Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben

Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben

By Benjamin Knight Fuchs R. Ph.ScienceHealth & FitnessMental HealthEducationSelf-ImprovementLife Sciences
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Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben episodes

  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, November 2, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia, Emergency Room Realities, and Nutritional Healing with Dr. Lisa Singletary
    Pharmacist Ben examines postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and adrenal health before welcoming Dr. Lisa Singletary, an emergency physician who shares how foundational nutrition helped her recover from severe arthritis and leave a wheelchair behind.
    Emergence, Intuition, and the Building Blocks of Health
    Ben Fuchs opens the broadcast welcoming listeners to Aging Well and reflecting on the concept of emergence. Citing Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousand hours principle, Ben explains that decades spent examining human physiology allow an intuitive understanding to arise, comparing it to how a complex beehive or anthill functions beyond the knowledge of any individual insect. He critiques artificial intelligence for offering isolated facts without the transcendent perspective needed to perceive the entire biological forest. Ben invites listeners to call the program and announces that Dr. Lisa Singletary will join the conversation at the bottom of the hour. Highlighting his thirty-year affiliation with Youngevity, he emphasizes that he endorses only formulations he has witnessed working firsthand, such as Beyond Tangy Tangerine and the Healthy Start Pack. He encourages the audience to take charge of their wellness through foundational supplementation, mentioning his digital school at Pharmacist Ben's Academy and regular online educational sessions.
    Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome and Adrenal Duress
    Ben shifts focus to postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, breaking down the medical acronym into Latin roots describing an accelerated heart rate upon standing upright from a prone position. He explains that rising from a chair requires the body to coordinate countless microscopic adjustments across fifty thousand miles of blood vessels to maintain steady pressure against gravity. When the adrenal glands become depleted from ongoing duress, they fail to regulate vascular tone effectively, causing blood pressure to drop and prompting the heart to race in panic. Ben identifies three primary triggers of physiological duress: toxemia from refined foods and sugar, hypoxia caused by poor breathing habits or chronic inflammation, and cellular starvation stemming from micronutrient malnutrition. He stresses that conventional medicine offers no real answers for this miserable cluster of symptoms, urging individuals to reclaim authority over their daily habits rather than relying on an authoritarian pharmaceutical model.
    Adrenal Support, Mega-Dose Vitamin C, and Medicinal Zinc
    Continuing his examination of adrenal health, Ben emphasizes that targeted supplementation is essential because modern diets cannot supply the necessary micronutrients. He underscores the importance of vitamin C during times of acute stress, contrasting human inability to produce the nutrient with animals like goats, which synthesize thirteen grams daily under calm conditions and over one hundred fifty grams when stressed. Ben sharply criticizes the official Recommended Dietary Allowance of one hundred milligrams, dismissing it as a ridiculous deficiency allowance designed merely to stave off death rather than support vitality. He also highlights zinc, recalling how pharmacy curriculum treated both zinc and vitamin C as powerful medicinal agents rather than passive supplements. Ben notes zinc's therapeutic utility for blood sugar balance, immune defense, and skin repair, citing a fellow pharmacist who commercialized a simple zinc cold remedy into a billion-dollar sale to demonstrate the undeniable biochemical power of fundamental minerals.
    From Rural Maryland Healers to an Allopathic Wheelchair
    Dr. Lisa Singletary joins the program, recounting her childhood on a rural Maryland farm where her grandparents served as trusted community healers using barks, roots, and poultices. Inspired by the television series Marcus Welby, M.D., she entered medical school hoping to help people, only to have natural healing methods systematically educated out of her as wasteful and unscientific. Dr. Singletary practiced conventional allopathic medicine before leaving her career for eight years to act as the primary caretaker for her aging parents. During that period, she experimented with simple topical honey for bedsores, marveling at its unexpected efficacy when standard treatments failed. The physical and emotional strain of caregiving, combined with poor diet and high stress, eventually left her severely disabled. Suffering from crippling arthritis and widespread inflammation, she could not slide open laundry detergent packages or apply skin lotion, eventually relying on her father's wheelchair simply to move around her home.
    Nutritional Epiphany, Energy Medicine, and Team Leadership
    Desperate for relief, Dr. Singletary finally listened to a friend's recommendation to try Youngevity's Beyond Tangy Tangerine. Taking multiple daily scoops, she experienced a dramatic physical turnaround, shedding eighty-five pounds and walking out of her wheelchair within eight months. Her intellectual paradigm shifted after reading an alternative medicine textbook containing a chapter on energy medicine, which argued that every pharmaceutical pill is merely chemical energy interacting with the body's electromagnetic network. Realizing that Dr. Joel Wallach had already formulated comprehensive nutritional recipes, she embraced Youngevity wholeheartedly, eventually building a business team drawing from church and family connections. Dr. Singletary describes the psychological hurdle of setting aside the conventional doctor's authoritative ego in order to embrace network marketing and personal development tools. Ben praises Dr. Wallach as a polymath across pathology, anthropology, and biochemistry, validating her transition from rigid institutional dogma toward empowering people through cellular nutrition.
    Emergency Room Realities, End-of-Life Care, and Patient Autonomy
    Reflecting on her years working in urgent care and emergency departments at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Singletary describes the chronic cortisol elevation and poor dietary habits common among frontline medical personnel. She shares her vision for a specialized nursing facility called Last Mile Running, where elder residents would receive aggressive hydration and skin-absorbed nutrients even if unable to swallow. Dr. Singletary laments how institutional medicine frequently resists nutritional recovery near the end of life, recalling an alert elder whose family chose to remove his feeding tube after he improved on fucoidan. She also recounts how hospital staff declared her mentally competent father psychiatrically unfit when he refused a nasogastric tube, discharging him rather than honoring his wishes. After discussing her father's passing from a bowel obstruction related to excessive loperamide use before public speaking, the hosts exchange closing contact details, with Ben announcing upcoming guest Kimberly Meredith before signing off.
    59 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 31, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    The Thyroid Behind Every Chronic Disease, Leaky Gut, and Wilhelm Reich's Theory of Contraction
    Pharmacist Ben flies solo this week, tracing chronic disease back to an underactive thyroid, walking through the biology of iodine, tyrosine and mitochondria, and invoking Wilhelm Reich's theory of bodily contraction to explain why aging bodies curl inward.
    Opening Remarks and the Case for Supplementation
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show alone, welcoming listeners to Aging Well and thanking what he calls the Pharmacist Ben Choir and the Pharmacist Ben Singers for growing on him. He repeats his call-in number, 888-627-6008, and invites testimonials from anyone using Youngevity products, especially Beyond Tangy Tangerine and the Healthy Start Pack, noting he has sold Youngevity since the late 1990s and would never put his name on a product he did not fully believe in. He mentions a morning call with his friend AJ, whose father is doing better since starting nutritional supplements. Ben's core argument is blunt: skipping supplements does not merely mean missing out on optimal health, it means missing nutrients altogether, leaving people barely surviving rather than thriving. He adds what he calls a pillar of nutrition, that the more nutritionally deficient a person already is, the faster and more dramatically their body absorbs and responds to nutrients once they are finally supplied.
