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OK, so I've been procrastinating writing this intro to the Matt Frazier interview for about a week, because I wanted to get the prose just right.

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OK, so I’ve been procrastinating writing this intro to the Matt Frazier interview for about a week, because I wanted to get the prose just right.

Matt is the founder of No-Meat Athlete, originally a blog, then a book, and now a movement growing on its own steam.

We talked about Matt’s introduction to running, his views on entrepreneurship and challenge, and about his discovery of the plant-based road to competitive excellence. As well as the No Meat Athlete movement and brand, and the dance between control and letting go.

But here’s what excited me about doing the write-up: our philosophies clicked on so many levels, the conversation went much deeper than I was planning or expecting.

I believe this interview is one of the great treats available on Plant Yourself.

Please enjoy, comment, and share.

Links

No Meat Athlete website

The book: No Meat Athlete

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Elana "Titanium" Priesman is an unlikely subject for a magazine devoted to fitness.

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Elana “Titanium” Priesman is an unlikely subject for a magazine devoted to fitness.

Overweight as a child, obese as a young adult, uninterested in sports, picked last in gym class to the groans of her teammates, Elana achieved a stunning turnaround a couple of years ago.

Culminating in her profile in the October 2014 Vegan Health and Fitness magazine, in an article titled “How I Lost 100 Pounds.”

In this heartfelt conversation, we cover:

* Elana’s junk-food childhood, and the impact on her weight, emotions, and self-esteem

* her experience with the Atkins diet

* her problems with prescription drugs

* her fling with paleo

* empowerment through information, and how she became the patient doctors hate the most (a “googler”)

* the turning point

* strategies for transitioning to and maintaining a plant-based lifestyle

* progress in fits and starts, and the importance of commitment and community

* her outreach to help others

* my prediction about the most popular girl’s name in 2017

Pam Popper, PhD, ND, is Executive Director of The Wellness Forum and co-author of the 2013 book, Food Over Medicine: The Conversation that Could Save Your Life.

I had interviewed Pam a year ago about her first book, Solving America’s Healthcare Crisis, and really enjoyed the conversation. She has a way of making complex concepts simple and stark, so that people who hear her are motivated to take positive action to improve their health.

Even so, when our publisher, BenBella Books, sent me a reviewer’s copy of Food Over Medicine, I stuck it on a shelf in my office and let it sit there for several months. “Not another book about plant-based nutrition and health,” I was thinking. I’ve read dozens of them, even c0-written one, and it just didn’t seem like there was anything left to hear.

So imagine my surprise when, two weeks ago, I popped it open – just to take a quick look – and found myself having finished it a couple of hours later. I could not put it down, which is exactly the sort of review I want my books to generate.

So I got Pam back onto the podcast, the first guest to make a second appearance. And we got through about a quarter of my questions, so it looks like the esteemed Dr. Popper may have to become a regular.

In this conversation, we cover the following:

* why you should always tell a hospital you’re uninsured if you’re admitted for emergency testing

* the difference between health stories and health science, and how to respond to people who tell you their grandpa smoked and drank and ate meat three times a day and lived to 103

* why most of what we read in medical journals is wrong (and I am introduced to a seemingly innocuous procedure called subset analysis)

* how to prevent compliance problems in patients and clients shifting to a plant-based diet

* the importance of getting enough water (yeah, you’ve heard it before, but this time you’ll really start drinking 8 glasses a day – I did!)

* why The Wellness Forum is explicitly NOT a vegan program

* the “combination lock” theory of diet, and why “good enough” is probably not good enough

* why high HDL is a silly biomarker of health

* why more doctors don’t prescribe nutritional interventions for their patients

* the one thing more powerful than all the lobbying and advertising money in the world

* the shocking statistic that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric meds at any given time

* what the plant-based movement is doing really badly, and how to improve

* and much more…

Enjoy, comment, and please share!

Links

The Wellness Forum

Food Over Medicine: The Conversation that Could Save Your Life

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From his early days in the belly of the beast as a claims adjuster for the tire industry, to his work on the front lines with Ralph Nader's Institute for Auto Safety, to his own work making companies pay for their negligence, Sean has seen it all as an insider.

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Sean Kane is president of Safety Research and Strategy, and founder of The Safety Institute.

From his early days in the belly of the beast as a claims adjuster for the tire industry, to his work on the front lines with Ralph Nader’s Institute for Auto Safety, to his own work making companies pay for their negligence, Sean has seen it all as an insider.

He fights tirelessly (oh, did a bad pun just slip into this blog?) to hold manufacturers and marketers accountable for the damage their products cause.

And lest you peg him an anti-technology crusader, he’s also an organic gardner and supporter of the use of appropriate technology to solve societal and agricultural problems.

In this conversation, we cover:

* why many manufacturers fear the advent of self-driving cars

* why many safety issues never get publicized or addressed

* the unintended consequences of fixing the rollover problem of light trucks and SUVs

* the millions of sloppy and untested lines of code that run modern automobiles, and how they’re taking control away from drivers

* willful misrepresentation of the “frivolous McDonalds hot coffee” lawsuit to make it much harder to take corporations to court for damages, and why frivolous cases almost never make it to court already

* the upcoming epidemic of “car hacking”

* why staying off the cutting edge of technology may be the safest strategy

* what ordinary citizens can do to help improve vehicle and product safety

* the complicated Tesla Motors story

Enjoy, comment, and please share!

Links

Safety Research and Strategy

The Safety Institute

Ralph Nader’s Center for Auto Safety

Hot Coffee: The documentary that tells the truth about the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit

FarmHack.net: An open-source community for resilient agriculture

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Dr Garth Davis is medical director of Surgical Weight Loss at Memorial Harmon Memorial City Hospital in Houston, Texas.

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Dr Garth Davis is medical director of Surgical Weight Loss at Memorial Harmon Memorial City Hospital in Houston, Texas.

After years of performing weight loss surgery, with himself overweight and faced with a medical recommendation to start taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, Garth woke up one day and asked the question, “Why are Americans so overweight and unhealthy?”

Which led him to a second question: “Where in the world are people slim and healthy?”

Which led him to a comprehensive study of nutrition, a complete overhaul of his personal lifestyle and diet, and a totally new way of working with his obese patients.

In this interview, we cover:

* the only form of psychological intervention ever to show clinically positive results, and how Garth uses it with his patients

* the unnaturalness of all low-carb diets, and their toll on our health

* why sugar is not the cause of diabetes

* the tyranny of “normal”

* how the medical system is changing (slowly!) to encourage better health

* the elephant in the health-care room that will eventually force the medical profession to recommend a plant-based diet

* and much more…

Enjoy, let us know what you think, and please share!

Links

Dr Garth on Facebook

The Davis Weight Loss Clinic (Houston)

The EPIC Oxford Study

The Adventist Health Study

Recommended book: The Beck Diet Solution

Proteinaholic – the book that I helped Dr. Garth write!

Thoughts on the episode? Let us know.

In college, Janice Stanger developed serious eating disorders to hide her binge eating from others. At 5'4", she ballooned somewhere past 165 pounds (she admits to having stopped weighing herself when the news got too grim).

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