Essential Ingredients

The Protein Math Nobody Explained to Me

Justine Reichman — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:23:29 GMT

A NOTE FROM JUSTINE

A few weeks ago, I thought I understood protein. Turns out, I understood the idea of it—not the math. This week, I’m sharing what I learned about eating for muscle, metabolism, and the body I want to carry with me for the long haul.

— Justine

The Protein Math Nobody Explained to Me

A few weeks ago my nutritionist told me to download Carb Manager. She had been watching my numbers for a while and was concerned about my muscle mass, specifically about how much actual animal protein I was getting versus how much I thought I was getting. I pushed back a little, the way you do when someone questions something you have believed about yourself for years. What about my chia seed pudding, I asked her. That has a lot of protein in it, doesn’t it. I can still hear her response. That is not the same kind of protein, she said. It does not factor in the same way.

I did not fully understand what she meant until I started tracking. I have always thought of myself as someone who eats plenty of protein. The app disagreed. I was under my target most days, and worse, I had been assuming without checking that a serving of chia pudding or lentils or a scoop of hummus could stand in for chicken or eggs on a one to one basis. It cannot, and learning why changed how I think about eating in midlife entirely.

“For decades, many women have been taught to think about food almost exclusively in terms of calories. It’s time we started thinking about protein instead. As we age, preserving muscle becomes one of the most important investments we can make in our long-term health. Muscle supports a healthy metabolism, helps us maintain a healthy weight, protects our bones, improves balance and mobility, and allows us to remain active and independent as we get older. Rather than asking, “How little can I eat?” I encourage my clients to ask, “Am I giving my body enough high-quality protein to preserve the muscle that’s going to carry me through the rest of my life?” - Rebecca Steiner - Holistic Health & Weight Loss Coach

Here is the part that matters most if you are navigating a GLP-1 medication, or simply the metabolic shifts that arrive in your forties and fifties. Rapid weight loss on these medications can pull a significant share of that loss from lean muscle rather than fat, sometimes twenty five to forty percent of total weight lost, unless protein and resistance training are deliberately prioritized. Muscle is not just about strength or how your jeans fit. It is your metabolic engine, and losing it accelerates the very slowdown so many of us are trying to outrun.

The research on how much protein actually triggers muscle building is fairly consistent. Around twenty five to thirty grams per meal appears to maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis, in both younger and older adults, and spreading that across three or four meals matters more than loading it all at dinner.

Now, the plant protein question, because this is exactly where I had it wrong, chia pudding and all. Muscle protein synthesis depends on leucine, a specific amino acid that acts like a trigger. Animal proteins are naturally rich in it. Most plant proteins are not, so a serving of chia seeds, lentils, or black beans, gram for gram, produces a smaller anabolic response than the same amount of chicken or salmon. This does not mean plant protein cannot build or preserve muscle. Research shows that plant based protein blends, when fortified or combined to match the leucine and amino acid profile of whey, stimulate muscle protein synthesis just as effectively. The catch is volume and combination. You likely need more of it, and a wider variety of sources, to get there.

Midlife adds another layer, and it is not identical for everyone. Women tend to see a faster decline in muscle and bone density starting around the perimenopausal years, tied closely to falling estrogen, which is also why bone density deserves real attention alongside muscle. Men lose muscle and bone more gradually, tied to slowly declining testosterone, but the decline is still real and still worth training and eating for.

None of this requires perfection. It requires understanding the actual target, twenty five to thirty grams, spread evenly, weighted toward protein sources with a strong amino acid profile, plant included, just in thoughtful amounts. That is the whole premise. Know the number, feed the muscle you are trying to keep.

Did you catch last week’s episode?

September is shaping up to be an exciting month, filled with meaningful conversations, inspiring events and opportunities to connect. We would love for you to join us!

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Inside Medgevity: How Keith Bozeman is Redefining Proactive Healthcare in Midlife

Justine Reichman — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:03:44 GMT

“I wanted someone who was helping with proactive strategies. So if I’m sick one to two days a year, I want a doctor, but the 363 other days a year, I want someone helping me with strategies to not get sick. Unfortunately, our doctors aren’t trained for that; the medical system doesn’t have that.” —Keith Bozeman

Proactive healthcare shouldn’t wait until you’re sick — that’s the entire premise behind Medgevity, the concierge, physician-led practice built by this week’s guest, Keith Bozeman. After losing access to the kind of doctor who actually had time for him, Keith set out to rebuild what he’d lost: a coordinated team of a physician, dietitian, and exercise scientist working together year-round, not just during an annual physical.

In this conversation, Keith and host Justine Reichman dig into what it actually looks like to have a health team instead of a single doctor squeezing you into a 15-minute slot. They talk about DEXA scans that reveal what the bathroom scale hides, why cholesterol numbers alone don’t tell the full story, and why perimenopause and andropause so rarely get discussed before they hit. This episode is for anyone in midlife who’s frustrated with reactive medicine and wondering what a proactive, team-based approach could actually change.

By the end, you’ll understand why Keith insists the doctor has to be the quarterback of your care — and why he thinks gyms, not hospitals, might be the next healthcare hub in your community.

Key takeaways:

A patient who lost only five pounds on the scale actually lost nine pounds of fat and gained four pounds of muscle — proof that body composition data tells a truer story than weight alone.
High cholesterol doesn’t automatically mean a statin is the right call; additional data like calcium and soft plaque scores can change the decision entirely.
Most people get zero guidance before perimenopause or andropause hits, even during annual OB/GYN visits, leaving couples blindsided by symptoms no one warned them about.
Medgevity doesn’t mark up any test or supplement it recommends, removing the financial incentive that often muddies medical advice.
It took Keith at least 18 months and one trusted dietitian saying yes before Medgevity had a functioning team — proactive healthcare had to be built relationship by relationship.
Partnering with gyms instead of building brick-and-mortar clinics let Medgevity reach people nationwide without the geographic limits of an in-person practice.

Listen to the full conversation to hear Keith’s complete story, and subscribe to Essential Ingredients so you never miss an episode: https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast

Meet Keith:

Keith Bozeman is a healthcare entrepreneur, business leader, and Founder & CEO of MEDgevity, a physician-led healthcare company focused on longevity, preventive medicine, and personalized wellness. With a mission to transform traditional healthcare into a proactive model centered on helping individuals live healthier, longer lives, Keith is driving innovation at the intersection of medicine, nutrition, fitness, and technology.

Before founding MEDgevity, Keith built an accomplished executive career in the technology and business services sectors, serving as President of TEKsystems and holding multiple senior leadership positions throughout his tenure. He also contributed to the startup ecosystem as a Principal at Blu Venture Investors, supporting emerging technology companies and growth-focused ventures.

Under Keith’s leadership, MEDgevity has expanded its network of physicians, nutrition experts, and health professionals while embracing artificial intelligence and modern healthcare solutions to improve patient outcomes. He is passionate about redefining healthcare through evidence-based longevity strategies, integrated wellness programs, and innovative care delivery models.

Keith is recognized for his expertise in healthcare innovation, business leadership, longevity medicine, preventive health, digital health transformation, and organizational growth.

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

01:16 Meet Keith Bozeman: The Visit That Started Medgevity
02:16 The Real Cost of Skipping Proactive Care
03:42 Why the Doctor Has to Be Your Health Quarterback
10:12 DEXA Scans: What the Scale Doesn’t Tell You
17:31 From Supercenter Dream to Virtual Care Model
19:17 Building a Trusted Team From Scratch in 18 Months
22:13 What Your First Month at Medgevity Looks Like
24:03 Bringing Proactive Healthcare Into Gyms Nationwide
27:46 Keith’s Advice: Don’t Give Up on Healthcare

THE PRIMES

✨ You’re more capable than you have ever been, and somehow more invisible than ever. You keep handing out advice you do not take yourself. You keep saying ‘after this next thing’ to your own life, and the people around you have no idea because, from the outside, everything looks fine— that is exactly what The Primes was built for. 🤝

The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work.

🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception.

🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️

👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you.

⌛Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026.
🔗Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

06: Beyond Relaxation: Michael Stusser and Heather Bishop Dive Deep on Enzyme Baths, Zen Gardens, and Trust Ownership

Justine Reichman — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:04:04 GMT

“We are so well positioned to have it continue and flourish because we have become a Perpetual Purpose Trust, which means this place is no longer owned by one person or any financial interest—it is owned by purpose.” —Michael Stusser

“We’re always trying to figure out how we keep moving the property forward in a way that’s sustainable, and also how it’s going to impact our guests, our business, our staff.” —Heather Bishop

A perpetual purpose trust sounds like a legal footnote until you meet the two people who actually built one. This episode traces how Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary in Sonoma County became the first U.S. spa to place itself inside that structure — permanently removing any future owner’s ability to chase profit over mission.

Justine first sits down with founder Michael Stusser, who traces the idea back to a single afternoon in an 800-year-old Kyoto stone garden, and then with CEO Heather Bishop, who inherited the vision and had to figure out how to make it legally unbreakable.

This one’s for anyone who’s tired of the word “sustainable” doing all the talking and none of the work. Michael and Heather don’t just describe the enzyme bath, the meditation gardens, or the gray water system — they explain the budgeting, the permits, and the trade-offs behind each one. It’s a conversation about what it actually costs, in time and humility, to build something that outlasts you.

The enzyme bath’s heat comes entirely from billions of thermophilic bacteria fermenting Douglas fir and rice bran — not from any external heat source.

Osmosis’s perpetual purpose trust means the business has no human shareholder; its “shareholder” is the mission itself, enforced by a trust committee and an independent trust enforcer.

