The Habit Healers

Every cuisine on the planet figured out the same trick. Asian stir-fries pair tamarind with palm sugar. Moroccan tagines fold dried apricots into braised lamb. German cooks set sauerkraut next to pork. The contrast of sweet and sour is one of cooking’s oldest and most universal principles, and it exists because without it, flavor stays flat.Most of us understand this instinctively when it comes to desserts or salad dressings. But what about a bowl of risotto? A pasta sauce? A side dish of roasted vegetables? In this week’s Habit Healers live, Chef Martin Oswald made the case that savory food needs sweetness too, and that the best place to find it is not in the sugar bowl. It is already sitting in your produce drawer.The Sweetness You Never NoticedMartin started the session with a question, “How much sugar is in a tomato?” The answer, per 100 grams of ripe tomato, is about 2.4 grams. That is roughly a quarter of a teaspoon. Not much, until you consider how that sweetness plays off the acidity of a good vinaigrette.Then he walked through the lineup. A sweet potato comes in at about 2.8 grams of sugar per 100 grams, raw. A red bell pepper has around 4.2. Carrots sit at about 4.7. English peas are higher still. Corn tops them. And beets land at roughly 6.8 grams per 100 grams.But the real surprise was shallots. That tiny onion, the one most home cooks use sparingly, packs about 7.9 grams of sugar per 100 grams. More than a teaspoon in a single small handful.Now, before anyone panics about the sugar in their vegetables, Martin was quick to point out the obvious. These sugars come packaged with fiber and a range of vitamins and minerals. They are nothing like the tablespoon of refined sugar lurking in a burger bun or the sweetened dressings you get at most restaurants. The goal is not avoidance but awareness, learning to let those natural sugars do the work that refined sweeteners usually handle.Why Roasting Changes EverythingIf you bite into a raw onion, you are not going to taste sweetness. You are going to taste something sharp enough to make your eyes water. The sugar is there, but so are pungent sulfur compounds that overwhelm the palate.Roasting changes the equation. Heat drives off water, which concentrates whatever sugar is present in the vegetable. It also triggers chemical reactions between sugars and amino acids that produce entirely new flavor compounds. The effect is dramatic. A raw sweet potato tastes starchy. A roasted sweet potato at 330 degrees for an hour tastes like dessert.Chefs have known this for decades. Martin described how, early in his career at European health resorts, the standard approach was to steam everything. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, he and his colleagues had shifted to roasting because the flavor difference was so stark. Roasted carrots, roasted beets, roasted peppers. The produce was the same. The technique made it taste completely different.One important note on temperature. Martin roasts at 330 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, never higher. Going above 400 degrees risks creating acrylamide, a compound formed when starchy foods are heated to high temperatures and browned too aggressively. The goal is golden color, not dark brown. As Martin put it, go for the gold.Two Ways to Roast Onions (and Why You Should Make a Big Batch)Martin demonstrated two methods for turning raw onions into something sweet and deeply flavored.The stovetop method is faster and more hands-on. Slice two onions about a quarter-inch thick, put them in a dry pan over medium heat, and let them cook for three to five minutes. When they start to stick, add a small splash of water and let that cook off. Repeat the process, adding water and letting it evaporate, until the onions turn golden.The oven method is what Martin called the lazy version, and it is the one I am more likely to use. Slice two onions, put them in a covered pan, and roast at around 330 degrees for about 50 minutes. Then remove the cover and let them cook another 15 minutes to finish browning. Set a timer, walk away, come back to golden onions.Either way, Martin’s strong recommendation was to cook in big batches. These roasted onions freeze beautifully and save time every night of the week. You can toss them into a bolognese, spread them on hummus toast, pile them onto a pizza, or fold them into a grain bowl. One session at the stove or oven sets you up for a week of meals.A bonus tip from the session that had nothing to do with sweetness but earned the biggest reaction from the audience. If you refrigerate your onions overnight before cutting them, the cold suppresses the enzyme responsible for making you cry. Martin said it is not a perfect fix if you are processing 200 pounds of onions for a catering event, but for a home cook doing two or three, it makes a real difference.The Soubise, ReinventedThe centerpiece of this week’s session was a sauce most home cooks have never heard of. A soubise is a classic French onion sauce, and in its traditional form, it starts with about a pound of butter. The butter does two things. It provides richness and it creates the smooth, creamy texture that makes the sauce cling to food.Martin’s version skips the butter entirely. Instead, he blends roasted onions with soaked cashews, roasted garlic, and vegetable stock. The cashews, once soaked and blended smooth, provide the same creamy body that butter would, without the saturated fat. The roasted onions deliver the sweetness. The garlic adds depth. The stock adjusts the consistency.The ingredients for this version are simple. Roasted onions (from the batch you already made), a handful of soaked cashews, a couple of cloves of roasted garlic (which you roasted right alongside the onions), vegetable stock, and whatever fresh herbs you have on hand. Martin mentioned basil and thyme as favorites, though rosemary works just as well. Blend everything until smooth, adjust the thickness with more stock if needed, and season.Martin tasted it on camera and could not stop eating. Three bites turned into an extended sampling session, and his reaction told you everything you needed to know.One Sauce, a Dozen MealsWhat makes this soubise so practical is its versatility. Martin used it as the base for a risotto made with rye berries, though any whole grain works. Quinoa and barley are obvious substitutes, but so are buckwheat and millet. He tossed in English peas and corn for sweetness, spooned the sauce over a roasted sweet potato with sunflower seeds and a drizzle of pomegranate molasses, and kept going from there. You could stir in tomato paste for a different direction, or blend in basil puree to make something closer to a basil cream sauce. Add more cashew butter and it becomes an alfredo.For anyone managing blood sugar, Martin offered a sensible approach. The demonstration layered several sweet elements together for visual effect, but in practice, you would choose one or two rather than stacking them all. A roasted sweet potato with the soubise is one meal. The grain risotto with peas and corn is another. And if you are watching your glucose response, eating a small salad with bitter greens like radicchio or Belgian endive before the main course can help moderate the spike.The deeper lesson of the session was not really about any single recipe. It was about rethinking where sweetness comes from. Most of us reach for sugar or honey without considering that the vegetables already in our refrigerator have their own sweetness waiting to be unlocked. Roasting is the key. Patience is the only ingredient it requires.If you want to get guidance on how these techniques fit your own health goals, join us in The Habit Healers community on Skool. It is where we take everything from these live sessions and put it into practice together. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

What if the simplest way to lower your blood sugar after meals was a tiny seated movement you can do at your desk? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and I’m walking you through the science of the soleus push-up, a research-backed exercise that targets a deep calf muscle uniquely built to pull glucose straight out of your bloodstream while you sit.We sit for ten or more hours a day, and most of our muscles are doing almost nothing during that time. But there’s one outlier: the soleus, a small, flat muscle deep in your calf that is roughly 88% slow-twitch endurance fibers, the highest ratio of any muscle ever measured. A 2022 University of Houston study found that activating this muscle through a simple seated heel-raise dropped post-meal blood sugar spikes by up to 52% and cut insulin demand by 60%. An early replication in people with prediabetes showed a 32% reduction. The science is still early, but the muscle biology is well-established, and the early lab results are hard to ignore.What you’ll learn:* Why the soleus muscle is uniquely designed to burn blood sugar without fatiguing* How the soleus push-up reduces postprandial blood glucose and insulin spikes* The exact technique for performing soleus push-ups at your desk* Why bending your knee at 90 degrees is the key to activating the right muscle* What the research actually shows, and what we still don’t know* How to build this micro-movement into long stretches of sittingI am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over.Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/your-body-has-a-built-in-blood-sugarA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

I’ll be honest with you. I schedule these live conversations with Jud Brewer MD PhD partly so I can get free therapy. He’s a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University, and I figure if we’re going to have a conversation about perfectionism, I might as well get something out of it too.So here’s my problem. My Substack is ranked number five in health and wellness. I started it about sixteen months ago from nothing. And I still lie awake some nights thinking I should be doing better. I should reach more people. I should write better articles. I could help more. It’s ridiculous when I say it out loud, and I know that, and it doesn’t stop the feeling.Dr. Jud had just published an article called “Perfectionism Is a Calibration Problem”, and I wanted to dig into it with him because I recognized myself in almost every paragraph.The Gambler Who Wasn’t GamblingOne of his patients described his own perfectionism this way. He said he felt like a gambler going deeper into debt, thinking the only thing he could do was gamble more, because stopping wouldn’t solve the debt.He wasn’t talking about money. He was talking about his work.Dr. Jud said he loved that description because it captured something he’d been seeing in patients for decades. The man knew he was never going to win. Perfectionism, for him, wasn’t about reaching a standard. It was about constantly moving the goalposts. He’d get close to whatever he was aiming for, and then he’d raise the bar on himself. Again and again and again.I told Dr. Jud that I do this too. I go back and revise articles I’ve already published. Articles that people have already read and commented on and liked. He looked at me and said, essentially, your articles are fine, Laurie. They’re working. The fact that you’re going back to change them is the loop in action.I know. I have a problem. Hence the free session.The Most Disturbing Love Story Ever ComposedDr. Jud brought up something unexpected during our conversation. He referenced a symphony by Hector Berlioz, the Symphonie Fantastique, which he had written about in his article. He played it in college, and the backstory is wild.Berlioz was a French composer who fell madly in love with an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson. She didn’t speak French. He didn’t speak English. He pursued her relentlessly anyway and wrote an entire symphony to woo her. The whole piece is built around a musical theme called the idée fixe, which translates to “fixed idea.” It represents total obsessive fixation.In the symphony, the main character descends into an opium dream. That theme keeps coming back in every movement, but each time it returns more distorted, more unrecognizable. By the fourth movement, the character has murdered his love interest and marches to the guillotine. You can hear the drumroll, the blade, and then the head bouncing into the basket. The fifth movement is a witch’s sabbath where the beloved dances over his grave.Dr. Jud pointed out that Berlioz likely borrowed the idée fixe concept from French psychiatry at the time. It was a term floating around in medical circles in the 1800s. So a symphony about romantic obsession has its roots in clinical descriptions of how the mind gets stuck.That’s the whole point of pairing these two things, Dr. Jud said. If you get too consumed by anything, it doesn’t end well.If you want to hear it, here’s a full documentary and concert performance. Fair warning, it’s dark, but the music is extraordinary, and understanding the story behind it changes how you hear every movement.An Uncalibrated GaugeSo what do you actually do about it? Dr. Jud didn’t go to the usual place of willpower or discipline. He went to measurement.He compared perfectionism to a blood glucose monitor that isn’t calibrated. If the device keeps shifting its readings, you’ll never get a number you can trust. That’s what happens when we rely on our own internal sense of “good enough” as the only standard. We keep changing what good enough means. On a bad day, nothing passes. On a good day, we might let something through, but we’ll second-guess it within the hour.His suggestion was to get external reference points. For his patient, that meant working with a coach. For me, it’s been reader feedback.I learned this the hard way. Early on, I used some attention-grabbing titles, the kind marketing courses teach you to write. One of my readers told me that a headline I’d written caused her so much anxiety that she didn’t even open the article. She said she loved my work but that title made her feel afraid.I could have taken that personally. For a second, I did. My heart rate went up. I felt defensive. But then I sat with it and thought about where she was coming from. And she was right. That wasn’t the kind of writer I wanted to be. So I changed how I write titles. That one piece of feedback has shaped hundreds of articles since.When Are You Spending Too Much Time?I asked Dr. Jud if there’s a way to tell when you’ve crossed from healthy effort into the perfectionism zone. He said to pay attention to two things.First, look at whether the time you’re investing is producing any real change. When you’re swapping individual words in an article, and none of those swaps would make any difference to a reader, you’ve passed the point of useful revision. You’re spending more and more time for less and less return.Second, ask yourself if you’re taking feedback personally. When we take things personally, Dr. Jud said, we close down. We get defensive. We can’t learn anything in that state. He connected this to Carol Dweck’s work on mindset. When we’re contracted and defensive, whether from internal self-judgment or from someone else’s comment, we’re in a fixed mindset. Learning requires the opposite. It requires being open enough to wonder what you might not know yet.I had a great example of this from my own Substack. One of my very first articles that went viral, the one about habits of people who age well, got two negative comments out of hundreds of positive ones. Two people felt offended by it. I could have fired back. I could have pointed out that hundreds of other people loved it and these two were outliers. Instead, I responded with questions. I asked, gently, what about the piece had landed that way for them. Their second responses softened. It turned into a real conversation. We both grew from it.Dr. Jud called that a growth mindset in action. Curiosity instead of defensiveness. You can feel the difference in your body when you shift from one to the other.The Valley of DisappointmentI see a version of perfectionism in my clinic all the time, though it doesn’t always look like perfectionism. It looks like impatience.Patients with blood sugar challenges come in motivated. They change their diet, they start exercising, and they expect their numbers to transform right away. When the labs don’t budge after a week or two, they get discouraged. I call this the valley of disappointment, and it swallows a lot of people.What I try to explain is that a hemoglobin A1C reflects your blood sugar trend over three months. Not three days. Your cells are already responding to the changes you’ve made. Your metabolism is already shifting. But those changes take time to show up in lab results, and we live in a world that has trained us to expect instant feedback on everything.That’s perfectionism applied to your body. You’ve decided what the timeline should be, and when your biology doesn’t cooperate, you assume the effort was wasted. But the effort is working. Your body just hasn’t had time to show you yet.My early Substack articles were not as good as the ones I write now. They weren’t. And the only reason the newer ones are better is that I kept hitting publish on the ones that were good enough. If I’d waited until I thought something was perfect, I would have published nothing.Fear Is the Cheapest Room in the HouseWe spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about fear as a motivator, because this comes up constantly in my practice. In primary care, we’re short on time. So we go to the thing that feels logical. Your blood pressure is high. Your labs are getting worse. You need to make changes or you’re shortening your life.I had a patient not long ago who was diagnosed with diabetes. The diagnosis scared her, and she did well for about six months. Then something stressful happened in her family and she went back to her old habits. After that, the worsening lab numbers didn’t faze her at all. She’d become immune to the fear. What finally got through to her was when she physically couldn’t do the things she wanted to do. That had nothing to do with a number on a lab report. It was about her actual life.Dr. Jud mentioned a colleague at Yale who studied tobacco packaging. All those graphic images of diseased lungs that Congress required on cigarette packs? His research showed they didn’t actually change behavior. You can scare someone into paying attention for a moment, but the effect wears off fast. Then you need a bigger scare, and a bigger one after that, and eventually there’s nowhere left to go.He quoted a 14th-century poet named Hafiz. Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I want to see you in better quarters.That line has stuck with me. I made a decision early on not to use fear or rage bait to grow this newsletter. Every marketing course I’ve taken says that’s the fastest path. Common enemy, polarizing takes, urgency that borders on panic. I refuse to do it. Growth has been slower. But my readers are here because something about this work feels right to them, not because they’re running from something.You can apply the same idea to parenting, by the way. You can scare your kids into compliance for about ten seconds. After that, you’ve just damaged the relationship.What You Get From Letting GoDr. Jud’s final point was the most practical one. He said the way out of these loops, whether it’s perfectionism or the fear trap, is to actually pay attention to how it feels when you do things differently. Not in some forced positive-thinking way. Through actual lived experience.What does it feel like to hit publish and move on to the next thing instead of agonizing for another hour? What does it feel like when someone gives you tough feedback and you get curious about it instead of defensive?It feels better. Your brain can learn from that, the same way it learned the old pattern.And if you catch yourself beating yourself up for being a perfectionist? Dr. Jud laughed at that one. That’s just another loop, he said. Same approach. Notice it. Ask yourself what you’re getting from it. See if kindness works better than the beating.I’ll add my own practical note. I’ve learned that I’m more vulnerable to my inner critic when I’m tired or hungry or trying to work late at night. So I write first thing in the morning, after my walk, when I’m rested and fed. I exercise early because I know I won’t do it later, and I know that skipping it gives the critic more to work with. That’s not some grand strategy. It’s just knowing myself well enough to stay out of my own way.You’re worth that kind of honesty with yourself. And your good enough is probably a lot better than you think.To read Dr. Jud Brewer’s full article, visit “Perfectionism Is a Calibration Problem” on his Substack, Inside the Curious Mind. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Most people assume dementia is genetic, but the latest research tells a different story. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the 2024 Lancet Commission’s findings that 45% of dementia cases worldwide are linked to 14 modifiable risk factors, and what that actually means for the choices you make every day.I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, and I want you to hear this clearly: the window where these changes matter most is midlife, often years or decades before symptoms show up. The same habits that lower your LDL cholesterol, stabilize your blood sugar, and protect your heart are also building a brain that resists Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline. Hearing loss and high LDL are now tied as the two largest individual risk factors for dementia, and most people have never had a conversation about either one through the lens of brain health.In this episode, you will learn how to translate the science into a real plan, including the seven daily habits with the strongest evidence and the medical appointments worth booking now.What you will learn:* How exercise, a Mediterranean and plant-forward diet, and quality sleep protect against cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease* Why hearing loss is one of the largest modifiable risk factors for dementia and what to ask your audiologist* How LDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and A1c connect to long-term brain health* The role of social connection, stress management, and depression treatment in dementia prevention* Why midlife is the most important window for brain health and where to start this weekDr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-fourteen-risk-factors-explainedA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

There are 1.4 billion people on this planet dealing with hypertension. That number is so large it stops meaning anything. So let me bring it closer. Somewhere in your life, probably within arm’s reach, is a person whose blood pressure is slowly, silently beating up their heart, their kidneys, and their brain. And the most common medical advice they will receive is some version of “cut back on sodium.” Nobody tells them how to make food taste good after they do.This what Chef Martin Oswald taught us today’s live session. Martin has developed recipes for Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s program, where the protocols are strict and allow no oil and no sodium at all. He has also cooked for diabetic populations where two out of three patients have hypertension riding alongside their blood sugar problems. He has had to figure out, at a professional level, how to build flavor when the easiest shortcut in the kitchen is off the table.What he taught us today was not a recipe but a system. Six contrasts that, when layered into a single dish, create so much happening on your palate that you stop reaching for the salt shaker. Then he proved it by building the dish in real time and eating it in front of me from 5,000 miles away.I want to walk you through what he covered.Sweet and SourThis is the one most people already know from Chinese takeout, but Martin took it somewhere more useful. His first move was to hold up a bottle of balsamic vinegar, and I guessed it immediately, which I was proud of for about three seconds before he explained the part I did not know.Plain vinegar is thin. You taste it for a moment and then it vanishes, which is the problem with using it as a sodium replacement. Salt has staying power on your tongue, and a splash of vinegar does not compete with that.So Martin reduces his balsamic. He cooks it down by about 50 percent, which takes roughly twelve minutes, and what comes out is thick, glossy, and viscous enough that it clings to a spoon. That viscosity is the key. When you drizzle reduced balsamic onto a dish, it stays on your palate long enough to deliver a sting that mimics what salt does. The acidity hits the same spot on the top of your tongue. It is not sodium, but your taste buds respond to the same physical sensation.Then comes the balance. If you have something sour, you need something sweet to play against it. Martin used apple slices, though you could just as easily use mango. The point is not a specific fruit but the habit of always thinking in pairs, so that wherever there is acid, there is sweetness somewhere nearby.Spicy and RichThis one surprised me. Martin held up a jar of Italian chili flakes and asked me what the contrast to spiciness should be. I would have guessed sweet, because that is how Asian cuisine often handles heat, and it works. But Martin went in a different direction.He reached for richness. Almond butter, tahini, and cashew butter all work here. When something rich coats your palate, it creates a physical barrier that dampens the sting of the chili. Think about how olive oil coats your mouth and suddenly you are tasting the oil more than whatever was underneath it. Nut butters work the same way. The fat sits on your taste buds and softens the spiciness so you get the flavor of the chili without the burn overwhelming everything else. If you have ever made a dish that turned out too hot, adding a spoonful of almond butter or tahini will pull it back into balance.Hot and ColdThis was the one I got right, and I was unreasonably pleased about it. A hot dish needs a cold contrast. Martin’s go-to technique, one he used throughout his years of catering with 20 live cooking stations and 50 to 60 cooks, was to place a cold, crunchy salad directly on top of a hot entree rather than on the side. The temperature difference between the warm food and the cool greens creates a contrast that keeps your palate engaged bite after bite, so each spoonful feels a little different from the last.Spices and Fresh HerbsThis is a concept that takes a moment to land, because most home cooks think of spices and herbs as doing the same job. They do not. Spices go into the base, getting toasted into the grain and cooked into the sauce and built into the bottom layers of a dish. Herbs come in later and sit on top, raw or barely cooked, adding a brightness that plays against the deeper warmth of the spices underneath.Martin listed some of his favorites for sodium replacement cooking, including cumin, caraway seeds (though he never uses those two together, saying they clash), coriander, and fenugreek. Each one acts as a foundation. Then he pairs them with fresh herbs, like parsley with caraway or cilantro with cumin. Every culinary tradition has its own version of this pairing, and the reason they all do it is because the contrast between a cooked spice and a fresh herb makes food feel more complete.He also mentioned celery seed, and then immediately confessed it is the one ingredient he has ruined more dishes with than any other. It is powerful, and a little goes a very long way. If you overshoot, there is no fixing it. He recommends it for soups, where the liquid dilutes the intensity, and nowhere else. I told him he had found his weakness in the kitchen. He did not appreciate that.Bitter and SweetMartin held up a celeriac root, and I had no idea what it was until someone in the chat guessed it. In America, celeriac is not common, but it should be. It is stronger than green celery, and it is one of the best tools Martin knows for replacing sodium. You only need about a tablespoon, diced small and added to your cooking liquid or stock. It gives the dish a backbone, a savory depth that fills in some of what salt used to provide.The contrast to bitterness is sweetness, and Martin reaches for dried fruit like goji berries, dried apricots, raisins, and dates. This is the same principle behind Moroccan stews that pair chickpeas with dates, or cauliflower dishes that tuck a few raisins into the sauce. The sweetness rounds off the bitter edge without masking it entirely.Umami and FreshUmami is the heavy hitter, and Martin draws it from mushrooms, tomato paste, and roasted onions. Roasting onions in the oven, sliced and covered with foil, produces an umami-like flavor that is surprisingly intense. Tomato paste, which you can find in sodium-free versions, adds both umami depth and body to a sauce. Mushrooms are umami in its purest form.But umami is also where flavor fatigue sets in fastest. A mushroom risotto is incredible for five bites and then it becomes heavy. The contrast is something bright, fresh, and acidic. A simple salad with a light vinegar dressing, served alongside or on top of the dish, resets your palate and makes the next bite of the rich entree feel new again.The Dish He BuiltOnce Martin finished walking through the six contrasts, he built a complete meal using all of them at once.He started by toasting whole oat groats in a dry pan with caraway seeds, a whole clove of garlic (unpeeled), a bay leaf, rosemary, thyme, and oregano. The toasting deepened the flavor of the grain before any liquid ever touched it. His argument is that when you cannot cheat with salt, everything else has to taste better, and toasting your grain is the first place to start. This works with brown rice, buckwheat, millet, and red rice. White rice, he noted, has no flavor to unlock, so toasting it does nothing.He deglazed the pan with his own homemade mushroom stock, made with zero sodium. His method for stock is to save every herb stem and vegetable scrap, add them to a pot that lives in the fridge, boil it up, and repeat. The stock just keeps getting richer.In a separate pan, he roasted cauliflower and celeriac with a splash of stock. He added fenugreek seed (which he noted has good research behind it for diabetics), tomato paste for umami, and a spoonful of almond butter for richness. Then came the chili flakes for heat and the goji berries for sweetness against the bitterness of the celeriac and cauliflower.The salad was baby romaine, thinly sliced raw onion (Martin puts raw onion in every salad now after reading about its health benefits), a light splash of apple cider vinegar, thin apple slices for sweetness, and a generous dusting of sumac.Sumac, by the way, is one of Martin’s absolute top ingredients for sodium replacement. It delivers a tart, almost lemony flavor that fills in for salt in a way few other seasonings can.He plated the grain and vegetable stew in a bowl, placed the cold salad directly on top, and then drizzled the reduced balsamic around and over everything. All six contrasts were present in a single dish. And he used a spoon to eat it, dipping the bottom of each bite into the pooled balsamic for that opening sting before the rest of the flavors arrived.He said he did not miss a single drop of sodium. I believe him.Making It Work at HomeYou do not need to use every one of these contrasts in every meal. The point is to understand the system so you can apply whichever pieces make sense for what you are cooking. A roasted sweet potato becomes a different experience with a drizzle of reduced balsamic. A grain bowl gains real depth if you toast the grain first and add celeriac to the cooking liquid. A stir fry that came out too hot calms right down with a spoonful of tahini. And a heavy stew that is starting to feel monotonous comes alive again when you pile a cold, bright salad on top.And if your sauce feels thin and flavorless, cook it down. Viscosity carries flavor, and Martin made this point clearly. A thin broth slides off your taste buds before you can register it, while a thick sauce coats your palate and lets you actually taste what is there. This is the same reason the Japanese add silken tofu to their soups. It gives the liquid enough body to hold the flavor in your mouth.Martin’s flavor wheel, which maps out all of these relationships and more, is available on his Substack, Martin’s Healing Kitchen. It is worth bookmarking. If you know somebody dealing with hypertension, send them this video. Even if they are not ready to cook without salt entirely, learning one or two of these contrast techniques can start shifting the balance. And if you try building this dish yourself, come back and tell us how it went. I want to hear what your version tasted like.Chef Martin and I go live every Wednesday at 10 AM Pacific. If you missed the earlier sessions on spices and herbs for sodium replacement, those replays are on both of our Substacks. Come join us next week.The Habit Healers Skool CommunityIf you want to go deeper on this and get direct support from both of us, join The Habit Healers community on Skool here. That is where we take what we cover in these live sessions and turn it into real, lasting changes in how you cook and eat. Martin and I are both in there, and so is a group of people working on the same things you are. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Is your mouthwash raising your blood pressure? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m breaking down nitric oxide, the Nobel Prize-winning molecule your body makes in real time to regulate blood pressure, blood flow, erectile function, brain health, and how your muscles handle blood sugar.Most of us have never heard of it, and yet nitric oxide is one of the single most important signaling molecules in your cardiovascular system. Research shows that daily antiseptic mouthwash use can wipe out the nitrate-reducing bacteria in your mouth that your body relies on to produce it, and short-term studies link this habit to rising blood pressure and a higher risk of prediabetes and hypertension.I’ll walk you through the two different systems your body uses to make nitric oxide, why one of them depends entirely on your oral microbiome, and the simple four-part protocol I give my patients to restore healthy nitric oxide production naturally, using food, movement, smarter oral care, and your breath.What you’ll learn in this episode:* Why nitric oxide is essential for healthy blood pressure, circulation, and endothelial function* How antiseptic mouthwash may be linked to hypertension and prediabetes* The highest-nitrate foods for lowering blood pressure naturally, including arugula, beets, and leafy greens* Why nasal breathing beats mouth breathing for cardiovascular and lung health* A simple “bee breath” practice that increases nitric oxide output from your sinuses* The role of nitric oxide in men’s health and erectile functionDr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/the-bathroom-habit-that-may-be-raisingA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Anxiety isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a habit loop your brain learned, and the thing that actually breaks it is curiosity.In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the neuroscience of why chronic worry feels impossible to stop, and why the usual advice of “just push through” or “think positive” tends to fail at the exact moment you need it most. Drawing on the research of neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Jud Brewer at Brown University, I explain how anxiety follows the same trigger, behavior, reward cycle that drives stress eating, phone-checking, and other everyday habits. I’ll share why your prefrontal cortex goes offline under stress, what brain imaging reveals about the posterior cingulate cortex and rumination, and how a simple ten-second practice called the Curiosity Pause can begin to rewire the loop. We also talk about why perimenopause and menopause can make worry feel harder to manage, and when it’s time to bring in professional support for anxiety, panic attacks, or depression.What you’ll learn in this episode:* How the anxiety habit loop forms in the brain and why willpower can’t override it* Why trying harder to stop worrying often makes rumination worse* The four steps of the RAIN technique (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Note)* How curiosity acts as a “bigger, better offer” for your brain’s reward system* Why women in perimenopause and menopause may notice rising anxiety and worry* When to seek professional help for generalized anxiety disorder or panicDr. Marbas’s Substack Article:https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/did-your-brain-accidentally-trainA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe to Chef Martin Oswald’s Healing Kitchen Substack. Right now, across Austria, something is happening that most Americans have never seen. Farmers are pulling thick white asparagus spears out of mounded soil, each one grown entirely in the dark, never touched by sunlight, never given the chance to produce chlorophyll. They are as fat as a thumb and pale as bone. And for the next few weeks, they will dominate menus from Vienna to Munich the way lobster dominates a New England summer.Chef Martin Oswald brought a pile of them to today’s live session, and the first thing he did was hold one up next to his pinky finger. It dwarfed it. These are not the thin green stalks you snap at the grocery store. White asparagus is its own vegetable, really, with a milder flavor, a different nutritional profile, and a texture that can go from tender to woody in the space of a few inches.That texture difference is the whole reason most cooks peel them. The lower portion of a white asparagus spear has a tougher outer layer, and the standard European approach is to strip it off with a peeler before boiling the spears in water spiked with sugar, lemon juice, and bay leaf. It works. But it throws away the part of the vegetable where the minerals are most concentrated.Martin’s argument is simple. The minerals in any vegetable travel from the soil upward through the stem. The highest concentration sits in the outer layers. Peel those away and you are discarding the very thing that makes asparagus worth eating in the first place. So he does not peel. Instead, he borrows a technique from a completely different vegetable.He cooks his asparagus the way you cook onions.Think about a raw onion. It is sharp, almost aggressive on the palate. But cook it slowly in a pan, let it sweat and soften and eventually take on a golden color, and all that harshness transforms into sweetness. The French built an entire soup around this principle. Martin applies the same logic to asparagus. He cuts the spears in half lengthwise, adds just enough olive oil to coat the pan (he estimated about 40 calories’ worth, roughly a third of a tablespoon), and lays them flat side down over medium heat.The key is patience. You are not blasting them with high heat. You are watching for a light golden color on the cut surface, something that takes roughly three to four minutes per side, though Martin does not watch the clock. He watches the pan. “If your pan is hotter, the time is not going to help you,” he told me. When the heat is right, the natural sugars in the asparagus caramelize gently, and the bitterness that lives in the unpeeled skin fades the same way it fades in a slowly cooked onion.There is a word for the first stage of that process, and Martin taught it to us today: “suer,” a French culinary term for sweating an ingredient at low heat until it turns translucent. Push past that stage, let the color deepen to gold, and you cross into caramelization territory, where bitterness gives way to sweetness without ever adding sugar. The restaurants add sugar. Martin does not need to.This same technique works with green asparagus. In fact, when you do it with green spears, it is called blistered asparagus. And it works on the grill, too, as long as you keep the heat at medium. Crank the grill to high and you are back to bitterness, plus the added problem of charring, which creates the kind of compounds you do not want on your food.Martin also shared a grilling trick worth remembering as the weather warms up. Instead of drizzling oil over the vegetables and watching it drip through the grates and flame up, take a folded paper towel, dip it in oil, and wipe it directly onto the grill grates. The asparagus goes on dry. It does not stick. It does not flame. Your eyebrows survive intact. (I told Martin he might have already lost a few of his. He did not disagree.)Once the asparagus was golden and tender, the session turned into a salad build. Martin tossed pine nuts into the same pan, letting them pick up a light toast. He added strips of radicchio, which wilted and lost much of their raw bitterness from the residual heat. Then came capers, which I pointed out are one of the richest food sources of quercetin, a potent anti-inflammatory compound. He sliced thin strips of organic lemon rind (not zested, but cut with a knife into little ribbons) and tossed those in too. A scatter of fresh parsley. A sprinkle of hemp seeds for protein.The dressing was crushed strawberries with lemon juice. That was it. No added oil in the dressing. The sweetness of the berries balanced the residual bitterness of the asparagus and radicchio, and the capers pulled the whole thing back toward savory. Martin’s philosophy came through clearly in that moment: whatever you cook, you are always looking for balance between sweet, sour, and bitter. The strawberry dressing was not decoration. It was the counterweight that made the dish work.He plated the warm asparagus mixture over a bed of raw white radicchio leaves and tasted it on camera. The verdict: the capers made it. The asparagus was sweet from the early-season harvest and the slow caramelization. The strawberries were almost too sweet on their own, but the capers and lemon rind pulled everything back into balance.For anyone who wants a heartier meal, Martin suggested building a base layer of cooked lentils or a quick white bean hummus (pureed white beans loosened with their own cooking liquid, seasoned simply) and piling the asparagus salad on top. That turns a light appetizer into a full lunch.We also talked about two bonus ingredients worth seeking out. Radicchio, Martin explained, is extraordinary when grilled. Quarter a head, skip the oil entirely, lay the quarters cut-side down on a medium grill, and let them caramelize without burning. The bitterness fades, a rich sweetness develops, and you end up with something that belongs on a summer table. The Italians, he noted, handle radicchio bitterness differently for risotto. They chop the bitter white base fine and cook it into the rice, where the bitterness disappears entirely, then scatter the red leaves on top raw for color.And then there were the stinging nettles. Martin held up a sad-looking bunch and dared me to touch one. I declined. (I have been stung on runs before. It is not fun.) But once blanched or steamed, the sting disappears immediately, and what you are left with is a green that tastes and cooks like spinach. Martin’s move is to puree blanched nettles into a potato-leek-fennel soup. The color is stunning, the flavor is clean, and the whole thing is built from ingredients you can forage or find at a farmers’ market. If stinging nettles are not available where you live, spinach with garlic makes a fine substitute in the same soup.One more thing about asparagus that caught my attention today. Asparagus is rich in inulin, a type of fermentable fiber that functions similarly to resistant starch. It travels through the digestive system intact until it reaches the colon, where it feeds beneficial gut bacteria. So when Martin talks about keeping the skin on for the minerals, you are also keeping all that prebiotic fiber intact. That is a lot of nutritional value to throw in the compost bin.There was a larger point underneath all the cooking today, and Martin made it without belaboring it. In Europe, people still go out and pick stinging nettles in the spring. They forage for wild asparagus and elderflowers and mushrooms. It is not trendy or unusual. It is just what you do when the season turns. Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped paying attention to what is growing right outside. Maybe the asparagus is a good place to start paying attention again. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Can the same plate of food lower your blood sugar, reduce your cholesterol, and bring down your blood pressure? If your doctor has flagged rising glucose, elevated LDL, and borderline blood pressure, you might be dealing with one problem showing up in three places: insulin resistance.On this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and I’m walking you through the cardiometabolic diet, an eight-pillar food framework built on randomized trials and large-scale research. Instead of treating each number with a separate plan, this approach targets the shared metabolic root that connects them all. I’ll explain how insulin resistance damages your arteries through the same signaling failure that raises your fasting glucose, why post-meal blood sugar spikes may cause more vascular harm than consistently elevated levels, and how specific foods can restore what’s broken. From the meal sequencing trick that costs nothing to the single seed that rivals blood pressure medication in clinical trials, each pillar hits a different part of the same system, and they stack.What you’ll learn in this episode:* How insulin resistance drives high blood sugar, elevated LDL, and high blood pressure through one mechanism* The food order strategy proven to lower post-meal glucose spikes without changing what you eat* Why ground flaxseed may be the most powerful single food for blood pressure and cholesterol* How to stack three types of soluble fiber for maximum LDL and blood sugar reduction* The nitrate-rich vegetables that bypass broken blood vessel signaling to lower blood pressure naturally* Why 30 different plants a week matters more for your gut microbiome than any single dietary labelLink To Dr. Marbas’s Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/if-your-labs-are-creeping-read-thisA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Social isolation raises your risk of dying from any cause by 32%, putting loneliness in the same mortality category as smoking. But the daily habit that fights social disconnection is far smaller than you think. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the research behind what I call the three-stranger habit, and why a few seconds of real human connection each day could be one of the most important things you do for your health.I break down the commuter experiments that proved talking to strangers actually feels good (even though we all predict it won’t), the coffee shop study that showed a brief genuine interaction boosted both mood and sense of belonging, and the neuroscience of why your brain treats a stranger’s smile as a reward. We also go deeper into emerging research on oxytocin, DNA methylation, and biological aging, and what it suggests about social connection as molecular maintenance for your body.This isn’t about becoming an extrovert or filling your calendar with social events. It’s about showing up differently in the moments you’re already in. I’ll give you the exact habit: who to talk to, what to say, and why it works across every personality type.What you’ll learn in this episode:* Why social isolation carries the same health risk as smoking, and what the Surgeon General’s advisory means for you* The three-stranger habit: a simple daily practice to rebuild social connection in under a minute* What commuter and coffee shop experiments reveal about the benefits of talking to strangers* How your brain’s reward system responds to micro-interactions, even with people you’ve never met* The emerging science linking oxytocin, gene expression, and biological aging to social bonds* One question to ask yourself once the stranger habit feels easy is to reconnect with the people who matter mostLink to Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-can-three-strangers-do-for-yourA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I take a closer look at something most of us accept without question. I feel more tired, I recover more slowly, my numbers start to shift—and I’m told, “that’s just aging.” But what if that explanation is missing the most important part?I break down the science that’s changing how we understand aging entirely. Not as a single, inevitable decline—but as a set of specific biological processes that can be measured, tracked, and in some cases, slowed or even reversed.I walk through the twelve hallmarks of aging—the actual mechanisms happening inside my cells—and what the research says I can do about each one. From inflammation and mitochondrial function to gut health and cellular repair, this isn’t theory anymore. These are processes I can influence with what I do every day.I also explore one of the biggest debates in medicine right now: is aging a disease… or something else entirely? And more importantly, does that distinction even matter for how I live my life?This episode changed the way I think about getting older.Because aging isn’t just something that happens to me—it’s something I’m participating in, whether I realize it or not.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Most people trying to do something about aging are working from an incomplete picture. They hear about a supplement worth trying, or a fasting protocol, or a stress management app, and they keep adding items to a list with no clear organizing logic. What they rarely hear is which specific biological changes are happening inside their body right now, and which daily actions actually affect them.In this episode, Dr. Laurie Marbas breaks down the 2023 framework of the Twelve Hallmarks of Aging, the biological processes that drive every age-related decline we can measure. From DNA damage to cellular recycling, these hallmarks are the “why” behind getting older. But more importantly, they are points of entry that respond to what you do each day.We are counting down the ten habits that cover all twelve of these processes. Not most of them. All of them.In this episode, we discuss:* The “Zombie Cell” Secret: Why your waist measurement is a hidden aging accelerator and a better indicator of health than the scale.* The Power of Diversity: Why eating 30 different plants a week is the magic number for your gut microbiome.* Metabolic Timing: Why a 15-minute walk after your largest meal is the single most impactful way to calibrate your body’s “growth vs. repair” switch.* The Brain’s Nightly Rinse: The specific fluid-based cleaning system that only activates during deep sleep to flush out waste proteins.* The Ultimate Intervention: Why exercise targets more aging hallmarks (seven in total) than any other single action.Dr. Laurie Marbas also introduces the “Tiny Healing Habit” approach, the smallest effective starting points for each protocol to help you build a sustainable routine that actually shifts your biology.Stop guessing and start targeting the science of you.Link Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-ten-habits-could-slow-everyA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Every Wednesday at 10 AM we go live. Join next week’s Substack Live with Chef Martin Oswald here. Half a cup of red lentils costs about thirty cents. That’s what Chef Martin Oswald held up on our live today before turning it into something I’d never seen before, a homemade lentil tofu.He didn’t need any special equipment or hard-to-find ingredients. Just lentils, water, a blender, and a stockpot.Martin and I have known each other for over a decade now. We first met in 2012 at a dinner in Colorado hosted by another physician, where Martin was catering and sharing the story of his shift toward health-focused cooking at his restaurant in Aspen. We became fast friends, did a research project together, appeared on local TV, and eventually built what is now the Habit Healers community. He lives in Austria and I’m in the U.S., but every week we show up on screen together because the combination of clinical science and real culinary skill is something neither of us can do alone.Today’s session was built around a single question. How do you make a meal that’s low in calories, high in protein, and actually satisfying enough that you don’t raid the kitchen two hours later?That question matters more than most people realize.Why Protein and Satiety Matter During Weight LossWhen you’re losing weight, whether through caloric restriction or with the help of a GLP-1 medication, the body doesn’t just burn fat. It can break down muscle, too. And muscle is your metabolic furnace, the thing that keeps your resting energy expenditure high and protects against frailty as you age.The way you prevent that comes down to two things. You need adequate protein intake, and you need resistance training. Even twice a week is enough on the resistance side. But the protein piece trips people up, especially when appetite drops on GLP-1 medications. If you’re eating less overall, every meal has to carry more nutritional weight. That means whole foods instead of processed fillers, and it means learning how to cook meals that deliver real protein, fiber, and micronutrients in a form your body can use.This is also where visceral fat enters the picture. That fat sitting around your organs is an active endocrine organ in its own right, pumping out inflammatory molecules that travel through the portal vein straight to the liver. Over time, the liver becomes inflamed and fat-infiltrated, and it stops responding to insulin the way it should. Blood sugar starts creeping up, the pancreas compensates by working harder, and eventually you’re looking at a type 2 diabetes diagnosis.Losing visceral fat reverses a lot of that damage. But the process has to be done in a way that preserves muscle and provides real nutrition, which brings us back to Martin’s kitchen.The Lentil TofuMartin has been developing this recipe across five different lentil varieties, and he recommends starting with red lentils because they’re the most affordable and the most forgiving.The method is simple, even if the result looks like something from a professional kitchen.Soak half a cup of red lentils overnight. Don’t cook them. Just let them sit in water. The next day, drain and rinse them, then add the soaked lentils to a high-powered blender with fresh water (or vegetable stock for more flavor) and blend until very smooth. Pour the mixture into a stockpot and bring it to a boil on high heat, stirring constantly with a flat metal spatula. This part is critical because if you stop stirring, the bottom burns. As it cooks over the next ten to fifteen minutes, the proteins begin to coagulate and the mixture thickens to the consistency of a thick soup.Once it reaches that point, pour it into glass containers about halfway full. Tap them on the counter to release air bubbles. Let the containers cool to room temperature before putting them in the fridge, because the condensation from hot liquid will cause problems. Then refrigerate overnight.By morning, you have a homemade lentil tofu.Martin showed us the finished product on camera, and the texture was remarkable. Firm enough to slice but soft enough to melt in a soup. And because you control the entire process, you can season the liquid however you want before it sets. Think curry powder, smoked paprika, Cajun spice, miso, or anything that fits the meal you’re building. The flavor possibilities are wide open.Compared to store-bought tofu, Martin’s version is significantly cheaper, fully customizable, and made from ingredients you can see and name.The Carbohydrate LadderMartin pulled out a visual demonstration today that I think is worth bookmarking. He lined up his pantry staples from highest to lowest carbohydrate content per 100 grams and walked through each one.White rice and sushi rice sit at the top with 78 grams of carbohydrates per 100-gram serving. Black rice and red rice are close behind at around 72 to 78 grams. Barley and buckwheat come in at 71, soba noodles drop to 66, and freekeh (roasted green wheat berries) and quinoa land at 64. Amaranth is slightly lower.Then comes the real shift. Lentils drop to around 40 grams of carbohydrates per 100 grams. Chickpeas and white beans, including gigante beans, fall to 15 to 17 grams. Lupine beans win the legume category at just 13 grams, with high protein and high fiber on top of that. I put lupini bean flakes in my oatmeal every morning and Martin says they can be used in everything from lasagna to bolognese.At the very bottom of the ladder sit konjac noodles, which have zero carbohydrates. Martin doesn’t recommend them as a permanent staple because they lack the nutrition of whole legumes, but he sees them as a useful transitional tool for someone who’s just starting to get their blood sugar under control.The point of this exercise isn’t that rice is bad. Martin still cooks with it for certain dishes. But if you’re managing blood sugar, knowing where your staples fall on this ladder lets you make smarter swaps without giving up satisfaction.And fiber plays a major role in all of this. When you eat whole grains and legumes with their fiber intact, glucose absorption slows down. Your blood sugar rises more gently and your gut microbiome gets the fuel it needs. Stripped grains like white rice don’t offer that same buffer.The Thai Soup That Ties It All TogetherMartin’s final demo was a Thai-style broth soup designed to be ultra-low calorie but genuinely filling. The base was a fragrant broth made with kaffir lime leaf, galangal, ginger, red Thai curry paste, lemongrass, and vegetable stock. He built it strong on purpose, because the rest of the bowl is intentionally light. Into the broth went konjac noodles, sautéed vegetables like shiitake mushrooms, leeks, broccoli, and red pepper, and cubes of his homemade lentil tofu.The reason this works comes down to viscosity. A clear broth on its own can taste good, but it doesn’t fill you up. You finish the bowl and you’re still hungry. When you add silken tofu, or Martin’s lentil version, it changes the body of the soup. It creates a creamy, substantial mouth feel that your brain registers as a real meal, giving you protein and fiber and volume without the caloric load.There’s a timing benefit too. Because soup takes longer to eat than most meals, your satiety hormones have a chance to kick in. It takes about twenty minutes for your stomach to signal your brain that food is arriving, and a bowl of broth soup naturally slows you down enough for that signal to land.Martin pointed to Japanese miso soup as the original model for this approach. A culture with roughly 5% obesity rates has been doing this for generations, building meals around light broth, silken tofu, vegetables, and slow eating.A Quick Note on Veggie StockOne of our viewers, David, asked whether you can make stock from vegetable peelings and end bits. Martin said absolutely, and that’s what he does at home. He keeps a pot going with trimmings, adds bay leaf, thyme, coriander seed, a dried porcini or shiitake mushroom for umami depth, tomato paste or a whole tomato, and cabbage as the backbone. If you don’t have time to make your own, a clean veggie stock powder with no MSG, no added sodium, and no oil works as a shortcut.The Habit Healers Community with Chef MartinIf today’s session is the kind of content that makes you think differently about your kitchen, I want you to know this is what we do every single week inside the Habit Healers community on Skool.I run live coaching every Tuesday at 4 PM Pacific for ninety minutes. We work through one science-backed concept, I give one small habit challenge for the week, and we come back together to talk about what worked and what needs adjusting. Real coaching, real accountability, and a group of people who are actually showing up.Martin has an entire cooking school inside the community with videos, recipes, and the kind of practical kitchen wisdom you saw today. If you are looking for a welcoming community to take one habit at a time, one week at a time, join us here. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore a small shift that completely changed how I think about meals. Same plate. Same food. Same calories. But depending on what I eat first, my body responds in a completely different way.I walk through the science behind why starting with protein and fiber—like vegetables, beans, or lentils—can significantly reduce blood sugar spikes, sometimes to a degree that rivals medication. And the best part? I don’t have to give up the foods I enjoy. I just change the sequence.I break down what’s actually happening inside my body—from the physical effects of fiber slowing glucose absorption, to the hormonal response driven by GLP-1 (the same pathway targeted by popular weight-loss drugs). I also unpack some of the newer, more surprising science around gut hormones like GIP, and why the old “good vs. bad food” narrative doesn’t hold up.Most importantly, I make this practical. What does this look like at breakfast? At dinner? What do I do when everything is mixed together on one plate?This episode isn’t about restriction or perfection. It’s about using biology to my advantage—with one simple habit I can start today.Same food. Different order. A completely different outcome.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Most of us learned to cook the same way. Find a recipe. Follow the steps. Hope it turns out. And when it does, we make it again. And again. Until we have maybe six or seven dishes in rotation and a lingering suspicion that real cooks know something we don’t.They do. But it’s not what you think.Chef Martin Oswald trained under Wolfgang Puck. He’s cooked in restaurants where a single plate costs more than most people’s weekly grocery bill. And when he cooks at home, he doesn’t use recipes. He opens the fridge, looks at what’s there, and builds.That’s what he showed us during our live Substack session this week. Not a recipe. A method.The flavor is in the layersMartin started with kamut, an ancient variety of wheat with large, chewy grains and a nutty flavor. He’d soaked it overnight, and the first thing he did was toast it in a dry pan. His kitchen, he said, smelled like popcorn within five minutes.Then came the spices. Fennel seed, caraway (or cumin if you’re stateside), black pepper, and fenugreek, all crushed together in a mortar and pestle. Not measured with precision. Tossed in by the palmful. The grinding releases the oils, and the oils carry the flavor.He added the crushed spices to the toasting kamut and let them bloom together on medium-low heat. Too hot and spices go bitter. That was secret number one.Building from the bottom upNext came what the French call mirepoix and what every cuisine on the planet has its own version of. Leeks, celery root, and carrots went into the pot. In the American South, you’d swap in green peppers, celery, onion, and garlic. In Italy, it’s soffritto. The concept is universal. You’re creating a base layer of vegetable flavor underneath everything else.Martin didn’t have vegetable stock on hand, so he improvised. A tablespoon of high-quality soy sauce went into plain water. Then a spoonful of tomato paste, roasted in the pan for about thirty seconds until it turned slightly brown. That roasting step pulls out more umami than you’d get just stirring it in raw.He deglazed with water, dropped in a fresh bay leaf (frozen fresh bay leaf holds more flavor than dried, he noted), a sprig of rosemary, and three sprigs of lemon thyme. Then he put the lid on and walked away for twenty minutes.That’s the part most home cooks skip. Not the walking away, but the layering. Every addition was a decision about what the dish still needed. More depth, more earthiness, more fragrance. He tasted throughout the process and adjusted. When he came back, he added Aleppo pepper for heat, lemon juice for acid, a spoonful of tahini for richness, a bit of miso stirred in off the heat to preserve the probiotics, and torn ramp leaves for a hit of garlic.The finished kamut had so many dimensions of flavor that it didn’t need butter, cream, or cheese to feel complete.The strawberry-fennel salad While the kamut simmered, Martin threw together a spring salad that took about four minutes and sounded like it belonged on a restaurant menu. Sliced strawberries, fennel shaved paper-thin, a splash of balsamic vinegar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and a handful of walnuts.He let the vinegar sit with the fennel and strawberries while the kamut finished cooking. The acid softened the raw fennel and the strawberries broke down just enough to create natural viscosity in the dressing. That was Martin’s word for it. Viscosity. When you cook without oil or butter, you need something to replace the mouthfeel. Mashed strawberries, nut butters, extra sauces. The lower in fat you cook, the more liquid you need to build into the dish.He layered greens on top of the marinating fruit and fennel without tossing, so the leaves wouldn’t wilt before dinner. Then he plated the kamut risotto, topped it with the salad, and placed the acidic components on top so every bite offered a different combination of flavors. Sweetness from the strawberries bumped up against the garlic punch of the ramps, while the earthy kamut underneath gave way to bright lemon on top.He called it avoiding flavor fatigue. Every forkful should surprise you a little.The real takeawayMartin wasn’t showing us two recipes. He was showing us a way of thinking. Toast your grains. Crush your spices fresh. Build your base vegetables. Layer umami with soy sauce, tomato paste, and miso. Add herbs at different stages for different effects. Finish with acid and heat. Taste constantly.None of this requires culinary school. It requires a mortar and pestle, a decent pan, and the willingness to stop following instructions and start paying attention to what the food actually needs.That’s intuitive cooking. And once you get the hang of it, recipes start to feel like training wheels.Join Us in The Habit Healers Community on Skool.You already know what to do. Eat better. Move more. Sleep longer. You’ve known for years. The problem was never information.Habit Healers is a live weekly coaching community where I teach one small habit per week and Chef Martin Oswald handles the food. Every Tuesday at 4 PM PT, we get on Zoom and talk about what actually happened when you tried it. Real adjustments, not theory.The habits rotate through five pillars of metabolic health. Blood sugar, movement, stress, sleep, and connection. You join whenever, start wherever, and build from there.Weekly live coaching. A new habit challenge every seven days. Chef Martin’s recipes. People who are actually doing this alongside you.Habit Healers is open now. Click here to learn more. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I take a hard look at a question most of us have asked ourselves at some point—and I challenge the answer we’ve been given. What if it’s not about willpower at all? What if the food I’m reaching for was engineered, very deliberately, to override the systems in my body that are supposed to tell me when to stop?I walk through the science behind how modern food is designed to drive overconsumption—from the “bliss point” that maximizes pleasure without triggering fullness, to foods that literally dissolve before my brain can register calories, to combinations of fat and carbohydrates that don’t exist in nature but light up my brain’s reward system in ways it wasn’t built to handle.I also unpack how variety, texture, smell, and even labeling strategies are used to keep me eating longer than I intended—and why none of this shows up on a nutrition label.But this isn’t just about what’s being done to me. It’s about what I can do next. I share a simple, practical “food defense” approach I can actually use in my own kitchen and at the grocery store—without turning my life into a full-time project.This episode changed how I see every snack, every label, every craving.Because once I understand the system, I stop blaming myself—and start seeing the design.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Ever have that Sunday night feeling where you decide this is the week everything changes? You’re going to meditate, quit sugar, and hit the pavement at 5 AM. Then Wednesday hits, the wheels fall off, and by Friday, you’re back where you started, blaming your lack of willpower.But what if I told you the problem isn’t you? It’s the habit you chose.In this episode, I’m breaking down The Selection Problem. We often pick habits based on a podcast recommendation or a random Instagram post without ever checking if they actually fit our real, messy lives. Most habits are dead on arrival because we didn’t know how to check for a pulse.I’m sharing my CAN Test, a simple, three-question filter I use with my patients to ensure a habit will actually heal you instead of just exhausting you:* C – Clear: Can you describe it in one sentence a 12-year-old would understand?* A – Actionable: Can you do it right now with what you already own?* N – Nourishing: Does it leave you feeling physically better, or does it feel like punishment?Join me as we perform a “Habit Autopsy” on your past failures and reframe how you approach change. You don’t have a willpower problem; you have a design problem. Let’s fix it.Link to Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/most-habits-are-dead-on-arrival-heres Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Most of us treat dessert like a transaction. You get the pleasure, you pay the metabolic price. Maybe you skip it entirely, white-knuckling your way past the freezer at 9 PM. Maybe you give in and spend the next hour renegotiating with yourself about what that means.But what if the math didn’t work that way? What if you could build a dessert that actually brought fiber, protein, omega-3s, and polyphenols to the table, for a fraction of what a standard dessert costs you metabolically?That’s exactly what Chef Martin Oswald walked us through in this week’s live. And the base ingredient might surprise you: tapioca.The 94-Calorie Starting PointNot boba tea tapioca. Not the sugary pudding cups from your childhood. Old school tapioca pearls, cooked in water. That’s it.One cup of cooked tapioca comes in at about 94 calories. It’s gluten-free. It has a satisfying, slightly chewy texture that makes your brain believe it’s eating something indulgent. And on its own, it’s basically a blank canvas.Martin is clear about what tapioca is and isn’t. It’s not a superfood. It doesn’t bring much nutritional value by itself. What it brings is a low-calorie, satiating base that fills your stomach while you load it up with the ingredients that actually matter.Think of it as the foundation of a house. Nobody lives in a foundation. But you can’t build the good stuff without one.The Building Block ApproachThis is where Martin’s Wolfgang Puck training shows up in the most unexpected way. He doesn’t hand you a single recipe and send you on your way. He teaches you a concept he calls Baustein, the German word for building blocks.You start with your base. Then you choose from four categories to build your dessert:Fiber. Ground flaxseed (grind it fresh so it doesn’t go rancid and you actually absorb the omega-3s). Chia seeds, which work beautifully stirred right into the warm tapioca. Psyllium husk, soaked in a quarter cup of water first until it blooms into a gel. A word of caution here: if you’re not used to much fiber in your diet, start with small amounts of psyllium husk. It’s essentially the active ingredient in Metamucil, and your gut will need time to adjust.Protein. Silken tofu blends in seamlessly and adds a creamy texture. Soy yogurt or any plant-based yogurt. Nut butters pull double duty here, covering both protein and healthy fats. You could even fold in pureed white beans or adzuki beans (a traditional Japanese ingredient in sweet desserts, naturally sweet and beautifully small).Polyphenols. This is where dessert starts doing real metabolic work. Dark chocolate at 80% cacao or higher, melted right into the warm tapioca. Frozen dark berries: blueberries, cherries, black currants. Low-sugar or no-added-sugar fruit preserves. And the spices: cinnamon, cloves (which have some of the highest antioxidant activity of any spice), cardamom, allspice. Martin layers these in generously. The berries bring the polyphenols. The spices multiply them.Sweeteners. Date syrup and maple syrup are Martin’s go-to choices. You need very little, especially once you’ve trained your palate down from the sugar levels most packaged desserts deliver. Martin mentioned his own process of reducing sugar over time. It took patience, but now he genuinely prefers less sweetness. Your taste buds adapt. Give them the chance.Three Desserts from One PotIn the live (which you can watch above), Martin builds three completely different desserts from a single batch of cooked tapioca. Each one uses three-quarters of a cup of the cooked base, which means one cup of dry tapioca pearls cooked with five cups of water gives you enough for six servings, stretching to eight once you add your building blocks.Chocolate tapioca. Dark chocolate broken into pieces, laid on top of the hot tapioca and left to sit for three minutes (don’t stir yet, let the heat do the work). Then stir it into a glossy, creamy chocolate pudding. Add ground flaxseed and a drizzle of date syrup. As it chills, the texture gets even better.Peanut butter tapioca. Two generous tablespoons of peanut butter stirred into the warm tapioca with chia seeds, a splash of soy yogurt, and date syrup. This one is all comfort food, and it covers your healthy fats, fiber, protein, and omega-3s in a single bowl.Berry tapioca. Black currant preserves (or any dark berry), stirred in with plant-based yogurt, psyllium husk, cinnamon, and a pinch of cloves. This one needs to sit in the refrigerator overnight so the psyllium can thicken it up. By morning, you’ve got a gorgeous, set pudding.And because Martin can’t help himself, he also made a peanut butter cup version: peanut butter tapioca on the bottom, chocolate tapioca layered on top, served in a glass. He topped a matcha version with fresh strawberries and chia seeds, dusted with matcha powder.All of these are make-ahead friendly. Pour them into glasses, refrigerate overnight, and top with fresh fruit before serving. They actually improve with time.The Real MathHere’s what makes this worth your attention. A standard restaurant dessert runs somewhere between 400 and 800 calories, most of it from refined sugar and saturated fat, with essentially no fiber, no beneficial plant compounds, and nothing that helps you feel full beyond the sugar crash.Martin’s tapioca desserts land somewhere around 150 to 300 calories per serving, depending on how generous you are with the nut butter and chocolate. But those calories come packaged with fiber, plant protein, omega-3 fatty acids from the flaxseed, and polyphenols from the dark chocolate, berries, and spices. The protein and fiber keep you satisfied. The polyphenols support your metabolic health rather than working against it.You’re not white-knuckling past the freezer anymore. You’re opening the fridge and pulling out something that’s actually working for you.This Week’s Habit ChallengeMake one batch of tapioca this week. Just the base: one cup of tapioca pearls, five cups of water, simmer for about 20 minutes until the pearls turn translucent. Then pick one building block combination and try it.If you’re not sure where to start, the chocolate version is hard to beat. Break up a couple of squares of dark chocolate (80% or higher), drop them into three-quarters of a cup of hot tapioca, wait three minutes, stir, add a teaspoon of ground flaxseed and a small drizzle of date syrup. Refrigerate for a couple of hours. That’s it.You can also swap the tapioca base for cooked barley, oats, or quinoa (the quinoa option keeps it gluten-free). The building block concept works the same way regardless of what base you choose.One dessert. One new habit. See how it feels.Want to go deeper? Every Tuesday at 4 PM PT, I meet with our Habit Healers community on Skool. We work through one small habit per week, rotating through all five pillars of metabolic health, with Chef Martin’s plant-forward recipes, real coaching, and a group that actually shows up for each other. No perfection required. Come join us. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore an idea that completely changed how I think about my daily routine: the “tea medicinal cabinet.” It’s not about adding anything complicated—it’s about being more intentional with something I’m probably already doing… making a cup of tea.I walk through six teas that actually earn their place based on the science. From green tea’s role in cognitive health and metabolism, to hibiscus lowering blood pressure in clinical trials, to chamomile helping improve sleep quality—this isn’t guesswork or internet wellness trends. It’s what the evidence really shows (and where it falls short).I also break down the difference between true teas and herbal infusions, how processing changes what’s in your cup, and why honesty matters when we talk about health claims—like when peppermint or ginger tea helps, and when the research actually supports something stronger.This episode isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing one small thing, slightly better.Six teas. Real evidence. And a simple shift I can make starting today.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In 1994, doctors scanned a boy’s brain and found zero creatine inside it. Not low. Completely absent. He had severe intellectual disability, seizures, and almost no language. That case should have changed how medicine thinks about the $0.12/day powder sitting on every gym shelf. It didn’t. Not for decades.In this episode, Dr. Laurie Marbas breaks down the science connecting creatine to your brain, not your biceps. You’ll learn why your brain burns 20% of your body’s energy despite being 2% of your weight, how creatine acts as a rapid-response backup battery for neurons, and why the blood-brain barrier makes brain loading so much harder than muscle loading.We cover the sleep deprivation experiments where creatine prevented cognitive collapse, the 2024 study showing a single dose changed brain chemistry within hours, and the depression trial that doubled SSRI remission rates in women, then got ignored because nobody can patent a molecule that costs twelve cents a gram.Plus: why women’s brains are uniquely vulnerable after menopause (estrogen directly regulates the enzyme that recycles brain energy), what the failed Parkinson’s and Huntington’s trials actually tell us, and the first clinical trial showing creatine can replenish brain energy reserves in menopausal women.This isn’t a story about getting stronger. It’s about whether the most studied supplement in sports nutrition has been misunderstood for 167 years.