Self quantification is essential if you want to possess the data you need to make the best-informed decisions for your health. This had only been done in doctor’s offices in the past, but now with the growth of the self quantification movement and the explosion of available technologies to assist those who want to learn more, you don’t need a doctor to tell you if you have improved from one year to the next. You can tell yourself if you improved from one day to the next. We speak with Bob Troia, or Quantified Bob as many people know him, so you can hear how he approaches self quantification and what advice he has for you.

In this deep dive, you will learn …

How and why did you start getting into measuring your biomarkers (0:29)

• An obsession with measuring performance gave way to an obsession measuring health and wellness
• Uses data from wearables to track sleep, glucose, activity, stress, body composition
• Uses exercise equipment like an ARX machine to measure performance

What is Bob’s optimal measurement and life hack stack (4:31)

• Use of a glucose meter, sleep wearable, removing light and EMFs from his bedroom, heart rate variability, air quality monitor

Bob sleeps with his mouth taped shut, seriously (10:18)

• This is done to force air through your nose when you breathe while sleeping because breathing through your nose keeps the passages clear
• It also keeps your mouth from getting dry, helps with dental development, give you a more restful sleep
• Bob prefers 3M tape, in case you were wondering

Where should a beginner start their self-quantification journey (17:15)

• Activity (Fitbit) and sleep (Oura ring) quantification are best for starters who want helpful insights
• Experiment with altering and shortening their eating windows and taking time to actually chew and digest the food
• Be more aware of ways to improve psychological or mental state and getting your emotional systems in alignment

What else do you have that others should consider getting (23:44)

• CBD oil for pain and inflammation
• Nutribullet or something like that for quick, healthy meals
• Infrared oven
• Blue light protection for the evening to allow your body to unwind at the end of the day
• PEMF device, though it can be pricey

Full Transcript

Saad Alam: 00:00

So we’re here with Bob Troia. He is a serial entrepreneur, data quantification guy, bio-hacker, kind of health guru extraordinaire and what we wanted to do is, Bob, we’re super excited to be here.

Bob Troia: 00:14

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Saad Alam: 00:14

Yeah, we’re appreciative of the time that you’ve giving us. And honestly, you have a really interesting outlook on life. You measure absolutely everything there is out there. Tell us a little bit how you got into it, what your goals are, where you’re trying to take it.

Bob Troia: 00:29

Sure. Well, to take it way back, just my personality, the way I kind of am is just a curious mind and I’ve always sought to kind of understand myself better in whether it was as a teenager when we had just a tape measurer and a stop watch, and we’re trying to measure performance and how do you get faster or stronger and writing down workouts in a notepad. I was always just kind of obsessed with understanding what sort of knobs I could turn that adjust that. As I got older, the shift went more from performance to kind of thinking in terms of wellness and longevity as you get more into the professional world. And while that was happening, we saw a lot of things happening with advances in technology and sensors and wearables and just the things that we could do that we just couldn’t do even five years ago.

Bob Troia: 01:10

And in terms of measuring everything, well, I measured a lot of things I’ve probably taken it to extremes, but I don’t always measure everything. I think there’s a time and place to do certain things and you get a certain set of information that you can take and put it aside and go back to it later. There’s definitely elements of passively collected data, whether or not I use it is I have it there but if I ever have to go back to it. So whether it’s like location data or biometric data coming off of wearables or sleep data. It’s just good to have that information. But there’s times where I might be doing continuous glucose monitoring for like a period of two weeks, but I’m not always wearing a continuous glucose monitor. I might have two weeks of data and I can gain a lot of insights from that and go back to it later. And if I want to revisit that, do some more experiments to say six months from now, I could go back and do another kind of experiment with the same tools.

Bob Troia: 01:58

So I think it’s about also being wiser. It’s not about being the most quantified person. I think it’s about being smart about it. And I think for most people, they get really excited when they start getting into the world of say biohacking and self quantification. They want to buy a million things and start tracking a million things. But then you’re overwhelmed with all this information. You don’t really know what to make of it. So it’s something that I’ve built over many years. So I’ve got layers of information and data that I can kind of dive deeper and deeper into if I need to go there. But often times like today, I may have just been okay, how did I sleep last night? Just doing some body composition analysis or looking at my body’s resiliency in terms of stress levels. I can measure heart rate variability. There’s certain metrics that, at any given time, you look at.