The five-and-a-half-acre property couldn’t legally go into the same trust as the business, so it’s being paid off and moved into a separate land trust over the next three to five years.

A gray water system currently covers roughly 50–60% of the property’s irrigation needs, with a rainwater catchment system planned to close the gap entirely.

Osmosis sources its enzyme bath wood shavings as a byproduct from local lumber operations that would otherwise throw them away.

Trust-based decision-making already changed real policy — Heather cites expanding paid time off to all staff, including part-time employees, as a direct result of the trust’s staff-benefit objectives.

Listen to the full conversation with Michael Stusser and Heather Bishop, and follow Essential Ingredients so you don’t miss what’s next.
https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast

Meet Michael:

Michael Stusser, founder of Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary, is a pioneer in ecological sustainability, organic gardening, and holistic wellness. Beginning his journey at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960s, he helped establish horticultural training centers and later served on the board of the Farallones Institute in Sonoma County.

In the early 1980s, Michael apprenticed in traditional landscape gardening in Kyoto, Japan, where he immersed himself in Zen meditation and discovered the healing power of cedar enzyme baths. Returning to California in 1984, he introduced this unique practice, gaining national recognition in outlets like The New York Times and CNN. By 1988, he transformed five acres in Freestone into Osmosis, blending inspired landscaping, meditation traditions, and eco‑restoration to create a sanctuary rooted in sustainability, spirituality, and rejuvenation.

Meet Heather:

Heather Bishop is the CEO of Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary, where she leads one of Northern California’s most distinctive hospitality businesses with a focus on people‑centered leadership and operational excellence. Over the past decade, she has guided Osmosis through transformative organizational change, overseeing operations, finance, HR, strategic planning, and guest experience for a team of 80+.

Heather recently spearheaded the company’s transition into a Purpose Trust‑owned business—one of the few in the United States—ensuring long‑term mission preservation while modernizing governance, HR systems, and employee benefits. With expertise in executive leadership, organizational development, change management, and hospitality operations, Heather is dedicated to building resilient, purpose‑driven organizations where employees thrive and guests enjoy exceptional experiences.

Connect with Osmosis:

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

01:48 Meet Michael Stusser: The Kyoto Garden That Started It All
03:11 What Is an Enzyme Bath, Really?
09:51 Osmosis Becomes a Perpetual Purpose Trust
13:03 Self-Love, Deep Peace: Osmosis’s Core Mission
16:38 Meet Heather Bishop: Massage Therapist to CEO
19:40 Stewarding Salmon Creek and the Meditation Gardens
27:17 Inside the Cedar Enzyme Bath’s Sustainable Sourcing
30:28 Perpetual Purpose Trust, Explained in Plain Terms
36:03 Why the Land Stayed Out of the Trust
39:30 What Sustainability Actually Costs

THE PRIMES

The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work.

🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception.

🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️

👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you.

⌛Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026.
🔗Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

I Don’t Want to Reinvent Myself. I Want More of Myself.

Justine Reichman — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:05:17 GMT

A NOTE FROM JUSTINE

This conversation has become bigger than what I can fit into a newsletter.

On September 22 at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, I’m bringing M Is for More to the stage for a live conversation about menopause, andropause, relationships, and what it really means to move through this chapter of life together.

Not to reinvent ourselves. To understand ourselves—and each other—better.

I’d love for you to join us.

-Justine

I Don’t Want to Reinvent Myself. I Want More of Myself.

A few months ago, a man I respect and admire told me he’s fine. That andropause, whatever it is, isn’t him. He said it the way people say things they’ve never actually had to examine, easily, almost automatically, the same tone you’d use to wave off a question that doesn’t apply to you. I didn’t argue with him. I just asked how he’d been sleeping lately, whether his drive felt different than it did ten years ago, whether he’d noticed his patience running thinner than it used to, even with the people he loves most. He answered every question before he realized what he was describing back to me.

I think about that conversation often, because it isn’t rare. It’s the pattern. If you’re a woman reading this, you probably arrived at perimenopause already half fluent in the language of hormones, even if no one ever sat you down and taught you the vocabulary properly. You picked it up in fragments, from your mother, from friends comparing notes, from your own body insisting you pay attention. If you’re a man, there’s a good chance you arrived at the equivalent shift with no vocabulary at all, no one who told you the ground might move beneath you too.

I’ve spent the better part of two years writing through my own transition in this very newsletter, documenting the parts that felt disorienting and, more surprisingly, the parts that felt like arrival. And this is the truth underneath all of it: I never set out to become someone else. Every article I write, every conversation I bring onto the podcast, exists in service of a different idea entirely. This chapter of life was never about reinvention for me. It has always been about becoming more of who I already was underneath the version of myself that spent years accommodating everyone else first.

The stakes here are not abstract, and I don’t say that lightly. A 2024 meta-analysis of nearly 77,000 women found that depression touches roughly a third of women moving through the menopausal transition, and researchers have found again and again that the risk of depressive symptoms during this window climbs to two to four times higher than at other points in a woman’s life. Layer loneliness on top of that, the particular isolation of feeling like your own body has become a stranger while the people around you have no idea what to say, and you get a decade capable of quietly reshaping careers, marriages, and the way someone sees their own worth, often without anyone close to them ever knowing why.

This needs to be talked about, out loud and without embarrassment. We need to make the information available to people who’ve never had access to it, and we need to normalize what andropause and menopause actually are, stages of life, not diseases we’re trying to cure. This fall, I’m launching M Is For More, a podcast series and a set of live studio recordings built around this conversation, the one so many of us have been having alone when we didn’t need to be. My hope is simple: I want a husband to finally recognize what his wife has been carrying, and I want a wife to understand what her husband has never had the language to say out loud. Details on the series, and how to join us for a live recording, are on the NextGen Purpose website.

I’ve asked Dr. Lisa Brent to co-host this series with me. She’s a naturopathic doctor who has spent years treating women through perimenopause and menopause with bioidentical hormone therapy, gut health, and lifestyle medicine, and in the conversations, we’ve had about her patients, she kept circling back to the men in their lives, the husbands and partners living through their own version of this shift in silence, with no one to name it for them.

Women tend to be good at asking for help and taking care of themselves and others when biological changes are happening. Men, not so much. It’s important for men to knwo that they don’t have to power through the changes that happen at mid-life and that asking for help and caring for themselves during this time is an act of self-love as well as love for their partner. - Lisa Brent

She’s one of the only people I know who can hold both sides of this conversation with real clinical grounding, not just good intentions. Together, we’re building a series structured around that overlap, pairing what a woman is experiencing with the corresponding shift happening in the men around her, so the research and the lived experience sit side by side instead of in separate rooms.

I built this community because I watched people I love, me included, move through this without a map for far too long. With Lisa’s clinical grounding and my own two years of writing through this transition, we want this series to give couples and families the vocabulary to recognize what’s happening to each other before resentment or distance sets in, not after. That’s the impact I’m after, fewer people white knuckling their way through this decade in isolation, and more of them finding both the language and the company to move through it well. Understanding what’s happening in your own body, and in the body of the person sitting across from you at the table, changes what becomes possible between you. That’s the whole premise. That’s why I’m doing this.

Join me!

JOIN THE WAITLIST

In this episode of Essential Ingredients, Justine Reichman sits down with cardiovascular health expert Dr. Daniel Chong and Dr. Lisa Brent to explore why heart health deserves far more attention during midlife. The conversation breaks down when people should begin testing, what cholesterol numbers do—and don’t—tell us, and why cardiovascular disease often develops long before symptoms appear. They also discuss practical ways nutrition, movement, oral health and more comprehensive testing can help people take a more proactive approach to protecting their heart health as they age.

05: Midlife Heart Health: Dr. Daniel Chong on When to Start Testing and Why

Justine Reichman — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:00:35 GMT

“It [cardiovascular disease] becomes an issue in middle age because that’s when they start looking, not because that’s when it starts.” —Dr. Daniel Chong

Heart disease and midlife are more connected than most people — or their doctors — realize, and this episode of Essential Ingredients pulls that connection into the open. Justine Reichman sits down with naturopathic physician Dr. Daniel Chong and returning co-host Dr. Lisa Brent to unpack why cardiovascular risk quietly rises for both men and women in midlife, and why so few people are told to watch for it until it’s already underway.

This conversation is for anyone in perimenopause, menopause, or andropause who’s been handed a cholesterol number without context, or who’s simply never been told when to start paying attention. Dr. Chong breaks down lipid testing, arterial plaque, nitric oxide, and even the surprising role your dentist plays in your heart health — all in plain, usable language.

By the end, you’ll understand that cardiovascular disease isn’t a midlife event — it’s a decades-long process that just happens to get noticed in midlife, and that the actions you take starting this week can change its trajectory.

Key Takeaways:

Plaque development in the arteries can begin in childhood or even before birth, so family history matters far more than age when deciding when to start testing.
A single elevated LDL reading isn’t enough to justify a statin prescription — triglyceride-to-HDL ratios and more detailed testing give a fuller picture.
Gum disease and harsh antibacterial mouthwash can disrupt oral bacteria needed to produce nitric oxide, which directly affects artery health.
Dark leafy greens, berries, garlic, and onions support nitric oxide production and should be eaten daily, regardless of what else is on the plate.
Movement spread throughout the day — not just a single workout — meaningfully lowers cardiovascular risk on its own.
Around age 35–40 is a reasonable starting point for a fasting lipid panel if there’s no strong family history pushing that number younger.