🔗 Full article with references and downloadable protocol worksheet: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-the-cheapest-supplement-inA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Every week, Chef Martin Oswald and I go live on Substack to dig into one concept and build a meal around it. This week, Martin did something I hadn’t seen before. He set out five items on his counter. A pumpkin, a jar of miso, a handful of blueberries, a potato, and a single leek. Then he asked a question that reframed how I think about plant diversity.You’ve heard the recommendation. Eat 30 different plants a week. It’s in every health book, every magazine, every wellness feed. And it’s a solid starting point. But Martin’s visual made something click for me as a physician. If you fill those 30 slots with iceberg lettuce, cucumber, celery, and watermelon, you can technically hit the number and still miss entire categories of fiber your gut bacteria depend on.Not all plant fibers do the same job.Three fibers, three jobsI like to break fiber into three functional categories. Soluble fiber, the kind you find in oats, barley, apples, and beans, works like a net. It traps glucose and slows its absorption, which helps keep blood sugar from spiking after a meal. Insoluble fiber, found in the skins of fruits and vegetables, brown rice, and wheat bran, acts more like a bulldozer. It adds bulk and keeps things moving through the digestive tract.Then there’s a third category that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. Fermentable fiber.Resistant starch and inulin are two of the most well-studied fermentable fibers, and they behave differently from the first two types. They pass through the small intestine without being digested at all. They travel intact to the large intestine, where your gut bacteria ferment them and produce byproducts called short-chain fatty acids, particularly butyrate, propionate, and acetate. These short-chain fatty acids are sometimes referred to as postbiotics, and they feed the cells lining your colon, help maintain the intestinal barrier, and play a role in blood sugar regulation.Research consistently shows that fermentable fiber consumption increases short-chain fatty acid production, supports the growth of beneficial bacterial populations like Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli, and may improve insulin sensitivity. One study in healthy adults found that inulin increased GLP-1 (a satiety hormone) within 30 minutes and reduced ghrelin (a hunger hormone) several hours later. A large study of 174 young adults found that resistant starch from potatoes produced the greatest increase in fecal butyrate compared to resistant starch from maize or inulin from chicory root.If you’re only eating colorful plants and never touching the foods that contain these fermentable fibers, you’re leaving a major category of gut support on the table.The smarter 30Martin’s five items on the counter represented five different ways to feed your gut. Colorful plants for phytonutrient diversity, fermented foods like miso and kefir for live bacterial cultures, polyphenol-rich foods like berries and green tea, resistant starch from cooked and cooled potatoes, and inulin-rich foods like leeks, onions, garlic, and sunchokes.His argument, and I agree with it, is that 30 plants a week is a great framework, but the smarter version is choosing your 30 from across all of these categories. That’s what moves the needle from “eating a lot of plants” to actually nourishing the microbial ecosystem that regulates your metabolism.The sunchoke advantageThis is where Martin’s demonstration got really interesting. He held up a single small sunchoke, roughly 50 grams, maybe the size of your thumb. That one piece contains approximately four to six grams of inulin, enough to be physiologically effective based on the clinical literature showing benefits at five grams daily.Then he showed the comparison. To get the same amount of inulin from leeks, you’d need about five bulbs. From onions, roughly one entire onion. From garlic, an entire head. And from potatoes (as resistant starch rather than inulin), approximately 10 ounces of cooked and cooled potato.Sunchokes, also called Jerusalem artichokes, store their carbohydrates primarily as inulin rather than starch. Research shows they contain 10 to 22 grams of inulin per 100 grams of fresh weight, making them one of the most concentrated whole-food sources available. Chicory root is technically higher, but you don’t cook with chicory root.This doesn’t mean you need to eat sunchokes exclusively. Martin’s point was about understanding relative concentrations so you can make strategic choices. A little leek in your risotto, some raw onion on your salad, garlic in your stew, and sunchokes when you can find them. Those additions compound across meals.Resistant starch, the cook-cool-repeat trickMartin’s first dish was an Austrian potato salad called Kartoffelsalat. He grew up eating it. Everyone in Austria cooks it. And nobody there thinks of it as a gut health intervention, but that’s exactly what it is.When you cook a starchy food like a potato and then let it cool, the starch molecules reorganize into a crystalline structure that resists digestion by human enzymes. This process is called retrogradation, and it converts digestible starch into resistant starch type 3 (RS3). The cooled potato now behaves more like a fermentable fiber than a simple carbohydrate. Your gut bacteria can ferment it, producing butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids. Research confirms that even when you gently rewarm these foods, a significant portion of the resistant starch remains intact.Martin’s technique matters here. He boiled the potatoes, then sliced them thin while still hot. The thin slicing exposes more surface area, which allows the starch to leach into the dressing (veggie stock, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, apple cider vinegar, and about a teaspoon of olive oil). As the salad sits, especially overnight in the refrigerator, the starch thickens the sauce into something that looks almost like mayonnaise. No mayonnaise in it. Just the potato starch doing its job.Then you bring it out the next day, warm it gently to just above body temperature (around 120°F), and eat it. You’ve built resistant starch overnight and preserved it through gentle rewarming.The dose-dependent approachMartin also made a sunchoke and potato soup, and this is where the practical wisdom came through. He split it 50/50 between sunchoke and potato, because a full sunchoke soup would deliver too much inulin at once for most people.This is the piece I want everyone to hear. If you’ve never eaten significant amounts of fermentable fiber, you cannot start with a bowl of sunchoke soup and expect your gut to handle it gracefully. The bloating, gas, and discomfort people experience when they “go plant-based” or suddenly add beans to every meal isn’t a sign that the food is wrong for them. It’s a sign they increased the dose too fast for their current microbiome to handle.Start with roughly five grams of inulin per day, the equivalent of that small sunchoke or a generous portion of leeks or onion in a meal. Give your gut two weeks to adjust before increasing. You can dilute high-inulin foods by combining them with milder ingredients. Sunchoke soup cut with potato or cauliflower works well, and distributing onion across lunch and dinner rather than eating it all in one sitting makes a difference too.For his third demonstration, Martin braised raw sunchoke wedges with bell pepper and ramps (a wild garlic from the allium family that appears in spring). The whole thing took about three minutes. The point was to show that these foods don’t require complicated recipes. You can add sunchoke to virtually any braise, soup, or stir-fry, controlling the dose based on how much your system tolerates.One important caveat for anyone managing blood sugar closely. Even with the resistant starch benefit from cooking and cooling, potatoes can still spike glucose in some people, particularly those with diabetes or significant insulin resistance. If that’s you, lean into the inulin-rich foods instead. Leeks, onions, sunchokes, and asparagus deliver the fermentable fiber without the glycemic load.What Chef Martin cookedMartin prepared three dishes during our live. The first was Austrian potato salad (Kartoffelsalat) with ramps and an apple cider vinegar dressing. The second was a 50/50 sunchoke and potato soup finished with orange zest and sesame seeds. And the third was braised sunchoke wedges with bell pepper and ramps. He’ll be publishing the full recipes on his Substack soon. I’ll link them here when they’re live. In the meantime, subscribe to Chef Martin’s Substack so you don’t miss them.This week’s habitPick one meal this week and add a fermentable fiber source you don’t normally eat. Throw a leek into your soup, toss some cooled potato into a salad, or grab a sunchoke if your grocery store or farmers market carries them. Start small, pay attention to how your gut responds, and build from there.You already know what to do. Eat better. Move more. Sleep longer. You’ve known for years. The problem was never information.Habit Healers is a live weekly coaching community where I teach one small habit per week and Chef Martin handles the food.Every Tuesday at 4 PM PT, the group gets on Zoom to talk about what actually happened when you tried it. Real adjustments, not theory.The habits rotate through five pillars of metabolic health. Blood sugar, movement, stress, sleep, and connection. You join whenever, start wherever, and build from there.Weekly live coaching. A new habit challenge every seven days. Chef Martin’s recipes. People who are actually doing this alongside you.Habit Healers is open now.References* Baxter NT, Schmidt AW, Venkataraman A, Kim KS, Waldron C, Schmidt TM. Dynamics of Human Gut Microbiota and Short-Chain Fatty Acids in Response to Dietary Interventions with Three Fermentable Fibers. mBio. 2019;10(1):e02566-18. Published 2019 Jan 29. doi:10.1128/mBio.02566-18* DeMartino P, Johnston EA, Petersen KS, Kris-Etherton PM, Cockburn DW. Additional Resistant Starch from One Potato Side Dish per Day Alters the Gut Microbiota but Not Fecal Short-Chain Fatty Acid Concentrations. Nutrients. 2022;14(3):721. Published 2022 Feb 8. doi:10.3390/nu14030721* Tarini J, Wolever TM. The fermentable fibre inulin increases postprandial serum short-chain fatty acids and reduces free-fatty acids and ghrelin in healthy subjects. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2010;35(1):9-16. doi:10.1139/H09-119* Chen Z, Liang N, Zhang H, et al. Resistant starch and the gut microbiome: Exploring beneficial interactions and dietary impacts. Food Chem X. 2024;21:101118. Published 2024 Jan 3. doi:10.1016/j.fochx.2024.101118 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In 2018, researchers at MIT published a study in Science that tracked how different types of information move through social media. They found that false and emotionally charged content spread roughly five times faster than accurate information.That number came up in my monthly conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who specializes in anxiety and habit change. Jud has spent years studying how anxiety moves through populations, and he frames the problem in a way I hadn’t considered before. He treats anxiety like an infectious disease, not as a metaphor but as a framework with real clinical utility.Dr. Jud Brewer’s article “Anxiety Is Contagious. Your Phone Is a Super Spreader.”What Anxiety Actually IsJud uses a working definition in his clinic that I find incredibly useful. Anxiety is fear of the future. Not fear of what’s happening right now, in front of you, but fear of what might happen. And because the future is always unknown, anxiety has an endless fuel supply if we let it.That distinction matters. Fear is often tethered to something concrete, like a dog running at you or a car swerving into your lane. Anxiety floats. It attaches itself to whatever is available, including the emotions of the person sitting across from you, or the headline you just scrolled past.The Problem of Emotional ContagionJud described something from his clinical practice that illustrates this well. If a patient walks into his office carrying heavy anxiety and he isn’t deliberately grounded, he absorbs it. Then he carries it into the next appointment, where the new patient picks up on his shifted energy and asks what’s wrong. One anxious patient has now infected two people without anyone realizing what happened.This isn’t unique to a psychiatrist’s office. You walk into a lively party and your mood lifts before anyone has spoken to you. You walk into a funeral and everything in you goes quiet, even if you didn’t know the person well. The emotional atmosphere of a room changes your internal state before your conscious mind has time to catch up.I told Jud about my experience during COVID. I was doing telemedicine, so patients weren’t physically in front of me, but the anxiety still transferred. Patients were scared and wanted answers I didn’t have, and I was already anxious myself about a situation none of us could predict. That emotional charge came through the screen, through text, through the tone of emails. I’d read a perfectly benign message and filter it through my own anxiety until it felt like a threat. The contagion doesn’t require physical proximity, just a channel.Why Your Phone Changes the MathIn person, emotional contagion is limited by the size of the room. Only so many people can be near you at once. Social media removes that constraint entirely. Millions of people connected through a single platform, each one a potential carrier and a potential host.If you’ve ever forwarded a panicky social media post because it alarmed you and you wanted other people to know about it, you’ve participated in the contagion. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the system is designed to exploit exactly that impulse. Emotional content gets shared, and alarming content gets shared even faster. And the algorithm takes note of every click, every share, every comment, and serves you more of the same.Your phone is the first thing most of us see in the morning and the last thing we look at before sleep. There is no social distancing from a device that lives in your pocket.The Evolutionary LogicA listener named Lou asked a great question during our live. Is this an evolutionary adaptation?Jud pointed to herd animals. When a deer senses a threat, its eyes widen and the amount of visible sclera increases. That’s a signal visible from across a field. One deer’s wide eyes can spook an entire herd in seconds, and that capacity for rapid transmission of fear kept those herds alive for millions of years.We see the same wiring in human crowd behavior. A section of a stadium panics and suddenly there’s a stampede, even though most of the crowd never saw the original threat. The prefrontal cortex goes offline, rational assessment shuts down, and everyone shifts into pure reaction. The mechanism that once protected us from predators now gets activated by a push notification.The Infectious Disease PlaybookThis is the part of the conversation I found most useful. Jud doesn’t just describe the problem. He applies infectious disease logic to it.If anxiety spreads like a virus, through aerosolization of emotional content via social media, then we can borrow from the same playbook we use for physical contagion, including immunization, protective barriers, and basic hygiene.Recognize that it happens. Most people don’t think of anxiety as something they can catch. But you’ve lived it. A friend calls in a panic, and you hang up the phone feeling wound up even though nothing in your own life has changed. Just naming that phenomenon starts to take away some of its power.Build grounding practices as immunization. Jud described two specific practices his lab has studied.Five-finger breathing uses top-down and bottom-up nervous system regulation simultaneously. As you breathe in, you trace from your pinky up to your thumb. As you breathe out, you trace back. Ten breaths, done anywhere, no equipment required.Noting practice is even simpler. You pause and note whatever is most present in your experience, moment to moment, cycling through your five senses plus thinking, including seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and thinking. You label what’s happening and move on.Jud’s lab recently completed a three-year brain imaging study on noting practice. They induced worry in participants, including a high-anxiety group, and found that worry activated the default mode network, the self-referential processing center of the brain. After participants learned the noting practice (that same day, not weeks of training), the practice completely deactivated the default mode network below baseline. Even in people who had never meditated before. Experienced meditators showed an even greater decrease, which suggests the skill deepens with repetition.Practice curiosity as long-term immunization. Jud kept coming back to this one. Curiosity, he said, is one of the best defenses against social contagion. When a headline triggers that familiar tightening in your chest, the difference between getting swept in and staying grounded often comes down to one internal shift. Instead of “oh no,” you go to “oh, interesting.”That shift is small but physiologically significant. It gives your prefrontal cortex a moment to come back online before the emotional reaction takes over.I experienced something like this a few years ago. We were in Florida, in the ocean in December, and the water was rough. Choppy on the surface, calmer underneath. I could feel anxiety swelling up, which is rare for me. But something very similar to what Jud describes as noting kicked in. I looked around. I checked in with what was actually happening rather than what I was afraid might happen. The anxiety dissolved, still there for a moment and then simply gone. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds, but it was a visceral demonstration of what grounding can do in real time.What I Learned the Hard Way About HeadlinesI shared something with Jud that felt relevant. When I first started writing on Substack, I occasionally used more urgent-sounding titles. Things like “number one cause of death as you get older.” I was trying to get people to stop scrolling and pay attention to something important. My subscribers told me it was anxiety-provoking. They said they didn’t come to me for that kind of energy.They were right. They were protecting themselves from exactly the contagion Jud is describing. Even well-intentioned content can function as a vector if it triggers fear before it delivers value. I changed my approach after that.A Practical Screen TrickMy son does something worth mentioning. He keeps his phone screen in grayscale mode. No color at all. He finds that the absence of bright, saturated visuals makes him significantly less likely to fall into a mindless scroll. It’s a small friction point, but friction is exactly what you need when the system is engineered to be frictionless.What You Spread Comes Back to YouJud ended our conversation with something that reframed everything we’d discussed. The goal isn’t just to protect ourselves from catching anxiety. It’s to deliberately spread something better.Social contagion works in both directions. Some of the most popular content on Instagram is people doing kind things for strangers, and that content goes viral for the same reason fear-based content does, because emotions are contagious and we instinctively share what we feel.The algorithm learns from your behavior. If you engage with fear-based content, the algorithm feeds you more of it. You amplify whatever chamber you’re in. But if you consistently engage with content rooted in curiosity and genuine usefulness, that’s what comes back to you.We have a responsibility in this. Not just to ourselves, but to everyone we have influence over. What you amplify with your attention is what you’re spreading.As Jud put it at the end of our conversation, here’s to spreading curiosity and kindness.This article is based on my monthly conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer. You can watch the full interview in the video above.Dr. Jud Brewer’s Inside the Curious Mind SubstackReferencesVosoughi S, Roy D, Aral S. The spread of true and false news online. Science. 2018;359(6380):1146-1151. doi:10.1126/science.aap9559 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In 1983, your cell phone weighed two pounds, cost four thousand dollars, and could only make calls.And strangely enough… it may have been better for your brain.In this episode, I explore how we traded a heavy, inconvenient tool for a featherlight slot machine — and why that design shift quietly rewired our attention, our posture, our sleep, and our relationships.I explain the neuroscience behind doom scrolling, including the powerful behavioral principle of variable ratio reinforcement — the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. Your phone isn’t irresistible because you lack discipline. It’s irresistible because it was engineered to exploit dopamine and uncertainty.We also talk about:* Why Generation Z is the “canary in the digital coal mine”* How the developing prefrontal cortex makes teens especially vulnerable* The physics behind “text neck” and the 60-pound head* How blue light disrupts melatonin and fuels the anxiety-sleep cycle* Why even a silent phone on the table fragments your attention (“technoference”)Then we pivot to solutions.Not detoxes. Not shame. Not willpower.Design.I walk you through the research-backed Digital Wellbeing Protocol — small environmental changes that shift power back to you. From the grayscale hack to the bedroom ban to the 30-minute morning delay, these are structural adjustments that work with your biology instead of against it.You don’t need to become a monk.You don’t need to delete your life.You just need to move the slot machine.This episode is about reclaiming your focus, your sleep, and your presence — not by fighting your brain, but by redesigning your environment.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Chef Martin Oswald and I filmed this live from two different continents (he was in Austria, I was in the U.S.) and we spent over an hour fighting technical issues before we actually got the thing to work. So if you watched live and stuck around through all of that, thank you. Genuinely.Once we got going, we covered three things. The dirty dozen. The clean 15. And then a conversation Martin wanted to have about what he calls “beyond organic,” which turned out to be the part I found most interesting. The video is above if you want to watch us actually cook. What is below is everything we talked about, organized so it is easier to use.The Dirty DozenThe Environmental Working Group publishes an annual dirty dozen list, which identifies the twelve produce items most contaminated with pesticide residues. Research consistently shows that pesticide exposure, even at low chronic levels, is associated with hormonal disruption, metabolic dysfunction, and increased inflammation. For anyone focused on metabolic health, this is not a footnote.The current U.S. dirty dozen includes strawberries, spinach, kale, grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, bell peppers, cherries, blueberries, green beans, and apples. These are the items where buying organic makes the biggest practical difference, and where Martin and I both agree you should not compromise if budget allows.One thing worth knowing is that the dirty dozen varies by region. What is highly contaminated in Colorado may not match what is sprayed heaviest in California, and international listeners will have their own regional variation to consider. The EWG list at ewg.org is updated each year and is a reliable starting point, but it reflects primarily U.S. data.Potatoes deserve a special mention because people often assume that anything growing underground is somehow protected. Martin explained pesticides applied at the soil surface do penetrate down, and the bugs that target root vegetables are prolific. Conventional potatoes are consistently among the more contaminated options, so organic matters there too.During the live, Martin put together what he called a Dirty Dozen Salad. It is a spring arugula base with blueberries, raspberries, and roasted pistachios and almonds, topped with quinoa he had seasoned during cooking with clove, cinnamon, black pepper, and a little chili. The dressing was something I want to make every week. Strawberries, garlic, yogurt (plant-based works fine), a splash of vinegar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and optional mustard and basil, all pureed into a vivid pink dressing. I know garlic and strawberry sounds counterintuitive. I had the same reaction. Martin’s point is that garlic works beautifully with greens in a Caesar, so when you think of it as dressing the greens rather than pairing with the strawberries, it clicks. His one technique rule is to dress only about two-thirds of your greens, never the full amount. Over-dressing weighs the salad down and makes it go soggy fast.Click here for the recipe. The Clean 15On the other end of the spectrum, the clean 15 are the items least contaminated with pesticide residues. These are produce with thick skins, natural pest resistance, or growing conditions that make heavy spraying unnecessary. Buying conventional versions of these is a reasonable, evidence-informed way to save money and redirect it toward the dirty dozen.The current clean 15 includes avocados, sweet corn, pineapple, onions, papaya, sweet peas, asparagus, honeydew melon, kiwi, cabbage, mushrooms, mango, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and carrots.Martin added some nuance here that I found useful. Radicchio and bitter greens generally have some of the lowest contamination levels of any produce you will find, not because they are grown organically but because insects do not want them. Bitter compounds are a natural defense mechanism. Martin said it simply during the session: “Bitter is better.” These are also some of the most potent liver-supportive foods available, and in his view, underused by people who could benefit most from them.White asparagus is worth a specific note. In Austria, it is grown completely covered by mounded soil to protect it from light, which also means it is naturally shielded during growing. As a result, it tends to have very low contamination even in conventional form. Green asparagus is equally good. Both are clean 15 options that are also nutritionally strong.For the Clean 15 Salad, Martin demonstrated a technique I am now going to use regularly. He cut cabbage, carrots, asparagus, and English peas into small, even pieces, then steamed them in a covered pot with just a splash of water for three to four minutes. After steaming, he immediately transferred them to cold water to stop the cooking and preserve the color. He then dressed them with whole grain mustard, flat-leaf parsley, and an avocado-based dressing he had prepared with sesame, ginger, soy, miso, rice vinegar, and lime juice. In lieu of salt, he added a small balsamic drizzle for acidity. His philosophy is to cook very low on sodium and use acids to compensate, whether lemon, lime, balsamic, or vinegar. It is a habit that makes food taste more complex, not less satisfying.For anyone with a sensitive digestive system, there is no need to eat these vegetables crunchy. Steaming them soft, what Martin called “shankos” (a culinary term from therapeutic kitchen work developed for elderly patients decades ago), retains meaningful nutrition while making the food far easier to digest. If raw and crunchy cruciferous vegetables cause gas or discomfort, softer steaming is the right call. You still get the benefit.Click here for the recipe.Beyond OrganicThis is where the conversation went in a direction I did not anticipate, and it is the part I keep thinking about.Martin recently sat down with Professor Harald Mange, a researcher based in Graz, Austria, who studies childhood obesity and unadulterated food systems. Their conversation led Martin to describe a third tier of food quality, something that sits above organic certification in terms of nutritional density.The concept centers on the alpine farming and foraging tradition. Martin pointed out that Switzerland consistently produces some of the longest-lived populations in the world, with average lifespans comparable to Japan and higher than Italy. When he and Professor Mange pulled on that thread, what kept coming up was not a single food or supplement but the food environment itself. Foraged wild berries from forests. Bitter greens growing in rocky soil. Cattle grazing on pristine alpine grasses with no commercial feed in sight. People physically exposed to cold and heat as a byproduct of living and working outdoors rather than as a wellness intervention.The nutritional argument is compelling. Plants that grow in harsh conditions (cold temperatures, poor soil, exposure to pests without chemical protection) respond by producing significantly higher concentrations of protective phytocompounds. These are the antioxidants and secondary metabolites that research increasingly connects to cancer protection, cardiovascular health, and metabolic function. A blueberry harvested from a forest hillside in Austria and a conventionally grown blueberry in a covered greenhouse may look identical. They are not the same food.The practical takeaway for most of us is the farmer’s market, and Martin was clear about how to approach it. Not every farmer’s market vendor is organic, and not every label that says organic is fully what it claims. His parents are farmers, and they were honest with him that growing everything organic at scale is genuinely difficult. What the farmer’s market does offer, particularly from smaller operations with a limited number of crops, is a higher likelihood of fresher, less-processed, more nutritionally intact food. Talk to the vendors. Ask what they grow and how. Look for the unusual items, the strange roots, the foraged greens, the heirloom varieties. That is where the density is.Martin’s example from his own kitchen in Austria made this concrete. A neighbor grows Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes) that come back year after year with no spraying needed because the plant is essentially a weed. They are harvested locally, handled minimally, and eaten seasonally. Sunchokes contain inulin, a prebiotic fiber that feeds beneficial gut bacteria and produces short-chain fatty acids that support blood sugar regulation and reduce inflammation. Martin also freezes porcini mushrooms and wild huckleberries at peak season rather than preserving them in sugar. His freezer is his pantry for winter. The goal is produce harvested at its nutritional peak and stored without adulteration, not produce engineered to last three weeks in a refrigerated shipping container.A Note on WashingWash everything, every time, regardless of whether it is organic. Martin’s method of choice is plain water, which he has used consistently for years. If you want to go further, a dilute baking soda solution is the most evidence-informed option for reducing pesticide residues on surface-washed produce. Vinegar and water will help reduce mold and surface bacteria, particularly on items like blueberries that develop mold quickly. Both work. Neither is a substitute for buying organic on the dirty dozen in the first place.One practical tip Martin shared is to only wash what you are about to use. Storing produce wet accelerates breakdown and mold. Wash as needed, not in bulk ahead of time.His chef trick for tired greens is worth keeping. Arugula or spinach that has dried out over a few days can be revived by soaking in warm water (around 100 degrees Fahrenheit) for about three minutes. It comes back crisp. Cold water will not have the same effect.Quick ReferenceAlways buy organic (Dirty Dozen) -- strawberries, spinach, kale, grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, bell peppers, cherries, blueberries, green beans, apples. Add potatoes to your personal list.Safe to buy conventional (Clean 15) -- avocados, sweet corn, pineapple, onions, papaya, sweet peas, asparagus, honeydew melon, kiwi, cabbage, mushrooms, mango, sweet potatoes, watermelon, carrots. Bitter greens like radicchio are also low-risk.Washing -- plain cold water works for most situations. Baking soda diluted in water is the best option for reducing pesticide residue on produce you could not buy organic. Vinegar and water extends the shelf life of mold-prone berries.Reviving tired greens -- soak in warm water (around 100 degrees Fahrenheit) for three minutes.Freezer as pantry -- buy organic or foraged produce at peak season and freeze it. Frozen at peak is nutritionally superior to fresh produce that has been shipped and stored for weeks.For sensitive digestion -- steam vegetables soft rather than eating them raw or crunchy. You preserve meaningful nutrition and make it far more digestible.Quinoa technique -- dry-toast the quinoa in a pot for three to five minutes before adding spices and water. It brings out a nuttiness and gives you more control over the texture. Season during cooking rather than after.Dressing rule -- dress no more than two-thirds of the greens in a salad. Over-dressed salad becomes soggy and heavy within minutes.Acidity instead of sodium -- balsamic drizzle, lemon juice, lime juice, and good vinegar can replace most of the salt in a dish while adding complexity.Farmer’s market strategy -- go to smaller vendors with fewer crops. Talk to them. Look for the unusual roots, foraged items, and seasonal specialties. These are most likely to approximate the nutritional density of truly unadulterated food.Check your region’s list -- ewg.org publishes an updated dirty dozen and clean 15 each year. The U.S. list is the most widely referenced, but regional contamination data varies. Use it as a baseline and adjust for where your food is grown.Join the Habit Healers CommunityIf you want to cook this way every week alongside Chef Martin and me, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside the Habit Healers Community on Skool. Martin brings his professional kitchen into our sessions with recipes, techniques, and walkthroughs built specifically around the science of metabolic health. I bring the clinical framework. Every week, we take what we know and turn it into something you can actually do at dinner tonight.We cook, we talk, we troubleshoot the real obstacles (time, budget, picky families, and all of it). If you are ready to build a kitchen practice that works for your metabolic health long-term, come join us.Join the Habit Healers Community.ReferencesEnvironmental Working Group. Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen. ewg.org. Updated annually. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Why can a 150-pound man develop Type 2 diabetes… while a 300-pound man does not?For decades, we were told a simple story: gain weight, get sick. Stay thin, stay safe. But that story falls apart the moment you look at real patients.In this episode, I walk you through the concept that changed how we understand diabetes: the Personal Fat Threshold.I explain why the issue isn’t how much fat you carry — it’s where your body can safely store it. Some people are born with a metabolic “bathtub” the size of a swimming pool. Others have a kitchen sink. When your personal storage limit is exceeded, fat spills into places it doesn’t belong — your liver, your pancreas, your muscles — and that’s when the real trouble begins.We unpack:* Why BMI is a blunt and often misleading tool* What “ectopic fat” is and why it drives insulin resistance* The Twin Cycle hypothesis and how liver fat and pancreatic fat feed each other* Why beta cells in Type 2 diabetes may be stunned — not dead* And why early diabetes can often be reversedThen I explain something hopeful.When you “drain the tub” — often by losing 10–15 kilograms — liver fat drops within days. Blood sugar can normalize within a week. Over weeks, the pancreas begins to recover. In many cases, diabetes goes into remission.This isn’t about perfection. It’s about crossing back below your personal threshold.Finally, I share how we translated this science into the 30-Day Blood Sugar Reset — a simple, daily micro-habit approach designed to lower the pressure on your liver and pancreas without turning your life upside down.Because diabetes isn’t a moral failure.It isn’t a willpower problem.And it isn’t always about how you look.It’s about overflow.And overflow can be drained.