    Eight Chapters of Good Nutrition and the Standard American Life
    Ben pivots to his framework for understanding nutrition, what he calls the Eight Chapters of Good Nutrition, a simplified presentation he first delivered in 2011 and still teaches at Pharmacist Ben's Academy, his ten-dollar-a-month digital school with roughly ninety members. He lists the chapters as protein, fats, carbohydrates, water, fiber, vitamins, minerals and accessory nutrients, promising to spend coming shows unpacking each one starting with protein. He recalls the low-fat panic of the 1990s and 2000s, pointing to fat-free SnackWell's cookies as proof that cutting fat while loading up on sugar made people fatter, since fat is naturally satisfying while sugar invites overeating. Ben contrasts his like-minded Youngevity community with what he calls the standard American lifestyle of tacos, hamburgers, potato chips, alcohol and medication, which ends in death around age seventy-nine for men and eighty-one for women, far short of what he insists is the true human genetic lifespan of 120 years, a decline he traces back ten thousand years to the first processed grains.
    Hypothyroidism and the Triangle of Disease
    Ben describes that day's Academy lesson on hypothyroidism, citing Dr. Broda Barnes's book Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness, which he first read in the 1980s and still regards as correct that an underactive thyroid lies behind nearly every chronic degenerative disease, from heart disease and diabetes to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and autoimmune conditions. He notes that roughly eighty percent of hypothyroidism patients are women, a pattern he connects to the hormone estrogen, which he recalls pharmacy school calling the crap-show hormone. Because the thyroid itself cannot be directly treated, Ben argues doctors are left managing symptoms rather than causes. He introduces what he calls the triangle of disease, a pillar of alternative medicine holding that where a problem shows up, whether the heart, brain, liver or skin, is never where it actually began; treating the organ is like treating a rotten apple instead of the diseased tree, while the real chemistry causing the breakdown always sits further upstream, which he calls both frustrating and genuinely good news because upstream remains within a person's own control.
    Iodine, Tyrosine and the Thyroid's Chemistry
    Ben walks through the biology of thyroid hormone itself, explaining that the gland needs two ingredients to function: the element iodine, found mainly in the ocean and scarce in most diets outside seafood, seaweed, eggs and iodized salt, and the amino acid tyrosine, which also works as a mild stimulant on its own. He describes thyroid hormone as simply tyrosine with iodine attached, produced in two forms, T4 and T3. T4, he says, is the storage form, making up about ninety percent of output and lasting five to seven days in the body like a log waiting in a fireplace, while T3 is the active form, the actual flame that switches cells on to burn fuel and generate heat. He traces how the hypothalamus senses low thyroid hormone and signals the pea-sized pituitary gland, which releases TSH to the thyroid itself, the same hormone doctors test for, describing the whole relationship as a thermostat regulating the body's temperature and energy.
    Hashimoto's, Leaky Gut and Wilhelm Reich
    Ben identifies Hashimoto's disease, the autoimmune attack behind most hypothyroidism, as caused by toxicity reaching the blood through a leaky gut, or intestinal permeability, rather than any mysterious genetic fate, insisting a patched-up gut lets everything else in the body improve. He connects this to Wilhelm Reich, who died in prison after inventing the Orgone machine and argued that under chronic stress the body physically contracts, hunching and armoring itself into tiny pockets Ben calls pockets of death, while health lies in expansion, open posture, deep breathing and expansive emotions like love over fear. Ben praises bodywork, naming Rolfing and Reichian massage specifically, for releasing those contracted pockets, half-joking that government health spending should go toward massage and hot tubs rather than more medication. He closes the segment reiterating that roughly 130 autoimmune diseases exist, all traceable to the same toxic, leaky-gut origin rather than the bad-luck inheritance doctors often describe to patients and their families.
    Mitochondria, ATP and a Closing Charge to Listeners
    Ben turns to the cellular machinery behind fatigue, describing mitochondria as battery factories inside the body's roughly 100 trillion cells that convert glucose into ATP, the chemical energy that also produces the warmth of a healthy metabolism. He credits thyroid hormone, specifically T3, with instructing mitochondria to multiply and work harder, explaining why an underactive thyroid leaves people cold, tired and mentally slow, sometimes misdiagnosed with depression, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's when the true cause is thyroid or constipation-driven. He lists classic hypothyroid signs including dry skin, eyebrow hair loss, cracking nails, puffy eyes, swollen legs and a hoarse voice, citing his own ninety-four-year-old mother's hardened, swollen legs as an example nobody has investigated. Closing the hour, Ben recounts his friend Chris in Alabama, who called after hearing him on Coast to Coast AM with Parkinson's symptoms and felt better within a week on supplements. Ben signs off wishing listeners a happy Halloween, repeating his website, pharmacistben.com, and promising to return Monday.
    1 hr
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 28, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Mind Viruses, Medical Fraud, and the Fourfold Square of Health
    Pharmacist Ben flies solo this week, tracing the word "doctor" back to fraud, unpacking memes as mind viruses from the Golden Arches to the pandemic years, and following historian Jared Diamond's case against agriculture all the way to his own fourfold square of health.
    Opening Remarks and a Life Devoted to Nutrition
    Pharmacist Ben opens the hour alone, welcoming listeners to Aging Well and reintroducing himself as a nutritional pharmacist from Boulder, Colorado who uses supplements where other practitioners reach for pharmaceutical drugs. He gives out his call-in number, 888-627-6008, and his email, [email protected], along with his websites pharmacistben.com, pharmacistbensacademy.com, themineralway.com and formulationscienceLLC.com. He mentions he appeared on Coast to Coast AM the previous night, a show he does every six weeks to talk about Youngevity supplements, nutrition and lifestyle, and invites any listeners tuning in from that audience to call in. Reflecting on turning 66 and having worked online since 2011, he marvels at fifteen or sixteen years of videos and podcasts built around one idea: that people are not sick, they are starving, and that the body is a healing, regenerating system that only needs the right raw materials to do its work.
    The Word Doctor and the Medical Model
    Ben turns to etymology, noting that doctor originally meant teacher, from the Latin root for doctrine, but today to doctor something means to commit fraud, as in doctored tax forms or doctored evidence. He argues the modern medical model has become fraudulent in that same sense, not for true emergencies like broken bones or burns, which genuinely require medicalization, but for the lifestyle-driven conditions that he says make up eighty to eighty-five percent of the nation's multi-trillion-dollar health spending. He insists people are complicit rather than victims, having been infected with the cultural belief that doctors and drugs can restore health that diet and daily habits actually destroyed. He is careful to praise his many physician friends as good, caring people who dedicate their lives to easing suffering, drawing a distinction between the individuals practicing medicine and what he calls a broken, profit-driven system built around managing symptoms rather than correcting the underlying causes of disease.
