboard to observe very quickly.
The next O in OODA is Orient. What do you want is the central question here. What are you trying to solve for? Are you trying to solve for minimizing interest, which is definitely a tactical question. It sounds like this is in the optimized pillar of retirement planning. Do you want to minimize the interest that you're paying? Do you want to lower your monthly cash flow? Is that what you're trying to solve for? Get clear on what you're trying to solve. Are you trying to solve for the psychological benefit of just not being debt free?
I would observe and try to pin down what it is I want here and start to tease around the opportunity cost. So, let's assume you took the 200, 000 and paid off the mortgage. What would be the impact on the life of Hal and his wife after you spent that 200, 000? Well, your liquidity, and you can create these what if scenarios on paper, your liquidity would go down by 200, 000. Your monthly cashflow would be in a better position because you don't have the payment. So cashflow increases, liquidity decreases. You would have the savings of the interest that you're not going to have to pay if you played out the amortization schedule. So those are the three that come to the top of my head as orienting if I pay it off, I'd lose some liquidity, I increase my cash flow, I decrease the interest paid. There may be some second order consequences there, Hal, like if I lower my cash flow, that means I don't have to take as much out of my IRA so I could do Roth conversions or something like that. There may be some second order consequences that you could tease out in this exercise.
What happens if you don't pay off the mortgage? Well, if you don't pay off the mortgage, you're going to have a lot more liquidity. You're going to have 200, 000 more of liquidity. You're going to have the cash flow continue as it already is. If you don't pay off the mortgage, you have the opportunity to use that 200, 000 in some other way. That could be to simply buy 5 percent treasuries or to invest it long term. There's an opportunity cost there that arbitrage between the two and we'll call it two and three quarters that you're paying on the interest and what you potentially could earn otherwise, obviously there's risk there and you know, another second order consequence of not paying off the mortgage would be that you may have to draw money from other places in order to meet the payment, but you get the exercise. I'm not doing it completely here for you, Hal, but you want to think through this.
Okay. Let's look at the situation as it is. Let's define what I want, which is hard, right? Either option, it sounds like for you is perfectly reasonable. Pay it off, get the interest savings, but lose liquidity or just keep it going and have that 200, 000 to use for other things. But if you can start to tease out what you want and then play with the opportunity cost of both paths, you're going to be in a better position to decide.
Perhaps it was You pay off 50, 000 of it to jump on the amortization schedule so you're paying less interest than you are principle. I mean, there's multiple pathways that you can take here and then just make a decision.
If you decide not to pay it off, that's a two-way decision, right? You can not pay it off and then change your mind later, or just throw extra money at it. Maybe another option would be in these pathways is what if I just create my own amortization schedule and I put this much extra towards it in order to accelerate the payoff. My mortgage and I have a mortgage on my house in Colorado. I made an extra payment this year, this month, because that will help jump me through and if I do that 30-year mortgage, it's a lot lower because my plan is to ultimately have it paid off. So, if you decide not to pay it off, then that's a two-way decision. If you pay it off, that's more of a one-way decision. You can't get your money back unless you did something fancy on remortgaging it in some way.
I actually faced this decision Hal, I forget how many years ago now, where my mortgage is two and five eighths, so very close to yours. Mortgage balance, roughly the same. I had the money to pay it off, and this is when interest rates were zero, not where I could earn more now. I chose not to pay it off because when I went through this type of analysis, I value the liquidity of the money, even though I was earning less interest because interest had increased because I am a business owner and I value liquidity because it gives me flexibility and paying off the mortgage, giving up my 200, 000. I think my principal and interest payments are like 900 a month. I was paying more in taxes in insurance per month than I was in my principal and interest didn't change my cash flow situation significantly. I would much rather have the 200, 000 to hold on to. So that was the decision I came to myself.
But I think the key is just think through this in a logical way and just make a call. It sounds like you're in a position where this optimization is more of a, well, optimization that is critical to your life. But that's how I would think through it. All right, now let's get to Mark Trotman, the amazing Mark Trotman, and talk about an option if you're looking to build a house in retirement.
Mark: Hey, Roger, this is Mark. Just listened to your recent podcast this week entitled, Should I Get My Mortgage for My Retirement Home? I love your show. Listen to it every week, as soon as it comes out. I was thinking there's another option for your listener or any of the listeners, as a matter of fact, if you pay off, pay down a big portion of your mortgage and that's called a mortgage recast, I did this myself.
