The Habit Healers

In this episode, I explore a small shift that completely changed how I think about meals. Same plate. Same food. Same calories. But depending on what I eat first, my body responds in a completely different way.

I walk through the science behind why starting with protein and fiber—like vegetables, beans, or lentils—can significantly reduce blood sugar spikes, sometimes to a degree that rivals medication. And the best part? I don’t have to give up the foods I enjoy. I just change the sequence.

I break down what’s actually happening inside my body—from the physical effects of fiber slowing glucose absorption, to the hormonal response driven by GLP-1 (the same pathway targeted by popular weight-loss drugs). I also unpack some of the newer, more surprising science around gut hormones like GIP, and why the old “good vs. bad food” narrative doesn’t hold up.

Most importantly, I make this practical. What does this look like at breakfast? At dinner? What do I do when everything is mixed together on one plate?

This episode isn’t about restriction or perfection. It’s about using biology to my advantage—with one simple habit I can start today.

Same food. Different order. A completely different outcome.

Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/

A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

Most of us learned to cook the same way. Find a recipe. Follow the steps. Hope it turns out. And when it does, we make it again. And again. Until we have maybe six or seven dishes in rotation and a lingering suspicion that real cooks know something we don’t.

They do. But it’s not what you think.

Chef Martin Oswald trained under Wolfgang Puck. He’s cooked in restaurants where a single plate costs more than most people’s weekly grocery bill. And when he cooks at home, he doesn’t use recipes. He opens the fridge, looks at what’s there, and builds.

That’s what he showed us during our live Substack session this week. Not a recipe. A method.

The flavor is in the layers

Martin started with kamut, an ancient variety of wheat with large, chewy grains and a nutty flavor. He’d soaked it overnight, and the first thing he did was toast it in a dry pan. His kitchen, he said, smelled like popcorn within five minutes.

Then came the spices. Fennel seed, caraway (or cumin if you’re stateside), black pepper, and fenugreek, all crushed together in a mortar and pestle. Not measured with precision. Tossed in by the palmful. The grinding releases the oils, and the oils carry the flavor.

He added the crushed spices to the toasting kamut and let them bloom together on medium-low heat. Too hot and spices go bitter. That was secret number one.

Building from the bottom up

Next came what the French call mirepoix and what every cuisine on the planet has its own version of. Leeks, celery root, and carrots went into the pot. In the American South, you’d swap in green peppers, celery, onion, and garlic. In Italy, it’s soffritto. The concept is universal. You’re creating a base layer of vegetable flavor underneath everything else.

Martin didn’t have vegetable stock on hand, so he improvised. A tablespoon of high-quality soy sauce went into plain water. Then a spoonful of tomato paste, roasted in the pan for about thirty seconds until it turned slightly brown. That roasting step pulls out more umami than you’d get just stirring it in raw.

He deglazed with water, dropped in a fresh bay leaf (frozen fresh bay leaf holds more flavor than dried, he noted), a sprig of rosemary, and three sprigs of lemon thyme. Then he put the lid on and walked away for twenty minutes.

That’s the part most home cooks skip. Not the walking away, but the layering. Every addition was a decision about what the dish still needed. More depth, more earthiness, more fragrance. He tasted throughout the process and adjusted. When he came back, he added Aleppo pepper for heat, lemon juice for acid, a spoonful of tahini for richness, a bit of miso stirred in off the heat to preserve the probiotics, and torn ramp leaves for a hit of garlic.

The finished kamut had so many dimensions of flavor that it didn’t need butter, cream, or cheese to feel complete.

The strawberry-fennel salad

While the kamut simmered, Martin threw together a spring salad that took about four minutes and sounded like it belonged on a restaurant menu. Sliced strawberries, fennel shaved paper-thin, a splash of balsamic vinegar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and a handful of walnuts.

He let the vinegar sit with the fennel and strawberries while the kamut finished cooking. The acid softened the raw fennel and the strawberries broke down just enough to create natural viscosity in the dressing. That was Martin’s word for it. Viscosity. When you cook without oil or butter, you need something to replace the mouthfeel. Mashed strawberries, nut butters, extra sauces. The lower in fat you cook, the more liquid you need to build into the dish.