Bob Troia: 02:41

If I’m going to do a workout at, and we’re at HACKD, I might be looking at certain data, like on an ARX machine where I’m looking at my strength outputs. I’m gonna compare it to how I did last week. I’ll see if I was a little bit under the weather for a few days. I might be like, hey you know, I lost a little bit last week, that’s okay. I’m gonna see if I can pick it back up next workout. And so it’s all about measuring things that for me, that provide insights, not just for the sake of measuring.

Bob Troia: 03:07

But you can also take it another direction and uncover things about yourself you didn’t realize. So sometimes I’ll just look at data and I’ll just uncover a trend or some correlation. I’ll be like oh, that’s cool. I had one experiment, it wasn’t even an experiment, I’d been wearing a heart rate monitor and had some wearables and I think I went to the Belmont Stakes, which is a horse racing kind of event. All day you’re betting on horses, it’s gambling, it’s very exciting and I took all the data, it was all timestamped and you know what time every race was and I actually could measure the thrill of gambling. I was actually looking at how my body responds to the highs and lows of like … And it was pretty cool to see and I’d never set out to make that as an experiment. But it just kind of reveals things about yourself that you understand.

Bob Troia: 03:48

And so, for me, I just like to, anything I try, I like to have some information to back it up for myself and the one thing I should point out is, what works for me might not work for you, you’ll get different results. So it doesn’t mean anything is wrong or right, we’re just all very highly individualized. And that’s why you hear terms like single-subject experiments or N of 1, because we are, we’re all kind of individuals and we will have our own unique quirks in our data.

Saad Alam: 04:13

So after all this time you’ve been spending looking at different technologies, testing things. If you had to think about what your optimal or premium stack is for Bob, four things, what are those things and why?

Bob Troia: 04:25

A stack or just tools or?

Saad Alam: 04:28

Yes, sure.

Bob Troia: 04:31

For me, I would say the things to really pay attention to would be … and this is more of a long term thing, but there’s acute numbers as well, understanding your body’s glucose, blood sugar response. This could be, not just going to the doctor once a year and saying you’re pre-diabetic or whatever. It’s understanding day to day, this trend, you’ll see the effects of everything from travel to different foods that you eat, to exercise to just stress, all that stuff will affect that. So I think you can get a glucose meter for like $30 in any drugstore and people can start understanding that. So we hear about this proliferation of things like type-two diabetes in our society, it’s like, that stuff doesn’t just hit you out of nowhere, it’s stuff … it’s decades of lifestyle and you can catch it early on.

Bob Troia: 05:16

I would say understanding our body’s … I’ll put these together, but your sleep and your body’s heart rate variability, your stress response, they’re very hand in hand, because I think one will affect the other. If you’re very stressed you might not sleep well. If you don’t sleep well you might add to your body’s stress. And we can do that wearing wearables and other tools.

Bob Troia: 05:38

Now the challenge is you might start tracking your sleep and it tells you you sleep like crap. And you go, I know I sleep like crap. I don’t the device to tell me I sleep like crap. But what you might start being able to do now is take other data points and figure out what … because it might not be one thing. It could be a combination of four or five things that affect your sleep quality. And it can be everything from your meal timing at night to exposure to blue light in the evening to other factors. And so I’ve done lots of experiments with not just playing around with those variables, but also understanding ways to maybe optimizing my sleep environment. So my bedroom. So using things like blackout curtains and removing external light sources. Paying attention to things like EMF’s in my bedroom and making sure that my body is kind of like a sanctuary, you spend a third of your life there.