So instead of taking out two mortgages on the home, if the mortgage company allows it, and the mortgage company I have is a large national bank, and they do allow for recast, and in my situation, I was selling a second home, I paid off the second, paid down the mortgage by a significant amount, and requested a recast. In my case, they said, as long as I had paid down, I think it was 30, 000 of principal, they would entertain a recast and it didn't cost anything. Basically, what they do is they re-amortize the loan back to the original ending date of your current loan.
So let's say it was an originally a 30 year fixed loan, three years down the road, you pay off a chunk of it because you had a windfall, some case, my case, it was the sale of a second home and then you pay it down what they would do in that case, since there's 27 years left on the amortization schedule, they will recast the loan with the amount of principal currently left on the loan back to that 27 years, therefore lowering the monthly payment. So instead of having to have a first and a second mortgage, you could look into whether the mortgage lender has that recast option, and this is really good if you have a very low interest rate loan that you don't want to refinance, but you do want to lower your monthly payment, especially for retirees like myself. That's beneficial. A recast is a way to keep that loan, not to have to refinance it, not have to pay closing costs, but lower the monthly payment after a large principal pay down.
I just wanted to throw that out there as additional option. It worked for me and for anyone who maybe is in this situation but didn't have two loans to start with, that's an option for them to look into. Thanks. Keep up the great work, love the show and have a great day.
Roger: Love Mark's wisdom. You can check him out on Mark's Money Mind podcast and in the Rock Retirement Club.
All right. Next week, we're going to focus exclusively on listener questions. So, it's going to be a speed round. We're just going to go through questions and try to help people take little baby steps and hopefully help you as well. But with that said, let's get on to the Rock Life segment and chat with Bobby about weight loss and studies.
ROCK LIFE WITH DR. BOBBY
Ah, now it's time to rock life with Dr. Bobby Dubois and talk about energy. How are you doing, Bobby?
Dr. Bobby: I'm doing well. I'm ready to talk about a weighty subject.
Roger: We're talking about weight here, but before we get to that, how's your podcast going?
Dr. Bobby: Well, thanks for asking. It's really, really, really gone better than expected. I have, you know, 12 or 1400 followers and lots of people going to the website. It's just been a hoot and fun. So far, the comments that have come through have been positive, but as you've counseled me, just wait, I'm going to get my share of things people don't like, but I'm really enjoying it. I feel like I have more time to go into subjects and hopefully help people in ways that are useful to them.
Roger: We'll have a link to it in our 6-Shot Saturday email, but let's remind everybody of the name.
Dr. Bobby: Live Long and Well, with Dr. Bobby.
Roger: Very Spock like reference there.
Dr. Bobby: Yeah, it's got a lot of different sub references. You know someday somebody will call me up and say well you're infringing on somebody's language. It's not exactly that language. Hard to think you could copyright "live long", but you know who knows, who knows.
Roger: The Ohio State University copyrighted "The".
Dr. Bobby: Now I'm in trouble.
Roger: So, weight has come up as a thread in the weaving of thinking about energy in terms of risk of cardiac disease and everything else. So, what are we going to talk about when it comes to weight today?
Dr. Bobby: So there have been a couple of different studies that captured the attention of the news media. I'd like to walk through them because I think they're not only interesting for what they said, but also there are lessons behind the headlines on how we might want to look at other headlines we want to run across, you know, as always, their take home messages. I'm hoping that at the end of this, people will be careful about reading headlines and whether to believe them and to begin to ask the question, is this something to incorporate in my life, or do I want to dig further?
Second, more specifically, it's about intermittent fasting, where that's what a couple of studies I want to talk about, and the punchline here is that intermittent fasting is neither panacea, nor harmful in my opinion, and we'll get into the details. So that's what I'm hoping people will take from this.
Roger: We just had Peter on to talk about cyber security. In that conversation Bobby, we talked about being very careful when you receive unsolicited texts or to really examine emails from unknown sources that you get right because of all the fishing exercise that people are trying to do.
I think of that way with headlines and definitely with health and investing is it's easy to get swayed by things, fooled by things for lack of a better term. So I think the skill of being discerning in what you read is a good one to work on.
Dr. Bobby: I think what you're saying is absolutely correct.
There may be another discussion we can have in the future after I've sort of thought about this more, which is, it's one thing to look at a headline and say, huh, that seems a little screwball. But as we go to Google and Google now goes to ChatGPT, or their version of it, we're now going to have AI synthesis, and how do we begin to get a sense of whether that synthesis, you know, that paragraph they're giving you is completely wrong or not in the health space. I'll have to noodle on this.