    Memes as Mind Viruses
    Ben introduces the idea of the meme, tracing the word to biologist Richard Dawkins and his book The Selfish Gene, where memes were coined as a short form of memory, units of cultural information that spread through a population the way genes spread through a genome. He argues a meme is really a mind virus, an idea absorbed without examination simply because the culture handed it over, and offers examples: reaching for a moisturizer only because a mother and grandmother always did, or assuming a prescription drug advertised on television must be the answer to a diagnosis. He points to the Golden Arches and the Coca-Cola logo as classic memes capable of triggering hunger or thirst on sight, and argues that advertisers, marketers, and institutions including medicine and government all benefit from inoculating the public with memes that serve the institution rather than the individual, which is why he says most people make health decisions based on infection rather than logic.
    Biological Viruses and the Pandemic
    Turning from the abstract to the biological, Ben explains that a virus of any kind, computer, biological, or mental, shares one trait: it does not care about its host, the vector, it only wants to spread. He describes how a biological virus is nothing more than a piece of genetic information that hijacks a cell's DNA, forcing the DNA to manufacture more virus until the cell bursts and spreads infection further, and notes that trillions of viruses exist harmlessly in soil, air, water, and the human body at every moment. He then turns to what he calls one of history's great frauds, the pandemic of several years earlier, recalling how masks, lockdowns, and fines swept the country while fast-food lines stayed just as long, arguing the episode proved people were more frightened by media-driven mind-virus infection than genuinely protective of their health, and that many never got to see dying loved ones because of it.
    Medicine's History and the Fraud of Metrics
    Ben dates today's medical model to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, invoking John D. Rockefeller's involvement and arguing that pharmaceuticals became wildly profitable because a bottle of pills can cost patients thousands while containing mere specks of actual medicine made from petroleum byproducts. He coins the phrase ridiculous deficiency allowance for what agencies call the Recommended Dietary Allowance, arguing it keeps people deprived while deceptively reassuring them they are healthy. He revisits the 1970s case of Karen Ann Quinlan, kept alive on machines against her family's wishes, and recalls Jack Kevorkian's advocacy for allowing suffering patients to die, framing both as proof that medicine's mandate is survival rather than thriving. He also describes fibromyalgia as a textbook example of a condition with normal blood tests despite whole-body pain, arguing that cholesterol, thyroid, and other standard metrics are routinely normal in genuinely sick people because the tests were designed by the same companies selling the remedies.
    Agriculture's Mistake and the Fourfold Square of Health
    Citing historian Jared Diamond's claim that agriculture was the worst mistake in human history, Ben argues farming forced hunter-gatherers who worked two or three hours a day into twelve-hour labor, shrinking stature and health while birthing the hierarchies, laws, and governments needed to compel people to dig irrigation ditches. He traces a sprawling line from the Sumerian Empire and the Code of Hammurabi through the Epic of Gilgamesh to the biblical story of Moses, arguing much of the Old Testament, written in Babylon, borrowed earlier Babylonian material. He then lays out his framework for wellbeing: spiritual trust that everything is in working order, mental clarity free of mind viruses, emotional balance, and physical health built on his fourfold square of nutrition, respiration, movement, and rest, explaining hormesis and antifragility as the principles by which controlled stress, like lifting weights, makes muscles and the whole body stronger. He closes by noting no calls came in, plugging his websites and upcoming skin-care line before signing off until Saturday.
    1 hr
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 26, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    The Cell as the Root of Disease, Parkinson's, and a Caller's Synaptiv Story
    Pharmacist Ben spends a solo hour making the case that every disease, from cancer to Parkinson's, is really a cellular problem rather than an organ problem, before producer Doug puts caller AJ on the air to describe how one dose of the supplement Synaptiv seemed to calm his father's shaking hands.
    Opening Remarks and the Worldview Puzzle
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show from his usual seat, giving out the call-in number 888-627-6008 and inviting listeners who enjoy his eclectic mix of philosophy, history, religion, chemistry and biology to join him on Zoom. He builds an extended metaphor comparing a listener's worldview to a jigsaw puzzle, arguing that every small insight that clicks into place delivers a hit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter he says drives people toward little daily wins like opening a pistachio or finishing the dishes. He quotes Jerry Garcia's line that the Grateful Dead are "like licorice," not for everyone but beloved by those who love it, and applies the same idea to his own niche audience. He mentions a mysterious listener who once mailed him a thumb drive containing years of his old daily radio programs, and says his real goal is to get everyone to love the cells of their own body as much as he does.
    The Cell as the Root of All Disease
    Ben argues there is strictly speaking no such thing as prostate, breast, skin or liver cancer, only prostate cell, breast cell, skin cell and liver cell cancer, insisting the distinction matters because modern medicine treats organs and tissues while ignoring the cell underneath. He walks through the word cytotoxic, explaining that the Latin root cyto- always means cell, and argues that statin drugs and beta-blockers are cytotoxic poisons a cell will never voluntarily absorb the way it eagerly takes up vitamin C. He describes the liver as an immigration checkpoint that vets every foreign, or "xeno," molecule entering the bloodstream, and claims pharmaceutical companies set doses well above what cells actually need because the body works to clear the drug out. For Ben, failing to see the cell as the nexus of health has built a medical industry whose interventions often weaken the very cells they are meant to help.
    Cell Theory and the Rise of Drug Culture
    Turning to history, Ben notes that cell theory is barely two hundred years old, emerging in the early nineteenth century once microscopy let scientists see that the body is built from countless invisible, self-organizing units rather than being one continuous mass. He says drug theory arose around the same time, pointing out that the very first medications, including aspirin, opium, morphine and heroin, were developed purely to relieve pain, a problem he calls almost unimaginable before modern pain relief existed. He recounts a friend traveling to India for cheap dental extractions who found pain medication largely unused there, describing teeth pulled with no relief at all. From that history Ben traces a line to today's drug culture, citing a figure that roughly sixty percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug, which he calls evidence of a system built to manage symptoms rather than heal the cells underneath them.
    From Prokaryotes to Mitochondria
    Ben marvels that a cell, a hundredth the size of a pinhead, contains six feet of coiled DNA, an internal skeleton and thousands of working parts, yet needs only food, oxygen and a clean place to function. He traces cellular evolution back three and a half billion years, describing primitive prokaryote cells, essentially bacteria that could only ferment sugar and form slimes, until roughly five hundred million years later they symbiotically merged with early mitochondria to form eukaryotes, the first cells capable of using oxygen. He frames this oxygen-driven "quantum combustion" as the same chemistry as a fire, calling the energy inside a mitochondrion comparable, relatively speaking, to bolts of lightning. He argues that sugar burns out the mitochondria, that calorie restriction and fasting protect them, and that this is exactly why every documented longevity study points to eating less as the clearest path to a longer life.
