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, 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
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, October 3, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Dementia as Arthritis of the Brain, Thiamine, and Calorie Restriction
    Pharmacist Ben opens his Saturday broadcast on the Mighty 90 essential nutrients and his years as a nutritional pharmacist, then argues that dementia is a nutritional and lifestyle problem rather than a mystery. He draws on his father's nursing home story, blood sugar and mitochondria, calorie restriction, and the B vitamins thiamine and niacin.
    Opening Credentials and the Nutrition Edge
    Pharmacist Ben opens the hour with his greeting and a reminder of the broadcast schedule, then gives out the phone number for listeners with questions or success stories. He describes himself as a nutritional pharmacist who attended pharmacy school long ago and then worked in drugstores, where he grew uneasy about prescribing for lifestyle conditions. As an athlete himself, he remembers reading bodybuilding magazines and learned that nutrients could be an edge, and he began wondering whether they could also heal. Early in his career he recommended zinc picolinate to a mother whose child had acne, and the child improved. His employer was not thrilled with that advice and he was let go, so he opened his own compounding pharmacy, making skincare and nutritional products. He tells listeners, "we're not sick, we're starving," and that the body needs to be fed.
    The Institution Versus the Individual
    Ben turns to what he calls the flaw in the medical model, which he says is not a criticism of doctors or nurses, whom he calls beautiful people. He argues that medicine excels at trauma and emergencies, but fails at lifestyle and ambulatory care, where people are trained to keep patients alive rather than help them thrive. He cites a figure claiming that chronic degenerative disease affects over sixty percent of Americans, and he says the body is designed to heal. To make nutrition less overwhelming, he describes what he calls the Eight Chapters of Good Nutrition, from protein and fats through water, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, and accessory nutrients. Ben says he simplifies nutrition because people who find it confusing give up, and the medical model benefits from that surrender.
    Dementia as Arthritis of the Brain
    Ben describes dementia as a single kind of breakdown, which he calls arthritis of the brain, with Lewy body, vascular, and Alzheimer's dementia as different labels for the same process. He explains that cells are fed, oxygenated, and kept free of toxins, and that when they are starved, suffocated, or toxified, inflammation follows. He says he watched his father, who had Alzheimer's dementia, grow clearer-headed in a nursing home after Ben smuggled in Beyond Tangy Tangerine, because the staff would not allow it. Ben recalls the change as a wilted plant perking up once it is watered. He then describes his July visit with his mother, now ninety-three. Her mind remains good, but her body has declined, and she now pulls herself up the stairs by the railing. Ben says that visit led him to dedicate the rest of his life to helping people age well, a commitment that shapes the program's name, Aging Well.
    Sugar, Mitochondria, and Calorie Restriction
    Ben says the sicker a person is, the faster the body can turn things around once the assaults stop, so a turnaround can begin right away even if full recovery takes time. He lists blood sugar as step two, and claims that Alzheimer's dementia is sometimes called type 3 diabetes. He argues that the brain and heart contain the most mitochondria, the parts of cells that produce energy, and that the modern sugar load is frying them. He names methylene blue and NAD as popular anti-aging tools that work on mitochondria. Ben then makes his strongest claim, that calorie restriction may be the most powerful strategy for slowing or reversing aging, because a body eating slightly below its needs activates healing and growth chemistry. He compares calories to heat, noting that machines and bodies both run better cooler.
    Digestion, Appetite, and Finding Purpose
    Ben digresses to digestion, explaining that peristalsis, the wave of muscle and nerve movement, slows when we eat, so heavy eating leaves food sluggish in the gut. He says the rumbling stomach between meals is the digestive system cleaning itself out, like a self-cleaning dishwasher, and he links chronic constipation to overeating. He recommends supplementation as an easy way to eat less, calling it a natural GLP-1-like strategy that reduces appetite. Ben says food has become a source of pleasure for people who are suffering, and he urges listeners to find purpose, meaning, or a legacy. He jokingly says that without purpose people find Ben & Jerry's, and he admits he is addicted to ice cream himself, and that he is more susceptible when not supplementing. Ben says that when people age, metabolism slows, so the need for supplementation grows.
