Gaia’s Top 10 Videos on Holistic Health and Lifestyle
How do you discover your own path of well-being and vitality to achieve optimal health? The road is different for everyone and is an enduring, life-long mission. We invite you to sit with experts, from various health-related fields, who share the fruits of their research on nutrition, supplements, dentistry, detoxing, and unlocking our full health potential. What you may discover could change every aspect of your life.
1. The Gut Movie
In The Gut Movie, we follow the journey of journalist and researcher Kale Brock as, in the quest to discover whether the “optimal microbiome” does indeed exist, he travels from Australia to Namibia to live with The San, an ancient hunter-gatherer people living traditionally from the land. During the excursion, Brock monitors his own microbiome and how it changes in conjunction with the new surroundings and takes microbiome samples of The San to gauge the significant differences in microbiota present across cultures.
With expert commentary by leading gastroenterologist Professor Thomas Borody, molecular geneticist Dr. Margie Smith, immunology researcher and expert Professor Mimi Tang, naturopath and chiropractor Dr. Damian Kristof and others, The Gut Movie provides an insightful yet entertaining look at the explosive research of the gut and its impact on human health.
2. Healing Matrix
Dr. Edward Group, Dr. Sue Morter, and Regina Meredith connect you with top researchers and visionaries exploring alternative healing modalities and emerging sciences to bring you information that can help you make better-informed choices concerning your health and wellbeing. Gain the tools you need to help heal yourself, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
3. Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
An inspiring film that chronicles one man’s personal mission to overcome illness, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead outlines the many health benefits of juicing.
One hundred pounds overweight, loaded up on steroids, and suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease, Joe Cross is at the end of his rope and the end of his hope. In the mirror, he saw a 310 lb. man whose gut was bigger than a beach ball and a path laid out before him that wouldn’t end well.
With doctors and conventional medicines unable to help long-term, Joe turns to the only option left, the body’s ability to heal itself. He trades in the junk food and hits the road with juicer and generator in tow, vowing only to drink fresh fruit and vegetable juice for the next 60 days. Across 3,000 miles Joe has one goal in mind: to get off his pills and achieve a balanced lifestyle.
4. Fasting: The Movie
Fasting may serve as the solution to solve our epidemic of chronic illnesses today. However, most think of only one method of fasting when they hear the term “fasting.” This documentary explores several different methods of fasting, including Time-Restricted Feeding, Intermittent & Prolonged Fasting, Long-Term Water Fasting, Religious Fasting, Eating Disorders, Improvising or Fasting Unsafely, Fasting Mimicking Diet, and Juice Fasting.
The film includes interviews with 54 people, including the world’s leading scientists and medical professionals on fasting, as well as individuals who used fasting to treat obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular problems, skin problems, high blood pressure, chronic headaches, joint pain, and many others. This is no doubt the most comprehensive and objective look at fasting on film.
5. Hungry for Change
You are what you eat. Hungry for Change exposes the hidden traps set by the diet, weight-loss, and food industries that make keeping weight off impossible. Learn how to get rid of cellulite, detox effectively, and eat foods for glowing skin, healthy hair, and a more vibrant YOU.
6. What’s With Wheat?
More and more people are diagnosed with celiac and non-celiac gluten sensitivity than ever before! You have to ask the question, “WHY?”.
Cyndi O’Meara, nutritionist and founder of Changing Habits, went on a global quest to find out the reason why! She could not understand why, after millions of years of eating wheat, we now have this growing epidemic of wheat and gluten intolerance. O’Meara has been a nutritionist for over 30 years and has lived a healthy lifestyle her entire life. In fact, she has never taken any medication, not even panadol (acetaminophen). Cyndi went on an elimination diet a few years ago after gaining some excess weight and suffered aches and pains, which she thought was just part of getting older.
After eliminating foods out of her diet, she noticed when she re-introduced wheat that her aches and pains came back. She started to question why, as she was brought up on a healthy diet, had eaten healthy foods all her life, and the bread she ate was always from organic sources.
