The Big Middle

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 Richmon...

How to keep your skin at its healthy best on this episode of The Big Middle, the podcast exploring longer, healthy midlife by design, learning from the sharpest thinkers around. 

Regulars will know and adore the sharp thinker I’ve invited back on the show. It’s Dr Fayne Frey, crusading age-positive dermatologist and skin cancer specialist - my guiding light as you may have heard last week through my encounter with a malignant melano...

A skin cancer update for you now if you’re a regular listener or viewer of The Big Middle - a mix of the personal and the general. 

Eighteen months after the first of two operations to cut out a malignant melanoma, I’m happy to report the scar on my outer calf has smoothed out impressively; it’s kinda bumpy-wavy now, nicely faded. 

I thought it would never settle down. It resembled a shark bite for the first six months after the surg...

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...

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 et...

Much of the world - rich north and poor south - is drowning in an ocean of hyperpalatable, addictive fakery masquerading as food. 

Much of that fakery has fed our disconnect with natural food production cycles and practices. 

And it’s left most of us in a food muddle - moral, environmental, nutritional.  

We latch on to our dietary tribe with conviction but what if our beliefs are based on a limited understanding of the evolution of g...

Don’t Shoot the Messenger - an admonition I’m invoking right off the top of this episode of The Big Middle.

The messenger is my guest Jayne Buxton - journalist-author of The Great Plant-Based Con: Why Eating a Plants-Only Diet Won’t Improve Your Health or Save the Planet.

As you might guess, Jayne's been shot and trolled multiple times on the socials since her book launched three months ago (June 2022). But she's also been praised fo...

Health is wealth and expect the unexpected - surely the two most apt truisms of these crazy days on so many fronts.

Both ring truer than usual for guest Catherine Foot. 

She’s been a year in her post as head of Phoenix Insights, a new UK think tank set up to transform the way society responds to the possibilities of longer lives. 

It’s a workplace milestone fate served up with the kind of surprise we can all do without - a long recove...

Oh our frazzled brains. Help clearing that fog, curbing that anxiety, finding your focus - and that elusive word - in this fascinating episode with neuroscientist Dr Andrew Hill. 

He's one of the world’s leading practitioners of neurofeedback.

Dr Hill age-stages his best bio-hacks to nourish and rewire our brains for peak performance. Meal-timing is critical, he says. As is getting enough deep sleep. And he tells us intermittent fast...

It’s as if she’s got a hotline to your head. She gets inside your mind, rummages round all those piles of messy-feely thoughts, even the ones in the darkest corners, then heads for your heart. 

Scottish writer Donna Ashworth translates our thoughts and feelings about life, love and loss into poetry that stuns in its simple complexity. 

Her beautiful words proved a salve for our battered souls and minds at the height of the pandemic. ...

They call themselves retirement recidivists. 

My guests Bruce Hiland and Ted Kaufman tried but failed several times to call time on busy, high-status careers. 

They’re the authors of the book Retiring?: Your Next Chapter is about Much More than Money.  

They say figuring out what you're going to do is job one after you've sorted your financial future.  

To win at retirement, they say much more attention must be paid to planning how you...

I’ve always given the notion of retirement shortest shrift on The Big Middle. 

What does it even mean in 2022? 

We don’t retire these days, we shift gears, we make transitions. 

We keep earning if we need to (and most of us need to) while we grow our minds, feed our passions, soothe our souls and figure out how to give back - do something that matters to more than ourselves. 

Two fascinating guests join me on The Big Middle to talk tra...

We’re recording this episode of The Big Middle 35 days after Russian President Vladimir Putin started his savagery in Ukraine, compounding our state of psychic trauma just as we learn to live with COVID. 

The courage and resilience of Ukrainians is breathtaking. The images of the immense suffering of innocents pulverised by Russian shells in their homes and as they flee is horrifying. 

I’m betting you too are finding it harder than e...

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 a...

She's been called Queen of Orgasms and The Lube Queen. On the socials, she goes by SamTalksSex. Sam Evans is a  sexual health and pleasure expert who's exasperated that frank talk and clear, practical information about all aspects of consensual sex is still hard to get, mired in stigma. 

A former renal and occupational health nurse, she's a tireless campaigner for better information and understanding of how to keep enjoying the many...