The Habit Healers

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 fr

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

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. O

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 metabo

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 ou

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 th