Listen to the full episode for the complete breakdown of lab testing, imaging, and diet strategy Dr. Chong uses with his patients: https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast

Meet Daniel:

An expert in cardiovascular health, Dr. Daniel Chong is a licensed naturopathic physician with over two decades of experience. He earned his doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine in 2000. Dr. Chong specializes in preventing and reversing cardiovascular disease using drug-free strategies, defining himself as a “nutritional angiologist.” He holds advanced certifications in cardiometabolic medicine and the Bale-Doneen Method for heart attack prevention. Dr. Chong helps patients optimize arterial health through advanced risk assessment, lifestyle medicine, and nutrition at his Vital Human telehealth practice and Portland clinic.

Meet Lisa:

Dr. Lisa Brent is a licensed naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist specializing in women’s health. With a commitment to holistic and patient-centered care, she integrates primary care training with expertise in lifestyle medicine, nutrition, bioidentical hormone therapy, and gut health. Dr. Brent is dedicated to empowering her patients through education, individualized wellness strategies, and compassionate support. She is the founder of Be Well Natural Medicine, hosts educational events such as the Women’s Health Symposium, and provides care both in-person and via telehealth.

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

00:32 The #1 Cause of Death for Women Nobody Talks About
02:14 Meet Dr. Daniel Chong: Cardiovascular Expert
04:17 Why Heart Disease Risk Rises in Midlife
06:02 When Should You Start Checking Your Cholesterol?
09:02 How Long Elevated Lipids Matter More Than the Number
11:44 The Hormone Mistake Most People Make
17:21 What to Actually Ask Your Doctor
18:42 Why One Lipid Panel Isn’t Enough for a Diagnosis
24:05 The Surprising Link Between Dental Health and Heart Disease
28:37 The Diet Pattern That Actually Protects Your Heart
37:17 One Change to Make This Week

THE PRIMES

🤝 The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work. 🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception.

🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️

👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱 If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you.

⌛ Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026.
🔗 Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

Before the Fire Starts

Justine Reichman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:01:42 GMT

A NOTE FROM JUSTINE

I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens to our food system before climate disasters become visible. This week, I’m looking at the quieter cost of extreme heat—and the people and crops absorbing it long before the smoke arrives.

— Justine

The Hidden Cost of Extreme Heat: What Happens to Our Food System Before the Fire Starts

Last week I stood at the farmers market in Marin, and the peach guy looked tired in a way I hadn’t seen from him before. I asked how the season was going, expecting the usual complaint about prices, and instead he told me his trees had been dropping fruit early for three weeks straight, before it had a chance to fully ripen. He wasn’t talking about a fire. He was talking about the heat that came before any fire ever could, the kind that sits over an orchard for weeks and just presses.

We tend to picture climate and food colliding in the dramatic moment, the flames on the ridge, the smoke turning the sky orange. What I keep learning, from farmers and from the research, is that the real damage happens in the months before that, unnoticed by almost everyone outside agriculture. For every degree Celsius above a crop’s optimal range, wheat yields can drop six percent and corn suffers similarly, according to climate researchers tracking these patterns for over a decade. Sustained heat doesn’t just shrink harvests. It changes what’s actually in the food itself, reducing protein and mineral density in grains as plants struggle to move nutrients from soil to seed under stress. The apple or the loaf of bread on your counter may look identical to last year’s, and be measurably less nourishing.

The people absorbing the sharpest edge of this are farmworkers, the ones in the fields at five in the morning trying to beat the heat that will make afternoon work dangerous by noon. Extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related death among outdoor laborers in this country, and there is still no federal OSHA standard requiring water, shade, or rest breaks for the people growing our food. Only a handful of states have built their own protections, mostly after someone died. Researchers at UC Davis have found early signs of chronic kidney disease in farmworkers repeatedly exposed to this kind of heat and dehydration, a slow toll that doesn’t make headlines the way a wildfire does.

What unsettles me most is the question nobody’s really answering yet. If heat is changing the nutritional makeup of what we grow, unnoticed and undocumented before any visible sign shows up on a label or a stem, how would any of us actually know what we’re eating has changed? I don’t think the answer is fear. I think it’s attention, paid to the people and the land doing this work long before anything reaches your table.

I’d love to know: when you picture where your food comes from, does the person picking it factor in at all? I’m genuinely asking, because mine didn’t, not until I started asking.

How do I know my coffee is actually clean?

This is one of those questions where the label is almost never enough — and the archive goes deep on exactly why. What keeps coming up across multiple conversations is that 'clean coffee' isn't a single standard; it's a layered question about soil practices, mold and mycotoxin testing, pesticide load, and even how the cherry is processed before it becomes a bean. Andrew Salisbury of Purity Coffee makes a point that stuck with me: most companies stop at 'avoiding the bad stuff' instead of actively maximizing what's beneficial — and there's nearly 30,000 studies on coffee's health properties that most brands never even engage with. The short version? Look for brands that publish their testing protocols, source from farms using regenerative or biodynamic practices, and can tell you exactly what they're screening for — not just what certifications they hold. As always, check in with a qualified professional for anything specific to you.

Get your ticket today

04: 10 Hertz: The Brain Hack Hiding in Your Own Hands Dr. Izzy Justice Found

Justine Reichman — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:03:35 GMT

“One day is a mental marathon, and so it is very difficult for the brain to be the best version of itself for everything. You don’t have to be— your average is good for average experiences. Your best is needed for your most important experiences.” —Dr. Izzy Justice

The 10 Hertz brain state is the frequency neuroscientist Dr. Izzy Justice says separates your best decisions from your worst ones — and it’s hiding in plain sight, 10 to 20 seconds away at any moment. After running more than 18,000 wireless EEG brain scans on everyone from NBA players to executives to trauma survivors, Dr. Justice discovered that peak focus, deep empathy, and total presence all cluster around the same low-noise brainwave frequency: roughly 10 Hertz.

In this conversation with host Justine Reichman, Dr. Justice explains why wireless EEG technology changed how we understand the brain, how trauma physically “polarizes” specific neurons decades after the event, and why the fix isn’t suppressing the memory but giving it a final chapter. He also walks through three practical neurohacks — techniques that take seconds, require no equipment, and can be used mid-conversation, mid-pitch, or mid-panic.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt foggy under pressure, reactive in a stressful moment, or unsure why their body remembers things their mind has tried to forget.

Key Takeaways:

Peak human performance and full sensory presence both happen near 10 Hertz, a measurably low-noise brain frequency — not a mindset or personality trait.
Trauma creates highly “polarized” neurons that stay dormant until a matching sound, smell, or sensation reactivates them, sometimes decades later.
You don’t need to be your best self all day — reserving these techniques for one or two high-stakes moments daily is enough.
The 10-10 technique (count fast to 10, then slow back to one) shifts brain state in about 20 seconds using nothing but your mind.
The palm-tap technique and 4-2-8 breathing pattern each take 10 to 20 seconds and can be done anywhere, anytime.
Healing trauma isn’t about erasing the memory — it’s about writing a final chapter where the experience serves a purpose.
Listen to the full conversation and subscribe to Essential Ingredients so you never miss an episode: https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast

Meet Izzy:

Dr. Izzy Justice is the Chief Neuroscience Officer at Neuro580, a groundbreaking company at the forefront of human performance, sports psychology, and mental training. As a pioneering Sports Neuroscientist, he has certified over 300 coaches worldwide and has worked with elite athletes across multiple sports, many of whom have gone on to win Major Championships and Olympic Medals.

Dr. Justice is the creator of Neurohacks-rapid, science-backed techniques that remove mental distractions, boost focus under pressure, and help athletes access the flow state in real time. With over 18,000 EEG-based functional brain scans conducted during live performance, he brings unmatched insight into golf neuroscience, mental toughness, and brainwave management for peak performance.

As a consultant and executive coach, Dr. Justice has helped over 30 CEOs and dozens of Chief People Officers unlock leadership mindset, drive business performance, and build cultures of resilience through neuroscience.

From Zambia, Africa, and based in the U.S. for the past 40 years, Dr. Justice is the Best-Selling Author of 10 Books, including his latest, Your Brain Swings Every Club (Foreword by Brad Faxon), which bridges the gap between golf focus techniques, emotional control, and personal mastery.

Connet with Neuro580:

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

01:03 Meet Dr. Izzy Justice: From Boardroom to Brainwaves
04:10 How Wireless EEG Technology Changed Brain Science
08:32 Redefining Trauma as a Neuroscience Problem
14:03 The Mothers Who Turned Grief Into Purpose
19:55 The 10 Hertz Scale: Why Less Brain Noise Wins
28:22 The 10-10 Neurohack for Instant Focus
30:26 The Palm Tap: A 15-Second Calm Reset
33:00 The 4-2-8 Breathing Technique
41:10 What We’ll Understand About the Brain Next
42:45 Key Takeaway: Longevity Starts With Your Brain

Resources:

Book
Life Explained: Chasing 10Hz by Dr. Izzy Justice

THE PRIMES

🤝The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work. 🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception.

🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️

👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you.

⌛Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026.
🔗Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

Nobody Asks What You're Building. They Ask When You're Retiring.

Justine Reichman — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:49:11 GMT

A NOTE FROM JUSTINE

I used to think retirement was the goal. Now I think purpose is — and writing this piece made me realize how much I don’t want to stop building, learning, and creating just because I hit a certain age. If the question “when are you retiring?” has ever unsettled you too, I’d love to hear where you land.

— Justine

Is ‘natural fragrance’ actually natural?

Short answer: not necessarily. ‘Natural fragrance’ is a catch-all that can legally hide dozens of undisclosed chemicals, even on products marketed as clean. Ask the brand directly, or go fragrance-free. Your nose will adjust — and your skin will thank you.