7. Healing the Luminous Body
Alberto Villoldo, PhD., introduces and explains the luminous energy field that surrounds and informs our physical body like a blueprint of life. It is a secret of ancient shaman-healers that many of our physical and psychological problems stem from imprints within our luminous body. Dr. Villoldo unveils how to heal and recover from these destructive imprints and regain our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.
Join us as we travel to the Andes Mountains to learn the secret of the ancient Shamans, a secret that can lead all of us to health, happiness, and beauty. It was here, that he discovered the wisdom of the luminous body from the indigenous shamans. This ancient knowledge reveals the secret of true health and happiness.
8. Transcendence: Healing Herbs & Sacred Medicine
Tired? Sluggish? Cranky? Suffering from brain-fog or migraines? Plant medicine has been used for centuries, but why are these cheap, safe, and time-tested healing remedies no longer promoted? Uncover powerful healing herbs and sacred medicine rituals that can help you heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and how some of these healing plants may even be growing in your backyard.
9. Thrive
Ayurveda, often known as the sister science to yoga, is a 5000-year-old holistic medical system originating in India. Ayurveda means “the knowledge of life” and is known for being one of the world’s oldest and most comprehensive medical systems. Unlike anything seen before on Gaia, Thrive: Self-Healing with Ayurveda is a multi-part educational experience focused on finding balance amidst the pressure of modern life. Thrive celebrates the fact that people learn in many different ways and everyone has a unique pathway to self-healing. Thrive offers five ways to explore: a docuseries, cooking shows, self-care tutorials, yoga classes, and meditations.
Through this series, you will come into a deeper connection with your unique body type, understand your imbalances, and learn techniques to restore greater harmony to your system. By learning to bring balance to the mind, body, emotions, and spirit, you will be able to more easily navigate challenging circumstances and fundamentally change the way you live in the world.
10. Invisible Illness
Invisible Illness tells the stories of people living with Invisible Illness. Whether it’s chronic pain, Crohn’s, Lyme, SIBO, PTSD, or any other illness not visible or obvious on the outside, our stories need to be shared. Stories of hope and resilience, courage and perseverance, and above all, a sense of community and belonging that is sorely needed. Not only stories from those suffering but from the people supporting and healing those who live with an invisible illness.
These and other conditions and illnesses don’t necessarily manifest themselves in such a way where you can easily see the pain a person is suffering. This often results in friends, family, and even the medical community doubting or even dismissing the individual. So not only is the illness “invisible,” often the person suffering feels invisible and invalidated. Chronic pain. Lyme disease. Fibromyalgia. Diabetes. SIBO. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Endometriosis. Depression. PTSD. Hashimoto’s. Infertility. Traumatic brain injury. The list goes on and keeps growing, in the number of illnesses and amount of people affected by them.
About the Author
Your Body Is a Superorganism Thanks to These Microbes
Dr. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., a pioneer in the field of epigenetics who worked as a stem-cell biologist has effectively bridged the gap between mind, body, and spirit. Of particular note is his approach to the immune system, a widely appreciated (yet poorly understood) function of the body.
We Are Made of Microorganisms
As humans, we each possess a microbiome, a community of microorganisms (such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses) that inhabit the body. Our bodies are home to about 100 trillion of these microbes, and their role in protecting us from disease cannot be overstated: They are not just necessary, but crucial, to human life on a great many levels.
Microbiome research is an emerging field in which researchers investigate how the bacteria that live in and on our bodies affect our health and states of mind. Beneficial microbes in the gut have much to do with how efficiently we can extract calories from different kinds of food, how likely we can escape colon cancer or heart disease, and even how we metabolize different kinds of drugs.
And, as Lipton teaches, these microbes regulate a wide array of aspects related to both mind and body—from the removal of toxins to gut feelings, and from sleep patterns to appetite. In fact, because of their role in the production of certain hormones such as serotonin, a deficiency in the microbiome literally affects happiness levels and may contribute to anxiety and depression.
