You don’t need to eat a big slab of meat every day to meet your protein needs. In fact, loading up on animal-based protein, especially from factory-farmed sources, can do more harm than good.

Studies show that an excessive amount of red meat can lead to increased inflammation, accelerated aging, and increased risk of chronic disease. One major culprit? A sugar molecule called “Neu5Gc,” commonly found in red meat. Your body sees it as a foreign invader, triggering an immune response that can lead to long-term inflammation.

Of course, you should always consult with your doctor before making any drastic changes to your diet. But for many people, plant-based protein can be a powerful alternative that’s packed with benefits like fiber, healthy fats, and anti-inflammatory polyphenols.

Plus, research has continuously shown that non-meat protein sources can be better for your health, longevity, and brain function. Here are six high-protein foods I love and recommend all the time — your body and brain will thank you.

Lentils are my top choice when it comes to legumes. They’re one of the most protein-rich legumes, with fewer calories than most. They’re also higher in resistant starch and prebiotic fiber, which feed your gut microbiome.

Pro tip: Soak or pressure-cook lentils to reduce lectins, which can impact or slow down nutrient absorption. You can add lentils to soups, stews, or homemade veggie burgers.

Hemp seeds are one of the rare plant-based proteins that contain all nine essential amino acids, making them a complete protein.

They’re rich in omega-3s, magnesium, and gut-friendly fiber. Just be sure to choose organic, cold-pressed hemp protein with no added sugars.

Pro tip: Trader Joe’s sells organic hemp protein power, which I like adding to smoothies. You can find hemp hearts at Costco — perfect on salads or roasted vegetables.

Native to Brazil’s Cerrado region, Barù nuts pack more protein per serving than nearly any other nut. They’re also full of antioxidants and fiber, and have a satisfying, earthy crunch.

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Pro tip: You can usually find Barù nuts at grocery stores, but if you don’t, try looking online. I love snacking on a handful daily. They taste like a cross between peanuts and almonds.

This blue-green algae is one of the most protein-dense foods on the planet (by weight, it’s nearly 70% protein). It contains iron, B vitamins, and a powerful antioxidant called phycocyanin that helps support brain and immune function.

Pro tip: Try adding spirulina to your smoothies or juices. You can also substitute it with chlorella, another nutrient-rich algae, in powder or tablet form.

Flaxseeds don’t get enough love, but they’re a fantastic source of plant protein, omega-3s, and lignans, which have hormone-balancing benefits.

When flaxseeds are in their whole form, you cannot digest their beneficial compound, so always choose ground flaxseeds.

Pro tip: I like to keep a bag of organic whole flax in the refrigerator and grind it as needed to ensure freshness (just like you’d only grind coffee beans right before brewing). Add to smoothies, sprinkle on salads, or try my cinnamon flaxseed mug in a muffin recipe for a quick, healthy breakfast.

Sick of quinoa or couscous? Sorghum is a protein-rich ancient grain with a subtly sweet, nutty flavor. One cup has 21 grams of protein (more than twice that of quinoa), and three ounces of sorghum has more iron than a serving of steak!

Even better? It’s a great source of polyphenols and one of the few lectin-free grains.

Pro tip: Use sorghum flour for gluten-free baking, or look for it in pasta form for a high-protein, plant-forward meal.

Dr. Steven Gundry, MD, is a former cardiac surgeon, founder of GundryMD, and author of the bestselling books ”The Gut-Brain Paradox″ and ”The Plant Paradox.” For over two decades, his research has focused on the microbiome’s role in chronic disease and longevity. He received his degrees from Yale University and the Medical College of Georgia, and completed his surgical residency at the University of Michigan. Follow him on Instagram @drstevengundry.

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Avoiding mistakes in business and life comes down a few simple things, according to billionaire investor Charlie Munger, who died last week at age 99: good financial habits, integrity and “avoiding toxic people and toxic activities.”

Munger shared the advice during a Q&A session at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting in May.

An investing icon in his own right, Munger was the long-time business partner of Warren Buffett, the enormously successful investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. For decades, shareholders have flocked to the company’s annual meeting just to hear Buffett and Munger’s advice.

People are “almost certain to succeed” if they spend less than they earn, invest shrewdly, learn continually and remain disciplined, Munger continued. Without those traits, you’ll need a lot of luck to be successful, he said.

