Whole Foods founder John Mackey said his Apple Watch helped him quit drinking

• Whole Foods founder John Mackey told Business Insider he quit drinking in January 2022.
• Mackey realized through his Apple Watch that alcohol was impacting his quality of sleep.
• "I wish I'd stopped drinking 30 years ago," Mackey said.

Dry January continues amid the US surgeon general's new warning of the link between alcohol and cancer. Still, it's just another month for Whole Foods founder John Mackey, who stopped drinking in January 2022. The 71-year-old told Business Insider he's never felt better.

"I wish I'd stopped drinking 30 years ago," Mackey said. "That's 30 years of feeling good that I let go past."

Mackey said his Apple Watch contributed to his decision to cut alcohol out of his life for good.

"I was tracking my sleep, and some days I didn't sleep well, and some days I did sleep well," he recalled. "So, I started to ask the question, 'Well, what did I do differently when I didn't sleep well?'"

Mackey discovered that three factors had an impact on his sleep.

"One was how much exercise I did — more exercise led to better sleep," he said. "Second was if I ate a big meal late, I didn't sleep very well. And third was if I drank any alcohol at all, my deep sleep went to zero. I didn't get any deep sleep."

Mackey said he typically enjoyed a glass of wine or beer a few times a week, and his "total sleep would drop, on average, about an hour" when he drank.

"I like drinking alcohol, so I did not want to give it up," Mackey said. "But I did the experiment over and over and over again, and I got the same results."

When Mackey stopped drinking, he said he started to "sleep better all the time."

"When you drink, you would have what I call a 'throwaway day.' You can get through the day, you can do your work, but you kind of don't feel good, and you're just waiting to get home where you can relax and go to bed early," he explained. "It's a throwaway day. I don't have those anymore."

Multiple studies have linked alcohol to sleep issues. It blocks REM sleep (the stage that helps the brain with learning and memory), disrupts our circadian rhythm, and can exacerbate breathing problems while sleeping.

Along with his sleep, Mackey has been tracking his steps, pulse rate, and blood pressure for years, which he says taught him that "consciousness does change things."

"Once you know that you're off track, you can begin to make changes and then you can monitor with wearables and additional testing so you can see how your progress is going," he said. "Almost all my health habits have gotten better because I've become more conscious of them."

After encouraging Americans to become more conscious of their food, Mackey — who sold Whole Foods to Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion — hopes to help them with their health.

Over the summer, he opened the flagship location of his new holistic health and wellness club in Los Angeles. Dubbed Love.Life, the 45,000-square-foot space offers a range of services to its members, from diagnostic testing and physician appointments to a fully equipped gym and spa, plus acupuncture and pickleball. Memberships start at $790 a month.

Mackey told BI he hopes to expand Love.Life and "change the paradigm" of the American healthcare system.

"The diseases that kill us today are not really infectious diseases; they're chronic diseases — heart disease, cancer, obesity, stroke, type 2 diabetes, a lot of autoimmune diseases," Mackey said. "These are all chronic diseases that take years to develop. But doctors are just prescribing pharmaceutical drugs not to cure the disease but to manage the symptoms."

"We now have the technology where we can do tests, we can find out what your baseline is, then we can treat that and we can track that," he added. "We can create plans for people and monitor them to help people be the healthiest versions of themselves."