That Bruce Springsteen’s a wealthy man cannot be questioned. What’s up for question is his degree of wealth.

Forbes estimates Springsteen’s net worth at $1.2 billion in a July 2024 article and calls it “conservative.” But in an interview with the Daily Telegraph three months later, Springsteen calls it “real wrong.”

What’s not in dispute is that Sony purchased Springsteen’s entire music catalog for at least $500 million in 2021 and that he still commands top dollar when he tours. The best seats can sell for over $4,000 on Ticketmaster, according to the New York Post.

That Bruce Springsteen’s been “one of the leading figures of American music” over the last 50 years cannot be questioned either. After all, that’s the view expressed by none other than Encyclopædia Britannica.

What is up for question is the degree to which Springsteen has affected you. Yet even if it’s been non-existent so far, a few of his words from a recent interview could now have a life-enhancing impact upon you and your health.

These words, however, are not lyrics from Springsteen’s most recent release, “Tracks II: The Lost Albums.” They were said to Jon Pareles of The New York Times about why he unveiled that work as it was first created, as seven distinct albums he had made years ago but chose not to market back at the time.

Because an album is “a cohesive group of songs, basically, that end up being greater than the sum of their parts.”

After reading the entire article, those were the words that stayed with me, for I realized Springsteen’s vision of an album should be how you and I envision our health. Read his words again with that idea in mind, and then ask yourself an absolutely important —albeit metaphorical — question.

“In the never-ending production of my health album, am I giving short shrift to my B-side songs?”

If you’re being truthful and you’re a typical American adult, the answer’s “Yes.”

In the research cited in last week’s article, the American adults studied in it needed to be free from major chronic diseases such as cancer, congestive heart failure, kidney failure, stroke, and type 2 diabetes to be classified as aging healthfully. Yet a 2024 Centers for Disease Prevention and Control report finds that over 60 percent of American adults have at least one chronic disease, 40 percent have two or more, — and 12 percent have at least five.

According to doctor and certified nutritionist Jonny Bowden, what underlies every single chronic disease is prediabetes. In a recent Model Health Show podcast, he tells host Shawn Stevenson the odds that an American adult has at least one measure of prediabetes — too much abdominal fat, too big of a waist, too high a level of triglycerides, too low a level of HDL cholesterol, and too little of a response to insulin — stands at 92 percent.

He also tells Stevenson the way to be part of the other 8 percent in only three words. “Eat real food.”

Bowden, is a spry, soon-to-be 80 year old who still walks his dog in the hills and plays tennis “at least five times a week, maybe six, two hours a time.” He has written 13 books, including the bestsellers, The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer, and Living Low Carb.

He considers real food ones “your great, great, great, great grandmother would recognize.” Not kale chips.

“Kale is real food. Chips are not.”

His advice is to eat only what comes from what he “narcissistically” calls the “four Jonny Bowden food groups,” foods you could gather, pluck, fish, or hunt.

And while I’d advise all meat eaters to get as much of their meat as possible from hunting and not the grocery store, I rarely advise any type of eater to hunt health-and-fitness info armed with a smartphone and their aim on TikTok. But when it comes to learning more about fibermaxxing, I’ll make an exception.

Fibermaxxing’s nothing more than a catchphrase for making changes to your diet in order to ingest more fiber, something the average American needs to do. As I’ve written before, the average American falls about halfway short of meeting the Food and Drug Administration’s Daily Value for fiber: 28 grams for every 2,000 calories consumed.

Moreover, that recommended amount is not optimal, just what’s needed to prevent an insufficiency. So if you have one, two, or even all four of the aforementioned measures of prediabetes and ask me what you need to do to counteract that, one of the things would be to count the grams of fiber you consume daily — and have that number increase incrementally until it reaches somewhere between 60 and 80, depending on your body weight and what your body could tolerate.

So if you see some TikToker making a monster salad for supper that includes green cabbage, red cabbage, carrots, broccoli, brown rice, and sauerkraut (as Bloodflower does) and you start doing the same, I’m all for that.