Roger: I was actually just thinking about this too, because if the AI bot is going to go to the internet for the available information, and the internet is full of tons of content, marketing, misinformation, studies, where conclusions that are cited where the conclusions aren't what the study said. Bad information in is bad information out, even in an AI bot, I would think.
Dr. Bobby: Well, and it compounds itself, because let's say of the billion web pages that are out there, obviously it's way more than that. Now all of them are by and large written by humans, but in short order, half of those may be written by bots.
So now when it's combing the internet, it's like a second order problem, because not only is there the bad information in some websites, now you have the synthesis of that bad information, which may be 10x greater than the original stuff, and it will swamp the AI algorithm and may increasingly give us misinformation. That's something I'm sort of keeping tabs on.
Roger: My premise is finding safe places is going to be more important than ever before to have thinking more deeply about these things.
Anyway, that might be a topic for another day.
Dr. Bobby: You got it.
Roger: What is the first study that we want to dissect a little bit?
Dr. Bobby: Okay, so the first two studies are about the weight loss approach of time restricted, eating or intermittent fasting, that's sort of how many people popularize it.
Intermittent fasting is basically you narrow the window within 24 hours where you eat. So, some people eat between a period of six hours and then they don't eat for 18 hours or they eat for eight hours and then they don't eat for, you know, 16 hours or whatever it is.
Nominally, what that amounts to is you generally end up with two meals, not three meals a day. Many people might skip breakfast and just have lunch at one o'clock and dinner at six, and they have a pretty narrow window for eating. So that's what intermittent fasting is all about.
Now the champions of this, this has been around for a bit, would tout that the way it works is that it's changing your metabolism, or it's changing your appetite and that it's something going on in biochemistry which helps with weight loss.
So, the first study I wanted to share with people is they really put this to the test. If you intermittent fast, what it does provide for you is you tend to eat less calories. Because you're only eating two meals. Yeah, of course you could tank up for those two meals, but it tends to allow people to eat less if they skip a meal. This was a head-to-head randomized trial where they took people with the time restricted eating and compared them who were on a more typical weight loss diet, but they kept the calories exactly the same. So, one group ate throughout the day and they had, whatever it was, 1, 500 calories or 2, 000 calories a day. The other group did the time restricted, but still had the same number of calories. Lo and behold, it was no difference in the amount of weight loss at 12 weeks or their blood sugar. It wasn't a metabolic game changer. So, what it tells us is that that's not magic in intermittent fasting. But what it does is it might allow some people to have a lower calorie intake, which is what they're really trying to accomplish.
I do this, and I don't do it because I think it's magic, but if I'm trying to lose a couple of pounds because I ate too much over the course of a couple of weeks or whatever, it just allows me not to eat as much. So, That's what the first study, the first study basically helps us to say intermittent fasting can be really helpful for reducing calories, but there's no magic beyond that.
You want to have the cantaloupe diet. If it's the same number of calories, you're going to get the same amount of benefit or lack thereof.
Roger: I think we talked about this before of a lot of it comes down to calories in calories out.
Dr. Bobby: Yes, and that's my belief. Now, there are devotees of other views and yes, eating sugar has its own problems.
Roger: Right.
Dr. Bobby: From a weight loss standpoint, because what we've observed a hundred times is all weight loss programs work until they stop working and no one is more sustainable than another.
Roger: Yeah, I have a daily target of a 13 hour fast, which basically works through end of dinner. It's just, there's no logic to it other than to have some time constraints so I don't graze late at night or early in the morning.
Dr. Bobby: Yeah, exactly. Gail's been skipping dinner a lot as her approach to weight loss, which turns into sort of intermittent fasting. For whatever reason, when it came time to dinner, I didn't really want to make dinner. I didn't want to eat dinner. I went to bed. We talk about don't eat before bed and boy, that felt good because I hadn't eaten for hours and hours before bed, but I woke up in the morning feeling frisky as a kitten because I didn't have a full stomach.
So. It felt great.
Roger: Frisky as a kitten. Okay. I'm going to log that one.
Dr. Bobby: Bobby is frisky. You heard it here.
Roger: So, the whole concept before going to the next one, just a quick question on this intermittent fasting, because part of that is the concept of is it ketosis, that by Not eating for a long time, your body goes into ketosis?