Bob Troia: 06:28

On the stress side, heart rate variability is something every morning, before I even get out of bed, the first thing I do is I do a one minute spot check where I have an app on my phone, you can put your finger over the flash and the camera lens and it can pick out your pulse rate and it can in one minute, show you your heart rate variability. Which is a sign of your body’s parasympathetic or sympathetic balance which means your fight or flight response versus your rest and digest. Athletes will use this a lot to decide if they can train hard on a given day or they should recover and you can actually predict things like I can see I’m about to be sick. You’ll see these trends in there. And so for me-

Saad Alam: 07:06

What’s the name of that app?

Bob Troia: 07:07

There’s one called HRV for training, there’s another one called Sweepy HRV, there’s another one called Ithlete. Some of them work off the phone, off the flash, there’s other ones that will work with a chest strap, like a polar chest strap and there’s other ones that they make a special little finger clip that you can put on that would pull it from there. You can also do it from the ear with it. There’s all these devices, it’s just a matter … it’s one minute before you even get out of bed, it just says where’s your body right now?

Bob Troia: 07:32

Because it will change and if you get up and you wait a minute or you walk around a bit, it’ll change. You want to know what happens right when you wake up. And then lastly I would say, we pay all this attention to our bodies and we think about health and fitness and all that, but we don’t pay a lot of attention to our environment and I’ve really spent a lot of time understanding my indoor environment and my home especially and optimizing that.

Bob Troia: 07:52

So whether it’s air quality, water quality, looking at all those variables because if that ultimately does affect us, especially living in a city, like New York City, just walking around the air quality’s not the best and you can buy these very inexpensive air quality monitors that, under $200 and you just set it up, it’s on your home wifi network. You can look at your app real time, even if you’re not home, like a security system and go what’s the quality of, what’s going in my home? And you can automate stuff.

Bob Troia: 08:18

So you can say if there’s too many dust particles in the air, kick on an air purifier and just automate the whole thing. You can do things with regulating temperature, humidity, etc. So I think we also get exposure to what’s called a volatile organic compound, that could be from anything from furniture polish, you ever smell that kind of benzene kind of smell, to cleaning supplies in our home, to plastic, if you have children, toys and things like that. We want to make sure that our home is as optimized as possible too because the environment ultimately will affect us, as much as, if someone had the, they could be training everyday and be in great physical shape but the environment can just be beating them down.

Saad Alam: 08:59

Most people assume that health is going to the gym once a day or eating the right meal two times a day and for a lot of people it’s …

Bob Troia: 09:09

It’s not necessarily sexy because you think about oh … because people like, they want to train, they want to do all this other stuff, they want to pop a bunch of supplements, cool, but at the same time, if they’re living in a toxic environment and they’re either throwing away money or they’re missing half the battle which is just taking care of your… what’s the low hanging fruit?

Bob Troia: 09:28

It’s gonna be like I spent a third of my day, let’s say eight hours in my bedroom sleeping and so let’s optimize that and that’s a third of my life, I know my environment I’m set up for success there. Now, sleep wise, if there’s other things affecting my sleep, then you have to dig deeper into that and understand what factors are affecting your sleep quality.

Saad Alam: 09:46

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bob Troia: 09:47

I’ve experimented with everything from, like I said, blackout curtains, I’ve done incline bed therapy where you take your headboard and your raise it about six to eight inches, so your bed’s, you don’t really notice it, but on a slight decline and that actually helps your body with circulating your lymphatic system and stuff like that. It also makes your heart work a little harder, because you’ve gotta pump blood, that’s got to come back up. For me that’s been a pretty cool thing to check out, regulating temperature.

Bob Troia: 10:18

I think people tend to sleep in rooms that are too hot and I think colder room, even if you, you get under the covers, stay warm, but the air quality, I think I sleep better when the air is really cold. I’ve just noticed that and I’ve talked to other people that had the same experience. We could talk about, a lot of people had, not so much a full on sleep apnea, but they have some form of an apnea, so there’s something called mouth taping, where you take a little piece of this 3M micro port tape, costs about 10 cents, you put it on your mouth and it looks really scary and stuff because you think you’re gonna suffocate, but it forces you to nose breathe and people will often say, oh my nose is clogged or whatever, but what ends up happening is, it clears up. The first time I did it I was worried I was gonna suffocate, whatever.

