Last week I found myself caught up in an airplane boarding queue as my fellow passengers hustled and bustled to get settled in seats. The plane was packed full of corporate commuters traveling between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two busiest cities. There was a sense of chaos in the air.   As harried passengers pushed and shoved their bags into tight overhead lockers, the line lagged and a flight attendant made polite small talk with me. “Hello, busy day?” he asked, expecting me to reply with the common response, “Yes, crazy.” But I wasn’t feeling stressed or rushed. “No, not... 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 »

A few weeks ago something happened that knocked me for six. For the non-Aussie person reading this blog it’s the best expression I can find to describe an event triggering feelings of sudden unexpected grief that brought everything to a stop. It’s a phrase that refers to the game of cricket where the ball is hit out of the park without touching the ground.   I had sleepless nights and anxious days. I reached for comfort foods and returned to old habits. What followed shortly after was a familiar and somewhat scary physical response. I felt flat, exhausted and foggy... Read full article »

I’d like to tell you the story of an apprehensive pack of lab rodents that have been able to teach us something profound about stress. If you’ve seen my film The Connection you will have heard a little about these animals, which were studied by scientists at the National Centre for Biological Sciences.   In a series of studies, the Indian researchers took lab rats and restrained them for two hours a day, for ten days to stress them out. The scientists observed that the animals started acting anxiously even when they weren’t being constrained. When they were placed in... Read full article »

It was Monday morning. I was stuck in a hot car park with my husband and 18-month-old son. We were an hour out of Sydney. Our car was broken down. My email inbox was chock-a-block, there were a bunch of voicemails on my phone and I had a ‘To Do’ list as long as my arm.   We’d just spent the weekend on the Hawkesbury River at a holiday house only accessible by boat and after successfully transferring our luggage from the boat to the car with relatively little fuss from my son, we discovered the car had a flat... Read full article »

I met someone recently who has stayed in my mind. A young, charismatic man with multiple sclerosis. He had come to one of the premieres of The Connection on our recent world tour.   The reason our meeting stayed with me is because he was already across some of the research featured in the film about how important our mind is when it comes to our health. He’d already read the books written by Professor George Jelinek, who has developed an evidence based program to help other people recover from MS. This young man was strict about his plant based,... Read full article »