Dr. Nicola Schmitz - Alter Health

Season 2, Episode 8: Three Generations, And What Their Bodies Were Asked To Do In this episode, I compare three generations of bodies: our grandmothers, our mothers, and us. I talk about how daily life used to contain continuous, varied, unconscious movement - carrying, walking, lifting, cleaning, climbing, gardening, kneading, bending - and how modern life has removed much of...

Season 2, Episode 7: Food: The Information You Eat Three Times A Day In this episode, I talk about food not only as fuel, but as information. I look at how modern food has changed: nutrient density, processing, additives, pesticides, packaging, ultra-processed foods, and the growing evidence that what we eat communicates with metabolism, inflammation, hormones, gut m...

Season 2, Episode 6: A Journey Through A Single Night In this episode, I take you through one night of sleep, hour by hour. I talk about sleep as one of the most active biological states of the body: a time for memory consolidation, hormonal regulation, immune recalibration, glymphatic clearance, mitochondrial recovery, oxidative stress repair, and cel...

Season 2, Episode 5: Three Ways Stress Lives In A Body In this episode, I talk about stress not as a vague feeling, but as biology. I describe three different stress patterns I have seen again and again: the high-functioning achiever who cannot feel the cost, the person who switches off but never truly resets, and the person whose nervous system is frag...

Season 2, Episode 4: The Journey Of A Single Marker Today we do something different. We follow a single molecule on its actual journey, from a leaf of spinach growing in a field, through your gut wall, through your liver, through an enzyme called MTHFR that you may have heard about from genetic testing, into a single cell, all the way to a specific s...

Season 2, Episode 3: The Fabric Of Your Life Everything you do enters your body through four doors. The bloodstream, the nervous system, the hormonal cascade, and the microbiome. Every meal, every night of sleep, every stressful call, every walk, every drink of water passes through one of these four channels and becomes, on the other side, inf...

Season 2, Episode 2: Why Genes Are Not Your Destiny If a doctor has ever told you that something runs in your family and there is nothing you can do about it, this episode is for you. Genetic risk is real. Genetic destiny is not. The gap between the two is where almost all of the useful work happens, and almost nobody is taught to see it. We look at....

Season 2, Episode 1: What Epigenetics Actually Is, And What It Is Not Two identical twin sisters, raised in the same house in northern Germany, ended up in their late fifties with two completely different bodies. Same DNA, two different lives, two different biologies. This is the door into Season 2, and into one of the most important scientific findings of the last tw...

Season1, Episode 6: Why I Am Telling You All Of This I spent years doing this work quietly, one person at a time. This episode is about why I finally started saying it out loud. About the resistance I had to overcome. About who this podcast is for. And about what I hope happens between you and me over the seasons to come. Stay connected: Website: www....

Season1, Episode 5: When We Walked Away From The Life We Built We sold our practices. We sold our house. We took our daughters and moved to Dubai. Not because we were running away. Because we understood that you cannot heal in the same environment that broke you. This episode tells the story of the biggest external change of our lives, and what happened to our....