Saad Alam: 10:57

When you say tape it, you mean actually tape your mouth shut?

Bob Troia: 10:59

Yeah, you just take a piece, a couple pieces of this tape and it’s called 3M micro port tape because it comes off very, you can take it off without ripping your lip up and you put it on and now you’re forced to breathe out of your nose.

Saad Alam: 11:10

Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Bob Troia: 11:10

And you sleep the whole night like that and what’s happening is because you’re breathing … I used to always wake up with a little bit of congestion, like I always had a little bit of a kind of like a sinusitis, a little stuffy nose and because you’re breathing through you’re nose all night it’s … well a couple things are happening, you’re forcing the passages to stay clear and so the mucous and stuff doesn’t build up. We also generate most of our nitric oxide through our nose breathing, so when you talk about breathing in general and why it’s better to breathe through your nose, whether you’re meditating or exercising, you’re building, you’re generating that through the nose.

Bob Troia: 11:43

Also by keeping your mouth shut, people out there, they tend to sleep with their mouth open, they’ll have dry mouth, they’ll have other issues and so that keeps the moisture and stuff in your mouth. There’s all these benefits to mouth taping and I’ve even seen it where there’s some dentists they’re recommending parents do it with their children and it looks really like, people think it’s they’re being child abusers or whatever, but it’s important because it actually helps with their dental development too, because it forces the tongue to stay on the roof of the mouth and from a development standpoint, it actually improves, it has it’s benefits there.

Bob Troia: 12:15

But for me, it was more just, I had a feeling, if I sleep at night, I’m kind of waking up with catching flies when your mouths open or your not really breathing properly and that creates a bunch of disruption and so in my sleep data, I saw, I had a bunch of little red dots. I was like oh, I slept eight hours last night, but you see little red dot, red dot, red dot, red dot, it doesn’t mean I was just up and awake for like 20 minutes, I didn’t even realize I was awake, but I was maybe tossing and turning. I was having these little wake ups because maybe my breathing was just getting interrupted briefly and once I started mouth taping, those red dots kind of went away.

Saad Alam: 12:48

Is it, how often do you mouth tape?

Bob Troia: 12:50

When I remember to. If I just happen to fall asleep without doing it, it’s fine, but I would say I try to do it as much as possible. I’d say at least four to five days a week.

Saad Alam: 13:00

Oh, that’s crazy. So you go home, are you getting this by the way? So you go home and your girlfriend knows this,

Bob Troia: 13:06

Oh it’s funny, she’ll turn to give me a kiss goodnight and she’ll be like okay, but she’s very forgiving of all that stuff I do, because I usually have, I’ve got electrodes hooked up to me, I do other stuff when I’m sleeping, but yeah, again, it’s one of those things that looks kind of freaky and scary but it’s actually pretty safe and there’s … I mean the whole point of even the tape, you’ll know for example, some people will try it for the first time, they’ll wake up in the morning and the tape will be off.

Bob Troia: 13:39

Well that meant that they sort of reverted back to breathing through their mouth and it basically blew the tape off. It’s a good sign that are you probably breathing? Is it helping you? Some people, it takes a few times to do it, before their body gets into the habit of just staying on the nose breathing, not having a panic and just breathing right through the mouth and blowing the tape off. There’s another company that makes a tape that has a tiny little opening in the front so if you feel really scared about, like you’re worried about suffocating, it actually lets you, if you want to, it’ll let air through the middle of it. It’s called like Somnifix and they’re making these little strips, but the 3M tape, you buy a whole roll of it for just a few dollars and it lasts awhile. That’s the best bang for your buck if you’re gonna do mouth taping.

Saad Alam: 14:21

What’s the easiest way … I’m sure you meet people that are like “Bob you have done hundreds of different experiments or some large number of experiments, if I could do three things just to get started that are easy that are actually gonna have a significant improvement of my health, what are those things?”