Ask your question here!

Nobody Asks What You’re Building. They Ask When You’re Retiring.

I have started to notice a question following me around lately, usually dropped casually into conversation the way people used to ask what you did for a living. Now they ask when I plan to retire, and every single time it lands on me like a small alarm going off. I do not think people mean anything by it. I think it is just the script we have all inherited, the assumption that somewhere out ahead of midlife there is a finish line, and the whole point of the race is to reach it and stop.

Here is the truth, and I say this knowing not everyone has the privilege to feel this way about their work. The idea of retiring scares me. Not because I am afraid of aging, and not because I cannot imagine slowing down. It scares me because the version of retirement most people describe sounds like doing nothing, and doing nothing is the opposite of how I want to spend the years I have left. I love building my media platform. I love sitting across from a guest on the podcast and watching an idea take shape in real time that neither of us expected when we started talking. I love dreaming up new ways to get young people access to the arts, chasing a book I have wanted to write for years, and carrying forward the parts of my mother’s legacy that still feel unfinished. I feel more alive right now than I have at almost any other point in my life, and I am genuinely trying to understand whether that is a fluke or something closer to how this stage is supposed to feel once you finally get here.

Part of what I am realizing is that this is not just enthusiasm for its own sake. For the first time, I feel like I have real experience to lean into and leverage, decades of it, sitting there like a reservoir I finally know how to draw from. Every interview I have ever conducted, every project that failed before it worked, every hard lesson my mother’s illness and recovery taught me about the body and about resilience, all of it is available to me now in a way it simply was not available at 25 or even 35. I am not guessing anymore, and there is a kind of ease in that, in building with the accumulated weight of everything I have already lived through, in finally putting pieces together that I spent decades collecting without fully realizing that was what I was doing.

I want to be careful here, because I am not saying this because I think everyone should feel the way I do about work. I know plenty of people count down the years until they can stop, and their job has never given them what mine gives me. What I am questioning is not their choice. It is the story underneath it, the one that tells all of us, often without our ever quite noticing, that work and paycheck are the same thing, and that stopping the paycheck means stopping the purpose too. I work because I need to pay bills and build security, of course I do. But underneath that practical reason is something that has nothing to do with money at all. I love to learn. I love to build. I love to give back. I love watching an idea move from a conversation into something real that touches other people’s lives, and that is what keeps me thinking and moving and, frankly, thriving, none of which disappears the day I stop needing a paycheck.

The research backs up what this feels like from the inside, more than I expected it to. A study out of UC Davis, published this year in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, followed more than thirteen thousand adults over fifteen years and found that people with a stronger sense of purpose had a twenty eight percent lower risk of developing cognitive impairment as they aged. The researchers were careful to point out that purpose is not something you can prescribe or purchase, that it has to be built, through relationships, through goals, through the kind of meaningful activity that gives your days a shape worth getting up for. Meanwhile an entire wave of retirees are already living out the practical side of this question, unretiring in growing numbers and heading back into some form of work, and while plenty of that is financial necessity, a real portion of it comes down to people missing the identity and structure and sense of contribution that work gave them, even after they had the means to walk away from it entirely.

So I keep circling the same set of questions, and I do not think they have tidy answers. I have started to wonder whether retirement was ever really about stepping away from a job title at all, or whether the word itself is the problem, built for a different era and a different lifespan, too small for what a lot of us actually want out of this next chapter, especially once we finally have the experience to make that chapter count. I have started replacing the word in my own head with a different idea, one I keep coming back to. Instead of asking how do I retire, I ask how do I get more, more curiosity, more creation, more chances to be useful to something bigger than myself, more of the aliveness I feel right now rather than less of it.

I do not know if this drive is something that only comes with age and enough scar tissue to know what actually matters, or if it was always there and simply needed the right decade and the right experience to surface, and I find myself wondering the same thing about you, about whether the years behind you have started working for you the way they seem to be working for me now, instead of simply piling up. I would love to know where you land on this. Does the idea of retiring excite you, or does it unsettle you the way it once unsettled me? I am genuinely curious, and I think this conversation is only going to get louder as more of us reach this stage of life at the same time, so let’s have it together.

Mediterranean Mystery: Katina Mountanos on How to Spot a Quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil

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03: Mediterranean Mystery: Katina Mountanos on How to Spot a Quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Justine Reichman — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:01:15 GMT

“You can taste the quality.” —Katina Mountanos

Most of what’s labeled “extra virgin olive oil” on grocery shelves isn’t giving you the extra virgin olive oil benefits you think it is — and Kosterina founder Katina Mountanos found that out the hard way.

In this episode, Justine sits down with Katina to unpack why so much store-bought olive oil tastes flat, what polyphenols actually do in the body, and why the “don’t cook with olive oil, it has a low smoke point” advice you’ve been following is flat-out wrong.
Katina traces her obsession with real olive oil back to summers on her family’s farm in Koroni, Greece — and the moment, years later, that a $12 bottle from a New York supermarket tasted nothing like it. That gap sent her through an olive oil sommelier certification, a deep dive into polyphenol research, and eventually a full-time business built on transparency: harvest dates, single-origin sourcing, and third-party testing for everything from acidity to microplastics.

This episode is for anyone who’s stood in the oil aisle wondering which bottle is actually worth it, and for anyone rethinking what “seed oil vs olive oil” really means for their health.

High-antioxidant extra-virgin olive oil can contain 500–1,000+ mg/kg of polyphenols, compared to roughly 150 mg/kg in average grocery-store bottles.
Smoke point is not the right test for whether an oil is safe to cook with — free radical emission under heat is what actually matters, and olive oil emits far fewer than seed oils.
A bottle labeled “Italian” or “Greek” extra-virgin olive oil can still be a blend of residual oils from multiple countries and harvests, bottled together under one label.
Plastic packaging accelerates rancidity and can leach microplastics, so glass or tin with a visible harvest date is a stronger buying signal than the words “extra virgin” alone.
Fresh, high-polyphenol olive oil produces a peppery burn at the back of the throat — the same sensation researchers first mistook for ibuprofen contamination.
Cooking with avocado oil or genuine early-harvest olive oil, instead of canola or other seed oils, is a low-effort swap with a real anti-inflammatory upside.

Listen to the full conversation for Katina’s grocery-aisle checklist and her at-home smell-and-taste test — then subscribe so you never miss an episode. https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast

Meet Katina:

Katina Mountanos is the founder and CEO of Kosterina, a premium Greek extra virgin olive oil and Mediterranean foods brand built at the intersection of taste, health, and transparency. Raised between New York and the olive groves of Koroni, Greece, Katina grew up knowing what truly good olive oil should taste like. After becoming a certified olive oil sommelier and uncovering the powerful health benefits of high–polyphenol extra virgin olive oil, she launched Kosterina as a passion project while working in consumer brands at Walmart.

Today, Kosterina’s early-harvest, cold-pressed, high-antioxidant olive oils, fruit-infused vinegars, and olives are nationally available at Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and online, and are recognized for both exceptional flavor and rigorous quality testing. Grounded in the Mediterranean diet, Katina’s work champions cooking at home, clean ingredients, and replacing inflammatory seed oils with olive oil to support heart, gut, metabolic, and overall health.

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

00:52 Meet Katina Mountanos: Growing Up in Greek Olive Country
06:09 Why Kosterina’s Polyphenol Levels Triple the Average
08:46 Building Kosterina as a Passion Project While at Walmart
14:26 Busting the Smoke Point Myth About Cooking With Olive Oil
16:51 Canola Oil, the “Hateful Eight,” and Why Blends Deceive
19:09 How to Spot Real Extra Virgin Olive Oil at the Store
21:48 The Smell-and-Taste Test for Good Olive Oil at Home
27:31 What’s Next: Vinegars, Olives, and a 2027 Launch

Resources:

DISCOUNT
Get a 15% discount when you shop at Kosterina
Use code: essential15

THE PRIMES

The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work. 🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception. 🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️

👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you.

⌛Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026.
🔗Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

Who You're Becoming

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:30:15 GMT

Hey, it’s Justine.

Starting this week, I'm moving to one Substack a week — fewer emails, more worth opening. This issue has the piece I've been sitting with for months (about my mother, fear, and how wellness travel has quietly flipped from crisis care to prevention), a conversation with Dr. Mitra Ray that goes deeper on the longevity side of that same shift, and a couple of things I'd love your help with. Let's get into it.

- Justine

In the winter of 2001, I flew from New York with my mother to a clinic in Mexico, and later that year to Paracelsus in Switzerland, because she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and fear had gotten there before reason could. She wasn’t out of options. She had good ones, real ones, sitting right there in the city she lived in. But a diagnosis like that has a way of making the known world feel unsafe, and she went looking for something further away, something that felt like it hadn’t already failed other people she knew.

I want to be honest about that trip, because honesty is the only thing that makes this story worth telling. I was not excited. I was not at peace with any of it. I understood why she was scared. I have never been opposed to alternative medicine as one part of a fuller picture. But watching her chase protocols with no peer review behind them, in places that traded on hope more than evidence, felt like watching someone run from the exact thing that could have helped her. I sat in that discomfort the entire trip, and I never stopped hoping she’d come home and do the harder, more ordinary thing.

She did, eventually. She had a mastectomy, went through chemotherapy, and enrolled in a clinical trial that gave her access to Herceptin before most patients could get it. That combination, the unglamorous kind of medicine, is what beat her cancer. The alternative chapters weren’t the cure. They were the detour she needed to take before she could walk back toward what actually worked.