He layered greens on top of the marinating fruit and fennel without tossing, so the leaves wouldn’t wilt before dinner. Then he plated the kamut risotto, topped it with the salad, and placed the acidic components on top so every bite offered a different combination of flavors. Sweetness from the strawberries bumped up against the garlic punch of the ramps, while the earthy kamut underneath gave way to bright lemon on top.

He called it avoiding flavor fatigue. Every forkful should surprise you a little.

The real takeaway

Martin wasn’t showing us two recipes. He was showing us a way of thinking. Toast your grains. Crush your spices fresh. Build your base vegetables. Layer umami with soy sauce, tomato paste, and miso. Add herbs at different stages for different effects. Finish with acid and heat. Taste constantly.

None of this requires culinary school. It requires a mortar and pestle, a decent pan, and the willingness to stop following instructions and start paying attention to what the food actually needs.

That’s intuitive cooking. And once you get the hang of it, recipes start to feel like training wheels.

Join Us in The Habit Healers Community on Skool.

You already know what to do. Eat better. Move more. Sleep longer. You’ve known for years. The problem was never information.

Habit Healers is a live weekly coaching community where I teach one small habit per week and Chef Martin Oswald handles the food. Every Tuesday at 4 PM PT, we get on Zoom and talk about what actually happened when you tried it. Real adjustments, not theory.

The habits rotate through five pillars of metabolic health. Blood sugar, movement, stress, sleep, and connection. You join whenever, start wherever, and build from there.

Weekly live coaching. A new habit challenge every seven days. Chef Martin’s recipes. People who are actually doing this alongside you.

Habit Healers is open now. Click here to learn more.

In this episode, I take a hard look at a question most of us have asked ourselves at some point—and I challenge the answer we’ve been given. What if it’s not about willpower at all? What if the food I’m reaching for was engineered, very deliberately, to override the systems in my body that are supposed to tell me when to stop?

I walk through the science behind how modern food is designed to drive overconsumption—from the “bliss point” that maximizes pleasure without triggering fullness, to foods that literally dissolve before my brain can register calories, to combinations of fat and carbohydrates that don’t exist in nature but light up my brain’s reward system in ways it wasn’t built to handle.

I also unpack how variety, texture, smell, and even labeling strategies are used to keep me eating longer than I intended—and why none of this shows up on a nutrition label.

But this isn’t just about what’s being done to me. It’s about what I can do next. I share a simple, practical “food defense” approach I can actually use in my own kitchen and at the grocery store—without turning my life into a full-time project.

This episode changed how I see every snack, every label, every craving.

Because once I understand the system, I stop blaming myself—and start seeing the design.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/

A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

Ever have that Sunday night feeling where you decide this is the week everything changes? You’re going to meditate, quit sugar, and hit the pavement at 5 AM. Then Wednesday hits, the wheels fall off, and by Friday, you’re back where you started, blaming your lack of willpower.

But what if I told you the problem isn’t you? It’s the habit you chose.

In this episode, I’m breaking down The Selection Problem. We often pick habits based on a podcast recommendation or a random Instagram post without ever checking if they actually fit our real, messy lives. Most habits are dead on arrival because we didn’t know how to check for a pulse.

I’m sharing my CAN Test, a simple, three-question filter I use with my patients to ensure a habit will actually heal you instead of just exhausting you:

* C – Clear: Can you describe it in one sentence a 12-year-old would understand?

* A – Actionable: Can you do it right now with what you already own?

* N – Nourishing: Does it leave you feeling physically better, or does it feel like punishment?

Join me as we perform a “Habit Autopsy” on your past failures and reframe how you approach change. You don’t have a willpower problem; you have a design problem. Let’s fix it.Link to Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/most-habits-are-dead-on-arrival-heres Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

Most of us treat dessert like a transaction. You get the pleasure, you pay the metabolic price. Maybe you skip it entirely, white-knuckling your way past the freezer at 9 PM. Maybe you give in and spend the next hour renegotiating with yourself about what that means.

But what if the math didn’t work that way? What if you could build a dessert that actually brought fiber, protein, omega-3s, and polyphenols to the table, for a fraction of what a standard dessert costs you metabolically?

That’s exactly what Chef Martin Oswald walked us through in this week’s live. And the base ingredient might surprise you: tapioca.

The 94-Calorie Starting Point

Not boba tea tapioca. Not the sugary pudding cups from your childhood. Old school tapioca pearls, cooked in water. That’s it.