As for avoiding toxic people, look out for those “who are trying to fool you or lie to you or aren’t reliable in meeting their commitments,” Munger said. “A great lesson of life is get them the hell out of your life — and do it fast.”

Munger’s advice echoes comments he made in 2019 to CNBC’s Becky Quick about living a “long and happy life.”

The secret to a happy life is being cheerful despite your troubles, and avoiding traits commonly associated with toxic people, like envy or resentment, Munger said. As a rule, you should “deal with reliable people, and you do what you’re supposed to do.”

“All these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite,” Munger said in 2019.

At the shareholders meeting in May, Buffett shared his own thoughts on the topic. To him, most major mistakes in life can be avoided by simply being a good person who acts with integrity.

In making his point, Buffett recalled advice he received from his longtime friend and business partner Tom Murphy: “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.”

“Think about what great advice it is when you sit down at a computer and screw your life up forever by telling someone to go to hell, or something else, in 30 seconds and you can’t erase it,” Buffett said.

In other words, think twice about giving someone a piece of your mind. As tempting as it may be in the moment, it’s likely not worth the long-term risk to your reputation. After all, how you treat others is a reflection of your own values.

“Write your obituary and figure out how to live up to it,” he said, adding that he’s never known a kind person who “died without friends.”

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Lucy Rout is not your typical entrepreneur.

The 30-year-old Londoner — known for going viral for skiing off an icy slope in a bikini and for consulting her Instagram followers on whether she should fly 10,000 miles for a fourth date with a man — has used her eclectic experiences to develop a new dating model that’s all about making meaningful connections.

Rout told CNBC her confidence had never been lower when using traditional dating apps.

After years of being ghosted, and what she describes as a “strange dopamine cycle of downloading, trying some dates, experiencing bad behavior, writing them off, and vowing to never do it ever again, and then starting the cycle again,” — Rout determined that people were hungry for in real life (IRL) connections. 

She came up with the idea of Haystack Dating in a bid to increase the chances of people building romantic connections.

“What we absolutely can do is increase the chances and put people in the right environments where they feel safe and included. Use a bit of tech, use their similar interests and bring them together, and just make it less of a needle in a haystack and more of a needle in a sewing box,” she told CNBC Make It in an interview. 

Rout doesn’t just expect her customers to show up at an event and attempt to strike up conversations at random. Instead, attendees fill in a form that inputs their data through an algorithm that matches them with a small group of people based on similar interests and personality traits.  

“I researched the parameters that lead to meaningful connections and tried to understand a lot more about the psychology of how people work — introvert versus extrovert, effort levels, career ambition. I spoke to hundreds of people about it and I came up with this current algorithm, which we’re always optimizing,” Rout said.  

Attendees commit to an activity such as cricket or touch rugby for an hour, and then spend the rest of the evening with the full group of guests.

So far, as many as 200 to 500 people have shown up to a single event, and 92% of customers show up alone, Rout said, with events in London costing around £30 ($39.85).

Rout has been documenting her entrepreneurial journey and her distaste for men’s poor behavior in the dating world on Instagram for years.

A cancer survivor, she created a pill case called Tabuu that secured investments on BBC’s Dragon’s Den in 2023. Before Haystack, she was working on Tabuu remotely in Colombia, while posting snippets of her life, reminding women to never chase a man “unless he is the ice-cream man.”

Three years of using dating apps severely deteriorated her confidence, Rout told CNBC. She’s not alone, with dating app users becoming increasingly disenchanted with online dating.  

Frequent use of dating apps can contribute to a decline in mental health and negatively impact a person’s body image, according to a study published in April. Increasing the number of available partners on dating apps lowered self-esteem, the study found. Across heterosexual and LGBTQ + connections, ghosting and online sexual violence were factors that contributed to psychological distress. 

These experiences are leading to a decline in dating app use, according to an OFCOM report from late 2024, which tracked how U.K. adults spent time online. From 2023 to 2024, Tinder lost nearly 600,000 users, Hinge saw 131,000 less visitors to its app, Bumble shed 368,000 users, and Grindr users were down 11,000.  

As millennials and Gen Z leave online dating behind, IRL events are making a comeback, and even dating apps are trying to tap into the hype. Hinge announced a $1 million fund in March, for social groups across New York, Los Angeles and London to put on events for young people to connect in person and build relationships.  