Twenty-five years later, I keep returning to wellness destinations, and the calculus has flipped entirely. Nobody I meet at these places is running from a diagnosis. They’re running toward decades, trying to buy back the vitality that got spent on ambition, trying to arrive at seventy the way they left forty. The global wellness tourism market has crossed a trillion dollars, and the fastest-growing segment isn’t crisis care, it’s longevity: diagnostics, sleep optimization, cellular recovery, protocols built around prevention rather than fear. Even boomers, once the generation most loyal to conventional medicine, are now among the biggest spenders on longevity-focused travel. What used to be a last resort has become a first move.

I don’t think this shift is about vanity, though it gets dismissed that way. I think it’s about a generation that watched people they loved wait until fear was the only thing driving the decision and decided to get ahead of it instead. My mother eventually chose the treatment that saved her life, but only after fear sent her searching everywhere else first. The people filling these retreats today are trying to close that gap before fear ever gets the chance to widen it.

I’m continuing this exploration in person, visiting the wellness spots claiming to define what comes next, separating what’s substantive from what’s simply well-marketed. I’d love to know where you’ve been, what worked, and what you walked away from. Tell me in the comments. This series only gets sharper with your experience in it.

Ask Justine

324+ episodes of Essential Ingredients, five years of conversations — now you can just ask instead of scrolling. Ask Justine answers in my voice and shows you exactly which episode it pulled from.

Try it on whatever’s stuck in your head lately.

Ask Justine →

Six founding spots left.

That’s it. The Primes is a curated membership for women who are still leading, still building, still fully in it — while navigating perimenopause and menopause without a single conversation about it happening anywhere in their professional world. I built this because that silence needed to end.

Founding membership closes September 21, 2026.

Apply to The Primes →

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02: Dr. Mitra Ray on Longevity Habits That Reversed Her Age

Justine Reichman — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:03:42 GMT

“You have to figure out how to make self-care a priority because you know the body does not sit still... Your mindset will allow you to move forward, or it will take you backwards.” —Dr. Mitra Ray

Stanford-trained biologist Dr. Mitra Ray spent three decades building a career in women’s longevity, but the habits she taught everyone else became something she never expected: the infrastructure that kept her upright after her husband, Doug, died suddenly in a paragliding accident in October 2023. In this conversation with host Justine Reichman, Dr. Ray traces her path from NIH- and Alzheimer’s-funded cancer research to walking away from the lab, building a word-of-mouth wellness brand that sold 2 million copies with zero advertising, and eventually testing her own biological age during the hardest year of her life — and watching it go backward.

This episode is for anyone navigating midlife, grief, perimenopause, or the quiet realization that the wellness habits they’ve dismissed as trendy might be the thing holding them together. Dr. Ray and Justine talk candidly about cold plunging, sobriety, plant-based nutrition, sleep science, and the gut-microbiome research behind cravings — grounding every claim in the biology, not the buzzwords.

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Key takeaways:

Dr. Ray’s biological age measurably reversed during the year she grieved her husband, evidence that consistent habits can outperform circumstance.
Comparing your current body to a memory of your 25-year-old self is biologically counterproductive — memories change every time you access them, and the comparison itself triggers cortisol and inflammation.
Cold plunging activates the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, the brain region tied to willpower and will to live, which Dr. Ray leaned on deliberately after losing Doug.
Food cravings are largely dictated by gut bacteria, not willpower — feeding plant-based bacteria gradually shifts what your body craves.
“Superagers” in their 80s are still generating new neurons, making neurogenesis — not a return to a younger self — the more useful benchmark for healthy aging.
Grief lives in the body: cortisol, thyroid, and hormone levels shift during loss, and naming that process without judgment is part of recovering from it.

Listen to the full conversation and subscribe to Essential Ingredients for more real conversations at the intersection of food, purpose, and building a better future: https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast

Meet Dr. Ray:

Living a long, healthy life is not as complicated as the wellness industry would have you believe. Dr. Mitra Ray has spent more than 30 years helping people understand this, and more importantly, live it.

Her path into health was shaped by both rigorous science and lived experience. She completed her undergraduate degree at Cornell University and earned her PhD from Stanford Medical School, where her research was funded by multiple NIH grants and recognized with the Young Investigator Award from the Federation of American Societies in Experimental Biology. Her work has been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Cell Biology: journals that do not publish ideas lightly.

But credentials alone do not explain why audiences across four continents keep coming back to hear her speak, or why her books and lectures on health, beauty, brain function, and longevity have resonated as widely as they have. The reason is simpler: she translates what the science actually says into something you can do and sustain.

Her focus has always been whole plant foods, an active body, and a clear mind. These three things, she has come to understand, are not a wellness trend. They are the foundation. Everything downstream of that foundation — how you look, how you feel, how you age — follows.

In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Ray is also a Juice Plus+ Partner, aligning with her commitment to making whole food nutrition more accessible in everyday life.

The Elder’s Evolution, her Substack publication, is where she writes about what it means to age well, with full attention paid to both the biology and the deeper questions that biology alone cannot answer.

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

01:31 Meet Dr. Mitra Ray: From Stanford Lab to Wellness Pioneer
05:41 Leaving Science: How Her Family and Peers Reacted
09:03 Why Doctors Still Ignore Whole-Food Nutrition
16:52 Stop Comparing Yourself to a Body That No Longer Exists
19:45 Building a 2-Million-Copy Word-of-Mouth Wellness Brand
23:03 After Doug’s Death: The Habits That Became Her Infrastructure
32:36 Cold Plunging, the AMC, and Rebuilding Willpower After Loss
51:02 The Real Benchmark for Aging Isn’t Your 25-Year-Old Self
54:34 Cravings Aren’t Willpower — It’s Your Gut Microbiome

WTF: Two Outbreaks, Two Years, One Supplier

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:02:17 GMT

Hey, it’s Justine.

Twenty-seven states. Nearly 7,000 people. A parasite most of us have never heard of, riding along in shredded lettuce. And when I traced the outbreak back to its source, I found a name I'd seen before — the same supplier at the center of the 2024 McDonald's E. coli outbreak that killed one person and sent kids into kidney failure. Two outbreaks, two years apart, two totally different menu items, one company standing behind both. That's not a coincidence. That's a structure — and it's worth understanding before the next recall makes you ask anyway.

- Justine

WTF: One Bag of Lettuce Shouldn’t Be Able to Affect Half the Country

I was standing at my own counter tearing lettuce for a salad when I first saw the headline. Twenty-seven states. A parasite most people have never heard of, spreading through shredded iceberg lettuce that had been served at Taco Bell locations across the Midwest, then traced to a distributor whose name most Americans wouldn’t recognize even after eating its products for years. Nearly seven thousand people possibly sickened. And as I kept reading, the detail that actually stopped me wasn’t the outbreak itself. It was the name of the supplier. The same company had been at the center of the 2024 E. coli outbreak tied to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, the one that hospitalized dozens of people, sent children into kidney failure, and killed an older adult in Colorado. Two outbreaks, two years apart, two completely different menu items, one company sitting at the center of both.

That is not a coincidence. That is a structure.

My father has always believed in research and evidence over speculation, and he taught me early that when the same failure shows up twice, you stop looking at the individual incident and start looking at the system that produced it. My mother taught me something that complements that instinct rather than competing with it: ask where your food actually comes from, and don’t stop asking until you get a real answer. I have spent the last several years applying both of those lenses to the food on my own table, and this particular story sits right at the intersection of them. It is not really about lettuce. It is about how few hands our food passes through before it reaches us, and what happens when one of those hands slips.

Here is the part that should unsettle you as much as it unsettled me. A handful of companies now sit at nearly every chokepoint in the American food system. Four companies control roughly 82 percent of U.S. beef slaughter. Four companies control half the global seed supply. Two companies own 60 percent of the carrot market. Four grocery retailers, Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons, control close to 70 percent of what gets sold on grocery shelves nationwide. This didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen quickly. It happened over four decades of mergers, acquisitions, and vertical integration, each one justified by the promise of lower prices and greater efficiency. And for a while, on the surface, that promise held. Food got cheaper, shelves stayed full, restaurants could source at scale.

But efficiency and resilience are not the same goal, and they often pull in opposite directions. A system built for efficiency wants fewer suppliers, longer routes, bigger single-site processing, and just-in-time delivery with almost no slack in it. A system built for resilience wants the opposite: more suppliers, shorter routes, redundancy, and enough slack that one bad actor or one contaminated batch can’t take down the whole shelf. We built the first kind, at scale, on purpose, because it was cheaper. And a cheaper system with a single point of failure will eventually fail at that single point, which is exactly what a bag of lettuce just demonstrated to twenty-seven states at once.

This is where the story stops being abstract and starts being personal, and it’s personal on both ends of the supply chain, not just the consumer end. Farmers have been squeezed into this same consolidation from the other direction. As buyers merge and retailers demand uniform, high-volume contracts, small and mid-sized farms get priced out of the very market they used to feed directly. For some crops, farmers now receive as little as fifteen cents of every dollar a shopper spends at the register. To survive, they either scale up to meet the volume a handful of massive buyers require, sell to a larger operation, or leave farming altogether. The diversity that used to exist in American agriculture, dozens of regional growers supplying dozens of regional buyers, has been replaced by a small number of suppliers who now carry outsized consequences when something goes wrong. When Taylor Farms recalls lettuce, it isn’t just affecting a bag in your refrigerator. It’s rippling through a system that already left very few farmers standing to fill the gap.