Bob Troia: 14:40

Yeah, I think it just goes back to some of the things I mentioned, understanding your baseline, day-to-day activity and sleep metrics, I mean that’s very actionable, easy data to understand. You can see some trends, you’ll know if someone is active/inactive, things like body composition are good to trend over time, but if I have someone who comes to me and they’re obese, I’m not gonna put them on a scale, we kind of know that there’s a problem, that that’s the result and so you figure out, what’s the low hanging fruit? And especially when we talk about people that are more, say adults that are more in the real world, they’re in the workforce, they usually come in saying three things. They’re like, “I sleep like crap, I’m stressed out, and I want to lose a little bit around my waist” and that’s usually, everything distills down to those three habits.

Bob Troia: 15:32

So I often just say to people, we’ll start simple because I want them to understand also because not everyone’s a data scientist, not everyone’s gonna be able to make these really in depth correlations, so let’s make it really easy so they can understand what’s happening. So we look at sleep, activity, data metrics, from there we can start advancing to things, like I said, heart rate variability, things to understand the stress response to life and this is all aside from looking at getting some lab tests, if they need that, if they’re working with a doctor or integrated practitioner and just really understanding where they’re at right now.

Bob Troia: 16:10

It’s one thing for them to say where they want to be, but we need to understand where they are and if it took them 20 years to get where they are now, it’s not like we’re gonna change it overnight. We can start implementing these new behaviors and making these changes and getting an understanding of things, but it took me six, seven years, when I first sort of dove into when biohacking, as a term, really caught on and I was digging deeper into things like lab testing and I really rethought my approach to diet and nutrition.

Bob Troia: 16:35

I had a lot of stuff that was going on in terms of autoimmune issues, I had gut issues and that stuff took years to resolve. Even focusing really hard on it, it just takes time and you have to give your body time to kind of get back to where it needs to be. That’s why people like things like nootropics and all that, it’s an immediate “I feel something now” but if you say to someone, “take this, you’re not gonna notice anything, maybe three years from now, it’ll be resolved” and they’re like well what am I gonna see? No you’re just gonna be in a better state, you’re gonna feel better, people don’t necessarily want that, they want that like, that’s why in the supplement world, you see these pre workouts and people love that, because they can feel it’s working right away, versus things that they have to put in some effort to.

Bob Troia: 17:15

But I would say, for the average person for someone just starting out, just getting some basic metrics on themselves, just looking at activity, sleep and there’s certain apps, this is like the Oura ring, it’s a finger worn sensor versus a Fitbit which is around the wrist, but what’s nice about it is they’ll give you insights each day too, it’ll know, for example, you slept a certain way, we saw your heart rate was elevated in the middle of the evening, overnight, which to them goes, oh you must have had a late meal and you didn’t even have to tell it you had a late meal, it knows. Or you were drinking alcohol. Or it’ll say to you, you’re going to bed an hour too late, go to bed an hour early tonight and some people kind of laugh at it. One day it told me I should go to bed at like 9 P.M. and I was like what? 9 P.M. I’ll try it and then I slept amazing and I woke up really early, but at the same time maybe my circadian sort of window where I should’ve been awake versus sleep was off and so it told me that.

Bob Troia: 18:18

So I think, for people to start tracking it, I think that’s one part of it but it has to get those … they need some insights and feedback and that’s why the toolmakers and these devices and things that are out there, they’re getting better at giving that back to people. Instead of just saying, you know you sleep like crap. I think … and I’m talking about people who are trying to figure this out on their own, not working with a coach or a team trainer and doctor and stuff like that. It’s getting better in terms of what type of insights we can get.

Saad Alam: 18:48

So sleep is one, what are the other two things you think people can do easily to get started?

Bob Troia: 18:54

I would say experimenting in terms of their eating windows and their diet. I think people … and I’m not even saying whether someone’s gonna call themselves paleo or put whatever label on that, I’m talking literally about the concept of, most people are just eating all day and I think even if you’re eating the same number of calories, just condensing that into a shorter window to see how their body deals with that, again part of it can resolve, maybe they’re eating too late at night, that affects sleep, or they’re starting eating too early in the day or they’re …

Bob Troia: 19:27

I just think people, they feel like if they’re not eating all the time, then they’re starving or something like that and I’ve done a lot, I’m sure you have as well, we’ve done a lot around fasting and intermittent fasting and I think, people understanding the idea of I approach food just as it’s nutrition.