    Thiamine, Niacin, and the B Vitamins
    Ben names two B vitamins as the standouts for brain health, thiamine, vitamin B1, and niacin, vitamin B3. He says thiamine is central to sugar and alcohol metabolism, is lost in urine, and is cooked out of many foods, so most people are deficient unless they supplement. He says all the B vitamins work together, and that the brain, heart, and skin need them most. He ties thiamine to peripheral neuropathy, the burning in hands and feet that he says callers raise on nearly every show, and to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which he says is treated with thiamine in hospitals. He then describes pellagra, which he links to niacin deficiency, with skin rashes, digestive trouble, and dementia. Ben closes by urging listeners to consider Beyond Tangy Tangerine, to send questions with a phone number, and to tune in Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
    57 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, September 30, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Mind Viruses, the Information War on Health, and the TMR Shake Story with Stan Dennison
    Pharmacist Ben traces the hidden history of propaganda, Sigmund Freud, and Edward Bernays before taking a caller and welcoming his longtime friend Stan Dennison, the Stay Natural formulator behind TMR Shake, to tell the story of his health scare, his forty years in network marketing, and the products that changed his life.
    Institutions, Individuals, and the Case for Aging Well
    Pharmacist Ben opens the show thanking producer Douglas Newsom for an AI-generated intro built by what Ben calls the Pharmacist Ben Singers, then lays out the mission of Aging Well: helping listeners move into their final years with as little physical decline as possible. He argues that aging poorly is not inevitable, pointing to hundred-year-old bodybuilders and weightlifters as proof that the body's potential is far higher than most people reach. Ben frames the real obstacle as a conflict between institutions and individuals, explaining that the word institution derives from a root meaning static, so by nature institutions such as medicine, government, and law exist to perpetuate themselves rather than to serve the person in front of them. He is careful to say this is not an attack on doctors and nurses personally, only on the model they operate inside, and insists listeners can reclaim power once they understand how the system actually works.
    Freud, Bernays, and the Birth of the Mind Virus
    Ben traces what he calls the information war back to Sigmund Freud, the first thinker to argue that unconscious drives shape conscious behavior, and to Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, who turned those insights into tools for manipulation. He credits Bernays with engineering the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the four-out-of-five-doctors cigarette slogan, and the Torches of Freedom campaign that recruited women to march smoking in a New York parade, reframing cigarettes as symbols of independence rather than taboo. Ben connects this history to memetics, describing memes as small units of information that spread through a culture like a virus, embedding beliefs people never examine, such as reaching for a doctor or a moisturizer without question. He calls his own simple, repeatable phrases, like dirty blood and leaky gut, an attempt to inoculate listeners against those mind viruses with information that is easy enough to actually stick.
    Greg Calls In From New Braunfels
    A caller named Greg phones in from New Braunfels, Texas, saying he first discovered Ben through an appearance on Coast to Coast AM and later signed up for email and text alerts that told him about tonight's broadcast. Greg explains he mostly wanted to listen rather than ask a question, and Ben thanks him warmly, telling him that people motivated enough to track him down across platforms tend to be the ones ready to hear material he describes as connoisseur-level, not something found on typical radio. Ben uses the moment to return to his theme of belief systems, retelling an old cartoon in which one fish asks another what water is, unaware he is swimming in it, as a way of explaining that most listeners do not notice the assumptions baked into phrases like getting sick means going to the doctor. He treats the call as a bridge back into the larger argument about memetic infection and health.
    Dementia as a Nutritional, Not Mysterious, Disease
    Returning to a running thread on the show, Ben insists dementia is, in his words, arthritis of the brain, arguing that labels like vascular, Lewy body, and Alzheimer's mainly benefit specialists rather than patients, since every version amounts to the brain falling apart. He describes working with a man in Alabama with Parkinson's disease and says any condition framed this way is reversible if caught with enough time left, because the body is always cycling between anabolic building and catabolic breakdown, with age simply tipping the balance toward breakdown. Ben's larger claim is that most chronic illness is really starvation dressed up as disease, naming B complex vitamins, electrolytes, and his longtime supplement Beyond Tangy Tangerine as tools he has watched reverse symptoms in people written off by the medical system. Before handing off to his guest, he promises to return to one of his favorite topics, thiamine, on a future broadcast, calling it one of the most underappreciated vitamins there is.
    Stan Dennison's Forty Years in Network Marketing
    Ben welcomes his longtime friend Stan Dennison, a formulator he has known for several years, who recounts stumbling into network marketing roughly forty years ago when a gas station friend, Danny Kalk, repeatedly pitched him a gold-coin company until Dennison finally paid ten dollars just to end the conversation. Reading the paperwork later, Dennison discovered the concept of a compensation plan for the first time in his life and signed up his mechanic and two friends within days, launching a business he built despite knowing almost nothing. He describes years of hard living, riding bulls and smoking and drinking while making money, until at thirty-eight he was diagnosed with Barrett's esophagus and offered an operation doctors could not guarantee would work. That diagnosis pushed Dennison and his wife, now naturopath Dr. Laura, toward alternative health, starting with a product that became EatLess Appetite Suppressant and later a blood purifier called Hope, built after his cancer scare convinced him the body's own immune system does the real healing.