What is that? Am I even saying that right, Bobby? That is where it burns calories more or something like that.
Dr. Bobby: So, there's a great question. It goes back to the Atkins diet, which is the no carb diet. The Atkins diet, if you follow it religiously, people really lose weight. It's basically a no carb diet. This goes back to a finding in patients with kidney disease on dialysis. They don't want to eat. They just can't eat because their biochemistry is so out of whack, it takes away their appetite. So, and they're in a state of ketosis because their kidneys have failed. They tried to create a diet that mimicked having those ketones floating through your body that would take away your appetite.
The problem is, if you had one potato chip, you had to start all over again and two weeks later before you were able to get.
Roger: Oh, wow.
Dr. Bobby: It takes a long time. Intermittent fasting is not going to get you there in 12, 16 or 20 hours, but that's kind of the origin of it. They're like, oh, you'll get ketotic. You won't be hungry, but your body doesn't adjust that quickly. So, for me, and for what the data seems to suggest, it's really about a way to help you eat fewer calories.
Roger: Okay.
Dr. Bobby: No more, no less.
Roger: What about the next study?
Dr. Bobby: Okay. So, one of the questions that comes up about intermittent fasting is, Oh, there's these good aspects of it, but maybe there's harms associated with it? So, this study, which got a remarkable amount of press coverage, CNN, New York Times, Sky News, Smithsonian Magazine, you name it, had the headline, I'm paraphrasing what the headline was, intermittent fasting, they called it time restricted eating, linked to a 91 percent increase in cardiovascular death.
Roger: Oh boy.
Dr. Bobby: So, people doing intermittent fasting had a doubling of their death rate for cardiovascular disease, and that was picked up everywhere.
Roger: Of course. It's very clickable.
Dr. Bobby: It's clickable, and boy, was it clicked. So, I read this, of course had to pull up the original writing about it, and it was like, oh my god, why did the press pick this up?
This is so full of holes, it's like Swiss cheese. I thought this was instructed, one, because my take on the study is, don't worry about it, if you think intermittent fasting helps you, great, do it. But let's now dig in because I think it's instructive, not only about the punchline here about intermittent fasting, but more generally about studies and headlines and how to look at them.
Okay, so the 1st thing was on the worrisome side, this was a press release from the American Heart Association. So, this wasn't like the Lebanese Institute of Health coming up with a statement. This was like, wait a second, this is the American Heart Association. How could they possibly say something that wouldn't be something worth paying attention to?
So that was the first thing that was like, you got to be joking.
Roger: So, we have credibility. We have credibility, perceived credibility in the source.
Dr. Bobby: They had credibility. Now I'm beginning to wonder.
Okay, so next thing. It's an observational study, and as we've talked about, what you really want to do is say, okay, here's a group of people that intermittent fasting and not and we completely randomized them.
You know, 100 people walked in the door and we say, you 50, you go over there and you're reading this way, you 50, you go over there randomly, and then we see what happens. Obviously, it's a difficult thing to do because you'd have to follow people for 5 or 10 years. So, this was an observational study. So, they took people who had been doing intermittent fasting and compared them to people who weren't.
Now you would like to think they adjusted for all the things that might have caused a biased set of results. But they didn't. So, the people in the two groups were completely different. There were more smokers, there were fatter people among the people that did intermittent fasting. They didn't adjust for things like stress, the quality of the diet, who had more or less muscle mass, so they didn't adjust the way they could have or should have to make it at all believable.
Now it gets worse from here. Okay. Those are the obvious boo boos that we all struggle with, and we try to adjust for. This was a study that began in 2003. They looked at what was happening to people's diets in 2003, and they took a two-day diet assessment. This is a survey that gets done. In 2003 or so said, tell us about what you ate in the last two days. From that they inferred, oh, some people didn't have meals three times a day, and then they extrapolated for the next 15 or 20 years and said, okay, what you told us in two days in your life 15 years ago is how you led your life. There's no reason to believe that that two-day recollection had anything to do with what they did. So, we were probably not comparing people that actually did it versus didn't. If you go back to 2003, nobody had ever heard of intermittent fasting. That wasn't part of our understanding.
So, these people weren't skipping meals for health reasons. They probably skipped meals because they had three jobs going on simultaneously. They didn't get a chance to eat or they weren't getting their paycheck. So, they just figured, I'll skip a meal. This was not doing it for health reasons. You're probably picking up people who had stress points in their life that they didn't eat.