    Parkinson's Disease as Cellular Inflammation
    Ben shifts to Parkinson's disease, which he has researched and discussed with patients for years, describing it as inflammation localized to the substantia nigra, the brain's small, dark dopamine-producing region. He links dopamine to the pleasure of completing small tasks, joking about Bob Weir's remark that fame spoiled him because he stopped bothering with pistachios that are hard to open, and contrasts that with Parkinson's patients who cannot even lift a cup or button a shirt once that dopamine supply is damaged. He criticizes recent medical headlines describing low-dose radiation trials and brain stimulation studies at the Mayo Clinic, arguing such interventions ignore the underlying cellular dysfunction. Because a cell only needs food, oxygen and cleanliness to avoid inflammation, Ben insists much of Parkinson's is driven by nutritional deficiency and is, in many cases he has personally witnessed, reversible or at least mitigated through proper nutrition rather than pharmaceutical management.
    AJ's Call About His Father's Tremor
    With time running short, producer Doug tells Ben that caller AJ has been waiting on the line, and Ben brings him on to share a story about his father. AJ explains his dad is in and out of rehab with hands shaking so badly he cannot open a jar of mayonnaise, and that he normally refuses AJ's supplements entirely, including selenium and Youngevity's Rebound and Tangy. His father agreed to take only one pill of a product called Synaptiv instead of the recommended two, and by the next visit his shaking had visibly calmed. The two then discuss why people distrust family advice over a doctor's, with AJ comparing blind faith in physicians to believing in Santa Claus or the Wizard of Oz, and Ben citing the book "The Social Transformation of American Medicine" on how doctors gained their elevated status. Ben thanks AJ, closes the show, and signs off until Wednesday.
    1 hr
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 24, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Microinflammation, a Mother's Decline, and a Cardiac Comeback with Dr. Drew Peterson
    Pharmacist Ben opens solo with reflections on his mother's decline and the cellular biology of inflammation before welcoming his longtime friend Dr. Drew Peterson, a Chinese-medicine practitioner and Youngevity educator, to tell the story of his own near-fatal heart emergency and the supplement program that brought him back.
    Opening Remarks and a Mother's Decline
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show from his usual seat, giving out the call-in number 888-627-6008 and inviting listeners with questions or nutritional success stories to join him. He dedicates the hour to his mother, 93 going on 94, recalling a recent visit to New York where he saw how frail and forgetful she has become, a woman who never knew about supplementation, exercise or meditation. The sight convinces him he is "26 years behind her" and spurs him to devote the next two or three decades to helping himself and his listeners age well. He traces his own interest in nutrition to his years as an athlete and pharmacy student in the late 1970s and 1980s, insisting there is no such thing as a drug-deficiency disease, only underlying nutritional deficiency, and introduces his framework of spiritual, mental, emotional and physical health alongside nutrition, respiration, movement and rest.
    A Nutritional Pharmacist's Origins
    Ben recounts starting his pharmacy career at a Kmart Pharmacy in Boulder, Colorado in the 1980s, when recommending vitamins and minerals alongside prescription medication was considered a radical idea, long before the internet or health-food stores existed. He describes gradually dropping the drugs altogether and becoming a full-time nutritional pharmacist, a path that has let him help, by his own estimate, more people than he can count. He credits a sense of purpose for a satisfied life and lays out his framework for understanding the body: SMEP, standing for spiritual, mental, emotional and physical health. Of the 50,000-plus medical diagnoses recognized in the United States, he argues they are all variations on the same underlying problem, stagnation, comparing the clogged, degenerating body to the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, which once caught fire because it had grown so polluted and stagnant.
    Macro and Microinflammation at the Cellular Level
    Turning to the biology of disease, Ben explains that inflammation, far from being an enemy, is the body's protective response, citing the classical Latin signs dolor, calor, rubor and tumor, pain, heat, redness and swelling. He distinguishes the visible "macroinflammation" of a black eye or sprained ankle from an invisible "microinflammation" occurring among the body's roughly 100 trillion cells. Comparing a dying cell to a decomposing body that releases toxins, the same reason medieval armies threw corpses over castle walls to spread disease, he argues that dying cells leak chemicals the body must constantly contain. A single dead cell causes no noticeable problem, he says, but the inflammatory burden accumulates silently for years until a critical mass is reached and a person suddenly seems to develop Parkinson's disease, arthritis or diabetes "out of nowhere," when the process had actually been building unnoticed since childhood.
    Parkinson's, the Gut, and a Spiritual Detour
    Ben previews a deeper discussion of Parkinson's disease planned for a future broadcast, noting that two recent articles support his longstanding claim that the condition begins in the gut: one linking Helicobacter pylori infection to higher Parkinson's risk, another by Dr. Russell Blaylock describing Parkinson's as fundamentally inflammatory and driven by excitotoxicity, with constipation as an early, decades-ahead warning sign now sometimes treated with fecal implants. He widens the lens into protection and stagnation as a life philosophy, arguing that living in constant self-protection, fed by anxious news consumption, itself causes disease. The monologue drifts into spiritual territory, describing God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, and equating that omnipresence with the physics concept of nonlocality, referencing the book "How the Hippies Saved Physics" to connect quantum entanglement with Eastern and Christian ideas about the self being part of something larger.
    Introducing Dr. Drew Peterson's Heart Crisis
    Ben welcomes his longtime friend Dr. Drew Peterson, a doctor of chiropractic, acupuncturist and Chinese-medicine therapist who fields calls and emails for Youngevity and has assisted more than 16,000 people over eleven years. Peterson traces his path from marine biology and hydroponic nutrient research for crops destined for the International Space Station, through soil science at the University of Vermont, chiropractic school in Portland, a Chinese-medicine apprenticeship in Florida where he watched a Taiwanese master cure children's leukemia with herbs, and botanical medicine training at the University of Colorado. He then describes his own recent crisis: after a stressful recertification exam, he developed ventricular tachycardia, a racing heartbeat of 170 with no chest pain, was rushed by ambulance for cardioversion, and learned an artery nicknamed "the widowmaker" was blocked, the legacy, doctors said, of a congenital heart defect he had unknowingly compensated for since childhood soccer games.
    Recovery, Supplements, and the Youngevity Pitch
    After a double bypass about two years ago left him weak for months, Peterson says supplementation let him cut nearly 90 percent of the drugs doctors wanted him on, refusing a statin after reading about astronaut-physician Dr. Graveline's memory loss and avoiding blood thinners that caused spontaneous bruising in favor of essential fatty acids, Coenzyme Q10, two grams of vitamin C daily, Youngevity's Ultimate Daily Classic and Gluco-Gel for his gums and connective tissue. He credits Youngevity's Plant Derived Minerals and Ultimate Daily Classic with helping one of his dialysis patients urinate again after three years, and the two discuss how aging digestive enzymes drain the body's metabolic reserves. Closing the hour, Ben thanks Peterson, promotes Youngevity as both a health regimen and a low-cost business opportunity, plugs Pharmacist Ben's Academy at ten dollars a month, mentions an upcoming Coast to Coast AM appearance, and signs off until Monday's broadcast.