One cup of cooked tapioca comes in at about 94 calories. It’s gluten-free. It has a satisfying, slightly chewy texture that makes your brain believe it’s eating something indulgent. And on its own, it’s basically a blank canvas.

Martin is clear about what tapioca is and isn’t. It’s not a superfood. It doesn’t bring much nutritional value by itself. What it brings is a low-calorie, satiating base that fills your stomach while you load it up with the ingredients that actually matter.

Think of it as the foundation of a house. Nobody lives in a foundation. But you can’t build the good stuff without one.

The Building Block Approach

This is where Martin’s Wolfgang Puck training shows up in the most unexpected way. He doesn’t hand you a single recipe and send you on your way. He teaches you a concept he calls Baustein, the German word for building blocks.

You start with your base. Then you choose from four categories to build your dessert:

Fiber. Ground flaxseed (grind it fresh so it doesn’t go rancid and you actually absorb the omega-3s). Chia seeds, which work beautifully stirred right into the warm tapioca. Psyllium husk, soaked in a quarter cup of water first until it blooms into a gel. A word of caution here: if you’re not used to much fiber in your diet, start with small amounts of psyllium husk. It’s essentially the active ingredient in Metamucil, and your gut will need time to adjust.

Protein. Silken tofu blends in seamlessly and adds a creamy texture. Soy yogurt or any plant-based yogurt. Nut butters pull double duty here, covering both protein and healthy fats. You could even fold in pureed white beans or adzuki beans (a traditional Japanese ingredient in sweet desserts, naturally sweet and beautifully small).

Polyphenols. This is where dessert starts doing real metabolic work. Dark chocolate at 80% cacao or higher, melted right into the warm tapioca. Frozen dark berries: blueberries, cherries, black currants. Low-sugar or no-added-sugar fruit preserves. And the spices: cinnamon, cloves (which have some of the highest antioxidant activity of any spice), cardamom, allspice. Martin layers these in generously. The berries bring the polyphenols. The spices multiply them.

Sweeteners. Date syrup and maple syrup are Martin’s go-to choices. You need very little, especially once you’ve trained your palate down from the sugar levels most packaged desserts deliver. Martin mentioned his own process of reducing sugar over time. It took patience, but now he genuinely prefers less sweetness. Your taste buds adapt. Give them the chance.

Three Desserts from One Pot

In the live (which you can watch above), Martin builds three completely different desserts from a single batch of cooked tapioca. Each one uses three-quarters of a cup of the cooked base, which means one cup of dry tapioca pearls cooked with five cups of water gives you enough for six servings, stretching to eight once you add your building blocks.

Chocolate tapioca. Dark chocolate broken into pieces, laid on top of the hot tapioca and left to sit for three minutes (don’t stir yet, let the heat do the work). Then stir it into a glossy, creamy chocolate pudding. Add ground flaxseed and a drizzle of date syrup. As it chills, the texture gets even better.

Peanut butter tapioca. Two generous tablespoons of peanut butter stirred into the warm tapioca with chia seeds, a splash of soy yogurt, and date syrup. This one is all comfort food, and it covers your healthy fats, fiber, protein, and omega-3s in a single bowl.

Berry tapioca. Black currant preserves (or any dark berry), stirred in with plant-based yogurt, psyllium husk, cinnamon, and a pinch of cloves. This one needs to sit in the refrigerator overnight so the psyllium can thicken it up. By morning, you’ve got a gorgeous, set pudding.

And because Martin can’t help himself, he also made a peanut butter cup version: peanut butter tapioca on the bottom, chocolate tapioca layered on top, served in a glass. He topped a matcha version with fresh strawberries and chia seeds, dusted with matcha powder.

All of these are make-ahead friendly. Pour them into glasses, refrigerate overnight, and top with fresh fruit before serving. They actually improve with time.

The Real Math

Here’s what makes this worth your attention. A standard restaurant dessert runs somewhere between 400 and 800 calories, most of it from refined sugar and saturated fat, with essentially no fiber, no beneficial plant compounds, and nothing that helps you feel full beyond the sugar crash.

Martin’s tapioca desserts land somewhere around 150 to 300 calories per serving, depending on how generous you are with the nut butter and chocolate. But those calories come packaged with fiber, plant protein, omega-3 fatty acids from the flaxseed, and polyphenols from the dark chocolate, berries, and spices. The protein and fiber keep you satisfied. The polyphenols support your metabolic health rather than working against it.

