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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-every 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

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 Loss When 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 Tofu Martin 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 Ladder Martin 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 Together Martin’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 Stock One 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 Martin If 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 layers Martin 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 up Next 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 takeaway Martin 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 Point Not 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 Approach This 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 Pot In 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 Math Here’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 Challenge Make 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-in 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

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 jobs I 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 30 Martin’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 advantage This 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 trick Martin’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 approach Martin 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 cooked Martin 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 habit Pick 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.

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 Is Jud 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 Contagion Jud 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 Math In 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 Logic A 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 Playbook This 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 Headlines I 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 Trick My 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 You Jud 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 Substack References Vosoughi 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 Dozen The 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 15 On 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 Organic This 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 Washing Wash 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 Reference Always buy organic (Dirty Dozen) -- strawberries, spinach, kale, grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, bell peppers, cherries, blueberries, green b

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 reversed Then 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