    The TMR Shake and a Favorite Vitamin
    Dennison and Ben spend the closing segment on TMR Shake, a total meal replacement Dr. Laura spent two years formulating for their son's college athletics, testing recipes on children before adults because kids cannot hide a bad taste the way grown-ups do. He describes freezing leftover shake into an ice-cream-like snack, using the vanilla version as coffee creamer, and fielding reports from diabetics whose blood sugar and sleep improved after switching to it, alongside a dedicated vegan version that beat competitors in taste tests at plant-based events. Both men tie the shake and Youngevity's Beyond Tangy Tangerine back to thiamine, which Ben calls essential for blood sugar control, focus, and emotional regulation in children too often diagnosed with attention problems rather than nutrient deficiency. Dennison, now seventy and recovered from his earlier health scare, closes by urging listeners to stay open-minded rather than mind-infected, and Ben signs off thanking him and previewing Saturday's broadcast and ongoing Zoom calls.
    59 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, September 28, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Hair Loss Calls, the Triangle of Disease, and the Coffee Shop Interview Philosophy with Tom Chenault
    Pharmacist Ben Fuchs takes calls on hair loss, thyroid health and dental implants before welcoming longtime friend Tom Chenault, the network marketer and author of The Coffee Shop Interview, to discuss sobriety, personal development and building genuine relationships in business.
    Beyond Tangy Tangerine and a Big Preview
    Pharmacist Ben opens the hour thanking what he calls the Pharmacist Ben Singers for an AI-built intro song, then settles into his usual rhythm, joking that he talks so much on Zoom calls and podcasts that even he gets tired of his own voice. He gives out the call-in number, 888-627-6008, and tells listeners he has spent forty years learning to look at the body in a way he calls unique and effective. He pitches Beyond Tangy Tangerine, the Youngevity powder he has taken for thirty years, saying he could not look at himself in the mirror if he did not tell people about it. Ben explains why he loves network marketing as a business model, low-cost to enter at four or five hundred dollars, or thirty dollars for wholesale pricing, and previews the coming half hour with his friend Tom Chenault, plus a Sunday mental-health talk in Lone Tree that Tom is sponsoring.
    Joni and Joan Call In
    The first caller, Joni, phones in from Massachusetts after receiving one of Ben's emails, telling him she has listened for about three months and that her late mother, who died in 2018, loved the show for years before that. Touched, Ben invites her to email her mailing address to [email protected] for a gift. The next caller, Joan, asks about her own hair loss, and Ben explains that hair is governed by hormones working together: estrogen, testosterone, cortisol and insulin. He describes his root-not-fruit philosophy, insisting that health problems must be traced to their source rather than treated at the surface, and tells Joan to start a free food diary from pharmacistben.com to find foods that cause bloating. He walks her through dosing Beyond Tangy Tangerine by taste rather than by directions, sipping it in water throughout the day, and asks her to call back the following Monday to report her progress.
    Douglas, Berna and Donna Round Out the Calls
    Douglas calls next from Jacksonville, Florida, explaining he first heard of the show through Dr. Wallach on Coast to Coast AM and, at sixty-nine, is listening purely to learn rather than to ask a question. Berna calls from Fort Lauderdale, a Youngevity representative of twelve years, asking about her own thinning hair; Ben coins what he calls the Four Hormone Horsemen of Hair Loss, blood sugar, estrogen, testosterone and cortisol, and recommends FucoidZ, Ultimate EFAs, Ocean's Gold and Plant Derived Minerals while describing his triangle of disease, the digestive system and blood sugar system beneath the adrenal glands and thyroid. He previews Wednesday's guest, TMR shake formulator Stan Denniston. Finally Donna, calling from Orlando and originally from Poland, asks whether dental implants are wise at their age; Ben recommends Youngevity's Healthy Bone and Joint Pack before and after surgery and Ultimate Enzymes to reduce swelling, adding that root canals may carry some connection to heart health worth researching.