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Miller MD and I went deep on this one. We sat down for a Friday live and covered something that gets overlooked in the constant noise about macronutrients, protein targets, and which diet trend deserves your attention this week. We talked about the micronutrients that actually keep your brain and body running, the ones most people never test for, and what happens when they quietly fall short.If you watched the replay, this is your reference guide. If you haven’t watched yet, start with the video above and come back here for the details.Your Brain Has a BouncerBefore we got into specific nutrients, Dr. Miller explained something worth understanding: the blood-brain barrier. Your brain is picky about what it lets in. Unlike your gut lining, which is one cell layer thick and held together by tight junctions, the blood-brain barrier is roughly 400 times tighter. It has to be. Your bloodstream carries immune cells, toxins, and pathogens that would cause serious damage if they reached your brain tissue.Specialized cells called astrocytes, pericytes, and microglia wrap themselves around the blood vessels that supply the brain, creating a filtration system that only allows through what the brain actually needs: glucose via dedicated transporters, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and select nutrients. Everything else gets turned away.When this barrier is working well, the brain stays protected while the glial cells on the inside handle cleanup and maintenance. That is a healthy brain. And the nutrients that make it through that barrier are exactly the ones we spent the rest of the session talking about.Vitamin DDr. Miller started here because it is one of the most common deficiencies she sees, regardless of diet. You may not feel it right away, but signs can include slower wound healing, getting sick more often, autoimmune flares, and declining bone density.The test to ask for is a 25-hydroxy vitamin D level. I aim to get my patients into the 40 to 60 range. Below 20 is clearly deficient, and most physicians will agree with that. Research during the pandemic showed that individuals with levels closer to 46 to 50 had less severe infections, which tracks with what we know about vitamin D’s role in immune and cardiovascular protection. It functions more like a hormone than a simple vitamin, and your whole body depends on it.Here is the thing that surprised me about my own levels. I have lived in sunny places for most of my life. I run outside regularly without sun protection (yes, I know). And I have never been able to get my vitamin D above 30 without supplementation. There are genetic variations that affect your ability to convert sunlight into usable vitamin D, which is why testing matters more than assumptions.Most of my patients do well on around 2,000 IU daily, but this is individual. I would not take over 4,000 IU without a physician monitoring your levels, because toxicity is real. NatureMade is a reliable, affordable brand you can find at any pharmacy or Walmart.MagnesiumThis one comes up constantly. Even people eating a solid plant-based diet can fall short. The challenge with magnesium is that blood tests are unreliable. Only about 1% of your total magnesium circulates in your blood, so a serum level can look normal while your tissues are depleted. An RBC (red blood cell) magnesium test is somewhat better, but still imperfect.Pay attention to symptoms: muscle cramps, especially if you are on a diuretic like hydrochlorothiazide. Difficulty sleeping. Muscle twitching. Anxiety. Heart palpitations. Migraines. Headaches. Constipation. As we get older, the cramping and sleep disruption tend to be the most common complaints.For food sources, pumpkin seeds are a powerhouse. I eat them every single day. Dark chocolate (you are welcome), avocado, almonds, and leafy greens are all solid sources. But if you have gut issues, if you are gassy or bloated or dealing with loose stools or constipation, there is a good chance you are not absorbing well. Aging also reduces stomach acid, which compounds the problem.Someone asked during the live what the best form of supplemental magnesium is for muscle twitching. Dr. Miller and I both recommend magnesium glycinate (or bisglycinate), 200 to 400 milligrams. It absorbs well and is less likely to cause the GI side effects you might get from other forms.Omega-3 Fatty AcidsDr. Miller brought this one up because of her focus on inflammation and healthy aging. What your body really needs are EPA and DHA, the two omega-3 fatty acids that do the heavy lifting for joint health, cardiovascular protection, and brain function. DHA in particular is critical for the brain, and people who carry the APOE4 gene may need even more of it to get adequate amounts across the blood-brain barrier.If you eat fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, or herring, you are getting pre-made EPA and DHA. If you eat plant-based, you can get ALA from flax seeds, chia seeds, walnuts, hemp seeds, and leafy greens, and your body can convert that ALA into EPA and DHA through a series of enzymatic steps.But not everyone converts efficiently. Research suggests that a meaningful percentage of the population has genetic variations that reduce this conversion. If your levels are low despite eating ALA-rich foods, you may need a direct source of EPA and DHA. Both Dr. Miller and I recommend algae-based omega-3 supplements for this reason. The fish get their omega-3s from algae anyway, so you are just cutting out the middleman.I check an omega-3 index and aim for at least 5.5, though above 8 is probably ideal for cardiovascular health. Vitamin D, B12, and algae-based omega-3s are the three supplements I recommend nearly everyone consider. I like Nordic Naturals for the algae omega-3.Vitamin B12This is the non-negotiable one. If you eat a plant-based diet and you are not supplementing B12, stop what you are doing and start. B12 only comes from bacteria. Animals accumulate it because they consume bacteria through their food, and it gets stored in muscle tissue. Humans have bacteria that produce B12 in the gut, but it is made beyond the point of absorption. So you cannot rely on internal production.The majority of my patients need 500 to 1,000 micrograms daily. And this is not only a plant-based issue. People taking metformin, proton pump inhibitors, or anyone getting older can have reduced B12 absorption regardless of diet.Symptoms can be insidious. Numbness. Fatigue. Brain fog. Balance issues. I had a patient who had been vegetarian for most of her life and came to me in her mid-30s with severe nerve weakness, fatigue, and an inability to grip a cup without dropping it. Multiple doctors had missed it. Her B12 was below the low end of normal. We started injections, and within weeks, her grip strength returned. She was fortunate that she did not have permanent nerve damage, but that outcome is possible when deficiency goes unaddressed for too long.I check three things: serum B12, homocysteine, and methylmalonic acid. I aim for a serum B12 above 500, and I want homocysteine below 10. I have seen homocysteine drop beautifully with B12 supplementation, even when the B12 level was technically in the normal range. Do not wait for a number to fall below the reference range before you act. That reference range represents 95% of the population, not necessarily what is optimal for you.IronIron deficiency deserves careful attention, especially for women. You can have normal circulating iron and normal iron saturation and still have low ferritin, which is your iron storage protein. That low ferritin can cause restless legs, sleep disruption, fatigue, brittle hair and nails, and hair loss. Research shows that people who replenish ferritin to at least 50 notice improvements in energy and focus. Sleep specialists prefer levels closer to 70.Women who menstruate, endurance athletes, and runners are at higher risk. I know from experience. As I entered perimenopause, my periods got heavier and lasted longer. I was running longer distances. I was compounding the problem. And if you drink a lot of tea with meals, the tannins can reduce iron absorption, so separating tea from meals can help.Pumpkin seeds are a great plant-based source, along with dark green leafy vegetables and beans. If you eat animal products, you are likely getting enough. But if you are supplementing iron, please do so under physician guidance. Too much iron causes its own set of problems. And if you are a man with low iron, that is unusual enough to warrant investigation. In my practice, low iron in men is rare, and when it does occur, we need to look for a source of loss, particularly GI bleeding.ZincZinc is a cofactor for nearly every cellular function in the body. Immune support, wound healing, thyroid function, and hair health all depend on it. Research shows that supplementing zinc within the first 24 to 48 hours of a cold can reduce the duration by a day or two.You can test serum zinc, ideally in the morning since levels fluctuate throughout the day. Pumpkin seeds and cashews are excellent plant-based sources. Dr. Miller and I both see patients whose zinc remains low even after dietary changes, and those individuals need supplementation.One important caution: high-dose zinc can interfere with copper absorption. If you stay under 10 to 15 milligrams of supplemental zinc, copper is generally not a concern. Above that, you want to be mindful.IodineThis is the one that sneaks up on people who are trying to eat healthier. Iodine comes primarily from seafood and iodized salt. When people clean up their diet, cut back on processed foods, switch to sea salt or eliminate salt entirely, and stop eating fish, they quietly remove their main iodine sources.I learned this the hard way early in my career. I was counseling patients to reduce sodium, and they were cutting out iodized salt without replacing the iodine. Their TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) started creeping up. Once we identified the iodine deficiency and replaced it, their thyroid function normalized.T3 (your active thyroid hormone) is literally three iodine molecules. T4 is four. You need iodine to make thyroid hormone. If it is too low, hypothyroidism follows. But too much can also cause thyroid problems, which is why I have seen patients walk in on 1,000 micrograms of supplemental iodine and run into trouble.You need around 150 micrograms per day, roughly a quarter to half teaspoon of iodized salt. Seaweed and nori are good sources. The gold standard test is a 24-hour urine iodine collection, which yes, means collecting your urine for an entire day and keeping it in the fridge. A serum level is less reliable unless you are significantly depleted.One more thing: the worry about soy and cruciferous vegetables damaging your thyroid is only relevant if your iodine is low. I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I have been eating soy, broccoli, kale, and cauliflower for 14 years on a whole food plant-based diet, and my thyroid medication dose actually decreased when I went plant-based because the inflammation in my body went down. So eat those foods. Just make sure your iodine is sufficient.PotassiumPotassium-rich foods help buffer sodium intake and support healthy blood pressure. Symptoms of low potassium include muscle cramps, fatigue, palpitations, and elevated blood pressure. It shows up reliably on a basic or comprehensive metabolic panel, which your doctor is likely already checking.Most adults probably get about half of what they need. Potatoes, bananas, avocados, and dark leafy greens are all excellent sources. If you are on a diuretic, pay extra attention. People with kidney disease (stage 3 and beyond) need to work with their nephrologist to monitor potassium closely.I want to share a story from a patient in Canada. She had reversed her type 2 diabetes on a whole food plant-based diet, lost close to 100 pounds, and come off her blood pressure medications. Then her doctor told her that her elevated potassium was caused by her plant-based diet. Her kidney function was perfect. I told her this was almost certainly a lab artifact. When blood sits too long before being processed, or when the blood draw is traumatic (the needle jostles, cells rupture, potassium spills out), you get a falsely elevated reading. We had her redraw from both arms, well-hydrated, no fist clenching, and her potassium came back completely normal. Lab error is the number one cause of falsely elevated potassium when kidney function is intact. Stay hydrated before your draw and do not let one result panic you.B Vitamins (Beyond B12)Dr. Miller took us through the broader B vitamin family. These are found in leafy greens, nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains, lentils, and avocados. When levels are low, you might notice decreased energy, altered mood, brain fog, or poor sleep.An important piece of this puzzle is methylation. Some B vitamins need to be methylated (activated) before your body can use them, and genetic variations in the MTHFR pathway can impair that process. Dr. Miller shared a case of a patient eating a comprehensive diet with plenty of plants who could not sleep and had persistent low energy. Genetic testing revealed a methylation issue. Targeted supplementation with B2, B3, B6, and B9 (folate) significantly improved her sleep, mood, and focus.A few warnings here. Taking high doses of B vitamins without a clear reason can backfire. Certain people cannot metabolize large amounts and will feel worse, not better. B6 toxicity specifically can cause nerve tingling and numbness. And if you get cracking at the corners of your mouth, unexplained rashes, or slow wound healing, consider whether B vitamin status might be a factor.CholineThis is one I do not think gets enough attention. When I audit my own diet on Cronometer, I was hitting my targets for calcium, iron, and everything else, but I was only getting about half the choline I needed as a pre-menopausal woman. After menopause, the situation gets more complicated because estrogen supports some internal choline production, and when that drops, dietary needs increase.Low choline can contribute to fatty liver. I have had two patients with unexplained fatty liver, one in her early 40s and one in her early 50s, who had been through GI workups and liver biopsies with no answers. When we started replacing choline with phosphatidylcholine, their liver markers improved.The richest dietary source is eggs. On a plant-based diet, soy products and cruciferous vegetables are your best options, which is another reason to not cut those food groups based on internet fear-mongering. If you have genetics that impair choline absorption, or if your diet has become too restrictive, supplementation may be warranted.FiberThe United States is a fiber-deficient country. The FDA recommends 25 grams per day for women and 35 grams for men, though ancestral populations likely consumed 50 to 100 grams daily. Most Americans fall well short.Research shows that eating more than 30 different types of plants per week supports a diverse microbiome. Fiber only comes from plants, specifically fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes. It is absent from animal products entirely.If you are not used to eating much fiber and you suddenly increase your intake dramatically, your microbiome will protest. The bacteria that break down fiber need to be cultivated gradually. Start slow, increase steadily, and if you are struggling with tolerance, try blending or cooking high-fiber foods to pre-digest them somewhat. Start with lentils if beans give you trouble. They tend to be easier to tolerate.I get 75 to 80 grams of fiber daily without trying at this point. But I grew up eating beans, vegetables, and potatoes because they were cheap, so my gut was accustomed to it long before I went fully plant-based.SodiumMost Americans consume too much sodium from processed foods and restaurant meals. But there is another side. People on very clean diets, particularly those who eliminate salt entirely, can develop dangerously low sodium levels.Dr. Miller shared her own experience with hyponatremia (low sodium). She was not eating salt because she thought she was not supposed to, and it got her into real trouble. We both see this pattern: health-conscious people drinking large amounts of water, avoiding salt completely, and ending up with sodium levels around 125 (normal is 135 to 145), which is clinically significant.Sodium is essential for nerve conduction. Every nerve signal in your body depends on sodium transport. The sweet spot for daily intake appears to be around 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams. Both too low and too high are problematic, and the relationship follows a U-shaped curve.If your sodium runs low, step one is to check whether you are drinking too much water and eating too little salt. A pinch of iodized salt added to whole food cooking is a long way from the excessive sodium in processed food. If the simple fixes do not resolve it, a workup for kidney issues, adrenal dysfunction, SIADH, heart failure, or medication effects is appropriate.And for the record, if anyone on the internet tells you to drink massive amounts of salt water, do not.ProteinYou can absolutely get sufficient protein on a plant-based diet. I want that to be clear. Beans, legumes, soy, whole grains, nuts, and seeds all contribute. But I do see trouble when people become overly restrictive, skip protein-rich foods because of bloating fears, or eat only fruit for entire meals.A rough starting point for protein needs: estimate your ideal body weight (start with 100 pounds at 5 feet tall, add 5 pounds per inch, then divide by 2.2 to get kilograms). Aim for at least 1 gram of protein per kilogram, preferably 1.2, and up to 1.6 grams for people doing regular exercise. Less than 1 gram per kilogram is where I start seeing problems, especially in older adults who are already losing muscle mass.On labs, a low creatinine can sometimes signal inadequate protein intake. And if you feel fatigued, struggle with satiety, or are not building muscle despite resistance training, protein is worth auditing. I ask patients to walk me through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If there is no protein source at two of those meals, we have found a gap.One of my favorite tricks: lupini bean flakes. The brand Aviate (A-V-I-A-T-E) on Amazon is excellent. A quarter cup gives you 12 grams of protein for only 80 calories. I add them to oatmeal, smoothies, soups, and chili.Pair your protein with resistance training. You need to give your muscles a reason to hold on to the protein you are feeding them. Eating enough protein without lifting anything heavy is only half the equation.How to Audit Your Own NutritionIf this felt like a lot, here is where to start.Download the app Cronometer (C-R-O-N-O-M-E-T-E-R). Log your normal eating for one week without changing anything. At the end of the week, look at where you fall short. Then decide whether you need to adjust your food choices or talk to your doctor about targeted supplementation.For lab work, ask your physician about the following: 25-hydroxy vitamin D, serum B12 with homocysteine and methylmalonic acid, a complete metabolic panel (which includes potassium and sodium), an iron panel with ferritin, serum zinc, and an omega-3 index. For iodine, the 24-hour urine collection is the most accurate test.Our motto for this conversation: test, do not guess. Whatever your dietary pattern, make sure it is actually working for you by checking the data. What works for one person may not work for the next. We have the same basic plumbing, but our genetics, microbiomes, absorption capacity, medications, and life circumstances make each of us a unique case.If something does not feel right and your doctor says your labs look fine, do not stop asking questions. Sometimes the answer is in the nutrients nobody thought to check. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this week’s live session, Chef Martin Oswald pulled back the curtain on something most people never think about: calorie stacking. It’s the way traditional cooking piles fat on top of fat, layer by layer, from the oil you sauté in to the cream in the sauce to the cheese on the finish. By the time a plate of pasta or a restaurant entrée reaches your table, those invisible layers can easily add up to over 1,000 calories, and the food doesn’t look any different than if it had half that number.Martin spent years cooking in high-end kitchens where butter sauces and cream reductions were the standard. When he transitioned to cooking for physicians and cardiovascular health programs, he had to solve a real problem: how do you keep the flavor and the mouthfeel of those sauces without the caloric weight behind them?His answer came down to three techniques. Each one recreates what Martin calls viscosity, the way a good sauce coats your tongue and carries flavor across your palate, without cream, butter, or excessive oil. Here’s the breakdown.Method One: Vegetable Puree (Martin’s Go-To)Simmer cauliflower in vegetable stock for 7-10 minutes. Blend it smooth. Done.What you get is a base with the consistency of heavy cream and roughly 40 calories per 100 grams. (A traditional cream sauce runs about 240. A butter sauce can top 500.) The natural pectin in cauliflower is what gives it that coating texture.From here, you can take it anywhere. Alfredo, lasagna, risotto, or Martin’s move from the session: cook it with Thai curry paste and kaffir lime leaves, and you have an instant curry sauce where the cauliflower completely disappears behind the spices.Cauliflower not your thing? Martin says butternut squash, onions, or virtually any vegetable that softens and blends will work the same way.Batch cooking tip: Make a cauliflower soup on day one. Use the leftover puree as a sauce base for the next two or three days.Method Two: The RouxA roux is one of the oldest thickening techniques in cooking, common across French, Austrian, and Southern American kitchens. Martin’s low-calorie version:* Sauté onions dry in a pan (no oil).* Add mushrooms. Splash vinegar over them as they cook. (Martin’s trick: the acidity builds deep flavor and steams off as the mushrooms release water.)* Add one measured teaspoon of olive oil (~40 calories), then one tablespoon of whole grain flour directly on top.* Toast the flour for about three minutes, stirring constantly. (Skip this step and your sauce will taste like raw paste.)* Add liquid (stock, water), bring to a boil, whisk well, and simmer 7-10 minutes.This method is especially good for soups and stews that feel too thin. Martin made the point that a watery soup might be perfectly nutritious, but your palate registers it as unsatisfying. Just a small amount of roux changes the entire eating experience without meaningful caloric cost.Method Three: The Tapioca Slurry (Martin’s Secret Weapon)Martin told us he ran a blind tasting of five different starches and tapioca flour won easily. It produces a sauce that coats your mouth just enough, then releases cleanly. It holds up in the refrigerator for days without separating (arrowroot breaks down overnight), and it gives you a clear, glossy finish rather than the cloudy look from wheat flour. It’s also completely flavor-neutral, unlike agar agar, which can carry a faint seaweed taste and mute other flavors in the dish.The method:* Mix 1 tablespoon tapioca flour with 3-4 tablespoons cold water.* Stir constantly. (If you let it sit, the starch sinks and clumps.)* Drop it into your already simmering sauce.* Bring back to a quick boil, then reduce to a simmer. One minute and you’re done.Martin demonstrated this by building a lemongrass kaffir lime teriyaki sauce: pounded lemongrass (crushing the stalk releases the aromatic oils), torn kaffir lime leaves, soy sauce, a touch of date syrup for sweetness, thickened with the tapioca slurry.One thing to know: Because this sauce coats food as a glaze rather than pooling on the plate, you use less per serving. That means the sauce itself needs to be more concentrated in flavor. Season it a touch stronger than you think you need.Why This MattersResearch consistently shows that reducing the energy density of your meals, eating the same satisfying volume but with fewer calories per bite, is one of the most effective strategies for sustainable weight management. The mistake most people make is trying to eat less. The opportunity is to eat differently. Swapping a cream sauce for a cauliflower puree doesn’t shrink your plate or leave you hungry. It changes what your food is made of while keeping the experience of eating it intact.As Martin put it: you’re removing the calories, improving the nutrient profile, and the sauce still does everything the heavy cream and butter versions would do.Want more techniques like these from Chef Martin, plus weekly live coaching on the habits that actually move the needle with me? The Habit Healers community is now open. Learn more here. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

What happens if you stretch for just three minutes every morning for two weeks?Not an hour.Not a hot yoga class.Not a heroic “new year, new me” overhaul.Three minutes.In this week’s Habit Healers Live Lab, I share what actually changed in my own hip after seven days of micro-dosing mobility — and why biology responds to consistency far more than intensity.We treat stiffness like a project that needs a dramatic fix. But your nervous system doesn’t care about your weekend warrior session. It adapts to what you do daily. In this episode, I explain why you can’t “cram” mobility any more than you can cram brushing your teeth — and how small, repeatable inputs begin to recalibrate the body’s built-in safety brakes.I walk you through:* Why more stretching doesn’t automatically mean more gains* What PNF (contract–relax) actually does in the nervous system* The difference between forcing length and updating tolerance* Why dynamic mobility is more like practice than stretching* And how strengthening your glute med might be the missing pieceI also give you the full Week 2 protocol — under five minutes total — designed to shift your system from guarding to allowing.This isn’t about forcing tissue to surrender.It’s about teaching your brain that new range is safe.If you’ve ever felt “rusty,” blamed your birthday, or assumed fixing a 20-year stiffness problem required a 60-minute workout… this episode will challenge that story.We’re not chasing intensity.We’re rewiring defaults.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of "Learn My Lesson," I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Jake Goodman, a psychiatrist and the writer behind the "Mental Health Movement" Substack. Dr. Goodman shared his inspiring journey into medicine, detailing his early aspirations, the challenges he faced getting into medical school, and his eventual specialization in psychiatry. He also discussed his personal experience with depression during his residency, which has significantly enhanced his empathy and understanding as a psychiatrist.We delved into the topic of dementia, a growing concern among our aging population. Dr. Goodman explained the basics of dementia, including its different types such as Alzheimer's, Lewy body dementia, and frontal temporal dementia. He emphasized the importance of recognizing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as a precursor to dementia and discussed various ways to prevent and manage these conditions.Key preventive measures highlighted include regular exercise, quality sleep, socialization, and proper nutrition. Dr. Goodman also stressed the importance of getting hearing and vision checked, managing blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and addressing any micronutrient deficiencies. He mentioned the potential benefits of certain medications and supplements, while also cautioning against unnecessary polypharmacy.We also touched on the ethical considerations of genetic testing for dementia risk, with both of us agreeing that it's a nuanced decision that requires careful thought.Dr. Goodman practices at the Goodman Memory Clinic, offering virtual consultations in California, Florida, and New York. He is active on social media and Substack, where he shares valuable insights on brain health and mental well-being.This episode is packed with practical advice and thoughtful discussions on dementia prevention and mental health, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in these topics. Thank you, Dr. Goodman, for sharing your expertise and experiences with us!Links to connect with Dr. Goodman:Virtual Practice (Goodman Memory Clinic): https://forms.gle/BDWhyrsw65V5YYia8Newsletter: https://jakegoodmanmd.substack.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakegoodmanmdDr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

I get referred patients regularly because I practice what people call “holistic medicine.” And the story is almost always the same: they’ve been through conventional medicine, they keep getting more prescriptions, their numbers may look fine on paper, but they don’t feel any better. Sometimes they feel worse. There’s a lack of vitality that nobody seems to be addressing, and nobody is asking why.That conversation stuck with me, because it’s exactly the kind of gap Chris Miller MD and I discussed in our latest live. Chris is a physician I trust, someone I go to when I have clinical questions that sit outside my own lane. She’s board-certified in lifestyle medicine like I am, and she’s gone further into integrative and functional medicine training. She practices in 23 states via telemedicine, and she brings a perspective shaped by her own health challenges, including managing lupus.What follows is a summary of our conversation, along with some practical guidance if you’re trying to find a physician who actually sees you, not just your lab results.The Habit Healers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Problem With “Holistic”I deliberately chose the phrase “whole person medicine” for this conversation instead of “holistic.” Not because holistic is a bad word, but because it carries so much baggage that it can mean almost anything. For some people, holistic means walking away from conventional medicine entirely. That’s not what Chris and I practice, and it’s not what we’d recommend for anyone.Whole person medicine, the way we define it, means something specific. It means your physician doesn’t just treat the complaint that brought you through the door. If you come in with high blood pressure, a whole person approach doesn’t stop at a prescription. It looks at your blood sugar. It checks inflammatory markers. It asks about your sleep, your stress, your diet, how connected you feel to the people around you. It recognizes that inflammation in one system doesn’t stay in one system. Your cardiovascular health, your brain, your gut, your immune function are all talking to each other.And the treatment plan reflects that. Diet and lifestyle come first. Integrative tools like yoga, acupuncture, or mind-body practices can support recovery. Supplements fill actual documented gaps (not guesswork). And medications are used when they’re indicated, because keeping someone safe is always the priority. As Chris put it during our conversation, her first job with every patient is to keep them safe. If something is dangerously abnormal, you address it with whatever tools you have, including pharmaceuticals. Then you build the lifestyle foundation underneath.Evidence-Based Shared Decision-MakingOne of the things I talked about in the live was an article by Greg Katz, MD, a cardiologist on Substack, about a patient who came in with exertional chest pain during exercise. His primary care doctor hadn’t been too alarmed. That would have set off alarm bells for me. The patient eventually ended up seeing Dr. Katz, had imaging that showed significant blockage in the LAD (sometimes called the “widowmaker”), and then faced a decision: stent, or medical management?What made Dr. Katz’s approach stand out was the shared decision-making process. He looked at the data, including the ISCHEMIA trial, which shows that for stable patients, stenting and medical management produce comparable long-term outcomes. He discussed it with colleagues. He presented the evidence to the patient. And together, they decided.That model is what whole person medicine looks like in action. It doesn’t mean your doctor avoids modern interventions. It means your doctor uses evidence to guide the conversation and treats you as a partner in the decision, not a passive recipient.Where Lifestyle Medicine Fits (and Where It Stops)Chris and I are both board-certified in lifestyle medicine through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (lifestylemedicine.org). That certification means a physician has foundational training in nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management, and behavior change as therapeutic tools.For a lot of people, that foundation is enough. Shift to a more plant-forward diet, improve sleep quality, add consistent movement, manage stress, and many chronic conditions start to improve.But Chris’s own story is a good example of when it’s not enough. She changed her diet. She optimized sleep and stress management. Her lupus didn’t budge. So she went deeper. She trained in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil, studying mind-body techniques, vagal nerve activation, and the role of the parasympathetic nervous system in healing. Then she trained in functional medicine, which uses more advanced testing (microbiome analysis, heavy metals, mold exposure) when standard approaches haven’t uncovered the root problem.What she found was that she had genetic variants affecting methylation and B vitamin activation. No amount of dietary change alone was going to correct those abnormalities. She needed targeted supplementation and a more precise approach.The lesson isn’t that diet and lifestyle don’t matter. They remain the foundation for the vast majority of people. The lesson is that autoimmune disease, and really any chronic condition, is not one-size-fits-all. If you’ve made meaningful lifestyle changes and you’re still not getting better, that doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It may mean there’s a layer underneath that hasn’t been addressed yet.Inflammation: What to Know, What to Ask ForChris and I spent a good chunk of our conversation on inflammation, because it sits at the crossroads of so many conditions. Joint stiffness, brain fog, depression, difficulty sleeping, waking up sore. These can all be signs of chronic low-grade inflammation. And at its worst, acute inflammation is what triggers heart attacks and strokes.There are a few basic markers your doctor can check. A CBC (complete blood count) is drawn at most annual visits, and shifts in your white blood cell count from your personal baseline can signal something brewing, even if the number still falls in the “normal” range. If you usually run around 3.5 and now you’re at 6 or 7, that’s worth investigating.Beyond the CBC, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) is one of the most useful inflammatory markers. It’s produced by the liver in response to inflammatory signals anywhere in the body, and research has linked elevated hs-CRP to increased risk for cardiovascular events, neurodegenerative disease, and autoimmune flares. A target of less than 1.0 mg/L is generally considered protective.One caveat Chris raised that I think is important: hs-CRP can spike temporarily after an intense workout or during an acute viral infection. If you just ran 20 miles or you’re fighting a cold, recheck it a week later before drawing conclusions.ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) is another inflammatory marker, and it can sometimes catch what CRP misses, particularly in certain autoimmune conditions. The two tests use different mechanisms and respond to different inflammatory signals, so it’s not uncommon to see one elevated while the other is normal.The point is this: if you’re feeling off and your doctor isn’t checking inflammatory markers, it’s worth asking.The Bigger Metabolic PictureI’ve been spending more time writing and thinking about metabolic health, and one statistic has stuck with me. Research looking at cardiometabolic health criteria in American adults found that only a small fraction, roughly one in fourteen, met all five markers of optimal metabolic health. That data only goes through 2018, so the real number now is likely worse.Metabolic health is, at its simplest, how well your body processes and uses energy. Insulin resistance is part of it. Blood sugar regulation is part of it. And poor metabolic health doesn’t just show up as diabetes. It accelerates heart disease, contributes to cognitive decline, worsens GI issues, and fuels chronic inflammation.This is where every conversation about whole person medicine eventually leads. The daily habits, what you eat, how you move, whether you sleep well, how you manage stress, whether you have meaningful social connection, build or erode your metabolic health over time. No single doctor’s visit can undo years of accumulated damage. But the right physician can help you understand where you stand and build a plan that actually addresses the full picture.A Word on GLP-1 MedicationsChris and I both shared that our thinking on GLP-1 medications has evolved. Neither of us is a pill-first physician. But the data on these drugs keeps expanding in directions that are hard to ignore.The most obvious use is for food noise, that constant mental chatter about the next meal that some people experience no matter how carefully they eat. For patients who have solid lifestyle habits and are still battling that relentless drive, GLP-1 medications can lower the volume enough to let everything else work.Beyond weight management, emerging research suggests GLP-1 medications may lower systemic inflammation, reduce cardiovascular events in high-risk individuals, and show protective effects for brain health and cognitive decline. There’s also growing interest in their role for autoimmune conditions, where they may help quiet an overactive immune response that persists even after lifestyle optimization.None of this means GLP-1s are for everyone. But they’re a tool, and a whole person physician uses every appropriate tool available while keeping lifestyle as the foundation.Menopause Hormone Therapy: Evolving With the DataI also brought up menopausal hormone therapy in our conversation, because roughly 90% of my patients are women in this age group, and it’s one of the first things I discuss. My own experience going through perimenopause at 53, despite being extremely active and metabolically healthy, shook me. The hormonal fluctuations hit hard even when everything else was dialed in.Chris and I have both evolved our thinking here as the data has matured. FDA-approved (not compounded) menopausal hormone therapy, picked up at your local pharmacy, has compelling evidence for bone health, brain health, and cardiovascular protection when used in the right window for the right patient. Hot flashes are not just an inconvenience; they’re driven by cytokine release, and severe vasomotor symptoms carry their own health risks.This is highly individualized. But a physician who dismisses hormone therapy without looking at the current evidence isn’t practicing whole person medicine. They’re practicing 2002 medicine.Supplements: Less Is More (With Four Exceptions)Patients come to me on 20 or 30 supplements sometimes, stacked up from different practitioners, internet recommendations, and well-meaning friends. My approach is to strip it back and focus on what the evidence actually supports.For most of my patients, four supplements cover the bases:Vitamin B12 is non-negotiable for plant-based eaters, and it’s also commonly depleted in people over 65, anyone on metformin, or anyone taking proton pump inhibitors like omeprazole. I recommend 500 to 1,000 micrograms daily and want to see blood levels between 500 and 1,100.Vitamin D is one I check routinely. Even people with significant sun exposure can run low due to genetic differences in conversion. I couldn’t get my levels above 27 or 28 despite training for marathons in Florida without supplementation. For most people, around 2,000 IU daily is a reasonable starting dose, adjusted based on labs. Insurance doesn’t always cover vitamin D testing, but services like Jason Health or similar direct-to-consumer lab companies can make it affordable. [Link to direct-to-consumer lab options]Algae-based omega-3s matter especially for people who aren’t eating much fish or who are limiting nuts and seeds. You can check your omega index to see where you stand.Creatine isn’t technically a vitamin, but I’m a fan. The research on brain health and muscle performance, particularly for women over 40, is growing. It’s one I take daily.Chris added a few others she watches closely in her patients. Zinc can be difficult to absorb, especially without seafood in the diet, and it’s a cofactor for immune function and gut repair. She checks levels before supplementing. Magnesiumtends to run low even in people eating plant-rich diets, possibly due to declining soil quality, and she optimizes based on labs. And B vitamins beyond B12 can matter for people with methylation variants like hers.One important note Chris raised: if you’re supplementing zinc at higher doses (above 30 mg), you need to add copper, because zinc competes with copper for absorption.The principle here is straightforward. Don’t guess. Test. Supplement what’s actually low. And reassess annually, because your needs change over time.How to Actually Find a Whole Person PhysicianSo what do you do with all of this? Here are concrete steps you can take.Start at lifestylemedicine.org. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine has a provider directory. Any physician listed there has, at minimum, foundational training in using diet and lifestyle as therapeutic tools. It’s not a guarantee of a perfect fit, but it’s a much better starting point than a random internet search. Ask about visit length. Fifteen-minute appointments are a red flag for the kind of care we’re describing. Chris’s minimum appointment is 30 minutes, and most of her patients see her for an hour. That time matters. It’s what allows a physician to actually listen, investigate, and explain.Pay attention to how they handle your questions. A good physician will tell you when they don’t know something, and then go find the answer or refer you to someone who has it. If a doctor dismisses your concerns because your numbers are “technically normal” or because you’re “healthier than most of their patients,” that’s information about whether they’re the right fit.Be cautious of practitioners who order expensive, unvalidated tests or stack you on dozens of supplements without clear clinical reasoning. Every test should have a purpose. Every supplement should have a documented deficiency or clear clinical indication behind it.Look at their willingness to evolve. Medicine changes. The data on GLP-1s, menopausal hormone therapy, protein needs, and nutrient testing has shifted meaningfully in the past five years. A physician who hasn’t updated their approach in a decade is not practicing whole person medicine. They’re practicing old medicine.Consider telemedicine. Chris is licensed in 23 states and is accepting new patients at chrismillermd.com. If you don’t have access to this kind of care locally, telemedicine can bridge the gap. Your Next StepsIf this conversation sparked something for you, here are three things you can do this week:Check your most recent labs. Pull up your last blood work and look at your white blood cell count, your fasting glucose, and whether hs-CRP was included. If it wasn’t, ask for it at your next visit.Write down your top three health concerns. Not diagnoses. Concerns. How you feel. Fatigue, stiffness, brain fog, poor sleep, whatever it is. Bring that list to your next appointment and see how your physician responds to it. Their response will tell you a lot.Search the ACLM provider directory. Even if you’re happy with your current doctor, it’s worth knowing who’s in your area or available via telemedicine who practices with this lens. You can find the directory at lifestylemedicine.org. [Link to ACLM directory]Chris Miller MD is a board-certified lifestyle and integrative medicine physician licensed in 23 states and accepting new patients. You can learn more at chrismillermd.com.If you want to go deeper on these topics with weekly coaching, recipes from Chef Martin Oswald, and a community of people working on the same habits, join us inside the Habit Healers community on Skool. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Watch the full live cooking session with Chef Martin Oswald in the video above. Recipes for the creamy tofu scramble, tofu medallion with lupini bean cake, and peanut butter chocolate mousse can be found here.Join us in the Habit Healers Skool community where Chef Martin and I work together to bring culinary medicine and healing habits to you live every week in our exclusive community.Most people think about protein the way they think about a car battery. One source doing one job in one spot. You open the hood, point to it, and say, “There it is. That’s my protein.”A block of tofu on the plate, a scoop of beans in the bowl, and you call it handled.But what if you’ve been thinking about plant protein all wrong? Not because the sources are bad, but because the strategy is.That’s the idea Chef Martin Oswald brought to our live cooking session this week, and it changed how I think about building a plate. He calls it protein stacking, and the concept is so simple it’s almost annoying: instead of relying on a single protein anchor in a meal, you layer protein into every component, from the dressing to the sauce to the side dish and even dessert.The Strategy No One Talks AboutWhen Martin and I sat down to talk about protein and fiber (because pairing the two matters for blood sugar, satiety, and gut health), I expected him to walk through a list of high-protein plant foods. He did that. But then he did something more interesting. He cooked a full three-course meal where every single element carried protein, and none of them felt like they were trying.The walnut dressing on your salad? That’s not just fat and acid. That’s protein and alpha-linolenic acid. The hemp seeds blended into your chocolate mousse? Thirty-three grams of protein per hundred grams. The soy milk you splash into your tofu scramble instead of water? More protein than almond or oat milk, working in the background of every dish.Martin’s point is that most people who move toward plant-based eating make a common mistake. They identify one protein source per meal and stop there. They don’t think about the dressing, the binder, the dessert, or the cooking liquid as opportunities. But when you start stacking, those five or eight grams here and there add up fast. By the end of a three-course meal built this way, you’re easily looking at forty grams or more without ever feeling like you ate a “high-protein” diet.The LineupBefore Martin started cooking, he walked through his go-to plant protein sources and made a case for each one. A few stood out.Sunflower seeds are one of the most underrated options in the plant protein world. They pack serious protein per serving, they contain vitamin E, and they cost a fraction of what you’d spend on nuts like cashews or almonds. Martin calls them the best value protein next to peanuts, and he’s not wrong. You can fold them into a dressing at lunch, sprinkle them on breakfast, and blend them into a dessert at dinner.Pumpkin seeds carry even more protein per hundred grams and work as a topping, a snack, or a blended sauce base. Hemp seeds sit at the very top of Martin’s list. He treats them like a rescue ingredient, something you can drop into virtually anything (sauces, smoothies, baked goods, oatmeal) to boost the protein content without changing the flavor profile in any dramatic way.And then there are lupini beans. I’ve been telling people about lupini bean flakes for a while now, and Martin confirmed what I already suspected. They’re the king of the bean protein world. The flakes dissolve into oatmeal, stir into soups, and blend into patty mixtures with almost no resistance. If you only add one new ingredient to your pantry after reading this, make it lupini bean flakes. (These are my favorite.)Three Dishes, One PrincipleMartin cooked three things during our session, and each one demonstrated protein stacking in a different context.The Creamy Tofu ScrambleThis is Martin’s riff on the scrambled eggs he grew up eating in Austria, and he’s particular about texture. He crumbles the tofu by hand rather than cutting it into cubes, which gives you a softer, more egg-like mouthfeel. The trick that separates a mediocre scramble from a great one? Two things. First, a teaspoon of cashew powder stirred in with soy milk (not water, not oat milk) to build creaminess and add protein simultaneously. Second, a squeeze of lemon juice. Martin says acidity transforms tofu scramble into a completely different product, and based on how it looked on camera, I believe him.He served it over quinoa, stacking another protein layer underneath. Add avocado on top and you’ve got a breakfast (or dinner, honestly) that will keep you full for hours.The Tofu Medallion with Lupini Bean CakeThis is the weekend dish, the one you make when you want to impress someone or just treat yourself. Martin sliced firm tofu through the center, cut medallion shapes with a round cutter, and then carved the edges smooth. That might sound fussy, but he explained that the rounded edges change the way the tofu feels in your mouth. Smoother, less rough on the palate.He marinated the medallions in what he calls the “umami bomb,” a sauce built on fermented black beans that carries enormous flavor. The leftover tofu trimmings? Those became the scramble. Nothing wasted.For the base, he made a cake (his word for it; I kept calling it a patty) from pureed chickpeas and cooked lupini bean flakes, bound with a flax egg and seasoned with the same umami sauce. The chickpea puree acts as the glue that holds everything together, and if you’re nervous about it falling apart, Martin’s advice is simple: use more chickpea puree and a little less lupini until you find the ratio that works for your hands and your pan. You can also add a tablespoon of arrowroot flour or tapioca starch to help it bind as it heats.He layered it all on a bed of steamed spinach, topped it with the roasted tofu medallion, added a spoonful of kimchi for fermented tang, and finished it with a pureed carrot sauce. (Pro tip from Martin: if you make carrot soup one day, that same soup becomes the sauce the next day. Restaurant logic applied at home.)Between the lupini beans, chickpeas, tofu, and spinach, this single plate carried roughly thirty plus grams of protein before you even count the walnut dressing on the salad course.The Peanut Butter Chocolate MousseThis is dessert where the protein isn’t an afterthought but the structural foundation of the whole thing.Martin made this two ways in one cup. The outside layer is a peanut butter cream: just peanut butter thinned with soy milk (or vanilla soy milk, which he says works beautifully) and stirred until smooth. If your peanut butter is stiff from the fridge, warm it gently in a water bath or microwave for a few seconds.The inside is a chocolate mousse made from hemp seeds blended with cocoa powder, soy milk, and a touch of vanilla. He sweetened his with maple syrup, though he usually reaches for date syrup. The key to getting it silky is either soaking the hemp seeds overnight or using a high-powered blender. If you try to shortcut this with a regular blender and dry seeds, you’ll end up with grit instead of mousse.Between the peanut butter, hemp seeds, and soy milk, this dessert carried around eight to ten grams of protein. That’s a protein bar disguised as something you actually want to eat.Martin also dropped an idea I can’t stop thinking about: swap the chocolate mousse for an espresso version. Blend hemp seeds with espresso, dates, and a little soy milk. Use that as the center, keep the peanut butter cream on the outside, and you’ve got something that belongs on a restaurant menu.A Quick Note on FiberBefore Martin started cooking, I brought up something I’ve been thinking about. When you puree nuts, seeds, or vegetables, a lot of people worry that you’re destroying the fiber. You’re not. Blending does what your teeth do. It breaks food into smaller pieces, but the fiber stays intact. You only lose fiber when you strain it out, like when you juice something and discard the pulp.This matters for anyone who struggles with digestion, especially as we get older. Martin mentioned a concept from Austrian health resorts called Schonkost, a gentle cooking approach that favors steaming and pureeing over raw preparations. For people in their seventies and eighties, raw vegetables at dinner can be genuinely hard to process. Blended soups and purees deliver the same fiber and nutrients in a form the body can handle more easily.So if you’ve been avoiding smoothies or pureed soups because you thought blending destroyed the good stuff, you can let that one go.The HabitIf protein stacking sounds complicated, it isn’t. Start with one change. Next time you make a salad dressing, use a nut or seed base instead of plain oil and vinegar. That’s it. You’ve just added protein to a part of your meal that normally has none. From there, you can start thinking about your cooking liquids (soy milk over water), your toppings (hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds), and your desserts (blended nut or seed creams).You’re not aiming for perfection here. You’re just recognizing that protein doesn’t have to live in one place on your plate. It can show up everywhere, doing its work in the background of every bite.Don’t forget to get Martin’s recipes here. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

You’ve seen the headlines: “Drug cuts heart attack risk by 50%.” It sounds dramatic. Reassuring. Urgent. But in this episode, I show you exactly how that single percentage is designed to mislead you.I break down the difference between Relative Risk and Absolute Risk — and why one makes for great marketing while the other tells you what actually matters to your life. We walk through real numbers together, translate medical jargon into plain English, and expose how a “50% reduction” can quietly mean a 1% benefit.Then we go deeper.I explain why a result can be “statistically significant” and still clinically useless. We unpack the famous p-value (and why it doesn’t mean what most people think it means). I teach you how to read a Confidence Interval like a pro — including the crucial “Line of No Effect” that determines whether a study actually worked or quietly failed.And finally, I give you the most practical tool of all: the Number Needed to Treat. This is the number that answers the only question that really matters:How many people have to take this drug for one person to benefit?If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by medical research, confused by health news, or skeptical of miracle claims but unsure why — this episode is your toolkit.By the end, you won’t just read headlines.You’ll decode them.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based on my conversation with Chef Martin Oswald, author of the Chef Martin’s Healing Kitchen Substack, this is day 6 and the finale of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit, hosted by The Habit Healers.If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day.If you missed Day 2 of our Brain Health Summit with Annie Fenn, MD you can watch it here. We discussed foods to decrease dementia risks.If you missed Day 3 of our Brain Health Summit with Jud Brewer MD PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to unwind your anxiety.If you missed Day 4 of our Brain Health Summit with Dr. Dominic Ng, you can watch it here. We discussed microplastics in your brain.If you missed Day 5 of our Brain Health with Chris Miller MD, you can watch it here. We discussed brain inflammation.Click here for the 25 recipes, Chef Martin, created for the Brain Health Summit!Months before the first Brain Health Substack Summit interviews aired, Chef Martin Oswald and I did something a little unusual. We reached out to each of our experts and asked them a simple question: What are your favorite brain-supporting ingredients? They each sent back a list. They had no idea what would happen next.What happened next was Chef Martin Oswald. From his kitchen in Vienna, Martin took those ingredient lists and built original recipes around every single one. The experts never saw it coming. Dr. Annie Fenn didn’t know her ingredient picks would become a Northern Moroccan Charmoula. Dr. Dominic Ng had no clue his favorites would land on a plate with Pumpkin Seed–Crusted Salmon with Sauce Gribiche, Roasted Beets & Leeks. Each recipe was a surprise, designed to show that the science these experts study can actually end up as something you’d want to eat on a Tuesday night.This final session of the summit brought it all together. Martin walked through the dishes he created for each expert, and in doing so, he connected the dots between five days of interviews spanning inflammation, microplastics, the gut-brain axis, habit change, and blood sugar regulation. What became clear, sitting there watching him plate dish after dish, was that the same core ingredients kept showing up across every expert’s list. The overlap was the point.The Sodium Problem (and the Flavor Fix)One of the first things Martin addressed was sodium. High blood pressure damages the brain over time, and most people eat far more sodium than they realize. This came up in our conversations with Dr. Chris Miller about neuroinflammation and again in our discussions about cardiovascular health and its direct link to cognitive decline.Martin’s approach to cutting sodium is not about deprivation. He builds flavor in layers. First, increase potassium-rich foods like sweet potatoes, beans, and greens. Then lean on acidity: balsamic drizzle, pomegranate reduction, lemon juice. These cover the flavor gap that opens when you pull back on salt. Next, fermented foods like miso, sauerkraut, and kimchi add a tangy, funky depth that salt alone can’t replicate. And miso in particular carries enough potassium to offset its own sodium content, making it close to neutral for blood pressure.He also pointed to something practical: reduced-sodium salt is easy to find and an immediate swap anyone can make today. Combined with generous use of fresh herbs and ground spices, you’re not mourning the loss of salt. You’re replacing it with something more interesting.The Blood Sugar Thread If there was a single theme connecting every expert on this summit, it was blood sugar. Martin noticed it too. Across the original recipes he developed for the summit, almost none contain high-glycemic foods. The experts didn’t coordinate on that. They arrived at the same place independently, which tells you something about how central glucose regulation is to brain health.Martin’s dishes rely on low glycemic load ingredients: beans, leafy greens, whole grains like barley, and plenty of non-starchy vegetables. He also explained the practical difference between glycemic index and glycemic load. Beets, for example, have a higher glycemic index when compared to sugar as a reference point. But the glycemic load of a real serving of beets is relatively small because of the fiber content. The fiber slows the glucose spike. This distinction matters because it keeps people from avoiding perfectly good foods based on a misleading number.He also mentioned a useful eating strategy that came up in our conversation, eat the non-starchy vegetables first, then the beans or grains. That sequence alone can blunt the glucose rise from a meal. It costs nothing and requires no special equipment.Brain Health in a Bowl: Feeding the Gut-Brain AxisThe gut-brain connection came up with nearly every expert. Annie Fenn, MD discussed it. Dr. Chris Miller went deep on neuroinflammation. Dominic Ng talked about it from a microplastics angle. Martin took all of that and built dishes that combine prebiotics and probiotics in a single meal.One of his standout techniques is adding miso to cashew butter and letting it sit for two days. The probiotics from the miso colonize the entire batch. Add a splash of sourdough liquid, and you’ve boosted the fermentation further. That cashew butter then becomes a topping for a sauerkraut soup. When you cook sauerkraut, you kill the beneficial bacteria, but the cooked kraut still functions as a prebiotic, feeding the good bacteria you’re scooping on top. The result is a single bowl delivering both the prebiotic and the probiotic. That kind of layering is exactly what the science supports, and Martin builds it into dishes that make sense for a weeknight.The Anti-Inflammatory Superbowl and the Color RuleFor Chris Miller MD ’s recipes, Martin created an antioxidant board packed with about nine different plant foods in a single dish. The principle is visible before you even taste it: every color on the plate represents a different phytonutrient. Red onions, dark greens, golden turmeric, deep purple blueberries. Both Chris Miller and Dr. Jud Brewer independently flagged blueberries as a priority ingredient, which gives you a sense of how strong the evidence is behind them.Martin’s practical advice here was refreshingly low-pressure. The healthiest food, he said, is the one you actually have in your kitchen. You don’t need to replicate every recipe exactly. The goal is to get more color and more variety onto the plate, using whatever you have on hand.He also built potassium into this dish deliberately, bringing the sodium-balance strategy full circle. And the turmeric was there because Dr. Miller specifically requested it for its anti-inflammatory properties. Every ingredient was pulling double or triple duty.Microplastics, Salmon, and What You Can Actually DoOur conversation with Dr. Dominic Ng about microplastics was one of the more startling interviews of the summit. He shared research showing that human brains contain roughly seven grams of microplastics, the equivalent weight of a plastic spoon. He brought an actual plastic spoon as a prop during the interview, which drove the point home in a way numbers alone can’t.But the research also contained something reassuring. Studies comparing younger and older adults found similar levels of microplastic accumulation, suggesting the brain reaches an equilibrium. We appear to be filtering microplastics out, likely through the glymphatic system, which was only discovered in 2012. That system acts like a nighttime cleaning crew for the brain, clearing waste during deep sleep.For Martin’s dish honoring Dominic’s ingredient list, he built a plate of spinach, beets for nitrates, and salmon crusted with pumpkin seeds for magnesium. The salmon delivers EPA and DHA, the omega-3 fatty acids that came up repeatedly throughout the summit. For people who don’t eat fish, Martin noted that beans and tofu can stand in for the salmon, though a reliable source of omega-3s remains important regardless.The practical takeaways from the microplastics conversation were grounded and doable: use a HEPA filter, vacuum regularly, mop with a wet mop to capture particles instead of pushing them airborne, and protect your sleep so the glymphatic system can do its job. Sleep is not a luxury. It is maintenance.Julie Fratantoni’s Matcha Dishes and the Power of FennelJulie Fratantoni, PhD brought brain exercises to the summit, and her ingredient picks led Martin to create two matcha-based dishes. One featured a matcha and hemp seed sauce thick enough to cling to roasted vegetables and fennel. The other was a konjac noodle dish with salmon and matcha. Martin shared that he’d eaten enormous amounts of fennel while losing 30 pounds in two months. Fennel has a structural bite to it that most vegetables lack. You have to chew it slowly, and that mechanical process keeps you feeling full in a way that watery vegetables like cucumber simply don’t. If you’re working on weight and find yourself unsatisfied after meals, fennel is worth trying for that reason alone.Both of Julie’s dishes were, predictably, low glycemic load. The yogurt, the blueberries, the fiber-rich components all kept blood sugar stable. Martin pointed this out, and it reinforced the theme: when you cook with the ingredients these experts recommend for brain health, you end up with meals that are also good for metabolic health. The two are not separate problems.The Blueberry Dessert That Made a Community Member’s DayFor Jud Brewer MD PhD ’s recipes, Martin created a blueberry bake that one of our Habit Healers community members, made the very next day. She reported back that it was so good the pan was already empty before she could take a photo. The recipe is remarkably simple: plant-based yogurt mixed with a tablespoon of tapioca flour per cup of liquid, poured over blueberries in a baking dish, then into the oven for 30 to 40 minutes. The texture comes out like creme brulee without the cream, the eggs, or the sugar. You can use any mixed berry you like, and vanilla plant milk adds enough sweetness that additional sugar becomes unnecessary.Martin said something during this part that stuck with me. He said he always feels a little bad putting out recipes because he can’t fully convey texture and thickness through a written page. You just have to look at it, try it, and adjust. That honesty is part of what makes cooking with Martin’s recipes different from following a sterile set of instructions. There’s room to experiment.Annie Fenn’s Recipes and the Barley BreadAnnie Fenn, MD, who has written an entire brain health cookbook, provided ingredients that led Martin to create a tomato-anchovy sauce served over toasted barley bread with greens. The anchovies deliver omega-3 fatty acids in a concentrated form. The barley bread, made from a European-style seed bread recipe, provides beta-glucan fiber that supports both cholesterol management and blood sugar stability. Martin emphasized that you should toast the bread until it’s dry and firm so it can soak up the tomato juices without turning to mush. White bread, he said, would just collapse. The toasted whole grain holds up, and the contrast between crispy bread and warm, garlicky tomato sauce is the whole point.Martin built a cross-over dish connecting Annie’s ingredients with Julie Fratantoni’s matcha theme, showing how the same core nutrients keep appearing across different experts’ recommendations.What Martin Got Right: The Biggest LessonNear the end of the session, Martin stepped back from the individual recipes and offered what he called the biggest lesson from the entire summit. Control your weight. Control your blood sugar. And make sure you have a reliable source of omega-3 fatty acids. That’s it. Three concrete things. Not a complicated protocol. Not a list of 47 supplements. Three priorities backed by every expert who appeared on the summit.Martin has been working in metabolic health cooking for years, and he said this summit brought it all together for him in a new way. The connection between brain health and metabolic health is not theoretical. It shows up on the plate. It shows up in the ingredients. When five different experts from different specialties all land on the same foods, that convergence is telling you something.Summit RecipesChef Martin Oswald created original recipes for each expert. Find them all here.Key Takeaways from the Brain Health Substack SummitBlood sugar regulation is the common thread. Every expert on this summit, across different specialties, flagged blood sugar as central to brain health. Martin’s recipes reflect that: nearly all of them are low glycemic load without anyone having to think about it.Sodium reduction is a flavor problem, not a willpower problem. Use acidity, fermented foods, herbs, spices, and potassium-rich ingredients to replace what salt was doing. Miso is especially useful because its potassium content offsets its sodium.Feed the gut-brain axis with real food. Combine prebiotics (cooked sauerkraut, fiber-rich vegetables) with probiotics (miso, fermented cashew butter, kimchi) in the same meal. The gut communicates directly with the brain through the vagus nerve, and inflammation can travel that route.Eat the rainbow, but don’t stress about perfection. Each color on your plate represents a different protective phytonutrient. Blueberries showed up on nearly every expert’s list. But the best food is whatever you actually have and will actually eat.Protect your sleep to protect your brain. The glymphatic system clears waste, including microplastics, during deep sleep. Go to bed at the same time. Wake up at the same time. This is not optional.Omega-3 fatty acids appeared across every expert’s recommendations. Salmon, sardines, anchovies, or plant-based alternatives like walnuts and flaxseed. Make sure you have a consistent source.The three biggest priorities from the summit: Control your weight. Control your blood sugar. Get your omega-3s. Start there.This article is part of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers. If you found this valuable, share it with someone who could benefit. And if you want to put these ideas into practice with a community behind you, join us in The Habit Healers community on Skool, where Chef Martin Oswald and I work together to help you build the habits that protect your brain and your metabolic health. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based on my conversation with Chris Miller MD, author of the Chris Miller, MD Substack, this is day 5 of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.Click here to join, our final conversation tomorrow with Chef Martin Oswald and we will dive into all the delicious recipes he created for each of our Brain Health Substack Summit panelists.If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day.If you missed Day 2 of our Brain Health Summit with Annie Fenn, MD you can watch it here. We discussed foods to decrease dementia risks.If you missed Day 3 of our Brain Health Summit with Jud Brewer MD PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to unwind your anxiety.If you missed Day 4 of our Brain Health Summit with Dr. Dominic Ng, you can watch it here. We discussed microplastics in your brain. Subscribe to get the updates on the Brain Health Summit each day!There is a particular kind of tired that most people over 45 know well. You wake up and the day already feels heavy. You have a list of things to do and the motivation to do exactly none of them. You sit down to read something and the words just slide off the surface of your brain. You used to be sharp. You used to be a person who did things. And now you’re wondering what happened.Most people chalk it up to aging. Or stress. Or some personal failing they can’t quite name. And what Chris Miller MD would tell you is that all of those people are wrong.Chris is an emergency physician who spent over a decade working in the ER before her own body started fighting against her. It began with a swollen finger. Then more fingers. Then came the diagnosis: lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system, the very thing designed to protect you, turns on your own tissue with alarming aggression. Her inflammation markers were sky-high. Her whole body was under siege. And eventually, the ER became too physically demanding to keep working in.But what struck Chris most wasn’t the joint pain. It was what happened to her brain.“I felt foggy,” she said during our discussion. “I was not motivated. I thought something was wrong with me, like I was lazy. But really, it was inflammation. My neurotransmitters were off.”That distinction matters enormously. Because if you’re lying on the couch at 3 p.m. unable to will yourself into action, and the actual problem is an immune response happening inside your skull, then no amount of self-criticism will fix it. You’re yelling at yourself for something your brain chemistry is doing without your permission.What’s Going on Exactly?To understand what’s going on, you need to understand what inflammation actually is. And the simplest way to think about it is as a security system.Your immune system runs 24 hours a day, patrolling your body for threats. A virus enters through your nose, the immune system grabs it. You cut your finger, the immune system repairs the wound. You breathe in polluted air, the immune system works to clear it out. Roughly 70 percent of your immune system sits in your gut, which makes sense when you consider that one of the biggest entry points for foreign substances is through the food you eat.All of that is normal and necessary. The problem starts when the security system gets overstimulated.If you’re eating highly processed food at every meal, breathing contaminated air, sleeping poorly, and running on stress hormones all day, your immune system never gets a break. It keeps releasing inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines (think of them as alarm bells), which tell the rest of the body to ramp up the immune response even further. Normally, inflammation spikes when there’s a threat and then settles back down. But when the threats never stop coming, the inflammation goes up and stays up. That’s chronic inflammation. And that’s when things start breaking.Fortunately, your brain has a built-in defense against all this: a structure called the blood-brain barrier. Picture the lining of a normal blood vessel as a single layer of cells. The blood-brain barrier is about 50 times tighter than that, reinforced with specialized support cells called astrocytes. It’s like a fortified wall around your brain, keeping out the inflammatory chaos happening in the rest of your body.But here’s what Dr. Miller emphasized: when inflammation is chronically elevated, that wall starts to crack. The cytokines get through. And once they’re inside, they activate the brain’s own immune cells, called microglia, which then start releasing their own inflammatory signals. Now you have inflammation inside the fortress.What Brain Inflammation Actually Feels LikeThe symptoms are maddeningly vague, which is part of what makes this so tricky to spot. Chris described the most common ones from both her clinical practice and her own experience.Fatigue is at the top of the list. Not the kind of tired you feel after a bad night’s sleep, but a bone-deep exhaustion that doesn’t lift. More than 80 percent of people with autoimmune conditions describe fatigue as their number one symptom, and Dr. Miller points directly to brain inflammation as the reason.Then there’s the motivation problem. When microglia are activated and releasing cytokines inside the brain, they suppress dopamine, the chemical that drives you to start and complete tasks. Less dopamine means less motivation. They also reduce serotonin, the chemical involved in mood regulation. So now you’re tired, unmotivated, and a little depressed. The problem is biological, not personal.And then there’s brain fog. Chris struggled to even describe it, which she acknowledged was sort of the point. “It feels like things are distant,” she said. “Like you want to calculate something and you almost can’t get there. Even though you know what you want to do, you just can’t.” I’ve dealt with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune condition affecting the thyroid gland) for nearly 30 years, and I know exactly what she means. It feels like wading through molasses. You can see the thought arriving. You watch it come toward you. And then it either takes forever to land or it drifts right past.Headaches can also be a sign. So can anxiety. The overall picture is of a brain that isn’t broken in any dramatic way but is running on degraded hardware.The Surprising List of Things That Set Your Brain on FireSome of the causes of neuroinflammation (the medical term for inflammation specifically in the brain) are predictable. Autoimmune diseases. Head injuries. COVID and other serious infections. When you have a bad flu and feel that total withdrawal from the world, the foggy detachment, that’s your brain responding to the inflammatory cascade in your body.But some causes are less obvious.Blood sugar spikes, for instance. You don’t need to be diabetic for this to matter. Even if your fasting blood sugar and your A1C (a measure of average blood sugar over three months) look normal, the spikes that happen after meals can still damage the blood-brain barrier. Every time your blood sugar shoots up after eating, your insulin surges to bring it back down, and that surge creates a small hit of inflammation that chips away at the barrier over time.Low estrogen is another one. Estrogen is strongly anti-inflammatory, which helps explain why so many women experience sudden cognitive changes during perimenopause and menopause. I lived this firsthand. I had such an abrupt cliff from perimenopause to menopause that I went from fine one week to not fine the next. That rapid drop in estrogen removes a major source of inflammation protection for the brain.Chronically elevated cortisol, the stress hormone, directly activates the microglia. So living in a constant state of stress doesn’t just feel bad. It is physically inflaming your brain.Air pollution is a culprit too. Chris described reading studies linking air pollution to dementia through glial cell activation. She even mentioned her frustration with neighbors whose wood-burning fireplace pollutes the air in her neighborhood. It’s one of those things that feels insignificant, a neighbor’s fireplace, but breathing contaminated air over months and years adds up.And poor sleep. Sleep is arguably the most important factor in this whole equation, which brings us to one of the most remarkable discoveries in neuroscience in the last two decades.The Brain’s Nighttime Cleaning CrewUntil about 2012, scientists didn’t know the brain had its own waste-clearance system. The rest of your body has the lymphatic system, a network of vessels that filters out waste and toxins. But the brain was thought to operate differently. Then researchers discovered the glymphatic system (the “g” comes from glial cells, which play a central role in the process), and it changed the way we think about sleep.The glymphatic system surrounds the brain. During deep sleep, it activates, flowing through and around brain cells to clear out metabolic waste, damaged proteins, inflammatory debris, all the byproducts of a brain that’s been thinking and firing all day. Every time your neurons fire, they produce a form of cellular exhaust called reactive oxidative stress. The glymphatic system is what takes out that trash.I like to use an analogy when I explain this to patients. During the day, the office workers are busy at their desks, tossing things into the trash can as they go. At night, the cleaning crew comes in and empties the bins, mops the floors, hauls everything away. If the cleaning crew never shows up, or only gets 20 minutes to do a full night’s work, the garbage piles up.That’s exactly what happens when you don’t get enough deep sleep. The microglia that were activated during a stressful day, or by blood sugar spikes, or by any of the other triggers, are supposed to calm down during deep sleep and switch from their inflammatory mode back into their cleaning and repair mode. Without that reset, they stay activated. The inflammation compounds. And night after night, the damage accumulates.The good news, Dr. Miller was careful to point out, is that a bad night here and there won’t ruin you. The brain is resilient. But chronic sleep deprivation is a different story, and improving your deep sleep is one of the most powerful interventions available for reducing neuroinflammation.What You Can Actually Do About ItDr. Miller outlined a set of strategies that collectively form a strong defense against brain inflammation. None of them are exotic. All of them are backed by research. And the cumulative effect of stacking them together is significant.Lower your overall inflammation first. This is the foundation. If your body is chronically inflamed, those cytokines will keep battering the blood-brain barrier. Get tested: a high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) blood test measures a protein your liver produces in response to inflammation, and an erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) test measures how quickly red blood cells settle in a tube, which speeds up when inflammation is present. These are simple blood tests you can ask your doctor to order. They won’t catch every type of inflammation (some inflammation is localized and won’t show up on these tests), but they’re a solid starting point.Prioritize deep sleep. This is when the glymphatic system does its work and the microglia switch back to their calm, repair-focused state. If you’re not sleeping well, start asking why. The solution will be different for everyone, but the importance of getting there is universal.Manage stress actively. This means concrete daily practices. Deep breathing, time in nature, walking, yoga, laughter. All of these lower cortisol. Chris also mentioned the vagus nerve, a major nerve that runs from the brainstem to the gut and plays a key role in calming the body’s stress response. Stimulating it through practices like gargling, singing, or cold water exposure can help lower inflammation in the brain. I’ve recently started walking three times a day instead of just once, and the effect on my cognitive load has been noticeable.Eat to fight inflammation. Omega-3 fatty acids are critical. Your brain’s cell membranes need them, and low omega-3 levels leave the brain vulnerable to inflammation. Fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, sardines, and herring are the most concentrated food sources. For people who don’t eat fish, flaxseeds and chia seeds provide a plant-based form (called ALA) that the body partially converts to the usable forms. Algae-based omega-3 supplements are another option. Beyond omega-3s, fiber-rich foods feed your gut microbiome, which produces short-chain fatty acids that travel to the brain and actively fight inflammation. Sulforaphane, a compound found in broccoli and broccoli sprouts, is particularly potent for brain health. Turmeric and ginger directly reduce inflammation by turning off a gene pathway called NF-kappa B (a master switch that controls dozens of inflammatory genes). Blueberries, tea, dark chocolate, and polyphenol-rich olive oil all contribute as well.Build muscle. This one surprises people, but the research is clear. When you build muscle through resistance training, the muscle tissue releases signaling molecules called myokines, which are essentially anti-inflammatory cytokines. Muscle also triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein that promotes the growth of new nerve cells and strengthens the connections between existing ones. On top of that, more muscle mass improves your body’s ability to handle blood sugar, reducing those insulin spikes that damage the blood-brain barrier. Chris called it one of the biggest levers we have for slowing aging and protecting the brain.Do cardio too. Aerobic exercise protects the endothelium (the lining of blood vessels), including the blood vessels that form the blood-brain barrier. Research has shown that people with good cardiovascular fitness maintain larger brain volume as they age.Watch your blood pressure. High blood pressure is one of the most damaging forces acting on the blood-brain barrier, and it’s also one of the most commonly undertreated. Dr. Miller recommended keeping blood pressure below 120/80, and noted that some people have a genetic predisposition to stiffer blood vessels, which makes them more prone to hypertension. And I want to stress this: rising blood pressure with age isn’t inevitable. In populations studied in blue zones (regions of the world where people routinely live past 100), people maintain the blood pressure of their youth well into old age.The Labs Worth Asking AboutBeyond hs-CRP and ESR, Chris and I highlighted several other tests worth discussing with your doctor.Vitamin D should be checked and optimized. Most people don’t get enough from sunlight alone, and supplementation is often necessary.Homocysteine is an amino acid your body produces as a byproduct of normal metabolism. It gets broken down by B vitamins (specifically B6, B9, and B12), but some people have genetic variations that make them poor methylators, meaning they can’t process homocysteine efficiently. High homocysteine damages blood vessel walls, including the ones feeding your brain, and is associated with increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and cognitive decline. If your level is above 10, it’s worth investigating. I’ve been checking homocysteine in my patients for a long time, and I recommend keeping B12 between 500 and 1,000 in lab results. Even when B12 looks adequate, homocysteine can still be elevated, which means something further up the metabolic chain needs attention.Blood sugar markers including fasting blood sugar, hemoglobin A1C, and fasting insulin paint a fuller picture of metabolic health and its effect on the brain.Thyroid function should be assessed, especially given the connection between thyroid inflammation and brain fog.Nutrient levels for things like zinc and iodine are worth checking, particularly if you’ve changed your diet recently or have gut issues that could impair absorption.The One-Habit Starting PointIt would be easy to read all of this and feel overwhelmed. Chris and I both anticipated that reaction. The advice isn’t to overhaul your entire life by next Tuesday.