You’re not white-knuckling past the freezer anymore. You’re opening the fridge and pulling out something that’s actually working for you.

This Week’s Habit Challenge

Make one batch of tapioca this week. Just the base: one cup of tapioca pearls, five cups of water, simmer for about 20 minutes until the pearls turn translucent. Then pick one building block combination and try it.

If you’re not sure where to start, the chocolate version is hard to beat. Break up a couple of squares of dark chocolate (80% or higher), drop them into three-quarters of a cup of hot tapioca, wait three minutes, stir, add a teaspoon of ground flaxseed and a small drizzle of date syrup. Refrigerate for a couple of hours. That’s it.

You can also swap the tapioca base for cooked barley, oats, or quinoa (the quinoa option keeps it gluten-free). The building block concept works the same way regardless of what base you choose.

One dessert. One new habit. See how it feels.

Want to go deeper?

Every Tuesday at 4 PM PT, I meet with our Habit Healers community on Skool. We work through one small habit per week, rotating through all five pillars of metabolic health, with Chef Martin’s plant-forward recipes, real coaching, and a group that actually shows up for each other. No perfection required. Come join us.

In this episode, I explore an idea that completely changed how I think about my daily routine: the “tea medicinal cabinet.” It’s not about adding anything complicated—it’s about being more intentional with something I’m probably already doing… making a cup of tea.

I walk through six teas that actually earn their place based on the science. From green tea’s role in cognitive health and metabolism, to hibiscus lowering blood pressure in clinical trials, to chamomile helping improve sleep quality—this isn’t guesswork or internet wellness trends. It’s what the evidence really shows (and where it falls short).

I also break down the difference between true teas and herbal infusions, how processing changes what’s in your cup, and why honesty matters when we talk about health claims—like when peppermint or ginger tea helps, and when the research actually supports something stronger.

This episode isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing one small thing, slightly better.

Six teas. Real evidence. And a simple shift I can make starting today.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/

A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

In 1994, doctors scanned a boy’s brain and found zero creatine inside it. Not low. Completely absent. He had severe intellectual disability, seizures, and almost no language. That case should have changed how medicine thinks about the $0.12/day powder sitting on every gym shelf. It didn’t. Not for decades.

In this episode, Dr. Laurie Marbas breaks down the science connecting creatine to your brain, not your biceps. You’ll learn why your brain burns 20% of your body’s energy despite being 2% of your weight, how creatine acts as a rapid-response backup battery for neurons, and why the blood-brain barrier makes brain loading so much harder than muscle loading.

We cover the sleep deprivation experiments where creatine prevented cognitive collapse, the 2024 study showing a single dose changed brain chemistry within hours, and the depression trial that doubled SSRI remission rates in women, then got ignored because nobody can patent a molecule that costs twelve cents a gram.

Plus: why women’s brains are uniquely vulnerable after menopause (estrogen directly regulates the enzyme that recycles brain energy), what the failed Parkinson’s and Huntington’s trials actually tell us, and the first clinical trial showing creatine can replenish brain energy reserves in menopausal women.

This isn’t a story about getting stronger. It’s about whether the most studied supplement in sports nutrition has been misunderstood for 167 years.

🔗 Full article with references and downloadable protocol worksheet: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-the-cheapest-supplement-in

A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

Every week, Chef Martin Oswald and I go live on Substack to dig into one concept and build a meal around it. This week, Martin did something I hadn’t seen before. He set out five items on his counter. A pumpkin, a jar of miso, a handful of blueberries, a potato, and a single leek. Then he asked a question that reframed how I think about plant diversity.

You’ve heard the recommendation. Eat 30 different plants a week. It’s in every health book, every magazine, every wellness feed. And it’s a solid starting point. But Martin’s visual made something click for me as a physician. If you fill those 30 slots with iceberg lettuce, cucumber, celery, and watermelon, you can technically hit the number and still miss entire categories of fiber your gut bacteria depend on.

Not all plant fibers do the same job.

Three fibers, three jobs

I like to break fiber into three functional categories. Soluble fiber, the kind you find in oats, barley, apples, and beans, works like a net. It traps glucose and slows its absorption, which helps keep blood sugar from spiking after a meal. Insoluble fiber, found in the skins of fruits and vegetables, brown rice, and wheat bran, acts more like a bulldozer. It adds bulk and keeps things moving through the digestive tract.