Bob Troia: 19:45

I mean yeah, I don’t have the emotional connection in terms of … I can go a whole day or whatever without eating, I’m not worried about that, but I think for a lot of people there’s an emotional connection, so they still want that, the flavor and the taste and all that, but I think there’s a way of condensing this stuff in terms of not eating all the time and then people will have a better understanding of food.

Bob Troia: 20:08

And even just when you are eating, being more conscious of eating slower or being more aware of it because I’ve seen people who eat the healthiest food and they sit at their computer while they’re eating or they’ve got their phone in one hand and they’re slamming down the food and they’re eating in within three minutes. I guarantee you, you’re not getting the benefits of that meal the same way as if you just took 20 minutes to sit and digest it, chew it, your body actually will treat it very differently.

Bob Troia: 20:34

Second thing I’d say, would be just be more aware of eating, diet, nutrition, where you are on that. Without going down the rabbit hole of special types of diets and all of that. And then I would say, the third thing for me is, if we’re talking on quantification side, I personally do think environment is still a big one. We talked about tracking environment but if you want to go a little bit more outside of metrics, a lot of our well being is tied to mental health, emotional health and even if someone doesn’t like to meditate, there are tools, this even ties into stress management.

Bob Troia: 21:19

There are tools that will allow us to work through that and get out of our heads a little bit and this is something I look back on, just whether it’s harboring certain emotions or things that you just haven’t dealt with or your kind of suppressing or just being more social and because I think our mental being is also tied to just being social and around people.

Bob Troia: 21:44

Because we talked about measuring heart rate variability every morning and what I actually found was if I went out and had one or two drinks of alcohol the night before, my heart rate variability actually improved the next day. You’d think it would go down to drink alcohol, but if I drank one or two, it actually improved and when I was like “oh, that’s interesting, does alcohol improve my heart rate variability?” Well it doesn’t. What I figured out was, the reason when I had the one or two drinks, it means I’m out with friends, I’m out in a social setting, I’m having a great time and it changes your physiological state.

Bob Troia: 22:14

So I would say being more aware of ways to improve that, your emotional and health and there are tools, like Mwave is a company that does something from HeartMath, it’s about using a sensor that clips to your ears, they’re measuring your heart rate variability and also along with breathing and getting your emotional systems all in alignment. They make a device called inner balance that you can do it anywhere.

Bob Troia: 22:43

I’ll do it in a sauna because you can just clip it your ear and you just look at, on your phone, there’s this little pattern that you breathe with it and it adjusts to get you back into the zone and you do a five minute session of that once a day. You feel completely different afterwards and I just feel like we don’t take the time to even take a few minutes just to do that and even if you’re not into meditation, you’re not into any of that, I’m a technology guy, I’m a data guy. There are actually tools out there that will let you do it and you don’t feel like … you can take all the spiritual stuff out of the equation, but it’s still helping you deal with yourself on an emotional level.

Saad Alam: 23:18

And so you’re basically saying, there’s sleep, there’s intermittent fasting or playing with the windows when you’re actually eating and then there’s just emotional wellbeing. Right? What are three tools, that we’ll call them a little bit harder core, whether its infrared sauna or using something like a Joovv, what are the three tools that you think people should all have in their house because if they use them on a daily basis, they’ll just result in so much of a better individual.

Bob Troia: 23:44

Well, this has been my … because now we’re shopping around the holidays and stuff, I was like what gifts do I give all my family and friends? The number one thing this year has been CBD oil. I mean, no matter who I’ve had, because people are in pain, people are inflamed, people are … it’s just, magical thing that whether you give it to an adult, a parent, a grandparent, everyone just seems to have a benefit from it and you let them try it, whether they put some in some coffee or they just take some drops or they do whatever with it, and for me that was definitely one thing I would say everyone … some element of, I’m done taking pharmaceuticals, we have a society that’s all on opioids and all that and I think there’s more natural ways to get people around that and I think that’s gonna be a huge thing in the next few years as we see that emerge.

