The Big Middle
Susan Flory
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Top 10 The Big Middle Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Big Middle episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Big Middle for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Big Middle episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Designed for Ageing winners
The Big Middle
10/06/22 • 37 min
It’s playtime on The Big Middle. I'm celebrating the oft-forgotten fun side of living as older by staying switched-on and active. This is a very particular celebration; we’re meeting five of the 26 winners of a big-money design competition here in the UK. Fun factors into all their design projects.
The competition winners are sharing a £20 million pot of government money for design innovations to help us all as we age. All projects are either on the market or close to it and all have potential to scale. Competition leader Julia Glenn of Innovate UK, an arm of UK Research and Innovation, is along to tell us more about how the winners were chosen and what's next for them.
Who won for what:
Lily Chow - Holly Health is partnering with charity Age UK's branches in the London boroughs of Lewisham and Southwark to develop a digital coaching service. It will improve the physical and mental health of older adults to slow the onset of chronic conditions.
Clara Sbraccia - KYMIRA through MISFIT is making a new smart garment bio-monitoring service to help Ida Sports create appropriate sports footwear to help women of all ages, and specifically older women, participate safely and more confidently in sports.
Afroditi Konidari - Tendertec’s FitBees, a service led by women, is integrating home sensors with smart garments to monitor people's activity. This is linked to a programme of community fitness for older adults, including those living with carers.
Howard Blackburn - Yorkshire company Innerva is making power-assisted exercise machines more user-friendly for older people and the machines more readily available throughout the community.
Ben Wilkins - Good Boost Wellbeing is transforming leisure centres into community musculoskeletal treatment hubs with artificial intelligence (AI) and gamified exercise monitoring in gyms and pools. Using gamification extends the service to more people by including those who are less mobile.
Full scroll of winners here.
Enjoy!
Links
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
- Holly Health
- Kymira
- Tendertec's Fitbees
- Good Boost Wellbeing
- UKRI on Twitter
- Holly Health on Twitter
- Kymira on Twitter
- Innerva on Twitter
- Good Boost Wellbeing on Twitter
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Nicolette Hahn Niman
The Big Middle
09/22/22 • 73 min
I'm back with another fascinating guest in my ongoing quest to better understand how our food system became so badly broken and our nutrition beliefs so skewed.
Animal foods are demonised. Biologically-dead, factory-made fare that’s poisoning our bodies - and draining health care budgets - is being promoted in the guise of planetary preservation.
Where’s the truth? How do we get to solutions? How do we make the right healthy and ethical choices?
My guest is long-time vegetarian Nicolette Hahn Niman, an environmental activist lawyer-turned-beef farmer who’s been touring her latest book, the second edition of Defending Beef, across the UK from her ranch north of San Francisco.
We get into everything about the practise of regenerative farming, the environmental and health benefits of raising and eating grass-fed beef, and, in an interview first for Nicolette, discuss menopause and the challenges it brings to staying healthy and strong. Most of us need to take stock of our food choices and lifestyles at midlife, especially now that we're ageing differently.
I know you'll find this as fascinating as I did. I reverted to being an omnivore after years of vegetarianism so we talk plenty about what needs to change to make the lives of animals raised for food a whole lot less miserable. Nicolette joins other #RealFood advocates in saying "It's not the cow, it's the how."
Links
- Buy Nicolette's book Defending Beef
- Find her on Facebook
- And on Twitter
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Dr Jeff Foster
The Big Middle
03/17/22 • 64 min
Women in the demon grip of menopause - those of us who don’t sail through it with nary a care - might well scoff at men who clamour for attention for their struggles with andropause, the male menopause.
Are they even comparable? And don't only a small percentage of men experience it?
Questions I put to Dr Jeff Foster, a men’s health specialist here in the UK.
We cover the men's health fundamentals - the importance of testosterone and estrogen, erectile dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer, turtle bellies, "moobs" (man boobs) and more.
Dr Foster is the author of the excellent, practical book Man Alive: The Health Problems Men Face and How to Fix Them.
Alongside his work within the National Health Service, the NHS, he's a co-funder of H3 Health, a private clinic in Warwickshire for midlife men and women.
Loved learning from Dr Jeff. Video version up soon on my newborn YouTube channel. Do have a gander and subscribe - massive thanks if you do!
Links
- Buy Dr Jeff's book Man Alive here
- Dr Jeff's clinic H3 Health
- Jeff on Instagram
- Jeff on Twitter
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12/23/21 • 24 min
Still croaky from apparently not COVID but a beast of a cold/flu combo I picked up in France; where better huh? We're all in virus-avoidance mode, still, so I can only hope you manage to avoid all the nastiness out there and have the merriest Christmas possible.
This is The Big Middle, the podcast free-ranging around all aspects of messy, glorious life in the bigger middle. I loosely define that as mid-40s through mid-70s.
I found myself explaining the theme of this podcast a lot in recent weeks. Before I got sick, I had meetings with switched-on folk I'd have thought would have twigged to the fact we're in the midst of a demographic shift that demands a cultural and institutional revolution that's slow to come. They were surprised when I trotted out this milestone statistic from the World Health Organisation: there are now more over-60s in the world than there are under fives. That happened last year. By 2030, one in six of us will be 60 or older.
The life model we've made is hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with this new reality. It was designed for 50 and 60 year lives, not the century the babies of today are likely to experience and the 80s and 90s we might be lucky to get.
We jam everything into our first 50 years and then nothing's defined bar the fuzzy notion of retirement and, in your late 60s, state pension access. We haven't properly reconfigured our institutions and expectations to reflect longer lives in relative good health - relative to a century ago.
I started this podcast three years ago to explore this cultural and structural disconnect. My first guest was Geoff Filkin, then the chair of the UK charity The Centre for Ageing Better. He'd written a manifesto for better longer lives. Lord Filkin has moved on to other roles advancing his manifesto but its themes remain central to the demographic upheaval of now and the future, despite the haircut COVID has given to global life expectancy statistics. My first question to him was about the nature and scale of that upheaval.
Links
Dr Jay Wrigley
The Big Middle
11/11/21 • 70 min
I've got just the right learned guest for you to spill all the tea on the interaction between hormones and food and feeling your healthy best when all is in balance.
Achieving that balance is no small feat in The Big Middle years.
But functional medicine Dr Jay Wrigley has tried and tested ways to optimise the nutrition and energy bang you get from what you eat and how you live while taming those rambunctious midlife hormones.
Links
- Dr Jay's website
- His bio
- Dr Jay on Twitter
- Link to podcast with menopause specialist Dr Zoe Hodson
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Tim Spector
The Big Middle
10/07/21 • 63 min
The central thread I’ve been pulling through a raft of episodes with superstar scientists and doctors is there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to what to eat to live healthy for longer - no off-the-peg plan. Every esteemed expert I’ve brought you has reinforced this fact.
There are few who can emphatically state “that’s true” more than Tim Spector. He's a data explorer extraordinaire, a genetic epidemiologist who heads up his department and his ground-breaking Twins UK project at King's College London.
Tim is one of the most cited scientists around, with research papers numbering nearly 1,000. He's working on his fifth book after his hot sellers The Diet Myth and Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong.
His work on the microbiome and identical twins has exploded current nutrition and energy models. It's exposed the widespread fiction of the standardized dietary guidelines - the ones governments and nutrition practitioners foist on us, the unwitting public, under pressure from Big Food manufacturers. They have the resources of medium-sized countries and control research money.
We covered plenty but not all. Please see the show notes for more details about his research into gut health, genetic disease markers, epigenetics and COVID19 symptoms. Trust me, you'll want to devour it all. It's fascinating.
<< Please view the information in this episode as only that; it should not be construed as personal medical advice. Go to your GP or family doctor for that. >>
Links
- Tim on Wikipedia - meatiest bio I could find with links to specific research we didn't manage to address
- That recent paper on sugar-dippers
- ZOE - the health science company Tim co-founded to measure individual food responses
- ZOE COVID Symptom Study app - a not-for-profit initiative launched end of March 2020 to support COVID-19 research.
- The PREDICT studies
- The Twins UK study
- Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We've Been Told About Food is Wrong
- The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat
- That great Financial Times profile of Tim by Madhumita Murgia - July, 2021
- Tim on Twitter I Instagram
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Sam Feltham
The Big Middle
07/02/21 • 59 min
Wish we indy podders had music rights cuz, for this episode of The Big Middle, I’d fire up Sisters Are Doin It For Themselves, that glorious Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox feminist anthem from the 80s. People Are Doin' It For Themselves is the tweaked version I’ve had on my brain loop since inviting Sam Feltham to come have a chat.
Sam is a health crusader of the first order. Six years ago, he founded the UK’s Public Health Collaboration charity - a grassroots education hub that’s part of a global wave of people rising up against the dietary orthodoxy that’s making way too many of us sick.
Sam rather impressively chose to make himself temporarily sick to prove all calories are not created equal - they differ in nutritional value and biochemical impact.
Hear how the former fitness trainer and entrepreneur scoffed nearly 6,000 calories a day for 21 days at a stretch to test three dietary regimes: real food, fake food and vegan. A fascinating, inspirational guy. Enjoy!
Links
- Public Health Collaboration UK website
- PHCUK Real Food graphics
- Sam's biohacking overeating experiments
- Expert interviews Sam did for his Smash the Fat Fitness + Fat Loss Bootcamp website
- Sam on Twitter
- Am I the only one who hasn't heard of Footgolf? Looks FuN!
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Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees
The Big Middle
06/17/21 • 40 min
There’s a dark symmetry to what’s happening in this time of COVID when it comes to life expectancy.
The global numbers are, no surprise, falling after several years of stall and splutter.
The last time they fell so much was 100 years ago, after the Spanish flu killed 20 to 50 million people.
The extent of decline this time isn't knowable yet but the consensus is COVID will significantly cut into the current global average of 72 years, 8 months. The numbers now are much higher in the rich global north - an average 79 in the US, 82 in the UK.