    Tom Chenault Joins to Talk Network Marketing
    With time running short on caller questions, Ben brings on his old friend Tom Chenault, calling him Youngevity's top networker and a gifted network marketer. Tom points to a photo of himself as a homeless man behind him, noting he will mark thirty-eight years of sobriety the next day, and credits network marketing with giving him what he calls the greatest life of anyone he knows. He warns that artificial intelligence threatens nearly every profession except genuine human relationships, and argues that success in the business requires falling in love with people, discovering what is missing in their lives, and helping solve it without a personal agenda. He plugs his book, The Coffee Shop Interview, urging listeners to buy it as a cheap PDF from thecoffeeshopinterview.com rather than pay eight dollars for it on Amazon, and Ben notes that Tom and his wife Denice have been married twenty-seven years.
    Belonging, Love, Trust and Safety
    Ben and Tom turn to personal development, with Tom comparing network marketing to Landmark Education, Tony Robbins seminars or Bible study, arguing the same growth applies with a compensation plan attached. He describes a breakthrough from the day before, after a lecture by what he calls a crazy priest made him confront the pain his divorce caused his young children years earlier. Tom distills success into four components he jokingly calls BLTS: belonging, love, trust and safety, saying people who feel all four from someone will do anything for and with them. Ben connects the idea to the nervous system, noting most people live in chronic fight-or-flight, and that offering someone a moment of calm is really an act of love. The two also mention studying Eric Worre's book Pro Code together daily at noon Mountain time on Facebook, treating it as a serious textbook for building the business.
    Chenault's Health Results and Weekend Plans
    Tom, now seventy-five, describes wearing a Hume band that reads his biological age as fifty-five against his chronological seventy-five, crediting his results to Beyond Tangy Tangerine 2.5, the TMR shake with banana and almond milk, and cutting out fried food, gluten and sugar, while logging over twelve thousand steps and nine hours of sleep most days. He praises the patience of the Youngevity staff in San Diego and healthcare professionals like Dr. Laura Dennison and Dr. Singletary who support representatives. Tom previews the coming weekend, a Saturday Zoom on rheumatoid arthritis with Cheryl Morley, Steve and Michelle Wallach and Louise Adrian, and a Sunday event in South Denver where Ben will speak on the history of nutrition and Dr. Wallach's message. Ben thanks Tom warmly, calling him a beautiful human being, and closes the broadcast by thanking producer Douglas Newsom, who signs off praising the calls.
    1 hr
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, September 23, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    The Hidden History of Vitamins, Beriberi, Mitochondria, and Ultra-Processed Food
    Pharmacist Ben opens the hour by describing his mother's decline as the reason he launched this show, then traces the science of aging from 1980s bodybuilding-era nutrition through the discovery of vitamins, the biology of mitochondria, and the food industry's engineering of ultra-processed cravings, before pitching his own Youngevity supplement line.
    A Mother's Decline Sparks a New Mission
    Pharmacist Ben opens with a burst of enthusiasm over an AI-generated intro song built by his producer Douglas, joking that a Staples Singers-style tribute would have cost thousands of dollars only a few years ago. He pivots quickly to the reason the show exists at all: a visit to his 93-year-old mother in New York, once a vital Army-tough woman, whom he found unable to rise from a chair without pulling herself up by a railing, her memory slipping even as her mind stayed mostly sharp. At 66 and, in his words, "right behind her," Ben says the visit convinced him to spend whatever years remain helping people age with more strength and clarity than she has left. He frames the entire program, Aging Well with Pharmacist Ben, as an answer to a world that can send people to Mars yet still cannot teach its citizens how to run their own bodies.
    From the Weight Room to Pharmacy School
    Ben traces his fascination with nutrition to the 1980s gym culture he grew up in, poring over bodybuilding magazines about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno while experimenting with whey protein, creatine, and branched-chain amino acids to build muscle. That curiosity led him to pharmacy school hoping to study, as he puts it, food as medicine, only to discover the curriculum was built around medicating toxicity rather than nourishing the body. He recalls being struck that prescription drugs work in doses as small as a few grains of salt, and that the liver's first-pass detoxification means every dose is inflated to survive being cleared from the body. From that frustration grew his lifelong distinction between macronutrients, the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates that supply energy, and micronutrients, the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids he calls the mighty ninety essential nutrients, which the body needs to actually use that energy.