“Find the one easiest lever that you can move,” I told the summit audience, “and make it the tiniest piece.” For one person, that might be a five-minute walk in the morning. For another, it might be turning off the TV 30 minutes earlier and going to bed. For another, it might be adding ground flaxseed to a morning smoothie.The brain is remarkably sensitive to changes in both directions. When you’re not taking care of your body, it suffers. But when you start making even small improvements, it responds. Chris put it simply: “Every small change does add up and does help. And we can protect our brains. There’s a lot we can do.”One of our Habit Healers readers had blood sugar in the prediabetic range. After four months of incorporating small daily habits she’d learned from the newsletter, her fasting blood sugar dropped to 91 and she’d lost weight. No dramatic overhaul. Just consistent small choices, compounding.That’s the real takeaway from this conversation. The fog, the fatigue, the creeping sense that your brain isn’t what it used to be: these aren’t inevitable. They have a biological explanation. And the biology can be changed.Key Takeaways from Day 5Brain inflammation is real and underdiagnosed. Chronic fatigue, lack of motivation, brain fog, low mood, and anxiety can all stem from an overactive immune response inside the brain, not from personal weakness.The blood-brain barrier protects you, but it has limits. When chronic inflammation, high blood sugar, elevated cortisol, or high blood pressure persist over time, this barrier breaks down and allows inflammatory signals into the brain.The glymphatic system is your brain’s cleaning crew. Discovered only in the last 15 years, it clears waste and calms activated immune cells during deep sleep. Without adequate deep sleep, the trash piles up.Muscle is medicine for the brain. Resistance training releases anti-inflammatory myokines and BDNF, which promote new nerve growth and strengthen brain connections.Food is a direct lever. Omega-3 fats, fiber, sulforaphane (from broccoli and broccoli sprouts), turmeric, ginger, blueberries, and polyphenol-rich foods actively reduce brain inflammation.Blood pressure is a brain health issue. Keeping it below 120/80 protects the blood-brain barrier. Rising blood pressure with age is not inevitable.Key labs to discuss with your doctor: hs-CRP, ESR, vitamin D, homocysteine, B12, fasting blood sugar, hemoglobin A1C, fasting insulin, thyroid panel, and nutrient levels (zinc, iodine).Start with one small change. The brain responds to improvements quickly. Pick the easiest thing you can do, make it tiny, and build from there.Chris Miller MD writes on Substack, where she shares her journey leaving emergency medicine and discovering integrative medicine, after experiencing significant autoimmune and other health concerns. Inspired by Dr. Millers’s brain health food recommendations, Chef Martin Oswald created the Anti-inflammatory Super Bowl packing incredible anti-inflammatory ingredients into a single dish for the Brain Health Summit.This interview is part of The Habit Healers Brain Health Substack Summit. For more expert conversations on protecting and improving your brain health, subscribe to The Habit Healers.PS. Want to train your brain with games backed by science? Check out my free weekly Substack, Train the Brain Games, where I share cognitive challenges focused on processing speed and other skills the research actually supports. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based on my conversation with Dr. Dominic Ng , author of the Brain Health, Decoded Substack, this is day 4 of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.Click here to join tomorrow for Brain Health Substack Summit Day 5 with Chris Miller MD, where will discuss the brain and inflammation. *Our final conversation will be on Saturday with Chef Martin Oswald and we will dive into all the delicious recipes he created for each of our Brain Health Substack Summit panelists. If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day.If you missed Day 2 of our Brain Health Summit with Annie Fenn, MD you can watch it here. We discussed foods to decrease dementia risks.If you missed Day 3 of our Brain Health Summit with Jud Brewer MD PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to unwind your anxiety.Subscribe to get the updates on the Brain Health Summit each day!In December 2024, a neuropathologist named Elaine Bearer was looking through her microscope at brain tissue from two deceased dementia patients at the University of New Mexico when she spotted something she couldn’t explain. Strange brown lumpy things, she called them. They weren’t cells. They weren’t proteins. They weren’t any of the usual suspects you find when you go looking for what killed someone’s brain.They were plastic.This was the opening act of a study that would be published in Nature Medicine in early 2025 by Dr. Matthew Campen, a toxicologist at the University of New Mexico. His team did something no one had done at this scale before. They took brain tissue samples from people who had died in 2024 and compared them to brain tissue from people who had died in 2016. They dissolved the tissue into a slurry, spun it in a centrifuge, and pulled out a small pellet of undissolved material. Then they heated that pellet to 600 degrees Celsius.What they found was about 4,800 micrograms of plastic per gram of brain tissue. If you gathered it all together, it would weigh roughly seven grams. That is the weight of a standard plastic spoon.When I sat down with Dr. Dominic Ng for Day Four of the Brain Health Substack Summit, he held up that exact prop. A plastic spoon. “Don’t say I don’t come prepared,” he said from his home in Scotland.Dr. Ng is a physician neuroscientist. He grew up in Hong Kong, moved to the UK for medical school, and took one of his earliest jobs working for the CJD surveillance unit, traveling around the country diagnosing prion disease (a rare and fatal brain condition caused by misfolded proteins). That work led him deeper into neurology, and eventually into Alzheimer’s disease and motor neuron disease, which Americans know as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He is now completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh under some of the leading researchers in neurodegeneration and aging, and he writes the popular Substack newsletter Brain Health, Decoded.He came on the summit to talk about microplastics. And the first thing he wanted people to understand is that this problem, while real, is more complicated than the headlines make it sound.The Spoon in Your HeadThe Campen study found that the amount of plastic in human brains had roughly doubled between 2016 and 2024. That tracks with what we’d expect as global plastic production continues to climb. More than half of all plastic ever manufactured has been produced since 2002, and production is on pace to double again by 2040.But the study also turned up a finding that nobody predicted. Age didn’t matter. The brain of a 24-year-old and the brain of an 84-year-old contained approximately the same amount of plastic.Think about that for a second. If microplastics were simply accumulating over a lifetime the way plaque builds up in arteries, you’d expect people in their eighties to have far more than people in their twenties. They’ve been alive longer. They’ve eaten more food, breathed more air, drunk more water from plastic bottles. The older brain should be packed tighter.It wasn’t. And that one observation tells us something important. The brain appears to be clearing microplastics at roughly the same rate it takes them in. There is some kind of equilibrium going on, a biological trade where the brain absorbs a certain load and then dumps it. The amounts are the same across age groups because the intake and the outflow have reached a balance.This is the first piece of genuinely good news in the microplastics conversation. Your brain isn’t just passively filling up like a landfill. It’s fighting back.The Hitchhiker ProblemTo understand why microplastics are concerning even if the brain can partially manage them, you need to know what plastic actually is.Dr. Ng broke it down this way. Plastics are polymers, which means they are long chains of small molecules derived from fossil fuels. The word “polystyrene” means multiple styrenes linked together. “Polyester” means multiple esters. These long molecular chains are what give plastic its structure.But the chains alone don’t give plastic all the properties we rely on, things like flexibility, durability, and heat resistance. To achieve those, manufacturers add chemicals. Phthalates go into PVC and cling film to make them bendable. Bisphenols go into thermal receipt paper and food containers. PFAS, sometimes called forever chemicals, coat nonstick pans.And this is where the real trouble starts. Microplastics, Dr. Ng explained, probably aren’t doing most of their damage on their own. They’re doing damage because they carry things with them.He used an analogy anyone who’s stored leftover tomato sauce in a plastic container will recognize. You know how the red stain never fully comes out? That happens because plastic absorbs what it touches. The same thing happens in the environment. As plastic breaks down into tiny fragments, about the size of a virus at around 200 nanometers, those fragments pick up environmental toxins, heavy metals, and industrial chemicals.So when microplastics enter your body through the food you eat, the water you drink, or the air you breathe, they don’t travel alone. They bring hitchhikers. And those hitchhikers, the bisphenols and phthalates and PFAS, are what scientists call endocrine disruptors. Your endocrine system is essentially the body’s internal messaging network. It controls your hormones, which in turn regulate your body temperature, blood sugar absorption, metabolism, thyroid function, and reproductive health. When you throw foreign chemicals into that system, the effects ripple everywhere. Research has linked these disruptors to increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, and kidney disease.Why Your Brain Is the Perfect TrapA single liter of bottled water contains roughly 250,000 plastic particles. Your indoor air carries about 500 particles per cubic meter, shed from your clothing, furniture, and carpet fibers. It enters through your gut, crosses into your blood, and from there, goes everywhere. But the brain accumulates far more than other organs. In the Campen study, brain tissue contained concentrations seven to thirty times higher than the liver or kidneys.Dr. Ng explained why with another kitchen analogy. “Have you ever tried to clean bacon grease out of a plastic container?” he asked. Fat clings to plastic because both are lipophilic, meaning they are chemically attracted to each other.Your brain, by dry weight, is approximately 60 percent fat. Your liver and kidneys contain much lower percentages. On top of that, the brain receives about 25 percent of your heart’s total blood output, despite accounting for only about 2 percent of your body weight. So you have a high-fat organ with a massive blood supply. If microplastics are floating through your bloodstream, the brain is essentially a magnet for them.The technical term for the layer of fat that insulates brain cells is the myelin sheath. It wraps around neurons and helps regulate the speed of electrical signals. Campen’s team found that microplastics tend to concentrate in exactly these fatty myelin cells. The plastic lodges itself in the insulation of your wiring.The Brain’s Drainage SystemThe reason younger and older brains contain similar amounts of plastic brings us to one of the more remarkable discoveries in modern neuroscience, and it happened only about a decade ago.In 2012, researchers identified the glymphatic system, a waste-clearance network in the brain. Think of it as the brain’s internal plumbing. While you sleep, cerebrospinal fluid (the clear liquid that cushions your brain and spinal cord) flushes through channels between brain cells, washing away metabolic waste products. This is the same system responsible for clearing out the protein fragments associated with Alzheimer’s disease.Dr. Ng believes this is almost certainly how the brain manages its microplastic load. There is no published research yet directly connecting glymphatic clearance to microplastic removal, and he was careful to say that. “We’re still in pretty early days when it comes to this research,” he told me. But the logic is sound. The glymphatic system is the only known route the brain has for clearing foreign material, and it is most active during deep sleep. Exercise also appears to enhance its function.Which means the same habits that protect you from Alzheimer’s disease may also be protecting you from microplastic accumulation. Sleep, exercise, and keeping your brain’s waste-clearance system running well.The Dementia QuestionOne finding from the Campen study raised eyebrows. Brains from patients who had died with dementia contained three to five times more microplastics than brains from patients without dementia.That sounds alarming. But Dr. Ng pointed out what the researchers themselves noted: the cause likely runs in the opposite direction. Dementia makes the brain more porous. The blood-brain barrier, which is the tightly controlled gateway that normally filters what gets into brain tissue, degrades as dementia progresses. A more porous brain means more plastic gets through. The dementia came first. The extra plastic followed.That said, animal studies have shown that microplastic exposure can trigger chronic inflammation in the brain. Your immune system recognizes the particles as foreign material and mounts a defense, releasing chemical signals that put surrounding cells on high alert. In the short term, this is useful. It’s the same mechanism that fights off bacteria. But when the alarm never shuts off, that sustained inflammation damages healthy tissue. And we know that chronic inflammation is one of the central drivers of neurodegenerative disease.Dr. Ng was also frank about one frustrating reality. The immune system can’t actually break down the plastic. “Part of the reason we choose plastics is because they’re so durable,” he said. “Those chemical bonds are really strong.” Even at the nanoscale, the particles resist degradation. The body can move them out, but it can’t destroy them.What You Can Actually DoWhen I asked Dr. Ng whether we should all be panicking, he referenced the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Don’t Look Up, where an asteroid threatens Earth and everyone either ignores it or spirals into hysteria. “That’s not where we’re at,” he said. “But I also don’t think we’re at the point where everything is fine.”He put it this way: it is perfectly rational to want to reduce your exposure, even without definitive proof of a specific threshold for harm. You don’t need to wait for ironclad evidence to make reasonable changes.His practical advice for reducing exposure came down to a few key habits.Swap your containers. Replace plastic cups, bottles, and food storage with glass or stainless steel. Heat accelerates plastic breakdown, so never microwave food in a plastic container or drink hot beverages from plastic-lined takeaway cups. This is one of the single largest sources of microplastic ingestion.Filter your water. A reverse osmosis filter removes about 99 percent of microplastics from tap water. Standard pitcher filters, many of which are housed in plastic, are less effective and may even add microplastics back in. Canada has already begun implementing advanced filtration at the municipal level, with pilot programs in Ottawa removing about 90 percent of particles from public water supplies.Clean your air. Indoor environments carry roughly 500 microplastic particles per cubic meter, released from synthetic clothing, upholstery, and carpeting. Vacuuming more frequently and using a damp mop picks up settled particles before they become airborne again. An air purifier with a HEPA filter adds another layer of protection.Be smarter about laundry. Synthetic fabrics shed microfibers every time they go through the wash. Reducing load frequency and washing fuller loads cuts down on fiber release. You’re not generating less dirty laundry, you’re just being more strategic about how you process it.And then there are the habits that support your brain’s own clearance system.Sleep. The glymphatic system does its heaviest work during deep sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation means your brain’s plumbing runs at reduced capacity, whether the waste is protein fragments or plastic particles.Exercise. Physical activity enhances glymphatic function and increases blood flow to the brain. It doesn’t have to be punishing. Dr. Ng emphasized that it should be something you enjoy, ideally with other people.Social connection. This one surprised me, but Dr. Ng was emphatic. Connection with family and friends, initiating gatherings, staying socially engaged: these are among the most protective factors against cognitive decline. He admitted it sounds soft coming from a neuroscientist, but the data is consistent.The Future of Alzheimer’s, and Why It Matters HereToward the end of our conversation, Dr. Ng shared something from his Alzheimer’s research that reframes how we should think about brain health in general.He described a gap between how researchers talk about Alzheimer’s and how patients talk about it. Patients think of it as something that happens to you in old age, a diagnosis you receive when memory starts failing. Researchers increasingly see it as a process that begins 20 years before any symptoms show up. And the tools to detect it that early already exist.Blood tests can now measure levels of amyloid beta and phosphorylated tau, two proteins whose accumulation is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s pathology. The vision Dr. Ng described is one where a routine blood draw in your forties or fifties could flag elevated levels, and a doctor would sit you down and say: here is what we need to change. More exercise. Better diet. Better sleep. More social connection. Not a drug. A prescription for living differently.This is the same prescription that protects against microplastic accumulation. The same habits that keep your brain’s clearance system functioning. The same behaviors that lower chronic inflammation.It all points in one direction. The basics work. And they work across multiple threats simultaneously.As Dr. Ng put it, people spend too much energy chasing the 5 percent optimizations while ignoring the 80 percent. Supplements, biohacks, and boutique protocols are fine in their place. But the foundation is diet, movement, sleep, and human connection. Get those right and you’ve pulled the biggest levers available.TakeawaysEveryone already has microplastics in their brain. The 2025 Campen study found approximately seven grams, the weight of a plastic spoon, in human brain tissue. This amount has roughly doubled since 2016.The brain accumulates more plastic than other organs because it is 60 percent fat and receives 25 percent of the body’s blood supply. Microplastics are lipophilic (attracted to fat), so the brain acts as a concentration point.Age doesn’t predict how much plastic you carry. Young adults and elderly adults had similar amounts, which suggests the brain has an active clearance mechanism, likely the glymphatic system.Microplastics are Trojan horses. The particles themselves may be less harmful than the chemicals they carry: phthalates, bisphenols, PFAS, and environmental toxins that act as endocrine disruptors and trigger chronic inflammation.You can meaningfully reduce your exposure. Switch to glass containers, use a reverse osmosis water filter, avoid heating plastic, clean indoor air with a HEPA filter, vacuum and damp mop regularly, and wash laundry in fuller loads.The same habits that fight Alzheimer’s fight microplastic damage. Sleep fuels the glymphatic system, exercise enhances brain clearance, diet reduces inflammation, and social connection protects against cognitive decline.This is not an asteroid-level crisis, but it is not nothing. Dr. Ng says we are somewhere in the middle. Concern is rational. Panic is not. The most protective steps are also the simplest ones.Dr. Dominic Ng writes Brain Health, Decoded on Substack, where he translates cutting-edge neuroscience into practical tools for cognitive performance and mental wellbeing.Inspired by Dr. Ng’s brain health food recommendations, Chef Martin Oswald created the Pumpkin Seed-Crusted Salmon with Sauce Gribiche, Roasted Beets & Leeks, packing seven brain-boosting ingredients into a single dish for the Brain Health Summit.This interview is part of The Habit Healers Brain Health Substack Summit. For more expert conversations on protecting and improving your brain health, subscribe to The Habit Healers.PS. Want to train your brain with games backed by science? Check out my free weekly Substack, Train the Brain Games, where I share cognitive challenges focused on processing speed and other skills the research actually supports.References* Nihart AJ, Garcia MA, El Hayek E, et al (Campen MJ). Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains. Nat Med. 2025;31(4):1114-1119. doi:10.1038/s41591-024-03453-1* Iliff JJ, Wang M, Liao Y, et al. A paravascular pathway facilitates CSF flow through the brain parenchyma and the clearance of interstitial solutes, including amyloid β. Sci Transl Med. 2012;4(147):147ra111. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3003748 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based on my conversation with Jud Brewer MD PhD, author of the Inside the Curious Mind Substack and the book, Unwinding Anxiety among others, this is day 3 of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.Click here to join tomorrow for Brain Health Substack Summit Day 4 with Dr. Dominic Ng If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day.If you missed Day 2 of our Brain Health Summit with Annie Fenn, MD you can watch it here. We discussed foods to decrease dementia risks.Jud Brewer MD PhD is a neuroscientist and physician who discovered something about worry that medical schools never taught him. It changed how he treats every patient.In 1987, right around the time Prozac hit pharmacy shelves and promised to change everything about how we treat mental illness, a researcher published a two-page paper that almost nobody noticed. The paper proposed something that sounded, frankly, ridiculous: that anxiety might be driven by the same brain mechanism that gets people hooked on cigarettes.The paper sat there for decades. Psychiatrists kept writing prescriptions. Patients kept struggling. And a young psychiatrist named Jud Brewer, who would go on to run habit-change research labs at both Yale and Brown University, never even heard about it.I sat down with Jud for the third interview in our Brain Health Summit series to talk about this discovery and what came after it. Jud and I have been friends for a while now. I have lost count of how many times he has been on my podcast. But this conversation was different because we went deep into the science of why your brain treats worry like a reward, and what you can actually do about it.For years, Jud did what most psychiatrists do with anxious patients. He prescribed medications. And he watched most of them walk out the door no better than when they came in. The best medications available for anxiety only produce a meaningful reduction in symptoms for about one in five patients. That means for every person a doctor helps, four others are still gripping the armrests. Jud describes this as “playing the medication lottery.” You write the prescription. You hope for the best. And most of the time, you lose.Then something unexpected happened. Jud had been running programs to help people who struggled with binge eating. Those patients started telling him something he had not anticipated: anxiety was driving them to eat. Could he build a program for that?The question sent him back to the literature. And that is when he found that forgotten two-page paper from the 1980s. He had never considered anxiety as a habit. But he knew quite a bit about how to change habits. That single realization changed the entire trajectory of his clinical work.The Worry Loop Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to SeeTo understand how anxiety works as a habit, you need to understand how all habits work. And the basic formula is surprisingly simple. Every habit has three parts: a trigger, a behavior, and a result.Take stress eating. You feel stressed (that is the trigger). You grab ice cream from the freezer (that is the behavior). And for a few minutes, you feel distracted from whatever was bothering you (that is the result). Your brain files this away as useful information. Calories, good. Pizza, very good. Stress gone, even better. As Jud explained during our conversation, our brains hit what food scientists call the “bliss point,” and the loop locks inSmoking works the same way. So does scrolling your phone at 2 a.m. The trigger-behavior-result loop is the engine that drives nearly every habit, good and bad.But anxiety? Anxiety is sneakier.The formal definition of anxiety is a feeling of worry or nervousness about something that might happen in the future. Notice the problem buried in that definition. The trigger is the feeling of being worried. And the behavior? Also worrying. The feeling of worry drives the act of worrying, which produces more feelings of worry, which drives more worrying.It feeds itself. It is a loop with no exit ramp.So why would a brain do something so obviously counterproductive? Because decades of research show that worrying feels better than doing nothing. When you feel scared or uncertain, sitting still with that discomfort is almost unbearable. Worrying, even though it accomplishes nothing, gives your brain the sensation that you are at least doing something. And doing something, it turns out, is rewarding enough to lock in the habit.There is another trick your brain plays on you. If you worry constantly, and then you happen to solve a problem, your brain connects the two events. You worried. The problem got solved. Therefore, worrying solved the problem. Jud calls this the fallacy of causality. Both things are true on their own: you were worrying, and the problem did get solved. But the worrying did not cause the solution. You just happened to be doing both at the same time. If you have generalized anxiety disorder (a condition where worry is your brain’s default setting), you are almost always worrying, so every good outcome looks like proof that worry works.On top of that, worrying gives you what researchers call an illusion of control. I know this one personally. During our conversation, I admitted that I call my own version “mother worrying anxiety.” As a mother of three, I spent years convinced that worrying about my children was part of my job description. If I did not worry, who would? It felt like a form of vigilance, like standing guard. But as Jud pointed out to me, in what was essentially a live therapy session (you’re welcome for the free entertainment), worrying about my kids never once kept them safe. Three decades of worrying gave me exactly zero protection and probably a few extra gray hairs.Why Willpower Will Not Save YouBefore Jud got into his solution, he made a point that might be hard to swallow. Willpower, that thing we have been told our whole lives is the key to changing bad behavior, has zero evidence supporting it in the neuroscience of habit change.Zero.He acknowledged that this can be a lot to take in. If you are not ready to accept it right now, that is fine. But neuroscientists do not even use the word willpower when they study how habits form and break. What they study is reinforcement learning, which is the actual mechanism that determines how strong a habit becomes and how it can be dismantled. The concept has been researched for over fifty years and is considered the most well-established model of behavior change in all of neuroscience. The basic idea: if something feels rewarding, your brain will push you to do it again. If it stops feeling rewarding, your brain starts to let it go.This is how habits form, and it is also the key to breaking them.Jud illustrated this with his smoking patients. Instead of telling them to resist cigarettes through sheer force of will, he does something that sounds insane. He tells them to go ahead and smoke. But he adds one instruction: pay attention while you do it.What happens? They notice that cigarettes taste awful. Really awful. The experience without autopilot running is so different from what their brain expected that it creates what neuroscientists call a negative prediction error. That is the technical term for what happens when your dopamine system fires a signal that basically says: “Hey, this is not nearly as good as you remembered.” That signal updates the habit. The cigarette loses its grip. Not because the patient muscled through a craving, but because the brain revised its own math.Jud calls this the Santa Claus moment. It is like being a kid and pulling down on Santa’s beard at the mall, only to see your neighbor Dave underneath. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The spell is broken. You cannot go back to believing.The good news? This same mechanism also reinforces good habits. When you pay attention while exercising or eating a healthy meal, your brain registers a positive prediction error: “Oh, this actually feels better than I expected.” The good stuff gets stronger. The bad stuff gets weaker. Same system, working in both directions.And here is the part that should make anyone dealing with anxiety sit up a little straighter: this same mechanism works for worry.Seeing the Gig Is UpJud walked me through what he calls the three gears method. It is the core of his book Unwinding Anxiety and the foundation for his clinical programs.First gear is simply recognizing the behavior. Not analyzing it. Not asking why you are anxious. Not diving into your childhood or trying to trace the worry to its source. Just naming the behavior. “I am worrying.” That is it. Jud has found that when patients spend too much time asking why they are anxious, they burn energy and get stuck in yet another unproductive loop. He now teaches a rapid version of this gear: just identify the behavior and move on.Second gear is the Santa Claus moment applied to worry. You ask yourself one question: what am I getting from this? And then you actually feel the answer in your body. Not intellectually. Physically. What does worrying actually feel like? Tight chest. Clenched jaw. Racing thoughts that go nowhere. You sit with that experience and you let your brain register what is really happening. No sugar coating. No story about how worry keeps you safe. Just the raw deal: worry feels terrible and does not produce anything useful.This is where disenchantment happens. Disenchantment is a term from psychology that means losing your positive illusion about something. When you truly see that worrying gives you nothing of value, the habit starts losing its power. Your brain gets that negative prediction error, just like the smoker who finally tasted the cigarette. You cannot go back to pretending worry was helping you.Third gear is what Jud calls finding the bigger, better offer. Your brain needs a replacement. Not a distraction, not a coping strategy, but something that genuinely feels more rewarding than the old habit. During our conversation, Jud actually put me on the spot and had me do this exercise live. He boiled the rapid version of this gear down to a single comparison: what does it feel like to worry versus not worry? My answer was instant. Worry felt like a tight chest, stress, and the sensation that I could not breathe. Not worrying felt like peace. It felt like trusting that my children would grow up and figure things out on their own. Your brain can hold both of those experiences side by side and decide which one it prefers.The Difference Between Planning and WorryingOne of the most useful things that came out of our conversation was the distinction Jud makes between planning and worrying. They look similar from the outside, but they are completely different animals.I got personal during our discussion, and I want to expand on that story here. When my oldest daughter was five, someone tried to take her at a mall. It was terrifying. My husband was deployed and I was alone. Afterward, I was afraid to take her anywhere. My pediatrician told me I had to go back to that mall with her, which felt impossible. But I did it. I picked her up, held her tight, walked through the building, and left.After that, I enrolled in Krav Maga. I put the kids in self-defense classes. Those were plans. Those were concrete actions I could take to increase our actual safety. But alongside those plans, I also started worrying constantly about my children. And all those defense classes? They never reduced the worry. All they did was reinforce the feeling that I had to keep doing something, anything, to make sure my kids were okay.Jud pointed out something that stopped me cold: learning self-defense after a scary experience is a reasonable response. Walking through life expecting to be attacked at any moment is not. One is preparation. The other is a habit that runs on fear.And that distinction matters enormously for parents. We live in a culture that mistakes worry for good parenting. Social media amplifies it. You see influencers modeling a version of parenthood that nobody can actually maintain, and then you feel guilty because you cannot keep up. Jud told me that anxiety is more learned than genetic. There are genetic components, sure, but we do not have control over our genes. What we can control is whether we pass our worry habits down to the next generation by modeling them every day.He and I both grew up in the era that people now call “free-range parenting,” which at the time was just called parenting. My mom opened the front door, told us dinner was at five, and did not expect to hear from us until then. We survived. And yet the generation raising kids today has been conditioned to believe that anything less than constant vigilance is neglect. That conditioning is, itself, a habit loop. Jud is writing an entire chapter about this in his upcoming book, and it is about how parents can break the cycle so their kids do not inherit it.From Unwinding to FlourishingThe most exciting part of what Jud shared is the work he is doing now that goes well beyond reducing anxiety. His new program, called Going Beyond Anxiety, uses a rapid induction method to teach people the three gears faster than ever. Instead of working through an entire book to understand the framework, patients can learn the essentials quickly and get back to what Jud calls baseline, meaning a state where anxiety is no longer running the show.But baseline is not the finish line. As he put it during our talk: “Who wants to be normal? I don’t want my patients to be normal. I want them to be exceptional.”Once the foundation is solid, the same reinforcement learning mechanism that broke the anxiety habit can be used to build new habits around things like generosity and patience. Jud runs live group sessions where he teaches the science of gratitude and how it can be reinforced just like any other habit. Gratitude feels good. It is relatively easy to practice. The hard part is remembering to do it, and then pushing into what he calls the advanced level: being grateful even to the driver who just cut you off in traffic, because that person just taught you something about your own reactivity. There is a Tibetan teaching that says “be grateful to everyone,” and Jud takes that seriously enough to build clinical exercises around it.His clinical results back all of this up. In randomized controlled trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (the government agency that funds medical research in the United States), Jud’s approach produced a 67 percent reduction in anxiety among people with generalized anxiety disorder. The group that received standard clinical care? Fourteen percent. That fourteen percent lines up almost exactly with the one-in-five odds of the medication lottery he was playing years ago.He also mentioned something his Substack readers have been wondering about: the pause in new articles over the past couple of months. The reason is that he has been writing his next book, and he now has 42 chapters done. He will be back to publishing on Substack soon, and the book, which builds on everything since Unwinding Anxiety, should be out next year.One more myth worth busting, and we had a good laugh about this one. The popular idea that it takes 21 days to change a habit has no basis in science. It came from a 1960s book by a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz called Psycho-Cybernetics. Maltz noticed that his patients took about 21 days to adjust to their new nose. Somehow this observation about rhinoplasty became a universal rule about habits. The real answer, as Jud put it, is that the right question is not “how quickly can I change this habit?” but “what do I need to change this habit?” Because once you understand the methodology, the habit changes at whatever speed your brain can process the new information. Nobody Jud has ever worked with has said “all I needed was three weeks.” If it were that easy, he and I would both be out of a job.A Practical Guide to Breaking the Anxiety HabitBased on our conversation, here is a framework you can start using today.Recognize the behavior, not the cause. When you notice anxiety, do not spiral into trying to figure out why you feel this way. Just name what you are doing. “I am worrying.” “I am ruminating.” “I am catastrophizing.” Naming the behavior without judgment is the first gear.Ask yourself: what am I getting from this? Do not answer this in your head. Feel it in your body. Notice what worry actually does to you physically. Does your chest tighten? Does your breathing get shallow? Does your stomach clench? Let yourself experience the full reality that this habit does not deliver what it promises. This is how your brain becomes disenchanted with the old pattern.Compare the two states. What does it feel like to worry versus not worry? Hold both experiences side by side. Let your brain do the math on which one it actually prefers.Stop confusing worry with preparation. Making a plan is useful. Running disaster scenarios on repeat is not. If your action produces a concrete result, that is planning. If it just produces more of the same feeling you started with, that is a worry loop.Know that this takes practice, not willpower. You are not weak for having anxiety habits. You are running software that was installed by experience, reinforcement, and a brain that is doing what brains do. The update comes from paying attention, not from gritting your teeth.Consider structured support. Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program and his book, Unwinding Anxiety, offer a step-by-step framework with clinical evidence behind it. He also has free resources on his website for anyone who wants to start with the basics. I have referred my own patients to his programs and watched them come back with life-changing results.Dr. Jud Brewer’s gratitude article mentioned in video from Inside the Curious Mind on Substack.Click here for Chef Martin Oswald’s recipe, created specially for Dr. Jud Brewer.ResourcesJud Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author of Unwinding Anxiety, The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit, and the forthcoming book on going beyond anxiety. He is the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center and writes the Inside the Curious Mind Substack. You can find his programs and free resources at his website.Books by Dr. Brewer:* Unwinding Anxiety* The Craving Mind* The Hunger HabitWant to keep your brain sharp between summits? Check out the free Train the Brain Games Substack for puzzles, challenges, and brain-boosting exercises you can do anytime. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I’m unpacking a new warning that caught a lot of people off guard: a late-2025 conference abstract suggesting long-term melatonin use may be linked to higher rates of heart failure and worse outcomes. The headline is scary, but I’m going to walk you through what it actually means, what it doesn’t prove, and why this one study raises questions that a single abstract can’t answer.I’ll explain why melatonin isn’t just a “natural sleep gummy.” It’s a hormone and a timing signal, a darkness message that helps run your circadian clock. And because your circadian system also helps regulate blood pressure, heart rate, vessel tone, and stress hormones, melatonin has real cardiovascular effects. I break down what we know about those effects (including the ways melatonin can lower nighttime blood pressure and shift the body into a calmer “rest-and-digest” mode), and why dose and timing matter more than most people realize.Then I get into the messy part: the evidence is mixed. There are studies suggesting melatonin could be protective in certain situations, yet there are also case reports and mechanisms that hint it might cause problems in specific people, especially at high doses or with certain health conditions. So I lay out the most plausible explanations for the new association (confounding from insomnia and other risk factors, masking symptoms, interactions, supplement quality issues), and how clinicians are thinking about it right now.If you take melatonin nightly or you’ve ever assumed it’s harmless because it’s “natural”this episode is my practical, science-first guide to what to do next: how to interpret the risk, what questions to ask your doctor, and why “lowest effective dose for the shortest necessary time” is the safest default until we have better data.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based on my conversation with Annie Fenn, MD, author of the Brain Health Kitchen Substack and cookbook, this is day 2 of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.Click here to join tomorrow for Brain Health Substack Summit Day 3 with Jud Brewer MD PhD.If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day. Annie Fenn, MD is an OB/GYN turned culinary school graduate who lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She spent twenty years practicing medicine, the last ten focused on menopause, before leaving to pursue a lifelong dream of cooking. She came back to Jackson Hole and started teaching people how to make healthy food that actually tasted good.Then, around 2015, her mother was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. It progressed to Alzheimer’s.Annie did what any doctor does when disease hits close to home. She went to the research. Not the surface-level stuff. The deep literature. She was looking for anything that could slow her mother’s progression, and what she found changed the direction of her entire career. There was a dietary pattern, backed by real studies, that appeared to protect the brain from developing Alzheimer’s in the first place. And for people with early dementia, there was evidence it could slow things down.That discovery became Brain Health Kitchen, first as a cooking school, then as a bestselling Brain Health Kitchen cookbook, and now as a Substack and worldwide community where Annie takes people on retreats to longevity hotspots around the globe. When she showed me her original copy of the book during our live conversation for Day 2 of the Brain Health Summit, it was held together by love and tape. She carries it everywhere. Her guests sign it.What she built from that research is something I think every person reading this needs to know about: a food pyramid designed specifically for the brain.Ten Rungs on a Different Kind of PyramidWhen Annie wrote her cookbook around 2021, she wanted to create brain-healthy eating guidelines that anyone could follow, regardless of whether they were vegan, Mediterranean, or somewhere in between. She drew from two dietary patterns with the strongest evidence for protecting the brain against dementia: the Mediterranean diet and the MIND diet (which stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay). Then she layered in newer research that neither of those original frameworks had included.The result is a food pyramid with ten brain-healthy food groups, and when Annie walked me through it during our conversation, a few things genuinely surprised me.Vegetables sit at the base. No surprise there. But what is surprising is the second rung: leafy greens, broken out as their own category. In most dietary guidelines, leafy greens get lumped in with other vegetables. The MIND diet pulled them out separately because the data warranted it. Studies showed that people who ate at least a cup of leafy greens per day had brains that looked 11 years younger on MRI scans.Eleven years. That is not a marginal benefit. That is a decade of aging you might be able to offset with a daily salad.Whole grains come next, though Annie is careful to point out that most people have the wrong picture in their head when they hear this term. She is not talking about hamburger buns, flour tortillas, or English muffins. None of those are whole grains. She means red rice, black rice, quinoa, millet, steel-cut oats, and breads where actual wheat is the first ingredient on the label. The distinction matters enormously, especially for people who carry the APOE4 gene variant (a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s), who may need to emphasize lower-glycemic options and lean harder on vegetables, legumes, and leafy greens instead.Berries hold their own rung because they are the only fruit singled out as an official brain-healthy food group. The data links berry consumption specifically to better performance on memory tests.Beans and legumes are next, and Annie pointed to something that I think is underappreciated: beans are one of the few food groups found on the table in virtually every blue zone on the planet, from Costa Rica to Okinawa to Sardinia. They contain a type of fiber that reaches the lower intestine, where many of the gut bacteria that influence brain health are waiting for nourishment. Most processed food never makes it that far. For people who believe they cannot tolerate beans, I suggested during our conversation that they start with lentils in small amounts, cooked well, and gradually increase from there before moving on to heartier beans. Annie built on that and got even more specific: start with red lentils in particular, the kind that fall apart when cooked. They are lower in fiber than other varieties, need no soaking, and tend to be the gentlest entry point for people rebuilding their tolerance.Nuts and seeds follow, drawing on cardiovascular research that has shown for years that a handful of nuts four to five days a week reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke. Annie included seeds as well, because many people have nut allergies and seeds carry similar brain-protective properties, including monounsaturated fats and flavonoids (the colorful pigment compounds in plants that are emerging as significant players in brain health).The Surprising RungsThis is where the pyramid gets interesting.Fish and seafood occupy the next level, and Annie has actually built a separate pyramid just for this category. At the base are small fish like sardines and anchovies, which are highest in omega-3 fatty acids and lowest in environmental toxins. Cold-water fish like cod and wild-caught salmon sit in the middle. She designed the fish pyramid around three criteria: omega-3 content, environmental sustainability, and toxin accumulation. Low intake of fish and seafood, she told me, is itself a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, supported by many studies. For people concerned about microplastics, she noted that omega-3 supplements are now purified and filtered, making them a viable alternative. (Algae omega-3 supplements for those who are plant-based will also work.)Fermented foods earned their own spot on the pyramid, which is a departure from the Mediterranean and MIND diets, neither of which addressed fermentation directly. Annie drew on research from Stanford showing that adding even a few servings of fermented food per day increases the diversity of the gut microbiome (the vast community of bacteria living in your intestinal tract), which is increasingly understood to be a key driver of brain health. This includes yogurt, kefir, cottage cheese with live cultures, kimchi, sauerkraut, and even authentic long-fermented sourdough bread.Speaking of sourdough, Annie had something to say about what that word actually means. A loaf of sourdough from the supermarket that sits on the counter for a month without going stale is not what she is talking about. Real sourdough, the kind baked in Sardinian villages using old-fashioned long fermentation, is a different product entirely. Now, an important caveat here: the beneficial bacteria that develop during sourdough fermentation do not survive the oven. Baking temperatures kill them. So sourdough does not deliver live probiotics the way yogurt or sauerkraut does. But the long fermentation process still changes the bread in meaningful ways. It lowers the glycemic response, improves digestibility, and produces organic acids and prebiotic compounds that may support gut health even without live cultures. That is why communities in Sardinia that eat traditionally fermented sourdough bread daily still seem to benefit from it. The fermentation does real work on the grain before it ever reaches the oven.Meat, poultry, and eggs appear near the top of the pyramid, meaning smaller portions and less frequent servings. This is the most individualized category. Annie explained that previous studies had lumped processed and unprocessed meat together, making meat look uniformly bad for the brain. But recent research from the UK Biobank separated them out and found that unprocessed meat may actually reduce dementia risk, while processed meat remains among the worst foods for the brain. Eggs contain choline, a nutrient important for brain health and nerve function, though people who are cholesterol hyper-responders may need to limit them.Sweets sit at the very top. Annie refuses to live in a world without brownies, and I respect that. But her sweets are strategic: packed with fiber, made with nutrient-dense ingredients, and built to minimize the glycemic spike that comes from white flour and white sugar. Her rule of thumb is that fiber must accompany sugar to blunt the blood sugar response.Two additional categories run alongside the pyramid. Extra virgin olive oil is the primary cooking fat, consistent with both the Mediterranean and MIND diets. And the final category is one that tells you a lot about how brain nutrition science has evolved.What Got Kicked Off the PyramidIn the original MIND diet, the tenth brain-healthy food group was red wine. That recommendation held up for years, supported by the idea that moderate drinking might offer some protection. Annie kept red wine on the pyramid when she first built it. Then the data changed.Around 2021, large studies from the UK Biobank and the British Medical Journal dismantled the moderate-drinking hypothesis. We now know there is no amount of alcohol that is safe for the brain. If you drink at all, light drinking, defined as under six drinks per week, is the least harmful option. Annie took red wine off and replaced it with three things we actually have solid evidence for: coffee, tea, and water.The coffee research in particular has gotten remarkably specific. The largest study on coffee ever conducted, from the UK Biobank at the end of 2024, confirmed that regular coffee drinkers are more protected from dementia and finally sorted out a question that had lingered for years: is it the coffee or the caffeine? The answer is both.But Annie laid out four conditions that determine whether your coffee is actually helping your brain.First, caffeinated coffee provides the protection. Decaf is not harmful, but it does not appear to reduce dementia risk. Second, it should be unsweetened, and that includes artificial sweeteners. The UK Biobank study actually looked at what people put in their coffee and found that additives can undermine the benefits. Third, skip the creamers. Even high-quality dairy cream may bind up the polyphenols (the plant compounds responsible for many of coffee’s health benefits) and reduce their effectiveness. In European studies, where people tend to drink coffee black, the results were always strongly positive. American coffee culture, with its syrups and creamers, is a different story. Fourth, use a paper filter. Unfiltered coffee from a French press or espresso machine allows compounds called diterpenes through, which can raise LDL cholesterol.As for tea, green tea performed especially well in the research, thanks to its high concentration of catechins and EGCG, both types of polyphenols with brain-protective properties. And hydration itself turned out to be more important than I expected. Annie’s point was direct: you need to be well hydrated for your brain to thrive. My simplest recommendation is to drink water first thing in the morning. Rehydrate the brain after a night of sleep.The Supplement QuestionSupplements came up frequently during our conversation, and Annie’s perspective as a physician who is also deeply skeptical of the supplement industry made her advice especially practical.She recommends a brain-focused multivitamin. The one she takes is called Relevate, made by a company called NeuroReserve, where she sits on the scientific advisory board. It combines omega-3 fatty acids in a specific DHA-to-EPA ratio, vitamin D, B vitamins, choline, lutein, and flavonoids into three capsules. She noted that it simplified her routine because she no longer needed to take multiple separate supplements.For people who prefer a more widely available option, she pointed to the Centrum Silver multivitamin, which was used in one of the largest supplement studies ever conducted. That study, called COSMOS, found that people who took a daily multivitamin had a reduced risk of dementia. The likely explanation is a catch-all effect: when you give a multivitamin to a large population of older adults, you end up correcting iron, folate, B12, and other micronutrient deficiencies that many people do not even know they have. Those deficiencies, left uncorrected, can contribute to cognitive decline.Creatine was the other supplement we discussed at length. Annie said she is highly skeptical of supplements in general, so anything that makes her list has to impress her. Creatine did. The data on creatine and muscle maintenance during resistance training has been solid for years, but in the last five years, brain health research has caught up. A pilot study looked at creatine in people with Alzheimer’s and found a slight improvement in cognitive symptoms with no adverse reactions. There is also emerging data on creatine during perimenopause. Annie herself started using it as a jet lag protocol during her frequent international travel, doubling her dose for three days upon arrival in a new time zone, based on military sleep-deprivation research.Dr. Darren Candow, the top creatine researcher in Canada, spaces his creatine away from coffee and sips it in his water bottle throughout the day. Annie does the same. I put mine in my oatmeal every morning, which also works.For any supplement purchase, Annie stressed the importance of third-party testing for heavy metals and verification. I recommend a site called ConsumerLab.com, which costs about $90 a year and independently tests supplement quality.Building Your Own PyramidOne of the things I appreciated most about Annie’s approach is that she does not insist everyone eat the same way. The Brain Health Kitchen food pyramid is a foundation built on the best available science. But she encourages every person to build their own version of it, based on what they enjoy eating, whether they like to cook, what their personal health vulnerabilities are, and what their goals look like.If you are APOE4 positive, you might dial back whole grains and emphasize leafy greens and legumes. If cholesterol is a concern, you might skip the eggs and choose soy milk, which Annie’s research identified as the top milk for brain health due to its ability to lower LDL cholesterol. If you cannot eat beans, you can increase cruciferous vegetables, nuts, seeds, and other high-fiber foods. If dairy is part of your life, go organic, especially after researchers like Dr. Ray Dorsey have established strong links between pesticide exposure in conventional dairy products and Parkinson’s disease risk. The pesticides concentrate in animal fat, which means full-fat conventional dairy carries more risk.The point is not perfection. The point is getting the big picture right and making it your own.Your Brain-Healthy Eating Action GuideBased on my conversation with Annie, here are the most actionable takeaways:Eat a cup of leafy greens every day. This is the single food habit with some of the most dramatic brain-imaging data behind it. Spinach, kale, arugula, romaine, Swiss chard. Put them in a salad, blend them into a smoothie, wilt them into a soup. The method does not matter as much as the consistency.Add a fermented food daily. Yogurt (unsweetened, unflavored, with live cultures), kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, or cottage cheese with CFU counts on the label. These deliver live beneficial bacteria that support gut microbiome diversity, which in turn supports the brain. Rethink your coffee. If you drink it, make it caffeinated, black, unsweetened, and paper-filtered. If you use a French press, pour the coffee through a paper filter before drinking it. If you prefer pods, Green Mountain appears to be one brand that includes a small paper filter.Eat fish or seafood regularly, or supplement with omega-3s. Low intake of omega-3 fatty acids from seafood is a documented risk factor for Alzheimer’s. Prioritize small fish like sardines and anchovies, or cold-water fish like wild-caught salmon and cod. If fish is not part of your diet, a purified algae omega-3 supplement is a reasonable alternative.Swap processed grains for real whole grains. Red rice, black rice, quinoa, millet, steel-cut oats. If the first ingredient on the bread label is not “whole wheat” or a recognizable whole grain, it is not a whole grain product.Eliminate processed meat. The distinction between processed and unprocessed meat is now well-established in the brain health literature. Hot dogs, deli meat, bacon, and sausages carry clear risk. Unprocessed meat in moderate amounts sits in a different category entirely.Consider a multivitamin. Either a brain-specific formulation like Relevate or a well-studied general multivitamin like Centrum Silver. Think of it as insurance against the micronutrient deficiencies that accumulate with age.If you drink alcohol, know the current science. There is no amount that is safe for the brain. If you choose to drink, keep it under six per week and understand that you are accepting a tradeoff.Want to go deeper? Check out Dr. Annie Fenn’s Substack, Brain Health Kitchen, and her bestselling cookbook, The Brain Health Kitchen: Preventing Alzheimer’s Through Food.Read Dr. Annie Fenn’s article here.Order The Brain Health Kitchen cookbook here.Brain-Healthy Recipe from Chef Martin OswaldAs part of the Brain Health Substack Summit, Chef Martin Oswald created a special brain-healthy recipe inspired by Dr. Annie Fenn’s food pyramid. This recipe brings together several of the brain-healthy food groups into a single dish.See Chef Martin Oswald’s recipe here.Want to train your brain with games backed by science? Check out my free weekly Substack, Train the Brain Games, where I share cognitive challenges focused on processing speed and other skills the research actually supports.This article is part of the Brain Health Substack Summit, the first-ever summit of its kind on the Substack platform. All week long, I am sitting down with leading experts in neuroscience and cognitive health for live conversations and in-depth articles. The summit is hosted by The Habit Healers. Subscribe to both The Habit Healers and Brain Health Kitchen so you do not miss a single conversation.References* Morris MC, Tangney CC, Wang Y, Sacks FM, Bennett DA, Aggarwal NT. MIND diet associated with reduced incidence of Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimers Dement. 2015;11(9):1007-1014. doi:10.1016/j.jalz.2014.11.009* Morris MC, Wang Y, Barnes LL, Bennett DA, Dawson-Hughes B, Booth SL. Nutrients and bioactives in green leafy vegetables and cognitive decline: Prospective study. Neurology. 2018;90(3):e214-e222. doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000004815* Zhang Y, Chen J, Qiu J, Li Y, Wang J, Jiao J. Intakes of fish and polyunsaturated fatty acids and mild-to-severe cognitive impairment risks: a dose-response meta-analysis of 21 cohort studies. Am J Clin Nutr. 2016;103(2):330-340. doi:10.3945/ajcn.115.124081* Kim JH, Kwon YJ, Lee Y, et al. Associations of Individual Beverage Types and Substitution with Dementia Risk: A UK Biobank Cohort Study. J Nutr Health Aging. 2026;30(1):100740. doi:10.1016/j.jnha.2025.100740* Baker LD, Manson JE, Rapp SR, et al. Effects of cocoa extract and a multivitamin on cognitive function: A randomized clinical trial. Alzheimers Dement. 2023;19(4):1308-1319. doi:10.1002/alz.12767 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based on my conversation with neuroscientist Julie Fratantoni, PhD, author of the Better Brain by Dr. Julie Substack, as part of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.Click here to join tomorrow for Brain Health Substack Summit Day 2 with Annie Fenn, MD.In the late 1990s, I was sitting in a pharmacology lecture during my first weeks of medical school, staring at a stack of handouts thick enough to be mistaken for a semester’s worth of reading. It was two weeks of material. I had three children at home. My youngest was ten months old.So I started drawing cartoons.I drew a Pepsi bottle to represent peptidoglycans, a class of molecules in bacterial cell walls. Then I drew a little van driving across the Pepsi bottle for vancomycin, the antibiotic that targets those molecules. I colored the van red, because vancomycin can cause a flushing reaction known as “Red Man Syndrome.” When test day came, I didn’t need to scramble for facts. I could see the picture in my head. The van. The Pepsi bottle. The red.My classmates noticed. They started borrowing my cartoons, which forced me to explain the drawings out loud, which meant I had to think even harder about what the relationships between the drug classes actually were. Nearly thirty years later, I still remember pharmacology details I probably have no business remembering. My daughter later went to medical school and adopted the same method. We published books about it called Visual Mnemonics.I did not know it at the time, but I had stumbled into something neuroscience now has a very clear explanation for. And it is not what most people think of when they hear the words “brain exercise.”That is exactly what I wanted to explore when I sat down with Julie Fratantoni, PhD, for the opening conversation of our Brain Health Substack Summit. Julie is a neuroscientist, the author of the Better Brain Substack, and someone who works directly with clients on cognitive performance. I expected her to talk about brain-training apps and puzzles. Instead, she dismantled almost everything I thought I knew about what it means to exercise your brain.The Basketball ProblemJulie likes to use basketball to explain two very different approaches to brain training.Imagine you are coaching a youth basketball team. You run drills: dribbling, passing, shooting. Each skill gets practiced on its own. This is what researchers call bottom-up training. You are building individual abilities one at a time, rep by rep. My husband coached our youngest’s basketball team, so I know this routine well. You drill the fundamentals first, because no strategy in the world matters if you cannot get the basics right.Now imagine game day. Suddenly your players need to decide when to pass, when to shoot, how to coordinate with teammates, how to adjust when the other team changes formation. That is top-down training. It requires the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain right behind your forehead, which handles planning, problem-solving, decision-making, and the ability to pull separate pieces of information together into something useful.The same split exists in cognitive training. Bottom-up brain exercises target single skills like working memory (the ability to hold information in mind temporarily), attention, or processing speed (how fast your brain takes in and responds to information). Top-down exercises challenge your prefrontal cortex to do the harder work of organizing, judging, and thinking critically.Here is where things get interesting. Most commercial brain-training apps focus on bottom-up skills. And the majority of research shows that getting better at those games does not translate into real-life improvement. You get better at the game. That is about it.Julie was blunt about this during our live conversation. The majority of research shows that these games do not generalize to real life, she said, and she wanted to say it loud and clear because it is the question she gets asked more than almost any other.The 23-Hour ExperimentThere is, however, one notable exception, and it comes from one of the largest cognitive training studies ever conducted.The ACTIVE study enrolled about 3,000 adults aged 65 and older and assigned them to one of three types of cognitive training: speed training, memory training, or reasoning training. A fourth group served as a control and received no training at all. The participants trained over a period of three years and were then followed for two decades.The result that caught everyone’s attention was this: the speed training group showed a 25 percent reduction in the risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. The memory and reasoning groups did not show that same protective effect.But Julie pointed out something most people overlook when they read about this study. The speed training was adaptive, meaning it automatically adjusted its difficulty based on how each person performed. The other two types of training were not. That distinction matters, because it suggests the key ingredient may not have been speed itself, but the fact that the challenge was always calibrated to the right level for each person.And then there is the dosage. Over three years, the total training time amounted to about 23 hours. Julie did the math. That is less than an hour a month.Less than an hour a month, and it moved the needle on dementia risk by a quarter.The Posture ProblemSo should we all just download a speed-training app and call it a day? Not exactly. And this is where Julie’s thinking takes a turn that changes everything.She asked me to think about posture. Say you spend twenty minutes at the gym working on your form and alignment. That is great. But then you go home, sit hunched over a desk for eight hours, and repeat that for months on end. What is your posture going to look like in five years? Probably not great, because the eight hours of slouching vastly outweigh the twenty minutes of effort. We both immediately sat up straighter when she brought this up during the live, which I think proves her point.The brain works the same way. If you spend an hour a month on a brain-training app but the rest of your waking hours are filled with chronic stress, constant distraction, and information overload, your cognitive health is going to reflect those thousands of hours, not the handful of training minutes.Your brain is on all the time, Julie said. We are in this age where a lot of us are information workers. You take your brain home with you at the end of the day and you are always thinking. It never turns off.Her argument is that we need to stop thinking of brain exercise as a separate activity that gets scheduled into the calendar and start thinking of it as the way we use our brains all day long. The question changes from “What brain exercise should I do?” to “How am I using my brain during the sixteen or so hours I’m awake?”And she has a specific four-step framework for doing exactly that.Exercise One: ReinterpretationThe first exercise has nothing to do with puzzles or games. It has to do with stress.Your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, judgment, critical thinking, and complex problem-solving, essentially goes offline when you are stressed. Not a little offline. Functionally offline. When your body shifts into a threat response, your amygdala (the brain’s alarm center, which processes fear and strong emotions) takes the wheel, and your higher-order thinking gets sidelined. You cannot exercise a brain region you cannot access.Julie teaches a technique called reinterpretation, which is a form of cognitive reframing. The idea is simple. When something stressful happens, you deliberately look at it from a different angle.Here is her example. You send a friend a heartfelt message and hear nothing back. The default emotional response might be hurt feelings, or offense, or the start of an anxious spiral about the state of the friendship. Reinterpretation asks you to pause and consider: maybe your friend had a terrible week. Maybe something happened in their life that has absolutely nothing to do with you.I had to laugh when she gave this example, because I know exactly where my mind goes in that situation. My worried-mother brain skips right past “they’re ignoring me” and lands on “are they in a ditch somewhere?” But there is also a possibility people forget about entirely: maybe there was a plain old technical glitch and the text never arrived. That happens more often than any of us want to admit.The shift in perspective is not just a feel-good trick. Brain imaging research shows that people who practice reinterpretation regularly show decreased activity in the amygdala and increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. The actual pattern of brain activation changes. You are, in a measurable sense, training your brain to stay in thinking mode rather than reacting mode.This matters because chronic stress does not just feel bad. It damages the brain over time and increases risk factors for cognitive decline. Getting good at recovering from stress, at catching yourself before the spiral, is one of the most protective things you can do for your long-term brain health.Exercise Two: Single-TaskingOnce your nervous system is regulated and your prefrontal cortex is back in business, the next exercise is deceptively simple. Do one thing at a time.Julie is emphatic about this. Multitasking is not a productivity strategy. It is an added source of stress, and most people do not realize it. Every time you bounce between browser tabs, glance at your phone while someone is talking, or try to follow a podcast while answering emails, your brain has to work to suppress the distractions. That suppression burns through your cognitive resources the same way running too many programs slows down a computer.But the real cost of distraction is this: your brain cannot encode what it never paid attention to.This is the answer to the question people ask Julie more than almost any other: “How do I improve my memory?” Her answer does not involve mnemonics or supplements. It involves giving something your undivided attention in the first place. If you were only half-listening, there is nothing to remember, because the information never fully entered your brain.There is also a compounding effect. Julie points out that neuroplasticity, the brain’s well-documented ability to rewire itself based on experience, works in both directions. Every time you practice sustained focus, you strengthen the neural pathways that support attention. But every time you toggle between tasks, you reinforce the pattern of distraction. The brain you have is a brain that you have built based on how you use it every day, she said. If your daily habit is fragmented attention, you are literally building a more distractible brain.Starting small works. Even two minutes of genuine, undivided focus on a single task is a beginning. You build from there. The goal is not to be locked in every second of the day. The goal is to protect your attention for the things that actually matter. And as I mentioned during our conversation, that level of focused engagement is also how you get into a flow state, those stretches where hours pass and you barely notice because you are so absorbed in what you are doing.Exercise Three: The Heavy LiftingThis is the one Julie calls the strength training for the brain, and it is the step most people skip.After you have calmed down (step one) and focused in (step two), the real exercise is engaging deeply with whatever information is in front of you. Julie calls it integrating information. It means taking what you just read, watched, or heard and doing something active with it in your mind, rather than letting it wash over you.Think about the last book you read. If someone brought it up at dinner next week, could you say something meaningful about it? Or would you find yourself saying, “Oh yeah, I read that, but I don’t really remember what it was about.” Julie says that experience is completely normal, and also completely avoidable. Forgetting is actually a protective feature of the brain. We do not need to store every single thing. But for the things that matter to you, the things you invested your time in, there is a way to make them stick.Her approach is to ask yourself a few questions after you engage with something that matters. What is one thing I learned that updates my thinking? How does this apply to my life? What would I tell a friend about this, and why should they care? These do not need to be formal. You do not need a journal or a worksheet. A minute or two of honest reflection is enough.What you are doing, at the neurological level, is creating hooks. New information that just passes through your brain has nothing to attach to. But when you actively connect it to something you already know or care about, you give it anchor points. The more connections you make, the more likely you are to remember it later and to use it when it counts.Julie takes this a step further and recommends adding a social component. If you saw a great film, went to an exhibit, or listened to a conversation that struck you, challenge yourself to share the core takeaway with someone. Not a blow-by-blow summary, but the essence: what was meaningful, and why. This forces you to distill, which is itself a high-level cognitive skill. And it gives you a reason to do the thinking in the first place. One of her clients, a woman with grown children in their twenties, uses this as motivation. She processes what she learns so she can pass it along to her kids. The purpose drives the practice.Julie also made a point that I think matters for everyone reading this on Substack. When you share an article or a podcast with someone, tell them why. “Oh, you should read this” is easy to ignore. But “this changed the way I think about how I learn” gives the other person a reason to engage, and the act of putting that into words forces you to figure out what the takeaway actually was.And here is the part that connects back to that pharmacology lecture in the 1990s. I was not just memorizing drug classes. I was drawing cartoons, which forced me to identify the key relationships. Then I was teaching classmates, which forced me to explain those relationships out loud. Years later, sitting with a patient who mentioned a medication, the red van on the Pepsi bottle appeared in my mind and helped me recall a critical side effect. The information had hooks in every direction. It had been used, shared, applied, and reapplied. That is why it stuck.Julie explained the neuroscience behind it perfectly. Memory is not about perfectly freezing and preserving the past, she said. Memory is about what you need for the future. Your brain remembers things you are going to use again. So if you can create a connection to how something is relevant to your life, how it helps you, how it helps someone else, those are the things that get remembered.Exercise Four: Do NothingThe fourth and final step is the one that surprises people most. After all that effort, after calming down, focusing in, and thinking hard, the most important thing you can do is rest.Not rest as in watch Netflix. Not rest as in scroll through your phone. Real rest. No new input at all.Neuroplasticity, the process by which your brain forms new connections, requires rest to complete. Exposure to new information starts the process, but the actual rewiring happens during downtime, when your brain is not being asked to take in anything else. Think of it like concrete. You can pour it and shape it, but it needs time to set. If you keep pouring new concrete before the first batch hardens, you end up with a mess.Julie recommends short, strategic breaks throughout the day, particularly after periods of focused learning or engagement. They do not need to be long. Even 30 seconds to two minutes of sitting with no input, no phone, no podcast, no music, can make a difference.She also pointed to something called ultradian rhythms, which are natural cycles your body runs through during the day, roughly 60 to 120 minutes of focused capacity followed by a 20-minute period when your brain needs to recover. I recognize this pattern in my own work. After about 45 minutes of reading and writing for my Substack, I start losing the thread. When I find myself going back and trying to re-read the same paragraph, I know it is time to get up. I keep kettlebells nearby and usually head outside and walk around for a bit. I come back sharper, with better ideas, and ready for the next session.The reason for this is not just physical refreshment. When you stop focusing on a task, your brain activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network. This network, sometimes called the creativity network, is responsible for making unexpected connections between ideas. It is the reason you often have your best insights in the shower, on a walk, or in the middle of doing something completely unrelated. By resting, you are not wasting time. You are giving your brain the space to do work it literally cannot do while you are focused.Julie described the same thing from her own experience. She will be writing something, go take a walk, and then come back with all these ways to make it better and new ideas she would not have had if she had just kept pushing through.The uncomfortable truth is that most of us have almost no real rest in our day. When we take a “break,” we reach for our phones. Scrolling through social media feels like a break, but it is actually flooding your brain with new visual and emotional stimulation. Julie mentioned someone she spoke with recently who had a significant realization about this: scrolling is not rest. Netflix is not rest. Only true absence of new input qualifies.Driving in silence is one of Julie’s favorite recommendations. She says people hate it at first. Then they start to crave it.The Four-Step FrameworkTo recap Julie’s four brain exercises:Reinterpretation. When stress hits, practice looking at the situation from a different angle. This calms your amygdala (your brain’s emotional alarm center) and brings your prefrontal cortex (the thinking part of your brain) back online. This is a brain exercise.Single-tasking. Do one thing at a time. Give important tasks your full attention. Your brain cannot form memories of things it never properly noticed in the first place. This is a brain exercise.Deep integration. After engaging with something that matters, pause and ask yourself: what is one takeaway? How does this apply to my life? What would I tell someone about this? This creates the mental hooks that make information stick. This is a brain exercise.Rest. Take short breaks with no new input. Let your brain consolidate what it just learned. Allow the default mode network, your brain’s creativity system, to come online. This is a brain exercise.None of these require an app. None of them cost money. None of them need to be scheduled into a separate block of time. They are ways of using the brain you already have, all day long, in a slightly different and much healthier way.Your Brain Health Action GuideBased on my conversation with Julie, here are practical ways to start putting these four exercises into your daily life:Start with stress recovery. The next time you feel a stress reaction building, pause before reacting. Ask yourself: what is one other way to look at this situation? Practice this once a day. Over time, you will get faster at it, and your brain’s stress response will literally become less reactive.Protect your attention. Pick one activity each day, a conversation, a chapter, a work task, and commit to giving it your complete focus with no phone and no other screens. Start with five minutes if that is all you can manage. Build from there. Notice how much more you remember afterward.Reflect after learning. After you read an article, listen to a podcast, or finish a meeting, take 60 seconds and ask yourself: what is the one thing I want to take from this? Even better, tell someone about it and explain why it mattered to you.Schedule real rest. Build at least two or three short breaks into your day where you have zero new input. No phone. No music. No screens. Just your own thoughts. Try it after a focused work session, or even during your commute by driving in silence. If you find your mind wandering to new ideas and connections, that is not a failure of focus. That is your default mode network doing its job.Adapt your challenge level. Remember the ACTIVE study: the training that actually reduced dementia risk was adaptive. It met people where they were. Whatever you are working on, whether it is a new skill, a puzzle, or a demanding project, make sure the difficulty is appropriate. Too easy and your brain coasts. Too hard and stress shuts down the very systems you are trying to strengthen.Want to go deeper? Check out Dr. Julie Fratantoni’s article on this topic, How to Exercise Your Brain, on her Substack, Better Brain.Read Dr. Julie’s article here.Brain-Healthy Recipe from Chef Martin Oswald As part of the Brain Health Substack Summit, Chef Martin Oswald created a special brain-healthy recipe inspired by Dr. Julie’s work. Good nutrition is one of the foundations of cognitive health, and this recipe was designed with that in mind.See Chef Martin Oswald’s recipe here.Want to train your brain with games backed by science? I recently launched a free weekly Substack called Train the Brain Games where I share cognitive challenges focused on processing speed and other skills the research actually supports. It grew out of my own curiosity about whether the puzzles I love are actually doing anything for my brain. Turns out, some of them are. Subscribe for free and give your brain a real workout each week.This article is part of the Brain Health Substack Summit, the first-ever summit of its kind on the Substack platform. All week long, I am sitting down with leading experts in neuroscience and cognitive health for live conversations and in-depth articles. The summit is hosted by The Habit Healers. Subscribe to both The Habit Healers and Better Brain so you do not miss a single conversation.References:1. Coe NB, Miller KEM, Sun C, et al. Impact of cognitive training on claims-based diagnosed dementia over 20 years: evidence from the ACTIVE study. Alzheimers Dement (N Y). 