I think about this every time I read a label at the grocery store now, the same instinct that pulled me into the olive oil story last year. Who actually grew this. How many hands did it pass through. What happens to the people at both ends, the farmer who grew it and the family who’s about to eat it, when something breaks in the middle. Those questions used to feel like they belonged to a different kind of shopper, someone with more time or more money or more paranoia than the rest of us. I don’t think that’s true anymore. The Taylor Farms outbreaks didn’t happen at a farmers market or a specialty grocer. They happened at Taco Bell, at Jack in the Box, at McDonald’s, the places most Americans eat without a second thought about where the ingredients came from. That’s the whole point of a consolidated system. You don’t get to opt out of it just because you can afford to shop somewhere that feels safer, because the same handful of suppliers are very often standing behind both the cheap option and the premium one.

The good news, and there is real good news here, is that we already know what the alternative looks like, because it’s been proving itself for years in the background while the headlines focused elsewhere. Regional food hubs across the country aggregate produce from dozens of small and mid-sized farms and distribute it to schools, hospitals, restaurants, and grocery stores within their own region. When COVID disrupted the large-scale supply chain in 2020, hubs like Common Market in Philadelphia pivoted within days, sourcing from nearby farms and keeping schools and hospitals supplied while larger distributors sat frozen. Minnesota’s Sprout food hub connects more than a hundred small farms to school districts, restaurants, and a community-supported agriculture program, and does it while keeping the money and the produce inside the region it serves. The USDA now runs Regional Food Systems Hubs and Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure programs specifically designed to build more of this capacity, because the agency itself has acknowledged what the pandemic and these repeated recalls have made obvious: a food system with only a few suppliers at each chokepoint is not actually efficient once you account for what happens when one of them fails.

None of this means the answer is to only eat local or reject anything mass-produced. That’s not realistic, and it isn’t the argument I’m making. What I am asking, of you and of myself, is to hold two things at once, the way I’ve learned to do with most of what shows up in this work. Convenience and scale have given us real abundance, and they’ve also built a structure with so few redundancies that a single supplier’s bad batch can ripple across half the country and reach both a fast food counter and a family farm’s livelihood in the same week. Understanding that trade-off doesn’t require becoming an alarmist. It just requires paying attention, the same way my mother taught me to, and asking better questions before the next recall makes you ask them anyway.

I’d love to know where this lands for you. Have you thought about how many suppliers actually stand behind what’s on your plate this week? Have you had a moment, like mine at the counter, where a headline made you look differently at something you’d normally eat without a second thought? Tell me in the comments. This is exactly the kind of conversation I want this space to hold.

Be sure to register for our next Farm Walk!

I Built Something I Wish Existed Eight Years Ago

What if the answer you’re googling at 2am was already sitting in a conversation I had two years ago — you just couldn’t find it?

I’ve now had 318+ conversations on this podcast. Some of the smartest people I know — doctors, founders, farmers, formulators — sitting across from me, saying things that changed how I think about food, about my body, about what it means to build a life on purpose instead of on autopilot.

And for years, the honest truth is: most of it disappeared the moment the mic turned off.

You’d hear it once, maybe write down a name or a supplement or a phrase that stuck. And then it was gone — buried in episode 214, or 87, or 301, in an app you’d have to scrub through for twenty minutes to find again. Meanwhile you’re up at 2am googling “is this normal at 47” and getting answers written by nobody, sourced from nothing, that sound confident and mean nothing.

That gap bothered me. So, I closed it.

Meet Ask Justine

Ask Justine is a new tool on NextGen Purpose that lets you ask a real question — about hormonal health, clean beauty, regenerative food, building something meaningful in midlife — and get an answer pulled directly from our own archive. Not the internet at large. Not a generic AI trained on everything and grounded in nothing. Our actual conversations. Our actual guests. My actual voice.

How to use it: Go to the site, type your question the way you’d ask a trusted friend who happens to know a lot of smart people — because that’s essentially what this is. You’ll get a real answer, and you’ll see exactly which episode, which guest, which conversation it came from. No mystery. No black box.

Why this is different from every other AI tool you’ve tried

Here’s what nobody tells you about most AI chatbots: they’re built to sound confident, not to be honest about what they don’t know. Ask something a generic AI hasn’t actually seen good information on, and it’ll still give you a tidy, well-formatted answer — because bluffing is what it was trained to do.

Ask Justine works the opposite way. Every answer is traceable back to a real conversation. If we haven’t covered it, it tells you that honestly, instead of pretending. And because it’s built on years of primary-source conversations — not scraped internet content — it can actually reflect a real opinion, a real disagreement between two guests, a real nuance, instead of flattening everything into safe, generic wellness-speak.

Nobody else in this space has this. Not because the technology is hard to copy — it isn’t — but because nobody else has spent eight years building the archive underneath it. That part can’t be shortcut.

What this actually means for you

If you’re the kind of person who’s been quietly navigating something — a health shift, a career pivot, a sense that the way you’ve been doing things isn’t the way you want to keep doing them — you now have a place to ask the real question, in the real moment you’re having it, and get an answer grounded in conversations with people who’ve actually thought hard about it.

Not a search engine. Not a forum full of strangers guessing. A living archive that’s actually listening.

Try it right now: head to Ask Justine on NextGen Purpose and ask the question you’ve been sitting on. See what it knows — and where it came from.

🎧 New Podcast Appearance: I joined Louanne Hunt for a conversation about trusting your inner compass, raising resilient children, and why the answers we're searching for are often already within us. If you've enjoyed this week's essay, this conversation is a natural companion. Listen here → Mommy, Mommy, Are We Lost?

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The Future of Wine Depends on More Than the Vineyard

Justine Reichman — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:58:25 GMT

Hi, it’s Justine,

In this conversation, I sit down with Allison Jordan of the Wine Institute and Jeff O’Neill, whose four decades in the wine industry have led him to a simple but powerful belief: meaningful change only happens when we make it possible for others to join us.

Jeff doesn’t see regenerative and organic farming as something one vineyard can accomplish alone. His vision is about removing barriers, sharing what works (and what doesn’t), and creating a pathway that empowers more growers to adopt practices that benefit the land, the people who work it, and the communities that depend on it.

One of the themes that stayed with me most was his commitment to accessibility. Too often, cost and complexity prevent producers from taking the next step. Jeff’s work is focused on making regenerative and organic certification more attainable—not because it’s easy, but because the long-term impact reaches far beyond the bottle. It protects vineyard workers by reducing exposure to harmful pesticides, strengthens the resilience of the land, and creates a healthier future for everyone connected to the food and wine system.

I’m grateful to have partnered with 7x7 to share this conversation and the larger story behind it. After watching the interview, I invite you to continue with 7x7’s editorial feature, which explores why this movement is gaining momentum and why collaboration—not competition—may be the key to its future.

Because the most lasting change isn’t driven by one person. It’s built by communities willing to learn, share, and grow together.

Watch the conversation below, then continue reading with the accompanying 7x7 feature.

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The best conversations start when the right people are in them. If this issue made you think — or if you know someone wrestling with the same questions about trust, wellness, and showing up fully — share it with them.

The more thoughtful voices at this table, the richer we all become.

Regenerative Wine: Jeff O'Neill & Allison Jordan on Land Stewardship

Justine Reichman — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:02:58 GMT

“It is getting pesticides out of the vineyard. It’s making sure that when we send a worker home, they’re not going home and hugging their child with any other pesticide or herbicide. It is a mission, but it does start with the dirt, and it has to flow all the way through the winery into the bottle.” —Jeff O’Neill

“A lot of times, people think about the environmental side of sustainability, but it’s also about the social pieces— how you treat your employees, worker health and safety, and also how you exist within the community.” —Allison Jordan

Regenerative organic wine sounds like a buzzword — until you stand in a vineyard that’s actually living it. This week, Justine Reichman sits down at Ram’s Gate Winery with Allison Jordan (VP of Environmental Affairs, Wine Institute) and Jeff O’Neill (founder, Ram’s Gate and O’Neill Vintners & Distillers) to unpack what real stewardship looks like when an entire industry commits to it.

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Key takeaways:

How the California Code of Sustainable Wine Growing turned 200+ best practices into a statewide movement, covering everything from soil health to worker safety
What it actually takes to earn CCOF Organic and Regenerative Organic Certification — including the 3-to-5-year soil conversion most people never hear about
Why Ramsgate planted fruit trees inside its vineyard rows, and what that agroforestry bet could mean for the next 20 years
The honest answer to the question every skeptic asks: Does regenerative wine actually taste as good?
This conversation is proof that sustainability isn’t a marketing layer — it’s a rebuild from the soil up, and it’s changing what “good wine” means.
🎧 Listen to the full episode now:

Meet Jeff:

As the visionary founder and owner of Ram’s Gate Winery, Jeff O’Neill is a transformative leader in the wine and spirits industry. An accomplished entrepreneur and CEO of family-owned and operated O’Neill Vintners & Distillers, Jeff brings decades of expertise to his craft. Ram’s Gate Winery is the culmination of Jeff’s passion for producing world-class wines, offering an unparalleled visitor experience at an Estate designed by architect Howard Backen and interiors by Orlando Diaz-Azcuy. A passionate advocate for the planet, Jeff has been a leader in environmental stewardship for over 20 years. His deep commitment to building a more sustainable future for the wine business earned him recognition as Wine Enthusiast’s Person of the Year in 2022.

Meet Allison:

Allison Jordan serves as the Vice President of Environmental Affairs for the Wine Institute and as the Executive Director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. In these roles, she oversees the California Sustainable Winegrowing Program and the Certified California Sustainable Winegrowing Program, while also representing the Wine Institute on the board of directors of the National Grape Research Alliance. Previously, Allison held leadership positions at SureHarvest and the Resource Renewal Institute. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the Goldman School at UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Psychology from Allegheny College. She is a fellow in the German Marshall Fund’s American Marshall Memorial Fellowship program.