Then there’s a third category that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. Fermentable fiber.

Resistant starch and inulin are two of the most well-studied fermentable fibers, and they behave differently from the first two types. They pass through the small intestine without being digested at all. They travel intact to the large intestine, where your gut bacteria ferment them and produce byproducts called short-chain fatty acids, particularly butyrate, propionate, and acetate. These short-chain fatty acids are sometimes referred to as postbiotics, and they feed the cells lining your colon, help maintain the intestinal barrier, and play a role in blood sugar regulation.

Research consistently shows that fermentable fiber consumption increases short-chain fatty acid production, supports the growth of beneficial bacterial populations like Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli, and may improve insulin sensitivity. One study in healthy adults found that inulin increased GLP-1 (a satiety hormone) within 30 minutes and reduced ghrelin (a hunger hormone) several hours later. A large study of 174 young adults found that resistant starch from potatoes produced the greatest increase in fecal butyrate compared to resistant starch from maize or inulin from chicory root.

If you’re only eating colorful plants and never touching the foods that contain these fermentable fibers, you’re leaving a major category of gut support on the table.

The smarter 30

Martin’s five items on the counter represented five different ways to feed your gut. Colorful plants for phytonutrient diversity, fermented foods like miso and kefir for live bacterial cultures, polyphenol-rich foods like berries and green tea, resistant starch from cooked and cooled potatoes, and inulin-rich foods like leeks, onions, garlic, and sunchokes.

His argument, and I agree with it, is that 30 plants a week is a great framework, but the smarter version is choosing your 30 from across all of these categories. That’s what moves the needle from “eating a lot of plants” to actually nourishing the microbial ecosystem that regulates your metabolism.

The sunchoke advantage

This is where Martin’s demonstration got really interesting. He held up a single small sunchoke, roughly 50 grams, maybe the size of your thumb. That one piece contains approximately four to six grams of inulin, enough to be physiologically effective based on the clinical literature showing benefits at five grams daily.

Then he showed the comparison. To get the same amount of inulin from leeks, you’d need about five bulbs. From onions, roughly one entire onion. From garlic, an entire head. And from potatoes (as resistant starch rather than inulin), approximately 10 ounces of cooked and cooled potato.

Sunchokes, also called Jerusalem artichokes, store their carbohydrates primarily as inulin rather than starch. Research shows they contain 10 to 22 grams of inulin per 100 grams of fresh weight, making them one of the most concentrated whole-food sources available. Chicory root is technically higher, but you don’t cook with chicory root.

This doesn’t mean you need to eat sunchokes exclusively. Martin’s point was about understanding relative concentrations so you can make strategic choices. A little leek in your risotto, some raw onion on your salad, garlic in your stew, and sunchokes when you can find them. Those additions compound across meals.

Resistant starch, the cook-cool-repeat trick

Martin’s first dish was an Austrian potato salad called Kartoffelsalat. He grew up eating it. Everyone in Austria cooks it. And nobody there thinks of it as a gut health intervention, but that’s exactly what it is.

When you cook a starchy food like a potato and then let it cool, the starch molecules reorganize into a crystalline structure that resists digestion by human enzymes. This process is called retrogradation, and it converts digestible starch into resistant starch type 3 (RS3). The cooled potato now behaves more like a fermentable fiber than a simple carbohydrate. Your gut bacteria can ferment it, producing butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids. Research confirms that even when you gently rewarm these foods, a significant portion of the resistant starch remains intact.

Martin’s technique matters here. He boiled the potatoes, then sliced them thin while still hot. The thin slicing exposes more surface area, which allows the starch to leach into the dressing (veggie stock, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, apple cider vinegar, and about a teaspoon of olive oil). As the salad sits, especially overnight in the refrigerator, the starch thickens the sauce into something that looks almost like mayonnaise. No mayonnaise in it. Just the potato starch doing its job.

Then you bring it out the next day, warm it gently to just above body temperature (around 120°F), and eat it. You’ve built resistant starch overnight and preserved it through gentle rewarming.

The dose-dependent approach

Martin also made a sunchoke and potato soup, and this is where the practical wisdom came through. He split it 50/50 between sunchoke and potato, because a full sunchoke soup would deliver too much inulin at once for most people.

