YCCOP Crib Sheet
Plant Yourself!
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Food Rebellion
Plant Yourself!
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pyp-438-tada-hozumi
Plant Yourself!
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pyp-432-eric-adams
Plant Yourself!
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We Move, Therefore We Think
Plant Yourself!
Today's guest, Barbara Tversky, has spent her professional life questioning the primacy of the mind over the body. Her incredible book, Mind in Motion, argues that our abilities to think and perceive originate in our bodies. And more specifically, in the process of movement and feedback from the environment. Which means that physical activity is far from optional exercise. Moving our bodies in multiple ways, frequently, is the core of who we are as homo sapiens. If you want to grow and evolve, books and philosophies are fine, but challenging your physical body with new situations and...
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Democracy Means a Healthy and Safe Environment for All
Plant Yourself!
"If living were a thing that money could buy, You know the rich would live, and the poor would die." - All My Trials, Joan Baez Today's guest, Jovita Lee, is co-founder and vice president of Democracy Green, a North Carolina-based non-profit dedicated to environmental justice. The environmental movement has a long and shameful history of privileging certain parts of the environment over others. Specifically, it's focused on preserving spaces enjoyed by the rich, and where the rich live. The result is a nation in which environmental racism condemns poor people and people of color - regardless...
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Outlasting Broken and Unjust Systems
Plant Yourself!
Meryl Fury is a registered nurse and CEO of the Plant-based Nutrition Movement. And she's a fierce advocate for justice and sanity in a world lacking both. Emblematic of her approach to life is the story of how she went vegetarian at the age of 15, to help her family make ends meet during the economic troubles of the mid-1970s. When her mother admonished her to continue eating meat to stay healthy, Fury refused, and even spat out the meat sauce coating her spaghetti. Just as she outlasted her mother's insistence 35 years ago, Fury is still striving to outlast the broken food and healthcare...
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The Younger Skin Diet
Plant Yourself!
I think that having healthy, attractive skin is probably a lot more motivating to most people than a healthy heart, or liver, or pancreas. I mean, those organs are great and all, and important, but they're so, well, hidden. Out of sight and out of mind, at least until they malfunction. Skin, on the other hand - it's staring us in the face all day long. Hell, it is our face. And when our skin feels dry and paper, or sags, or gets spots and wrinkles, we don't like that one bit. So the good news and the bad news is - our lifestyles can significantly affect the health of our skin. Diet,...
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Tiny Leaps Make Big Changes
Plant Yourself!
Gregg Clunis learned most of what he knows about persistence, strategy, personal development, and success from watching his immigrant parents struggle to achieve their dreams. Originally from Jamaica, Gregg and his family followed his father, who had been a professor and police officer in their native country, and worked as a migrant farm laborer in their new home. Gregg was attracted to the self-help world, and quickly discovered that the tactics and messages were often at odds with his perspective, and that of his generation in general. Little was evidence-based, but instead reflected the...
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Creating a Platform for Black Plant-Based Health Experts
Plant Yourself!
Judy Brangman, MD, aka The Plant-Based MD, visits the podcast to talk about her labor of love, the Reclaim Your Health Summit. The summit is the first one featuring exclusively people of color in the plant-based healthcare space. Eighteen doctors, a dietitian, and a fitness expert all share their wisdom and action plans with Dr Brangman, and with everyone who signs up for this free event. There are the big names, like Milton Mills, Kim Williams, Terry Mason, Baxter Montgomery, and Columbus Batiste. And there are about a dozen Black plant-based docs who I'm just getting introduced to. In our...
info_outlineRichard Kwok is an environmental researcher who studies the effects of environmental pollution on human health. He's also my neighbor, and we met while cleaning up litter and quickly discovered a lot of interests in common. While the environment doesn't often change our genetics, it can have huge impact on our epigenetics, or how those genes get expressed in our bodies. We can see those changes in methylation and histone markers in our blood, and they can be dramatic. And with advances in data science, certain chipsets can predict health outcomes with sometimes scary accuracy. This is huge. Traditionally, we know about the links between environmental factors and disease through self-report. Epidemiologists assess the environment and then find people who've been exposed to it and see how they fare. Do they have more cancer? More heart disease? Impaired respiratory function? The problem with this methodology is that it can take years or even decades for some environmental exposures to have a clinical impact on health. And public health is rarely well-funded (at least, before the shit hits the fan and some pandemic is ravaging the population, which is arguably always too little too late). So we don't know what's dangerous and lethal until it's been around long enough to do a lot of damage. When we study epigenetic biomarkers, on the other hand, we can look at a population exposed to, for example, the Blackwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and quickly discover the downstream health implications. In our conversation, Richard guided me through this new field, and shared some of the most robust findings that have the potential to revolutionize public health and health care.