Connect with Wine Institute
Website

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Chapters:

01:08 Meet Allison Jordan: The Voice of California’s Wine Institute
02:36 Inside the California Code of Sustainable Wine Growing
06:58 Meet Jeff O’Neill: 40 Years Building Regenerative Wine
09:51 What Regenerative Organic Certification Really Requires
12:38 Ram’s Gate’s Agroforestry Bet: Fruit Trees in the Vine Rows
14:23 Does Regenerative Organic Wine Actually Taste Better?
16:26 Why Today’s Wine Consumer Demands Transparency
19:14 Scaling Regenerative Practices Across California Vineyards
23:23 Jeff O’Neill’s 50-Year Vision for California Wine

WTF: Since When Do We Have to Sell Ourselves Back to Ourselves?

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:13:35 GMT

Hey, it’s Justine.

Welcome back to another WTF — the series where I say the quiet part out loud and ask the questions that make us all a little uncomfortable (in the best way).

This week’s WTF moment hit me hard, because I kept hearing the same phrase over and over: that we have to sell ourselves back to ourselves. And every time I heard it, I thought... wait, WTF? When did being who we already are become something we have to repurchase?

So that’s where we’re going this week. If you’ve ever nodded along when everything in you wanted to push back, or sanded down your story to make it more palatable — this one is yours.

Edges on, friends.

- Justine

WTF: You Don’t Need to Sell Yourself Back to Yourself

Here is something I keep hearing, and honestly, it makes me a little crazy: we have to *sell ourselves back to ourselves.*

Think about that for a second. We have been so thoroughly convinced that we are somehow not enough, not current enough, not evolved enough, not trending enough, that we actually have to buy back into the version of ourselves we already are. The audacity.

There is an entire industry built on this premise. The retreats, the rebrand guides, the 12-step frameworks for becoming your best self. And look, I am not here to tear any of that down. Some of it is genuinely good. But somewhere in all of it, we started confusing *growth* with *replacement*. Like who you actually are is a rough draft, and the real you is somewhere out there in a $97 masterclass.

Here is what I know, after years of building this platform, hosting hundreds of conversations, and being in rooms where people were performing versions of themselves they thought they were supposed to believe in: the most powerful thing you can do is not change your story. It is *own it.*

Owning it does not mean you are rigid. It does not mean you have all the answers or that you will die on every hill. I have changed my mind more times than I can count. I have sat across from people with completely different worldviews and genuinely listened, not to convert them, not to be converted, but because real perspective is one of the most valuable things you can collect.

But there is a difference between being open and being unmoored.

I cannot tell you how many times I said yes when I meant no. Nodded along when something felt completely wrong to me. Softened my opinion in a room because I could feel the temperature dropping. Whether it was politics, or religion, or just the way someone wanted me to show up, there was always this low-grade pressure to align. To smooth the edges. To make my values a little more... agreeable.

That is the sell. That is where we lose ourselves, one small compromise at a time.

What I want for this community, what NextGen Purpose is actually *for*, is a platform where none of that is necessary. Where you can hear a point of view that challenges yours and not feel like you have to either adopt it or defend against it. Where sharing a story is not a performance of correctness but an act of honesty. Where someone can read something here and think, *finally, someone sees this too*, or equally, *I completely disagree, and knowing that clarifies exactly where I stand.*

Both of those outcomes are the point.

The greatest thing I have learned is not a methodology or a mindset hack. It is simply this: I am allowed to be who I am. I do not have to sell myself on a different version of Justine to feel legitimate. My values are not a liability. They are the whole thing.

And that is what I want for you too. Not the polished, market-tested narrative. Not the identity that makes everyone comfortable. Not the version of your story that has been sanded down for palatability.

The real one. The one with the edges still on it.

Because when you know who you are and you stop apologizing for it, something shifts. You stop performing and start contributing. You stop seeking validation and start offering something genuine. You show up, and people feel it.

*That* is what we are building here.

Not a space where everyone agrees. A space where everyone is allowed to actually mean what they say.

I am unapologetic about that. And after everything, I think you deserve to be too.

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Your Nervous System Wasn't Designed for Notifications

Justine Reichman — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:12:21 GMT

Hi, it’s Justine.

Last week I caught myself flinching at my own phone. Not at anything on it — just the buzz. And I realized I’ve spent years trying to out-organize a problem that isn’t an organization problem at all. It’s a body problem.

That sent me back to a conversation I haven’t stopped thinking about since we recorded it — with a physical therapist who accidentally became a lavender farmer because her own body figured out something her mind hadn’t caught up to yet.

This one’s for anyone whose shoulders live near their ears. Take a breath. Let’s get into it.

🎧 The conversation behind this piece

DeAnna Schaefer spends her weekdays as a physical therapist and her weekends running a lavender farm in Point Reyes — a farm she never planned to build. In this episode of Essential Ingredients, she tells me how walking her first rows of lavender calmed something in her she couldn’t name, why she went looking for the science afterward, and what her patients’ bodies taught her about the rest we all keep postponing.

If you want to hear DeAnna’s full story, including how the farm shifted her own relationship to stress, catch the full episode of Essential Ingredients. And if this piece stirred something in you, hit reply. I read every response.

Planting Self-Care: How Lavender Teaches Rest, Renewal, And Joy with DeAnna Schaefer - YouTube

Your Nervous System Wasn’t Designed for Notifications

Your phone buzzes and your shoulders climb toward your ears before you’ve even looked at the screen. That reaction isn’t a character flaw or a sign you need to unplug for a month in the woods. It’s biology doing exactly what it was built to do, just aimed at the wrong target.

For most of human history, a sudden sound meant something worth reacting to: a branch snapping, a shift in the wind, a predator’s rustle in the grass. Your nervous system learned to treat every sharp, unexpected signal as information about survival, and it still does. The problem is that a push notification about a sale or an unread email triggers the same cortisol response as an actual threat, dozens of times a day, with no branch and no predator in sight. The body can’t tell the difference between urgent and important. It just knows something demanded its attention, and it responds accordingly.

This is why another wellness gadget rarely fixes the exhaustion. You don’t need a smarter alert system. You need your senses to remind your body what safety actually feels like.

I’ve noticed this most clearly in my own space. The room I’m in shapes my state before I’ve consciously registered a single object in it, and a smell can shift my mood faster than any thought I could talk myself into. There’s a reason for that. Scent bypasses the analytical part of the brain almost entirely, traveling straight to the amygdala and the limbic system, the oldest parts of us, the parts that decide in an instant whether we’re safe. Visual order works differently but arrives at the same place, giving the nervous system evidence, gathered without a single word, that nothing here requires vigilance.

I thought about this while talking with DeAnna Schaefer on Essential Ingredients. DeAnna spends her weekdays as a physical therapist, working with bodies that have learned to brace, and her weekends on a lavender farm in Point Reyes that she built almost by accident, after discovering how much calmer she felt simply walking her own rows of it. She wasn’t chasing a wellness trend. She was following a bodily response she couldn’t explain until she understood the science behind it, and she built a second career around a plant that had already been regulating her nervous system long before she gave it credit for doing so.

That’s the part worth sitting with this week. Not another purchase, not another app, but the actual room you’re standing in and the actual air you’re breathing. Notice what your space is telling your body right now.

Be sure to tune into our newest episode!

Know someone who needs to read this?

The more thoughtful voices at this table, the richer we all become.

109: Andrew Salisbury's Regenerative Experiment for Antioxidant Coffee

Justine Reichman — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:03:55 GMT

“Farming in a way that’s good for the health of the consumer and good for the product is also good for the environment. And so everybody wins, and then our consumer wins.” —Andrew Salisbury

Coffee health benefits aren’t just marketing; they’re backed by nearly 30,000 studies, yet almost none of that research made it into the bag of coffee sitting in your kitchen.

In this episode of Essential Ingredients, Justine Reichman talks with Andrew Salisbury, founder of Purity Coffee, about the personal frustration that led him to rebuild coffee from the soil up. It started with his wife’s low energy and a stubborn question: was her daily coffee helping or hurting? That question sent Andrew to two coffee scientists at Vanderbilt, who handed him a list of health benefits tied to coffee — and a gap no company was filling.

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Andrew explains why coffee is actually the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet, ahead of blueberries and kale, and why most companies stop at “avoiding the bad stuff” instead of maximizing the good. He walks through Purity’s three-level testing process — bean, soil, and now the body — and explains why regenerative, shade-grown farming produces higher yields and more antioxidants than industrial methods, while also sequestering carbon rather than releasing it. The conversation moves from roast curves and chlorogenic acids to the real economics of paying farmers a premium, and why climate change is expected to cut Arabica coffee supply in half by 2035.

Meet Andrew:

Andrew Salisbury is the founder and CEO of Purity Coffee, a specialty coffee company built on a simple but radical premise: every decision from farm to cup should be made for human health first. After investigating his wife’s low energy and digging into research at the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt, Andrew discovered that coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet—and that no brand was optimizing coffee specifically for health.

Partnering with leading coffee researcher Professor Adriana Farah, Andrew spent 18 months developing Purity’s approach: shade-grown, regeneratively farmed, organic coffee that is independently lab-tested to minimize mold, mycotoxins, pesticides, and heavy metals while maximizing antioxidants and polyphenols.

Through Purity Coffee and the emerging concept of “circular health coffee,” Andrew is helping reshape how the industry thinks about regenerative agriculture, soil health, and clean sourcing, proving that what’s best for the drinker can also be best for farmers and the planet.

