Eat Move Think

There's a national effort underway to get people to download what's known as a contact tracing app. To help listeners understand why they're so important, Eat Move Think host Shaun Francis talks to the University of Waterloo math PhD candidate who pioneered the "decentralized Bluetooth exposure notification" technology that started it all—James Petrie, the director of research at Covid Watch . Als...

At 55, Deedee Moscoe looked around one day and realized her life needed a reboot. Caring for her aging parents left her without any time for her career—or herself. Deedee's journey to remake her life is chronicled in a documentary called Hack Your Age , airing on Zoomer Media's Vision TV. It's also emblematic of the moment we're in, as society returns to the next normal. With host Shaun Francis, D...

By devoting so much of our attention to stopping the spread of COVID-19, with lockdowns, with physical distancing measures, by closing borders and many businesses, are we ignoring the possibility we could be harming population health in other ways? That's what host Shaun Francis explores with Dr. Vivek Goel, member of the federal government's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force and vice-president of rese...

What's the objective for COVID-19 management? Is the model to eradicate the virus altogether? To contain it until we have a vaccine? And how does that objective affect our U.S. border strategy? Irfan Dhalla is a physician and a vice-president at Unity Health Toronto who is challenging policy makers to think about such issues. In this episode, he and host Shaun Francis engage in a fulsome debate ab...

Dr. David Carr is an ER doc who has been on the front lines caring for patients affected by COVID-19 in Toronto. Host Shaun Francis spoke to Dr. Carr about the mistakes we've made these last few months, what it's like to tell someone they're infected with COVID, and the dangerous resource crunch we're facing as the health care system tackles the elective surgery backlog while still fighting the pa...

Exercise is the most important thing you can do to help yourself cope. But the pandemic makes it difficult for us to get physical activity. Host Shaun Francis spoke with brain health expert Dr. Jennifer Heisz, the professor who leads McMaster University's Neurofit Lab, to learn a set of easy-to-follow tips and tricks that use physical activity to decrease stress even in these uncertain times. For...

The need for more testing has existed throughout the pandemic. To stop COVID-19, you need to be able to see it and assess how many people have it. Most jurisdictions in North America are nowhere near the ideal yet. To learn what's going on, host Shaun Francis spoke to one of the most outspoken of the experts on the issue, Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw, a clinical epidemiologist.  For complete show note...

A recent poll revealed that 50% of us feel our mental health has worsened since the pandemic started. Dr. Jonathan Danson is a clinical psychologist who believes that the extra time we all have, from not having to commute or take kids to sports practices, is particularly difficult for high achievers. He says it induces "analysis paralysis," and his prescription for how to address that forms a larg...

Why do some large gatherings of people become superspreader events, while some do not? Jonathan Kay is a Canadian journalist who compiled a database of the most important COVID-19 clusters. His analysis features surprising implications for business and government, and may help all of us return to work safely — as well as make life more enjoyable over the next few months.  Please subscribe and rate...

What's to come? For those seeking guidance, we checked in with the Mayo Clinic's Dr. Kai Singbartl. He's the chair of infection control and prevention at Mayo Arizona, and he spoke to Medcan's chief medical officer, Dr. Peter Nord, about the COVID-19 therapies that excite him, and when to expect a vaccine. Also, please check out Medcan's Dr. David Carr on the Toronto Star's This Matters podcast. P...

Coronavirus has compressed all the different parts of our lives into one place—the home. So Shaun consulted with an expert in work/life balance on how to navigate our new reality. Stew Friedman is an emeritus professor at Wharton business school. He founded the Wharton Leadership Program and its Work/Life Integration Project. He's also a bestselling author and the coauthor of this spring's fascina...

Our relationship with food has changed since social distancing began. We're eating in more. We're worrying whether food will be available. And we're indulging more. So for this episode, we decided to feature a conversation between Medcan's two in-house food experts: Leslie Beck is the nutrition columnist for The Globe and Mail and Medcan's director of food and nutrition. Jason Smidt is the executi...

Epidemiologists are researchers who study disease outbreaks—how they happen and how long they'll last. One of the world's foremost is Dr. David Fisman, a professor at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a practicing infectious diseases clinician at Toronto Western Hospital. Shaun Francis interviewed Dr. Fisman about how long we'll have to live with social distancing,...

We're all dealing with anxiety lately. What do we do if things start to spiral? How do we manage our thoughts when the future is so unpredictable? What if it all starts to seem like a little too much? Medcan Director of Mental Health Dr. Gina Di Giulio, a clinical psychologist, has a frank, authentic and grounded discussion with Eat Move Think executive producer Christopher Shulgan that walks thro...

What's to come as this pandemic develops? How far might governments go to prevent the spread of the coronavirus? The problem is, we just don't know. So to confront some concrete scenarios, we interviewed an on-the-ground observer in Spain, another Western democracy, but one with 22 times the number of COVID-19 cases, to learn what life is like there—in one possible future scenario for Canada. The...

How do you work out when you're self-isolating? It's an important question. Even if social distancing has you trapped inside, exercise is important for immune function and mood. It's also the secret to a good night's sleep. Here, Medcan Director of Fitness Stephen Salzmann provides listeners with the basic principles that go into any workout session, outlining a series of strength-building push an...

An expert in infectious disease, Dr. David Kelvin is a Canada Research Chair at Dalhousie University's Faculty of Medicine who conducts research in China and Italy. He's also just been given a million-dollar grant to develop a test to predict whether a given person will experience a mild, moderate or severe case of COVID-19. Here, Medcan Chief Medical Officer Dr. Peter Nord spoke to Dr. Kelvin to...

This week it became apparent that the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, will not be contained and likely represents something that North America and the world will be navigating for months to come. Here, in a special episode, Shaun interviews Medcan Chief Medical Officer Peter Nord to create an audio explainer of the evolving situation at its most important inflection point yet.

It's a human tendency to feel irritable if the body goes too long without eating. But Dr. Felice Jacka's research indicates our relationship with food is much deeper. Dr. Jacka is the author of Brain Changer: The Good Mental Health Diet and a psychiatric epidemiologist from Australia's Deakin University, where she runs the Food and Mood Centre . And she's almost single-handedly created one of the...

Entering 2020 we're now firmly in the second year that marijuana has been legalized in Canada. But there remain an enormous number of questions. What's a safe dose? Has CBD oil actually been proven to do anything? And how the heck do you pronounce cannabinoids? To answer these questions, we gathered together three of the world's experts for a panel discussion last year at the National Arts Centre...