    1 hr
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 14, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Dirty Blood, the Mighty 90, and Why No Drug Can Heal the Body
    Pharmacist Ben spends the hour on cellular biology, "dirty blood," and his case that no prescription drug can actually heal the body, before his longtime friend and caller AJ joins to debate word origins, Youngevity products and a glaucoma case, with producer Doug phoning in questions.
    Opening Remarks on Nutrition Versus Medicine
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show from Boulder, Colorado, giving out his call-in number, 888-627-6008, and inviting listeners to share success stories about nutritional supplementation. He introduces himself as a nutritional pharmacist who favors vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids over what he calls toxic pharmaceutical drugs and deadly medical procedures, blaming iatrogenic, hospital-induced illness for a large share of American deaths. He notes the United States has more drugs, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies than any other country yet remains the sickest and fattest, with life expectancy stuck at 79 for men and 81 for women against what he calls a genetic lifespan of 120 years. Reflecting on his pharmacy career beginning in 1986, he says he never felt comfortable using drugs to make the body better, though he credits pain medication, from his own knee surgery, and antibiotics as genuinely useful, while arguing that drugs for chronic lifestyle conditions quietly deplete the body's stores of magnesium, copper, zinc and vitamin C.
    The Cell, DNA, and the Mighty 90
    Ben turns to cellular biology, describing the roughly 100 trillion cells that make up the human body, each about a hundredth the size of a pinhead yet packed with hundreds of thousands of constantly rebuilding working parts. He marvels that each cell holds six feet of DNA, enough that all the DNA in a human body stretched end to end would reach Saturn and back six times, and frames this complexity as evidence of a divine design rather than randomness. He explains that a cell asks for almost nothing: food, oxygen and a clean place to work, yet most people fail to provide even that. Ben argues the degenerative process begins at birth for most people and proceeds so gradually, cell by cell, that illness seems to strike suddenly, "boom," out of nowhere, when in fact it has been building for years. He names the "Mighty 90," the vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids he calls essential, as the raw material the body needs to keep that construction going.
    Why Drugs Can't Heal and Heart Disease Myths
    Moving to his critique of conventional medicine, Ben insists there is not a single prescription drug on earth capable of healing the body, only hiding symptoms, while nutrients supply the raw material the body uses to heal itself. He singles out heart disease treatment, saying cardiologists prescribe beta-blockers and calcium channel blockers to deliberately slow a struggling heart, or use ablation to cauterize it back into rhythm, procedures he calls absurd even as he insists he holds no grudge against individual doctors. He cites statistics that sixty percent of Americans carry at least one chronic degenerative disease, forty percent have two, and most people over 65 take four or five medications, calling the numbers a case of "reductio ad absurdum." He recommends Youngevity's Healthy Start Pack, delivered monthly for about $120, as a simplified way to get all ninety essential nutrients, and recounts decades of callers telling him they came off their medications, lost weight, and gained energy and mobility after starting supplementation.
    Calorie Restriction and Engineered Food
    Ben pivots to eating habits, arguing that calorie restriction is the only scientifically proven way to extend lifespan, tracing the word "calorie" to the Latin for heat and comparing an overheated body to an overworked engine needing a cooling fan. He says most people consume three to four thousand calories a day against an actual need closer to eight hundred to a thousand, a surplus he blames on food deliberately engineered in laboratories to maximize pleasure and repeat consumption rather than nourish the body. He links this engineered pleasure to the broader stresses of modern life, from money and politics to the news, arguing that eating remains one of the few pleasures left to people and so resists change. He offers one piece of good news: once someone starts a nutritional supplement program like Youngevity's, appetite naturally decreases, so overweight listeners tend to lose weight without having to fight their cravings, a side effect he calls one of the products' hidden bonuses.
    AJ Calls In: Words, Minerals, and Glaucoma
    Ben brings on his friend AJ, a self-described autodidact who has studied nutrition on his own since taking a health coaching course, and the two spar affectionately over Ben's habit of turning nutrition into what AJ calls "a church-like affair." AJ reminds listeners that Youngevity has lower-cost entry points than Beyond Tangy Tangerine, naming the Basic Mighty 90 pack and the Plant Derived Minerals, roughly sixty of the ninety essential minerals, for about $24. He shares a client's story of glaucoma whose bloodshot eyes and excess weight improved within a month or two on the products, which Ben ties to underlying blood sugar problems, or "dysglycemia," rather than full-blown diabetes. The conversation wanders into etymology, with Ben and AJ tracing "authority" to "author," "doctor" to the Latin for teacher, and "grammar" to "grimoire," a book of magic, referencing the book "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" to argue that people live inside labels rather than reality itself.
    Dirty Blood, Leaky Gut, and the Close
    AJ relays a question from producer Doug about whether young blood can rejuvenate an older body, and Ben answers that platelet-rich plasma treatments show it can help on a smaller scale, while giving blood prompts the body to manufacture fresh blood, provided nutrition is adequate. Ben introduces his recurring idea of "dirty blood," arguing that a leaky gut lets undigested food particles, bacteria and immune chemicals into the bloodstream, driving the hypercoagulable, inflamed blood behind most chronic disease, and notes in passing that the blood thinner warfarin was originally developed as rat poison. He fields Doug's question about morning gas, tying it to circadian rhythms and recommending the supplement i26 for chronic bloating, and briefly mentions Pope Leo's lung adenocarcinoma as a condition he believes nutrition could help. After signing off and promising a future show on cancer, Ben stays on the line with Doug and AJ, trading supplement dosing advice and swapping recommendations for other shows on the network, including one called "Reclaiming Authenticity."
    1 hr 18 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 12, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Bone-Building Vitamin C, Blood Acidity, and the Case That Aging Is Subclinical Scurvy
    Pharmacist Ben spends a solo hour connecting vitamin C to strong bones, blood pH and the body's calcification process, taking calls from Nora on osteoporosis, producer Doug on a worrying brain scan, and Academy member Bruce, before arguing that much of aging itself is a form of "subclinical scurvy."
    Opening Remarks and the Ridiculous Deficiency Allowance
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show from Boulder, Colorado, welcoming listeners, thanking the "Pharmacist Ben Singers," and giving out his call-in number, 888-627-6008, for questions, comments and success stories. He directs listeners to pharmacistben.com and pharmacistbensacademy.com for his podcasts, videos and daily blog posts, mentioning a recent post on lavender oil. He introduces himself as a nutritional pharmacist who prefers supplements to pharmaceutical drugs, describing the body as a divinely designed healing system that needs raw materials, the "mighty 90" essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids. He attacks the Recommended Dietary Allowance, which he nicknames the "ridiculous deficiency allowance," arguing it only prevents outright deficiency disease rather than supporting thriving health, and uses vitamin C as his example, saying the RDA of roughly 70 to 80 milligrams is ten to a hundred times too low for anyone who wants strong collagen, resilient bones and resistance to infection.