2026;12(1):e70197. Published 2026 Feb 9. doi:10.1002/trc2.70197 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Marg KJ, Afsi, Lydia R, Tony, and many others for tuning into my live video with Chef Martin Oswald! This week on Habit Healers Live, Chef Martin and I turned brain science into brain food, literally. Inspired by Dr. Dominic Ng’s recommendations for the Brain Health Substack Summit happening next week, Chef Martin prepared two stunning salmon dishes designed to preserve omega-3 fatty acids and pack as many brain-boosting ingredients as possible into every bite.The result? Seven of Dr. Ng’s recommended brain health ingredients in a single recipe. Here’s what we learned.The Science Behind Today’s CookDr. Ng’s brain health food list breaks down into several key categories, and Chef Martin built today’s dishes around them:Gut-Brain Axis: Kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut, and leeks — Chef Martin chose leeks as the foundation for his vegetable sides.Cerebrovascular Blood Flow (or as I put it, “blood to the brain”): Roasted beets, spinach, and kale — beets and spinach both made it into today’s dishes.Neuroinflammation: Extra virgin olive oil, berries, and turmeric — olive oil was used in cooking, and turmeric appeared in the French spice blend.Neuroplasticity: Sardines and anchovies — a Moroccan sardine dish is coming later this week (stay tuned!).Neurotransmitters: Eggs, pumpkin seeds, and turkey — eggs showed up in the gribiche sauce, and crushed pumpkin seeds became the crust on the salmon.Dish #1: Pumpkin Seed-Crusted Salmon with Sauce GribicheChef Martin’s first dish was a thick-cut Atlantic salmon fillet with a crushed pumpkin seed crust, served over water-sautéed leeks, French lentils, beets, and spinach, topped with a classic French sauce gribiche.Key Cooking Tips for Preserving Omega-3sWhy it matters: Omega-3 fatty acids begin to oxidize at around 160°F. The whole goal is to cook salmon slowly at lower heat to preserve these essential brain nutrients.Cook skin-side down first. The skin acts as a protective barrier, shielding the omega-3-rich oils from direct heat. Sear skin-side down for 5–7 minutes on medium heat.Don’t flip too early. If the skin sticks, it’s not ready. When properly cooked, the salmon will release from the pan on its own. Use a stainless steel pan. Chef Martin recommends stainless steel to avoid particles from coated pans breaking off with use.Bring fish to room temperature first. Let salmon sit out for about 30 minutes before cooking. Cold fish won’t cook evenly, it’ll stay raw in the center.Sear the sides. A restaurant trick: briefly press the sides of the salmon against the pan to seal all around. This prevents those white protein spots from forming on top.Use the paper towel trick. After cooking, rest the salmon on a paper towel to absorb the oxidized cooking oil before plating. This is what the best restaurant chefs do.Check temperature: For home cooks, use a thermometer — 125°F is the target for medium-rare salmon that preserves the most omega-3s.Oven method alternative: You can also slow-bake salmon at 250°F for about 45 minutes (for a one-inch fillet). It comes out buttery, creamy, and incredibly nutrient-rich.About Sauce GribicheThe word of the day! Gribiche (G-R-I-B-I-C-H-E) is a classic French sauce made with hard-boiled eggs (for choline and neurotransmitter support), capers, parsley, shallots, mustard, and apple cider vinegar. The acidity of the sauce balances the richness of the salmon, a key flavor profiling principle.The Vegetable SideChef Martin kept this intentionally low-calorie to balance the richness of the fish: leeks cut into strips and water-sautéed (no butter, no oil), French lentils (recommended by Dr. Chris Miller for fiber), pre-cooked beets (for nitrates and cerebrovascular blood flow), and fresh spinach wilted in at the end.Get the full recipe for the Pumpkin Seed–Crusted Salmon with Sauce Gribiche, Roasted Beets & Leeks here. Dish #2: Matcha Salmon Noodle BowlThe second dish was inspired by Dr. Julie Brantantoni’s recommendations. Chef Martin used the belly portions of the salmon, the fattiest part with the highest concentration of omega-3s, cut into small, fingernail-sized pieces and cooked very quickly to avoid oxidizing those delicate fats.What’s in the BowlThe base is konjac noodles (also called sweet potato starch noodles), a great option for anyone managing blood sugar, as they have essentially no carbohydrates. Just rinse with hot water and they’re ready.The star is a matcha dressing made with matcha, tahini, garlic, ginger, and date syrup. Chef Martin’s advice from legendary German chef Witzigmann: when you name a sauce after an ingredient, that ingredient should be the star. Let the matcha shine.Finished with shiitake mushrooms sautéed in a touch of sesame oil (only about 30 calories to flavor an entire dish, compared to 120 calories of olive oil for the same impact), leeks, spinach, hemp seeds (plant-based omega-3s and protein, added at the very end to preserve nutrients), black sesame seeds, and fresh torn mint leaves.Full Matcha Salmon Noodle Bowl recipe coming soon.Wild vs. Farmed Salmon: What to KnowA viewer asked whether wild salmon is better than Atlantic farmed salmon, and the answer was a clear yes. Chef Martin explained that cheap farm-raised salmon often contains synthetic omega-3s and added coloring. The fish can fall apart when you lift it, a sign of how much oil has been added. Wild salmon (like coho) has a naturally darker, deeper red color.If you’re buying farmed salmon, invest in higher-quality options from reputable farms. Avoid the cheapest mass-produced options, which can come with concerns about water quality and antibiotic use.Don’t Eat Fish? Here Are Your OptionsFor those who don’t eat fish (myself included!), Chef Martin and I discussed several alternatives. You can substitute tofu or azuki beans in these dishes for protein and texture. Konjac noodles add substance without spiking blood sugar. Omega-3 supplementation (EPA and DHA) is another option, Chef Martin himself eats mostly vegetarian and takes omega-3 supplements, inspired by Dr. Dean Ornish’s 2025 Alzheimer’s study. I take omegas daily. Hemp seeds, ground flax, and chia seeds provide plant-based ALA omega-3s and can be sprinkled on any dish.What’s Coming NextMoroccan Sardine Charmoula recipe — dropping mid-week on Chef Martin’s SubstackSummary article with all Brain Health Forum recipes — coming next Saturday with Chef Martin reviewing everything together.Don’t Miss: Brain Health Substack Summit Starts Monday!Starting Monday, February 23rd at 10:00 AM Pacific, I’m going live every day next week with a different brain health expert for the Brain Health Mini Substack Summit. Half-hour live interviews each day, covering how we can increase our brain longevity. The lineup includes Julie Fratantoni, PhD on Monday, with five more experts throughout the week, and Chef Martin Oswald closing it out with a full recipe roundup.Join the Brain Health Substack Summit live here.I highly recommend subscribing to Chef Martin’s Substack for all his incredible brain health recipes, he and his wife, Carolyn, work tirelessly to bring you dishes that are as nourishing as they are delicious.Subscribe to Chef Martin’s Healing Kitchen Substack. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I’m digging into a question that sounds almost absurd until you look at the data: why is pickleball—arguably the “sweetest, safest-looking” sport in the park—sending so many people to the emergency room?Pickleball looks harmless. The court is small. The serve is underhand. The ball is basically a wiffle ball. And yet, ER records tell a different story: fractures (especially wrists), sprains, strains, and a pattern that’s hard to ignore—older adults showing up for pickleball injuries at rates that started to rival tennis. I walk through what’s really happening, and why the sport’s design quietly creates the perfect setup for falls, tendon overload, and sudden-stop injuries.I explain how two rules—the double bounce and the kitchen—shape the way your body has to move: quick lunges, short sprints, abrupt decelerations, and reactive steps at the net. It doesn’t look like sprinting, but it often acts like sprinting in bursts. And that mismatch—between what the game demands and what many bodies are prepared for—is where trouble starts.But I’m not here to villainize pickleball. In fact, I make the case for why it’s one of the most powerful “stealth health” activities out there: it’s fun enough that people actually show up, it can hit moderate intensity, and studies suggest benefits for lower-body power, cognition, and even chronic pain when it’s introduced with a smart ramp-up. The problem isn’t pickleball—it’s the gap between enthusiasm and preparation.We also get specific about the injuries that worry clinicians: the Achilles rupture story (tendons adapt slowly, even when you feel “fit”), the rare-but-serious eye injuries that can threaten vision, and the overuse problems the ER doesn’t capture—things like tennis elbow and shoulder tendinopathy that creep in when you play back-to-back without recovery.And then I give you the practical fix: how to make pickleball safer without ruining the fun. I walk through a simple warm-up framework (RAMP), the strength and balance basics that reduce fall risk, and the small decisions that matter more than people realize—court shoes, gradual play-time build, rest days, and yes, eye protection if you’re living at the net.This isn’t about playing harder. It’s about playing longer.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Marg KJ, Afsi, Sherrie McGraw, Eve Franco, Tony, and many others for tuning into my live video with Chef Martin Oswald! Brain Food That Actually Tastes Good: A Feast for Your Neurons (and Tastebuds)We went live today from Las Vegas to Vienna, and if you missed it, you missed a masterclass on how to turn “medical advice” into a culinary masterpiece.We are gearing up for the Brain Summit (Feb 23rd–28th), where we’ll be interviewing experts like Annie Fenn, MD , Jud Brewer MD PhD , Chris Miller MD, Julie Fratantoni, PhD, and Dr. Dominic Ng. But today wasn’t just about talking science; it was about putting Dr. Chris Miller’s anti-inflammatory protocols directly onto a plate.The goal? Decreasing stroke risk, fighting atherosclerosis, and keeping those blood vessels wide open to feed your brain.Here is the breakdown of the “strategic dishes” Chef Martin whipped up.The Strategy: Avoiding “Flavor Fatigue”Chef Martin Oswald introduced a fascinating concept today: Flavor Fatigue.When you eat a dish that tastes exactly the same from the first bite to the last, your palate gets bored. To keep healthy eating exciting, you need layers. You need a mix of hot and cold, cooked and raw, spicy and tart.Here is how he built the ultimate Anti-Inflammatory Bowl.1. The Roasted BaseMartin didn’t just throw veggies on a pan; he layered the antioxidants:* The Power Move: He started with cauliflower (cruciferous) and dusted it with turmeric.* The Fiber: Chickpeas went in for their soluble fiber to help grab cholesterol and feed gut bacteria.* The Spice: He used Garam Masala. It’s Martin’s favorite spice blend because it is loaded with high-polyphenol spices like clove.Chef’s Tip: Watch your oil. Instead of free-pouring olive oil, Martin suggests using a teaspoon or even a splash of water to keep the calorie density low, which is crucial for stroke prevention.2. The “Raw” element (Vital for Vitamin C)Here is something we often forget: Vitamin C is heat-sensitive. If you cook your peppers or fruits, you lose a significant amount of that nutrient.To solve this, Martin created a raw Purple Coleslaw right in the middle of the bowl:* The Crunch: Red cabbage (the cheapest, most effective antioxidant bang for your buck).* The Surprise: He added blueberries directly into the slaw instead of raisins.* The Dressing: A mix of tahini, lemon juice, and a touch of date syrup to break down the cabbage fibers.3. The Endothelial BoostersTo finish the bowl, he added cooked beets and raw arugula. Why? Nitrates. These are essential for the endothelial lining of your blood vessels, ensuring good blood flow to the brain.Get the Full Anti-Inflammatory Bowl Recipe Here.Dessert: “Carolyn’s Clafoutis” (The Healthy Remake)We can’t talk brain health without talking about berries. Dr. Jud Brewer loves them, and so do we.Martin’s wife, Carolyn, makes a healthy version of the classic French Clafoutis, that usually loaded with heavy cream, butter, and sugar. Martin is sharing her recipe and how she turned it into a brain-healthy powerhouse without sacrificing that custard-like texture.The 5-Ingredient Fix:* Frozen Blueberries: He used frozen because they are picked at peak ripeness and retain their nutrients.* The Liquid: Almond milk (or oat milk) mixed with a little yogurt for acidity.* The Binder: Tapioca flour (or arrowroot) mixed with almond flour.* The Omega-3s: Soaked ground flaxseeds.* The Sweetener: A touch of date sugar or maple syrup.The result? A purple, custard-like treat that melts in your mouth, minus the saturated fat.Eat the RainbowBy the time Martin finished plating, we counted nearly 15 different plants in just one meal. From the shiitake mushrooms to the fresh parsley garnish, this is what gut diversity looks like.Read my article on “The Rainbow Plate: A System So Simple It Will Change the Way You Eat Forever”Coming Up NextWe are back next Wednesday for another live cooking session. We’ve covered veggies and berries; next week, we are diving into healthy fats. Martin will be demonstrating the smart way to cook Salmon (for those who eat fish) so you don’t destroy the delicate Omega-3s with high heat.See you then! Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I’m sharing a movement that looks a little ridiculous… but tells you a lot about your body in seconds: the duck walk—walking forward while staying in a deep squat.I take you back to where it actually came from: not fitness, but medicine. In the 1950s, orthopedic surgeons used the duck walk as a quick stress test for knee problems—especially the meniscus—because deep bending under body weight can reveal issues fast. And that’s exactly why it’s so interesting: it’s not just an exercise, it’s a snapshot of your mobility, strength, balance, and joint tolerance all at once.I break down what the duck walk really is (deep squat + tiny controlled steps), why it feels brutally hard almost immediately, and what’s happening under the hood—your quads and glutes staying “on” the whole time, the higher energy cost, and the balance/proprioception challenge that makes most people wobble at first.Then I share my own story: after breaking my left ankle and spending weeks in a boot, I struggled to fully get my mobility back—even when I stretched. The duck walk surprised me. It helped restore ankle dorsiflexion, made my deep squat steadier, and the improvement was noticeable enough that I kept it as a long-term practice.But I’m also very clear about the fine print. This movement asks a lot from your knees. I walk through the key structures it stresses (patellofemoral joint, tibiofemoral joint, meniscus), the warning signs that mean you should stop (sharp pain, swelling later, catching/locking, giving way), and who should skip it or only do it with guidance.Finally, I give you the practical “how”: treat it like a skill, start supported, keep steps small, modify the depth, and progress through simple phases over a few weeks instead of turning it into a knee lottery. If you want a fast way to assess where your weak link is—ankles, knees, balance, or strength—this episode will help you figure it out and build it safely.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Rod Miller, Afsi, Diane J Jacobs, Ann Therriault, and many others for tuning into my live video with Chris Miller MD! You Are Only as Old as Your EndotheliumWe often ask, “How is your blood pressure?” or “How is your cholesterol?” But when was the last time anyone asked you, “How are your blood vessels?”In this chat, Chris Miller MD and I stop looking at the heart as just a pump and start looking at the pipes. We specifically look at the endothelium. This is a layer one cell thick that lines your entire vascular system. It is your lifeline to every organ in your body. If it ages faster than you do, you are in trouble.The Damage Dealers: Oxidative StressYour endothelium is sensitive. It is actually an endocrine system, not just a wall. What makes it stiff and rigid?* The Usual Suspects: Spiking blood sugar, high salt intake, and ultra-processed foods damage the lining.* The Silent Killer: Oxidative stress. Think of this as biological rust from pollution, smoke, or just the metabolic waste of living.* The Lifestyle Hit: Lack of exercise makes vessels stiff while chronic stress clamps them down and makes them rigid.The Healing Habits ProtocolYou do not need a complete life overhaul overnight. Dr. Chris suggests small habits that compound. 1. The Exercise Prescription* Just Walk: It is arguably the best thing for vascular relaxation.* Add Resistance: Even two days a week makes a difference.* The Secret Weapon: Yoga and stretching improve vagal tone. This helps relax stiff vessels even further.2. The Menu* Nitric Oxide Boosters: Beets, arugula, and leafy greens help the endothelium produce nitric oxide to dilate naturally.* The Protector: Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that protects the endothelial lining.3. The Sleep Non-Negotiable* If you only do one thing, go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Even if your sleep quality isn’t perfect yet, the rhythm helps reset your biology.The Audit, Acceptance, Action MindsetWe got a little philosophical at the end. We realized that health is not about shaming yourself for the genetics you were dealt.* Audit: Know your numbers. Get a baseline. Look at your lipids, your CRP (inflammation), and your fasting insulin.* Acceptance: Stop fighting your history. Dr. Chris had to accept her Lupus journey. I had to accept my difficult menopause. Radical acceptance stops the “shame train”.* Action: Once you know where you are and accept it, take one small step. I shared a story about a patient of mine who reversed Type 2 diabetes. She started by simply walking to the end of her driveway.Coming UpWe also teased our upcoming Brain Health Mini Substack Summit at the end of the month. We will dive into neuroinflammation and how to clear the fog.Watch the full replay above to hear Dr. Chris’s take on “Flow” states and why leaving the ER was the best thing for her health Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Cindy Chance, Marg KJ, Afsi, Cathy Moffitt Boyd, Denise Tarasuk, and many others for tuning into my live video with Chef Martin Oswald! We have a massive announcement!We are thrilled to officially announce the upcoming Brain Health Mini Substack Summit, a mini Substack summit taking place the last week of February (Feb 23rd - 28th). I think this will be the first of its kind! (Please share this with your friends and family who would enjoy this amazing event!)I will be interviewing five incredible experts, including Annie Fenn, MD , Dr. Dominic Ng , Julie Fratantoni, PhD , Chris Miller MD , and Jud Brewer MD PhD, live for 30 minutes each day. But here is the best part: Chef Martin Oswald is creating a specific brain-health recipe for each interview based on the ingredients provided by those experts. Then on the last day of the summit, February 28th, Martin and I will go live to talk about the recipes and answer any and all of your questions.Don’t miss out on this unique event where medicine meets culinary art. Subscribe now so you don’t miss a single interview or recipe. Want to go deeper with us? Join Martin and me in our Culinary Healing Group for exclusive community support and deeper dives into food as medicine and weekly private group meetings with me. Join the Culinary Healing Group here. The Silent Enemy: Why Sodium Matters for Your BrainToday, we are diving deep into sodium and brain health. You hear about “low sodium” all the time, but why is it actually important?High blood pressure is a leading cause of death worldwide, and often, it’s undetectable unless you are actively measuring it. Excess sodium is a major driver of high blood pressure, especially for those with metabolic disease or insulin resistance.Think of it this way: “Where the sodium goes, the water flows”.When you consume excess sodium, fluid retention increases blood pressure within your vessels. But beyond that, sodium actually stiffens the blood vessels. This forces your heart to work harder and can starve the brain of nutrients, leading to fatigue, forgetfulness, and even cognitive decline.But here is the challenge: Everything tastes better with salt. It’s the default setting for flavor. So, how do we protect our brains without resigning ourselves to bland food? Martin has the answers.The Chef’s Toolkit: How to Engineer Flavor Without SaltChef Martin Oswald walked us through a fascinating “Flavor Wheel” designed to replace the sensation of salt with other potent characteristics. It’s not just about removing sodium; it’s about building layers of flavor that outshine the need for it.1. The Herb LayerDon’t just look for “salt substitutes.” Look to herbs that mimic the profile of sodium.* Celery Leaves: This is Martin’s top recommendation. The leaves have a flavor profile very close to sodium.* Lovage: Known in Europe as the “Maggi herb,” it has a complex, herbaceous flavor that crosses parsley, celery, and basil.* Rosemary & Thyme: Use the whole sprig in soups and stews to let the leaves cook off and impart deep flavor.2. The “Sting” (Acid & Spice)Salt gives a little “prickle” on the tongue. To replace that, we need ingredients that offer a similar sensation.* Sichuan Peppercorns: These provide a unique numbing or prickly sensation that distracts the palate from the lack of salt.* Sumac: A spice with a sour, prickly characteristic. It’s fantastic in hummus or sprinkled over risotto.* Citric Acid: The secret ingredient in many salt-free blends. It provides that sharp sourness and “sting” found in candy and processed foods, but can be used as a cooking tool.3. Umami: The Fullness FactorUmami provides the roundness and satisfaction we usually get from salt.* Mushrooms: While Porcini is the gold standard, dried Shiitake mushrooms are a budget-friendly way to get massive umami flavor. You can even grind them into a powder to use as a spice.* Nutritional Yeast & Tahini: Great for adding savory depth.* Seaweeds (Kelp/Nori): These provide that “ocean” flavor and are a critical source of Iodine. Note: If you cut iodized salt, ensure you are getting iodine from other sources for thyroid health.4. The Fermentation Game-ChangerFermented foods are perhaps the most powerful tool for replacing sodium because their “funkiness” and tanginess mimic the sensation of salt.* Fermented Cashew Butter: Martin revealed a new “Flavor Bomb”, cashew butter fermented with miso and lemon zest. It eats like sour cream and adds incredible richness.* Miso: While it contains sodium, the high potassium content can help negate blood pressure effects, and you can dilute it with other ingredients.* Almond Milk Kefir: A great way to add thickness and tang to dressings.5. Sweet & Sour ReductionsWe also discussed using glazes to fool the palate.* Blueberry Balsamic Coulis: Instead of sugary store-bought glazes, reduce vinegar by 75%, then cook it down with fresh blueberries (skin on for pectin) to make a thick, tart sauce.* Pomegranate Molasses: A thick, tart, and deeply flavorful drizzle that works beautifully on roasted vegetables.* Preserved Lemon: By cooking whole lemons (blanched to remove bitterness) and preserving them, you get a product that adds brightness to risottos and salads without the mountain of salt traditionally used in Moroccan curing.What’s Next?This was just a preview! Next week, we will continue this conversation focusing on weight control and plaque prevention for the heart and brain.We will see you then!Please subscribe so you won’t miss the Brain Health Substack Summit.Comment below if you are looking forward to this and tag anyone who might be interested in attending. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I’m asking a question that sounds a little wild until you start looking at the evidence: are animals the most powerful medicine we have? And I’m not talking about magic—I’m talking about biology, behavior, and the quiet ways other species seem to “read” us better than we read ourselves.I start with Oscar, the hospice cat who stunned a nursing home staff by repeatedly curling up beside residents just hours before they died. From there, I zoom out into the bigger pattern: the silent, constant conversation between human bodies and animal senses—smell, breath, posture, rhythm, routine. I explore how we communicate across species without words, from the way dogs (and even cats) follow our pointing and gaze, to the oxytocin loop that kicks in when a dog holds eye contact, shifting both of us toward calm and connection.Then I go deeper into the long history of partnership—wolves at ancient campfires turning into dogs, cats showing up where grain attracted mice, and how co-evolution didn’t just change them… it shaped us. I talk about attachment, why a dog can feel like a “secure base” the way a parent does for a child, and what research suggests about stress, cortisol, blood pressure, loneliness, and even immune training in kids raised around pets.We also get practical: what happens when animals become part of the treatment plan—therapy dogs on hospital floors, service dogs helping veterans with PTSD, animals acting as bridges for kids with autism, and horses used in rehab. And yes, I go to the edge of the map: sea lions that may keep someone afloat, elephants that appear to mourn, a pig that saved a woman’s life, and dogs that can sometimes detect seizures, low blood sugar, or even cancer.But I don’t skip the fine print. I talk about zoonotic risks, bites, hospital infection control, and the ethical line between partnership and exploitation—because if animals are part of health, their wellbeing has to be part of the equation too.By the end, I’m left with the real question: if animals already function like quiet, unpaid members of the healthcare team… what would it look like to treat that bond as something we plan for—on purpose?Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of the Habit Healers podcast, Dr. Laurie welcomes Dr. Jud Brewer to discuss his Substack article, "The Generosity Paradox." Dr. Brewer explores the complexities of generosity, emphasizing that it is not as straightforward as many believe. He delves into the emotional aspects tied to giving, such as guilt and giver's remorse, and highlights that generosity encompasses more than just monetary donations. The conversation introduces three different types of generosity, starting with the "transactional loop," where giving is linked to an expectation of receiving something in return. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion that unpacks the deeper components of generosity and its impact on our lives.Link to Dr. Jud's article: https://judbrewer.substack.com/p/the-generosity-paradox-why-your-brainDr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

If you’ve ever felt like you have to choose between running for your heart or lifting for strength, I’m here to tell you that’s the wrong question. In this episode, I walk through the simple truth the research keeps repeating: cardio and resistance training do different jobs, and if you want your workouts to fight aging—not just burn calories—you need both.I’ll explain why cardio is great at supporting your heart and metabolism, but why lifting is the lever that protects the stuff that actually makes aging harder: muscle, bone density, and the ability to keep moving well. We’ll talk about bones in particular—because they don’t respond to wishful thinking. They respond to force. If you want stronger hips and spine over time, you have to put your body under a load that feels heavy.Then I get into the real reason most of us skip strength work: not laziness—friction. The tiny barriers (drive time, waiting for equipment, “I’ll do it later”) quietly kill the habit. So I share the strategy that actually works: habit stacking—bolting lifting onto the cardio you already do, so it becomes automatic instead of optional.I’ll also give you my favorite “zero commute” tools that take up almost no space—a doorstop kettlebell, a weighted vest, a sandbag—and exactly what “heavy” means in real life (hint: 8–12 reps, with the last two feeling brutal). Because the bottom line is this: your heart needs movement… but your bones need battle.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you We Are Getting Old?, Marg KJ, Afsi, Martha Leinroth, Steve D, and many others for tuning into my live video with Chef Martin Oswald! We are back! After a little break, and a wonderful trip to Malta for Martin and Puerto Vallarta for me, we are diving straight into the “funky” side of the kitchen.With February 1st marking “Fermentation Day,” it is the perfect time to talk about one of the most overlooked yet powerful tools in our culinary medicine chest: Fermented Foods.As Chef Martin Oswald explained in our live session, fermented foods are ingredients that have been transformed by micro-bacteria or yeast. These microbes eat the sugars and starches and convert them into acids, gases, or alcohol.The result? That signature “tangy” (or as we decided to call it, “funky”) flavor that indicates a food is rich in probiotics and prebiotics.Here is a breakdown of the fermented powerhouses we discussed today and how you can sneak them into your daily meals.1. Fermented Black SoybeansIf you have read the Dr. Greger cookbooks, you likely know the power of black soybeans for lowering cholesterol. But have you tried them fermented?* The Flavor: Intense umami.* How to use: Rinse the salt off with water and soak them for 10 minutes. Toss them into a stir-fry or dressing to boost flavor.[Link: Get the Fermented Black Soybean Recipe Here]2. Homemade SrirachaForget the store-bought stuff; making your own sriracha is easier than you think.* The Method: It is a 7-day fermentation process using a 2% sodium ratio by weight.* Chef’s Tip: Using less salt (sticking to that 2% safety mark) actually makes the fermentation faster and the flavor “funkier” and better.Chef Martin’s Homemade Sriracha Recipe.3. KimchiWe are moving from Thailand to Korea with this staple. Kimchi isn’t just a side dish; it is a flavor bomb for dressings and sauces.* The Process: Massage the cabbage with salt to release the liquid. Rinse it with water three times to remove excess sodium. Add a chili paste made with Korean chili and massage again. Ferment for just 48 hours before moving it to the fridge.* How to Eat: Chop it up and mix it into a vinaigrette or a plant-based yogurt for an incredible sauce.Chef Martin’s Kimchi Recipe.4. Gochujang (Korean Chili Paste)Think of this as the fermented cousin of ketchup.* The Hack: It can be very spicy on its own. Martin suggests mixing it with a little tomato sauce to thin it out and create a “spicy ketchup” that replaces the sugary store-bought versions.5. Miso and The Cashew Cream HackJapan is a Blue Zone for a reason, and Miso is a big part of that. But you do not have to limit it to soup.* Chef’s Secret: Martin blends soaked cashews with water to make a cream, then stirs in a tablespoon and a half of blonde (white) miso. Leave it on the counter for a day or two, and the bacteria from the miso will ferment the cashew cream.* Result: A tangy, probiotic-rich cream that tastes like sour cream or crème fraîche. Perfect for topping soups or risottos.6. Sauerkraut: The Ultimate “Funky” FactorWe saved the funkiest for last. Sauerkraut is a prebiotic powerhouse.* Beyond the Reuben: Do not just put it on a sandwich. Martin uses it in his Tart Lorraine (replacing the onions with sauerkraut) and his Segediner Goulash (a stew with potatoes and oats).* Crucial Rule: Always add your fermented foods (like sauerkraut or miso) at the very end of cooking. High heat kills the healthy bacteria.Tart Lorraine with Sauerkraut Recipe A Note on YogurtWe also touched on yogurt. While Dr. T. Colin Campbell remains neutral on dairy yogurt, he notes you must eat it daily to maintain the bacteria strains. For a plant-based option, we love Kite Hill (unsweetened plain). It is a great base for sauces or a morning muesli.Resource SpotlightIf you want to read deep studies on the science of fermentation (we are talking deep history and molecular science), check out Jürg Vollmer at the Food Revolution Substack. He is doing incredible work on the subject.COMING SOON: The Brain Health Substack Mini-Summit!We are absolutely thrilled to announce that at the end of February, we will be hosting a Brain Health Summit right here on Substack.We are bringing together some of the leading minds in brain health:* Annie Fenn, MD * Julie Fratantoni, PhD * Dr. Dominic Ng * Chris Miller MD * Jud Brewer MD PhD * Chef Martin Oswald Chef Martin is creating specific brain-healthy recipes tailored to each doctor’s ingredients and recommendations. We will have live interviews, recipe posts, and deep dives into how to fuel your mind.Keep an eye out for the official schedule on February 1st. You will not want to miss this!PS. Did you know that Chef Martin and I run a weekly group called Culinary Healing? You can check it out here. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe

Ever been called “lazy” even though you can spend hours building something brilliant when it grabs your attention? In this episode, I walk through why that disconnect is basically the signature of ADHD—and why ADHD isn’t really an attention deficit so much as an attention regulation problem.I’ll break down what’s happening in the brain using a simple (and weirdly accurate) framework: the “Task Positive Network” (the boss that tries to get work done) versus the “Default Mode Network” (the chatterbox that daydreams, worries, and notices squirrels). For an ADHD brain, that office management system glitches—so you’re trying to do the worksheet while the radio is blaring inside your head. Then I’ll explain the “Lego paradox”: why dopamine can flip you into hyperfocus when something is interesting, and why boring tasks can feel physically painful.We’ll also talk about why ADHD diagnoses have risen, why girls and adults have been historically missed, and what medication actually does (think: cognitive eyeglasses—not a personality eraser). But the heart of this episode is the practical part: the ADHD Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)—a four-phase system I use to “engineer” an ADHD-friendly life with less shame and more structure. I’ll introduce the one-time setup, the daily boot sequence, and the crucial If/Then logic tree—so when you drift, freeze, or overwhelm hits, you’re not relying on willpower… you’re following a script that works with your brain.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62 Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe