What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You

Psychiatrist Professor Joanna Moncrieff discusses her new book Chemical Imbalance: The Making and the Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.

I first spoke to Joanna two years ago, just after she had published a review paper suggesting that there was no link between depression and an imbalance of serotonin in the brain.

And her book picks up what happened next. As her article gained more and more attention, she found herself in a political...

GP Dr Safia Debar discusses how we can leverage emerging knowledge of neuroscience to help us more effectively manage our stress.

This is something, she has personal knowledge of after finding herself burnt out as a GP, when she turned to her first degree in neuroscience to see how it could help her rethink her approach.

Safia argues it is not so much the stress that we face, but how we think about that stress and the processes tha...

Dr Louise Newson, who runs a menopause clinic, discusses many of the myths about Hormone Replacement Therapy for women - or HRT for short. What are the risks? Who should take it and for how long? It's a subject which has been much misunderstood.

Too frequently, women in either the years leading up to the menopause or during the menopause itself, get misdiagnosed when they go to see their GP about symptoms. That can mean they end up...

Journalist Katherine Eban's investigation over more than ten years has uncovered one of the most shocking medical scandals imaginable, which affects millions of patients across the world.

In this podcast, she discusses the shocking reality of what happens or perhaps more accurately what doesn’t happen, when generic drugs that we import, are manufactured in countries with poor regulations.

When a drug is first approved, it is releas...

Norwegian GP Dr Torkil Færø argues wearable devices that measure our heart rate and other health metrics, if used in the right way can be transformative in keeping us healthy and helping prevent disease in the future.

In his book, The Pulse Cure, he explains why he thinks far more attention should be paid to a key metric which turns out to give a surprisingly accurate snapshot of our level of stress and overall health -  and that i...

Whistleblower Dr Carl Elliott's life changed for ever, when he tried to alert his university about the running of a drug trial which had resulted in the suicide of a patient. A patient whose mother felt should never have been enrolled in a trial in the first place.

Carl’s battle came at a huge personal and emotional cost and at the end of years of campaigning and lobbying, little had really changed.

His disillusioning experience as...

The idea of developing dementia is probably one of our greatest health fears. We tend to think of it as an irreversible disease that gradually robs us of our faculties.

But podcast guest, psychiatrist Dr Kat Toups is one of a group of doctors and researchers who argues that certainly in its early stages, the disease is actually reversible. The mistake - she says  - is to think of dementia as an illness with a sole cause and instead...

Cardiologist Dr Scott Murray discusses what we can all do to reduce our risk of heart disease.

I think many of us are familiar with the idea that elevated levels of the so-called bad cholesterol - low density lipoprotein or LDL for short - have been linked to cardiovascular illness. (Although, in fact there is a group of scientists who argue that LDL levels are unconnected with heart disease.)

But Scott argues the picture is actual...

Professor Sarah Berry discusses her research in personalised nutrition, which is uncovering the hugely varied effects different foods may have on one particular group or individual compared to others. This variability can be due to our genetics, metabolism or a number of other factors.

This may well have important implications for what, when and how we  should eat.

For example, research is revealing that as we age, many of us have ...

Dentist Dr Victoria Sampson argues that while the gut microbiome gets a huge amount of attention, funding and publicity, the oral microbiome gets almost entirely overlooked, yet it is essential to our health.

As she explains in this podcast, it has  a close symbiotic relationship with our gut biome, so changing the composition of one affects the other. And perhaps most importantly of all, poor oral biome health is linked to a range...

This week's guest is Dave Feldman, who unusually for this podcast is not a doctor or a medical researcher, but actually a software engineer.

For a long time, there has been concern that those on a very low carb or ketogenic diet are pushing their cholesterol to very high levels. This is something that Dave experienced personally, when he noticed the amount of his so called bad cholesterol -  the low density lipoprotein, known as LD...

Oncologist Professor Robert Thomas, argues along with standard conventional cancer treatments - all of which he uses - that exercise and diet can play a pivotal role in improving cancer outcomes.

Robert says for the newer biological therapies which require a patient to have robust immunity, research is revealing that a healthier lifestyle and gut health, can improve the chances of responding well to these biological agents by 30-40...

Author and journalist Tom Mueller,  after meeting whistleblowers working in the US dialysis industry seven years ago, decided to investigate further. Tom argues what he found is a cautionary tale not just about dialysis, but about the impact on healthcare of for profit medicine in general.

His book How to Make A Killing: Death, Dollars and the Business of Blood, contains one statistic that I found extraordinary. Although the US has...

Investigative reporter Michael Moss has spent many years uncovering just what it is about processed and fast food that makes it so hard for many of us to resist.

This is the final podcast of three that I am doing in conjunction with the  International Food addiction Consensus conference held on 17th May.

Michael says he now believes from his decades of research, that particular combinations of  flavour, texture, fat, protein and ca...

Psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke discusses how addictive substances like alcohol and drugs cause our dopamine levels to rocket, and reveals - perhaps surprisngly - that highly processed, high sugar food can also have a similar effect on our brains. This is the second podcast of three that I'm doing in conjunction with the International Food Addiction Consensus conference held in London on 17th May. 

Anna argues we've transformed our wo...

Dr Rob Lustig discusses whether it’s really possible to become addicted to food, and if it is, does that change how we view those who struggle in their relationship with food?

In our conversation, Rob argues that the phrase "food addiction" is a misnomer, and that the real issue is food additive addiction. He says all the medical evidence suggests that two additives drive this - sugar and caffeine. And while foodstuffs such as fat ...

In the last few decades, there has been a huge increase in allergy and allergic reactions, but why? Just what has changed in our health and environment to bring this about? Consultant NHS allergist Dr Sophie Farooque discusses one of the biggest puzzles in medicine.

For example peanut allergies were almost unknown before the 1990s, but today it  and other food allergies are much more common. Sophie reveals the best thing to do to s...

Dr Jason Fung argues that much of what we think we know about weight loss is simply wrong.

Jason says that the critical factor in losing weight is hormones - not calories. He believes calorie counting is an overly simplistic approach. And that actually dieting may be the worst thing you can do, because it slows your metabolic rate which actually makes it harder to reduce weight in the future.

Jason argues medical science reveals th...

Beth Zupec–Kania is a dietician and nutritionist, who has spent over 30 years developing very low carb -  otherwise known as ketogenic diets - to treat a range of both physical and mental health conditions. She has worked with many of the leading neurologists and psychiatrists pioneering this field.

I heard Beth speak at a conference  Metabolic Psychiatry: Understanding How Modifying Metabolism Can Create Mental Health last Novembe...