This is the piece I want everyone to hear. If you’ve never eaten significant amounts of fermentable fiber, you cannot start with a bowl of sunchoke soup and expect your gut to handle it gracefully. The bloating, gas, and discomfort people experience when they “go plant-based” or suddenly add beans to every meal isn’t a sign that the food is wrong for them. It’s a sign they increased the dose too fast for their current microbiome to handle.

Start with roughly five grams of inulin per day, the equivalent of that small sunchoke or a generous portion of leeks or onion in a meal. Give your gut two weeks to adjust before increasing. You can dilute high-inulin foods by combining them with milder ingredients. Sunchoke soup cut with potato or cauliflower works well, and distributing onion across lunch and dinner rather than eating it all in one sitting makes a difference too.

For his third demonstration, Martin braised raw sunchoke wedges with bell pepper and ramps (a wild garlic from the allium family that appears in spring). The whole thing took about three minutes. The point was to show that these foods don’t require complicated recipes. You can add sunchoke to virtually any braise, soup, or stir-fry, controlling the dose based on how much your system tolerates.

One important caveat for anyone managing blood sugar closely. Even with the resistant starch benefit from cooking and cooling, potatoes can still spike glucose in some people, particularly those with diabetes or significant insulin resistance. If that’s you, lean into the inulin-rich foods instead. Leeks, onions, sunchokes, and asparagus deliver the fermentable fiber without the glycemic load.

What Chef Martin cooked

Martin prepared three dishes during our live. The first was Austrian potato salad (Kartoffelsalat) with ramps and an apple cider vinegar dressing. The second was a 50/50 sunchoke and potato soup finished with orange zest and sesame seeds. And the third was braised sunchoke wedges with bell pepper and ramps. He’ll be publishing the full recipes on his Substack soon. I’ll link them here when they’re live. In the meantime, subscribe to Chef Martin’s Substack so you don’t miss them.

This week’s habit

Pick one meal this week and add a fermentable fiber source you don’t normally eat. Throw a leek into your soup, toss some cooled potato into a salad, or grab a sunchoke if your grocery store or farmers market carries them. Start small, pay attention to how your gut responds, and build from there.

You already know what to do. Eat better. Move more. Sleep longer. You’ve known for years. The problem was never information.

Habit Healers is a live weekly coaching community where I teach one small habit per week and Chef Martin handles the food.

Every Tuesday at 4 PM PT, the group gets on Zoom to talk about what actually happened when you tried it. Real adjustments, not theory.

The habits rotate through five pillars of metabolic health. Blood sugar, movement, stress, sleep, and connection. You join whenever, start wherever, and build from there.

Weekly live coaching. A new habit challenge every seven days. Chef Martin’s recipes. People who are actually doing this alongside you.

Habit Healers is open now.

References

* Baxter NT, Schmidt AW, Venkataraman A, Kim KS, Waldron C, Schmidt TM. Dynamics of Human Gut Microbiota and Short-Chain Fatty Acids in Response to Dietary Interventions with Three Fermentable Fibers. mBio. 2019;10(1):e02566-18. Published 2019 Jan 29. doi:10.1128/mBio.02566-18

* DeMartino P, Johnston EA, Petersen KS, Kris-Etherton PM, Cockburn DW. Additional Resistant Starch from One Potato Side Dish per Day Alters the Gut Microbiota but Not Fecal Short-Chain Fatty Acid Concentrations. Nutrients. 2022;14(3):721. Published 2022 Feb 8. doi:10.3390/nu14030721

* Tarini J, Wolever TM. The fermentable fibre inulin increases postprandial serum short-chain fatty acids and reduces free-fatty acids and ghrelin in healthy subjects. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2010;35(1):9-16. doi:10.1139/H09-119

* Chen Z, Liang N, Zhang H, et al. Resistant starch and the gut microbiome: Exploring beneficial interactions and dietary impacts. Food Chem X. 2024;21:101118. Published 2024 Jan 3. doi:10.1016/j.fochx.2024.101118

In 2018, researchers at MIT published a study in Science that tracked how different types of information move through social media. They found that false and emotionally charged content spread roughly five times faster than accurate information.

