The other day I found myself in an unusually bad mood. It was witching hour in my house – the time when I try to cook my family dinner while my “threenager” toddler is whining, my 8-week-old baby is in need of a cuddle before taking a nap, and I’m feeling ravenous. I usually approach this time of day as a lively challenge and I enjoy coming up with novel ways to handle it, but on this occasion it was all too much. I was overwhelmed, anxious and snappy.   One explanation for my moodiness is that I had a... Read full article »

When I was in the US last year for the tour of my film The Connection, people kept talking about the microbiome. It seemed to be a buzzword. In fact, Fortune Magazine declared 2015 "The Year of the Microbiome." But before I started sculling kombucha, popping probiotics and fixating on a ‘microbiome diet’, I wanted to find out for myself what it is, what the research actually shows and what this could mean for our health.   If you’re new to the craze, the human microbiome is the term being used to describe a bacterial world that subsists on humans... Read full article »