    Nora's Call and the Vitamin C Bone Connection
    Ben recalls his own knee surgery decades earlier, admitting he begged for morphine on the gurney and defending the real place of prescription drugs for acute pain, before taking a call from Nora, a listener from the BBS Radio website who asks about strengthening bones for her osteoporosis. Ben explains that bone is mostly collagen, the same protein that keeps skin from wrinkling, and that vitamin C is the one nutrient without which collagen, and therefore bone, cannot be built. He corrects Nora's assumption that oranges are a strong source, noting an orange holds only about 30 milligrams against a need of roughly 3,000, and names chili peppers as a far richer source. He lists bone broth, magnesium, zinc, strontium and silica, recommending Abkit's liquid silica gel, as further bone-builders, and credits weight-bearing movement, citing astronauts who return from zero gravity with weakened bones, while warning that sugar, cigarettes and drugs all break connective tissue down.
    Doug's Question and the Logic of Calcification
    Producer Doug raises a question about an acquaintance whose brain scan showed white spots, possibly described as calcification, accompanied by mild headaches. Ben says he cannot confirm whether the spots are calcium but frames all disease as "MBFA disease," his tongue-in-cheek shorthand for "my body is falling apart," and explains that the brain, only two percent of body weight but consuming twenty percent of nutrients, deteriorates easily under nutritional deficiency. He walks through blood pH, explaining the scale from zero to fourteen using battery acid, Coca-Cola, water and Ivory Soap as landmarks, and argues the blood must stay close to 7.35. He describes dying cells releasing acid, comparing it to besieging armies throwing corpses over castle walls to spread disease, and explains that bone itself is a calcium depot that releases buffering calcium into acidic blood, a chronic process he blames for both osteoporosis and calcification in the brain, skin, kidneys, thyroid and heart.
    Repair, Not Disease, and the Call for Supplementation
    Ben extends the acidity discussion to amyloid plaques and cholesterol, arguing both are the body's repair patches for degenerating brain and blood vessel tissue rather than diseases in themselves, and criticizes medicine for suppressing repair processes with drugs that can only shut things down, never rebuild tissue. He insists every human body retains the capacity for restoration if given proper raw materials, and urges listeners toward Youngevity's Healthy Start Pack or, as an entry point, Beyond Tangy Tangerine, promising noticeable results within one or two days. Reflecting on his own age of sixty-six against a human genetic lifespan he puts at 120 years, he urges listeners of every age to begin supplementing to avoid becoming, in his words, "a ward of the medical model." He returns briefly to Doug's question, suggesting the friend's blood sugar history matters, and cites the book of Kings' line that "my people perish for lack of knowledge" as his motivation for the show and for Pharmacist Ben's Academy.
    Bruce's Call and the Youngevity Story
    A caller named Bruce, a Pharmacist Ben's Academy member and Youngevity distributor under a sponsor named Becca, phones in simply to thank Ben and praise the Academy's personal, one-on-one question-and-answer format. Ben thanks Bruce warmly, jokes that the show's loyal audience consists of Bruce, Nora, Doug and a listener named Dakota commenting in, and credits his friend AJ for building the pharmacistben.com and pharmacistbensacademy.com websites. He recounts following Youngevity since the 1990s, a network-marketing company founded by Dr. Joel Wallach, whom he credits with delivering hundreds of presentations a year before retiring, and frames his own broadcasting as carrying that mission forward. He pitches the business opportunity alongside the health message, telling listeners who like the Youngevity products and the entrepreneurial lifestyle that distributing offers both a platform to spread nutritional education and a way to earn income.
    Vitamin C, Subclinical Scurvy, and Closing
    Returning to vitamin C, Ben calls it the "Babe Ruth of vitamins," noting humans are among the few animals that cannot make their own and that stressed animals naturally produce more, which he ties to adrenal health. He explains that severe deficiency causes scurvy, in which connective tissue dissolves and blood vessels rupture, citing Dr. Matthias Rath's book "Why Animals Don't Get Heart Attacks," and argues modern aging, from wrinkles to osteoporosis to heart disease, is really "subclinical scurvy." He offers a cold-prevention protocol of a gallon of water, zinc picolinate with copper glycinate, three to five grams of vitamin C daily and extra sleep, and briefly notes vitamin C's role in intravenous cancer protocols. Closing the hour, he previews a future discussion of connective tissue and skincare, repeats his contact details and broadcast schedule of Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays on BBS Radio, and signs off until Wednesday.
    59 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 10, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    World Mental Health Day, the Safety Nervous System, and the Secret Behind HLH
    On World Mental Health Day, Pharmacist Ben spends a solo hour on the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, tracing loneliness, anxiety and a listener's wife's HLH diagnosis back to how safe or unsafe the body feels.
    Opening Remarks and World Mental Health Day
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show from Boulder, Colorado, thanking Doug Newsom and his brother Donald Newsom for his slot on BBS Radio and giving out his call-in number, 888-627-6008, for questions, comments and success stories. He introduces himself as a nutritional pharmacist who favors vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids over pharmaceutical drugs, tracing his skepticism back to pharmacy school in the 1980s and to his work in skin care and nutrition at the Blistex Corporation since 1983. He promotes his free Zoom calls through Pharmacist Ben's Academy, including a session on plant-derived colloidal minerals set for the next morning at live.dailywithdoc.com. He observes that despite unprecedented numbers of doctors, drugs, hospitals and insurance companies, longevity has stalled while cancer, heart disease and mental illness keep rising. He announces that October 10th is World Mental Health Day, quoting the Reverend John Watson's line that everyone is fighting a hard battle, and turns toward a discussion of loneliness hiding behind ordinary, successful-looking lives.
    Loneliness Epidemic and the Safety Nervous System
    Ben expands on the loneliness epidemic, citing World Health Organization figures that one in six people worldwide feels lonely and that 470 million suffer from anxiety disorders, even though roughly six billion people use the internet. He calls this contradiction the lonely crowd, people surrounded by connection yet starved for trust, affection and recognition. He distinguishes loneliness from solitude, noting that someone living alone can feel connected while someone surrounded by family can feel profoundly isolated. Comparing people to bees removed from a hive, he argues humans evolved to depend on tribe and community, and that rejection activates the amygdala, the brain's survival center. He recalls the isolation measures of recent years as the worst possible response to crisis, and credits Youngevity's community of distributors as the kind of tribe that counters loneliness. He promises to finally explain the nervous system behind safety and emergency that he introduced on a previous broadcast.
