I talk a lot about what we eat for our health. But what about the air we breathe at home?

If you or your kids have asthma, constant sniffles, a lingering cough, sinus issues, or you’ve noticed damp patches and that musty smell, this episode could change how you think about your home.

As a new dad, I'm personally really interested in how our home environment shapes early immune development. This conversation made me think differently about ventilation, condensation and what really matters.

My guest is Dr Peter Cook, a Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter. His research looks at how airborne fungal spores interact with the immune system and drive allergic and asthmatic disease, an area that has been surprisingly neglected.

In this episode, we go into:

• What mould actually is and when it becomes a problem
• What is a safe level of mould?
• How mould exposure can trigger asthma and allergic disease
• Who’s most at risk
• Whether mould testing kits are worth your money
• If dehumidifiers and air purifiers actually work
• Practical steps you can take this week to reduce your exposure and protect your health

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Today we’re having an uncomfortable but very necessary conversation about antidepressants and the theory that these drugs work for those with depression by correcting imbalanced chemicals in their brain.

Our guest to discuss this topic is Joanna Moncrieff, a Professor of Psychiatry at University College London, and works as a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS. She is author of numerous scientific papers including a major review that showed there was little evidence to support the idea that depression is caused by a serotonin abnormality. Her most recent book "Chemically Imbalanced: the making and unmaking of the serotonin myth” is what we’re going to be discussing today.

This was a complete eye opener for me. For years I believed in the pharmaceutical washed message that antidepressants worked because of a genuine brain chemical imbalance that we corrected with medications. This is not proven.

Today we’ll discuss over-use and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs in the public sphere, the changing philosophy of mental health and how we got to a point where over 8 million people in the UK use antidepressants.

We discuss what serotonin is, how we measure it in the body, why the imbalance theory is inconclusive, whether antidepressants have good evidence that they work and their many side effects.

I want to make it clear that this episode is not meant to shame or belittle anyone on medications for mental health, but provide accurate information about how we can safely treat these problems and offer informed consent weighing up the pros and cons of medications like antidepressants. The use of these medications has well recognised withdrawal and dependency effects and should not be stopped without strict supervision of your medical practitioner.

We’ve also linked to the Maudsley deprescribing guidelines here in the show notes for practitioners educating themselves on how to do this with their patients.

Chemically Imbalanced Book

Website: https://joannamoncrieff.com/

🎬 Watch the podcast on YouTube here

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🌐 View full show notes, including guest details, on our website

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Even though I’m a skeptic I love health tech. I wear a wearable, I play with red light therapy gadgets and I monitor my bloods more regularly than a lot of my peers. Rather than being overwhelmed with the data, I thrive in it, and I’m able to reasonably weigh up the information from all these inputs because of my experience of being a medical doctor for over 15 years.

But with so much health tech interest, the landscape has become confusing and it can be hard to separate health from hype.

So we’re chatting to Lara Lewington today who’s covered some of the world’s greatest innovations, presenting the BBC’s flagship technology show, Click and many more. She’s explored Artificial Intelligence in health, the use of home hormone testing and whether there are any devices that can actually help us meditate better.

This is a super fun episode where we discuss what tech is available today that can help us eat, sleep and exercise better as well as stress less and prevent disease. I learnt both about the world of breath testing to guide our food choices, an app to help you with jet lag, as well as the potential for intelligent and personalised cancer screening.

Hacking Humanity dives into this and a lot more, which is available in all good bookstores.

Some of the products discussed include:

Whoop

Oura

Omed

Dexcom and Abbot CGMs

Timeshifter App

Eli Health

BrainPatch AI

Grail Testing

Truecheck

Ezra

🎬 Watch the podcast on YouTube here

📱 Download The Doctor’s Kitchen app

🌐 View full show notes, including guest details, on our website

☕️ Try Exhale Coffee here

🥗 Join the newsletter and receive a 7 day meal plan

📷 Follow on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.