Thrive on Plants

Melatonin isn't just a sleep aid. It might be one of the most misunderstood molecules in your body, and understanding it could impact your healthspan. Most of us know melatonin from the supplement aisle: something you take when you can't sleep. But Dr. Deanna Minich has spent years making the case that this "sleep hormone" is actually a primordial, multitasking molecule she calls the "mother molecule," made not only in your pineal gland but in your gut, skin, ovaries, and even inside your mit...

What if the missing piece of your menopause care isn't a hormone at all? Cynthia Thurlow, NP, has spent more than two decades in clinical medicine. But no one, not her training, her colleagues, or her own doctors, prepared her for what perimenopause would do to her body. Or for how much of it would trace back to her gut. After a serious infection, a 13-day hospitalization, and weeks of antibiotics, she had to rebuild her microbiome in the middle of perimenopause. That experience became The Me...

She was born vegan. Her mother had been vegan for nine years before Anne arrived. Her father founded the American Vegan Society the year John F. Kennedy was elected president. And now, at 56, Anne Dinshah is the CEO of that same organization, taking up springboard diving for the first time since high school, rowing fifteen miles at a stretch on the Schuylkill River, and building bridges between people who think differently and a philosophy she has lived every single day of her life. This is n...

What if the way you eat is directly shaping how you think, feel, and cope? Serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine- the molecules your brain uses to regulate mood, motivation, and stress response- are synthesized from essential amino acids. Amino acids that come from food. That means what you put on your plate every day either supports your brain health or quietly undermines it. In this episode of Thrive on Plants, I sit down with Dr. Elizabeth Winings, Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Pract...

Most women over 50 are doing everything they were told to do. Eating less. Exercising more. And getting nowhere. In this episode of Thrive on Plants, Dr. Daphne Bascom sits down with Debra Atkinson, an exercise physiologist, former Iowa State kinesiology lecturer, and founder of Flipping 50, to discuss why the old fitness rules stop working in midlife and what actually builds a strong, capable body for the long haul. Debra spent more than thirty years in the fitness industry before realizing ...