    Two Nervous Systems and the Senses
    Ben explains that the nervous system translates the outside world, sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, into internal biochemistry, and that every sense ultimately works through touch, whether light touching the eye or molecules touching the tongue. He describes a voluntary nervous system governing movement and an autonomic nervous system running the heart, liver and digestion automatically, itself split into two branches. The sympathetic nervous system, the fight, flight or freeze response, dilates the pupils, speeds the heart and shuts down digestion to prepare the body for danger, a leftover from outrunning predators. The parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest response, constricts the pupils, slows the heart and restores digestion. Ben argues most people, especially the chronically sick, spend too much time sympathetic, and that watching the news or arguing during meals actively suppresses digestive juices, since the body was never designed to eat while fleeing a threat.
    Brainwaves, Open Focus, and Vulnerable Love
    Ben connects the two nervous systems to brainwave states, explaining that slower alpha and theta waves accompany parasympathetic relaxation and suggestibility, while faster beta waves accompany sympathetic focus and critical thinking. He notes that commercials and hypnotists exploit slow, rhythmic movement, like syrup pouring on pancakes or a swinging pendulum, to induce an alpha state where viewers believe rather than question. He adds that shifting from narrow, central vision to wide peripheral vision, open focus, is one of the fastest ways to trigger parasympathetic calm, a technique he says spiritual traditions have used for centuries. Turning to practical remedies, Ben says the quickest way out of chronic fight or flight is to love or care for something vulnerable, citing soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan who are given dogs. Because a dog, a baby or a child is weaker and safe, caring for it activates the safety nervous system more effectively than any supplement, drug or surgery.
    Warm Baths, Blood Pressure, and Original Separation
    Ben walks through physical signs of each nervous state, from dry mouth and chronic constipation under sympathetic stress to increased saliva and relaxed digestion under parasympathetic calm, citing a listener's email about a seven-year-old with daytime bladder accidents as a case of sympathetic overdrive. He recommends a warm bath as one of the fastest parasympathetic triggers, explaining that it echoes the total safety of the womb before birth, which he calls a primal wound of separation. Drawing on the Latin root of sin, meaning without or separate, Ben argues that disconnection, not any specific food or germ, is the deepest cause of disease, and that the cross symbolizes reconnection between people and God. He challenges listeners on blood pressure medication to take a reading, sit in a warm bath for ten to twenty minutes, then measure again, predicting a dramatic drop, and recommends Youngevity's Healthy Brain and Heart Pak alongside the practice.
    Robert's Letter and the Offending Agent
    Closing the hour, Ben reads an email from a listener named Robert whose wife has been diagnosed with HLH, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, and is being treated with steroids and chemotherapy. He breaks down the Latin roots, blood cells, white cells and tissue, to explain it as a severe autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks the body's own cells, producing fever, an enlarged liver, rashes and neurological symptoms. Ben insists every chronic illness, including HLH, is inflammatory and defensive, meaning some offending agent has entered the bloodstream, almost always through food, since the digestive tract is the body's one major opening to the outside world. He argues modern food is engineered not to nourish the body but to please the brain, making natural eating harder to sustain than processed alternatives. Ben closes by directing listeners to pharmacistben.com and Pharmacist Ben's Academy, promoting tomorrow's free Zoom call on plant-derived colloidal minerals, and signing off until Monday's broadcast.
    58 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 7, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Dirty Blood, Dysbiosis, and the Logic Behind Every "Idiopathic" Disease
    Pharmacist Ben spends a solo hour tracing skin problems, autoimmune disease and a listener's bone condition back to a single root cause: what gets into the bloodstream through a compromised gut. Along the way he revisits his pharmacy-school doubts about prescription drugs, his decades formulating skin care, and a caller's misdiagnosed "acne."
    Opening Remarks and Nutritional Pharmacy Roots
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show from Boulder, Colorado, greeting listeners and giving out his call-in number for questions, comments and Youngevity success stories. He urges anyone not already supplementing to start with Beyond Tangy Tangerine, explaining that a deficient body absorbs nutrients fastest, like a dry sponge. He introduces himself as a reformed prescription drug pharmacist who grew suspicious of the medical model in pharmacy school after watching a training film about a revolutionary new beta-blocker drug, later known as propranolol, in which fifteen minutes of praise were followed by forty-five minutes of side effects read aloud. He recalls his years as a bodybuilder discovering that nutrients could give an edge, and concludes that most sickness reflects nutritional deficiency rather than a missing drug. He frames America's spending on doctors, hospitals and insurance as proof that medicalization has failed, setting up his decision to practice what he calls nutritional pharmacy.
    Forty-Three Years Studying the Skin
    Ben describes his parallel career as a skin-care chemist, recalling that while his pharmacy classmates earned internship hours in drugstores, he spent four years working for Dr. Tony Jones, the inventor of Blistex, learning to formulate topical products and grow skin cells. He says he has studied and practiced dermatological pharmacy for forty-three years, since 1983, and argues that skin and nutrition are inseparable, since healthy skin requires adequate vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, protein and quality fats. He criticizes the multibillion-dollar skin-care industry for chasing exotic ingredients while missing what he calls the real secret, concentrated nutrients delivered both internally and topically. Ben insists that almost no skin problem, whether acne, psoriasis, eczema, dryness or premature aging, is truly caused on the skin itself; it is nearly always a systemic issue surfacing on the surface. He says explaining this to clients, more than any product he sells, is what has repeatedly changed people's skin and their lives.
    A Caller From Mexico and the Trouble With Beans
    Ben describes a conversation that day with a woman in Mexico whose dermatologist diagnosed acne, which he says is a misdiagnosis. True acne, he explains, develops in the T-zone from cells dividing rapidly inside a follicle, while her condition, blemishes spread diffusely across the whole face, is what he calls a macular, immune-driven rash rather than acne. He traces her trouble to beans and legumes, staples of the Mexican diet, explaining that seeds carry natural anti-nutrients called lectins meant to discourage predators, and noting that ricin, the poison associated with Cold War-era assassinations, is itself derived from a bean molecule. He says vegetarians, who rely heavily on legumes, are especially prone to these inflammatory reactions despite believing their diet is uniquely healthy. Ben predicts that once the woman removes the offending foods, her skin will visibly improve within days and fully clear within roughly one to two skin-turnover cycles, about twenty-eight to fifty-six days.
    Reactions, Not Diseases, and Dirty Blood
    Ben argues that the word disease is misleading and prefers to call every health problem a reaction, a response to an action, meaning something entering the bloodstream, almost always through food. He cites a Telegraph report on research from Deep Science Ventures finding that vegetables are roughly half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s because of declining soil quality, meaning people must eat twice as much produce to get the same minerals. Ben says the human body is roughly two million years old but is being fed a food supply that changed entirely within the last century, a mismatch he compares to altering evolution's clock one second before midnight. He introduces a raisin-bread metaphor, describing the body as cells embedded in an extracellular matrix, a word he traces to the Latin for womb or mother, and argues that when the blood feeding that matrix turns thick and hypercoagulable, every chronic illness from arthritis to cancer to Meniere's disease follows the same root cause.
