Josh LaJaunie and I had a spirited conversation with Hope Hughes and David Powell, hosts of the Curiously Veg Podcast, about a recent BBC documentary which featured the autopsy of an obese woman. Hope and David were taken aback by critics who accused the film of fat shaming. They reached to to me, and I…
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Gene Stone is the author of about 40 books (he wasn’t quite sure of the exact count), and has become the pre-eminent co-author on books in the plant-based and vegan genres, including Michael Greger’s runaway bestseller How Not to Die, Rip Esselstyn’s The Engine 2 Diet and My Beef with Meat, and a bunch of others.
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Ken Botts has been in food service for over 35 years, since he discovered the financial rewards of frying chicken and slinging pizza as a teenager trying to pay for his own car insurance. At age 18, he discovered Diet for a Small Planet, by Francis Moore Lappé, and made the connection between the food we eat and the world we inhabit.
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Josh LaJaunie is, by his own admission, a simple Bayou coonass who discovered plants and running, and transformed his life. His backstory is well documented in a couple of Rich Roll Podcasts, which you should drop everything and listen to if you don’t know Josh yet (links below).
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Sandi Kronick is founder and CEO of Eastern Carolina Organics (ECO), an innovative food hub company that connects medium-scale organic farmers with local and far-flung markets. Located in Durham, NC, ECO is part of a new breed of mission-driven for-profit companies looking to help us eat better within a capitalist framework.
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Vlad Chituc is a behavioral economics researcher at Duke University. He works with Dan Ariely at the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and focuses on issues of ethics, morality, and decision-making.
When we chatted briefly a few weeks ago about his veganism and his commitment to reduce animal suffering, I was struck by his contrarian views and the really cool research behind them.
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Antonia Demas, PhD, is founder and director of the Food Studies Institute, an organization that creates and promotes nutrition-based curricula for elementary schools.
From the Food Studies Institute website: “Her curriculum, Food Is Elementary, has been used successfully in more than 3,000 schools in 33 states. She consults throughout the U.S. and abroad and trains and certifies teachers as food educators. Dr. Demas is a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and at the University of Illinois Medical School.”
Dr Demas was an early student of T. Colin Campbell at Cornell, and upon discovering his research, immediately began working to translate it from the Ivory Tower into the Real World.
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Susan Benigas is executive director of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) and founder of the Plantrician Project. Through these and other efforts, Susan is in the forefront of the movement to educate doctors about the healing power of diet and lifestyle.
Susan got into this world as a marketer (which parallels my own path). She discovered firsthand how important marketing chops are to getting the word out about health in her work on St. Louis’ Hooked on Health initiative, and her corporate health promotion business, Amp it Up for Life.
What I really admire about Susan is her energetic optimism. It’s a quality I find in leaders who succeed in creating change against all odds. In our conversation, we discuss those odds, and the stakes, and why lifestyle medicine and the healing power of a whole food, plant-based diet will ultimately prevail.
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Dina Rose, PhD, grew up in a household rife with dysfunctional lessons, attitudes, and behaviors related to food and eating. Her mother struggled with food and obesity, and ultimately died of obesity-related illness when Dina was 5 months pregnant with her daughter.
Dina did not want to repeat history, so she dove into the question of how to teach kids to eat healthy and develop a positive relationship with food. Her background in sociology allowed her to step back from the parenting fads of the moment, and look at the big picture issue of socialization: how we pass values and habits and mindsets to our children.
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