For all but the life extension radicals, the focus has shifted to healthspan - how long we live in good health - without the chronic diseases of lifestyle, genetic bad luck, and general physiological wear and tear.
On this episode of The Big Middle, what’s happening with healthspan?
This is the terrain of my learned guest Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees, the founder and CEO of Outcomes Based Healthcare, which he’ll tell us all about.
Links
- Dr Rupert's bio
- Outcomes Based Healthcare
- HumanHealthSpan.com
- Piece in The Times about OBH's findings: "Fifth of people in UK [sic England] will suffer from poor health before age 30" - August 2018
- The APPG for Longevity's key reports "Levelling up Health" (April 2021) and "The Health of the Nation" (February 2020) - see page 57 for Dr Rupert's paper
- Epidemiologist Veena Raleigh writing for The King's Fund - "What is happening to life expectancy in England" - April 2021
- Dr Rupert on Twitter
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Megan Ramos
The Big Middle
08/13/20 • 49 min
The fact COVID-19 preys on the obese has made it more important than ever to get ourselves out of that condition. Why is clear. How has always been complicated, fraught with clashing opinions and claims founded on little or misinterpreted science and a whole lot of anecdote, conjecture and falsehoods.
I’m partial to the new science around the ancient teaching of the healing power of fasting. I’ve followed a relaxed low-carb-medium-fat-no-sugar way of eating for the past five years. It's how I’ve suppressed a couple of autoimmune disorders this way - Rheumatoid Arthritis and Hashimoto’s, an attack on the thyroid - that arrived with menopause. That’s my N = 1 experience, of course, not to be construed as medical advice. This episode is not that.
If you’ve explored fasting as you look to optimise your health, you’ll know my guest by name and reputation. Megan Ramos is co-founder, along with Dr Jason Fung, of the Toronto clinic Intensive Dietary Management and The Fasting Method programme. There's an exploding online community around what they do, helping countless people recover from metabolic illness.
Links
- Megan and Jason's Toronto clinic Intensive Dietary Management
- Jason and Megan's site for The Fasting Method
- 'Practical Fasting': The Use of Therapeutic Fasting in a Clinical Setting - Megan highlighting the inequality around access to healthy, real food in her speech to the 2019 Low Carb Down Under event in Australia
- Therapeutic use of intermittent fasting and ketogenic diet as an alternative treatment for type 2 diabetes in a normal weight woman: a 14-month case study in the British Medical Journal - June, 2020 -authors Charlene Lichtash, Jason Fung, Katherine Connor Ostoich, Megan Ramos
- Therapeutic use of intermittent fasting for people with type 2 diabetes as an alternative to insulin in the British Medical Journal - Sept 2018 - authors Suleiman Furmli, Rami Elmasry, Megan Ramos, Jason Fung
- The Fasting Method's free Facebook page
- Megan on Twitter
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Nutritionist Sally Norton
The Big Middle
12/01/22 • 59 min
Can you harm yourself by eating too much spinach? Should those baby leaves we know and love as a "superfood" come with a health warning? And what about almonds? Both are super-high in oxalates.
If you’re not already rolling your eyes and saying Nooooo Susan, I’ve maxed out on worrying about what to eat when, this fascinating conversation will make you think again.
Sally Norton is a nutritionist and public health leader from Richmond, Virginia raising awareness about oxalates,chemical toxins found in many plants. She suffered decades of ill health before discovering they were the cause of her misery.
Why focus on oxalates when all plant toxins - lectins, phytates, tannins, glycosylates and goitrogens - can damage our gut and immune system?
"What makes oxalates special is they're nearly impossible to remove from foods. They accumulate in the body and create long-term damage. They're tiny and get everywhere, messing up cells by stealing essential minerals and electrolytes and causing both physical damage and oxidative stress in cells and their mitochondria. The preparation methods used to disarm many of those other compounds, such as fermentation and high-heat cooking, don't adequately lower the toxic actions of oxalates. "
"Remember too that the affected cells include our immune system, nerves and brain, glands and critical organs. By the time we reach 40, we all have some degree of a toxic load of oxalate compromising our glands, bones, brain, etcetera. They cause us to miss out on our potential for enjoying our lives, beyond our youth."
Toxic Superfoods, Sally's new book on oxalates, is out this month.
Enjoy learning all about oxalates. No more heaving plates of spinach for me - just a handful or two!
Links
- Sally's website
- Sally's book Toxic Superfoods
- Sally on Twitter
- and on Instagram
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FAQ
How many episodes does The Big Middle have?
The Big Middle currently has 115 episodes available.
What topics does The Big Middle cover?
The podcast is about Ideas, Culture, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Resilience, Work, Aging, Podcasts, Education, Entrepreneurs, Science, Health, Transition and Longevity.
What is the most popular episode on The Big Middle?
The episode title 'Nutritionist Sally Norton' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The Big Middle?
The average episode length on The Big Middle is 42 minutes.
How often are episodes of The Big Middle released?
Episodes of The Big Middle are typically released every 13 days, 22 hours.
When was the first episode of The Big Middle?
The first episode of The Big Middle was released on Sep 6, 2018.
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