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Podcast

PYP 144: Irving Kirsch on Harnessing the Placebo Effect and Discovering the Truth about Antidepressants

March 1, 2016

Irving Kirsch is a soft-spoken researcher who accidentally stumbled upon one of the biggest and most costly errors in modern medicine. His cautious yet relentless search for the truth has made him persona non grata to much of the psychiatric profession and pharmaceutical industry, and a hero to the rest of us.

His findings, documented in his book The Emperor’s New Drugs as well as in dozens of published papers and book chapters, has generated a lot of controversy, including a 5-page cover story in Newsweek and a segment on 60 Minutes.

His conclusion: antidepressant drugs, including blockbusters like Prozac and Paxil, don’t work. They’re no better than placebo, meaning the only reason people feel and get better when they take those drugs is because they believe they will.

When you look at the evidence collected and analyzed and curated by Kirsch, it’s hard to disagree.

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PYP 143: Janice Stanger on Hormonal Disruption and Dietary Dangers

February 23, 2016

Janice Stanger, PhD, author of The Perfect Formula Diet, is a repeat podcast guest. This time, she’s on because she gave a remarkable presentation on hormonal health and disease at the annual Wellness Forum Health conference.

Near the beginning of her talk, she read a quote from a medical textbook with a single word omitted: “[Blank] is the most powerful anabolic hormone in the human body.” – and asked us to fill in the blank. I stood confidently, raised my hand, and boomed out the answer, Human Growth Hormone.

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PYP 142: Alan Goldhamer on the Fastest Way to Improve Health

February 16, 2016

Alan Goldhamer, DC, is coauthor, with Doug Lisle, of The Pleasure Trap, and co-founder and director of one of the most important medical institutions in the world: The True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, California. Using lifestyle medicine and supervised water fasting, the staff at True North achieve medical miracles on a daily basis.

Simply by letting the body heal faster than it can be made sick.

The healing power of water fasting is so remarkable that reputable medical journals feared for their credibility when asked to publish Goldhamer’s results. Only recently has the British Medical Journal published a case report of a woman whose follicular lymphoma disappeared after 21 days of water fasting and 9 months of clean eating.

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PYP 141: Antonia Demas on Overhauling Food Education

February 8, 2016

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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PYP 140: Chef AJ on the Ultimate Weight Loss Challenge

February 1, 2016

Chef AJ is a funny, ferocious, blunt, and incredibly warm and supportive leader in the plant-based movement. It’s always a treat to talk with her, and this podcast gives me a good excuse to do so at least a couple times a year.

This interview was inspired by her talk at the Raleigh NC Vegfest in the fall, on weight loss. Her approach is as easy to understand as it is simple to implement. And it appeals to my wholistic brain, since it involves no counting, weighing, measuring, or proportioning. Just eat foods to the left of the red line, as much as you want, whenever you want, until comfortably full.

To me, this ease about food is the ultimate benefit. Freedom from obsession, from the need to keep your food scale close, and from the inherent distrust most of us have developed about our bodies and our urges.

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Robert Whitaker on Institutional Psychiatric Corruption: PYP 139

January 25, 2016

Robert Whitaker has written some of the most dystopian, disturbing, and fascinating stories of evil unleashed that I’ve ever read.

Unfortunately for us, he’s not a fiction writer. Instead, he reports on the psychiatric industry.

In his 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which won the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ 2010 book award, Whitaker showed how the story told by the American Psychiatric Association – that mental illnesses were caused by known chemical imbalances in the brain, and modern wonder drugs were safe and effective – was a deadly lie.

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PYP 138: Kelly Turner on Radical Remission from Cancer

January 19, 2016

Kelly Turner, PhD, is the author of Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds. If you have cancer, or know anyone who has cancer, or are a human being (Western men have a 1/2 chance and women a 1/3 chance of developing cancer in their lifetime), you need to read this book.

It’s not one of those “Think happy thoughts and cure everything books.” Instead, it’s a profoundly scientific look at a group of people who may hold the key to curing cancer – and who have been systematically ignored, marginalized, and dismissed as irrelevant by medical research for the past 150 years.

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PYP 137: Paul Kerton on harmonizing strength and compassion

January 12, 2016

I goggled at my Facebook feed, early one December morning, when I read that Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, was advocating for a plant-based diet at the Paris climate talks. The “You hit like a vegetarian” actor, bodybuilder, and politician was the last person on earth I would have ever guessed to make such a statement.

paul-kertonRight after that, I turned on BBC World Service radio and started making my oatmeal. The interview in progress was with a soft-spoken, articulate, and passionate vegan bodybuilder from Norwich, UK named Paul Kerton. Kerton was responding to the Schwarzenegger story, and sharing his own, and was reaching roughly 300 million people with this message of life and hope.

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PYP 136: Eileen Kopsaftis on How to Become Ageless

January 5, 2016

Eileen Kopsaftis is an amazing physical therapist based near Albany, New York. She’s unusual in many ways, including her use of nutrition to help her patients get out of pain and regain function, and her hands-on (literally) approach to resolving pain and mobility issues.

Her passion is healthy aging. And until I looked up her bio in preparation for writing these show notes, I had no idea that she’s 10 years older than me. So she definitely practices what she preaches – and it definitely works for her.

I’ve met Eileen in person twice, at Wellness Forum Health conferences, and both times she’s helped me with my own aches and pains. So I’m a believer in her approach on a cellular level, and not simply based on my reading of the research.

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PYP 135: Susan Benigas on Growing a Generation of Plant-Based Doctors

December 29, 2015

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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Hi, I’m Howard Jacobson, host of the Plant Yourself Podcast, co-author of You Can Change Other People and Sick to Fit, and co-founder of WellStart Health Coach Academy.

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