590 - The Power of Healthy Thoughts (Gut Feeling and The Placebo Effect)

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Episode #590 - The Power of Healthy Thoughts (Gut Feeling and The Placebo Effect)

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⌚ Sat 11 February 2012  ☻Marc David, Ben Goldacre

Download Hour1 Download Hour2This week, two angles on the mind-body connection which challenge the simplistic model of man as machine. First, Marc David speaks on the essential but often overlooked mental aspects of eating. Then we hear Ben Goldacre speaks on the placebo effect.

In our first hour, Marc David, author of The Slow Down Diet, Eating for Pleasure, Energy and Weight Loss challenges the idea of calorie controlled dieting. He is the founder, director, and primary instructor for the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Marc David highlights the presence of neurons in the gut as evidence that digestion is a complex process involving the whole person, in which mood and setting are important. Could this explain why reductionist science never seems to work out what is a healthy diet and what not...? In our second hour we hear two radio shows on the placebo effect from the BBC Radio 4 series, Bad Science on the placebo effect. He starts by narrating on the history of the double blind trial. Then he reports on a wide variety of surprising results, establishing that different colors of placebo work better for different illnesses and that brand name placebos (or brand name aspirin) works better than generic ones.
Thanks to Coutney Coop Radio for The Deconstructing Dinner Podcast
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Source archive: Deconstructing Dinner (60 min) Marc David The Placebo Effect (1) (28 min) Ben Goldacre The Placebo Effect (2) (26 min) Ben Goldacre

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