    White Rice, Beriberi, and the First Vitamin
    Ben walks listeners through the history of nutrition science, arguing that agriculture, beginning roughly ten thousand years ago with the cracking of grain, made humans shorter and sicker even as it fed more of them, a thesis he credits to historian Jared Diamond. He lands on the late nineteenth century, when American colonizers brought white, polished rice to the Philippines, and Filipinos abandoned their traditional brown rice to imitate their conquerors. Within years, the indigenous population began suffering burning nerve pain, brain problems, and cracked, ulcerated skin, a cluster of symptoms doctors eventually named beriberi. Scientists later examined the discarded brown rice polishings and isolated the substance missing from the polished rice, thiamine, or vitamin B1, the first vitamin ever identified. Ben calls this the birth of the entire concept of deficiency disease, the idea that a single missing nutrient, rather than a germ or a toxin, could be the true cause of a devastating illness.
    Mitochondria, ATP, and Subclinical Deficiency
    Ben connects that century-old discovery to the present, noting that peripheral neuropathy, the burning nerve pain in hands and feet that callers ask him about on nearly every show, was the hallmark symptom of beriberi and disappeared once patients received thiamine. He introduces the idea of subclinical deficiency, a shortfall not severe enough to cause outright disease but enough to leave a person, in his phrase, leaving health on the table. From there he moves inside the cell to the mitochondria, the structures that convert sugar and fat into usable energy called ATP, explaining that nearly every modern disease is increasingly understood as a mitochondrial or energy disease. He mentions recent public fascination with methylene blue, NAD, NADH, and NMN as evidence that mitochondrial health has become mainstream, arguing that without enough micronutrients the body takes in plenty of energy from food but cannot actually use it, leaving people what he calls starving and obese at once.
    Engineering Ultra-Processed Food and MSG
    Ben shifts to how the food industry engineered the modern diet, tracing the shift to the Industrial Revolution, when factories could suddenly produce more goods than there were buyers, forcing companies to make food irresistible rather than merely nourishing. He describes early twentieth-century products like Cracker Jack, Wonder Bread, and Crisco shortening as the first wave of foods concentrated with sugar and fat while their bitter, nutrient-dense parts were stripped away, and notes the cereal industry's deliberate targeting of children who had no willpower to resist. He then recounts how Japanese soldiers in World War I gained a reputation for the best rations after scientists discovered monosodium glutamate, a molecule that could make any food, in his words, taste like filet mignon, at the cost of exciting and eventually damaging brain cells. Ben warns that MSG now hides on ingredient labels under names like hydrolyzed protein, yeast extract, and natural flavoring.
    Beyond Tangy Tangerine and Inflammation as Defense
    With time running short, Ben pivots to the Youngevity supplement line he has endorsed for thirty years, singling out the powdered blend Beyond Tangy Tangerine as, in his telling, life-changing for himself, his mother, and countless patients, and directing listeners to his sites, Pharmacist Ben's Academy and The Mineral Way. He briefly distinguishes dementia types, including Alzheimer's, vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and frontotemporal dementia, arguing all of them are, at root, inflammatory diseases of the brain. He then defines inflammation itself as the calling card of the immune system, calling it a survival mechanism that becomes destructive only in excess, and suggests that a body chronically inflamed reflects a life spent chronically on the defensive. Running out of time before he can finish the thought, Ben promises to continue on the next broadcast, Monday, September 28th, and signs off wishing listeners a wonderful week.
    1 hr 1 min
  • Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben, September 21, 2026
    Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
    Launching Aging Well, From Kmart Pharmacy to Dr. Wallach's Nutrition Revolution, with AJ Joseph
    In his inaugural broadcast, Pharmacist Ben traces his path from a fired Kmart pharmacist to a nutrition evangelist inspired by Dr. Wallach, takes calls from listeners Bruce, Joe and John, and talks with his friend AJ Joseph about the hip injury that Youngevity supplements helped him overcome.
    A New Show Born From a Mother's Decline
    Pharmacist Ben opens his inaugural broadcast of Aging Well with Pharmacist Ben, joking about his board operator being the network owner and thanking what he calls the Pharmacist Ben Singers from the show's intro. He tells listeners this new program grew out of a visit to his 93-year-old mother, a former Army sergeant he describes as once vital and resilient, whom he found unable to rise from a chair or climb stairs without help. At 66, he says the visit convinced him to devote whatever years he has left to helping people age with quality of life, noting that roughly sixty percent of Americans over 65 take multiple medications. He outlines what the new show will cover: nutrition, skin care, the Youngevity products he has represented for years alongside Dr. Wallach, and the inspirational stories he favors, before giving out the call-in number and promising to explain the recent closure of his skin-care company, Truth Treatments, in a future episode.