    Birth, Gut Bacteria, and the Intestinal Wall
    Ben traces chronic illness back to birth, explaining that babies passing through the birth canal are coated in bacteria that colonize the intestine and, he says, effectively supply genetic material the body's roughly twenty thousand genes cannot provide alone, pointing to the Human Genome Project's discovery of far more proteins than genes to explain them. He warns that the thirty percent of babies delivered by Caesarean section miss this bacterial bath, and that babies born to unhealthy mothers, or who are formula-fed rather than breastfed, inherit compromised immune systems from day one. This chain of events produces dysbiosis, his term for disordered gut bacteria, which he says inevitably inflames the intestinal lining. Ben calls that lining the frontier between the outside world and the bloodstream, the single point through which everything that triggers disease must pass, and argues it explains conditions from acne to atherosclerosis to autoimmune disease without needing any diagnosis labeled idiopathic.
    A Listener's DISH Diagnosis and Looking Ahead
    Ben reads a listener email about a wife diagnosed with DISH, diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, a condition of excess bone growth that doctors label idiopathic. He reframes the word as inflammatory rather than unexplained, arguing that inflammation disrupts the regulated, step-by-step maturation of cells so they keep growing unchecked, the same mechanism he says underlies acne, fibroids, cysts and cancer. He recommends listeners keep a food diary, citing a vegetarian caller whose skin, menstrual and fibromyalgia symptoms improved once she removed avocados, which he links to histamine. Running short on time, Ben promises to continue the discussion of DISH and introduce the idea of love versus fear as the two basic postures toward life on the next broadcast. He closes by repeating his contact email, inviting listeners to his Friday Zoom calls and Pharmacist Ben's Academy, reaffirming his decades-long endorsement of Youngevity's Beyond Tangy Tangerine, and signing off until Saturday's show.
    1 hr
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 5, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Peer Advocacy, Social Care Networks, and the Gordian Knot of Health with Giovanna Marc
    Pharmacist Ben welcomes peer advocate and PhD Giovanna Marc to talk about her journey through mental health crises, her work as a peer specialist, and New York's Medicaid social care pilot. The hour also covers pharmacy history, engineered food, nutrition, and a closing argument that the gut is where health problems begin.
    Pharmacy Roots, Toxic Drugs, and Engineered Food
    Pharmacist Ben opens the hour by describing pharmacy as a practice rooted in food, herbs and botanicals before synthetic drugs took over in the middle of the nineteenth century. He argues that people now take prescriptions as an ordinary part of life, even though every drug must be cleared from the body using nutrients such as B vitamins, vitamin C, magnesium and zinc. He recalls his early years as a pharmacist in the 1980s, when he began suggesting supplements to patients and was let go from a Kmart pharmacy. Ben then turns to processed food, describing excitotoxins such as monosodium glutamate as additives that make food hard to resist. He presents nutritional supplementation as a way to offset an imperfect diet, mentions his Pharmacist Ben's Academy, and sets up the rest of the hour with a promise to talk about mental health.
    Introducing Dr. Giovanna Marc and Her Story
    Ben introduces his guest, Dr. Giovanna Marc, as a PhD and peer advocate who helps people reach mental health services, food assistance and other community resources. He describes a close friend who struggled with alcoholism, drug use and delusions while relying on Medicaid, and says he found it nearly impossible to find good care for her. Before inviting Marc to speak, he asks her to share how she came to the work and what she has endured. Marc begins by telling listeners she was a teen mother who later lost a child, then lost another child after a period of improvement. She says she has lived with agoraphobia, has been on medication for most of her life, and has spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Ben responds with repeated expressions of amazement and tells her she has turned her tragedy into something that helps people.
    Peer Specialists, Howie the Harp, and Advocacy Work
    Marc explains her early attempts to find work after years of crisis, saying she kept trying even after a job as a peer specialist did not last. She credits Julio Medina, who runs Exodus Transitional in New York City, with taking her under his wing, and she recalls completing a two-week mental health work development program before landing that first position. Ben asks what a peer specialist is, and Marc answers that peers use their lived experience to help others going through similar situations. She describes Howie the Harp, the training program named for advocate Howard Geld, which she says began in New York in 1995. An internship at CASES, a reentry program, led her to return to school, and she later earned a PhD in organizational innovation and change leadership, with a thesis on the emergent peer workforce in hybrid employment settings. Ben calls her work turning personal tragedy into help for others, something he compares to the Lord's work.
    Social Care Networks and the Medicaid Pilot
    Marc describes her nonprofit, Multi Assistance Resource Centers, which she says is entirely peer-led and helps people navigate services. She explains that much of its current work involves New York's Medicaid waiver 1115, which she describes as a social care network addressing social needs rather than medical ones. Her example is a person worried about six months of unpaid rent, a light bill near shutoff, and children who must still get to school. Marc says addressing those problems can keep people out of emergency rooms, and she lists weekly food subscription boxes and transportation to work, school, doctor visits and court. Ben is astonished that government recognizes financial stress as a cause of illness, and asks how the program is paid for. Marc answers that it runs through Medicaid, while Ben says he doubts the government has money for it. She adds that the program is a pilot in New York State with an end date of March 2027. Ben asks her to send him a link so he can learn more.
    Paranoia, Food, and Supplements in Daily Life
    Ben asks whether people are going crazy these days, and Marc says they are more paranoid and that today's constant video makes everything visible. Marc says she is 51 and Ben says he is 66. Ben argues that the mental health crisis may be even more significant than chronic degenerative disease, and Marc agrees, saying people doubt what they see and hear. Ben asks how much of mental health is nutritional, emotional or spiritual, and Marc says she would blame most of it on nutrition, pointing to fruits and vegetables distributed free in the Bronx at Hunts Point. Ben reacts with surprise at the price of a banana at a Whole Foods market. Marc describes her morning supplements and says that at first she felt dizzy and nauseous, and that Beyond Tangy Tangerine caused gassiness until she took a smaller dose. She says that since she began taking it, her mind is clearer, she enjoys going out more, and she still has challenges, although she is more consistent now. Ben calls her testimony remarkable.
    Meniere's Syndrome, the Gordian Knot, and Closing Remarks
    Ben closes with a story about a friend who has Meniere's disease, which he describes as an inner ear condition linked to dizziness, vertigo, balance problems and migraines. He calls the problem a rotten piece of fruit whose real cause is in the soil, and he argues that Meniere's always appears alongside digestive, blood sugar or other problems. Using the legend of the Gordian knot, he says the medical model tries to untangle symptoms when it should cut them off at the root, which he places in the intestine. He recommends a food diary, eliminating problem foods, and taking Beyond Tangy Tangerine, with a broader nutrient pack for more complete support. Ben says he expects his listeners to notice a difference within a few days to a week, and he promises to explain more on the next episode. He thanks Marc for her work, previews his Wednesday broadcast, and signs off.
    1 hr

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