Bumble IRL was founded in 2022 with a range of exclusive in-person events centered around fitness, food, music and charity. 

“Yes, you can meet 5 Hinge dates in a week, or you can come to one pub once and meet a few hundreds. I think people do want to find love, and they’re just no longer willing to put themselves through the crap that comes with dating apps.

“That’s exactly where I got to. I got to dating burnout. And I just thought to myself, you know, I’m not going to do this anymore, I’m actually going to try and fix it for other people,” Rout said.

It was at an entrepreneurial networking event that Rout met her now-boyfriend in December 2023. In a turn of events that she documented on Instagram, she flew 10,000 miles as he was travelling to South-East Asia to meet him again for a fourth date.  While she was navigating her new relationship, Rout was developing Haystack to help others find love. 

With nearly 50,000 followers, it was Rout’s Instagram community that drove the initial sales for Haystack, with word-of-mouth reviews and recommendations helping spread the word. 

“Whilst I’d say initial sales definitely were driven by my Instagram community, you don’t go back if you’ve had a bad experience. I am not going into the numbers, but we have had a very high return user rate,” she said.

Haystack is set to launch in Leeds, and together with her team of six, Lucy is bringing her events to the rest of the U.K.

“In IRL events, there’s a hell of a lot more accountability, and people behave very differently in person than they do virtually. There is no way in hell that people in real life would have said to me some of the things they said on dating apps. People behave better. They’re kinder.” 

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When Matt Linde and Udi Kore were first approached to develop the old site of St. John’s College’s campus in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, it was a dream come true for the two men who grew up in the area.

Linde, CEO of People Restoring Communities, and Kore, Founding Partner at Avenue Realty Capital, first walked through the property in the summer of 2017.

The building has had many names over the years since the cornerstone was laid in 1869. It has been known as the College of St. John the Baptist, St. John’s College, and St. John’s University, New York, before relocating to its current campus in Queens, which is now simply referred to as St. John’s University.

It was abandoned by the university after classes ceased in 1972 and had been deteriorating for decades. The Roman Catholic church next door, St. John the Baptist, used it for various purposes over the years, including as a nunnery and a boarding school.

“I think it looked like a great place to shoot a horror movie. Paint was chipping off the walls. Holes everywhere. Debris all over the floor, birds flying through it. It was clearly a severely neglected asset,” Linde tells CNBC Make It.

“Combine that with the beautiful bones of this building, amazing high ceilings, amazing arch windows, it wasn’t difficult to see the vision that you could take this building and turn it into something beautiful.”

Following the initial walkthrough, the business partners agreed that the existing floor plans were suitable for converting the property into a luxury apartment building. After some negotiations, Linde was able to secure a 99-year ground lease from St. John the Baptist, which grants his company the right to construct and operate for the entire duration of the lease.

“At the end of the 99 years, unless the church agrees to let us extend it and sign another lease, the lease hold will return to the Catholic Church,” Linde says.

The partners say that, for the church, it was vital that the old college be preserved, but also converted for better use.

“It was very important for the church to keep the original elements of this structure, but find a way to convert it to a better use that will create some sort of income for the church,” Kore says. “They just wanted someone to come in and create a business plan that made sense for them to convert it and still be a really good part of the fabric of this neighborhood and that’s what we essentially did.”

When Linde and Kore got on board with the project, they had to pay $3.7 million to take over the lease. In addition, they had to split the lots where the old college and St. John the Baptist sit so the church could maintain their tax exemption and the building could be taxed like any other property.

For funding, they secured a construction loan of $72,125,000 and had an additional $31,502,859 from private equity for a total of $103,627,859, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Property taxes for the building are around $700,000 a year.

Renovations began in 2020. That process included adding a new wing and connecting the older wing to it, as well as building an underground parking garage. The old college was converted into a 205-apartment building, with 147 one-bedroom units, 48 studios, and 10 two-bedroom units. The partners named the building The Hartby, as an homage to the cross streets Hart Street and Willoughby Avenue.

Of the 205 units, 62 are designated for affordable housing, meaning the rents will range from $2,495 to $3,939 per month and are accessible via the NYC Housing Connect lottery. The rent for the remaining apartments ranges between $3,130 and $6,950 per month.