    Callers Bruce and Joe Report Results
    Pharmacist Ben takes his first calls of the new show, starting with Bruce, a member of Pharmacist Ben's Academy, who reports that eight dark brown circles that had appeared on his knuckles disappeared after he began the Healthy Start Pack, Youngevity's combination of Beyond Tangy Tangerine, Osteo FX and Ultimate EFAs. Ben tells him such dark patches often signal missing nutrients and says most people notice results within a day or two of starting the powder. He then bribes a second caller, Joe, onto the air, thanking him for support of the show and asking him to email The Mineral Way with his mailing address for a promised gift. Joe, calling from outside after his connection cuts out, says he has been focusing on the Rise and Restore canisters rather than Beyond Tangy Tangerine and has noticed his fingernails growing faster and stronger. Ben calls the observation a good sign, explaining that fingernails, the body's fastest-growing tissue, offer a window into overall internal health.
    From Journalism Degree to Kmart Pharmacist
    Ben turns to his own biography, explaining that he earned a journalism degree from Syracuse University in 1980 before working odd jobs, then entered pharmacy school in 1982 hoping to study food as medicine, graduating in 1986. Drawn instead to the precision of pharmaceuticals, he became a pharmacist at a Kmart in Denver around 1987, where he noticed patients taking more medications without getting healthier, and grew troubled by what the industry called noncompliance, patients quietly resisting drugs that made them feel worse. Still in his twenties, he began recommending nutritional supplements alongside prescriptions, then grew bolder, suggesting patients take magnesium or zinc instead of certain medications entirely. Kmart's district manager, a man Ben remembers only as Mr. Osher, eventually arrived with a security guard and fired him, telling him he was not, in Ben's retelling, cut out to be Kmart material. Ben calls the firing fair, since the company wanted him selling drugs rather than steering customers away from them.
    Starting a Nutrition and Skin-Care Pharmacy
    After the firing, Ben starts his own pharmacy in Denver focused entirely on skin care and nutrition, making custom skin-care products himself and recommending supplements as a healing tool rather than an add-on. Word spreads through the Denver area by the early 1990s, and patients with psoriasis, acne and scarring see dramatic improvement, since, as Ben notes, the skin responds strongly to nutritional deficiencies for better or worse. He begins hosting small talks in his pharmacy, drawing only two or three people at first, then renting library meeting rooms as attendance grows through the mid-1990s. Fascinated by chemistry since childhood, he immerses himself in biochemistry and the mechanisms behind nutrition, arguing that anyone who wants to be an effective nutritionist must understand how supplements actually work in the body rather than simply repeating dosage recommendations. He frames those years as the period when he was learning as much as he was teaching, building the foundation for everything he says he still practices decades later.
    Discovering Dr. Wallach's Cassette Tapes
    Working in his pharmacy lab one day, Ben begins receiving cassette tapes in the mail titled Dead Doctors Don't Lie, tossing them in a drawer until curiosity gets the better of him and he finally plays one, stunned by lectures on organ meats, glucosamine and what the speaker calls the Pig Pack. Weightlifting soon after with a friend named Russ, Ben learns the tapes belong to Dr. Wallach, who happens to visit Denver often, and within weeks Wallach walks into Ben's lab in person. The two hit it off immediately, and Wallach, unable to host his own daily radio show every day because of travel, invites Ben to fill in, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. Ben says nearly forty years of treating patients since has convinced him that America suffers a collective nutritional deficiency behind much of its skin, mental-health and chronic-disease burden, and he cites dentist Weston Price's research on indigenous populations whose teeth, gums and skin stayed healthy until adopting a Western diet.
    AJ Joseph's Hip Story and a Debut Sign-Off
    Ben brings on his friend AJ Joseph, who helped build his academy and websites, and asks him to tell his own story. AJ recalls growing up on junk food in Harlem, then walking with a cracked hip for nearly two years in his forties after a surgeon insisted he could not possibly have one, wrapping his waist, hip and leg tightly in Ace bandages just to get through each week. After hearing Dr. Wallach discuss athletes on Coast to Coast, AJ began drinking Beyond Tangy Tangerine and other Youngevity products, and within ten days was back on the basketball court. Ben ties the story to what he calls the ridiculous deficiency allowance, arguing that official recommended daily allowances only prevent diseases like scurvy or pellagra rather than helping people thrive. A caller named John, listening from Wenatchee, Washington, thanks Ben for years of prior broadcasts before the hour runs out. Ben closes the debut episode by thanking AJ and listeners, and giving out his websites before Wednesday's next show.
    58 min

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Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben Discover the science of looking better, feeling better and living better at every age. Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben is about something much bigger than simply trying…