The Habit Healers

Your fasting glucose is normal, but your A1c keeps climbing, and no one can tell you why. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking you through exactly what that gap means, why post-meal blood sugar spikes are the hidden driver of rising A1c in most people, and the nine habits that target the hours your fasting blood draw never sees. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifesty...

Fast eaters are more than three times as likely to carry belly fat, even when they’re eating the same food as slower eaters. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the science of why eating speed quietly shapes weight, blood sugar, and metabolic health, and what to do about it. We dig into the gut hormones that tell your brain you’re full, GLP-1, CCK, and PYY, and why the...

When Tim Gannon walked into the kitchen at the Pyramid Bistro in Aspen, Chef Martin Oswald figured he was a salesperson. Martin let him stand there for ten minutes. Gannon didn’t seem to mind. When Martin finally acknowledged him, Gannon rattled off every flavor on the menu that night, sage and allspice and the rest, with the precision of someone who had spent his life thinking about food at this...

What if your annual physical is missing the tests that matter most? Most standard lab panels were built to catch disease, not to tell you where your health is heading. On this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking you through eight blind spots in the typical yearly checkup, four blood markers your doctor can add to your next requisition, and four simple physical assessments you can do...

Most of what you’ve been told about sleep is wrong, and the science has shifted in ways your doctor probably hasn’t caught up on yet. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking you through fourteen of the most common sleep myths, from the eight-hour rule to weekend catch-up sleep, and showing you what the latest research actually says. Some of these will surprise you. Sleep regulari...

Every cuisine on the planet figured out the same trick. Asian stir-fries pair tamarind with palm sugar. Moroccan tagines fold dried apricots into braised lamb. German cooks set sauerkraut next to pork. The contrast of sweet and sour is one of cooking’s oldest and most universal principles, and it exists because without it, flavor stays flat. Most of us understand this instinctively when it comes t...

What if the simplest way to lower your blood sugar after meals was a tiny seated movement you can do at your desk? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and I’m walking you through the science of the soleus push-up, a research-backed exercise that targets a deep calf muscle uniquely built to pull glucose straight out of your bloodstream while you sit. We sit for ten...

I’ll be honest with you. I schedule these live conversations with Jud Brewer MD PhD partly so I can get free therapy. He’s a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University, and I figure if we’re going to have a conversation about perfectionism, I might as well get something out of it too. So here’s my problem. My Substack is ranked number five in health and wellness. I started it about sixtee...

Most people assume dementia is genetic, but the latest research tells a different story. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the 2024 Lancet Commission’s findings that 45% of dementia cases worldwide are linked to 14 modifiable risk factors, and what that actually means for the choices you make every day. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifestyle medicine phys...

There are 1.4 billion people on this planet dealing with hypertension. That number is so large it stops meaning anything. So let me bring it closer. Somewhere in your life, probably within arm’s reach, is a person whose blood pressure is slowly, silently beating up their heart, their kidneys, and their brain. And the most common medical advice they will receive is some version of “cut back on sodi...

Is your mouthwash raising your blood pressure? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m breaking down nitric oxide, the Nobel Prize-winning molecule your body makes in real time to regulate blood pressure, blood flow, erectile function, brain health, and how your muscles handle blood sugar. Most of us have never heard of it, and yet nitric oxide is one of the single most important signali...

Anxiety isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a habit loop your brain learned, and the thing that actually breaks it is curiosity. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the neuroscience of why chronic worry feels impossible to stop, and why the usual advice of “just push through” or “think positive” tends to fail at the exact moment you need it most. Drawing on the research of...

Subscribe to Chef Martin Oswald ’s Healing Kitchen Substack. Right now, across Austria, something is happening that most Americans have never seen. Farmers are pulling thick white asparagus spears out of mounded soil, each one grown entirely in the dark, never touched by sunlight, never given the chance to produce chlorophyll. They are as fat as a thumb and pale as bone. And for the next few weeks...

Can the same plate of food lower your blood sugar, reduce your cholesterol, and bring down your blood pressure? If your doctor has flagged rising glucose, elevated LDL, and borderline blood pressure, you might be dealing with one problem showing up in three places: insulin resistance. On this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and I’m walking you through the cardiometabol...

Social isolation raises your risk of dying from any cause by 32%, putting loneliness in the same mortality category as smoking. But the daily habit that fights social disconnection is far smaller than you think. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the research behind what I call the three-stranger habit, and why a few seconds of real human connection each day could be...

In this episode, I take a closer look at something most of us accept without question. I feel more tired, I recover more slowly, my numbers start to shift—and I’m told, “that’s just aging.” But what if that explanation is missing the most important part? I break down the science that’s changing how we understand aging entirely. Not as a single, inevitable decline—but as a set of specific biologica...

Most people trying to do something about aging are working from an incomplete picture. They hear about a supplement worth trying, or a fasting protocol, or a stress management app, and they keep adding items to a list with no clear organizing logic. What they rarely hear is which specific biological changes are happening inside their body right now, and which daily actions actually affect them. In...

Every Wednesday at 10 AM we go live. Join next week’s Substack Live with Chef Martin Oswald here . Half a cup of red lentils costs about thirty cents. That’s what Chef Martin Oswald held up on our live today before turning it into something I’d never seen before, a homemade lentil tofu. He didn’t need any special equipment or hard-to-find ingredients. Just lentils, water, a blender, and a stockpot...

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 medic...

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 m...

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...

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 P...

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 pol...

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,...

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...