That number came up in my monthly conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who specializes in anxiety and habit change. Jud has spent years studying how anxiety moves through populations, and he frames the problem in a way I hadn’t considered before. He treats anxiety like an infectious disease, not as a metaphor but as a framework with real clinical utility.

Dr. Jud Brewer’s article “Anxiety Is Contagious. Your Phone Is a Super Spreader.”

What Anxiety Actually Is

Jud uses a working definition in his clinic that I find incredibly useful. Anxiety is fear of the future. Not fear of what’s happening right now, in front of you, but fear of what might happen. And because the future is always unknown, anxiety has an endless fuel supply if we let it.

That distinction matters. Fear is often tethered to something concrete, like a dog running at you or a car swerving into your lane. Anxiety floats. It attaches itself to whatever is available, including the emotions of the person sitting across from you, or the headline you just scrolled past.

The Problem of Emotional Contagion

Jud described something from his clinical practice that illustrates this well. If a patient walks into his office carrying heavy anxiety and he isn’t deliberately grounded, he absorbs it. Then he carries it into the next appointment, where the new patient picks up on his shifted energy and asks what’s wrong. One anxious patient has now infected two people without anyone realizing what happened.

This isn’t unique to a psychiatrist’s office. You walk into a lively party and your mood lifts before anyone has spoken to you. You walk into a funeral and everything in you goes quiet, even if you didn’t know the person well. The emotional atmosphere of a room changes your internal state before your conscious mind has time to catch up.

I told Jud about my experience during COVID. I was doing telemedicine, so patients weren’t physically in front of me, but the anxiety still transferred. Patients were scared and wanted answers I didn’t have, and I was already anxious myself about a situation none of us could predict. That emotional charge came through the screen, through text, through the tone of emails. I’d read a perfectly benign message and filter it through my own anxiety until it felt like a threat. The contagion doesn’t require physical proximity, just a channel.

Why Your Phone Changes the Math

In person, emotional contagion is limited by the size of the room. Only so many people can be near you at once. Social media removes that constraint entirely. Millions of people connected through a single platform, each one a potential carrier and a potential host.

If you’ve ever forwarded a panicky social media post because it alarmed you and you wanted other people to know about it, you’ve participated in the contagion. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the system is designed to exploit exactly that impulse. Emotional content gets shared, and alarming content gets shared even faster. And the algorithm takes note of every click, every share, every comment, and serves you more of the same.

Your phone is the first thing most of us see in the morning and the last thing we look at before sleep. There is no social distancing from a device that lives in your pocket.

The Evolutionary Logic

A listener named Lou asked a great question during our live. Is this an evolutionary adaptation?

Jud pointed to herd animals. When a deer senses a threat, its eyes widen and the amount of visible sclera increases. That’s a signal visible from across a field. One deer’s wide eyes can spook an entire herd in seconds, and that capacity for rapid transmission of fear kept those herds alive for millions of years.

We see the same wiring in human crowd behavior. A section of a stadium panics and suddenly there’s a stampede, even though most of the crowd never saw the original threat. The prefrontal cortex goes offline, rational assessment shuts down, and everyone shifts into pure reaction. The mechanism that once protected us from predators now gets activated by a push notification.

The Infectious Disease Playbook

This is the part of the conversation I found most useful. Jud doesn’t just describe the problem. He applies infectious disease logic to it.

If anxiety spreads like a virus, through aerosolization of emotional content via social media, then we can borrow from the same playbook we use for physical contagion, including immunization, protective barriers, and basic hygiene.

Recognize that it happens. Most people don’t think of anxiety as something they can catch. But you’ve lived it. A friend calls in a panic, and you hang up the phone feeling wound up even though nothing in your own life has changed. Just naming that phenomenon starts to take away some of its power.

Build grounding practices as immunization. Jud described two specific practices his lab has studied.

Five-finger breathing uses top-down and bottom-up nervous system regulation simultaneously. As you breathe in, you trace from your pinky up to your thumb. As you breathe out, you trace back. Ten breaths, done anywhere, no equipment required.

Noting practice is even simpler. You pause and note whatever is most present in your experience, moment to moment, cycling through your five senses plus thinking, including seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and thinking. You label what’s happening and move on.

Jud’s lab recently completed a three-year brain imaging study on noting practice. They induced worry in participants, including a high-anxiety group, and found that worry activated the default mode network, the self-referential processing center of the brain. After participants learned the noting practice (that same day, not weeks of training), the practice completely deactivated the default mode network below baseline. Even in people who had never meditated before. Experienced meditators showed an even greater decrease, which suggests the skill deepens with repetition.

