Botanist, nature photographer, writer, and founder of Wild Food Adventures, John Kallas discusses his book Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate. Learn how to identify, harvest and prepare nutritious and delicious wild greens within walking distance of your kitchen

Bestselling author Dr. Michael T. Murray, discusses how five common medications–for sleep, headaches, osteoarthritis, acid reflux and depression—can lead to unforeseen consequences, sometimes even, in the log-run, worsening the condition they are meant to treat. Michael T. Murray ND is a naturopathic physician regarded as one of the world’s top authorities on natural medicine. An educator, lecturer, researcher, and health food industry consultant, he is the author of more than 30 books, including his newest with coauthor Joseph Pizzorno ND, The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine.

Family physician Daphne Miller long suspected that farming and medicine were intimately linked. Increasingly disillusioned by mainstream medicine’s mechanistic approach to healing and fascinated by the farming revolution that is changing the way we think about our relationship to the earth, Miller left her medical office and traveled to seven innovative family farms around the country, on a quest to discover the hidden connections between how we care for our bodies and how we grow our food. Farmacology, the remarkable book that emerged from her travels, offers us a compelling new vision for sustainable health and healing—and a wealth of farm-to-body lessons with immense value in our daily lives. Dr. David Naimon hosts.

Could it be possible that your vitamin and mineral supplements offer you no health benefits at all or even that they harm you, shortening your life or increasing the incidence of disease?  Several studies recently have suggested that.  Yet the quality of the studies themselves has also been called into question.  Thus leaving the average person confused if they should continue their vitamins.    For that reason we’ve invited today’s guest to Healthwatch to help clear up the confusion.   Dr. Walter Willett, is chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of public Health and professor of  medicine at Harvard Medical School.  Dr Willett is the author of the book Eat Drink and Be Healthy, he was written over 1000 scientific articles, and is the 2nd most cited author in clinical medicine.

Dr. David Naimon talks with author and psychotherapist Gary Greenberg about his latest book, The Book of Woe, an insider’s challenge to psychiatry’s scientific pretensions. “Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno. He guides us through the not-so-divine comedy that results when psychiatrists attempt to reduce our hopelessly complex inner worlds to an arbitrary taxonomy that provides a disorder for everybody. Greenberg leads us into depths that Dante never dreamed of. The Book of Woe is a mad chronicle of so-called madness.”—Errol Morris, Academy Award–winning director, and author of A Wilderness of Error

When Temple Grandin was born in 1947, autism had only just been named. Today it is more prevalent than ever, with one in 88 children diagnosed on the spectrum. And our thinking about it has undergone a transformation in her lifetime: Autism studies have moved from the realm of psychology to neurology and genetics, and there is far more hope today than ever before thanks to groundbreaking new research into causes and treatments. Now Temple Grandin reports from the forefront of autism science, bringing her singular perspective to a thrilling journey into the heart of the autism revolution.  TEMPLE GRANDIN is one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. She is a professor at Colorado State University and the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards.

In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us.  The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of six previous books, including Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all New York Times bestsellers.   Dr. David Naimon hosts.

Dr. Naimon talks with Sandor Katz about his do-it-yourself guide to home fermentation. Katz contextualizes fermentation in terms of biological and cultural evolution, health and nutrition, and even economics.  Michael Pollan, in the foreword, describes The Art of Fermentation this way:  “The Art of Fermentation is much more than a cookbook…Sure, it tells you how to do it, but much more important, it tells you what it means, and why an act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world. Or rather, with several different worlds, each nested inside the other: the invisible world of fungi and bacteria; the community in which you live; and the industrial food system that is undermining the health of our bodies and the land. This might seem like a large claim for a crock of sauerkraut, but Sandor Katz’s signal achievement in this book is to convince you of its truth. To ferment your own food is to lodge an eloquent protest-of the senses-against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we were all passive consumers of its commodities, rather than creators of unique products expressive of ourselves and the places where we live.”

“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.

Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.

A botanist, medical biochemist, and self-defined “renegade scientist,” Diana Beresford-Kroeger brings together ethnobotany, horticulture, spirituality and alternative medicine to discuss how forests affect our health individually, collectively, ecologically and globally. Her books include The Global Forest and Arboretum Borealis: A Lifeline of the Planet.