Jason Bawden-Smith joins me with a jam-packed episode. This episode covers a multitude of topics, however, all returning to the importance of mitochondria and the role they play in our health. Jason highlights the role our environment is playing in our health and what we can do about it. This is an episode that is sure to open your eyes to new concepts about health, I know it did for me.

Selected Links from the Episode:

Jason Bawden-Smith's website - Mito HQ

Jason's book 'In The Dark' free pdf copy

Unstress episode with Nicole Bijlsma on healthy homes

Unstress episode with Dr Pri Bandara on the health impacts of wireless technologies

Download the PDF transcription

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Hello and welcome to Unstress, I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Now today's episode is going to challenge you. We are always talking about food and exercise and sleep and it's very important. However, well, I'm not going to spoil it. My guest today is Jason Bawden-Smith and Jason's background as you'll hear is environmental science. He's an entrepreneur, he's an author, he's a speaker, but he also had his health challenges and I won't spoil that either because he'll share that with you. But today's episode will certainly challenge you. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Jason Bawden-Smith.

Download the PDF transcription

Welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Bawden-Smith:    Thank you, Ron. What a pleasure and honour to be invited on this tremendous show of yours on Unstress. I listened to a few episodes, I loved them all, and can't wait to dive deep into the topic today.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Great. Well, there are so many things that I've been looking forward to talking to you about and there are quite a few things that we're going to cover that I think some of our listeners may find surprising, confronting, enlightening. But I wondered if you might just share with us a bit about your journey that's brought you to this point.

Jason Bawden-Smith:    Sure. My interests on the environmental impact on human health started as a teenager when I was swimming in what was then, heavily contaminated oceans in Sydney. We're talking in the early and mid-80s where we swam in the effluent. When particular winds came, they blew this untreated sewerage from the sewage treatment plants, and I, unfortunately, got a severe ear infection which ruined my balance and prevented me from being a decent surfer. I was never going to be a great surfer, but there's nothing like getting a severe ear infection to motivate you.

I remember coming home one day, my mother said, "Why did you have a half an hour-long shower?" And I said, "Well, I was swimming in shit and I wanted to get it all off me." And I started complaining and whining and carrying on and she looked me square in the eye and said, "We're going to have to fix it, go on, fix it." And I went, "What, how am I going to do that?" But mothers have a great way of influencing you. And I spent the next 10 years working on that issue, led me to an applied science degree to environmental health. There were no environmental degrees in the mid to late 80s. I was one of the very first ones. Now they're everywhere.

From there I worked at New South Wales, Department of Health, where I worked on the border pollution issue, and then once that was solved, moved into more toxicology orientated childhood lead poisoning, was my major for my master's thesis, which was awarded at the university prize and made all the media pretty much across Australia and got me in a whole host of problems because I was coming out saying it was lead paint. And while we had led petrol back in those days, it was giving a little bit to everybody. It wasn't the source of the actual childhood lead poisonings or the number of animals that were dying from lead poisoning.

That was my master's degree. I left health to go to academia. I started a PhD again on more lead research. I didn't like it.