Practice curiosity as long-term immunization. Jud kept coming back to this one. Curiosity, he said, is one of the best defenses against social contagion. When a headline triggers that familiar tightening in your chest, the difference between getting swept in and staying grounded often comes down to one internal shift. Instead of “oh no,” you go to “oh, interesting.”

That shift is small but physiologically significant. It gives your prefrontal cortex a moment to come back online before the emotional reaction takes over.

I experienced something like this a few years ago. We were in Florida, in the ocean in December, and the water was rough. Choppy on the surface, calmer underneath. I could feel anxiety swelling up, which is rare for me. But something very similar to what Jud describes as noting kicked in. I looked around. I checked in with what was actually happening rather than what I was afraid might happen. The anxiety dissolved, still there for a moment and then simply gone. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds, but it was a visceral demonstration of what grounding can do in real time.

What I Learned the Hard Way About Headlines

I shared something with Jud that felt relevant. When I first started writing on Substack, I occasionally used more urgent-sounding titles. Things like “number one cause of death as you get older.” I was trying to get people to stop scrolling and pay attention to something important. My subscribers told me it was anxiety-provoking. They said they didn’t come to me for that kind of energy.

They were right. They were protecting themselves from exactly the contagion Jud is describing. Even well-intentioned content can function as a vector if it triggers fear before it delivers value. I changed my approach after that.

A Practical Screen Trick

My son does something worth mentioning. He keeps his phone screen in grayscale mode. No color at all. He finds that the absence of bright, saturated visuals makes him significantly less likely to fall into a mindless scroll. It’s a small friction point, but friction is exactly what you need when the system is engineered to be frictionless.

What You Spread Comes Back to You

Jud ended our conversation with something that reframed everything we’d discussed. The goal isn’t just to protect ourselves from catching anxiety. It’s to deliberately spread something better.

Social contagion works in both directions. Some of the most popular content on Instagram is people doing kind things for strangers, and that content goes viral for the same reason fear-based content does, because emotions are contagious and we instinctively share what we feel.

The algorithm learns from your behavior. If you engage with fear-based content, the algorithm feeds you more of it. You amplify whatever chamber you’re in. But if you consistently engage with content rooted in curiosity and genuine usefulness, that’s what comes back to you.

We have a responsibility in this. Not just to ourselves, but to everyone we have influence over. What you amplify with your attention is what you’re spreading.

As Jud put it at the end of our conversation, here’s to spreading curiosity and kindness.

This article is based on my monthly conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer. You can watch the full interview in the video above.

Dr. Jud Brewer’s Inside the Curious Mind Substack

References

Vosoughi S, Roy D, Aral S. The spread of true and false news online. Science. 2018;359(6380):1146-1151. doi:10.1126/science.aap9559

In 1983, your cell phone weighed two pounds, cost four thousand dollars, and could only make calls.

And strangely enough… it may have been better for your brain.

In this episode, I explore how we traded a heavy, inconvenient tool for a featherlight slot machine — and why that design shift quietly rewired our attention, our posture, our sleep, and our relationships.

I explain the neuroscience behind doom scrolling, including the powerful behavioral principle of variable ratio reinforcement — the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. Your phone isn’t irresistible because you lack discipline. It’s irresistible because it was engineered to exploit dopamine and uncertainty.

We also talk about:

* Why Generation Z is the “canary in the digital coal mine”

* How the developing prefrontal cortex makes teens especially vulnerable

* The physics behind “text neck” and the 60-pound head

* How blue light disrupts melatonin and fuels the anxiety-sleep cycle

* Why even a silent phone on the table fragments your attention (“technoference”)

Then we pivot to solutions.

Not detoxes. Not shame. Not willpower.

Design.

I walk you through the research-backed Digital Wellbeing Protocol — small environmental changes that shift power back to you. From the grayscale hack to the bedroom ban to the 30-minute morning delay, these are structural adjustments that work with your biology instead of against it.

You don’t need to become a monk.You don’t need to delete your life.

You just need to move the slot machine.

This episode is about reclaiming your focus, your sleep, and your presence — not by fighting your brain, but by redesigning your environment.Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/

A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62