The Hartby has some of the old college’s original details like exposed brick and a window that was originally part of the school’s chapel. Linde and Kore also created a courtyard and what they call a winter garden that connects the apartment building to the historic church.

Other amenities include a lounge, gym, yoga room and business center.

The Hartby started leasing in April of this year, and the building is currently at around 50% occupancy and 70% leased. Linde and Kore estimate the building will be fully leased by September.

Linde and Kore say The Hartby has been embraced by the people in the neighborhood, who specifically appreciate their choice to honor the original design of the old college. The church, they say, was also in complete shock when they saw the completed project.

“I think they were a little bit in awe when they came in here because they’ve seen it in disrepair for so many years,” Kore says. “They really felt like we did what we said we were going to do, which is to preserve as much of it as possible so it will never be forgotten. I think it’s one of those landmarks that will hopefully be part of Brooklyn forever.”

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By some standards, Angela and Brian are fulfilling the American Dream. 

The 52-year-olds were high school sweethearts, have been married for 28 years, raised four children and will soon be empty nesters. They have a net worth of $1.57 million, including nearly $900,000 invested.

But Angela isn’t satisfied with their life. 

“I just worry that life is passing us by, and we can be doing and spending more on life,” she wrote in her application to appear on author and self-made millionaire Ramit Sethi’s “Money for Couples” podcast. The couple joined Sethi for a recent episode, seeking advice to work through differences in their feelings around money. Their last names were not used.

“We never eat out. Vacations are once a year. He always thinks we are poor. I need someone to tell him that we are OK money-wise,” Angela wrote.

Brian disagrees. “I think she feels that we’re at a comfortable place financially right now for our plan going forward,” he said on the podcast. “I don’t see that. I think we just need more. I wish I would’ve started [investing] much earlier.”

Here’s Sethi’s advice for them.

Brian and Angela earn $188,000 a year and have $294,000 in debt between their mortgage and car payments. Their fixed costs account for 72% of their monthly income.

Sethi generally recommends these costs not exceed 50% to 60% of your income, but Angela and Brian have been paying extra on their mortgage, so they have some wiggle room, he said.

However, Brian and Angela’s most frequent financial disagreements revolve around relatively small money decisions, like groceries and dining out. 

Angela does the shopping and financial management, so she has a good idea of what they can afford, the couple told Sethi. But Brian constantly nitpicks her purchases. Angela wants to go out to dinner or drinks more frequently, but Brian almost always says no.

“We’re living too little of a life, is the problem,” Angela said. Sethi agreed, and said the shrinking “didn’t happen all at once. It happened $2 at a time.” That’s the “hidden cost of decades of frugality,” he added.

It’s wise to live within your means, no matter your income. But Brian’s frugality, including his resistance to spend on things that will make his wife happier, seems to come at the expense of their relationship, Sethi said.

“First, you [budget] for a reason. Then, you do it out of habit. And sometimes, you start to believe you don’t deserve anything else,” Sethi said. “It goes beyond saving money on coffee. And sometimes in situations like this, you start to realize how narrow your life has become.”

While Angela would like to retire in the next five years, she fears Brian will feel like he needs to work “till he is 80,” she said.

Sethi walked the couple through retirement projections to show how their investments could change if they decide to put away more each month or retire later. But he warned that the financial logistics won’t matter so much if they can’t get on the same page about how they want to spend their time and money.

“The two of you have so many different options,” Sethi said. “But I don’t think any of it happens if you’re not actually connected, starting right now.”

In addition to showing them that they can afford the date nights and some of the immediate travel Angela would like to do, Sethi encouraged Brian to initiate planning nights out so he can get as excited about a date as Angela. And when Angela asks him to try a new restaurant or activity, “sometimes we just have to say yes and our feelings change later,” Sethi said.

Brian agreed he needs to “not give in, but compromise,” he said. “I think I need to be a better husband and compromise and rebuild the foundation of this relationship.”

Even if it’s small things like going out for coffee, planned activities together will help the couple start “getting those adventurous feelings back,” Sethi said.

They’re currently on track to have nearly $1.5 million in investments if they retire in five years and could see that value surpass $2 million if they wait 10 years. But either way, they are able to afford reasonable outings and activities, he told them.

“Whether it’s joining a group together or trying some new stuff, that brings you way closer,” Sethi said.

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