If that isn't enough to make you worried about this study, this isn't even a published article. This was an abstract presented at an American Heart Association meeting with no 20-page paper to say, okay, now how did you actually do this, and did it undergo peer review by other experts to say whether this study was done correctly?
All of these reasons got thrown out the window when the American Heart Association did their press release and the news media picked it up. As you can see, it's a highly flawed study. You know, it's like saying eating ice cream increases the risk of drowning, and I bet you if I did that study and did an analysis of who eats ice cream or when, I'd find the correlation. Why? Because people eat ice cream in the summer when it's hot, and guess what? That's when they go swimming. So, you'll correlate eating ice cream with drowning and that's really not what's going on. So observational studies, if they're not done well, they're not peer reviewed. If they're not examined carefully can be very misleading.
Roger: You got the soapbox out. I like it.
Then the question becomes, and I think actually this will be fun, Bobby, we need to do this on a future episode, and maybe we do it on video, where we actually look at one or two studies and look for indicators of the types of things that you found.
I'm thinking of myself, and probably somebody listening, I see the headline, I read the article, and less, I don't know what to believe, right? Because I'm not a scientist, I don't go look, I mean, in the financial realm, I can follow these threads deep like you do in the medical world. It would be good to have some way of navigating this so we know when we should be more skeptical and when we shouldn't.
Dr. Bobby: Well, one of my goals in chatting with you and your listeners and my podcast is not only to talk about interesting things, but gradually teach people how to do it yourself. To begin to ask these four or five or six questions, so, they can begin to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I mean, we've got one more study that I think will add to this and hopefully begin to give people some tools that they could take into looking at these things.
Roger: Before we get to that study, let's just answer the question, should we all stop doing time restricted eating? Is it okay if I have that midnight snack?
Dr. Bobby: I think there's no harm in time restricted eating on the parameters that we talked about, the six hours or eight hours or whatever. But also, don't go into it thinking it's biochemically going to solve everything.
If it helps you, I mean, this is kind of your N of one trial, give it a go, see if it makes a difference for you for Gail. It helps me. It seems to help, but it's only because it reduces the calories.
Roger: That's definitely what I've noticed Bobby with mine. Like if after dinner is when I want to just out of boredom or want a flavor to not grab the junk calories that I just don't really need.
If it solves that, then great, but all the other perceived benefits really aren't backed from the studies that you've seen.
Dr. Bobby: That's my interpretation.
Roger: Okay.
Dr. Bobby: You'll have others that will still tout that it is uniquely different, but I've curated the literature and I don't see anything beyond its help and real help in reducing calories for some people.
Roger: Okay.
Dr. Bobby: You know, when 75 percent of the U. S. population is overweight or obese. A lot of us have this issue and whatever works, beautiful, do it.
Roger: Alright, so this final study I'm excited about because I actually like vinegar. Vinegar reminds me of being with my grandmother and eating ring bologna and dipping it in vinegar as a kid.
Dr. Bobby: Ooh, yum.
Roger: So, this, Okay. Yeah. This study is about drinking one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar each day, is linked to weight loss in young adults.
Dr. Bobby: Exactly, and this too, not surprisingly, was picked up by, in this case, 127 news outlets. This is a tricky, tricky, tricky one because you want me to teach people how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The problem is, and I'll sort of get to this a little bit later, that this might fall in the wheat, not the chaff. Meaning, I don't have a simple answer to, this study is wrong. Well, I'll explain kind of how I get it out of this box, because I don't want to live in this box.
Let me tell you what the study did.
So, this study looked at obese or overweight adolescents. So, it's a younger population, not necessarily the listeners of this podcast, and they did a randomized trial. So, they took this group of adolescents. I don't remember if there was 400 total, 100 in each category, something like that, and they divided them into four groups.
One group just go about your day, eat your normal, whatever, and we'll see you back. We'll see if you gained weight or lost weight.
Another group gave a teaspoon a day of apple cider vinegar. The next got two teaspoons. The third one got three teaspoons, which makes a tablespoon. Lo and behold, they lost weight. They lost 15 pounds. The one that had the highest apple cider vinegar. It was basically once a day in the morning and they lost weight. This was a randomized trial. It was published in a decent journal.
Now, it was a Lebanese study, so you might be like, I don't know the quality control of studies in Lebanon. I frankly have no idea whether the studies were done well, but there's no glaring flaw that I can look at and say, Oh yeah you should ignore it.