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

01:19 Meet Andrew Salisbury: Founder of Purity Coffee
04:37 Coffee’s Surprising #1 Antioxidant Ranking
05:31 Why No One Built Health-First Coffee Sooner
10:03 Inside Purity’s Three-Level Coffee Testing
12:14 How Regenerative Farming Fights Climate Change
15:23 Clean Sourcing: Farm-to-Cup Transparency
23:54 Balancing Sustainability With Accessible Pricing
33:50 The Future of Coffee and Soil Health
40:44 Where to Find Purity Coffee

WTF: The Grocery Store Was Designed to Beat You

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:28:21 GMT

Hey, it’s Justine.

Before we blame ourselves for another "bad" choice at the grocery store, it's worth asking a different question:

What if the system was designed to make healthy choices harder in the first place?

This week, we're unpacking the hidden forces shaping what ends up in our carts—and why understanding them is the first step toward changing them.

- Justine

WTF: The Deck Was Stacked Before You Ever Walked Into the Store

If you have ever stood in the cereal aisle reading every label, comparing two “healthy” looking boxes, and still walked out unsure whether you picked the better one, you are not bad at this. You are dealing with a food environment that was built, on purpose, to make that confusing. That is the short version. Here is the long version, because the specifics are where this actually gets useful.

It’s not you. It’s the aisle.

Picture it with me. Not the candy-colored boxes with the cartoon mascots, you already know to skip those. I am talking about the box two shelves over. The “wholesome” granola. The “fruit and grain” bar with a smiling sun on the label. You read the front. You flip it over and read the back too, because that is what someone who is trying does. Then later, from a friend, a podcast guest, a headline, you find out the “healthy” bar has the same 12 grams of added sugar as the candy you walked right past.

That gap, between doing everything right and still feeling like you lost, is the one I want to talk about today.

This week, the dots got connected for us.

The Global Food Institute at George Washington University released a policy brief on reducing added sugar in kids’ diets. The next day, journalist Jessica Grose connected the dots in a New York Times opinion piece. The reason this feels so hard is not a personal failure of discipline or label reading. The food environment, the shelf placement, the marketing budgets, the “healthy halo” packaging, was built to make the processed, high sugar option the default and the conscious choice the exception.

I have sat across from the people who study this for a living over 318-plus episodes of Essential Ingredients, and here is the thing that still gets me every time. We treat grocery shopping like a personal morality test, when it is actually a mismatch. On one side, a parent with a cart and good intentions. On the other, a marketing budget in the billions, built specifically to win that exact aisle.

A few examples, because specifics matter more than outrage:

The yogurt marketed to kids with a cartoon character on the front often has more added sugar per serving than a scoop of ice cream, but it is shelved next to the produce, not the dessert aisle.
“Fruit snacks” that list real fruit third or fourth on the ingredient list, behind corn syrup and concentrate.
Drinks labeled “naturally flavored” that still deliver more than 30 grams of added sugar in a single juice box, close to the full daily limit nutritionists recommend for a child.

None of that is an accident. It is a design choice. Once you see it as a design problem instead of a willpower problem, something in you can finally exhale.

This is exactly where “incorporation, not perfection” earns its keep.

I did not build NextGen Purpose around perfection, because perfection is not a real strategy. It is a setup for guilt. The triple win I keep coming back to, good for business, good for people, good for the planet, only works when all three are actually true at the same time. Right now, added sugar in kids’ food is a case where it is good for one business’s quarterly earnings and bad for the other two. That is not a triple win. That is a single win wearing a health food costume.

The upside, and the actual point of the GFI brief, is that this default can move. Front of package labeling laws. School nutrition standards. Marketing restrictions on products aimed at kids. These are not abstract policy ideas. They are the same kind of structural shift that, decades ago, made seatbelts and smoke free restaurants the default instead of the exception. The system that built this mess is also the system that can unbuild it. It just needs enough people paying attention to make ignoring it more expensive than fixing it.

Check out a quick FAQ about this topic by becoming a paid subscriber.

What if your prime isn’t behind you—

but still unfolding?

We are officially introducing The Primes, a new NextGen Purpose initiative designed for people who believe that growth, reinvention, purpose, and possibility don’t have an expiration date.

This isn’t about aging.

It’s about evolving.

It’s about creating space for the conversations, connections, and experiences that help us navigate what’s next with greater intention and impact.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you: What does being “in your prime” mean to you today? Reply to this email and let us know. Your insights may help shape the conversations we’ll be having together.

Stay tuned.

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The Ultimate Bay Area Conscious Living Guide

Justine Reichman — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:10:12 GMT

Friends,

For years, whenever someone found out what I do, the conversation ended the same way: “Okay, but where do you actually shop? Where do you eat? What do you use?”

After 318+ episodes of Essential Ingredients — sitting across from farmers, founders, chefs, and makers who are quietly rebuilding how we eat, live, and care for ourselves — I finally sat down and put the answers in one place.

Today, I’m thrilled to share that the Bay Area Conscious Living Guide is officially live.

What’s inside

This isn’t a listicle pulled from a search engine. Every entry in this guide is somewhere I’ve been, something I’ve tasted, or someone I’ve talked to — often on the podcast, sometimes just over a farmers market table on a Saturday morning. You’ll find:

Farmers markets worth planning your weekend around, and the vendors to seek out at each one
Regenerative and sustainably minded restaurants where the sourcing story is as good as the food
Clean beauty and wellness finds that actually live up to their labels
Plus the grocers, makers, and hidden gems I recommend to friends when they ask

A quick heads-up: this one’s for paid subscribers

The full guide lives behind the paywall. Researching it the right way — visiting, tasting, asking the hard questions about sourcing — takes real time, and your paid subscription is what makes that kind of independent, no-sponsorships curation possible. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is the moment. You’ll get the complete guide today, plus every update and new neighborhood as I add them.

But I’d never leave you empty-handed

If you’re a free subscriber, here are three picks from the guide, on the house:

1. Fort Mason Center Farmers' Market — California Farmers' Markets Association

2. Sensitive Vintage

3. Berkeley Bowl Marketplace | grocery store

Consider these a taste. There are dozens more inside — organized by neighborhood, with my honest notes on each.

One last thing

Conscious living isn’t about perfection. It’s about knowing where your dollars go and choosing, a little more often, the people doing it right. This guide is my attempt to make those choices easier for you — because I genuinely believe the Bay Area is full of people worth supporting, and they deserve to be found.

Thank you, as always, for being here.

With gratitude,

Justine

[Upgrade to read the full guide below}

Don’t forget to listen to this week’s podcast episode!

108: 30-Second Health: Alex Fredericks on Building Voice Biomarker Tech

Justine Reichman — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:54:43 GMT

“Most people don’t understand that the best medicine cabinet is the thing that you put in your body, the food that you eat… So you could eat yourself well as equally as you can eat yourself sick.” —Alex Fredericks

Voice biomarker technology is turning a 30-second recording into a full-body readiness report — and it’s already caught things doctors missed.

In this episode, Justine Reichman sits down with Alex Fredericks, founder and CEO of ToneWell, to unpack how a PEMF frequency technology he encountered as a consultant became a static, auditable database of 150,000 biomarker data points that can flag hydration, hormones, inflammation, and toxins from nothing more than your voice. Alex walks through the real mechanics: a locked algorithm does the analysis, while AI only powers the concierge layer that turns raw output into daily, actionable priorities — a distinction he insists on, because “AI is the workflow, not the analytic.”
He shares two striking real-world moments: a client whose 3:30am hormonal spikes were traced to conflicting medications after she recorded a voice snapshot in the moment, and his own nephew, whose oddly low iron reading led to catching a serious kidney infection early. The conversation moves into food, toxins, and gut inflammation, and why Alex refuses to build a diagnostic tool — Tonewell tells you what’s going on, not what’s wrong, leaving the declaration to practitioners. It’s a grounded look at where AI genuinely helps health decisions, and where it should stay firmly in its lane.

Listen to the full conversation for the jiu-jitsu principle — “flow with the go” — that shaped Alex’s entire approach to building in a crowded wellness market.

Meet Alex:

Alex Fredericks is the founder and CEO of ToneWell, a voice-based wellness intelligence platform that turns a 30-second voice recording into a ranked, personalized readiness report across energy, sleep, stress, hydration, inflammation, and toxins. Drawing on more than two decades building brands and growth systems in music, consumer goods, and tech, Alex specializes in turning complex bio-data into clear, actionable insights.

A self-described Gen X latchkey kid and lifelong problem solver, he approaches AI in wellness with a strict filter: if it doesn’t improve decisions and reduce friction, it’s entertainment—not innovation. Before Tonewell, Alex worked across the green, organic, and holistic wellness space, helping companies translate emerging technologies into usable products.

Alex is also a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, and the principle “flow with the go” shapes how he builds resilient systems, sustainable habits, and tools that help people build better relationships with themselves.

Connect with ToneWell:

Connect with NextGen Purpose:

Chapters:

01:08 Meet Alex Fredericks: From Growth Engineer to Wellness Founder
05:48 The Voice Resonance Breakthrough Behind Tonewell
07:37 How a 30-Second Voice Scan Collapses Decision Time
10:25 “Flow With the Go”: The Jiu Jitsu Rule Behind ToneWell
13:46 Real Case: Catching a 3 A.M. Hormonal Imbalance
19:50 Why Alex Delayed ToneWell’s Subscription Model
24:16 Real Case: An Early Kidney Infection Catch
26:36 Inside the AI Concierge’s Safety Rails
31:27 What Actually Happens Between Voice and Report
37:43 Why Food Keeps Showing Up in Every Voice Scan