A User's Guide to Cheating Death - Episode Guide

What does it take to flush all the bad stuff from your body after a weeklong bender? Or after several years of eating junk food? Can you atone for your health sins and start fresh? No. Detoxing isn't actually a thing. But it's become a fixation of the western world. Stemming from the guilty pleasures of overindulgence and under-exercising, a belief has emerged that we must regularly rid our bodies of toxins via detoxifying diets, fasts, technologies, and more. The evidence - or lack thereof - behind this popular trend will be uncovered. The science, the risks, and the underlying beliefs and fears will be explored.

Youth may be wasted on the young, but luckily, you can buy it back. People are using everything from face-lifts to second skin tech to keep their youthful advantage. However, with the many unproven therapies on the market, how many actually work? This episode examines our evolutionary leanings toward finding youth appealing and pop-cultural portrayals of youth, before diving head-on into the strange, fascinating and unregulated world of the anti-aging industry. "A User's Guide to Cheating Death" is in search of the truth for those who try to defy aging.

Genetic testing, also known as DNA testing, allows the genetic diagnosis of vulnerabilities to inherited diseases, and it's spawned an entire industry around personalized fitness, assessing a child's athletic ability, and even for finding your perfect mate. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is being used by a growing number of people to make important health and life decisions, despite these tests being largely inaccurate. What are the consequences of using these faulty methods to make "healthy life choices" and is there any benefit in any of it?

Obesity is one of America's biggest public health concerns. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. The pressure to lose weight is intense and many are turning to surgical means to achieve results. The issue is even affecting children as kids as young as 13 undergo extreme surgeries to deal with their weight. Weight Loss Tourism is a huge market. Places like Tijuana, and Dubai's Talise Bay offer the most luxurious spas in the world, that double as weight loss packages, including an on-site team of medical doctors, personal trainers and a wellness chef ready to provide personalized care throughout your stay.

"Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food", said the famous Greek physician, Hippocrates. Unfortunately, that was spoken before most of our medical understanding. As a society, we've become obsessed with the concept of organic food and products, chemical free farming, healing foods, and natural remedies. People are distrusting GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and other "non-natural" solutions. Organic products fetch a premium price. Families are turning to holistic approaches to medical issues, sometimes with fatal consequences. But what is causing people to distrust modern medicine and approaches to farming? Where does this romantic notion of "natural is better" come from? And most importantly, are these stances scientifically supportable?

For those suffering from a chronic illness or degenerative disease, our rapidly evolving world is offering more promise for a cure than ever before. But with such a great volume of treatment options and so much conflicting information available, it's also becoming more difficult for those suffering to make critical treatment decisions. People are wasting thousands of dollars, and worse, wasting time. From cryotherapy to stem cells that regenerate a human heart, "A User's Guide to Cheating Death" explores the evidence behind cutting edge disease management research, new breakthroughs and untested procedures while meeting the real patients who swear by them, and how the media is exploiting genuine excitement.

Timothy Caulfield explores the cultural shift surrounding how we view sleep in an era that glorifies being busy, meet those changing the narrative, explore the sleep-aid industry to figure out what actually helps, discuss novel therapies for insomnia, and talk about the stark affect that prolonged sleep deprivation on has on our health and longevity.

Timothy delves into the history of vitamins and supplements and meets the thought leaders who are pushing the envelope within the industry, from Silicon Valley start-ups, to MIT's Aging Center. Can you cheat death by popping a pill?

Relationships and sex are a crucial part of a vital life: people in relationships live longer, sex reduces stress and promotes exercise, and loneliness can have a huge negative impact on health. We'll also be examining the impact of technology on the eld—dating apps make making connections easier than ever, but the developing realm of AI companionship and burgeoning sex tech industry over the same experience without human interaction—is a synthetic relationship experience as beneficial as the real thing?

Are we too clean? Germ theory and hand washing saved millions of lives, but has the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction? We talk about everything from regular soap versus anti-bacterial, our microbiome and the role of probiotics, the hygiene hypothesis and the rise of auto-immune diseases, and explore both fecal transplants and helminthic therapy.

Timothy starts with FitBits, and ends with home-implantation, and meeting the scientists, futurists, and aspiring cyborgs in between as we discover how technology is merging with our bodies, and what that could mean for our health.

It used to be that spirituality didn't have a place in the research laboratories of the world. However, more than ever before, the spheres of spirituality and science are overlapping. We talk to researchers studying pain and acupuncture in the wake of the opiate crisis, the role of meditation in mediating stress-related disease, and explore the ancient roots behind some of today's modern treatments.