Bob Troia: 24:38

I think in terms of other things that everyone should have in their home, I would say something … I guess this is more on the cooking side of things and all that, so I’ve got two things I use. Basically some form of good blender, whether it’s a Nutribullet or something like that, to make healthy, quick, to go, if we’re time strapped, but you can make a nice super shake or whatever, that’s full of vegetables and nutrients and all that. I’ll just pound one in the morning on the way out.

Bob Troia: 25:16

I have what’s called an infrared oven, so even when you’re cooking forward, if we’re searing steaks or the fats, if we’re oxidizing, if we’re burning them at too high of a temperature, with infrared oven and it’s one of those stupid looking, infomercial looking like things, but they work. And what they do is, because it’s infrared, so it’s kind of cooking from the inside out, it’s penetrating in, but it’s also giving it a slight sear, so if I cook a steak on it, I get this perfectly seared, little bit of sear on the outside because you want that little bit of that flavor, but it doesn’t burn it and you still cook it thoroughly on the inside. And I’ve got it dialed in to where I know I can put a steak on there, within like 12 minutes I’ve got this perfectly cooked steak and I use it for so many things because again, a hot pan, when you’re throwing oil and stuff in and people tend to burn stuff, they cook it really hot.

Bob Troia: 26:08

I mean, yeah crispy bacon probably is the most amazing thing in the world, but that crispy bacon, now you’ve basically taken all those fats and you just really oxidized and denatured them and so you’ve got to figure out ways to cook that are … even if you think your intentions are good, you’re eating quality food but you’re cooking improperly, you mess up the benefits of that food. I’d say everyone should definitely have that and I do think air quality monitors, I mean we all have carbon monoxide detectors in our home, that’s for a reason, because that’s an odorless gas that can kill us if we have carbon monoxide that gets into our environment, that’s why by law we have those sensors.

Bob Troia: 26:46

But there’s a lot of other things that we should be measuring in our air quality as well. I think everyone in a home should have some form of blue light protection for the evening, so if you’re sitting around, people want to watch TV … I mean if you can’t turn off the TV two hours before bed, some people that they want to unwind still and watch some television, blue blocking glasses basically allows their bodies to start naturally producing melatonin, it allows us to unwind naturally. Our circadian rhythms get all messed up when we’re on our devices until we go to bed or in bed, we’re on our phones.

Bob Troia: 27:22

I do everything from, I’ve got filters on my phone that cut out some of those blue type of wavelengths of light and white and also wearing just these glasses and there’s cheap ones, that you can buy for like $8, that they’re not sexy or anything but if you’re just at home, they’re $8, I’ve got like a dozen of them, I give them out as gifts to people because I’m just like here just put these on in the evening while you’re you know … you’re not gonna be out in public with them, nobody cares what you look like and people swear by them. They use them and they go, wow it really helped me unwind, it really helped me fall asleep faster because your body can start getting into that production of melatonin and do it naturally instead of taking external supplements to help sleep.

Bob Troia: 28:02

So there’s a lot of stuff I think everyone should have, I mean, it’s just a cost for some things, there’s certain tools, for PEMF, which is like pulse electromagnetic frequencies, I mean everything from aches and pains and little acute injuries and stuff, just to have that around, I use these little coils that are hooked to a 9 Volt battery and that can basically just pre solve injuries and pain really quickly and it’s completely like just … it’s a pretty great experience to use these things and they’re not cheap though, even the smallest devices are still gonna cost like $500 and they go upwards of $30,000, does that make sense for any home? It’s hard to say.

Bob Troia: 28:45

Some families will invest in their health and I would say, with regards to other … Yeah, there’s a lot of things, it’s just a cost issue, I think for most families and that’s why even a facility like this that we’re in, it gets it out of like … I had some of these pieces of equipment in my home and I was using it, but it’s sitting idle for 23 hours of the day so why not make it available to other people so that it can be used 24/7 and now you can bring the cost down to someone who may be can’t afford to buy that piece of equipment, but they can definitely afford to have access to it, that’s pretty important.