So where do I net out with this?
I honestly don't believe it because losing 15 pounds in 12 weeks is a remarkable feat and to have it happen with something as simple as that is hard to believe.
Now, you can do a study and come up with findings that are random and if it gets repeated, it'll be like, nah, we didn't observe that could be repeated 10 more times.
Roger: Yeah, I was going to say, isn't that part of the process of getting it published and peer reviewed, but it also gives you lay out exactly what you did so other scientists can go duplicate to give some, oh, yeah, we got that too. Isn't that part of the process?
Dr. Bobby: Totally, and if you get 2 or 3 more publications. of research that duplicate this, now we seriously have something, okay, but do we act upon it today? Well, I have two thoughts on this. Because the findings are so beyond what you would believe, I have to come up, well, is there a theory here? Could it be that drinking some apple cider vinegar in the morning kind of cuts your appetite for some reason? You know, the acidity, maybe it changes your blood pH, maybe it does something to your stomach and the hormones, the ghrelin and other things. Maybe there's something there that it actually, I mean, it's hard to believe that vinegar changes your metabolism in such a way that you burn more calories.
The only kind of plausible thing I could see, and we don't know the answer from this study, is that maybe it cuts your appetite. Who knows?
Okay. So, it's going to take a year or two or three before other people do this study and get it peer reviewed and in publication. So now we got a couple of years where we don't know the answer.
So, what do we do? Well, we do an N of one trial in ourselves.
Roger: I was thinking this is like the perfect idea for that because there's no real downside unless you're allergic to vinegar.
Dr. Bobby: You'll know it within, you know, they did three months, but you ought to know it sooner than three months. Take a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in the morning, and then let me and Roger know whether it helped you and we'll quickly get some good data that might help us answer this question.
So, I don't believe it's going to turn out to be true because it's way too beyond belief. Let's try it out if you want to.
Roger: There is one big downside that I just identified.
Dr. Bobby: Uh oh.
Roger: If I take a few teaspoons of vinegar cider or vinegar in the morning and try to get a good morning kiss from my wife that might decrease the number of good morning kisses I get.
Dr. Bobby: Going to have to reverse the order.
Roger: It's going to have to be in the window first. It's the window of brushing my teeth and taking the vinegar. Oh, that's my kissing window. If I do this.
Dr. Bobby: Okay. Well, you have a conundrum as I like to say in the family.
Roger: The big thoughts here, be careful with headlines and start to be a more skeptical about what we read at the heart part of these headlines influence us. Even if we don't read the article.
Dr. Bobby: Totally.
Roger: Any other final thoughts?
Dr. Bobby: You know, remember what your mother told you. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. So, something looks beyond belief either on the good side about the vinegar or the bad side about intermittent fasting, look more carefully or talk to an expert who's independent of the study, or if you can do an N of 1, beautiful. Do it, and then you'll know what works or doesn't work for you.
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
Roger: On your marks, get set,
and we're off to take a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock. Retirement, but rock life.
So, in the next seven days, I want you to just chill out. It is the heat, dead heat of summer. I'm back in Texas now, boo. I'm trying not to be pouty about this, just FYI, I'm trying not to be, but it's the heat of summer. We got family, we got vacations, we had fun. So just go enjoy yourself.
CONCLUSION
Well, thank everybody for hanging out with me today. Hope you're having a great week. We just got back from Colorado. So, this is just personal at the end of the show.
Got back from Colorado. We were there for a month and a half. We had a lot of fun. I was a little injured. Couldn't mountain bike as much as I wanted to, but we really got settled into the house. We had a little party with local Rock Retirement Club members and a listener, which was awesome. Also had some client friends over that were traveling through town, which was awesome.
Our first observation is one, I got to be there, just as my happy place. Driving 15 miles an hour through town, going to the local Ace Hardware store, getting to know people, having a trail just to walk everywhere, riding on a bike to the store. It's where I'm supposed to be, I think.
Second is it still felt a little bit like vacation because we had so many people come and visit. I don't feel like I had my office set up there, but I don't feel like I got my rhythm. I will say, I don't know why I say the top five. It's definitely one of the top five best decisions of my life. I feel very convicted about that. Love the people there. Love the friends that I have there. Love just being out in nature easily.
So that's my quick update. We'll give you updates as we go. Hope you have a wonderful day.
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only, and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance references are historical and does not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.